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Tag: police culture

  • Baltimore police talk

    If you want to hear some details about Baltimore police and policing during after the riots, listen to this 20 minute discussion with Sgt Robinson and Lt Butler on WBAL with C4.

  • How about telling cops what they should do rather than what they shouldn’t do?

    Here’s my piece in today’s New York Times:

    Critics of police — and there have been a lot this past year — are too focused on what we don’t want police to do: don’t make so many arrests; don’t stop, question and frisk innocent people; don’t harass people; don’t shoot so many people, and for God’s sake don’t do any of it in a racially biased way.

    Those are worthy goals all, but none of this tells police what they *should* do. Some critics of police seem to forget that the job of police and crime prevention involves dealing with actual criminals.

    It’s a perfectly fine short piece. I do want to move the discussion away from what police shouldn’t do to what police should do. But I find the whole New York Times “room for debate” concept a bit disingenuous. Because there’s no debate. As a writer, I don’t know who else is writing or what they are going to say. It really would be nice to respond to other points and flesh out the issues. Instead “room for debate” is a collection of 300-400 word op-eds. Perhaps that is what it should called: “Room for too-short opinion pieces from people willing to write for free just to get a Times byline.” Doesn’t really roll of the tongue, admittedly.

    (On principle, in solidarity with free-lance writers everywhere, I try not to write for free, especially to for-profit businesses. Writing is work. And workers should be paid. A proper 800-1,000 word op-ed published in the print edition of the Times or the Washington Post or the Daily News or with CNN.com generally pays $200 – $300. A dollar figure that has actually decreased for some publication. Now the $300 I get from CNN is not a lot of money, mind you. But it really is the principle… and the money. And yet once again I wrote for the Times for free because it’s the Times. So much for principles. Or money. But it is pretty easy for me to hammer out 300 words.)

  • David Simon and the Code

    This interview with David Simonis well worth reading in its entirety. Does he get some things wrong? Sure. Is he a little too believing that cops with the best stories are representative of the entire police department? Sure. (Among other things, drug-free zones were never used to arrest people. Too much paperwork. But that change the horrible concept of a “no-rights” zone.) Still, as usual, Simon gets a lot more right than wrong. And when it comes to the big picture, he’s very very right.

    Simon also explains why, when it comes to crime stats, I only really trust homicides:

    In the beginning, under Norris, he did get a better brand of police work and we can credit a legitimate 12 to 15 percent decline in homicides. Again, that was a restoration of an investigative deterrent in the early years of that administration. But it wasn’t enough to declare a Baltimore Miracle, by any means.

    …

    [Q: So they cooked the books.]

    Oh yeah. If you hit somebody with a bullet, that had to count…. In the Southwest District, a victim would try to make an armed robbery complaint, saying , ‘I just got robbed, somebody pointed a gun at me,’ and what they would do is tell him, well, okay, we can take the report but the first thing we have to do is run you through the computer to see if there’s any paper on you. Wait, you’re doing a warrant check on me before I can report a robbery? Oh yeah, we gotta know who you are before we take a complaint. You and everyone you’re living with? What’s your address again? You still want to report that robbery?

    …

    I mean, think about it. How does the homicide rate decline by 15 percent, while the agg assault rate falls by more than double that rate. Are all of Baltimore’s felons going to gun ranges in the county? Are they becoming better shots? Have the mortality rates for serious assault victims in Baltimore, Maryland suddenly doubled? Did they suddenly close the Hopkins and University emergency rooms and return trauma care to the dark ages? It makes no sense statistically until you realize that you can’t hide a murder, but you can make an attempted murder disappear in a heartbeat, no problem.

    But these guys weren’t satisfied with just juking their own stats. No, the O’Malley administration also went back to the last year of the previous mayoralty and performed its own retroactive assessment of those felony totals, and guess what? It was determined from this special review that the preceding administration had underreported its own crime rate, which O’Malley rectified by upgrading a good chunk of misdemeanors into felonies to fatten up the Baltimore crime rate that he was inheriting. Get it? How better than to later claim a 30 or 40 percent reduction in crime than by first juking up your inherited rate as high as she’ll go. It really was that cynical an exercise.

    Mayor O’Malley personally showed me that binder of reclassified stats in 2001. I couldn’t analyze it of course. But yes, O’Malley — right or wrong — did reclassify the crime rate up after he took office.

    And Simon continues:

    We end the drug war. I know I sound like a broken record, but we end the fucking drug war…. The drug war gives everybody permission. And if it were draconian and we were fixing anything that would be one thing, but it’s draconian and it’s a disaster.

    …

    You didn’t ask me about the rough rides, or as I used to hear in the western district, “the bounce.” It used to be reserved — as I say, when there was a code to this thing, as flawed as it might have been by standards of the normative world — by standards of Baltimore, there was a code to when you gave the guy the bounce or the rough ride. And it was this: He fought the police. Two things get your ass kicked faster than anything: one is making a cop run. If he catches you, you’re 18 years old, you’ve got fucking Nikes, he’s got cop shoes, he’s wearing a utility belt, if you fucking run and he catches you, you’re gonna take some lumps. That’s always been part of the code. Rodney King.

    But the other thing that gets you beat is if you fight. So the rough ride was reserved for the guys who fought the police, who basically made — in the cop parlance — assholes of themselves.

    …

    I’m talking in the vernacular of cops, not my own — but even in the vernacular of what cops secretly think is fair, this is bullshit, this is a horror show. There doesn’t seem to be much code anymore – not that the code was always entirely clean or valid to anyone other than street cops, and maybe the hardcore corner players, but still it was something at least.

    Now I never heard of “the bounce.” Granted I didn’t work in the Western. But Simon best knows an earlier era of policing than I experienced. What’s always, in police circles, looked back on as the “good ol’ days: the “rough ride,” the “beat-and-release,” the barefoot drop-off, the street corner mass macing? They all had their time. But times change.

    I do not believe that the wagonman gave Freddie Gray a “rough ride.” And there was another prisoner in the van who said as much. Cops knew Gray as low-level hustler and occasional C.I. He didn’t fight cops. He did what he had to do to get by. That’s not the worst crime in the world. But here’s what interesting, as told to me: Gray wouldn’t resist arrest, but he would go limp every time he saw the wagon: “I think he was an undiagnosed claustrophobic. I could arrest him with no problem. But he would go limp when he saw that wagon. He didn’t like the wagon.”

  • Too many? Too few? Or just right?

    Arrests are way down in Baltimore. But not just this month (though they are) but over many years.

    There were 40,000 arrests in 2014 (3,300 a month). In 2003 there were 114,000 arrests. Like I said, arrests are way down. This is worth repeating because it goes against a narrative that the riots were somehow the inevitable result of overaggressive policing and too many arrests.

    Now of course arrests could be down and Baltimore could still be over-policed — and the war on drugs continues to be the problem — but even if over-policing were a problem, Baltimore and America is less overpoliced now that it was a decade ago.

    I think we need to ask just what number of arrests would be around right. Generally. I don’t mean this as a quota. And I know this doesn’t help day-to-day policing. As a police officer, you don’t make arrests based on some arbitrary ideal yearly goal. I know that.

    But as part of society, as an thinking person, as an American, it’s fair to come up with some rough number of arrests at which we can collectively say, “yeah, that seems about right.” Because the status quo seems to be to criticize cops for making too many arrests, and then criticize cops again when they make fewer. What do we want police to do?

    Take arrests in New York City. There were about 315,000 adults arrest year for the past 20 years. That’s some variance, to be sure, but it’s all in the same big ballpark. The number was lowest in 2003 (279,000) and highest at about 345,000 (in 1998 and 2010).

    Questioning arrest numbers allows us to ask, for instance, what good NYC got from a 20 percent increase in arrests between 2003 and 2010? Not much, I would say. See, if you can keep crime down and quality of life up, certainly fewer arrests are better, other things being equal. Arrests are harmful to the people arrested and their family. Also, if nothing else, arrests are expensive.

    Now Baltimore City went from 2,677 arrest in April of this year to what will probably be about 1,600 in May. That’s a big drop. But policing in Baltimore has changed. And since crime is up, people are saying police aren’t doing their job. But it does beg the question, what is the right number of arrests for a high-crime city of 620,000 people?

    If you refuse to answer that, that’s fine. But then don’t complain that arrests numbers are too high or too low. And I don’t want arrest number to be a goal. I can’t state that clearly enough. But I do think arrest numbers are a useful crude indicator of discretionary police activity (not a very good one, but useful nevertheless).

    For years, critics — myself included — said there were too many arrests in Baltimore. 84,000 in 1999; 111,529 in 2003. I don’t care if everybody arrested was guilty of whatever. It’s just too many arrests.

    And then arrests declined (25 percent from 2004-2009). Homicide and crime also went down. Win-win!

    But in 2007, the Baltimore Sun reported on declining arrests:

    Some complain the pendulum has swung to the other extreme — police aren’t doing enough to quell violence.

    Israel Cason… said it is less common to see police “slamming people on the ground, emptying their pockets on the street.”

    “You don’t see that too much no more,” he said.

    The downside, he said, is that drug dealers are congregating on street corners again without getting challenged.

    “They know what [the drug dealers] are doing, but [the police] don’t do nothing,” Cason said. Referring to free samples of drugs that dealers circulate through the community, he said: “We got testers out here every day, the police stand right there with them. They went from one extreme to the other.”

    But arrests kept getting lower. And so did homicides. Again, win-win.

    Last year, 2014, there were just under 40,000 arrests in the city. Homicides were a low (for Baltimore) 211. Seems like job well done, right? But if 40,000 is good, is 20,000 even better? Well, not if that more recent drop is because patrol officers aren’t able to do their job. And the department isn’t willing to support them when they do.

    So say what you want about the causes of the riots. (Myself, I like to blame rioters and Baltimore’s too large criminal class.) In 2014 arrests were down 50 percent over six years and 65 percent from 2003. So it doesn’t seem like Baltimore police are currently locking up too many people for no reason. Francis Barry talks about this in BloombergView:

    If the riot was fueled by anger not only over police brutality but also police arrests for low-level crimes… it’s a good thing the rioters were too young to light a match or loot a store in 1998 or 2003.

    It’s actually well worth reading his whole Barry piece, and his earlier article, too, in which he takes on David Simon and points out, among other things, that “the national decline in arrests runs counter to the idea that America has become increasingly over-policed, particularly in poor minority communities.” So what’s the problem in Baltimore. Could it not be, at least in part, that criminals just don’t like police?

  • Murder in Baltimore

    With murdered doubled post-riot, you’d think more people would care. I don’t mean people in high-crime neighborhoods in Baltimore, they do care. It’s all those other people who so righteously saw police as the biggest problem in the hood. Where are they, now that the murder rate has doubled?

    Oh, and how did that “gang truce” work out? Well that hasn’t worked out so well. Legitimizing and empowering gangs is not the answer. It’s the Cloud Cuckoo Land idea, embraced by too many, that crime prevention can be purely collaborative and never confrontational. It’s also a strangely insulting concept, especially when it comes from outside white liberals, that criminals somehow represent the community more than the police.

    Yes, police can and should be more polite in their job. There’s no reason to be an asshole on the job (which is not to say that some people sometimes don’t need to get told off sometimes). But being a dick is not only wrong, it’s bad policing. It makes the job tougher for all police. Still, more polite and empathetic and understanding police — which can make non-criminals less anti-police (a more important than many cops want to admit) — will not stop criminals from killing each other.

    I think a lot of this comes down to the old sociology fallacies that A) police don’t deserve credit for preventing crime, B) culture doesn’t matter, and C) the only real causes of crime and what is perceived as bad culture are inequality, racism, and lack of opportunity. But the “root causes” did not magically change on April 27, when Baltimore burned.

    After the riots and horrible leadership from Baltimore’s mayor and police commissioner, proactive police patrol all but stopped. Why? Because all police work has the risk of going south. There’s long been the maxim in policing, “if you don’t work you can’t get in trouble.” I’m not a big fan of the thin-blue-line trope, and yet here you have a pretty clear cut case where police have done less and criminals have done more.

    Racism in America and violence in America are two separate problems. To walk up to an enemy and pull a trigger is something some people choose to do and others do not. Somehow, lots of poor people — even in Baltimore — manage to live decent and even joyous lives without killing somebody. Calling out racism and racists — a noble calling — isn’t going to save one black life in Baltimore. To see police as some kind of nexus between racism and violence is a tragic mistake. Baltimoreans aren’t being killed by racists. They’re being killed by each other (Freddie Gray being a notable exception).

    In parts of Baltimore we pay police to deal with those people who think murder is an acceptable problem-solving methods. Police deal with these criminals daily because these criminals are hanging out on the corner all day dealing drugs. Some neighbors have the gumption to not like this. So they call the police. And in come the police to clear the corner. And that’s what real police do.

  • “Group on the corner, disorderly, no further, anonymous”

    I don’t want to make too much out of this, but there is something just a little funny about a reporter being robbed on camera and then running, in tears, to the police. No, it’s not funny because somebody is robbed. No, it’s not funny that she was traumatized by it. It is just a little funny because at the same time she might be filing a report about police brutality, who does she run crying to when threatened? The police.

    Or… maybe she’s just harassing an innocent unarmed youth. After all, the guy said he didn’t do it.

    It’s the moral equivalence that bother police. The idea that people would take word of the mob purse snatcher as equal to a cop’s word. Even worse is the idea, which I hear a lot of, that these guys are actually morally superior to working police officers. It’s absurd. (You can get another take on this from a previous post.)

    Here’s the thing about the guys who were threatening her: it’s not like they just appeared yesterday and won’t be here tomorrow. Police deal with these guys literally every day. These dozen youths are out there every night in the streets of Baltimore. They might not always be acting up quite so much. But sometimes they are. Too many people pretend it’s all about bad police oppressing good people. But they don’t live or work in neighborhoods where they get harassed by these specific youths. But good people do. And they call the police. I’m talking class, not race.

    Police handle “routine calls for service” like this every hour. When I texted my friend working the Eastern last night wishing him well, he replied, “Thanks brother. Just another night in the hood! Lol.”

    A typical call may be because Pops called 911 because these kids on the corner, in front of his house, are being loud, rowdy, breaking bottles, and otherwise disrespectful. You get the call. You pull up. You’re solo. There they are. Deal with it. That’s what cops do. Every goddamn day. You know, I got tired telling the same group of drug dealers to get off the same corner every goddamn night. But I did. I had to. It was my job.

    Usually what happens in the ghetto stays in the ghetto. Literally and figuratively. I spoke to many teenagers in the Eastern who had never been downtown. Never been out of Baltimore. Never left their neighborhood. It might be one thing to never leave your neighborhood if you live somewhere nice, but if your whole world is centered around Rutland and Crystal? (Go on, google-steet-view 1511 Rutland Ave, Baltimore MD 21213 and take a look around. Hell, buy that home for $8,000!) Take a stroll down the 1700 block of Crystal Ave. No wonder you’re messed up. Who do you think is pulling the trigger on 200-plus homicides a year in the city of Baltimore? Since Freddie Gray died in police hands — between April 13 and April 26 — there have been 8 murders in Baltimore.

    So yesterday — along with hundreds of peaceful protesters — a bit of the ghetto broke out of the ghetto. Now if you’re so ideologically inclined you might think that’s good. Or, if you’re in a restaurant where things are being thrown through the windows, you might not (while praying that a Molotov cocktail doesn’t follow suit). But here are a dozen human being society tries to ignore, until we put them in prison. I’m not talking about the protesters. I’m talking about these dozen thugs.

    And I don’t actually blame these kids for being foolish — I know they’re fools, but hell, they never had a chance. Look where they grew up. Look at their parents — as much as I blame the people who apologize for their bad actions. Those who call mindless violence a “rebellion” or “giving voice to the voiceless.” Those who blame police for trying to calm a disturbance. Those who believe in the false ideal of the gentleman thug.

    So we pay police to deal with the problems of our country and to somehow contain these kids so they don’t beat up working tax-paying voters. We, collectively, have failed. And then we wait for police to make a mistake and blame it all on them.

  • An interview with BPD Commissioner Batts

    Both lengthy and honest, from 2011, when Batts was “between jobs.” Post-Oakland. Pre-Baltimore.

    [thanks to a commenter]

  • “All types come out of the woodwork”

    I always welcome intelligent comments from police officers. Here is an email (lightly edited) from a retired sergeant about police-involved shootings in general. I always appreciate thoughtful comments from police officers. I don’t necessarily agree with everything he writes (but I don’t need to). It’s a well stated opinion based on experience.

    When it comes to police issues, we don’t hear from police officers enough. If you want to understand police, you need to listen to police. I reprint this with his permission:

    What irritates me in this brouhaha about police shootings of unarmed people, specifically black males, is that no one as far as I can determine has said anything about the fact that the recent shooting incidents were not egregious examples of trigger happy cops simply deciding to gratuitously confront someone for the hell of it. In reality they are examples of an officer doing his duty and either conducting an investigation, responding to a call for service, or responding to an on-view situation.

    For whatever reason, doing the job went south fast, but the shootings were not examples of some psychopathic cop who decided he was going to whack somebody that day to break up a boring day, or have I missed something? Plus, lo and behold, the deceased were not “innocents,” for a few had rap sheets to make a mother cry. Did they deserve to be killed? I can only answer that question the way I answered it when I was peppered by friends about my police experiences, especially when I would relate those of the “hairy” kind where justification for using my service weapon was a no-brainier, even if I didn’t see a weapon. Some of my friends would say they would have shot the person. My seemingly high-minded response was simply to say that I wasn’t raised to be an assassin, but I meant it.

    …I joined the force in 1973 at age 29. Prior to this defining life experience, I did 4 years in the Marine Corps, got a BA in American History under the Vietnam era G.I. Bill program, did one year of graduate work in American History and jumped at the Police Agent Program that the [department] initiated to attract clowns like me: college graduates. My wife thought I was nuts, but she relented and continued her graduate work. Why I didn’t bag the whole thing after 6 months on the street is a question I am still trying to answer after 40 years of pondering.

    As you realize, no matter what position you take on policing in this country, all types come out of the woodwork — me include — as well as [others]. In my view the average American harbors an ambivalent attitude about American law enforcement, either loving us or hating us depending who is getting the shitty stick shoved up the ass. I can attest to the fact that even good cops can be real knuckle heads when they can’t control their tempers and act professionally, sometimes with tragic results. And cops, or wannabe cops, take any kind of perceived criticisms as an unjustifiable assault on their person. So it goes.

    As to more recent events in Baltimore:

    Again my point being reinforced by what happened: a seemingly legitimate police action that went South for whatever reason, with two supervisors at the scene to boot, a Sgt. and a Lt. This is a head shaker.

    …

    Guys always take off…. They did for me when I worked [there]. The deceased … had a respectable rap sheet, so he was no cherry. However, capital punishment doesn’t apply to drug crimes, unless you live in garden spots like Iran or Saudi Arabia.

    This doesn’t look good for the Agency, especially with supervision at the scene. What a fucking mess.

    [No comments on this one because because it’s somebody else’s opinion.]

  • The latest from Baltimore: Freddie Gray

    Things are tense for police after the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore Police custody.

    I got no clue what happened. And I’m not going to say much till I do.

    Keep in mind that Baltimore cops don’t know what happened. But boy is this turning into quote a jackpot. A man died in police custody. Of a broken spine. Shit is hitting the fan. Six cops have been suspended (with pay).

    It’s slowly becoming national news (which is rare, when it comes to Baltimore police issues).

    What we do know is that last Sunday morning police in the Western approached a group of people. A guy takes off running. Cops chase. Bike cops catch and arrest the guy, Freddie Gray for carrying a small knife. He gets put in a wagon. When Gray comes out of the wagon, he’s seriously injured. He dies a week later.

    From the New York Times:

    “We have no evidence — physical, video or statements — of any use of force,” the deputy police commissioner, Jerry Rodriguez, said at the news conference. “He did suffer a very tragic injury to his spinal cord, which resulted in his death. What we don’t know, and what we need to get to, is how that injury occurred.”

    Mr. Gray died Sunday, a week after his arrest. Witnesses captured parts of his encounter with the police on a cellphone video, in which screams can be heard as officers drag him into a transport van. An autopsy showed no wounds, except for the severed spinal cord, and the videos do not show the police acting forcefully.

    …

    On the way to the station, the van made at least two stops — including one in which Mr. Gray was taken out and placed in leg shackles after the driver complained he was “acting irate in the back,” Mr. Rodriguez said. After Mr. Gray arrived at Baltimore’s Western District station, police officers called medics, who took him to a hospital.

    From the Sun:

    “When he was placed inside that van, he was able to talk, he was upset,” Deputy Police Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said. “And when Mr. Gray was taken out of the van, he could not talk, he could not breathe.”

    Police said they used no undue force when arresting Gray and can find no evidence from cellphone and city surveillance videos that officers brutalized Gray. They said an autopsy shows no indication that force was used.

    But you need force from somewhere to be injured the way Gray was fatally injured. It is the responsibility of the wagonman (or woman) to make sure prisoners are safe and strapped down during transport.

    It seems we have what started as a case of “felony running.” Running from police is not a a crime. But fleeing from police does give police reasonable suspicion to stop (Illinois v. Wardlow, 2000). We used to make fun of cops who caught a “felony runner.” That would happen when somebody takes off. You chase them! It’s natural. You’re a cop. You catch them… and then you realize they haven’t actually committed a crime. You search (I mean frisk) them hoping to find something. Anything. But if you don’t, you have to let them go. You can’t even get them for loitering. They weren’t loitering if they ran. Now I wouldn’t chase people just for running. But I could have, if I liked running more.

    The court vague said you need something other than running, but that something can be almost anything including “high crime area” or “drug corner.” So I’m willing to say the approach, the chase, the stop, the frisk, the search, and the arrest were all legal.

    I’m not saying this is the case here, but just FYI, it is not uncommon in Baltimore for corner boys to assign one person to be a “runner,” just to get police off on a wild goose chase. That could be some young kid. It could be a junkie.

    Police pull up. Somebody runs. You can chase him. Or you can let him run. Personally, I’d prefer to grab the second guy who tried to get away, figuring he would be more likely to have the stash or a gun.

    Now in this case Gray did have a small knife, for which he was arrested. (If you make cops chase you, they can be damn sure they will, as they should, lock you up for any legal reason.)

    Meanwhile angry people think the police and politicians are covering things up. And yet most police officers also don’t trust the department and politicians. I wrote about race and police attitudes towards the discipline process back in 2008 in “Two Shades of Blue.” The idea is that the powers-that-be — and Baltimore has a black mayor and black police commissioner — will punish police officers, guilty or not, to placate the public. I assume that among the six suspended officers are those who made the arrest (I don’t know if that’s true). And yet the department has already said that things were OK when they handed off the prisoner. I hope they enjoy their paid days off.

    Personally, it’s worth noting my surprise that these Western officers were doing any work at all on a Sunday morning. That is not generally how we rolled in the Eastern. Maybe it’s just because it’s spring. And you it’s spring in Baltimore because the bikes are in bloom.

  • Too far a gap to bridge?

    I lose hope when, on one hand, the South Carolina F.O.P uses the term, “professional race agitators” in a press release. As a former dues-paying member, I will gladly offer my editing service gratis to any FOP newsletter. Seriously. If your goal is P.R. and you’re talking about “the recent tragedy.” Do not use the term “professional race agitators” in the same press release. Just don’t. Trust me on this one. (Al Baker’s story in the Times.)

    On the other hand, people in Baltimore are protesting a man who remains in a coma after being injured during an arrest. Meanwhile, Baltimore being Baltimore, police shot somebody near the protest who had a loaded gun (the fourth BPD-involved shooting in 2015). And one group of anti-police protesters is idiotic enough to ask in a tweet, “how could [police] know it was loaded?”

    See, when police have to explain why they shot a criminal with a loaded gun, it doesn’t make you want to engage. It makes you want to go to local F.O.P. bar, drink too much, and talk about “professional race agitators.”

    [Meanwhile, just FYI, 11 people were shot in the last 24 hours in NYC.]