The Police Game

Scott Glover and Matt Lait report in today's LOS ANGELES TIMES that one Los Angeles Sheriffs Department (LASD) supervisor, Lt. James Tatreau, organized "games" in which deputies were urged to compete to see who could make the most arrests in a day.

The reason Tatreau said he instituted the games were, one, "there are good, hardworking deputies and there are the lazy guys [and] he was trying to encourage the less motivated deputies to get more involved in proactive police work."

This unwittingly provides information to the rest of the world that LASD may not have wanted disclosed. Civil rights activists, and victims of false arrest, have long recognized that there is pressure on law enforcement officers to make arrests, which naturally leads to false arrests. If they make fewer arrests, they are viewed as not doing their job.

That's not true, of course. An officer who investigates, finds no basis for an arrest, and refrains from arresting is doing his or her job. But law enforcement agencies don't all see it that way. They like officers who make lots of arrests.

Tellingly, despite the game, the number of arrests didn't go up. Apparently the law-abiding officers didn't give a rat's ass about Lt. Tatreau's "game." But we should. Because police all over the country play that game every day. That's how it works.

Texting Out The 4th Amendment

Suzanne Smalley writes in The Boston Globe today that Boston Police are hoping to boost anonymous crime accusations by inviting tipsters to text their tips. ("Crime solvers tap into texting - Police hope to get aid from young.")

The police claim that the purpose of this innovation is to combat a "Stop Snitchin' ethos" among young people in the inner city.

Some might think that the way to combat a "Stop Snitchin' ethos" is to have a criminal law enforcement system of police, prosecutors, and judges that people in the inner city trust and respect, rather than hate and fear.

Boston has a better idea. Use text messaging from cell phones. Apparently the reason why a "Stop Snitchin' ethos" would fail to discourage texted tips - even though it stops the same kids from using the same cell phones to make their crime reports in the form of spoken words - is that the texted tips would be even more anonymous. A 911 voice call is taped, and recorded voices are identifiable.

The problem is bogus tips, of course. A tip, bogus or not, has achieved nearly the authority in our country of a search or arrest warrant signed by a judge. So somebody who for any reason would like to see you busted can send an armed paramilitary force your way with a phone call. There are guidelines that supposedly limit the power of the police to break into your home or prone you out on the street on the basis of an anonymous tip, but they only come up if the tipster doesn't happen to know the minimums they have to satisfy; some lawyer is willing to raise the guidelines as an issue in a courtroom; and some judge thinks the lawyer "whining" about "technicalities" is worth paying attention to. Meanwhile, the police have already come and gone, perhaps taking a family member with them, perhaps leaving some teeth on the floor.

That's the way it works. And in Boston, it's going to start working that way a lot better, thanks to creative use of modern technology.