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  • RIP Daryl Gates

    RIP Daryl Gates

    The career of Gates should not be celebrated. My sincere condolences to his family and those who loved him. Seriously. But LA Police Chief Daryl Gates didn’t like to give breaks to other people. So why should I give him one?

    Gates is still popular among conservative law-and-order types. Drugs on a block? Send in an armored tank. Casual drug users? “Taken out and shot.” Oh, he later said those words were just “calculated hyperbole.” You know, to get attention. Well he got mine.

    I wonder what Daryl Gates’s position would be when a 16-year-old punk punched one of his police officers? Probably charge him as an adult and throw away the key. If only that had happened to Gates when Gates was a young cop-punching punk we might have been saved from his rule. But Gates did not live by the Golden Rule.

    Gates got a lot of breaks in life. It’s not like Gates was born on third and thought he triple. It’s more like he got on first after being hit by a pitch. Then advancing to second on a passed ball and stole third. Thenhe thought he hit a triple.

    After not being charged with assault after punching a cop (break #1), Gates got his life in order. Military veteran Gates gets hired as a cop because of an affirmative action program for veterans (break #2). Soon, because of some unknown connections (at least unknown to me), he becomes the driver for Chief Parker (break #3).

    There’s no merit exam to become the chief’s driver. Gates must have had a very good hook. The funny thing about commissioners’ drivers is that they very often go on to become police commissioners. “Well,” goes the joke I heard years ago from Bill Bratton, “Commissioners sure know how to pick the best drivers. That’s why they always end up rising so quickly in the ranks!”

    Based on Gates political connection (break #3), he becomes police chief (break #4). Now let’s look at some of the lowlights of his 43-year police career, the last 14 of which he was in charge:

    1) Gates pissed off just about everybody who wasn’t white and conservative (which explains a good part of popularity among those who are).

    2) Gates was a racist SOB. Exhibit A is his observation that black people’s arteries don’t open like “normal people.” His apology, something about cardio-vascular disease, was even weirder. But there’s more to his racism than just this one line.

    3) Operation Hammer.

    4) Gates set armored cars into troubled minority neighborhoods to “send a message.” I’m not exactly certain what that message is.

    5) Gates helped establish SWAT and police reliance on military weaponry. The jury is still out on whether a SWAT-like more-militaristic entity within police departments is good or bad, at least for small departments.

    6) Gates helped establish D.A.R.E. The jury has settled this one. D.A.R.E. does not work. It actually increases drug use. Gates could not keep his own children drug free. Please don’t trust him with yours.

    7) He established C.R.A.S.H., the unit that gave Rampart a bad name and led to the worst police corruption/brutality/murder scandal in police history!

    8) When the L.A. Riots broke out, Gates was nowhere to be found. I guess he had somewhere more important to be.

    9) Many people, myself included, blame Gates for the LAPD’s leaderless withdrawal from the initial trouble at Florence and Normandie. It was this withdrawal that almost killed Reginald Denny. It was this withdrawal that let much of the city go to hell.

    Fifty-three people were killed and thousands injured. Hundred of millions of dollars in property destroyed. I think we’ve kind of forgotten just how big this was. The whole nation was on edge. This riots certainly had a big impact on me. On the day of the verdict I got out of the subway in Manhattan and saw a crowd of scared women running through the street holding their shoes in their hands. Somebody had gotten aggressive with a garbage can half a block away. I had thought we had left this “burn down our city” thing back in the early 1970s. The LA Riots woke me up and were one of the reasons I became interested in police.

    10) Gates gave police “professionalism” a bad name by somehow convincing many people that only clean-cut white guys could be “professional” police. And also effed up the entire LAPD. He left a city in ashes and a police force mired in corruption and brutality. It took him 14 years as chief to accomplish all this.

    The riots also broke the tacit agreement Gates had with the public. “You give me free reign to do what ‘needs to be done,’” Gates basically said, “and I’ll keep you safe by keeping ‘them’ in line.” But the L.A. riots ended any charade of effective leadership. The Christopher Commission was pretty damning.

    And once things did settle down, people wanted Gates out. It was only then that we learned he couldn’t be fired. Such was the final ignominious legacy of the so-called “professional” movement in policing. The police had managed to completely separate themselves from the public and from politics. Hey, politics ain’t perfect, but it’s better than a Dictator Gates. And dig this irony: when the riots broke out, Gates was at a politicalfund raiser!

    I’m not certain how the city finally got Gates to resign. I suppose they gave him a golden parachute or something (break #5). He never did apologize or accept any blame for his bad leadership. The closest he came was saying, “Clearly that night we should have gone down there and shot a few people…. In retrospect, that’s exactly what we should have done. We should have blown a few heads off.”

    L.A.’s mayor said Gates had, “brought Los Angeles to the brink of disaster just to satisfy his own ego.” Gates later dismissed Rodney King as, “a no-good S.O.B. parolee who has never been able to find himself ever since.”

    HadGates been a successful police leader, perhaps we could then debate the merits of his horrible public posture. No matter how good his get-tough hate-filled rhetoric makes some police feel, if you want the politically incorrect truth, here it is: Gates was a bad police chief; he failed at crime prevention; he failed at preventing scandal. His tough-talk tough-action approach never worked. It didn’t work in his personal life (two failed marriages and a son lost to drug abuse). It didn’t work in the city of Los Angeles.

    When Gates became chief in 1978, there were 678 murders in L.A. After 14 years at the helm, homicides increased 61 percent (1,092 murders in 1992. The population increased about 20% during this time).

    Gates was a racist, hypocritical, egoistical, affirmative-action baby. Worse than that, he was ineffective. Let me put it another way. Over the past 40 years the average number of murders per year without Gates in charge, 522. With Gates in charge? 876. Well done, Sir! Way to keep our city safe.

    Daryl Gates is best remembered as a warning and not a role model. He didn’t tell the truth other people were afraid to say. He misled the public, misled the police, and stoked hatred and racism.

    Since Gates departure, homicides have gone down every year. In 2009 there were 315 murders.

    “Just the facts, Sir. Date of birth and description of the looters?”

  • Bring out your dead

    An excellent essay by Chicago Police Officer Martin Preib in Chicago’s Newcity.

    The dead seek the lowest places in Chicago: We find them in basements, laundry rooms, on floors next to couches, sticking out of two parked cars or shrubs next to the sidewalk. It is more than gravity that pulls them down, for in every dead body there is something more willfully downward: the lowest possible place, the head sunken into the chest and turned toward the floor.

    I have smelled the smell of death. It is bad. And there was one call I never had in my brief time on the streets: a really stinky dripping leaking ripe DOA. It’s a call I’m happy to have missed.

    The essay is from the just published The Wagon and Other Stories from the City by the University of Chicago Press. I’m happy to see more academic presses, U of C in particular, to be publishing more cop related books. I just ordered it from Amazon.

    [Thanks to Mayor Irish Pirate for the link]

  • Off Duty and Black in Montgomery County

    I recently received this from a (black) Baltimore police officer:

    If you want to know what an Eastside drug dealer feels when confronted by Baltimore Police, show BPD ID to Montgomery County police. They tossed me out of a restaurant in Bethesda because my shirt rode up and my holstered weapon with the badge adjacent were visible.

    According to the manager, several patrons were “uncomfortable,” and I was told by “security” that I couldn’t be in the establishment while armed. When I didn’t leave, police were called and I was escorted out by MCPD, told “not to make trouble,” and threatened with “difficulty” if I didn’t cooperate.

    After securing my weapon and voluntarily offering to let a MCPD Lieutenant pat me down, I was told that I was making it more difficult than it had to be, threatened with arrest, and again refused entry into the establishment by police. No public intoxication, no disorderly, no assault, no nada! Apparently BWB (breathing while Black) is an arrestable offense in Montgomery County.

    Amazing how Whites, both Hopkins oncologists and crackheads from Harford Co. pass through the Eastern District. As a police officer, I maintain the ability to discern which is which. How convenient it must be to work in Mont Co. where this skill is obviously not needed.

    In the interest of fairness, when I made a formal IAD complaint, I specifically mentioned the Lt. and the Corporal, instead of the officers who were following their lead. They even sent a communication to BPD about it taking four of them to escort me out of the establishment. My chain of command just laughed it off. So far, but with IAD, you never know. You know, the last LOD death in Mont Co was run over by a fellow officer during a foot chase.

    Talk about “Black and Blue”…This shit is depressing!

    PLEASE make sure your students understand that when you REALLY need back up…you don’t give a damn WHERE it comes from!

    Thx for letting me vent,
    [name]

  • Why you never chase

    Karen Schmeer, a friend of a dear friend, was killed on January 29 while carrying groceries home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She was killed by a speeding car filled with drug-shoplifting hoodlums fleeing the police. The impact knocked her out of her boots and flung her through the air, half a city block.

    Karen’s death is more than a simple tragedy. Karen wasn’t just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Karen might be alive if police did not bend or break the exact rules put in place to prevent this kind of senseless death.

    Let me be clear: the police did not kill Karen Schmeer. Criminals did. Let them rot. But their guilt does not absolve the police of responsibility.

    While it is the job of police to catch crooks, it’s not always their job to chase crooks. Not in cars. Cars are dangerous.

    Police say they weren’t in pursuit at the time of the crash, but witnesses, according to the Daily News, “saw the car weaving in and out of traffic going north on Broadway with a squad car with lights and sirens blaring in hot pursuit.” Why the discrepancy? Because police should never be chasing suspects up Broadway at 8pm.

    You don’t need to pull the trigger to be guilty of murder. You don’t have to want to kill somebody. You do need to accept the likely consequences of your actions. This is what moral responsibility is about.

    New York, like most cities, forbids car chases “whenever the risks to [police] and the public outweigh the danger to the community if the suspect is not immediately apprehended.” That’s pretty much all the time unless it’s Osama Bin Laden himself at the wheel.

    Car chases aren’t worth it. They often end in some crash. And the pursued car does not have the emergency lights and sirens to warn people out of the way. The car that killed Karen didn’t even have its headlights on.

    The NYPD pursuit policy is based on the only effective way to reduce the danger of a car chase: don’t do it. For police, it’s as simple as it is unsatisfying.

    Police love a good chase, and there are informal rules to keep your supervisor from stopping the fun. Don’t “chase.” Instead, “follow.” Don’t get on the radio unless your voice is calm and your siren is off. When the suspects bail and run, the one you catch is the driver. If, God forbid, something really bad happens, say you lost contact before it happened.

    We all know that driving is dangerous–especially so for police–and we all know people who have been hurt and killed in car crashes. When I was a rookie cop on the streets of Baltimore and driving too fast to some call, I was confronted by my partner: “Do you know anybody [out there]!? Would you cry if anybody died?!” My sergeant put it another way, “I think of my wife or children in a car. They may die. For what?” This was the wisdom of experience. The message was simple: slow down.

    Still I couldn’t resist the thrill of the chase. I remember one fondly, on small empty city streets in the middle of the night. A guy with a van was speeding, ran a red light, and wouldn’t pull over. It ended OK. The guy bailed and didn’t crash. I caught him. Nobody got hurt. I had a blast.

    Three months later, when the judge saw my suspect in court, he said, “I know you! You’re a drug dealer.”

    Taken off guard, the young man replied meekly, “I used to be a drug dealer.” Then he requested a jury trial. When I talked to him later, he said, “That judge doesn’t like me. I used to deal, but I don’t play that no more.”

    “Then why did you run?” I asked.

    “I didn’t have a license… And I was little drunk.” He was also backing up five years of prison time. He got off with a $500 fine for a suspended license.

    I didn’t need to chase that guy, but I did it for the thrill. When I look back, I count my lucky stars nobody was killed. I made a dangerous situation worse by going the wrong way down one-way streets and pushing another driver past his limits.

    Had Karen Schmeer walked in front of the car I was pursuing that night and been killed, I would have tried to cover my ass with the exact words a NYPD spokesman used in this case: “Cops tried to pull over the suspects minutes before the crash, but they lost the car momentarily. When they caught up with the vehicle, it had already struck Schmeer, as well as several other vehicles.” Maybe that’s true.

    But I’m at least willing to say I was wrong.

    [Reprinted from New York’s West Side Spirit]

  • New Orleans Police after the flood

    Dan Baum wrote an excellent, award winning, best selling book about New Orleans, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans. He first spent time there as a reporter and writer for the New Yorkerin the days after Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent devastating flood.

    A few years ago I cold-called (or email) Dan after my wife realized that we were going to be in New Orleans with them and, more impressively, Dan and his wife just happen to be our doppelgangers. Dan and I shared a love for 1) writing books about ending the drug war, 2) food, 3) bicycles, and 4) literate women who edit extremely well. (Our mutual fondness for hats and hat stores is just, as they say down there, lagniappe.)

    Dan is no dummy (though I’d never say that to his face). At our very first dinner, while discussion corporal punished in schools, Dan coined the title for my upcoming book, In Defense of Flogging.

    Dan is also a very good writer. (He also loves guns and I look forward to his next book about America and guns.)

    In the days after we met, Dan and his wife were kind enough to waste some time with us, so we [queue montage music] biked around, got a food tour of the city, danced in a second line, ate too much, drank just right, and heard some great music.

    So naturally I’m very curious about Dan’s thoughts on the famously f*cked New Orleans Police Department. But honestly, except for the police officers in his book, I had no idea what we thought about any of the many issues plaguing the NOPD. The officer who left? The officers who staying? The behavior during the flood? I couldn’t get a straight answer! And it wasn’t for lack of trying.

    My queries were generally returned with what can only be described as minor apoplectic fits. There was this one: “didn’t I ask you not to get me started about the NOPD during katrina? didn’t I?” And then this one, “This is total, unreconstructed bullshit, and the kind of toxic rumor that made the disaster immeasurably worse when it was going on. Christ almighty.”

    But stubborn I am. So I sent him the latest on the police killing and cover-up of unarmed civilians on the Danziger bridge and politely wrote, “If you could be so kind to help me out, would you mind calmly and briefly (15 sentences or less) telling me your thoughts on police behavior during and after the flood, and the criminal proceedings that have followed.” Perhaps Dan is a sucker for uncharacteristic formality, but it worked. And that he did not stick to the length limit is but our gain.

    I decided early in my Katrina reporting to believe nothing I didn’t see with my own eyes. New Orleans, as I constantly told the New Yorker’s fact-checkers, is not a fact-rich environment, and the bullshit that flies around that city is beyond belief.

    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 not only criminally incompetent, they made everything immeasurably worse by all their talk about babies being raped in the Superdome and roving bands of marauders.

    I also saw no violence or predation whatsoever. Everyplace I was, people were taking care of each other with unbelievable tenderness. Even the gold-toothed young men in the Convention Center were bringing water to the old folks, protecting a play area for the toddlers, and so on. I never once saw a black man with a gun who was not in uniform. My editor kept asking me about the violence — because he was listening to the reporters who were repeating the wild-ass assertions of the city’s so-called leadership — and I kept saying, “there is none.” I saw looting, but what I saw was people going into supermarkets and drug stores to take what they needed. Invariably, the liquor shelves were completely intact. The French Quarter is full of stores full of valuable art and antiques and no burglar cages over the windows. They were untouched. (Yes, smash-and-grab artists tend to go after electronics, but still, a lot of very valuable stuff was left unmolested.)

    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. The police abuses are prime examples of what Rebecca Solnit, in her excellent book, “A Paradise Built in Hell,” calls “elite panic.” Officials, cops especially, are terrified of mass chaos and therefore react to it whether it exists or not. On some level, it creeps them out that the people really don’t need them at all. Left alone, they behave just fine.

    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.

  • Juking the Stats

    A recent report of retired New York City police officers warns that the NYPD is playing fast and loose with the numbers. Knowing when and where crimes occur is essential to good policing and Compstat, a system of crime-data analysis created in 1994, played a large role in bringing down crime in New York City. But ever since, numbers have ruled the NYPD’s roost. If crime numbers are not down, precinct commanding officers need numbers to show they’re doing something—something quantifiable.

    In the police world, two statistical categories are important: Part I felony crimes reported to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Statistics and internal measures of “productivity,” namely arrests, citations, and summonses. There are ways to play with both. But perhaps surprisingly, the police department’s emphasis on the latter, the so-called productivity stats, is a much greater cause for concern.

    Sergeants, lieutenants, captains and inspectors feel intense pressure to produce ever better stats. To some extent this can be good. Police are paid to work. But the pressure to produce more with less is as overwhelming as it is unrealistic. Mind you, the orders never come from above to just make numbers up, but when commanding officers talk about “productivity,” the rank-and-file hear “quotas.”

    “I’d love it if I always had enough good C’s [criminal citations], but I need numbers,” one officer told me, “And if I don’t have enough stats and Compstat is coming up, I don’t care if they’re bullshit. I’ll take whatever the f— I can get!” In a world where “better stats” and “more stats” are synonymous, the tail is wagging the dog. And police are nothing if not creative in finding ways to please their bosses.

    Officers know what they see on the streets. Any desk sergeant who reclassifies or “corrects” a report sends a terrible and destructive message. And these pressures have grown substantially in the past decade.

    When a $2,000 stolen laptop model can be found on EBay for less than $1,000, a felony larceny might be reclassified as a misdemeanor and all but disappear from the stats. Or say a tourist reports a robbery but the police, knowing she’s on the next flight back to Germany, record her loss as lost property.

    Of course statistical errors can run both ways. There’s a lot more false reporting of crime than the public realize, and police are certainly not fools. That German tourist may have simply wanted a police report to scam insurance money. Real life is not easily quantifiable, and trying to determine which bubble on a report best reflects reality leaves lots of room for honest interpretation.

    For statistical errors, data are supposed to be small and random. But for crime data, we’ll generally settle for errors as long as they’re consistent. Given that the distinction between felony and misdemeanor is basically arbitrary anyway, it doesn’t really matter if ten percent of felonies are reclassified as misdemeanors as long as it’s done every year. After all, far more than ten percent of crimes are never even reported.

    The problem with fudging crime numbers for political gain is that you can’t stop. You have to do it every year just to stay even. Eventually you’ll get promoted and transferred, if you’re lucky, leaving your more honest and naïve replacement to deal with surprisingly bad crime numbers.

    Certainly some stats, like murders and car thefts, are more reliable than others. The former are hard to fudge and the latter are generally reported for insurance reasons. And by these measures, the drop in violent crime is impressively clear. Murders alone are down 70 percent from their 1994 peak and 11 percent in the last year alone. This is real. These numbers matter.

    But too many measure of police “production” do little but produce internal stats and pad officers’ overtime pay. Take low-level marijuana possession arrests. In 1994 there were 3,141 of these in New York City. In 2008 they had exploded to 40,383! This 1,285 percent increase was not the result of a epidemic of marijuana possession but a simple change in police tactics.

    To say these arrests caused the crime drop is absurd, akin to claiming that a parking-ticket blitz prevents traffic deaths. These arrests—at great taxpayer expense and motivated only by internal police pressure to produce “stats”—simply pad officers’ overtime pay while sending tens of thousands of mostly poor minority men through the criminal-justice system.

    Messy as they may be, it’s hard to image a police world were numbers didn’t matter. What’s important is that these numbers aren’t produced for their own sake. Statistics need to stay focused on crime and not internal, malleable, and ultimately destructive measures of “productivity.” The hard-working men and women of the NYPD deserve as much.

  • Baltimore Police Doing Their Job

    Like they do every day. But this time there was more snow.

  • The snowball heard round the web

    Everybody is talking about it…

    …so here’s my two-cents:

    For a cop, having a gun out isn’t such a big deal. Pointing a gun at someone is a big deal. Waving it around would be a big deal (and would also show a lack of professional training). I understand others may see any display of a gun as a shocking development. But this is D.C. and this is a police officer. The streets are dangerous.

    Simply having your gun out means there’s a threat. Having your hand on your holster means there might be a threat. This officer has lived through a lot of threats and I don’t begrudge him for feeling threatened by a large crowd. And from what I can tell he holstered up pretty quickly.

    To me the question is why the guy got out his Hummer in the first place? That’s the mistake. He could have just kept on driving.

    [Though I should point out, because I haven’t heard anyone else do so, that all the uniformed officers handled the scene very well.]

    When you’re inyour vehicle, snowballs are not a threat to anything but your manhood. The only potential threat to the officer was created by the officer when he made a choice to exit his vehicle to initiate a useless confrontation with a large group of people. Christ, if you feel so threatened while driving your Hummer, what’s the point of owning a Hummer in the first place!?

  • Maurice Clemmons shot dead

    Good shooting. Good riddance. Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper has a good analysis:

    Clemmons, nursing a two-day old bullet wound to the stomach, having killed four cops already and facing at least life in prison, frantically searching for a way out of the state if not the country, and packing one of the dead officers’ sidearms, would have beyond a shadow of doubt murdered again. There and then.

    He was denied that chance. Whether Clemmons was seeking cover to pull the gun and fire, or about to flee, the officer did precisely the right thing. It was not a “cold-blooded murder,” as at least one reader has asserted. It was a courageous and necessary act.

  • “Dupe” badges

    Seems like everybody in the NYPD is doing it.

    And so what? The whole concept is strange to this former Baltimore police officer. So is the language.

    I had three real badges when I was cop. They give you one, for your shirt or jacket. You need to pay for others. One other you need, for the wallet. I also got one more, one suitable for framing, a so-called plaque badge. The wallet badge is also a plaque badge (flat) with the pins cut and filed off. When I quit, I turned one of them in. You do the math.

    But cops know that the badge isn’t the big deal. It’s the “credentials” that matter. I had but one of those. And I turned it in like a good boy.