A Department of Justice study revealed that a whopping 84 percent of police officers report that they’ve seen colleagues use excessive force on civilians, and 61 percent admit they don’t always report “even serious criminal violations that involve abuse of authority by fellow officers.”UPDATE: A collection of military veteran comments on the Ferguson events.
This self-reporting moves us well beyond anecdote into the realm of data: Police brutality is a pervasive problem, exacerbated by systemic failures to curb it. That’s not to say that every officer is ill-intentioned or abusive, but it is to suggest that the common assumption that police are generally using their authority in a trustworthy manner merits serious reconsideration.
A Moment of Unity
It appears that, though we still disagree as to whether looting is an appropriate response to a police shooting, there is a moment of considerable left/right unity on the need to restrain the police. From The American Conservative:
it is to suggest that the common assumption that police are generally using their authority in a trustworthy manner merits serious reconsideration.
ReplyDeleteActually, that doesn't logically follow.
I completely agree that if 84 % of police have seen (how many times?) colleagues use excessive force, that's a problem and it's a very interesting data point.
But so is the oft-cited stat about women having experiences some form of sexual assault in their lifetime. The problem is that neither of these stats shows there's a pervasive problem.
I've been physically groped by men in my life. More than once. Does that men that men "generally grope women"?
Of course not. It means that men sometimes grope women/girls. Likewise, if 84% of cops have seen (again, how many times?) excessive force used, it does NOT logically follow that police don't *generally* use their authority in a trustworthy manner.
It means that sometimes, cops don't use their authority in a trustworthy manner. How often?
We can't tell from that statistic.
I am far more alarmed by the 61% not always reporting serious criminal violations involving abuse of authority.
Another parallel with rape stats: the lack of a standard definition of excessive force:
ReplyDelete“Excess is in the eyes of the beholder,” explains William Terrill, a former police officer and professor of criminal justice at Michigan State. “To one officer ‘objectively reasonable’ means that if you don’t give me your license, I get to use soft hands, and in another town the same resistance means I can pull you through the car window, [or] I can tase you.”
Like sexual assault, there seems to be no accepted definition of when force becomes excessive.
Yes, sixty-one percent means most police have overlooked serious criminal violations by brother officers.
ReplyDeleteIf you want more, here's the link to the DOJ study. For example, asked how pervasive excessive force is, 62.4% of officers said excessive force was "seldom" but not "never" used in their department; 21.7 percent said it was "sometimes, often, or always" used.
So that's more than a fifth of departments that self-report as excessively violent; most departments believe they only rarely resort to excessive force. ("Never" was also an option, getting 16%, probably for very placid communities where force isn't really necessary at all.)
... the lack of a standard definition of excessive force...
ReplyDeleteThere's also the problem that "excessive force" is not just subjectively variable, as the guy says, but objectively too: what is "excessive" for stopping a jaywalker is objectively different from what is excessive when stopping a murder in progress.
So there's no way around that one. You can only talk about excessive in an analogical way.
On the other hand, good news -- very strong majorities of police self-report that their department does not use excessive force more often against blacks or other minorities than they do against anyone else. That's a very interesting finding, I think. The police clearly believe that they and their brother officers are not guilty of the commonly-believed (and frequently asserted) charge that they treat blacks worse than whites.
Well, at least, police officers who aren't black believe that: later we find that black officers believe in a substantial majority (57.1%) that blacks are more likely to be subject to physical force by police than whites.
ReplyDeleteThe Left is essentially playing both sides. Unions with blacks are coordinated with the con artists like Jackosn and Sharpson. Unions with police officers involved, need loyalty from the Nazis in training, or else Democrats don't get funding.
ReplyDeleteCoincidentally, Democrats get funded from Jackson and Sharpton too, although only in an ancillary fashion. Those two serve as the Overseers, in effect, collecting the taxes from blacks heightened with the Passion of rhetoric (Jackson rhetoric mind you). This is in return for certain privileges and immunities, which are Not extended to the black commoners being used as cannonfodder to keep the police forces in line.
In the South, if you ever spoke out against Democrat antics in Civil War I or various other issues, you were considered an outsider, an alien, or invader, someone that cannot be trusted. This prevented people from even admitting they were voting for people like Reagan, until Reagan at least. The same psychological conditioning method is used to keep the police and other National Park Ranger do gooders in line. They either sit down and shut up, Obeying Authority. Or they quit. Either way is fine for maintaining control of a Death Star type organizational factor.
One State. One Loyalty. Nothing outside the State. One Death Star. One Life. One Death. One for all, and all for the Messiah.
"The police clearly believe that they and their brother officers are not guilty of the commonly-believed (and frequently asserted) charge that they treat blacks worse than whites."
The police consider anyone outside their tribe to be either guilty or in need of obeying the Authorities. After all, police obey the authorities in All things, so why shouldn't the rest of us? Criminals or citizens (future criminals) matter no more to the goon squads than the health of pigs matter to the farmer. It only cuts down on the price of the Meat if there are problems.
But so is the oft-cited stat about women having experiences some form of sexual assault in their lifetime. The problem is that neither of these stats shows there's a pervasive problem.
ReplyDeleteStatistics are merely manufactured propaganda designed to influence weak minded target populaces. I've seen it done numerous times over the years.
The raw data, however, is more valuable, although not in itself critically important.
The reason why there is a pervasive problem is connected to why people don't know there is a pervasive problem. They have no idea what the True Nature of the Left is, so they cannot fix something they refuse to see. In looking for "causes" of unknown unknown, they find a few statistical variables, account for them, then sit down and rest thinking it's over.
It's not over.
There was a great study in Montgomery county a few years back on the "driving while black" controversy.
ReplyDeleteThe study found that black officers, while fully believing white officers were more likely to pull black drivers over for essentially no reason were just as likely to pull black drivers over as their white co-workers :p
So there's our subjective evaluation of reality, (black officers think white officers are probably racists) and there's what the data tells us (there's essentially no difference between the way black/white officers treat black drivers, at least when it comes to pulling them over).
This meshes very nicely with many other studies that have shown that blacks are at least as wary of young black men than whites are, and oftentimes more suspicious/wary of them!
What, exactly, does "militarization" of police have to do with this shooting?
ReplyDeleteWere assault weapons used? Tanks? LAVs?
I'm really confused. What am I missing? As long as I've been alive, police have carried handguns.
How did "militarization" cause this shooting?
The police simply reflect the citizens- as our collective morals and intelligence collapse, the pool of recruits gets contaminated.
ReplyDeleteI think the people objecting to the militarization are objecting to the response to the protests. The original shooting was just an ordinary cop responding to an incident of jaywalking.
ReplyDeleteAnd it sounds like badly at that.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, it isn't the shooting of the kid so much as the response of the cops to the unrest.
Really Cass, if you can't look at the pictures of those cops dressed up like soldiers and see something out of line, then you're being willfuly obtuse.
Call it Fergistan.
ReplyDeleteWell, the governor saw something out of line. He apparently pulled the county police out of the effort, and tonight's pictures are all smiling cops in ordinary police uniforms, no weapons other than holstered guns, smiling and hugging the protesters and expressing sympathy with them.
ReplyDeleteWhich, you know, would have worked yesterday too. Somebody gave him some good advice.
I think the people objecting to the militarization are objecting to the response to the protests.
ReplyDeleteAh, that makes more sense.
Really Cass, if you can't look at the pictures of those cops dressed up like soldiers and see something out of line, then you're being willfuly obtuse.
I hadn't seen any pictures last night when I posted that comment, Eric. I was asking a serious question, not knowing exactly what happened except to read that an unarmed teen was shot walking away from the police.
Just before I posted the comment, I watched a video of an eye witness (a young black woman) who said she came around the corner to see an officer inside a police car and a young man reaching into the patrol car. The cop inside and the young man were struggling.
She was there and tried to film it, and even she's still not exactly sure what happened.
As for the idea that smiling cops armed with hugs would have prevented over 20 businesses from being vandalized and looted, or multiple shootings all over the city, or protesters throwing rocks, bricks, and carrying molotov cocktails, perhaps that is the case. I'm skeptical, but I wasn't there and the news is still filtering out.
That doesn't mean the official reaction was the right one, by the way.
Which is kind of the point: none of us was there. 5 people were shot during the "nonviolent" protests. Several people were badly beaten by the crowd (one with a baseball bat). Only one of them was shot by a cop.
And I still don't see how militarization caused any of this to happen? Yes, the "optics" were bad, but did "militarization" make this situation worse? If so, how? That's a serious question - I'm not be facetious.
I suppose I think a little less heat until all the facts are out and a little less surety that you would have handled the situation better might be nice.
I think I've been pretty restrained in my criticism of this incident, and entirely out of concern for your sensibilities. Nevertheless, one thing I do agree with from the veteran comments is that we frequently dealt with angry protests in Iraq without leveling guns at people -- seeing all these policemen in full battle rattle with AR-15s pointed at the crowds is making me a little crazy. That's ridiculously bad training, at least.
ReplyDeleteI think I will wait for all the facts to come out before I make up my mind how police "should" have handled things.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I have read in local accounts today, there was a ton of damage to local businesses, multiple shootings and beatings, rioters throwing rocks, bricks, and several pictures of rioters with Molotov cocktails. IOW, a real mess. These are all from local St. Louis news outlets and there are tons of pictures.
But that's not mostly how national media have described it at all.
Oddly, this is pretty much what happened with the Trayvon Martin case: the initial reports were inaccurate and the national media narrative selectively admitted all sorts of pertinent information that was covered in local papers. They kept publishing an old picture that made him look years younger.
I see a lot of that going on here, and I think maybe we shouldn't jump the gun (so to speak) before we have all the facts.
Well, what I said in the original post is that it's nice to see some unity forming about the need to restrain police in general. That led not with comments about this incident in particular, but with a link to a piece that includes quite a bit of evidence where the facts are in -- including the self-reporting study we were discussing.
ReplyDeleteWe can 'wait and see' on this particular incident, but there are plenty of facts to support the conclusion that reform to police training, equipping and practices is broadly needed -- as well as the conclusion that, even according to the police, serious crimes by police officers often go unreported to superiors and are thus unrestrained by the chain of command or any other process.
There's plenty of evidence to support the conclusion, however this event plays out.
Why aren't they rioting over the black one that got killed at Walmart for having an airsoft rifle around?
ReplyDeleteOr was that not black enough for the Sharptons?
" IOW, a real mess."
ReplyDeleteA really good opportunity for some of us to get wet work in and get it stuck in.
Depends on perspective.
As for all the facts, did that matter with Tray in Florida? In war, it doesn't matter who has the facts, only who's still standing.
In Ferguson, MO, a young African American was killed by a police officer for jaywalking, and the city and county police have attacked the mostly African American citizens with baton rounds, tear gas, armored vehicles, tanks, and riot gear while threatening them with automatic rifles.
ReplyDeleteAt the Bundy ranch, white anti-government militia wanna-bes pointed loaded firearms at federal employees and law enforcement officers in the support of a criminal, and nothing happened.
Of a piece, isn't it?
-bc
And it gets even better: Yon dead 'youth' seems to have been a strong arm thief:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/michael-brown-a-suspect-in-robbery-of-cigars-from-store/article_52c40b84-ad90-5f9a-973c-70d628d0be04.html
Although, the Ferguson police apparently don't bother to actually check ID's very well:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/15/the-day-ferguson-cops-were-caught-in-a-bloody-lie.html
Real nice place, that is.
Gets even better - the Chief said the "robbery did not have anything to do" with the officer stopping Brown for jaywalking and then killing him. So why mention it? So the character assassination of the victim can begin!
ReplyDeleteOf a piece with Trayvon Martin, isn't it?
-bc
Hardly.
ReplyDeleteYou'd have never have heard about Trayvon Martin if George Zimmerman had been named Jorge Carpentiro.
Just like you've never heard of Roderick Scott and Christopher Cervini.
It is interesting that they brought it up, though. The only reason it could be relevant -- since the prosecution of the dead man is impossible -- is to try to lend public credence to the idea that there was some sort of struggle over the gun (as the officer says, but other witnesses deny). Someone who will strong-arm a merchant might go for an officer's gun, too.
ReplyDeleteThe charitable explanation, then, is that the PD is protecting their own by doing this in order to try to sway the jury pool. The less charitable explanation is character assassination of the dead.
I didn't interpret it that way at all.
ReplyDeleteIt beggars belief that people seriously think that in the middle of 4 days of violent rioting, police should dribble out pieces of information randomly rather than trying to figure out what happened (this is EXACTLY how the Marines handle this sort of situation, a fact that seems to be getting lost here). Of course we'd approve of how the Marines handle investigations, but here we are suspicious of the police, and therefore primed to criticize and jump to conclusions.
There is a witness at the scene on video claiming she saw Brown with part of his body inside the police car. It's not easy to drag a 300 pound man through a window from inside a car. The physics just don't work here.
I am nowhere near ready to claim the police did everything right because we simply don't know enough.
It's alarming how important facts have been almost surgically excised from national media coverage. Radley Balko, for instance, wrote a piece in the WaPo in which he claimed there had been essentially no violence the first day.
You know, the day the first gas station was burned to the ground. The photos I've seen of the protest during the day showed regular police officers, no riot gear.
And that night, violent rioting erupted.
Now, another QuikTrip has been looted. Even with "better" police reaction. So it would seem that things aren't as simple as some folks would like them to be.
And there were NO arrests after last night's debacle. Who protects local business owners? Who's looking out for them?
Sorry, hugging isn't going to deter this sort of thing.
In Ferguson, MO, a young African American was killed by a police officer for jaywalking, and the city and county police have attacked the mostly African American citizens with baton rounds, tear gas, armored vehicles, tanks, and riot gear while threatening them with automatic rifles.
ReplyDeleteThis makes no sense at all.
First of all, we still don't know what happened on the day of the shooting. You have chosen to uncritically accept one side and not even mention the other (that the police claim there was a struggle over the officer's weapon, the officer was injured, and that Brown lunged into the police car.
So you're taking sides before the investigation is complete. But you don't get to just dismiss one side's story of what happened. It may come out that this shooting was completely unprovoked - I have no trouble conceding that.
You also fail to note that the police were attacked by the crowd, some of whom were armed with rocks, bricks, guns, and Molotov cocktails. You fail to mention (why?) that innocent people were shot by rioters and over 20 local businesses were looted and vandalized.
Pretty one-sided summation, I'd say.
What I'm arguing is that we stil don't know.
So no, the two cases not "of a piece" at all. Except to people who make up their minds by dismissing any fact that undermines the conclusion they have already decided upon.
It beggars belief that people seriously think that in the middle of 4 days of violent rioting, police should dribble out pieces of information randomly rather than trying to figure out what happened (this is EXACTLY how the Marines handle this sort of situation, a fact that seems to be getting lost here). Of course we'd approve of how the Marines handle investigations, but here we are suspicious of the police, and therefore primed to criticize and jump to conclusions.
ReplyDeleteWait a second here. I've heard Marine Corps PAOs, and military PAOs generally, respond to allegations of wrongdoing in Iraq and elsewhere a thousand times or more. The form of the response is this:
'We are aware of allegations that X occurred. At this time there is a formal investigation, which we will pursue with diligence. At this time we ask for patience during the full investigation as the liberty and lives of Marines are at risk, and they as much as anyone deserve a full investigation and a fair trial if necessary.'
I don't think I have ever heard a Marine Corps PAO say something like:
'We are aware of these allegations. Here is another set of allegations that we are investigating, which we admit are irrelevant to whether the allegation against our people is true.'
Even during the debate over torture at GitMo, where the allegation that these were bad people who may know something about terror plots was frequently raised by defenders of waterboarding, the allegation was relevant. Indeed, it was immediately relevant to the question of whether extraordinary means could be used to question them.
Here, the police admit that the facts aren't relevant to the truth of the allegation. They are helpful in shading the public's understanding of the character of the dead man, though. He can't even be tried for the charge, so it need never be proven -- not even further investigated. It can just be put out there.
And there were NO arrests after last night's debacle. Who protects local business owners? Who's looking out for them?
ReplyDeleteThe very first thing in the original post was a condemnation of looting. I think looters should be shot. But you can shoot them just as well with traditional pump-action shotguns as with AR-15s, and at less damage to the property of local business owners.
Also, apparently the best answer is unarmed local militia led by community leaders. They actually stopped looters last night, unlike the police on these several occasions.
ReplyDeleteHere, the police admit that the facts aren't relevant to the truth of the allegation. They are helpful in shading the public's understanding of the character of the dead man, though. He can't even be tried for the charge, so it need never be proven -- not even further investigated. It can just be put out there.
ReplyDeletePardon my French but that makes no sense, Grim. It can be further investigated. The store clerk could ID Brown, for instance, and his companion. It makes no sense to say it can't be further investigated.
No one - even the dead man's family - is disputing that he's the guy in the video. And the idea that it's "character assassination" for people to know that Brown and one of the major witnesses are on camera robbing a store and violently intimidating the clerk 10 minutes before the shooting isn't irrelevant.
You really, really seem to want to rush to judgment here. Why not wait for things to settle out? This isn't about militarization, and it's not going to prove your larger point.
My husband was in the Marines for 30 years. The Marines don't release all the info they have the moment they get it during investigations. Sheesh, even I have seen that. In 30 years, you see quite a few investigations.
They take time, and in the meantime the Marines don't rush to the press with every new piece of information.
I think that I need to back off this discussion, though I do find it interesting.
ReplyDeleteI respect you, and very much value your friendship, Grim. And I don't want to damage it by unintentionally saying something that comes across wrong or is carelessly worded.
I have long disliked the feeding frenzy that erupts over the Internet with stories like this. I'm not saying that you're part of that - just that I don't want to be. It's so tempting to think that *this* fact or that is going to provide us with simple answers, but I suspect there are none here.
You are, of course, perfectly free to write whatever you like (and you should be). I just have such a different gut feeling about this that I think it would be better if I stepped back a bit.
I hope that you will understand, my dear friend :)
Of course I understand. We can discuss it whenever you like -- ten years from now, or never. I won't in any way be offended if you wish to step away.
ReplyDeleteAlso, apparently the best answer is unarmed local militia led by community leaders. They actually stopped looters last night, unlike the police on these several occasions.
ReplyDeleteThey didn't, actually, stop very many looters.
Eric Hines
Some is more than none. They've still got a better record than the police.
ReplyDeleteArmed citizens protecting their own businesses have a better record too, for that matter, although I guess this curfew means they'll be required to sit at home while their place is looted.
They've still got a better record than the police.
ReplyDeleteThat's certainly true. Especially when the reinforcement police pull back and decide not to enforce the law or protect the property from the looters.
Eric Hines
Yeah, I noticed that too.
ReplyDeleteSo my question going into tonight is this: will the police continue that policy, but combined with a curfew that prevents law-abiding citizens from protecting their own property (or the property of fellow citizens)? That would be an effective way of punishing the community of Ferguson for daring to question the manner in which the police provide whatever 'protection' they care to.
Given the way the local constabulary botched the stop of the young man, botched their reaction to the reaction of that stop, and botched the communications leg of all of that, I suspect the reinforcements' pull back was worth a try.
ReplyDeleteWhat'll be interesting to me will be events tonight and the state cops' reaction--or proaction.
The citizenry aren't happy with the curfew, and the hours of it seem strange to me.
Eric Hines
Should have taken the option of US Marines doing COIN in American cities more seriously. Inevitably it was going to produce an occupation anyways, no matter what people wanted. At least with the US Marines, there would be some competency involved once they fix the problems, temporarily without 100% execution of the Democrat power factions.
ReplyDeleteNow the option is expired. Try again next century, after the country is dissolved and reformed.