It’s been four weeks since the shooting deaths of officers Ramos and Liu, and the NYPD apparently remain angry, blaming Mayor de Blasio and those protesting against police killings. Patrick Lynch, spokesperson for the NYPD’s union blamed de Blasio, saying there was “blood on his hands,” and suggested there was a “war” against police. E-mails passed back and forth among police called the NYPD to “wartime policing.” There have been calls for de Blasio’s resignation with a petition circulating on Moveon, of all places. In what would appear to be a concession, de Blasio has even declined to support his Council’s call for a ban on chokeholds. Meanwhile, the Cleveland police and their supporters are rallying to resist the Justice Department’s call for reform.
I find these efforts by the police to overrule the civil authority and even dictate policy to be extremely alarming. What makes the police think that they should be able to resist civilian authority and dictate policy? There are at least three factors contributing to this police arrogance: the aggressiveness of the law enforcement culture, their enormous horde of military-style weapons, and their lack of accountability represent.
I do not doubt that many, even perhaps most, law enforcement officers are decent, hardworking people who genuinely want to serve and protect their communities. Nevertheless, perhaps because the nature of the job often attracts aggressive personalities, because the nature of the job hardens officers, or because the system itself strongly encourages aggressiveness, law enforcement officers in general seem more aggressive than average. The frequency of domestic abuse among police clearly shows this aggressiveness. Forty percent of law enforcement officers abuse their spouses or domestic partners. That is four times the percentage in the general population.
And yet a study of 123 police jurisdictions revealed that 45% lacked a policy for handling domestic abuse. Even in cases of repeated abuse a mere 19% of the nearly 18,000 police departments in this country would fire the officer involved. Do we really want lethal weapons and enforcement power in the hands of officers unstable enough to abuse even those they presumably love?
The Justice Department’s investigations of twenty police departments in the past several years provide further evidence of police aggressiveness. The Department has compelled ten of the twenty, including most recently Cleveland, to begin reforms under Department supervision.
These investigations have found thousands of instances of civil rights violations and brutally abusive tactics, including over 600 such instances in Cleveland alone. Also suggestive of abuse are the more than 100 cases against the NYPD that the City of New York settled, costing the city millions of dollars
Contributing to this aggressiveness and authoritarianism of police is the vast arsenal of weapons at their disposal. Over the last eight years,
the Pentagon has given local cops some $1.9 billion worth of equipment—including 600 mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPs), 80,000 assault rifles, 200 grenade launchers, and 12,000 bayonets.
Such weapons are quite clearly designed for invading and occupying hostile territory, not for serving and protecting one’s
community. In addition, since 2002, Homeland Security has given to local law enforcement agencies over $41 billion for the purchase of such equipment. Homeland Security, along with private weapons manufacturers, has sponsored a yearly convention for cops called Urban Shield, at which weapons companies pitch their latest cop toys for purchase with Homeland Security’s grants. Urban Shield has also included various hostage and riot practice exercises for the police. These training exercises, some of which have lasted as long as 48 hours non-stop, have enabled police teams to try out the military equipment
on sale.
The problem with having so many military style weapons and training with them is that inevitably, like boys on Christmas morning with new toys, the police want to use them. And use them they have! Designed for use in hostage incidents or mass shootings, heavily armed SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams are now used for all sorts of purposes from simply serving warrants to raiding innocuous poker games. According to Shane Bauer, writing in Mother Jones,
In 1984, just 40 percent of SWAT teams were serving warrants. By 2012, the number was 79 percent. In all, the number of SWAT raids across the country has increased 20-fold since the 1980s, going from 3,000 per year to at least 60,000. And SWAT teams are no longer limited to large cities: In the mid-1980s, only 20 percent of towns with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 had such teams. By 2007, 80 percent did.
This increased use of SWAT teams has occurred in spite of significant decreases in crime nationwide over the last two
decades. Radley Balko reports that there have been dozens of SWAT team raids on simple residential poker games and sports pools. Balko has found over fifty cases of SWAT raids where police killed innocent
people.
Even children are not safe. In a Habersham County, Georgia, no-knock drug raid a police SWAT team used a flashbang grenade, leaving a two year old hospitalized with severe burns and a collapsed lung. It turns out that the police had the wrong house. Yet the police have not been held accountable and the county has refused help with the parents’ million dollar hospital bill.
As I suggested earlier, I do not doubt that the vast majority of police are decent, hardworking, compassionate people who genuinely want to do what is best for the communities they serve. The NYPD performed heroically on 9/11 and, as Mayor de Blasio has pointed out, handled last year’s climate march and most of the recent protests against aggressive policing with consummate and restrained professionalism. The problem is that far too often the police, if you’ll pardon the pun, fail to police themselves, fail to hold each other accountable. This is pretty obvious in recent grand jury outcomes in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases. Without repeating all that has been said about Ferguson, I might just sum up that police, ludicrously over-armed in their military-style riot suits, consistently displayed contempt for Brown’s family, the community, the demonstrators, and the news media, all groups they are hired to protect and serve. And Bob McCulloch’s handling of the grand jury not only defied precedent, but even broke the law. There is even reason to suspect McCulloch suborned perjury in his use of one witness. And it is simply incomprehensible to me a grand jury chose not to indict Daniel Pantaleo and his fellow officers for the murder of Eric Garner.
It is highly unusual for a grand jury not to indict. For example, in 2010, federal prosecutors called grand juries in 162,000 cases. Only 11 of those grand juries failed to return an indictment. On the other hand, police are rarely indicted. According to the Houston Chronicle, no Houston cop has been indicted for a fatal shooting since 2004. Out of 81 cases against police in Dallas between 2008 and 2012, grand juries indicted only one cop.
The police unions have led the outcry against de Blasio as they led the similar outcries against Mayors Lindsay and Dinkins before him, and it is the unions that most frequently protect the police from accountability. Ironically and hypocritically, many of the police, who are generally quite conservative and have historically opposed unions and worked as strike breakers, belong to the most powerful unions in the country, unions which have repeatedly dictated policy to the cities the police are paid to serve.And anti-union conservative politicians seem not the least bit concerned about the power of police unions. Perhaps the most egregious example of the power of police unions is the career of Chicago police commander John Burge. Between 1972 and 1991 Burge and his cohorts tortured 118 minority detainees to get them to confess. Protected by his union and various political allies of the police, he escaped punishment until 2010 when he was convicted of perjury. Again protected by his union, he served only three and a half years and is still receiving full pension benefits.
These statistics and examples suggest that, along with the rich and powerful, police are accorded a different standard of justice than the rest of us.
The Blue Wall of Silence, the absolute refusal of police to criticize each other or report abuse, has been familiar to us since Frank Serpico testified about NYPD corruption in the early 1970’s. Like much of our society, from the President on down, the police despise and ostracize whistleblowers. Serpico says that even today, more than forty years after testifying, he is a pariah among the police, who still send him “hate mail.” In a piece provocatively titled, “The Police Are Still out of Control. I Should Know,” Serpico writes,
Police make up a peculiar subculture in society. More often than not they have their own moral code of behavior, an "us against them" attitude, enforced by a Blue Wall of Silence. . . . Speak out, and you’re no longer "one of us." You’re one of "them.”
Serpico cites James Fyfe, “a nationally recognized expert on the use of force,” whose
Above The Law points out that police who blow the whistle on police wrongdoing may find themselves abandoned in
“emergency situations.”
The indignant police response to Cameron McLay, Pittsburgh Police Chief, clearly illustrates police ostracism of those who criticize them. McLay appeared online with a sign saying, “I resolve to end racism @ work” followed by a Twitter hashtag, “#end white silence.” In response, the local police union president attacked the mayor, accusing him of “insinuating that we [the police] are now racist.”
Terrible and frightening as are police killings of unarmed black men, even more frightening is their contempt for civilian authority and for civil protest. It seems reasonable to assume that the police face a far greater threat from heavily armed, right wing white militias than from Mayor de Blasio or unarmed protestors committed to non-violence. Yet they seem to reserve their contempt and disdain for peaceful demonstrators rather than for right wing white militias. Their contempt for citizens exercising their first amendment right to assemble and protest, combined with their contempt for popularly elected authority, their aggressiveness, their willingness to use hyper-powered, military weapons, and their lack of accountability, represent a serious threat to civil government.
How then do we protect ourselves against this threat? Clearly to effect change we need a powerful and massive movement—a movement not just of millions, but of tens of millions. Then perhaps we can effect some necessary changes:
To address police aggressiveness, we should require that all recruits undergo psychological testing and extensive interviews with psychiatrists. We should also require extensive training in non-violent conflict resolution. We should require that police come from and appropriately represent the population and community they serve. We should require our police forces to dismiss from service repeat domestic abusers. And we should forbid the use of SWAT teams except in clearly defined situations such as hostage takings and mass killings.
To address the accumulation of weapons, we should forbid police forces from accepting or purchasing military weapons or from using federal funds or funds from fines to maintain such weapons or to buy ammunition for them. The funds could then be used to pay for the testing and training mentioned above as well as to increase officers’ pay, allowing us to forbid moonlighting.
To address lack of accountability, we need citizen review boards for each police district to be locally elected and separate from government. While they need safeguards to protect the rights of accused police, they also need authority and should be empowered to indict police officers.
This seems to me to be the minimum necessary to ensure that our police officers serve and protect the whole community, not occupy it.