PoliceMisconduct.net

Police Misconduct News Watch for 01-09-10

January 9, 2010 @ 12:33 PM by David Packman

Time once again for the weekly Police Misconduct News Watch where we review a few of the stories in the news over the last week as captured on our National Police Misconduct News Feed.

All This For Running A Stop Sign?

A West Valley Utah police officer is being sued by a man claiming he was picked up and thrown to the ground face-first by an officer who stopped him for allegedly running a stop sign. Apparently the officer tailed him without pulling him over until he got to his girlfriend’s house and then when he got out of his truck the officer turned on his lights. The officer then walked up to his truck, shoved him inside of it, then dragged him back out and shoulder-tossed him face-first into the pavement while holding his arms behind him so he couldn’t break the fall.

On the dashcam video that captured the incident the man asks why he was being arrested after being manhandled and the cop appears to say “you ran a red light.” When the man demanded to see the video to prove that the cop then seems to say “you’re going to be that way?” and shuts him in the cruiser while he begins to search the truck. Apparently the man was only charged with speeding and failure to stop at a stop sign.

The man, Ceasar Medina, has filed suit alleging excessive force and wonders if this wasn’t a case of racial profiling.

Popehat Covers Cop Rehired After Fired For Hanging & Kicking Partner

The guys over at Popehat gave us mention when they covered the story of a North Carolina State Trooper who was recently forced to be rehired after he was fired for hanging his partner, Ricoh the dog, off the ground while repeatedly kicking him. They have the video of the disturbing incident that, apparently, the North Carolina State Personnel Commission, didn’t find disturbing at all when they said firing him wasn’t justified.

Professional Courtesy Apparently Extends Into Retirement

New York City police are refusing to press charges against their former commissioner, Howard Safir, who allegedly backed his SUV into a pregnant pedestrian while he was getting out of his double-parked parking spot. The detectives who looked into the case say Safir didn’t do anything wrong when he hit the woman and then fled the scene because they say he wasn’t aware that he had hit her.

However, witnesses say they heard Safir’s wife warn him about the woman before hitting her and that, after hitting her, the woman confronted Safir about not paying attention to what he was doing and that Safir drove away after that while witnesses wrote down the license plate number.

The woman and her unborn baby were apparently ok and only suffered minor injuries. She didn’t know who had hit her even after detectives visited her in the hospital, instead she was told by reporters who interviewed her afterwards.

Speaking of New York…

New York City Police Officer Sean Spencer, who is no stranger to costing the city money after already sued four times for $80k, has cost the city another $35k for falsely arresting a grandmother with a clean history for allegedly being a prostitute and then lying on his report by insisting the woman had a previous history of prostitution arrests. The police union-hired attorney representing him says disciplinary actions are pending… but we won’t hold our breath since it’s not like he hasn’t done this before.

He’s like the Energizer Bunny of Sticky-Fingered Cops

A Dallas Texas police officer who was hired in 2002 despite being accused of theft at his former job as a cop, then fired in 2006 for stealing tires from the auto yard, then forced to be rehired by a judge on appeal is now suspended while under investigation for allegedly stealing the boots from a state police officer, apparently because they were shinier than his… not that the officer is much use anyway as the department keeps him off the streets since prosecutors cannot use him to testify.

What’s Worse? A Sticky Fingered Cop with A Gun

Minneapolis Minnesota police officer Timothy Edward has been arrested on allegations that he robbed a bank on his way into work after police discovered evidence from the crime in his locker. It doesn’t end there as it seems that Officer Edwards may also be linked to at least another dozen armed robberies in the area over the last two weeks.

Police Chief Tim Dolan has been quoted as saying he can’t believe this and has never heard of anything like it before… of course, it’s not like he really pays much attention when his officers are accused of misconduct so he’s probably not lying. Though it still would seem that he should be familiar with cops robbing people when his officers assigned to the Metro Gang Task Force caused a fiasco when they were caught confiscating money and property from all those innocent people for their personal use last year.

Remember, I Didn’t Hit That Guy… Or Else

Little Silver NJ police officer Steven Solari has been arrested on numerous charges including witness tampering and obstruction over allegations that he beat a man in custody and bounced his head off a metal filing cabinet while his hands were cuffed behind him… and then he visited a witness to the assault the next day, while in uniform, in an attempt to convice the witness to lie to investigators. In total he now faces 6 charges, the most serious could land him in prison for 20 years… but odds are he’ll get a good deal from prosecutors before then.

Quote of the Week:

“[The] tests don’t look at answers in the realm of society norms, but “cop norms.” In tests that look for the norms of general society, some of what a police officer displays might come off as pathological.”

-Dr. Stephen Ross, Psychologist hired to perform pre-employment psychological testing for Allen County IN Sheriff’s Department on why law enforcement agencies in Indiana use a test with different standards than other pre-employment psychological tests. -Via The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette

Officer-Involved Sexual Misconduct Starts New Years with Surge in Cases

January 8, 2010 @ 1:56 PM by David Packman

William Grigg at LewRockwell.com wrote today about a few of the recent cases of sexual misconduct by law enforcement officers in the news over the last few months… it’s a good piece, I recommend it, yet he only grazes the very tip of the iceberg.

Of the 71 reports of police misconduct that we’ve tracked in the first 7 days of January so far, 15 have involved sexual misconduct by law enforcement officers, including:

Orlando FL – A police officer has been charged after forcing a lactating mother to follow him to a parking lot where he groped her breasts and then asked to suck them while working security at a bar where the woman was watching a show, but not drinking.

Hubbard County MN – The county has settled a lawsuit for $500k to a woman who claimed that an on-duty deputy raped her. That deputy resigned after the allegation but was never charged.

Grove City OH – A police sergeant has plead guilty to public indecency charges after caught masturbating at a Kohls department store when a woman reported him to security and video confirmed the complaint.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg NC – A police officer is facing numerous charges that appear to grow by the day as new alleged victims continue to step forward . Initially charged with sexually assaulting two women while on-duty, those charges expanded after another woman accused him of sexually assaulting her twice, once in front of her boyfriend who he arrested when he called 911, and then today by another 2 women who claimed he demanded to search them during a traffic stop for speeding and then groped them instead.

Sangamon County IL – A deputy has been sued by a woman claiming she was raped last January by that deputy at her home after he responded to her 911 call for help when she mistakenly thought her husband was stuck outside in his car in freezing temperatures.

Riverside County CA – A deputy has accepted a plea deal that will give him 1 year of prison for charges of assault with a deadly weapon, 2 counts of sexual battery, unlawful intercourse with a minor, and 2 counts of sexual penetration with a foreign object when he sexually abused his girlfriend’s 16yr old daughter.

Henry County GA – A deputy has been fired after arrested on charges of child enticement, molestation & statutory rape of a 15yr old girl. He claims the girl told him and his wife that she was 18.

Omaha NE - A police officer was convicted of online child enticement after caught by another cop pretending to be a teen, he’s to be sentenced in March.

Fredericktown MO – A police captain has been charged with 16 counts of statutory sodomy involving at least 3 children under 12, 14, & 17.

Hawaii – An Hawaii DPS deputy was arrested on allegations that he sexually assaulted a then 6 year old girl at least 30 times between 1992 through 1996.

Hamilton County TN – A deputy who was assigned as a middle school resource officer was charged with 2 counts of statutory rape of 15yr old student after a friend reported her suspicions.

St Louis MO – A police officer has resigned after being charged with 2nd degree statutory rape of a 17 year old girl.

Campbell County TN – A former deputy was arrested on multiple counts of sexual battery of girl under 13 years of age that he apparently molested for years while he was a deputy.

Baker County FL – A jail deputy was charged with sexual battery of a child under 12 after an unnamed relative turned in videos of the molestation acts that she found. He allegedly abused & made videos of the abuse for years and may have had other victims if the other videos found by police weren’t downloaded from the internet.

Even today there were more stories released, including one out of California where a West Covina police sexual crimes detective is accused of harassing an alleged rape victim for explicit photos and the victim’s sister-in-law, a police chief in nearby Baldwin Park, is being investigated for allegedly telling her to keep quiet about it.

Sadly, while this may seem like a strange surge in cases starting out this year, it actually isn’t abnormal. Last year’s statistical report revealed that sexual misconduct reports against police were the second most common type of police misconduct report for the 8.5 months that we tracked reports in 2009 and that nearly half of those 500+ sexual misconduct reports involved the sexual abuse of children.

Why is this type of misconduct so prevalent and why isn’t it likely that it will decline anytime soon? The answer probably has more to do with the prevalent cultures within law enforcement than with law enforcement agency policies themselves. Yet there is no definitive answer since sexual misconduct by law enforcement hasn’t been a well-researched topic, despite it’s prevalence and because it is one of the best kept secrets of law enforcement.

…and perhaps that’s a larger part of the reason why the trend is likely to continue apace this upcoming year.

2009 NPMSRP Statistical Report Feedback

January 5, 2010 @ 5:19 PM by David Packman

So, what did you think of our year-end police misconduct statistical report?

Let us know what you think by taking the poll, via comments, or send us an email!

[poll id="14"]

Your feedback is important to us since the statistical report is ultimately the reason we do all we do, including the news feed.

Thanks!

*NOTE: For those voting that you wish the report had more information, please do let us know what additional information you would like to see in the report so we can improve it.

Thanks!

NPMSRP 2009 Preliminary Police Misconduct Statistical Report

January 3, 2010 @ 11:58 PM by David Packman

Non-interactive push-pin map of police misconduct incidents recorded by the NPMSRP within the last 8.5 months of 2009

NOTE: To see the reports that were used to generate this map please refer to the 2009 Aggregate Police Misconduct Reports in the database menu bar at top. For more maps and info about our maps, visit here.

INTRODUCTION

The National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project (NPMSRP) was started in March of 2009 as a method of recording and analyzing police misconduct in the United States by utilizing news media reports of police misconduct to generate statistical information in an effort to approximate how prevalent police misconduct may be in the United States. The NPMSRP has run in beta form since April 2009 until mid-December and this report is the culmination of this beta-phase NPMSRP effort for the year of 2009 as we head into our release-phase of the NPMSRP for year 2010.

As part of this project, reported incidents of misconduct are aggregated into a news feed on Twitter and then added into an off-line database where duplicate entries and updates are removed and remaining unique stories are categorized for statistical information which is then presented on this site.

While the use of news reports to generate statistical data may seem strange, keep in mind that police departments do not normally release any detailed information about disciplinary matters, and sometimes they don’t release anything at all. The use of court records by themselves would only garner information about misconduct cases that were successfully prosecuted and would miss confidential settlements and cases of misconduct that were not prosecuted but did result in internal disciplinary action.

It should also be noted that the use of media reports acts as a filter that limits the number of outwardly questionable allegations of misconduct, but that this may also suffer from under-reporting due to laws that limit the amount of information law enforcement agencies report to the press. Therefore, if anything, the resulting statistics we publish should be considered as a low-end estimate of the current rate of police misconduct in the United States and for any locality we cite.

Additionally, In order to allow for accurate comparisons between this project’s statistics and the US DOJ/FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) statistics, it should be noted that this project utilizes the same methodology as the UCR by way of a hierarchical reporting system that only records the most serious allegation when more than one allegation is associated with an singular alleged incident of misconduct. It should also be noted that both the FBI/DOJ UCR and NPMSRP report on alleged instances, not just convictions.

SUMMARY

The following report was generated from data gathered in the months of April 2009 through mid-December 2009. In the those 8.5 months there were:

3,445 – Unique reports of police misconduct tracked by the NPMSRP
4,012 – Law enforcement officers alleged to have engaged in misconduct.
261 – Law enforcement leaders (police chiefs or sheriffs) that were cited in those reports.
4,778 – Alleged victims of police misconduct cited in tracked reports
258 – Fatalities reported in connection with alleged instances of misconduct.
15.05 – Reported incidents of misconduct tracked per day on average or a report of misconduct every 96 minutes.
$198,943,000 – Reported costs in police misconduct related civil litigation, not counting legal fees or court costs.
980.64 per 100,000 – Estimated average 2009 US police misconduct rate (PMR = officers implicated per 100,000 officers)

The following comparisons are made between the NPMSRP 8.5 month statistics projected out to one year and the 2008 US DOJ/FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) statistics and the 2004 Bureau of Justice Statistics Criminal Sentencing Statistics:

1 out of every 266 (376.5 per 100k) police officers were accused of a violent crime. Per the UCR, 1 out of every 220 (454.5 per 100k) citizens were accused of a violent crime in 2008.

1 out of every 1,875 (53.3 per 100k) police officers were accused of homicide. Per the UCR, 1 out of every 18,518 (5.4 per 100k) citizens were accused of homicide in 2008 while 1 out of every 4037 (24.77 per 100k) officers died in the line of duty in 2009.

1 out of every 947 (105.63 per 100k) police officers were accused of sexual assault. Per the UCR, 1 out of every 3,413 (29.3 per 100k) citizens were accused of sexual assault in 2008.

33% of police officers charged in 2009 were ultimately convicted while 68% of citizens charged were ultimately convicted in 2004.

64% of police officers convicted were actually sentenced to spend time in prison in 2009 while 72% of citizens were sentenced to incarceration in 2004.

Law enforcement officers were sentenced to an average of 14 months in prison when sentenced to incarceration in 2009 while citizens were sentenced to an average of 37 months in prison when incarcerated in 2004.

MISCONDUCT BY CATEGORY AND STATUS

When examining misconduct reports by type, non-firearm related excessive force complaints were most common at 18.1% (772) of all reports, followed by sexual misconduct complaints at 11.9% (509), and then fraud/theft reports at 8.9% (382).

When examining reports by last reported status, 45.9% had resulted in some sort of adverse outcome for the officers involved. Of those, 14% (596) were disciplined internally and 31.9% (1,363) were criminally charged. Of those who were criminally charged, 32.5% were convicted for a 10.4% total criminal conviction rate for alleged misconduct incidents.

27% of incidents resulted in a publicized lawsuit, and of those 1,156 civil actions, 34.3% resulted in a settlement or judgment in favor of the alleged victim.

NATIONAL STATISTICAL MAPS

The following statistics only count state, city, and county law enforcement agencies since current federal law enforcement employment rates were not available for calculation. The statistical rates are based on the NPMSRP statistics and employment data provided by the 2008 US DOJ/FBI UCR.

The following density map shows the number of police misconduct incidents in each state as compared to the national average number of incidents per state:

The following density map shows the Police Misconduct Rate (PMR) per 100,000 law enforcement officers for each state as compared to the NPMSRP US national average police misconduct rate for 2009, which is 980.64, and the Mean Average wich is 848.32.

State Statistical Ratings

The following rankings and charts show projected misconduct rates and indexes based on the last 8.5 month’s worth of data gathered by the NPMSRP and then sorts the resulting statistics by state.

Police Misconduct Rates per State
The following chart sorts states by their individual standard Projected Police Misconduct Rate (PPMR). The Projected PMR is calculated by averaging the number of incidents over the 8.5 month period to a monthly average, then multiplying that by 12 to estimate a projected 12 month misconduct total, then calculating the per 100,000 officer miconduct rate over that period of time based on the 2008 UCR statewide sworn law enforcement officer employment rate for that given state.

State	Cases	Projected Misconduct rate per 100k
DC	73	2313.33
WV	62	2303.41
VT	17	2207.91
IN	139	1876.05
NM	50	1713.31
MT	19	1624.68
MS	58	1612.81
MN	100	1591.98
ID	29	1524.24
OR	59	1414.16
CT	72	1177.56
WA	86	1144.85
LA	140	1142.07
AR	49	1140.77
MA	133	1130.50
TN	119	1081.85
OH	166	1072.55
PA	189	1067.81
AZ	97	1061.56
OK	56	1027.41
MD	105	949.07
NH	17	935.31
FL	286	907.83
MI	122	883.08
TX	323	865.69
IA	31	848.32
SC	68	845.89
IL	222	841.42
CO	67	814.85
WY	8	811.36
NE	20	808.80
UT	25	749.98
AL	57	746.83
GA	120	697.48
AK	6	672.27
MO	68	664.96
ME	10	628.85
DE	10	614.88
SD	6	591.52
CA	338	587.03
VA	74	565.99
NC	87	557.00
RI	10	546.56
NV	22	542.23
WI	48	519.75
NY	214	492.62
KY	27	488.12
ND	4	461.36
KS	22	456.01
NJ	104	453.45
HI	5	235.53

Adjusted Police Misconduct Rates per State
The following chart uses the same methodology as the above PPMR chart for projecting the PMR per state but then determines the percentage variance from the average law enforcement per capita for each state and then multiplies that percentage by the PPMR for that state to adjust for high or low law enforcement per capita rates. This is an experimental method being used to help negate the statistical penality states with low populations or low officer per capita rates can face over shorter periods of statistical modeling.

State	Cases	Projected Misconduct rate per 100k	Police per 100k pop	Adjusted Misconduct Rate per 100k
DC	73	2313.33	752.75	7860.56
WV	62	2303.41	209.43	2177.57
LA	140	1142.07	392.36	2022.74
VT	17	2207.91	174.96	1743.76
NM	50	1713.31	207.62	1605.76
IN	139	1876.05	164.03	1389.13
CT	72	1177.56	246.54	1310.51
MA	133	1130.50	255.61	1304.43
MS	58	1612.81	172.77	1257.81
MT	19	1624.68	170.66	1251.58
MN	100	1591.98	169.87	1220.75
TN	119	1081.85	249.87	1220.23
ID	29	1524.24	176.27	1212.82
MD	105	949.07	277.25	1187.77
IL	222	841.42	288.71	1096.58
AR	49	1140.77	212.37	1093.60
OR	59	1414.16	155.41	992.05
FL	286	907.83	240.54	985.72
OK	56	1027.41	211.26	979.80
PA	189	1067.81	200.73	967.57
SC	68	845.89	253.34	967.34
WY	8	811.36	261.33	957.11
AZ	97	1061.56	198.46	950.99
OH	166	1072.55	190.23	921.03
CO	67	814.85	235.01	864.42
TX	323	865.69	216.53	846.14
WA	86	1144.85	161.93	836.83
NH	17	935.31	195.01	823.35
GA	120	697.48	250.77	789.55
AL	57	746.83	231.13	779.19
MI	122	883.08	194.97	777.21
NJ	104	453.45	372.92	763.33
MO	68	664.96	244.21	733.05
DE	10	614.88	262.97	729.91
NE	20	808.80	195.75	714.67
NY	214	492.62	314.66	699.72
IA	31	848.32	171.82	657.96
VA	74	565.99	237.58	607.00
RI	10	546.56	245.82	606.48
NC	87	557.00	239.10	601.18
CA	338	587.03	221.15	586.02
UT	25	749.98	171.98	582.22
AK	6	672.27	183.60	557.15
WI	48	519.75	231.66	543.52
NV	22	542.23	220.29	539.20
KS	22	456.01	243.06	500.34
ME	10	628.85	170.53	484.08
SD	6	591.52	178.07	475.47
KY	27	488.12	182.91	403.03
ND	4	461.36	190.81	397.38
HI	5	235.53	232.65	247.35

AVG	83.12	980.64	221.53	919.25

Police Misconduct Index by State

The NPMSRP Police Misconduct Index (PMI) is a statistical representation of both the Police Misconduct Rate as well as how authorities and the judicial system effectively responds to police misconduct in each state. This chart contains the PMR for each state along with the total disciplinary actions taken (PMDPR), the criminal prosecutions pursued (PMCPR), the convictions per prosecution (PMConR1), and the convictions per misconduct incident (PMConR2), and utilizes those figures to create a Police Misconduct Index (PMI) which may help predict how likely police misconduct is to trend upwards or downwards in the future based on the assumption that a lack of effective response to misconduct may induce more misconduct to occur in the future. The lower the PMI, the less effective the response to police misconduct and, therefore, the more likely it is that police misconduct may increase within that state.

*note: West Virginia state statistics are based on an estimated law enforcement population since they do not provide statistical information to the federal government.

Local Law Enforcement Agency Ratings

All local population and law enforcement agency employment numbers are supplied by the FBI/DOJ UCR program’s 2008 report, which was the most current data available at the time this data was compiled. All statistical information is generated by utilizing the UCR numbers along with current misconduct data gathered through the NPMSRP.

Please note that, since this project utilizes data about law enforcement agencies as supplied by the FBI/DOJ Uniform Crime Reporting program, not all local law enforcement agencies are included in this report. Notably, among the missing agencies are all agencies in West Virginia and any other individual agencies which do not participate in the UCR program.

The average national police misconduct rate is estimated to be 980.64 per 100,000 police officers. In 2008 there were an estimated 712,360 state and local law enforcement officers employed in the US for an average of 1 law enforcement officer for every 234.2 people in the US.

Law Enforcement Agencies Employing 1000+ Officers

The following are the top 25 local law enforcement agencies by police misconduct rates that employ over 1000 law enforcement officers:

	Agency	State	Reported	PMR
1	Palm Beach County	FL	27	3043.17
2	New Orleans	LA	31	3018.65
3	Washington	DC	73	2554.09
4	Baltimore	MD	54	2447.44
5	Dallas	TX	55	2285.59
6	Boston	MA	33	2102.58
7	Fort Worth	TX	21	1992.60
8	St. Louis	MO	19	1906.76
9	Albuquerque	NM	13	1781.34
10	San Jose	CA	17	1733.19
11	Atlanta	GA	19	1654.73
12	Memphis	TN	24	1612.96
13	Denver	CO	17	1555.48
14	Jacksonville	FL	18	1499.11
15	Seattle	WA	14	1497.72
16	San Antonio	TX	19	1243.16
17	DeKalb County	GA	9	1189.32
18	Detroit	MI	25	1162.60
19	El Paso	TX	9	1124.00
20	Orange County	CA	14	1064.72
21	Indianapolis	IN	11	975.47
22	Newark	NJ	9	963.55
23	Philadelphia	PA	46	958.90
24	Cincinnati	OH	7	911.36
25	Chicago	IL	85	897.15

Law Enforcement Agencies Employing 500-999 Officers

The following are the top 20 local law enforcement agencies by police misconduct rates (in projected percentages) that employ 500 to 999 law enforcement officers:

	Agency	State	Reported	PMR
1	Minneapolis	MN	39	6171.72
2	Oakland	CA	24	4417.75
3	Pittsburgh	PA	26	4312.94
4	St. Paul	MN	15	3536.79
5	Toledo	OH	15	3309.86
6	Maricopa County	AZ	16	2941.33
7	Mesa	AZ	15	2545.13
8	Birmingham	AL	13	2323.19
9	Gwinnett County	GA	11	2294.38
10	Portland	OR	16	2281.09
11	Baton Rouge	LA	9	2020.70
12	Collier County	FL	8	1801.92
13	Prince William County	VA	7	1784.81
14	Orlando	FL	9	1714.86
15	Tulsa	OK	10	1713.24
16	St. Petersburg	FL	6	1662.08
17	King County	WA	6	1626.92
18	Yonkers	NY	7	1520.80
19	Fresno	CA	8	1368.93
20	Pima County	AZ	5	1272.56

Law Enforcement Agencies Employing 100-499 Officers

The following are the top 20 local law enforcement agencies by police misconduct rates (in projected percentages) that employ 100 to 499 law enforcement officers:

	Agency	State	Reported	PMR
1	Anderson	IN	10	12051.28
2	Pinal County	AZ	13	8728.57
3	Muncie	IN	6	8294.12
4	Stark	OH	7	7152.17
5	Greenville	SC	9	7129.21
6	Lincoln	NC	5	7050.00
7	Missoula	MT	5	7050.00
8	Flint	MI	10	7014.93
9	Spokane	WA	7	6950.70
10	Waco	TX	11	6572.03
11	Stratford	CT	5	6467.89
12	Peoria	IL	11	6204.00
13	North Richland Hills	TX	5	6184.21
14	Oakland BART	CA	9	6160.19
15	Dallas	TX	18	5615.04
16	Albany	GA	7	5576.27
17	Columbia	MO	6	5529.41
18	Burbank	CA	6	5458.06
19	New Bedford	MA	11	5385.42
20	Washtenaw	MI	5	5261.19

Law Enforcement Agencies Employing 50-99 Officers

The following are the top 20 local law enforcement agencies by police misconduct rates (in projected percentages) that employ 50 to 99 law enforcement officers:

	Agency	State	Reported	PMR
1	Greece Town	NY	12	18800.00
2	Coeur d’Alene	ID	9	18661.76
3	San Luis Obispo	CA	8	18193.55
4	Bozeman	MT	6	16920.00
5	West Memphis	AR	8	15887.32
6	Salisbury	MD	9	15107.14
7	Russellville	AR	5	14100.00
8	Harrison Town	NY	6	11589.04
9	Jefferson County	AR	4	11058.82
10	Stoughton	MA	4	10846.15
11	Warren	OH	6	10317.07
12	East St. Louis	IL	5	10217.39
13	Easton	PA	4	9724.14
14	Volusia County	FL	4	9400.00
15	Jeffersonville	IN	4	9245.90
16	Southaven	MS	6	8812.50
17	McKeesport	PA	3	8294.12
18	New London	CT	5	7833.33
19	Midland County	TX	4	7726.03
20	Melrose Park	IL	4	7520.00

*Please note that cities and counties from West Virginia and individual local agencies that chose not to participate in the FBI/DOJ UCR program are also not included in the NPMSRP localized report because we have no information on the number of officers employed at those agencies.

Terminology

Misconduct Types:

Accountability – Incidents involving evidence of police misconduct cover-ups, lack of investigations, allegations of lax disciplinary response to sustained allegations, and other activities that involve accountability policies or processes.

Animal Cruelty – Acts of violence resulting in harm to animals both on and off duty that may include unnecessary shooting incidents, inappropriate training of K9 units, or other such activities.

Assault – Unwarranted violence occurring while off-duty excluding murder.

Auto – Incidents involving reckless operation, failure to adhere to high-speed chase policy, or other acts of neglegence involving use of law enforcement vehicles excluding cases of impared operation. (see DUI).

Brutality – Unwarranted or excessive physical violence occurring while on-duty excluding cases of firearms or tasers.

Civil Rights – Violations of general civil liberties that would be ruled unconstitutional yet not covered by other categories. For example, excessive force would be a violation of constitutionally protected rights, but is already covered in the Brutality class. However, complaints of warrantless eavesdropping or illegal disruptions of lawful protests would be deemed civil rights violations.

Sexual Misconduct- Sexually-related incidents including rape, sexual assault, sexual battery, misuse of police equipment/data to elicit sex, harassment, coercion, prostitution, sex on duty, incest, and molestation.

Theft/fraud – includes financial crimes such as robbery, theft, shoplifting, fraud, extortion, and bribery

Shooting – gun-related incidents both on and off-duty, including self-harm

Taser – Excessive force where the primary use of force involved an electrical shock device including incidents where usage was not within training or policy parameters that resulted in excessive injury or death. When the taser is also used in conjunction with excessive physical force, this will be recorded as “Brutality”.

Color of Law – incidents that involve misuse of authority such as bribery, use of position for favors, extortion by threat of arrest, or use of badge to avoid arrest.

Perjury – includes false testimony, dishonesty during investigations, falsified charging papers, and falsified warrants.

Raid – Misconduct occuring during warranted or warrantless raids or searches including wrong-address raids, mistaken raids, use of no-knock raids on warrants requiring notification, or mistreatment during execution of a raid.

Misconduct Status/Outcomes:
Allegation – First stage of a misconduct complaint, can be from victim, witnesses, relatives of the victim, and other sources. Simply an allegation of misconduct.

Investigation – Second stage of a misconduct complaint, can be an internal investigation, criminal investigation, external investigation, or a DOJ/FBI civil rights investigation.

Lawsuit – Civil complaints filed in court, generally requires more evidence than a simple allegation, but still within the realm of allegations.

Charged – Criminal complaints filed in court, generally requires more evidence than a simple allegation, but still within the realm of allegations.

Trial – Criminal trials in court, requires enough evidence to establish probable cause, higher threshold than civil litigation or criminal charges, but still allegations.

Judgment – These are rulings that support a civil litigation complaint excepting settlement agreements that are typically, officially, said to not be admissions of guilt. Should be considered a confirmed case of misconduct.

Disciplinary – Results of investigations that confirm misconduct complaints but do not result in termination of employment.

Termination/Firing – Results of investigations that confirm misconduct severe enough to warrant termination of employment.

Conviction – Results of criminal trials that confirm allegations serious enough to warrant criminal charges. These include both rulings and guilty pleas.

Methodology

Information Gathering:
Data is gathered from various media outlets use of manual website searches utilizing multiple search engine platforms performed approximately once an hour from approx 8:00am PST until 2:00am PST. Reports are reviewed as located to determine if they meet any categorization listed above and are sufficient credible while not duplicative of reports already recorded by the NPMSRP. There are no sufficient key terms that work well enough to automate this data gathering tasks and the results must be vetted by human intervention as well to avoid duplicate entries.

Information Storage:
Confirmed stories about police misconduct that have been vetted to ensure that the story is about a case of misconduct or allegation of misconduct are published to a publicly available news feed on Twitter called “The National Police Misconduct NewsFeed”. From there, the stories are also copied to a spreadsheet where they can later be sorted and analyzed.

Data Analysis:
At the first day of the month, data from the previous month is merged into a second database that contains all reports for the given year where they are further vetted to remove any duplicate reports. These resulting reports are then sorted and analyzed. All duplicate stories, stories that are informational, stories involving policy, and legislative issues are purged from the spreadsheet or have associated officer or victim counts removed.

Any items involving a status change about a specific incident are culled so that only the latest status story remains to avoid duplicate data. Only the most serious charge in a series of charges related to a single incident of misconduct are recorded to maintain parity with the national UCR statistical analysis methodology.

Data Presentation:
After all data has been analyzed it is presented on this site by General, Geographical, Type, and Status datasets. Once per month an interactive incident map is made available on the site for all incidents recorded the previous month. A list of incidents recorded is also made publicly available for review as well. Once per quarter a statistical report is produced that contains a review of all data recorded and analyzed for the year to that date with a yearly report issued after the end of year in January of the following year.

Important Notes:
The data collected and presented here should only be used to provide a very basic and general view of the extent of police misconduct within the US. It is, by no means, an accurate gauge that truly represents the exact extent of police misconduct since it relies on the information voluntarily gathered and/or released to the media, not from information gathered first-hand by independent monitors who investigate complaints of misconduct… which is because no such agency exists for any law enforcement agency in the US.

This information has been gathered here because nobody else is gathering it and the national government has not gathered it for several years. Keep in mind that geographical distribution of misconduct reports can be representative of concentrations of corruption or permissive attitudes towards abusive police policies or can be indications of more open information sharing between police agencies and local media along with departmental efforts to reduce misconduct by actively engaging problematic officers. There is no real way to determine which is the case since there is no independent monitoring and investigation into allegations of police misconduct.

In general, monthly reports do not provide as accurate a depiction of the overall extent of police misconduct in the US whereas quarterly and yearly reports are more reliable as a statistical reference, therefore we no longer produce monthly statistical reports.

Contact

Please feel free to contact the NPMSRP via email at news@policemisconduct.net for any questions, comments, or recommendations.

Thank you.

New Orleans	LA	3018.65
Washington	DC	2554.09
Baltimore	MD	2447.44
Dallas	TX	2285.59
Boston	MA	2102.58
Fort Worth	TX	1992.60
St. Louis	MO	1906.76
Albuquerque	NM	1781.34
San Jose	CA	1733.19
Atlanta	GA	1654.73
Memphis	TN	1612.96
Denver	CO	1555.48
Jacksonville	FL	1499.11
Seattle	WA	1497.72
San Antonio	TX	1243.16
Detroit	MI	1162.60
El Paso	TX	1124.00
Indianapolis	IN	975.47
Newark	NJ	963.55
Philadelphia	PA	958.90

Worst Police Misconduct Videos of 2009

January 1, 2010 @ 11:30 AM by David Packman

The Worst Police Misconduct Video of 2009 Reader’s Poll has ended and the results are in…

Even though there weren’t as many votes as the last time we did a poll for videos released in 2008, the results were very definitive about which video was the worst. But I think most of us already knew which one nearly everyone would pick, which is why we allowed everyone to cast up to 3 votes, so we could get an idea of which other videos people found appalling as well.

Needless to say, there were a lot of videos of police misconduct released this year and that appears to be a trend due to a combination of the diligence of a populous armed with now-commonplace hand-held video technology and the expansion of surveillance and on-board dashcams in police vehicles. The Orwellian dream realized of 24/7 monitoring of civilian life appears to be a double-edged sword for police, though it’s also true that they continue to fight to keep such videos under wraps… many more videos were mentioned in reports that never made it out to the public, kept under wraps thanks to laws in some states that keeps information about misconduct secret.

Needless to say, we unfortunately see no reason not to expect even more videos to be released in 2010 showing police misconduct at it’s worst…

But for now, here are the results of our 2009 Worst Police Misconduct Videos Reader’s Poll:

5th WORST VIDEO OF 2009
VIDEO 21 – 15yr old special needs student beaten over dress code violation

Marshawn Pitts – Age 15 – Dolton IL – May 2009 – Dolton Police Officer Christopher Lloyd – Unemployed, Currently facing charges for Sexual Assault in seperate case

What a convoluted case this turned out to be. Officer Lloyd apparently had quite a checkered past before hired by Dolton while he was still suspended from the Robbins IL police department after fatally shooting the husband of his ex-wife twenty-some times then claiming self-defense. While the Chicago PD first accepted his word without investigating the case, prosecutors have since reopened that case after Lloyd ended up in the spotlight in this case.

A civil suit is pending in this case, but since then Lloyd has ended up in even more trouble after being arrested in Indiana on sexual assault charges for allegedly holding a pillow over a woman’s face as he raped her. That case is still pending trial.

4th WORST VIDEO OF 2009
VIDEO 15 – Cops drag racing kill two teens in 90mph+ accident

Ashlie Krakowski and David Servin – Age 19 – Milford CT – June 2009 – Milford CT Officer Jason Anderson – Facing trial for 2nd degree manslaughter

There’s nothing new to report on this case other than the two teens were allegedly drunk at the time of the incident, a point apparently raised by the defense after charges were filed against officer Anderson. However, that fact was dismissed as the primary causative factor in this crash, which is still alleged to be the speed of the officer, for which there has been no other explanation offered beyond the allegation that he was attempting to race the other officer who’s dashcam captured the fatal crash.

3rd WORST VIDEO OF 2009
VIDEO 6 – Officer beats 15yr-old girl for kicking off tennis shoe
Malika Calhoon – Age 15 – King County WA – November 28, 2008 – KCSO Deputy Paul Schene – Fired, Pending Criminal Trial, civil suit settled for $125k.

There’s actually a lot to tell on this case. Calhoon was later arrested a second time for allegedly threatening another teen in the presence of that teen’s mother in a nearby shopping mall and has made a plea bargain in that case. The civil suit filed by Calhoon’s family for the beating incident settled quickly for $125k. Sure, she might not be an angel, but she still didn’t deserve to be assaulted like that in a holding cell and then falsely charged for being attacked.

Paul Schene was fired prior to his trial for misdemeanor assault for the incident, which is still pending since it was delayed over the shooting death of a Seattle Police officer late in 2009. Interestingly, shortly after Schene was fired a search of his locker uncovered illegal narcotics, though the department didn’t pursue charges as a result of that discovery. His partner, shown in the video, was not disciplined in the case even though he never reported the incident.

2nd WORST VIDEO OF 2009
VIDEO 2 – Innocent man put on life support in coma after tackled by deputy
Christopher Harris – Age 29 – Seattle WA – May 2009 – King County Deputy Matthew Paul – No Disciplinary Action, Civil Suit Pending

Sadly, in this case, there’s still no word of any change in Christopher Harris’ condition and last we’ve heard he was still in a vegetative state. After the incident the King County Sheriff’s Office and King County Prosecutor both insisted the incident was nothing more than an accident, though that never stopped them from arresting and prosecuting others for negligent homicide… the deputy never faced any disciplinary action either, though there is a civil suit against the department and deputy pending.

WORST VIDEO OF 2009
VIDEO 11 – Oscar Grant shot in back during arrest while face down on ground
Oscar Grant – Age 22 – Oakland CA – January 2009 – Oakland CA BART Officer Johannes Mehserle and Officer Tony Pirone – Mehserle trial for murder pending, Pirone under possible internal investigation.

When the Oscar Grant shooting incident first broke I did a detailed analysis of the video provided at the time and was the first to point out that, prior to the shooting, the incident had been needlessly aggravated by BART officer Tony Pirone when he appeared to assault Oscar Grant. A video later revealed during preliminary hearings against Johannes Mehserle appeared to lend further evidence supporting this assertion as it is claimed that Pirone can be heard uttering a racial slur towards Grant during that initial incident.

Furthermore, both Pirone and his partner, Marysol Domenici, were found to be at fault for their actions by an outside review and that review recommended that those two officers be fired for their role in aggravating the incident… though it appears that they still have their jobs after the police chief has defended them.

Officer Mehserle, meanwhile, has been charged with murder for shooting Oscar Grant in the back during the encounter and his trial, since moved to Los Angeles County, will likely take place sometime mid to late 2010. No charges or disciplinary actions were known to be taken against Pirone or Domenici, though the department and several officers are facing civil rights lawsuits from both Grant’s family and a number of people who were detained that night, only to be released later without charges.

FYI

December 19, 2009 @ 3:55 PM by David Packman

The National Police Misconduct Statistics & Reporting Project and the National Police Misconduct News Feed are both temporarily suspended.

NOTE: The NPMSRP and National Police Misconduct News Feed will be back online
starting January 1, 2010. Stay tuned!

-packratt@policemisconduct.net

Criminal Justice In The Age of New Professionalism

December 18, 2009 @ 4:07 AM by David Packman

scalia In 2006, US Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia rendered an opinion in Hudson v Michigan concerning a Fourth Amendment violation case in which he heralded a previously unannounced age of “New Professionalism” for US law enforcement. This new age cited reforms in accountability that would remove the need for civil rights protections as police departments could be trusted to hold those rights in high regard and hold officers accountable for violating the law.

Of course, his declaration of this as the age of new professionalism wasn’t without contention and the term has been cited time and time again when people discuss cases of police misconduct, especially those in which the officers don’t appear to be held as accountable as Anton may hope others believed they would have been. The term even took root through Radley Balko’s running series of “New Professionalism Roundup” reports on police issues titled after this new age of accountability and professionalism.

Sadly, it’s still too difficult to definitively determine just how well police departments are adhering to this proclamation of neoprofessionalism. This is because a vast majority of departments still shroud disciplinary records in a dark veil of secrecy. This is also thanks to new laws in many states that facilitate this lack of accountability through special sets of rights that exist only for police officers.

While efforts like ours, the National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project (NPMSRP), are trying to lift this veil of non-transparency, those efforts can only be so accurate because of this lack of transparency in the age of new accountability.

However, while our statistics are, at best, a guess at the true extent of police misconduct and how that misconduct is dealt with behind the blue wall of silence law enforcement agencies surround themselves with, our method of statistical data gathering is likely to be fairly accurate at determining how the justice system itself holds law enforcement officers accountable when their misconduct rises to the level of stark criminality.

So, just how well does Scalia’s justice system hold law enforcement officers accountable in his age of new professionalism? We can get a good idea of this by looking at how conviction rates and incarceration rates for prosecuted police officers compares to the same set of statistics for the general population at large.

Thankfully the US DOJ Bureau of Justice Statistics does keep track of civilian conviction data, though they don’t do it yearly and the latest data we could find was for 2004. Still, it’s good enough for us to use as a basis of comparison since it’s highly unlikely that these rates have declined significantly since then.

We apply the same criteria to our NPMSRP data as the BJS does to theirs by limiting cases to felonies and excluding sentencing length data for life sentences and death penalty cases. (of which there were 5 life sentences and 1 death sentence in the NPMSRP data set).

While the BJS data is gathered over the course of one full year, the current set of NPMSRP data has been gathered over an 8 month period of time, from April 2009 – November 2009.

By comparing BJS data with NPMSRP data we can see that, of the cases prosecuted, law enforcement officers were convicted at less than half the rate as the general population within what we recorded in 2009.

BJS General Population Conviction Rate – 68%
NPMSRP Law Enforcement Conviction Rate – 33%

Furthermore, when convicted, law enforcement officers were sentenced to incarceration less often than the general population by 8%.

BJS General Population Incarceration Rate – 72%
NPMSRP Law Enforcement Incarceration Rate – 64%

Finally, when incarcerated, the general population spent 6 times longer in prison cells than their convicted police officer counterparts.

BJS General Population Mean Sentence Length – 37 months
NPMSRP Law Enforcement Mean Sentence Length – 6 months

Clearly, this does not appear to be a very promising sign of any age of new professionalism in the way the justice system treats law enforcement officers. Indeed, lady justice in the US isn’t very blind when it comes to dealing with criminal police misconduct.

A few interesting facts did come to light in this latest examination of how the justice system deals with police misconduct though.

First, excepting cases of murder, not a single case of domestic assault resulted in a prison sentence, even when firearms were involved.

Of the 3,825 police officers who were cited in the reports of police misconduct we tracked over this 8 month time period, 34% were criminally charged (1,307).

Next, there was a large deviation in the sentence length data, while the mean sentencing rate was a mere 6 months, the average rate was 48.5 months due to a few outlying cases where officers were sentenced to long stays in prison. This highlights that sentencing leans heavily towards the lower end of the scale for police officers with a bulk of cases resulting in sentences of 1 year or less. (123 to 110 and 153 of 233 being 2 or less years)

Most convictions that resulted in sentences were the result of financial crimes including theft, fraud, and robbery (56). A very-close second were sex crimes (52) and then crimes of non-sexual physical violence (35). Over half of the sex crimes involved minors (28).

Finally, while the conviction rate and the incarceration rates haven’t budged much from when we last compared NPMSRP data with BJS data four months ago, the mean sentencing rates for law enforcement officers dropped by 50%.

Of the life sentences, 3 life sentences were for murder, one was for robbery, and one was for sexual assault of a minor. The single death sentence was for murder.

Again, the NPMSRP data is gathered through monitoring the media for reports about police misconduct. While this method is not as accurate as we would like for determining the true rate of police misconduct in the US, we feel it is very accurate when it comes to how the criminal justice system treats police officers when allegations are serious and credible enough to make it into prosecution, especially since most prosecutors are very hesitant to prosecute police officers because of their close working relationships and co-dependence.

Also, while not every case of misconduct, or even disciplinary action, makes the news because of laws that protect disciplinary records from public scruitiny, the criminal prosecution of a police officer almost always makes it’s way to the press because these are public record and are considered highly newsworthy events.

If there are any questions about the data used to generate this report or about the NPMSRP itself, please feel free to write us at news@policemisconduct.net

What Can I Do About Police Misconduct?

December 15, 2009 @ 3:49 AM by David Packman

An image to illustrate the current state of affairs in the battle against police misconduct… On the left a typical anti-misconduct protest and the image on the right is a police union protest against police accountability.

In the comment section of our Worst Police Misconduct Videos of 2009 Reader’s Poll a commenter named Juliet asks

“what can we do to make sure that all acts of violence and unnecessary force that have physical evidence, aka video, are fully punished as thy would be with ANY NORMAL CITIZEN??? what can i do, as a person? please help me understand how we can right these wrongs, I am so disgusted!!!!”

Have you asked that question of yourself when reading the 3,500+ reports of police misconduct we’ve recorded in our National Police Misconduct News Feed in the last 9 months?

…Or any of the articles we’ve published here?

…Or after seeing all the videos recording alleged incidents of misconduct?

…Or reading about all the times that police never faced any real personal consequences for their actions?

If you did… that’s progress and that’s part of the reason why this site is here. To get you to ask that question, especially if you never asked yourself something like that before.

But the answer isn’t as easy as most people think it is…

See, the biggest reason that police misconduct goes unpunished so often is that a majority of people in the US don’t really mind police misconduct… in fact, a majority doesn’t even believe it happens. This is also why there is so little organized support for police accountability efforts like this one here. (as I illustrated very recently)

Now, sure, there are a good number of people who do know that it happens and who do speak out at a local level, and that’s good… but it’s also somewhat ineffective because the more meaningful battles over police misconduct aren’t really won or lost at the local level.

To illustrate why police accountability isn’t as much of a local-only issue that most people believe it to be, let’s look at one of the videos in our list of the worst of 2009 as an example…

The case of then 15-year-old Malika Calhoun, who was assaulted in a holding cell by a King County Sheriff’s deputy last year, sparked outrage across the US when the video was released early this year. But it wasn’t just the video that really got people talking, it was what happened in response to it.

What happened? Well, the officer wasn’t fired until several months later and the misdemeanor criminal charges filed against him were far less significant than the felony charges he pressed against the young girl in the holding cell that he beat up for kicking off a tennis shoe that he claims hit him in the shin.

Why did it take so long to fire him? Well, despite the initial gut feeling that most people had to blame the sheriff, the fact is that her hands were tied. She had to follow a very specific process in order to make sure that when the officer was disciplined that the disciplinary action wouldn’t be overturned on appeal… and thanks to past contract negotiations, state laws, and multi-level appeals systems set up to protect officer rights, it is incredibly difficult to actually fire a police officer and even when done correctly it’s more likely than not that it will be overturned anyway.

Why was the officer only charged with a misdemeanor for beating the girl like a ragdoll instead of a felony like the one the teenager was charged with for kicking a soft shoe off her foot? The answer is simply that this was the only charge available to the prosecutor to file against the officer. There are no state laws that make official misconduct a crime in itself in Washington state and there are no provisions that hold police to higher standards by making it a crime in itself to abuse a prisoner in your custody. So, even here, hands were tied at a local level to do anything at all about this cop.

…but that didn’t stop protests and angry letters condemning local leaders and agencies for something that, frankly, they could only do so much about because their hands were tied at the local level.

Why?

Because most battles over police accountability and transparency, all the real meaningful fights over how local officials can respond to police misconduct are not won on a local level… they are won in the state legislatures, courthouses, and in little-known committees established to deal with public employee labor issues and law enforcement officer rights issues.

…and guess what. All those protests against police misconduct, all those groups that call attention to individual cases, all those people who get angry and write letters to the press and their local officials about police misconduct… they all go unheard at the state level because they are quiet when legislators are deciding on new “law enforcement officer bills of rights” or how much say police unions can have in the way their employers can investigate misconduct and discipline them for it.

…and police unions definitely make sure that their voices are heard when they drive these kinds of initiatives forward at the state and federal level, and they back their voices with a very large, and growing, amount of lobbying cash… not to mention the clout their endorsements bring at election time for lawmakers hungry to prove that they have “tough on crime” credentials.

What does this have to do with what any of us can do about police misconduct?

The only things that counter lobbying dollars and police union influence on state-level politics is fear of the electorate and/or counter-lobbying by opposing groups. At the state level, there are no groups that challenge these anti-accountability efforts by police unions. So the only thing left is public opinion… and as I’ve pointed out frequently, a majority of people don’t mind their police committing a little misconduct so long as they aren’t the victims themselves and so they turn a blind eye to it.

Which brings us to the first battle that must be fought against police misconduct, and that’s the battle for public opinion. In order to have any chance at stopping efforts to limit police accountability, all the efforts to reduce the consequences police face for committing crimes, you have to have public opinion on your side and you need to organize that opinion against state-level politics instead of localized individual cases of misconduct.

If you doubt this, think of the last thing that locally-aimed protests and civil actions did in your area to address police misconduct. Did you city or county establish a powerless civil review board that can’t even review disciplinary records because state law dictates that those records can’t be disclosed because of law enforcement officer privacy issues that don’t apply to other public employees?

Did that protest march and public pressure convince the police chief to fire an officer who was later rehired after he appealed to an arbitrator or public employee relations board when things quieted down?

The answer to those problems won’t be found at the door of your local council person. The solution is at the state level. The solution is to lobby against police union efforts to reduce accountability and to lobby for keeping the unions out of the disciplinary process.

Did the prosecutor file charges only to later offer a plead deal with a slap on the wrist because it’s nearly impossible seat a jury that will convict a cop?

Did the prosecutor refuse to even file charges at all because the prosecutors depend on police union endorsements and because most people support police and believe that anyone harmed by them deserves it somehow?

The answer here isn’t in a protest at the doorstep of the police department. The battle here is in the minds and hearts of your neighbors, your friends, and your families because if they don’t get upset when a bad cop gets off scott free, why would an elected prosecutor or judge care?

So, if what we do here at least got you to ask yourself “what can I do about police misconduct”… here’s my answer.

Educate yourself and others on what your state does to enable that lack of accountability and work to convince police accountability groups and protesters that the fight isn’t local, that it isn’t something that should only be addressed when it happens. But that the fight is higher up at the state and federal level and it must be fought when police unions lobby for legislation that keeps misconduct secret and allows them to have more say in how they can and cannot be disciplined… and that these fights need to happen even when there isn’t a case of misconduct that’s grabbed the headlines.

If you join a police accountability or anti-misconduct group, do what you can to convince them of where the real battles are, at the state level, because so far these groups don’t work together at nearly the same level that police unions work together at the state and federal level where they work nearly unopposed to change the laws in their favor. These local groups need to organize more and cooperate with other groups more at a state and federal level like police unions do.

If there isn’t a police accountability group where you live, then organize! Anywhere that there’s a police union that participates in lobbying efforts or contributes to a statewide lobbyist front for police unions there should be a group of citizens organized to fight for police accountability and transparency… that there isn’t should give you an idea of just how well-organized and strong these police unions really are.

Most importantly, get others to ask the same question!

Talk to everyone you know about police misconduct. Once you convince them that it’s a problem, make sure that you understand why police get away with it so often and that it is this lack of consequences that causes more misconduct to occur… and remember that when you talk about misconduct that you’re not preaching to the choir, that you should do your best not to come off as some person who just hates cops because this won’t win anyone over.

These suggestions are based on what all my research so far shows…

That most cases of misconduct that go unanswered happen because local officials and civilian oversight mechanisms are limited in how they can address it because of state laws that protect police officer privacy and give them elevated employment rights that the rest of us don’t have.

That most police leaders give up on trying to do anything about it after their efforts to address it get overturned by arbitrators, public employment committees, and appeals boards… that officers in most states have up to five levels of appeals they can run their employer through at enormous cost and risk to the employer and no cost to the union-supported officer.

That elected judges and prosecutors refuse to address it because of their close relationships with police or they cannot effectively prosecute it because the public is heavily biased in favor of the police. The successful prosecution rate against police officers is lower than it is against the general public and most juries acquit even in the face of overwhelming video evidence that would convict any other citizen. Why? It’s not just the prosecutor’s fault.

That civil lawsuits by themselves are ineffectual at addressing police misconduct and are becoming even less effective all the time as they become harder to win due to public bias and win less on average because of state tort reform laws and unfavorable federal court rulings… and that cities are now starting to move to fight cases more often than settling them because of this.

So, it’s not like these suggestions are being pulled out of thin air. This is why this project exists after all. Not just to determine how prevalent police misconduct is in the US… but also why it’s so prevalent by examining what happens in all these cases of misconduct.

I hope that helps answer the question.

Police Misconduct NewsWatch for 12-12-09

December 12, 2009 @ 12:18 PM by David Packman

Time for another weekly Police Misconduct NewsWatch where we take a look at a few of the 93 incidents our National Police Misconduct NewsFeed has captured this week.

Canadian SciFi Author Beaten By Border Patrol

First, one story that’s burning up the blogosphere but hasn’t yet been reported in the MSM comes via BoingBoing. Canadian science fiction author Dr. Peter Watts is claiming that he was beaten, arrested, and thrown in a holding cell wet and half-naked at the US/Canadian border in Michigan for simply asking US Border Patrol agents what was going on.

For those who don’t know, the US Border Patrol is an agency that has grown rapidly but does not have any oversight mechanism whatsoever, unlike even the larger urban law enforcement agencies that at least have an appearance of one. This combination of lax hiring practices due to staffing pressure and the lack of even a fundamental oversight mechanism has been leading to problems for a while now, something I’ve talked about before back on the old site.

Still Looking For That “Higher Standard”?

For those of you who appreciate how law enforcement officers are held to a higher standard, there were a lot of special plea deals for cops this week that demonstrated that…

In Huntington Indiana a police officer got a deal that gives him a year in prison for molesting a 15 year old girl on multiple occations.
An Albuquerque New Mexico gang cop got probation in a deal for pleading to stealing drugs and cash in a bust that cost prosecutors a case.
A 51yr old Clifton Forge Virginia police officer was given a suspended sentence for sexually battering an 18yr old family friend.
A Baltimore Maryland police officer was given a suspended sentence deal for pleading to a reduced non-sexually related charge for molesting a 13yr old relative. Asked by judge to pretty-please stay away from kids.
An FBI agent in West Virginia was given a suspended sentence after found guilty of using survielance cameras to watch young girls undress in mall changing rooms. His fellow agent was also given a similar non-sentence last month.
The former Oakwood Texas Police Chief is also set to get a sweetheart deal for pleading guilty to repeatedly tasering his girlfriend in the face. Probation, community service, and anger management classes will clear is record even though he was originally charged with felony aggravated assault w/deadly weapon. The victim is pleading with the judge to deny the deal.

…Or That Big Old Blue Wall?

Of course, the only thing more frustrating than that is what happens when departments go over the top to protect their own…

A Lorain Ohio police officer who was finally fired last year after an extensive background of sexual misconduct got rape charges dismissed against him because his department took too long to investigate rape allegations made against him.
In Springfield Illinois, the city has spent nearly $340,000 to defend two officers they had already fired in a civil rights suit for planting drugs and false arrest. Now the city will have to authorize even more for a second trial now that the first has ended in a mistrial… That city already faces a severe deficit and attorneys for the victims say they would have settled but the city keeps refusing to talk.
In Cannon County Tennessee, a deputy there has resigned after his girlfriend filed a protection order against him for threatening her with a gun when she tried to end their relationship, claiming he said “if I can’t have you, nobody will”. Now she claims the department tried to cover it up and another deputy agrees and is claiming that he was fired right after that incident for “not defending his brother in arms” when he didn’t join in when several other deputies tried to discourage the woman from filing a complaint.
Detroit Michigan is now under a federal investigation for $700k used to secretly paying off two people who claimed the infamous “Booty Boys” police officers, who are accused of fondling several men during illegal searches, had groped them. The problem? Whoever authorized the secret payouts may have violated the law by bypassing the city council in that effort to keep it secret, and thus keep those cases from being part of a larger suit against the officers filed by almost 20 other men. The city won that case, btw…

Hired To Protect Your Kids… But Who Protects Your Kids From Them?

In Texas, some people may think that the police officers assigned to protect your kids in school are specially screened for the task? They should think again… Thanks to police unions, a former Dallas TX police officer who was forced to be rehired twice before fired a third time was then hired by the Lancaster Independent School District as a school police officer (they’re sworn officers too apparently) where he was also forced to be rehired after fired once already and now has been arrested for assaulting a student for eating the wrong lunch… he’s on paid leave this time, by the way.

Of course, it’s not like I haven’t talked about the problem of putting aggressive cops in school hallways before…

That’s it for this time… stay safe out there!

Who Wants To Know?

December 8, 2009 @ 6:06 PM by David Packman

One of the things I try to keep aware of in the course of this project is that what I’m doing is not popular. So, while disappointing, it shouldn’t have been surprising that the NPMSRP was turned down for funding by the Open Society Institute’s Justice Fellowship and that the OSI has never awarded a grant to any study of police misconduct before either.

After all, it would be abnormal and surprising for them not to have a substantial bias against a project that researches police misconduct.

Why do I say this?

According to all the polling data currently available, most people in the US don’t believe police misconduct even happens… and don’t really want to know either.

A Harris Interactive poll on the most trusted professions released in August of 2006 shows Americans hold police officers in very high regard with over 3/4 (76%) of Americans saying they implicitly trust police… In fact, only once in the history of that poll did the confidence in police trustworthiness drop below 70%, and only just slightly.

Furthermore, a Pew Research study released in November of 2007 on race relations had an interesting finding buried in the middle of it’s report. A full 2/3 (66%) of Americans trust the police to not use excessive force. Almost 3/4 (73%) have the utmost confidence in police to equally enforce the law.

When people wonder why so few resources are devoted to studying police misconduct in the US, this is one of the main reasons… there is no demand for it, nobody really wants to find out.

Now, sure, a lot of the people who read this site might have a hard time keeping this in mind since we all tend to travel in the same internet circles of like-minded sites that do hold a degree of skepticism towards law enforcement practices in the US… but it is necessary for any police accountability activist or researcher to keep in mind that there is an almost overwhelming bias, deference even, shown towards police officers in the US.

After all, it’s not just the fault of the system itself that the conviction rate for police officers charged with criminal offenses is 30% while the general conviction rate is more than double that at 68% and why police officers only spend 1/3 of the time that regular people spend behind bars when sentenced to any actual prison time.

…it’s not just that prosecutors and judges are lenient towards the police nor is it just because fellow officers tend to cover for misconduct more often than reporting it. It’s because society permits misbehavior by police officers and, as a result, juries accept it as a possibility less often and organizations spend less time researching it.

After all… how else could it be that nobody has really questioned why the last comprehensive study into police misconduct prevalence is in the US was done in 2002?

Frankly, it’s because so few really care to know and it is imperative that people who do care keep in mind that speaking out against injustices caused by police misconduct just is not something people want to hear in the US.

After all, what you don’t know can’t hurt you, right?

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