The Root Problems with Police in America

Let me begin by saying that yes, there are good officers on every police force.  That said, I suspect every police force in the nation also has officers who have no business wearing a badge and carrying a gun.  One of the big problems as noted in prior posts is that rather than weeding out these unfit officers, the entire system within departments is focused on protecting them seemingly under a mindset that views admitting that some officers are toxic and need to be removed somehow discredits the entire force.  As people are now realizing (new study shows 74% of Americans see a problem with police), not getting rid of these toxic and unfit officers is what is what is destroying the image of the entire force.  If someone is racist, prone to brutality and gets an adrenaline rush by abusing citizens, they simply do not belong on a police force anywhere.  Add to this mix the militarization of police forces and  it is a recipe for problems.  A Washington Post column looks at the problem and possible solutions, which include ridding the country of an occupant of the White House who fans racism, division and violence.  Here are excerpts: 

Every day — every night, to be more precise — more bad apples roll before our eyes. The video is horrifying; the camera unflinching. So, more Americans — white Americans, even Republican Americans, a majority of Americans except, it seems, those who work behind fortified barricades for President Trump — have come to understand: The problem of policing is not individual apples, but bushels full of them. It is a diseased tree.

A diseased tree with three infected and intertwined branches that each must be lopped off. The worst, by far, is systemic racism in police departments nationwide — and here perhaps the arboreal metaphor fails, and the disease is in the trunk itself, if not in the soil of our national history. The second is the embedded culture of brutality and tolerance of brutality among police officers. The third, connected to the second, is the militarization of police departments, with combat-style equipment designed for battlefields and heedlessly deployed in American streets, that reinforces this culture of violence and, as Trump would have it, “domination.”

Those who were inclined, who had the distance — and, yes, the privilege — to be inclined to give officers and departments the benefit of the doubt can no longer soothe themselves with the illusion that these are random, unrepresentative incidents. Technology in the form of omnipresent video cameras has conclusively ended that debate. Those who are white can no longer rest comfortably in the fiction that this is a problem confined to the other.

[W]hile there should be no doubt that police brutality has a racial cast, there is also no doubt that lighter skin offers no absolute immunity. Witness the violent assault Monday on peaceful protesters of every hue at Lafayette Square. Witness the unprovoked shoving Thursday of 75-year-old Martin Gugino by police officers during a demonstration in Buffalo: Officers push Gugino, shove a baton into him, his head hits the pavement, he is motionless and bleeding, and the officers march on. We are not all George Floyd now, because not all of us are at similar risk. But all of us are at some risk when police believe they can act like this.

The gratifying news is that the public gets it, more than ever before. A new ABC News/Ipsos poll finds that three-fourths of those surveyed believe Floyd’s killing is not an isolated incident but part of a broader problem in the treatment of African Americans by police.

The shift is remarkable. Just six years ago, after the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and the death of Eric Garner after he was put in a chokehold by New York City police, just 43 percent thought the incidents signified a broader problem, compared with 74 percent today.

No single measure will suffice to fix the situation; many individual steps can help.

Training to create a police culture of intervention against out-of-control colleagues, not a blue wall of silence. Swift — and, where appropriate, criminal — consequences . . . .Revamping police union contracts to end unwarranted protections for violent officers, including shielding their disciplinary records from public view and making it difficult to remove them.

Restoring the Justice Department’s role — abandoned by the Trump administration — in reshaping the behavior of rogue departments. Reconsidering the doctrine of qualified immunity that has shielded officers from civil liability for their abuses.

And demilitarizing police departments. Under a 1997 law, more than $7 billion in surplus military equipment, from grenade launchers to armored vehicles, has been transferred at no cost to local police departments. . . . . As researchers Ryan Welch and Jack Mewhirter explained in 2017, even controlling for household income, population characteristics and violent crime levels, “more-militarized law enforcement agencies were associated with more civilians killed each year by police.” In short, “Militarization makes every problem — even a car of teenagers driving away from a party — look like a nail that should be hit with an AR-15 hammer.

[A]nother necessary element of the solution: a president who will help change the culture of brutal and racist policing, not reinforce it. Not send out his national security adviser to contend that the problem is limited to “a few bad apples that have given law enforcement a bad name.” Acknowledging the scope and nature of the disease is an essential precondition to curing it.

Donald Trump Bloviates in Virginia Beach

GOP windbag and liar in chief Donald Trump appeared before a small crowd in Virginia Beach and gave another one of his substance free speeches that played on white fears of minorities and implied that he's favor creating an even more oppressive police state.   The supposed purpose of the appearance was to address issues facing the military in this region of Navy, Army and Air Force bases.  For the most part, it turned out to be Trump's usual race based and anti-trade message.  Here are details from the Virginian Pilot: 

Calling himself “the law and order candidate,” Republican presidential contender Donald Trump said Monday that police need more authority to protect the public but acknowledged a growing problem of racial unrest.

Trump told a crowd of about 175 supporters in a Westin Town Center hotel ballroom that he had intended to focus his afternoon speech on his proposals to assist military veterans but changed his speech after Thursday’s ambush and killing of five Dallas police officers and wounding of 10 others. Trump and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who introduced him, both argued for a stronger national focus on law enforcement.

“It’s time for our hostility against our police and against all members of law enforcement to end, and end immediately – right now,” Trump said. “We must maintain law and order at the highest level, or we will cease to have a country.”

The presumptive GOP nominee said the violence and resulting protests highlight a growing threat of racial unrest.

“I think it’s a bigger problem than people understand. I think it’s far bigger than President Obama wants to admit,” Trump said. “He doesn’t want to admit it because it’s taking place during his administration. I mean, when you have 11 cities absolutely ready to blow up over the last three or four days – and it could very well get worse. I mean we’re just going into the summer.”

The New York businessman said he could help solve those problems by blocking U.S. companies from moving operations overseas and keeping more jobs here.

Lamenting the persistent problems of veterans snagged in the Veterans Affairs bureaucracy, Trump promised a deep investigation as soon as he takes office. Among his proposed VA changes: Eligible veterans would be able to get VA-paid medical care from any doctor or medical facility rather than just the VA hospital system.

Acknowledging Hampton Roads’ dependence on defense spending, Trump said in the interview that he’ll release a detailed plan before the Nov. 8 election, outlining how he’ll grow the size of the military. It will include more personnel, more ships, more aircraft and other equipment, he said

Three hours before his speech, three former military officers who support Clinton spoke out against Trump outside the hotel.

“Donald Trump has said so many things over the years that are just so utterly insulting to the men and women who serve our country,” said Dave Belote, a retired Air Force colonel and unsuccessful 2015 state Senate candidate. “He calls our military ‘a disaster.’ ”
During the candidate’s stop, dozens of people stood outside the front entrance of The Westin.  The number of signs for and against him was about equal.
 

How Many Americans Are Killed by the Police Each Year?

The killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and other recent shootings of unarmed individuals by police may have the much needed benefit of forcing a rethinking of the deference too often given to police office.  Yes, there are many good and honest police officers, but from my own experience there are a number of "bad apples" who sadly are protected by police departments rather than expelled.  From my dealings with police internal affairs departments, most are more worried about protecting police officers rather than determining the truth and disciplining police officers who damage the image of the police in general and who too often seem only too ready to trample on the rights of citizens.  A piece in FiveThirtyEight looks at the question of how many Americans are killed by police each year.  What is disturbing is the fact that this question cannot be easily answered.  The impression, however, is the answer is too many.  Here are highlights:

Earlier this month, a police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. The shooting and the response have reignited concerns about racial profiling, police brutality and police militarization. The incident has also drawn attention to a remarkable lack of knowledge about a seemingly basic fact: how often people are killed by the police.

Some reporting has put forward one of the only figures available: the approximately 400 “justifiable police homicides” each year since 2008, according to the FBI’s annual Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR). That data point has appeared with heavy caveats in a string of media reports, including in USA Today, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Washington Post.

But these estimates can be wrong. Efforts to keep track of “justifiable police homicides” are beset by systemic problems. “Nobody that knows anything about the SHR puts credence in the numbers that they call ‘justifiable homicides,’” when used as a proxy for police killings, said David Klinger, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri who specializes in policing and the use of deadly force. And there’s no governmental effort at all to record the number of unjustifiable homicides by police. If Brown’s homicide is found to be unjustifiable, it won’t show up in these statistics.

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program, which compiles the SHR, relies on voluntary involvement of state and local police agencies — a fact that may raise some questions about the integrity of the data.

But the bigger issue is that the basic UCR reports don’t include any information on victims or offenders. That data is provided to the FBI via a separate form, also called the Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR). The circumstances of each death are supposed to be recorded here, with classifications like “gangland killings” (code 46), “lovers triangles” (code 40), and “felon killed by police” (code 81).

The “400 justifiable police killings” figure comes from these SHR forms. This is a problem, for four main reasons:

1. Fewer local police agencies report SHR data than report standard UCR data.
2. “Felon killed by police” refers narrowly to justifiable police homicides, and “unjustifiable homicide by police” is not a classification. This means it’s difficult to combine unjustifiable police homicides — which could be listed as crimes elsewhere in the database — with “justifiable” police homicides.
3. If the legality of a police homicide is in question, it may not be reported to the FBI SHR until the investigation is resolved. If the investigation concludes in a new reporting year, the old SHR data may not be updated, regardless of whether the killing was found to be justifiable or not. Criminology professor Geoff Alpert of the University of South Carolina, an expert on police violence, said he has “never seen a department go back and audit their numbers and fix them.”
4. Killings in federal jurisdictions, such as federal prisons or military bases, are not included in the database.

Account for all that, and you would have the true number of police homicides each year.   It’s more than 400.

Obviously, with the militarization of police forces, the chances that more Americans will be unjustifiably killed by police officers increases significantly.