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Category: Police

  • 99 problems but this is no longer one

    The Supreme Court ruled in Rodriguez v. United States (2015) that K9s cannot be used in traffic stops (without cause) if it delays the driver. Period. Previously, the law of the land was that the driver couldn’t be delayed too much. But it wasn’t clear how much was too much. Waiting for a K9 unit was too much. But if the dog was already there, then it was considered OK. No longer.

    Both as a constitutional issue and a strike against the war on the drugs, I think this decision is eminently reasonable. I’m never liked fishing for drugs. And telling otherwise innocent people to wait while dogs sniff around is like a police state. (And besides, we should be skeptical of probably cause based on a dog. Have you ever seen a dog put on the stand?)

    K9s can be really useful to police. To search large buildings, for instance. (Another break-in at the Monument Street Market?) And the threat of calling in the dogs is useful in getting some idiot to come out of his hole he crawled into.

    Post Rodriguez, to search with a dog without cause means you’d have to have another officer doing the traffic stop part while the K9 does his business at the same time. This won’t change policing too much, since there aren’t too many K9 units anyway. But it does make me wonder what those K9 units are going to do when they’re not needed for real police work. I guess they can still give traffic tickets. But it makes the dog kind of superfluous.

    I also think it’s important to point out that this will (slightly) increase officer safety. The police academy is filled with videos of cops getting attacked and killed when they start asking to search a vehicle for drugs. Now one could argue that finding and arresting criminals is part of the job, but if your primary concern is officer safety, the safest thing to do in a traffic stop is give a ticket and let the car drive away.

  • The latest from Baltimore: Freddie Gray

    Things are tense for police after the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore Police custody.

    I got no clue what happened. And I’m not going to say much till I do.

    Keep in mind that Baltimore cops don’t know what happened. But boy is this turning into quote a jackpot. A man died in police custody. Of a broken spine. Shit is hitting the fan. Six cops have been suspended (with pay).

    It’s slowly becoming national news (which is rare, when it comes to Baltimore police issues).

    What we do know is that last Sunday morning police in the Western approached a group of people. A guy takes off running. Cops chase. Bike cops catch and arrest the guy, Freddie Gray for carrying a small knife. He gets put in a wagon. When Gray comes out of the wagon, he’s seriously injured. He dies a week later.

    From the New York Times:

    “We have no evidence — physical, video or statements — of any use of force,” the deputy police commissioner, Jerry Rodriguez, said at the news conference. “He did suffer a very tragic injury to his spinal cord, which resulted in his death. What we don’t know, and what we need to get to, is how that injury occurred.”

    Mr. Gray died Sunday, a week after his arrest. Witnesses captured parts of his encounter with the police on a cellphone video, in which screams can be heard as officers drag him into a transport van. An autopsy showed no wounds, except for the severed spinal cord, and the videos do not show the police acting forcefully.

    …

    On the way to the station, the van made at least two stops — including one in which Mr. Gray was taken out and placed in leg shackles after the driver complained he was “acting irate in the back,” Mr. Rodriguez said. After Mr. Gray arrived at Baltimore’s Western District station, police officers called medics, who took him to a hospital.

    From the Sun:

    “When he was placed inside that van, he was able to talk, he was upset,” Deputy Police Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said. “And when Mr. Gray was taken out of the van, he could not talk, he could not breathe.”

    Police said they used no undue force when arresting Gray and can find no evidence from cellphone and city surveillance videos that officers brutalized Gray. They said an autopsy shows no indication that force was used.

    But you need force from somewhere to be injured the way Gray was fatally injured. It is the responsibility of the wagonman (or woman) to make sure prisoners are safe and strapped down during transport.

    It seems we have what started as a case of “felony running.” Running from police is not a a crime. But fleeing from police does give police reasonable suspicion to stop (Illinois v. Wardlow, 2000). We used to make fun of cops who caught a “felony runner.” That would happen when somebody takes off. You chase them! It’s natural. You’re a cop. You catch them… and then you realize they haven’t actually committed a crime. You search (I mean frisk) them hoping to find something. Anything. But if you don’t, you have to let them go. You can’t even get them for loitering. They weren’t loitering if they ran. Now I wouldn’t chase people just for running. But I could have, if I liked running more.

    The court vague said you need something other than running, but that something can be almost anything including “high crime area” or “drug corner.” So I’m willing to say the approach, the chase, the stop, the frisk, the search, and the arrest were all legal.

    I’m not saying this is the case here, but just FYI, it is not uncommon in Baltimore for corner boys to assign one person to be a “runner,” just to get police off on a wild goose chase. That could be some young kid. It could be a junkie.

    Police pull up. Somebody runs. You can chase him. Or you can let him run. Personally, I’d prefer to grab the second guy who tried to get away, figuring he would be more likely to have the stash or a gun.

    Now in this case Gray did have a small knife, for which he was arrested. (If you make cops chase you, they can be damn sure they will, as they should, lock you up for any legal reason.)

    Meanwhile angry people think the police and politicians are covering things up. And yet most police officers also don’t trust the department and politicians. I wrote about race and police attitudes towards the discipline process back in 2008 in “Two Shades of Blue.” The idea is that the powers-that-be — and Baltimore has a black mayor and black police commissioner — will punish police officers, guilty or not, to placate the public. I assume that among the six suspended officers are those who made the arrest (I don’t know if that’s true). And yet the department has already said that things were OK when they handed off the prisoner. I hope they enjoy their paid days off.

    Personally, it’s worth noting my surprise that these Western officers were doing any work at all on a Sunday morning. That is not generally how we rolled in the Eastern. Maybe it’s just because it’s spring. And you it’s spring in Baltimore because the bikes are in bloom.

  • Too far a gap to bridge?

    I lose hope when, on one hand, the South Carolina F.O.P uses the term, “professional race agitators” in a press release. As a former dues-paying member, I will gladly offer my editing service gratis to any FOP newsletter. Seriously. If your goal is P.R. and you’re talking about “the recent tragedy.” Do not use the term “professional race agitators” in the same press release. Just don’t. Trust me on this one. (Al Baker’s story in the Times.)

    On the other hand, people in Baltimore are protesting a man who remains in a coma after being injured during an arrest. Meanwhile, Baltimore being Baltimore, police shot somebody near the protest who had a loaded gun (the fourth BPD-involved shooting in 2015). And one group of anti-police protesters is idiotic enough to ask in a tweet, “how could [police] know it was loaded?”

    See, when police have to explain why they shot a criminal with a loaded gun, it doesn’t make you want to engage. It makes you want to go to local F.O.P. bar, drink too much, and talk about “professional race agitators.”

    [Meanwhile, just FYI, 11 people were shot in the last 24 hours in NYC.]

  • Occupy the Corner

    Protests in Baltimore against violence. From the Baltimore Sun:

    “Occupy the Corner,” as it was called, was the opening salvo in another year of community outreach arranged by the anti-violence group known as 300 Men March. As they have for the past two years, members plan to gather every Friday evening into the fall to walk the streets as a group and engage residents young and old in an effort to make neighborhoods safer.

    …

    “There are a lot of people who want to do something about the violence but don’t necessarily have the outlet,” Bahar said before Friday’s event. “That’s why we created ‘Occupy the Corner’ — to give people an outlet, not against police violence but more specifically the day-to-day violence happening in the communities, of young folks gunning other folks down.”

    City Councilman Brandon Scott joined the sign-wavers, saying he hopes it will help reclaim the Penn North neighborhood from drug dealing.

    “When we are engaged in our communities, we have less violence,” Scott said. Last year, the group focused its efforts in the Belair-Edison community in Northeast Baltimore, Scott said, because there had been a spate of homicides there. During the months of activity there, he added, the number of killings dropped.

    Scott also drew a distinction between the anti-violence efforts of 300 Men March and the protests against police violence.

    “Both issues are valid,” he said, adding that he may very well join the rally Saturday, too. But complaints about police misconduct are no excuse, he added, for failing to take personal responsibility for what goes on in the community.

    …

    “This is very good, but it’s only symbolic,” said Field, 63, who leads African-American heritage tours. “As soon as the 300 crowd came, the evil folk left,” he said. But he added that “five minutes after they leave, it’s going to be a drug corner.”

    If you really think that people (black people in particular) only care about violence when it comes from police, you’re either woefully uninformed or willfully ignorant.

  • Here’s what’s up in Oklahoma

    This is an email I received from (someone I believe is) an Oklahoma Police officer. He answered my question — why does Oklahoma lead the nation in people killed by police? — very well. It’s knowledge I don’t have, and I can’t say it better myself. He agreed to let me reprint it here, anonymously:

    To clarify, the reserve academy is 240 hours (nights and weekends), the full time academy is 600 hours (increased to 600 4-5 years ago). Reserves are limited to the number of hours they may work. When I started in ____ the reserve academy was 168 (min hours, most add additional training to it) and I think full time was 320. A few years before that it was less and less.

    They have increased training greatly over the last 15-20 years. The main reason it has taken so long to increase the hours and why it isn’t as high as the national average is that most departments can’t afford to have an officer tied up at the academy for more time. Most have a difficult time making it while they are gone as it is, due to a lack of manpower. The only area where the standards in OK exceed standards is firearms. They made the qualification course easier 3-4 years ago, but it’s still difficult. (Before they used to start at 50 yards, now they have eliminated those and added more at 25 yards).

    As for the reason for more shootings by officers and other issues in general, there are many things that contribute.

    1) OK is a “conservative” state. They continually increase penalties while at the same time cutting budgets, causing less personnel, less continuing education opportunities, increased early release of inmates (I think the last news article I read on our prisons stated at they are only about 60% staffed). In my opinion, the ones on parole are far from adequately supervised. There is also, in my opinion, a lack of mental health services.

    2) Pay. No one wants to say it, but low pay contributes to they quality of officers. You get some that do it for the right reasons, then some that never should be officers. It’s hard for most agencies to find suitable officers. With the exception of a handful of agencies in the metro areas and the OK Highway Patrol, I would estimate the average salary as 30K. Some smaller agencies in our area start at just above minimum wage. Some small towns have one full time and actually pay one or two reserves (many end up going to the full time academy and becoming full time at some point).

    3) Low number of officers per square mile outside of OKC, Tulsa, Norman, and Lawton. There are no agencies outside of the metro areas that I know of they have more than one officer per unit. In many areas, the nearest backup may be 15-20 miles away. (More likely to fight or attack a solo officer.) It’s not that these areas are not populated, just not as densely populated. The tax bases do not generate enough to hire additional officers.

    4) Meth and prescription drugs, abused everywhere, but sadly more so in OK. Leads to increases crime and violence in general

    5) Suicide by cop. This seems to be happening more in OK. A few weeks ago I was involved in a pursuit and shootout with a man who had murdered his brother and told some people he wouldn’t be taken alive. As a result of his actions, a state trooper was injured by glass flying into his eye when a bullet from the suspect struck his windshield. The suspect was shot and killed. The same night one of the troopers that came to assist with that stopped a car and the driver pulled a pistol and started shooting at him, causing the trooper to retreat to his car and return fire. The suspect then exited his vehicle and shot himself in the head. The last I heard no one was able to determine why the man did it.

    6) Change in our society. I used to think my elders didn’t know what they were talking about when they spoke of changes, but I have noticed them myself over my 35 years of life, especially the last 10. With newer generations, ethics and personal responsibility seems to have declined. Children are doing things in school now that we would have never done or even thought about doing. Some (sadly some of my own family) have no respect for themselves or anything else. (I’m not sure if this is everywhere or just in our region.). We also have a high percentage of our population on various forms of welfare and large economically depressed areas (not that this makes someone a criminal).

    7) Broken juvenile justice system and some parent that just don’t care. In OK, they can do nearly anything without consequences, and they know it. By the time they turn 18 is too late and they continue to be criminals.

    8) Drug trafficking and cartels. I-35 , I-40, and I-44. Besides local drug manufactures, large amounts are brought through our state. (Same is true for AZ, NM, and TX).

    9) EVERYONE in OK is armed. I personally do not have an issue with it. I purchased my first firearm, a Colt single action .22, from an elderly neighbor when I was 9 years old. I have collected and enjoyed shooting ever since, both competitively and recreational. In OK, I would estimate that over 50% of the population have weapons and many hunt. It is legal for citizens to own suppressors, machine guns, and short barreled rifles (with appropriate paperwork and ATF tax stamp). The vast majority of gun owners are very responsible, however, with increased gun ownership, there is naturally going to be increased issues involving firearms. Same is true with alcohol (our state had a huge problem with DUI), fattening foods, and smoking.

    All of this sounds bad, but Oklahoma is actually a good state to live in, it just had some issues like anywhere else.

  • Well done, NYPD. What’s your secret?

    The national average, the rate of people killed by police (as they define it, which is pretty loose, but OK) is 0.36 per 100,000. This is over the past 23 months. That’s roughly 1,135 killed per year.

    This is based on these data from May 2013 to April 2014. I believe it’s similar to (but a bit messier than) killedbypolice.net. But it’s got city and county data, which isn’t at killedbypolice.net.

    Now we already knowthat the rate of being killed by police is a hell of a lot higher in Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona (0.8) — five times higher — than it is in New Jersey, Michigan, and New York (0.15).

    But states are big and have hundreds of police departments. I want to break it down by city. The rate in California is twice the national average. I don’t think San Francisco police are shooting a lot of people. So who is?

    Well, Bakersfield (rate = 2.1, which includes killing in the city killings both by the Bakersfield PD and the Kern County Sheriff Dept.), Salinas (2.0), Stockton (1.4), Fresno (1.1), and Santa Ana (0.9) come to mind. These are crazy high rates.

    Super high seem to be Kansas City, MO (rate = 2.0), Oklahoma City (1.7), St Louis (1.5), Tulsa (1.4), Phoenix (1.2), and Albuquerque (1.1). Remember all these figures are rough. So I don’t mean to rank order, but I do mean to group these cities together.

    Bakersfield? Salinas? Maybe it’s been a bad two years, but there are only 363,000 people who live in Bakersfield. Between 2012 and 2013, the NYPD killed 21 people. And in the past 23 months 15(!) people have bit the dust in Bakersfield? Do correct me if I’m wrong. The stats may be a fluke. Or maybe it was a bad two years. Or maybe the numbers are wrong. But it’s still a hell of a red flag!

    The rate in Los Angeles 0.5. That’s not quite twice the national average… but it’s one-forth of Bakersfield and Salinas. Baltimore’s rate is 0.9. Chicago comes in at 0.6.

    The NYPD? The big bad NYPD? The killers of Diallo, Gurley, Bell, Garner, and so many other?

    Zero-point-one-three. New York City’s rate is 0.13. The rate of people killed by police in one-third the national average. This is amazing.

    Put another way, Chicagoans are 5 times as likely to be killed by police. Baltimoreans 7 times as likely. And Bakersfield? Lovely Bakersfield? In the streets of Bakersfield you’re 16 times more likely to be killed by police than you are in New York City. [Update 2017: This is no longer true. The number of people killed by police in Bakersfield has declined greatly. But the overall numbers for small- to medium-sized cities west of the Mississippi are still very large.]

    [Update: See Nick Selby’s description of those shot and killed by police in Bakersfield. Maybe the streets just really are meaner.]

    Think of this, too, as my NYPD friends do. Shootings by NYPD may be tragic, but compared to the rest of the nation, they really do seem to fall in the category of isolated incidents. Whatever the NYPD is doing to shoot so few people seems to be a case of best practices. Maybe the focus should be not to criticize the NYPD but to learn from it. The systemic problems seem to be out west. And maybe people who want to protest police shootings should protest police who really are shooting too many people.

    Go west, young man, go west. There is health in the country, and room away from our crowds of idlers and imbeciles.

    [I want to emphasize these results are primarily, not double-checked, and based on unverified data. But the even as just ballpark figures, the differences are too dramatic to ignore.]

  • “If I had a hammer… I’d hammer out justice.”

    This is the second paragraph of an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates:

    When Walter Scott fled from the North Charleston police, he was not merely fleeing Thomas Slager, he was attempting to flee incarceration. He was doing this because we have decided that the criminal-justice system is the best tool for dealing with men who can’t, or won’t, support their children at a level that we deem satisfactory. Peel back the layers of most of the recent police shootings that have captured attention and you will find a broad societal problem that we have looked at, thrown our hands up, and said to the criminal-justice system, “You deal with this.”

    Nothing against women’s rights advocates, but I haven’t heard anybody question the logic of passing laws that lock people up for failure to pay child support. (And while I’m at it, can I just mention that mandatory domestic violence laws are racist, do not work, and have have hurt countless men and women.)

    This is the first paragraph. It’s just as good:

    There is a tendency, when examining police shootings, to focus on tactics at the expense of strategy. One interrogates the actions of the officer in the moment trying to discern their mind-state. We ask ourselves, “Were they justified in shooting?” But, in this time of heightened concern around the policing, a more essential question might be, “Were we justified in sending them?” At some point, Americans decided that the best answer to every social ill lay in the power of the criminal-justice system. Vexing social problems–homelessness, drug use, the inability to support one’s children, mental illness–are presently solved by sending in men and women who specialize in inspiring fear and ensuring compliance. Fear and compliance have their place, but it can’t be every place.

    And this if from the end:

    Police officers fight crime. Police officers are neither case-workers, nor teachers, nor mental-health professionals, nor drug counselors.

    I’m pretty sure Ta-Nehisi Coates isn’t trying to be pro-cop, but that’s the kind of line that will get carried off on cops’ shoulders at a police convention!

    That last paragraph goes on:

    The problem of restoring police authority is not really a problem of police authority, but a problem of democratic authority. It is what happens when you decide to solve all your problems with a hammer. To ask, at this late date, why the police seem to have lost their minds is to ask why our hammers are so bad at installing air-conditioners. More it is to ignore the state of the house all around us. A reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all. It’s avoidance. It’s a continuance of the American preference for considering the actions of bad individuals, as opposed to the function and intention of systems.

    There’s more. And you should read the whole thing. But that is my good-parts version.

  • Why are Christians so violent?

    I know that headline is unfair clickbait, but there are many things that could be said about this video. Here’s a Daily News story.

    I think it’s interesting primarily to show what can happen when officers fail to gain control of a situation: a mess. A lethal mess. A cop gets shot. Two of the fighting Graver family get shot, one fatally.

    Tactically, clearly mistakes were made, but it’s hard to second guess. It’s rare to find a group that is so willing and able to fight cops. Still, in terms of “things that could have gone better,” one place to look is that fight only started after the cops arrived on scene. That could be a place for improvement. Once the brawl is on, well this is why you always want a fight to be two, three, or four police to one. What a mess. What part of “get on the ground” don’t they understand.

  • Killed by Police (3 of 3): Cutting the number in half

    Killed by Police (3 of 3): Cutting the number in half

    [See my previous posts 1 and 2 and about NYC.]

    It’s not unreasonable to believe — even when one knows the vast majority of police-involved shootings to be justified — that three police-involved homicides per day is perhaps two too many. Can the number of police-involved killings be reduced without placing officer’s lives in danger? Of course. We know this because some departments shoot a hell of lot more people than other departments.

    If California could reduce their rate of police-involved shootings down to the rate that already exists in the state of New York? 135 people a year would by killed by police. And that’s just in California alone.

    Police in some states are much more likely to pull the trigger than in other states. Now this does not take crime and violence against police into account, which would in an ideal world. But the differences are still incredibly stark. And since we’re looked it states rather than cities, I mean, it’s not like cities in New York, New Jersey, and Michigan normally come to mind as epitomizing peace, love, and non-violence.

    [It’s worth warning and repeating that all this assumes the data is valid enough. I am assuming that. But I may be wrong.]

    Oklahoma has a police-involved homicide rate of 0.78. That’s higher than the overall homicide rate in Sweden. Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona all have rates of police-involved killings that are twice the national average (0.36) and four to five times higher than Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Virginia, New Jersey, Michigan, and New York.

    My guess is the differences have to do with better training, more police officers per capita, less public tolerance of police-involved killings, higher police standards and pay, and differences in police culture.

    But really, in terms of police training and standards, there’s no reason to think we couldn’t bring all states in line with the best states. And if police across the nation killed just as often as police in those least trigger-happy six states currently do? That would cut the national rate of police-involved killings by half and save 500 lives a year. This would also save 500 cops a year from having to shoot and kill somebody. Police lives matter, too.

    2020 Update. And 2020 caveat.

  • “Who gave this reserve cop a gun?”

    Uh, it’s his own gun. But headline aside (writers don’t write the headline), I like to think I make some good points in this CNN piece about Robert Bates, the Tulsa County “reserve deputy” who thought his gun was a Taser and shot and killed a criminal.