Respect mah accountabilitah!
by Tom Sullivan
Accountability. It’s not just for teachers anymore. Media Matters caught this yesterday morning. So did I:
Fox’s Tucker Carlson declared that a new mandate requiring New York City police officers to provide written justification for stop-and-frisk encounters is “an attack on police practices that have worked.”
NYPD officers will soon be “required to inform some suspects why they’re being stopped and frisked” after a federal judge approved a mandate proposed by the federal monitor tasked with addressing the department’s stop-and-frisk tactics. “The form would explain that officers are authorized to make stops in some circumstances and spell out what might have prompted the stop, including suspicion of concealing or possessing a weapon, engaging in a drug transaction or acting as a lookout,” The Wall Street Journal explained, noting how the move comes after a federal judge found “the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk unconstitutional and ordered an overhaul of the department’s procedures.”
Countering Carlson’s assertion that this is just “another layer of bureaucracy” impeding police from protecting the public from criminals, Neill Franklin, a former Baltimore cop was on message in defense of the new regulation:
“It’s a ‘best practice.’ Many police departments are already doing this across the nation. This is a very important issue regarding the Constitution and the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, where we should be free from unreasonable search and seizure. We should be secure among our persons, our places, and effects. Something this serious warrants documentation.”
John Rafferty, a retired NYPD lieutenant who runs a private security service, called it a “tactical nightmare,” explaining:
“You have minutes to search for people who have committed crimes, many times. And if you stop the wrong person, you’re going to spend time to have this officer fill out a form rather than continuing to look for the actual perpetrators. It’s ridiculous.”
Ridiculous, that is, if arresting dangerous criminals is what you actually spend most of your time doing. There is some debate about that. Right now, “one in seven New Yorkers have a warrant out for their arrest.” That’s 1.2 million people:
Commissioner Bratton and NYPD officials insist they are merely enforcing the law in areas with the highest rates of crime, which happen to be predominantly minority communities in the outer boroughs. Still, the sheer scale of the effort is remarkable: In stark contrast to the annual rate of only a few thousand criminal cases a year, the NYPD issued 458,000 quality of life summons in 2014. The list of summonsable offenses is staggering. You can be fined for walking between subway cars, putting a backpack on a subway seat, or using a friend’s MetroCard to enter the subway. Loitering (even in front of your own building), being in a park after 1 a.m., and jaywalking can all result in court summons, depending on the officer’s discretion.
By misusing their discretion, a handful of officers might account for a high percentage of a department’s annual arrests, and those discretionary arrests across the country seem to include disproportionately high numbers of minority citizens, and not just in New York City. This report is from last October:
The report, released Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, said that blacks are 11.5 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession, even though advocates say that white and black people use the drug at similar rates.
The research also showed that blacks are nearly nine times more likely to be arrested for disorderly conduct in Minneapolis than whites. The racial disparities for the rates of arrest for vagrancy (7.54 times more likely) and for minors violating curfew or loitering (16.39) are equally stark, according to the report that was based on arrest data from the Minneapolis Police Department.
“What might be viewed as a noisy argument between two white people, might become disorderly conduct when it’s between two black people,” said Teresa Nelson, legal director for the ACLU’s local chapter.
And we mustn’t forget Ferguson, where the U.S. Department of Justice found:
* African Americans account for 95 percent of Manner of Walking charges; 94 percent of all Fail to Comply charges; 92 percent of all Resisting Arrest charges; 92 percent of all Peace Disturbance charges; and 89 percent of all Failure to Obey charges.
* African Americans are 68 percent less likely than others to have their cases dismissed by the Municipal Judge, and in 2013 African Americans accounted for 92 percent of cases in which an arrest warrant was issued.
* African Americans account for 96 percent of known arrests made exclusively because of an outstanding municipal warrant.
Getting back to New York:
Amid the debate over increasingly dangerous, and in some cases lethal, police tactics, a recent report by WNYC has discovered a disturbing reality about the way that New York’s police officers operate.
According to their findings, just 15% of New York Police Department arresting officers generate over 50% of all “resisting arrest” charges, while an even smaller group of just 5% accounted for over 40% of those incidents.
Those incidents, by the way, can result in injuries and costly lawsuits. Once more, back to the Twin Cities:
But more people in the community are calling for greater accountability for police officers, saying they’d like to see the money the city spends on settlements used for other needs.
“There’s got to be a way of holding an officer accountable for what they do and not put their misdeeds on the backs of taxpayers of St. Paul,” said Jeff Martin, president of the St. Paul NAACP. “There’s got to be some equity in the system — if you’re an officer who cost the city some money, you should be held to a higher standard, whether that’s losing your job or maybe some of your pension.”
How do we keep track of whether a certain subset of officers has a proclivity for stopping people at random, for seeing disorderly conduct where others see merely a noisy argument, whether suspects seem to get injured resisting arrest more by certain officers than by others, or whether certain officers spend a ridiculous amount of time (Rafferty’s word) filing paperwork — “another layer of bureaucracy” (Carlson’s words) — for arrests they’ve made on “manner of walking” or open container charges while dangerous criminals make their getaways?
Accountability is all the rage for other subsets of government employees. If we tracked and evaluated the performance of police departments the way we do the performance of schools, do you think we might find “innovative solutions,” cost savings, and improved performance there, too?
Increased oversight might explain why your typical authoritarian would oppose accountability measures for the police. Teachers? We expect to hold them accountable. Government bureaucrats? We expect to hold them accountable. But police? Heaven forfend!
Because, you see, the authority-authorities are special. If we hold them to the standards of accountability we are so free with when it comes to common public employees, where will it end? Next thing, people will want to hold the High Priests of Wall Street accountable for committing trillions of dollars worth of fraud on a global scale. And we can’t have that.