police
-
Sidestepping Immigration to Focus on Solving Crimes
-
Police Chiefs: Death Penalty Doesn't Work
-
Disabled People More Likely to Be Victims of Crime
Denied a Promotion Because She’s a Woman
Published November 16, 2009 @ 06:50AM PT
Andrea Young was a 13-year veteran of the Pennsylvania State Police when she sat for the state’s promotion exam. She scored sixth out of 2,000 test-takers. But she was skipped for the promotion, and she argues in a new lawsuit that the snub was just one facet of the consistent harassment she suffered as a female officer on the force.
Just 4% of state cops in Pennsylvania are women, and Young said she endured jokes about her sex life and even received a photo of one officer’s penis. Other officers admitted to her they were cheating on the test, but then accused her of cheating. She says she wasn’t only targeted because she’s a woman, but because she was a speaking up about the conditions under which she worked.
Smart on Crime in North Carolina
Published October 30, 2009 @ 06:19AM PT
A few years ago, the West End neighborhood of High Point, North Carolina, had a serious crime problem. Drug dealers controlled entire blocks, gun shots rang out at night. But now the streets are safer. Violence is down. And locals say a targeted, community-based approach to drugs and crime brought the change they needed.
A great story last week in the Economist checks in on High Point and finds solid evidence that the 'smart-on-crime' approach works.
High Point Police Chief Jim Fealy tells the Economist that his department did the normal thing for years, where officers would “come rolling in like an occupying army" and descend upon West End's rough blocks. It didn't work.
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition: Starting a Conversation
Published October 14, 2009 @ 11:53AM PT
Matt was kind enough to let me invade his blog with a couple of guest posts. My name is David Bratzer and I've been a police officer in British Columbia for four years. Before that I worked as a jailer in city cells (aka the drunk tank) for two years. And before that, I worked in a couple of different areas: air traffic control trainee, tech support for an Internet startup, fast food cook, ESL teacher in Russia, residence assistant and a few other jobs as well. This speaks to the hiring practices of modern police agencies. They like to recruit officers with life experience, particularly the kind that demonstrates ethical decision making, respect for diversity and a sense of adaptability.
In my spare time, while off-duty, I manage the daily blog for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
LEAP is a group of 16,000 cops, judges and prosecutors who want to end the War on Drugs. We don't support or encourage drug abuse, but we believe that a system of regulation would be more ethical and less harmful than prohibition.
Like my work in drug policy reform, I should clarify that whatever I write here is my own opinion. My thoughts are influenced by my experiences on the job, but they certainly don't represent the official position of the department where I work. With that said, here are a couple of ideas about some broad trends in law enforcement:
1) DNA - A lot of people think we've already seen the criminal justice benefits of DNA. However, there is a lot of good still to come from this area of science. More on this later.
2) Video surveillance - One of the best technologies for solving crime and increasing police accountability. It will become more pervasive, which is not a bad thing as long as it is regulated properly.
3) Use of force - An often misunderstood area of policing. Life altering decisions are made in seconds and then analyzed for months and years afterwards. I will try to offer “the cop perspective,” and at the same time make a few suggestions on how the profession of law enforcement could improve in this area.
I hope to write more about these topics, but I thought it might be nice to start with some Q & A. If you leave a question in the comments section on any topic related to law enforcement, I’ll do my best to answer it in my next post.
A Nobel Prize in Economics … About Police Departments?
Published October 13, 2009 @ 04:54PM PT
Usually, criminologists don’t pay that much attention to what economists are doing – or vice versa. This week, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel Prize for various disciplines, gave us good reason to reconsider the link between economics and policing.
Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to with the Nobel Prize in this category, was recognized for her contributions to the “analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.” What does this mean? Ostrom has successfully demonstrated that commonly-shared property (such as fish stocks, grassland, or groundwater basins) is often better-managed by pools of users than by government structures or private entities. The idea is that local systems of users often develop subtle and refined regulations for usage over time, including practices for monitoring and enforcement that protect the resource, even when the benefits to users are only modest.
What does this have to do with policing?
One of Ostrom’s early projects tested the presiding assumption that police departments centralized at the city level created economies of scale that resulted in more efficient policing. To the contrary, Ostrom’s survey of 80 metropolitan areas found that small, locally-controlled forces are more effective than a large, city-wide controlled police force in meeting citizen demands for neighborhood police protection. As Ostrom noted in a later article, “For patrolling, if you don’t know the neighborhood, you can’t spot the early signs of problems, and if you have five or six layers of supervision, the police chief doesn’t know what’s occurring on the street.” This point was made in 1974, and almost twenty years later, police departments like that of Chicago decentralized their organizations to encourage officers to proactively identify and address sources of crime and disorder in their patrol areas. Community-based policing took root and now much of the federal funding provided by the Department of Justice for local crime issues requires locally-based teams of law enforcement agents and community partners to work together at the neighborhood level. (For more on this, check out the Project Safe Neighborhoods website at the Department of Justice.)
The basic idea is intuitive: that the people who own the resource are more likely to shepherd it wisely – this is as important an insight for crime and public safety as it is for environmentalism!
Taking Victims Seriously
Published September 29, 2009 @ 05:06AM PT
The Philadelphia Inquirer today praised the Philadelphia Police Department for improving the way it treats victims of sexual assault, marking a complete turnaround from ten years ago. It's rare the a media outlet will praise a police department when it does something right, so kudos to the Inquirer for sending kudos to the cops.
Ten years ago, the Inquirer hammered the police for allowing investigations of sexual assaults to slide, for treating victims callously and for generally not taking rapes seriously. It led to a harsh national spotlight and sweeping reforms, including another look at hundreds of cold cases. The reforms are ongoing, but today's story shows that a lot has changed:
Watching Philadelphia Police Capt. John Darby talk to reporters last month about the rape of a jogger near Forbidden Drive, Carol Tracy sat before the television, slack-jawed.
She couldn't believe how sensitive he seemed.
Police had no suspect. The victim had been unwilling to sit with detectives.
"He said he understood how traumatic this event was for the victim, and that he hoped she would be in a place where she would be able to speak to police in a short time," recalled Tracy, who directs the Women's Law Project. "He understood the trauma of the event was having a devastating impact on her."
An Arrest in Rocky Mount
Published September 03, 2009 @ 05:57AM PT
I wrote in August about the six women found strangled over the last four years near Rocky Mount, NC -- believed to be the victims of a serial killer. All six victims were black women, and most of them were sex workers with drug addictions. Three more women are missing. These murders began in 2005, and for years this group of marginalized, poor victims wasn’t getting a lot of attention. Finally, when the sixth victim was found this summer, the national media started to notice. (And I’m no better than the MSM; I didn’t write about until after the Anderson Cooper show had swooped down on rural Rocky Mount).
So the Silver Fox makes an appearance and suddenly we have a suspect. Antwan Maurice Pittman was charged yesterday in the murder of Taraha Nicholson, who was found strangled to death in March. The cops aren’t saying whether Pittman is tied to any of the other crimes, or even what evidence connects him to this crime. I don’t know what broke the case. I do believe the victims’ families, however, when they say the response wasn’t exactly all-hands-on-deck after the first few victims were found dead. Now we have to watch closely to make sure the police have the right guy.
Q & A: Cops Against the Drug War
Published August 26, 2009 @ 03:46AM PT
A week ago at Netroots Nation, I sat down with two members of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition to discuss the group’s efforts to support drug legalization. Jack Cole (right), the organization's Executive Director, spoke about the group’s work advocating against drug prohibition and David Bratzer (left), an active police officer in Victoria, British Columbia, talked about the challenges of advocating against the drug war while serving as an officer.
Here are some excerpts from our conversation:
Q: Can you tell me about your path that brought you to work with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition?
Jack Cole: I was in the New Jersey State Police for 26 years, and I was undercover in narcotics. When I went into narcotics, I thought drugs were the scourge of the earth and I was going to save the world. But after about three years of living on the street with those folks, I came to the realization that the only thing different between them and me is that they wanted to put something in their bodies that I didn’t want to put in mine.
Everything else was the same, they had the same wishes, they wanted to make a living, raise a family, get respect from other people in the world. And it made me think that all these things I’d been learning in my whole my life were lies about, about this stuff.
…If there was an epiphany, I think, one of the biggest shocks was about three years into the undercover work. I realized that I liked some of the people that I worked on, better than some of the people I worked for. Something’s wrong with this picture. But I stayed in law enforcement for another 11 years, after I had decided that the war on drugs was wrong and the only way to reduce drug abuse would be to legalize drugs, I decided that in 1973, but I stayed in narcotics for another 11 years.
Q: David, is it rare for a serving officer like yourself to speak out publicly on this issue?
David Bratzer: Yes, it’s rare. Gradually it’s changing, though. The difficulty is, as a serving officer, it brings up some issues that a retired officer might not have. People ask: ‘Are you still going to enforce drug laws while on duty?’ My answer to that is: ‘Of course I will.’ I took an oath to uphold all laws, not to just pick and choose…But, when I first came out with this position, a lot of people at my department were concerned about that.
Q: Are there officers and departments that choose not to enforce drug laws in order to focus on other crime?
DB: Certainly in Canada, and I would expect in the U.S. as well. There are officers who make broad use of their discretion, and also as you go up the chain throughout senior management, and that’s a good thing. And the trick is, how do you find those officers and speak with them and convince them to speak out publicly about it.
JC: There is discretion. Some officers will stop somebody with suspected marijuana on them and subject this vegetation to the wind test. If it passes the wind test, they get arrested. Of course, most things fail the wind test. The wind test is that if it blows away when you shake it out, it’s not marijuana.
