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  • How to make people care about violence

    How to make people care about violence

    Over at Nola Crime News, Jeff Asher tweeted this graphicjust now.

    Click on it; it moves! So while people are dying, I’m thinking about data presentation. There’s something about a moving line that may make one pay attention to dead people in a way that actual dead people don’t.

    Jeff’s graphic looks at Baltimore City shooting victims over the past 365 days. Each data point tallies the total number of shooting victims over the past 365 day. This nullifies seasonal change, which is worth a lot. But by taking a past-year average, you lose the “BAM” of what happened literally overnight, after six police officers were criminally charged for the death of Freddie Gray. The violence didn’t just “increase.” It stepped up, by two-thirds. Overnight. After April 27, 2015. The visual above indicates a rapid but continuous increase over the course of a year. But it’s still a good visual and can’t think of better one.

    I don’t know how to present a good visual that shows what has happened in Baltimore. In the past I’ve tried with a pre- and post-riot trend line. Not just once, but twice. But that’s hardly convinced the masses that police (or more dead bodies) matter.

    People are already talking about the rise in violence in Baltimore in terms of poverty or drugs or police legitimacy or blah-dee-blah. And sure, all that matters. But stop it! None of that, not any of that, explains the increase in violence. Police because less proactive because A) innocent cops were criminally charged and B) Political pressure (from the mayor, the police commissioner, and the US DOJ) told police to be less proactive as a means to reduce racial disparity in policing. You see it Baltimore. You see it Chicago. You see it in New Orleans. The problem is you’re seeing it basically everywhere.

    Here’s New Orleans, again from Jeff Asher.

    These increases are no joke. This is a “holy shit” type increase in violence. And the chart under-presents the quickness of the increase.

    What happened in New Orleans? I don’t know NOLA as well as Baltimore or New York. But the NOLA PD has seen a 30 percent reduction in manpower and a massive reduction in proactive policing (as measured by drug enforcement. I also suspect the consent decree hasn’t helped police in terms of crime prevention, since, and this is important: crime prevention isn’t one iota of any consent decree. Somehow, crime is supposed to manage itself while police are better managed.

    The only big city of note without an increase in violence is NYC. And even here, people objectto the exact kind of proactive policingthat keeps crime from rising. Luckily, at least in New York, even liberal Mayor de Blasio isn’t listening to the “police are the problem” posse.

  • “You Get the Police You Ask For”

    Since I’ve been remiss at writing anything here recently, I’m going to link to a piece from Jim Glennon at Calibre Press:

    [Baltimore] Mayor Pugh then thanked federal officials for their assistance in the arrest of a man who murdered a three-year-old in 2014.

    …

    The Mayor’s expectation that the FBI can assist in the day-to-day in Baltimore not only won’t happen, it can’t. The Feds, and I am not one to bash them, are great at what they do. But what they don’t do is don uniforms and walk a beat.

    The Baltimore cops may be undermanned but that isn’t the reason for the surge in crime. They have been understaffed before. What’s different in the past two years? An absence of proactive policing. The surge in crime began immediately after the cops pulled back. Though no division of the elite political class, few criminologists, no mainstream media outlets, and no legal activist groups like the ACLU will openly acknowledge this.

    Why? Because they are the ones who wanted proactive policing stopped in the first place.

    …

    The anti-police pundits blather on about how the violence isn’t as bad as in the early 1990s. They’ll yammer about how the crime surge is only in about 75 of the country’s counties. They’ll wax poetically about economic issues, past history, immigration, lack of trust between the police and the community, and then they will go back to their security-controlled TV studios and gated communities, sip chardonnay and chitchat about law enforcement ills with like-minded peers.

    Meanwhile, real people are dying, and the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ, and the VIPs won’t be able to stop the carnage.

    …

    So politicians, pundits, etc., you got what you asked for. The question is: Did the citizens ask for it?

  • Not how I was trained

    I’m curious what cops think about this police-involved shooting in Portland, Oregon:

    Hearst, a seven-year bureau member who became a police officer after graduating from Multnomah University’s bible college, said he never saw Hayes with a gun, but was trained not to wait to see one. [emphasis added]

    “Because if I let him get his hands on his gun, he will be able to pull that gun out and shoot me or my coworkers before I’m able to react to it.”

    To be clear, this was an armed robber who was shot. But he didn’t have a gun. (His replica gun was nearby.) The “trained not to wait to see one” rubs me the wrong way. Thoughts?

  • “A police officer’s view from street level”

    San Francisco Sgt Adam Plantinga always had good insight on policing. A few years back I posting a bunch of excerpts from his book: 400 Things Cops Know.

    Plantinga was interviewed recently in The Christian Century and addresses some tough issues. It’s worth reading the whole interview, but in case you don’t:

    There’s a 90-10 rule in law enforcement: 90 percent of people are decent, 10 percent aren’t, and as a cop you deal with that 10 percent about 90 percent of the time.

    …

    All of this has a tendency to make you skeptical and disillusioned—to distort your worldview. It’s part of what’s known as compassion fatigue…. In its most damning strain, goodness starts to look something like weakness.

    …

    What the police must strive for is equality under the law. If that isn’t happening, attention must be paid. But in some people’s minds, every time a white police officer has a negative encounter with a black suspect, racism is clearly afoot. To be sure, racism is threaded through every institution in our country, from mortgage lending to how kids are disciplined in school.

    …

    But if a police controversy is about race only because some people arbitrarily decided to make it about race, the damage that can be done is much more than simply the Boy Who Cried Wolf syndrome. Accusations of racism are incendiary.

    …

    Some of these recent cases generate such a visceral reaction that they demand a response. The Walter Scott case in North Charleston, where the officer shot Scott while Scott was running away, looked to me like a straight-up assassination. The shooting of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa bears all the trappings of an officer tragically overreacting to a perceived threat.

    …

    The governor of Minnesota was quick to say that if Philandro Castile had been white, he wouldn’t have been shot by police. I’m not sure how fair that is, but it seemed to resonate with a lot of people as true. But if Michael Brown were a large white man going after Wilson’s gun after slugging him in the face, would Wilson have just brushed it off as the misguided antics of a fellow Caucasian? That doesn’t strike me as plausible.

    …

    Then there are the cases, and I believe they are rare, where a life is lost because officers didn’t know how to properly use the equipment on their duty belt or they panicked or they simply made an awful decision that they can never take back. There may not have been malice involved but the damage is done. Those officers’ cases should be decided in criminal court where they are entitled to the same due process as anyone else.

    …

    And ask any street cop and she’ll tell you about a host of times she could have justifiably used deadly force but elected not to.

    That’s why cops bristle when they see a protester screaming that the cops are indiscriminately murdering people as he holds up a sign that says “It Could Be My Son Next.” Good sir, if your son comes at the police with a knife or a gun, then yes, God help him, he could be next. Otherwise, your son has about as much chance of being murdered by the police as he has of dying while canoeing.

    Anytime an officer fires his weapon, it should be subject to intense scrutiny. The police are to uphold the sanctity of life whenever possible and must justify every bullet we fire. But don’t overstate the problem.

    …

    You build trust in a lot of ways. It starts by getting out of your patrol car and talking with people. The neighborhood’s contact with you must be more than simply knowing you as the arresting officer. You’ve got to explain to folks why you’re doing what you’re doing. It doesn’t always work, but it’s still a worthy endeavor.

    A prevailing police weakness is the habit of brushing off people’s questions, as well as an inability to seriously consider a point of view other than our own. The public might be wrong on some issues, or have unrealistic expectations of the department. But we have to listen to them.

  • “The corrupt and brutal ones always work together as if pulled by some magnetic force”

    “The corrupt and brutal ones always work together as if pulled by some magnetic force.” (Perhaps said by a Chicago cop, but I can neither cite nor verify.) I think the reason why, might be as simple as the fact that nobody likes to be given the stink-eye by their colleagues. So if most people disapprove of what you do, you eventually get drawn like-minded folk who appreciate your work ethic and style. In the police world, for the more aggressively inclined, this means a specialized unit that focuses on arrests for drugs (and guns and maybe vice). And then, in precious semi-isolation, you feed and build on the habits of those most similar to you.

    I wrote about the federal indictment of seven Baltimore City police officers yesterday (the actual indictment is here) and said: “This is about bad apples. But it’s not just about bad apples. There’s the barrel that allows these apples to rot.”

    Who else is to blame? How do we prevent this from happening again? Who said, “Crime is up! Get me guns! And take all the overtime you need”? Who ignored complaints because the “numbers” were good?

    I don’t have the answers. But these are sincere questions. Because true organizational change best happens from within. Things sure didn’t improve when innocent Baltimore copswere criminally charged after the death of Freddie Gray. And the solution sure won’t be found in some faddish mandatory training course in implicit-bias or gender-based stereotypes. Bad reform does more harm than good. Good cops will work less; bad cops work harder.

    Last year I spent a fair amount of time criticizing the DOJ’s report on the Baltimore City Police Department. And for good reason. The DOJ report was anonymously written, horribly researched, and basically per-ordained boilerplate designed to document just enough systemic bias to activate the legal trigger needed to implement a federal consent decree while simultaneously absolving current political and police leaders of any and all accountability for the current mess Baltimore is in. These so-called investigators went to Baltimore while this crap was going on and the worst they could find were some poorly written arrest reports from five years ago?

    But I also wrote this:

    Mixed in with questionable methodology, intentions, and anecdotes, there’s some of God’s awful truth in this DOJ report. Yes, the department is a dysfunctional organization that keeps going only because of the dedication of rank-and-file who do their best, despite it all.

    I tried to highlight what the report got right. I hoped things would get better, but I didn’t think they would:

    Maybethis DOB report will improve the department despite itself. Though I might be wrong, I doubt it. I suspect people will ignore [what’s wrong with the organization] and just focus on eliminating discretionary proactive policing that saves lives. If policing has taught me anything, 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.”

    It did get worse.

    I also wrote this about the DOJ report:

    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.

    …

    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.

    …

    I defend most police officers because I’ve been there. … 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.

    …

    And thenwe get to a failed discipline process.

    [From the DOJ Report:] The system has several key deficiencies.

    …

    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.

    How much do you want to bet that one or more of the just-indicted officers are on that list? But did anybody do anything?

    You know what might help: figure out who didn’t do the wrong thing. What you have here is an inadvertent integrity sting. Now I know you’re not supposed to get credit for doing what you’re expected to do. But you might find something out from who (if anybody) in that squad didn’t abuse overtime. Whose name didn’t come up in a wire tap? Who entered the squad, had a look around, and left right away thinking, “maybe uniform patrol isn’t so bad after all”? But that’s not the way these things work.

    [Update: According to Justin Fenton in the Sun these seven were the entire squad. As to spending your career “risking your life” to protect others as a defense, this clip from Scott and Bailey comes to mind.]

    It’s not that good cops cover for bad cops as much as they stay the fuck away from them. Why? Because if you know enough to rat somebody out, you’re already in way too deep. And if you don’t know enough, well, what are you supposed to do? Go to Internal Affairs and say, “I’ve heard rumors”? And what if some of the rumors happen to be about Internal Affairs? Nope. What you do is put on blinders to cover your ass. Why? Because when the shit hits the fan, you don’t want to be anywhere near it. This is not a Blue Wall of Silence as much as a Blue Cone of Silence. And when the bad cops are off segregated in their own unit, it makes it so much easier to see no evil. If your Spidey Sense tingles, you stay the hell away.

    And the solution — and this is always the case — needs to focus on the wrongdoers rather than be collective punishment on the majority, who are good. From my book, Cop in the Hood:

    Some officers enter the police department corrupt. Others fall on their own free will. Still others may have an isolated instance of corruption in an otherwise honest career. But there is no natural force pulling officers from a free cup of coffee toward shaking down drug dealers. Police can omit superfluous facts from a police report without later perjuring themselves in court. Working unapproved security overtime does not lead to a life in the mob. Officers can take a cat nap at 4 a.m. and never abuse medical leave. There is no slope. If anything, corruption is more like a Slip ‘N Slide. You can usually keep your footing, but it’s the drugs that make everything so damn slippery.

    As to overtime, from 15 year ago:

    To control overtime pay, superiors also discourage late discretionary arrests. While a legitimate late arrest may result in a few extra hours of overtime pay, the sergeant signing the overtime slip is likely to ask details about the arrest to confirm the legitimacy before adding an extra hour or two and giving very explicit instructions to “go straight home.”

    This “rounding up” of overtime was pretty common. And I’ll even defend it as one of the only carrots a boss has to reward somebody for doing a good job. Regardless, it is a far cry from what seems to have happened here.

  • Seven Baltimore cops indicted

    The Feds arrested seven Baltimore City cops today. I don’t know all the details yet, but the robbery charges seem major. “Robberies while wearing a police uniform,” I just heard. But you know what? Even without knowing the details I can go out on a very short limb and predict a few things. Why? Because it’s always the same. And that’s what makes it so frustrating. It’s like we never learn.

    Articles in the Wall Street Journal and the Baltimore Sun. And an unrelated scandal in Chicago. Though I will read these stories thoroughly. It bothers me that I don’t have to. Some things are always the same. Always:

    • Drugs. Always drugs. I’m not one for “root causes” theories in the abstract, but if you want to end police corruption, you’ve got to end drug prohibition. That’s it. Until then, this will happen. This only question is when, where, and how often. The drug game is dirty. And it is a game with arbitrary rules. It taints all involved, even the honest cops.

    • A specialized unit, removed from the generally non-corrupt culture of most police officers.

    • A selective unit, in that people don’t just get assigned there. Officers need to self-select. And the more aggressive cowboys do. And this aggressive hot-headed police sub-culture can feed on itself. Here’s something you may not know: most officers have no desire to work with those cops. Why? Because most cops don’t like they way they operate. Do cops know they’re dirty? No. But they certainly suspect things aren’t kosher. So the good cops stay away. You stay away because there’s guilt by association in the police department, and when the shit hits the fan, and it always does, you don’t want to find yourself in the jackpot.

    • Red flags galore. Let me guess, the officers involved had tons of overtime (this seems to be one of the charges). Too much legal (or illegal) overtime is a red flag. But usually what now happens is the department cracks down on all overtime. Collective punishment, in essence. And that will only piss off the honest cops who are trying to do their job.

    I bet a few of these cops are “highly decorated.” Yes, too many awards is a flag.

    I’m also going to guess there were a lot of complaints against these officers over the years. Now of course if you do aggressive work you’ll get more complaints than some lazy hump who never gets out of their car. And you need to be careful not to see every complaint as legit, because most are BS. But still, when you get a dozen complaints — use of force, discourtesy, the whole nine yards — in a year or two? I think of the line from the Wire:

    “…which for Herc will make an even four in the last two years.”

    “None sustained.”

    “But all of them true.”

    On the flip side, you can’t treat every complaint as a career hold. That’s how you get the maxim, “If you don’t work you can’t get in trouble.” Flags aren’t guilt. That’s why they call them “flags.” You notice them. You investigate. And maybe there’s nothing to them. But sometimes there is. Somebody up top needs to notice these flags. And somebody with authority, you know, a “leader,” needs to put their neck on the line and take action.

    • High “productivity.” You want guns and drugs and cash on the table? You reward officers for arrests? Then you get this. (Not always, mind you. Not immediately. Not all officers. But yes, eventually it is inevitable). It’s not easy to balance “productivity” on one hand with “laziness” on the other. But I’m telling you, there’s a huge middle ground into which fall 80 percent of cops.

    • Bad supervision. The sergeant got arrested, and this implies the squad was rotten to its core. So, I can’t help but wonder, who was the Lieutenant? Go on up the chain of command, for a change. Not just to punish and blame, but to inquire, reform, and figure out how this happened. Did the LT close his or her eyes because of pressure from higher up? I don’t know. Where exactly was the communication breakdown? Because this is about bad apples. But it’s not just about bad apples. There’s the barrel that allows these apples to rot.

    The military-like chain-of-command does nothing more efficiently than suppress open communication. In a police department, it’s too easy to put on blinders and not know what is happening around you. In fact, you’d be a fool to do otherwise. This is not the same as a “blue wall of silence,” mind you. But it is a problem. But even if those higher up don’t know about the crimes happening under them, it’s still a failure of leadership.

    Anyway, I’m just writing about scandals in general. But if these facts are true in this case — and I bet they are — isn’t that, as they say in the police world, a clue?

  • Milwaukee Chief Flynn: “We can predict who’s going to get shot. We do. If we could only predict where and when, we’d be doing a great job. We can’t do that.”

    [See my previous post on Ed Flynn.]

    Flynn isn’t new at this.

    A few years back, Flynn was answering questions about a controversial police-involved shooting. At a community meeting, some criticized him for being “disrespectful,” because he was on his phone. His response is well worth watching.

    The cop involved in that shooting was later fired. Officers voted Flynn a nearly unanimous vote of no-confidence. Like I said, he gets it from all sides. He must be doing something right.

    But crime is up in Milwaukee, and here he is talking about police backing off (at 7:16).

    Later is that same interview he talks about deadly violence, and it’s worth quoting at length (at 8:28):

    We need to focus on the fact that it’s a finite group of people. There aren’t ten-thousand run-amok criminals out there. There’s a finite number of people who have prior arrests for weapons possession or other violent crimes overwhelmingly shooting people like them.

    And unfortunately the system doesn’t act like a system.

    …

    There are a lot of other variables out there, and so far most of them have escaped accountability.

    …

    No matter where you start looking at the co-location of victimization in this city or any city like us, every single negative social indicator is in the same place where the dead bodies are. There are a lot of moving pieces to the problem. Many of our most violent offenders have been identified at early times in their careers by both the juvenile justice system or even by the schools. We know the statistics: how many children exposed to violence end up replicating the violence; how many children that were the victims child abuse or physical abuse will replicate that behavior later on; how many of our most violent offenders committed their first violence when they were young juveniles.

    The data is there to focus resources on those with the most potential for violence. When we do network analysis we constantly find out that there’s 20 percent of our homicide victims in any given year have been witnesses or involved in other shootings and homicides. We can predict who’s going to get shot. We do. If we could only predict where and when, we’d be doing a great job. We can’t do that. We can do a network analysis, we give you the names of ten people in the next 18 months, at least six of them will be shot. The challenge is there’s no one to parse any of this information off to. Probation and parole are broken. Juvenile courts are broken. Nobody visits these folks at home except the police.

    So there are challenges out there. They are not simplistic. There are things that need to be done on the front end with young children that will pay dividends in years, and they need to start now. Same token, there’s more than most be done with young offenders. I’m not saying they all need to go to jail. But if they get neither services nor sanctions, why should their immature brains think something is going to happen to them when they turn 18 or 19? Time and again we see it. We keep grinding out the data. Other actors have to start stepping up. It’s going to cost money, but that’s what we pay taxes for.

    [Comments are open on my similarly themed previous post on Flynn.]

  • Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn: “We’ve got to get beyond the finger pointing that does nothing except to depolice at risk communities”

    Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn is smarter than your average flatfoot. Generally considered a progressive in the police world, he’s the type of chief who should at least be embraced by the political left. But Milwaukee is one of the latest police department to be sued by the ACLU for racially disparate policing. But Flynn refuses to de-police the city’s most violent streets. For this, Flynn gets heat from all sides: Republican senators, the anti-police crowd, and conservative Sheriff David Clarke (the Milwaukee County Sheriff better known for his Trump-loving cowboy-hat wearing general buffoonery).

    Most recently, Flynn didn’t take kindly to lawsuits from the ACLU making him and his police department out to be the bad guys. This is worth watching. “Disparity is not the same as bias,” Flynn says. That’s an important point that needs to be said loud and clear. If not, we abandon those most at risk. Here’s an edited six minutes of Flynn:

    [The full version is here.]

    Flynn understands the political equations. He frames the right questions. He give the right answers. And he can talk about “ellipses” of social problems, explicit and implicit biases, negative social indicators, evidence-based policing, and the history of racist policing in America. As my father always said, if you get criticized for all sides, you must be doing something right.

    [my next post on Flynn]

  • Reducing Crime: the White House has to be more than a pulpit for a bully

    I wrote this article for the Washington Post:

    President Trump declared in executive orders this month that the federal government would try to “reduce crime in America” and that the White House was opposed to violence against law enforcement officers.

    …

    Crime reduction does not happen through fearmongering or federal fiat. And violence against police is illegal. But although the substance of these orders is near zero, their very existence reveals a shift in focus under the Trump administration.

    Reducing crime is a fabulous wish, and a federal focus on crime reduction was curiously absent in the previous administration.

    …

    Trump’s finger-pointing at immigrants — Mexicans and Muslims in particular — is particularly misguided, since these groups have little to do with crime or violence in America.

    …

    Any profession, law enforcement included, appreciates kind words from up top. But the White House has to be more than a pulpit for a bully. Ultimately Trump will be judged by deeds, not words. And the president’s actions are not promising.

    Click through for the whole piece.

  • Sometimes there are good guys and bad guys

    A Baltimore police officer shot and killed an armed man who pointed a loaded gun at him.

    You’d think this would be cut and dried. But no. It’s Baltimore.

    I mean really, if any police-involved shooting is clear cut. It’s this one. Luckily for police, the cop had a body camera. Luckily it captures (barely) the key moment. Deal, a known violent offender, raises his loaded gun to shoot the cop.

    The cop, thank God, is quicker on the draw. Deal is shot and killed. And that’s where this story should end.

    But no, not in Baltimore, where officers are often criticized for doing the right thing.

    Commissioner Davis received flack at a press conference defending the cop, in part because he called Deal a “bad guy.” Why besmirch the dead? Because maybe some issues need to be presented without moral relativism. Because if you don’t point out there’s right and wrong here, people will fill in the void with an alternative facts. Also, you owe it to your officers to support them through tough times.

    [Have you killed somebody? Me, neither. But friends of mine have. And it’s not easy on them, no matter how justified and necessary the killing was. And it’s more difficult if people are saying you made a bad choice, especially when you didn’t.]

    In this case the City Papertakes aim at the cops in really one of the most idiotic police-related articles I’ve ever read. I like the City Paper. I’ve been reading it (admittedly not regularly anymore) for almost 20 years.

    According to the story, the reason you don’t know about this shooting is because “national news is at a chaotic premium right now.” Actually, no. First of all, you are reading about it cause it’s in all the papers and on the TV news.

    But what’s reckless about the City Paper story goes beyond this shooting. You may not follow this as closely as I do, but indeed, many “reformers” do not want police to be proactive at all. The story in the City Paper criticizes police for being part of the system wherein Deal ends up being shot and killed.

    Less proactive policing is the goal, the position of the DOJ report on the BPD. The DOJ asserts many things, which others may then take as Gospel because the DOJ said so. This is a real problem. The report says police shouldn’t confront/chase/arrest active violent offenders, especially if their identity is known. After all, somebody may get hurt:

    The need for the suspect’s immediate apprehension must be weighed against the risks to officers and the public caused by engaging in a foot pursuit. If officers know the identity of the suspect, his or her immediate apprehension is likely unnecessary without exigent circumstances. However, if circumstances require that the suspect be immediately apprehended, officers should contain the suspect and establish a perimeter rather than engaging in a foot pursuit, particularly if officers believe the suspect may be armed.

    Let’s talk this through.

    Man armed with an illegal gun, so you set up a “perimeter.” (Sounds cool!) How do you do that?

    What if Deal simply turns the corner and goes in a home of a friend and closes the door. (Or worse a stranger’s home.) Do you send in the militarized SWAT team? What if you didn’t see which house. Do you start banging on all the doors? That’s not really community policing. Or maybe, since you know who Deal is, you go back to the station and start filling out an arrest warrant. (Meanwhile, calls for service are backing up until the “perimeter” is called off.)

    Or what if Deal puts his gun in his waistband and runs through a vacant building into the alley. Baltimore is not like New York, where blocks are often solid with buildings and there are no alleys. But let’s say there happens to be four units at the ready (fat chance) to block off the street and sit in the rear alleys. Then what? Is a cop back there? What does she do? She was given a description of young black male, black hoodie, jeans. How does she know if it’s Deal? Does she start stopping all young black males who “match the description”? And what if Deal runs from her? Do you set up a new “perimeter”?

    And then what?

    At some point police will have to confront Deal.

    That’s why we have police. Police confront “bad guys” so we don’t have to. (Not to say Deal didn’t have any redeeming qualities, it’s just that I don’t think they’re particularly relevant in this incident.)

    Perimeter or not, assuming Deal doesn’t voluntarily put himself in handcuffs, you either chase, catch, and cuff Deal, or you police in such a manner where you do not cross his path. And if you do the latter, it would failure of the fundamental role of police in society. But when police do get the memo (or lawsuit) and police less proactively, crime goes up and people complain police aren’t doing their job. Sigh.

    I’d prefer to resolve the apprehension of an armed gunman here and now rather than have it play out for hours or days. Especially if I lived on that block. What message does it send it police let Deal walk away? Now that would be a real blow to police legitimacy.

    If there is a story here, it’s about the failure of society, and in particular Baltimore’s criminal justice system that was unwilling or unable to keep Deal off the streets. I mean, how does one even manage to get arrested and released three times in one month? Not only to you have to be a horrible criminal, you have to be kind of bad at it. Even Mosby’s often incompetent State’s Attorney’s office wanted Deal held without bail! From the Sun:

    For the third time in a month, 18-year-old Curtis Deal had been arrested on gun or drug charges. Judge Nicole Taylor wanted to be sure the young man understood what was expected if she released him to wait for trial.

    “You’re not going out at night, you’re not going to get food, you’re not going to meet your girlfriend. You’re in your house,” Taylor told him at Monday’s bail review hearing, raising her voice.

    “I’m giving you an opportunity to go to school and not be in jail pending this trial. The curfew is 1 p.m., 7 days a week.”

    Deal said he understood. Taylor wished him luck.

    The next day about 3 p.m., Deal was fatally shot by a Baltimore police detective

    It’s worth reading the whole article by Kevin Rector and Carrie Wells in the Sun. It’s a fine piece of journalism.