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  • On Death Notifications: “I have terrible, terrible news.”

    Consider how a single pull of the trigger impacts people — reporters, cops, EMS, nurses, doctors — who are strangers to the victim in the literal sense but are forced to have a visceral connection with the dead and those who survive them.

    450 people have been shot and killed in Chicago in the first two-thirds of this year; 178 shot and killed in Baltimore. One of the worst parts of any job is giving a death notification. And if you don’t do that on your job, try and have a bit more sympathy for those who must. It’s hard to go through unscathed, especially if you have to go through this repeatedly. It never gets easy. (And then also consider why cops may object and object rather strongly when they get home from doing this and then have to listen to some well-scrubbed intellectual proclaim that police officers are the problem, uncaring, and racist.)

    This is an incredibly powerfully written account in the New York Times by Doctor Naomi Rosenberg on how to tell a mother that her shot son is dead.

    First you get your coat. I don’t care if you don’t remember where you left it, you find it. If there was a lot of blood you ask someone to go quickly to the basement to get you a new set of scrubs. You put on your coat and you go into the bathroom. You look in the mirror and you say it. You use the mother’s name and you use her child’s name. You may not adjust this part in any way.

    I will show you: If it were my mother you would say, “Mrs. Rosenberg. I have terrible, terrible news. Naomi died today.” You say it out loud until you can say it clearly and loudly. How loudly? Loudly enough. If it takes you fewer than five tries you are rushing it and you will not do it right. You take your time.

    After the bathroom you do nothing before you go to her. You don’t make a phone call, you do not talk to the medical student, you do not put in an order. You never make her wait. She is his mother.

    When you get inside the room you will know who the mother is. Yes, I’m very sure. Shake her hand and tell her who you are. If there is time you shake everyone’s hand. Yes, you will know if there is time. You never stand. If there are no seats left, the couches have arms on them.

    Read the rest.

  • Will a Consent Decree Help or Hurt Baltimore City Police Officers?

    [This is a guest post by Jacob Lundy. He has ten years of law enforcement experience including street crimes, homicide, academy instruction, and consent decree compliance. He wrote this for Copinthehood.com in the hope that Baltimore can learn from what he and the City of New Orleans have gone through. The selective bolding is mine, but what follows is Jacob’s. He writes here as a policy advisor to the New Orleans Fraternal Order of Police.]

    An absurdly concise title for a piece tackling one of the most expensive, sprawling, and lately, ubiquitous endeavors most major police agencies will navigate. This question — frequently posed to me by legislators, criminal justice professionals, and citizens — is certainly on the minds of Baltimoreans in recent weeks.

    The answer, as you might expect, is not so concise.

    I believe the more appropriate question may be “are consent decrees necessary?” My short answer to this questions is, perhaps surprisingly, usually. My assessment should not be taken as a slight to police officers who work tirelessly day and night in Baltimore and elsewhere who may feel that a consent decree is an indictment on your service. Certainly DOJ’s recently published investigation of the Baltimore Police Department was not flattering, but such reports are equally if not more overtly critical of overextended leadership, outdated policies, and political machinations that manifest in the problems documented by Justice.

    Consent decrees are a mixed bag, to be sure; I believe the real debate lies in how long they should last, how invasive they should be, and how compliance teams, officers, and Justice might get started as collaboratively as their relationship will eventually become. Below I have tried to outline some of the most salient matters facing Baltimore police officers.

    In my view, two major problems lead to the conditions we see facing police in major American cities today. First and foremost is the ever growing list of social problems shifted onto the backs of law enforcement. We are a country obsessed with fighting symptoms rather than tackling root causes, and nowhere is this phenomenon more visible than the front seat of a police car. Guns, healthcare, schools, drug addiction, economics, mental health — all of these have been relegated to law enforcement with little notice.

    Secondarily, policing will always be a series of competing priorities, especially as agencies continue to be pulled in so many directions. A cop in one neighborhood equals a void in another. A cop tied up with paperwork is a cop not engaged in crime abatement. Forty cops attending in-service training means forty empty police cars. On a larger scale, one million taxpayer dollars invested in a police behavior early-warning system results in a tangible deficit in overtime patrols. This is clearly a zero-sum game, which naturally dictates where precious resources are directed.

    These two realities create tremendous downward pressure for street level law enforcement to maintain order by whatever means they can improvise in the field. This is where impromptu and often unconstitutional stratagem are born, such as “clearing corners.” With a dearth of root cause solutions, field officers know that “clearing corners” may alienate residents but reduce shootings in twenty-minute intervals. As Peter Hermann in the Washington Post recently pointed out, Western District Baltimore reported 66 murders in its 2.8 square miles in 2015. Police officers in urban America have been triaging violent crime block by block for years.

    Once a consent decree is implemented in the affected jurisdiction, the near immediate upside for law enforcement tends to be a reprieve from this relentless and unsustainable pace. While consent decrees are well known by now for their sweeping reforms to agency policies, use of force training and investigation, general oversight (typically layered and civilian), detention and arrest demographic reporting, community policing and engagement strategies, and constitutional policing generally; what is less well known are the considerable benefits to the rank and file.

    Consent decrees direct resources to officers in the form of extensive job training and professional development, support services, and incidentally, a more orderly and professional workplace. Many large police departments in recent years have become pressure cookers of untenable workloads which naturally results in job stress that is passed on to the public. The Department of Justice notes in nearly every consent decree that substantive discipline is lacking — most cops will acknowledge that malicious extrajudicial discipline is rampant. Such practices tend to naturally wane with the outsider presence.

    While I see a number such improvements in New Orleans’ consent decree era, I will admit that even I was surprised when in a recent police forum an overwhelming majority of colleagues present described their workplace as “dramatically improved” over the past few years.

    In the next two years Baltimore officials will likely (hopefully) be surprised by how collaborative and productive their relationship with DOJ will be. Admittedly, Justice is seen by field officers as an occupying faction in the initial months. And while field officers will lament the increase in administrative tasks for years to come; they often are equally surprised by their eventual relationship with Justice. While every city presents unique challenges, an early key to success is embracing the inevitable change and being proactive — Baltimore officials have clearly adopted this strategy.

    Consent decrees come with predictable drawbacks as well as some unexpected consequences peculiar to each jurisdiction. Chief among complaints are substantial costs [ed note: $11 million per year in New Orleans] and a distraction from basic crime control. Calls will take longer and result in longer wait times. Many also see the precipitous increase in administrative burdens as excessive, which compounds these problems.

    While there is a lack of any major corpus of data on the effects of current and former consent decrees in these areas, I believe one clear effect is their tendency to shine a glaring light on deficiencies in domestic policy and highlight some of the truly fundamental issues facing the future of policing in America. Wherever the reader chooses to point blame, these significant problems exist and need to be addressed. Baltimore and Chicago are struggling through one of the most violent years in decades.

    Rank and file officers can expect to see a slightly emboldened criminal population; many will feign vindication in light of DOJ’s report and challenge local law enforcement’s legitimacy during interactions. Defense attorneys will wave printed copies of the DOJ report on Baltimore in open court as general evidence of your “corruption.” Officers should also prepare for major changes to the handling of citizen complaints and discipline in general. Most complaints will essentially be taken at face value until disproved. Discipline will almost certainly be widespread and strictly applied until there is inevitable pushback, and then Baltimore and Justice eventually find a compromise. All of this will predictably take a toll on morale, the acute symptoms of which are temporary. All Baltimore area police labor groups should be proactive in approaching DOJ early on and getting a seat at the table. Baltimore officials should view New Orleans’ dedicated and invested compliance team and its relationship with the monitoring team as a model for progress.

    To DOJ’s credit, the agency openly acknowledges that consent decrees evolve, and with each passing year they learn from experience and actively work to improve the process for all involved. I think it is impossible to deny that the initial drain on resources creates a vacuum in crime control and increases in response times. I believe this is a primary area where we should expect improvement. Local crime is not the responsibility of DOJ per se, but any negative impact on crime control affects local populations; an increase in crime is contrary to both agencies’ long-term goals. A potential solution to this very real concern may involve historical analysis followed by an agreed upon strategy to minimize the potential for such scenarios prior to implementation. I also believe future monitoring teams should reach out to and engage rank and file officers either directly or through labor groups early on. New Orleans’ monitoring team are transparent and honest about their goals and expectations and are quite easy to work with, but it took longer than necessary in my opinion for field officers to feel confident in this fact.

    Whether the observer believes DOJ is infringing on the autonomy of state and local governments — who are merely struggling to control violent crime within their borders — or rightly stepping in to enforce the nation’s primary source of law; one immutable fact every similarly situated city has discovered is that arguing the legal merits of intervention is largely a waste of time. Consent Decrees appear to be here to stay; existing consent decrees are likely the best reference for any city wishing to avoid one.

  • Enough with the “Fakery”

    John McWhorter on the developing taboo of using the phrase “black-on-black crime.” (Spoiler alert: “We need to nip the burgeoning of this new and useless taboo in the bud with all deliberate speed.”):

    “What’s wrong is to refer to black on black crime as evidence of something uniquely pathological about black people.

    …

    [But] to instead classify the term “black on black crime” as a slur, period — and this is what is happening of late — is illogical. Moreover, it detracts attention from genuine concern for black communities.

    …

    And finally, treating “black on black crime” as a new “bad word” will only create fakery, and the way we discuss race in this country already has enough of that. Enlightened people’s impulse to avoid causing offense to black people and to always demonstrate that they are not racists will force a certain attendance to the pox on saying “black on black crime.” It will become a cocktail party cliché to dutifully observe “But white people are more likely to be killed by whites!” and shrug, with the implication that anyone who doesn’t understand that is “one of them,” unenlightened, and likely willfully so, impeded by their inner racists from giving black people are fair shot.

    But under the radar, plenty of people will always know that this taboo doesn’t really make sense, and that it even seems to pull attention away from what real black people living real lives think of as their real problems.

    We should, to the extent we can, use language with clarity and honesty. Pretending it’s always wrong to refer to something called “black on black crime” is antithetical to that mission, and we need to nip the burgeoning of this new and useless taboo in the bud with all deliberate speed.

    I came across thisat the same time I was responding to a request for some data. Somebody asked if there was any hard data backing up an assertion I made that blacks want more (not less) police presence.

    A quick search with the ol’ googlay found this 2015 Gallup poll: 38 percent of blacks want more police presence (and this compares to just 18 percent of whites). Only 10 percent of blacks want less police presence. Wanted more police and wanting fewer bad police are not mutually exclusive, of course.

    People — particularly black people, particular people more likely to be victimized by violent crime — want more police. So when you hear people say blacks are over-policed and want lesspolicing, you might wonder for whom they speak. Meanwhile, the Movement for Black Lives (which is or overlaps heavily with Black Lives Matter) released a platform that is more concerned with the problem of Israel(?) than black-on-black crime. (Did I miss it? Is there really nothing in this platformabout crime when not perpetrated by cops?) Fear of crime and criminals always trumps fear of police and over-policing.

    A short while back another person with knowledge of crime issues asked me if it were really true that blacks are more likely than whites to commit serious violent crimes. It’s good not to highlight this point out of context (lest racists go to town) since poverty and other variables account for much of the racial disparity, but indeed, yes.

    In 2014 (latest UCR numbers, when homicides were fewer) 6,095 blacks and 5,397 whites were murdered in America. There are 42,749,0000 blacks and 247,814,000 whites in America. That comes out to a black homicide rate of 14.3 and a white homicide rate of 2.2 per 100,000. [Just FYI, last year the homicide rate in Baltimore’s Eastern District was 100 per 100,000.] This is a huge disparity. Blacks are 6.5 times more likely than whites to be killed. I kind of thought this was common knowledge. But maybe I’m in too deep.

    So this goes back to the usage of “black on black crime.” I don’t care to engage in semantic debates when lives are at stake. I won’t be silent. But if it helps move the discussion toward solutions, I’m very willing to drop “black on black crime” and talk instead about black homicide victims or something. But talking about black homide victims begs the question of who the killers are. And since most crime is intra-racial, we’re left with a certain circular logic that goes back to “black on black” crime! [And look, I just combined three questionable phrases in one paragraph! Along with “black on black crime,” I’m not really certain if I did “beg the question” or if my logic was “circular.” But my point is to get my point across.]

    Not so long ago a friend of mine commented on the phenomenon of white folks who complain they can’t use the “n-word.” His point was “Why? You gotta ask yourself, why do you want to use it? What are trying to express that demands using this work?” (He was using the abstract “you” and not referring to me, just FYI.) If your point is simply to offend, then maybe it’s best to keep your trap shut. See, the value of political correctness isn’t to march in lockstep with some ideology, it’s to not be an asshole.

    So it’s fair to ask, “Why do you want to use the phrase ‘black-on-black crime’?” And the answer is because too many people are trying to distract from a real problem. Like too many cops, I’ve seen the carnage of “black on black crime” first hand. Last year the homicide rate in Baltimore’s Eastern District was 100per 100,000. I, like many police officers, too often feel that we are the only people who actually give a shit. Murders don’t make the papers; victims won’t even tell you their names. Who else (apart from EMS, nurses, and doctors) spends most of their waking hours trying to save lives? Now this sentiment may not be true, but when you get home after hearing gunshots, canvassing for witnesses, and riffling through the bloody clothes of another young black male victim, it’s an understandable sentiment.

    Call it what you will, but rather than make another phrase taboo, we should, as McWhorter says, pay more attention to “what real black people living real lives think of as their real problems.” Sometimes those voices are too hard to hear.

  • John Timoney

    A nice homage to John Timoney in the New York Times. Among other things:

    In 1972, New York officers fired 2,510 bullets and killed 66 people. By 2014, there were 288 shots fired and eight people killed.

    What happened? Mr. Timoney said that in 1972, the department put restrictions on when officers should shoot their weapons. Within a year, officers were firing about half as many shots.

  • “Imma start a riot like it’s Baltimore”

    Turns out the cop who once rapped “Imma start a riot like it’s Baltimore” turns out to be prophetic!

    But all joking aside, this cop who shot and killed an armed and dangerous man was from the community.

    More than 1,000 people have circulated a 2014 image, shared by the Milwaukee Police Department, identifying and lauding Officer Dominique Heaggan-Brown as the rookie cop who helped a homeless woman find a warm meal during frigid weather.

    …

    “I was aware that he was an officer like most people,” he added. “When we did have a chance to hang out it was pure kicking it, or he would pop up at some of my shows in support sometimes.”

    …

    Smith’s sister, Sherelle Smith, said the officer and her dead brother knew each other from their high school days.

    And then some people started listed his home address. There were death threats. Officer Heaggan-Brown — from the community he policed, doing his job, involved in a justified shooting — is now in hiding.

  • “Policing is differentiated from other occupations by the use of coercion”

    My colleague Eugene O’Donnell, former cop and prosecutor, writes in The Crime Report about “The ‘Post-Policing Era’ in America: How Will We Cope?” I don’t actually think we are entering “a post-policing era,” but it’s certainly likely we’re going to see police responding to forces asking them to do much, much less of the coercive actions that justify the need for police in the first place:

    [Let us discount] the notion that if the police are nice to everyone the world will truly shine. In fact, when the police are doing the enforcement duties that differentiate them from other civilian occupations they are enmeshed in conflict, undertaking work that is adversarial and frequently leaves people smarting.

    It’s worth quoting this article by O’Donnell at length:

    “The policeman is denounced by the public, criticized by the preachers, ridiculed in the movies, berated by the newspapers, and unsupported by prosecuting officers and judges. He is shunned by the respectable, hated by criminals, deceived by everyone, kicked around like a football by brainless or crooked politicians.”

    —August Vollmer, police reformer and chief, Berkley, California, 1929.

    This is the dawn of the post-policing era in America, and the nation needs to come to grips with how to maintain safety and secure order with cops playing a dramatically reduced role. From coast to coast there is an acute shortage of men and women seeking to be police officers.

    Half a century ago, the Kerner Commission envisioned policing as a profession, with baccalaureate- carrying cops. But almost no police department in the county requires, or plans to require, a four-year degree for hiring. It is absurdly out of reach.

    In fact, departments with even the most minimal requirements struggle to recruit new officers.

    …

    It is dawning on police officers and institutions that the police job is presently undoable in our far too violent and armed nation, and is rapidly becoming utterly impossible without a willingness to shoulder enormous physical and psychic risks and exposure to dire, possibly incarcerative consequences.

    To discharge the duties of a job that involves using force, even lethal force, on others in unscripted situations, while a camera records one’s improvised, clumsy and sometimes terrified decision-making for dissection by battalions of armchair second guessers makes this a career choice easily shunned.

    (Some reforms are overdue and necessary but cannot be reconciled with the need to find humans to do the work.)

    …

    Once individuals have identified their political persuasions, than all issues are framed, and solutions filtered, through those orthodoxies. In fact, political philosophies are pretty useless when trying to accurately identify what a community’s problems are, and fashioning solutions.

    Thus, at present, an absurd partisan conversation about who is “pro-police” and who isn’t is a feature of this year’s presidential election. This team-police versus team-citizen approach avoids serious issues and the need to make choices. Only a political knave or a novice offers an affirmative blueprint for keeping the public safe from crime and terrorism: The rewards all flow to they who critique the best and express in the loudest voice the need for empathy and a view of humanity that is distinction free.

    …

    Policing’s Hard Truths

    Policing is differentiated from other occupations by the use of coercion; thus it is fair to say policing is not infrequently lawfully brutal, but relatively rarely crosses the crime to criminally brutal. To say this in today’s environment is to utter words that are construed as almost hate speech, and subject the speaker to the loudest approbation.

    …

    Policing is expected to be the one and only profession that can achieve a fairness that is elusive in every aspect of a market economy. Thus far in Chicago out of nearly 300 homicide victims, almost all are black and a handful, nine, are white. No fairness there. Some construct arguments about the police that omit these shockingly disparate facts, ignoring that these numbers are potent weapons in the hands of the most divisive figures in public life. (And it is worth looking at the faces of the lives snuffed out by this long-running genocide)

    …

    The unstated idea that the police are no longer needed has become a mainstay, amongst many elites including those who pen editorials for the New York Times and the Washington Post. Enforcement and incarceration are regarded as evils per se. Last week’s Department of Justice report on the Baltimore police nowhere mentions the toxic implications of allowing shooters to shoot and remain free in their own communities.

    …

    Community policing—which is ill defined and amorphous–is once again being offered up as an ameliorative in the midst of our current crisis. It is never quite clear what it is or how it works in a poor or high-crime community, but it advances the notion that if the police are nice to everyone the world will truly shine. In fact, when the police are doing the enforcement duties that differentiate them from other civilian occupations they are enmeshed in conflict, undertaking work that is adversarial and frequently leaves people smarting.

    …

    The “police problem and criminal justice systems needs fixing” debate over the past few years has consumed a staggering amount of time, but precious little in the way of solutions that will take us forward into the future–a future where the police will play a much, much reduced role.

  • “The Light’s Better Here”

    A nice critique of quantitative data over at City Observatory. It’s about transportation planning, but the lesson can be applied to anything, especially policing:

    Reliance on data to solve complex problems is subject to what’s sometimes called the “drunk under the streetlamp” effect: An obviously intoxicated man is on his hands and knees on the sidewalk, under a streetlamp. A passing cop asks him what he’s doing. “Looking for my keys,” the man replies. “Well, where did you drop them?” the cop inquires. “About a block away, but the light’s better here.

    If anything, we have too much data on arrests, response time, clearance, even (sometimes) use of force. These are easy things to count. That doesn’t make them particularly useful or qualitatively significant. Things you can count won’t lead us to solutions that involve foot patrol, discretion, and positive interactions with the public. In policing, a job well done is just too hard to count.

  • “Three Years of Nights”

    Very good piece by Peter Nickeas in Chicago magazine. “Three Years of Nights: Violence convulses the city after dark. Reporting on it leaves its own scars.” It sure does. Same for policing (though for some more than others). And just another 17 years of the same and he’s have the career of a copper:

    It was the beginning of a three-year stint working overnights at the Chicago Tribune, covering any violent event that happened in the city after dark. I’d wanted a job at the paper, and this was the one they had. I was 25 years old.

    …

    Earlier in the night, two guys had fired an AK-47 and a revolver into a park where people were hanging out and playing ball. They wounded 13, including a 3-year-old…. A park had been sprayed with bullets. Not in a war zone. In this city. Stretcher after stretcher was wheeled away. A rare bit of emotion in a dispatcher’s voice on hearing that a 3-year-old had been shot in the face: “Jesus Christ. Ten-four.”

    …

    Sometime that summer — I have trouble recalling exactly when — the bursts of exhilaration that had been keeping me going started to peter out. I had trouble staying awake and was stealing sleep in the car between shootings. I spent slow nights in a sort of tape delay, neither awake nor asleep, stirring only when I heard something on the scanner. My senses were dulled. The adrenaline valve wasn’t opening like it used to. I responded to intense scenes — bystanders screaming at police, a paramedic wrestling an air mask onto a victim’s face — with a weird calm. Jason felt it, too, and described it as the feeling you get just after you dive into a pool, your body weightless, your muscles relaxed, sounds muted, your mind focused. At ease.

    And yet the shootings that followed that Fourth of July weekend were some of the most harrowing I’d ever covered. A kid killed at a slumber party. A 3-year-old shot on the block with his mom. Jason and I spent hours one August night in Englewood listening to relatives of a dead 16-year-old girl wail with grief. Hours of shrieking. A detective had confirmed the mother’s fear that it was her daughter lying dead down the street by walking up and starting the conversation with “So, uh, she has a tattoo on her left hand?”

    …

    I looked like shit. Few people told me, but I knew. I’d gained weight, and I’d taken on this gaze I couldn’t shake. My right eye twitched. I hadn’t been sleeping, and I looked mean when I was relaxing.

    When my shift was done that morning, I went to the Billy Goat and drank Jameson with friends. We drank more at Rossi’s. I went home, ordered Mexican food, and passed out before I could eat it. It was a celebration for me.

    I never really left overnights. I still work them here and there. More over the summer, when it’s busy.

    For three years, I’d inhabited a world separate from the one my friends lived in. On the train into work on summer Fridays, the other passengers dressed up for a night out in Wicker Park or Lake View, I’d sit there preparing for my shift, checking Twitter to see where people were getting shot or where people were calling in gunfire. I’d vacillate between wishing I were out with my wife and just wanting to start working.

    There’s not a relationship in my life that is stronger now than it was when I started covering violence. I don’t remember when I stopped giving honest answers when people at dinners or parties asked, “How’s work?” The truth is a conversation ender. I’d start a story, see things getting awkward, then power through it, apologizing at the end. It’s an isolating job. Part of leaving nights has been learning to move past that, or deciding whether to even try. Maybe it’s not healthy, but writing about violence feels like what I should be doing. It feels normal. It’s what I want to do. I want to help the city understand a little. That’s important to me.

  • The DOJ is Right (4): The actual department is a mess (3/3)

    Update: The links have changed (oops!) since these were first published. Here are links to all my August 2016 posts on the DOJ report on the BPD.
    1 https://copinthehood.com/initial-thoughts-on-doj-report-on-2/
    2 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-1-2/
    3 https://copinthehood.com/the-dojs-war-on-broken-window-2/
    4 https://copinthehood.com/cant-you-take-joke-2/
    5 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-2-n-word-2/
    6 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-3-that-damn-kid-on-2/
    7 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-4-on-diggs-dig-2/
    8 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-1-2/
    9 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-2-actual-department-is-2/
    10 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-3-actual-department-is-2/
    11 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-4-actual-department-is-2/

    F) And then there’s the problem of recruitment and retention:

    It appears BPD’s staffing shortage will not be resolved in the short term. We heard from officers, supervisors, and command staff that many officers join BPD to gain experience in a high-activity environment, and after three to five years, leave the Department for less-demanding and higher-paid positions with neighboring agencies…. This is a significant drain on the Department’s resources, as these experienced officers, if they remained, would be the future leaders of the Department, and critical to the success of the Department’s law enforcement efforts. The Department also appears to be confronting challenges in recruiting qualified officers — it has only met a fraction of its goals for the 2016 Academy class. At least one of the Department’s background check processes — its psychological testing — has been investigated for allegedly rushing those evaluations, sometimes conducting psychological evaluations for aspiring officers in as little as fifteen minutes.

    I totally aced that test. I still remember my doctor’s name was “Doctor Outlaw,” which I still think is a cool name for a doctor interviewing cops.

    G) And equipment issues are more key than outsiders may suspect:

    Officers suffer from being supplied with outdated, broken, or in some cases, no equipment. As one officer noted to the Fraternal Order of Police in a focus group, “How am I supposed to pull someone over for having a taillight out when my car has two?”

    Officers have no computers in their cars, forcing them to return to the district station to type reports, and even those computers are often not working…. Taking officers off the street to type reports at the district takes away from time that could be spent on law enforcement or community building activities. It also creates inefficiencies for officers who often must write reports on paper in the field while their memories of incidents are fresh, and then type the same information into computer databases after arriving at the district station at the end of their shift.

    H) There’s good news and bad news about how easily some of these things can be solved:

    Despite its budgetary issues, the City of Baltimore will need to make an investment in its public safety facilities and resources to ensure that officers have the tools necessary to properly serve the residents and businesses of the City.

    The answer is money. Baltimore doesn’t have too much of it.

    Here’s the thing. Cops work in a shitty environment. They know that. But accountability ends above the civil-service ranks. Why is that? Where is the leadership and accountability on high? Nobody blames the bosses — the mayor and police commissioner in particular — for the dysfunction of the department they control. This does so much to lower morale. It matters. Low morale is so much of the reason some cops become burnt-out assholes on the street. Where does the buck stop? Certainly not with the lowly patrol officer.

    Now if your job were that shitty, you’d walk off. But police can’t. The show must go on. No matter how bad things get, police have to go out there and make the best of it. Radios die, car transmissions don’t work, your car gets a flat and there’s no spare, computers are down, your uniform splits at the seams, and now body cameras are another can of things that can break. Despite all of that, one thing is certain: cops will go and answer the next call.

    You can’t fight City Hall. Cops get blamed for bureaucratic nightmares that not only do they have no control over. This dysfunction screws good cops and there’s nothing they can do about it. You think cops like working with (the very small minority of really) bad cops? Hell, no. But the system has no way to get rid of them. So you make do. You have to. And then you get pissed off when one bad cop who should have never made it out of the academy, should have been fired, should not have been promoted — this guy? He actually admits his racist crimes, and somehow people consider him the good guy and blames everybody else who was forced to work through his misdeeds.

    I defend most police officers because I’ve been there. I’ve had to drive shifts with a car that couldn’t go faster than 20 MPH. I’ve had to fill out forms. I’ve had to deal with citizens calling 911 to lie about me, I’ve had to work with cops I wouldn’t trust as far as I can throw.

    So fix it, dammit. Good cops want to, but they can’t. They’re tools in this system. And yet every day they get up from their bad dreams and go to work. It doesn’t matter how bad things get, police will do their job, most of them professionally. If one thing is true is for police, it’s that cliche: “the show must go on.”

    Maybe this DOB report will improve the department despite itself. Though I might be wrong, I doubt it. I suspect people will ignore this key section and just focus on eliminating discretionary proactive policing that saves lives. If policing taught me nothing else, it’s that things can always get worse. Or, as has been said: “I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn’t make it worse.”

  • The DOJ is Right (3): The actual department is a mess (2/3)

    Update: The links have changed (oops!) since these were first published. Here are links to all my August 2016 posts on the DOJ report on the BPD.
    1 https://copinthehood.com/initial-thoughts-on-doj-report-on-2/
    2 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-1-2/
    3 https://copinthehood.com/the-dojs-war-on-broken-window-2/
    4 https://copinthehood.com/cant-you-take-joke-2/
    5 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-2-n-word-2/
    6 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-3-that-damn-kid-on-2/
    7 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-4-on-diggs-dig-2/
    8 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-1-2/
    9 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-2-actual-department-is-2/
    10 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-3-actual-department-is-2/
    11 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-4-actual-department-is-2/

    C) It’s not like most police don’t want to make things better. They can’t. A lot this is systemic to any large bureaucracy in a poor city. But it’s not like cops haven’t tried to improve things. People care. But nothing seems to get better. The organization is dysfunctional:

    Individuals throughout the Department have highlighted that the Department needs to significantly improve its training program. For example, in 2012, the Fraternal Order of Police’s Blueprint for Improved Policing in Baltimore includes an entire section focused on training issues and recommendations. See FOP Blueprint for Improved Policing (July 11, 2012), at 6–8. More recently, BPD’s July 2015 Training Academy Needs Assessment provides a program analysis, describing major issues in personnel, curriculum, equipment and structures, and budgeting. It also notes that the Academy has been working to address some of these issues.

    And we don’t know what is happening because:

    Serious deficiencies in BPD’s supervision of its enforcement activities, including through data collection and analysis, contribute to the Department’s failure to identify and correct unconstitutional policing.

    D) And then we get to a failed discipline process:

    The system has several key deficiencies. First, BPD sets thresholds of activity that trigger “alerts” to supervisors about potentially problematic conduct that are too high. Because of these high thresholds, BPD supervisors often are not made aware of troubling behavioral patterns until after officers commit egregious misconduct. Second, even where alerts are triggered, we found that BPD supervisors do not consistently take appropriate action to counsel the officer, consider additional training, or otherwise intervene in a way that will correct the behavior before an adverse event occurs. Third, critical information is omitted or expunged from the EIS that could help address officer training or support needs or help prevent future misconduct.

    …

    It is clear that the Department has been unable to interrupt serious patterns of misconduct. Our investigation found that numerous officers had recurring patterns of misconduct that were not adequately addressed. Similarly, we note that, in the past five years, 25 BPD officers were separately sued four or more times for Fourth Amendment violations.

    You might call that a red flag.

    E) Officers feel and are unsupported:

    BPD fails to support its officers through effective strategies for recruitment, retention, and staffing patterns, and does not provide them with appropriate technology and equipment.

    Specifically:

    First, BPD does not have a Department-wide plan to address staffing shortages in patrol; instead, each district deals with its own shortages independently. Districts address their staffing shortages by “drafting,” or requiring, officers to work additional hours after their regular ten-hour shift. Officers are “drafted” to work up to an additional ten hours after their regular shift, making for, potentially, a twenty-hour day.

    …

    Officers we spoke with consistently informed us of the serious negative impact that drafting has on their morale. Additionally, the potential negative impact that drafting has on officers’ decision-making skills after working for up to twenty hours is equally troubling.

    This policy contributed to the death of my friend, who was killed in a traffic accident after many months of mandatory overtime and 12-hour shifts.