Go to qualitypolicing.com

Category: Police

  • Flint needs police!

    You may know Flint, Michigan, from “Roger and Me“. In many ways, Flint is typical of America’s struggling small cities. It’s 2000 population, just over half African-American, was 125,000 (so it’s probably down to about 110,000 right now). Flint has about 35 homicides a year, disproportionatly concentrated in its north side ghetto. Thirty-five homicides puts Flint in the same league as Baltimore, at least when it comes to murder.

    Michael East, Saginaw, Michigan police officer and author of the excellent Beyond Hope?, sent me this link responding to the mayor’s plan to lay off police officers.

    Now I don’t know Flint Mayor Dayne Walling from Adam, and I’ve never been to Flint, but if the police officer in the video is being straight with us, that tow deal sounds shady.

    What I find more amazing is the fact that Mayor Walling wants to reduce the police force to 120 officer. That’s a rate of 109 per 100,000 citizens. By comparison (don’t hold me to these numbers, they’re rough and corrections are welcome), New York city had about 410. Baltimore 450. Chicago 500 (Does Chicago really have more officers per capita than NYC now? That’s news to me). Los Angeles, always on the low end, has about 260 officers per 100,000.

    Flint’s 120 police officers for a city of 110,000 is scarily low! Especially for a city with a lot of crime. Remember, as a rule of thumb, at any given time 1/6 of officers are working and 1/2 of those are on patrol That’s just 10 officers for any given shift!

    Flint needs more cops. That’s clear. But of course, given their dire straights (and it’s not like I’m giving Flint any money), perhaps this a great opportunity for something truly radical!

    How about unplugging Flint’s police force from the 911 system? Alas, the mayor says he can reduce response time, so I don’t have much hope.

    A dozen officers on the street simply cannot answer 911 calls and do anything else. Period. So what is more important? Chasing the radio or real police work. I say real police.

    What if one city would let polices officer actually be police officers, free to patrol and prevent crime (mostly on foot or bike) instead of being slaves to the radio, serving as glorified report writers, and chasing every last prank call to 911. Response time matter for fire and ambulance. Very rarely for police.

    Why not try it? It’s not like Flint has much choice.

  • Why you never chase

    Karen Schmeer, a friend of a dear friend, was killed on January 29 while carrying groceries home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She was killed by a speeding car filled with drug-shoplifting hoodlums fleeing the police. The impact knocked her out of her boots and flung her through the air, half a city block.

    Karen’s death is more than a simple tragedy. Karen wasn’t just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Karen might be alive if police did not bend or break the exact rules put in place to prevent this kind of senseless death.

    Let me be clear: the police did not kill Karen Schmeer. Criminals did. Let them rot. But their guilt does not absolve the police of responsibility.

    While it is the job of police to catch crooks, it’s not always their job to chase crooks. Not in cars. Cars are dangerous.

    Police say they weren’t in pursuit at the time of the crash, but witnesses, according to the Daily News, “saw the car weaving in and out of traffic going north on Broadway with a squad car with lights and sirens blaring in hot pursuit.” Why the discrepancy? Because police should never be chasing suspects up Broadway at 8pm.

    You don’t need to pull the trigger to be guilty of murder. You don’t have to want to kill somebody. You do need to accept the likely consequences of your actions. This is what moral responsibility is about.

    New York, like most cities, forbids car chases “whenever the risks to [police] and the public outweigh the danger to the community if the suspect is not immediately apprehended.” That’s pretty much all the time unless it’s Osama Bin Laden himself at the wheel.

    Car chases aren’t worth it. They often end in some crash. And the pursued car does not have the emergency lights and sirens to warn people out of the way. The car that killed Karen didn’t even have its headlights on.

    The NYPD pursuit policy is based on the only effective way to reduce the danger of a car chase: don’t do it. For police, it’s as simple as it is unsatisfying.

    Police love a good chase, and there are informal rules to keep your supervisor from stopping the fun. Don’t “chase.” Instead, “follow.” Don’t get on the radio unless your voice is calm and your siren is off. When the suspects bail and run, the one you catch is the driver. If, God forbid, something really bad happens, say you lost contact before it happened.

    We all know that driving is dangerous–especially so for police–and we all know people who have been hurt and killed in car crashes. When I was a rookie cop on the streets of Baltimore and driving too fast to some call, I was confronted by my partner: “Do you know anybody [out there]!? Would you cry if anybody died?!” My sergeant put it another way, “I think of my wife or children in a car. They may die. For what?” This was the wisdom of experience. The message was simple: slow down.

    Still I couldn’t resist the thrill of the chase. I remember one fondly, on small empty city streets in the middle of the night. A guy with a van was speeding, ran a red light, and wouldn’t pull over. It ended OK. The guy bailed and didn’t crash. I caught him. Nobody got hurt. I had a blast.

    Three months later, when the judge saw my suspect in court, he said, “I know you! You’re a drug dealer.”

    Taken off guard, the young man replied meekly, “I used to be a drug dealer.” Then he requested a jury trial. When I talked to him later, he said, “That judge doesn’t like me. I used to deal, but I don’t play that no more.”

    “Then why did you run?” I asked.

    “I didn’t have a license… And I was little drunk.” He was also backing up five years of prison time. He got off with a $500 fine for a suspended license.

    I didn’t need to chase that guy, but I did it for the thrill. When I look back, I count my lucky stars nobody was killed. I made a dangerous situation worse by going the wrong way down one-way streets and pushing another driver past his limits.

    Had Karen Schmeer walked in front of the car I was pursuing that night and been killed, I would have tried to cover my ass with the exact words a NYPD spokesman used in this case: “Cops tried to pull over the suspects minutes before the crash, but they lost the car momentarily. When they caught up with the vehicle, it had already struck Schmeer, as well as several other vehicles.” Maybe that’s true.

    But I’m at least willing to say I was wrong.

    [Reprinted from New York’s West Side Spirit]

  • New Orleans Police after the flood

    Dan Baum wrote an excellent, award winning, best selling book about New Orleans, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans. He first spent time there as a reporter and writer for the New Yorkerin the days after Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent devastating flood.

    A few years ago I cold-called (or email) Dan after my wife realized that we were going to be in New Orleans with them and, more impressively, Dan and his wife just happen to be our doppelgangers. Dan and I shared a love for 1) writing books about ending the drug war, 2) food, 3) bicycles, and 4) literate women who edit extremely well. (Our mutual fondness for hats and hat stores is just, as they say down there, lagniappe.)

    Dan is no dummy (though I’d never say that to his face). At our very first dinner, while discussion corporal punished in schools, Dan coined the title for my upcoming book, In Defense of Flogging.

    Dan is also a very good writer. (He also loves guns and I look forward to his next book about America and guns.)

    In the days after we met, Dan and his wife were kind enough to waste some time with us, so we [queue montage music] biked around, got a food tour of the city, danced in a second line, ate too much, drank just right, and heard some great music.

    So naturally I’m very curious about Dan’s thoughts on the famously f*cked New Orleans Police Department. But honestly, except for the police officers in his book, I had no idea what we thought about any of the many issues plaguing the NOPD. The officer who left? The officers who staying? The behavior during the flood? I couldn’t get a straight answer! And it wasn’t for lack of trying.

    My queries were generally returned with what can only be described as minor apoplectic fits. There was this one: “didn’t I ask you not to get me started about the NOPD during katrina? didn’t I?” And then this one, “This is total, unreconstructed bullshit, and the kind of toxic rumor that made the disaster immeasurably worse when it was going on. Christ almighty.”

    But stubborn I am. So I sent him the latest on the police killing and cover-up of unarmed civilians on the Danziger bridge and politely wrote, “If you could be so kind to help me out, would you mind calmly and briefly (15 sentences or less) telling me your thoughts on police behavior during and after the flood, and the criminal proceedings that have followed.” Perhaps Dan is a sucker for uncharacteristic formality, but it worked. And that he did not stick to the length limit is but our gain.

    I decided early in my Katrina reporting to believe nothing I didn’t see with my own eyes. New Orleans, as I constantly told the New Yorker’s fact-checkers, is not a fact-rich environment, and the bullshit that flies around that city is beyond belief.

    What I saw of the police during the storm were heroic officers operating with no leadership or resources whatsoever. The cops I was with were protecting and serving under incredibly trying conditions, and doing so with professionalism and compassion. That they were cut adrift from any command or support was obvious; Eddie Compass (and Ray Nagin) were not only criminally incompetent, they made everything immeasurably worse by all their talk about babies being raped in the Superdome and roving bands of marauders.

    I also saw no violence or predation whatsoever. Everyplace I was, people were taking care of each other with unbelievable tenderness. Even the gold-toothed young men in the Convention Center were bringing water to the old folks, protecting a play area for the toddlers, and so on. I never once saw a black man with a gun who was not in uniform. My editor kept asking me about the violence — because he was listening to the reporters who were repeating the wild-ass assertions of the city’s so-called leadership — and I kept saying, “there is none.” I saw looting, but what I saw was people going into supermarkets and drug stores to take what they needed. Invariably, the liquor shelves were completely intact. The French Quarter is full of stores full of valuable art and antiques and no burglar cages over the windows. They were untouched. (Yes, smash-and-grab artists tend to go after electronics, but still, a lot of very valuable stuff was left unmolested.)

    I say all this because for the NOPD to say, “we had to do what we did because the city was in chaos” is patent bullshit and disgraces the majority of officers, who did their jobs without any support at all. There was no chaos. The structure of government disappeared, and the people behaved themselves admirably. The police abuses are prime examples of what Rebecca Solnit, in her excellent book, “A Paradise Built in Hell,” calls “elite panic.” Officials, cops especially, are terrified of mass chaos and therefore react to it whether it exists or not. On some level, it creeps them out that the people really don’t need them at all. Left alone, they behave just fine.

    We now are learning about some of the things bad cops did. And it’s certainly true that a small number of civilians did bad things during Katrina. But the vast majority, cop and civilian alike, behaved exactly as we would hope they would.

  • Officers Acquitted in Mineo “Abuse” Trial

    “We the jury weighed all the evidence and found reasonable doubt.” I’ll say.

  • I Like Art

    I’m not a “quote of the day” kind of guy. But I just came across this one from Art Buchwald. I always like his moxie:

    We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don’t think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great. If you’re hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time.

  • A felony just ain’t what it used to be!

    Lost in all the talk about the NYPD juking the stats is the simple fact that each and every year, the value of felony theft (“grand larceny” in NY State) goes down with inflation.

    New York State defines felony grand larceny (§155.30) as over $1,000. And this is where it’s been for the past 25 years.

    This makes the 64% reduction in grand larceny over the past 20 years all the more impressive since inflation alone has stripped almost 40% of a felony’s value.

    By lowering the value of a felony, we’re cheapening its meaning and labeling more and more people as felons. And is harmful and costly for all of us.

    $1,000 today is closer to the $275 a felony larceny was raised fromin 1986 (and where it was from 1965 to 1986). To keep the value of a felony consistent, it’s time to raise the dollar amount to $1,600 – $1,900. But since this figures stick with us for 20 or 30 years, why not jack it up to an even two-grand?

    Last time we did this, serious felony crime in New York City decreased 11% overnight. And this despite rising crime!

    Here’s to a $2,000 felony! Let the movement start here.

    [Thanks to a police officer for raising this question and to a John Jay librarian who dug up this hard-to-find information on a moment’s notice! Ain’t librarians grand?!]

    p.s. While we’re at it, maybe it’s time to adjust that “$20” figure in the 9th Amendment, too.

  • General Order No. 41, 1870

    General Order No. 41, 1870

  • Juking the Stats

    A recent report of retired New York City police officers warns that the NYPD is playing fast and loose with the numbers. Knowing when and where crimes occur is essential to good policing and Compstat, a system of crime-data analysis created in 1994, played a large role in bringing down crime in New York City. But ever since, numbers have ruled the NYPD’s roost. If crime numbers are not down, precinct commanding officers need numbers to show they’re doing something—something quantifiable.

    In the police world, two statistical categories are important: Part I felony crimes reported to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Statistics and internal measures of “productivity,” namely arrests, citations, and summonses. There are ways to play with both. But perhaps surprisingly, the police department’s emphasis on the latter, the so-called productivity stats, is a much greater cause for concern.

    Sergeants, lieutenants, captains and inspectors feel intense pressure to produce ever better stats. To some extent this can be good. Police are paid to work. But the pressure to produce more with less is as overwhelming as it is unrealistic. Mind you, the orders never come from above to just make numbers up, but when commanding officers talk about “productivity,” the rank-and-file hear “quotas.”

    “I’d love it if I always had enough good C’s [criminal citations], but I need numbers,” one officer told me, “And if I don’t have enough stats and Compstat is coming up, I don’t care if they’re bullshit. I’ll take whatever the f— I can get!” In a world where “better stats” and “more stats” are synonymous, the tail is wagging the dog. And police are nothing if not creative in finding ways to please their bosses.

    Officers know what they see on the streets. Any desk sergeant who reclassifies or “corrects” a report sends a terrible and destructive message. And these pressures have grown substantially in the past decade.

    When a $2,000 stolen laptop model can be found on EBay for less than $1,000, a felony larceny might be reclassified as a misdemeanor and all but disappear from the stats. Or say a tourist reports a robbery but the police, knowing she’s on the next flight back to Germany, record her loss as lost property.

    Of course statistical errors can run both ways. There’s a lot more false reporting of crime than the public realize, and police are certainly not fools. That German tourist may have simply wanted a police report to scam insurance money. Real life is not easily quantifiable, and trying to determine which bubble on a report best reflects reality leaves lots of room for honest interpretation.

    For statistical errors, data are supposed to be small and random. But for crime data, we’ll generally settle for errors as long as they’re consistent. Given that the distinction between felony and misdemeanor is basically arbitrary anyway, it doesn’t really matter if ten percent of felonies are reclassified as misdemeanors as long as it’s done every year. After all, far more than ten percent of crimes are never even reported.

    The problem with fudging crime numbers for political gain is that you can’t stop. You have to do it every year just to stay even. Eventually you’ll get promoted and transferred, if you’re lucky, leaving your more honest and naïve replacement to deal with surprisingly bad crime numbers.

    Certainly some stats, like murders and car thefts, are more reliable than others. The former are hard to fudge and the latter are generally reported for insurance reasons. And by these measures, the drop in violent crime is impressively clear. Murders alone are down 70 percent from their 1994 peak and 11 percent in the last year alone. This is real. These numbers matter.

    But too many measure of police “production” do little but produce internal stats and pad officers’ overtime pay. Take low-level marijuana possession arrests. In 1994 there were 3,141 of these in New York City. In 2008 they had exploded to 40,383! This 1,285 percent increase was not the result of a epidemic of marijuana possession but a simple change in police tactics.

    To say these arrests caused the crime drop is absurd, akin to claiming that a parking-ticket blitz prevents traffic deaths. These arrests—at great taxpayer expense and motivated only by internal police pressure to produce “stats”—simply pad officers’ overtime pay while sending tens of thousands of mostly poor minority men through the criminal-justice system.

    Messy as they may be, it’s hard to image a police world were numbers didn’t matter. What’s important is that these numbers aren’t produced for their own sake. Statistics need to stay focused on crime and not internal, malleable, and ultimately destructive measures of “productivity.” The hard-working men and women of the NYPD deserve as much.

  • Sean Bell officers won’t face federal charges

    Nor should they.

    The story from the New York Times.

    You can read everything I’ve written about Sean Bell. This post is probably the best, if you just want one.

    Also, on principle, I’m against recharging people at the federal level. Smacks of double jeopardy to me. The Fifth Amendment is pretty explicit: “[No person shall] be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.” That’s what trying somebody at the federal level is. One crime. One trial. Here’s to the Bill of Rights!

    Too bad the Supreme Court begs to differ.

  • Baltimore Police Doing Their Job

    Like they do every day. But this time there was more snow.