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Tag: Ferguson

  • “‘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

  • Remain Calm!

    Apparently there’s still no need to worry.

    Here is what I think matters: 2015 will almost assuredly see (we don’t the numbers for sure yet) a double digit in increase in homicide. See this Washington Post piece for a clue.

    And yet, if you listen to Ames Grawert and James Cullen, there’s no need to worry:

    Rather than stoking unfounded fears of a new crime wave, always just beyond the horizon, we should take this opportunity to ask how we can expand on the public safety gains of the past 25 years.

    …

    While there were 471 more murders in large cities in 2015 than 2014, more than half (260) of that increase occurred in just three cities: Baltimore, Washington and Chicago.

    My favorite ideological statistical shenanigans: if you ignore places where crime is up, crime isn’t up!

    America has not seen a double digit increase in homicide since 1971. (1986 and 1990 came close.) Since 1971 is my entire lifetime. So, yeah, we probably saw the biggest annual increase in murder in my lifetime and perhaps ever. Seems like something to worry about.

    But no. We who care about these dead people are just stoking public fear, as if police have anything to do with confronting murderers, and perhaps even preventing a few shootings.

    In Baltimore, mayoral candidates are talking about how best to reform police. Very little on how to prevent shootings. They should be talking about how to get back to how they were exactly one year ago, before police were seen as the problem and violent crime doubled.

    Just remember, no matter what happens, if it’s not ideologically expedient to worry about rising homicide, just repeat this mantra: Remain Calm. All is well.

    Related, at this is an interesting piece of the jigsaw puzzel. Homicides are down thirty-some percent in NYC this year, which seems to negate last year’s increase in NYC. At least here in New York, the sky is not falling.

    Mac Donald predicted in 2013 that if New York City ended its controversial stop-and-frisk program, crime would skyrocket back to pre-1990 levels.

    Well, stop-and-frisk formally ended in 2014, and the lights still haven’t gone out on Broadway. In fact, as the number of stops by police tapered off, so did the city’s murder rate, hitting a historic low the same year the program ended. Despite a small increase, the murder rate remained low in 2015, while shootings, major crime and arrests all fell in tandem.

    NYC is OK. But elsewhere, I’m not so sure.

    [Thanks to EyeRishPirate for bringing this to my attention.]

  • Continuing with the “Ferguson Effect”

    The other week I wrote about the so-called “Ferguson Effect.” Alex Elkins has some more thoughts on this issue, over on his blog:

    The main “take-away,” the one the authors hope the media will pick up and run with, namely, that the Ferguson Effect, as construed by conservatives and certain media outlets, is “spurious.” This is too strident, in my opinion, in light of the available evidence that *something* did change over the past year. It’s not as if the change was in aggravated assault, a notoriously unreliable classification subject to manipulation by police command. No, the change was in murder, hardly a trivial matter.

    …

    Lastly, the authors were unable to link crime trends to the sense that police had backed off in the era of #BlackLivesMatter. They write: “It is important to note that the city-level crime data used in this analysis cannot establish whether loss of legitimacy or de-policing is at the root of an observed increase in crime, or whether contagion induced by social media was responsible for transmitting these changes.”

    That, of course, is the argument that cops have made. Police have contended that after the deaths of Mike Brown and Freddie Gray, and the intense public criticism of over-policing, they have made fewer discretionary street stops and scaled back proactive Broken-Windows-style policing, and as a result, they say, opportunistic criminals have entered the void and committed more violent crimes, like murder.

    In light of all the killing in 2015, I’m willing to entertain this idea. I don’t understand why some seem to think that conceding this premise — that protest has had some effect on police — threatens the Left and its agenda. Massive street protests and intense sustained media attention surely have affected cops — indeed, many have said as much. We can grant that and still maintain the legitimacy of protest and our concerns.

    …

    We have lots of work to do. Refuting the so-called Ferguson Effect — which essentially asks who’s to blame, which conservatives like Mac Donald use to undermine legitimate democratic protests against abusive state practices — when the evidence actually does indicate an increase in violent crime, should be the least of our concerns.

  • Your Personal Ferguson Effect

    There’s an interesting comment in a previous postwhere an officer describes what he calls “my personal Ferguson Effect.” Two similar cases. One cop shot and killed a non-compliant unarmed person. The other cop did not shoot a non compliant person and is now dead.

    The knowledge after the fact of whether the suspect had a gun or not is certainly emotionally powerful in forming our judgements of these officers, but it is irrelevant legally to the officer on the scene attempting to effect an arrest of a non-compliant suspect.

    …

    The fact that the media and the masses apply this rule of hindsight to police use of force and are pressuring police agencies to do the same for internal investigations makes me fearful that the courts will soon start pushing to adopt this same rule of hindsight. That is my personal Ferguson Effect.

    Leaving aside these specific cases, I’m curious if other officers have had specific moments in the past couple years — their own Ferguson Effect — that changed the way you do their job. Was there some discussions, protests, riots, news report, prosecutions, politician, Benghazi (I’m kidding about the last one, I hope) that changed the way you do your job?

  • Defining the Ferguson Effect

    Denying the Ferguson Effect and any link between policing and crime has become almost a cottage industry in some circles. It’s sort of the liberal equivalent of conservatives denying climate change and, er, on the small chance it is changing, any link between global warming and human activity. Sure, the world may be warmer. But God works in mysterious ways. Same with crime, if you listen to many of the Left.

    Here’s a new study :

    There is no evidence to support a systematic Ferguson Effect on overall, violent, and property crime trends in large U.S. cities.

    OK. But the author do admit:

    The disaggregated analyses revealed that robbery rates, declining before Ferguson, increased in the months after Ferguson. Also, there was much greater variation in crime trends in the post-Ferguson era, and select cities did experience increases in homicide.

    OK…. So doesn’t that mean there is a Ferguson Effect? Apparently not:

    Overall, any Ferguson Effect is constrained largely to cities with historically high levels of violence, a large composition of black residents, and socioeconomic disadvantages.

    “Constrained to”? Isn’t “constrained to” synonymous with “present in”? Aren’t cities with “historically high levels of violence, a large composition of black residents, and socioeconomic disadvantage” exactly where you’d expect to find a Ferguson Effect!? I mean, I wouldn’t expect to find a Ferguson Effect in Winnetka, for crying out loud! (Winnetka, Illinois: median income $211,000; 0.3 percent black.)

    Liberals, myself excluded, have long tried to discount the efficacy of policing vis-à-vis crime prevention. And now academics seem to want to deny any “Ferguson Effect” because… I don’t know. Just guessing, but maybe it goes against a Progressive narrative that police are racist enforcers of bourgeois heteronormative values?

    There’s no reason the Ferguson Effect needs to be universal or even linked specifically to one event in August, 2014. The question shouldn’t be if all cities haven’t seen an increase in all crime but rather why why some cities — most cities, in fact — have.

    What if, hypothetically to be sure, a laser-like focus on police-violence reduced police-involved killings but simultaneously allowed hundreds and even thousands of more murders to happen? If that were true, then what?

    What if “hands up don’t shoot” were built on a false narrative? What then? What if, just for the sake of debate, we assumed that most police-involved killings were actually justified (since most are) and even life saving? What if the goal of eliminating police-involved killings was, in part, counterproductive? Then what?

    Different cities have had different “Ferguson Moments.” It wasn’t like something magically changed everywhere when Michael Brown was (justifiable) killed. All policing is local.

    In New York City the Ferguson moment may have been protests after the death of Eric Garner. Cops were verbally attacked, physically attacked, and two were killed and another bludgeoned with a hatchet. If you think none of that matters… well then you haven’t talked to any New York City cop.

    In Baltimore, just thinking out loud here, perhaps it was the protests and riots after the death of Freddie Gray. And the misguided criminal prosecution of innocent cops. In Cleveland, not that I know much about Cleveland, I would assume policing changed related to the killing of Tamir Rice. In Nashville? Beats me. But maybe it was giving hot chocolate and coffee to protesters. I applauded that move. Liberals like me love that shit. But I bet it pissed off a lot of the rank-and-file.

    So no, it’s not Ferguson per se. Call it whatever you effing want. (I’ve never been a fan of the actual term “Ferguson Effect.”) I’m talking about the real-world effect of an anti-police narrative, the fear cops have of getting in trouble for doing their job, and perhaps the first-hand experience of policing anti-police protests.

    Meanwhile, in Chicago:

    Cops say they have avoided making many of the stops they would have routinely done last year. They fear getting in trouble for stops later deemed to be illegal and say the new cards take too much time to complete.

    Their reluctance to make stops was borne out by a police statistic released Sunday: Officers completed 79 percent fewer contact cards in January 2016 than over the same period last year.

    January 2016 was the deadliest first month of the year since 2001

    Just coincidence, of course. There’s no way to prove any of this. But I sure haven’t heard any good alternative explanation. (At some point, I am partial to Occam’s Razor.)

    The ACLU rejects any correlation between declining street stops and rising violence…. Other cities have scaled back their street stops without an explosion of shootings. The reduction of “invasive” street stops is actually a good thing.

    Really? Well, yes, the NYPD scaled back its stops and crime did not increase. (Not only did crime not increase, between 2011 and 2013 homicides in New York City plummeted 35 percent!)But that doesn’t mean that all police stops are bad and to be prevented.

    The ACLU released a report in March that found blacks accounted for 72 percent of [Chicago] stops between May and August of 2014, but just 32 percent of the city’s population.

    Again?! Once again we have a denominator problem. Eighty percent of Chicago homicide victims are black. And presumably murderers, too, since most homicides are intra-racial. Should only 32 percent of those arrested for homicide be black? I don’t think so. Are only 32 percent of public drug dealers black? No. So why would one expect only 32 percent of those stopped by police to be black?

    Look, cops aren’t always right. And cops will always complain. But if homicide is going up and cops are saying, “Uh, here’s the problem: I can’t do my job. And this is why….” Perhaps we should listen. What worries me is the goal to eliminate virtually all discretionary police activity couched in the language of social and racial justice. But if you want police to do less, there’s no better way than mandating a two-page form for every stop.

    We will see what happens. But crime already is up in many cities. And that — not reducing the number of police stops — should be our first concern.

    [see also this]

  • Cops on Comey

    I love thoughtful cops. Especially those who can write. He emailed me this and agreed to let me repost it, anonymously. I wish him well and am happy to see people like this still becoming police officers.

    I’m a police recruit with a B.A. in the social sciences, and I read your blog a lot. Granted I am just a recruit and don’t know anything at all, but I thought I’d send you some thoughts about your posts on Comey and his remarks.

    I do not care at all about “scrutiny.” I work for a large, liberal city. We all have dash cameras and are required to tape every call. Body cameras are coming shortly and everybody knows it, and I’m fully in favor of it. I don’t care one bit if citizens film. We’ve talked about it in the academy, and it’s part of our training.

    What I do care about a lot more is the possibility of being the next Darren Wilson. Everybody in the academy watches every viral video and reads about every controversial police incident that happens in this country. Everybody knows about Ferguson. In Ferguson, a cop defended himself while trying to detain a robbery suspect. The Grand Jury agreed with it and the DoJ’s own investigation proved it via forensics and witness interviews. And that cop lives every day of his life in hiding. Wilson has no job, no job prospects, a wife and kid he can’t support, half the country thinks he’s a murderer, and every news article about him states he is “the white police officer who shot unarmed black teen Michael Brown.” His life is over.

    So people are idiots if they think cops don’t stand out there, see a black guy with some good warrants or who matches the description of a suspect, and think “this stop could cost me everything if he fights and dies – is it worth the risk?” To me, being fresh and new, I say it is. But I definitely understand it when the old guys sit around and say it isn’t. Your data from Baltimore shows this quite clearly.

    I think most cops recognize scrutiny is important and valid. But they also feel like this is a profession and we are entitled to some professional respect. Nobody tells nurses how to give medicine, or plumbers how to fix piping, but everybody feels the need to referee police use of force even if the extent of their expertise is watching NCIS reruns.

    So while police need to be responsive to public opinion, the public also needs to defer at some point to people with technical expertise on use of force. Certain things cannot bend. If someone tries for my gun, I will kill or maim them until they quit, even if they’re 18 and I originally stopped them for jaywalking. If the public refuses to accept that, police will pull back because the only other choices are to get fired or get hurt.

  • “‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ was built on a lie”

    I thought we all knew this by now, but apparently some people missed the memo. Responding to my Washington Postop-ed, a few people see rather upset that I wrote:

    In Ferguson, as the Justice Department made very clear, all credible evidence supported officer Darren Wilson’s account of a justified, legal and necessary shooting. Brown robbed a store, fought for the police officer’s gun and then physically charged the cop.

    People, this isn’t debatable any more.

    If you still don’t want to believe this and won’t read the DOJ report, read my summary or a very brave piece by The Post’s Jonathan Capehart:

    “Hands up, don’t shoot” became the mantra of a movement. But it was wrong, built on a lie.

    …

    It is imperative that we continue marching for and giving voice to those killed in racially charged incidents at the hands of police and others. But we must never allow ourselves to march under the banner of a false narrative on behalf of someone who would otherwise offend our sense of right and wrong. And when we discover that we have, we must acknowledge it, admit our error and keep on marching. That’s what I’ve done here.

    Or John Maynard Keynes or Paul Samuelson may or may not have said: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?”

  • “Why become a cop?”

    My latest piece at CNN.com is up. They titled it: “Why would you want to be a cop?”

    I speak to a lot of police officers, retired, on the job, and soon-to-be. Anybody who knows cops knows it’s in their nature to complain (there’s an old barb about there being just two things cops don’t like: change and the status quo). But the idealism of my students can be lost with on-the-job realities: incompetent bosses, nasty working conditions, and any quota system (be it for revenue or arrests) that demeans their professionalism.

    Police officers try to maintain their pride and idealism on the job, but it can be a tough battle when faced with a hostile political structure and a misunderstanding public too quick to blame police for society’s ills. Blaming one officer for the misdeed of another is neither fair nor productive. To have the hashtag #blacklivesmatter held against you is both frustrating and absurd. The general public doesn’t seem to care about black lives unless a cop is involved. Police see and help victims every day while most murders don’t even make the evening news.

    Police do become thin-skinned to criticism — too quick to take offense to even well intentioned criticism — because the job isn’t just what you do for a living, it ends up defining who you are. The job damages you physically and, more worrisome, drains you emotionally.

    Policing demands a level of hyper-alertness synonymous with post-traumatic stress disorder.

    …

    So as best they can, police officers make do with the job they have. Certainly police can and should play a role in rebuilding the public’s trust. But the public should have more empathy for those who have no choice but to deal with society’s problems — poverty, massive incarceration, racism, crime — that we, collectively and to our shame, cannot or will not fix.

    [Special thanks to Sgt B and to A.D. for his comment on a previous post. I probably could have done it without you, but it certainly wouldn’t have been as good!]

  • “Generating New Revenue Streams” by policing

    Sometimes it’s important to remember how you got to Point B from Point A to where you are today.

    You don’t just stumble into a system like Ferguson’s where the city tries to get 30 percent of it’s total budget from fines, citations, and court fees. Ferguson isn’t unique.

    I just stumbled across this article from 2010, writen by a police officer, that lays out the potential of using police for revenue:

    Based on the research for this article, there is a clear presumption of need for law enforcement to generate new income streams. A first necessary step in that process is to examine possible revenue-generating ideas.

    …

    Their most prominent recommendations were:

    • fees for sex offenders registering in a given jurisdiction,

    • city tow companies,

    • fine increases by 50 percent,

    • pay-per-call policing,

    • vacation house check fees,

    • public hours at police firing range for a fee,

    • police department-run online traffic school for minor traffic infractions,

    • department-based security service including home checks and monitoring of security cameras by police department,

    • a designated business to clean biological crime scenes,

    • state and court fees for all convicted felons returning to the community,

    • allowing agency name to be used for advertisement and branding,

    • triple driving-under-the-influence fines by the court,

    • resident fee similar to a utility tax,

    • tax or fee on all alcohol sold in the city,

    • tax or fee on all ammunition sold in, the city,

    • public safety fees on all new development in the city,

    • 9-1-1 fee per use,

    • police department website with business advertisement for support,

    • selling ride-a-longs to the public, and

    • police department–run firearm safety classes.

    …

    Modeled after other California agencies, the party ordinance allows an administrative citation to be issued at loud parties where the music is plainly audible 50 feet from the property line. The first citation is $100, a second $200, and a third or subsequent citation within 12 consecutive months is $500. The goal of the ordinance is to reduce repeat party calls, improve the quality of life for surrounding residents, and generate a revenue stream to offset the cost of response and enforcement.

    It’s just so blatant and wrong to see police (or the courts, or prisons) as a source of generating revenue. If you need money, that is what taxes are for.

    Anyway, for what it’s worth, West Covina, CA, does not seem best to be a particularly bad offender in terms of milking its residents, best I could understand their municipal budget. And some of those ideas above are actually pretty good ideas.

  • DOJ: The Whole Damn System is Guilty!

    [My other posts on the DOJ reports, 1 & 3.]

    The DOJ’s report of Ferguson isn’t just about police or just about race. A large part of the report — to me the more disturbing part — is about a whole system of government using the criminal justice system as a tool to legally steal from its residents. It’s feudal, but more arbitrary. That makes it despotic. And it’s not unique to Ferguson.

    When the mafia ran a town, at least they knew they were the mob. But this is a system working under the cover of the law. But in its operation it’s nothing more than old-fashioned criminal racket.

    I don’t want to say you shouldn’t see this in a broader context of race and racism (I mean, the people getting exploited are poor and black). But one could be blind to race and still be outraged. Just don’t be not be outraged because the victims are poor and black. Presumably there are poor whites facing the same problem somewhere else in small town America. I don’t know. It’s wrong.

    Here’s how it works: the political system makes rules and tells the police to issue fines. Not for crimes, mind you, but for small stuff, traffic violations and municipal violations. The stated goalis to raise money. The court system multiplies those fines. The goal — the stated goal — is to get 30 percent of funds (the legal limit) through such skullduggery. From the DOJ report:

    It is rare for the court to sentence anyone to jail as a penalty for a violation of the municipal code; indeed, the Municipal Judge reports that he has done so only once. Rather, the court almost always imposes a monetary penalty payable to the City of Ferguson, plus court fees.

    …

    The City Manager also requested and secured City Council approval to fund additional court positions, noting in January 2013 that “each month we are setting new all-time records in fines and forfeitures,” that this was overburdening court staff, and that the funding for the additional positions “will be more than covered by the increase in revenues.”

    …

    In its budget for fiscal year 2013, the City budgeted for fines and fees to yield $2.11 million; the court exceeded that target as well, collecting $2.46 million. For 2014, the City budgeted for the municipal court to generate $2.63 million in revenue.

    …

    The Finance Director wrote to Chief Jackson that “unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year. What are your thoughts? Given that we are looking at a substantial sales tax shortfall, it’s not an insignificant issue.”

    …

    Even as officers have answered the call for greater revenue through code enforcement, the City continues to urge the police department to bring in more money. In a March 2013 email, the Finance Director wrote: “Court fees are anticipated to rise about 7.5%. I did ask the Chief if he thought the PD could deliver 10% increase. He indicated they could try.”

    “As the RLCs [Red Light Cameras] net revenues ramp up to whatever we believe its annualized rate will be, then we can figure out how to balance the two programs to get their total revenues as close as possible to the statutory limit of 30%.”

    How do you work in such a system and maintain a clean conscious? Well…

    City officials’ application of the stereotype that African Americans lack “personal responsibility” to explain why Ferguson’s practices harm African Americans, even as these same City officials exhibit a lack of personal–and professional–responsibility in handling their own and their friends’ code violations, is further evidence of discriminatory bias on the part of decision makers central to the direction of law enforcement in Ferguson.

    In other words, if you knew the right person, your tickets and fines simply disappear. So the idea of “personal responsibility” didn’t actually extend to oneself. It was only used for other people.

    As to the police, I think the focus on racist emails sent by police is kind of a red herring. I mean they are racist. And? And — since these emails are sent on the job on their job email accounts — this racism is part of the accepted culture. OK. (This goes beyond private tasteless gallows-humor jokes about crime scenes and victims, with which I have no problem).

    Racists jokes don’t actually make the joke teller become a racist person. Racist jokes let other people know when person is racist. So I’m kind of happy to see these jokes because now I know. But it doesn’t shock me that there are racists in the police department. It would shock me if there were not. Liberals seem to revel every time a racist is outed. Conservatives love saying racism doesn’t matter. But of course there are racists and of course it matters. But here’s why I kind of shrug my shoulders when stuff like this comes out. It’s not like racists disappeared when the 13th Amendment was passed. Racist didn’t suddenly let their daughters date black men after the passage Civil Rights Act of 1964. We don’t need to solve racism to make things a hell of a lot better.

    And debating whether a joke is racist or only in bad taste is not an argument worth having. I think many of the cops are racist. But, like Jefferson’s bible, we can say the F.P.D. is seriously messed up without even talking about race.

    You might still think Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim. You might be the most conservative Eric-Holder-hating cop. You can think every example of police action in the DOJ report is OK. You can do all that and still read this DOJ report and be outraged at the facts that not subject to ideological interpretation or “liberal bias.” (But don’t forget this is the same DOJ that did not throw Darren Wilson under the bus.)

    Ferguson uses its police department in large part as a collection agency for its municipal court. Ferguson’s municipal court issues arrest warrants at a rate that police officials have called, in internal emails, “staggering.” According to the court’s own figures, as of December 2014, over 16,000 people had outstanding arrest warrants that had been issued by the court.

    Ferguson has a population of 21,000.

    Cops understand this emphasis on fund raising:

    One officer told us that officers could spend more time engaging with community members and undertaking problem-solving projects if FPD officers were not so focused on activities that generate revenue. This officer told us, “everything’s about the courts . . . the court’s enforcement priorities are money.” Another officer told us that officers cannot “get out of the car and play basketball with the kids,” because “we’ve removed all the basketball hoops — there’s an ordinance against it.”

    There’s some irony there in moving kids from off one “court” to on to another.

    [Also, this DOJ report places strong blames on 12-hour shifts as hurting community relations. It links 12-hour shifts to lack of defined beats. I’m not certain why those would go together. This is news to me. Feel free to comment.]

    Overall the police organization comes off as pretty incompetent. Again, not hard for a former cop to imagine. But this level of institutional slackness is pretty bad:

    In Ferguson, officers will sometimes make an arrest without writing a report or even obtaining an incident number, and hundreds of reports can pile up for months without supervisors reviewing them.

    That’s messed up.

    Officers invoke the term “ped check” as though it has some unique constitutional legitimacy. It does not. Officers may not detain a person, even briefly, without articulable reasonable suspicion. To the extent that the words “ped check” suggest otherwise, the terminology alone is dangerous because it threatens to confuse officers’ understanding of the law.

    Along with issuing a “wanted” (basically issuing warrants for people without probably cause. ) I’ve never heard of a “ped check.” It’s unacceptable. As is this:

    In our conversations with FPD officers, one officer admitted that when he conducts a traffic stop, he asks for identification from all passengers as a matter of course. If any refuses, he considers that to be “furtive and aggressive” conduct and cites–and typically arrests–the person for Failure to Comply.

    And it lead to things like this:

    One woman… received two parking tickets for a single violation in 2007 that then totaled $151 plus fees. Over seven years later, she still owed Ferguson $541 — after already paying $550 in fines and fees, having multiple arrest warrants issued against her, and being arrested and jailed on several occasions. Another woman told us that when she went to court to try to pay $100 on a $600 outstanding balance, the Court Clerk refused to take the partial payment, even though the woman explained that she was a single mother and could not afford to pay more that month.

    The report concludes:

    Our investigation indicates that in Ferguson, individual officer behavior is largely driven by a police culture that focuses on revenue generation and is infected by race bias. While increased vertical and horizontal diversity, racial and otherwise, likely is necessary to change this culture, it probably cannot do so on its own.

    So these two reports tell us that Darren Wilson is innocent (and the protesters were indeed wrong at a very basic level about the facts). But one can’t in good faith say one DOJ report is spot-on and the other is terrible, biased, and based on lies. Ferguson is a seriously fucked-up place! The system is racist. Even if it’s not racist (which it is), it’s immoral and broken. And the Ferguson Police are a part of that system.

    So wouldn’t it be great if liberals could say, “Gosh, sorry. We were wrong about Michael Brown and Darren Wilson.” And then conservatives (and cops) could say, “Apology accepted. But you know what? A system of government run as extortion using police as the muscle to extort money from poor people is racist and wrong.” Oh, what a wonderful world it would be.