Why It's Almost Impossible to Reform America's Police

[Dominus Atheos]

This is not about police abuse, but about the politics around the police in general.

The increasing isolation of America’s police

Politico has put up a fascinating profile of Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, which is the country’s largest police union.

More than anything, the profile highlights how law enforcement is politically positioned in a way that basically immunizes from criticism and oversight. Republicans have long been loathe to criticize police and police unions because they see themselves as the law-and-order party, despite the fact that deference to police ought to run afoul of their alleged dedication to limited government, and that Pasco’s group ought to animate the GOP’s distrust of public service unions.

Democrats have been playing defense on law-and-order issues since Michael Dukakis got creamed in the 1988 election. Any instinct to defend the disadvantaged groups disproportionately affected by police abuse gets drowned out by that and by the enormous influence wielded by police unions.

Consequently, a guy like Pasco can get away with saying some pretty outrageous things in defense of police officers without losing any credibility on Capitol Hill.

For example, I interviewed Pasco several years ago for an article about citizens recording cops with their cell phones. Pascoe believes this should be illegal. In fact, he supported a now-repealed Illinois law that made recording an on-duty police officer a felony on par with sexual assault — punishable by 15 years in prison.

Here’s how Pasco responded when I asked him why he thinks people should be arrested for recording police:

“You have 960,000 police officers in this country, and millions of contacts between those officers and citizens. I’ll bet you can’t name 10 incidents where a citizen video has shown a police officer to have lied on a police report. Letting people record police officers is an extreme and intrusive response to a problem that’s so rare it might as well not exist. It would be like saying we should do away with DNA evidence because there’s a one in a billion chance that it could be wrong. At some point, we have to put some faith and trust in our authority figures.”

It takes some talent to fit so many wrong-headed notions into so few words.

Pasco later added, “Police officers don’t check their civil rights at the station house door.” That’s a pithy soundbite. It’s also wrong on two counts. First, all citizens in a public space — cop or otherwise — have no reasonable expectation of privacy. In advocating for such a “civil right” for cops, then, Pasco isn’t asking that cops be treated the same as everyone else; he’s asking for extra protections. Second, police officers do check of their some civil rights at the station house door. For example, a police officer does not have the same free speech rights on-duty that he has while off-duty.

Since I interviewed Pasco, we’ve seen countless more incidents in which citizen-shot videos have shown a cop (or multiple cops) to have lied, either in a police report or on the witness stand. So the notion that a lying cop is as rare as lying DNA is absurd.

In a 2010 USA Today article on the same topic, Pasco then worried that fear of being implicated by video might cause police to hesitate before using force. That “hesitation” argument is a common one. It’s regularly invoked by police interest groups when they’re trying to undermine a policy that would make it more difficult for police to kill people and get away with it.

Here’s an example from a police chief in East Chicago, Indiana late last year:

More police officers are being killed, because they’re hesitating more before pulling the trigger to defend themselves, [Chief Mark] Becker said.

That hesitation stems in part from pressure created by news media and community activists who are increasingly claiming police-involved shootings are racially motivated, he said.

“There’s a small fraction of people who want to come to judgment before knowing all the facts,” he said.

That public pressure is a factor as police officers make life-and-death decisions within seconds, he said. “That plays out in a police officer’s mind,” Becker said. ” ‘What do I do, what do I do?’ and then all of a sudden he’s getting shot.”

Here’s an example from March, from “use-of-force consultant” who testifies on behalf of police accused of using excessive force. He’s responding to a rare instance of criminal charges that were filed against a local police officer :

“Most often I’ve seen officers die in confrontations because they hesitated to shoot when clearly it was necessary for them to shoot,” [Emanuel Kapelsohn] said. “As a police instructor, one of the hardest things for me to try to teach and train is the balance between the willingness to fire during a brief window of opportunity when if the officer doesn’t fire, he or her partner or bystander or victim may be killed – and knowing that if she fires, this maelstrom is going to befall them.”

In late 2013, Dallas police chief David O. Brown initiated new lethal force training for his officers that would emphasize deescalation. This triggered a furious response and the following letter from the police union.

This termination was not that of just an officer but that of the foundation of police training, which is/was our Deadly Force Policy. Up until Monday, Dallas Police Officers were allowed to use deadly force when they were in fear for their life or another’s. As of Monday, Dallas Police Officers no longer know when they can use deadly force and, if they do, question whether they are going to be fired if they are forced to. This up in the air policy creates doubt and hesitation in an officer about when/if to use deadly force, which ultimately is going to result in an officer and/or a citizen getting killed. This doubt will always result in a hesitation in officers’ response times to citizen’s calls. No longer can an officer quickly drive to a man with a gun, robbery in progress or domestic abuse call because the officer no longer believes he/she can use deadly force, if it is required, without fear of being terminated.

The most recent example comes just today from Baltimore, under the headline, “Violence surges, as Baltimore police officers feel hesitant.”

“In 29 years, I’ve gone through some bad times, but I’ve never seen it this bad,” said Lt. Kenneth Butler, president of the Vanguard Justice Society, a group for black Baltimore police officers. Officers “feel as though the state’s attorney will hang them out to dry.”

Several officers said in interviews they are concerned crime could spike as officers are hesitant to do their jobs, and criminals sense opportunity. Butler, a shift commander in the Southern District, said his officers are expressing reluctance to go after crime.

“I’m hearing it from guys who were go-getters, who would go out here and get the guns and the bad guys and drugs. They’re hands-off now,” Butler said. “I’ve never seen so many dejected faces.

“Policing, as we once knew it, has changed.”

So because a prosecutor has charged the six cops who illegally arrested a man and gave him a “rough ride” in the back of a police van that resulted in his death, all Baltimore cops are now afraid to use force. How does this follow? It would be logical if they were now hesitant to give rough rides — and that of a course would be a good thing. But what happen to Gray shouldn’t impact conscientious Baltimore cops in the slightest. There’s no connection between employing extra-judicial punishment by roughing a suspect up after he’s been arrested and cuffed, and using force to stop a violent person from harming innocent people. To argue that accountability in the former will lead to hesitation in the latter is to argue that we can’t have any accountability for any killing by a police officer, because it may cause other officers to hesitate before shooting people.

Yet examples of police groups making this argument abound. Law professor and former police officer Seth Stoughton explained in the Atlantic last year how this fear of hesitation is embedded in a police officer’s psyche early on in his training, and then over and over again.

There are countless variations, but the lessons are the same: Hesitation can be fatal. So officers are trained to shoot before a threat is fully realized, to not wait until the last minute because the last minute may be too late.

But what about the consequences of a mistake? After all, that dark object in the suspect’s hands could be a wallet, not a gun. The occasional training scenario may even make that point. But officers are taught that the risks of mistake are less—far less—than the risks of hesitation. A common phrase among cops pretty much sums it up: “Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.”

In most police shootings, officers don’t shoot out of anger or frustration or hatred. They shoot because they are afraid. And they are afraid because they are constantly barraged with the message that that they should be afraid, that their survival depends on it. Not only do officers hear it in formal training, they also hear it informally from supervisors and older officers. They talk about it with their peers. They see it on police forums and law enforcement publications. For example, three of the four stories mentioned on the cover of this month’s Police Magazine are about dealing with threats to officer safety.

Officers’ actions are grounded in their expectations, and they are taught to expect the worst.

My media colleagues are to blame here, too. I’ve read countless articles since Ferguson in which a sheriff or police chief or police union head is quoted about how America is increasingly turning into a “war zone,” or how police today face threats unlike any other period in American history — usually without challenge or context. But crime, homicides of cops, and assaults on cops have all been in decline for 20 years. That’s rarely pointed out in the story. Exaggerating the threat to cops not only skews discussion about policing issues, it may also make cops more likely to see threats where there aren’t any, with tragic consequences.

Each December we also get stories about how many police officers were killed in the previous year, complete with quotes from figures like Pasco about how dangerous policing is, often with statements blaming protesters, recordings of police abuse, and other “anti-police rhetoric” for the violence. We saw this play repeated just this week with the FBI’s release of data showing an 89 percent spike in homicides of cops in 2014. But this spike only in comparison to 2013, the safest year for police in the modern era in 2013. Even with the spike, 2014 was still the fourth safest year for cops since 1959. Again, only occasionally do these articles include this context about how policing is actually getting safer.

Few interest groups have been as successful at framing the public debate as Pasco, the police unions, and law enforcement officials. Because they have no natural opponents in politics (the way, say, teachers unions do), and because it’s so easy to stir up the fear of crime, they can marginalize their critics, claim injury at the slightest criticism, and send their critics running for cover.

Look at New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. He ran on a platform of reining in police abuses. He won on that platform. You’d think that would give him the political cover to occasionally criticize police officers who exceed their authority. Last year, not long after the non-indictment of the police officer who killed Eric Garner, de Blasio told a private gathering that he has instructed his son to be careful when interacting with police, and to avoid sudden movements, such as reaching for his cell phone. This is good advice: There is a long list of people shot, Tased, and killed by police who mistook cell phones for guns, including, most notably, Amadou Diallo in New York City. Moreover, it’s hard to even see what’s objectionable about that advice. It is, after all, an instruction to listen to a police officer’s instructions, to not complain, and to not do anything that might make the officer feel unsafe.

Yet the police groups went berserk. They protested by turning their back on de Blasio at a funeral for two cops who had been slain while on the job, then abdicating their public duties with a work slowdown. De Blasio’s criticism of the police was tepid at most. But it sparked a revolt in which the police department basically asserted its independence from civilian authority. That’s scary. And de Blasio learned his lesson. After some officers were accused of roughing up protesters at a recent rally, the mayor rushed to the officers’ defense.

Police interest groups have managed to frame a relentlessly one-sided debate. Any accountability proposals risk making cops hesitate before killing bad guys, they say, thus jeopardizing both cops and the public. Any criticism of excessive force articulated by an elected official is taken as criticism of all police officers. Should some lunatic kill a police officer after that criticism is uttered, that official now “has blood on his hands.” When crime and killings of police officers are down, it means increased militarization, marginal accountability, and non-transparency are all working, therefore we need more of those policies. When crime and killings of police officers are up, it means the criminals are taking over, therefore we also need increased militarization, marginal accountability, and non-transparency, so cops can do their job of getting the bad guys.

It’s hard to think of a profession more sensitive, psychologically isolated, and protective of its own than law enforcement. Imagine if all the doctors in a city refused to treat patients because one doctor was unfairly accused of malpractice. It’s unthinkable. Police advocates say this sort of camaraderie is because cops are bonded by the threats they face. Perhaps. But the profession seems to have gotten more isolated and more protective even as the job of police officer has gotten safer. Combat soldiers also face threats, yet it isn’t at all difficult to find former soldiers who, for example, have been willing to criticize, say, Abu Ghraib or other war atrocities. You just don’t see the same tendency to defend that you see in cops.

I suspect part of the problem lies in the fact that policing has been so immune from criticism and oversight from elected officials for so long. When you’re accustomed to only genuflection from political leaders, even a mild rebuke will sting. When you’ve been entrusted to investigate your own with little oversight, or when you’ve been able to negotiate contracts that make it nearly impossible to hold bad cops accountable, it must seem like dire times people with the power to do something about it start to question whether such policies and protections are healthy.

In the end this is a political problem, which means it will require a political solution. Political leaders have long deferred to police interests because that’s what the political climate dictated. When crime was up, people voted for law and order. When crime was down, they voted on other issues. That created a ratchet effect on these issues — when voters fear crime, we escalate the powers we give to cops and prosecutors and erode accountability and transparency. But when we no longer fear crime, we don’t vote any of those policies away. No one angrily votes against a politician for being “too tough on crime.”

This has been engrained in politicians for a decade. Public opinion is turning on many of these issues, but police unions are still powerful, and crime is still easily exploitable. Most politicians believe that there are only votes to be gained by deferring to the police and only votes to be lost by suggesting that police could be more accountable.

And they’re probably right. As the de Blasio example shows, even politicians who have demonstrated that there’s voter support for reform can later conclude that the political costs of standing up to police abuse are just too high. It may take voters actively punishing politicians for refusing reforms (as opposed to rewarding politician who support them) to get real reform to happen. It may take people voting on crime with the same passion that we voted on crime in the 1980s and 1990s, only in reverse. But that would also require a strong interest in and passion for these issues by a group of voters much larger than the groups usually victimized by police brutality. To put it more bluntly: For police reform to happen, white people have to start caring.

Until that happens — until there’s an incentive for politicians to hold police as accountable as any other public service group — law enforcement as a profession will only grow more isolated.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- ... as-police/

[Dominus Atheos]

http://www.vice.com/read/why-its-almost ... police-508

From Freddie Gray in Baltimore to Walter Scott in South Carolina to the more than 100 people tortured and framedover two decades in Chicago, the issue of police abuse has finally started to permeate the national discourse. But even as regular headlines reveal fresh abuses, many officers continue to take shelter behind the use-of-force framework for police interactions, suffering few or no negative consequences for excessive use of force.

There are roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States. Most of them operate relatively autonomously, yet officers are shielded in the same way in most states and jurisdictions. Spurred by the growing national movement against police brutality, lawmakers and activists have started looking for solutions that would hold police officers more accountable for the use of force. On Friday, President Obama's new Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced that the Justice Department would investigate the Baltimore Police Departmentto determine whether there had been systemic civil rights violations by officers.

But given the sheer number of law enforcement agencies in the country, the DOJ doesn't have nearly enough resources to investigate all of them. Between close relationships with prosecutors, secretive police culture, and laws that protect officers from taking personal responsibility for their actions, the obstacles to police reform are stifling.

Prosecutors and the Police
Trusting police officers is effectively a professional requirement for most prosecutors, and that trust doesn't evaporate when an officer the prosecutor works with shoots a suspect. So it's not surprising that indictments for on-duty incidents are exceedingly rare without incontrovertible evidence that contradicts an officer's version of events.

In Los Angeles County, no officer has been prosecuted for an on-duty shooting since 2001. According to the Los Angeles Daily News, "In each of the 409 shootings since January 2010, prosecutors determined on-duty officers were justified in using deadly force." Taken together, that seems like a lot of shootings without a single unjustified incident. But prosecutors look at each case individually on its own merits, and more often than not, they believe the police officer.

Generally speaking, prosecutors are not incentivized to doubt every story of the cops they work with daily. In addition to working together on criminal cases, many state and local prosecutors are elected officials who rely on political support from police. And prosecutors often run on their conviction stats, further disincentivizing them from questioning the people who supply the cases that keep them in office.

As for the use of force, over the years the Supreme Court has essentially created a checklist of requirements for police violence to be justified. Unsurprisingly, police explanations in use-of-force incidents often sound remarkably similar to those requirements: The most common explanations will include "the officer feared for his life" and "the suspect reached for his waistband," as if for a weapon.

This doesn't mean all officers who say something like this are lying. Rather, officers know exactly how to frame their account of an incident in a way that will satisfy a prosecutor. And the current state of the law gives a large benefit of the doubt to police officers, giving prosecutors all the more reason to accept their version of events.

The Problem with Police Culture
In 2010, the Village Voice published an exposé of New York City police officers in Bedford-Stuyvesant's 81st Precinct. The report was based on many hours of secret tape recordings that revealed police practices that had been denied publicly, including manipulation of criminal charges to satisfy departmental statistical goals. Put simply, the precinct ran a coordinated effort to lie about crime stats.

The whistle-blower, Officer Adrian Schoolcraft, was dragged from his apartment by police supervisors and involuntarily committed to a mental health facility for six days—on those supervisors' claims of his mental instability. For his public service, Schoolcraft was harassed by fellow officers, run out of the department, and still awaits action on his lawsuit against the city and NYPD. The deputy chief who ran Schoolcraft's precinct and helped drag him from his home retired in 2014 with a $135,000 pension.

The retaliation is evidence of what is commonly known "Thin Blue Line" or "Blue Wall of Silence"—an internal cultural code that trumps constitutional policing with "how things are really done" in many police departments, enforcing trust and loyalty among officers over the individual rights of citizens. The penalty for breaching can be ostracism, harassment, or worse.

Sometimes, it's as simple as officers covering for one another. In the shooting death of Walter Scott in South Carolina, the initial police reports were missing critical information about what happened, suggesting that other officers may have been complicit in crafting a narrative that looked good for the officer now facing a murder charge. Same goes for the Tamir Rice shooting, in which initial reports don't match what the surveillance video showed. In other cases, the wall has been used to obscure a long-running pattern of torture more commonly seen under brutal dictatorships, or the sadistic retaliation for a punch that never happened.

Last year, a months-long investigation by the Baltimore Sun exposed how much money the city was paying in police brutality settlements. The reporters had to dig through court records because police disciplinary records for Maryland law enforcement are kept secret by statute. Records secrecy is common among many states, but Maryland and a few other states go much further, giving police a full swath of procedural protections known as the Law Enforcement Officers' Bill of Rights (LEOBR).

As attorney Ken White explained at the Popehat blog, these codified protections give police more rights than citizens during criminal investigations. In Maryland, the LEOBR shrinks the statute of limitations to 90 days for a citizen to file an actionable complaint against a police officer on duty, grants the officer full access to the investigation against him, and strictly limits the time, place, and manner of interrogations of the officer. White also notes the notorious "cooling off" periods that an officer enjoys after a potentially criminal incident before investigators may question him. Depending on the state, those periods last anywhere from 48 hours to ten days.

Some states provide labor arbitrators to reinstate fired officers and award them back pay, even when they were dismissed for violent conduct. Such protections make it exceedingly expensive and difficult for cities and departments to purge violent officers from their ranks.

Is It Fixable?
The federal government exercises a limited role in overseeing police departments. In the wake of a scandal involving police corruption or violence in a major city, the DOJ's Civil Rights Division may launch investigations for "patterns and practices" that violate the civil rights of residents, as it has in Baltimore. But the decentralized nature of law enforcement in the US means that in most cases police reform will have to be implemented at the state and local level.

As Maryland lawmakers can attest, reform will not be easy. Nearly 20 law enforcement reform bills died in the legislature this year, though a dedicated working group promises to reintroduce many reforms—including repeal of Maryland LEOBR—in the next session.

On the plus side, the city of Baltimore established a searchable database of brutality lawsuits in response to the Sun investigation. In Missouri, the state legislature is considering modest reforms of the state's use-of-force law in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting.

In New York State, the Legal Aid Society has created a database of lawsuits and allegations against police officers that defense attorneys and litigators can use in future actions against officers who re-offend. And a sustained campaign by activists and protestors induced the City of Chicago to set up a $5.5 million reparations fund to over 100 victims of torture by the police department over a 20-year period.

Exposing the human toll of systemic abuse to the public puts pressure on politicians to act to curb it in the future. This pressure is driven home to those politicians by the steep financial liability to which abusive officers expose their governments. The challenge lies in getting access to such information, publishing it, and shaping the reform when it comes.

[Guardsman Bass]

It runs deeper than the rise of the warrior cop, although that's likely a big contributor to it - I remember some cops going off in the comments thread on a Mother Jones article on this about how every cop "had a target on their back" and so forth, even when their on-the-job fatality rate is quite low.

The roots of it run deeper than that. I read about similar attitudes back in the 1950s LAPD. I think it ultimately comes down to a combination of police professionalization in the early twentieth century, the general impunity in committing violence against black people by any white person (police or not) until the mid-twentieth century, and the persistence of police departments in areas with troubled racial histories without major reforms, purges, or overhauls.

[Alyrium Denryle]

It runs deeper than the rise of the warrior cop, although that's likely a big contributor to it - I remember some cops going off in the comments thread on a Mother Jones article on this about how every cop "had a target on their back" and so forth, even when their on-the-job fatality rate is quite low.

Part of that is just the uncertainty. Racism aside (because there is that...), unlike other jobs with high mortality rates, there are people actively trying to kill cops on occasion. It is largely random, and certainly unpredictable. A logger in the woods can take precautions, and while accidents happen, in their heads they can be like "Ok. I have done everything I can to avoid an accident" and then go about their day. Accidents still happen, and they get complacent because it is all day every day, but they can function. The stress hormones are active, but adrenaline is not unless a tree falls in an unexpected direction

Police dont have that. Humans dont handle small probabilities very well (think of it like an inverse lottery in this case). Because they dont know if the person they are pulling over for speeding is trafficking 20 lbs of coke and likely to shoot them, their brain responds with "better safe than sorry" and ramps up the adrenaline. Every. Single. Time. Precisely because they cannot predict the outcome of that traffic stop (or whatever).

I can analogize a bit better using personal experience here.

I dont freak out when handling venomous snakes. I know what to do with them, they are not actively hunting me, and if I get tagged, that is all on me. There are precautions. I have taken them. I am as safe as I am going to be. Fine. Cool.

Crocodilians are another matter. Whether I am working with frogs and snakes like I used to, or aquatic insects now. If I am in an area where there are large crocodilians, especially at night, they might actually be actively hunting me at the water's edge. Even though I know the probability is low, my brain says "better safe than sorry, my survival could depend on hyper-vigilance" and ramps up the adrenaline. I have had times when I have stopped collecting specimens because I heard the wrong sound and just needed to Get the Fuck Out.

[salm]

Part of that is just the uncertainty. Racism aside (because there is that...), unlike other jobs with high mortality rates, there are people actively trying to kill cops on occasion. It is largely random, and certainly unpredictable. A logger in the woods can take precautions, and while accidents happen, in their heads they can be like "Ok. I have done everything I can to avoid an accident" and then go about their day. Accidents still happen, and they get complacent because it is all day every day, but they can function. The stress hormones are active, but adrenaline is not unless a tree falls in an unexpected direction

Police dont have that. Humans dont handle small probabilities very well (think of it like an inverse lottery in this case). Because they dont know if the person they are pulling over for speeding is trafficking 20 lbs of coke and likely to shoot them, their brain responds with "better safe than sorry" and ramps up the adrenaline. Every. Single. Time. Precisely because they cannot predict the outcome of that traffic stop (or whatever).

I can analogize a bit better using personal experience here.

I dont freak out when handling venomous snakes. I know what to do with them, they are not actively hunting me, and if I get tagged, that is all on me. There are precautions. I have taken them. I am as safe as I am going to be. Fine. Cool.

Crocodilians are another matter. Whether I am working with frogs and snakes like I used to, or aquatic insects now. If I am in an area where there are large crocodilians, especially at night, they might actually be actively hunting me at the water's edge. Even though I know the probability is low, my brain says "better safe than sorry, my survival could depend on hyper-vigilance" and ramps up the adrenaline. I have had times when I have stopped collecting specimens because I heard the wrong sound and just needed to Get the Fuck Out.

Police in other countries seem to have this fear of crocodiles better under control. Perhaps the US cops should investigate how these cops manage be scared on a less frequent basis. Or not so much the cops themselves but the people responsible for their training.

[Solauren]

Actually there is more to it then that.

Cops Grabbing Money from Motorists

Small Poor Communities are literally being run on traffic fines

Tracking Police related Deaths

Police are being used by smaller communities in the same vain as medieval tax collectors, it's causing problems in those already-poor areas, people are turning to crime, and then getting killed by them.

[Ralin]

Police in other countries seem to have this fear of crocodiles better under control. Perhaps the US cops should investigate how these cops manage be scared on a less frequent basis. Or not so much the cops themselves but the people responsible for their training.

Well, one you're suggesting that foreign countries can do something better than America. Which is so obviously ridiculous that it clearly discredits you because America is the greatest country on earth in every conceivable way. Two, see above about the difficulty of reforming American police departments. Three, a lot of that probably stems from differences in larger culture, economics, legal systems and gun ownership that translate into American cops' fear of crocodiles coming from issues that really can't be touched by police training.

[Gaidin]

Police in other countries seem to have this fear of crocodiles better under control. Perhaps the US cops should investigate how these cops manage be scared on a less frequent basis. Or not so much the cops themselves but the people responsible for their training.

I think what Alyrium is giving you is a legit police-side stress analysis that really can't be avoided, but at the same time, it has to be stood up with the idea of the links that Solauren has provided. If towns didn't have to or want to be run on traffic fines, then that stress side of the whole issue might ramp down because hell they might have legitimate funding and the traffic stops might, hilariously, be legitimate instead of something they hunt down. I say hunt down because, one of my high school teachers was a former police officer and he said you could usually get as many tickets as you wanted on one corner just casually watching because people didn't care to follow simple rules(if you don't mind an anecdote). But six one way half dozen the other whether you want to believe that. You still run into the stress idea. And you run into the idea of whether you could do something about that at least a little bit by properly funding the town and department and not forcing them to run everything on fines. Or so I'd think.

[Joun_Lord]

Despite the play up of fears, as the article mentions cops don't have a ton to fear. Very few die annually, crime might be higher then our superior Eurocommie cousins but it is overall pretty damn low despite just being hit with the recession recently.

I think it was posted in another topic here that around 100 cops have died yearly recently while nearly a thousand citizens have died by their hands. Just looking a wiki in 2014 624 people died at police hands and that number may well be higher considering some local police don't report their numbers. Compare that to police deaths in the line of dooty in 14 which was 127. Thats total deaths, not people killing them. Only 51 officers were actually killed "feloniously" and 44 died in accidents.

Thats like what, 12 times higher rate of people being killed by cops then cops being killed by people? For fucks sake in 2013 only 27 cops were murdererized which is the lowest in 35 years. Yeah real fucking dangerous. Apparently you are more likely to die on the job as a garbage collector or a roofer. Strangely those people manage to do their jobs without killing hundreds of people in the process.

I do sympathize with cops, their jobs are dangerous (just not as dangerous as collecting refuse from bins) and incredibly stressful. Well so is my freaking jobs dealing with children who were taught no boundaries and how to treat other peoples nice things, dumbfuck teens, and adults who apparently think corners make perfect bathrooms and yet I've never killed anyone even if it was really, really, really tempting after cleaning out a USED condom out of a computer disk drive.

And if cops are worried about false allegations and punished for shooting some guy who was all stepping mad, they'd be all for as many cameras recording them as possible. Hard to make something up when there is photographic evidence that shit didn't go down like that. Of course the same can be said of them, hard to make up shit and say "he was coming right for me" when the cameras say otherwise.

[biostem]

I wonder if removing firearms from your standard patrol officers would be feasible - if they encounter a situation where lethal force is required, then they can call in SWAT or some other special unit. Have cops *only* carry a baton/nightstick, and maybe pepper spray or a taser. Next, have all police wear a camera, and have tampering with or otherwise obstructing/removing it be a fireable offense. Lastly, have any death of someone while in custody investigated by a third party, which is not affiliated with the police in any way.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Part of that is just the uncertainty. Racism aside (because there is that...), unlike other jobs with high mortality rates, there are people actively trying to kill cops on occasion. It is largely random, and certainly unpredictable. A logger in the woods can take precautions, and while accidents happen, in their heads they can be like "Ok. I have done everything I can to avoid an accident" and then go about their day. Accidents still happen, and they get complacent because it is all day every day, but they can function. The stress hormones are active, but adrenaline is not unless a tree falls in an unexpected direction

Police dont have that. Humans dont handle small probabilities very well (think of it like an inverse lottery in this case). Because they dont know if the person they are pulling over for speeding is trafficking 20 lbs of coke and likely to shoot them, their brain responds with "better safe than sorry" and ramps up the adrenaline. Every. Single. Time. Precisely because they cannot predict the outcome of that traffic stop (or whatever).

I can analogize a bit better using personal experience here.

I dont freak out when handling venomous snakes. I know what to do with them, they are not actively hunting me, and if I get tagged, that is all on me. There are precautions. I have taken them. I am as safe as I am going to be. Fine. Cool.

Crocodilians are another matter. Whether I am working with frogs and snakes like I used to, or aquatic insects now. If I am in an area where there are large crocodilians, especially at night, they might actually be actively hunting me at the water's edge. Even though I know the probability is low, my brain says "better safe than sorry, my survival could depend on hyper-vigilance" and ramps up the adrenaline. I have had times when I have stopped collecting specimens because I heard the wrong sound and just needed to Get the Fuck Out.

Police in other countries seem to have this fear of crocodiles better under control. Perhaps the US cops should investigate how these cops manage be scared on a less frequent basis. Or not so much the cops themselves but the people responsible for their training.

In this case, it is not the training that fails to assuage the fear. So long as conditions in the US continue as they are, that fear will exist. We have a lot of guns, and we have a lot of violent crime. Those conditions lead to a situation where it is reasonable (but not probably true on a per-capita per police contact basis, but once you start multiplying police-citizen interactions a legitimate attack on an any one officer becomes very likely) for police to be afraid at traffic stops.

It is not paranoia is someone really is out to kill you. No one is out to kill police on a regular basis in say, Sweden. In the UK, there might be chavs who want to kill police, but they dont have guns, so pepper spray is usually enough to deal with them.

Despite the play up of fears, as the article mentions cops don't have a ton to fear. Very few die annually, crime might be higher then our superior Eurocommie cousins but it is overall pretty damn low despite just being hit with the recession recently.

I think it was posted in another topic here that around 100 cops have died yearly recently while nearly a thousand citizens have died by their hands. Just looking a wiki in 2014 624 people died at police hands and that number may well be higher considering some local police don't report their numbers. Compare that to police deaths in the line of dooty in 14 which was 127. Thats total deaths, not people killing them. Only 51 officers were actually killed "feloniously" and 44 died in accidents.

Thats like what, 12 times higher rate of people being killed by cops then cops being killed by people? For fucks sake in 2013 only 27 cops were murdererized which is the lowest in 35 years. Yeah real fucking dangerous. Apparently you are more likely to die on the job as a garbage collector or a roofer. Strangely those people manage to do their jobs without killing hundreds of people in the process.

If you bothered to read, there is a difference in how people to respond to "the risk of falling off a roof" and "the risk that someone will try to kill them". Plus, there are a shit load of injuries suffered by police at the hands of suspects, just not very many deaths. This is because people are not very good at attacking police officers (most GSWs are not even lethal, and while most police are terrible shots, most criminals are worse shots), and because we have *really* good trauma care in the US (our healthcare system is shit on the back end, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the front end, especially when it comes to acute trauma)

[salm]

In this case, it is not the training that fails to assuage the fear. So long as conditions in the US continue as they are, that fear will exist. We have a lot of guns, and we have a lot of violent crime. Those conditions lead to a situation where it is reasonable (but not probably true on a per-capita per police contact basis, but once you start multiplying police-citizen interactions a legitimate attack on an any one officer becomes very likely) for police to be afraid at traffic stops.

It is not paranoia is someone really is out to kill you. No one is out to kill police on a regular basis in say, Sweden. In the UK, there might be chavs who want to kill police, but they dont have guns, so pepper spray is usually enough to deal with them.

I tried to compare the number of people killed by the police in countries with similar rates of violent crime as the USA but I can´t really find any statistics on how many people get killed per year by police in these places. I tried to find data for Thailand, Latvia, Ukraine and Estonia but found nothing.

[Captain Seafort]

It is not paranoia is someone really is out to kill you. No one is out to kill police on a regular basis in say, Sweden. In the UK, there might be chavs who want to kill police, but they dont have guns, so pepper spray is usually enough to deal with them.

Even in the UK's worst year, when almost 150 people (2.65/million pop) were murdered in the course of their duties trying to enforce the law of the land, they killed 80-odd people - a rate of 1.5/million (pop: 56 million). Going by the numbers above, murders of US police officers are a third of that in absolute terms (0.15/million pop), and they're killing people at a rate of 2-3/million (pop:350 million).

[Alyrium Denryle]

It is not paranoia is someone really is out to kill you. No one is out to kill police on a regular basis in say, Sweden. In the UK, there might be chavs who want to kill police, but they dont have guns, so pepper spray is usually enough to deal with them.

Even in the UK's worst year, when almost 150 people (2.65/million pop) were murdered in the course of their duties trying to enforce the law of the land, they killed 80-odd people - a rate of 1.5/million (pop: 56 million). Going by the numbers above, murders of US police officers are a third of that in absolute terms (0.15/million pop), and they're killing people at a rate of 2-3/million (pop:350 million).

Problem

UK police are not usually armed, and when they are, they are not alone or in a pair. They come in as a tactical squad, as I recall. Armed police are specialized units. Guns allow for escalation of a conflict, and UK police dont have the option of that escalation. Their only option is to de-escalate if they can, and call in armed police should it be necessary

In the US, police do, and given that they want to preserve their own lives, they will often do so before the threat reaches full imminence ie. before the threat to their life is so imminent that they risk not being fast enough (in many cases, they are not justified in doing that, but that is not a decision made by a rational calmly thinking mind).

It makes perfect sense that under these conditions, UK police will be killed more often than they kill in turn, while US police will exhibit the opposite trend.

There are of course other factors that, for example, bias the police officers decision to escalate. Race being one of them. There are also socio-economic conditions that increase the likelihood of a police officer being attacked that exist in the US, and not in other per capita GDP comparable western nation states, and thus make them more afraid of attack.

Also: actually read. I have already made a long elaborate point of saying that the fear response exhibited by US police is not proportionate to the risk they face. But even so, we cannot actually expect any different.

[Alyrium Denryle]

In this case, it is not the training that fails to assuage the fear. So long as conditions in the US continue as they are, that fear will exist. We have a lot of guns, and we have a lot of violent crime. Those conditions lead to a situation where it is reasonable (but not probably true on a per-capita per police contact basis, but once you start multiplying police-citizen interactions a legitimate attack on an any one officer becomes very likely) for police to be afraid at traffic stops.

It is not paranoia is someone really is out to kill you. No one is out to kill police on a regular basis in say, Sweden. In the UK, there might be chavs who want to kill police, but they dont have guns, so pepper spray is usually enough to deal with them.

I tried to compare the number of people killed by the police in countries with similar rates of violent crime as the USA but I can´t really find any statistics on how many people get killed per year by police in these places. I tried to find data for Thailand, Latvia, Ukraine and Estonia but found nothing.

I uh.. yeah, the US has the violent crime rate of developing and (the bad) former eastern bloc nation states, and I suspect that those nations might not have the numbers, or dont report them. Though I am a bit surprised by Latvia and Estonia.

[Captain Seafort]

Problem

UK police are not usually armed, and when they are, they are not alone or in a pair. They come in as a tactical squad, as I recall. Armed police are specialized units. Guns allow for escalation of a conflict, and UK police dont have the option of that escalation. Their only option is to de-escalate if they can, and call in armed police should it be necessary

In the US, police do, and given that they want to preserve their own lives, they will often do so before the threat reaches full imminence ie. before the threat to their life is so imminent that they risk not being fast enough (in many cases, they are not justified in doing that, but that is not a decision made by a rational calmly thinking mind).

It makes perfect sense that under these conditions, UK police will be killed more often than they kill in turn, while US police will exhibit the opposite trend.

In the circumstances that produced those numbers they were routinely armed.

Also: actually read. I have already made a long elaborate point of saying that the fear response exhibited by US police is not proportionate to the risk they face. But even so, we cannot actually expect any different.

Still, I think it's worthwhile to provide the hard numbers in order to demonstrate just how disproportionate that response is.

[Alyrium Denryle]

In the circumstances that produced those numbers they were routinely armed.

Was this before or after public disarmament?

Still, I think it's worthwhile to provide the hard numbers in order to demonstrate just how disproportionate that response is.

The numbers you gave are useless for that. The crime rate in the US is much higher than in the UK, and there is no indication about the ratio of police to civilians, which also matters a hell of a lot. You would also need the number of attacks resulting in injury to police officers.

[Dominus Atheos]

The Problems With Policing the Police
No sooner had the video gone viral than the Justice Department announced it would again be scrutinizing the conduct of a local police force – this time in North Charleston, S.C., where a white officer had shot and killed an unarmed black man, Walter Scott, as he tried to run away.

Such announcements have become almost a national ritual in this moment of heightened sensitivity to police conduct, a ready federal response to the charges of bias and abuse that have risen against law enforcement agencies across the country. From Albuquerque to Ferguson, the arrival of the department’s Civil Rights Division has been meant to signal that Washington understands there is a problem and is committed to solving it.

But as the Obama administration has ratcheted up its oversight of state and local law-enforcement agencies, using a 21-year-old law to impose reforms on police forces that show a pattern of civil rights violations, questions about the effectiveness of those interventions have also been on the rise.

In cities like Detroit and New Orleans, officials have railed at the high cost of the Justice Department’s reform plans, including the multi-million-dollar fees paid to the monitors who make sure local officials comply with federal mandates. Elsewhere, some local officials have simply refused to accept what they view as meddlesome dictates, preferring to fight the demands for change in federal court.

Then there is the challenge of making the policing reforms last. Even where local leaders have embraced Washington’s prescriptions, Justice Department officials have increasingly found themselves returning to grapple a second time with problems they thought they had fixed.

“What we want to do is make sure that we are opening investigations and seeing sustainable reforms through to the end,” the head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, Vanita Gupta, said in an interview.

In cases like that of North Charleston, S.C., Justice officials have sometimes stepped in behind local prosecutors to examine whether police officers involved in a shooting used “objectively unreasonable force” against a suspect in violation of their Constitutional rights. The department seemed to take that approach in announcing Tuesday that it would investigate the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man whose spinal cord was severed after he was arrested by the police in Baltimore.

But it is the more systemic investigations – in which state or municipal law-enforcement agencies are suspected of engaging in a “pattern or practice” of civil rights violations – that have both raised public expectations and sometimes fallen short of lasting reforms.

In Cleveland, where Attorney General Eric Holder appeared in December to decry a longstanding pattern of “unreasonable and unnecessary use of force” by the police, he neglected to mention that the Justice Department had investigated the city’s police a decade before. Justice officials settled that earlier case after the city promised to revise its policing methods.

Other recurring problems have emerged in police departments in Miami, New Orleans and New Jersey, all of which had promised to carry out major changes in response to Justice Department investigations that turned up evidence of discriminatory policing.

In interviews, Justice Department officials acknowledged that some of their earlier reform plans have fallen short. At times, they said, the department chose benchmarks that did not adequately measure the conduct they were trying to change. In other instances, federal officials did not sufficiently monitor or enforce the reforms they had sought.

“We continue to learn from each of our agreements and, frankly, improve on the way we enforce the statute,” said Mark Kappelhoff, another senior official in the Civil Rights Division. “That learning continues up until today.”

The Justice Department’s growing attention to local law-enforcement agencies comes at a time of intense public scrutiny of police forces around the country.

When local prosecutors have failed to indict police officers for shooting unarmed suspects or committing other apparent excesses, critics have often pressed Washington to act under the statute that criminalizes the use of “objectively unreasonable force” by an officer of the law.

Holder’s Justice Department has charged more than 400 law-enforcement and corrections officers with various violations of constitutional rights in recent years. But its occasional inquiries into police shootings have often left the activists disappointed – as they were when the department concluded in March that the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson did not violate federal law.

The Civil Rights Division conducts its broader, “pattern or practice” investigations under a different federal statute. That law took shape after the 1991 roadside beating of Rodney King by white officers of the Los Angeles Police Department, and was finally enacted in 1994.

That statute, known as 14141 after its section of the U.S. Code, allows the Justice Department to investigate almost any report of police actions that suggest a pattern of violations of citizens’ constitutional civil rights. Where the allegations are upheld, the department can seek agreement with local governments on policing reforms or – as it has done more aggressively under President Obama – go to the federal courts to force changes under closely monitored consent decrees.

Justice officials also announced the most recent of those inquiries on Tuesday, saying they would examine complaints that police in the central Louisiana town of Ville Platte and sheriffs of the surrounding Evangeline Parish had detained people without cause.

With both the individual and systemic cases, the remedies might include ordering police agencies to conduct new training, set up computerized databases, install dashboard cameras on patrol cars or change the way they handle citizen complaints. The agreements are sometimes overseen by retired police officials who have implemented similar reform plans in their own cities.

The investigations are intended to serve as examples. The office that conducts the inquiries, the Special Litigation section of the Civil Rights Division, has only about 50 lawyers, some of whom concentrate on issues other than police accountability. They field complaints by the hundreds. “They have to pick their battles,” said Stephen Rushin, a visiting assistant professor at the University of Illinois College of Law who has studied the process.

The Ferguson inquiry that began last September, for example, involved a relatively tiny police force of 54 officers and a town population of barely 20,000. But it required hundreds of Justice Department interviews, the review of 35,000 pages of police records and an extensive statistical analysis of police and court data, among other steps, the report noted. And though the investigation prompted the swift resignations of Ferguson’s police chief, city manager and municipal judge, the hardest part may be yet to come: negotiating a reform agreement that the city’s surviving officials will not only accept but implement fully.

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For most of the Clinton and Bush administrations, a primary critique of civil rights activists and legal scholars was that the policing investigations were too few and far between to resonate nationally. According to one recent study, the Justice Department investigates fewer than 0.02 percent of the country’s nearly 18,000 state and local law-enforcement agencies each year.

As in Ferguson, the Civil Rights Division has tried to pick its shots for maximum effect. “We have to think about how we can have a force-multiplying effect through our investigations,” Gupta said.

But even where the department’s interventions have been successful, they have rarely been smooth.

One of its more-noted successes, with the Los Angeles Police Department, began with an inquiry in the summer of 1996. It then took almost five years of investigation, data analysis and negotiation before a consent decree was reached. The court-supervised monitoring then continued for more than a decade until early 2013.

The LAPD’s progress was halting. During the first seven years the police department spent under federal supervision, citizen complaints about police stops, arrests and racial profiling all rose at various times, although excessive-force complaints fell. Even after the department adopted a more successful approach to curb racial profiling, a federal judge extended his oversight for another four years.

“Obviously these things don’t happen overnight,” said William Yeomans, a former senior official of the Civil Rights Division. “There are always forces that will pull police departments towards reverting to practices that got them into trouble in the first place. It is not something that you do once and then walk away from.”

Justice officials cited the department’s investigation of racial profiling by the New Jersey State Police, which led to a consent decree in 1999, as an example of how it has emphasized the more rigorous collection and analysis of policing data to measure whether policy changes have made the desired impact.

The department found that New Jersey troopers stopped black and Latino drivers much more frequently than white motorists, and it ordered changes in policing that were to be tested against data on the race and gender of drivers stopped in the future.

But in a forthcoming study of New Jersey traffic stops between 2005 and 2007, researchers at Columbia University found that while the disproportionate stops of minority drivers fell, African-Americans and Latinos were still almost three times more likely to be searched than whites. In addition, researchers found that white troopers were 20 percent more likely to search minority drivers than were black troopers.

“That’s the problem with consent decrees,” said Jeffrey Fagan, a Columbia Law School professor who oversaw the study. “They did everything that was asked of them except stop profiling.”

Over the six years following the law’s passage, the Clinton administration launched 25 investigations into discriminatory policing and the excessive use of force, more than half of which led to court-sanctioned consent decrees or memorandums of agreement.

Many of those inquiries came in big, racially and ethnically mixed cities like Los Angeles and Detroit, where political leaders were generally sensitive to complaints of discrimination and sometimes welcomed federal intervention as a way to compel police unions to accept changes in policy.

The Bush administration approached the law very differently.

As he was campaigning for the presidency in 2000, then-Governor George W. Bush told the country’s biggest police union: “I do not believe the Justice Department should routinely seek to conduct oversight investigations, issue reports or undertake other activity that is designed to function as a review of police operations in states, cities and towns.”

His Justice Department generally upheld that view. Of 12 excessive-force and discriminatory policing inquiries begun in Bush’s first term, only two resulted in settlements during his administration, and neither of those was a consent decree. No consent decrees were imposed during Bush’s second term.

“I generally did not want to be in the business of running law enforcement agencies at the Justice Department,” said Bradley Schlozman, who oversaw the Special Litigation section during part of that time.

Under Schlozman, the section shifted some of its staff from policing inquiries to other duties. A 2008 report by the Justice inspector general also accused Schlozman of violating department policy and federal civil service law by pushing for conservative attorneys while trying to weed out those he considered “pinkos” or “libs.” (Federal prosecutors declined to press charges in the matter, and Schlozman, who denied politicizing the hiring process, said he had made his comments about liberals in jest.)

While political support for the 1994 civil rights law declined sharply under Bush, other shortcomings of the statute also came into focus, former officials and legal scholars said.

“It was a desperately needed piece of legislation,” said Yeomans, who now teaches law at American University. “But it took the Department of Justice a while to figure out what to do with it.”

In Cleveland, which was plagued by discrimination and excessive-force complaints, the Justice Department concluded a four-year investigation in 2004 by reaching an out-of-court settlement with the city. The deal, which Justice officials monitored for a year, included a prohibition against officers from firing at fleeing vehicles unless someone’s life was in danger.

But by 2013, Justice Department investigators were back in the city. This time they came at the request of the mayor, to look into another rash of police shootings and other issues. Among the problems they reviewed was a high-speed car chase that began when officers mistook the car’s backfire for a gunshot, and ended with a barrage of 137 police bullets that killed both the unarmed driver and his passenger.

“Obviously the reforms that were attempted there didn’t take hold,” Kappelhoff, the Justice Department official, said.

Justice officials have also found themselves back in Miami, where seven black men died in police shootings during an eight-month span ending in 2011. In 2006, the department had closed an earlier civil rights investigation of the Miami police after the force pledged to make a series of changes sought by Washington.

“Unfortunately, many of the systemic problems we believed were fixed have reoccurred, evidenced by a steady rise in officer-involved shootings,” the then-head of the Civil Rights Division, Thomas Perez, wrote to Miami’s mayor and police chief in July 2013.

Perez (who is now the Obama administration’s Labor secretary) made similar statements about the New Orleans Police Department in 2011, when federal prosecutors released a scathing, 158-page report that portrayed a force rife with bias and abuse. Only seven years earlier, the Bush administration had closed a lengthy Justice Department investigation of the force after it promised to track officers’ conduct with a new data-management system and overhaul its handling of citizen complaints.

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Over the last few years, Attorney General Holder has made the law enforcement investigations a higher priority. This year, his department asked Congress for a $2.5 million budget increase to add 13 attorneys and six investigators to its Civil Rights Division’s police misconduct team, department documents show.

Rather than simply checking off mandated changes in policy, as it did in the past, the agency has emphasized the more sophisticated analysis of data to assess change. “We call our last six years our 2.0 era of consent decrees,” Kappelhoff said.

A 2012 agreement with Seattle, for example, requires local police to report the rate of arrests, where an officer used excessive force, and how many times police department policy was violated in each incident. In Albuquerque, where a consent decree was signed last November, the police will track officers’ use of force and their interactions with the mentally ill, and set up a review panel to analyze the results.

What the Justice Department has not managed to do is to make its reform plans any less costly to carry out.

In Detroit, where the police department came under two separate consent decrees in 2003 (one related to a high number of police shootings, the other tied to the illegal detention of witnesses), the city later sued its former federal monitor, Sheryl Robinson Wood, demanding a $10 million refund for her work.

City officials noted that while Wood was billing the Detroit police as much as $193,680.55 a month, she was also carrying on a secret romantic relationship with the then-mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, who is now serving a 28-year federal prison term for public corruption. At the time, the city was also sliding into bankruptcy. (Lawyers for the city eventually reached out-of-court settlements with Wood’s former employers: for $1.75 million with Kroll Associates, Inc., the investigations firm, and $350,000 with two law firms where she had worked.)

In New Orleans, Mayor Mitch Landrieu sought to have a federal judge block a Justice Department consent decree, arguing that it would cost the city at least $10 million. “I’m completely and totally committed to reforming the police department, but my job is to protect all of the taxpayers of New Orleans,” Landrieu said. The judge rejected the appeal.

Justice Department officials acknowledge that the re-training, data collection and monitoring they demand often come at substantial taxpayer expense. But they contend that the failure to fix systemic police problems carries even greater costs – not only in public-relations problems and community mistrust, but also in the settlement of civil lawsuits, dismissals and the like.

Some legal scholars and civil libertarians have argued that the costs of the refusing to change discriminatory police practices should be even higher. They have pressed the Justice Department to aggressively use of its authority under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which allows the department to cut off federal funds to any program or agency that is found to engage in discrimination.

Even some police departments that have been investigated repeatedly, the activists note, have continued to draw generous grants from the Justice Department itself for equipment, training and other needs.

For instance, in September 2013, six months after the Justice Department began a new investigation into discriminatory policing in Cleveland, the city received a grant of $1.25 million to hire 10 new police officers and another $1 million for crime-prevention efforts. The next year, just before Attorney General Holder accused the force of “systemic deficiencies,” it was awarded $1.9 million more to hire 15 new officers.

In theory, the civil rights law gives the federal government wide latitude to cut off funds. But while the department has sometimes accused local police agencies of violating Title VI rules – as it did in Ferguson – it has avoided using the law to cut off police assistance funds.

“Title VI, at the end of the day, is more of a threat than anything else,” said Robert Driscoll, a former senior Justice Department official under President Bush.

Driscoll, who supervised the Special Litigation Section between 2001 and 2003, has also found some weaknesses the Justice Department’s “pattern or practice” interventions, including its lack of subpoena power to compel the release of internal documents from local police forces.

In Maricopa County, Arizona, Driscoll represented the famously contentious sheriff, Joe Arpaio, when he became the first in a series of local law-enforcement officials to defy a Justice Department lawsuit under the 1994 law.

At the behest of the Phoenix mayor, Phil Gordon, Justice officials began in 2008 to investigate Arpaio’s campaign to enforce federal immigration laws, which included stopping Latino drivers without cause and detaining those suspected of being undocumented.

When Justice officials sought access to sheriff’s department records and facilities, Arpaio refused. “It being him, we just extended the finger and said, `No, we’re not going to cooperate,’” Driscoll recalled.

After the Justice Department sued Arpaio for the access under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act in 2010, the county cut off funding for the litigation and he was forced to settle. Justice officials then found that Arpaio and his office of had “intentionally and systematically” discriminated against Latinos in traffic stops, unfounded arrests and jail practices.

But Arpaio refused to accept the oversight of a federal monitor, so the department sued again, winning an injunction that bars deputies from stopping drivers solely on the suspicion that they might be undocumented. On April 15, the Ninth Circuit court of appeals upheld most of the reforms that a district judge had ordered the sheriff’s office to undertake, including re-training and the filming of traffic stops, but limited some of the freedom of the court-appointed monitor.

“We know that there are going to be police departments that are recalcitrant, that are not interested in engaging in reform,” Gupta, the Civil Rights Division chief, said. “And for those, we obviously have all the tools that we use across the department to really push them to do so.”

But Arpaio’s capitulation has not dissuaded some other local forces from fighting back as well. Over the past few years, Justice officials have been challenged by the Seattle police officers’ union; the Missoula, Montana county attorney; and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, a polygamous Mormon sect, among others.

Like Arpaio in Arizona, the sheriff of Alamance County, N.C., Terry Johnson, also refused to share his records with federal investigators after they found that he, too, was illegally targeting Latino drivers. This time, the Justice Department responded by filing a civil lawsuit to force discovery.

By the time a federal judge heard the case last summer, the county had already spent more than $450,000 on the litigation. Since issuing its findings of discriminatory policing in 2012, the Justice Department has also withheld what the county attorney, Clyde Albright, claimed was more than $2.4 million in federal drug asset forfeiture monies that would have gone to the sheriff’s office; a Justice official said the actual amount was considerably less than that. The Department of Homeland Security also suspended Alamance from a program that offers training and other support to local law-enforcement agencies for their help in enforcing federal immigration laws.

“This is what the federal government does,” Albright complained in an interview. “They just want to come in and take over your law-enforcement agency. They march in the door and say you are guilty of all these things. My reaction is, `Says who?’”

A ruling in the federal lawsuit is expected soon.

http://time.com/police-shootings-justic ... tigations/

[Dominus Atheos]

I'm a black ex-cop, and this is the real truth about race and policing

On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with.

That's a theory from my friend K.L. Williams, who has trained thousands of officers around the country in use of force. Based on what I experienced as a black man serving in the St. Louis Police Department for five years, I agree with him. I worked with men and women who became cops for all the right reasons — they really wanted to help make their communities better. And I worked with people like the president of my police academy class, who sent out an email after President Obama won the 2008 election that included the statement, "I can't believe I live in a country full of ni**er lovers!!!!!!!!" He patrolled the streets in St. Louis in a number of black communities with the authority to act under the color of law.

That remaining 70 percent of officers are highly susceptible to the culture in a given department. In the absence of any real effort to challenge department cultures, they become part of the problem. If their command ranks are racist or allow institutional racism to persist, or if a number of officers in their department are racist, they may end up doing terrible things.

It is not only white officers who abuse their authority. The effect of institutional racism is such that no matter what color the officer abusing the citizen is, in the vast majority of those cases of abuse that citizen will be black or brown. That is what is allowed.

And no matter what an officer has done to a black person, that officer can always cover himself in the running narrative of heroism, risk, and sacrifice that is available to a uniformed police officer by virtue of simply reporting for duty. Cleveland police officer Michael Brelo was recently acquitted of all charges against him in the shooting deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, both black and unarmed. Thirteen Cleveland police officers fired 137 shots at them. Brelo, having reloaded at some point during the shooting, fired 49 of the 137 shots. He took his final 15 shots at them after all the other officers stopped firing (122 shots at that point) and, "fearing for his life," he jumped onto the hood of the car and shot 15 times through the windshield.

About that 15 percent of officers who regularly abuse their power: they exert an outsize influence
Not only was this excessive, it was tactically asinine if Brelo believed they were armed and firing. But they weren't armed, and they weren't firing. Judge John O'Donnell acquitted Brelo under the rationale that because he couldn't determine which shots actually killed Russell and Williams, no one is guilty. Let's be clear: this is part of what the Department of Justice means when it describes a "pattern of unconstitutional policing and excessive force."

Nevertheless, many Americans believe that police officers are generally good, noble heroes. A Gallup poll from last year asked Americans to rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in various fields: police officers ranked in the top five, just above members of the clergy. The profession — the endeavor — is noble. But this myth about the general goodness of cops obscures the truth of what needs to be done to fix the system. It makes it look like all we need to do is hire good people, rather than fix the entire system. Institutional racism runs throughout our criminal justice system. Its presence in police culture, though often flatly denied by the many police apologists that appear in the media now, has been central to the breakdown in police-community relationships for decades in spite of good people doing police work.

Here's what I wish Americans understood about the men and women who serve in their police departments — and what needs to be done to make the system better for everyone.

1) There are officers who willfully violate the human rights of the people in the communities they serve

As a new officer with the St. Louis in the mid-1990s, I responded to a call for an "officer in need of aid." I was partnered that day with a white female officer. When we got to the scene, it turned out that the officer was fine, and the aid call was canceled. He'd been in a foot pursuit chasing a suspect in an armed robbery and lost him.

The officer I was with asked him if he'd seen where the suspect went. The officer picked a house on the block we were on, and we went to it and knocked on the door. A young man about 18 years old answered the door, partially opening it and peering out at my partner and me. He was standing on crutches. My partner accused him of harboring a suspect. He denied it. He said that this was his family's home and he was home alone.

My partner then forced the door the rest of the way open, grabbed him by his throat, and snatched him out of the house onto the front porch. She took him to the ledge of the porch and, still holding him by the throat, punched him hard in the face and then in the groin. My partner that day snatched an 18-year-old kid off crutches and assaulted him, simply for stating the fact that he was home alone.

I got the officer off of him. But because an aid call had gone out, several other officers had arrived on the scene. One of those officers, who was black, ascended the stairs and asked what was going on. My partner pointed to the young man, still lying on the porch, and said, "That son of a bitch just assaulted me." The black officer then went up to the young man and told him to "get the fuck up, I'm taking you in for assaulting an officer." The young man looked up at the officer and said, "Man ... you see I can't go." His crutches lay not far from him.

The officer picked him up, cuffed him, and slammed him into the house, where he was able to prop himself up by leaning against it. The officer then told him again to get moving to the police car on the street because he was under arrest. The young man told him one last time, in a pleading tone that was somehow angry at the same time, "You see I can't go!" The officer reached down and grabbed both the young man's ankles and yanked up. This caused the young man to strike his head on the porch. The officer then dragged him to the police car. We then searched the house. No one was in it.

These kinds of scenes play themselves out everyday all over our country in black and brown communities. Beyond the many unarmed blacks killed by police, including recently Freddie Gray in Baltimore, other police abuses that don't result in death foment resentment, distrust, and malice toward police in black and brown communities all over the country. Long before Darren Wilson shot and killed unarmed Michael Brown last August, there was a poisonous relationship between the Ferguson, Missouri, department and the community it claimed to serve. For example, in 2009 Henry Davis was stopped unlawfully in Ferguson, taken to the police station, and brutally beaten while in handcuffs. He was then charged for bleeding on the officers' uniforms after they beat him.

2) The bad officers corrupt the departments they work for

About that 15 percent of officers who regularly abuse their power: a major problem is they exert an outsize influence on department culture and find support for their actions from ranking officers and police unions. Chicago is a prime example of this: the city has created a reparations fund for the hundreds of victims who were tortured by former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge and officers under his command from the 1970s to the early ‘90s.

The victims were electrically shocked, suffocated, and beaten into false confessions that resulted in many of them being convicted and serving time for crimes they didn't commit. One man, Darrell Cannon, spent 24 years in prison for a crime he confessed to but didn't commit. He confessed when officers repeatedly appeared to load a shotgun and after doing so each time put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Other men received electric shocks until they confessed.

The torture was systematic, and the culture that allowed for it is systemic. I call your attention to the words "and officers under his command." Police departments are generally a functioning closed community where people know who is doing what. How many officers "under the command" of Commander Burge do you think didn't know what was being done to these men? How many do you think were uncomfortable with the knowledge? Ultimately, though, they were okay with it. And Burge got four years in prison, and now receives his full taxpayer-funded pension.

3) The mainstream media helps sustain the narrative of heroism that even corrupt officers take refuge in

This is critical to understanding why police-community relations in black and brown communities across the country are as bad as they are. In this interview with Fox News, former New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir never acknowledges the lived experience of thousands and thousands of blacks in New York, Baltimore, Ferguson, or anywhere in the country. In fact, he seems to be completely unaware of it. This allows him to leave viewers with the impression that the recent protests against police brutality are baseless, and that allegations of racism are "totally wrong — just not true." The reality of police abuse is not limited to a number of "very small incidents" that have impacted black people nationwide, but generations of experienced and witnessed abuse.

The media is complicit in this myth-making: notice that the interviewer does not challenge Safir. She doesn't point out, for example, the over $1 billion in settlements the NYPD has paid out over the last decade and a half for the misconduct of its officers. She doesn't reference the numerous accounts of actual black or Hispanic NYPD officers who have been profiled and even assaulted without cause when they were out of uniform by white NYPD officers.

No matter what an officer has done to a black person, that officer can always cover himself in the running narrative of heroism
Instead she leads him with her questions to reference the heroism, selflessness, risk, and sacrifice that are a part of the endeavor that is law enforcement, but very clearly not always characteristic of police work in black and brown communities. The staging for this interview — US flag waving, somber-faced officers — is wash, rinse, and repeat with our national media.

When you take a job as a police officer, you do so voluntarily. You understand the risks associated with the work. But because you signed on to do a dangerous job does not mean you are then allowed to violate the human rights, civil rights, and civil liberties of the people you serve. It's the opposite. You should protect those rights, and when you don't you should be held accountable. That simple statement will be received by police apologists as "anti-cop." It is not.


4) Cameras provide the most objective record of police-citizen encounters available

When Walter Scott was killed by officer Michael Slager in South Carolina earlier this year, the initial police report put Scott in the wrong. It stated that Scott had gone for Slager's Taser, and Slager was in fear for his life. If not for the video recording that later surfaced, the report would have likely been taken by many at face value. Instead we see that Slager shot Scott repeatedly and planted the Taser next to his body after the fact.

Every officer in the country should be wearing a body camera that remains activated throughout any interaction they have with the public while on duty. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy for officers when they are on duty and in service to the public. Citizens must also have the right to record police officers as they carry out their public service, provided that they are at a safe distance, based on the circumstances, and not interfering. Witnessing an interaction does not by itself constitute interference.

5) There are officers around the country who want to address institutional racism

The National Coalition of Law Enforcement Officers for Justice, Reform and Accountability is a new coalition of current and former law enforcement officers from around the nation. Its mission is to fight institutional racism in our criminal justice system and police culture, and to push for accountability for police officers that abuse their power.

Many of its members are already well-established advocates for criminal justice reform in their communities. It's people like former Sergeant De Lacy Davis of New Jersey, who has worked to change police culture for years. It's people like former LAPD Captain John Mutz, who is white, and who is committed to working to build a system where everyone is equally valued. His colleagues from the LAPD —former Sergeant Cheryl Dorsey, now a frequent CNN contributor (providing some much-needed perspective), and former officer Alex Salazar, who worked LAPD's Rampart unit — are a part of this effort. Several NYPD officers, many of whom are founding members of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, the gold standard for black municipal police organizations, are a part of this group. Vernon Wells, Noel Leader, Julian Harper, and Cliff Hollingsworth, to name a few, are serious men with a serious record of standing up for their communities against police abuse. There's also Rochelle Bilal, a former sergeant out of Philadelphia, Sam Costales out of New Mexico, former Federal Marshal Matthew Fogg, and many others.

These men and women are ready to reach out to the thousands of officers around the country who have been looking for a national law enforcement organization that works to remake police culture. The first priority is accountability — punishment — for officers who willfully abuse the rights and bodies of those they are sworn to serve. Training means absolutely nothing if officers don't adhere to it and are not held accountable when they don't. It is key to any meaningful reform.

Police abuse in black and brown communities is generations old. It is nothing new.
Racism is woven into the fabric of our nation. At no time in our history has there been a national consensus that everyone should be equally valued in all areas of life. We are rooted in racism in spite of the better efforts of Americans of all races to change that.

Because of this legacy of racism, police abuse in black and brown communities is generations old. It is nothing new. It has become more visible to mainstream America largely because of the proliferation of personal recording devices, cellphone cameras, video recorders — they're everywhere. We need police officers. We also need them to be held accountable to the communities they serve.

http://www.vox.com/2015/5/28/8661977/ra ... ce-officer