Recently in Policing Category

Abolish the Police?

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Some ideas of the soft-on-crime crowd are simply misguided, but some are so bizarre as to make one question their sanity. Christopher Rufo has this article in the City Journal, with the above title, on one of the latter variety.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr has this op-ed, with the above title, in the New York Post.

Serving as a cop in America is harder than ever -- and it comes down to respect. A deficit of respect for the men and women in blue who daily put their lives on the line for the rest of us is hurting recruitment and retention and placing communities at risk.

Jason Riley on Bloomberg and Crime

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Jason Riley has this column in the WSJ with the headline/subhead "Bloomberg Grovels Over Stop and Frisk: If black lives matter, New York's former mayor has nothing to apologize for."

He traces the history of the horrific rise and subsequent fall of crime rates from the 1960s through recent years.

Minority communities bore the brunt of the crime wave and vocally criticized what they considered inadequate law enforcement. In 1967, the Harlem-based Amsterdam News editorialized that the city "can't get rid of crime by ignoring or compromising with it" and called for "restoring the legitimate, unbiased use of firearms by our police." The local chapter of the NAACP said, "It is not police brutality that makes people afraid to walk the streets at night" and demanded an end to "the reign of criminal terror in Harlem." In a 1968 report, [Vincent] Cannato writes, the civil-rights organization asked for "greater police protection in Harlem, harsher criminal penalties for murderers and drug dealers, and 'vigorous' enforcement of the city's anti-vagrancy laws."

Bloomberg's Apology

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Rafael Mangual has this article in the City Journal regarding almost-candidate Michael Bloomberg following the lead of candidate Joe Biden and apologizing for past correct positions on criminal justice.

Bloomberg's apology (again, like Biden's) ignores the role that proactive policing played in driving down crime. By exercising their authority to initiate contacts with citizens--in some cases, by legally detaining, questioning, and, yes, frisking those whom they reasonably believed to be involved in crimes and armed--NYPD officers significantly deterred crime in the city's most troubled precincts (which had large minority populations). This was the finding of a 2014 study, which addressed an important limitation in the earlier assessments of stop-and-frisk. Those assessments focused on citywide crime numbers, though many of the NYPD's stops were concentrated in high-crime neighborhoods. With a more "microlevel" analysis, the 2014 study found that NYPD stops-and-frisks had significant, albeit "modest," effects on crime.

The Big Lie About Ferguson

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The maxim "if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth"* often serves our opponents well. In the case of the Big Lie about the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, though, it may be unraveling. Candidates' lies about that incident are so clearly contrary to the now-well-known facts that even left-leaning media are calling them out on it. William Saletan reports for Slate:


Last week, in a Democratic presidential debate, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro read a list of black Americans killed by police violence. Alongside Laquan McDonald, Walter Scott, and Eric Garner, Castro named Michael Brown, who was shot dead five years ago in Ferguson, Missouri. Several of the current Democratic candidates have accused the officer who shot Brown of murder. Brown's death was a tragedy, but it wasn't a murder. When Democrats claim it was, and when they refuse to correct that mistake, they cast doubt on their commitment to truth. And they undermine the cause of criminal justice reform.

Discrimination Via Non-Enforcement

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And now, for something completely different.

Most civil rights complaints against law enforcement are complaints that the police did too much in their pursuit of suspects. However, this decision from the NInth Circuit involves a civil complaint by USDoJ against two towns for discriminatory enforcement where most of the complaints are for non-enforcement or, in one case, actively helping a fugitive.
The WaPo's fact-checker column is sometimes biased, but they get it right in their evaluation of the outrageous statements of Senators/candidates Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren that Michael Brown was "murdered" by a police officer in the notorious Ferguson, Missouri incident.

The column recounts the statements of the witnesses found credible by the Justice Department during the Obama Administration, which make it crystal clear that the "hands up" claim was a lie and that Brown attacked Officer Wilson. They award the maximum Four Pinocchios, reserved for "whoppers."

The claim is not merely false. It is one of the most destructive lies in recent history. For a candidate to repeat it is beyond inexcusable.

See also this post on the Eighth Circuit's dismissal of the civil suit filed by Brown's companion, the original perpetrator of the "hands up" lie.

Police Shootings, Crime, and Race

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The Economist, which is certainly no friend of our point of view on criminal justice issues, has this article on a study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

The researchers found that white police officers were no more likely to shoot minority citizens than non-white officers were. If anything, black police were more likely to kill black civilians, because police tend to be drawn from the communities they work in. The best predictor of the race of killed civilians, they found, was the rate of violent crime in the place they lived. In areas with high rates of violent crime by African-Americans, police were more likely to shoot dead a black person. In areas in which white people committed more crimes, police were more likely to shoot white people.
If you really want to reduce police shootings, and for that matter incarceration rates, address the cultural influences that lead too many young people to choose the path of crime.
A divided panel of the Ninth Circuit today decided City of Los Angeles v. Barr, No. 18-55599, the latest round in the battle over federal grants to cities that refuse even the simplest cooperation with efforts to deport criminal aliens. From the majority opinion by Judge Ikuta, joined by Judge Bybee:

Ferguson Civil Case Dismissed

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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, en banc, has reversed an order of the District Court and ordered Dorian Johnson's suit against Officer Darren Wilson, the City of Ferguson, and the former Chief of Police dismissed. Johnson was the companion of Michael Brown in the notorious 2014 incident. Johnson claimed that Brown had his hands up at the time of the shooting. Riots ensued. A subsequent investigation by USDoJ found that Johnson's story was false, and Brown attacked Officer Wilson.

Despite being the cause of such horrific damage, Johnson actually sued, claiming that his Fourth Amendment rights were abridged. Because this case is decided pretrial, Johnson's version of events is assumed to be correct. The court held that even with that assumption, Johnson was never seized within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. He was simply ordered to stop walking down the middle of the street, which is illegal, and move to the sidewalk where pedestrians are supposed to walk.

The case is Johnson v. City of Ferguson, No. 16-1697. CJLF filed an amicus brief in support of the defendants.
Phil Matier reports in the SF Chronicle:

The Home Depot in Oakland is having problems with homelessness and crime, and it's gotten so bad that the hardware chain may shut the store unless the city can curb the thefts and clean up the tent and RV camps that dot the area, City Councilman Noel Gallo said.

California's "Use of force" law

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Both the Sacramento County D.A.'s Office and the California Attorney General's Office announced that neither will pursue charges against two Sacramento police officers who were involved in the 2018 shooting death of Stephon Clark.  Both the Sacramento County D.A. and the Attorney General found that the "officers believed they were in danger when they shot and killed Clark."  The DOJ's report can be found here.

In 2018 and 2019, 62 law enforcement officers were killed by gunfire while in the line of duty.  Officer Natalie Corona just started her career with the Davis (California) Police Department when she was shot and killed by a man who rode up on a bike as she was investigating a minor traffic accident.  She was 22 years old.  Sergeant Steve Hinkle had been with the Sullivan County (Tennessee) Sheriff's Office for 27 years when he was shot and killed as he was conducting a welfare check.  He was 67 years old.  Just a few days ago, Officer Nathan Heidelberg was shot and killed while responding to a residential burglar alarm in Midland, Texas.  He was 28 years old.  Like these three, 59 other men and women were killed by gunfire while carrying out their duty to serve and protect over the last 15 months.

Community Policing, Rightly Understood

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George Kelling, a pioneer of community policing and a long-time friend and advisor to CJLF, has this article in the City Journal trying to clear up some misunderstandings about the "Broken Windows" approach.

Over the last quarter of a century, the United States has seen historic drops in crime--most famously in New York. These gains, once thought impossible, were achieved largely through dramatic innovations in policing, especially the adoption of an approach that stressed order maintenance in communities, data- and intelligence-gathering, and a problem-solving approach to crime and disorder.

In recent years, however, antipolice sentiment has risen in the U.S., sparked in part by a series of tragic, high-profile police-involved killings in major cities but also by the work of critics, mostly on the left but also on the libertarian right, who argue that targeted policing aimed at public disorder is coercive, hostile to community life, and often racist. These critics see such policing as the antithesis to what they call community policing. The arguments that have gained popular currency among police critics have essentially blinded them from seeing that the sort of aggressive policing that they object to can actually be an element of a community-policing model.

The increasingly widespread view that community policing and order-maintenance efforts are at odds represents a fundamental misunderstanding. In reality, the proactive policing that New York first undertook in its subway system under then-transit police chief William J. Bratton in the early 1990s--informed in significant part by Broken Windows theory--was a core element of community policing. Indeed, the very behaviors that residents wanted more heavily policed called for exactly the sort of approach that many modern community-policing advocates now decry.
William McGurn's WSJ weekend interview is with our friend George Kelling. The title is the caption of this post. The subtitle is "Thirty years ago, crime was out of control. Then came 'broken windows' policing. Are politicians forgetting its lessons?" The answer to that question is obvious.

Mr. Kelling says one problem is that his critics often don't understand what broken-windows policing is. Some complain that it makes criminals of young African-American men over minor infractions. Others conflate it with tactical approaches such as "zero tolerance" or "stop and frisk."
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How Low Can They Go?

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With California's Legislature and Governor hell-bent on passing as much pro-criminal, anti-victim, anti-law-abiding-people, anti-law-enforcement legislation as they possibly can, I have begun to wonder if there is any bottom.  Is there any depth below which they will not sink?  Is there any depth below which the voters will wake up and vote the bums out?

Maybe.  The pro-criminal forces recently sneaked a major change in criminal law through the Legislature by tucking it in to a "budget trailer" bill having to do with funding health programs.  With the sloppy wording that has become so common in pro-criminal legislation, the bill would allow any judge to "divert" any criminal, including murderers and rapists, from prosecution merely upon a finding that the defendant has a mental health diagnosis and that it "played a significant role" in the offense.

The state's district attorneys are, naturally, up in arms.  Mental disorder is a broad category, and it gets broader with each edition of the psychiatrists' manual.  We are presently on the DSM-5; if present trends continue we will all be mentally disordered by the DSM-8.  "Significant role" is so broad and vague that it could mean just about anything.

Don't think for a minute that every judge would apply mental health standards with appropriate discretion.  Back in 2005, a federal judge in Connecticut tried to hold up the execution of a notorious serial rapist/murderer because he thought the "diagnosis" of sadism was powerfully mitigating.  See this post.

The outcry is so loud that even Governor Brown may be backing down.  A fix is reported to be in the works to ram through the Legislature in its waning hours.  We'll see.

On another front, the police unions are correctly outraged about a bill that would severely limit the use of deadly force relative to current law and greatly expand the exposure of officers to homicide prosecutions.  We will see if they can get this bill killed.  If not, it will be yet one more reason for anyone seeking a career in law enforcement to leave California and go elsewhere.  And when they are gone, "who ya gonna call?"

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