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.

California's Big Secret

Matt Lait and Scott Glover follow up in today's LA TIMES ("Privacy risk to police unclear") on the failure of a bill (SB 1019) in the California state legislature which would have reopened to public view administrative hearings on officer misconduct. The hearings have been closed since a recent California Supreme Court decision.

Lait and Glover tracked down legislators who justified their votes on the grounds that making the hearings public -- as they had been for decades -- would put officers' lives at risk. The TIMES asked for examples of officers who had ever been harmed, or even threatened with harm, as a result of the public hearings in the past. Answer: none.

This is because whatever the problem is, it's a new one, which wouldn't be reflected in the prior history of these hearings.

That new problem is the internet. The police union's general counsel provided this questionable, but helpful statement: "Once you have that name, it's easy to locate residences and addresses. ... The example I use is any jerk sitting in a cave in Afghanistan with access to the Internet can download it."

The statement is questionable because finding residential addresses on the internet can't be the problem. If it were, officers wouldn't continue to give out their business cards, identify themselves in court when they testify, wear nameplates on their uniforms, etc. Nor would judges give their names in open court. Or prosecutors. These are ways that a criminal can easily obtain names of people he or she doesn't like in his or her case, without any disciplinary hearing taking place. So the concern is not the officers' home addresses. Those are strictly hidden from the internet.

Yes, the internet is the problem. But not due to an officer safety issue. Here's the problem: "Police union leaders said that trial lawyers and reporters would mine the records to try to undercut the credibility of officers."

That's the problem. Not officer safety. Officer credibility.

Over the last decades, California has gotten into the business of constantly moving a large segment of its population in and out of jails and prisons, over and over. The policy, which the public approves, is to deal with all sorts of societal problems -- poverty, mental disability, substance abuse -- by throwing them into cages. Still homeless? Back to jail. Still addicted? Back to jail. Still bothering the neighbors with your paranoia and delusions? Back to jail.

One defect of this policy is that it creates an ocean of criminal law enforcement litigation for the courts to resolve. The due process protections of the U.S. Bill of Rights create a bottleneck for that ocean to pass through. It's not feasible to respect the rights of the criminally accused to things like probable cause before arrest; or to evidence collected without unlawful searches; or to uncoerced confessions; when you've got such an ocean to take care of. The release valve for that ocean of cases is law enforcement officers' false statements, in police reports and on the witness stand, sometimes referred to as "testilying" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testilying). False statements about why someone was pulled over in the first place; about alleged self-incrimination; about whether someone consented to a search; statements like that. Without those false statements -- which admittedly include false statements against defendants who really are guilty, but also convict the innocent -- the system would break down. The alternative would be to move from a policy of cages, to a policy of treatment, education, counseling. And California isn't ready for that. So its system routinely depends upon the false statements of police.

That system can't work without concealing the records of officers who have been caught lying in the past. As police union officials fear, defense attorneys would be duty-bound to show those records to the jury, and a lot of defendants, defendants who committed the charged conduct, as well as innocent defendants, would escape the cage. Over time, the number of jurors would increase who simply refuse to accept the word of a cop without some independent supporting evidence. And court dockets would become totally unmanageable as more defendants opted for jury trials, because those trials became more winnable.

So California has developed an "honor" system for controlling records of police dishonesty. In order for a criminal defense attorney to see any iota of information from the personnel records of a testifying officer who has been caught lying in the past, the attorney has to make one or more "Pitchess" motions, at the end of which they may obtain incomplete skeletal traces from those personnel records. This procedure typically takes months to complete. And this procedure depends on the police independently deciding, on their "honor," what is, and what is not, appropriate for the judge or the defense attorney to see. Those records are kept by the police, and they only bring into court what they choose to bring, on their "honor."

There's plenty of room for error in this "honor" system. But if the LA TIMES wants to talk to criminal defense attorneys about examples of such errors, it's unlikely any names will be mentioned. It's all a big secret in California, by law.

If the disciplinary proceedings were again made public, then by conducting an internet search, a criminal defense attorney could swiftly check to see whether the police in a particular case had failed to disclose all incidents of an officer's prior dishonesty. Those incidents, given the amount of false statements police are called upon to make, pile up. After five or ten years, too many officers would be of no use to the system, because the jury could be shown that their statements were not reliable. It's impossible to recruit enough new, "clean" officers to make up the difference.

So in California, by defeating this legislation, the system is keeping its officers "clean" by hiding the dirt. 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.

Overcrowding

The LA TIMES reports today, following a review of 2 million jail releases, that Paris Hilton will be serving more time than 80% of those convicted of her same sort of crime - probation violation on a DUI. The article goes on to discuss Sheriff Baca's early release program - which the Hilton case judge specifically barred from application to Hilton, and sent her back to jail in defiance of.

Nothing too astonishing here. People who become judges can find they prefer the exercise of power with a minimum of interference. So when a fellow government official impinges on that power, there will be this kind of conflict.

More interesting is comparison with another headline the same day in the same paper: "City attorney, D.A. wage heated turf war." Two Los Angeles government prosecutors are sniping at each other because, with an election coming up, City Attorney Delgadillo is keeping the juiciest cases for himself, by charging them as misdemeanors (District Attorney Steve Cooley handles felonies).

Both of these stories grow out of the same phenomenon: the vast presence criminal law has come to have in our society. In the years since the Democratic "Great Society" program of funding social welfare and education programs to address our country's ills "failed", we have embarked on a course of throwing every conceivable problem in jail: poverty, mental disability, substance addiction, you name it. Laws that once were enforced only against the most egregious offenders are now routinely applied on a "zero tolerance" basis. The reason? As the turf wars reported today illustrate, crime is power. For municipal officials, crime is like the wind in a schooner's sails. It gets them where they want to go. So the more "crime" they can create, and then "fight", the better, up to a point.

Jail overcrowding can only be resolved by building more and bigger jails, or by reducing the police overcrowding in our personal lives. Which will it be? Where government officials like judges and prosecutors are concerned, crime is power. The end of the Paris Hilton story will be a cry for "reform" in the shape of more, and more colossal, cages for the poor and afflicted. That's how it works.

Baca ordered to report on Hilton's release

The LA TIMES reports today that L.A. County Sheriff Baca has been formally ordered by the County Board of Supervisors to report on why he ordered Paris Hilton released "early."

It's likely he'll formally reiterate his prior explanation: that the judge gave her a too-harsh sentence in the first place, and she had medical problems that the jail couldn't handle.

And a couple days ago, it was reported that a Hilton forebear had previously contributed to Baca's reelection campaign. And there is general suspicion that Baca (unlike the rest of us!) treats celebrities differently.

But I'm thinking about the Boston Strangler. Albert DeSalvo was convicted in the early sixties of sexually assaulting and strangling more than a dozen women in their homes, in a highly-publicized trial, but sentenced to imprisonment in the state's asylum for the criminally-insane - Bridgewater State Mental Hospital - following a brilliant defense by F. Lee Bailey. You can imagine how careful they were not to let The Boston Strangler out.

Nevertheless, he escaped a few months later - and then turned himself in! The escape, DeSalvo explained, was to draw public attention to the hideous conditions at the mental hospital. It worked. Big scandal.

The conditions in the L.A. County Jails are unspeakable. The system routinely relies on them to obtain confessions for defendants in criminal cases. The deal is, confess today, whether you did it or not, and you'll be out on probation tonight, or at least transferred to state prison. Of those who haven't spent the night there, only a defense attorney who has discussed these options with a trembling defendant while the stench coming through the bars makes your eyes water can understand.

This is not something the chief jailer wants somebody like Paris Hilton talking about, because people would listen to her. And they certainly don't want her dying behind bars, as so many inmates with obvious medical needs do. So they let her out.

That's how it works.

208 Arrested at Puerto Rican Day Parade

June 12, 2007 NEW YORK TIMES: “208 Arrested at Puerto Rican Day Parade, a Steep Increase”

I was there. I was trying out my skate skills. I want to go back to skating now I’ve moved back to New York City, and roller-skate the way I used to 20 years ago. So I went to Central Park and skated around, unintentionally running into the huge crowds and heavy police presence on the roadway.

The police claim the massive arrests this year were because of the Latin Kings, a Puerto Rican “street gang.” They didn’t have permission to march in the Puerto Rican Day Parade, and were supposedly attending anyway. So lots of people got busted.

Legal Aid lawyer Edward McCarthy is quoted in the NY TIMES on how the arresting was done. “People said they were being told by the police that they needed this group to turn the corner; then when they obeyed, the police were waiting around the corner.” Typical. Use compliance to trap the innocent. A number of non-gangmember types, committing no crimes, were reportedly “swept up with the crowd,” arrested, booked, arraigned, released.

Why is this happening? What purpose does it serve? People of color are processed, branded – for life. For the rest of their lives they will have a criminal record, and they will be in a national “gang database” as “gang-affiliated.” That makes them second-class citizens. Easier for the criminal law enforcement system to handle.

The charges will be dropped, lawsuits will be filed, civil rights lawyers will win a cash settlement for their clients, new rules will be written. But there’s really no need for any “new rules.” Everybody knows the 4^th Amendment prohibits this stuff. And as the immigration rights police riot in Los Angeles showed, the rules are sometimes little more than suggestions to be disobeyed at will. And our government is paying these people court awards with tax money – their money.

And the “new” rules will not include, and the courts will not order, the removal of their names from the “gang database.” That’s how it works.