By Julia Dahl
A growing movement is training police officers not to kill citizens — even when they seem to be asking for it.
Read full entry »Continuing its "Cop 101" series on what police officer training is like these days, the Las Vegas Review-Journal describes how prospective cops are told to protect themselves: "One by one, the police academy recruits walk into what they think is a bar fight, unaware of what's behind the door. From the darkness, a knife-wielding attacker lunges at them. A few draw their guns and fire. They live. Most freeze, pull their Tasers or do any number of things besides pull their guns. For the purposes of the exercise, they die."
It was a drill to see if the recruits had "fire in their gut," one they had been warned about several weeks earlier. For three months, the academy staff tries to build the sense of fight in the recruits, instilling in them the idea that out on the streets, giving up gets you killed. The drill halfway through the six-month academy marks a transition in the recruits' training. They'll build upon the basic material they learned in the first half of the academy and develop the more advanced tactics and skills they'll need as beat cops. By now five of the original recruits in the class covered by the newspaper have quit. "The bad guys are getting better. They're getting smarter," says training officer Will Germosen. Instructors are careful to train the recruits as realistically as possible to avoid developing "training scars," he says.
Read full entry »The Las Vegas Review-Journal describes what it's like for prospective police officers to go through training these days. When the clock strikes 6:15 a.m., they get the first taste of what lies ahead at the Metropolitan Police Department Academy. "Quit freaking looking around!" officer Dean Leslie barks as he emerges from the academy gate. As the newspaper describes it, recruits stand in various states of disarray and officers circle them like a pack of wolves stalking prey. They lurk on the fringes of the room, scanning for a sign of weakness -- an unbuttoned shirt pocket, an unnecessary twitch, a wandering eye -- then pounce.
The recruits learn under a revised academy curriculum dubbed "Cop 101." The program was overhauled in 2007 when the department was hiring 600 new officers under a sales tax initiative. Previously, there were several classes a year, each with 100 to 120 recruits. Because of their size, the classes were heavy on lectures. Now, the number is down to 45 recruits. The smaller classes make it easier for recruits to learn and harder for them to hide their shortcomings. The curriculum focuses on the basic tasks of a patrol officer. No more learning about blood spatter patterns and advanced topics no beat cop has to worry about. Classes are more hands-on, with more practical learning scenarios. Under the old program, 19 percent of recruits dropped out of the academy, and 17 percent didn't finish field training. Now, the academy attrition rate spiked to 31 percent, while all but 8 percent of the new officers made it through field training.
Read full entry »Senior Associate
Pew Center on the States
Florida
Read full entry »Portland, Ore., police should consider further restraints on when officers can use the Taser stun gun to stop a threat, and the department should make clear in its written policy that officers should fire a minimum number of stun cycles against a suspect, according to a city audit reported by the Oregonian. A review of 50 random Portland police firings of the Taser in 2009 showed they were mostly effective in resolving incidents, although police fired multiple cycles in about one-fifth of those cases. Officers often used more than one Taser cycle to gain a suspect's compliance; they used four or more cycles in slightly more than 20 percent of the cases examined.
City Auditor LaVonne Griffin-Valade had the Audit Services Division conduct the review to determine how the bureau's policies compare with national models and if officers are following directives that are in place. Tasers are considered a less lethal weapon, designed to temporarily incapacitate or restrain a person when lethal force is not appropriate. In 2005, the bureau issued Tasers to all of its officers. Currently, Portland police are authorized to use a Taser when a person engages in or threatens physical resistance. Portland's policy is more permissive than model guidelines in that it allows Taser use when the subject shows only the intent to resist police and that it doesn't require medical response for each use.
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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 20th 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.
Read full entry »The cost of retirement benefits for Los Angeles city employees will grow by $800 million over the next five years, dramatically eroding the amount of money available for public services to taxpayers, reports the city's Times. In a bleak assessment delivered to members of the City Council, City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana said pensions and health benefits for current and future retirees would jump from $1.4 billion next year to at least $2.2 billion in 2015.
Those costs remain a fraction of the city's overall annual budget, which is currently $18.8 billion. But more troubling is the fact that retirement costs are consuming an increasingly large portion of the general fund, which pays for basic services such as parks and public safety. By 2015, nearly 20% of the city's general fund budget is expected to go toward the retirement costs of police officers and firefighters, who now have an average retirement age of 51. The figure was 8% last year. Once civilian employees are factored in, nearly a third of the city's general fund could be consumed by retirement costs by 2015, Santana said.
Read full entry »Some police officers are furious that Detroit Mayor Dave Bing wants to nominate a convicted murderer to serve on a board that metes out discipline to cops and sets department policy, reports the Detroit News. Others argue Raphael B. Johnson, who served 12 years in prison for second-degree murder and is now a motivational speaker, is an inspiration and would be a good fit for the unpaid, four-member Board of Police Commissioners.
Deputy Mayor Saul Green said in a statement, "Raphael Johnson is an example of someone who has made the most of a second opportunity. He can play an important role in strengthening our connection to the community to better address public safety." Johnson, 35, was convicted of murder as a teenager. Bing has said he wants to put Johnson on the panel, but has not formally submitted the nomination to the City Council. Some, including several officers who did not want to be quoted, fearing reprisal from the Mayor's Office, say the nomination plan sends a bad message.
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Use The Crime Report to find out more information about police accountability and civil liberties.
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The U.S. legal system is slowly coming to realize that many underage sex workers are victims of exploitation, not juvenile delinquents.
The King of Prostitution wears a black polyester robe. His kingdom is a windowless, white-painted courtroom in midtown Manhattan, and his subjects are the men, women and children of the night.
On a hot Tuesday afternoon in June, one of those children steps up to the defendant’s table and faces Judge Richard Weinberg. The muscular young woman is just 16, with full, glossy lips, blunt-cut bangs and long black hair. She was picked up on a charge of loitering for prostitution.
Her Legal Aid attorney, who will represent dozens like her before the court today, asks the judge if she can plead to disorderly conduct, and thus receive counseling instead of jail time. The judge agrees, then asks the young woman a series of questions to make sure she understands the consequences of her plea.
“Have you discussed this case with your attorney?” asks Weinberg.
“Yes,” says the girl in a baritone voice that betrays that the gender of her birth is male.
The judge, however, does not blink. He’s seen it all before. In fact, although the rap sheet in front of him and the male voice make it clear the “she” is technically a “he,” Weinberg continues to refer to the defendant using female pronouns out of, he explains later, an effort to inject “a little humanity” into the court proceedings.
Judge Weinberg estimates that he sees 80 percent of the prostitution cases in Manhattan ―–which is why he jokes he’s the “King”―at the Midtown Community Court (MCC), which was established by the Center for Court Innovation in 1993. MCC is one of a growing number of law enforcement initiatives to address underage prostitution in a less punitive, more constructive manner.
Instead of incarcerating kids in the sex trade, Weinberg tends to order counseling. And instead of just handing the child a list of names for providers that’s likely to end up in the trash, MCC offers what Weinberg calls “a full menu” of social services upstairs, including individual and group counseling, job training and drug treatment.
Many criminal justice professionals and jurists like Weinberg are slowly learning how to help these kids. But in an era of budget cuts, getting police and legislators to see these teens as the victims of exploitation they often are remains an uphill battle.
It begins with a change in the words used to define them.
Innocence Lost
In the age of “Taxi Driver,” they were called teen hookers or child prostitutes: girls and boys who got paid for sex. But in the past decade, spurred by increased awareness of their manipulation by adult pimps, experts and advocates have begun casting about for a label that implies some level of victimhood.
The new terms don’t exactly roll off the tongue. Two of the most popular are “domestic minor sex trafficking victim” and “commercially sexually exploited child,” both of which are mouthfuls. The most succinct is “prostituted minor.”
And that is where the battle begins.
In 2005, the Washington State-based advocacy group Shared Hope International received a grant from the U.S. State Department to look at sex trafficking in the U.S. What they found, according to Senior Director Samantha Vardaman, was that, contrary to popular belief, “most of the victims of sex trafficking in the U.S. were domestic minors.” Armed with this sex-trafficking definition, Shared Hope went to the Department of Justice (DOJ) the following year and asked for money to do another study, this time looking at how law enforcement was serving this population and what services were available.
The new study found that in the 10 major metropolitan areas surveyed, the DOJ-funded Human Trafficking Task Forces—which, according to Vardaman, were initially conceived as a way to deal with trafficking of foreign victims to the U.S.—generally weren’t aware they were supposed to be focusing on domestic sex trafficking at all. This realization led the group to its next project: law enforcement education.
“We needed law enforcement to make a connection between a child being prostituted and traffickers, and they hadn’t done that before,” says Vardaman. Using the DOJ grant money, the group has trained more than 10,000 law enforcement personnel around the country since 2007 on how to identify and treat prostituted minors.
The results, says Vardaman, have been inspiring.
“Law enforcement has been very supportive,” she says. “They want to be on the side of right.”
But proper training is key. Anecdotal information suggests that beat cops simply don’t think about minors involved in prostitution as victims of trafficking. Sonia Ossorio, Executive Director of NOW-NYC, a women’s advocacy group, encourages volunteers to “ask a cop” in their neighborhood about the state’s 2008 Safe Harbor for Exploited Children Act, which redefined all sex workers under 16 as trafficking victims.
“What we’ve found is that they can’t describe it,” says Ossorio. “One New York City cop told a volunteer, ‘That happens in New Jersey, not New York.’” Another, says Ossorio, described the law as pertaining to assaults on traffic cops.
Another problem is the lack of reliable data on what New York City Legal Aid attorney Katherine Mullen calls this “lost” population.
Without permanent homes and often under the thumb of pimps or other exploiters, underage sex workers aren’t exactly easy to study. Law enforcement records don’t help. In 2006, Kimberly Mitchell and two colleagues from the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center began a nationwide study of juvenile prostitution cases. The researchers surveyed just over 2,500 law enforcement agencies throughout the country, asking for data on the number of juvenile prostitution arrests in 2005, the last year for which data was available. The results were disappointing.
“Record keeping was all over the place,” says Mitchell. Many agencies did not even have filing systems that allowed them to distinguish between underage and adult prostitution arrests in their data. Advocates and academics estimate there are between 100,000 and 300,000 juveniles involved in sex work at any given time in the U.S. But according to the New Hampshire study, “no scientifically credible estimate of the overall number of juveniles involved in prostitution yet exist.”
There are, however, some things we do know.
According to a 2009 report on prostituted minors in Las Vegas, 50 reported being physically abused at home, 41 percent reported sexual abuse, and 53 percent said they had been the victim of a sexual assault. The 2005 data that UNH researchers were able to get showed that in 57 percent of the reported cases the teens had a pimp, or “third party exploiter,” benefiting from their sex work and 21 percent had traveled across state lines for prostitution. Also in 2008, Dr. Ric Curtis, chair of the anthropology department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, did a survey of this population in New York City and found that fewer than 10 percent had a parent they could go to if they were in trouble, and 87 percent said they wanted to leave “the life” but for various reasons, chief among them lack of housing and employment, felt they could not.
Jessica Alvarez (not her real name), 25, is a perfect example.
At 18, Jessica was living in New Jersey with several other girls in a house owned by her pimp. She’d fled the Bronx, New York home of her mother, who drank and relied on public assistance to pay for the cramped apartment that housed uncles, nephews and brothers-in-law. At first, she admits, she was charmed by the Mercedes her pimp drove, and the nice clothes he bought for her.
“I’d never even had a dishwasher,” says Jessica, who is now in college and asked not to be identified.
After a few months of selling sex, Jessica says she wanted to leave, but had no idea where to go – or what to do. She was afraid of her pimp, who once punched her in the face for rolling her eyes, and knew her family and friends would be appalled if they learned what she’d been doing.
Beat-Up Kids
“The girls who involved in prostitution are the most beat-up of beat-up kids,” says Alexis Kennedy, a professor of forensic psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who authored the 2008 study. Kennedy, a Canadian, says she thinks the U.S. “is headed for a major paradigm shift” when it comes to underage sex workers.
“In Canada, they don’t arrest anyone under 18 for prostitution,” says Kennedy. “When I realized that these kids were being picked up and dropped into the juvenile detention system I was shocked. If you’re going to do that, you have to have programs for them and few do.”
In New York State, the Safe Harbor Act redefined prostituted minors under 16 as trafficking victims, but created a gray zone for 16 and 17 year olds by granting dual jurisdiction to the criminal and family court. So, if a 16-year-old is lucky enough to be seen in Judge Weinberg’s court, he or she will likely be referred to family court, or offered counseling.
But the same teen arrested in a different New York county, could receive vastly different treatment, likely including incarceration.
Of course, the law only works if police and the courts know the sex worker they’ve picked up is underage, and many prostituted minors lie about their age, since the punishment for adult prostitution related offenses is often no more than a few nights in jail. Without identification or fingerprints on file, the system may never know that the 20-year-old they just slapped with a criminal offense was actually 15-year-old trafficking victim.
But remand to family court is no panacea. According to New York City Legal Aid attorney Katherine Mullen, even though family court sees only a “miniscule” number of actual prostitution cases, hundreds of New York kids are detained in juvenile facilities each year because of “suspicion” of prostitution.
“It can be total innuendo,” says Mullen, who says she has one 14-year-old client who has been incarcerated for two months on a shoplifting charge because the judge suspects she is involved in prostitution. “The judges are still under the assumption if you’re locked up you’re safe [from your pimp], which is technically true. If you locked up a domestic violence victim she’d be safe too, but eventually she’s going to get out and you’ve done a lot of damage.”
But according to Mullen, if a child is the subject of a delinquency case—whether it be shoplifting, false impersonation or lying to a police officer, all charges Mullen says are common for young people involved in prostitution—group homes and social service agencies can exercise “discretion” about whether or not they want to work with them.
And when there is no place for the prostituted minor to go, she goes to detention – unless she gets lucky and falls into the hands of one of the country’s few non-profits devoted solely to helping prostituted minors.
In New York City, a group called Girls Education and Mentoring Services (GEMS) does just that. Spokeswoman Muhammida El-Muhajir says the 12-year-old group “wasn’t always so welcome” in the city’s court system. GEMS, a program run by women who have survived prostitution, has counselors at family and criminal courts throughout the city waiting to interview and assist girls whom the court suspects may be involved in prostitution. The group has 15 safe beds, which is a drop in the bucket when you consider that John Jay Professor Curtis estimates there are at least 3,500 minors involved in prostitution in the city.
Looking Forward
In the nearly two years since New York’s Safe Harbor Act passed, Illinois, Washington and Connecticut have all approved similar laws. And last week in Texas, the State Supreme Court ruled that no child under the age of consent can be charged with prostitution.
“Every state law that’s passed is getting better and better, and clearer and clearer,” says Mullen.
But even the best law is limp without money to assure compliance. Safe Harbor, which only went into effect in April 2010, called for law enforcement training on dealing with prostituted minors, but according to Mullen, the state’s budget crisis has kept that money from being appropriated. And although the state estimated earlier this year that it would cost $10 million to effectively implement Safe Harbor, the current budget only sets aside $3 million.
Without these services, prostituted minors are likely to continue in this dangerous life. According to Vardaman, 70 percent to 80 percent of adult prostitutes began selling sex as youth.
Nobody knows this better than Jessica Alvarez, who escaped her pimp and returned home to New York only to find herself selling sex on her own.
“I was so confused,” says Alvarez. “I was feeling like it’s night and I wanna get dressed up and go out on the streets. I felt embarrassed and disgusting, but I didn’t know how to make my own choices. I didn’t know how to be normal.”
It wasn’t until she was 23 and happened upon the screening of the film “Very Young Girls,” produced by GEMS, that she realized there were other people out there who’d been through what she had―and that with some guidance, she could get her life back.
“Now I know I was taken advantage of,” says Alvarez, who is finishing a B.A. in psychology and plans to get a Masters’ in social work. “And I know I have so much more to offer. I can empower other girls. They see me and say, ‘You have your own apartment? You go to school?’ It gives them hope.”
Julia Dahl is a contributing editor of The Crime Report
Photo by chuckTM via Flickr.
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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.
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Use The Crime Report to find out more information about police shootings.
Read full entry »President
National Judicial College
Nevada
dressel@judges.org
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School of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Wisconsin
Baughman@wisc.edu; jbuechne@wisc.edu
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Grant Sawyer Institute
University of Nevada
Reno, Nevada
JTR@unr.edu
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Grant Sawyer Institute
University of Nevada-Reno
Nevada
mleone@unr.edu
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