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Strategy and Tactics Page |
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Reclaiming professionalism sounds great, but it begs an underlying issue
By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. Having suffered for years through the mind-numbing rhetoric of community policing, your blogger was thrilled to attend the panel entitled “A New Professionalism” at the June 2010 conference of the National Institute of Justice. Sparks flew from the very start when Christopher Stone, Guggenheim Professor of the Practice of Criminal Justice at Harvard’s Kennedy School took on – hold your breath – community policing. Placing himself firmly in the ranks of the contrarians, he criticized its “cacophony” of purpose, airing out what many have whispered for years, that by absorbing every promising strategy that comes along, with even the most focused crime-fighting programs labeled as inspired by its principles, the concept has been blurred beyond recognition. As it turns out Dr. Stone wasn’t there just to slay one dragon. A monograph soon to be released by Harvard’s Executive Session on Policing intends to rehabilitate – hold on to your fedoras – police professionalism. Dr. Stone and his colleagues will argue that their version, snappily entitled “the new professionalism,” does not portend a rebirth of the much-maligned model that dominated American law enforcement in the decades preceding community policing. (To complicate matters some insist that the recent explosion in aggressive strategies such as stop and frisk signals a reincarnation of the “bad” professionalism, but never mind.) There are at least four aspects to the new, improved version (keep in mind that Harvard’s report isn’t out, so this is based on what your blogger scratched out the old-fashioned way):
But wait a minute: wasn’t the community concept supposed to be a Swiss Army knife? Didn’t it take care of every important concern? Not according to Dr. Stone. Even its central tenet – that citizens must help shape the police response – has supposedly fallen short. Exactly what “communities” are supposed to do is vague. What’s more, the strategy is silent in areas rife with liberty concerns. How should police deal with political dissent? When should they apply aggressive methods like stop and frisk? How should they employ those new, enticing technologies? Not so fast, said David Sklansky, Professor of Law and Chair of the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice. (Full disclosure: David was an Assistant U.S. Attorney while I supervised an ATF squad in Los Angeles. That he didn’t always prosecute when we wished will have no influence on this essay.) While Prof. Sklansky agreed that community policing has definitional issues, one being that communities don’t agree within themselves as to what’s needed, he argued that it nonetheless focuses much-needed attention to the tendency to under-engage with citizens and over-rely on technology. Voicing skepticism about recent innovations such as “information-led” and “predictive” policing, he worried that their preoccupation with numbers harkens back to the same old bureaucratic tendencies that veered professionalism off course. Instead of doing away with community policing he suggested developing an “advanced” version, and we trust that its precepts will be addressed in the forthcoming paper. Professors Stone and Sklansky were followed by Chief Ronald Davis, East Palo Alto, California. His views reflected the concerns of someone who’s involved in the practical side of things, securing resources and making things happen so that others have something to pontificate about. Although Chief Davis supports improvements, he warned that any departure from the status quo could confuse politicians and grantors. With COPS disbursing millions each year that’s not an idle concern. Chief Davis also offered a provocative question. Is policing a profession or a vocation? If it’s a profession its rules, practices and techniques should make the national coherence that Dr. Stone finds lacking a non-issue. Yet profound socioeconomic, cultural and political differences between communities, even those located within the same political boundaries, assure that policing will remain far from “coherent” for the foreseeable future. In his seminal volume, “Varieties of Police Behavior,” James Q. Wilson argued that the centrality of discretion defines police work as a craft. Unlike a true profession, policing doesn’t lend itself to standardized procedures or written directives. It’s mostly learned through apprenticeship, as even the best academies can’t simulate the infinite variety of situations and personalities that officers encounter each day. Policing’s deeply individualized and particularized nature makes its study exceptionally challenging. And we haven’t even touched on how police interact within their own ranks, nor with outsiders. To understand why cops and chiefs behave as they do we must understand the forces that shape their environment. In past years that was done ethnographically (think Wilson, Manning, Van Maanen and Muir.) Lacking contemporary research of such depth it seems wise to take another look at how the sausage gets made. There are many interesting questions. Crime has supposedly receded, so why have things taken such an aggressive turn? In an earlier post we mentioned the veteran Camden PD captain who was browbeaten during a Compstat meeting because one of his teams made only a single arrest in four days. Whether that one pinch was particularly difficult or noteworthy seemed to be of little interest, which considering the pressures generated by Compstat isn’t particularly surprising. That’s not to say that constructs such as community policing or police professionalism or the new versions of each have no value. Yet developing a framework that can advance policing to the next level requires far more than from what this (admittedly astigmatic) vantage point looks like a mishmash of ideology, assumptions and superficial observation. So, having discouraged jumping to prescriptions it now seems only fair to make one. Before revising any more paradigms, let’s do the grunt work. If we need a template, “Varieties of Police Behavior” seems an excellent choice. Dr. Wilson sent graduate students to eight communities; with money from COPS we could dispatch them to eighty, and do it regularly. Imagine that: a national survey! Interviewing a cross-section of cops, politicians and citizens couldn’t help but enlighten us about how policing gets done and, most importantly, why. First describe; then and only then prescribe. Isn’t that what we insist our students do? Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! RELATED ARTICLES Quantity and Quality The Craft of Policing RELATED POSTS Too Much of a Good Thing? A Very Dubious Achievement Liars Figure Slapping Lipstick on the Pig: Part I Part II Part III Home Top Permalink Print Share this post Posted 7/4/10 WHAT’S MORE LETHAL THAN A GUN? Officers have more to fear from accidents than from criminals
By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. May and June were terrible months for the California Highway Patrol. On May 7 Officer David Benavides lost his life when his patrol aircraft crashed. One month later, on June 9, motorcycle officer Phillip Ortiz was on a freeway shoulder writing a ticket when he was struck by an errant vehicle; he died from his injuries two weeks later. On June 11 CHP motorcycle officer Tom Coleman was killed when he collided with a truck during a high-speed chase. On June 27 the toll reached five when two officers, Justin McGrory and Brett Oswald were struck and killed by vehicles in separate incidents, McGrory while citing a motorist and Oswald as he waited for an abandoned car to be towed. Accidents kill many more cops than gunplay. According to the FBI, 530 officers were feloniously killed in criminal encounters between 1999-2008, with ninety-two percent (486) shot to death. But nearly half again as many (746) perished in accidents. Seventy-one percent (528) died in auto, motorcycle and aircraft wrecks (including pursuits, responding to calls and ordinary patrol, all under “collision”.) Sixteen percent (123) were on foot, ticketing motorists, directing traffic and investigating accidents when they were fatally struck by a vehicle. Thirteen percent (95) were killed in other mishaps, including accidental shootings, falls and drownings. Texas led in both accidental and felonious deaths (81 and 52, respectively). California was second in both (78 accidental and 46 Florida was third in accidental deaths (47) and fourth in felonious (22). But its proportion of struck by vehicle deaths was considerably higher, with one officer killed while on foot for every three who died in collisions (in Texas and California it was about one in six.) Five dead CHP officers in less than two months is an appalling number, whatever the cause. That three were struck and killed by errant vehicles seems particularly noteworthy. As these two charts demonstrate, the incidence and distribution of accidental police deaths in the U.S. has been relatively stable over time. But while the numbers are small, California has seen an uptick in deaths of officers struck by vehicles.
According to the FBI 17 CHP officers lost their lives in accidents between 1999-2008. CHP over-representation in the struck-by-vehicle category becomes more evident when we expand the timeline. Online CHP accounts of officer deaths reveal that 38 officers were accidentally killed between 1991 and July 2010. Twenty-two (58 percent) lost their lives in collisions, 15 (39 percent) when struck by vehicles, and one died in an accidental shooting. (Overlapping FBI and CHP data were reconciled except for one case in 2000 and one in 2003.) Considering where CHP officers spend their time that’s hardly surprising. Making stops on freeways and interstate highways exposes them to high-speed traffic, where there is little opportunity to correct one’s mistakes or accommodate errors made by others. All bets are off when drivers are tired, distracted, intoxicated or driving faster than conditions warrant. Police are well aware of the dangers. In 2003 the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) and NHTSA formed a committee, LESSS, to study ways to mitigate the hazards of traffic stops. Its initial recommendations suggested enhancing police car resistance to rear-end crashes, packing trunks to avoid the penetration of fuel tanks and passenger compartments in rear-end collisions, improving the visibility of officers and vehicles, widening traffic lanes and building shoulders, enacting “move over” laws to slow oncoming traffic and keep it away from stopped police cars, and devising best practices for safely positioning officers and vehicles. An appendix listed traffic stop procedures in use by a dozen law enforcement agencies, including the CHP. In a related article the IACP’s Police Chief magazine, while conceding there were differences in opinion, recommended, among other things, that officers “minimize their...time in cruisers and prepare citations and other documents outside their vehicles whenever feasible.” In 2005 LESSS issued a roll-call video, “Your Vest Won’t Stop This Bullet”. Reproduced in print by Police Chief, it offered tips to enhance the safety of traffic stops. Suggesting that insofar as possible officers stay out of their cars until ready to leave, it suggested that if they had to use a radio or such they strap in to avoid becoming a projectile should the vehicle be struck. Why abandon a metal container to take one’s chances on foot? Thanks to the Arizona DPS, which documented the risk in 2002, word spread that Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptors were susceptible to catching fire in high speed rear-end collisions. Taken on (some say, reluctantly) by NHTSA, the vulnerability led to a number of recommendations, including the suggestion that officers carefully pack their vehicle’s trunk. LESSS didn’t come out and say so, but the risk of these fires (about a dozen cops had already perished in them) undoubtedly influenced their recommendation that officers on traffic stops keep out of their cars. Traffic stops aren’t the only hazard. Eight of the fifteen CHP officers struck and killed by cars between 1991-2010 weren’t ticketing anyone: two were investigating unoccupied cars, three were at an accident site, and two were directing traffic. Standing on a roadway is risky, and particularly so when motorists are impaired (intoxicated drivers were involved in at least a third of the officer deaths.) Being under the influence, though, doesn’t fully explain why someone would veer into a traffic stop. One possible explanation well known to driving instructors is target fixation, the tendency to steer in the direction where one is looking rather than where they intend to go. Suppose for example that emergency lights catch the attention of a drunk, sleepy or unskilled driver. Depending on the circumstances, their impairment might keep them from correcting in time to avoid running into the scene. To that extent bright warning lights could actually be counterproductive. Clearly there’s a long way to go to make cops safe. One hopes that the CHP’s recent tragedies spur renewed efforts to counter the plague of accidental deaths that beset law enforcement. It’s the least we can do for our police. Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! UPDATES 07/21/10 According to the NLEOMF as of July 1 police gunshot deaths are up 41 percent, from 22 to 31 compared to the same period last year. Traffic deaths are up 35 percent, from 31 to 42. Home Top Permalink Print Share this post Posted 5/16/10 NYPD’s expansive use of stop-and-frisk may threaten the tactic’s long-term viability
“These are not unconstitutional. We are saving lives, and we are preventing crime.” By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. That’s how department spokesperson Paul J. Browne justified the more than one-half million “Terry” stops done by NYPD officers in 2009. But not everyone’s on board. A current Federal lawsuit by the Center for Constitutional Rights charges that the department’s own statistics (NYPD must keep stop-and-frisk data in settlement of an earlier case) prove that its officers routinely and impermissibly profile persons by race. In Terry v. Ohio (1968) the Supreme Court held that officers can temporarily detain persons for investigation when there is “reasonable suspicion” that they committed a crime or were about to do so. Persons who appear to be armed may also be patted down (hence, “stop-and-frisk.”) Later decisions have given police great leeway in making investigative stops. For example, in U.S. v, Arvizu (2002) the Court ruled that officers can apply their experience and training to make inferences and deductions. Decisions can be based on the totality of the circumstances, not just on individual factors that might point to an innocent explanation. Last year NYPD stop-and-frisks led to 34,000 arrests, the seizure of 762 guns and the confiscation of more than 3,000 other weapons. Eighty-seven percent of those detained were black or Hispanic. Since they only comprise fifty-one percent of the city’s population, to many it smacked of racial profiling. In its defense, NYPD pointed out that fully eighty-four percent of those arrested for misdemeanor assault in 2009 were also black or Hispanic. Its stops, the department insists, are proportionate to the distribution of crime by race. There is data to support both views. A 2007 Rand study found only a slight disparity in the intrusiveness and frequency of NYPD stops once differences in crime rates are taken into account. But a 1999 analysis by the New York Attorney General concluded that the disparity in the frequency of stops could not be explained by racial differences in criminal propensity. Dueling studies aside, NYPD concedes that blacks, Hispanics and whites who are stopped are equally likely to be arrested (for all races, that’s about six percent.) Indeed, blacks are less likely than whites to have weapons (1.1 versus 1.6 percent.) So why are blacks and Hispanics far more likely to be stopped in the first place? According to NYPD, that’s because anti-crime sweeps usually take place in high-crime (read: poor) precincts where many minorities happen to live. It’s a truism that policing resembles making sausage. Even when cops try to be respectful, no amount of explanation can take away the humiliation of being stopped and frisked. Although NYPD executives and City Hall argue that the tactic has been instrumental in bringing violent crime to near-record lows, a recent New York Times editorial and a column written by Bob Herbert, one of the city’s most influential black voices, warn that its use has driven a wedge between cops and minorities. NYPD’s aggressive posture harkens back to the grim decade of the 1960’s, when heavy-handed policing lit the fuse that sparked deadly riots across the U.S. Encouraged to devise a kinder and gentler model of policing, criminologists and law enforcement executives came up with a new paradigm that brought citizens into the process of deciding what police ought to be doing, and how. The brave new era of community policing was born. It wasn’t long, though, before observers complained that the newfangled approach was of little help in reducing crime and violence. Spurred for more tangible solutions, academics and practitioners devised problem-oriented policing, a strategy that seeks to identify “problems,” which may include but are not limited to crime, and fashion responses, which may include but are not limited to the police. But despite its attempts at practicality, POP’s rhetorical load is substantial, while its strategic approach is not much different than what savvy police managers have been doing all along. Then CompStat arrived. To be sure, police have always used pin maps and such to deploy officers. CompStat elevated the technology. More importantly, it prescribed a human (but, some argue, not necessarily humane) process for devising strategic responses to crime and holding commanders accountable for results. It was introduced, incidentally, by the NYPD. Compstat has been criticized for placing unseemly pressures on the police. Its preoccupation with place, though, resonated with criminologists who had long believed that geography was critical. Soon there was a new kid on the block: hot-spot policing. An updated, more sophisticated version of a strategy known as selective enforcement, it encourages police to fashion responses that take into account the factors that bind geography to crime. It’s not just that a certain kind of crime happens at a certain time and place, but why. After forty years of ideological struggle and experimentation vigorous policing has come back in style. For an example look no further than the campaign pledge by Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter to attack the city’s violence epidemic with hot spot policing and “stop, question and frisk” His call to action has been echoed in cities across the U.S. From Newark, to Philadelphia, to Detroit, Omaha and San Francisco, police are using a variety of aggressive strategies including stop-and-frisk to restore the peace and get guns off the street. That’s the good news. The bad news is that from Newark, to Philadelphia, to Detroit, Omaha and San Francisco.... Benefits don’t come without costs. Stop-and-frisk is no doubt effective, yet as recent events in New York City demonstrate it’s not without potentially serious consequences. An inherently elastic notion whose limits officers frequently test, Terry is more than ripe for abuse. Of course, whether NYPD’s enthusiastic embrace has stretched stop-and-frisk beyond what the Supremes intended will be the subject of litigation for a long time to come. Let’s hope that events on the ground don’t make the decision moot. Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! RELATED POSTS Slapping Lipstick on the Pig: Part I Part II Part III What Can Cops Really Do? Liars Figure Of Hot-Spots and Band-Aids Love Your Brother...and Frisk Him, Too! UPDATES 07/21/10 Although the database is gone, NYPD officers will keep documenting stop-and-frisks on paper forms. Agency critics say that’s OK, as the danger of misusing data has been greatly reduced. 07/17/10 Against police protests that it will deprive them of a valuable information resource, New York Governor David Paterson says he will sign a measure that prohibits NYPD from placing identifying information of innocent people who are stopped into a database. 07/12/10 An area of Brooklyn thick with low-cost housing got 13,200 stop and frisks last year, about one per resident. Cops were originally welcomed, but now people are wondering. 06/28/10 New York Times op-ed says that NYPD appropriately targets minority neighborhoods because that’s where the crime is, and that law-abiding residents in those areas support the police. 06/07/10 Detroit police aggressively use stop-and-frisk and a mobile strike force to get guns off the street. They credit their approach for yielding 40 fewer homicides and 99 fewer shootings so far this year than last. But complaints about mistreatment and excessive force are mounting. 05/28/10 Detroit PD chief Warren Evans deployed anti-crime teams and expanded SWAT. But the recent accidental shooting of a 7-year old is causing the city to question his paramilitary approach. 05/20/10 NYPD enters information from stop-and-frisks, regardless of outcome, into a database that’s used as an informational source for officers and detectives. Critics want that stopped. 05/19/10 Thirty years ago a British writer praised San Diego PD’s “community” approach. Now an American writer says that, rhetoric aside, in the field it was always been about making arrests. Home Top Permalink Print Share this post Posted 1/17/10 Why don’t witnesses come forward? Often, for a very good reason
“These rats deserve to die, right or wrong? . . . My war is with the rats. I'm a hunt every last one bitch that I can, and kill 'em.” Extract from wiretap of Philadelphia drug lord Kaboni Savage, charged in 2009 with ordering seven murders. “If you see something, you better look the other way...Don't tell nothing unless you can take care of yourself, because the city don't have nothing in place to help you.” Philadelphia resident Barbara Clowden commenting on the murder of her sixteen-year old son only days before he was to testify against the man who tried to burn down their home. By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer thirteen witnesses or relatives of witnesses have been murdered in the city of brotherly love since 2001. Philadelphia does have a witness assistance program, currently funded at about $1 million per year. But despite the danger – Ms. Clowden’s son, Eric Hayes, was gunned down far from their old neighborhood – help is limited to paying for a motel room and living expenses, and that only for four months. Beneficiaries must sign a 13-page form that requires them to stay away from their former neighborhoods and avoid those they left behind. That’s not unusual. Because relocated witnesses tend to return to their old haunts, no less an authority than the U.S. Department of Justice recommended that cities with witness protection programs draft detailed contracts to forestall liability. Witness intimidation is a major national concern. According to a 2006 study it figured in nearly a third of Minneapolis murders and half of its violent crime. It’s supposedly why Trenton’s citizens are reluctant to help police, and why Boston’s cops cleared less that four in ten homicides. None of this should prove surprising. Nearly two decades ago about one-third of Bronx County (NY) criminal court witnesses reported they had been threatened; of the remaining two-thirds, a majority said they feared reprisal. What can be done to discourage intimidation? The Justice Department has recommended several strategies, including admonishing defendants to stay away from witnesses, keeping dangerous persons in jail until trial, strengthening penalties for making threats, and vigorously prosecuting those who do. Of course, none of these approaches is fail-safe. In-custody defendants can get friends to do their bidding. Prosecuting intimidators after the fact doesn’t solve the original problem. Doing so also requires – you guessed it – a willing witness. Spending more money protecting witnesses would help. Still, with 14,180 murders and 1,382,012 violent crimes in 2008, relocating everyone is impossible. What’s more, few persons are eager to upend their lives for the sake of putting someone in jail. Those who do are prone to break the rules, occasionally with lethal consequences. Consider the case of 23-year old Chante Wright. Placed under protection of US Marshals after witnessing a homicide in Philadelphia, she was shot and killed only hours after returning home to visit her ailing mother. If getting witnesses to cooperate is difficult, what about compelling them to testify under penalty of law? DOJ discourages the practice, warning that it can “backfire” and lead those who might eventually cooperate to “forget.” On the other hand, your blogger knows from experience that once such witnesses take the stand they usually tell the truth. Those who prevaricate can be impeached, and particularly if they’ve made inconsistent verbal or written statements in the past. Indeed, misbehaving witnesses have often influenced jurors to convict. That, in fact, has been the experience in Philadelphia. A defense lawyer and former D.A. praised its prosecutors, saying that they’re “among the best in the country in trying recantation cases. They've raised it to an art form.” Detectives try to “lock in” witnesses by getting detailed statements early on. And should witnesses clam up or change their minds, officers are more than happy to take the stand and read what they were told, “line by line.” Prosecutors have even ordered the arrest of material witnesses to guarantee their availability come trial. To prevent intimidation court records must be signed out with photo ID, and D.A.’s often ask that defense lawyers be prohibited from giving clients copies of police reports (reproducing and distributing official documents on the street is a common intimidation technique.) Over a defense objection, a scared female witness was even allowed to take the stand while draped in a burka. Whether one asks or compels witnesses to testify, it’s impossible to avoid the underlying moral dilemma. How can we balance their safety against the imperatives of fighting crime? In July 2005 two assailants shot and killed Philadelphia resident Lamar Canada over a gambling debt. An eyewitness, Johnta Gravitt, voluntarily identified one of the shooters as Dominick Peoples. Gravitt’s statement was supported by Martin Thomas. A friend of Peoples, he told police that the suspect buried the guns used in the shooting in his backyard (they were dug up.) It was an open-and-shut case, at least until ten days after the 2006 preliminary hearing, when Gravitt was gunned down. Someone then posted a copy of Thomas’ statement on a local restaurant wall. It bore the ominous inscription, “Don't stand next to this man. You might get shot.” Thomas stopped cooperating. Forced to appear at Peoples’ trial two years later, he recanted everything. Peoples was convicted of killing Canada. Gravitt’s murder remains unsolved. As of this writing, Thomas hasn’t been harmed. Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! RELATED POSTS Lying: The Gift That Keeps on Giving UPDATES 04/26/10 In Long Beach (Calif.) two high-school girls were arrested for intimidating witnesses in a murder case against two gang members. Some witnesses called at a hearing have already recanted. 04/16/10 New Orleans citizens are hopping mad about violence and drug hot spots. But they’re afraid to testify or even hang a Neighborhood Watch sign. “Witnesses get killed,” one said. Home Top Permalink Print Share this post Posted 12/14/09 Camden PD fights crime and violence. And its own officers.
By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. Being first is normally an honor. But when the FBI reported that Camden, New Jersey, pop. 76,182, had 1,777 violent crimes and 54 murders in 2008, yielding a sky-high violence rate of 2332.6 per 100,000 and a dismal murder rate of 7.1 per 10,000, it was hardly bestowing praise. Just like in 2004 and 2005 (and nearly 2007, when it was number two) Camden was once again the most dangerous city in the U.S. While the UCR warns against simply ranking communities – after all, there are demographic variables such as age, educational attainment and income to consider – there’s no escaping the implications. Aggregating all Part I crimes except arson, Camden’s 2008 crime score was twenty-four percent higher than runner-up St. Louis, a stunning fifty-eight percent more than fifth-placed Flint, and a ridiculous two-hundred-and-four percent higher than twenty-ninth placed Newark, itself no slouch in the violence sweepstakes. Current-year figures are mixed. As of last month homicides and shootings were both down (although still ahead of 2006) but aggravated assault has increased, driving overall violence up five percent over 2008. It’s no surprise that in 2002, in what was billed as the “biggest municipal takeover in American history,” New Jersey brought Camden under State control. Taking over in exchange for injecting a $175 million stimulus, it appointed a “Chief Operating Officer” with authority to approve all decisions of the Mayor and City Council. One year later New Jersey’s attorney general appointed a “Police Director” to oversee the struggling police department. What’s been the result? A recent headline by the Philadelphia Inquirer says it all: “Camden Rebirth: A promise still unfulfilled.” Despite years of intervention the local economy remains stagnant. Empty, boarded-up storefronts litter vast sections of the city. During rainstorms raw sewage overflows into basements, driving hapless residents from their homes. And while crime and violence remain unacceptably high, police strength, which Trenton promised to keep at then-existing levels, has plunged from fifteen to thirty-four percent depending on how one’s counting. Equipment shortages and malfunctions are also rampant, with police cars in such disrepair that twenty recently flunked State inspection. That’s not to say that the State hasn’t tried. In 2008 a leap in the homicide rate led to the sixth command change in as many years. Luis Vega, a tough-minded ex-NYPD cop became the new police director while veteran Camden officer John Thomson was installed as the new chief. Tactics were thoroughly revamped. Compstat is being used to track crime patterns and assess effectiveness. Police regularly swoop down on hot spots, ticketing and arresting petty violators in an attempt to remedy quality-of-life problems that were supposedly ignored in the past. To insure that cops are doing as they’re told Jose Cordero, the attorney general’s gang czar, shows up each week to monitor progress. Alas, there’s been considerable blowback from the rank-and-file. With only 290 officers on active status, as compared to 440 when the State took over, the weight of the new style has fallen heavily on the shoulders of ordinary cops. Their complaints range across a broad spectrum, from missing lunch breaks and being denied vacation time, to being pressed to arrest and stop citizens without adequate cause, to being told how and where to patrol while camera-toting internal affairs detectives run around making sure they comply. Something had to give, and it did. Like each of his predecessors, Police Director Vega lasted only one year, resigning in August for “family reasons”. If Camden’s Mayor has her way, he won’t be replaced: I dare anyone to show me any police department in the country that has been studied as often as the Camden Police Department, has had as many leadership changes and . . . [such a] confusing and fractured command structure. Is Camden’s aggressive approach the appropriate response? Hot-spot strategies are nothing new, but the city’s “mobilization drill” version seems more like the work of an occupying force than a civilian police: ...out of nowhere, 16 police cruisers, lights flashing, pull into the neighborhood. Car doors slam, officers fall into formation. There's a 30-second briefing before officers are off to look for speeding motorcycles, teenagers smoking pot, and men wanted on warrants. In less than two hours on a summer evening, 38 pedestrians are questioned, 14 traffic tickets are issued, and one arrest is made... Citizens aren’t the only targets. The union leader calls Compstat meetings “nightmares.” A recent example featured Mr. Cordero, the AG’s man, browbeating a veteran captain because one of his teams made only a single arrest in four days. (A newsman who was present didn’t report whether Mr. Cordero asked about the nature of the case.) Any city that thinks it can cite and arrest its way out of a perfect storm of poverty and joblessness is badly mistaken. Same goes for any department that tries to bully cops or turn them into robots. It’s no secret that many of the forty officers who left the department last year did so because they were disgruntled. What’s more, those still hanging around don’t seem much happier. That’s a bad sign. In the real world – and that presumably includes Camden – most police work is done outside the presence of supervisors and internal affairs. It’s well known that micromanagement and heavy-handed supervision can destroy morale and stifle innovation. They can also break the bond between staff and line, yielding platoons of independent contractors who could care less what the chief thinks. As the Mayor suggests, Camden PD really is an excellent case study. It’s for that reason that its troubles became the topic for a midterm essay at Cal State Fullerton. Here is what a student who happens to be a working street cop had to say: The problem associated with the officers’ resistance [to being told what to do] stems from the type of individual that is hired for law enforcement. An assertive, decision-making type of person would not want to be told when to exercise that assertiveness and how to make one’s decisions. Camden PD badly needs to find a balance that will allow it to implement effective strategies while allowing officers the discretion and flexibility they need, and the job satisfaction they seek. Perhaps its managers could begin by looking past Compstat and asking those most familiar with field conditions – their own officers – to help devise sensible and sustainable responses to crime and violence. If they’d like, we could send a couple students to help them get started. Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! RELATED POSTS The New Normal A Tale of Three Cities UPDATES 02/22/10 Four Camden officers have been suspended and at least thirty convictions have been overturned as accusations swirl that they planted evidence and stole drugs and money. Some of the suspects had records and were told by their lawyers to plead guilty to avoid harsher sanctions. 01/04/10 Step aside, Camden: Saginaw, Michigan (pop. 55634) has been the most violent U.S. city with a population greater than 40,000. Its 2008 rate, 3295, was 40 percent higher than Camden’s. 12/30/09 As of December 21, murders in New Jersey dropped ten percent in 2009, from 369 to 332, while in Camden they plunged forty percent, from 55 to 33. A Camden councilman and former cop cautions that factors other than the police are probably involved. Home Top Permalink Print Share this post Posted 11/15/09 In hindsight everything’s simple. But policing takes a lot more than hindsight.
By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. So much violence, so little time! While the (virtual) ink from “Hidden in Plain Sight” was still wet we were shaken by horrific news from Cleveland, where police were unearthing human remains at the home of registered sex offender Anthony Sowell. As digging continues eleven bodies have been found, all female. So far the identities of ten are known. Ranging in age 25 to 52, most were reportedly addicts and sex workers. Sowell, who had been released in 2005 after doing fifteen years for rape, had apparently lured them in with drugs and liquor. How was he caught? It wasn’t because police and public health authorities followed up on complaints about a horrible stench emanating from the residence (they didn’t). It wasn’t because a woman accused Sowell of choking and raping her last November. (Sowell was arrested but the case was dismissed, apparently because the victim didn’t seem credible.) It wasn’t because a deputy checking up on sex offenders got suspicious when he stopped by to chat with Sowell last month. (The officer didn’t enter the home. Maybe it smelled too bad. Anyway, there was no need, as Sowell was reporting as required. A psychologist even declared that he was unlikely to reoffend!) It wasn’t because a woman told police that shortly after the deputy left Sowell choked and raped her, then offered her money to keep quiet. (She supposedly didn’t show up for an interview.) And it wasn’t because a naked woman landed on the street after “falling” from Sowell’s upper-floor window. (She reportedly refused to talk to officers who went to see her at the hospital.) In the end Sowell’s September victim finally met with the cops. What she said led them to obtain arrest and search warrants. Once inside the home, their noses led them to two bodies. Hmm, something suspicious here! Only days after the grim discovery in Cleveland another mass killing rocked the nation. This one happened all at once. On November 5, 2009 a thirty-nine year old Fort Hood psychiatrist went on a shooting spree, killing thirteen and wounding twenty-eight. Major Nidal Malik Hasan now stands charged with capital murder. Hasan had a troubled history. According to a former classmate at the Medical University of the Armed Services, he frequently expressed opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and considered himself “a Muslim first and an American second.” Hasan once gave a lecture on “whether the war on terror is a war against Islam.” When students challenged him about the topic’s relevance (it was an environmental health course) Hasan got “sweaty and nervous and emotional.” After graduating in 2003 Hasan was an intern and resident at Walter Reed Medical Center. If anything, his clashes with colleagues got worse. Hasan seemed distracted. He was often late for work and made himself unavailable even while on call. Co-workers said that he was occasionally belligerent and belittled colleagues. Hasan’s detached attitude and extremist orientation (he gave a bizarre lecture in which he remarked that “the Quran teaches that infidels should have their heads cut off and set on fire”) led colleagues to worry about his mental health. Indeed, superiors considered terminating Hasan’s residency, but the procedures were onerous and they were afraid he would accuse them of religious bias. In the end Hasan was dealt with in the time-tested manner: he was promoted (to Major) and transferred to Fort Hood. While at Walter Reed Hasan exchanged e-mails with radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Designated by the U.S. as a “global terrorist,” the imam lives in Yemen, where he went after leading a Virginia mosque that Hasan attended. Picked up by routine intercepts, the e-mails were forwarded to a Joint Terrorist Task Force. Agents apparently contacted a top official at Walter Reed, who surmised that the messages were in connection with Hasan’s research on post-traumatic stress. Concluding that the e-mails were innocuous, the task force closed its file. But what did they really know about Hasan? Had they been told that his PowerPoint presentation on post-traumatic stress included a slide with the purported Muslim warrior creed, “we love death more than you love life”? Were they aware that he was trying to get an early separation because of alleged religious persecution? Neither Walter Reed nor the task force were in a position to investigate an odd duck at Fort Hood. That was a job for Army intelligence or CID. But they weren’t alerted, so the puzzle remained unassembled. Even had they looked they would have missed a key fact: Hasan had recently purchased a handgun. And not just any handgun, but an unusually expensive, highly lethal, high-capacity cop killer that was never intended for civilian use. Of course, since the Feds and Texas lack centralized gun registries, there was no way to know that Hasan bought a gun short of asking him or visiting gun stores. Everyone (like your blogger) who’s kicked off an intelligence program knows to prepare for an avalanche. Whether information arrives electronically or through word of mouth, there are hardly enough resources to examine data let alone pursue more than a tiny fraction of leads. That embarrassment of riches affects everyone, from the pointy-heads at police HQ to the cop on the beat. Cast your net too broadly and you’ll invariably commit a rash of “Type 1” errors, sending out trivial leads and squandering your credibility. Narrow your search and you’ll get bit by “Type 2” errors, missing worthwhile targets like Sowell or Hasan whom any idiot should have known to investigate. Police are expected to accomplish something. As we’ve pointed out, catching real terrorists is tough, so it’s not surprising that given limited resources the Feds might choose to “rope in” dummies. More generally, the tendency to reach for low-lying fruit is manifested in a preference for so-called “actionable” intelligence, meaning that the underlying offense is self-evident or nearly so. Put simply, until a victim signed on the dotted line Sowell was just another of the umpteen weasels polluting Cleveland’s troubled Imperial Avenue neighborhood. Hasan? He wasn’t even on radar. It’s a truism that Type 2 errors of omission usually go undetected, so the chances of being seriously embarrassed by not acting are small. Sowell and Hasan were exceptions. Their dangerousness wasn’t appreciated because the default strategy is to dismiss, dismiss, dismiss. Unless there’s an obvious violation, officers may go to extraordinary lengths to routinize information and interpret questionable behavior in its most favorable light. Consider for example the Madoff scandal, where the Feds overlooked blatant inconsistencies and ignored detailed tips in a rush to “prove” that all was well. Doing nothing is easy to justify. According to the spokesperson for the Cleveland sheriff, the deputy who talked with Sowell didn’t go in the house because he didn’t have the authority. Hasan was promoted because kicking him out might have triggered controversy. Absent an underlying crime – Sowell’s murders were as yet undiscovered; Hasan’s were still to be committed – neither case offered an obvious entry point or investigative path. Intending no pun, there was plenty of reason to dig, but the calculus of political, bureaucratic and individual needs mitigated against anyone picking up a shovel. As we suggested in “Hidden in Plain Sight,” disorganized, poverty-stricken neighborhoods are particularly challenging. Sowell preyed on victims who were indisposed to turn to police, and if they did, were unlikely to be believed. Citizens besieged by violence had long given up trying to wake up the city to their plight, while overburdened cops looked on even the oddest circumstances, like women tumbling from windows, as just another symptom of the miserable conditions on their beat. In the end, it’s that last observation that offers the hint of a remedy. Rare events such as mass murder are difficult to predict precisely because they are rare. Our best shot at preventing them lies in avoiding the urge to routinize and in paying close attention to the unusual and offbeat, like naked women falling from the sky and military officers e-mailing with terrorists. Solving cases retrospectively is easy. Developing the ability to anticipate crime and work prospectively is the real trick. Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! RELATED POSTS Hidden in Plain Sight An Illusion of Control Doing Nothing, Redux RELATED ARTICLES VPC report on “big boomer” handguns Defense Dept. report on Fort Hood UPDATES 07/01/10 Dontae Morris was released from prison even though he had an outstanding felony bad checks warrant. Two months later he shot two Tampa police officers to death during a traffic stop. 05/23/10 Alleging that his craziness was readily apparent, a Senate committee and his defense lawyer are demanding access to Maj. Nidal Hasan’s mental health and disciplinary files. Of great concern is that authorities knew of his contacts with the notorious Anwar Awlaki but did nothing. 04/02/10 Was a D.C. shooting that killed three and wounded four preventable? Police had linked the alleged triggerman to a recent murder, but prosecutors refused to seek a warrant. Another suspect, a juvenile, had nine convictions and had absconded from supervision. 03/05/10 Parents of deceased Pentagon shooter John Bedell, 36, had warned police that their son was manic-depressive and might have a gun. 03/04/10 John Gardner, a registered sex offender arrested for the rape and murder of San Diego-area teen Chelsea King, and now a suspect in at least two other attacks, kept eluding police radar because on each occasion he was registered in another area. San Diego paper on Chelsea King 01/14/10 Hasan was promoted although he didn’t meet standards for “physical fitness, appearance and work ethic.” His overseers now face discipline for failing to act. 12/28/09 Following his father’s phone call, US officials placed would-be aircraft bomber Umar Abdulmutallab on a database of terrorism suspects but not on the no-fly list, which has been cut due to complaints. His visa was flagged for a thorough investigation should he reapply when it expired. 11/23/09 Cleveland councilman calls system that left Sowell on the street “completely broken” 11/20/09 Gun control groups seek to ban importation of pistol and ammo used by Ft. Hood shooter (FN Herstal Five-seveN, 5.7X28 mm cartridge) as too lethal to be suitable for sporting purposes 11/20/09 Defense and Army Depts. launch major probes into the Ft. Hood massacre Home Top Permalink Print Share this post Posted 9/13/09 The unintended consequences of sloppy policing
By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. In 2006 a 911 caller reported that women and girls were “living in squalor” in the rear yard of a home in Antioch (Calif.) A deputy contacted the homeowner and warned him that living outdoors in a residential area was a code violation. According to the complainant, the officer explained that he didn’t go inside or enter the yard because that would require a search warrant. He then left. Two years later Phillip Garrido went to the UC Berkeley P.D. to apply for a permit to hold a religious event on campus. He was accompanied by two teens he introduced as his daughters. Worried about their “robotic” behavior and washed-out appearance, an officer asked Garrido to return the next day. Meanwhile she punched his name and birthdate into the computer. Bingo! The 58-year old man was on life parole for kidnapping and rape. He had spent eleven years behind bars. Called by the cops, a stunned parole agent said no, Garrido didn’t have any children. Why were they asking? It turns out the 11 and 15-year old girls who were with Garrido were indeed his, fathered with a woman whom he snatched eighteen years earlier in Placerville, a town about two hours’ drive away. Then only eleven, the girl was grabbed at a bus stop outside her home as her horrified stepfather looked on. For the next eighteen years she and the two daughters she would bear lived in a ramshackle arrangement of tents and lean-to’s behind the house that Garrido and his wife Nancy shared. On September 4, 2009 San Bernardino (Calif.) police went to the group home where Trevor Castro lived to arrest him on a drunk driving warrant. After six months of being held captive in the squalid facility the 23-year old developmentally disabled youth was delighted to be handcuffed. After what he had experienced going to a real jail would be a pleasure. Once inside officers were horrified by what they saw and smelled. Nearly two dozen elderly and mentally ill persons were living in modified chicken coops with no running water, using buckets as latrines. Running away was impossible, as the compound was encircled by a block fence topped with razor wire. Physical beatings were common. The home’s operator had a history of run-ins with the authorities. Police arrested her on sixteen felony counts of elder abuse. Neighbors applauded the action but wondered why it took so long. Patrol cops frequently responded to disturbances outside the home but always left without going inside, explaining that they couldn’t do so without a warrant. Complaints to code enforcement fell on deaf ears. Doing nothing for lack of a search warrant is a lousy excuse. Inquisitive cops and detectives often probe private space by obtaining the consent of owners or occupants. There are also plenty of other things that can be done. Had the deputy simply run a criminal record check he would have learned that Garrido was on life parole for an offense that made any contact with teens highly irregular. Officers could have searched the property without a warrant or alerted a parole agent. But the deputy didn’t check. Assuming, perhaps, that the complainant was exaggerating, he reportedly spent a half-hour with Garrido, then left. Too bad for Garrido’s victims, who wound up doing another two years in captivity before UC cops stepped in. “We are beating ourselves up over this,” said the Sheriff. “I’m first in line to offer organizational criticism, offer my apologies to the victims and accept responsibility.” (Click here for a video of the news conference.) It was much the same story at the group home. Police could have asked to look around from the very start. If refused (an unlikely event) they could have referred matters to regulators. They, in turn, would have quickly discovered what officers would have learned had they bothered to check: the home was unlicensed. It could have been shut down and its owner arrested months earlier. But officers never checked. Embarrassed city fathers now promise to investigate. What trips up ordinary cops can also trip up the almighty Feds. Knowledgeable insiders had warned for decades that Bernard Madoff’s investment returns seemed grossly excessive, yet not once did the G-Men (and women) try to confirm that the trades which supposedly yielded the enormous profits were actually made (they weren’t.) Why bother? Madoff had a sterling reputation; what’s more, no Ponzi scheme of that magnitude could possibly exist! But it did. When your blogger ran an ATF gun trafficking group in the nineties he was astounded by the thousands of relatively new guns that LAPD recovered each year. Where did they come from? It turned out that many had been going out the back door of corrupt gun stores. (One such case accounted for 10,000 guns in two years.) It happened, in part, because ATF inspectors didn’t compare what dealers said they bought against distributor invoices, enabling crooked licensees to create piles of firearms for illegal resale by the simple expedient of leaving incoming guns off the books. For police the first step towards recovery is to concede a weakness for jumping to conclusions. Serious crime isn’t always apparent, and as cops filter information through their storehouse of experiences and preconceptions it’s not surprising that they’ll occasionally goof. Fortunately, testing assumptions is often as simple as grabbing a mike, making a phone call and using a keyboard. Taking the trouble to confirm what’s “obvious” can keep officers from overlooking the unexpected, like captives living in tents and chicken coops. Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! UPDATES 07/01/10 Fearing that a civil suit would expose the State to astronomical damages, California agreed to pay Garrido’s victim $20 million for failing to discover her imprisonment. 07/01/10 Two months before killing two Tampa officers a convicted drug dealer was released from prison although he had a felony bad checks warrant because the sheriff refused to pick him up. 06/03/10 A “low risk” classification meant that John Gardner’s GPS movements were “passively” monitored, leading agents to miss many curfew violations and trips to rural areas. The “passive” category was eliminated, but parole GPS is still not a real-time tool. OIG Report CDCR response 03/04/10 John Gardner, the registered sex offender arrested for the rape and murder of San Diego-area teen Chelsea King, and now a suspect in at least two other attacks, kept eluding police radar because on each occasion he was registered in another area. San Diego paper on Chelsea King 02/13/10 Although Garrido displayed strange behavior, parole agents gave him “perfunctory attention” and never searched his home. In 2008 he filed papers to start a church, “God’s Desire.” 11/04/09 Calif. Corrections Dept. IG criticized parole agents for ignoring clues that something was seriously amiss at Garrido’s home, including the unexplained presence of a young girl in 2008 10/02/09 Despite repeated complaints, parole agents and Cleveland police didn’t aggressively investigate registered sex offender Anthony Sowell until decomposed bodies were found in his home 09/16/09 Needlessly large caseloads distract parole agents from properly supervising dangerous parolees RELATED POSTS Missed Signals An Illusion of Control Doing Nothing, Redux Home Top Permalink Print Share this post
SLAPPING LIPSTICK ON THE PIG (PART III) Simple policing strategies are the best By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. It’s as close to a Nobel as a criminologist can get. David L. Weisburd, a professor with joint appointments at Hebrew University and Virginia’s George Mason University was awarded the 2010 Stockholm Prize in Criminology for demonstrating that hot-spot policing doesn’t displace crime. One of a growing number of academics who propose that offending is rooted in place, Dr. Weisburd believes that concentrating efforts at crime-prone locations deters crime and can minimize conflicts between the public and police. In the mid-90’s Dr. Weisburd and his colleagues tested an enhanced drug hot spot strategy in Jersey City (N.J.) Police identified fifty-six open-air drug markets. At half undercover officers bought drugs and made arrests as usual. In the others they cranked things up, selecting targets in advance rather than ad-hoc, placing extra cops on patrol and sending in housing and liquor inspectors. What happened? Both the old and new approaches suppressed drug activity about equally. Effects from the enhanced sites also benefitted adjoining areas, contradicting the conventional wisdom that intensive policing displaces crime. In a later study Dr. Weisburd and others geocoded 14 years (1989-2002) of Seattle crime data to reflect “street segments” (both sides of the street of a contiguous block.) Their analysis replicated earlier findings that crime concentrates at relatively few places. They also discovered that offending at these hot-spots was stable over time, and that the city’s crime drop, which coincided with a general improvement across the U.S., was mostly due to declines at high-crime “micro-locations.” (“Trajectories of Crime at Places,” Criminology, 42:2, May 2004.) Dr. Weisburd returned to Jersey City to revisit the crime-displacement hypothesis. Two hot spots were selected; one prostitution, the other drugs. Police hit the prostitution site with a series of reverse stings, each time arresting dozens of clients. They also set up checkpoints between operations to inform and warn potential customers. A narcotics task force, a violent offender squad and intensified patrol took care of the drug location. (A few non-law enforcement tactics were applied at both locations, but what the cops did seems by far the most salient.) Prostitution and drug offending plunged at both sites, with gains remaining evident after policing subsided. Again, there was a “diffusion of benefits” to surrounding areas and no substantial displacement. Offenders later explained to researchers that relocating was not so much in the cards as it would be difficult and unsafe. (“Does Crime Just Move Around the Corner?” Criminology, 44:3, August 2006.) Drug, vice and stolen property stings (remember the LEAA-funded storefront operations?) have been around for decades. To respond to shootings and gang violence police across the U.S. have deployed specialized gang and anti-violence units and staged stop-and-frisk campaigns. As effective as such strategies may be (credited with a 32 percent 2007-2008 homicide drop in Milwaukee) they also tend to sweep in innocent citizens, making it crucial that officers are well trained and supervised and that there is good communication between the police and the community. Multi-agency task forces are very popular. Philadelphia’s “Operation Pressure Point” deploys teams of police, probation officers and Federal agents to crime hot spots on weekend evenings, when most violence occurs. In Charlotte (N.C.) police partner with ICE to combat violent Central American gangs. U.S. Marshals regularly stage fugitive apprehension projects. A recent California example netted more than 1,000 wanted persons, including thirty-one homicide suspects. Long-term Federal-local racketeering investigations seem particularly promising. Last month the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles struck at the MS-13 gang, indicting twenty-four members on charges that could in some instances draw life terms. In May he indicted 147 members of the Varrios, a gang that is centered in the tiny, impoverished unincorporated community of Hawaiian Gardens.
Despite their many successes, the literature still treats police as though they’re in the nineteenth century. It’s assumed that crime can’t be deterred without (a) bringing in outside experts to (b) design stunningly complex programs that (c) involve special innovations and (d) call for multiple “partners.” And we haven’t even mentioned the impenetrable, eye-popping rhetoric that’s usually offered in justification. In fact, there’s pitifully little proof that tacking on extraneous interventions -- slapping lipstick on the pig, if you will -- adds significant value to the core component of most anti-crime strategies: the police. As Cincinnati discovered, adding complexity can create turmoil, making programs so unwieldy that they can’t possibly be sustained. It may not seem so from TV cop shows, where everything gets resolved in sixty minutes and there’s no paperwork, but even simple arrests consume lots of resources. Police must also jump through legal and procedural hoops that civilians can’t begin to fathom. Most officers accept the limits of their authority and try to be effective within established law and procedure. Asking them to do things far removed from the norm is a recipe for confusion. Consider how Baltimore officials reacted to the notion (a strategy actually applied in High Point, N.C.) of making buys from street drug dealers, then calling them in and threatening prosecution if they don’t behave: Representatives from the Police Department, state's attorney's office and mayor's office attended training last year sponsored by the Bureau of Justice Assistance to learn about how it works, and determined it wasn't a good fit for Baltimore, where much criticism of law enforcement focuses on repeat offenders who avoid prosecution. “When you have a city as violent as Baltimore, if you have enough to bring an indictment, we're not going to give bad guys a choice,” said Margaret T. Burns, a spokeswoman for Baltimore State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy. [A mayor’s representative] said elements of the strategy might work, “but having enough information to indict somebody and then not actually doing so is not something that this group felt was appropriate.” “Not giving bad guys a choice” is hardly the most pressing issue. In his younger days, when your blogger worked undercover buying everything from machine guns to a stolen front-end loader (don’t ask) he quickly learned that there’s no such thing as a “routine” deal. Explaining why someone got hurt while police were fulfilling the odd requirements of an “innovative” program is not something that any chief or prosecutor would want to do. Tightening the law enforcement screws may be easier than dealing with the underlying conditions that breed crime. But keeping things down once the cops are gone is tough. Even crooks learn, and once the low-hanging fruit gets picked -- and get picked it must -- taking it to the next level may require far more resources than a local agency can spare. (That’s where the Feds can help.) Initiatives such as Weed and Seed have sought to sustain gains with social service and community-building programs. Results, though, have been uneven, possibly because of the very heavy lifting that’s needed to turn disorganized communities around. We may be asking far too much from the police while giving them far too little credit for their knowledge and accomplishments. As the ones most intimately aware of their environment, they’re in the best position to design and implement appropriate responses to crime. Outside advice can be useful, but it must be offered humbly and accepted with a critical eye. In the end, encouraging police to work where they’re most comfortable and productive, while offering them the resources and information they need to do a quality job, will insure that the critical things only they can do are done right. Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! UPDATES 06/24/10 An $870,000 settlement for 14 plaintiffs has ended Baltimore PD’s campaign to stop and question young persons and arrest them for “quality of life” offenses such as loitering and littering. 05/28/10 To combat violence Detroit PD chief Warren Evans deployed special teams and expanded SWAT. But its accidental shooting of a child is causing doubts about his paramilitary approach. 05/20/10 George Gascon, SFPD’s new chief, is tamping down disorder in the Tenderloin with drug buy-and-bust operations. It seems to be working, but whether it’s sustainable is an open question. 05/13/10 In Newburgh, NY, a violence-ridden community of 29,000, more than 300 local, state and Federal officers fanned out to arrest dozens of gang members on drug charges. 05/12/10 NYPD made 575,000 stop-and-frisks in 2009, arresting 34,000 and seizing 762 guns. Minorities were stopped more often; police say it’s because the tactic was used in high-crime areas. 05/10/10 Newark police chief says the “real keys” to the city’s crime decline are aggressive enforcement strategies that target gun possessors and drug dealers. 05/03/10 Milwaukee police chief credits use of advanced mapping and crime information technology for crime drop. 04/21/10 Instead of emotional responses such as “Three Strikes and You’re Out,” DOJ and academics are pushing for an “evidence-based” approach to policy formation. 03/08/10 Philadelphia PD says walking beats drove down crime in troubled areas; others aren’t so sure. 03/03/10 Detroit PD is warning cops who don’t stop enough cars. But its aggressive strategies, including using tactical teams, hot-spots and stop-and-frisk, are drawing citizen complaints. 02/02/10 NY Times’ Bob Herbert condemns NYPD for a “despicable” stop-and-frisk campaign. A Federal lawsuit against the practice has been filed by an advocacy group. Floyd v. City of NY 12/02/09 Philadelphia PD credits “Operation Pressure Point,” a geographically targeted, local-Federal campaign against crime, drugs and guns for sharp decline in homicide 08/13/09 Detroit PD is targeting crime-ridden “hot spots” with large teams of officers, supplanted by other local and Federal agencies. Update 08/12/09 Even with a shrinking force, Camden (NJ) PD is flooding “hot spots” with cops and making as many arrests as possible. RELATED ARTICLES New Yorker article on Ceasefire NIJ Symposium on Predictive Policing NIJ Policing for Crime Prevention (in “Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn’t, What’s Promising,” National Institute of Justice, 1997.) OTHER POSTS ON POLICE STRATEGIES Policing on a Budget What Can Cops Really Do? Of Hot-Spots and Band-Aids OTHER POSTS IN THE 2009 NIJ CONFERENCE SERIES DNA’s Dandy, But What About Body Armor? Science is Back. No, Really! Slapping Lipstick on the Pig Part I Part II Home Top Permalink Print Share this post
SLAPPING LIPSTICK ON THE PIG (PART II) “Proving” that crime-control strategies work is laden with pitfalls By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. In August 2005 the prestigious journal Criminology & Public Policy published “Did Ceasefire, Compstat, and Exile Reduce Homicide?”, an analysis by Richard Rosenfeld and two colleagues from the University of Missouri-St. Louis of three celebrated violence reduction programs: Boston’s Project Ceasefire and Richmond’s Project Exile (both discussed in Part I) and Bill Bratton’s Compstat, a program that began in New York City and spread throughout the U.S. Each program was widely credited with success. But according to the authors none had been satisfactorily evaluated. Using sophisticated statistical techniques, they sought to determine whether declines in homicide in Boston, Richmond and New York City went significantly beyond drops that were being experienced elsewhere. Corrections were taken for police coverage, incarceration rate, level of cocaine use, population density and resource deprivation, the last a composite measure that includes factors such as poverty rate and male unemployment. Their conclusions rattled more than a few cages. Once extrinsic factors were taken into account New York’s drop in homicide didn’t significantly exceed that of comparable areas. Compstat might be a terrific idea, but in this study it wasn’t demonstrably so. Richmond, on the other hand, easily passed the test, its adjusted 22 percent yearly decline in firearm homicide proving significantly better than reductions elsewhere. Ceasefire proved to be a mixed bag. As this chart from the Ceasefire report illustrates, a steep and persistent decline in the number of youth gun homicide victims coincided with the project (pre/post-intervention means 3.5/1.3. See “Reducing Gun Violence: the Boston Gun Project’s Operation Ceasefire,” National Institute of Justice, September 2001, p.58)
Examining an extended three-year post-intervention period, Rosenfeld and his colleagues calculated that Boston enjoyed an adjusted 30-percent yearly drop in youth gun homicides, nearly twice the 16 percent yearly reduction reported in comparable cities. However, since the actual number of deaths was few, the 14 percent improvement wasn’t enough to reach statistical significance. (Expanding the victim age range, thus increasing their number by only three yielded what the writers termed “marginal” significance.) But let’s not quibble. Boston Ceasefire posted impressive real-world results. That’s to be expected. Police, probation officers and Federal agents served warrants, did stop-and-frisks, made drug and gun busts and conducted probation and parole checks. Yet, although the NIJ Research Report concedes that the program incorporated the “certainty, swiftness and severity of punishment” aspects of the deterrence model, the tendency has been to credit Ceasefire’s success to its unique notification and warning aspects. That explanation has become so common that when discussions at the recent NIJ conference turned to the program one could be excused for thinking that there was no enforcement component at all. On the contrary: as the descriptive sections of the NIJ report make clear, police & probation efforts were very substantial. They were certainly so from the perspective of offenders, who are unused to concerted law enforcement measures, and particularly if they persist. Teasing out just how much of Boston Ceasefire’s fourteen percent gain came from locking people up and how much from everything else was impossible then, and it’s impossible now. As one of Project Safe Neighborhoods’ evaluators told the blogger, specifying the effects of, say, notifications is well-nigh impossible. In 1999 the University of Illinois School of Public Health initiated Chicago Ceasefire.
Don’t be fooled by the “Ceasefire” label -- this is an unique approach. Street workers and “violence interrupters” prowled inner-city areas, identifying and counseling high-risk youth, mediating disputes and defusing situations that might lead to violence. Every effort was made to keep staff members independent and credible. Unlike Boston, there was no deployment of police, and while official tips about violence were welcomed, information only flowed one way. A recent NIJ evaluation reports mixed results. Seven of Chicago Ceasefire’s sites were matched with seven locations where the program was not in effect. Homicides fell significantly more than in the matched area at only one site (again, death counts were very small.) Other results were more promising. When compared to matched locations, four project sites experienced additional decreases of 17 to 24 percent in shots fired, and four demonstrated additional decreases of 16 to 34 percent in actual shootings. Evaluating Chicago Ceasefire presents many challenges. There were other projects, including PSN, operating in and near Ceasefire sites. Assessors also raised serious doubts about the equivalency of the comparison sites. That’s a potentially fatal flaw. High-crime locations such as those where Ceasefire was deployed tend to attract more policing. Without data on the nature and intensity of law enforcement activity, attributing improvements to program effects is risky. There’s another concern. Consider, for example, the far higher violence rates of PSN vis-à-vis non-PSN cities. Of course, you say: that’s how sites were selected in the first place! But extreme scores are unstable and apt to revert to more moderate levels for no discernible reason. If a generalized crime drop is already underway, precipitous changes could be easily misinterpreted. Absent a robust research design, bundling high-crime locales is just asking for trouble come evaluation time. In “Knowing when to fold 'em: an essay evaluating the impact of Ceasefire, Compstat and Exile,” UCLA statistician Richard A. Berk gloomily concludes that unless programs are specifically designed to be rigorously evaluated doing so may be unwise. What if random assignment, a strong quasi experiment, or a convincing analysis of observational data are not in the cards? Even if the policy questions are vital, it may be wise to throw in the hand. Suspect science, even the best that can be done under the circumstances, does long run damage to the credibility of all science. The position taken here is that under these circumstances, responsible researchers should withdraw until stronger studies are possible. It may even be possible to help make those stronger studies more likely. Guilding the lily with unsupportable claims ultimately works to everyone’s disadvantage. Yet public servants don’t have the luxury not to decide, and their decisions must be based on something. Often that “something” is their best judgment, informed with hefty doses of real-world experience. Next week in the (hopefully) final part of this series we’ll examine some promising real-world approaches to fighting crime and violence. Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! RELATED ARTICLES New Yorker article on Ceasefire UPDATES 07/23/10 With ten more killings in 2010 than all of 2009 Minneapolis is implementing Project Exile. 06/24/10 Richmond officials and the Feds tout the effectiveness of stiff gun and drug sentencing in tamping down violence. But an academic thinks the lock-’em up mentality is counterproductive. 06/03/10 Spurred by an increase in homicide, Pittsburgh’s “One Vision One Life” used a Chicago Ceasefire-type street intervention model to prevent violence. But things got worse. Full study 05/20/10 To increase citizen confidence New Orleans PD opened CompStat meetings to the public. 04/21/10 DOJ and academics push for an “evidence-based” approach to policy formation. 04/09/10 Baltimore PD suspends Compstat, calls meetings unproductive badgering sessions. 01/08/10 L.A. sponsors academy to train and license gang intervention workers 12/08/09 Ceasefire conference participants speak of program’s successes and limitations 11/25/09 Boston Commish credits “aggressive use” of Ceasefire with drop in violence 11/19/09 Gang intervention worker training program in Los Angeles delayed 09/14/09 Operation Ceasefire to be implemented in Salinas (Calif.) 08/11/09 Gang intervention worker standards urged 07/29/09 Baltimore gang intervention worker wounded 07/13/09 National Academy of Sciences urges that Bureau of Justice Statistics be insulated from pressures to support DOJ programs, suggests it supplement the FBI’s UCR Report OTHER POSTS IN THE 2009 NIJ CONFERENCE SERIES DNA’s Dandy, But What About Body Armor? Science is Back. No, Really! Slapping Lipstick on the Pig Part I Part III Home Top Permalink Print Share this post
SLAPPING LIPSTICK ON THE PIG (PART I) Do elaborate violence-reduction initiatives make a difference? “Given his extensive criminal record, if there was a Federal law against By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. Issued by United States Attorney Don Stern (yes, Stern), the pithy threat, which was plastered throughout a violence-ridden Boston neighborhood, was actually part of Operation Ceasefire, a strategy devised by Harvard researchers to combat youth gun violence. Ceasefire had two components: a law enforcement campaign to curb gun trafficking, thus reduce the supply of firearms, and a so-called “pulling levers” approach intended to reduce the demand for guns. Beginning in 1996 gang members in selected crime hot spots were summoned to group meetings where they were warned by police, probation and the Feds that if violence continued serious consequences would follow. Educators, job training specialists and community workers were also on hand to offer alternatives. Posters were put up to spread the word about the project and what happened to those, like Freddie, who dared to ignore it.
Once the notification and publicity phases were done the hammer fell. Cops swarmed problem locations, doing stop-and-frisks and arresting drug dealers, gun possessors and those with outstanding warrants. Probation officers conducted surprise searches. Thanks to United States Attorney Don Stern’s enthusiastic participation, felons and drug dealers caught with guns -- or, as in the above example, ammunition -- wound up in Federal court, where bail was rare and sentencing tough. Progress was soon evident. Comparing the two-year implementation period (May 1996 - May 1998) to the five years preceding the intervention, the mean number of monthly gun deaths for ages 24 and under fell sixty-three percent. Citywide gun assaults declined by a quarter. During 1998-2000 a violence-fighting initiative called SACSI sought to implement the Ceasefire model in ten cities: Indianapolis, Memphis, New Haven, Portland, Winston-Salem, Albuquerque, Atlanta, Detroit, Rochester and St. Louis. U.S. Attorneys were in charge of each site. Once the preliminaries were done police and the Feds hit the streets with all they had. Their gloves-off approach yielded promising results. Gun assaults in Indianapolis fell 53 percent. Portland enjoyed a 42 percent decrease in homicide. Although SACSI gave lip service to “pulling levers” NIJ’s own report reveals that for better or worse the focus was overwhelmingly on law enforcement: Each of the SACSI sites implemented both enforcement and prevention strategies, yet all sites, particularly at the start, emphasized enforcement and prosecution. Many of the initial strategies were enforcement oriented -- targeting hotspots and repeat offenders, crackdowns, sweeps, saturation patrols, serving warrants, and making unannounced visits to probationers....Prevention activities in most sites were meager and implemented late in the SACSI program....(pp. 10, 15) Evaluators tried to assess the effectiveness of notification and warning strategies. Their conclusions weren’t encouraging: The impact of the lever-pulling approaches was mixed. Three of four sites found that offenders had indeed “heard the message” about new violence bringing swift and certain law enforcement action. Yet, in those same sites, there was no difference in the recidivism rates of lever-pulling attendees and those of comparison groups of offenders. Researchers in Indianapolis found a general deterrent effect due to offenders’ awareness of increased police stops, probation sweeps, and the like, rather than their awareness of SACSI “offender notification” meetings and messages. (pp. 4-5) Federal law treats gun-toting criminals harshly. Title 18, United States Code, section 924, imposes a mandatory minimum 5-year penalty on drug dealers and violent offenders caught with guns. Armed felons with three prior convictions for violence or drug trafficking are subject to a fifteen-year term with no possibility of parole. In 1997 these provisions became the centerpiece of Project Exile, a program intended to rid Richmond (Virginia) of armed thugs. Unlike Ceasefire, there was no pre-hammer component -- it was all vigorous policing from the very start. Within a year gun homicides were down forty-one percent. In 2001 the U.S. Justice Department blended components of Ceasefire, SACSI and Project Exile into an anti-violence initiative called Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN).
U.S. Attorneys in each judicial district were encouraged to work with mayors, police chiefs, local prosecutors and probation and parole to devise and implement comprehensive, locally-attuned strategies to fight violent crime. Trainers and IT experts were provided. Although the emphasis was on law enforcement, sites were encouraged to incorporate Ceasefire’s “pulling lever” components, and many did. A recently published evaluation of PSN offers a mixed picture. While Federal prosecutions increased overall, philosophical differences and workload concerns made some U.S. Attorneys and judges reluctant to take on street offenders, whom they viewed as a local responsibility. In districts where PSN took hold the partnerships were mostly among law enforcement agencies rather than the broader spectrum envisioned by Ceasefire. And getting probation and parole involved wasn’t always easy, a significant issue given their key monitoring and sanctioning roles. (Probation officers may have been reluctant to play “cop,” thus lose credibility with their charges.) Evaluators identified eighty-two cities where PSN was implemented and 170 cities where it was not. Violent crime rates were compared between the pre-intervention period of 2000-2001 and a four-year period, 2002-2006, when the program was in effect. PSN cities (also called “target” cities) were classified by “dosage”, meaning the program’s rigor -- high, medium or low. (It’s too complicated to go into here, but dosage was measured in a way that heavily weighted law enforcement efforts.) Both PSN and non-PSN cities were also categorized by level of Federal prosecution -- high, medium and low. Statistical significance aside, PSN’s effects seem insubstantial. Overall, violent crime per 100,000 pop. fell about 4 percent in PSN cities (top trend line) while in non-PSN cities it declined about 1 percent.
PSN’s effects might have been attenuated by weak implementation. As the chart demonstrates, sites higher in “dosage” fared better at the start. (Why the effects of medium dosage persisted, while high dosage did not, is an open question.)
High levels of Federal prosecution seemed helpful for PSN and, to a lesser degree, non-PSN sites, while low levels appeared catastrophic for the latter. Again, there is some inconsistency, as low level of Federal prosecution is associated with a greater reduction in violence than medium level.
Whatever their causal mechanism, most gains were wiped out over time. By 2005 the trend in violence was on the upswing for non-PSN cities regardless of prosecution level, for PSN cities at all prosecution levels, and for PSN cities at both low and high dosages of program implementation. As the PSN evaluation suggests, and as recent events in Boston, Cincinnati and elsewhere illustrate, lean economic times and other factors can make programs like Ceasefire, SACSI, Project Exile and PSN difficult to sustain. Expending scarce resources on complex partnerships with non-governmental entities and on elaborate techniques such as offender call-ins and notifications raises even more questions. How well such approaches work and whether they add sufficient value to justify their distraction and expense are among the issues we’ll look at next week. Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! RELATED ARTICLES New Yorker article on Ceasefire RELATED POSTS What Can Cops Really Do? Crime-Fighting on a Budget The Gangs of L.A. Of Hot-Spots and Band-Aids Love Your Brother -- And Frisk Him Too! OTHER POSTS IN THE 2009 NIJ CONFERENCE SERIES DNA’s Dandy, But What About Body Armor? Science is Back. No, Really! Slapping Lipstick on the Pig Part II Part III UPDATES 07/14/10 Pittsburgh used the “call-in” strategy made popular by the Boston gun project, bringing influential gang members, some on probation and parole, to a meeting where community leaders spoke about the impact of gun violence and the US Attorney described tough Federal sentences. 07/04/10 Baltimore credits aggressive gun-law enforcement and a partnership with the Feds that yields long prison sentences for driving down murders. Residents convicted of gun violations wind up on a registry (425 names so far) and get regular visits from the cops. 06/03/10 Spurred by an increase in homicide, Pittsburgh’s “One Vision One Life” used a Chicago Ceasefire-type street intervention model to prevent violence. But things got worse. Full study 04/07/10 In Indianapolis, convicted burglars under supervision are being “called in” to a meeting to hear from victims, be warned about returning to crime and offered drug and job counseling. 02/02/10 NY Times’ Bob Herbert condemns NYPD for a “despicable” stop-and-frisk campaign. A Federal lawsuit against the practice has been filed by an advocacy group. Floyd v. City of NY Home Top Permalink Print Share this post Posted 6/21/09 DOJ promises that, henceforth, research will drive crime control policy
By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. Last Monday a throng of academics, practitioners and grantees (and this blogger) assembled in Arlington, Virginia for the 2009 Conference of the National Institute of Justice. It was obvious within moments that DOJ had a special message to put across. Kristina Rose, NIJ’s acting director had hardly taken up the mike when she launched into an ebullient portrayal of a rejuvenated, researcher-friendly, scientifically-oriented organization anxious to develop evidence-based strategies to combat crime, drugs and terrorism. The hotel’s immense ballroom felt like a revival tent. At long last, science is here to stay! Ms. Rose then turned over the podium to her boss, Laurie Robinson, acting head of the Office of Justice programs, the umbrella agency of which NIJ is a part. While Ms. Rose, a key NIJ official during the Bush years looked on, Ms. Robinson sharply rebuked the preceding Administration for snubbing research. Declaring that “science will once again be respected at the Department of Justice,” she said that extensive safeguards had been put in place to prevent political meddling. Hours later the same assurances were put forth in a luncheon address by her boss, Attorney General Eric Holder. Allegations that Bush and his cronies were hostile to science aren’t exactly new. Yet when the new kids on the block wind up sounding like Elmer Gantry one wonders whether they’re merely slapping lipstick on the same old pig. That’s not an idle concern. Although the AG and his underlings seemed sincere, it hasn’t been that long since the National Academy of Sciences pointed out that a host of forensic “disciplines” touted under both Republican and Democratic administrations lacked a scientific basis. NIJ’s brazen, ultimately unsuccessful attempt to suppress the study helps explain why the NAS suggested that an independent organization be created to oversee forensics, as “advancing science in the forensic science enterprise is not likely to be achieved within the confines of DOJ.” Writing in a recent issue of The Criminologist, a former president of the American Society of Criminology voiced serious doubts about placing DOJ in charge of criminal justice research. His concern, that political appointees might be tempted to twist conclusions to fit policy (or, one might add, ideology) isn’t the only drawback. Confounding complexities, a lack of basic knowledge about the causes and prevention of crime and a paucity of valid metrics can make it well-nigh impossible to determine whether newfangled interventions offer unique advantages. DOJ, as a law enforcement agency, expects its components to demonstrate success in the fight against crime. As the conference wrapped up one well-regarded researcher (and frequent grantee) privately complained that NIJ’s eagerness to showcase solutions is a recipe for exaggeration. There were other issues.
PoliceIssues will be commenting on specific aspects of the proceedings in the coming weeks. To contribute your thoughts -- and we hope that you will -- please click on “Feedback.” Stay tuned! Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! UPDATES 04/21/10 Instead of emotional responses such as “Three Strikes and You’re Out,” DOJ and academics are pushing for an “evidence-based” approach to policy formation. 06/23/09 Funding shortage forces LASD to forego DNA testing of thousands of rape kits OTHER POSTS IN THE 2009 NIJ CONFERENCE SERIES DNA’s Dandy, But What About Body Armor? Ignorance is Not Bliss Slapping Lipstick on the Pig Part I Part II Part III Home Top Permalink Print Share this post Posted 3/29/09 Dissecting the murder of four police officers, and its implications By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. The blame game’s already underway. Only hours after parolee-at-large Lovelle Mixon shot and killed four Oakland (Calif.) police officers, the horrific event was being portrayed as another example of America’s losing battle against crime and violence. Some, including California Attorney General Jerry Brown, wagged their fingers at the State’s much-maligned correctional system, which routinely places dangerous men like Mixon, who did six years for armed carjacking, under the supervision of vastly overburdened parole agents (Mixon was one of seventy.) Meanwhile Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca and writer-activist Earl Ofari Hutchinson bemoaned practices that keep ex-cons from getting the jobs and education they need to succeed in law-abiding society. Gun control advocates complained of the ease with which would-be killers can circumvent the few meaningful restrictions that exist (two of the officers were reportedly shot with an assault rifle that is illegal in California but easily obtainable elsewhere.) Concerns were also raised, albeit far more discreetly, about the tactical decisions that might have led four experienced police officers, including two SWAT-team sergeants, to be gunned down by a single assailant. It all began when sergeant Mark Dunakin stopped Mixon for an expired license tag. Returning to his motorcycle, Dunakin discovered that Mixon’s driver license was fictitious and called for backup. Officer John Hege arrived. As Dunakin headed back to the car, possibly to make an arrest, Mixon stepped out with a pistol and opened fire. Both officers fell, wounded. Mixon walked up and shot them again at point-blank range. Dunakin died at the scene; Hege lingered for hours before being declared brain dead. Mixon fled to his sister’s apartment, where he had stashed an assault rifle. Less than two hours later, an Oakland PD SWAT team forced their way in. Mixon, who was hiding in a closet, fired wildly through the walls, fatally wounding sergeants Daniel Sakai and Ervin Romans, who were struck in the head. Other officers then shot Mixon dead. There’s no such thing as a “routine” traffic stop. Just hours after the Oklahoma City Federal Building was brought down by a truck bomb, killing 168 and injuring more than 400, a highway patrolman stopped Timothy McVeigh for a traffic violation. McVeigh, who had the advantage, could have reached for the loaded Glock 9mm. under his jacket. But he didn’t. Mixon chose differently. He had been avoiding his parole officer and probably guessed there was a warrant for his arrest. What’s more, only a day before the shootings, Oakland police learned that Mixon’s DNA profile matched biological evidence recovered from the recent rape of a twelve-year old girl. A suspect in a string of crimes including another rape, auto theft and murder (a witness who implicated him refused to testify), Mixon had just done nine months for parole violation after being caught with a drug scale and a stolen laptop. For a time he worked as a janitor but according to a cousin Mixon bought the car he was driving with proceeds from a far more lucrative gig: pimping. Were the officers’ deaths preventable? We can blame the “system” until the cows come home, but Mixon’s conduct clearly suggests that there was no way to control him outside of a cell. And in a society where bearing assault rifles is considered a God-given right it was equally impossible to keep him away from guns. If it’s not the “system,” might things have turned out differently had the motorcycle officers taken more care? Maybe, but cops can’t draw down on everyone. Patrolling the inner cities, where a goodly proportion of adult males have spent time in prison, almost requires being in a state of denial. Paradoxically, experienced officers may be at special risk. Having managed to avoid serious trouble for years, they may get careless and ignore warning signs that would send a rookie diving for cover. Perhaps the second officer’s arrival was a distraction. Maybe it lulled both into a false sense of security. We’ll never know. Once the unfathomable happened and two officers were down, having someone call to say where the shooter had holed up was an unexpected break. Normally such situations are resolved with a “surround and call-out,” but Mixon didn’t respond. A cop killer was hiding in an apartment building whose design reportedly offered no safe way to evacuate its occupants. Since the murder of twelve students and a teacher at Columbine High School, SWAT teams have been far more inclined to act sooner rather than later when innocents are at risk, and that’s what they did here. Throwing in two “flash-bang” grenades as a diversion, they stormed the apartment. We know what happened next. Exactly how the SWAT team made entry and why it chose to proceed as it did will be a topic of analysis and debate for years. Although some practices may change, the prognosis is ultimately poor. Due to the penetrating power of modern ammunition and the difficulty of protecting the head many SWAT teams prefer to make entries “stacked” behind hard armor. Unfortunately, full-height shields that can defeat rifle fire are too heavy and cumbersome to fit into tight spaces and may impede visibility. Many agencies have deployed robots, but they’re also subject to constraints. For one thing, they can’t see through walls; Mixon, it’s reported, was hiding in a closet. Given the number of guns in civilian hands, when individuals are hell-bent to do the wrong thing assuring officer safety is well-nigh impossible. For madmen with a rifle there is simply no solution. Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! RELATED POSTS There’s No Easy Solution Reviving an Illusion Disturbed Person + Gun = Killer, Disturbed Person + Assault Rifle = Mass Murderer UPDATES 01/08/10 Official report faults SWAT’s entry into the residence as poorly conceived and “premature” 04/06/09 Binghamton police criticized for waiting 45 minutes to enter the scene where thirteen were killed Link to blog post Link to critical video Home Top Permalink Print Share this post Posted 2/1/09 WHO’S GUARDING THE HENHOUSE? (PART II) The devastating legacy of Al Gore’s reinvention movement By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. In the wake of a mortgage scandal that brought on the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, current and retired FBI agents are doing something totally out of character: they’re sniping at their beloved Bureau. In a recently published exposé a former agent charged that the agency’s shift of thousands of agents to counter-terrorism fatally impaired its ability to combat financial crime. “The public thought the administration was resourcing counter-terrorism when in fact they were forcing cannibalization of the criminal program. Now the chickens have come home to roost.” Crime may be hard to prevent but it’s usually easy to discover. Victims are likely to complain. And for so-called “victimless” crimes such as such as drug dealing and prostitution police can target the settings where these crimes are known to occur and use surveillance and undercover to draw out offenders. But what the mortgage shysters were doing was different. To all appearances they were conducting a legitimate business. Want to buy a home but lack proof of income? No problem, just tell us what you make, and if it’s enough (wink, wink) you’re in! Everyone got their slice of the pie, from brokers who sealed the deals to supposedly rock-solid financial institutions that bundled the shaky loans into tempting, high-yield securities. In time, as teaser rates expired and homeowners found themselves unable to keep up foreclosures soared, driving down home values and rendering those nifty mortgage-backed investments worthless. Felled by greed, Wall Street’s carefully nurtured façade of invulnerability collapsed. Surprise! The Masters of the Universe had no clothes. Where were the cops while all this was going on? Even the vaunted FBI is at its best after a crime has occurred and there are witnesses and victims to describe exactly what happened. But borrowers weren’t complaining, at least not until they found themselves on the street. Neither were lenders. As a retired FBI official pointed out, “you had victim banks that would not acknowledge that they were victims. ‘We're not out any money,’ they would say. ‘Nothing has been foreclosed.’ The banks weren't reporting, the regulators weren't regulating, and the FBI was concentrating on external mortgage fraud as opposed to the underlying internal problem.” Regulators not regulating? What’s that all about? Rewind to the early 90’s, when in a Pollyannish fit of goodwill Vice-president Al Gore sought to bring Government and industry together in a new Great Hug: The Vice President introduced the idea of customer service for regulated industries -- that "good players" who want to comply with federal regulations often need information and assistance... Most importantly, the Vice President called on federal regulators to form partnerships with the community they regulated to explore even more groundbreaking ways to achieve goals like clean air and safe food. In February 1995, to reinforce the work of the Vice President and his regulatory workgroup, the President met with regulators. He directed them to cut obsolete regulations, reward results, not red tape, get out of Washington-create grass roots partnerships, and negotiate, don't dictate. Within a year sixteen-thousand pages of “unnecessary federal regulations” fell to the knife. By 2000, when the National Performance Review had run its course, a glowing self-assessment boasted that agency rule books had been thinned by an astounding 640,000 pages. But the NPR’s most tangible accomplishment was its impact on the Federal civilian workforce, where it supposedly eliminated a whopping 426,000 positions. (That turns out to be a bit of an exaggeration, as the government had been steadily shrinking since at least 1990. Still, Congressional Budget Office statistics reveal there were 225,900 fewer non-Postal civilian employees in 2000 than 1995, a not-inconsequential decrease of eleven percent.) Perhaps more significantly, the worker bees who remained on the job got hammered with a New-Ageish ideology that redefined the relationship between industry and government as a “partnership”, with the former becoming the latter’s “customer”. Traditional Government performance measures such as the number of times that regulators slapped an industry’s hands were eschewed in favor of a kinder and gentler approach: The use of regulatory partnerships has become the preferred approach for getting results. NPR worked with five key regulatory agencies (EPA, FDA, FSIS, OSHA and FAA) to pilot new approaches, to deploy information technology, and to do a better job measuring what matters— namely their impact on their mission (e.g. clean air) as opposed to historical process measures (e.g. the number of tickets written for regulatory violations). As a result, food-borne illness, toxic emissions, and worker injury rates are dropping. And the regulated community has better information and tools to help with compliance. Naturally, boosters of government reinvention declared the effort a resounding success. Meanwhile no one seemed to notice that regulatory agencies had turned into mere shadows of their former selves. “The regulators are the ones embedded in the banks,” a former FBI agent pointed out. “They would be able to see [financial fraud] if they were looking. They were the first line of defense in detecting it.” Unfortunately, the canaries in the coal mine had lost their voice. Demoralized by reductions in staffing and political interference, the S.E.C. and its sister agencies demonstrated little interest in pursuing the examples of “pervasive financial corruption” that kept popping up. Lacking victims or demonstrable evidence of serious harm, it’s no surprise that the FBI chose to allocate its resources in a different direction. Yes, we trusted. We trusted the system to police itself. We trusted brokers, dealmakers and investment bankers to watch out for the public interest. Yet thanks to “reinvention” no one was looking over their shoulders. There was nothing to deter profit mongers from tying up their consciences alongside their yachts. And it’s not over. Only the other day our new Prez chastized Wall Street bankers for shamelessly awarding themselves bonuses even as the government was rushing to prop up their institutions with Federal funds. Like they say, “what’s new”? Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! UPDATES 06/09/10 To prevent future Madoffs, FBI and SEC are looking for snitches on Wall Street 01/04/09 Fed chief Bernanke endorses more vigorous regulation, says financial crisis was caused by a “decline in underwriting standards” made possible by inadequate government oversight. 12/16/09 Financial fraud prosecutions plummeted before the markets collapsed 06/27/09 To make numbers, S.E.C. chased the “little fish” 06/04/09 Labeling airlines as “customers” mitigated against meaningful regulation Inspector General report 02/22/09 New S.E.C. Chief toughens enforcement 02/17/09 S.E.C. takes over Texas firm; $8 billion in assets missing 02/13/09 FBI returning agents from terrorism to fraud Home Top Permalink Print Share this post Posted 1/11/09 Specialized teams can help, but their officers must come from somewhere By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. “We have shown time and again that if you invest in law enforcement and hold police accountable . . . you will absolutely have a very definitive effect on crime.” According to LAPD Assistant Chief Earl Paysinger, that’s why the citizens of Los Angeles are enjoying a continued drop in homicide, with six percent fewer killings in 2008 than 2007, a reduction of twenty-seven percent over five years. Paysinger was taking his cue from Chief “Hollywood” Bill Bratton, whose well-known refrain -- “I take credit when crime goes down, I take blame when crime goes up” -- sticks in the craw of criminologists who insist that economics and social forces have a far greater effect on crime trends than the police. As regular readers of the Los Angeles Times know, the paper enjoys a long-running love affair with the Chief. Citing no authority other than Paysinger, the same article flatly reports that “the drop in violence is due, in part, to the LAPD's success in reducing gang-related crimes.” Never mind that near the end of the piece the luckless commander of the crime-besotted Central Division calls a startling one-year jump of 21 percent in robberies nothing to worry about: “These things happen. Some years numbers go up a little; some years they're down. The important thing is we are not seeing any patterns [that suggest larger problems].” Incidentally, Bratton’s goal of an overall five-percent crime drop wasn’t met (it was half that). And with the city’s finances in the toilet, his crime-reduction goals for 2009 are yet to be set. Can the police really impact crime? If there is an effect, can it be measured? These are distinct questions, but to answer the first requires that we say “yes” to the second. That’s where the problem comes in. In a recent op-ed in the L.A. Times, James Q. Wilson credited “sharp” declines in crime in New York and Los Angeles to strategies such as Compstat and stop-and-frisk. He also had particularly kind words to say about Bratton: “What he has accomplished without a big increase in the size of his force has been remarkable.” Then, in his very next breath, America’s top expert on the police made a stunning turnaround: To try to sort out the combined and complex relations between crime and the Well, that’s helpful! Some cities are experiencing far higher crime drops than L.A. In 2008 homicide in Milwaukee declined a startling 32 percent, while in Cleveland it fell 24 percent. Police credited the improvements to targeted enforcement strategies, including flooding affected areas with cops and using stop-and-frisk to arrest potential shooters and get guns off the street. Criminologists speak of two kinds of deterrence: general and specific. “General deterrence” works by creating fear of punishment. Citizens are made aware that there is a criminal justice system, that police are on patrol and that evildoers go to jail. Cranking it up by, say, flooding a problem neighborhood with cops can tamp things down even more. Unfortunately, improvements usually prove fleeting; when cops move on as eventually they must, crime returns. One way to enhance the gains is by bringing in the second kind of deterrence. In “specific deterrence” we prevent future crimes by arresting offenders. While the preventive effects are lagged, meaning they might not be immediately felt, they will persist as long as perpetrators remain incarcerated, thus unable to commit more crimes. “Hot spot policing” that combines aspects of general and specific deterrence, such as in Milwaukee and Cleveland, may offer the best solution. However, as the economy sours and officer/population ratios deteriorate, increasing coverage in one area might require drawing officers away from another, in effect robbing Peter to pay Paul. When some of L.A.’s better-off citizens learned that their already skimpily patrolled neighborhoods would have even fewer cops, their reaction was predictable. Is it possible to “do” specific deterrence without redistributing officers? Detroit thinks so. It partnered with the U.S. Marshal’s Service in a campaign to round up fugitives; at year’s end homicide was down fourteen percent. No, the results weren’t equal to Milwaukee’s, but the impact on patrol coverage was minimal. And if those caught up in the dragnets were active criminals, taking them off the street -- and keeping them off -- absolutely prevented crime. Keeping them off. There’s more to it than just making arrests. Now that they constitute as many as half or more of all murders, stranger homicides present a particularly vexing problem. Many are gang killings, where willing witnesses are rare, and despite the promises of CSI there may be little physical evidence left behind other than a bullet. Cutbacks that thin the detective ranks, perhaps to bolster patrol, may leave little opportunity to do the intensive, quality legwork that’s necessary to identify and convict killers, and none to investigate other serious offenses that, had they been solved, might have also led to the incapacitation of dangerous men. Crime rates fluctuate. Even when the swings are as pronounced as Milwaukee’s we disparage them as “random” not because they really are but because we lack the tools to accurately measure and apportion the change. What part is attributable to social forces? The economy? Policing? That uncertainty, though, shouldn’t discourage police from putting their best friend in the crime-fighting business to work. Specific deterrence works: as long as we keep arresting and imprisoning active offenders we’ll prevent crime. And that’s something you can count on. Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index!
07/21/10 Dogged by the SWAT killing of a 7-year old girl during filming of a reality TV show, his appearance in a TV trailer with an assault rifle, and an aggressive, take-no-prisoners style, Detroit chief Warren Evans resigned. Mayor Dave Bing said Evans’ actions had “compromised” the city. 07/04/10 Baltimore credits aggressive gun-law enforcement and a partnership with the Feds that yields long prison sentences for driving down murders. Residents convicted of gun violations wind up on a registry (425 names so far) and get regular visits from the cops. 06/24/10 An $870,000 settlement for 14 plaintiffs has ended Baltimore PD’s campaign to stop and question young persons and arrest them for “quality of life” offenses such as loitering and littering. 05/28/10 To combat violence Detroit PD chief Warren Evans deployed special teams and expanded SWAT. But its accidental shooting of a child is causing doubts about his paramilitary approach. 05/20/10 George Gascon, SFPD’s new chief, is tamping down disorder in the Tenderloin with drug buy-and-bust operations. It seems to be working, but whether it’s sustainable is an open question. 05/13/10 In Newburgh, NY, a violence-ridden community of 29,000, more than 300 local, state and Federal officers fanned out to arrest dozens of gang members on drug charges. 05/12/10 NYPD made 575,000 stop-and-frisks in 2009, arresting 34,000 and seizing 762 guns. Minorities were stopped more often; police say it’s because the tactic was used in high-crime areas. 05/10/10 Newark police chief says the “real keys” to the city’s crime decline are aggressive enforcement strategies that target gun possessors and drug dealers. 05/03/10 Milwaukee police chief credits use of advanced mapping and crime information technology for crime drop. 04/12/10 After two months of gang shootings, an Omaha task force is flooding areas with cops, serving outstanding warrants and using Federal law to prosecute gun-carrying felons. 02/02/10 NY Times’ Bob Herbert condemns NYPD for a “despicable” stop-and-frisk campaign. A Federal lawsuit against the practice has been filed by an advocacy group. Floyd v. City of NY 01/08/10 Baltimore to address citizen pleas for more civil neighborhoods by hiring 50 officers with $10 million Federal grant and placing them on walking beats to fight quality-of-life crimes 08/20/09 Aggressive enforcement in five problem zones and a Federal gang crackdown are credited for a 50 percent citywide drop in San Francisco homicides. 08/13/09 Detroit PD is targeting crime-ridden “hot spots” with large teams of officers, supplanted by other local and Federal agencies. 08/12/09 Even with a shrinking force, Camden (NJ) PD is flooding “hot spots” with cops and making as many arrests as possible. 07/09/09 Philadelphia’s “Operation Pressure Point” -- weekend sweeps of crime and drug hot spots by teams of police, State agents and Feds -- tamps down violence and nets drug dealers, buyers and persons wanted on warrants. 06/29/09 David Weisburd was awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology for his work showing that hot-spot policing reduces crime instead of just moving it around 06/28/09 Working with gangs, social agencies and police, intervention workers try to make a difference ALSO: One year after major police raid, gang-troubled area remains quiet 06/05/09 LAPD ups pressure on gangs, makes more arrests, rolls out new gang injunction 02/05/09 Baltimore using warrant service to prevent crime 01/13/09 Commenting on downward trends in homicide, noted criminologist says across-the-board improvements mean it’s more than police work Home Top Permalink Print Share this post Posted 12/19/08 While Madoff pulled off the heist of the century, who was watching?
By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. The widow was in disbelief. Her entire trust fund of $29.2 million wiped clean, she had only fond memories of that “lovely” and “thoughtful” New York financial magnate, an honored member and occasional visitor to the ultra-exclusive Palm Beach country club, founded a half-century ago to accommodate those whose ethnicity kept them from getting in anywhere else. Bernard L. Madoff’s business occupied three floors of Manhattan’s Lipstick Tower. On the eighteenth and nineteenth floors platoons of traders chugged away buying and selling securities. But the real action was on the secretive seventeenth floor. That’s where the former NASDAQ chairman and his assistant, Frank DiPascali, ran an exclusive investment business that earned their well-heeled clients returns of ten to twelve percent year-in and out, as predictably as the tick-tocking of a fine Swiss watch. On December 11, 2008 two FBI agents appeared on Madoff’s doorstep and asked whether he had an “innocent” explanation for the improbable accusations leveled against him by his sons, both principals in the brokerage side of the house. That’s when the Baron of Wall Street soulfully admitted, “there is no innocent explanation.” Investigators were stunned. Of the seventeen-plus billion that should have been in client accounts only three-hundred million remained. Madoff said that everything else had been lost in a decades-long Ponzi scheme in which principal from new suckers was used to pay existing investors. Now that the economy had tanked and withdrawal requests were skyrocketing the jig was up. Madoff’s best guess of the total loss? Fifty billion, or twice what GM and Chrysler are pleading for to avoid bankruptcy. Madoff’s victims are everywhere. Big losers in Southern California include L.A.’s Jewish Community Foundation, down $6.4 million, and Steven Spielberg’s Wunderkinder, a charity to which the acclaimed director reportedly contributed $1 million per year. Many Hollywood notables used money managers who invested with Madoff. One, Stanley Chais, faces a multi-hundred-million dollar lawsuit for failing to do due diligence. A respected philanthropist who served with Madoff on several charity boards, Chais complains that he, too was snookered. In the East the roster of victims includes the Elie Wiesel foundation, named after the Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor, which lost $37 million, and the JEHT foundation, which supports a host of non-profits including Cardozo law school’s famous Innocence Project. (JEHT was wiped out and closed its doors.) Yeshiva University, where Madoff was treasurer of the Board of Trustees and director of the business school, got whacked for a cool $100-125 million. Many New York real estate projects financed or secured by funds entrusted to Madoff are also imperiled. But by far the biggest losers are several externally-owned “feeder funds” that had Madoff manage their assets. One, the Fairfield-Greenwich Group, lost $7.5 billion. Another, Ascot Partners, lost $1.8 billion. And that’s not all. Madoff’s tsunami also swept through Europe, leaving banks from Spain to Great Britain to Switzerland reeling with losses totaling billions. How could it happen? All along there were whispers that it was a con game. As early as 1999 a respected Wall Street executive concluded that Madoff’s sterling results were bogus and turned him in to the S.E.C. Most who suspected something was amiss guessed, it now seems incorrectly, that Madoff’s unusually consistent performance was due to “front-running.” If he knew what securities the brokerage side of the house was about to buy, he could acquire them for his investors first, thus temporarily increasing their value. Then when the brokerage placed its bid he could sell the stocks at the inflated price, generating a tidy profit for his clients and a commission for himself.
That’s insider trading and illegal as heck. It would have required his sons’ help, but so far it seems that they’re in the clear. In an interview for a 2001 article, “Madoff Tops Charts; Skeptics Ask How”, Madoff denied any improprieties. He attributed his success to a unique system of hedging stock purchases that sharply reduced the effects of market fluctuations. Why didn’t he set up his own fund and really rake it in? Um, he was happy working for commission and didn’t want to bother. Shift gears to the violence-ridden decades of the eighties and nineties when LAPD was recovering ten-thousand guns a year. Many were recently purchased. It turned out that some licensed retailers were making big bucks pushing guns out the back door. How could that be? Dealer records were rarely reviewed. And even when inspectors showed up they never compared the books against distributor invoices, allowing unscrupulous sellers to accumulate large quantities of unrecorded guns for illegal resale. No, guns aren’t stocks but the principle is the same. Decades of deregulation have taken the bite out of the dog. In recent Congressional testimony, former S.E.C. Chairman Arthur Levitt complained that politicization and budget cuts curtailed enforcement and demoralized employees. In what the New York Times characterized as a “mea culpa,” Christopher Cox, the S.E.C.’s current head, angrily accused these same employees of ignoring a decade of warnings about Madoff. Rather than investigate they simply “relied on information voluntarily produced by Mr. Madoff and his firm.” Like the ATF inspectors, they accepted the books at face value. What else might they have done? They could have verified how much capital Madoff really held. Or they could have visited “Friehling & Horowitz,” the obscure auditing firm responsible for examining his books. Private financial researchers who did so ran into a middle-aged accountant and a secretary working out of a tiny office in remote New City, New York. That was one of the many reasons they advised their clients to steer clear of Madoff. No one in the S.E.C. has the power to arrest. That’s why an FBI agent signed the criminal complaint. In contrast with ATF, DEA, Customs and Immigration, which house regulatory and criminal investigation functions under the same roof, the FBI and S.E.C. work separately, creating a distance that inevitably inhibits the free exchange of information. Had it been otherwise a savvy agent might have learned of the scheme before it turned into an international catastrophe. In any case, we would be far better served if our battalions of highly-paid auditors and special agents spent their time aggressively ferreting out crime rather than picking up the pieces after the fact. It’s simply not good enough to put up a fence after a fox cleans out the henhouse. Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! RELATED ARTICLES Click here for the NY Times home page on the Madoff scandal Congress, whistleblower blast the SEC: NYT Ordinary people lost big: LA Daily News Mini-Madoffs popping up everywhere: NYT Whistleblower feared for life: NYT Victims speak out: Time Magazine LA Times Congress quizzes regulators: NYT In-depth report: NY Times Effects on charities: Jewish Daily Forward UPDATES 06/22/10 Frank DiPascali released on $10 million bail; faces 125 years 06/09/10 To prevent future Madoffs, FBI and SEC are looking for snitches on Wall Street 10/20/09 SEC inspectors relied on Madoff’s own books, which were falsified S.E.C. debrief notes 10/28/09 Actual cash losses to victims stands at $21.2 billion (paper losses $65 billion) 10/14/09 Madoff victims sue the SEC for failing to perform its duty to guard against fraud. 09/03/09 SEC OIG charges that despite abundant reasons to investigate Madoff, a “thorough and competent” examination was never done. Report summary 08/11/09 Frank DiPascali, Madoff’s right-hand-man, pleads to 10 counts, admits “it was all fake” 06/29/09 Madoff is sentenced to 150 years in Federal prison. His lawyers had asked for 12; Federal probation, which did the pre-sentence investigation, 50: 06/23/09 S.E.C. sues Stanley Chais, a Beverly Hills money manager who heavily invested with Madoff, for failing to guard his clients’ interests. 03/31/09 Feeder funds that invested with Madoff accused of (incorrectly) thinking he was “front-running” 02/21/09 No record that Madoff actually bought any securities with client funds in the last decade Home Top Permalink Print Share this post Posted 11/2/08 When money’s tight can we afford specialized units? By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. In many areas the prolonged downtrend in crime and violence has come to an end. At this writing Pittsburgh is well on its way to posting its worst murder record in a decade, with the number of homicides already equaling all of 2007. In Chicago, a city stunned by the recent brutal murders of actress Jennifer Hudson’s mother, brother and nephew, murder’s gone up nearly fifteen percent. As for the nation’s great crime-reduction success story, New York City, its murder rate (430 killings so far in 2008) is nine percent higher than at this time last year. Even the celebrated home of Operation Ceasefire is under siege; although Boston’s murder rate is slightly lower than in 2007, its proportion of victims under eighteen (67 so far in 2008) remains three times that of five years ago. What can police do? There are three approaches to reducing crime and violence: uniformed patrol, selective enforcement, and a community model.
Policing is at heart a crude tool, a way to apply force to achieve desirable social ends. Beyond putting cops on the street and locking up offenders we don’t really know what works. In any case, as crime goes up and citizens feel less secure, strategies that reduce already sketchy beat coverage, in effect robbing Peter to pay Paul, may not be the best approach. It may not be sexy, but helping traditional patrol and detectives become more efficient and effective by studying and adjusting how they work and deploy seems by far the most promising approach. Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! RELATED POSTS UPDATES 03/05/09 Budget crunch forces Massachusetts police to cut back on specialized units 12/08/08 Baltimore PD overtime cuts blamed for spike in homicides 11/11/08 Hamilton County (Cincinnati) faces drastic public safety cuts 11/09/08 Ceasefire pushed in Dayton Home Top Permalink Print Share this post Posted 7/13/08 INTRUSIONS “HAPPEN,” GOOD POLICE WORK DOESN’T Home intrusions by homicidal strangers may be more common than police imagine By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. When Patsy Ramsey told officers that she found a ransom note on the stairs that morning, claiming that her daughter had been kidnapped and demanding $118,000 for her release, eyes rolled. It was the day after Christmas 1996 in Boulder, Colorado. Instead of enjoying the holidays John and Patsy Ramsey were dealing with the abduction of their six-year old daughter, Jon-Benet. Later that day, when a thorough search of the home turned up the child’s body in the cellar, they became the prime suspects in her murder. Within days the D.A. announced that the parents were under an “umbrella of suspicion.” Why? Mostly because the victim was found in her own home and there were no signs of forced entry. (Not that there had to be, as the house had unsecured windows and one unlocked door, but still...) And the $118,000 mentioned in the note happened to be the exact amount of the bonus that John Ramsey recently received. For the next three years authorities pressed for the parents’ indictment. Finally in 1999 a Grand Jury said no. Police washed their hands of the case. Disgruntled officers left the department. Among them was former detective Steve Thomas, who in 2000 co-authored In JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation, a book that suggested the mother accidentally killed Jon-Benet while disciplining her, then tried to cover it up. (He, his co-author and publisher later settled an $80 million libel suit filed by the Ramseys.) His wasn’t the first book on the case. One year earlier Stephen Singular wrote Presumed Guilty – An Investigation into the JonBenet Ramsey Case, The Media and the Culture of Pornography. Drawing from his knowledge of the porn industry, he proposed that Jon-Benet’s death was an accident that happened while one of her parents -- probably the father -- was having her pose for pornographic pictures. Finally in 2001 came the parent’s book, The Death of Innocence, which assembled the profile of an intruder from information gathered by lawyers and private eyes. Intrigued by their work, the new D.A., Mary Keenan, hired retired detective Lou Smit to take a fresh look. His opinion? The cruel way in which Jon-Benet was murdered (strangled with a garrote, then bashed on the head) and the presence of male DNA on her underclothes indicated that the crime was committed by a sadistic pedophile who was familiar with the Ramseys and knew about the husband’s bonus. Smit’s conclusion -- that it was an intruder -- was supported by a recent announcement that matching DNA has been found in a second location on Jon-Benet’s underwear, a place that her attacker would have had to grab to undress her. Although the DNA profile has yet to identify a suspect, it ruled out all family members, so the indefatigable D.A. (now known as Mary Lacy) wrote the family an official apology. John Ramsey was happy to be exonerated. His wife Patsy would have been equally pleased; she died from cancer in 2006. Boulder police now face restarting the investigation from scratch. All the chief would say is that they’d consider it. Two years after Jon-Benet’s murder a startlingly similar incident took place in Escondido, California. On the morning of January 21, 1998 the body of Stephanie Crowe, 12, was discovered in her room. She had been stabbed to death. There were no signs of forced entry and none of the family members said they heard anything. Four days later police brought in her 14-year old brother, Michael. After a relentless six-hour session he confessed. Police then picked up a friend, Joshua Treadway and gave him even harsher treatment. He not only confessed but implicated a third boy, Aaron Houser. (Houser maintained his innocence throughout.) But in the Crowe case there was another suspect. Hours before the murder Richard Tuite, a 28-year old schizophrenic with a criminal record was reported wandering near the Crowe residence. Police were called but didn’t find him. The next day patrol officers encountered Tuite at a laundromat and brought him to the police station. They took his clothes, which seemed stained. Detectives, who had already focused on the boys, pooh-poohed any connection and didn’t bother sending anything to the lab. Six months later a judge threw out all of Crowe’s confession and most of Treadway’s, ruling that both teens had been coerced. Still, he held the boys for trial as adults. He also ordered, on behalf of the defense, that the items taken from Tuite be examined. In January 1999, as jury selection for the boy’s trial got underway, analysts reported that Tuite’s shirt was spattered with Stephanie Crowe’s blood. Charges against the boys were dismissed. Tuite’s case was taken over by the Sheriff’s Department and State Attorney General. In May 2003 he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to thirteen years. How did Tuite get in the residence? Through an open garage and an unlocked laundry room door. (For a detailed account of the Stephanie Crowe case, up to the boys’ clearance, click here.) Now consider the chilling case of Vicki Wegerle. It was September 16, 1986 in Wichita, Kansas. Bill Wegerle was driving home for lunch when his wife Vicki’s car passed him going the opposite direction; strangely, she wasn’t at the wheel. Bill Wegerle found her in their house, strangled to death with a nylon stocking. Police found no sign of forced entry. Wegerle immediately became the prime suspect. Word spread and people started to whisper. Their two children, who had been at school when the crime occurred, were mercilessly harassed by classmates. Bill Wegerle was never charged, and neither was anyone else. With the investigation stalled, the family’s life, made miserable enough by the loss of a wife and mother, was upended for nearly eight years. Then in 2004 a copy of Vicki’s driver license and photographs of the crime scene were anonymously mailed to a Wichita newspaper. One year later police arrested Dennis Rader, the “BTK” killer, a 59-year old married man and church deacon who had brutally murdered ten Wichita-area women between 1974 and 1991. After being out of the limelight for many years Rader had resumed taunting authorities, sending letters and leaving victims’ belongings in public places. Rader’s DNA was matched to scrapings from Vicki Wegerle’s fingernails. He said that he got in her house by pretending to be a telephone repairman. (For Rader’s description of how he murdered Vicki click here.) It’s not just living with someone that can get you in trouble. On August 12, 1989, Warwick, Rhode Island police discovered the body of Vicki Cushman, a single 29-year old woman in her ransacked apartment. She had been choked and her skull was crushed. On a table detectives found an unmailed letter she wrote begging her lover to come back. It was addressed to Scott Hornoff, a married Warwick cop. Hornoff was interviewed. He at first denied the affair, then an hour later admitted it. Detectives believed him and for three years looked elsewhere. Then the Attorney General, worried that Warwick PD was shielding its own, ordered State investigators to take over. They immediately pounced on Hornoff. Their springboard? Nothing was taken; the killing was clearly a case of rage. Only one person in Warwick had a known motive: Hornoff, who didn’t want his wife to find out about the affair. And he had initially lied. Case closed! Hornoff was tried and convicted. His motion for a new trial was rejected. And there it would have ended, except that in November 2002, thirteen years after the murder and six after Hornoff reported to prison, a local man walked into the Warwick police station and confessed. He was Todd Barry, a jilted lover. Providing details that only the killer could have known, he said he broke into his ex-girlfriend’s apartment and killed her in a drunken rage. It turned out that Barry’s name had been in Vicki Cushman’s Rolodex all along. Hornoff was freed. Barry got thirty years. But nothing’s really ended for Hornoff, who is still picking up the pieces of a shattered life. Stranger-intrusion killings are relatively infrequent. But police don’t investigate “overall” -- they look into individual crimes, each of which is unique. Even when it turns out, as in the last example, that the victim and killer knew each other, it’s possible to go terribly wrong. What’s the moral? Don’t just look where the light shines. And be very, very skeptical about what you think you know. Here’s how ex-cop Hornoff puts it: “After what I saw, there could be 10 witnesses to a crime and unless I saw it myself it would be very difficult for me to accuse anybody, and even if I did, that person would have to convince me that they didn't have a twin.” Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! Home Top Permalink Print Share this post Posted 4/6/08 To rid a city of gangs, look to the basics first Nero has become synonymous with deadly inaction in the face of crisis, which is precisely why his name springs to mind as one considers the Los Angeles City Council and its dangerous fiddling over control of the city's anti-gang programs...(Tim Rutten, “That Deadly Gang in City Hall,” Los Angeles Times, April 2, 2008) By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. Now that our home-town paper has joined Controller Laura Chick’s campaign to transfer control of gang programs from the self-dealing City Council to the self-serving Mayor, it seemed a good idea to turn on the ol’ time machine (L.A. Times historical on Pro-Quest) and check out the gains we’ve made during the last century and a quarter of anti-gang crusading: Last night between 11 and 12 o’clock Officers Whaling and Steele, together with the private watchman on the beat, made a round-up and captured seven of as tough youngsters as there are in the city, five of whom were white and two colored.... (“Youthful Hoodlums,” Aug. 3, 1889) Flash forward thirty years: Scores of marchers walked through a section of the South Robertson area of Los Angeles with banners calling for an end to gangs and guns and urging other locals to join the fight against crime. But just days later, residents [were] shaken by fresh bloodshed in two separate shootings that left a 37-year-old resident dead and a transient wounded. (“Two Shootings Unnerve L.A. Neighborhood,” April 3, 2008) Gangs are an endemic fixture of urban life. (If you think they’re only a problem here, check out Paris, whose suburbs regularly explode in riots set off by encounters between besieged cops and the young underclass.) Try as we might, it seems impossible to shake off the cycle of poverty, ignorance and hopelessness that leads youth astray. We’ve become so desperate that when a smart cookie like the City Controller comes along and promises that we can reorganize our way out of the swamp we snap at anyone who stands in the way. How dare the City Council disagree! Well, simmer down. What Controller Chick proposes, placing all gang programs under a “czar” working out of Hizzoner’s office, sounds suspiciously like that oh-so successful Federal model of Homeland Security. Really, if all it took to rout gangsters was bureaucratic reshuffling, wouldn’t every city across the U.S. from Alameda to Washington already be doing it? Are our elected officials really so venal that they’d let the killing continue just so they can hang on to pet projects? We actually know a lot about gangs and crime. For example, we know that if you’re reading this post you probably live in a place where it’s safe to walk at night. Crime, particularly gang crime, is a matter of place. Demographics do matter. Gangs arise in areas beset by poverty and its correlates: unemployment, violence, drug-dealing, single-parent households, illiteracy. The values that form in this witches’ brew are passed on between generations, accounting for the persistence of behavior that bedevils outsiders and even gangsters often find self-defeating. What’s to be done? Nothing can happen until residents of gang-infested areas feel free to go about their business without fear of being killed or extorted. Anyone who’s been exposed to the perverted mentality of gang leaders and “shooters” (triggermen, an influential few within each gang) knows just how difficult a task this is. It’s a job for police, who must respond in sufficient numbers -- and here quantity is important -- to restore the salience of conventional controls. Where society is profoundly disorganized schools wind up being the best place -- often the only place -- for transmitting and promoting positive values. But schools often take on the character of their communities, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. In areas where the neighborhood is the problem we must help transform educational institutions into oases of peace and learning. Tough-love policies and a willingness to exclude disruptive students are key to creating an atmosphere of safety and tranquility where those who are inclined to learn, can. Many students would also be better served through quality vocational education rather than conventional curricula that leaves them without a marketable skill even if they somehow manage to hang on until graduation. Prisons are the place of last resort. Yet they too can help. Creating “prisons within prisons” -- secure places where inmates disposed to better themselves receive intensive educational and vocational training -- can go a long way towards breaking the cycle of release and re-incarceration that besets our correctional system. Naturally the same goes for community corrections. There are other valuable approaches. Still, until the basics are attended to, local programs of the kind that L.A.’s “gang czar” might oversee are unlikely to provide significant relief. (If you don’t agree, do your own Pro-Quest search and report back.) Getting upset about who’s in charge of what doesn’t count is a silly distraction. It’s like fiddling while Rome burns. Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! UPDATES 07/27/10 City Controller criticizes L.A. gang reduction office’s failure to evaluate its efforts 05/15/10 Homeboy Industries faces huge deficits, may have to close 02/08/10 Ailing from cancer and in Federal custody, a former “shot-caller” for the Avenues gang gave a chilling account of his activities, describing shootings and other crimes with clinical precision. 02/08/10 Six Los Angeles gang members got life in Federal prison and many others received long terms as authorities dismantled a violent street gang connected with the Mexican Mafia 01/13/10 LAPD Chief Charlie Beck says gang intervention workers prevent violence 01/08/10 L.A. sponsors academy to train and license gang intervention workers 12/07/09 L.A.’s “Homeboy Industries” sends ex-gang members to intervene in Alabama 08/01/09 L.A. gang czar gave a $250,000 contract to Unity T.W.O., a gang intervention program with a history of problems. Things only got worse. 06/05/09 LAPD ups pressure on gangs, makes more arrests, rolls out new gang injunction 06/03/09 Seattle’s all-inclusive program seeks to cut gang violence in half Home Top Permalink Print Share this post Posted 2/10/08 The domestic arms race has made police work exceedingly risky “The actions of those officers were appropriate, and they're not to be criticized in any way.” By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. That’s how LAPD Chief Bill Bratton laid down the law to the Los Angeles Times when a reporter asked whether the shooting death of a SWAT officer and the grievous wounding of another might have been averted had the team not acted so hastily. While the question may have come too soon, it’s one eminently worth asking. Only moments before SWAT arrived patrol officers were already set to barge into the home of a resident who called 911 and told dispatchers that he had shot and killed his family. Why did SWAT rush in? After the 1999 Columbine massacre departments around the country supplanted conventional “surround and call-out” doctrines with “active shooter” strategies that endorsed making a quick entry, by patrol officers if necessary, when doing so might save lives. Without doubt, the new approach has worked. Prompt response by Kansas City patrol officers is credited for minimizing the toll of an April 2007 shopping center shooting spree that left one officer wounded and two citizens dead. More recently, officers burst into a packed Missouri city council meeting and shot dead a crazed gunman who had killed two cops and three city officials, probably saving several others from the same fate. Swift action can work miracles. But all bets are off if the element of surprise is missing and the perpetrator has had time to prepare; for example, as in Los Angeles, where the shooter positioned himself behind stacked mattresses and waited for officers to burst in. Active shooter strategies were not intended for barricaded suspects, and there is no doubt that despite Chief Bratton’s testy response LAPD will be carefully reviewing its policies to help prevent a repeat tragedy. Information is naturally the key. But how can officers know whether someone really is lying in wait? How much time must lapse before it’s considered too dangerous to rush in? Newfangled technology is hardly the answer. Dropping in microphones, sending in a robot -- all these are uncertain tools that take a lot of time, time that those already threatened or bleeding to death don’t have. There is another, equally serious issue -- gun lethality. According to Federal gun manufacturing records, less than twenty percent of handguns made in 1973 were high-caliber, meaning .357 and above for revolvers and 9 mm. and above for pistols (not including .38 revolvers and .380 pistols, which are considered medium caliber.) On that year only one-third of newly-manufactured handguns were pistols, a significant point since these can potentially hold more rounds than revolvers and are much quicker to reload. Over the next quarter-century things dramatically changed. By 1998 fifty-eight percent of handguns produced were high-caliber, and by 2006 the figure was a stunning sixty-five percent. On that year three-fourths of handgun production was reserved for pistols. Wound severity is a function of ballistics (see, for example, De Maio’s Gunshot Wounds,” 2d. Ed., p.59). As caliber and velocity increase, the energy that a bullet can transfer to tissue soars: Ballistics of commonplace pistol ammunition
Critics claim that firearms manufacturers purposely racked up their products’ lethality as a marketing ploy, much as auto manufacturers increased sales by building ever-larger SUV’s. Racing to keep from being outgunned, officers now routinely carry high-capacity .40 and .45 caliber pistols. (A .40 caliber pistol was one of the two handguns that the Missouri killer used when he burst in to the city council meeting. He stole it from the body of a police sergeant he had already murdered.) What does this mean to the cop on the street? Even when medical care is promptly available, as during the incidents in Los Angeles and Missouri, the arms race has made gunshot wounds far less survivable. Of the 26 officers shot and killed in 2006 while wearing body armor, nineteen were wounded in the head and neck, critical areas where differences in the lethality of a projectile can determine whether a victim lives or dies. Increases in lethality can help explain why, while the national murder rate has steadily dropped since the early 1990’s -- sixteen percent between 1997 and 2006 -- the number of officers feloniously killed by firearms has fluctuated. According to the FBI, 68 were killed in 1997, falling to 41 only two years later, then rising to 61 in 2001. Substantially fewer officers -- 46 -- were shot and killed in 2006. But in 2007 the count went way up again, with an estimated 69 officers killed by gunfire. There’s no snappy ending here. Considering the lethality and ubiquity of firearms, it’s a wonder that officers keep stepping up to the plate. And considering our bizarre love affair with guns, the future promises only more dead cops. Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! UPDATES 02/25/10 Maryland police, near Washington D.C., are accused of excessively deploying heavily-armed SWAT teams in routine cases; officers say it’s necessary to protect against armed criminals Home Top Permalink Print Share this post Posted 12/28/07 Intensively policing troubled areas isn’t a lasting remedy By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. In 2005 L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca bemoaned that a scarcity of resources was limiting his ability to battle gang murders in Compton, which the LASD serves under contract. With nearly half his patrol deputies committed to contracts with other cities and his countywide gang squad seriously understaffed, the Sheriff was reluctant to shift officers to a “hot spot” lest problems pop up elsewhere. But when year-end stats revealed that murders in Compton were sharply higher while those in nearby LAPD areas were way down, Baca flooded the city with homicide detectives, gang investigators and deputies from unincorporated areas. After a couple months of success the impromptu task force was disbanded. As one might expect, Compton promptly reverted to its old habits. When a July 2006 weekend of violence left four dead and others wounded, Baca sent back the extra troops, and that’s where they remain. Compton is getting a lot more police coverage than it pays for, and no one’s apologizing. There is no question that hefty, localized increases in police coverage can dampen violent crime. That’s why N.Y.P.D. recently decided to assign an entire academy graduating class of 914 recruits to its mobile field force, doubling it to nearly 2,000 so that it can start flooding troubled areas in Brooklyn. This flexibility is made possible by its superiority in numbers, in turn made possible by what New York City officers get paid (hint: it’s a lot less than L.A.) Except for wealthy communities, high salaries are invariably accompanied by low patrol densities, so sustaining a police “surge” (thing Baghdad) can be difficult. Just how expensive is it to police SoCal? West Covina, a typical middle-class community, estimates salary and benefits for a single officer at $125,000 per year. Since four officers are required for 24/7 coverage (three plus one for days off), that’s $500,000 for one cop around the clock, not including a vehicle, gas, equipment or support services! If officers work in pairs figure a cool million per year, per patrol car. How does hot spot policing work? It’s simple: stop as many suspicious vehicles and pedestrians as possible. Under the “Terry” doctrine officers can frisk anyone they reasonably suspect is armed. Since the Supreme Court’s ruling that the underlying “reason” why a cop stops a car is immaterial, traffic laws are applied to the hilt. Everything from a “white light to the rear”, to a missing expiration year sticker, to a five-mile per hour speeding violation is used to justify stops. But searching a vehicle or going beyond a pat-down requires more than suspicion -- it calls for either consent or probable cause. And that’s where the troubles begin. Pressured to show results, officers have fudged observations, falsified reports and abused suspects. Other than for Rafael Perez, the cocaine-stealing officer who originally blew the whistle, the Rampart scandal was never about cops lining their pockets -- it was about officers lying, cheating and planting evidence to justify arrests and cover up acts of brutality, including some terrible use-of-force mistakes. Can intensive policing make a lasting dent on violence? Yes, if officers remain indefinitely. Otherwise, no. Surges usually happen in areas -- like Compton -- that are poor and socially disorganized. That’s why it’s nearly impossible to “fill in” behind departing officers with community-based initiatives, as those require the active involvement of citizens who aren’t afraid to testify and help police. Hot-spot approaches may also have a natural life-cycle. If limited to a narrow time frame aggressive enforcement is likely to be accepted, even welcomed. But policing is not a precise instrument. Unless officers proceed with exquisite care, innocent persons will inevitably get caught up in the dragnet, and as the inevitable confrontations and misunderstandings pile up citizen support is likely to diminish. Is there a better solution than the hot-spot band-aid? Probably not. Ideally, law enforcement resources would be distributed according to crime problems, not citizens’ ability to pay. Unfortunately, American policing has from inception been highly fragmented, thus dependent on local funding. Extreme situations like L.A. County’s, where the Sheriff’s budget is overwhelmed by jail needs and contracts prevent sending deputies where they are most needed, only emphasize the structural defects of a criminal justice system that, no matter how unintentionally, best serves the interests of wealthy communities. Don’t believe it? Go visit Beverly Hills P.D. Don’t get lost in their headquarters, which wags have dubbed the Taj Mahal. Wind your way through rows of detective desks to the crimes against persons squad. (Try not to do it on the day when they have their one murder a year.) Tell them Compton needs help. Then oink back! Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! Home Top Permalink Print Share this post Posted 12/4/07 When kids tell tall tales the consequences can be grave By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. Jim Amormino was stunned. "In 28 years in law enforcement, I have never had a 4-year-old make up a story like this." The Orange County (Calif.) Sheriff’s Department spokesman was referring to an incident last month where a “spiky-haired man with a dragon tattoo” reportedly tried to snatch a kid playing in a park. Eight sheriff’s cars and a helicopter later, the victim admitted that the man she described was a TV character. She made the whole thing up to get back at her mother for leaving her alone in the playground. Last March OCSD deputies fanned out in another dragnet when a 12-year old Aliso Viejo girl reported that a man tried to abduct her at knifepoint. Hundreds of leads were checked before the girl admitted that she lied to justify missing her school bus. Amormino admitted that on average his agency received one such a report a month, usually from kids who are trying to get out of trouble. “He grabbed my hair and then he started pulling me. And that's when I screamed. I tried to go away, and then my friends were trying to help me, and that's when he started choking me.” After spending eight months in jail, Eric Nordmark went to trial in January 2004 for sexually assaulting three Garden Grove (Calif.) teens. But on the second day one of his accusers tearfully recanted. They made it all up. Their motive? To avoid being punished for coming home late. In March 2006 a 12-year old Buena Park elementary school student told police that she was sexually assaulted in a school restroom. An examination revealed some minor injuries. The girl gave a detailed description of the event and even helped prepare a composite sketch of the assailant. Days later she admitted making the whole thing up. Why? Who knows? Sometimes kids are encouraged to lie. In January 2006, after spending seven months in San Bernardino County (Calif.) jail, Christopher Fitzsimmons was released when DNA tests proved that he did not rape the 4-year old girl who accused him of assaulting her in a park. Defense investigators discovered that the girl’s mother, an acquaintance of Fitzsimmons, had accused others of raping her daughter, including two after his arrest. In 2005 Kyle Sapp publicly apologized. Two decades earlier he was one of dozens of children who swore that the owner and employees of a Manhattan Beach (Calif.) preschool forced them to commit numerous sex acts. None of it was true. Police and psychologists were sure that something happened, so the kids told them what they wanted to hear. “I felt everyone knew I was lying. But my parents said, ‘You're doing fine. Don't worry.’ And everyone was saying how proud they were of me.” Fortunately, that case fell apart and the only two defendants who went to trial were acquitted. But other endings haven’t been so tidy. Consider the case of John Stoll, freed in May 2004 after serving eighteen years for allegedly leading a cabal of Bakersfield (Calif.) child molesters. The last of forty-six defendants in a string of put-up cases, Stoll’s luck turned during two tearful, in-court recantations, including one by a 26-year old man whose false testimony as a child sent his own mother to prison for six years. Or how about the Wenatchee (Washington) child sex ring? In 1995 forty-three adults were arrested for sexually abusing sixty children. Eighteen were convicted, some on thousands of counts. Most were poor, rural people; several were mentally handicapped. But all the stories were lies, implanted by police and psychologists who isolated the children in a juvenile facility and pressured them to talk. Years later one remembered being told that “my parents did things to me and to my sisters...When I disagreed and said they were wrong, they said I was lying. I had to remember. I had to talk.” Some defendants served several years in prison before being exonerated. In 2001 the city and county were ruled negligent and forced to pay compensation. Awards went as high as $3 million. Eager to resolve immediate problems, to cover up being late for school or to get rid of a pesky detective or psychologist, children may not realize the harm their lies can cause. Young people are particularly susceptible to manipulation and pressure. Unsophisticated, dependent and eager to please, they don’t realize that authority figures may not have their best interests at heart. And whatever they say can always be taken back, right? Wrong. Consider the case of three West Memphis (Ark.) teens who were accused of murdering three Cub Scouts in 1993. Under relentless interrogation, one of the accused, a developmentally disabled youth, confessed and implicated two friends. Although there was no physical evidence connecting them with the brutal crimes, his confession -- which he quickly recanted -- led to their convictions. They’re still in prison. (DNA recently tied a victim’s father and the father’s friend to the scene. A Federal habeas hearing is pending. For another example check out the blog entry on the Stephanie Crow case.) Criminal investigators shoulder a tremendous burden. Their job, as I frequently admonish my students, is not to “collect evidence”, or “collect evidence beyond a reasonable doubt”, or any such simplistic formulation. It’s to discover the truth. And that’s a distinction well worth remembering. Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! Home Top Permalink Print Share this post Posted 11/23/07 LOVE YOUR BROTHER -- AND FRISK HIM, TOO! Aggressive patrol strategies have costs other than money By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. Brushing aside concerns by the retiring police commissioner, Philadelphia’s mayor-elect Michael Nutter announced that officers in the City of Brotherly Love would be implementing a “stop, question and frisk” campaign to combat a soaring murder rate, in 2006 nearly four times that of New York City (27.7/100,000 v. 7.3/100,000). Nutter, who will take office on January 7, was elected on a platform that makes fighting crime the top priority. His police-centric emphasis contrasts sharply with an initiative by outgoing chief Sylvester Johnson and other community leaders to flood Philly’s most dangerous neighborhoods with citizen patrollers. (Two-hundred members of the "10,000 Men: A Call to Action" movement are due to begin their duties this Thanksgiving weekend.) Stop-and-frisk is nothing new. Cops have been detaining and questioning citizens since there was a police. But its roots as a legally-sanctioned strategy trace back to 1968, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Terry v. Ohio that the Fourth Amendment allows officers to detain and frisk persons if there is “reasonable suspicion” that they are armed and about to commit a crime, a much less stringent standard than the probable cause requirement for conducting a search or making an arrest. Rulings after Terry allow officers to make investigative stops and temporarily detain anyone they reasonably suspect may have committed or is about to commit a crime, whether or not they might be armed. (See, for example, U.S. v. Arvizu). Reaching the “reasonable suspicion” threshold requires more than a guess -- it calls for the presence of objective, articulable facts that a reasonably well-trained officer would find compelling. Once they detain someone officers remain bound by the Constitution, so searching for anything beyond a weapon requires probable cause, and interrogation calls for Miranda. On its surface, Mayor-elect Nutter’s violence reduction approach seems like an ideal application for stop-and-frisk. But as the saying goes, the devil is in the details. Even if he follows through with plans to declare “crime emergencies” and impose curfews, his officers will still have to obey both the Constitution and Terry. Anti-crime campaigns place police, from the chief to patrol, under enormous pressure. Imagine what might happen when it is possible, as in the case of investigative stops, to count the number of times that a particular technique is applied. Will officers be encouraged to do quality work or just rack up the numbers? Will they pull over cars and stop pedestrians willy-nilly or only when there is reasonable suspicion? And it’s not just a question of what’s legal. Whether or not aggressive policing is done by the book, a heavy hand can erode the bonds of trust and confidence between citizens and police. When he was asked about a stop-and-frisk campaign, the present chief said, “While I’m the police commissioner, I’m not going to do it.” Well, soon there will be a new sheriff in town, who will do it. Let’s hope it’s done right -- legally and with restraint -- so that the besieged city can finally live up to its ambitious slogan. Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! RELATED POSTS Home Top Permalink Print Share this post Posted 10/28/07 WHO RIOTED IN MAC ARTHUR PARK? Bratton, who wasn’t there, moves swiftly to censure those who were By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. Within hours of the May Day melee at MacArthur Park, Chief Bratton warmed the cockles of every plaintiff’s attorney in town when he spanked L.A.’s finest, publicly refusing to “defend the indefensible.” Videotapes clearly showed Metro officers firing rubber projectiles and whacking away at ordinary citizens whose most heinous crime was assembling for a picnic. A few newsies got a full dose of equal treatment, a big no-no considering that LAPD’s rough handling of the media during the 2000 Democratic Convention led it to enter into a consent agreement allowing reporters safe access to police lines. Then came the LAPD’s own report, which took commanders to task for failing to anticipate problems and coordinate and control the response. LAPD agreed that its crowd control techniques were poor, the decision to disperse overbroad if not totally unnecessary, the order -- done from a helicopter! -- inaudible, the force used likely excessive (ka-ching!) and training inadequate. Now, to admit one or two little mistakes is one thing, but LAPD’s mea culpa (click here), which runs to more than one-hundred pages, so broadly indicts the agency’s management and training functions that one must wonder whether anyone at Parker Center has ever cracked open a book on policing. In a flurry of activity, Chief Bratton promptly relieved a Deputy Chief of his duties and reassigned a Commander “pending the action of personnel complain investigations.” The only thing apparently not being investigated is the Chief’s decision to attend an entertainment industry function rather than be present to oversee his department’s response to the largest planned demonstration in the City this year. Only days ago, in an update to the report, LAPD brass informed its lapdogs at the Police Commission that the department is zeroing in on twenty-six officers for using excessive force. But the LAPPL claims that Bratton misconstrued his own department’s use-of-force policies, which the union insists are so broad that it’s perfectly OK to fire rubber bullets at demonstrators and slug them with batons to move them along. Meanwhile, dozens of claims alleging police-inflicted injuries are themselves moving through the L.A. City Attorney’s bureaucracy, many extensively documented with medical records and videotapes. And when it comes time for the plaintiffs to present their case, guess who’ll be their number one witness? Chief “I wasn’t there” Bratton himself! Rest assured that he’ll be in the same sparkling uniform that he wore to that important Hollywood function while his troops were preparing to do the “indefensible” at Pico-Union. Ka-ching! Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to explore the homepage and topical index! UPDATES 07/04/10 Jurors award a TV camera operator $1.7 million and a comparably tiny $39,000 to a radio reporter; more to come. 06/09/10 L.A. settles with five journalists and a security man for $500,000 total; more to come. 10/30/09 District Attorney declines to prosecute officers involved in MacArthur Park incident. 07/01/09 Discipline board disagrees with Chief Bratton’s recommendation to fire four officers, imposes two suspensions and two reprimands. 11/20/08 L.A. to settle citizen lawsuits over LAPD’s excessive use of force at MacArthur Park for a combined $13 million, not including members of the media. Numerous officers still face discipline over the incident. 09/17/08 Chief Bratton calls for 11 officers to be disciplined and four more to be fired. |
felonious). For both the causes of accidental death matched those of the U.S. as a whole. Seventy-three percent (59) of officers accidentally killed in Texas died in collisions, 15 percent (12) when struck by a vehicle, and 12 percent in other ways. California’s proportions were 71 percent, 15 percent and 14 percent.
Ten died in collisions, six when struck by cars, and one in an accidental shooting. Referring to the chart on the right (again, keep in mind the low numbers) it seems that CHP officers are somewhat more likely to be fatally struck by a vehicle than the California norm.
No matter how one slices and dices, the troubled community’s crime stat’s are grim. Reproduced from an 
