Reply #54: Well, I'm back. Yesterday I was out all day and didn't get a chance to see that you've sent a reply

[MrScorpio]

And thanks very much for doing that.

Also, I see that you're now willing to ask questions (and hopefully have a civil discussion, I hope) about the actual state of police misconduct in this country. And I also certainly hope that you're sincere about this as well.

Be that as it may, I will stipulate that I am NOT the person who has done the ground pounding work to document the totality of police misconduct, I leave that to the experts.

Over the last year, since the Skip Gates incident, I've come across various net sources from quite a few organizations who have studied and continue to study the problem of police misconduct and have actually documented their findings. I will also freely admit that my threads about the subject of police misconduct were actually gleaned from their work. I have no qualms about not taking credit for other people's work. As a matter of fact from now on, I'll seek to do better by extending that credit.

Now first, I MUST reiterate: The subject at hand is Police Misconduct. Whereas, it was NEVER my supposition or intention to classify everyone in the police profession as inherently susceptible to criminal behavior more than the general population at hand, I do however say that police misconduct, in itself, is a serious problem. Yes, I actually believe that most police officers are law abiding citizens themselves, who faithfully honor their oath to uphold the rule of law.

But, when cops do go bad, because cops more than ordinary citizens are extended arrest powers, the authority to use deadly force when necessary and the authority of the state behind them, these cops represent a serious breach of the public trust, especially in matters of life and death situations. Frankly, I don't see how being concerned about a breach of the public trust can be classified as being "hyper obsessed".

All I say is that, it does all of us well to keep in mind the possibility that the cop that we may meet out on the street may or may not have our best interests at heart. In that case, it becomes quite the matter of self-preservation. You, Taitertots, may be quite willing to defer your own life and safety to whatever police officer that happens to be standing in front of you, but given the merest chance that whatever cop that I could meet may be predisposed to engage in misconduct, I prefer not to.

Next:

I'd like to introduce you to various online sources of information about the serious problem of police misconduct. Yes, you have every right not to take my word for it, I do however direct your attention to some of the people and organizations that are very credible about the subject:

First, we have VETERANS AGAINST POLICE ABUSE, http://veteransagainstpoliceabuse.org/

From their site:

Veterans Against Police Abuse was founded on 17 September 2009 (Constitution Day) and is dedicated to ensuring the sacrifices of our Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, Airmen and patriotic citizens remain unblemished by the un-American stain of police abuse. Our organization is dedicated to strengthening the Constitutional rights of all American citizens through public education, creative enterprise and legislative reform. We will be developing a commercial application (free to all) which has potential to greatly increase the transparency of the police force while also funding our lobbying efforts for two different legal reforms. Our organization has no agenda other than that which has been stated. We have no political, religious, or ideoglocal viewpoint other than that contained in the Constitution of the United States. We exist simply to strengthen and reinforce our Bill of Rights through commercial endeavor and legal reform focused on the singular issue of police abuse.

*snip*

Police abuse doesn't require bruises or blood. It often comes in the form of unlawful arrest or an arrest for victimless or petty crimes charged only to justify the physical display of state sponsored power. The keys to police abuse are insecurity and a lack of respect for American freedom and principles. Police abuse is both cowardly and un-American.

http://veteransagainstpoliceabuse.org/PoliceAbuse.aspx

Another organization is the CENTER FOR JUSTICE, which advocates for victims of law enforcement abuse. Some of their cases:

State v. Charles McNabb, superior court no. 03-1-01961-6, court of appeals no. 22939-4-III: Defending competent person’s right to refuse food and medical treatment while detained pending trial and challenging constitutionality of force-feeding order. Washington Supreme Court ruled 8-1 on April 10, 2008 that the state’s interest in applying the Department of Corrections’ force-feeding policy “outweigh his right to refuse artificial means of nutrition and hydration.” Read majority opinion here. Read dissent here.

Christopher Ostrander v. T.H. Madsen et al., federal district court no. CS-99-0017-WFN, 9th Cir. court of appeals no. 00-35506, 00-35538, 00-35541: Civil rights action for police brutality. On First Amendment and other grounds, 9th Circuit affirmed dismissal of counterclaims for defamation and malicious prosecution. Settlement, including compensation, negotiated after remand. Reply Brief: Ostrander v. Madsen

State v. Dayna Christoph, court of appeals no. 19112-5-III: The Center represented Ms. Christoph in vacating juvenile conviction based on coerced false confession and ineffective assistance of counsel in failing to discover overwhelming evidence of innocence. On appeal by state, court of appeals affirmed order vacating illegal conviction. Reply Motion to Vacate: State v. Dayna Christoph

State v. Randy McReynolds, 117 Wn. App. 309, 71 P.3d 663 (2003): Filed amicus brief for Washington Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers on proper unit of prosecution for possession of stolen property. In published opinion, court of appeals adopted arguments from amicus brief, curbing power of overzealous prosecutors to stack duplicative charges. Amicus Brief: State v. Randy McReynolds

Katherine Knox; Donald Westerman v. Spokane County District Court, superior court no. 00-20585-8-1, and court of appeals no. 19951- 7-III: Represented city and county public defenders in obtaining writ of mandamus ordering district court to comply with state-mandated procedures for appointment of counsel in criminal cases. The writ redressed systemic denial of the constitutional right to counsel. Brief: Knox/Westerman v. Spokane County District Court.

http://cforjustice.org/programs/cases/law-enforcement-misconduct/

Next is the NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ETHICS, an organization whose mission is to combat the problems of police misconduct with assessments and training:

Law Enforcement and Corrections

Special Notice

Please take a moment and go to the “Why Select the National Institute of Ethics” section of our website and look at the hundreds of seminars the Institute has conducted since 1991.

There is a reason that the vast majority of our courses are “repeat business.” Our goal is always to exceed the expectations of any agency that retains our services… and satisfaction is guaranteed.

As an example, every seminar student will receive a CD that contains over 500 leadership files. Included are the 12 extensive manuals that I have written during my career; all copyright free. We are very sincere about doing every thing we can to help you prevent misconduct.
Neal Trautman

http://www.ethicsinstitute.com/law_enforcement_and_corrections.html

Many of the organizations are locally based, such as the COMMUNITIES AGAINST POLICE BRUTALITY in the Twin Cities:

Communities United Against Police BrutalityTM is a Twin-Cities based organization that was created to deal with police brutality on an ongoing basis. We work on the day-to-day abuses as well as taking on the more extreme cases. Our overriding goal is to create a climate of resistance to abuse of authority by police organizations and to empower local people with a structure that can take on police brutality and actually bring it to an end. We provide support for survivors of police brutality and families of victims so they can reclaim their dignity and join the struggle to end police brutality.



WHAT IS POLICE BRUTALITY?
Communities United Against Police BrutalityTM defines police brutality as the use of excessive or unnecessary force by police officers with the purpose or expectation of causing death, bodily harm or mental harm to a human being. It is generally associated with race profiling and similar harassment by police of targeted people.

WHO IS AFFECTED BY POLICE BRUTALITY?
Although a majority of recent Minnesota police killings take place in a broader context of the nationwide epidemic of police violence and race profiling, where victims are predominantly people of color, police brutality respects no boundaries.

* Barbara Schneider, a white woman suffering from mental illness, was shot to death after Minneapolis police officers rammed through her locked apartment door and forcefully entered her bedroom. Their reason: she was playing her radio too loudly.
* Gennadiy Balandin, a 17-year-old Russian immigrant, was tragically disabled after being shot in the back three times by a Dakota County police officer, who alleges that Gennadiy went after the officer's gun. According to the official record, Gennadiy, reportedly nude at the time of the shooting, was allegedly under the influence of LSD.
* Artis Graham, a 35-year-old African-American man, died on October 18, 1998, six days after being brutally beaten with flashlights and batons by St. Paul police officers while his hands were cuffed behind his back. He had been stopped for a traffic violation. Police allege Artis was fleeing police in his car.
* Alfred "Abuka" Sanders, another African-American man, was gunned down on November 1, 2000 by Minneapolis police officers while trapped helplessly in his car in the alley near his home, after being followed by police and an Augsburg College security guard, for allegedly driving erratically. Police fired 33 rounds of ammunition at Alfred, striking his body several times. He was unarmed and had committed no crime.

These cases represent only a fraction of the many local victims who have lost their lives because of the increasing police brutality in Minnesota. Their wrongful deaths are a violation of all human rights and nothing less than government-sanctioned murder.

http://www.cuapb.org/HomePage.asp

Other local organizations are the various COPWATCH groups that have chapters in several cities:

Berkley, CA: http://www.berkeleycopwatch.org/

Los Angeles, CA: http://www.copwatchla.org/

Oakland, CA: http://www.oaklandcopwatch.com/Home.html

and Western Massachusetts: http://www.westernmasscopwatch.net/


Because local jurisdictions cannot always be expected to solve their own police misconduct problems effectively, the US JUSTICE DEPARTMENT and the FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION have divisions which are dedicated to addressing the problem:

Color of Law

U.S. law enforcement officers and other officials like judges, prosecutors, and security guards have been given tremendous power by local, state, and federal government agencies—authority they must have to enforce the law and ensure justice in our country. These powers include the authority to detain and arrest suspects, to search and seize property, to
bring criminal charges, to make rulings in court, and to use deadly force in certain situations.

Preventing abuse of this authority, however, is equally necessary to the health of our nation’s democracy. That’s why it’s a federal crime for anyone acting under “color of law” willfully to deprive or conspire to deprive a person of a right protected by the Constitution or U.S. law. “Color of law” simply means that the person is using authority given to him or her by a local, state, or federal government agency.

The FBI is the lead federal agency for investigating color of law abuses, which include acts carried out by government officials operating both within and beyond the limits of their lawful authority. Off-duty conduct may be covered if the perpetrator asserted his or her official status in some way.

During 2009, the FBI investigated 385 color of law cases. Most of these crimes fall into five broad areas:

• excessive force;
• sexual assaults;
• false arrest and fabrication of evidence;
• deprivation of property; and
• failure to keep from harm.

Excessive force: In making arrests, maintaining order, and defending life, law enforcement officers are allowed to use whatever force is "reasonably" necessary. The breadth and scope of the use of force is vast—from just the physical presence of the officer…to the use of deadly force. Violations of federal law occur when it can be shown that the force used was willfully "unreasonable" or "excessive."

Sexual assaults by officials acting under color of law can happen in jails, during traffic stops, or in other settings where officials might use their position of authority to coerce an individual into sexual compliance. The compliance is generally gained because of a threat of an official action against the person if he or she doesn’t comply.

False arrest and fabrication of evidence: The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right against unreasonable searches or seizures. A law enforcement official using authority provided under the color of law is allowed to stop individuals and, under certain circumstances, to search them and retain their property. It is in the abuse of that discretionary power—such as an unlawful detention or illegal confiscation of property—that a violation of a person's civil rights may occur.

Fabricating evidence against or falsely arresting an individual also violates the color of law statute, taking away the person’s rights of due process and unreasonable seizure. In the case of deprivation of property, the color of law statute would be violated by unlawfully obtaining or maintaining a person’s property, which oversteps or misapplies the official’s authority.

The Fourteenth Amendment secures the right to due process; the Eighth Amendment prohibits the use of cruel and unusual punishment. During an arrest or detention, these rights can be violated by the use of force amounting to punishment (summary judgment). The person accused of a crime must be allowed the opportunity to have a trial and should not be subjected to punishment without having been afforded the opportunity of the legal process.

Failure to keep from harm: The public counts on its law enforcement officials to protect local communities. If it’s shown that an official willfully failed to keep an individual from harm, that official could be in violation of the color of law statute.

Filing a Complaint

To file a color of law complaint, contact your local FBI office by telephone, in writing, or in person. The following information should be provided:

• all identifying information for the victim(s);
• as much identifying information as possible for the subject(s), including position, rank, and
agency employed;
• date and time of incident;
• location of incident;
• names, addresses, and telephone numbers of any witness(es);
• a complete chronology of events; and
• any report numbers and charges with respect to the incident.

You may also contact the United States Attorney's Office in your district or send a written
complaint to:

Assistant Attorney General
Civil Rights Division
Criminal Section
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, Northwest
Washington, DC 20530

FBI investigations vary in length. Once our investigation is complete, we forward the findings to the U.S. Attorney’s Office within the local jurisdiction and to the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., which decide whether or not to proceed toward prosecution and handle any prosecutions that follow.

http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/civilrights/color.htm
http://www.justice.gov/crt/split/complaints.php#Police

And last, but not least, there is INJUSTICE EVERYWHERE, The National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project: I rely their Twitter feed to supply the "anecdotes" that I "spam" the board with. An excellent source of information for stats and reports of incidence.

First, The 2009 Police Misconduct Push-Pin Map:



Despite the labels on some of the other maps that were made, this is the only true incident-based map since each push-pin represents a single report of police misconduct that occurred during the 8.5 month tracking period that the NPMSRP was active last year. The other maps show either per capita rates or the number of officers involved with reported incidents of misconduct.

This map isn’t that valuable except as an eye-catching way to show how much police misconduct occurs in the US within that period of time. It would have been more valuable if it were interactive and a visitor could zoom in and out of the map and click on each pin to see information about each incident. Unfortunately, the type of software needed to do that costs more than the NPMSRP, an unfunded independent project, can afford.




As mentioned above, this map isn’t actually an incident map, it is a density map that shows how many officers were associated with reports of police misconduct within the reporting period at a county-level. That is to say, the number of officers working in agencies, city and county, located within a given county that were referenced in a report of police misconduct.

It should be noted that when reports mention incidents where unspecified multiple officers were involved, the NPMSRP makes a conservative estimate as to what that number might be. For example, the general rule is that a traffic stop where a report mentions more than one officer was involved will be recorded as involving 2 officers, a wrong door drug raid will be recorded as involving 3 officers, crowd control 4… As you can see, these are very conservative estimates.

The other problems with this map involve the color scale. First, the colors used for the scale were a mistake since the darker colors for higher number of reported officers obscures some locations where misconduct was prevalent. Namely places like smaller counties near state borders and independent cities like Washington DC because the dark purple is hard to distinguish from the state borders. Second, by topping the scale at 30+ it also obscures the fact that some localities had rates far exceeding 30 reports. In fact, some more than tripled that number. Unfortunately, these problems weren’t realized until the mapping was half-way completed.

This map was still under development when the 2009 preliminary report was released but may be included in the final report when that is published. The value of this map is debatable really, it would have been more valuable as a heat map that showed per capita misconduct density on a localized level but we just don’t have that capability since something like that would require specialized software. This map, just zooming into county level for number of officers involved, took 50 hours to create manually. So, as you can see, doing anything more complex than that would just be too time-prohibitive without software to aid the process. (and you can tell why I didn’t want to redo the scale after I was half-way through)




This map shows the per capita police misconduct rates at a state-level for the recording period. To specify, it shows the per capita ratio of how many officers per state were cited in reports of police misconduct as compared with the number of sworn law enforcement officers reportedly employed at all law enforcement agencies within that state.

While fairly valuable on it’s own, this map still runs into problems with people’s expectations. For example, a lot of people expect states like Illinois or California to rank high, especially when they live there and constantly hear about reports of police misconduct on a weekly basis. (Yes, weekly basis… some cities had more reports than the number of weeks that the reports were recorded). This is why the incident map was included, to help address those questions… however, there’s a problem with that, which is why the following maps that weren’t included are needed too.

http://www.injusticeeverywhere.com/?p=1615

2010 Semi-Annual Report

http://www.injusticeeverywhere.com/?page_id=2793

Summary

The following statistical report is based on information gathered during the first half of 2010. The data used to create this statistical report is available for public viewing in the database section of this site. From January 2010 through June 2010 there were:

* 2,541 Unique reports of police misconduct cited.
* 3,240 Law enforcement officers cited in recorded police misconduct reports.
* 178 Of the law enforcement officers reported were departmental leaders, police chiefs, and sheriffs.
* 4,199 Alleged victims of police misconduct associated with these reports.
* 124 Fatalities associated with these reports.
* 17.9 Law enforcement officers cited in the news for misconduct each day on average.
* $148,512,000 in approximated police misconduct related settlements and judgments paid out in this period.

By projecting this month’s NPMSRP totals out to one year, the following comparisons can be made between the reported police misconduct allegation rate and the reported 2008 general crime rate* as published by the FBI and DOJ for 2008 (*please note that both the NPMSRP police misconduct rates and the FBI/DOJ UCR general crime rate statistics are reported incidents, not convictions):



Categorization

When examining misconduct reports by type, excessive force incidents were most common at 23.3% of all reports. Officer-involved sexual misconduct complaints were the second most reported at 10.6% and financial crime reports came in third at 7.5% of all reports.



Of the Excessive Force incidents, physical excessive force (punching, kicking, batons, and other physical force) incidents were most common at 62% of all excessive force reports, followed by firearm-related reports at 13%, taser-related incidents at 11%, and mixed (combination of physical and taser or physical and chemical) reports at 10%.

13% of excessive force reports involved fatalities and, of those fatalities, most were caused by firearms (60%) then followed by physical force (23%) then taser-related fatalities (17%). It should be noted that these fatalities are only excessive or unnecessary use of force related fatalities, not the total number of firearm or taser-related fatalities that may have occurred within this period of time.

The following table shows how the states rank for police misconduct rates based on calculating the rate of misconduct per 100,000 officers in each state based on officers involved in reports over the sample period of January-June 2010 (p/100k) and a projected PMR which takes that number and projects it at a constant rate over a 1 year period (p/100k Proj) for comparison with that national annual PMR:

That's just a taste of their work. Here's their Twitter Feed, it's frequently updated: http://twitter.com/InjusticeNews


So, yes, not every cop is a criminal. I'm not even CLOSE to making that assertion. But there is no way that you can tell the US Justice Department, the FBI and various citizens groups who are dedicated to recording and combating the danger of police misconduct in our society with a dismissive claim that they're just overstating the problem.

If you continue to do that, well... I have no idea what to say to you.