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Category: Police

  • Sometimes it’s just a job

    The seventh in a series from Sgt. Adam Plantinga’s excellent 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman:

    This job can turn sour for a variety of reasons. Maybe you got hurt in your last fight with a suspect. Maybe you have enough pending citizen complaints that it seems your solid, aggressive police work is actually being punished; you wonder if being a proactive officer is even worth the hassle. Perhaps a sergeant is breathing down your neck or your squad partner is good for nothing. Whatever the reason, you can adopt a lousy attitude rather quickly.

    You start to show up at assignments not because you want to make anything better, but because you have to. Then you do just enough at that assignment not to get written up or fired. You look at citizens with a growing Us versus Them disgust, resentful of a community quick to criticize the police for being heavy-handed, but at the same time not exactly lining up themselves to take a job where there is a reasonable chance of getting shot at and an excellent chance of working weekends and holidays.

    You will order zippers on your uniform shirts in addition to the buttons not because you want zippers, but because it will cost the city a few extra dollars per shirt so screw ’em. Or when the district captain comes into roll call and asks people to come up with ideas to stop auto thefts in the area, you might grumble, “I’ll take the assignments dispatch gives me, but you can’t order me to have an idea.” Or when you and your co-workers aren’t getting the off-days you request, you’ll band together and call in sick, the fabled “blue flu,” leaving the citizens short on protection, and leaving your fellow officers, who did choose to come in, short on backup.

    These attitudes are most prevalent among veteran officers. As a newer cop, you look at them and wonder if you’re seeing your future.

    At the same time, despite the challenges that come with the job, it’s good to keep in mind that this is the profession you chose. Not much point in bellyaching about it. During tough economic times when workers are being laid off across the country, you have a position that will not be outsourced any time soon. You are in an industry where business is always booming. Until the crime-fighting robot is perfected, you have plenty of job security.

  • When police-involved shootings aren’t about race

    There’s still the strange belief among some people that police only do bad things to black folk. When I was on Chris Hayes the other night, some commentators thought the initial stop was racially biased. Chris himself questioned whether a white person would have been stopped for a seat-belt violation. I find that crazy talk. There was so much bad going on in that shooting that to be distracted by the initial stop seems to miss the greater point. I know the vast majority of cops don’t give a damn about your race. And the idea that white people don’t get stopped for seat-belt violations is also demonstrably false. (If you want to download and read a large and rather academic pdf report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on the matter, knock yourself out.)

    Bad things do not only happen to black people. Most bad shootings don’t become issues till there’s unrest and/or Al Sharpton raises a fuss. And sometimes, a fuss should be raised. (And the last time the Rev tried to help some poor white guy who claimed he was brutalized by police, well, Sharpton sure picked the wrong white guy.)

    I’ve written a few times times about police killing white people, first on this blog in 2008. And then in 2009 there was the horrible police f*ck-up that resulted in police shooting and killing Rev. Jonathan Ayers. This was never big news. (In fact, to my dismay, my limited account of Ayer’s death seems to be the most extensive on record.)

    I’m not saying race never matters, but cops are not shooting black people because they’re black. Cops are not stopping black drivers for seat-belt violations because they’re black (though police may be searching your car for drugsafter that stop because you’re black). To believe that race is the issue in policing ignores and won’t solve the problem of people of all races who are wrongfully shot (or tased, or maced) by police. The issues have less to with race than with bad training and police officers making bad split-second decisions.

    So here’s a black cop shooting Bobby Dean Canipe, an unarmed white person (and a 70-year-old disabled vet at that).

    Clearly in hindsight this is not a good shooting. It’s a traffic stop and an old guy with a cane. And yet when Canipe gets out of his pick-up truck, on the highway, and I see a long hard object turn toward my face — and keep in mind I’m watching a youtube video and I *know* it’s not going to be a gun — I felt my ass pucker.

    Would a reasonable officer have feared for his or life in that situation? Yeah, potentially, probably, I think so.

    Sure it would have been great if the cop had known it was a cane. It also would have been great if the guy hadn’t gotten out of his truck and reached for his cane.

    A mistake. But I think a reasonable one. I’d let the cop off.

    [Hat tip to a commenter for bring this shooting to my attention.)

  • There are good people, too.

    The sixth in a series from Sgt. Adam Plantinga’s excellent 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman:

    There are good people in the neighborhood. They work hard. They try to raise their kids right. They’ll even help you push if your squad car gets stuck in a snow bank. You see them out there, tending to their lawns, cleaning the broken bottles off the sidewalk in front of their house, shaking their heads as a car with chrome rims drives by, the bass turned up so loud it rattles the stemware in their kitchen.

    Some of them have lived in the same house for 20, 30, 40 years and now look around and don’t recognize the street they grew up on or the people that live there. The block has taken a turn for the worse and they’re talking about moving. They don’t want to move, mind you. But maybe they’d rather live in a place where they can watch their grandkids play without having to worry about stray bullets or vicious dogs. Maybe they want to look out the window and see kids racing each other on bikes instead of some teen in an oversized I Got That Snow T-shirt doing a hand-to-hand drug deal. You can’t blame them for wanting out. You don’t live there. You wouldn’t make it. Sure, you patrol those streets and alleys but at the end of your shift, you go home. That makes you merely a tourist. Not a guide, but a guest.

  • Cops and fitness

    The fifth in a series from Sgt. Adam Plantinga’s excellent 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman:

    There are uniformed cops on the street who are grossly overweight. Their prominent bellies make their equipment belt hang so low it seems inaccessible to them and they can’t chase a suspect more than a block without collapsing. To them, a five-foot tall fence they need to scale might as well be five hundred feet.

    In my current department, it is said that we have an officer who once dropped his gun and was too fat to bend down and pick it up so he just waited until a concerned citizen came along who retrieved his firearm for him. How can this be? Chalk it up to years of less than salubrious living, cumulative stress, drive-through Chicken Fingers, and indifference.

    There are incentives for staying in shape on some police departments in terms of extra off-time awarded, but there are certainly no penalties, so once you’re out of the academy, you technically never have to exercise another day in your life. Is it fair to the general public that they are protected by such gelatinous first responders? No, it’s not. But police unions tend to have a lot of juice, and they would never go for a system that penalized overweight

    But even given that, you know that some of the more rotund officers are among the best investigators. A detective with 20 confidential informants who can pick up the phone after a fresh homicide and get a line on the murderer in ten minutes is worth a dozen Cross Fit uniformed officers, even if he is packing 75 extra pounds and wheezes frequently.

    But if you are someone who regularly responds to hot calls, some basic level of fitness is necessary. If you throw one punch and then are immediately ready for a water break, it’s time for some soul-searching. You have to ask yourself, if you were in physical peril and called the police, would you want an officer like you to be the first one on scene? If your answer is a resounding no, it’s time to get off the street and into police administration, investigations, or maybe retail.

  • S.C. State Trooper arrested for bad shooting

    Here’s me on Chris Hayes last night talking about the shooting of Levar Jones.

    And yeah, that’s my bolo tie. You got a problem with a little New Mexico sunshine on TV? Didn’t think so.

    Update: The officer pled guilty

  • Youth: The future (prison) leaders of tomorrow

    The fourth in a series from Adam Plantinga’s excellent 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman:

    As a cop, it’s easy to get discouraged about the state of today’s youth. You don’t see much of the honors student bound for Dartmouth, because she doesn’t do anything that would cause her to come into contact with you. You mostly see the teen hustler wearing a jacket with dollar signs written on it gearing up to break The Ten Commandments but good. You patrol neighborhoods where toddlers chew absently on cigarette butts from the ground and 2-year-olds with matted hair and jam-smeared faces play unsupervised in the street. You see fifth graders with girls’ names tattooed on their arms. You talk to teenagers whose dad is locked up and whose mom is strung out on dope. The kid’s breakfast is a bag of chips and his lunch is a butter sandwich—which is exactly what it sounds like—and his friends are all just like him and some of them are carrying guns. Does it really come as a shock that these young people tend to fall out on the lawless end? They’re just little criminals waiting to become big criminals. The shock would be if they turned out halfway normal. You marvel at the few that make it. It’s the equivalent of muscling their way out of quicksand.

  • The decline of Stop, Question, and Frisk in pictures and numbers

    The decline of Stop, Question, and Frisk in pictures and numbers

    The New York Times examines the decline of NYPD stops with pretty pictures:

  • On Fighting

    The third in a series from Adam Plantinga’s 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman:

    People give off plenty of indicators that they’re looking to fight. Some precursors are obvious, like the clenched fists and the readjustment of the feet into an attack stance. Others are more subtle, like the lowering of the chin to instinctively protect their neck, or the rigid setting of the jaw or brow. Some people dry their hands on their pants to prep themselves for an assault. Many of these indicators are reflexive. People don’t even know they’re doing them. They’re tells, like poker players have. So it helps to pay attention to these signs and signals because if you see them coming from the guy you’re about to arrest, take your baton out and call for backup, because he’s not going quietly. He’s going to make you work for it.

  • “Will police have more free time once pot becomes legal?”

    Good question! And it’s answered by Ted Hesson in his good article in Fusion.net.

    Spoiler alert: No.

    Second spoiler: I’m quoted.

    Third spoiler: I curse (yet again).

  • We Got Another Kingpin! (14)

    It’s been a few months, and actually “we” didn’t get him. But he was gotten all the same.

    From the BBC: “Mexican police have found the body of Aquiles Gomez, who was thought to be one of the main leaders of the Knights Templar drug cartel.”

    We win! (for the fourteenth time and counting…)

    As I wrote back in 2011:

    Ah, the illusive search for “Mr. Kingpin.” If only we could nab him, the whole criminal enterprise would tumble. Witness how we’re all safe from terrorism after the killing of Osama bin Laden. And notice how the drug war in Mexico has been won…