Police abuse and citizens

[MinDonner]

Honestly, I don't think it's helpful for non-Americans to be passing comment on the nuances of American English; we'd be pretty pissed off if the situation was reversed.

[Sturn]

What in their analysis was wrong? A link to a definition was even given. Please share the dictionary link for civilian being described solely as a non-combatant. Here's the top Google results of searching "civilian definition". I can find all of these by Googling while outside the US also:

A person following the pursuits of civil life, especially one who is not an active member of the military, the police, or a belligerent group.

A person following the pursuits of civil life, especially one who is not an active member of the military, the police, or a belligerent group.

a person who is not on active duty with a military, naval, police, or fire fighting organization.

a person not in the armed services or the police force.

A couple of the links even had this definition included:

anyone regarded by members of a profession, interest group, society, etc., as not belonging; nonprofessional; outsider: We need a producer to run the movie studio, not some civilian from the business world.

informal a person who is not a member of a particular profession or group, as viewed by a member of that group:I talk to a lot of actresses and they say that civilians are scared of them

So it's not just the police and armed forces that can and apparently do use the term civilian for people not of their profession. Are producers and actresses also meaning "non-combatant" because they believe they are at war with those outside their profession?

[Merentha]

Witness would be my preference, if that's the context, or person, but I'm also the person who gets obscenely irritated that there's a push to call "patients" "clients" now, as if the provider-client relationship will somehow result in better care. Outpatient mental health? Go nuts, client is appropriate. Inpatient critical care unit? Fuck you, don't act like calling them clients and making a business relationship somehow makes this better for anyone.

edit: vvvv Specific actions come back pretty quick, we're still going off what the first post of the thread was. Starting the new thread kind of gives you the opportunity to set the tone for the first few pages.

[Brandon Stark]

Back when we were discussing specific instances, whether they qualified as negligence or criminal activity, and how to prevent such events - accidental and intentional - from happening, I felt like participating in the thread was somewhat useful. Now that it's degraded into being told who I am, what I think, and the opinions I hold by a person I've never even met (with an admitted strong personal bias toward police officers for a variety of reasons), I don't feel that way anymore.

I guess the only real question is when I turned into this hate- and oppression-filled pumpkin, since I remember being a pretty nice guy when I was an English teacher before I became an officer.

[awesome possum]

Well this is encouraging, after a fashion: Texas cop arrested for assaulting/arresting a woman who was walking down the street

According to the arrest affidavit, Palermo stopped a Toyota Prius shortly after 1:00 a.m. for driving the wrong way on a one-way street and began questioning the driver.

A pedestrian walking by was called over by Palermo and asked why she was walking by his traffic stop. He then asked for the woman’s identification.

When the woman insisted she had done nothing wrong Palermo slammed her against the Prius; then onto the concrete driveway near his patrol car.

Palermo arrested the woman for obstruction. After his supervisors reviewed his report and talked to the pedestrian she was released.

Upon further investigation supervisors found the woman had lost two teeth and suffered a concussion during the illegal arrest.

Palermo was arrested for aggravated assault by a public servant. The woman is currently being treated for her injuries and could require further surgery, according to the affidavit.

And the "after a fashion" part:

Palermo has been on paid administrative leave since June 10

Maybe Sturn can clear this up: is there something in the rules/law/contract/whatever that states a cop must still be paid despite being taken off the job for poor performance/committing a crime?

[Lord O' Bones]

What exactly do you wish me to be more specific on? I will try to cover everything below.

The specific training. I appreciate your response, but you are almost entirely agreeing with me without providing more information. More information would be helpful to me and potentially others reading this thread.

But I will address these comments particularly:

"I don't recall a priority list from my MP days."

We didn't have one either. All was equally important. I was only commenting on my perception from before after, and during.

"Training. My comments are dated from 20 years ago. Perhaps things have changed. I actual recall after becoming a civilian cop that I wanted to go back to my old MP units and give them actual, good, training that could someday save an MP's life. That was how large the difference in law enforcement training was. To be fair, an MP did not train only for law enforcement. Half of the time I was training for combat situations."

And this is exactly what SImon is talking about. This attitude is seeping into our peace force when it should remain solely in our war force. I agree with you that this might be paranoid thinking, but it is becoming the prevalent thinking of the populace. Acknowledged by you or not.

I have never met a police officer that was not former miltary.

Today, I think it is even rare to see an MP doing law enforcement so it's probably even worse. But, today's MPs probably aren't doing much law enforcement, if any. As a personal example, as an MP I went to the range once a YEAR and got to shoot 50 rounds out of my service handgun to qualify. That was it. 50 rounds per year. That is ridiculous and dangerous compared to civilian police training.

That is ridiculous. As a Sailor I fired off 150 rounds of 9mm or .45 plus 50 rounds through an M-14 and combat loading and firing a Mossberg 12. At minimum.

eta: anually

[Sturn]

And this is exactly what SImon is talking about. This attitude is seeping into our peace force when it should remain solely in our war force. I agree with you that this might be paranoid thinking, but it is becoming the prevalent thinking of the populace. Acknowledged by you or not.

I'm not sure how me speaking about my MP training relates to your paragraph above. Honestly. You later added, "I have never met a police officer that was not former miltary". Are you saying that since many cops have prior military training, the military mindset is creaping into civilian police? Others above spoke of how respect for civilians was being taught to the military, so that's kind of counter to what you might be saying. I agree that a person with prior military experience will have a tendency, perhaps for years, to have a mission-target-solution mindset. At the same time, they will be a more disciplined cop.

An unscienfitic guess, but I think about half of my department has military experience. Some are actually in the National Guard and Reserves. That could obviously cause issues if you aren't able to switch between the two roles easily and frequently.

Training again trying to be more specific:

Academy: Civilian version was months. Excellent hands on and classroom training on a full range of subjects. Role-playing, subject matter experts teaching classes, hands on patrol, driving, shooting courses. MP police academy was only a small portion (2 weeks?) of my MP training. Law training was being shown a copy of the Uniform Code of Military Justice with no classes on what was actually inside of it. Seriously. It's this huge book, you'll learn more when you get to your first unit. I heard that phrase alot.

Newbie Training (after academy): In civilian law enforcement, this varies but my example is around 6 months with a Field Training Officer. You are shown everything imagineable and learn in the field with a senior officer directing and teaching you. There is documentation to ensure you are taught everything you should be taught. You are tested. You are evaluated. As an MP I rode along with an experienced MP....for one week. No testing. No real training, just here's how this radar thingy works, here's the evidence locker, etc. I still hadn't been taught any laws. You bascially had to learn by experience and ask questions along the way. Nothing formal at all. It could obviously have varied from unit to unit, but that was par for the ones I visited.

Continuing Education. As a civilian, yearly State documented requirement to keep your badge. Mandatory training in certain subjects. Both in-house and external training throughout the year. As an MP I recall a week of formal law enforcement training once in my 5 years. Every once in a while you would pick up something police related, typically first aid, when you were on a training cycle. The only mandated yearly training I recall was shooting 50 rounds out of my M9 at the range.

Hopefully MP law enforcement training has changed, but I doubt it. From my understanding modern MPs are doing less and less law enforcement. It's being contracted out while MPs are deployed for combat support missions. So, I'm guessing law enforcement training isn't getting stressed at all. Some of the criticism isn't completely fair though since MPs aren't just cops and the combat support mission is obviously up front when it comes to training.

[karaddin]

Sturn - Are you saying that language isn't important, or that you specifically don't think "civilian" is a problem? While I agree that there are probably more pressing issues, if you don't think language is important then I must respectfully disagree. The language we use for things has a very strong yet subtle influence on how we think about them. I believe you acknowledged in the last thread that in todays environment there is a lack of community policing (largely due to lack of resources), and seemed to think a return to having more of this would be good for police/general public relations. I would agree with that, and I think that sort of thing is where a seemingly innocuous word like civilian could do harm, as it encourages a thinking of "us" and "them". Now it doesn't necessarily denote lack of respect for the "them", but it does create a delineation that I think it would be beneficial to try and wear down - ideally police should see themselves as part of the community rather than separate from it.

Now it may be that in this case civilian isn't actually harmful for this reason, but inappropriate language can be.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Of all the problems that have been pointed out involving police and their interactions with the community in these threads I must say refering to non-police as "civilians" rather than "citizens" seems pretty de minimus. If I'm being beaten by an irrate officer because I refused his request to search my car the last thing I'll care about is the generic terminology he used for non-police before he started wailing on me.

[Sturn]

Sturn - Are you saying that language isn't important, or that you specifically don't think "civilian" is a problem?

Civilian isn't a problem. I never came close to saying language isn't important. I've never encountered anyone even mentioning a problem with the term civilian until this forum. It's not a negative term. It doesn't mean just, "non-combatant" as postulated by the original OP. I think that's been refuted by the many responses here and a simple look-up of it's definition.

eta: Someone please post a link of a cop doing something bad to a non-law enforcement person that has a gray area to debate about so we can move on to something more important.

[Sturn]

eta: Someone please post a link of a cop doing something bad to a non-law enforcement person that has a gray area to debate about so we can move on to something more important.

Here's one:

http://www.nydailyne...ticle-1.1401956

ACLU is complaining about police tracking license plate information (location and the tag number) and storing it using an automated system. Police have been doing this for some time. Typically this includes cameras on a car that automatically pick up license plates they, "see", as the patrol vehicle drives around. Alerts will immediately pop up for stolen license plates, stolen cars, a warrant for the driver, suspect vehicle, etc.

This information is also being stored. The car you passed may not be wanted now, but in an hour you may find out that car was seen leaving the scene of a child abduction. Now you at least know where it was an hour ago.

The complaint seems to be related to the NSA issues. Should this information (your tag number and its location on a certain date and time) be stored when you haven't done anything wrong?

Does anyone have a problem with this? It obviously creates much more good (solves crimes, potentially locates abducted children, does locate stolen property) then bad (oh no someone in the government knows where I was last Tuesday!).

A counter to this issue for me is that police have been doing this for decades manually. Cops can, and have, and do, run tags then note where they saw the vehicle by using eyeballs and pen & paper. Those notes are kept by many officers or departments, sometimes for years. This system just automates what we are already doing and makes it so much more efficient.

[Sci-2]

Excerpt from The Rise of the Warrior Cop:

Narcotics investigators had made a controlled drug buy a few hours earlier and were laying plans to raid the suspect’s home. “The drug buy was in town, not at the home,” Taylor says. “But they’d always raid the house anyway. They could never just arrest the guy on the street. They always had to kick down doors.” With just three hours between the drug buy and the raid, the police hadn’t done much surveillance at all. The SWAT team would often avoid raiding a house if they knew there were children inside, but Taylor was troubled by how little effort they put into seeking out that sort of information. “Three hours is nowhere near enough time to investigate your suspect, to find out who might be inside the house. It just isn’t enough time for you to know the range of things that could happen.”

[Centrist Simon Steele]

Simon, you're wrong.

Now we both feel superior. We've discussed this ad naseum. We won't agree. Let's shake hands and move on to a different topic.

I don't know, if I shake hands with you could I get handed assault charges for, you know, touching an officer of law?

Civilian isn't a problem. I never came close to saying language isn't important. I've never encountered anyone even mentioning a problem with the term civilian until this forum. It's not a negative term. It doesn't mean just, "non-combatant" as postulated by the original OP. I think that's been refuted by the many responses here and a simple look-up of it's definition.

eta: Someone please post a link of a cop doing something bad to a non-law enforcement person that has a gray area to debate about so we can move on to something more important.

Then don't talk about it. Enough people here are divided on the subject that your constant dismissal of it only shows how your viewpoints must be superior to all others, especially us civilians. It is "us vs. them" when you think about it the way you do.

I also think Awesome Possom posted a link to a pretty grievous crime against a civilian, where a cop still got to get paid after he assaulted a woman and severely hurt her. An enemy combatant if I ever saw one.

[Sci-2]

eta: Someone please post a link of a cop doing something bad to a non-law enforcement person that has a gray area to debate about so we can move on to something more important.

IMO the excerpt I posted is worth a read.

I'd be curious as to your reaction.

If it's been posted previously, apologies. Have not been following previous iterations closely.

[lessthanluke]

I don't know, if I shake hands with you could I get handed assault charges for, you know, touching an officer of law?

Then don't talk about it. Enough people here are divided on the subject that your constant dismissal of it only shows how your viewpoints must be superior to all others, especially us civilians. It is "us vs. them" when you think about it the way you do.

I also think Awesome Possom posted a link to a pretty grievous crime against a civilian, where a cop still got to get paid after he assaulted a woman and severely hurt her. An enemy combatant if I ever saw one.

By divided do you mean you vs everyone else?

[Centrist Simon Steele]

Excerpt from The Rise of the Warrior Cop:

Geez, that is scary stuff. I'm definitely going to buy that book. Another particularly telling passage:

"Taylor was later appointed police chief of the small town of Winfield, Missouri. Winfield was too small for its own SWAT team, even in the 2000s, but Taylor says she’d have quit before she ever created one. “Good police work has nothing to do with dressing up in black and breaking into houses in the middle of the night. And the mentality changes when they get put on the SWAT team. I remember a guy I was good friends with, it just completely changed him. The us-versus-them mentality takes over. You see that mentality in regular patrol officers too. But it’s much, much worse on the SWAT team. They’re more concerned with the drugs than they are with innocent bystanders. Because when you get into that mentality, there are no innocent people. There’s us and there’s the enemy. Children and dogs are always the easiest casualties.”

The stuff about the little girl trying to protect her littler brother from the SWAT team was heartbreaking.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

By divided do you mean you vs everyone else?

I see plenty of people here who agree and some who don't. Are you in the police force? You seem really personally butt hurt by my comment.

[Brandon Stark]

Geez, that is scary stuff. I'm definitely going to buy that book. Another particularly telling passage:

"Taylor was later appointed police chief of the small town of Winfield, Missouri. Winfield was too small for its own SWAT team, even in the 2000s, but Taylor says she’d have quit before she ever created one. “Good police work has nothing to do with dressing up in black and breaking into houses in the middle of the night. And the mentality changes when they get put on the SWAT team. I remember a guy I was good friends with, it just completely changed him. The us-versus-them mentality takes over. You see that mentality in regular patrol officers too. But it’s much, much worse on the SWAT team. They’re more concerned with the drugs than they are with innocent bystanders. Because when you get into that mentality, there are no innocent people. There’s us and there’s the enemy. Children and dogs are always the easiest casualties.”

The stuff about the little girl trying to protect her littler brother from the SWAT team was heartbreaking.

Another great example of how the drug war has negatively impacted police departments and their relationships with the community. Not the same as 'police misconduct' though. As I continue to say - the issue needs to be addressed through root causes, not calling the police assholes for doing what their communities ask them to do. The 'militarization,' of local police departments is a wholly different issue than individual officers performing acts or making decisions that are unethical or illegal.

At least a few times a week I get flagged down by citizens asking for the number for our county Drug Task Force because they've got a house in their neighborhood they want to be 'raided.' It's not like this is fueled by officer boredom.

Any time you have a person - much less a kid - look at you like you're anything other than the good guys its pretty devastating, especially as a dad. But that happens when we're helping child protective services, arresting one of their parents for domestic violence, or during a host of other non-SWAT/SRT related scenarios.

Reference the attitude held by officers toward the public, I can only say that all groups which have members placed in a position of power possess members who respect that power and do their best to remain polite and courteous, and members that see that relationship as a sign of lesser worth. It's something that needs to be monitored for and stamped out wherever its found in a department.

A good example of that is in an analogy for policework popularized by Lt Col Dave Grossman:

One Vietnam veteran, an old retired colonel, once said this to me: “Most of the people in our society are sheep. They are kind, gentle, productive creatures who can only hurt one another by accident.” This is true. Remember, the murder rate is six per 100,000 per year, and the aggravated assault rate is four per 1,000 per year. What this means is that the vast majority of Americans are not inclined to hurt one another.

Some estimates say that two million Americans are victims of violent crimes every year, a tragic, staggering number, perhaps an all-time record rate of violent crime. But there are almost 300 million Americans, which means that the odds of being a victim of violent crime is considerably less than one in a hundred on any given year. Furthermore, since many violent crimes are committed by repeat offenders, the actual number of violent citizens is considerably less than two million.

Thus there is a paradox, and we must grasp both ends of the situation: We may well be in the most violent times in history, but violence is still remarkably rare. This is because most citizens are kind, decent people who are not capable of hurting each other, except by accident or under extreme provocation. They are sheep.

I mean nothing negative by calling them sheep. To me it is like the pretty, blue robin’s egg. Inside it is soft and gooey but someday it will grow into something wonderful. But the egg cannot survive without its hard blue shell. Police officers, soldiers and other warriors are like that shell, and someday the civilization they protect will grow into something wonderful. For now, though, they need warriors to protect them from the predators.

“Then there are the wolves,” the old war veteran said, “and the wolves feed on the sheep without mercy.” Do you believe there are wolves out there who will feed on the flock without mercy? You better believe it. There are evil men in this world and they are capable of evil deeds. The moment you forget that or pretend it is not so, you become a sheep. There is no safety in denial.

“Then there are sheepdogs,” he went on, “and I’m a sheepdog. I live to protect the flock and confront the wolf.” Or, as a sign in one California law enforcement agency put it, “We intimidate those who intimidate others.”

If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen: a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath--a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? Then you are a sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero’s path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed.

There is an element I'm uncomfortable with in police work that sees officers ignore that middle paragraph, taking the analogy too far and treating citizens as if they're lesser beings. It's not one that I see all that often, and its something I see manifest itself in actual interactions even less, but it's there and it's something I speak up about. Note that the person he was talking to was not a police officer - nor is Grossman - but he's become a very popular law enforcement trainer on a variety of topics, so it's most often seen in that context.

I also know there are people who are horrified at linking the police and 'warrior,' at all, but I can't do anything about the reality of my job involving the confrontation of dangerous people on a regular basis.

[DanteGabriel]

To me, this is a particularly illuminating passage from the article:

BY THE MID-1990S, THE BYRNE GRANT PROGRAM CONGRESS had started in 1988 had pushed police departments across the country to prioritize drug crimes over other investigations. When applying for grants, departments are rewarded with funding for statistics such as the number of overall arrests, the number of warrants served, or the number of drug seizures. Those priorities, then, are passed down to police officers themselves and are reflected in how they’re evaluated, reviewed, and promoted. Perversely, actual success in reducing crime is generally not rewarded with federal money, on the presumption that the money ought to go where it’s most needed—high-crime areas. So the grants reward police departments for making lots of easy arrests (i.e., low-level drug offenders) and lots of seizures (regardless of size), and for serving lots of warrants. When it comes to tapping into federal funds, whether any of that actually reduces crime or makes the community safer is irrelevant—and in fact, successfully fighting crime could hurt a department’s ability to rake in federal money.

But the most harmful product of the Byrne grant program may be its creation of hundreds of regional and multijurisdictional narcotics task forces. That term—“narcotics task force”—pops up frequently in the case studies and horror stories throughout this book. There’s a reason for that. While the Reagan and Bush administrations had set up a number of drug task forces in border zones, the Byrne grant program established similar task forces all across the country. They seemed particularly likely to pop up in rural areas that didn’t yet have a paramilitary police team (what few were left).

The task forces are staffed with local cops drawn from the police agencies in the jurisdictions where the task force operates. Some squads loosely report to a state law enforcement agency, but oversight tends to be minimal to nonexistent. Because their funding comes from the federal government—and whatever asset forfeiture proceeds they reap from their investigations—local officials can’t even control them by cutting their budget. This organizational structure makes some task forces virtually unaccountable, and certainly not accountable to any public official in the region they cover.

As a result, we have roving squads of drug cops, loaded with SWAT gear, who get more money if they conduct more raids, make more arrests, and seize more property, and they are virtually immune to accountability if they get out of line. In 2009 the Justice Department attempted a cost-benefit analysis of these task forces but couldn’t even get to the point of crunching the numbers. The task forces weren’t producing any numbers to crunch. “Not only were data insufficient to estimate what task forces accomplished,” the report read, “data were inadequate to even tell what the task forces did for routine work.”

Not surprisingly, the proliferation of heavily armed task forces that have little accountability and are rewarded for making lots of busts has resulted in some abuse.

It's useful to remember this too -- pressures created by the stupid, wasteful, cynical War on Drugs are warping police forces. That was another thing the Wire was really good at -- it showed you how good intentions and human frailty can lead to hellish results. If this nation could get the fuck over the War on Drugs, I think a lot of the tensions between police and communities would be lessened. Sadly, law enforcement organizations, especially prison guard unions and the for-profit prison system, are doing their damnedest to keep that from happening.

[Sturn]

IMO the excerpt I posted is worth a read.

I'd be curious as to your reaction.

If it's been posted previously, apologies. Have not been following previous iterations closely.

I will when I get a chance. Time just ran out. Back on taxpayer time.