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Tag: DOJ report on BPD

  • The DOJ is Right (4): The actual department is a mess (3/3)

    Update: The links have changed (oops!) since these were first published. Here are links to all my August 2016 posts on the DOJ report on the BPD.
    1 https://copinthehood.com/initial-thoughts-on-doj-report-on-2/
    2 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-1-2/
    3 https://copinthehood.com/the-dojs-war-on-broken-window-2/
    4 https://copinthehood.com/cant-you-take-joke-2/
    5 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-2-n-word-2/
    6 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-3-that-damn-kid-on-2/
    7 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-4-on-diggs-dig-2/
    8 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-1-2/
    9 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-2-actual-department-is-2/
    10 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-3-actual-department-is-2/
    11 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-4-actual-department-is-2/

    F) And then there’s the problem of recruitment and retention:

    It appears BPD’s staffing shortage will not be resolved in the short term. We heard from officers, supervisors, and command staff that many officers join BPD to gain experience in a high-activity environment, and after three to five years, leave the Department for less-demanding and higher-paid positions with neighboring agencies…. This is a significant drain on the Department’s resources, as these experienced officers, if they remained, would be the future leaders of the Department, and critical to the success of the Department’s law enforcement efforts. The Department also appears to be confronting challenges in recruiting qualified officers — it has only met a fraction of its goals for the 2016 Academy class. At least one of the Department’s background check processes — its psychological testing — has been investigated for allegedly rushing those evaluations, sometimes conducting psychological evaluations for aspiring officers in as little as fifteen minutes.

    I totally aced that test. I still remember my doctor’s name was “Doctor Outlaw,” which I still think is a cool name for a doctor interviewing cops.

    G) And equipment issues are more key than outsiders may suspect:

    Officers suffer from being supplied with outdated, broken, or in some cases, no equipment. As one officer noted to the Fraternal Order of Police in a focus group, “How am I supposed to pull someone over for having a taillight out when my car has two?”

    Officers have no computers in their cars, forcing them to return to the district station to type reports, and even those computers are often not working…. Taking officers off the street to type reports at the district takes away from time that could be spent on law enforcement or community building activities. It also creates inefficiencies for officers who often must write reports on paper in the field while their memories of incidents are fresh, and then type the same information into computer databases after arriving at the district station at the end of their shift.

    H) There’s good news and bad news about how easily some of these things can be solved:

    Despite its budgetary issues, the City of Baltimore will need to make an investment in its public safety facilities and resources to ensure that officers have the tools necessary to properly serve the residents and businesses of the City.

    The answer is money. Baltimore doesn’t have too much of it.

    Here’s the thing. Cops work in a shitty environment. They know that. But 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. This does so much to lower morale. It matters. Low morale is so much of the reason some cops become burnt-out assholes on the street. Where does the buck stop? Certainly not with the lowly patrol officer.

    Now if your job were that shitty, you’d walk off. But police can’t. The show must go on. No matter how bad things get, police have to go out there and make the best of it. Radios die, car transmissions don’t work, your car gets a flat and there’s no spare, computers are down, your uniform splits at the seams, and now body cameras are another can of things that can break. Despite all of that, one thing is certain: cops will go and answer the next call.

    You can’t fight City Hall. Cops get blamed for bureaucratic nightmares that not only do they have no control over. This dysfunction screws good cops and there’s nothing they can do about it. 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. And then you get pissed off when one bad cop who should have never made it out of the academy, should have been fired, should not have been promoted — this guy? He actually admits his racist crimes, and somehow people consider him the good guy and blames everybody else who was forced to work through his misdeeds.

    I defend most police officers because I’ve been there. I’ve had to drive shifts with a car that couldn’t go faster than 20 MPH. I’ve had to fill out forms. I’ve had to deal with citizens calling 911 to lie about me, 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. They’re tools in this system. And yet every day they get up from their bad dreams and go to work. It doesn’t matter how bad things get, police will do their job, most of them professionally. If one thing is true is for police, it’s that cliche: “the show must go on.”

    Maybe this DOB report will improve the department despite itself. Though I might be wrong, I doubt it. I suspect people will ignore this key section and just focus on eliminating discretionary proactive policing that saves lives. If policing taught me nothing else, 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.”

  • The DOJ is Right (3): The actual department is a mess (2/3)

    Update: The links have changed (oops!) since these were first published. Here are links to all my August 2016 posts on the DOJ report on the BPD.
    1 https://copinthehood.com/initial-thoughts-on-doj-report-on-2/
    2 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-1-2/
    3 https://copinthehood.com/the-dojs-war-on-broken-window-2/
    4 https://copinthehood.com/cant-you-take-joke-2/
    5 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-2-n-word-2/
    6 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-3-that-damn-kid-on-2/
    7 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-4-on-diggs-dig-2/
    8 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-1-2/
    9 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-2-actual-department-is-2/
    10 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-3-actual-department-is-2/
    11 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-4-actual-department-is-2/

    C) It’s not like most police don’t want to make things better. They can’t. A lot this is systemic to any large bureaucracy in a poor city. But it’s not like cops haven’t tried to improve things. People care. But nothing seems to get better. The organization is dysfunctional:

    Individuals throughout the Department have highlighted that the Department needs to significantly improve its training program. For example, in 2012, the Fraternal Order of Police’s Blueprint for Improved Policing in Baltimore includes an entire section focused on training issues and recommendations. See FOP Blueprint for Improved Policing (July 11, 2012), at 6–8. More recently, BPD’s July 2015 Training Academy Needs Assessment provides a program analysis, describing major issues in personnel, curriculum, equipment and structures, and budgeting. It also notes that the Academy has been working to address some of these issues.

    And we don’t know what is happening because:

    Serious deficiencies in BPD’s supervision of its enforcement activities, including through data collection and analysis, contribute to the Department’s failure to identify and correct unconstitutional policing.

    D) And then we get to a failed discipline process:

    The system has several key deficiencies. First, BPD sets thresholds of activity that trigger “alerts” to supervisors about potentially problematic conduct that are too high. Because of these high thresholds, BPD supervisors often are not made aware of troubling behavioral patterns until after officers commit egregious misconduct. Second, even where alerts are triggered, we found that BPD supervisors do not consistently take appropriate action to counsel the officer, consider additional training, or otherwise intervene in a way that will correct the behavior before an adverse event occurs. Third, critical information is omitted or expunged from the EIS that could help address officer training or support needs or help prevent future misconduct.

    …

    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.

    E) Officers feel and are unsupported:

    BPD fails to support its officers through effective strategies for recruitment, retention, and staffing patterns, and does not provide them with appropriate technology and equipment.

    Specifically:

    First, BPD does not have a Department-wide plan to address staffing shortages in patrol; instead, each district deals with its own shortages independently. Districts address their staffing shortages by “drafting,” or requiring, officers to work additional hours after their regular ten-hour shift. Officers are “drafted” to work up to an additional ten hours after their regular shift, making for, potentially, a twenty-hour day.

    …

    Officers we spoke with consistently informed us of the serious negative impact that drafting has on their morale. Additionally, the potential negative impact that drafting has on officers’ decision-making skills after working for up to twenty hours is equally troubling.

    This policy contributed to the death of my friend, who was killed in a traffic accident after many months of mandatory overtime and 12-hour shifts.

  • The DOJ is Right (2): The actual department is a mess (1/3)

    Update: The links have changed (oops!) since these were first published. Here are links to all my August 2016 posts on the DOJ report on the BPD.
    1 https://copinthehood.com/initial-thoughts-on-doj-report-on-2/
    2 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-1-2/
    3 https://copinthehood.com/the-dojs-war-on-broken-window-2/
    4 https://copinthehood.com/cant-you-take-joke-2/
    5 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-2-n-word-2/
    6 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-3-that-damn-kid-on-2/
    7 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-4-on-diggs-dig-2/
    8 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-1-2/
    9 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-2-actual-department-is-2/
    10 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-3-actual-department-is-2/
    11 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-4-actual-department-is-2/

    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. (pp.128-139)

    A) Here’s how they describe the rule book, policies, or the book of General Orders I’ve already tried to describe. To say G.O.’s doesn’t follow “best practices” (pdf link) is an understatement:

    We found systemic problems with BPD’s method of drafting, distributing, and implementing policies that has made it difficult for officers to understand proper procedures and adapt to changing rules.

    This led the criminal prosecution (and acquittal) of officers.

    And there’s this (I know you might want to skim over this eye-numbing paragraph, but really read it to let it sink in):

    The Department has historically developed and published policies and amendments in a manner that officers find to be confusing and opaque. As many officers told us, the numbering system alone is a source of confusion. Generally, BPD policies have been organized with titles that included letters and numbers. During one period, however, the letter-and-number system was replaced with a system that included numbers alone. The new system only applied to newly implemented policies, however, and the majority of policies were still classified by letter-and-number. Policies from different eras are written in different formats, and often modified by annexes, memoranda, amendments, and rescissions, instead of replacing the old policy completely, making it difficult for officers to be confident that they had the current, complete policy.

    And this:

    While the policy manual has a table of contents [ed note: with no friggin page numbers; there are no page numbers! (Stab self in eye)], there is no index, and new additions and revisions can quickly make older manuals difficult to navigate. In fact, during our investigation, BPD was unable to locate one of its own amendments to disclose to us.

    And of course there’s a lack of any input from the rank and file:

    BPD likewise fails to provide officers the opportunity to provide input on the policy as it is developed. We spoke with many officers, including supervisors and others in positions of authority, who were frustrated by the lack of input they were able to have on policy development, including the policies developed in 2016. With nearly 3,000 sworn officers and another 1,000 personnel, BPD will likely receive conflicting input in addition to the helpful ideas generated if it seeks input from officers. Without seeking this input, however, BPD fails to learn critical lessons from the field, and, as importantly, it risks alienating its officers and undermining adherence to the policies it develops.

    B) And then there’s training:

    Indeed, BPD’s former director of the Training Academy released a needs assessment in 2015 that highlighted an “internal culture of placing training second,” “expectations for ‘rushed’ training,” and “outside pressure to condense training programs” as threats to the current program. See Baltimore Police Department Training Academy Needs Assessment (July 2015), at 5. Unfortunately, after the training director sent the needs assessment to BPD leadership, he did not receive a response for months. He also organized three different meetings with patrol commanders to begin making changes based on the needs assessment, but no commanders attended the meetings.

    …

    Officers who had furthered their training did so because of their own personal interest or ambition, often using private funds and overcoming obstacles posed by supervisors or work schedules. Rather than encouraging additional training, supervisors view training as a peripheral activity that is consistently superseded by the need to keep officers on the street.

    And consider this about the BPD academy:

    The program lost about two-thirds of its staff over the past three years: training staff fell from approximately 60 in 2013 to 20 currently. During the course of our investigation, thirty classes had no primary instructor. Multiple training units, including the ones responsible for supervisor training for new sergeants and lieutenants, were entirely vacant with no personnel staffing them.

    …

    The Fraternal Order of Police has also highlighted this concern, noting that class sizes for new recruit training have averaged 35–50 officers.

    …

    BPD training facilities are in a similarly troubling state. During the course of our investigation, we were informed that BPD has only 17 computers available to train its nearly 4,000 personnel. The buildings themselves are in disrepair: water cannot be consumed from the faucets, and the buildings often lack workable air conditioning and heating. According to the Academy’s recent needs assessment:

    “The decrepit state of the academy itself gives the impression of a lackadaisical and uncommitted attitude towards the necessities of training the modern police officer. Recruits, sworn personnel, visiting law-enforcement experts, and civilians get the impression that they are party to a fly-by-night, poverty-stricken department when they find themselves in a crumbling, drafty building.”

    [Ed Note: And this is the “new” academy! No different in the “old” academy I attended on Guilford St. But at least in the old days we could drink the water.]

    You’d think the DOJ might have mentioned that a trainee was shot in the academy. I mean, it really doesn’t get worse than that. At the time the academy was on its seventh head of training in the last 19 months.

    [to be continued in posts 2 and 3]

  • The DOJ is Right (1): Too many illegal stop and searchs (though sometimes just without written articulation)

    Update: The links have changed (oops!) since these were first published. Here are links to all my August 2016 posts on the DOJ report on the BPD.
    1 https://copinthehood.com/initial-thoughts-on-doj-report-on-2/
    2 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-1-2/
    3 https://copinthehood.com/the-dojs-war-on-broken-window-2/
    4 https://copinthehood.com/cant-you-take-joke-2/
    5 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-2-n-word-2/
    6 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-3-that-damn-kid-on-2/
    7 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-4-on-diggs-dig-2/
    8 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-1-2/
    9 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-2-actual-department-is-2/
    10 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-3-actual-department-is-2/
    11 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-4-actual-department-is-2/

    Too many officers in Baltimore conduct searches without being able to articulate probable cause. Too many people arrested for bullshit reasons illegally. This is wrong. It’s been happening forever. It needs to change. Maybe this DOJ report will bring about this change.

    That said, you can arrest someone for bullshit reasons legally. Bullshit means minor and perhaps to prove a point, but it’s not illegal. And sometimes people need to spend the night in jail whether because they’re threatened their mother, squatting on a stranger’s stoop, or ignore an officer’s lawful order to desist from criminal behavior (but behavior you don’t have probable cause to arrest them for). The charge can be loitering (Baltimore’s go-to), disorderly conduct (NYC’s go-to), disturbing the peace, trespassing, failure to obey, open container. Or any even more minor violation (littering, jaywalking, spitting, cursing, it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s on the books) combined with “failure to provide identification.” (It’s much harder to arrest somebody who does carry ID, because you can’t play the BS-ticket-you-don’t-have-ID game.)

    Such minor arrests do not and should not be prosecuted. The argument that arrests are bad because charges are dropped is absurd. As I wrote:

    Along with bureaucratic BS (prosecutors march to a much different drummer than cops), the standard for conviction is “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The standard for arrest is “probable cause” (which isn’t even “more likely true than false.” So of course good legal arrests will be dropped.

    On top of that, most low-level offenses are abated by arrest. You don’t actually prosecute people for loitering and trespassing on a stoop. A loitering arrest isn’t bad because it’s not prosecuted. It’s never prosecuted. And for such minor offenses, officer have pretty low motivation to write a good report, since it really just doesn’t matter.

    What I don’t get is so many illegal searches and arrests could be done legally, if the officer was clever and knew how to write. But where the report goes wrong is assuming that arrests and searches are evil because an officer didn’t articulate good cause in the arrest report. Much of the DOJ describes is just bad writing. That or officers not giving a damn about wasting time on a report for some BS arrest that is, in fact, abated by arrest. Cops’ inability to write is a major problem. But they some cops don’t learn good writing skills in high-school. There’s no language or writing test to become a police officer. Maybe there should be.

  • The DOJ is wrong (4): On Diggs and Trespassing (dig?)

    Update: The links have changed (oops!) since these were first published. Here are links to all my August 2016 posts on the DOJ report on the BPD.
    1 https://copinthehood.com/initial-thoughts-on-doj-report-on-2/
    2 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-1-2/
    3 https://copinthehood.com/the-dojs-war-on-broken-window-2/
    4 https://copinthehood.com/cant-you-take-joke-2/
    5 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-2-n-word-2/
    6 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-3-that-damn-kid-on-2/
    7 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-4-on-diggs-dig-2/
    8 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-1-2/
    9 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-2-actual-department-is-2/
    10 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-3-actual-department-is-2/
    11 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-4-actual-department-is-2/

    [75 percent of this post was written by somebody else. As was 90 percent of the research. I double-checked, edited.]

    I think the goal of the DOJ report is not about constitutional policing in Baltimore. It’s about police not stopping people. Full stop. I mean, hell, even I have moral issues with “clearing corners” in a free society, but I’m telling you I never saw a corner I couldn’t clear legally and constitutionally. Unlike many of my more “progressive” academic colleagues, I see police as an essential part of our free society. And until we can think of a better way to disrupt violent crime, sometimes corners need to be cleared. Sometimes criminals hanging disrespecting neighbors and police need to spend the night in jail. And we can do that when they loiter under a posted “no trespassing” sign.

    Done strategically, it’s an essential part of preserving police authority. And I’m afraid that when police stop being proactive — like you see right now in Chicago and Baltimore — the dead bodies will continue to pile up. I do hope I’m wrong.

    The DOJ report cites a federal district court case (Diggs v. Housing Authority of City of Frederick Md. 1999) at the bottom of p.36. The DOJ says Diggs casts doubt on “the type of highly discretionary trespassing arrests that BPD utilizes.”

    This is totally BS.

    The BPD does nothing like that described in Diggs, which dealt with a very specific and complicated police enforcement scheme in public housing to hand out warning citations to people, maintain a “trespass log,” and only allowed pre-invited listed guests on the grounds of public housing.

    Diggs was even explicit that the trespassing they were talking was not the same as trespassing under a posted “no trespassing” sign:

    Maryland law, for example, permits a duly authorized agent of the housing authority to enforce the trespassing law by posting reasonably conspicuous signs.

    Did they not understand what they read? Or maybe they don’t care. An ideological objection to low-level proactive discretionary policing could be more important than the quality-of-life and lives of Batlimoreans. Consider that.

    Quibbling over a footnote may be kind of irrelevant when Baltimore cops do conduct a lot of unlawful Terry stops. But I’ll note that cops who actually bother to document their stops (and therefore can be audited by the DOJ) are almost certainly not the ones we need to worry about most.

    [If you don’t know Terry is, see thisand thisfor starters.]

    The pages on bullshit loitering and trespassing arrests (pp.36-38) pissed me off. Again, I’m not too mad, because let’s face it — lots of Baltimore cops arrest people for loitering when they aren’t actually impeding the free flow of pedestrian traffic, and they arrest people for trespassing when they haven’t warned them to move along.

    BUT, the trespass warning requirement has a YUGE exception, which is when there’s a fucking sign on the property that says “NO TRESPASSING.” That’s your warning! If you don’t belong there, you can go to jail. So why all the hate on the Lieutenant’s trespassing arrest template (p.38)? He’s trying to show his cops what a legit trespassing arrest looks like. Isn’t that what good supervisors are supposed to do? And if you’ve got black cops policing a black neighborhood, you know as hard as might be for some whites to understand, whites are pretty irrelevant to a lot day-to-day to policing in a minority white city and police department.

    The DOJ also ignored Jones v. State (MD App 2010) which clearly states that a sign can serve as a trespass notification:

    As noted above, notification of a person not to enter or cross private property is … not present in the trespass on posted property statute.

    But Jones goes so much further. It actually gets kind of crazy:

    In addition, the fact that appellant may well have had permission to enter … does not negate [an officers] probable cause to arrest appellant for trespass on posted property. … Consequently, although a police officer may ask a suspect about any right or permission to be on the subject property, there is no requirement to do so in order to establish probable cause for arrest for trespass on posted property.

    [Just FYI, I’ve omitted the parts about “wanton trespass” to focus on “trespass on posted property statute.” Also keep in mind, this is Maryland Law. Your laws may be different! Ask your doctor if these laws are right for you.]

    Think of how powerful and potentially unfair that last sentence is. You could be sitting on your friend’s stoop. But if he’s in the bathroom when I show up, legally and constitutionally I don’t even have to give you the common courtesy of waiting for him to come back before locking you up. (This is why we need cops who understand the law and also exercise discretion and common sense.)

    So it sounds like the DOJ is trying to outflank the courts here by asserting that all trespass and loitering laws are unconstitutional. And they have little problem just making things up to achieve their goal. Who wrote this report? What is the methodology? It’s all so opaque. And because nobody will challenge a “voluntary” consent decree,” the DOJ can say pretty say whatever they want. And leaving Baltimore aside for a moment, shouldn’t we be a bit more concerned about lack of integrity and transparency in the US Department of Justice?

    Here’s the thing, I do have problems with illegal stops and searches and arrests and Baltimore. It’s wrong. I wish it would stop. I’ve written about it. And if that were the point of this report, I’d be all for it.

    This report is something deeper and slightly nefarious. It questions the very right of police to stop, frisk, and search people at all. Even when it’s legal and constitutional.

    The difference between an unconstitutional extension of a Terry Frisk and a legal search can really be as simply as me going, “Can I search you?” And yet why some officers won’t utter these four fucking syllables before sticking their hands in somebody’s pocket I have no fucking clue. Not once was I refused a consent search. Not once. (And had somebody said no, I suspect I still could have searched incident to arrest.)

    So illegal searches do piss me off. Not so much for the semantic omission of four syllables, but because 90 percent of illegal stops and searches (at least in the Eastern where I policed) could be done legally and constitutionally if only cops weren’t lazy or dumb. There’s no excuse for police not to play by the rules because, despite what cops might even believe, the game is rigged in favor smart police. Or at least it used to be.

  • How do you define “reasonable suspicion” and “probable cause”?

    It’s not easy. Trust me. And I was cop, have a PhD, and teach criminal justice. United States v. Humphries, (4th Cir. 2004):

    The Supreme Court has repeatedly admonished that the standard for probable cause is not “finely tuned” or capable of “precise definition or quantification into percentages.”

    Well that’s not helpful. But yeah, it’s a bit unfair to overly fault cops for not meeting a definition you can’t define.

    But, uh, what is probable cause. I’m telling you there’s no answer. But a working definition I’ve used and cops will know (“reason to believe…”) is actually not that good because “reason to believe” implies more than 50/50 chance. It’s less than that! Dig this, from US v. Humphries (4th Cir. 2004):

    Similarly, we have stated (United States v. Jones, 1994) that the probable-cause standard does not require that the officer’s belief be more likely true than false.

    Well, damn. That was sort of news to me. (Which is why I’m posting this.)

    So less than 50 percent is clear. And “reasonable suspicion” is clearly (though only partially) defined as “less than probable cause.” So we’re talking a pretty low bar here. But I mention in terms of the low “hit rate” cited in the DOJ Report. What’s good enough? 10 percent? 25 percent? It depends. But if the hit rate gets anything close to this level, you can’t argue there’s prima fascia evidence of unconstitutional policing.

    And the argument that arrests are bad because charges are dropped? It’s absurd. Along with bureaucratic BS (prosecutors march to a much different drummer than cops), the standard for conviction is “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The standard for arrest is “probable cause” (which isn’t even “more likely true than false.” So of course good legal arrests will be dropped.

    On top of that, most low-level offenses are abated by arrest. You don’t actually prosecute people for loitering and trespassing on a stoop. A loitering arrest isn’t bad because it’s not prosecuted. It’s never prosecuted. And for such minor offenses, officer have pretty low motivation to write a good report, since it really just doesn’t matter.

    [In my intro classes, I just want students to know that “reasonable suspicion,” based on Terry, is the legal standard to justify a stop and/or frisk; probable cause, based on the 4th Amendment, is the legal standard needed for a search or arrest. And even this is a tough sell.]

    [Thanks to somebody else for all the research and some of the writing here]

  • The Noble Lie: The truth does not matter

    Kim Hendrickson works on police and mental health issues and has this take:

    I am influenced by Plato so understand the importance–sometimes–of the noble lie. There is much to criticize in the investigations that lead to consent decrees. And they are often horribly unfair in the particulars. But in the Seattle context the process has done more good than bad even though the price has been high for many people (including taxpayers).

    Do I wish change would happen without scandal, lawsuits, gross mischaracterizations and federal scrutiny? Yes. But it typically doesn’t.

  • The DOJ is wrong (3): That damn kid on a dirt bike in 2007

    Update: The links have changed (oops!) since these were first published. Here are links to all my August 2016 posts on the DOJ report on the BPD.
    1 https://copinthehood.com/initial-thoughts-on-doj-report-on-2/
    2 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-1-2/
    3 https://copinthehood.com/the-dojs-war-on-broken-window-2/
    4 https://copinthehood.com/cant-you-take-joke-2/
    5 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-2-n-word-2/
    6 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-3-that-damn-kid-on-2/
    7 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-4-on-diggs-dig-2/
    8 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-1-2/
    9 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-2-actual-department-is-2/
    10 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-3-actual-department-is-2/
    11 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-4-actual-department-is-2/

    Picture a seven-year-old on a bike. From pp. 86-87 of the report:

    Allegations of BPD’s unreasonable use of force against juveniles are not new. BPD has a history of problematic encounters with youth that pre-date the period of our review. For example, in 2007, officers arrested a seven-year old child for sitting on a dirt bike during an initiative to confiscate dirt bikes.

    It became a minor scandal: A cop grabbed a 7-year-old off his bike for no reason right in front of his mom! Well that’s how the false narrative grew. The paper somehow left off the seemingly important detail that it was a motorized bike. That kind of matters, doesn’t it?

    Long story short: 7-year-old is rolling down the street on a illegal motorized ATV. The keys are in the bike. Yes, that’s what (some) 7-year-olds in Baltimore ride motor bikes with parental encouragement. A cop sees what is going on and about to happen and does, well, what mom should have done. He takes the kid off the bike. Nobody is hurt. But mom-of-the-year files a complaint against the officer saying police assault her kid. She then (naturally) files a lawsuit for money. But the city (and this isn’t natural) doesn’t settle. The case goes to court, and the city wins hands-down.

    I wrote about this in 2008:

    Police had the nerve to stop the 7-year-old from driving an A.T.V. down the street. He wasn’t “riding,” says the mom; the motor was off. He was just “rolling down the street.” The kid was 7. On a motorized ATV that can start with a key. So the police do their job and take the kid off the bike.

    People blamed about “zero-tolerance” policing, by the way.

    This was bad parenting and good policing. It should not be Exhibit A in “unreasonable use of force against juveniles.” See, back then this case bothered me because it was still kind of rare in 2007 for a cop to be attacked for doing the right thing. And I bet those who wrote this report make their kids wear a helmet before they can even get on a pedal bike.

  • The DOJ is wrong (2): the N-word

    Update: The links have changed (oops!) since these were first published. Here are links to all my August 2016 posts on the DOJ report on the BPD.
    1 https://copinthehood.com/initial-thoughts-on-doj-report-on-2/
    2 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-1-2/
    3 https://copinthehood.com/the-dojs-war-on-broken-window-2/
    4 https://copinthehood.com/cant-you-take-joke-2/
    5 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-2-n-word-2/
    6 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-3-that-damn-kid-on-2/
    7 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-4-on-diggs-dig-2/
    8 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-1-2/
    9 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-2-actual-department-is-2/
    10 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-3-actual-department-is-2/
    11 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-4-actual-department-is-2/

    From Vice Magazine:

    Of course, some former Baltimore cops take issue with the tone of the federal report, which cited 60 complaints of racial slurs against black people.

    “The BPD is not a bunch of white officers calling blacks n****rs,” said Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore cop and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “I didn’t hear the word used once by a white officer. Not once. I’m not saying it’s never been used, but this isn’t fucking Ferguson. I suspect much of the usage they talk about is from black officers. Doesn’t that matter? But the report doesn’t tell us.”

    [Vice actually printed the whole n-word, which I still find bold. Too soon for me.] Ah, you say, but I wasn’t there for long. True. Or maybe nobody used the word around me. Maybe. I hope that’s the case, because if all it takes is one cop to totally change police culture, man, that is great news. No. I didn’t hear white cops call people n****r because white cops don’t call people n****r in Baltimore.

    [Just as a reality check, I did ask one black cop if he ever heard a white cop use the word in public. He said “no.” (Somewhat reluctantly, I kinda thought.)]

    The report cites race in just one case. And it’s white using the word; we know this because his partner filed a complaint. Good. See, even if some whites wanted to use the word (I’m sure some whites do), you don’t hear white cops in Baltimore calling blacks n****r because, even if for no other reason, there are too many blacks around! Whites are a minority in the city and the police department.

    Now did I hear black cop from black neighborhoods calling another blacks n*****s? Oh, did I. Is this objectionable? I don’t know. Seems so to me. (And apparently it is to the citizens who filed complaints about it!) But far be it for me to white-man-splain to a black cop that his non-standard English using isn’t up to my college-educated standards. But no matter where you fall on this usage issue, blacks being rude to other blacks is not a sign of systemic racism in the department.

  • “Communities don’t commit crime; people commit crime”

    I love when other people do my writing for me! Thank you and keep these coming:

    On the racial disparity stuff, at least the DOJ is claiming they controlled for crime rates. (see p.63). But did they really? The report is full of boneheaded statements like “Despite making up only 41 percent of the Northern District’s population, African Americans accounted for 83 percent of stops in the district.” (p.65, n.72). Gee, how much of the violent crime in the Northern District is being committed in Greenmount [ed note: poor black] as opposed to Roland Park [rich white]?

    And people always talk in terms of higher crime rates in certain “communities” — as I just did. But communities don’t commit crime; people commit crime. Saying black people live disproportionately in high-crime neighborhoods is a euphemistic way of saying black people commit a disproportionate amount of crime. (And we’re talking about violent crime here, which is what drives street-level proactive enforcement). [Last year 93 percent of Baltimore homicide were black]

    If they tried to control for crime rates by focusing on the rates of crime in different communities rather than the rates of offending by black and white residents, isn’t that problematic? (Genuine questions here; I’m no statistician) [Ed note: Yes]. Doesn’t this all come down to how the DOJ drew the boundaries for the neighborhoods they studied? What did they use? Police districts? It seems like it. Look at p.63 (referring to disproportionate stops of African Americans despite “significant variation in the districts’ demographic characteristics and crime rates”).

    Let’s say the fictional North Central district is 100% white, and the fictional South Central district is 100% black. The crime rate is twice as high in the South Central, and people in the South Central are twice as likely to get stopped by police. I assume that would pass muster with the DOJ. But, of course, real districts in Baltimore don’t look like that. They’re mixed and largely segregated. They look like the Northern District, with lots of crime in black neighborhoods like Greenmount and hardly any crime in white neighborhoods like Roland Park. They look like the Southeast district, with far less crime in largely white Sector 1 than in Sector 2 (bordering the Eastern), where the population is mostly black. It seems to me this messes up any attempt to control for crime rates if they’re only looking at things at the district level. Better would be to break it down by individual neighborhoods, though that leaves room for error, too. Even better would be to study actual rates of offending by black and white residents. What percentage of robbery suspects were reported as black? What percentage of shooting suspects in cases that had eyewitnesses? What percentage of suspects from “CDS outside” complaints were described by the callers as black?

    Wouldn’t it be a powerful illustration to just look at the gender of people stopped? Men presumably account for about 50% of Baltimore’s population. Surely they make up a much higher percentage of those stopped and arrested. And I’m sure the disparity persists even if one attempts to control for crime rates in different “communities.” (I doubt the male/female ratio differs all that much district-to-district). Is that evidence that BPD cops are profiling men, and have an anti-male bias? Or are cops focusing on men because, well, men commit most of the crime in the city, and therefore it’s mostly going to be men who exhibit suspicious behavior that prompts officers to stop them?