NYPD police officers accuse the department of instituting an arrest quota system.
Former New York police department officer Adhyl Polanco, loves the NYPD. Or he did until he ran afoul of a body he describes as ever more consumed with writing nuisance tickets, executing dubious stop-and-frisks and arrests, and manipulating crime reports.
It’s also a department, he discovered, that squashes any hint of dissent. Officer Polanco said his supervisors in the 41st Precinct in the Bronx instructed him to slap handcuffs on teenagers guilty of nothing more than a boisterous walk to school. They told him to change reports of felony burglaries and attempted murder to far less serious charges of trespass and reckless endangerment.
In 2009, he detailed his complaints in a long letter to Internal Affairs. He had tape-recorded several of these incidents. Many months later, the department filed charges against him — for filing false arrest papers.
“They teach us to lie about stopping people. They teach us to lie about tickets, and ruin lives,” said Officer Polanco, who after about a decade on the force is suspended with pay. “I’ve never been a disciplinary problem. The only problem came when I decided to open my mouth.”
This, too, is Mr. Kelly’s police force, a department that can claim many victories but is consumed by a single imperative: crime and homicide rates must keep falling. Question this and top police officials offer a catchall answer: Do you want New York City to return to the bad old days?
There’s no definitive proof that top officials systematically manipulate crime data and set arrest quotas. But officers have stepped forward in recent years to talk of such practices in widely scattered precincts: Adrian Schoolcraft in the 81st in Brooklyn, and Chris Bienz in Queens. All of them, along with Officer Polanco, spoke first to Graham Rayman of The Village Voice and Jim Hoffer of the local ABC affiliate. Two officers from Brooklyn detailed near-identical complaints for me recently, although they requested anonymity. The department has said repeatedly that it is examining the many accusations of manipulation of crime data, though an internal report vindicated Officer Schoolcraft.
Officer Polanco, who was suspended more than two years ago, and five former officers gathered last week in Greenwich Village at a forum organized by the Police Reform Organizing Project. They talked not of petty grievances but, with passionate and pained words, of good police practices trampled.
“Make no mistake: There are quotas, and that is illegal,” a former New York City police captain, John A. Eterno, told the audience. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/08/nyregion/no-room-for-dissent-in-a-police-department-consumed-by-the-numbers.html?_r=3&ref=nyregion
Cracking the ‘Blue Wall of Silence’ in the NYPD.
Adhyl Polanco became a police officer to make a difference on the tough New York City streets of his youth. But he discovered the job was more about accumulating summons statistics and frisking teenagers.
Polanco was among a group of former and serving New York City cops who have broken the traditional law enforcement code of silence with scathing criticism of their city’s policing strategies in minority communities.
On May 3, six former New York City Police Department (NYPD) detectives, captains and sergeants (and Polanco, who is currently suspended with pay) gave personal accounts of being asked to meet “productivity goals” or downgrade crimes.
The pressure to produce ever-increasing arrests encourages a “cuff-first, exercise-discretion-later” attitude in the nation’s largest police force, the officers said at the panel, organized by the non-profit Police Reform Organizing Project (PROP), a group that advocates against what it calls prejudiced practices in the NYPD.
The cops argued that the demand for so-called “stop and frisks” — there were nearly 700,000 in New York City in 2011, compared to less than 100,000 in 2002 — has caused commanders to pressure their officers to harass the primarily black and Latino residents of the city’s high crime areas.
Polanco said he was suspended after he revealed orders to target youths on their way home from school in a 2009 interview with ABC News.
“Not everybody who lives in the hood is a criminal, and this needs to be said very loud to Commissioner (Raymond) Kelly,” Polanco said. “However they call the productivity goal, it’s there and it’s harmful to the community.”
John Eterno, a former NYPD captain who is now a professor of criminal justice at Molloy College, said he defended the police department in 1999, when it was hit with a class-action lawsuit alleging that stop and frisks involved racial profiling.
However, he has since soured on the practice.
Eterno’s recently published book, The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation, explores how the NYPD’s use of Compstat — a crime statistics database — has affected the reporting and analysis of crime.
“Initially I was very positive about stop and frisk and I still think it’s a good thing, if it’s not abused,” Eterno said. “However, today I am very confident, based on my research (and) on the interviews, that this practice is being abused by the New York City Police Department.”
Stop and frisk statistics expose New York’s “hypocrisy,” Eterno added, noting that while Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg insist that crime is drastically down compared to a decade ago, “how the hell can you have 700,000 suspects and say crime is down 80 percent?”
Read more:
http://www.thecrimereport.org/news/inside-criminal-justice/2012-05-cracking-the-blue-wall-of-silence
Scrutiny of Seattle police dep't. assistant chief exposes rift within dep't.
The King County Prosecutor's Office said Tuesday it will not file criminal charges against Seattle Assistant Police Chief Mike Sanford after reviewing the result of a criminal investigation into allegations of official misconduct. But Police Chief John Diaz said the department's Office of Professional Accountability will open an investigation into the allegations.
An assistant Seattle police chief was cleared by King County prosecutors Tuesday of criminal misconduct allegations that grew out of his handling of a traffic accident involving his daughter, donations he solicited for a charity and preparations for a promotion exam for prospective sergeants.
But the assistant chief, Mike Sanford, now will face an internal investigation and possible outside review by the city's ethics board, even as the department went to great lengths Tuesday to cast his actions as proper.
The case also has exposed deep rifts and finger-pointing within the department, at a time when it has come under intense scrutiny over December findings by the U.S. Justice Department that officers regularly use excessive force.
Sanford, 51, who commands the Patrol Operations Bureau and oversees five police precincts, is leading the department's response to the federal civil-rights investigation, devising a detailed plan to address the Justice Department's concerns as the city and federal attorneys negotiate a settlement.
The State Patrol, which conducted the investigation of Sanford at the request of federal prosecutors, submitted its report to the King County Prosecutor's Office on Thursday.
Shortly after a patrol spokesman confirmed the investigation Tuesday, the Prosecutor's Office announced that, after reviewing results of the inquiry, it would not file a charge of official misconduct, a gross misdemeanor.
Washington State Patrol criminal investigation report:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABPub/2012/05/08/2018167756.pdf
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2018165385_chiefprobe09m.html
Sheriff Joe Arpaio is sued by Justice Department.
Washington, DC — The Justice Department has sued Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona, asking a federal court to prevent the brazen and outspoken lawman from racially profiling Latinos, abusing them in his jails and retaliating against his critics.
"The police are supposed to protect and support our community, not divide them," said Assistant Atty. Gen. Thomas E. Perez, head of the Justice Department's civil rights division. "This is an abuse of power case involving a sheriff and a sheriff's office that has ignored the Constitution."
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Phoenix, alleges that Arpaio's Maricopa County department engages in a "pattern of unconstitutional conduct" against Latinos, especially immigrants.
Justice Department officials in Washington are asking the court to name an independent monitor to oversee the sheriff's office, develop reform policies to better staff the jails and patrol the county, and possibly find Arpaio and other top sheriff's officials in contempt of court if they do not make changes in a community whose Latino population has grown by 47% over the last decade.
A separate Justice Department investigation is reviewing allegations of criminal corruption in the sheriff's office.
The civil lawsuit Thursday describes a pervasive attitude that demeans Latinos and a sheriff who rules Maricopa County by blunt intimidation.
The suit alleges that his attitude has spread through the ranks, where jail employees have dismissed Latino inmates as "wetbacks," "Mexican bitches" and "stupid Mexicans," and sheriff's supervisors circulated an email depicting a photograph of a Chihuahua dog dressed in swimwear. "A rare photo of a Mexican Navy Seal," said the caption.
The lawsuit follows a series of Justice Department enforcement actions against other police departments accused of overlooking or ignoring civil rights, including those in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Portland, Ore., and Seattle.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-justice-sheriff-20120511,0,158798.story
Sheriff Joe Arpaio allegedly not only harrassed Latinos but ignored crime.
Before the United States Supreme Court issues its ruling in Arizona v. United States, the justices should take a few minutes to read the Justice Department's new civil rights complaint filed Thursday against Maricopa County and its notorious sheriff, Joe Arpaio. In fact, there ought to be a constitutional requirement that the justices do so before they finally tell us what they think about the core provisions of Arizona's anti-immigrant statute, SB 1070.
The allegations in the federal document are appalling -- and it's hard to get through them without at least thinking about what the enforcement of SB 1070 might be like if the Court permits the state to expand its power to arrest its resident Latino population. What is the value of Arizona's in-court assurances that it will respect the constitutional rights of these people when the federal government itself is alleging such risible proof of how bad things are today?
Read more:http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/05/sheriff-joe-arpaio-allegedly-not-only-harrassed-latinos-but-ignored-crime/257033/
DOJ's civil rights complaint:http://www.justice.gov/iso/opa/resources/512012510134311376158.pdf
New York police release data showing rise in number of stops on streets.
Police officers stopped people on New York City’s streets more than 200,000 times during the first three months of 2012, putting the Bloomberg administration on course to shatter a record set last year for the highest annual tally of street stops.
Data on the 203,500 street stops from January through March — up from 183,326 during the same quarter a year earlier — was sent to the City Council from 1 Police Plaza late on Friday under a legal requirement spawned by public outrage over the 1999 fatal police shooting in the Bronx of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed black street peddler.
On Saturday, the department disclosed the information to reporters and credited the controversial topic known as “Stop, Question, Frisk” as one of several policies of engagement whose effectiveness was vindicated by a decline in homicides in New York.
So far this year, 129 people have been murdered in New York through Friday, the 132nd day of the year, a number that put the city on track for a new low in annual homicides. The 471 murders logged by the Police Department in 2009 was the lowest annual tally for any previous 12-month period since reliable numbers were kept in the early 1960s.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/nyregion/new-york-police-data-shows-increase-in-stop-and-frisks.html
Tale of Two Cities: NYPD's racist arrests create class war in NY.
While privately possessing pot has been decriminalized for 35 years in New York, marijuana “in public view” -- burning or held visibly -- is an arrestable, finger-printable crime. What’s worse is that investigations by various news sources and academics alike have revealed that many of these kids deserve a much lesser charge. During stop-and-frisks, researchers found, police often reach their hands into the pockets or bags of suspects. Sometimes they find marijuana, and while the charge should be a decriminalized possession, police charge suspects with the more serious offense of marijuana “in public view,” even though police had to search them to find it. Stop-and-frisk has increased by 600 percent since Bloomberg’s first year in office.
Commissioner Kelly inadvertently admitted that police were making illegal marijuana arrests this fall, when he sent an internal memo to officers telling them to follow the law, and only arrest people for marijuana “in public view” if officers did not engage in action to put it there. But Kelly’s memo resulted in little change. Marijuana arrests dropped only 13 percent, and 2011 still saw more marijuana arrests than 2010. Last year, in fact, held the record for New York City’s second highest marijuana arrests in history. The pot arrest crusade cost New Yorkers an astounding $75 million.
“Safety should not come at the expense of our constitutional rights,” said City Councilwoman Debi Rose, “You should not designate young African Americans and Latinos ‘suspects.’” Rose said the NYPD has essentially declared a class war.
“We can no longer accept the price we are paying for a racially biased policing system,” said Kassandra Frederique, policy coordinator at the Drug Policy Alliance. “We can no longer allow our tax dollars to be used to criminalize young people of color -- there are better ways to teach our young people to not use marijuana. Today we are demanding that our elected officials fight for a united New York. Telling public officials that their silence speaks volumes and so do our votes. Let’s all work towards one New York where we are all treated with respect.”
Harry Levine, a Queens sociologist responsible for much of the data on racist policing, told AlterNet, “Roughly half of all stops result in frisks, and most of them require a full search,” adding that “The most shocking thing is how routinely police put their hands in people’s pockets -- the amount of blatantly unconstitutional, illegal searches of people’s clothing and possessions.”
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/155405/tale_of_two_cities%3A_nypd%27s_racist_arrests_create_class_war_in_new_york/