Cops Everywhere... They Lurves Us 2

 

It appears as though the fine officers with the NYPD have their own message board where they apparently like to rant about this and that... such as sites like Photography is not a Crime as well as yours truly...

(I wonder if they've seen Blue Must Be True? He keeps asking where I get all my hate-mail from.)

Well, last time some cops showed us some love like this it was from a fine group of officers in Chicago whose site is now, sadly, defunct. (I didn't do it, honest). Those law enforcement professionals sure did send me some wonderful correspondence, so I can't wait to see if the NYPD represent themselves with as much professionalism as the good ole boys from the CPD showed me.


Oh, and speaking about how police officers love to hear criticism, for some unknown reason the police watchdog website RateMyCop.com is currently offline. You might recall how, last year, their hosting site shut them down and forced them to get a new host after cops started complaining about it... Maybe it happened again? Nobody's saying anything yet, so stay tuned...

UPDATE: RateMyCop is back online after apparently being the victim of a hacker.

National Police Misconduct News Feed Criteria

Since there have been a few questions and concerns going back and forth about what stories should and should not go into the National Police Misconduct News Feed I decided that it might be a good time to go over the criteria I've developed for picking stories that qualify and then open it up to comments, questions, and suggestions.

First, any allegations, investigations into, criminal charges for, disciplinary actions on, lawsuits for, or judgments regarding misconduct by an active law enforcement officer while on-duty qualify for the feed.

Second, any story about an officer listed as a former officer but who was an active officer at the time of an alleged incident of misconduct but resigned or was fired afterward will be included in the feed.

Third, any story about off-duty criminal offenses alleged, charged, or convicted or any story about off-duty activities that would be construed as misconduct due to misuse of one's position as a law enforcement officer will also be included. These include incidents of theft, DUI, domestic violence, and assault.

Fourth, other stories may be included in the feed that relate to legal issues that affect police misconduct, such as department policy issues that obscure misconduct, legislative efforts that hinder efforts to prevent misconduct or handicap efforts to document or reduce misconduct, but will not be included in the statistics as a case of misconduct.

Fifth, when compiling statistics from the feed, duplicate stories about the same instance of misconduct and updates regarding a single incident of misconduct are removed from the offline database. So if you see multiple stories about a single incident, those will be addressed on the back-end of the statistic gathering process.

Finally, a note for those who wish to correspond with me via the Twitter feed, since it's used on other sites as a sort of news scroller I really try to limit personal communications and keep it reserved for stories of misconduct as much as possible... so please don't be offended if I don't reply publicly or if I choose to reply via a direct message instead of publicly.

With this in mind, I now open the floor for any questions, comments, concerns, or suggestions... and, of course, I always welcome submissions for articles that you think I might have missed!

Thanks for reading!

Police Misconduct - Widespread or Deep-seated?

While the National Police Misconduct NewsFeed project has just begun to give us a glimpse at the possible breadth of America's police misconduct problem, it sometimes fails to show just how deep it runs perhaps.

Sure, when most people think of police departments where corruption and misconduct run deep, we think of big cities like Chicago, Oakland, New York, or Philadelphia. So, does that mean smaller cities and towns are exempt from the problem of deep-seated police corruption and a culture of misconduct?

Furthermore, when we see more than one story of misconduct being reported from a specific location, is this just coincidence, or is this indicative of a deeper, more disconcerting problem?

Still sound confusing? Then consider some of these cases, buried deep within the police misconduct news feed:

Spring Lake Police Department in North Carolina was told it's officers may no longer make felony arrests in 2007. But recently things have gone from bad to worse as two of it's officers have been arrested on multiple felony charges and the state's district attorney is promising even more arrests while also admitting that he has to dismiss a majority of the misdemeanor charges filed against suspects by the department as well.

To sum it up, the department is so corrupt, so inept, that it cannot be trusted to even make a simple misdemeanor arrest, effectively shutting it down and forcing an already thinly stretched county sheriff to pick up the extra slack.

Think of it... an entire department of bad or inept cops. Would that make you feel a bit less secure if you lived there? No? How about this...

Cuyahoga County Sheriff Gerald McFaul left the Sheriff's Department in tatters as he resigned under civil and criminal allegations of nepotism, political favoritism, and a publicized search of his office and home by FBI and IRS agents.

After his departure the county requested an audit of the department and has recently found out that nearly half of their officers were never given civil service exams but instead were hired at the recommendation of friends and family within the department... in fact, many were members of the sheriff's own family or recommended by them without any other real qualifications. But since they've been employed for so long, the county can't fire them.

Still not wondering how entire departments could be problematic like this? Here's some more...

Since the beginning of this year, 1/3 of Smith Township's police department, near Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, have been arrested on criminal charges that include burglary, assault, perjury, and drug possession. One officer alone was accused of assaulting a 59 year old man and later accused of attacking a 19 year old fast food worker while on duty, just because he thought the kid was talking about him.

Then last week they found themselves in the crosshairs of a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging excessive force was used when officers arrested a couple after a concert. Smith Township's residents have taken to describing their police officers as incapable of controlling themselves and scary...

Would you be scared living there too? No? Well how about here...

Greece New York's Police Department is missing most of it's command staff, including it's chief, as they are suspended pending criminal and civil charges... in fact, many of the department's police officers are too. Things have gotten so bad in Greece that state officials have come down to do a complete audit of the department that has been in the news, in a bad way. So often, in fact, that the city recently canceled a ceremony that was supposed to honor the department because, well, I guess there wasn't anything left to really celebrate about it.

Does a police department with nothing left to honor make you think twice about how your own police department might operate behind closed doors? No?

Then I have one more place to tell you about... the place where cops like those who end up listed on the news feed go...

Because, if you've ever wondered where all the cops fired for misconduct go when they try to find a new job in law enforcement, wonder no longer... they went to the Maywood Police Department in California where they nicknamed themselves "The Police Department of Second Chances"...

Well, looks like they'll be hoping for third chances now that the effort to cut costs by lowering standards and recruiting officers from disciplinary hearings instead of job fairs and academies has resulted in a blistering audit by the California State Attorney General who found an environment of gross misconduct and widespread abuses against the citizenry.

So, would you want to move your family to Maywood and trust their safety in the hands of a department full of "second chances"?

As I said, the news feed does give us a glimpse into how widespread the problem of police misconduct is... but, just how deep does it run in each police department? Maybe that will become more clear in time as well.

In the meantime, maybe we should all start asking ourselves this question about our own local police force... before your department ends up in my feed too.

The Politics of Truth

In 2007, several incidents of police misconduct, including allegations that officers who lied were never punished, brought public outrage to a head in Seattle and prompted city officials to create 2 review boards to look into the Seattle Police Department's policies and methods of dealing with allegations of misconduct and disciplinary actions against officers.

The results of those efforts were touted and the city proudly declared that they implemented all of the recommended reforms suggested by those reviews in 2008... though, in truth, they really didn't.

The problem was that Washington State requires Seattle to negotiate all disciplinary policies with the police officer's union, which is about the same thing as if they were to require each school to negotiate rules and discipline with their students or requiring jails to negotiate terms of discipline with their inmates.

So, 11 of the recommended reforms had to be approved during contract negotiations between the city and the union. After initially suggesting that they would not negotiate any changes to disciplinary policy, the union changed tact and said that they would sell some of the reform items, after modifications, in exchange for more pay. So, the city and union picked and chose which reforms the city could afford to pay off the union to accept.

One of those reforms that was altered and then bought involved a proposed policy that would force the chief to fire any officer who was dishonest during the internal investigation process... The union said that was unacceptable unless the city added that the finding of dishonesty could only be used if the city established an INTENT to mislead with clear and convincing PROOF. The city relented and bought that modified reform, as worded below:

In the case of an officer receiving a sustained complaint involving dishonesty in the course of the officer's official duties or relating to the administration of justice, a presumption of termination shall apply. For purposes of this presumption of termination the Department must prove dishonesty by clear and convincing evidence. Dishonesty is defined as intentionally providing false information, which the officer knows to be false, or intentionally providing incomplete responses to specific questions, regarding facts that are material to the investigation. Specific questions do not include general or 'catch-all' questions. For purposes of this Section dishonesty means more than mere inaccuracy or faulty memory.

Fast forward to the present day and we find that the city bought and paid for a reform item that it can never enforce because, as the union bragged shortly after the contract was agreed upon, there is no real way to prove intent and that, so long as an officer is smart about it, all they have to do is say that any inconsistency found in testimony was a lapse of memory and all would be well.

Only now has the city realized their blunder as the union has overturned two rulings of dishonesty upon appeal which resulted in the rehiring of one officer who was fired on a finding of dishonesty involving a case of alleged brutality.

And now with a third case where the city attorney forced the police chief to change his planned disciplinary actions against another officer who was found to have been dishonest during his investigation into allegations of sexual harassment.

It's interesting that it's only just now that the city and the media are realizing that they didn't get all the reforms that they thought they paid for, even though I immediately noticed this problem shortly after the proposed contract was released in June of 2008, (here and here).

So, will the city keep telling citizens that they enacted all the reforms that were supposed to improve police accountability now? Will the press keep parroting the city's releases without doing research of their own to verify those mistaken claims?

Or will this new development cause people to reexamine the problems with police accountability in Seattle and Washington State as a whole and finally discover that the root of the problem cannot be solved at the local level because the problem is that the state is forcing cities to let their police officers dictate if, how, and why they can and can't be held accountable for their actions?

Keep watching to find out.

Well That Was A Dud

Site stats for the last month to give you an idea of just how stagnant this site has become.

Hmm, two months of effort getting the news feed process right, hours upon hours scanning and entering reports of misconduct each day into Twitter and a database, a full 24 hours of effort analyzing the data and preparing the results to see how extensive police misconduct might be...

...and I had less traffic yesterday and today than I've had for weeks and absolutely zero feedback.

So, there (was) a new poll on the right, is the Twitter news feed worth it?
Is gathering all this information and generating stats worth my limited time?
Heck, is this site even worthwhile?

Let me know... Because I don't like wasting my time or yours.


UPDATE: I've decided to try and keep at it for one more month and see how it goes... For those who wrote, commented, or voted. Thank you for the support and suggestions.

National Police Misconduct Reporting Project - April 2009 Statistics

PLEASE NOTE: The National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project and all associated police misconduct statistical reports have been moved to http://www.injusticeeverywhere.com

A Map of Police Misconduct

View 2009 April US Police Misconduct Reports in a larger map
UPDATE: Unfortunately, Google maps can only handle 200 entries per map, and since there are over 490 stories so far this month, I can't make an interactive map of police misconduct stories... I'll keep looking into it, but for the people who wanted to see this come out, I'm sorry.

I'm thinking of creating an interactive map of police misconduct cases in the US each month, but it's a gigantic pain in the butt and will take a lot of my time...

(Time is something which I barely have already between the working 2 jobs, taking care of family, this site, and the news feed... sleep and food happens every now and then too.)

So, the question is, does anyone think they would find this useful?

If so, does anyone know of an easy way to make a Google map like this?

Thanks!

NOTE: The above map is just a work-in-progress, it's not even close to being completed with close to 500 entries for this month alone pending so far.