I had a phone screen today for the technical [...]]]> 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.

One of the questions about this incident that sparked [...]]]> 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.

Here’s that list, based on the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Open Government Guide which contains the open records and meetings laws for all states, including how they may apply to police disciplinary records.

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.

This week was rather busy so there are, [...]]]> 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?

Police Union VS Public Safety

An interesting editorial from the editor of The Palm Beach Post was out this week about the West Palm Beach Florida police union’s efforts to force that city to ignore the economy and pay them more, even at the cost of public safety.

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.

Nobody Smiles For These Cameras

Some folks in Arizona are staging a protest against automated photo-radar enforcement in order to increase public awareness and get more signatures for their ballot effort to vote photo radar out of that state.

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.

From April to December of last year the NPMSRP tracked 61 reports of raid-related police misconduct ranging from wrong-door raids, faulty search warrants, [...]]]>

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.

From April to December of last year the NPMSRP tracked 61 reports of raid-related police misconduct ranging from wrong-door raids, faulty search warrants, warrantless raids, sexual assaults during raids, robberies committed during raids, injuries to innocent homeowners as well as children during raids, and even five questionable raid-related fatalities.

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.

Basically, the problem that I’ve been seeing is that when people visit here doing searches [...]]]> 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.

Thank you.

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 [...]]]>

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.

packratt@injusticeeverywhere.com

Thanks!

Thanks for your patience!

…and after listening to [...]]]> 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.

Hopefully, if anyone else has some questions about that report, please feel free to leave a comment or write an email. Also, I wrote a follow up article about the nature of how police are treated in the criminal justice system a few days ago as well.

Thanks.