Far be it from me to one of the ones who'll stand on a soap box and lecture #BlackLivesMatter on what it is they should and shouldn't do.
However, I do have few suggestions, which they can take or leave as they choose.
Following on from the discussion from earlier this week between Hillary Clinton and members of #BlackLivesMatter where Mrs. Clinton made a specific request for policy suggestions and laws that might help address the problem.
I have some.
Like most solutions, they should be well grounded in directly addressing the problem at hand, which, at least in the broad sense, is the rate of people, particularly but not exclusively young black males, who are being targeted, harassed, assaulted and killed by police.
Here are a few thoughts on the matter which I will explain in detail and also request for input over the flip.
[Note I started writing this a couple days ago, and before publishing Campaign Zero released their own 10-Point Plan to Curb Police Violence, I will review and comment on that later]
The mandating of body cams and vehicle cams for police, which has been the most common suggestion, is a good thing. Many of these cases of abuse and murder have been discovered or confirmed due to video. But that isn't nearly enough.
Demand Accurate Use of Force and Arrest-Related Death Reports
It's difficult to understand fully the depth and breath of a problem when it can't be accurately quantified. While the FBI reports that there are usually ~400 cases of "justifiable homicide by officers" each year, by contrast the Bureau of Justice Statistics counted more than 800 such deaths in 2009 (while estimating that their figures were only 80 percent accurate). And the website KilledByPolice.net counted more than 1,100 for 2014.
This wide disparity is a huge problem that has been noted even by The Wall Street Journal:
Yet according to national statistics intended to track police killings, Mr. Payton’s death in August 2012 never happened. It is one of hundreds of homicides by law-enforcement agencies between 2007 and 2012 that aren’t included in records kept by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
A Wall Street Journal analysis of the latest data from 105 of the country’s largest police agencies found more than 550 police killings during those years were missing from the national tally or, in a few dozen cases, not attributed to the agency involved. The result: It is nearly impossible to determine how many people are killed by the police each year.
Before we can tackle and correct the problem we have to have an accurate picture of the size and scope of the problem, and also it's racial aspect. BJS reports the following racial breakdown:
Among reported arrest-related deaths, 42% of persons were white, 32% were black, and 20% were Hispanic
Since black people are 13 per cent of the population, these BJS figures—while incomplete— show their rate of being killed by police during an arrest is nearly
three times higher than their numbers in the population.
Terminate publication of the FBI current "Murder by Race" chart
It may seem odd to suggest this immediately after saying we should get more data on police killings, but the real issue isn't just more data but rather replacing bad and useless data with data that is accurate. And this chart from FBI is totally, completely, absolutely useless. In fact, it's worst than useless. The chart below is the primary source and justification used by just about anyone who wants to thump down the "What about black on black crime?" card whenever the issue of police violence and murders comes up.
For decades people have been looking at this chart and performing math that produces the statistic that
92 percent of black people are murdered by black people, at which point they figure that's the end of the story. The point of view we see widely expressed as a result is that
black people are their own worst enemy so just "leave the cops and the rest of us alone."
They rarely if ever bother to look at the other numbers and to conclude that 83 percent of whites kill other whites. Nope, that usually doesn't happen.
But this is where it gets really bad. Because what's include in those numbers aren't all the murders that occurred that year. That's on this chart here:
So, in reality, the number of white people murdered in 2012 wasn't 3,128. It was 5,855. Black murder victims that year weren't 2,648
but rather 6,454. That means the calculations people such as
Pat Boone,
Joe Scarborough or
Joe Klein have been making are completely wrong. The reason is in the fine print of the first chart.
Right here:
The chart all these people rely on only includes murder cases with
a single victim and a single offender in order to create this nice neat one-to-one racial grid. The chart will never include killings like the Charlotte murders by Dylann Roof because there were nine victims. It will never include the shooting of two police by Jerad and Amanda Miller in Las Vegas because there were two offenders and two victims. It will never include a multiple victim school or theater shooting. Trying to draw conclusions, create "profiles" of potentially dangerous persons and craft decent public policy based on these data is complete lunacy.
We simply don't have accurate information.
The closest thing to accurate information we currently have is the Supplemental Homicide Report, which does include multiple victims and multiple offender cases. However, you can only generate a report based on the race of the "oldest offender," which leaves a giant hole for cases where there are multiple offenders of multiple races. But it does include all the murders instead of only half of them:
As you can see, this formulation produces a result that indicates
white on white murders are 92 percent while black on black murders are really 83 percent, which yet again shows the current FBI chart is bunk and anything based on it is junk science. The chart should be deleted and replaced with accurate information.
Besides murder isn't the only crime that happens. If you look at all types of crimes considering the fact that the BJS reports that black people are twice as likely to be arrested for the exact same offense—while their likelihood of encountering police use of force is three times greater—their general numbers aren't that bad at all. Also all these charts are about who was arrested for a crime. And we don't arrest every offender on anything. Never mind who gets convicted, or who actually did. the. crime.
When you widen the view further to include unsolved cases, the rate of blacks arrested for killing other blacks drops to just 55 percent, because the offenders are unknown more than 40 percent of the time, while white on white murder arrests falls to 64 percent which is fairly close to the overall arrest (clearance) rate for all murders at 67 percent.
In far more cases than we even realize we don't know anything. But we think we do and that inaccuracy thus forms attitudes, or rather misforms them, when police interact with communities of color.
Investigate Police Abuse by Outside Agencies
Once we have accurate data and metrics Federal resources should be prioritized to the cities and areas with the highest ratings of police shootings and abuse complaints. We've seen far too many situations where local prosecutors work directly and in tandem with local police, so their tendency is to sympathize, justify and rationalize the actions of those officers even when they go far over the line into abuse, violence and even murder. They're not going to bring anyone to justice when their "brother" officers are involved in the case most of the time.
FBI should engage in Officer Integrity Tests using undercover agents and informants to ensure that an officer's behavior is appropriate and professional with all citizens of all backgrounds, even when those citizens aren't perfectly cooperative and may be a bit "mouthy." This would be an implementation of the police version of the long-standing use of "civil rights testers" that have been helped to identify discrimination in jobs, lending and housing:
Testers can have a variety of responsibilities. Some pose as prospective renters, home buyers, job applicants, and more. Other testers are asked to observe and record physical features of a particular store, restaurant, apartment unit, or other public place. Testers take on these various roles for the purpose of gathering information to ensure that individuals or companies are complying with the law and to identify unlawful discrimination.
When officers in problem departments realize that anyone they stop
might be either a civil rights tester or an undercover FBI agent who has them under surveillance and that an officer might be personally brought up on charges, they might start behaving more appropriately—even if underneath it all their hearts really aren't into it as Mrs. Clinton has suggested they might not be.
It was by using undercover operatives and inside informants that the FBI investigated the L.A. Sheriff's Department for systematic abuse and ultimately brought down not only the sheriff, but also several high-ranking officers:
To then-Sheriff Leroy "Lee" Baca, it was a sucker punch and a betrayal by the FBI, his longtime partner in catching crooks. Federal investigators deliberately kept Baca in the dark as they set up a sting on the sheriff's turf—Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles.
...
FBI recordings and grand jury transcripts obtained by Eyewitness News shed new light on the federal probe that appears to be reaching higher up the LASD's one-time chain of command. Multiple sources close to the case tell Eyewitness News that indictments of higher-ranking officials could come at any time.
If that proves true, the defendants will join seven lower-ranking LASD deputy sheriffs who were indicted in late 2013. Those seven deputies, sergeants and lieutenants were convicted last year of obstructing the FBI investigation and will face federal prison time if their appeals are denied.
....
The FBI didn't trust Sheriff Lee Baca or his inner circle to keep quiet about the widening federal investigation into civil rights abuses and corruption inside L.A. County jails, which are run by the sheriff's department. Inmates were telling FBI agents harrowing tales from behind bars; deputy-on-inmate beatings, cover-ups, deputies engaged in gang-like behavior, falsified reports.
Officers shouldn't get a grace period of days to
coordinate their stories before they're interviewed by investigators, they should be treated just like any other criminal defendant in accordance with the Constitution, but they shouldn't get
special privileges. The FBI may have to use tactics that would be more commonly associated with
infiltrating the Mob when dealing with rogue departments because sadly, that's what it's gonna take sometimes.
Investigations of this type should be the rule with police violence and corruption, not the exception.
Establish Resource Parity for Criminal Defense
This may be a state-by-state issue, and may seem slightly counter-intuitive, but another one of the things I think we need to push for is to require equal funding and resources for the offices of public defenders and district attorneys. We shouldn't have a situation similar to what this former DEA agent describes, where communities of color and others that lack adequate economic means, become the targets for law enforcement simply because they don't have the affluence to fight back:
We were jumping on guys in the middle of the night, all of that. Swooping down on folks all across the country, using these sorts of attack tactics that we went out on, that you would use in Vietnam, or some kind of war-torn zone. All of the stuff that we were doing, just calling it the war on drugs. And there wasn’t very many black guys in my position.
So when I would go into the war room, where we were setting up all of our drug and gun and addiction task force determining what cities we were going to hit, I would notice that most of the time it always appeared to be urban areas.
That’s when I asked the question, well, don’t they sell drugs out in Potomac and Springfield, and places like that? Maybe you all think they don’t, but statistics show they use more drugs out in those areas than anywhere. The special agent in charge, he says ‘You know, if we go out there and start messing with those folks, they know judges, they know lawyers, they know politicians. You start locking their kids up; somebody’s going to jerk our chain.’ He said, ‘they’re going to call us on it, and before you know it, they’re going to shut us down, and there goes your overtime.'”
So let's make an effort to make sure that anyone who is stopped or arrested has access to a lawyer who isn't ridiculously overworked, has plenty of time, resources, their own investigators with equal access to tests and forensic results so that they too can "jerk the chain," even if they're poor, young, brown and/or black.
Officers should expect to get as vigorous and serious a pushback on their assertions as defendants get from a prosecutor's office, even defendants who are penniless.
Kossack dhonig also has a suggestion in this area based on his years both as a prosecutor and defense attorney. His idea is that public defenders' and district attorneys' offices be combined into one pool of lawyers who are randomly selected to either work for the prosecution or defense in order to break the one-sided and myopic us v. them relationship they have along with police. I think that's promising, but there may be conflicts of interest and client confidentiality issues when one attorney winds up on the opposite side from a former client or someone associated with them.
Ban the Use of Quotas for Tickets, Question and Frisk Stops.
As we've seen in the Ferguson DOJ Report, to increase city revenues, police and city officials were deliberately targeting poor citizens for minor traffic violations:
The city’s practices are shaped by revenue rather than by public safety needs.
The 67% of African Americans in Ferguson account for 93% of arrests made from 2012-2014.
A Ferguson woman parked her car illegally once in 2007. It ended up costing her more than $1,000 and 6 days in jail.
The disproportionate number of arrests, tickets and use of force stemmed from “unlawful bias,” rather than black people committing more crime.
A singled missed, late or partial payment of a fine could mean jail time.
Arrest warrants are “almost exclusively” used as threats to push for payments.
And if time is served, no credit for jail time is received and the length of time isn’t even recorded by the court.
We've also seen quotas used by the NYPD for its "stop and frisk" program:
Ninety percent of the people stopped in this program didn't receive a citation, warning or were arrested for doing anything wrong—which seems to mean that 90 percent of them had their 4th Amendment rights against an unwarranted detainment and search violated without any reasonable suspicion or probable cause.
Establish a Civil Rights Violation 911 Tip Line for Whistleblowers—Smash the Blue Wall
Officers who witness abuse by a fellow officer are unlikely to admit it within their own chain of command. Those that do are accused of disloyalty, of being a "rat" or "snitch" and are retaliated against with bad and even dangerous assignments, or bad performance reviews. That's what happened to former Baltimore Detective Joe Crystal:
"Being a cop was all I ever wanted to do,” he says. “A dream come true.”
But that dream turned into a nightmare four years ago when his brothers in blue turned on him—bombarding him with taunts and threats, refusing to come to his aid during drug busts and even leaving a dead rat on his windshield.
His crime? He reported a case of police brutality.
Crystal drew the ire of his department after coming forward to report the 2011 beating of a drug suspect by a fellow officer. Crystal’s subsequent trial testimony helped secure convictions against the cop who carried out the beating and the sergeant who helped facilitate it.
Crystal says the pattern of abuse that followed led him to resign from the job he loved.
Officers like Crystal are the ones who should be
retained on the force, not shoved out the door. He did the right thing. But unfortunately there is no safety valve to allow such officers to do the right thing and keep their positions. They should be able to leave a tip for outside agencies to investigate and keep their anonymity.
Officers who lie to help cover up the crimes of their fellow officers—like the ones who claimed the Georgia officer who shot a motorist in the head did it because he was "being dragged by the car" when those officers hadn't even been on the scene to witness any such thing—should be prosecuted to same extent as an accessory to the primary act of violence and murder.
Changing these policies, most of which don't require changing any laws, just applying them differently, would, I think, do a great deal to correct many of the problems that #BlackLivesMatter highlight. We can make these policy changes without putting police officers at greater personal risk or reducing the level of enforcement for communities that are in the greatest, most dire need.
Ultimately though, we need a revolution in our thinking and our expectations of policing in America to bring it in line with the Constitution and the true spirit of freedom and liberty. We have to reject the Baretta, Starsky & Hutch, Hunter, Lethal Weapon, Jack Bauer, S.W.A.T., hair-trigger cop ethos. We need a revolution in our understanding of each other, and between communities of means and want. That is something that occurred with this former Baltimore Officer Michael Wood who, like Joe Crystal, spoke up about the abuse he witnessed while on the job, after his work doing surveillance allowed him to recognize the inherent humanity of the people of color he observed:
I was a shift commander, and I told the shift that when you go out there doing car stops:
"I don't want to see you stopping an old lady—this is Baltimore! You stop 16-24 year old black males."
Why? Because 16-24 black males are the ones who commit all the crime. It's not until later that you complete the logic circle and realise that black and white [people] have drug possession at the same rate. You are only locking up black guys because they have drugs on them, and then they get in more trouble. We didn't know about the concept of institutional racism.
Wood: Did we think that the Black Community was lying all this time? They're not. Everybody in the Hood knows this.
Cenk: When you were in Narcotics, what turned you around?
Wood: The emotional and moral change happened when I watched drug dealers. He's doing this to make money, but he's [a normal person]. I could see people, I could hear their conversations. I'd watch this kid selling marijuana, and he's doing it to make money for diapers. And we're arresting him, giving him a record, ruining his life. What are we doing?
This officer went through a shift in consciousness, a shift in perspective. Unfortunately, like Crystal, he is no longer on the force—in his case due to an injury.
We have to do more than re-shuffle the rules but commit ourselves to changing our perspective so that America may actually live up to it's own ideals.
We don't have to trade our fear of the robber-man for our fear of the copper-man. That is a false choice. We can do better. We must do better.
Fri Aug 28, 2015 at 12:42 PM PT: Here's an interesting suggestion.
requiring liability insurance to pay the settlements cities are forced to pay for with taxpayer dollars. While not a bad idea, I'd take it a step further and make that a requirement of the union contract. If the union (and by extension the cops themselves since this would come out of their dues) is footing the bill when there's a settlement paid out, they'll be more likely to keep things in line better (not totally, but better). You have to be bonded and insured to do construction work on someone's house, or move their stuff from point to point, you have to carry malpractice insurance if you're a doctor (not sure about lawyers but I know it's available for them). And none of these professions include maybe shooting someone in the job description. Moreover, ever $2M settlement a city is paying out on behalf of the PD in one of these cases is $2M not available to improve the environment of the city itself.
Right now settlements such as these are being paid by the city,
not the police department.
Instead, taxpayers will shoulder the cost. Between 2006 and 2011, New York City paid out $348 million in settlements or judgments in cases pertaining to civil rights violations by police, according to a UCLA study published in June 2014. Those nearly 7,000 misconduct cases included allegations of excessive use of force, sexual assault, unreasonable searches, and false arrests. More than 99 percent of the payouts came from the city's municipal budget, which has a line item dedicated to settlements and judgments each year. (The city did require police to pay a tiny fraction of the total damages, with officers personally contributing in less than 1 percent of the cases for a total of $114,000.)
I would suggest that the city councils where there is a high rate of settlements draft a resolution either for the police department to
pay the city back or take on liability insurance for wrongful death and civil rights lawsuits. It might work best if the department had the option to require officers in the field to personally carry this insurance and for the insurance company to set their personal rates based on how many settlement payments are being generated
by that Officer. The Officer who choked Eric Garner had generated several previous cases and settlements against him.
Moreover, Pantaleo remains protected from financial liability despite that he was the subject of at least three civil rights lawsuits before the death of Garner. One case, in 2013, involved two men from Staten Island who alleged that Pantaleo and three other officers unlawfully stopped and ordered them from their vehicle, then pulled down their pants and "touched and searched their genital areas, or stood by while this was done in their presence." The city paid a $30,000 settlement to the plaintiffs, while the officers paid nothing. Two other lawsuits stemming from a 2012 incident alleged that Pantaleo and other NYPD officers falsely arrested and imprisoned two men, according to federal court records. (Both of those cases are pending.)
If Cops like Panteleo - much like a Doctor - had to carry his own personal liability insurance in order to walk the streets of New York with a gun and badge, and that if he fails to pay his premiums - because they've increased after paying out multiple claims - or he can't find a carrier that will take the risk of covering him, then he has to be
taken off the street by the department.
This is one way to have the situation, using the free market, to resolve itself.