There's always a general problem of 'who watches the watchmen?' How much bigger is the problem when you discover that the watchmen have an especially troubling record compared to the general population?
There is no more damaging perpetrator of domestic violence than a police officer, who harms his partner as profoundly as any abuser, and is then particularly ill-suited to helping victims of abuse in a culture where they are often afraid of coming forward. The evidence of a domestic-abuse problem in police departments around the United States is overwhelming. The situation is significantly bigger than what the NFL faces, orders of magnitude more damaging to society, and yet far less known to the public, which hasn't demanded changes.That's a substantial charge. What backs it up?
As the National Center for Women and Policing noted in a heavily footnoted information sheet, "Two studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10 percent of families in the general population. A third study of older and more experienced officers found a rate of 24 percent, indicating that domestic violence is two to four times more common among police families than American families in general." Cops "typically handle cases of police family violence informally, often without an official report, investigation, or even check of the victim's safety," the summary continues. "This 'informal' method is often in direct contradiction to legislative mandates and departmental policies regarding the appropriate response to domestic violence crimes." Finally, "even officers who are found guilty of domestic violence are unlikely to be fired, arrested, or referred for prosecution."Florida adopted an automatic reporting scheme for police domestic violence in 2008, and found that the number of incidents on record doubled. Police Chief Magazine, taking the problem seriously and trying to study it as you would expect a group that is both law-enforcement and journalist in its makeup, tracked all the news reports they could find.
Data on final organizational outcomes were available for 233 of the cases. About one-third of those cases involved officers who were separated from their jobs either through resignation or termination. The majority of cases in which the final employment outcome was known resulted in a suspension without job separation (n = 152). Of those cases where there was a conviction on at least one offense charged, officers are known to have lost their jobs through either termination or resignation in less than half of those cases (n = 52).There's a lot more at the link.
So, what to do about this kind of thing? I've seen a lot of suggestions that police wear videocameras on duty at all times -- I noticed some police wearing them just the other day, actually -- and the automatic reporting seems wise. Automatic firing based on a conviction? Increased legal penalties for those who engage in these acts 'under color of law,' as we used to say in civil rights legislation?
From your linked article:
ReplyDeleteWhat struck me as I read through the information sheet's footnotes is how many of the relevant studies were conducted in the 1990s or even before. Research is so scant and inadequate that a precise accounting of the problem's scope is impossible, as The New York Times concluded in a 2013 investigation that was nevertheless alarming.
I don't think it's justified to say that anyone beats his wife "under color of law". That phrase means the act was committed under the apparent authority of law (so a cop, in uniform, who uses his authority to commit a crime in public would be an example)
ReplyDeleteWhat you're suggesting is more of the "walking while black" type of deal - punishing a person differently because of who he/she is rather than the severity of the offense. If that isn't injustice, I really don't know what would be.
An employer has every right to fire an employee who commits a crime (at will employees can be fired for pretty much any reason). I don't really see the need for disproportionate penalties unless the act is performed within the course and scope of the officer's employment.
I'm not in favor of penalizing people for being cops any more than I am of penalizing them for joining the military. Both you and I have resisted suggestions like this when applied to the military before.
Why is this any different? Apply the law, and if they are getting preferential treatment, deal with that problem. But don't create two sets of laws.
I'm not in favor of penalizing people for being cops any more than I am of penalizing them for joining the military. Both you and I have resisted suggestions like this when applied to the military before.
ReplyDeleteWell, joining the military does actually mean coming under a different set of laws -- stricter laws, in many cases, especially in these areas of sexuality. As you know, adultery is actually illegal in the military. Military regulations require officers to report even suspicion of domestic violence to Family Advocacy, which is a group that exists in large part to stand watch on this very problem as it exists in the military. Commonly, a servicemember suspected of domestic violence is ordered to live in the barracks until Family Advocacy completes its work -- removed from his home just on suspicion, to make the investigator's work easier (and to protect the family allegedly under threat).
But the military isn't in charge of policing domestic violence in the general society. It's a big problem if those who actually have that duty have a culture of winking at it among their own. That makes you wonder how seriously they take it in any case.
As for what I meant by 'under color of law,' I was thinking of cases like this one where authority it being used to gain access to perpetrate a kind of sexual assault:
ReplyDeleteThe woman called 911, seeking help from police after reportedly being assaulted by her boyfriend. But while police responded to the domestic violence call, one of the officers allegedly took the woman into an upstairs bedroom and sexually assaulted her, authorities said.
But on the domestic violence side, I'm also thinking of intentionally under-reporting it in order to protect fellow officers, or promote them afterwards:
In more than 75 percent of confirmed cases, the personnel file omitted or downplayed the domestic abuse. Of those accused of domestic violence, 29 percent were later promoted and 30 percent were repeat offenders.
Those are official decisions being made that downplay the offenses and keep them from being consequential. That should itself be a crime, because it's a kind of racketeering: a move by an in-group to create these special standards for themselves and protect each other from retaliation. I see no reason that a citizenry might not pass laws to ban that specific behavior by police.
So, what to do about this kind of thing? ... [A]nd the automatic reporting seems wise. Automatic firing based on a conviction? Increased legal penalties for those who engage in these acts 'under color of law,' as we used to say in civil rights legislation?
ReplyDeleteAny or all of these might help, though I'm curious about how "automatic reporting" would work--that still seems to require human intervention to trigger the reporting. One mechanism mentioned in the linked article involved, for instance, requiring fingerprints of arrested officers to be automatically reported to the agency that licenses [them], but that requires the officer(s) to be arrested in the first place, the prints to be taken in the second place, and then to be entered into the reporting system in the third place.
The larger problem, though, is that if implemented by themselves, these things merely wish the problem off onto someone/something else. Wishing responsibility off onto others/other things is what Progressives do: [T]he average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.
The citizens who employ these cops--us--are the ones with primary responsibility. Most of these cops live in neighborhoods. Why are the neighbors turning a blind eye to the abuse going on next door? We are the watchmen of last (and first) resort, and we have a duty to perform.
Eric Hines
This duty perhaps needs a mechanism, though: something with formal authority to take action. A citizen council to review the handling of cases involving other police officers?
ReplyDeleteThere'd need to be a mechanism, too, for getting the case to the CC's attention. That nearly always has only one or two sources: the abuse victim (in the present context), who's often too terrified to speak or too inured to the situation to recognize it, and that neighbor.
ReplyDeleteThe CC would need to carefully sift the original reports to pull out the bad beefs and other chaff.
Then there's the matter of how to keep the CC from itself getting politicized. High turnover of membership would help but probably isn't enough. Rural communities, too, are going to have a small population from which to draw--they might want to band together in order to get a large enough population to support high turnover. Or one community's CC gets oversight of another community's force, by aperiodic random draw. Or....
Eric Hines
There's the traditional Athenian mechanism for avoiding corruption of offices: service by lot, rather like jury duty.
ReplyDeleteA draft? I'll have to think about that.
ReplyDeleteThe Athenians, and the other Greek polities of the time, lived under a different social compact, a different concept of social compact, than we do.
I'm not averse to a draft today, but I'm not convinced of its efficacy, either.
Eric Hines
Well, jury duty is a part of our social compact (and not Athens'). With the unemployment rate what it is, you could give anyone with something else pressing to do a waiver and still have plenty of people from whom to draw.
ReplyDeleteIf we're going to do a draft (the courts have said a military draft is legal, too), it needs to be universal--no waivers. Especially, a CC that's intended to watch over the watchdogs needs to be a cross section of the community the watchdogs watch over, not a selected (if only by default) subset that might not, in the aggregate, be objective and balanced.
ReplyDeleteEric Hines
Well, there's an off-chance the economy might improve someday anyway. I suppose we should set standards that will last in that eventuality.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure I said before that the police ought to be drafted. If nothing else, just to cycle everybody through the the experience.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if that would make things better--perhaps with conjunction with wearing cameras--but it ought to created a shared citizen experience.
Sure, but it should be a minimum threshold, not a series of except-fors. If you're an adult, living in the community, physically and mentally capable of the task, you're eligible to be called, and you must serve if called.
ReplyDeleteNo pleadings of inconvenience, no yet to be determined previous engagements, no paying someone else to sit in for you, no plaints about having a job or a kid or....
If the community is Chicago, not even being dead is an excuse--you vote, you sit on the CC. If it's New Orleans, it's even harder to opt out: they all cousins, you got a cousin, you got a vote--which means you serve on the CC.
Eric Hines
was the ways in which the police departments not only did not stop the abuses, but lost evidence and suppressed reports that might have compelled an earlier settlement.
ReplyDeleteIs that somehow supposed to be different from the Capital police, New Orleans PD, Detroit PD, LA PD, etc? No.
Remember the black woman that got executed in her car as she tried to drive away from a concrete barricade that she never hit, while Congress applauded the Capital police's "defense arrangements"? No?
Cops "typically handle cases of police family violence informally, often without an official report, investigation, or even check of the victim's safety,"
ReplyDeleteThis is similar to how the Vatican handled affairs in the bishoprys and archbishop areas of responsibilities.
However, the Catholic Church was at that time infiltrated and partially controlled by external/foreign agents implanted several decades ago. So their hierarchy, which was supposed to work on these non criminal, reform redemption based informal methods, broke down. And instead of solving people's issues informally without involving the police, the homosexual and child molestation rings used it to cover up their actions instead. All on the basis that claims made to the hierarchy were handled in house, they were never jumped to the police or to the top, like the Pope.
The police's hierarchy is even more corrupted, so nothing they try to do about it will solve the issue without fixing the system itself. And the system doesn't want to be fixed.
Well, there is a kind of analogy to what the Vatican did. And the response, generally, has been that the Vatican shouldn't have the power to handle those things in an enclosed way anymore: that they should be required to report sexual offenses by priests against children to outside authorities for an independent investigation.
ReplyDeleteSometimes, that's the only way to go. Whatever you think of police as a class of people, there's no reason to think they're better than priests.
Generally, independent is beginning to mean more government. So how can a government or private organization be independent, given the power of the Leftist alliance?
ReplyDeleteThis is like trying to solve the problem by assuming the problem is an isolated cadre of individuals or some corrupt superiors. It's gone far beyond that.
For the Vatican, the problem was isolated down to a small ring that was more or less a conspiracy. It didn't corrupt the culture, yet. It didn't corrupt all the brass, yet, that was why they were hiding it.
ReplyDeleteBy getting rid of the priests, they got rid of most of their spy ring and spy masters too.
That won't be the case in America.
There are two offenses here- the domestic violence is one, and the lesser.
ReplyDeleteThe other is treason. one an official swears to uphold the law, and violates his oath, he is acting in a treasonous manner to the public at large.
This is the greater crime.