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  • Strike against cop cameras

    When I was cop, boy did I joke about things I wouldn’t want seen on youtube.

    It might be a tad overgenerous to say what I said were even jokes. But I laughed. I still do. When I get a message on my answering machine that says, “Pete, will you stop touching little boys and pick up the phone!” I know who it’s from. And I’m pretty sure my wife knows I’m not a pedophile. But can references to raping innocent children ever be funny? Well, I think so. And you are free to think less of me, but what I and my friends say in private really is none of your business. Besides, does anybody not say things in private that would be inappropriate in the public sphere?

    So two cops in Austin are recorded on a tape made public, while in their squad car, making tasteless comments about rape (and a few other things). Now that this video is public, you need to react accordingly. But you also need to keep things in perspective. Is what these officers said serious? No. Threatening? No. Did it affect their job performance. I doubt it. And truth be told, this is positively mild compared to things I have said. Let me confess that I too have made tasteless jokes, in private, about sex, race, crime victims, ethnic origin, religion, sexual orientation, and quite frankly every other possible taboo subject I could think of.

    Now cops, more than most people, have a obligation to refrain from bad taste in public, and especially when dealing with the public. But that’s not what happened here. When you’re riding in a car with somebody for eight hours, you get bored. You talk about a lot of things. You joke. You make tasteless jokes. Of course it depends on whom you’re riding with and the camaraderie and relationship you have with your fellow officers. Yes, I can be crude and insensitive in private and caring, compassionate, and professional in public.

    Some of this is gallows humor. And police (and paramedics and firefighters) need it because they have to deal with a lot of unpleasant stuff. But you also need to joke to bring up subjects that would be otherwise be taboo. And police joke because a lot of people you deal with — the vast majority — lie to you. Some lie to you about robbery. Some lie to you about rape. Some lie because they think it will benefit them, they want revenge, or power. Some lie because they can’t tell or don’t know the truth. And cops have to listen to all of them. So back in the car you make jokes.

    A lot of police humor is at the expense of “victims” because a lot (most?) victims aren’t actually “innocent victim.” Now in the current climate of political correctness (especially with regards to sexual assault and rape), it’s not acceptable to even bring up the phrase “innocent victims” because the alternative places some blame on the victim. But police need to make such judgements because the freedom of other people, sometimes innocent victims themselves, is at stake.

    Outside of crimes where the victim isn’t doing anything illegal and doesn’t know the person who committed the crime, there are a million shades of gray. And police need to talk about these shades. And one way to discuss nuances is by joking and making tasteless comments. In private, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s how you learn. It’s how you cope. On the street cops need professionalism and discretion. In private, police use humor, and sometimes it’s not funny.

    Take two different rape cases. One was a nurse walking to work at Hopkins Hospital who was grabbed and raped by a stranger at knife-point. The other was a prostitute who engages in consensual sex but wasn’t paid the agreed amount. When the former happened, it was all hand on deck. A few days later the guy was caught. But for “failure to pay”? I once helped a supposed rape victim by doing little more than retriving her three jackets. It was cold outside.

    Or take a guy robbed while buying drugs. There were “real” robbery victims. You would know that when you saw a guy running barefoot wearing nothing but his tighty-whities. Now that was a robbery. And we would treat it accordingly. (Mind you, it still wasn’t “an innocent victim,” because he was still there to buy drugs… but the robbery was real.)

    But more than once I got a call for a robbery at the corner of Wolfe and Eager (then a 24/7 drug corner). On scene, the “victim,” a poor addicted white guy, would say he was minding his own business, jumped, and robbed of $20. Well, officer, what do you do?

    Generally people minding their own business don’t like being being taken for a drug dealer by some junkie too cheap to buy drugs in his own neighborhood. So this “victim” asks the first young black male he sees if he’s selling. The pissed-off non-drug dealer says, “sure” and takes his order, his $20, and continues on his merry way. The “victim” calls the police.

    I would try to keep a somewhat open mind on the off chance the “victim” was actually telling the truth. But do I start canvassing the neighborhood, stopping people who “meet the description.” Of course not. So I would conduct a brief investigation, perhaps by asking an old timer if he saw anything unusual, like an armed robbery (something beyond the usual chaos of an open-air drug market). If he nodded “no” with a look of, “you know how that white boy had it coming,” case closed. Call unfounded. Adam-No.

    And then, back in a parking lot, I would meet with a squademate and crack jokes. The guy running in his tighty-whities? “He was fast.” “Or slow.” “He had it coming… did you see what he was wearing?” “Exercise is important.” “I saw you looking at his package.”

    We would joke about anything. We needed to joke about everything. We didn’t joke because we didn’t care. We joked to stay sane. We joked to relieve the boredom. We joked to counter the cruelties of a very harsh and random world. We joked because the only real alternative would be despair. If you care too much — if you breakdown in a situation where any normal person would be unable to do anything but curl up in a fetal position and cry — you’re not a real police officer. We joked because laughing is good for the soul.

    So in this video one officer is telling another how to properly fill out a robbery report. And they they segue to insensitive comments about that robbery and then about about rape. They joke about fighting crime. They joke about ignoring crime. It was said in private, to each other. So I have no problem with it. Police should have a reasonable expectation to privacy when in private, even while on the job. And short of conspiring to commit a crime, there’s very little that should be off limits.

    Here are people who disagree with me. From Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post, and you can google a dozen others. And this news broadcastgives some good context.

    The lesson I see: police need to be more careful about the record button. And I still believe that cameras will be a net plus for police.

  • San Fran

    SFPD on jet ski outside Giants park. Not a bad gig, if you can get it.

  • Those pesky facts

    What if everything you thought about Michael Brown was wrong? Do you believe in evidence? Science? Evolution? Global warming? Can new evidence change your opinion? Is your conviction that a police officer killed an innocent surrendering black youth in Ferguson, Missouri, so strong that facts and evidence simply do not matter?

    Might you accept that there are racial injustices in the world in general — and perhaps in Ferguson in particular — while also understanding that perhaps the police officer in this case actually acted properly? Just maybe? The Atlantic says:

    A new report on Michael Brown’s official autopsy results appears to support Officer Darren Wilson’s version of the events on August 9, according to two medical experts.

    …

    St. Louis medical examiner Dr. Michael Graham told the paper that the autopsy “does support that there was a significant altercation at the car.” The other expert, forensic pathologist Judy Melinek, went even further, saying that the wound on Brown’s hand “supports the fact that this guy is reaching for the gun” and adding that another shot, which went through Brown’s forearm, means Brown could not have facing Wilson with his hands up when he was shot, an apparent contradiction of the now iconic “hands up, don’t shoot” posture adopted by protesters in Ferguson.

    …

    These recent leaks are meant to prime the public for an inevitable result: a grand jury investigation that ends with no charges being filed against Wilson.

    This is no way changes my belief that the police response to the protests was both tactically horrible and way over-the-top.

  • Score one for cop’s camera

    KOB Albuquerque reports how a lapel camera protected an officer against a woman’s false accusations that he sexually assaulting her.

  • Brrrr… it’s cold outside

    I can’t help but notice — now that another long hot summer is done and a commie mayor and Al Sharpton are running the show and the police have been thrown under the bus and Obama is president and the ACLU stopped letting police stop criminals and there’s no more stop question and frisk and there’s independent oversight and body cameras are coming and it’s open season on cops and people don’t show any respect and society going to hell — but crime *still* isn’t up (-4% by stats I don’t trust. But what I *do* trust is 249 homicides to date compared to 262 in last year’s record low. Shootings are up 6%). I know it’s in good part because of the hard work of the men and women of the NYPD, but I’d still like just one Republican, one conservative cop (or maybe somebody like Heather MacDonald) to admit he (or she) was wrong. It’s all very strange to me.

    Or maybe the only thing keeping New York City from become The Warriors are all the marijuana arrests or the bike ticketing blitz in Crown Heights? Nobody really believes that, right?

  • If crime doesn’t pay, why is it so expensive?

    And in case you were wondering, the cost of housing a prisoner in jail on NYC’s Rikers Island is now officially $100,000 per year! You get what you pay for, they say. $1.1 billion dollars. 42 percent higher than seven years ago. “During the same period, there was a 124 percent increase in assaults on the staff by inmates at city jails, and triple the number of allegations of use of physical force by guards.” Mazel Tov.

  • Bootlegging: for cigarettes, alive and well in New York City

    Story in the New York Times:

    The toothpick pressed a hidden button that released a large magnet that kept a secret compartment locked. Deputy Davis lifted the front of the row of shelves like you would the trunk of a small car, and inside were rows and rows, all different brands, of contraband. Not narcotics or pills, but unopened packs of cigarettes, perfectly legal in the state in which they were bought, but not here. Hence the secret compartment.

    The moral here is simple. You need some enforcers, but we shouldn’t waste too many resources in regulating a legal product. When there’s a huge market bootlegging, then you need to lower taxes.

    Also, I suspect that smoking isn’t down as much as people think as a result of raising taxes. Because if The Man can’t find the cigarettes, than the public health expert things they aren’t being smoked.

    According to a great study by Klaus von Lampe (et al), my brilliant colleague:

    It was found that 76% of cigarette packs collected [by looking at litter… how cool is that?] avoided the combined New York City and State tax. More specifically, 57.9% were untaxed (counterfeit or bearing no tax stamp), for 15.8% taxes were paid outside of New York City (including other states and New York State only). Only 19.4% of tax stamps collected indicated that New York City and New York State taxes were paid…. The finding that the majority of cigarettes did not have a tax stamp or bore a counterfeit tax stamp suggests that these cigarettes were being bootlegged, most likely from Native American Reservations. It was found that 76.2% of cigarette packs collected avoided the combined New York City and State tax.

    And two words: Eric Garner.

  • “Why we need to fix St. Louis County”

    Well said by Radley Balko in the Washington Post:

    When a local government’s very existence depends on its citizens breaking the law — when fines from ordinance violations are written into city budgets for the upcoming year as a primary or even the main expected source of revenue — the relationship between the government and the governed is not one of public officials serving their constituents, but of preying off of them.

    When the primary mission of a police department isn’t to protect citizens but to extract money from them, and when the cops themselves don’t look like, live near or have much in common with the people from whom they’re extracting that money, you get cops who start to see the people they’re supposed to be serving not as citizens with rights, but as potential sources of revenue, as lawbreakers to be caught. The residents of these towns then see cops not as public servants drawn from their own community to enforce the laws and keep the peace, but as outsiders brought in to harass them, whose salaries are drawn from that harassment. The same goes for the judges and prosecutors, who also rarely live in the towns that employ them.

    …

    This isn’t as much about a police shooting as it is about the release of residual anger over an antagonistic system of governing that virtually requires its poorest citizens to live in misery and despair.

    …

    If Bel-Ridge wasn’t collecting the equivalent of $450 in fines each year for each of the town’s residents, the town of Bel-Ridge probably wouldn’t exist.

    …

    This is what St. Louis County government is built upon. And this is what needs to be changed.

    When I was a cop, I knew my ticket money went to the city. Hell, I was happy to help Baltimore. But I never felt that my job depended on me fining residents.

    New York City gets about $500 million annually from parking tickets, which is the biggest chunk of about $820 million overall in fines. New York’s overall budget is about $70 billion. So we’re talking one to two percent of the city’s budget coming from fines. I don’t know about court fees, but I doubt they’re a money maker for the city.

    I don’t think a big-city perspective really gets at what is going on in these small towns where government seems to exist for the sole purpose of taking money from residents: “Pine Lawn, with an embattled mayor facing federal charges of steering towing jobs to a particular company, brought in close to 70 percent through its courts last year. At least four other St. Louis County municipalities — Beverly Hills, Bella Villa, Calverton Park and Cool Valley — all took in more than half their general revenue that way, according to reports submitted to the state.” And “It’s illegal: “The city of Bourbon was breaking state law. Under Missouri law, a city is only supposed to make 30 percent of its revenue off tickets.”

    Thirty, 40, 70 percent of budgets comes from fines and court fees? Mandatory private garbage collection? Per person occupancy permits? It sounds like a straight-up criminal racket, and one enforced by police and the courts.

  • “Can’t tase me, bro!”

    There’s an excellent article by the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf about the use of a taser for non-compliance. I’ve long argued that, without an actual threat, tasers should not be used for compliance. The taser is too easy, usually not necessary, and sometimes kills people.

    Now I’m all for people complying with lawful orders; you do not have the right to refuse a lawful police order. But this case gets at the heart of non-compliance. What do you do when somebody does not comply?

    Cops will be quick to justify use of force for non-compliance. I don’t have a quibble with that. But what kind of force is reasonable? Lethal force is not OK. Hands-on is OK. But what about the taser? Sometimes you need to take a step back and ask what kind of society we want to live in.

    Personally, I don’t want to live in a society where non-threatening people — whether they are criminally stupid or not is beside the point — routinely get zapped by government agents.

    (Just think, this is why our Founding Fathers were wise enough to include the right against self-incrimination in the 5th Amendment. Were it not for the right to remain silent, police could and would use tasers in routine interrogations.)

    Tasers have been used — shamefully, I might add — against naked people, the homeless, a legless man in a wheelchair (you can’t make this shit up), a 76-year-old man driving a tractor, a 10-year-old girl, a guy running on a baseball field (I thought that one was OK), the “Don’t tase me, bro” dude, a guy who didn’t understand English, and the misuse of a taser led to a good police offier’s suicide. If you scroll down to the bottom of the Atlantic piece, you can see lots of bad taser-use videos.

    Now there are good uses for the Taser, and tasers have been shown to reduce injuries. (Serious question: how many injuries prevented per taser-related death is acceptable?) But none of this, not even National Institute of Justice recommendations, justify the massive overuse of tasers in law enforcement. Police are trained to use tasers for non-compliance. In many of those above instances, officers were acting in accordance with their training and regulation. And then the same officers were punished when the craziness of such training and policy becomes apparent.

    What I like about this recent case is that I can see the complete absolutely correct unassailable logic… for both sides of the case.

    Here’s what happened: a jogger, Gary Hesterberg, is stopped by a law-enforcement officer for an infraction. Hesterberg doesn’t have ID and says his last name is Jones. He then fails to comply with a lawful order and resists arrest. Finally, when attempting to flee, Hesterberg gets tased and arrested. So clear cut. So logical. But the problem with such a description is that no matter how logical each step is, at some point it is absurd — to use phrasing of the court it is not “objectively reasonable” — to use a Taser against a jogger violating a leash law!

    In court, the government conceded the violation was minor. Lying to police officer and failure to comply are less minor, but, said the court, “not inherently dangerous or violent.” Still, all this and the jogger’s resistance to arrest “weighs in the government’s favor.” The arrest was valid. The court accepted the government’s claim that “using communication skills was not a viable alternative to effect Hesterberg’s arrest.” Nor was arresting the jogger at his house — he gave his real address but said his last name was Jones — given the jogger’s willingness to lie. The jogger said he wasn’t even certain that green-uniformed Federal Park Ranger was law enforcement. The court said, tough titty, kid. And the court also understood that the jogger could have avoided this whole mess had he simply A) given his real name or B) complied with lawful orders.

    And court understands that the decision made by the officer needs only be reasonable “from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.” This makes allowance for the fact that “police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments.”

    Now given all this, I would think the court is about to offer unqualified support for the government’s position and taser use. From Tennessee v. Garner (cops can’t shoot a fleeing felon), when know the government interest in stopping a fleeing suspect is not absolute:

    The Court finds that the intrusion on Hesterberg’s Fourth Amendment interest to be free from being tased greatly outweighs the minimal governmental interest in apprehending him for his violations of the law. Cavallaro’s use of her taser on Hesterberg was therefore unconstitutional.

    Did you get that? Here it is again: “The government’s interest in apprehending Hesterberg is simply too low to justify his tasing even if he willfully disregarded such a warning.” Daaaaamn.

    Weren’t listening? One last time: “The Court is not persuaded that the need to identify Hesterberg for his low-level violations of law justify Cavallaro’s use of the taser, even if the taser was the only tool remaining to collect Hesterberg’s identifying information.” Boo-ya.

    So what are you supposed to do? Let him jog away? Uh, yes. This is news to me and to most cops,

    Let him flee. Even if you have less-lethal weaponry at your disposal.

    This requires a seismic shift in the minds of law enforcement. Under certain circumstances sometimes it is OK, permissible — even required — to simply allow a person under arrest to flee. Cops will hate this, but it is a common sense, pro-police discretion, and pro-4th Amendment decision. It is worth remembering that though Garner was not “pro-police,” it turned out great for cops: scores fewer officers shot and killed!

    The judge, and this is important, even recognized that her decision goes against the regulations of the law enforcement agency that would permit tasing a 9-year-old girl or an 8-month pregnant woman: “The Court cannot imagine a rational fact-finder that would find it reasonable to tase a nonviolent and nonthreatening nine-year-old or eight-month-pregnant woman fleeing from non-serious misdemeanors.” Good.

    The jogger got $50,000.

    This certainly puts the rank-and-file in an awkward position. Their departmentally justified use-of-force policy is deemed, after the fact, to be unconstitutional and negligent. Once again somebody is telling police what not to do without any clear guidance as to what to do.

    Since you know it will take ages for police departments to catch up. I wouldn’t mind seeing a few police officers sue their own police department for policies that encourage or require officers to violate their oath to the constitution. “Failure to obey” doesn’t mean you get to use every toy on your belt. Police need to use their intelligence and common sense to understand the totality of the circumstance. I’ve got no problem with that. Because police generally have, despite what some may think, plenty of intelligence and common sense. Officers just need support from above and permission to use that discretion.

    I’m curious what cops out there might think. If you think this decision is absurd — if you think it should be OK for a cop to tase a minor offender fleeing arrest — at what kind of weaponry would you draw the line? Would rubber bullets be OK? Dog? Tear gas? Flash grenade? Sound cannon? Anything short of the lethal force prohibited by Garner? Or was Garner wrongfully decided?

    In an age where more and more less-lethal weaponry is in the hands of police, I think it’s important to clarify what kind of force is reasonable. For a leash-violation, a taser crosses the line.

    [Here’s a pdf of the court decision by the Federal Northern District of California case 13-cv-01265-JSC.]

    [Also, with regards to previous posts on race and police, it seems relevant to point out that the jogger was white. Had the jogger been black, I’m sure this would be seen as a racial incident and some people would claim, “Police never would have stopped a white jogger, much less tased him!” And this despite seeing again and again that police sometimes overreact to people of all races.]

  • Racial disparity in police-involved homicides: 4:1

    Trying to set the record straight is a bit like pissing into the wind. The substantively wrong pro-publica story has now been repeated by every news source I can find.

    I suspect that over time the idea that from 2010-2012, blacks males 15-19 years-old were 21 times more likely than non-hispanic-whites males to be killed by police will simply become remembered as: police are 21 times more likely to shoot black people. But it’s not true! (There I am again, getting spattered by my own pee.)

    The real figure they’re talking about — not just the numbers from 2010 to 2012 — the real figure is not 21 to 1 but 9 to 1. And when one includes hispanics in the count, the black-to-white ratio goes down to 5.5 to 1. If one looks at black and white men of all ages killed by police, the ratio is (just?) 4 to 1. (Ed note: based on later better data, the ratio is actually closer to 3 to 1.)

    Now you may wonder why I’m quibbling. What’s my point? Well, it’s important to base opinions and public policy on fact. And for starters, 4 to 1 versus 21 to 1 is a huge difference.

    One could also argue that even a disparity of 4:1 is unacceptable. And it is, on some level. But in the population examined by ProPublica — the same subset in which blacks are 9 times (not 21 times) as likely as whites to be killed by police — the black-to-white homicide ratio is 15:1. We know police-involved homicides correlate with homicide and violence in the community they police. So what rate of disparity would one expect in police-involved homicides? Certainly not 1 to 1.

    If you’re going to honestly talk about racial disparities in police-involved shootings, you need to discuss levels of violence among those with whom police interact. If one thinks police shootings are primarily an issue of racist police — if one thinks police only shoot black people, if one thinks white people are never stopped by police for minor offenses — one is not only wrong, but one won’t come up with any effective solutions. The vast majority of police-involved shootings are justified. That said, there are bad shootings. But this is more a police problem more than a race problem.

    If one wishes — as one should — to reduce the racial disparity of police-involved shootings, one needs to focus on racial disparities in crime and violence in general. If one wishes — as one should — to reduce the incidences of unjustified police shootings and improper police use-of-force, one needs to improve police training and reduce police militarization.

    To replicate the pro-publica study, here are the numbers for the past 15 years (15-19 year-old black and non-hispanic-white men, shot and killed by police and reported to the Uniform Crime Reports). This is the black-to-white ratio for police-involved homicides. All are based on population rates per 100,000 (using constant 2010 census figures, not adjusted for year):

    Past 1 year (2012, n = 24): 13 to 1

    Past 2 years (2011-2012, n = 45): 16 to 1

    Past 3 years (2010-2012, n = 62): 21 to 1

    Past 4 years (2009-2012, n = 92): 17 to 1

    Past 5 years (2008-2012, n = 110): 17 to 1

    Past 6 years (2007-2012, n = 140): 15 to 1

    Past 7 years (2006-2012, n = 162): 12 to 1

    Past 8 years (2005-2012, n = 183): 10 to 1

    Past 9 years (2004-2012, n = 209): 9 to 1

    Past 10 years (2003-2012, n = 226): 10 to 1

    Past 11 years (2002-2012, n = 249): 9 to 1

    Past 12 years (2001-2012, n = 262): 9 to 1

    Past 13 years (2000-2012, n = 286): 9 to 1

    Past 14 years (1999-2012, n = 312): 9 to 1

    Past 15 years (1998-2012, n = 339): 9 to 1

    With the above data, you can’t say anything conclusive from just the first few years of data. Certainly the group that I would least want to pick and highlight is the three-year (2010-2012) statistical outlier. Cherry-picking the highest number would be dishonest, but even assuming it’s just accidental is still shoddy research. One would expect the results to bounce around for the first few years and then settle down. Only then can one find validity — the idea that the number has any meaning.

    Why pick the past three years instead of the past 2, 4, or 15 years? One key to analyzing statistics is skepticism of “amazing” anomalies, especially from a small group. Something can be (in fact, will be 1 in 20 times) statistically significant but substantively irrelevant.

    But why is the 3-year cumulative number so high? Because only one non-hispanic white teen got shot and killed by police in 2010. Since the sample is so small, one strange year can screw up the data. But over more years the numbers settle down. Here one needs to go back maybe 8 to 10 years to find any substantive meaning. (And even then all this UCR data on police-involved homicides should be taken with a gigantic grain of salt.)

    [Also, there’s a bit more rambling detail, in less coherent form, in one and two previous posts. Here’s a follow-up post.]