Is Reporting Police Misconduct Career Suicide?

On December 23, 2008, King County Sheriff’s Deputy Brian Bonnar was acquitted of federal deprivation of civil rights charges that were filed against him on allegations that he had used excessive and unnecessary force when he arrested 41 year old Irene Damon. After reading the verdict, the judge in this case offered a stinging rebuke for Bonnar by suggesting that despite the jury’s decision that there was ample evidence that Bonnar’s conduct was not appropriate.

On March 13, 2009, King County Sheriff’s Deputy Don Griffee was acquitted of fourth degree assault charges that were filed against him on allegations that he had punched 21 year old Johnny Bradford while he was handcuffed in the back seat of a cruiser. Despite the verdict, jurors said they felt that Bradford’s testimony was believable, but that Griffee had offered a case of plausible deniability that prevented them from finding him guilty beyond all doubt.

On February 26, 2009, King County Sheriff’s Deputy Paul Schene plead not guilty to fourth degree assault charges that were filed against him on the basis of a video recording of him kicking, punching, and manhandling 15 year old Malika Calhoun in a holding cell. The video was released to the media a day later and it sparked outrage all over the world which prompted the US Department of Justice to consider pressing federal civil rights violation charges against Schene.

These cases are not uncommon in that there were allegations of abuse leveled against police officers.

These cases are not noteworthy just because they all came from the same precinct and police department.

Nor are they uncommon because of the results in which evidence and testimony that would convict a normal person were insufficient to convict a cop. After all, when 73% of white Americans do not believe police officers ever use excessive force, it’s nearly impossible to find an unbiased jury pool out there.

No, these cases are incredibly unique in the world of police misconduct in that, in each of these cases, it was a police officer who brought these allegations to the attention of their department, that the department listened to the officers who complained and investigated the accusations, that the department recommended charges in response to them, and did not silence the allegations and punish the officers that reported them.

Yes, these cases are incredible in that the officers who reported them didn’t face retribution for doing so… at least not that we can tell yet. But, will that culture within that department last after the sheriff is gone? Or will the union work to shift things back to an environment where officers are afraid to tell the truth in fear of retaliation from fellow officers and supervisors?

Indeed, a good portion of the reason why police officers do not report incidents of misconduct isn’t just because of the cultural pressures not to snitch that their fellow officers put upon them. It’s that the “no snitching” culture is actually enforced by practice within police departments across the US and that it’s expected that officers who report misconduct will be punished by their departments and eventually forced out or fired on allegations that normally wouldn’t result in termination.

That fact was recently reinforced when a reader commented to a story we published in February detailing the surprising number of police department heads who have been embroiled in allegations of misconduct in recent months. That reader posted this in response to that story:

"I can explain why most good officers do not step forward. I was an officer that stepped forward to report about one of the Chiefs on this very list and now I will never be a police officer again.

No agency would take me and it has caused many sleepless nights for me but I have come to terms with the fact that I did what was right. Seeing the justice that was done here makes me feel like I did right but that isn’t good for a person who has only police work to fall back on.

Reporting abuse over another cop, let alone a chief, is career suicide."

At first the reader who posted this wished to remain anonymous and not have the details of what he was referring to made public, and for good reason. But now he’s given us permission to tell the rest of his story of how police officers in America are usually treated when they try to bring misconduct allegation to light.

Here’s what he told us about what happened to him in a follow-up email:

"I was employed in Roberts, Wisconsin for a few years as a patrol officer. All was well until the day that the board decided that the part time police chief job needed to be full time.


The village board decided to hire Ricci Prein and all seemed well at first. At least until one evening when I found Chief Prein drinking while working on a squad car in the municipal garage. I found this to be a compromising position so I reported it to the board.


From that day on I was written up for any crazy thing such as the squad car being on the low end of full gauge or the oil dipstick, or not getting trash to the curb by 3 am when it got picked up at 3 pm that day.


I was also written up on several occasions for my military reserve service and when he was told he was wrong for doing so he still refused to retract anything. The harassment finally got so bad that one day I decided it was enough and I resigned from the department.


After my resignation I was unable to find a job for many years because of the things he would tell prospective employers about me. I tried to take it to court but the fact that I had no money and no lawyer in the area would handle it because of conflict of interests, I gave up. I was still lucky enough, if you call it that, to be called to active duty in the current war 2 times, which helped pay bills."

This, sadly, is what usually happens when officers report incidents of misconduct, whether it’s against another police officer or a supervisor. There are few real protections against retaliation for reporting misconduct and there is little impetus to change that since city governments benefit from this culture of retribution since it prevents officers from testifying in civil rights violation cases that could cause embarrassment to local governments and loses in court.

Most of the time, the story ends there. The police officer never finds work again and the culture of corruption continues on unabated and even more secure after examples have been made of officers who dared to cross the blue wall of silence.

But not in this officer’s case:

"After my deployments I returned home and wondered how to address this. I finally decided to run for the village president position (mayor). I won the election and there by became Prein's boss.


Now, I didn’t do anything to him personally, all I did was bring current concerns to the village board as should have been done in the first place when I reported the issues I had seen. I even abstained from any votes pertaining to those allegations. All this being said and done, the board finally made the decision that he was wrong all the time in the past and that he needed to be fired."

Ricci Prein was eventually fired in July of 2008 on five counts of misconduct in office, seven months after the village board laid out their case against him, and years after this officer first made his concerns known to the village board. However, he proved he wasn’t done getting back at that officer yet.

The officer’s name is Eric Fisher and he had recently run for re-election as village president. He might have won if it weren’t for constant public attacks made by ex-chief Prein made via letters to the editor in the local paper that not only attacked Fisher, but also his wife. That election ended yesterday with Fisher losing to his rival by 44 votes.

So, yes, Fisher is right in that, in most cases, reporting police misconduct can be a matter of career suicide. When we ask ourselves why officers won't report the misconduct they see and we say that it's because they are bad officers, we should remind ourselves of what happens to the good ones and how little support they receive from their community. For us to have better expectations from them, we must expect to support and reward them ourselves.

But, fortunately in this case, Fisher found another calling and this story still has a positive ending where most might not. Fisher now works at a high school with special education children. While it doesn’t pay what a police officer gets, it’s something that Fisher can put his determination towards good use once again.

He ended his story by saying this:

“I can never be a cop again, but hey, I love what I am doing now and hopefully when we recover completely from all this I will finish my degree in teaching and become a full time teacher."

While police unions would use cases like this as an argument that they need even more layers of appeals and protections to fight allegations of misconduct made against officers, this isn’t true. The answer to the problem of retaliation against officers who report misconduct isn’t to make it harder to discipline officers found to have committed acts of misconduct.

The answer is simple actually. As Karl Mansoor, an ex-police officer and law enforcement ethics instructor who fought his own battle against retribution for reporting misconduct, tells his readers… the answer is to make the complaint, investigation, and disciplinary processes transparent to the public in order to remove the incentives that keep misconduct and the retribution suffered for reporting it a secret.

The best solution to the problem of police misconduct and the culture of silence prevalent in police departments across the nation is to shine a little light on them.

Who Do You Call On A Cop?

Police culture's "Blue Wall of Silence" -The most effective no-snitching campaign in history.

One question that I've asked myself over and over again ever since I became a victim of police misconduct is what will I do when it happens again?

More specifically, would I do anything differently while it was happening to me again... and, perhaps more importantly, what would I do when I saw it happening to someone else?

I'm not alone in this, as a reader's recent letter illustrates:

"I have also been the victim of police excessive force and their arbitrary charging practices.

In my case, I was brutally grabbed by the windpipe by a police officer who outweighed me by at least 50 pounds. I was thrown face down onto the street, handcuffed, and kicked in the face and ribs while I was on the ground.

This all transpired after I had the audacity to yell out the word "Hey!" as exited from a restaurant where I encountered five police officers in the parking lot who were beating a teenage girl they had on the ground whom (I later learned) they were attempting to arrest for loitering.

Apparently, the cops took offense at my taking offense at the treatment that they were giving the young lady, all on the utterance of a single word of protest (and being in the wrong place at the wrong time with that opinion)."

I spent the night in jail on an "opposing a police officer" charge. To make matters worse, while I was locked up, different cops kept coming by and abused me verbally... in the hope that I would get angry enough to give them the excuse to take some other physical action against me.

The charges against him were dismissed, but that will never dismiss what it's done to him even though this happened many years ago.

"I've since witnessed numerous other incidences (of police misconduct) in other cities that I have lived in. But I now know enough to keep my mouth shut and to just stay out of it.


I admit that I feel pretty damned ashamed that the police – who are supposed to be the "good guys" – have intimidated me to the extent that I actually fear them enough to not want to speak out publicly against such abuse.


...when the cops are breaking the law, who do you call?"

While at first glance his response to being a victim of misconduct might seem detestable, but actually it's quite reasonable... there's no shame in it.

After all, ask yourself that same question, who would you trust to call on the police when the police act like criminals?

That's the question, isn't it? Who do you call when the police are brutally assaulting someone? Who do you cry out to for help while they are beating you? Sadly, the answer should be nobody.

See, you cannot intervene in an act of police misconduct without becoming another victim of it, and once you are arrested and beaten too your testimony would be discredited by police. Any hope the original victim had of the truth coming to light will have evaporated as soon as you stepped in to stop it. By intervening you do more harm than good... unless you're a cop... but cops hardly ever intervene except to help with the beating.

This is the sinister nature of police misconduct that I always seem to fail at explaining. It's the very heart of just how badly police misconduct shatters a victim's trust in our system of justice, in our society as a whole. This is at the heart of why it's so life-shattering... after a cop victimizes you, you'll never have anyone you can turn to for help again, nor anyone you would call to help someone else aside from yourself.

It's also hard to explain to others how it would be difficult for most victims of police abuse to call the police if we witnessed a crime or even if we were the victims of crime... after all, how will you know if a good cop will come to help or a bad one will come to victimize the victim, or you, even further?

Trust me, once you learn and understand what sadism some officers are capable of, you would balk at taking that risk again too. I know I don't want to go through being beaten up, arrested on a false charge, and then abused in jail without any access to medical care again... would you?

But the damage done by police misconduct goes even beyond that... think of all of the friends of victims who also have doubts about calling the police after they see how their friends were mistreated by police officers... and wonder at how that number of people grows exponentially as more and more victims are created each day by the police.

Police officials and politicians often bemoan the "culture of no snitching" which is prevalent in our cities these days, wondering at what causes it... not being able to understand why their citizens don't want to talk to their police officers.

Perhaps, for the answer to that question, they have no further to look than their own police departments.

Maybe the very first question that they should ask is... who would they trust to call on their police when their police act just like the criminals they are supposed to arrest?

About that Twitter

I got a few questions about my decision in the previous post to stop using Twitter as a news feeder for stories about police misconduct and why I changed my mind and started the feed back up.

Well, I decided to stop using it because my original intent for it was to show just how many reports there were of police misconduct each day in the US and give people interested in police misconduct a handy way to get information on those stories... but, not many people were really interested in it so I decided that little experiment was a failure... at least as far as the original intent was concerned.

But, after I looked over the data I collected by recording all those stories in Twitter, I found it would be useful to track this information from a statistical point of view, as pointed out in the previous post.

So I decided a better way to do that would be to record these reports in a database and codify them to make it easier to break down those statistics by type of misconduct and where misconduct might be most prevalent.

However... after a day worth of entering in the information from each story into a spreadsheet I found that I would never have enough time each day to do this because there were just too many reports to track each day and I have two jobs on top of what I do here, it just wasn't feasible.

But, Posting the stories and links to Twitter was very easy and I could always go back to those later and dissect them for the pertinent data I wanted to track when I had the time to do so.

So, I decided to start the feeds back up via Twitter... not with the expectation that anyone would actually follow them, but for my own statistical tracking.

If others want to read it or use the information I post, that's swell! But, that's not why I'm doing it anymore, it's just to gather stats on police misconduct, that's all.

Hope that answers any questions anyone might have had.

A Month of Police Misconduct in the News

If you haven't noticed, I started using Twitter (here) around the beginning of last month as a sort of extension for this site, a sort of "headline news feed" of sorts. Specifically, I use it to post any news articles that I come across that are related to police misconduct or detainee abuse.

It was an interesting month's worth of effort, but ultimately there wasn't enough interest to justify the time it takes to write up the feeds, few people were actually reading them. (though, one person did write to say they did find them interesting, thanks for that!)

But, even though I'm going to stop using Twitter since there aren't many people reading the feeds, the practice of recording these articles did help me notice something interesting...

Over the month-long effort of tracking stories of police misconduct and detainee abuse I've recorded at least 79 unique stories of police misconduct or detainee abuse.

Yes, 79 incidents reported in the news in one month's worth of time.

Of these reports:

• 10 articles covered 15 separate officers who were convicted of criminal acts. 2 of those officers will return to work with the same department after conviction.
• 29 stories that covered the trial, arrest, indictment, or charges filed against 39 police officers and 3 police chiefs.
• 12 stories about civil rights lawsuits against police departments, 3 of which resulted in awards totaling $1,625,000.
• 28 stories detailing accusations of police misconduct, 8 of which were captured on video.
• 3 Articles detailing investigations into jails accused of violating the rights of prisoners, including one against Seattle's King County Jail which is already under federal oversight for past rights violations.

Further breaking these down I found that, of these stories:

• 10 covered cases of alleged murder or attempted murder. 8 of which resulted in at least one death.
• 11 concerned allegations of or convictions for sexual abuse of children.
• 24 involve allegations of police brutality.
• 8 deal with allegations of domestic violence
• 14 cases where entire teams, sections, or an entire department has been accused of systematic abuses. One of which has a city contemplating dissolving their police department.
• 2 involve questionable police actions taken against people who report on issues of police misconduct.
• 3 involve police departments who were forced to rehire officers after sustained findings or convictions for misconduct.

I could go on, but the point is that all of these stories that I tracked for a month involved serious allegations and 10 of which resulted in actual convictions.

Many articles I didn't track involve officers accused of petty offenses and acts of misconduct like traffic accidents, falsifying overtime records, or other interdepartmental infractions. Also, there are undoubtedly several I missed because there are so many different keywords to track and filter.

So, are these just a few bad eggs in an otherwise healthy basket? Are 79 distinct cases reported in the press in a single month a sign of a healthy law enforcement system in the US?

Even though I'm going to stop using Twitter, I still think it's important for me to continue keeping count in order to see just how pervasive and systemic police misconduct really is in the US and give a summary each month. So I'll be recording what I find in a database in order to generate some useful statistics on police misconduct in America. Statistics that nobody else has really bothered to gather in any serious way up to now.

What do you think?

Stay tuned...

Police Misconduct NewsWatch for 04-01-09

There's a lot of interesting stories going on, so I thought I'd post an assortment of items today with no real theme.

Attorney Paul Richmond's Take on "Drug Czar" Kerlikowske
Attorney Paul Richmond is a civil rights attorney working in the Olympic Peninsula area who, among other things, has done a lot of work in the area of protester rights cases as well as teaching courses on how to film the police during protests. So, his perspective on how Kerlikowske has treated the issue of free speech and how he has dealt with criticism comes from experience, and he tells what he knows in an in-depth review of soon-to-be drug czar Kerlikowske's apparent contempt of free speech rights. (a link to Paul Richmond's blog is here since some are having trouble navigating to the linked entry)

While I did a story covering Kerlikowske's disinterest in detainee rights and issues of police abuses, Richmond's review of his frightening record towards first amendment rights is quite possibly much more frightening given the drug czar's supposed role in governance. It's a very interesting read and I highly suggest you go check it out.

The Problem and Solution of The Blue Wall of Silence
The always interesting Karl Mansoor brings his perspective as an ex-police officer and current law enforcement instructor to bear on the issue of the police code of silence in a post that references a comment made in one of my articles on the spate of police chiefs who have been facing allegations of misconduct and corruption.

The comment, specifically, deals with an officer who came forward to report the misconduct of one of the chiefs I mention and suffered for it, which the commentor says is the reason officers don't have any incentive to report abuses. While I do think that's an important point in that it addresses how distorted the civil service laws have become when they allow departments to punish cops who cross the blue wall of silence but makes it impossible for them to fire cops for acts of misconduct and brutality. But Karl has his own take on the issue, and it's pretty good reading.

There's a Crime Wave in Davie Florida!
Carlos Miller over at Photography Is Not A Crime talks about a crime wave in Davie Florida... but it appears to be the police who are committing the crimes, not the criminals. Several officers there have apparently run astray of the law with some accused of rape and one accused of threatening to murder his pregnant wife.

Carlos mentions these stories in response to another local area blogger who asks people to consider how stressful police work is when they read about these criminal offenses committed by police officers... one wonders if that blogger feels the same way about criminal offenses committed by normal citizens feeling stressed out too?

(by the way, police unions in Florida are trying to push through a new law that will make it more difficult for cities to discipline officers there. They say internal affairs is too overzealous when investigating complaints... seems to be the opposite in Davie Florida at least.)

Ft. Wayne Officials Afraid To Release Police Shooting Video
This was a recent story out of Fort Wayne Indiana where an officer has been accused of needlessly shooting a man 18 times. While internal investigations cleared the officer of any wrongdoing, like they always do, and he still has his badge and gun, but officials are refusing requests for the video out of fears that it would go national and disturb a lot of people...

From the article which quotes a lawyer who has seen the video:

As the officer tries to open Lemus-Rodriguez’s door, the car begins to go in reverse, Lee said. Arnold, in front of the car just off the passenger side, immediately fires three shots into the windshield. The officer who tried to open the door recoils with his hands in the air, as if startled by the shots, Lee said.

“It was shocking that even one shot was seen as necessary or warranted under the circumstances,” Lee said.

There’s a pause in the shooting. Arnold then fires more rounds into the windshield, Lee said. Arnold walks methodically toward the car as he fires, Lee said. At some point, the car makes a sharp turn.

There are no officers in the car’s path visible on the videos, Lee said.

“The other thing is there were two police officers behind the car that were in far greater danger of the crossfire from the shots, the 15 total shots by the police officer doing the shooting, than they were by the possibility of being hit by a car in reverse,” Lee said.

So... if the officer was cleared of wrongdoing, I wonder why city officials are so afraid of the national attention releasing the video would cause?

New York State Seeks To Force Cities To Cede Disciplinary Rights
Legislators in New York state are seeking to create a law that would force municipalities to negotiate issues of disciplinary action with their local police unions, effectively giving police officers a say in how, and if, they can be disciplined for acts of misconduct.

They should look to the city of Seattle to see the implications of such a law since Seattle has been forced to do this for years and had to recently bribe the guild with unheard of pay raises to implement a portion of recommended disciplinary reforms... the portions that ended up not being enforceable without the other recommended reforms.

Now, of course, officers who blow the whistle on misconduct need protections from retribution and officers need a barrier to protect them from politically motivated disciplinary actions... but those protections don't work and only protect problematic officers from being fired or disciplined. The solution to fix that isn't by giving the police unions, the groups that defend problematic officers, a say in how they can or can't be disciplined.

That's how they do it now in Seattle, and we all know how horribly it's turned out since officers here have five different levels of appeals that they can try after they've had a sustained misconduct finding, thanks to the union's ability to force the city to cave by threatening to protest in front of city hall each time it's come to negotiating a new contract.

Reader Submitted: Charges Dropped Against Man Who Shot At Cop
This one was sent to me by a reader who thought it was extraordinary that a citizen who shot at a police officer in self defense will not be charged. It is pretty damn rare, I agreed... however, I don't agree with describing the man as "getting off scott free" as they do in most of the news articles...

After all, the man lost his leg in the shooting, spent 13 months in jail waiting for trial, drained his savings hiring investigators, and will now be stuck with legal and medical bills even though he was cleared of any wrongdoing... hardly what I would call "scott free", but at least he has his freedom, huh? By the way, the officer who didn't announce himself got a medal of valor out of the exchange.

A Request To Support Community Based Media

With the recent demise of a major Seattle news outlet and reports of similar incidents in cities across the US, it's disconcerting that our sources for information about what happens around us are being consolidated and reduced to television-friendly soundbites that are filtered as to not offend advertisers or the editorial bias empowered by limited competition in local markets.

Still, there is some hope in the form of community-based media... but, when other news outlets are dying off from a lack of revenue, can non-profit news outlets like community-based radio keep itself afloat in this difficult economic climate?

My own favorite local community-based radio station, KBCS 91.3, recently held their spring fund drive and fell $50,000 short of their modest goal of getting $177,000 in donations that they need to stay on the air and keep providing invaluable programming that includes the production of in-depth news reporting and investigative reports that discuss important stories that just aren't covered in the mainstream media or even in our local alternative print press.

Now, with the number of sources for news and information decreasing, it's more important than ever to keep these independent and invaluable sources of news reporting alive. Sure, blogs and other sites like this one are here to report on things that most other outlets only report on sporadically, if at all, as a specialized and focused repository of information. And yes, from time to time we do produce exclusive stories that wouldn't be found in any other local media outlet.

But, in large part, bloggers and independent journalists just don't have access to the same resources, the same audience base, and the same sources of inside information that media outlets, including community-based media, has access to. We depend on them just as much as you do as sources of information on which to base many of our stories that we bring to you.

We need them to stick around, you need them to stick around. I can't replace what they do, just as I can not hope to cover the stories that the Seattle Post Intelligencer was able to cover thanks to their immense resources and access to public records that I just cannot afford to buy.

Now, I've often toyed with the idea of asking for donations to help build this site, produce better stories, and gain access to public records that I couldn't afford otherwise... but instead I'm going to ask that our readers consider donating to KBCS in order to keep them around and help them produce the kind of stories that we depend on.

Please visit their membership page and donate what you can to keep them on the air and keep them producing the great content that they've been giving to us with programs like One World Report that is produced locally and focuses on the issues that are important to our community like Seattle Police accountability and local civil rights issues.

If you won't do it for me, at least do it for yourself. We need all the voices that we can get who are willing to speak about important news stories. One major one has already been silenced, let's not risk losing another.

Against Police Misconduct, Divided We Will Fall

I wanted to take some time and explain some things to readers who may wonder about my previous article. I realize that, at first glance, it might have sounded pretty defeatist.

So, let me start by saying that I didn't write it to suggest that people fighting police misconduct should give up, quite the opposite. I wrote it to explain how and why these efforts need to step it up. I wrote it to help focus on the tactics people who defend police misconduct use to bypass local police accountability efforts.

I wrote it to explain that, without addressing the federal and state laws that make it impossible for cities to rid themselves of bad cops, what does it matter if we identify all the bad cops and detail their abuses, or hold protests against them, or even convince city officials that something must be done?

The problem we face is that organizations and individuals dedicated to address police misconduct and brutality just can't bring ourselves to cooperate with each other on a local level, let alone work with similar efforts in other cities to put pressure on state government and federal lawmakers to change the current laws that encourage police abuses.

Many put pressure and blame on police chiefs and leaders without understanding how they are often denied the tools they need to address the problems they are blamed for... Sure, those groups might force one chief to be fired, but it helps little if the next one in still isn't allowed to fire troublemakers just like the last one.

We need to realize that the police have many resources; they have their unions, their 'benevolent' organizations, their memorial groups, their own lobbyists, armies of lawyers on retainer, and countless other support groups, that all work together to pass laws that protect officers from discipline and accountability on a local, state, and national level...

How can any of us, we who dedicate ourselves to fighting abuses of authority, police brutality, and systemic abuses of civil and human rights, hope to fight that power without understanding how effective it is and working together to counterbalance it on the same level?

After all, what good is it if we devote all our resources in divided efforts to force changes at a local level while all those police organizations have the ears and pocketbooks of state and federal lawmakers all to themselves without any opposing viewpoint being heard?

That's the uphill fight we face... and we can't keep pretending that a tiny rally of a dozen people in Seattle, or that a small website written by one guy, or any of these things we do individually are going to accomplish anything lasting on their own. We have to understand the united front we all face when we try to confront police misconduct and how they use that unity to defeat our individual efforts.

But, if we could just get it together and use each others strengths and focus on meaningful goals instead of just being reactive to each individual case of misconduct... maybe we would stand a chance against the daily onslaught of police misconduct and those who seek to perpetuate it.

It's time to face facts. The people opposed to police misconduct cannot hope to make progress unless they can become just as united in that cause as police organizations are in their efforts to help problematic officers avoid discipline for their abuses.

We must accept that, while we remain divided, we will be destined to continue to fail if we keep trying the same failed tactics over and over again…

…and I have to accept that it’s going to take a lot more effort on my part than what I’ve put forward so far in order to have any chance of addressing the seemingly ever-worsening problem of police misconduct.