The #1 topic at a special meeting of law enforcement officers yesterday was… sunlight and its damaging impact on police morale:
Chiefs of some of the nation’s biggest police departments say officers in American cities have pulled back and have stopped policing as aggressively as they used to, fearing that they could be the next person in a uniform featured on a career-ending viral video.
That was the unifying — and controversial — theory reached Wednesday at a private meeting of more than 100 of the nation’s top law enforcement officers and politicians.
With homicide rates soaring inexplicably this year in dozens of U.S. cities, the group convened by new U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch concluded with a brief news conference promising a robust response to the reversal of decades of falling violent crime rates.
But for hours preceding that, mayors, police chiefs, U.S. attorneys and even FBI Director James Comey privately vented in a Washington ballroom that they don’t really understand the alarming spike in murders and applause filled the room when mayors said police officers’ sinking morale could be a factor.
***Wexler tried to sum up the day-long discussion for Lynch, who arrived near the end. But there was another problem, he told her, one that hits closer to home for the nation’s top cop.
“Perhaps the most difficult to calibrate, but the most significant,” he said, “is this notion of a reduction in proactive policing.”
Police chiefs and elected leaders from Baltimore, Chicago, New York and St. Louis were more blunt:
“We have allowed our police department to get fetal and it is having a direct consequence,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told Lynch. “They have pulled back from the ability to interdict … they don’t want to be a news story themselves, they don’t want their career ended early, and it’s having an impact.”
***New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton called it the “YouTube effect” that has emerged for officers post-Ferguson and, in New York, after the death of Eric Garner last year after he was put in a chokehold by an officer making an arrest.
Bratton told the gathering that he thought the malaise among New York City officers would have worsened if it wasn’t for the execution-style killing of two officers last December.
“Marchers in New York, marchers in my city were chanting, ‘what do we want, dead cops, when do we want them, now.’ Well, they got them, two dead cops in December. The legacy of those two officers deaths’ have slowed down the momentum of what was started before it reached tidal wave proportions — really throwing the scales of justice out of balance,” he said.
A lot to unpack here, first and foremost- GO FUCK YOURSELF RAHM. Second, the youtube effect is not, as these cowards would suggest, keeping them from doing proactive policing. What it is doing, is letting people see things like this:
That’s not proactive policing. Third, Bratton is a god damned disgrace for pushing the idea that the masses were chanting “death to cops.” That has been dealt with in a number of places:
And yet, evidence shows the group that engaged in the death chant against police weren’t part of Millions March NYC. And if they did indeed march on Dec. 13, they did so long after the larger protest had moved downtown. They were not part of the main group.
For one thing, according to the video, which was posted to Youtube the same day as the protest, the “dead cops” chant took place after sunset. You can see from the video that city lights are already on. The group starts by chanting “hands up, shoot back,” before switching to the death chant, and then an unintelligible chant at the end of the approximately 2 minute clip.
A story posted by the New York NBC affiliate says the marchers were proceeding “down Fifth Avenue at 32nd Street” at 4:30 p.m. The Millions March NYC protest kicked off at 2 p.m. as thousands gathered in Washington Square Park near New York University on 5th Avenue and 8th Street. After turning west on 14th Street the march, which stretched across all lanes and down more than ten city blocks, proceeded up 6th Avenue as far as Herald Square (home to the famed Macy’s flagship store) at 32nd and Broadway. It then proceeded downtown on Broadway, to One Police Plaza.
It was, in the vernacular of Bratton and those always excusing police misdeeds, just a few bad apples. Except this time, it really was.
Here’s another example of the “pro-active policing” that occurs on Bratton’s watch:
The three people who were with Thabo, including Pero Antic, all testified to this version of events. They said Thabo was targeted and attacked.
The police counter-testimony was very simple. They said that Thabo Sefolosha gestured at them in a manner they found threatening and refused to “move along” from a crime scene. So they broke his leg.
The most damning testimony against their account were two people from dramatically different walks of life. The first was the homeless man, True. Somehow, True was located and he testified that the “threatening gesture” allegedly made toward police was in fact Thabo handing True a twenty dollar bill.
The second person was his Atlanta Hawks coach, the reigning NBA Coach of the Year Mike Budenholzer. Coach Bud described Thabo’s character as being “of the highest order” and pledged that if Thabo was saying it, then his word was good. Every single person with whom I have spoken has said the same. If you were going to think of the last NBA player who would be involved in a situation like this, Thabo would top that list. This truth about his character did not, of course, protect him from the NYPD.
The State of New York Vs. Thabo Sefolosha bears startling similarities to another high profile incident involving the NYPD and a top athlete: retired tennis star James Blake. This week, a city agency confirmed Blake’s account that two police officers used excessive force in taking him down to the pavement and erred in not identifying himself. The only difference between the Blake and Thabo situations is that we have video of Blake being approached and roughed up. Our only video of Thabo was taken by someone in his party after the police began to attack, with one officer seen swinging a nightstick.
As a jury now attempts to untangle whether Thabo Sefolosha is guilty of resisting arrest, the uncomfortable truth of this matter was said bluntly by Thabo’s lawyer Alex Spiro. “I think [the NYPD] saw a black man in a hoodie. They grab him, they pounce on him, they pull him limb from limb, they smash him on the ground.”
They targeted and savagely beat a black man in a hoodie, broke his leg, and then lied about it because they are used to getting away with it. Only this time, they fucked up, because it was an NBA player who wasn’t going to back down.
Here’s how a Brit living in NYC described his experiences with law enforcement:
It’s best to think of the police as a sort of occupying army and avoid them accordingly – particularly if you are not white.
What Bratton and Rahm and all these shitty cops are really worried about is that the the youtube effect is exposing their actions, and the public is asking for some simple rules of engagement.
Peale
Suddenly there is an uptick in murders, but we have no idea who is being killed and why? If only there were some way to investigate those murders and figure it out.
ETA: Because I guess the murders are happening in forests and swamps and other places that are difficult to reach.
JPL
It only took the jury an hour to find Thabo Sefolosha, not guilty. Now let’s charge the police officers with using to much force.
Elizabelle
This would seem to be a great time to step up funding and training for Community Police and get them out of their cars. Eyes on the street, and known to community members.
They’re supposed to be guardians of the citizens they serve and protect. Not an occupying force of warriors.
Elizabelle
@Peale: That’s where having the CDC study gun deaths will really come in handy. We need to do it. Starting yesterday.
Study means of prevention too.
scav
24/7 video surveillance and comprehensive documentation is only unproblematic for the populace, not for the police. Pin on the badge and one gains invisibility and superpowers, including that long arm of the law that has gained all the powers formerly reserved to a jury of ones’ peers and the judiciary.
D58826
@Elizabelle: Our NRA overlords made sure in 1996 that these types of studies would be off limits to government agencies. The retired congresscritter who pushed the legislation has, in recent days, had seconds thoughts about the wisdom of the law that he helped get passed.
Patricia Kayden
The police have been on video beating up defenseless and peaceful Black protesters since the 1950s and not just in the Deep Bigoted South. It’s just that now Blacks are fed up and demanding that cops be held responsible for their violence. If cops cannot do their jobs without brutalizing the people they are paid to protect, perhaps they should quit their jobs en masse. Sick of them.
And cops should pay for their misconduct out of their own funds — versus getting the public to cover their behinds when they are successfully sued.
Calouste
Is the explanation for the soaring homicide rate that people killed by the police are now counted instead of ignored? Also note that homicide isn’t equivalent to murder.
Elizabelle
@D58826: Yup. I posted that article a few times, Jay Dickey, retired GOP from Arkansas. Written after the July 20, 2012 Aurora theatre shootings, but always appropriate.
We won’t know the cause of gun violence until we look for it, The Washington Post, July 27, 2012
We could get CDC funding to study gun deaths and injuries through. Keep an accurate count. We must.
Elizabelle
@Elizabelle: PS: I don’t mean they have to jog to crime scenes. More that they need to engage more with the communities they serve and be out and about.
Matt McIrvin
@Calouste: To some extent the rise in homicides is exaggerated. It’s significant and real, but it only exists in some places, which naturally get splashed all over the news. FiveThirtyEight had a nice article about it:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/scare-headlines-exaggerated-the-u-s-crime-wave/
Also, the order of events isn’t even clear. I think Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out somewhere that the homicide rise in Baltimore began before the Freddie Gray protests.
PIGL
@Peale: It’s almost as if the cops are not very good at their jobs. Or what we are supposed to believe are their jobs.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Bratton did a really good job of bolting the LAPD back together and making them a professional department after the Rampart scandal and ensuing consent decree.
Or so I thought. Looks like it was the consent decree and the LA city council that did the work, because Bratton has gone full-throttle idiot since moving to NYC.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Patricia Kayden: It’s not just blacks and browns anymore and whites REALLY need to get a clue on this. Our local cops beat/shoot/kill people all the damn time and this is one of the whitest cities in America. The victims of police violence, in my part of the US, are overwhelmingly white – because the populace is.
Anyone can be a target and everyone is.
Chris
The pessimist in me thinks that in ten or twenty years “we want dead cops” will have become all anyone remembers of this, much as all anyone remembers about Vietnam nowadays is “filthy hippies spit on troops.”
Sophist
You know, it’s gotten to the point where the words “resisted arrest” cause me to involuntarily roll my eyes. It’s essentially a charge that any cop can assert at any time in any situation in order to cover their ass. I think we need to change it to a sentencing modifier rather than a crime in itself. If you don’t get convicted of some underlying crime, you shouldn’t get punished for it.
Chris
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
Unfortunately, to the extent that whites get a clue, it’s often just in the form of “hey OBAMA! What about this WHITE guy who got shot by a cop? You only care when it’s BLACK people who probably deserve it anyway!”
Shakezula
Yay?
RSA
Morale?! For fuck’s sake. I personally think morale is pretty important, but if you bring the subject up in a different context, like harassment in the workplace, or racist speech, or the hoops that poor people have to jump through… it’s dismissed as being unimportant.
ThresherK (GPad)
I once dated an epidemiologist, but ended up with a social worker as the love of my life. (For the umpteenth time: She did not meet me “professionally”.)
If there were an the alternate universe with the former as my breakfast table companion, I don’t think our conversations on the subject would differ much.
SoupCatcher
@RSA: Morale is just nebulous enough to obscure things. Definitely less risky to admit to than temper tantrum work slowdown.
sukabi
I’d like to invoke law enforcements’ favorite justification for wiretapping, cell phone call grabbing, ect. re, their whine about being video tapped…. “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about.”
A guy
I like the cops. They are the ones who will go up Rum Creek in Logan County WV at midnight to respond to a domestic violence call. I sure as hell wouldnt
JustRuss
@sukabi: +1. And these guys saying “The problem isn’t the cops who are beating the crap out of people with no justification, it’s the fact that people are recording them”….I don’t even know where to start.
mclaren
Great! Police officers are policing less aggressively. Glad to hear it.
Since police officers are de-escalating their aggression, they don’t need weapons, so let’s take away their guns.
American police can now join British and Norgwegian and Finnish police and deal with issues without reaching for a gun.
PurpleGirl
Let’s see… you’re a retired tennis player in town (NYC) for the tennis tournement. You’re standing outside your hotel, in the middle of the afternoon, in broad daylight. You’re just standing there, taking a measure of the day, deciding what direction you’re going to go in and SUDDENLY a guy comes running over, tackles you and pulls you to the ground and tries to handcuff you. WTF?
Yes, there’s an investigation going on, the retired tennis player is planning a lawsuit (as well he should). The cop deserves more than just desk duty for however long, maybe he needs to lose his job, maybe lose his pension. The claim? Mistaken identity. Mistaken identity??? The cop just tackles the guy, just pulls him to the ground. Sorry but the cop union head who whines about the punishment himself needs some someone to that to him. And soon. And get told it was just mistaken identity.
Do I just the cops…. Hell no. But then I haven’t liked the cops since the mid-1980s when I would pass the local precinct and see all the cops sleeping in their cars, waiting for shift change because they live so far out on Long Island that they drive to work hours before shift change. They didn’t know the neighborhood, they didn’t know me, they looked at me as the opposition to them. Yes, they were/are an occupying force of even white working class areas.
rant over
mclaren
@Elizabelle:
This is a great idea. Getting back to beat cops walking a beat would solve a lot of problems.
Unfortunately, beat cops disappeared in the early 1960s when people started moving en masse out of the city centers into the suburbs. As long as American cities are designed as urban islands full of poor black people with outlying suburbs full of middle-class whites, cops walking a beat won’t be coming back because it’s just not practical to respond to a police call in a suburb by walking there. You can’t get there by walking.
Yet anther example of how the design of American cities has fucked us. U.S. cities need get knocked down and redesigned by livability, including (most importantly) making them people-centric instead of car-centric.
PurpleGirl
@PurpleGirl: A bit more to the rant… it’s a good thing there was a video of the incident. It was quite clear on what happened.
pete
Go Cole! Great rant. All thumbs way up. I particularly liked the first bit of unpacking.
Lavocat
I’m just waiting for people to start exercising their “2nd Amendment rights” on some out-of-control cops.
THAT should be fun. Cuz, god knows, America doesn’t have enough guns!
rikyrah
ON POINT, COLE
rikyrah
@Patricia Kayden:
ABSOLUTELY.
Let them go get other jobs.
I feel you.
rikyrah
@Patricia Kayden:
Police misconduct settlements should be taken out of the Police Pension fund.
Yes, that FIVE HUNDRED MILLION that Chicago has paid out because of the CPD should come from the Police Pension Fund and they have to deal with the consequences.
gex
@PurpleGirl: Also, said cop didn’t file any paperwork initially. Bratton learned about the situation on TV. So even while he was defending his cop for having done nothing wrong, he had every reason to believe his cop was trying to cover it up by “forgetting” to report the incident.
PIGL
@Sophist: this is a very good idea.
Chris
@Lavocat:
Unfortunately, out of control cops and Second Amendment Solution advocates seem to be two sides of the same coin. They’ll just give each other a pass and shoot black people, immigrants and liberal protesters.
PIGL
@rikyrah: I disagree. While I think that all cops are guilty, you can’t really go picking pockets like that. The employer is responsible, because we are all responsible, because the police work for us. If white voters like the idea of lynching the poor and the off-colour, well at least let them pay for it.
What I think will stop abuses is offending officers being imprisoned for lengthy periods and their senior officers in being held responsible for the action of the men and women under their command. That means demotions and dismissals for the blatant failures of supervision and enforcement of discipline that we see every day.
Chris
@PIGL:
My main question every time something like this happens is “where the hell are the Internal Affairs departments?” They exist to prevent things like this or at least deter them by making sure that policemen’s abuses are investigated and punished, yes? There’s already a system in place that’s supposed to regulate the police and prevent this kind of behavior. Why isn’t it working, and what do we need to give the IA departments to make sure they do their jobs?
Shana
Last week I drove from DC to Cincinnati and back. I saw two massive electric signs, both from the towns where they were located, not private billboard companies – the towns, that said “Blue Lives Matter.” One was in a suburb north of Cincinnati the other in (I think) West Virginia.
I know they were the towns’ signs because they said so at the top of the frames “City of …” “Township of …”
sukabi
@PIGL: is that realistically going to happen without some incentive like BREAKING the thin blue line? Have to get the cops and their union to quit covering up criminal behavior, ie beatings, shootings, ect. Trial, judgement & execution by cop needs to stop. Perhaps they need a monetary incentive, like PAYING out of their pension funds.
A guy
No lives matter
Quaker in a Basement
With homicide rates soaring inexplicably this year in dozens of U.S. cities,”
The conventional wisdom is offered up conventionally. And the other dozens of cities where homicide rates are not “soaring?” What are we to make of them?
The Sailor
@Elizabelle: “This would seem to be a great time to step up funding”
They make more that I do, about $80k a year, plus benefits. Also, they get a vacation when they murder people.
Fuck the police.
Bob Munck
Is there a definition of “proactive policing” that does not involve violations of the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution?
The Sailor
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
Total fucking bullshit. All that asshole did was provide cover for the murderers. Nothing changed, no cops went to prison, and it wasn’t just Rampart, it was the whole LAPD. It still is the whole LAPD.
Bratton was lipstick on a pig. Gates lives on.
(Sorry, I feel strongly about this.)
shomi
Whatever you say Clueless Cole. A guy who can’t even go to friggin Vegas without acting like he is going on the Bataan death march. I bet you would be fun to go camping with.