(MintPress) – In major cities throughout America, the call to keep the streets safe has repeatedly come at the expense of the civil liberties of the citizens the police swore to protect. From New York City to Chicago to Los Angeles, the call to reduce violent and drug crimes have created a backlog of civil suits, calls against police brutality and harassment and accusations of blatant police misconduct. More dauntingly, the public has grown to distrust their protectors. A recent piece from the Madison, Wis. Cap Times suggests the onset of apathy toward police work in an area most consider removed from inner-city violence.
In Part One of this series, it was argued that the police are moral agents responsible for their actions while serving the badge. This begs a very important question: If the police are moral agents, what devices are available to check police moralities not in line to the norms of the society? What can be done in light of police harassment? How about if a police officer breaks the law; can we count on the police to police themselves?
Part One of this special report on the moral obligations of police officers can be found here.
Policing the police
In the early part of this year, a California website ran a discussion with the topic “Ask a Cop.” An email participant posed a question, “I would like to know how it is possible for police officers to continually harass people and get away with it?” A police officer with a slanted sense of humor and some time on his hand answered,
“It is not easy. In California we average one cop for every 2,000 people. About 60% of those cops are on patrol, where we do most of the harassing. One-fifth of that 60% are on duty at any given moment and are available for harassing people. So, one cop is responsible for harassing about 10,000 residents. When you toss in the commercial, business and tourist locations that attract people from other areas, sometimes you have a situation where a single cop is responsible for harassing 20,000 or more people each day.
A ten-hour shift runs 36,000 seconds. This gives a cop one second to harass a person, and three-fourths of a second to eat a donut AND then find a new person to harass. This is not an easy task. Most cops are not up to it, day in and day out. It is just too tiring. What we do is utilize some tools to help us narrow down those people which we harass. They are as follows:
PHONE:
People will call us up and point out things that cause us to focus on a person for special harassment. “My neighbor is beating his wife” is a code phrase we use. Then we come out and give special harassment. Another popular one on a weeknight is, “The kids next door are having a loud party.”
CARS:
We have special cops assigned to harass people who drive. They like to harass the drivers of fast cars, cars blasting music, cars with expired registration stickers and the like. It is lots of fun when you pick them out of traffic for nothing more obvious than running a red light. Sometimes you get to really heap the harassment on when you find they have drugs in the car, are driving drunk, or they have an outstanding warrant.
RUNNERS:
Some people take off running just at the sight of a police officer. Nothing is quite as satisfying as running after them like a beagle on the scent of a bunny. When you catch them you can harass them for hours.
CODES:
When you can think of nothing else to do, there are books that give ideas for reasons to harass folks. They are called “Codes” Penal, Vehicle, Health and Safety, Business and Professional Codes, to name a few. They spell out all sorts of things for which you can really mess with people.
After you read the code, you can just drive around for a while until you find someone violating one of these listed offenses and harass them. Just last week I saw a guy smash a car window. Well, the code says that is not allowed. That meant I got permission to harass this guy. It is a pretty cool system that we have set up, and it works pretty well.
We seem to have a never-ending supply of folks to harass. And we get away with it. Why? Because the good citizens who pay the tab actually like the fact that we keep the streets safe for them. Next time you are in my town, give me a single finger wave. That will be a signal that you wish for me to take a little closer look at you, and then maybe I’ll find a reason to harass YOU.
Looking forward to meeting you!”
Unfortunately, police harassment is rarely a laughing matter. For five years, police officers in Rowlett, Texas allegedly harassed and bullied the political rival to the mayor due to his stance on state civil protections, going so far as to arrest his mentally-disabled son. Early this year, the police chief of East Haven, Conn. stepped down on speculations that his department intimidated and harassed Latino residents. Mayors and even governors used the police to disrupt Occupy protests across the nation. (Of note: the Albany police defied Gov. Cuomo’s request to clear a municipal park used by the Occupy protestors that was adjoining a state park.)
But, for Latinos and blacks, police harassment is a way of life. In New York City under the “stop-and-frisk” program, over 90 percent of those who are stopped are either Latino or black; this meets the classical definition of a racial bias. However, there seems to be no real recourse to address this; with both the mayor and the civilian head of the police force supporting the policy, there are few avenues available for the public to go to question this concern.
According to an article on the Raw Story, police officers are speaking out against “stop-and-frisk”; when used within the police officer’s discretion, “stop-and-frisk” could be a positive policing tool. However, it is believed that upper management is imposing “stop-and-frisk” quotas on street officers, making the practice arbitrary and abusive. Albert O’Leary, spokesman for the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, said, “The problem is for our officers when they’re working in a community, the community they’ve sworn to protect.” He added, “You’re turning the community against us. You become an occupying force.”
The NYPD has denied the use of quotas.
Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), told Raw Story, “What is needed is systemic overhaul for policing in communities of color, particularly of stop-and-frisk.” Mayor Michael Bloomberg and police commissioner Ray Kelly has both defended the policy on the basis that the murder rate dropped by nearly 50 percent this decade over the previous one. This is a false collation, as argued by Forbes and the New York Times; the drop in the murder rate occurred before the spike in “stop-and-frisk” stops in 2002. More to the point, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne has argued that an “illegal gun taken from someone’s hip was likely a gun used to rob, wound or kill someone” and, “Surging resources to where violent crime occurs has continued to drive murder numbers down.”
In response to heavy public pressure, the NYPD reduced the number of “stop-and-frisk” stops in the second quarter of this year. The New York Times reported, “The Police Department conducted 203,500 stops in the first quarter, a record number. But in the second quarter, April, May and June, the police stopped 133,934 people, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said.” This is despite a record low number of homicides and violent crimes for the second quarter.
New York City Councilman Jumaane Williams, who proposed the Community Safety Act — which would increase police accountability — said in a statement:
“Mayor Bloomberg has publicly admitted that the use of stop, question and frisk has no correlation with the murder rate, and under direct questioning his personal counsel could not confirm the nature of its relationship with the decrease in homicides. The connection to gun violence is also tenuous at best, considering the historical rise under this administration of stop, question and frisks along with the relatively unchanged number of shootings; this causal link is further weakened by the news that as stop, question and frisks have declined this year, the number of New Yorkers being shot has went down rather than up. “
An NYCLU report reveals that “a weapon was found in only 1.8 percent of blacks and Latinos frisked, as compared to a weapon being found in 3.8 percent of whites frisked.”
As reported by the NYCLU, Commissioner Kelly said this about “stop-and-frisk”: “[Stop-and-frisk] is a program that is effective … you used to not be able to walk down the streets of this city safely and today you can walk every neighborhood during the day and most neighborhoods at night.” This directly contradicts his statement issued in 2000: “[A] large reservoir of good will was under construction when I left the Police Department in 1994. It was called community policing. But it was quickly abandoned for tough-sounding rhetoric and dubious stop-and-frisk tactics that sowed new seeds of community mistrust.”
The NYPD has used “stop-and-frisk” as a suppression tactics in other ways. In March, Attorney General Eric Holder reviewed the suspect surveillance practices the NYPD was using against Muslims, which included “stop-and-frisk.” The review showed excessive use of surveillance, particularly in 2007, when the police force photographed and gathered intelligence on mosque worshippers and restaurant patrons as far out of their jurisdiction as Newark, N.J. This is a clear violation of the federal court order that bars New York City from collecting information involving political activities that is not related to “unlawful or terrorist activity.”
So, where does this leave the police officer who wishes to speak out against all of this? As Tod Burke, a professor of criminal justice and the associate dean for the College of Humanities and Behavioral Sciences at Radford University, told MintPress, that depends on the organization. A healthy, responsive law enforcement agency would have well-established avenues of communication and would support whistleblowing and anonymous reporting as a way to improve the department. However, in a department where challenges to the prescribed order are resisted, or where there is a healthy amount of corruption taking place, whistleblowers could endanger their livelihoods by speaking out. Whistleblowers could be ostracized, threatened, removed from field work or given less prestigious beats and/or discriminated in performance reports and promotion opportunities. Fellow officers could bully or shy away from whistleblowers, or worse, fail to protect or shield the whistleblower in a dangerous field operation.
The concept that the police will protect itself from all threats — internal and external — through silence, covering up evidence, brutality and bullying, and/or lawlessness is known as “the code of silence.” While almost every professional industry has some form of internal mechanism to defend itself from slander, in policing it seems to be exaggerated and disastrous in its results. Earlier this month, a Chicago jury ruled that the city’s police force knowingly suppressed evidence in the case of the 2007 beating of a female bartender by an off-duty police officer. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel promised that anyone in the Chicago Police department who perpetuated a code of silence would face consequences, while, at the same time, the city’s law department promised an appeal of the $850,000 judgment.
During the aftermath of the insult, the superintendent of police resigned amid allegations the police dragged its feet in this investigation, the Internal Affairs head’s recommendation for a tougher sentence on the accused officer was downplayed (the officer ended up with probation) and evidence was suppressed to the point that officers contradicted each other in sworn testimony.
The public also may have difficulties responding. Every department has some type of public outreach available for civilian reporting, have it be as simple as requesting to speak to the officer’s supervisor to as complex as addressing the local Citizens Review Board. However, in a highly polarized situation, even this may not be adequate. The NYPD is expected to have more than 400 lawsuits filed against them for “stop-and-frisk” in 2012 alone and has budgeted $180 million for settlements for fiscal year 2013, according to the New York World and as reported in the Gothamist. The NYPD expects their settlement payout for 2012 to be at least $154 million. Per capita annually for tort cases, the LAPD pays $14. The NYPD pays $81. Despite the fiscal drain and multiple federal citations for violating court orders and federal policy, New York City is showing no signs of admitting to having a bad policy in “stop-and-frisk.”
In New York City, the people have moved away from the politically compromised Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) toward addressing their concerns in the courts. This shows a complete breakdown of the system; a complete lack of public trust and support, which is essential for effective community-based policing. The district attorney of Bronx County, N.Y. has stopped accepting “stop-and-frisk” arrests in his district that came from the city’s “Clean Halls” program — an operation that allows the police to “stop-and-frisk” suspects inside their respective apartment complexes. Arrests now made in the Bronx for “stop-and-frisk” require the arresting officer to be interviewed by the DA’s office.
New York City has created a police state through its aggressive actions, and the way back to sanity will be long, painful and expensive.
Where do we go from here?
In the United Nations’ Office on Drugs and Crime’s “Handbook on police accountability, oversight and integrity,” the book offers this on the balance of police authority,
“The operational independence of the police leadership filters down to rank-and-file officers, where it takes the form of discretion (or discretionary powers). While on duty, a police officer typically has discretionary power in deciding which deviant behaviour to act on (obviously, acting within the bounds established in national law and policy).
Exercising some discretion is at the very heart of policing: not every offence is worthy of police action nor is police action always the best solution to a problem.9 Additionally, police officers typically have some room for manoeuvre when using police powers, with the authority to make decisions on such matters as how much force to use and on whether to carry out arrests or searches.
Operational independence requires police:
- To have a high degree of professionalism and independence from political influences
- To act in conformity with the law and established policies
- To operate on the basis of public consent (within the framework of the law), as evidenced by levels of public confidence
- To take responsibility for their decisions and operations, accepting liability when required, and to exhibit full transparency in decisions and openness to external scrutiny.
In other words, good policing is policing that is both effective and fair. Police who are ineffective, or illegitimate or unfair, in protecting the public against crime will lose the public’s confidence. Good policing is policing with legitimacy on the basis of public consent, rather than repression.”
In fighting police harassment litigiously, several shortcomings of the current legal system becomes apparent. Most states have restrictions on the type of tort cases that can be brought against public employees and the amount of damages that can be sought. The police officer may also have sovereign immunity (a nation cannot commit a legal wrong in the administration of its own management, according to sovereign immunity, unless the nation waives its right to protection; how this principle is carried out with states and municipalities is a continuing debate), and may be judgment-proof as a result. Civil rights cases brought before the federal government are notoriously hard to win, and only the most egregious cases ever reach settlement or decision.
Ultimately, the greatest weapon the people have in fixing the police is to be involved. “Stop-and-frisk” has been used by the NYPD for more than 10 years and has been a part of its operational guidelines since Terry v. Ohio — which declared street frisks not a violation of the Fourth Amendment prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures — was decided in 1968. However, public pressure from recent discussions, video tapings, media coverage and whistleblowing has solicited a response from city hall — even if it is a defensive reply.
This brings us back to the cop on the beat. No one expects a person to jeopardize his or his family’s livelihood, but if the cops will not stand up for what’s right, who will? In the end, ultimate responsibility for the actions police officers take lie on the shoulders of the police officers undertaking the actions. “I was just following orders” has been used to justify complacency in many of the greatest tragedies in history and can be construed the cry of the coward. We expect our police officers to be leaders, and true leadership entails the courage to do what’s right over what’s expected. It’s time to hold the police responsible, not only for the laws and orders they violated, but also for the laws and orders they enforced.
In community-based policing, if the officer is perceived as a non-caring force whose attitude is “I’m just doing my job,” the officer is as much a drag on the community as the vandals who smash out windows in the Broken Windows Paradox. An officer that does not care for the community he polices is a threat to the health and vitality of that community.
It’s time for accountability.