Prime C
Defender of Dank
- Posts
- 4,285
- Reactions
- 15,734
- Joined
- Dec 9, 2010
- Points
- 263
Cops are so out of control these days!
Page 14 of 22
·
Replies 261–280 of 434
- Status
Prime C
Defender of Dank
- Posts
- 4,285
- Reactions
- 15,734
- Joined
- Dec 9, 2010
- Points
- 263
jumpincactus
Premium Member
- Posts
- 11,605
- Reactions
- 35,935
- Joined
- Jul 24, 2011
- Points
- 438
A Decade After 9/11, Police Departments Are Increasingly Militarized
New York magazine reported some telling figures last month on how delayed-notice search warrants -- also known as "sneak-and-peek" warrants -- have been used in recent years. Though passed with the PATRIOT Act and justified as a much-needed weapon in the war on terrorism, the sneak-and-peek was used in a terror investigation just 15 times between 2006 and 2009. In drug investigations, however, it was used more than 1,600 times during the same period.
It's a familiar storyline. In the 10 years since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the government has claimed a number of new policing powers in the name of protecting the country from terrorism, often at the expense of civil liberties. But once claimed, those powers are overwhelmingly used in the war on drugs. Nowhere is this more clear than in the continuing militarization of America's police departments.
POLICE MILITARIZATION BEFORE SEPTEMBER 11
The trend toward a more militarized domestic police force began well before 9/11. It in fact began in the early 1980s, as the Regan administration added a new dimension of literalness to Richard Nixon's declaration of a "war on drugs." Reagan declared illicit drugs a threat to national security, and once likened America's drug fight to the World War I battle of Verdun. But Reagan was more than just rhetoric. In 1981 he and a compliant Congress passed the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, which allowed and encouraged the military to give local, state, and federal police access to military bases, research, and equipment. It authorized the military to train civilian police officers to use the newly available equipment, instructed the military to share drug-war–related information with civilian police and authorized the military to take an active role in preventing drugs from entering the country.
A bill passed in 1988 authorized the National Guard to aid local police in drug interdiction, a law that resulted in National Guard troops conducting drug raids on city streets and using helicopters to survey rural areas for pot farms. In 1989, President George Bush enacted a new policy creating regional task forces within the Pentagon to work with local police agencies on anti-drug efforts. Since then, a number of other bills and policies have carved out more ways for the military and domestic police to cooperate in the government's ongoing campaign to prevent Americans from getting high. Then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney declared in 1989, "The detection and countering of the production, trafficking and use of illegal drugs is a high priority national security mission of the Department of Defense."
The problem with this mingling of domestic policing with military operations is that the two institutions have starkly different missions. The military's job is to annihilate a foreign enemy. Cops are charged with keeping the peace, and with protecting the constitutional rights of American citizens and residents. It's dangerous to conflate the two. As former Reagan administration official Lawrence Korb once put it, "Soldiers are trained to vaporize, not Mirandize." That distinction is why the U.S. passed the Posse Comitatus Act more than 130 years ago, a law that explicitly forbids the use of military troops in domestic policing.
Over the last several decades Congress and administrations from both parties have continued to carve holes in that law, or at least find ways around it, mostly in the name of the drug war. And while the policies noted above established new ways to involve the military in domestic policing, the much more widespread and problematic trend has been to make our domestic police departments more like the military.
The main culprit was a 1994 law authorizing the Pentagon to donate surplus military equipment to local police departments. In the 17 years since, literally millions of pieces of equipment designed for use on a foreign battlefield have been handed over for use on U.S. streets, against U.S. citizens. Another law passed in 1997 further streamlined the process. As National Journal reported in 2000, in the first three years after the 1994 law alone, the Pentagon distributed 3,800 M-16s, 2,185 M-14s, 73 grenade launchers, and 112 armored personnel carriers to civilian police agencies across America. Domestic police agencies also got bayonets, tanks, helicopters and even airplanes.
All of that equipment then facilitated a dramatic rise in the number and use of paramilitary police units, more commonly known as SWAT teams. Peter Kraska, a criminologist at the University of Eastern Kentucky, has been studying this trend since the early 1980s. Kraska found that by 1997, 90 percent of cities with populations of 50,000 or more had at least one SWAT team, twice as many as in the mid-1980s. The number of towns with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 with a SWAT team increased 157 percent between 1985 and 1996.
As the number of SWAT teams multiplied, their use expanded as well. Until the 1980s, SWAT teams were used almost exclusively to defuse immediate threats to the public safety, events like hostage takings, mass shootings, escaped fugitives, or bank robberies. The proliferation of SWAT teams that began in the 1980s, along with incentives like federal anti-drug grants and asset forfeiture policies, made it lucrative to use them for drug policing. According to Kraska, by the early 1980s there were 3,000 annual SWAT deployments, by 1996 there were 30,000 and by 2001 there were 40,000. The average police department deployed its SWAT team about once a month in the early 1980s. By 1995, it was seven times a month. Kraska found that 75 to80 percent of those deployments were to serve search warrants in drug investigations.
TERROR ATTACKS BRING NEW ROUND OF MILITARIZATION
The September 11 attacks provided a new and seemingly urgent justification for further militarization of America's police departments: the need to protect the country from terrorism.
Within months of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, the Office of National Drug Control Policy began laying the groundwork with a series of ads (featured most prominently during the 2002 Super Bowl) tying recreational drug use to support for terrorism. Terrorism became the new reason to arm American cops as if they were soldiers, but drug offenders would still be their primary targets.
In 2004, for example, law enforcement officials in the New York counties of Oswego and Cayuga defended their new SWAT teams as a necessary precaution in a post–September 11 world. “We’re in a new era, a new time," here,” one sheriff told theSyracuse Post Standard. “The bad guys are a little different than they used to be, so we’re just trying to keep up with the needs for today and hope we never have to use it.” The same sheriff said later in the same article that he'd use his new SWAT team “for a lot of other purposes, too ... just a multitude of other things." In 2002, the seven police officers who serve the town of Jasper, Florida -- which had all of 2,000 people and hadn’t had a murder in more than a decade -- were each given a military-grade M-16 machine gun from the Pentagon transfer program, leading one Florida paper to run the headline, “Three Stoplights, Seven M-16s.”
In 2006 alone, a Pentagon spokesman told the Worcester, Massachusetts Telegram & Gazette, the Department of Defense "distributed vehicles worth $15.4 million, aircraft worth $8.9 million, boats worth $6.7 million, weapons worth $1 million and 'other' items worth $110.6 million" to local police agencies.
In 2007, Clayton County, Georgia -- whose sheriff once complained that the drug war was being fought like Vietnam, and should instead be fought more like the D-Day invasion at Normandy -- got its own tank through the Pentagon's transfer program. Nearby Cobb County got its tank in 2008. In Richland County, South Carolina,Sheriff Leon Lott procured an M113A1 armored personnel carrier in 2008. The vehicle moves on tank-like tracks, and features a belt-fed, turreted machine gun that fires .50-caliber rounds, a type of ammunition so powerful that even the military has restrictions on how it's used on the battlefield. Lott named his vehicle "The Peacemaker." (Lott, is currently being sued for sending his SWAT team crashing into the homes of people who appeared in the same infamous photo that depicted Olympic gold-medalist swimmer Michael Phelps smoking pot in Richland County.) Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio also has a belt-fed .50-caliber machine gun, though it isn't connected to his armored personnel carrier.
After 9/11, police departments in some cities, including Washington, D.C., also switched to battle dress uniforms (BDUs) instead the traditional police uniform. Critics says even subtle changes like a more militarized uniform can change both public perception of the police and how police see their own role in the community. One such critic, retired police sergeant Bill Donelly, wrote in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post, "One tends to throw caution to the wind when wearing ‘commando-chic’ regalia, a bulletproof vest with the word ‘POLICE’ emblazoned on both sides, and when one is armed with high tech weaponry."
Departments in places like Indianapolis and some Chicago suburbs also began acquiring machine guns from the military in the name of fighting terror. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick actually suspended the Pentagon program in his state after the Boston Globe reported that more than 80 police departments across the state had obtained more than 1,000 pieces of military equipment. "Police in Wellfleet, a community known for stunning beaches and succulent oysters, scored three military assault rifles," the Globe reported. "At Salem State College, where recent police calls have included false fire alarms and a goat roaming the campus, school police got two M-16s. In West Springfield, police acquired even more powerful weaponry: two military-issue M-79 grenade launchers."
September 11 also brought a new source of funding for military-grade equipment in the Department of Homeland Security. In recent years, the agency has given anti-terrorism grants to police agencies across the country to purchase armored personnel carriers, including such unlikely terrorism targets as Winnebago County, Wisconsin; Longview, Texas; Tuscaloosa County, Alabama; Canyon County, Idaho; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Adrian, Michigan; and Chattanooga, Tennessee. When the Memphis suburb of Germantown, Tennessee -- which claims to be one of the safest cities in the country -- got its APC in 2006, its sheriff told the local paper that the acquisition would put the town at the "forefront" of homeland security preparedness.
In Eau Clare County, Wisconsin, government officials told the Leader Telegram that the county's new APC would mitigate "the threat of weapons or explosive devices." County board member Sue Miller added, "It’s nice, but I hope we never have to use it." But later in the same article, Police Chief Jerry Matysik says he planned to use the vehicle for other purposes, including "drug searches." It may not be necessary, Matysik said, "But because it’s available, we’ll probably use it just to be cautious."
The DHS grants are typically used to purchase the Lenco Bearcat, a modified armored personnel carrier that sells for $200,000 to $300,000. The vehicle has become something of a status symbol in some police departments, who often put out press releases with photos of the purchase, along with posing police officers clad in camouflage or battle dress uniforms.
HuffPost sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Homeland Security asking just how many grants for the vehicles have been given out since September 11, how much taxpayer money has been spent on them, and which police agencies have received them. Senior FOIA Program Specialist Angela Washington said that this information isn't available.
The post-September 11 era has also seen the role of SWAT teams and paramilitary police units expand to enforce nonviolent crimes beyond even the drug war. SWAT teams have been used to break up neighborhood poker games, sent into bars and fraternities suspected of allowing underage drinking, and even to enforce alcohol andoccupational licensing regulations. Earlier this year, the Department of Education sent its SWAT team to the home of someone suspected of defrauding the federal student loan program.
Kraska estimates the total number of SWAT deployments per year in the U.S. may now top 60,000, or more than 160 per day. In 2008, the Maryland legislature passed a law requiring every police department in the state to issue a bi-annual report on how it uses its SWAT teams. The bill was passed in response to the mistaken and violent SWAT raid on the home of Berwyn Heights, Maryland mayor Cheye Calvo, during which a SWAT team shot and killed his two black labs. The first reports showed an average of 4.5 SWAT raids per day in that state alone.
Critics like Joseph McNamara, who served as a police chief in both San Jose, California, and Kansas City, Missouri, worry that this trend, now driven by the war on terror in addition to the war on drugs, have caused police to lose sight of their role as keepers of the peace.
"Simply put, the police culture in our country has changed," McNamara wrote in a 2006 article for the Wall Street Journal. "An emphasis on 'officer safety' and paramilitary training pervades today's policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn't shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed." Noting the considerable firepower police now carry, McNamara added, "Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that the police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed."
In 2009, stimulus spending became another way to fund militarization, with police departments requesting federal cash for armored vehicles, SWAT armor, machine guns, surveillance drones, helicopters, and all manner of other tactical gear and equipment.
Like McNamara, former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper finds all of this troubling. "We needed local police to play a legitimate, continuing role in furthering homeland security back in 2001," says Stamper, now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. "After all, the 9/11 terrorist attacks took place on specific police beats in specific police precincts. Instead, we got a 10-year campaign of increasing militarization, constitution-abusing tactics, needless violence and heartache as the police used federal funds, equipment, and training to ramp up the drug war. It's just tragic."
New York magazine reported some telling figures last month on how delayed-notice search warrants -- also known as "sneak-and-peek" warrants -- have been used in recent years. Though passed with the PATRIOT Act and justified as a much-needed weapon in the war on terrorism, the sneak-and-peek was used in a terror investigation just 15 times between 2006 and 2009. In drug investigations, however, it was used more than 1,600 times during the same period.
It's a familiar storyline. In the 10 years since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the government has claimed a number of new policing powers in the name of protecting the country from terrorism, often at the expense of civil liberties. But once claimed, those powers are overwhelmingly used in the war on drugs. Nowhere is this more clear than in the continuing militarization of America's police departments.
POLICE MILITARIZATION BEFORE SEPTEMBER 11
The trend toward a more militarized domestic police force began well before 9/11. It in fact began in the early 1980s, as the Regan administration added a new dimension of literalness to Richard Nixon's declaration of a "war on drugs." Reagan declared illicit drugs a threat to national security, and once likened America's drug fight to the World War I battle of Verdun. But Reagan was more than just rhetoric. In 1981 he and a compliant Congress passed the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, which allowed and encouraged the military to give local, state, and federal police access to military bases, research, and equipment. It authorized the military to train civilian police officers to use the newly available equipment, instructed the military to share drug-war–related information with civilian police and authorized the military to take an active role in preventing drugs from entering the country.
A bill passed in 1988 authorized the National Guard to aid local police in drug interdiction, a law that resulted in National Guard troops conducting drug raids on city streets and using helicopters to survey rural areas for pot farms. In 1989, President George Bush enacted a new policy creating regional task forces within the Pentagon to work with local police agencies on anti-drug efforts. Since then, a number of other bills and policies have carved out more ways for the military and domestic police to cooperate in the government's ongoing campaign to prevent Americans from getting high. Then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney declared in 1989, "The detection and countering of the production, trafficking and use of illegal drugs is a high priority national security mission of the Department of Defense."
The problem with this mingling of domestic policing with military operations is that the two institutions have starkly different missions. The military's job is to annihilate a foreign enemy. Cops are charged with keeping the peace, and with protecting the constitutional rights of American citizens and residents. It's dangerous to conflate the two. As former Reagan administration official Lawrence Korb once put it, "Soldiers are trained to vaporize, not Mirandize." That distinction is why the U.S. passed the Posse Comitatus Act more than 130 years ago, a law that explicitly forbids the use of military troops in domestic policing.
Over the last several decades Congress and administrations from both parties have continued to carve holes in that law, or at least find ways around it, mostly in the name of the drug war. And while the policies noted above established new ways to involve the military in domestic policing, the much more widespread and problematic trend has been to make our domestic police departments more like the military.
The main culprit was a 1994 law authorizing the Pentagon to donate surplus military equipment to local police departments. In the 17 years since, literally millions of pieces of equipment designed for use on a foreign battlefield have been handed over for use on U.S. streets, against U.S. citizens. Another law passed in 1997 further streamlined the process. As National Journal reported in 2000, in the first three years after the 1994 law alone, the Pentagon distributed 3,800 M-16s, 2,185 M-14s, 73 grenade launchers, and 112 armored personnel carriers to civilian police agencies across America. Domestic police agencies also got bayonets, tanks, helicopters and even airplanes.
All of that equipment then facilitated a dramatic rise in the number and use of paramilitary police units, more commonly known as SWAT teams. Peter Kraska, a criminologist at the University of Eastern Kentucky, has been studying this trend since the early 1980s. Kraska found that by 1997, 90 percent of cities with populations of 50,000 or more had at least one SWAT team, twice as many as in the mid-1980s. The number of towns with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 with a SWAT team increased 157 percent between 1985 and 1996.
As the number of SWAT teams multiplied, their use expanded as well. Until the 1980s, SWAT teams were used almost exclusively to defuse immediate threats to the public safety, events like hostage takings, mass shootings, escaped fugitives, or bank robberies. The proliferation of SWAT teams that began in the 1980s, along with incentives like federal anti-drug grants and asset forfeiture policies, made it lucrative to use them for drug policing. According to Kraska, by the early 1980s there were 3,000 annual SWAT deployments, by 1996 there were 30,000 and by 2001 there were 40,000. The average police department deployed its SWAT team about once a month in the early 1980s. By 1995, it was seven times a month. Kraska found that 75 to80 percent of those deployments were to serve search warrants in drug investigations.
TERROR ATTACKS BRING NEW ROUND OF MILITARIZATION
The September 11 attacks provided a new and seemingly urgent justification for further militarization of America's police departments: the need to protect the country from terrorism.
Within months of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, the Office of National Drug Control Policy began laying the groundwork with a series of ads (featured most prominently during the 2002 Super Bowl) tying recreational drug use to support for terrorism. Terrorism became the new reason to arm American cops as if they were soldiers, but drug offenders would still be their primary targets.
In 2004, for example, law enforcement officials in the New York counties of Oswego and Cayuga defended their new SWAT teams as a necessary precaution in a post–September 11 world. “We’re in a new era, a new time," here,” one sheriff told theSyracuse Post Standard. “The bad guys are a little different than they used to be, so we’re just trying to keep up with the needs for today and hope we never have to use it.” The same sheriff said later in the same article that he'd use his new SWAT team “for a lot of other purposes, too ... just a multitude of other things." In 2002, the seven police officers who serve the town of Jasper, Florida -- which had all of 2,000 people and hadn’t had a murder in more than a decade -- were each given a military-grade M-16 machine gun from the Pentagon transfer program, leading one Florida paper to run the headline, “Three Stoplights, Seven M-16s.”
In 2006 alone, a Pentagon spokesman told the Worcester, Massachusetts Telegram & Gazette, the Department of Defense "distributed vehicles worth $15.4 million, aircraft worth $8.9 million, boats worth $6.7 million, weapons worth $1 million and 'other' items worth $110.6 million" to local police agencies.
In 2007, Clayton County, Georgia -- whose sheriff once complained that the drug war was being fought like Vietnam, and should instead be fought more like the D-Day invasion at Normandy -- got its own tank through the Pentagon's transfer program. Nearby Cobb County got its tank in 2008. In Richland County, South Carolina,Sheriff Leon Lott procured an M113A1 armored personnel carrier in 2008. The vehicle moves on tank-like tracks, and features a belt-fed, turreted machine gun that fires .50-caliber rounds, a type of ammunition so powerful that even the military has restrictions on how it's used on the battlefield. Lott named his vehicle "The Peacemaker." (Lott, is currently being sued for sending his SWAT team crashing into the homes of people who appeared in the same infamous photo that depicted Olympic gold-medalist swimmer Michael Phelps smoking pot in Richland County.) Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio also has a belt-fed .50-caliber machine gun, though it isn't connected to his armored personnel carrier.
After 9/11, police departments in some cities, including Washington, D.C., also switched to battle dress uniforms (BDUs) instead the traditional police uniform. Critics says even subtle changes like a more militarized uniform can change both public perception of the police and how police see their own role in the community. One such critic, retired police sergeant Bill Donelly, wrote in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post, "One tends to throw caution to the wind when wearing ‘commando-chic’ regalia, a bulletproof vest with the word ‘POLICE’ emblazoned on both sides, and when one is armed with high tech weaponry."
Departments in places like Indianapolis and some Chicago suburbs also began acquiring machine guns from the military in the name of fighting terror. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick actually suspended the Pentagon program in his state after the Boston Globe reported that more than 80 police departments across the state had obtained more than 1,000 pieces of military equipment. "Police in Wellfleet, a community known for stunning beaches and succulent oysters, scored three military assault rifles," the Globe reported. "At Salem State College, where recent police calls have included false fire alarms and a goat roaming the campus, school police got two M-16s. In West Springfield, police acquired even more powerful weaponry: two military-issue M-79 grenade launchers."
September 11 also brought a new source of funding for military-grade equipment in the Department of Homeland Security. In recent years, the agency has given anti-terrorism grants to police agencies across the country to purchase armored personnel carriers, including such unlikely terrorism targets as Winnebago County, Wisconsin; Longview, Texas; Tuscaloosa County, Alabama; Canyon County, Idaho; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Adrian, Michigan; and Chattanooga, Tennessee. When the Memphis suburb of Germantown, Tennessee -- which claims to be one of the safest cities in the country -- got its APC in 2006, its sheriff told the local paper that the acquisition would put the town at the "forefront" of homeland security preparedness.
In Eau Clare County, Wisconsin, government officials told the Leader Telegram that the county's new APC would mitigate "the threat of weapons or explosive devices." County board member Sue Miller added, "It’s nice, but I hope we never have to use it." But later in the same article, Police Chief Jerry Matysik says he planned to use the vehicle for other purposes, including "drug searches." It may not be necessary, Matysik said, "But because it’s available, we’ll probably use it just to be cautious."
The DHS grants are typically used to purchase the Lenco Bearcat, a modified armored personnel carrier that sells for $200,000 to $300,000. The vehicle has become something of a status symbol in some police departments, who often put out press releases with photos of the purchase, along with posing police officers clad in camouflage or battle dress uniforms.
HuffPost sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Homeland Security asking just how many grants for the vehicles have been given out since September 11, how much taxpayer money has been spent on them, and which police agencies have received them. Senior FOIA Program Specialist Angela Washington said that this information isn't available.
The post-September 11 era has also seen the role of SWAT teams and paramilitary police units expand to enforce nonviolent crimes beyond even the drug war. SWAT teams have been used to break up neighborhood poker games, sent into bars and fraternities suspected of allowing underage drinking, and even to enforce alcohol andoccupational licensing regulations. Earlier this year, the Department of Education sent its SWAT team to the home of someone suspected of defrauding the federal student loan program.
Kraska estimates the total number of SWAT deployments per year in the U.S. may now top 60,000, or more than 160 per day. In 2008, the Maryland legislature passed a law requiring every police department in the state to issue a bi-annual report on how it uses its SWAT teams. The bill was passed in response to the mistaken and violent SWAT raid on the home of Berwyn Heights, Maryland mayor Cheye Calvo, during which a SWAT team shot and killed his two black labs. The first reports showed an average of 4.5 SWAT raids per day in that state alone.
Critics like Joseph McNamara, who served as a police chief in both San Jose, California, and Kansas City, Missouri, worry that this trend, now driven by the war on terror in addition to the war on drugs, have caused police to lose sight of their role as keepers of the peace.
"Simply put, the police culture in our country has changed," McNamara wrote in a 2006 article for the Wall Street Journal. "An emphasis on 'officer safety' and paramilitary training pervades today's policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn't shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed." Noting the considerable firepower police now carry, McNamara added, "Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that the police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed."
In 2009, stimulus spending became another way to fund militarization, with police departments requesting federal cash for armored vehicles, SWAT armor, machine guns, surveillance drones, helicopters, and all manner of other tactical gear and equipment.
Like McNamara, former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper finds all of this troubling. "We needed local police to play a legitimate, continuing role in furthering homeland security back in 2001," says Stamper, now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. "After all, the 9/11 terrorist attacks took place on specific police beats in specific police precincts. Instead, we got a 10-year campaign of increasing militarization, constitution-abusing tactics, needless violence and heartache as the police used federal funds, equipment, and training to ramp up the drug war. It's just tragic."
jumpincactus
Premium Member
- Posts
- 11,605
- Reactions
- 35,935
- Joined
- Jul 24, 2011
- Points
- 438
Why It’s Near Impossible to Indict a Cop
Here’s how the system protects police
How to police the police is a question as old as civilization, now given special urgency by a St. Louis County grand jury’s return of a “no bill” of indictment for Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson in his fatal shooting of an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown. The result is shocking to many, depressingly predictable to more than a few.
Can the cops be controlled? It’s never been easy: according to one old sociological chestnut, the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence is what defines modern government, and this monopoly is jealously protected against the second-guessing of puny civilians. All over the country, the issue of restraining police power is framed around the retribution against individual cops, from Staten Island to Milwaukee to Los Angeles. But is this the best way to impose discipline on law enforcement and roll back what even Republican appellate court appointees arecalling rampant criminalization?
Police shootings in America
First, the big picture. Last year, the FBI tallied 461 “justifiable homicides” committed by law enforcement—justifiable because the Bureau assumes so, and the nation’s courts have not found otherwise. This is the highest number in two decades, even as the nation’s overall homicide rate continues to drop. Homicides committed by on-duty law enforcement make up 3 percent of the 14,196 homicides committed in the United States in 2013. A USA Today analysisof the FBI database found an average of about ninety-six police homicides a year in which a white officer kills a black person.
The FBI’s police homicide stats are fuzzy, and they are surely an undercount, given that they come from voluntary reports to the FBI from police departments all over the country. That the federal government does not keep a strict national tally shows just how seriously it takes this problem. A crowdsourced database has sprung up to fill the gap, as has a wiki-tabulation.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about these police killings, many of them of unarmed victims, is that our courts find them perfectly legal.
SCOTUS and the license to kill
Chapter 563 of the Missouri Revised Statutes grants a lot of discretion to officers of the law to wield deadly force, to the horror of many observers swooping in to the Ferguson story. The statute authorizes deadly force “in effecting an arrest or in preventing an escape from custody” if the officer “reasonably believes” it is necessary in order to “to effect the arrest and also reasonably believes that the person to be arrested has committed or attempted to commit a felony…or may otherwise endanger life or inflict serious physical injury unless arrested without delay.”
But this law is not an outlier, and is fully in sync with Supreme Court jurisprudence. The legal standard authorizing deadly force is something called “objective reasonableness.”
This standard originates in the 1985 case of Tennessee v. Garner, which appeared at first to tighten restrictions on the police use of deadly force. The case involved a Memphis cop, Elton Hymon, who shot dead one Edward Garner: 15 years old, black and unarmed. Garner had just burgled a house, grabbing a ring and ten bucks. The US Supreme Court ruled that a police officer, henceforth, could use deadly force only if he “has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” The ruling required that the use of force be “objectively reasonable.” How this reasonableness should be determined was established in a 1989 case, Graham v. Connor: severity of the crime, whether the suspect is resisting or trying to escape and above all, whether the suspect posed an immediate threat to the safety of officers or others. All this appeared to restrict police violence—even if, in the end, Officer Hymon was never criminally charged for fatally shooting Edward Garner.
“Objectively reasonable”—what could be wrong with that? But in actual courtroom practice, “objective reasonableness” has become nearly impossible to tell apart from the subjective snap judgments of panic-fueled police officers. American courts universally defer to the law enforcement officer’s own personal assessment of the threat at the time.
The Graham analysis essentially prohibits any second-guessing of the officer’s decision to use deadly force: no hindsight is permitted, and wide latitude is granted to the officer’s account of the situation, even if scientific evidence proves it to be mistaken. Such was the case of Berkeley, Missouri, police officers Robert Piekutowski and Keith Kierzkowski, who in 2000 fatally shot Earl Murray and Ronald Beasley out of fear that the victims’ car was rolling towards them. Forensic investigations established that the car had not in fact lurched towards the officers at the time of the shooting—but this was still not enough for the St. Louis County grand jury to indict the two cops of anything.
Not surprisingly then, legal experts find that “there is built-in leeway for police, and the very breadth of this leeway is why criminal charges against police are so rare,” says Walter Katz, a police oversight lawyer who served on the Los Angeles County Office of Independent Review until it disbanded in July of this year. According to Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Irvine Law School, recent Supreme Court decisions are not a path towards justice but rather a series ofobstacles to holding police accountable for civil rights violations.
An officer’s personal threat assessment is often bolstered by the fact that there are between 270 million and 310 million guns in the United States. Take a grand jury’s failure to indict the police officers who fatally shot John Crawford III, the black man holding a BB gun in a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio. In a country where shooting sprees are a regular occurrence, where guns are widely available at Walmart and where fake guns that look very similar to real guns are sold in the same store, the police officers’ fears were deemed reasonable enough for the grand jury to find no probable cause of criminal wrongdoing. That is how the Supreme Court police violence jurisprudence works, and it was firmly on the side of officer Sean Williams, just as it has now been found to be on Darren Wilson’s. Given the deference and latitude hardwired into the law, “there is just an underlying assumption that the officer did not engage in criminal activity,” says Katz.
The first step to controlling the police is to get rid of the fantasy, once and for all, that the law is on our side. The law is firmly on the side of police who open fire on unarmed civilians.
The sick joke of self-regulation
The lethal use of police force typically sets off an internal police investigation to determine if departmental regulations were violated. The regs and the law are not the same thing. Case in point: the chokehold that NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo used to strangle Eric Garner, suspected of selling loose cigarettes, on Staten Island last July. (The grand jury bill on that case has still not been decided.) The chokehold is not prohibited by law, but it is by departmental rules. The violation might earn a departmental censure of some kind, from loss of vacation days to getting fired, but they tend to be radically mild, when not nonexistent.
What about internal affairs investigations? On television they are aggressive, dogged, uncompromising. In real life they tend to insulate the police from serious external sanction. “I stopped cooperating with the IAB ten years ago,” says Jason Leventhal, a former assistant district attorney in Richmond County, Staten Island who now works as a civil rights litigator, often suing the police. “IA will never, ever credit the claim of police abuse. They hide witnesses, they push witnesses around. The only time I cooperate with them is when I know I have their hands tied behind their back.”
Are there any effective civilian oversight systems at any major police department in the US? Nobody I interviewed for this article could name one. New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board occasionally docks vacation days from police officers but the board has no real teeth. Even staffers at the New York Civil Liberties Union have candidly told me that it’s more or less worthless. “I don’t have any faith in the CCRB or the Internal Affairs Bureau or any other internal mechanism,” says Ron Kuby, a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer in New York. Civilian complaints rarely even get in the way of an individual officer’s career. In New York, CCRB complaints don’t even go in a police officer’s file, says Kuby. “The PBA just says that the more aggressive officers will get excessive force complaints.”
Firing a police officer with a record of abusive behavior (or worse) is often extremely difficult and can carry a heavy political cost. Patrolmen Benevolent Associations, which have escaped the kind of resentment directed at other public-sector unions, tend to be powerful players in local politics able to inflict pain on any politico who would cross them. (Remember when Sarah Palin struggled to fire a state trooper and ex-brother-in-law who had allegedly acted like a thug towards her sister?)
The reality is, it is extremely difficult to get law enforcement to police itself, and self-regulation is here, just as it is in poultry processing or coal mining, a sick joke.
Civil suits
Civil suits for monetary damages require a lower standard of proof than criminal cases, but these suits are not a slam-dunk for victims of cop violence, either. The same jurisprudence that grants wide leeway to law enforcement still holds. Last March, one victim’s family lost a federal civil suit for wrongful death and civil rights violations brought against police officer Nicholas Bennallack for fatally shooting a fleeing and unarmed drug suspect. The jury believed the cop’s claim that he opened fire out of fear for his life.
What about all the times when excessive force suits get settled out of court? It turns out that massive payouts don’t deter police misconduct for one straightforward reason: neither individual officers nor police departments are responsible for coughing up the cash. The union covers the officer’s lawyer, and research from Joanna Schwartz of UCLA Law School found that governments, not individual officers, paid out 99.98 percent of the damages. Settlements and damages aren’t paid by the police department, whose budget will waltz by untouched, but typically out of the general municipal budget.
Kuby maintains that civil remedies will always fall short and thinks only criminal prosecution has a prayer of changing police behavior. “Prosecution works well with people who are not fundamentally criminal and have enough stake in the system to respond! Any response below that is an insult.” But he admits that the political will to make the criminal justice system restrain and regulate its own members and enforcers is consistently lacking—and has been as long as he’s been practicing law.
Don’t make a federal case out of it.
Occasionally the federal Department of Justice intervenes to prosecute individual cops for depriving a victim of his or her civil rights. If a state-level prosecution fails to secure a conviction, this can give the government a second chance to prosecute on different charges. Rodney King’s LAPD assailants were convicted in 1993 in just this way.
But the feds, like other prosecutors, only like to take on cases they can win, says Alan Vinegrad, who was part of the federal attorneys that prosecuted the NYPD officer who in 1997 sexually tortured Abner Louima with a broken-off broom handle. “In the Louima case it was painfully obvious that the use of force was extreme and willful,” says Vinegrad. “But in other cases, if the officer is acting more in the line of duty, a federal civil rights violation is a tougher thing to show.”
Will the Obama DOJ take on the Michael Brown case? It doesn’t look like it. Eyewitness testimony is conflicting, and so far the multiple forensic reports that have come out are not inconsistent with Darren Wilson’s version of the shooting—which would make the federal standard of willful misconduct difficult to prove. The Obama DOJ has signaled with leaks that it isbacking away from a federal case against the officer.
Far more useful are the DOJ Civil Rights Division’s root-and-branch interventions into violently dysfunctional police forces, triggered by “patterns and practices” of systematic rights violations rather than any one particular incident. For instance, the DOJ just launched a major effort to reorganize and reshape the police department of Albuquerque, reforming its trainings, protocols and appallingly trigger-happy habits. (The Albuquerque police have shot thirty-seven people in the past four years, twenty-three of them fatally.) This is a well-established tool of the federal government: other police departments under took overwholesale the Oakland police department in 2012. But note that these federal interventions do not entail punishments, civil or criminal, of individual police officers.
In the unusual instances when a law enforcement officer is convicted, the penalties tend to be remarkably light. Johannes Mehserle, the Bay Area Rapid Transit officer who shot the unarmed Oscar Grant III dead on New Year’s Day, 2009, served eleven months of a two-year sentence for involuntary manslaughter. Then there is Jon Burge, the Chicago police detective who led the torture of over 100 (mostly black) suspects, released last month after serving four and a half years in custody. (The statute of limitations had passed for the more serious offenses.) Burge still collects a $54,000 departmental pension.
Such Scandinavian-style lenity is quite different from the mind-numbing severity of sentences inflicted on non-cops. Consider the sixty years that potentially face Marissa Alexander for firing a warning shot at an abusive ex. Or the life sentences without possibility of parole that more than 3,000 Americans are serving for nonviolent crimes.
Video
Some observers see hope for police reform in the ubiquity of smartphone video recorders. It’s true that the ever-growing supply of police misconduct videos fuels the anger needed to sustain reform efforts, and even occasionally leads to police officers being disciplined or prosecuted. Examples include NYPD officers David Afanador and Tyrane Isaac, caught on camera pistol-whipping a teenage suspect last August, or South Carolina state trooper Sean Groubert who in September opened fire on a motorist heading into his truck to retrieve his driver’s license. Jason Leventhal told me he expects an indictment of the Staten Island police officer who strangled Eric Garner because the video evidence, caught on a cellphone, was so brutal. It would certainly be a good thing if police departments invested less in military gear like M-RAP armored vehicles and more in dashcams and GoPro cameras; with the right department protocols and practices, these cameras strengthen police accountability.
But just as often these videos end up illustrating just how much leeway police have in opening fire on a suspect. Take the police shooting of St. Louis resident Kajieme Powell, a mentally ill man allegedly holding a knife, a fatal shooting arguably less defensible than the Michael Brown shooting ten days before, and caught on a cell-phone video. Or, again, John Crawford III, whoseslaying by police officers was caught on the Walmart security cameras. Or the July, 2012 video of eight members of the Saginaw, Michigan, police department, six of them firing forty-six shots at Milton Hall, a mentally ill homeless man, hitting him eleven times, after he took out a pocket knife when a police dog started to lunge at him. Although the latter horrific video picked up a fresh wave of publicity when screened at a hearing of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, DC, last month, such videos cannot undo the legally enshrined deference to the subjective feelings of police officers when they reach for their weapons. No criminal charges were even attempted by state prosecutors in any of these cases; the DOJ has announced it is looking into the Crawford shooting, but declined to prosecute in the other two.
(A note on the IACHR and other international forums: bringing these cases of police shootings to them is a canny way to generate publicity and raise consciousness, but no one should ever imagine for even a second that such bodies will ever wield any actual power in American courts.)
There really is no courtroom miracle or lawsuit solution, no matter how clever the litigator, no matter how deep-dish the foundation grant, that is going to discipline the police and break them of their trigger-happy habits.
Thinking big
Police shootings are only one function of living in one of the most heavily policed societies in the world. Any movement to roll back this creeping overcriminalization is going to have to look beyond criminal prosecutions of individual police and take in the big picture.
The militarized police response to the mostly nonviolent demonstrations in Ferguson andelsewhere has appalled not only progressives but many conservatives as well. The army’s provision of of weapons surplus, from MRAPs to tanks, to local police departments under the federal 1033 Program, ought to be easy to end. But departments are reluctant to give back new toys, and majorities of both the congressional Progressive Caucus and the Black Caucus votedagainst a bill that would have stopped the disbursement of some military goodies to local police departments. Gun control advocates would do well to lobby hard and publicly for arms control measures applied to the police as well—undisciplined but up-armored cops are part of what that drives many otherwise sane private citizens to build private armories.
Wanton overpolicing had poisoned relations between the people and their government well before Darren Wilson shot dead Michael Brown. Less mediagenic than police militarization and far more insidious is law enforcement’s daily harassment of citizens for petty offenses. The local government in Ferguson has been treating its residents and neighbors less like free people with rights than like revenue milk-cows to be exploited to the max. Citations and fines for petty offenses are profligately inflicted on residents, particularly black residents. According to a blockbuster report issued by St. Louis’s ArchCity Defenders advocacy group, over 20 percent of city revenue comes from municipal courts (making them the city’s second-largest source of revenue), which issued enough warrants last year to slap three warrants, $312 worth, on every household in the town.
Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!
Not surprisingly, high on the list of demands issues at one Ferguson community forum was an end to the “overpolicing and criminalization of poverty,” an amnesty for old unpaid warrants, new fines proportioned to income and a state law capping municipal revenue from court fees at 10 percent. (Terrified by the Ferguson unrest, the city of St. Louis decided to eliminate 220,000 open arrest warrants for traffic violations last month.) The feeling of being under occupation by an armed force that cares more about meeting revenue quotas than public security corrodes all trust in law enforcement, and is the sort of environment in which police are more likely to open fire.
The state of emergency that Missouri governor Jay Nixon declared on November 17 seems all too likely to encourage the police overkill, both petty and heavily militarized, that shocked the world over the summer, when much of the state’s use of force against demonstrators was of dubious legality.
New policing models like the problem-solving approach developed by David M. Kennedy and others have focused law enforcement and social work resources on a city’s small number of known and likely violent gang members, leaving the rest of the community in relative peace. This approach has won demonstrable results in Boston and Cincinnati without intrusive “broken windows” policing or the wholesale stop-and-frisk harassment of black and Latino youth. Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College, writes in his memoir, Don’t Shoot, that this type of community policing doesn’t fix the entire economy, but it does reduce homicide—including police homicide—and at least create social peace.
Police demilitarization, the decriminalization of working-class people, new policing models: these are all projects that could work in Ferguson and thousands of other American cities. Although none of these large-scale ideas is explicitly race-conscious, they would most likely tighten the severe racial disparities in policing violence that exist all over the country, more so than pouring more money into racial sensitivity training for cops. (Changing residency requirements of municipal police officers to get a more ethnically representative force might help a little, though research shows that such requirements correlate with less confidence in the police, not more.)
These big-picture reforms are fundamentally political solutions that will require long-term effort, coalition politics that spans race, ethnicity and political affiliation—a challenge, but also a necessity. As police and prosecutors assume more and more power in the United States—regulating immigration (formerly a matter of administrative law), meting out school discipline, and other spheres of everyday life where criminal law was almost unknown even a generation ago—getting law enforcement on a tight leash is a national imperative. In the meantime, the constantstream of news reports of unarmed, mostly black and Latino civilians killed by police demands bigger, bolder approaches. They are the only available paths to getting the police under control.
http://www.thenation.com/article/190937/why-its-impossible-indict-cop#
Here’s how the system protects police
How to police the police is a question as old as civilization, now given special urgency by a St. Louis County grand jury’s return of a “no bill” of indictment for Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson in his fatal shooting of an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown. The result is shocking to many, depressingly predictable to more than a few.
Can the cops be controlled? It’s never been easy: according to one old sociological chestnut, the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence is what defines modern government, and this monopoly is jealously protected against the second-guessing of puny civilians. All over the country, the issue of restraining police power is framed around the retribution against individual cops, from Staten Island to Milwaukee to Los Angeles. But is this the best way to impose discipline on law enforcement and roll back what even Republican appellate court appointees arecalling rampant criminalization?
Police shootings in America
First, the big picture. Last year, the FBI tallied 461 “justifiable homicides” committed by law enforcement—justifiable because the Bureau assumes so, and the nation’s courts have not found otherwise. This is the highest number in two decades, even as the nation’s overall homicide rate continues to drop. Homicides committed by on-duty law enforcement make up 3 percent of the 14,196 homicides committed in the United States in 2013. A USA Today analysisof the FBI database found an average of about ninety-six police homicides a year in which a white officer kills a black person.
The FBI’s police homicide stats are fuzzy, and they are surely an undercount, given that they come from voluntary reports to the FBI from police departments all over the country. That the federal government does not keep a strict national tally shows just how seriously it takes this problem. A crowdsourced database has sprung up to fill the gap, as has a wiki-tabulation.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about these police killings, many of them of unarmed victims, is that our courts find them perfectly legal.
SCOTUS and the license to kill
Chapter 563 of the Missouri Revised Statutes grants a lot of discretion to officers of the law to wield deadly force, to the horror of many observers swooping in to the Ferguson story. The statute authorizes deadly force “in effecting an arrest or in preventing an escape from custody” if the officer “reasonably believes” it is necessary in order to “to effect the arrest and also reasonably believes that the person to be arrested has committed or attempted to commit a felony…or may otherwise endanger life or inflict serious physical injury unless arrested without delay.”
But this law is not an outlier, and is fully in sync with Supreme Court jurisprudence. The legal standard authorizing deadly force is something called “objective reasonableness.”
This standard originates in the 1985 case of Tennessee v. Garner, which appeared at first to tighten restrictions on the police use of deadly force. The case involved a Memphis cop, Elton Hymon, who shot dead one Edward Garner: 15 years old, black and unarmed. Garner had just burgled a house, grabbing a ring and ten bucks. The US Supreme Court ruled that a police officer, henceforth, could use deadly force only if he “has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” The ruling required that the use of force be “objectively reasonable.” How this reasonableness should be determined was established in a 1989 case, Graham v. Connor: severity of the crime, whether the suspect is resisting or trying to escape and above all, whether the suspect posed an immediate threat to the safety of officers or others. All this appeared to restrict police violence—even if, in the end, Officer Hymon was never criminally charged for fatally shooting Edward Garner.
“Objectively reasonable”—what could be wrong with that? But in actual courtroom practice, “objective reasonableness” has become nearly impossible to tell apart from the subjective snap judgments of panic-fueled police officers. American courts universally defer to the law enforcement officer’s own personal assessment of the threat at the time.
The Graham analysis essentially prohibits any second-guessing of the officer’s decision to use deadly force: no hindsight is permitted, and wide latitude is granted to the officer’s account of the situation, even if scientific evidence proves it to be mistaken. Such was the case of Berkeley, Missouri, police officers Robert Piekutowski and Keith Kierzkowski, who in 2000 fatally shot Earl Murray and Ronald Beasley out of fear that the victims’ car was rolling towards them. Forensic investigations established that the car had not in fact lurched towards the officers at the time of the shooting—but this was still not enough for the St. Louis County grand jury to indict the two cops of anything.
Not surprisingly then, legal experts find that “there is built-in leeway for police, and the very breadth of this leeway is why criminal charges against police are so rare,” says Walter Katz, a police oversight lawyer who served on the Los Angeles County Office of Independent Review until it disbanded in July of this year. According to Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Irvine Law School, recent Supreme Court decisions are not a path towards justice but rather a series ofobstacles to holding police accountable for civil rights violations.
An officer’s personal threat assessment is often bolstered by the fact that there are between 270 million and 310 million guns in the United States. Take a grand jury’s failure to indict the police officers who fatally shot John Crawford III, the black man holding a BB gun in a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio. In a country where shooting sprees are a regular occurrence, where guns are widely available at Walmart and where fake guns that look very similar to real guns are sold in the same store, the police officers’ fears were deemed reasonable enough for the grand jury to find no probable cause of criminal wrongdoing. That is how the Supreme Court police violence jurisprudence works, and it was firmly on the side of officer Sean Williams, just as it has now been found to be on Darren Wilson’s. Given the deference and latitude hardwired into the law, “there is just an underlying assumption that the officer did not engage in criminal activity,” says Katz.
The first step to controlling the police is to get rid of the fantasy, once and for all, that the law is on our side. The law is firmly on the side of police who open fire on unarmed civilians.
The sick joke of self-regulation
The lethal use of police force typically sets off an internal police investigation to determine if departmental regulations were violated. The regs and the law are not the same thing. Case in point: the chokehold that NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo used to strangle Eric Garner, suspected of selling loose cigarettes, on Staten Island last July. (The grand jury bill on that case has still not been decided.) The chokehold is not prohibited by law, but it is by departmental rules. The violation might earn a departmental censure of some kind, from loss of vacation days to getting fired, but they tend to be radically mild, when not nonexistent.
What about internal affairs investigations? On television they are aggressive, dogged, uncompromising. In real life they tend to insulate the police from serious external sanction. “I stopped cooperating with the IAB ten years ago,” says Jason Leventhal, a former assistant district attorney in Richmond County, Staten Island who now works as a civil rights litigator, often suing the police. “IA will never, ever credit the claim of police abuse. They hide witnesses, they push witnesses around. The only time I cooperate with them is when I know I have their hands tied behind their back.”
Are there any effective civilian oversight systems at any major police department in the US? Nobody I interviewed for this article could name one. New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board occasionally docks vacation days from police officers but the board has no real teeth. Even staffers at the New York Civil Liberties Union have candidly told me that it’s more or less worthless. “I don’t have any faith in the CCRB or the Internal Affairs Bureau or any other internal mechanism,” says Ron Kuby, a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer in New York. Civilian complaints rarely even get in the way of an individual officer’s career. In New York, CCRB complaints don’t even go in a police officer’s file, says Kuby. “The PBA just says that the more aggressive officers will get excessive force complaints.”
Firing a police officer with a record of abusive behavior (or worse) is often extremely difficult and can carry a heavy political cost. Patrolmen Benevolent Associations, which have escaped the kind of resentment directed at other public-sector unions, tend to be powerful players in local politics able to inflict pain on any politico who would cross them. (Remember when Sarah Palin struggled to fire a state trooper and ex-brother-in-law who had allegedly acted like a thug towards her sister?)
The reality is, it is extremely difficult to get law enforcement to police itself, and self-regulation is here, just as it is in poultry processing or coal mining, a sick joke.
Civil suits
Civil suits for monetary damages require a lower standard of proof than criminal cases, but these suits are not a slam-dunk for victims of cop violence, either. The same jurisprudence that grants wide leeway to law enforcement still holds. Last March, one victim’s family lost a federal civil suit for wrongful death and civil rights violations brought against police officer Nicholas Bennallack for fatally shooting a fleeing and unarmed drug suspect. The jury believed the cop’s claim that he opened fire out of fear for his life.
What about all the times when excessive force suits get settled out of court? It turns out that massive payouts don’t deter police misconduct for one straightforward reason: neither individual officers nor police departments are responsible for coughing up the cash. The union covers the officer’s lawyer, and research from Joanna Schwartz of UCLA Law School found that governments, not individual officers, paid out 99.98 percent of the damages. Settlements and damages aren’t paid by the police department, whose budget will waltz by untouched, but typically out of the general municipal budget.
Kuby maintains that civil remedies will always fall short and thinks only criminal prosecution has a prayer of changing police behavior. “Prosecution works well with people who are not fundamentally criminal and have enough stake in the system to respond! Any response below that is an insult.” But he admits that the political will to make the criminal justice system restrain and regulate its own members and enforcers is consistently lacking—and has been as long as he’s been practicing law.
Don’t make a federal case out of it.
Occasionally the federal Department of Justice intervenes to prosecute individual cops for depriving a victim of his or her civil rights. If a state-level prosecution fails to secure a conviction, this can give the government a second chance to prosecute on different charges. Rodney King’s LAPD assailants were convicted in 1993 in just this way.
But the feds, like other prosecutors, only like to take on cases they can win, says Alan Vinegrad, who was part of the federal attorneys that prosecuted the NYPD officer who in 1997 sexually tortured Abner Louima with a broken-off broom handle. “In the Louima case it was painfully obvious that the use of force was extreme and willful,” says Vinegrad. “But in other cases, if the officer is acting more in the line of duty, a federal civil rights violation is a tougher thing to show.”
Will the Obama DOJ take on the Michael Brown case? It doesn’t look like it. Eyewitness testimony is conflicting, and so far the multiple forensic reports that have come out are not inconsistent with Darren Wilson’s version of the shooting—which would make the federal standard of willful misconduct difficult to prove. The Obama DOJ has signaled with leaks that it isbacking away from a federal case against the officer.
Far more useful are the DOJ Civil Rights Division’s root-and-branch interventions into violently dysfunctional police forces, triggered by “patterns and practices” of systematic rights violations rather than any one particular incident. For instance, the DOJ just launched a major effort to reorganize and reshape the police department of Albuquerque, reforming its trainings, protocols and appallingly trigger-happy habits. (The Albuquerque police have shot thirty-seven people in the past four years, twenty-three of them fatally.) This is a well-established tool of the federal government: other police departments under took overwholesale the Oakland police department in 2012. But note that these federal interventions do not entail punishments, civil or criminal, of individual police officers.
In the unusual instances when a law enforcement officer is convicted, the penalties tend to be remarkably light. Johannes Mehserle, the Bay Area Rapid Transit officer who shot the unarmed Oscar Grant III dead on New Year’s Day, 2009, served eleven months of a two-year sentence for involuntary manslaughter. Then there is Jon Burge, the Chicago police detective who led the torture of over 100 (mostly black) suspects, released last month after serving four and a half years in custody. (The statute of limitations had passed for the more serious offenses.) Burge still collects a $54,000 departmental pension.
Such Scandinavian-style lenity is quite different from the mind-numbing severity of sentences inflicted on non-cops. Consider the sixty years that potentially face Marissa Alexander for firing a warning shot at an abusive ex. Or the life sentences without possibility of parole that more than 3,000 Americans are serving for nonviolent crimes.
Video
Some observers see hope for police reform in the ubiquity of smartphone video recorders. It’s true that the ever-growing supply of police misconduct videos fuels the anger needed to sustain reform efforts, and even occasionally leads to police officers being disciplined or prosecuted. Examples include NYPD officers David Afanador and Tyrane Isaac, caught on camera pistol-whipping a teenage suspect last August, or South Carolina state trooper Sean Groubert who in September opened fire on a motorist heading into his truck to retrieve his driver’s license. Jason Leventhal told me he expects an indictment of the Staten Island police officer who strangled Eric Garner because the video evidence, caught on a cellphone, was so brutal. It would certainly be a good thing if police departments invested less in military gear like M-RAP armored vehicles and more in dashcams and GoPro cameras; with the right department protocols and practices, these cameras strengthen police accountability.
But just as often these videos end up illustrating just how much leeway police have in opening fire on a suspect. Take the police shooting of St. Louis resident Kajieme Powell, a mentally ill man allegedly holding a knife, a fatal shooting arguably less defensible than the Michael Brown shooting ten days before, and caught on a cell-phone video. Or, again, John Crawford III, whoseslaying by police officers was caught on the Walmart security cameras. Or the July, 2012 video of eight members of the Saginaw, Michigan, police department, six of them firing forty-six shots at Milton Hall, a mentally ill homeless man, hitting him eleven times, after he took out a pocket knife when a police dog started to lunge at him. Although the latter horrific video picked up a fresh wave of publicity when screened at a hearing of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, DC, last month, such videos cannot undo the legally enshrined deference to the subjective feelings of police officers when they reach for their weapons. No criminal charges were even attempted by state prosecutors in any of these cases; the DOJ has announced it is looking into the Crawford shooting, but declined to prosecute in the other two.
(A note on the IACHR and other international forums: bringing these cases of police shootings to them is a canny way to generate publicity and raise consciousness, but no one should ever imagine for even a second that such bodies will ever wield any actual power in American courts.)
There really is no courtroom miracle or lawsuit solution, no matter how clever the litigator, no matter how deep-dish the foundation grant, that is going to discipline the police and break them of their trigger-happy habits.
Thinking big
Police shootings are only one function of living in one of the most heavily policed societies in the world. Any movement to roll back this creeping overcriminalization is going to have to look beyond criminal prosecutions of individual police and take in the big picture.
The militarized police response to the mostly nonviolent demonstrations in Ferguson andelsewhere has appalled not only progressives but many conservatives as well. The army’s provision of of weapons surplus, from MRAPs to tanks, to local police departments under the federal 1033 Program, ought to be easy to end. But departments are reluctant to give back new toys, and majorities of both the congressional Progressive Caucus and the Black Caucus votedagainst a bill that would have stopped the disbursement of some military goodies to local police departments. Gun control advocates would do well to lobby hard and publicly for arms control measures applied to the police as well—undisciplined but up-armored cops are part of what that drives many otherwise sane private citizens to build private armories.
Wanton overpolicing had poisoned relations between the people and their government well before Darren Wilson shot dead Michael Brown. Less mediagenic than police militarization and far more insidious is law enforcement’s daily harassment of citizens for petty offenses. The local government in Ferguson has been treating its residents and neighbors less like free people with rights than like revenue milk-cows to be exploited to the max. Citations and fines for petty offenses are profligately inflicted on residents, particularly black residents. According to a blockbuster report issued by St. Louis’s ArchCity Defenders advocacy group, over 20 percent of city revenue comes from municipal courts (making them the city’s second-largest source of revenue), which issued enough warrants last year to slap three warrants, $312 worth, on every household in the town.
Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!
Not surprisingly, high on the list of demands issues at one Ferguson community forum was an end to the “overpolicing and criminalization of poverty,” an amnesty for old unpaid warrants, new fines proportioned to income and a state law capping municipal revenue from court fees at 10 percent. (Terrified by the Ferguson unrest, the city of St. Louis decided to eliminate 220,000 open arrest warrants for traffic violations last month.) The feeling of being under occupation by an armed force that cares more about meeting revenue quotas than public security corrodes all trust in law enforcement, and is the sort of environment in which police are more likely to open fire.
The state of emergency that Missouri governor Jay Nixon declared on November 17 seems all too likely to encourage the police overkill, both petty and heavily militarized, that shocked the world over the summer, when much of the state’s use of force against demonstrators was of dubious legality.
New policing models like the problem-solving approach developed by David M. Kennedy and others have focused law enforcement and social work resources on a city’s small number of known and likely violent gang members, leaving the rest of the community in relative peace. This approach has won demonstrable results in Boston and Cincinnati without intrusive “broken windows” policing or the wholesale stop-and-frisk harassment of black and Latino youth. Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College, writes in his memoir, Don’t Shoot, that this type of community policing doesn’t fix the entire economy, but it does reduce homicide—including police homicide—and at least create social peace.
Police demilitarization, the decriminalization of working-class people, new policing models: these are all projects that could work in Ferguson and thousands of other American cities. Although none of these large-scale ideas is explicitly race-conscious, they would most likely tighten the severe racial disparities in policing violence that exist all over the country, more so than pouring more money into racial sensitivity training for cops. (Changing residency requirements of municipal police officers to get a more ethnically representative force might help a little, though research shows that such requirements correlate with less confidence in the police, not more.)
These big-picture reforms are fundamentally political solutions that will require long-term effort, coalition politics that spans race, ethnicity and political affiliation—a challenge, but also a necessity. As police and prosecutors assume more and more power in the United States—regulating immigration (formerly a matter of administrative law), meting out school discipline, and other spheres of everyday life where criminal law was almost unknown even a generation ago—getting law enforcement on a tight leash is a national imperative. In the meantime, the constantstream of news reports of unarmed, mostly black and Latino civilians killed by police demands bigger, bolder approaches. They are the only available paths to getting the police under control.
http://www.thenation.com/article/190937/why-its-impossible-indict-cop#
diamond2.0
- Posts
- 1,148
- Reactions
- 1,851
- Joined
- Jul 27, 2011
- Points
- 163
Cops are the biggest liars on earth !
How about this scum cop.
Road-raging off-duty cop shot woman in the head because she honked at him
SCOTT KAUFMAN
30 NOV 2014 AT 12:36 ET
A Houston woman was shot in the head by an off-duty police officer after she honked at him for cutting her off, KHOU 11 reports.
The victim — who did not wish to be identified for fear of retaliation — said that she was driving on the 610 Loop when Kenneth Caplan cut her off.
“He was about to hit me,” she said, “so I switched to the other lane, got in front of him and cut him off. I guess that pissed him off,” because he pulled alongside her, rolled down his window and opened fire.
“He was aiming at me and I thought he was going to cuss me out. It didn’t register that I was, you know, going to get shot. I just started crying because I knew I was going to die,” the victim said. “I wanted to call my mom to tell her ‘I love you.’”
One bullet grazed her head, opening a gaping wound that would not stop bleeding.
“I was like ‘oh my God, he just shot me.’ I was applying pressure to my head because it wouldn’t stop bleeding,” the victim said. “The blood was in between my nails, just crazy blood, and all over my cellphone, just covered.”
She was, however, able to pull over to the side of the road and call 911.
Investigators would not say what evidence led them to identify Caplan as the shooter, but his home district released the following statement:
“Kenneth Caplan was not on duty at the time of the incident in which he was involved nor was he displaying any article connecting him to the Harris County Constable’s Office – Precinct 6. The Harris County Constable’s Office – Precinct 6 neither condones nor tolerates the actions taken by Kenneth Caplan that connected him to this incident, and the necessary measures were taken to collect his credentials and remove him from our status.”
Watch a report on the incident via KHOU 11 below.
How about this scum cop.
Road-raging off-duty cop shot woman in the head because she honked at him
SCOTT KAUFMAN
30 NOV 2014 AT 12:36 ET
A Houston woman was shot in the head by an off-duty police officer after she honked at him for cutting her off, KHOU 11 reports.
The victim — who did not wish to be identified for fear of retaliation — said that she was driving on the 610 Loop when Kenneth Caplan cut her off.
“He was about to hit me,” she said, “so I switched to the other lane, got in front of him and cut him off. I guess that pissed him off,” because he pulled alongside her, rolled down his window and opened fire.
“He was aiming at me and I thought he was going to cuss me out. It didn’t register that I was, you know, going to get shot. I just started crying because I knew I was going to die,” the victim said. “I wanted to call my mom to tell her ‘I love you.’”
One bullet grazed her head, opening a gaping wound that would not stop bleeding.
“I was like ‘oh my God, he just shot me.’ I was applying pressure to my head because it wouldn’t stop bleeding,” the victim said. “The blood was in between my nails, just crazy blood, and all over my cellphone, just covered.”
She was, however, able to pull over to the side of the road and call 911.
Investigators would not say what evidence led them to identify Caplan as the shooter, but his home district released the following statement:
“Kenneth Caplan was not on duty at the time of the incident in which he was involved nor was he displaying any article connecting him to the Harris County Constable’s Office – Precinct 6. The Harris County Constable’s Office – Precinct 6 neither condones nor tolerates the actions taken by Kenneth Caplan that connected him to this incident, and the necessary measures were taken to collect his credentials and remove him from our status.”
Watch a report on the incident via KHOU 11 below.
diamond2.0
- Posts
- 1,148
- Reactions
- 1,851
- Joined
- Jul 27, 2011
- Points
- 163
Man arrested; deputies say he aimed banana at them
(AP) -- GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. -- A man is facing a felony menacing charge after two western Colorado sheriff's deputies say he pointed a banana at them and they thought it was a gun.
The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel reports 27-year-old Nathan Rolf Channing, of Fruitvale, was arrested Sunday.
According to an arrest affidavit, Mesa County deputies Joshua Bunch and Donald Love said they feared for their lives even though they saw that the object was yellow. Bunch wrote in the affidavit that he has seen handguns in many shapes and colors.
He wrote that Love was drawing his service weapon when Channing yelled, "It's a banana!"
The deputies say Channing told them he was doing a trial run for a planned YouTube video and he thought it would "lighten the holiday spirit."
(Copyright ©2014 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
(AP) -- GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. -- A man is facing a felony menacing charge after two western Colorado sheriff's deputies say he pointed a banana at them and they thought it was a gun.
The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel reports 27-year-old Nathan Rolf Channing, of Fruitvale, was arrested Sunday.
According to an arrest affidavit, Mesa County deputies Joshua Bunch and Donald Love said they feared for their lives even though they saw that the object was yellow. Bunch wrote in the affidavit that he has seen handguns in many shapes and colors.
He wrote that Love was drawing his service weapon when Channing yelled, "It's a banana!"
The deputies say Channing told them he was doing a trial run for a planned YouTube video and he thought it would "lighten the holiday spirit."
(Copyright ©2014 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
diamond2.0
- Posts
- 1,148
- Reactions
- 1,851
- Joined
- Jul 27, 2011
- Points
- 163
The Stazi have arrived...I had to put these up from awhile back. its telling !
Behind closed doors...............These vids are about what happens behind the camera that you dont see being reported as it happens.
In this one our t.v. shows us congress hearing. Just on the other side of the door this is going on at the same time. Youd think it would be news worthy .
Remember this speach by Clinton. Heres what happens behind the camera once again ..Our governemt officials are nothing but paid actors ! Old but very telling where the countries has gone .
Behind closed doors...............These vids are about what happens behind the camera that you dont see being reported as it happens.
In this one our t.v. shows us congress hearing. Just on the other side of the door this is going on at the same time. Youd think it would be news worthy .
Remember this speach by Clinton. Heres what happens behind the camera once again ..Our governemt officials are nothing but paid actors ! Old but very telling where the countries has gone .
Bulldog11
- Posts
- 2,709
- Reactions
- 6,719
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2010
- Points
- 263
I respect cops. Without the rule of law we might as well be Mexico where nobody can patent ideas or be safe to conduct business. My friends uncle was a priest in Mexico and he talked up against the cartel and they castrated and murdered him in his church. Things like that don't happen in the USA because cops normally act correctly,by the laws written in the constitution. However, I believe when a cop acts outside of the laws he should face double or triple the consequences.
caveman4.20
- Posts
- 5,969
- Reactions
- 9,125
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2012
- Points
- 313
Out of curiosity I wonder how LEO s treat other straight edge or by the book cops....especially when they don't want to play ball when they need a "favor"
diamond2.0
- Posts
- 1,148
- Reactions
- 1,851
- Joined
- Jul 27, 2011
- Points
- 163
I dont automatically respect cops. They have to earn it !
Welcome to the third world...
Welcome to the third world...
Last edited:
caveman4.20
- Posts
- 5,969
- Reactions
- 9,125
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2012
- Points
- 313
Great postWhy It’s Near Impossible to Indict a Cop
Here’s how the system protects police
How to police the police is a question as old as civilization, now given special urgency by a St. Louis County grand jury’s return of a “no bill” of indictment for Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson in his fatal shooting of an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown. The result is shocking to many, depressingly predictable to more than a few.
Can the cops be controlled? It’s never been easy: according to one old sociological chestnut, the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence is what defines modern government, and this monopoly is jealously protected against the second-guessing of puny civilians. All over the country, the issue of restraining police power is framed around the retribution against individual cops, from Staten Island to Milwaukee to Los Angeles. But is this the best way to impose discipline on law enforcement and roll back what even Republican appellate court appointees arecalling rampant criminalization?
Police shootings in America
First, the big picture. Last year, the FBI tallied 461 “justifiable homicides” committed by law enforcement—justifiable because the Bureau assumes so, and the nation’s courts have not found otherwise. This is the highest number in two decades, even as the nation’s overall homicide rate continues to drop. Homicides committed by on-duty law enforcement make up 3 percent of the 14,196 homicides committed in the United States in 2013. A USA Today analysisof the FBI database found an average of about ninety-six police homicides a year in which a white officer kills a black person.
The FBI’s police homicide stats are fuzzy, and they are surely an undercount, given that they come from voluntary reports to the FBI from police departments all over the country. That the federal government does not keep a strict national tally shows just how seriously it takes this problem. A crowdsourced database has sprung up to fill the gap, as has a wiki-tabulation.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about these police killings, many of them of unarmed victims, is that our courts find them perfectly legal.
SCOTUS and the license to kill
Chapter 563 of the Missouri Revised Statutes grants a lot of discretion to officers of the law to wield deadly force, to the horror of many observers swooping in to the Ferguson story. The statute authorizes deadly force “in effecting an arrest or in preventing an escape from custody” if the officer “reasonably believes” it is necessary in order to “to effect the arrest and also reasonably believes that the person to be arrested has committed or attempted to commit a felony…or may otherwise endanger life or inflict serious physical injury unless arrested without delay.”
But this law is not an outlier, and is fully in sync with Supreme Court jurisprudence. The legal standard authorizing deadly force is something called “objective reasonableness.”
This standard originates in the 1985 case of Tennessee v. Garner, which appeared at first to tighten restrictions on the police use of deadly force. The case involved a Memphis cop, Elton Hymon, who shot dead one Edward Garner: 15 years old, black and unarmed. Garner had just burgled a house, grabbing a ring and ten bucks. The US Supreme Court ruled that a police officer, henceforth, could use deadly force only if he “has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” The ruling required that the use of force be “objectively reasonable.” How this reasonableness should be determined was established in a 1989 case, Graham v. Connor: severity of the crime, whether the suspect is resisting or trying to escape and above all, whether the suspect posed an immediate threat to the safety of officers or others. All this appeared to restrict police violence—even if, in the end, Officer Hymon was never criminally charged for fatally shooting Edward Garner.
“Objectively reasonable”—what could be wrong with that? But in actual courtroom practice, “objective reasonableness” has become nearly impossible to tell apart from the subjective snap judgments of panic-fueled police officers. American courts universally defer to the law enforcement officer’s own personal assessment of the threat at the time.
The Graham analysis essentially prohibits any second-guessing of the officer’s decision to use deadly force: no hindsight is permitted, and wide latitude is granted to the officer’s account of the situation, even if scientific evidence proves it to be mistaken. Such was the case of Berkeley, Missouri, police officers Robert Piekutowski and Keith Kierzkowski, who in 2000 fatally shot Earl Murray and Ronald Beasley out of fear that the victims’ car was rolling towards them. Forensic investigations established that the car had not in fact lurched towards the officers at the time of the shooting—but this was still not enough for the St. Louis County grand jury to indict the two cops of anything.
Not surprisingly then, legal experts find that “there is built-in leeway for police, and the very breadth of this leeway is why criminal charges against police are so rare,” says Walter Katz, a police oversight lawyer who served on the Los Angeles County Office of Independent Review until it disbanded in July of this year. According to Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Irvine Law School, recent Supreme Court decisions are not a path towards justice but rather a series ofobstacles to holding police accountable for civil rights violations.
An officer’s personal threat assessment is often bolstered by the fact that there are between 270 million and 310 million guns in the United States. Take a grand jury’s failure to indict the police officers who fatally shot John Crawford III, the black man holding a BB gun in a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio. In a country where shooting sprees are a regular occurrence, where guns are widely available at Walmart and where fake guns that look very similar to real guns are sold in the same store, the police officers’ fears were deemed reasonable enough for the grand jury to find no probable cause of criminal wrongdoing. That is how the Supreme Court police violence jurisprudence works, and it was firmly on the side of officer Sean Williams, just as it has now been found to be on Darren Wilson’s. Given the deference and latitude hardwired into the law, “there is just an underlying assumption that the officer did not engage in criminal activity,” says Katz.
The first step to controlling the police is to get rid of the fantasy, once and for all, that the law is on our side. The law is firmly on the side of police who open fire on unarmed civilians.
The sick joke of self-regulation
The lethal use of police force typically sets off an internal police investigation to determine if departmental regulations were violated. The regs and the law are not the same thing. Case in point: the chokehold that NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo used to strangle Eric Garner, suspected of selling loose cigarettes, on Staten Island last July. (The grand jury bill on that case has still not been decided.) The chokehold is not prohibited by law, but it is by departmental rules. The violation might earn a departmental censure of some kind, from loss of vacation days to getting fired, but they tend to be radically mild, when not nonexistent.
What about internal affairs investigations? On television they are aggressive, dogged, uncompromising. In real life they tend to insulate the police from serious external sanction. “I stopped cooperating with the IAB ten years ago,” says Jason Leventhal, a former assistant district attorney in Richmond County, Staten Island who now works as a civil rights litigator, often suing the police. “IA will never, ever credit the claim of police abuse. They hide witnesses, they push witnesses around. The only time I cooperate with them is when I know I have their hands tied behind their back.”
Are there any effective civilian oversight systems at any major police department in the US? Nobody I interviewed for this article could name one. New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board occasionally docks vacation days from police officers but the board has no real teeth. Even staffers at the New York Civil Liberties Union have candidly told me that it’s more or less worthless. “I don’t have any faith in the CCRB or the Internal Affairs Bureau or any other internal mechanism,” says Ron Kuby, a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer in New York. Civilian complaints rarely even get in the way of an individual officer’s career. In New York, CCRB complaints don’t even go in a police officer’s file, says Kuby. “The PBA just says that the more aggressive officers will get excessive force complaints.”
Firing a police officer with a record of abusive behavior (or worse) is often extremely difficult and can carry a heavy political cost. Patrolmen Benevolent Associations, which have escaped the kind of resentment directed at other public-sector unions, tend to be powerful players in local politics able to inflict pain on any politico who would cross them. (Remember when Sarah Palin struggled to fire a state trooper and ex-brother-in-law who had allegedly acted like a thug towards her sister?)
The reality is, it is extremely difficult to get law enforcement to police itself, and self-regulation is here, just as it is in poultry processing or coal mining, a sick joke.
Civil suits
Civil suits for monetary damages require a lower standard of proof than criminal cases, but these suits are not a slam-dunk for victims of cop violence, either. The same jurisprudence that grants wide leeway to law enforcement still holds. Last March, one victim’s family lost a federal civil suit for wrongful death and civil rights violations brought against police officer Nicholas Bennallack for fatally shooting a fleeing and unarmed drug suspect. The jury believed the cop’s claim that he opened fire out of fear for his life.
What about all the times when excessive force suits get settled out of court? It turns out that massive payouts don’t deter police misconduct for one straightforward reason: neither individual officers nor police departments are responsible for coughing up the cash. The union covers the officer’s lawyer, and research from Joanna Schwartz of UCLA Law School found that governments, not individual officers, paid out 99.98 percent of the damages. Settlements and damages aren’t paid by the police department, whose budget will waltz by untouched, but typically out of the general municipal budget.
Kuby maintains that civil remedies will always fall short and thinks only criminal prosecution has a prayer of changing police behavior. “Prosecution works well with people who are not fundamentally criminal and have enough stake in the system to respond! Any response below that is an insult.” But he admits that the political will to make the criminal justice system restrain and regulate its own members and enforcers is consistently lacking—and has been as long as he’s been practicing law.
Don’t make a federal case out of it.
Occasionally the federal Department of Justice intervenes to prosecute individual cops for depriving a victim of his or her civil rights. If a state-level prosecution fails to secure a conviction, this can give the government a second chance to prosecute on different charges. Rodney King’s LAPD assailants were convicted in 1993 in just this way.
But the feds, like other prosecutors, only like to take on cases they can win, says Alan Vinegrad, who was part of the federal attorneys that prosecuted the NYPD officer who in 1997 sexually tortured Abner Louima with a broken-off broom handle. “In the Louima case it was painfully obvious that the use of force was extreme and willful,” says Vinegrad. “But in other cases, if the officer is acting more in the line of duty, a federal civil rights violation is a tougher thing to show.”
Will the Obama DOJ take on the Michael Brown case? It doesn’t look like it. Eyewitness testimony is conflicting, and so far the multiple forensic reports that have come out are not inconsistent with Darren Wilson’s version of the shooting—which would make the federal standard of willful misconduct difficult to prove. The Obama DOJ has signaled with leaks that it isbacking away from a federal case against the officer.
Far more useful are the DOJ Civil Rights Division’s root-and-branch interventions into violently dysfunctional police forces, triggered by “patterns and practices” of systematic rights violations rather than any one particular incident. For instance, the DOJ just launched a major effort to reorganize and reshape the police department of Albuquerque, reforming its trainings, protocols and appallingly trigger-happy habits. (The Albuquerque police have shot thirty-seven people in the past four years, twenty-three of them fatally.) This is a well-established tool of the federal government: other police departments under took overwholesale the Oakland police department in 2012. But note that these federal interventions do not entail punishments, civil or criminal, of individual police officers.
In the unusual instances when a law enforcement officer is convicted, the penalties tend to be remarkably light. Johannes Mehserle, the Bay Area Rapid Transit officer who shot the unarmed Oscar Grant III dead on New Year’s Day, 2009, served eleven months of a two-year sentence for involuntary manslaughter. Then there is Jon Burge, the Chicago police detective who led the torture of over 100 (mostly black) suspects, released last month after serving four and a half years in custody. (The statute of limitations had passed for the more serious offenses.) Burge still collects a $54,000 departmental pension.
Such Scandinavian-style lenity is quite different from the mind-numbing severity of sentences inflicted on non-cops. Consider the sixty years that potentially face Marissa Alexander for firing a warning shot at an abusive ex. Or the life sentences without possibility of parole that more than 3,000 Americans are serving for nonviolent crimes.
Video
Some observers see hope for police reform in the ubiquity of smartphone video recorders. It’s true that the ever-growing supply of police misconduct videos fuels the anger needed to sustain reform efforts, and even occasionally leads to police officers being disciplined or prosecuted. Examples include NYPD officers David Afanador and Tyrane Isaac, caught on camera pistol-whipping a teenage suspect last August, or South Carolina state trooper Sean Groubert who in September opened fire on a motorist heading into his truck to retrieve his driver’s license. Jason Leventhal told me he expects an indictment of the Staten Island police officer who strangled Eric Garner because the video evidence, caught on a cellphone, was so brutal. It would certainly be a good thing if police departments invested less in military gear like M-RAP armored vehicles and more in dashcams and GoPro cameras; with the right department protocols and practices, these cameras strengthen police accountability.
But just as often these videos end up illustrating just how much leeway police have in opening fire on a suspect. Take the police shooting of St. Louis resident Kajieme Powell, a mentally ill man allegedly holding a knife, a fatal shooting arguably less defensible than the Michael Brown shooting ten days before, and caught on a cell-phone video. Or, again, John Crawford III, whoseslaying by police officers was caught on the Walmart security cameras. Or the July, 2012 video of eight members of the Saginaw, Michigan, police department, six of them firing forty-six shots at Milton Hall, a mentally ill homeless man, hitting him eleven times, after he took out a pocket knife when a police dog started to lunge at him. Although the latter horrific video picked up a fresh wave of publicity when screened at a hearing of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, DC, last month, such videos cannot undo the legally enshrined deference to the subjective feelings of police officers when they reach for their weapons. No criminal charges were even attempted by state prosecutors in any of these cases; the DOJ has announced it is looking into the Crawford shooting, but declined to prosecute in the other two.
(A note on the IACHR and other international forums: bringing these cases of police shootings to them is a canny way to generate publicity and raise consciousness, but no one should ever imagine for even a second that such bodies will ever wield any actual power in American courts.)
There really is no courtroom miracle or lawsuit solution, no matter how clever the litigator, no matter how deep-dish the foundation grant, that is going to discipline the police and break them of their trigger-happy habits.
Thinking big
Police shootings are only one function of living in one of the most heavily policed societies in the world. Any movement to roll back this creeping overcriminalization is going to have to look beyond criminal prosecutions of individual police and take in the big picture.
The militarized police response to the mostly nonviolent demonstrations in Ferguson andelsewhere has appalled not only progressives but many conservatives as well. The army’s provision of of weapons surplus, from MRAPs to tanks, to local police departments under the federal 1033 Program, ought to be easy to end. But departments are reluctant to give back new toys, and majorities of both the congressional Progressive Caucus and the Black Caucus votedagainst a bill that would have stopped the disbursement of some military goodies to local police departments. Gun control advocates would do well to lobby hard and publicly for arms control measures applied to the police as well—undisciplined but up-armored cops are part of what that drives many otherwise sane private citizens to build private armories.
Wanton overpolicing had poisoned relations between the people and their government well before Darren Wilson shot dead Michael Brown. Less mediagenic than police militarization and far more insidious is law enforcement’s daily harassment of citizens for petty offenses. The local government in Ferguson has been treating its residents and neighbors less like free people with rights than like revenue milk-cows to be exploited to the max. Citations and fines for petty offenses are profligately inflicted on residents, particularly black residents. According to a blockbuster report issued by St. Louis’s ArchCity Defenders advocacy group, over 20 percent of city revenue comes from municipal courts (making them the city’s second-largest source of revenue), which issued enough warrants last year to slap three warrants, $312 worth, on every household in the town.
Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!
Not surprisingly, high on the list of demands issues at one Ferguson community forum was an end to the “overpolicing and criminalization of poverty,” an amnesty for old unpaid warrants, new fines proportioned to income and a state law capping municipal revenue from court fees at 10 percent. (Terrified by the Ferguson unrest, the city of St. Louis decided to eliminate 220,000 open arrest warrants for traffic violations last month.) The feeling of being under occupation by an armed force that cares more about meeting revenue quotas than public security corrodes all trust in law enforcement, and is the sort of environment in which police are more likely to open fire.
The state of emergency that Missouri governor Jay Nixon declared on November 17 seems all too likely to encourage the police overkill, both petty and heavily militarized, that shocked the world over the summer, when much of the state’s use of force against demonstrators was of dubious legality.
New policing models like the problem-solving approach developed by David M. Kennedy and others have focused law enforcement and social work resources on a city’s small number of known and likely violent gang members, leaving the rest of the community in relative peace. This approach has won demonstrable results in Boston and Cincinnati without intrusive “broken windows” policing or the wholesale stop-and-frisk harassment of black and Latino youth. Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College, writes in his memoir, Don’t Shoot, that this type of community policing doesn’t fix the entire economy, but it does reduce homicide—including police homicide—and at least create social peace.
Police demilitarization, the decriminalization of working-class people, new policing models: these are all projects that could work in Ferguson and thousands of other American cities. Although none of these large-scale ideas is explicitly race-conscious, they would most likely tighten the severe racial disparities in policing violence that exist all over the country, more so than pouring more money into racial sensitivity training for cops. (Changing residency requirements of municipal police officers to get a more ethnically representative force might help a little, though research shows that such requirements correlate with less confidence in the police, not more.)
These big-picture reforms are fundamentally political solutions that will require long-term effort, coalition politics that spans race, ethnicity and political affiliation—a challenge, but also a necessity. As police and prosecutors assume more and more power in the United States—regulating immigration (formerly a matter of administrative law), meting out school discipline, and other spheres of everyday life where criminal law was almost unknown even a generation ago—getting law enforcement on a tight leash is a national imperative. In the meantime, the constantstream of news reports of unarmed, mostly black and Latino civilians killed by police demands bigger, bolder approaches. They are the only available paths to getting the police under control.
http://www.thenation.com/article/190937/why-its-impossible-indict-cop#
caveman4.20
- Posts
- 5,969
- Reactions
- 9,125
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2012
- Points
- 313
Perfect response post, thanks for sharing
caveman4.20
- Posts
- 5,969
- Reactions
- 9,125
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2012
- Points
- 313
caveman4.20
- Posts
- 5,969
- Reactions
- 9,125
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2012
- Points
- 313
Anonymous- #OpAnonVerdict. Justice is Coming...:
caveman4.20
- Posts
- 5,969
- Reactions
- 9,125
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2012
- Points
- 313
ANONYMOUS - EMERGENCY ALERT! THE BILL OF RIGHTS H…:
caveman4.20
- Posts
- 5,969
- Reactions
- 9,125
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2012
- Points
- 313
Anonymous Message To The Whole World:
caveman4.20
- Posts
- 5,969
- Reactions
- 9,125
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2012
- Points
- 313
Anonymous: A Message to Humanity:
caveman4.20
- Posts
- 5,969
- Reactions
- 9,125
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2012
- Points
- 313
New Message From Anonymous To Everyone!:
caveman4.20
- Posts
- 5,969
- Reactions
- 9,125
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2012
- Points
- 313
Scary New Message from Anonymous!:
diamond2.0
- Posts
- 1,148
- Reactions
- 1,851
- Joined
- Jul 27, 2011
- Points
- 163
Thats a good question Caveman ! Google it . lol. I would say not very after all ive seen. This is the age of 1984 , thought crimes rule the day it seams ..How secure is that ? Certainly doesnt make me feel safe ! When i first started speaking my mind on government i notice this sheriff pull up to my house one day. I had just become a mmj patient to i think , Coincedance ? It looked like nobody home . no car . I'm watching him out my kitchen window with blinds down so i cant be seen sitting at computor with my dog on lap. So , sheriff goes to the side of my house were im sitting in the kicthen . Theres a side door to the kitchen. just that fast he turned my door handle , luckily it was locked. Just smoked up too. I tell ya , i bolted up with dog in hand and went out the front door to meet this little aspartame cowboy. He notices someone is home now and starts walking fast to his car and is midway when i catch him. I ask him , "why are you here trying to get in my house " ? He says " got a burglury call " . Hes hightailing it to his car rather than talk with me. I yelled at him it " sure wasnt me " as i stand in my palamas hwich i lived in .. He closed door and drove off. Maybe i should have unlocked the side door wait for him to enter and blast his fucking ass ! Safety work both ways !
This comes to mind
Read the discription .
The answer is evident ! 'citizen "
Last edited:
- Status
Page 14 of 22
·
Replies 261–280 of 434