Yeah, well, whether at the academy or on the job, if he was “taught” it, that’s going to be a factor in his defense.
There is an old expression that covers, that attitudes are not taught, they are caught. The academy doesn’t teach these kind of techniques, exactly the opposite, and I doubt anyone tells a cop “when doing a takedown on the street, bull rush the guy without identifying yourself and take him down”. Rather, what probably happens is they see other cops do things like this, then they see there is no retribution, so they ‘catch’ the idea it is okay to do this. It goes along with my comments on the thin blue line, that fellow cops, the PBA and the higher ups basically allow this to go on.
That said, if the written rules say this is invalid, then there is absolutely no way that the cop, or those supporting him, can claim he followed procedure or that what he did was justified. Obviously, I think a large part of the fault is with the culture in the department where the higher ups and fellow cops allow this to go on, but sending this cop for further training won’t work, because he already had training that made this kind of tactic illegal. There should be lawsuits against the police department, much as people have sued the Catholic Church, that their written procedures mean nothing and that there has been a classic fail in enforcing those rules, which means that the department is liable for allowing this to go on.
Interesting theory. I wonder if it is correct.
I think it is likely that you are correct, but how can you state it with such certainty? Have you been through the training?
I don’t see the logic in this. If a person has acquired habits that were not endorsed by or included in his or her initial training, there is no reason why retraining would not succeed in erasing them.
In the recent New Yorker piece about Bratton, there is a description of such a retraining, or further training, session attended by officers of a broad range of ranks and level of experience. The idea that a person is incapable of learning new techniques and/or being taught to question old ones is awfully pessimistic, IMHO.
I’m sure you consider yourself to be capable of change and learning.
@consolation:
Given the history of NYC in the past 40 odd years or so, anyone living here has seen incident after incident over that time period, where cops do things like this, and there is an immediate claim that they are going to retrain cops, that they are going to make it better. The police department has paid out a lot of money over the years from cases like this, which is telling as well.
How do I know? I am not a cop, but I have known some over the years, and i also was friends when I lived in NYC with a couple where the husband was a supreme court judge who routinely handled lawsuits involving police department based suits, so I have some insight into what goes on.
“I don’t see the logic in this. If a person has acquired habits that were not endorsed by or included in his or her initial training, there is no reason why retraining would not succeed in erasing them.”
There is a very big reason, and it is the same reason that an area I am more than familiar with, corporate restructuring and quality improvement efforts as a whole, fail. The training tells the cops what to do, how to do it, but that does not change the overall culture. This retraining was like when Ford Motor Company adopted the idiotic slogan “Quality is Job 1”, it doesn’t address the deeper issues, and quite frankly, had no real support from higher ups, that claim sounded wonderful of paper, but it was many years before Ford truly improved its products (and it was in a regime change). This training is nothing new, they have been writing new policies, they have been doing cultural sensitivity training, they have been doing training on procedures and defusing situations, for many years, when Bratton became commissioner the first time, under Giuliani, they instituted all kinds of changes with the ‘community policing’…yet 25 years later, the same kind of thing happened.
Why? Because the same kind of culture is in place, that while things have gotten a lot better from the ‘good old days’ (my favorite character, from the old Barney Miller TV show, lieutenant Dietrich “give me the old days, Barn, when it was knick knack paddywhack, hit them over the head”:)., but the overall culture is that when cops do things like this, that it is covered up, or they say “oh, we need better training”. The training tells you how to use a tool, but unless someone knows they have to use the tool that way, they likely will keep doing what they are doing.
As someone said, to change someone has to want to change, and if the culture doesn’t force someone to change, they often won’t. It isn’t so much that all cops are like this clown, they aren’t, most of the ones I have seen or known are professionals, the problem is that the ones like this can’t or don’t want to change, and there is little retribution if they don’t.
So you agree that people CAN change and have. The problem is that non-compliance and poor behavior needs to be more strictly enforced.
I think Patrick Lynch represents the core problem.
There aren’t significant consequences for poor behavior. The police know that the union will support them, the DA won’t prosecute them and that the prosecutor will botch their cases to the grand jury. Start firing, arresting, prosecuting, and sentencing bad cops and the behaviors will change.
@consolation:
Lynch and the “thin blue line” mentality certainly is. I didn’t say that people shouldn’t change, of course they can, the cops have changed a great deal from 50 years ago, for example. You hit the nail on the head “The problem is that non-compliance and poor behavior needs to be more strictly enforced.”. Exactly, and the problem is if with this cop, for example, they simply fine him and send him for ‘more training’, it is doing eactly that, not enforcing the laws. This cop was trained, had been trained many times, on what constituted reasonable force, yet he basically did something that only the biggest supporters of the cops could claim was reasonable, it would fail the reasonable man test by a big margin. Strict enforcement doesn’t mean "oh, they must of misunderstood’, it means if someone goes over that line like this, then they should have their private parts handed to them and shown the door, at the very least.
I’ll give you something to think about, where I think the problem wasn’t the cops, but training and I didn’t disagree with the grand jury.The Dialo case was a big cause celebre a number of years ago, he was gunned down by cops in the vestibule of his apartment building while he was trying to get his wallet out, someone yelled he was going for a gun, and they opened fire, I think it was 47 shots (Springsteen wrote a song about it).The cops were not exposed, they were behind a cops car and had other cover, so people asked, legitimately, why.
So what happened? This happened in Soundview, in a area loaded with housing projects, poverty, drug dealing and violent crime at the time (in the Bronx).The cops involved were a so called “Street Crimes unit”, which was an undercover operation used in high crime areas, to try and bring down the crime rate. It turned out that all the guys who were on that unit that night were relatively new cops, new to the unit, and they had no supervision from a more experienced officer. What happened was not a big surprise, the cops panicked, and they ended up killing an innocent man. What the grand jury found and I agree with them was that the very fact that inexperienced cops were put into that kind of position by itself was a big part of the problem, that and that there was no experienced supervision in the group, and the cops later on paid off a big settlement, they basically had no choice. The cops were put into a position to which they weren’t ready for, didn’t have supervision, and the fault was with the higher ups (part of the problem was that the street crimes units were being made up hastily, with inexperienced cops, in order to try and stem a surge in violent crime in some areas). You couldn’t blame the cops, they were put into a position to fail.
Contrast that to this case, where you couldn’t say that, the cop knew what his job was, he wasn’t dealing with a violent criminal who was wanted in the first place, and he didn’t follow procedure, the procedures are pretty clear on when force like that can be used, yet he used it. The policy was correct, the cop chose to ignore it, and for that he should be kicked off the force. Not to mention he had other complaints against him for force, it was just this time it was someone relatively famous, and he was caught red handed.
@musicprnt, I read the wikipedia entry on the Diallo shooting, and it does not say they were behind a car, but accosted him on the sidewalk and started to follow him up the steps. (One of them actually fell off the steps during the shooting.) That was my recollection of the incident, also.
Whether or not they were inexperienced I don’t know. Your basic premise, that they panicked, may well be true.
I was reminded of the Sean Bell shooting, too.
In any case, the cop in this case was completely unjustified, and his behavior was ludicrously over the top. His record makes it clear that he has a history of this kind of thing. He should have been retrained and fired if he persisted long since.
@consolation:
They were inexperienced, they were only a year or two on the force, and experts commented on the time that they were surprised they would have someone so inexperienced in that kind of job. From what I recall of what happened, the cops were not in any way threatened, but they panicked, not surprising given the area they were in and what it was like.
Obviously, I agree with you about this cop, there doesn’t seem to be any mitigating factors to make what he did acceptable, and keeping him on the force seems like it would be nothing more than more of the same, thin blue line , cover for my buddy kind of thing. If he he done this to some young black kid in East New York or Brownsville, we would be hearing how the kid resisted arrest or reached for what the cop thought was a weapon, or they would have mysteriously found a report of a violent crime that the kid could potentially match to justify it.
Sad, but true. And he would get off. I agree that with this guy’s record, the chances of him changing are slim. But I presume that there must be some disciplinary process that has to be completed before he could be fired, since we are not talking an offense of the magnitude perpetrated on Abner Louima by that vicious thug, Volpe. (At least he was convicted an jailed. ) Maybe not. If he can just be quickly fired, so much the better.
@consolation:
There are procedures, it won’t happen suddenly, there will be an investigation (while the officer in question will be on desk duty), then there will be an administrative trial to determine if he violated proper guidelines, and they can recommend anything up to and including firing him. The PBA will be representing him, and if they don’t like the decision from the administrative trial, they can appeal it, and also take it into court if they feel it violates the collective bargaining agreement between the police and the PBA.
He also will probably face investigation by the DA’s office, and potentially be probed by a grand jury who could indict him on charges if they feel he was acting outside police procedure. He could also face federal civil rights charges, especially if the DA decides not to bring this to the grand jury and/or the grand jury refuses to indict him.
It will play out over the next months, while I suspect the cops would love nothing more for this to blow over and go away so they can give this guy a slap on the wrist and put him back out there, there has been too much publicity, plus having it be someone somewhat famous is going to keep it in the public eye.
I’ve seen too many cases of police brutality growing up in East NY, Brownsville and Crown Heights to believe that their behavior will change strictly due to the James Blake incident. The cops need to kill an innocent famous person and have the video evidence leak to the public. NYPD is too powerful to force to change without something catastrophic occurring.