Some of you already know that I’ve been struggling to find a new job as my current employer cut my salary by 25% while at least doubling my workload… which is turning out to be rather detrimental to this project, let alone my personal and financial life.
I had a phone screen today for the technical writing portion of my skillset in which I was asked for writing samples and information about some of the projects I’ve been working on lately… and a funny thought struck me.
The largest publicly-available sample of my writing is something I can never claim as mine because, if I were to claim it as my own under my name, it would severely hamper my ability to find work and would cost me my current job…
The one piece of work that I am most proud of is one that I can never claim under my own name… that being this project here.
It’s just so incredible that the act of trying to bring a level of transparency and accountability to government, especially to law enforcement, has so many negative stigmas attached to it that it seems as though one must submit oneself to a life of solitude and poverty just by accepting the task of doing it… because someone must.
Perhaps that’s why so few have attempted to do what I’m doing here with the NPMSRP. After all, not only is it rare that I can openly claim that I’m the person doing this, but it’s also rare that I ever have the chance of actually talking about it with anyone.
Not only is it a potentially dangerous thing to do this since police might target you for bringing police misconduct to light, but it’s also heart-wrenching thing to be inundated with all these stories of people abused each day… and it’s a lonely thing doing this when you don’t have anyone to talk with about all of it.
I can definitely see why there aren’t many people that try.
Scott Greenfield, over at Simple Justice, put up a post yesterday about an incident in Broward County Florida where a plain-clothes police officer was accused of assaulting and falsely arresting a homeless man and the alleged incident was captured on video while also corroborated by a witness.
One of the questions about this incident that sparked a bit of discussion was why the name of the officer, accused of an act of misconduct, was kept a secret while the name of the homeless man wasn’t. Both were only accused, but one had more rights to privacy than the other.
Well, it’s a matter of police transparency and, as you can imagine, it causes a lot of confusion. To help clarify this confusion a little bit I’ve decided to put up a list of what each state’s laws say about how transparent law enforcement agencies can be about police misconduct via what they can release in response to a public records request.
Presumed open in the absence of any specific or local statutory prohibition
AL
D
Open except that Police chief/Sheriff has discretion on what may be redacted.
AR
D
All closed except when an officer is fired or suspended, and even then it is discretionary
AZ
C
All Closed, no apparent exceptions
CA
C
All Closed, no apparent exceptions
CO
C
Closed so long as any disciplinary records are kept within an officer’s personnel file
CT
P
Open except for complaints of a personal nature (i.e. allegations of marital infidelity)
DC
O
Presumed open aside from specific privacy provisions
DE
C
All Closed, no apparent exceptions
FL
P
Open to disclosure only after an internal investigation has been completed
GA
O
Appear to be open
HI
P
Some information concerning employment-related misconduct may be open (murky)
IA
C
All Closed, no apparent exceptions
ID
C
All Closed except for performance review records
IL
C
All Closed, no apparent exceptions
IN
P
Open after investigation if disciplinary action or dismissal occurred
KS
C
All Closed, no apparent exceptions
KY
P
Open after decision to discipline or take no action is made, officer has right to challenge release
LA
P
Appear to be open except when involving undercover officers or pending criminal charge
MA
P
Disciplinary records are closed but some internal investigation records may be open
MD
C
All Closed, no apparent exceptions
ME
C
Closed except for the official written decision filed upon termination and after all appeals
MI
P
Open after action taken on sustained complaint and only if no civil or criminal action pending
MN
O
Appear to be explicitly open, including names of those filing complaints
MO
P
Presumed closed, yet internal investigation files might be open if personal info redacted (murky)
MS
C
All Closed, no apparent exceptions
MT
C
Appear to be closed with no apparent exceptions (somewhat murky)
NC
D
Closed except at discretion of officials if release needed to maintain public confidence
ND
P
Apparently open, yet laws recently enacted appear to possibly close personnel files
NE
C
All Closed, no apparent exceptions
NH
C
All Closed, no apparent exceptions
NJ
P
Mostly closed except for date and reason of termination if fired, otherwise challengable (murky)
NM
C
All Closed, no apparent exceptions
NV
O
Appear to be open (murky)
NY
P
All closed except for civilian review board documents (very murky)
OH
O
Appear to be open
OK
P
Appear to be open only upon final disciplinary action, closed if no action taken
OR
D
Generally closed while the officer is still employed, discretionary upon resignation
PA
C
All Closed, no apparent exceptions
RI
C
All Closed, no apparent exceptions
SC
O
Appear to be open, yet sometimes challenged based on privacy law provisions
SD
C
All Closed, no apparent exceptions
TN
P
Open except for undercover officers or if officer can prove release would threaten officer’s safety
TX
P
Some are open if an investigation finds the complaint is valid (murky)
UT
P
Open if misconduct sustained, disciplinary action taken, and all appeals fail (murky)
VA
C
All Closed, no apparent exceptions
VT
C
All Closed, no apparent exceptions
WA
P
Internal investigation records are open but all indentifying information must be redacted
WI
P
Appear to be open upon conclusion of disciplinary action except for undercover officers
WV
P
Partially open depending on the type of request and discretion (murky, but mostly closed)
WY
C
All Closed, no apparent exceptions
So, in looking at our Broward County Florida example and Florida’s laws on disclosure of police misconduct records it seems as though state law there prohibits the release of information until any investigations into that incident are completed. Not that the BCSO would have released his name if they had discretion about it, but Florida state law allows them to keep it secret while it’s being investigated.
While state laws do have the most influence on how transparent law enforcement agencies are about police misconduct, each individual agency varies as well dependent on the collective bargaining agreements those agencies have with their respective police unions about what they can and cannot release or even how they can go about investigating complaints or discipline officers. So, while this list can answer a lot of questions about why one report of police misconduct in the media might have a lot of details and another might not have any at all, there is still some other ways in which police misconduct can be obscured locally.
Also, some of this analysis is a bit of guesswork since the legalese can vary from being straight-forward to being downright complex or suspiciously vague. So, where it gets murky, I’ve marked it as such and if anyone has any contradictory information from what I’m presenting in the above list, please do let me know.
Hopefully, this will help clear up some of the questions people have about police transparency.
Normally, for the weekly Police Misconduct NewsWatch feature, I review a few of the numerous police misconduct stories that we’ve tracked in our National Police Misconduct News Feed during the preceding week that I think didn’t get enough notice or that people seemed to take an interest in….
This week was rather busy so there are, sadly, a large number of stories to pick from… 99 since February 1 to be exact, not counting the ones added today.
But, even with so many to pick from, sometimes there are some stories that don’t make it onto our feed but still deserve a little discussion. So, for this edition, here are a few of the stories that didn’t make it onto our National Police Misconduct News Feed last week:
Chief Declares Open Season on Homeless Advocates in San Diego
A San Diego California police officer who, several witnesses say, threw a 73-year-old man known as “The Waterman” to the ground and repeatedly kicking him while goading him to get back up will not face criminal charges or disciplinary action after an internal investigation claims the officer did nothing wrong.
David Ross, aka The Waterman, is a generally well-known fixture in the area who gives out free bottles of water to the homeless. He was in the area when police were aggressively dispersing a crowd of homeless people in March of 2009 when he questioned one of the cops. The officer’s response was to hospitalize Ross with a severe concussion and torn rotator cuff.
Ross had been considering dropping the lawsuit filed in response to the incident until the department declared the unnamed cop did nothing wrong. He says that it’s because not doing something to show the police that beating people like this is wrong will only encourage them to do it more.
Oh Shenandoah
An interesting story crawled out of Shenandoah Pennsylvania where, according to one small-time TV station, the entire 7 cop town of just over 5,000 residents reportedly declared their support of at least one of the four officers there who are facing a variety of federal charges.
In case you don’t recall the name of this town, it was only just this past December when federal authorities announced that police chief Matthew Nestor, Lt William Moyer, and officer Jason Hayes had been charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice in the racially-motivated beating death of Luis Eduardo Ramirez Zavala in 2008 by helping cover for the teens who beat him to death.
Not only that, but in the course of the federal investigation more charges were brought in a completely different case alleging the police chief and a captain Jamie Gennarini were involved in an extortion racket targeting illegal gambling in 2004 and for extorting $2k cash from a local businessman and his family in 2007.
So, 4 of 7 officers in this town are facing federal charges… but, if that wasn’t enough, two pretty serious civil rights lawsuits are also pending against the town. One of those suits alleges Captains Gennarini and Raymond Nestor, the police chief’s father, had beaten 18-year old David Vega to death in 2004 and then hung him in a holding cell to make it look like suicide.
Coincidentally, the second lawsuit alleges that the police chief and another unnamed officer denied a detainee his medication and punched him in the back where he had just had spinal fusion surgery. That man ended up having a heart attack after left alone at the station overnight. He claims, in his suit, that he was threatened by Nestor afterward when he was told that he would end up like that Mexican who hung himself if he filed a lawsuit.
In any case… according to WNEP 16 in Pennsylvania, the entirety of Shenendoah PA is buying “We Support Billy” tee shirts and wristbands to help Lt. William Moyer pay for his criminal defense against federal conspiracy to obstruct justice, witness tampering, and evidence tampering charges. However, the claims of community support seem dubious as it should be noted that the “whole community” the reporter interview consisted entirely of Moyer’s family and the former police chief.
But, the interesting bit of this story was that the “climax” of this fund raising effort is to be held at the local fire station where they are hosting a benefit soup and bake sale… now, anyone facing criminal charges deserves to be defended and there certainly isn’t anything wrong with people trying to raise money to pay for that defense… but, the problem comes into the picture when the government itself sponsors the defense of a criminal suspect… which is what the town is doing by giving the group access to official governmental property, the firehouse, for their fundraiser.
…but, what should we expect from a town were all but one or two of that town’s police officers are sitting under a cloud of suspicion involving some egregious allegations of corruption and abuse?
Seems that the city has asked the police to forgo a 5% step raise next year in hopes of shaving $1,000,000 from the budget but the union has another idea, cut the plans to hire more cops so the existing officers can keep their raises at a time when other employees are getting pay cuts or laid off.
The article describes how sergeants there take home and average of $106,000 a year and, in 1998, forced the city to allow overtime to be calculated into their pensions at a time when the amount of overtime they were getting jumped by 300%. Not to mention statewide cop pension changes that will cost taxpayers up to $55,000,000 a year…
But, all this isn’t enough for the union who, apparently, would rather see fewer cops on the street and more cash in their pockets. As I’ve mentioned before, the thing people must keep in mind is that a police union is not designed to care about public safety, only about enriching itself by enriching and increasing the number of it’s members who pay dues to the union… and the proof of that is in the pudding.
The group Arizona Citizens Against Photo Radar (ACAPR) says that if they get it on the ballot that photo radar has never withstood a public vote anywhere that it got put up for a vote, and if they get the chance it will get voted out of that state as well.
The interesting bit is that, headlining for this protest going on today, is current Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu who took similar systems out of his county after he noticed that they didn’t improve public safety but increased the number of traffic accidents instead since motorists were spiking their breaks in panic whenever they saw those cameras.
See, sometimes we talk about law enforcement officers who try to do the right thing.
Still image from television report covering a January 27, 2010 massive police raid operation in Riverside California showing militaristic-looking police returning from raids on 100 homes in an armored personnel transport.
In January of this year we tracked 2 raid-related reports of police misconduct including a wrong-door raid on a Washington DC home that resulted in $3,000 in damages that police refuse to pay and a search warrant served on a Salt Lake City residence where homeowners granted police permission to search only to see them cause $25,000 in damages by pumping their then-empty home full of 10 canisters worth of tear gas.
But, we missed one big raid-related story last month. On January 27, 2010 a multi-agency 650 officer raid operation involving 34 agencies including the FBI, ICE, DEA, and Riverside Police Department targeted alleged members of the “East Side Riva” and “1200 Blocc Crips” gangs in the Riverside California area. This series of raids hit an estimated 100 homes and resulted in about 50 arrests…
Of course, if you’re skeptical like me, you might be wondering what happened at the other 50 homes hit by this massive wave of heavily armed cops?
As our fellow police accountability blogger at Five Before Midnight informed us, several residents of Riverside California’s east side community are saying many of the search warrants were based on flawed information which resulted in at least 11 innocent residents being raided, threatened, and even injured.
A spokesman for the Riverside County District Attorney, the agency said to have led the raid, says the operation was handled appropriately and that reports of wrong door raids, injuries, and children being threatened are all false. Though, it appears someone’s math is off if those 100 raids resulted in 50 arrests because this means that at least 1/2 of the homes invaded during the operation were potentially done by mistake.
Indeed, according to Five before Midnight’s author, one home was raided to capture an alleged gang member who had been dead for over a year and another home in Moreno Valley was targeted even though the suspect had moved out a year earlier. She also says that over 30 residents packed a city council meeting on Tuesday to complain about officers pointing guns at kids, women being dragged out of homes in their underwear, and one 46 year old developmentally disabled man with the mental capacity of a 6 year old who was cuffed during the searches but was never charged.
Additionally, in one case that appears to refute official claims of nobody being injured during the operation, photographs show images of a heavily-bruised 87-year-old man who says the pictures are of injuries he suffered at the hands of raiding cops who detained him during a raid on his home but never charged him with any crimes.
Other residents allege that the raids focused entirely on the Latino community and ignored the 1200 Bloc Crips gangs mentioned in the press. They say the raids came at a time when crime had actually fallen in their community recently despite the Riverside County District Attorney’s claims that the raids were needed due to a community plagued by gang violence.
The investigation leading up to this apparent invasion into a primarily Latino community was said to be 18 months in the making, but it seems a stretch to presume this was the case given some of the errors alleged so far. With what appears to be only a 50% success rate on the raids, it seems to be that a coin toss to decide which homes to hit would have been equally effective.
A meeting has been scheduled for February 4 by Riverside County, the police, and the US DOJ Community Relations team for the region to discuss community concerns about the raids.
In the meantime, yet another raid-related report has been added to our NPMSRP database for this year, courtesy of Riverside County California and the 43 other agencies that took part in this “Operation Promise”.
-Hat Tip to Five Before Midnight for letting us know about this one.
Long-time readers of this site know that one of my pet projects is finding a way to use the statistics generated by this National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project (NPMSRP) to do more than just give us a hint at how prevalent police misconduct is in the United States. One of the experimental models I’ve come up with is a “Police Misconduct Index” (PMI) which is a composite average of different types of police misconduct related statistics that could help predict how likely police misconduct rates for an area might rise or decline in the future.
The PMI works on the assumption that as the likelihood of potential consequences for acts of misconduct rise the prevalence of misconduct falls… and that the opposite holds true in that a perceived lack of risk for misbehavior invites a higher rate of misconduct. So, as a basis of this model, we calculate the PMI from a set of statistics that examine the current relative rate of misconduct, how state or local governments respond to reports of police misconduct, and how effective those responses are.
Now, the PMI chart that I use for this computation is a bundle of useful information in and of itself. Within the chart is the estimated rate of police misconduct along with the percentage of reports that result in disciplinary action, criminal prosecution, and ratio of criminal prosecutions to criminal convictions…. all of that info packed into a small table.
But, there was something missing from the PMI. It was the effect that transparency, or the lack thereof, might have on the rate of police misconduct and the propensity for that rate to rise or fall within a given area. After all, the saying goes, bad things thrive in the secrecy of darkness and ignorance. So, I had to find some way to include how much transparency is allowed into police misconduct records by state law for each state.
For those who aren’t familiar with the old chart and it’s naming conventions, here’s a rundown of the columns:
State – The abbreviation code for each state
PMR – The Police Misconduct Rate, which is a per capita ratio of officers out of 100k officers involved in police misconduct reports tracked by the NPMSRP.
PMDPR – The percentage of officers tracked that are subject to either/both disciplinary action and/or criminal charges.
PMCPR – The percentage of officers tracked that are prosecuted.
PMConR1 – The percentage of officers prosecuted who are convicted.
PMConR2 – The percentage of officers reported who are convicted.
FOI – The open records laws as they apply to public access to police misconduct records which can be either Open, Partial, Discretionary, or Closed.
PMI – The Police Misconduct Index which is an inverse predictive number, a lower number indicates a greater likelihood of increased police misconduct rates in the future.
Color coding: Dark red includes the 5 worst for each category, light red is worse than average, clear is 2 closest to average, light green is better than average, dark green includes the 5 best per category. FOI designations use a different, self explanatory, color code at the moment.
Now, the astute who read the 2009 Police Misconduct Statistical Report we published might note that the PMI has not yet been modified by the FOI as I’ve not yet determined how much the lack of transparency might affect the likelihood of a police misconduct rate change over time. I need trending data to see just how effective the old PMI is at predicting future rates and that will give me some more data with which I can then determine if the FOI does affect this rate and, if so, how much it might do so by looking at the deviations. I figure I might be able to do that after the 2010 Q2 report.
In any case, as you can see, even discounting the usefulness or potential efficacy of this predictive Police Misconduct Index, the process of generating the PMI gives us a lot of useful information that’s fairly difficult to find elsewhere.
In any case, I just thought I would share one of the things I’ve been working on in the background. Let me know what you think of it and if you have any suggestions on what you would like to see included that might also have an effect on future misconduct rate trends.
I thought I would try something new this month and devote an article to various reports that covered police accountability/transparency policy issues for the month. These reports generally don’t go into the statistical reports, but they do affect those statistics so I thought it would be a good idea to go over those reports each month… Let me know if you agree or not.
Pointing Fingers and Keeping Secrets in Charlotte North Carolina
In Charlotte-Mecklenburg NC, the controversy over police officer Marcus Jackson, who stands charged with sexually assaulting at least 6 female motorists during his brief time with that police department, seems to keep generating some interesting insights into a problematic hiring process that relies on a private company run by former Charlotte officers
for background checks on all potential officers.
Apparently, that company missed that officer Jackson had a questionable criminal history that would have prevented him from being a police officer in the first place. Of course, it also makes me wonder why the department didn’t just run it’s own background checks on each officer, which not only would have saved taxpayer money but also allowed them to manage quality control themselves.
In another twist to the Marcus Jackson case, it appears as though state law in North Carolina allows cities to release disciplinary records if city officials deem it’s important to maintain trust in police governance. However, after careful consideration, Charlotte officials decided that protecting themselves from a civil suit was more important than maintaining public trust in the police and decided to keep officer Jackson’s record secret.
Baltimore’s policy of keeping shootings a secret for Salvatore ends
Speaking of keeping secrets, Baltimore Maryland recently reversed a policy instituted in the beginning of 2009 that withheld the names of officers involved in shooting incidents. That policy was originally said to have been instituted as a result of an incident that had nothing to do with an officer-involved shooting but instead was the result of supposed threats made against Baltimore officer Salvator Rivieri who was the star of a rather infamous You-Tube video involving a skateboarder.
In case you needed a reminder, it’s this one:
In fact, apparently, there had not been a single threat made against an officer as a result of an officer involved shooting incident in the whole of 2008, so says the Baltimore Sun:
“Police stumbled in their attempt to justify and enforce the change. First, they pointed to 23 threats against officers from the preceding year as evidence that releasing names put officers in danger. But a review of those complaints found that none of them was related to the more than 20 police shootings that year; most came during arrests, and one was even made by officers against other officers.”
While the shift back towards more transparency puts the department back in line with other law enforcement agencies in that region, departments in New York City and Philadelphia PA still have policies that keep the identities of officers involved in shooting incidents a secret.
Will dishonesty be the only policy?
In Washington state there’s a push to pass state senate bill 6590 which was written in response to a truly bizzare Washington State Supreme Court ruling last year that forced the reinstatement of a police officer fired for dishonesty on the grounds that there was no state law that allowed for officers to be fired for dishonesty or perjury.
So far the bill has garnered the support of the law enforcement leaders in King County and Spokane but police unions in the state are arguing that the legislature has no right to make the rules, instead insisting that collective bargaining agreements take precidence.
As I already discussed earlier this month, Seattle is one city where efforts to enforce a “no lying” policy through contractual agreements with the police union fell flat on it’s face. The policy there, thanks to tinkering by the police union, has resulted in a 0% success rate after all 4 officers fired so far under that policy for lying have been rehired, with back pay, upon appeal.
Needless to say, if the bill doesn’t pass or the courts decide that collective bargaining agreements supersede it, then you can assuredly look forward to a lot more lying cops in Washington state very soon… which makes me wonder how much of a credibility hit police will eventually suffer if jurors were informed during each trial that there were no penalties for cops who didn’t tell the truth whenever cops testified.
If you thought firing a bad cop was hard, try firing his bad boss
This month in Connecticut, the Republican American reported that a combination of state laws and contractual agreements in place at most law enforcement agencies in Connecticut make it prohibitively difficult to dismiss even the worst of police chiefs there. Apparently, state statutes demand that police chiefs can only be fired after a city proves “just cause” which requires physical evidence of “overt malfeasance”, which puts the burden of proof almost on par of a criminal conviction.
But, so difficult is it to fire police chiefs that towns often have to resort to bribery to buy them out. The report details one case of a police chief from Madison CT who had been accused of solicitation, fraud, and other criminal activities but couldn’t be dislodged from his position until the town paid him $41k a year to retire, on top of his $71k retirement pension.
The article does site legislative efforts in the past to change this, but apparently those failed and the only one they could mention was a bill put forward in 1992. Apparently nothing has been tried since.
West Virginia debates starting it’s own NPMSRP
West Virginia State Senator Bill Laird (D-Fayette) is planning on introducing legislation this year that would create a state-wide database that would track disciplinary actions taken against police officers. In many states, West Virginia included, police officers can play cat and mouse with the system by resigning in order to keep any disciplinary actions or investigations a secret in order to get a police job in another department where, if the records were shared, they might otherwise be refused.
We generally call police officers who engage in the practice “gypsy cops” as they travel around from town to town once their propensity to misbehave gets them in trouble again and again. Apparently Laird, a former sheriff, is well aware of the practice and hopes that a centralized database that tracks disciplinary records will allow departments to see exactly why a prospective officer they plan to hire had left the last department they worked for.
Though, in some of the articles we’ve seen last year that referenced gypsy cops, the town officials who hired them seemed to be well aware of their histories and defended the hiring of those officers regardless of what they knew, (see here, here, and here). After all, it’s hard to pass up a bargain deal on a new police officer if you’re willing to overlook the flaws that will cost the town later when the lawsuits start hitting the guy that gets elected after you. So, I’m not quite sure this will deal with the problem on it’s own, but may help if this database is open to public review.
Though, I don’t doubt that there are officials in West Virginia who are concerned about how the number of repeat offenders on various police payrolls is making their state look in combination with the overall number of cases per capita there. It’s just a question of whether they will be able to get enough votes to pass anything that would be effective in the face of police union opposition.
Interestingly enough, we were contacted by a West Virginia state official earlier this month expressing interest in our annual statistical report which ranked that state fairly high for police misconduct per capita rates. Though, I should also mention that it wasn’t the official mentioned in this article and it didn’t go any further than asking how we came up with that per capita rate.
There’s more than one way to avoid police accountability and transparency
Finally, in Chicago Illinois, we see an example of a more devious way to hide police misconduct records, though not a new one.
In 2007, mayor Daley responded to criticism of the Chicago Police department’s accountability agency, now called the “Independent Police Review Authority” by revamping that agency to allegedly make it more transparent. But, there’s always a way around being ordered to make your records available to the public, as Columbia College journalism students investigating a questionable shooting incident recently discovered.
Seems that, while investigating a 2004 shooting incident that not only injured a suspect that didn’t appear to be armed as well as some bystanders as well, the students and Tribue reporters who were working with them filed a public records request for information on any shootings ruled unjustified by the agency… and were told that the agency doesn’t keep such statistics.
As I said, the practice of avoiding transparency by not keeping records in order to avoid public records requests isn’t new or unique to Chicago, South Dakota allegedly practiced the same technique to keep police disciplinary records a secret by not requiring police departments to keep such records. After all, you can’t file a public record request for a record that doesn’t exist.
…and we all know that if there’s no record of police misconduct then that means there wasn’t any police misconduct, right?
As some of you may know, I’m not publishing monthly statistical reports anymore. The reason for this was based on what I was seeing with the traffic to the site and how various search engines rank the pages on the site.
Basically, the problem that I’ve been seeing is that when people visit here doing searches for “police misconduct statistics” they are still hitting some of our earliest monthly statistical reports instead of the annual report or even the semi-annual report, both of which give a lot more information than the monthly reports did or could.
Also, the monthly reports tended to confuse people since, in order to do comparisons with other statistical reports, I would have to generate projections that took the month’s data and projected that data out to a year with the presumption that the month’s data would be an average… it was just an ugly thing to do and, like I said, it confused people.
So, we’re sticking to quarterly, semi-annual, and annual reports from now on. But, I do figure that I could still let people know how the month in misconduct looked towards the end of the month. Hence this new “month in review” feature.
January actually resulted in the lowest number of reports that we’ve tracked to date. While part of that may be because colder weather means fewer contacts between police and citizens, it’s also because I wasn’t able to track reports as well as I normally do for a variety of reasons. I’m hoping that this is just a temporary issue, we’ll see.
This month, with one day left (and being a Sunday that means there won’t be many more reports to add), there were reports of misconduct involving 445 law enforcement officers, including 25 law enforcement leaders.
Of those reports, 63 were reports of law enforcement officers convicted of criminal charges and 98 police officers criminally charged. Of the officers charged this month, a vast majority, 30, were for sex crimes and of those, most of those involved minors. Off-duty violence was the second most common criminal complaint, involving 11 assault charges and 16 domestic violence charges. On-duty excessive force criminal charges numbered only 4. However, 31 officers were accused of or under investigation for allegations of excessive force this month, not counting lawsuits.
Of lawsuits initiated this month, 50 of the 75 officers involved were accused of excessive force. This was followed by 13 false arrest and 5 sexual misconduct suits. Police misconduct cost US taxpayers at least $12,089,000 in January alone for all settlements and court judgments, not counting undisclosed settlements, attorney fees, or other court costs.
New York NY topped the list of officers involved in alleged acts of misconduct with 14 accused, followed by Springfield MA with 10, Chicago IL with 9, Elmira NY with 9, and Chicago IL with 7.
Reports tracked this month involved at least 520 alleged victims and 16 fatalities.
As always, if anyone has any questions, suggestions, or comments, feel free to let me know in the comments section or via email.
UPDATE: 02/02/2010 -A generous anonymous donor has offered to give James a laptop and it’s on the way to him now. Thank you to the few people who wrote with offers to help James and thank you very much to the anonymous donor for helping out, I truly appreciate it!
James Simmons, who we wrote about here, here, and here, is still homeless and jobless even after his wrongful conviction, based on the testimony of a deputy who was later fired for dishonesty, was overturned recently.
As we mentioned in the stories we wrote about it, James has an impressive resume as an information technology professional that ended with that arrest and conviction since having those on his record had barred him from working in that field again.
But, now with the conviction overturned and lawyers working on expunging his record of the associated arrest and charges, he’s working hard on trying to rebuild the life he lost and he needs help to do that.
James says one of the things he needs most to help with his job search and to refresh his skills is a laptop.
I figure there’s bound to be someone out there with an older model laptop that, while still functional, maybe doesn’t hold a charge much or sits in a closet gathering dust after being replaced with the latest and greatest… if so, I can’t think of too many more worthwhile causes than to help a guy rebuild a life that should have never been disrupted in the first place.
But, if failing that, I do have a particularly old set of laptop parts in my closet from an assortment of old NEC Versa FXi laptops that an old employer gave to me when those laptops broke and depreciated off the books a long long time ago. I can probably fashion most of those parts together into a working laptop except for a hard drive and an external CD-ROM (these ones are slimline and use a proprietary external CD ROM).
So, if all else fails and nobody out there has a laptop they are willing to donate, at least maybe help me rebuild this one to help James out, either by donating parts you might have laying around or helping me buy some of the parts I need to make it work. The external CDROMs for this cost from $25-$50 from what I can tell, and a working battery costs about $100-$150. Haven’t had time to price out the kind of hard drive this laptop needs yet… will do that later.
So, if anyone has a laptop they want to donate to James or if anyone wants to help me put together this older clunker for him, let me know.
Hey folks, sorry I haven’t been able to post any updates or stories lately, I’ve been overwhelmed with non-NPMSRP work at my day job. I’m working so many hours that I barely even have time to keep the news feed going.
So I woke up this morning to see that the news segment on WFAE in Charlotte North Carolina ran where I was interviewed and asked about what Charlotte Police Department’s record means in terms of the number of police officers that have been brought up on criminal charges within the last year.
…and after listening to it I can imagine that some people might get the wrong idea about what I’m saying. Of course, this is understandable as news radio clips tend to be short and, so, a lot of pertinent details get lost in the translation between the 20 seconds worth of clip that was distilled from about an hour’s worth of my talking with the reporter.
Not that it’s a bad report, not at all, I’m really glad that the reporter was doing research into the issue to find the truth. But police misconduct is a complex matter that, well, is difficult to distill into a short sound byte… so here’s some explanation.
What is Average?
One of the first things to address right off the bat is what I mean when I say Charlotte’s police department is about average by way of our statistical reports.
First of all, the biggest problem we’re trying to deal with as far as this project goes is that there really is no baseline for determining whether “being average” is a good thing or a bad thing. This is why I started this project, to come up with a ruler by which we can take these measurements to see where problems were and how to deal with them. Without that ruler, we’re sort of guessing and while the government gives us rulers to measure crime rates, it doesn’t do the same for police misconduct.
What do I mean? Well, what I mean is that we currently don’t have a definitive way to tell if the national average we’re seeing is normal, higher than normal, or lower than normal because there’s never been a concerted effort to actually measure the amount of police misconduct that goes on in the US and trend that data over time.
So, there’s no way to tell if the national average we report is higher than what it usually is or lower… because there is no other year’s worth of stats to compare it to.
So, when I say Charlotte is average and that it doesn’t make our top 25 worst list for departments over 1,000 sworn officers, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good thing for Charlotte because, while average, it may still be more misconduct than you should see normally. We just don’t have a way to tell if this is the case or not yet.
Police being arrested is a good thing?!?
I’d imagine that this one raised some eyebrows, and I can certainly understand why. But I want people to think about this carefully.
First, police misconduct will always happen. Police are human and they have the same temptations everyone else does. So, invariably, a certain percentage will commit crimes each year.
Second, if we accept that a percentage of cops will commit crimes each year, then it should be considered a deviation from the norm when a police department reports a number of police arrested that is significantly below that average. Especially if a large department reports 0 officers arrested.
Third, which do you think is more likely when a large department reports 0 officers arrested? That the department is staffed with super-human police officers devoid of the temptations normal humans have, or that there is a high potential that the department is shielding it’s officers from accountability and transparency, thus encouraging them to misbehave more.
So, when I say that sometimes it may be a good thing to see that a fair portion of officers are being disciplined or criminally charged it’s an acceptance of the fact that officers sometimes do bad things and that it’s better that those facts are out in the open and the officer held accountable for it than if it’s all kept secret.
I’m definitely not saying it’s a good thing that officers act in ways that get them arrested. I’m just saying it’s a good thing when they are arrested for acting in ways that would get a normal person arrested since it can be a sign of accountability and transparency. Als0 that, right now, it’s hard to tell if any given number of arrests made in a particular department is abnormally high or low yet because, as I said, we don’t have a ruler yet.
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I thought I would try something new this month and devote an article to various reports that covered police accountability/transparency policy issues for the month. These reports generally don’t go into the statistical reports, but they do affect those statistics so I thought it would be a good idea to go over those reports each month… Let me know if you agree or not.
