CT Senate Approves Bills Concerning Police Racial Profiling, Videotaping

The Connecticut state Senate voted Thursday for two key law enforcement bills that would strengthen the state's racial profiling law and protect citizens' rights to videotape police officers in their official duties, reports the Hartford Courant. The videotaping bill was prompted by the arrest of a Roman Catholic priest in February 2009, which prompted a criminal investigation by federal prosecutors and the FBI that led to the arrest of four East Haven police officers on charges of obstructing justice and excessive force against Latino residents.

The Senate voted to strengthen the decade-old profiling law, which some senators said is not being followed by police. Only 27 of the 92 local police departments are in compliance with the law, according to Senate Democrats. The president of the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association, Douglas Fuchs, does not agree that few departments are complying, adding that racial profiling data do not "accurately portray how Connecticut law enforcement across the state conducts business.'' Both bills now go to the House.

In a Colorblind Society, Did Trayvon Martin Have a Right to Stand His Ground?

By Delores Jones-Brown

Standard media analysis of this incident begins with Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense and the applicability of the “stand your ground” law to Zimmerman.  John Jay Professor Delores Jones-Brown asks if Trayvon Martin had a right to stand his, too. 

Four CT 'Bullies With Badges' Charged for Treatment of Latinos

A small group of East Haven, Conn., police officers who worked together on the evening shift were arrested Tuesday following a long federal investigation and charged with terrorizing Latinos in their town. Federal authorities called them "bullies with badges," and the indictment against them alleges a long list of crimes ranging from excessive force to obstructing justice, reports the Hartford Courant.

The four were "allegedly formed a cancerous cadre that routinely deprived East Haven residents of their civil rights," said Janice K. Fedarcyk, assistant director-in-charge of the New York office of the FBI. The investigation was prompted by a video recording of an encounter between some of the officers arrested Tuesday and the Rev. James Manship, pastor of St. Rose of Lima Church in New Haven. The federal probe found a pattern of discrimination by police, particularly against Latino residents. Connecticut's U.S. Attorney, David B. Fein, said more arrests and additional charges could be forthcoming.

Broken Justice

By Mansfield Frazier

In March 2009, U.S. Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) proposed the Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009 “which would create a blue ribbon commission to reevaluate [America’s] criminal justice system and drug policies, and make recommendations for reform.^” The bill has passed the House once but recently failed to achieve a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

Black and Busted in Dane County (Wisconsin)

By Dee HallF

The Wisconsin State Journal finds stark evidence that young black men in the state’s capital region aren’t benefiting from programs designed to keep youthful offenders out of the criminal justice system.

Latinos and the Justice System

By Cara Tabachnick

The American Bar Association is exploring new ways to address how Hispanics are treated by courts, police and immigration authorities.

Mother: Police Stops For NYC Young Blacks "Part Of Growing Up"

For young African-Americans in New York City, "police stops are part of growing up," Dionne Grayman, founder of a group called Mothers Empowered, writes on Women's eNews.  Recounting stories about her son, Grayman says, "One day, he was stopped by the police on his way home. Asked to present identification, asked where he was headed. That was the first time. The second time, he was asked for identification and frisked. Then the third time, the fourth, and the fifth. And he was patted down, had his backpack gone through, returned to him, sometimes gently, most times not."

Grayman says her brother-in-law is a New York City homicide detective. The officer gave her son a courtesy card issued to officers to give to their relatives in the event they have an interaction with a fellow cop. "My son has had the card thrown into his face and onto the ground," Grayman says. She calls her son a "typical All-American boy," yet "the saddest part of all of this is he'd begun to become 'immune' to being stopped. He, like too many other men of color in this city, had become desensitized to being treated criminally."

Cambridge, MA Officials Criticize Report On Gates Arrest

Cambridge, Ma., City Manager Robert Healy and Police Commissioner Robert Haas heard angry criticism from City Council members and the public over a report from a committee of outside experts on the 2009 arrest of Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates, the Boston Globe reported. Council member Marjorie Decker said the council was largely ignored by the panel of 12 academics and law enforcement personnel who examined the incident. Gates, who is black, was arrested by a white police officer after a woman called 911 to report a break-in. It turned out that Gates lived at the house and was simply struggling with a stubborn lock damaged in a previous break-in attempt.

The report said both Gates and the officer missed opportunities to de-escalate the tension, that they share responsibility for the controversial arrest, and that the dispute was avoidable. Council members said the $100,000 report did not address the issues of race relations and a citizen’s rights to question police.  “Frankly, I thought the report was trying too hard to convince us that we should all join hands and have a ‘Kumbaya’ moment, instead of really taking the bold steps to address something that was traumatic to a lot of people,’’ said Council member Leland Cheung. Said member Kenneth Reeves: “I don’t know how they could discuss this incident and not mention race.’

A New Era Opens in the LAPD

Accountability and civilian oversight have transformed Los Angeles’  police culture. But the job isn’t complete yet.

The good news in L.A. these days is that the epic struggle to reform the Los Angeles Police Department, which caused some of the deadliest American riots of the 20^th Century, and so fiercely dominated and divided the city, is finally nearing its end.

Thanks to the Christopher Commission reforms limiting the department’s independent power, the 2000 federal consent decree, and the seven-year tenure of reform chief William J. Bratton, followed by the appointment of his protégé, Charlie Beck, the worst of the LAPD’s insensitivity and brutality has been curbed. And its notoriously isolated paramilitary culture has been replaced by the inclusive spirit of community policing.

Above all, a new era of accountability and civilian oversight has taken hold, and the decades of LAPD officers routinely using excessive force without consequence appears to be over.

This last is a remarkable development for Los Angeles, where the LAPD’s fearsome reputation was accompanied by the knowledge among its officers that no matter what they did in the line of duty, they’d be utterly unaccountable to civilian oversight.

Officer accountability, however, must be the bedrock under which any good police force operates. Without it, as the LAPD discovered during the violent response of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, you become a hated army of occupation. Scandal-plagued departments in cities like New Orleans, which are now attempting to right themselves, would therefore do well to examine where L.A. has been on the issue of independent civilian oversight, and where it is now and still needs to go.

IG: ‘Nothing We Can’t Look At’

LAPD’s new Inspector General, Nichole Bershon, was remarkably upbeat about the cooperation she‘s been receiving from the LAPD when I met with her last month.  “We monitor every officer-involved shooting-investigation from the moment we’re called to the scene to its end; and take and monitor [citizen and other] complaints all the way through the process,” Bershon said.  “There’s really nothing today that we can’t look at [within the department]. We ask for it, we get it. No discussion, no questions.”

Moreover, a number of the I.G.’s oversight functions have been codified into either the City Charter or the LAPD (operations) manual. The Charter, for example, gives the I.G. “the same access to police department information as the Board of Police Commissioners” (which sets department policy.)  And the manual grants the I.G. the right to view the entire disciplinary file of all department employees, and requires that all LAPD employees “comply with any and all access to documents” requested by the Inspector General.

Additionally, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck has continued an operational policy begun by Bratton: the development of an open-door culture of respect and cooperation within the department towards the I.G.’s Office (IGO).

Nevertheless, this is precisely not the time for Los Angeles to rest on its laurels.

The need for a a robust Inspector General’s Office to monitor the department’s internal discipline system, and to ensure that complaints will continue to be properly received, investigated, adjudicated and, when appropriate, punished has never been greater.

The IGO was created by a 1995 amendment to the City Charter on the recommendation of the Christopher Commission, following the 1991 Rodney King beating, precisely because civilian oversight of the department was judged to be virtually nonexistent. The principal functions the IGO was expected to perform include: oversight of the department’s internal investigations and issuance of periodic reports to keep the department honest and transparent.

Since then, however, it has functioned haphazardly, at best.

Potential Problems

There have been and remain several serious potential problems. One is that the I.G. lacks the statutory powers of a traditional inspector general to act independently. Under the City Charter the I.G. works at the pleasure of the Police Commission, which has the authority, “by majority vote to direct the Inspector General not to commence or continue an investigation or audit.” (Emphasis added.) Moreover, the I.G. lacks traditional investigative tools such as subpoena power, and an attorney-client relationship with the Police Commission (which shields investigations).

While there’s no reason to worry about Chief Beck interfering with the IGO, we don’t know who will replace him, and what interests a new chief might represent. The mayor appoints the police commission which, in collaboration with the mayor, selects the police chief. If a newly elected mayor (and his hand picked commission) selected a hardnosed chief who allowed his officers to act unaccountably on the street (as the department did for decades in the not-so-distant past), and they backed that chief in stonewalling the I.G.O., what recourse would the I.G. have?

Such a scenario unfolded under LAPD Chief Bernard C. Parks, who took office in 1997. An old-school son of the LAPD’s secretive, circle-the-wagons LAPD culture, Parks sought to emasculate the I.G., with at least the acquiescence of Mayor Richard Riordan and his first-term police commission.  He denied the department’s first two Inspector Generals access to information and access to witnesses, sending a signal to the department’s leadership not to cooperate with them.

Information they requested and were entitled to would be send back incomplete or inaccurate, or only at the last moment, when the statute of limitations was about to run out. In addition, they were either barred from attending and/or contributing during use-of-force hearings adjudicating discipline cases.

The situation has changed since then. Bratton instilled a new sprit of cooperation with the I.G. when he became chief in 2002, and the federal consent degree forced on the LAPD by the U.S. Justice Department in 2000 additionally required the LAPD to adopt accountability policies, enforced by a federal monitor and judge looking over its shoulder.

That consent decree was lifted in 2009, and a Transition Agreement is now in place. Theoretically an I.G. could still go to federal court and get an order compelling a recalcitrant chief to comply with her requests. But not without creating yet another Los Angeles police crisis, and causing an enormous rift within the LAPD that would be catastrophic for an Inspector General’s Office that depends not only on the letter of the law, but on the free, cooperative flow of information.

Bershon says she is now reviewing the Transitional Agreement, with an eye towards what “protocols the IGO is operating under that should be codified in the LAPD Manual or Special Orders.”

That’s a start. But not nearly enough.

What’s really needed is a full-throated, comprehensive effort to codify the I.G.’s rights, investigative powers and independence from the police commission, in a revised City Charter statute. As former federal prosecutor and Los Angles City Council member Jack Weiss recently put it: “The bottom line is this: can we rely on future chiefs as enlightened as Bratton and Beck? Are they the ‘new normal’ or exceptions to the history of the department?”

He might have added: can we rely on a new Police Commission not to close down or nix an I.G. investigation that might be politically embarrassing – or worse? The citizens of Los Angeles and its police department have been through too much chaos and heartache to have to again gamble on the answers to such important questions.

Joe Domanick is chief of The Crime Report’s West Coast Bureau.  A version of this essay also appeared in the Los Angeles Times on August 12.

Photo by Kevin Dean via Flickr.

Traffic Stops and Police Trust

Citizens that experienced one or more traffic stops in the past year were less likely to contact the police for assistance or to report a neighborhood problem, researchers found in a new study. Using Police—Public Contact Survey data, the report looked at race and demographics in their findings.

Read the study here.

Use the Crime Report for more information on racial profiling.

How Racial Profiling Cases Affected Arizona Policing

Ogletree: Report On Gates Arrest Disappointing, "Unbelievable"

Harvard Law Prof. Charles Ogletree, who represented Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates in the case over the arrest last summer at his Cambridge, Ma., home, tells the Boston Globe that the new report on the case by a commission is disappointing. "For the report to say both Gates and Crowley had an equal opportunity to deescalate the situation is just breathtaking and unbelievable," says Ogletree. "The person with control and power to make an arrest that day was Sergeant James Crowley, not professor Gates. It was wrong of Crowley to arrest him."

Ogletree also says that Gates and Crowley "have been in constant contact" and went out to dinner together a few months ago. "They are friendly and they are still talking, and I am very hopeful there can be a larger forum to bridge the gap between police and the community," Ogletree says. Ogletree says he told Gates, who does not plan to file a lawsuit over the episode, that "even though he has a right to say what he did to Crowley, demanding his name and badge number, I wouldn’t advise it. I tell my law students never, ever to ask a police officer for his name and badge number, because the answer is not going to be satisfactory. It’s just going to escalate the situation."

New York State Task Force on Police-on-Police Shootings

In the last 30 years almost all of the police who have been shot and killed by fellow officers have been of color. This report works to identify specific actions that police agencies and government at every level can take to reduce the effect of racial bias in police shootings.

Read the full report here.

Use The Crime Report to find out more information about police shootings.

Cambridge, Ma., Arrest Review Finds No Links To Race

When Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his own home for disorderly conduct by a white Cambridge police officer last summer, President Obama led a chorus of critics denouncing the police action. The New England Center for Investigative Reporting says the arrest raised the question of whether officers disproportionately arrest blacks for disorderly conduct, considered one of the most discretionary and most abused charges in the criminal justice system.

But a review of the Cambridge department’s handling of disorderly conduct cases from 2004 to 2009 finds no evidence of racial profiling. Instead, the analysis finds that the most common factor linking people who are arrested in Cambridge for disorderly conduct is that they were allegedly screaming or cursing in front of police. Of the 392 adults arrested for disorderly conduct, 57 percent were white, and 34 percent were black. That racial breakdown almost exactly mirrored the racial composition of the population that Cambridge police investigated for disorderly conduct. Cambridge is 68 percent white and 12 percent black. Racial profiling specialists said the fairest way to analyze the Cambridge Police Department’s conduct was to compare the racial makeup of those charged to that of those investigated and not to the racial makeup of the overall population. The most striking conclusion from the Cambridge police data is that the majority of those arrested for disorderly conduct were allegedly yelling, often screaming obscenities, in front of police before the handcuffs snapped shut.

A Year After Gates Arrest, Racial Justice Problems Common: Ogletree

Next month marks the one year anniversary of the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis (Skip) Gates in his own home in Cambridge, Ma., and President Obama's subsequent "beer summit" with Gates and arresting officer James Crowley. In a new book on the case, Gates' attorney, Harvard law Prof. Charles Ogletree, concludes that the U.S. has "a long way to go to address the issue of racial justice, particularly in the criminal justice system." In "The Presumption of Guilt,"  Ogletree says the U.S. has learned little about the issue since the 1991 beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles led to riots. He spoke about the book yesterday at the University of the District of Columbia in Washington.

"In the cases of both Rodney King and Professor Gates, the police could have found other ways to handle the situation," Ogletree says. Ogletree was a mentor of Obama at Harvard Law School. In the book, he acknowledges criticism that Obama should have done more as president about the problem of racial profiling. Ogletree says that issue "is worthy of further discussion." Ogletree devotes more than 100 pages of the book to stories of blacks who believe they have been victims of racial profiling. Among them: Attorney General Eric Holder, who said he was stopped while driving from New York City to Washington, D.C., by a police officer who wanted to check his trunk for weapons. The incident left Holder humiliated and angry.