Go to qualitypolicing.com

Tag: bad cop

  • Van Dyke Guilty in Chicago

    Former Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder in the shooting of Laquan McDonald. This isn’t surprising. I think Van Dyke was found guilty because, get this, he was.

    I wrote this in 2015:

    The video is out. Finally. After long attempts to sweep it under the rugfailed.

    …

    It’s a bad shooting…. The officer who killed McDonald fits the pattern of bad cops: high activity, drug work, too many complaints. Sure, all the complaints weren’t justified, but some of them were. And undoubtedly he did a lot of bad shit that people didn’t file formal complaints about.

    Now of course I know that in a court of law anything Van Dyke did in the past is irrelevant to his guilt or innocence is this criminal case. Whether he was a “bad” cop or not is irrelevant and inadmissible in a court of law. But I’m mentioning it because I’m not a court of law.

    And second-degree murder seems correct. It meets these conditions:

    Intended to kill or do great bodily harm to that individual (or knew that the act would do so); or

    Knows that the acts create a strong probability of causing death or great bodily harm to the individual.

    Combined with this mitigating factor:

    At the time of the killing, he/she believed that the killing would have been lawfully justified but the belief was unreasonable.

    Van Dyke had options not limited to A) doing nothing, B) not shooting, and C) not continuing to pump rounds into McDonald after McDonald was down. As judged by this former police officer, I say Van Dyke was not reasonable.

  • “New Orleans Police Officers Plead Guilty in Shooting of Civilians”

    From the Times:

    The guilty pleas, which drew prison terms from three to 12 years, were the latest development in a wrenching 10-year saga that began when police officers responding to a distress call on the Danziger Bridge on Sept. 4, 2005, opened fire on unarmed residents, killing two and injuring four.

    …

    Under the terms of Wednesday’s deal, the four officers involved in the shooting received sentences ranging from seven to 12 years, with credit for time served. The fifth man, Mr. Kaufman, who was accused in the cover-up, got three years.

    …

    The victims, in a city still without order and drowning in floodwaters, were crossing the bridge in search of food or relatives when police officers rushed to the scene in a rental truck. The officers opened fire with shotguns and AK-47s, leaving four people severely injured and two dead: 17-year-old James Brisette, and Mr. Madison, a 40-year-old developmentally disabled man who took a shotgun blast in the back.

    …

    But other officers who had pleaded guilty testified that defendants had fired without warning, stomped on the dying and immediately afterward began to construct what would become an extensive cover-up.

    In 2010 I asked Dan Baumfor his general thoughts and posted about New Orleans after the flood. He wrote, in part:

    What I saw of the police during the storm were heroic officers operating with no leadership or resources whatsoever. The cops I was with were protecting and serving under incredibly trying conditions, and doing so with professionalism and compassion. That they were cut adrift from any command or support was obvious; Eddie Compass (and Ray Nagin) were … criminally incompetent.

    …

    Everyplace I was, people were taking care of each other with unbelievable tenderness…. I never once saw a black man with a gun who was not in uniform.

    …

    I say all this because for the NOPD to say, “we had to do what we did because the city was in chaos” is patent bullshit and disgraces the majority of officers, who did their jobs without any support at all. There was no chaos. The structure of government disappeared, and the people behaved themselves admirably.

    …

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

  • Scandal in the NYPD

    It’s still hard to figure out what exactly is going on. But Banks seems to be toast. Banks never had money problems. Maybe the IRS is interested. Overall, the best summary to date is by Lenny Levitt in NYPD Confidential.

    Along with connections to Da Mayor, the white elephant in the room is the “special consideration” given to the Hasidic community. It’s an open secret in the NYPD that Hasids and some of the Orthodox community are treated very kindly. Why? Because they got, as they say in Chicago, clout.

    In 2013 DeBlasio won the Democratic primary (and hence the general election) by 101,503 votes. He avoided a runoff by 5,623 votes. Fewer than 700,000 votes were cast. Yes, in a city of 8.5 million, local elections are decided in an off-year with less than 10 percent of total residents voting. Meanwhile, there are 15,000 Satmars whose leaders offer their votes as a block. Most voted for deBlasio.

  • “‘Walter Scott effect’: North Charleston traffic stops cut in half after shooting”

    Worth reading for many reasons: http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20160402/PC16/160409955

  • Bad Cop Good Movie: The Seven-Five

    I’m finally getting around to watching The Seven Five, a documentary about the 75 Precinct in the 1980s and criminal cop Michael Dowd. Good stuff… the documentary, that is, not the cop.

    I like how the movie is told through three perspectives: the dirty cops, the cops who caught them, and the criminal the cops worked for. And of course they’re all really charismatic.

    But what amazes me is the reputation for NYC being so crazy back then. I mean it was. Sort of. In 1990, the height of the crack epidemic (the Bronx was already burnt) New York City’s homicide rate peaked at 30 per 100,000.

    And the 75 Precinct was the highest homicide precinct in the city, with 126 murdersin 1993. That’s a rate of about 80 per 100,000.

    Last year in New York City? The homicide rate was 4.

    You know what Baltimore’s homicide rate was last year? 55.

    When I worked the Eastern District the homicide rate was 100.

    Last year in the Western District, the homicide rate was 140.

    Think of what that means, to residents and cops alike.

    [Fun fact: The most ever homicides in any one Baltimore district? The Western in 1972. 87homicides. (Though last year’s rate was probably higher, given the population flight from the area.)]

  • Special delivery

    The hammer begins to fall on the officers who idiotically took offense and arrested a guy who had the nerve to criticize their reckless driving. Murray Weiss in DNAinfo:

    The NYPD lieutenant involved in the questionable arrest of a Brooklyn mailman was stripped of his gun and badge Thursday and placed on desk duty.

    …

    The four are set to be harshly disciplined…. Machado, a former Marine who saw combat in Iraq, will take the heaviest hit because “the supervisor is the one who should dictate the situation,” a well-placed source explained.

    “He is the boss and he is [the] one who controls what occurs,” the source said, predicting Machado, an 11-year veteran, could lose as much as a year’s vacation, but not his job, which was something even the mailman, Glenn Grays, said he did not want to occur.

    You’d think, if the cops were in a legitimate rush rather than just driving like fools, they would have continued on to the emergency rather than having the time to stop and harass a mailman. I stand by my previous statement that this was “inexcusably shitty” police behavior.

  • Arrest of Postal Worker in Crown Heights

    Unless there’s more to this story that hasn’t come out — and there may be (though I wouldn’t bet on it) — this is inexcusably shitty.

    The video:

    So is this unrelated incident in 2013 when a cop made a left turn into and killed a teacher crossing the street. It’s all too common for drivers in error to get away with killing pedestrians in New York City without serious consequences. Add police into the mix, and this isn’t even a surprise.

    But the egregious and shameless part here is the city arguing that the victim “knew or should have known in the exercise of due/reasonable care of the risks and dangers incident to engaging in the activity alleged.” That’s lawyer talk for it’s the pedestrian’s fault for crossing the street, in the crosswalk, with the walk sign.

    Update:

    Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said Monday that he reviewed multiple videos of the incident and was “not pleased” with what he saw, and that the officers were supposed to be in uniform as part of their detail.

    “All four of these people, including the lieutenant, were in street clothes, not in uniform,” Bratton said during an unrelated press conference Monday. “That’s in direct violation of our patrol guide. So we will be investigating that element of it.”

    Grays said he hopes the officers involved will be disciplined, but not fired.

    “I don’t want them to be jobless because they might have family, kids they need to support,” he said.

    “It’s sad. I thought when I put on a uniform that I’d be treated a little different, but there’s no difference. I’m just another brother with a uniform.”

    Follow-up post.

  • There goes: “You get what you pay for!”

    Well Suffolk County certainly isn’t a good case study for my point that if you pay cops enough, you’ll avoid scandal. Though I’d still like to think that’s true, WTF?

    The former Chief of Police (how much did he make?) pled guilty:

    to federal charges stemming from accusations that he beat a suspect in custody, threatened to kill him and then coerced his fellow officers into covering up the misconduct.

    …

    Two decades ago, as a sergeant, Mr. Burke had a sexual relationship with a prostitute, according to an internal affairs investigation that accused Mr. Burke of accidentally leaving his handgun with the woman, Newsday reported.

    …

    With some 2,700 sworn officers and over 600 civilian members, the department is one of the largest in the region.

    Compared with those in other departments, officers in the Suffolk agency are well paid, making $125,000 in base pay. That is about $50,000 more than their counterparts in New York City, and it does not include overtime pay, which can be substantial, or the extra money officers receive for each year on the job.

    Detectives and sergeants have been known to earn more than $200,000 a year. The police unions on Long Island are so wealthy they have formed a “super PAC” to flood local elections with campaign donations

  • Fox Lake cop killled himself in “carefully staged suicide”

    When I was on Bill O’Reilly, he used Lt. Joe Gliniewicz’s death as a lead-in to asking: “Do you believe that the black lives matter crew and other radicals are igniting violence against police officers?” I didn’t. The next day I pointed out that Black Lives Matters doesn’t have a strong foothold in Fox Lake, Illinois, which is less than 1 percent African American. That works out to all of 80 black people.

    Well, it turn out the cop wasn’t even murdered. A police investigation revealed he killed himself in a “carefully staged suicide.” Normally I’d have a bit more sympathy for this guy, but it also turns out that he was stealing and laundering money for the past 7 years (something in the “5 figures”). He stole some of the money from a police youth training program he helped run. What a prick. He had 30 years on. He could have just retired. Classy.