Chauvin and Floyd: Two Men America Failed

Today, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of three counts of unintentional homicide against George Floyd. That such a tragic event occurred in a city with a black police chief and a black federal Representative indicates racism may not be the most culpable co-conspirator. Already, most Americans have forgotten the other three officers at the scene, only one of whom was white: J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane, and Tou Thao. (Thao was sued in federal court in 2017 for unreasonable force, causing a 25,000 dollars taxpayer-funded settlement.) All officers involved in Floyd's homicide were low-level patrolmen--not detectives, not sergeants, and not lieutenants. After 19 years on the job, Chauvin was doing the same police work as someone hired one week prior. Had I less education, I would say Chauvin was a sh*thead working a sh*t job in a sh*t area. 

Floyd was no role model, either. To minimize prejudice, the jury could not hear Floyd's prior convictions, including a guilty plea for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. Such imposed ignorance was reasonable given the lack of nexus between Floyd's death and his prior conduct, and I highlight Floyd's criminal record to show both men have more in common than one might assume. Chauvin, too, has a record: eighteen complaints, two reprimands. Chauvin is the product of a divorced home; Floyd was raised by a single mother. Chauvin is now divorced; Floyd was never married. Both men attended community colleges, then third-tier public universities. Both were in their mid-forties the day their paths crossed. Incredibly, they once had security jobs at the same nightclub, though no reason to interact, as one worked inside and the other worked outside. ("You had the house Negro and the field Negro.") If Floyd's death was tragic, then so was Chauvin's life: "'Nineteen years on the street is a long time, period,' said former MPD Chief Janeé Harteau. And 19 years in mostly the same place on the same shift is too long.'" Regardless of creed or color, we should be able to agree: no one, given a choice, would want the lives of these two men, which conveys a failure broader and more encompassing than race. 

On the contrary, who doesn't admire Joe Elsby Martin of LMPD or Ferdinand Alcindor, Sr. of NYPD? It was Officer Martin, a white man in segregated Louisville, who introduced Cassius Clay to boxing, and then presumably to the white lawyers who would represent Muhammad Ali. It was Officer Alcindor who fathered and helped raise the boy who would become UCLA graduate, NBA Hall-of-Famer, and author Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Who invented Spock and the Vulcan philosophy of "infinite diversity in infinite combinations"? That would be Gene Roddenberry, former LAPD officer, whose father worked for LAPD. 

Sadly, despite past luminaries, NYPD and LAPD are now recognized as two of America's most corrupt police departments. Multiple DOJ consent decrees, including one mentioned in Christopher Dorner's "manifesto," have been entered against them. As for Louisville Metro PD, it became infamous last year when officers shot and killed a sleeping (and innocent) Breonna Taylor in her bed. How did police departments morph from admiration to contempt on the same timeline that removed de jure segregation while subjecting police to greater oversight? Logically, the only explanation is that segregation, on a fundamental level, never changed, and judicial oversight failed to counter police unions' political influence. 

“You think about the imposition of Jim Crow laws,” [Kirsten] Delegard said, referring to laws and customs in the post-Civil War South that separated black people from white. “It’s not just in the South, it’s everywhere.” -- from MinnPost article by Greta Paul (2019) 

In the 1993-94 school year, less than 1% of Black students in the Minneapolis region attended highly segregated public schools--where 90% or more of the student body was not white, according to an NBC News analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Almost three decades later, in 2018, 25% of the region's Black students were attending such schools. -- NBCNews report (2020)

"Historian and author Richard Rothstein has studied segregation in education and housing in the United States for over 50 years, and in his book, The Color of Law, he shows that our segregated society is not the result of private activity or individual bigotry, but rather is a product of explicit government policies at the local, state, and federal levels..." -- Jeffrey Sachs

Indeed, an online search for "Minneapolis segregation" generates numerous links, each more disconcerting than the last. According to professor Myron Orfield's research, in 2015, low-income black residents in Minneapolis were 10 times more likely as Portland's black residents and over 5 times more likely as Seattle's black residents to live in high-poverty tracts. Read that again: we are referencing differences of 1,000% and 500+%. Oh, that black Representative I mentioned earlier? She's one of eight Minnesotan Representatives, and all seven of her colleagues are white.

America has a segregation problem resulting from the majority's desire to manage slaves after the Civil War. Racism is the effect, not the cause, of policies put in place by real estate agents, lawyers, judges, mayors, and police chiefs in response to free black movement. As long as America talks about race without fixing segregation, there will be other George Floyds and more Derek Chauvins. Both men are playing the same parts their ancestors played, a poor slave and a working slave, neither of whom was ever in control of his destiny. There is more than one tragedy here, but to see it, you must first admit every American is a part of it. 

© Matthew Rafat (April 2021)

Bonus: "Historically, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned Chinese laborers from coming to the United States. Although the act was repealed in 1943, Chinese immigrants were restricted until 1965, when the National Origins Formula was abolished. Japanese Americans were interned in camps during World War II. Ms. Owyoung’s grandmother was not allowed to live outside Chinatown in San Francisco, and when the family moved to Oakland, it was prohibited from buying property in certain areas." -- Christian Science Monitor, by Francine Kiefer (April 20, 2021)

Good Journalist Hunting, Part 3: Criminal Justice

"I am not educated, nor am I an expert in any particular field--but I am sincere, and my sincerity is my credentials." -- Malcolm X 

My Credentials

In the spirit of Brother Malcolm, here are my credentials regarding America's legal system: 

Sanctioned 11,000 USD by Northern District judge Samuel Conti (the party seeking sanctions later declared bankruptcy); 

Sanctioned 1,000 USD by Santa Clara Superior Court judge Socrates Manoukian, who reversed the sanctions verbally at a subsequent appearance once he realized a written order was required;

Flipped off an FBI recruiter at Levi Strauss & Co.'s HQ in San Francisco, California after I criticized the agency and he demanded my name. Fired by Levi's the same day, took a trip around the world shortly thereafter. (Fun fact: the company likes to shorten its name to LS&Co.);

Voluntarily resigned from D.C. Bar in protest against Trump v. Hawaii (2018) and mailed my admission certificates to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor;  

Arrested by police in 2016, sent to jail for several hours, accused of being under a controlled substance, released without charge due to "LACK OF SUF EVID." (Though I have advocated legalization of most drugs, I do not drink alcohol, nor do I smoke.) 

Arrested by police in 2019, sent to jail for several hours, accused of intimidation and obstruction. On the same day I sent trial briefs to the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office, the deputy district attorney said he would dismiss the case. At the next court hearing, the judge granted the prosecutor's request to dismiss my case in the "interests of justice." 

As of December 2020, I remain in good standing with the California State Bar since 2002 and have never had a client submit a complaint against me. 

Not All Government Agencies Believe in Transparency and Public Access

"I had a good working system of paying off policemen. It was here that I learned that vice and crime can only exist, at least the kind and level that I was in, to the degree the police cooperate with it." -- Malcolm X, referring to his pre-Islamic days as a numbers runner, bootlegger, and pimp. 

From Paul Krassner's The Realist, when abortion was illegal throughout America.

When dealing with American government, an honest man learns his experience varies based on which neighborhood he happens to visit, rendering all positive and negative stories equally true, and guaranteeing substantial private sector involvement. In fact, the more the government fails, the more the private sector enters with proposed solutions. Without balance, we shall live in a country with as many technological and regulatory standards as municipalities and also one where national leaders offer increasingly harsher promises of reform and efficiency.

Today, Americans find it fashionable to bash local cops but not the national military, which lacks sense until you realize most of America's GDP is manufactured, shipped, and protected by the military and its virtually unlimited spending--including marketing--whereas police departments cannot run annual deficits. 

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Interview, Playboy Magazine, July 1973

Though most African-Americans do not trust the police, their complaint has to do with competence, i.e., poor training, otherwise known as poor formal education. Subjected to constant examples of abuse of discretion, few Americans realize cops are only one piece of the legal ecosystem and its most easily derided. A landscape prioritizing mobile footage of police officers failing at their jobs while prosecutors and judges enjoy intransparency tilts toward instability. Consequently, the typical American voter has no qualms voting lawyers into political office despite the fact that incompetent police officers cannot exist without corrupt lawyers, and corrupt lawyers cannot exist without indolent judges. (It is worth noting most judges are merely lawyers with more political connections than other lawyers.). 

Part of the problem is that California judges deem themselves masters of their courtrooms and set their own rules, which include banning recording devices. Santa Clara County, California has notices throughout courtrooms citing Nixon v. Warner, 435 U.S. 589 (1978) and Marin Independent v. Municipal Court, 12 Cal.App.4th 1712 (1993) as authorities against transparency. The result? Unwarranted prestige of one governmental branch over another, with disproportionate respect gained from deliberate opaqueness. It is not until we actually look up the aforementioned cases that we realize the extent to which judges have gone to bar public access and thus public scrutiny. Incredibly, the "Nixon" in Nixon v. Warner refers to impeached President Richard Nixon, meaning California's judicial branch is using a criminal executive as protection against public access. As for Marin Independent, the court cited Nixon and used circular reasoning, holding that media can attend and report on judicial proceedings but has no absolute right to record proceedings because courts can set their own rules. Stated more simply, people can't record court proceedings because the king, er, court says so. 

Counterpoint from libertarian Justice William O. Douglas's book, Anatomy of Liberty (1963)

In California, I have civil law experience, but while practicing, had never seen criminal court proceedings other than assisting a colleague with a routine DUI--incidentally, an ample cash cow for local law enforcement when fines are paid as part of a negotiated plea. What I saw when wrongfully arrested would shock any professor, journalist, or academic who has ever praised the American justice system or who believes in robust checks and balances. Despite my legal education, I had no practical knowledge of criminal courts until my two arrests. Lawyers work either on civil or criminal cases, and even the courthouses are different depending on whether a case is criminal or civil.

Relevant Statistics

First, five statistics:

1. "74% of people in American jails have not been convicted of a crime. Sometimes this is because they’re considered a flight risk or danger to society, but the majority of individuals in jail are there because they can’t afford bail." -- Christian Science Monitor, August 3, 2020 

2. "[M]ore than half of Brazil’s prison population is eventually released without a conviction." -- Christian Science Monitor, August 27, 2020 [I include this statistic because astute readers will notice a connection between USA and Brasil, two countries that share disproportionate Catholic legal influence and a non-coincidental history of chattel slavery.] 

3. "One in three U.S. adults has been arrested by age 23. Communities of color; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals; and people with histories of abuse or mental illness are disproportionately affected. As a result, between 70 million and 100 million—or as many as one in three Americans—have some type of criminal record." -- from The Sentencing Project (2015) 

4. "Usually missing from the conversation about mass incarceration, however, is any recognition that imprisoned or detained Americans currently represent barely one-tenth of the total population of felony convicts. As a ballpark estimate, over 20 million Americans in society at large currently have a felony in their past, and this immense population is effectively statistically invisible." -- Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt (2019) 

5. "The countries with the highest estimated pretrial detention populations on an average day are, not surprisingly, those with the largest general populations. The United States heads the list with 487,000, followed by Brazil (190,000), Mexico (98,000)... As a result of these high pretrial detention rates, 10 to 40 percent of the entire incarcerated population is behind bars without a conviction in most countries in the Americas." -- Richard Aborn and Ashley D. Cannon (2013) 

6. "Misdemeanors... [low-level criminal offenses] account for about 80% of all arrests and 80% of state criminal dockets, says Alexandra Natapoff, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine and author of Punishment Without Crime." -- from NPR (2020) 

I had four thoughts when evaluating the above statistics. First, American police possess virtually untrammeled discretion--which means judges, city councils, and unions have failed in their presumed oversight function. Second, it follows from the aforementioned that police unions must have substantial power over city councils as well as judges and prosecutors. Third, prosecutors have little say in day-to-day police work and appear to operate in totally separate spheres than police--despite the teamwork one would assume in their symbiotic relationship. (Using an American football analogy, America's criminal justice system is like a QB attempting passes to a WR that drops the ball 3/4 times and doesn't know the play beforehand.) Fourth, prosecutors and police departments use misdemeanors to justify maintaining or increasing funding. After evaluating the above information and spending allocations, you may decide the military controls America's national government and police unions control local governments while politicians rotate every four years to provide the appearance of choice. The overall picture is more complex.

When anyone is arrested, police have an option to take the person to a holding cell-- typically a county jail--or "cite and release." The former requires fingerprinting, a health questionnaire, a mug shot, and other steps commonly referred to as a "booking." The latter is a written citation sent to the county district attorney's office, which then decides whether to file charges. Only if charges are issued are you required to take further action, including checking in at the local police station. Right away, you can see every single cop, whether rookie or veteran, has the power to make your life easier or harder. 

You may also notice we are dealing with two different government agencies: the police work for a city, whereas the jail and district attorney's office are run by a county. Both answer to separate government boards and sometimes sue each other to establish their required scope of duties, indicating a potentially adversarial relationship. (Imagine the American football game we described in the previous paragraph, and now add separate assistant coaches who don't always get along and who are paid from different sources.) 

Arrest Number One

In my first arrest, the government accused me of taking illegal drugs and arrested me while I was walking. (Again, I do not drink alcohol, nor do I smoke. I am a middling but dedicated former athlete and coach.) After my arrest, I was given a blood test, fingerprinted, questioned by a nurse, offered a Pop Tart, then put into a temporary cell with two other people. (I was also photographed, but I can't remember where in the process this step occurred. It may be that the steps are done based on whomever happens to be in front of a counter rather than in the back.) While I stayed in the cell for several hours, pacing back and forth out of boredom, four to five other people cycled through the same cell, most of them drunk. It dawned on me that even a lowly county jail is an expensive economic ecosystem. My arrest alone bolstered numbers used to justify taxpayer dollars to a lab technician; a nurse; several police officers; the district attorney's office; and private companies selling snacks. 

After my release, my personal items were returned, and I used my mobile phone to book a ride-hailing service back to my residence. Other arrestees pay substantial towing fees because they are unable to move their parked cars in a timely manner. If released, they are returned a key to a car that is often fifteen to twenty miles away, because most homeowners don't want to be anywhere near a jail or prison.

Arrest Number Two

My second arrest was at a sporting event. A drunk fan had the audacity to complain to private security about me, even though he was the one causing problems. Long story short, he was with three other people, I was alone, and I suppose four tickets are worth more than one. Unbeknownst to most patrons, sporting arenas are staffed by private sector workers but at least partly owned by cities. Police departments love professional sports because an insurance policy or the law requires a certain number of officers at events, and strapped local governments view sports as a way to boost officer pay and morale off-budget. In my incident, arena police didn't do any work or independent investigation. They simply carried out the wishes of the low-level private security guard and made an arrest. 

If you've been reading closely, then you've already extracted the unsteady and variable relationship between the following factors: annually balanced budgets; union negotiations; automatic cost of living increases (aka COLA); voter antipathy towards higher taxes; and competing government agencies. Such interplay provides perverse incentives in favor of arrests--especially considering most arrestees do not have enough out-of-pocket damages to justify a lawsuit. In cases where cities have paid substantial sums to arrestees, serious death or physical injury was part of the arrest, such as in NBA star Thabo Sefolosha's case. Seen another way, an arrest that doesn't lead to a conviction or even a charge still requires the same work as a legitimate arrest, and come budget time, no one is penalized for an arrest that doesn't generate a lawsuit and payout. 

After my second arrest, I was taken to the same jail as before and released after several hours. This time, the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office decided to charge me, which meant they issued a warrant. Unfortunately, they issued the warrant (aka notice to appear) to my residence months after the incident and when I was out of the country and thus had no way of checking in. I later discovered the government is not required to personally serve notice of a misdemeanor warrant/charge. I am unsure if the same latitude apples to felonies, but compare such discretion with a civil case: when I file a civil lawsuit, I must effect personal service of the complaint unless I swear to the court I have tried every means of personal service and failed, a process that requires hiring a third party and/or using a specialized database. It doesn't matter if the case is worth 250,000 dollars or 8,000 dollars--I have to effect personal service, which means I have to do everything humanly possible to ensure you receive the complaint in your hands. (Note: in California, restraining orders utilize a less rigorous process than civil complaints, leading to potentially widespread abuse--and more work for police.) If the court later decides I was not forthcoming about my diligence in locating the defendant, the judge can sanction me and/or refer me for disciplinary action, which could result in the loss of my license to practice law. 

Moreover, as a civil lawyer, I cannot sit on a complaint for months as the district attorney did in my case. I am required to serve the complaint within a short period of time and appear at a status conference regularly to tell the court I am actively pursuing the case. If I appear months after I file a complaint and tell a civil court judge that I have done nothing, the judge will likely dismiss the case sua sponte. Suffice to say, I was more than a little stunned at the gap in required diligence: work for an individual or business trying to get money, and you better cross your "i"s and dot your "t"s, or you can't get past the first stage of litigation; work for a government that can imprison you for failing to appear at a police station, and you can jail someone for 11 months without a reasonable person ever receiving or knowing about a warrant. 

Here we may be tempted to judge government more harshly than the private sector, but what we're actually seeing is government exempting itself from rules in order to avoid unnecessary costs or the potential for employee discipline. Since most governments are self-insured, any litigation, whether employee mistreatment or police brutality, impacts innocent taxpayers. In short, when the government "turtles," its shell is designed to protect the innocent. What's the catch? "Turtling" protects taxpayers but destroys the ability to see defects in governance, ensuring long-term decline. On corruption, George Carlin once remarked, "It's a club, and you ain't in it." When threatened, the "club"--any club, really--binds together more tightly, preferring jurisdictional carveouts as defectors sprout like statutory subsections from an original statute. The outsiders, aka the "others," leave because they are ignored or poorly treated, and they leave because the main body of law has failed to institute effective procedures alerting them to dissatisfaction. Even if you don't know Goodhart's Law, you know incentives matter, and incentives drafted in response to creeping corruption require plain eyesight, not rose-colored glasses or blindness. 

Predictably, as voters raise complaints, city councils--staffed mostly by lawyers and de facto union representatives--increase regulation. Yet, because the regulation is like an NFL front office demanding changes to the strange QB to WR scenario discussed earlier, we have the additional obstacle of the blind inserting themselves into a game they do not fully understand. Faced with miscommunication and mixed signals, the QB, the WR, and the coaching staff all form their own clubs to insulate themselves from further regulation. More arrests are made or not made to placate the front office (aka city council), and regulation intended to reform has merely decreased morale: "These arrests are based almost entirely on the word of cops, who say they are incentivized to round up as many 'bodies' as they can." 

Meanwhile, in criminal court, the district attorney runs the show. The judge, being structurally independent, has no pre-trial contact with the police or the accused, and thus relies on the integrity of the district attorney, who in turn depends on the integrity of the police. At the hearing where my charge was dismissed, about thirty other cases were present, and the judge didn't know any facts of my case, not even my arrest date--even though I could have been sent to jail for months. The judge brushed aside my comment that California's de facto one-party state had seemingly produced an outcome where life and liberty are treated with less respect than property and money. (Later, I realized civil courts function better than criminal courts because businesses, especially cost-conscious insurance companies, regularly use civil courts, whereas poor people and government employees regularly use criminal courts. Stated another way, each civil court filing provides hundreds to thousands of dollars for the government as well as the private sector, but each criminal court case is a negative taxpayer cost because criminal courts do not charge the accused fees or costs.) 

When Americans think of respected American judges, they are thinking of appellate courts with limited dockets, not busy trial courts. The United States has a few judges who will be remembered as bucking the tide of totalitarianism, namely Judge James Robertson, Robert Takasugi, Roger L. Gregory, and of course Justice Sonia Sotomayor. None of them are now trial court judges, which means you, an ordinary citizen, could never be heard by them. At the first level of litigation are mostly judges who do not understand much, who specialized in only one area of legal practice, and who are at the mercy of information given to them by lawyers. Were tragedy not certain, one might marvel at the fact that American courts depend on the integrity of lawyers in a country where most people do not trust lawyers and most lawyers do not trust each other. 

Conclusion

As of 2020, I am not actively practicing law, and I've enjoyed not wearing a suit in five-plus years. Abraham Lincoln once said, "Let no young man choosing the law for a calling for a moment yield to the popular belief -- resolve to be honest at all events; and if in your own judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer." When I realized I could not give my clients reasonably predictable outcomes based on the evidence, I resolved to quit practicing law as soon as possible. To the extent Americans cannot find an honest lawyer, judges may realize too late they have relegated American courts to the realm of the rich and the overinsured. 

It is tempting to say the United States should become like India, a country with perhaps an even more complex legal system. After all, post-colonial India excels at technology within a large, multicultural, and diverse land once colonized by the British, and no less a visionary than Jeff Bezos has said, "I want to make a prediction... I predict that the 21st century is going to be the Indian century." Realistically, we should strive to be exactly like ourselves, no better and no worse, and accept that growing pains are a normal part of a young nation's growth. One day, we will realize the foundation of globalization was built on an inherently insecure technological standard, and we will understand our devolution from civilization to fragmented security state. For now, until diplomacy and global cooperation improve, all we can do is hope our lonely betters survive to tell our stories as we stumble along in open darkness. 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (December 2020)

Dedicated to David Simon, creator of The Wire (2002-2008) 

Disclaimer: Nothing herein is legal advice. As of December 2020, I am not accepting new clients. I am writing solely in my capacity as an observer, and your experience with police and/or the criminal system may differ substantially from mine. 

Bonus: Good Journalist Hunting, Part 1 is HERE. Part 2 is HERE. 

Update: I don't mean to imply civil courts are perfect or more conducive to justice than criminal courts. Most civil court motion judges don't read all of the parties' briefs, but their law clerks prepare memorandums for them, which provide summaries of relevant law and facts. Civil court is procedurally intensive and geared towards creating a record of everything, which delays justice but also tends to soften both parties' original demands. In state criminal court, the district attorney functions as the judge's de facto law clerk until trial, blurring the lines between independent judiciary and executive branch (i.e., the district attorney acting on behalf of the state, mayor, and police). Compared to civil cases alleging over 25,000 USD in damages, most criminal cases lack bespoke dispositive motions because the system assumes a trial will take place, even though most civil and criminal cases settle or plead. 

Since lawyers know most cases settle, they are incentivized to overcharge or to allege every possible violation, but with an important difference: if a district attorney overcharges, s/he can usually drop the unnecessary charges before trial without consequences, whereas a civil lawyer, upon opposing counsel's request, must spend hours matching all of the facts and evidence to each element in each claim early in the case. This is another way of saying criminal statutes are extremely broad, whereas civil statutes at least attempt to restrict both parties. At the end of the day, civil lawyers not working for insurance companies have to show their clients results to get paid, and if a civil lawyer files too many claims or motions, at some point, the civil lawyer's own availability or client becomes a check and balance on excessive behavior. 

Finally, some civil lawyers do get default judgments against individuals by publication or by serving the complaint at an old address, but they still have to declare under penalty of perjury that 1) the address they used is the one given to them by a third-party investigator or specialized database (Lexis-Nexis, etc.); and 2) they attempted personal service at known addresses, including work. Any defendant not personally served can also file a straightforward motion to remove a default judgment if plaintiff failed to exercise proper due diligence. 

Update: regarding court transparency, the following opinion from federal Judge Davila in USA vs. Elizabeth Holmes (2021) is useful: 

The United States Supreme Court has held that the right to attend criminal proceedings “is implicit in the guarantees of the First Amendment.” Richmond Newspapers, Inc. v. Virginia, 448 U.S. 555, 556 (1980). The First Amendment right of public access extends to pretrial proceedings as well as documents filed in connection with those proceedings. Associated Press v. U.S. Dist. Court for Cent. Dist. of Cal., 705 F.2d 1143, 1145 (9th Cir. 1983); see also Kamakana v. City & Cty. of Honolulu, 447 F.3d 1172, 1178–79 (9th Cir. 2006) (“Historically, courts have recognized a ‘general right to inspect and copy public records and documents, including judicial records and documents.’” (quoting Nixon v. Warner Commc’ns, Inc., 435 U.S. 589, 597 & n.7 (1978))). Access to judicial records, however, is “not absolute.” Kamakana, 447 F.3d at 1178. The Supreme Court “has made clear that the right to an open trial may give way in certain cases to other rights or interests, such as the defendant’s right to a fair trial or the government’s interest in inhibiting disclosure of sensitive information.” Waller v. Georgia, 467 U.S. 39, 45 (1984).

Civil Liberties? What Do You Have to Hide?

Warning: article at the link below uses snarky language:

http://www.cracked.com/article_18620_6-completely-legal-ways-cops-can-screw-you.html

Oh, the busy populace.

Riots in Pittsburgh

Here is sgtrob88 commenting on a youtube video of police tear-gassing students at the University of Pittsburgh:

I would imagine 75% or more of these kids are liberal, yet going through this will probably not dissuade any of them of the notion that over-sized government is BAD. Like their hippy parents they will continue to allow government to increase in size and power all in the name of "caring for the little guy," while ignoring their own experiences in governmental abuse. While corporations are no saints, government is the one able to beat your *ss and get away with it.

Makes sense to me, except we need to differentiate between government actions that have the power to harm citizens (police, unnecessary laws, etc.) and government actions that can protect the public (public defenders, VA hospitals, etc.). Of course, since few people will agree on which government actions will either harm or protect the public, it seems appropriate to have a bias against broad laws or power of any kind.

Carlos Miller, Police, and the 1st Amendment

Carlos Miller has an interesting blog. If you're into photos, police, and/or the First Amendment, check it out here.

Hat tip to Popehat. Here is "Ken" pontificating below:

I’m grateful to cops, as a group. They do a frequently awful job under frequently abysmal conditions. That job is necessary to our safety. They deserve thanks for that — as do many other groups in our society. But I fall off the “hero” bus when people suggest that I owe individual cops respect no matter how they behave, and that I owe cops an obligation to look the other way when they ignore the rule of law, and that we ought to cut cops a break when they act like bullies any more than we would cut a break to a thug in an alley.

Can I get an "Amen"?

Intelligent Cops Need Not Apply?

I'm not sure I want to be anywhere near New London, CT. Apparently, they reject police officers who are too intelligent:

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_56314.html [link outdated--see below]

A U.S. man has been rejected in his bid to become a police officer for scoring too high on an intelligence test.

Perhaps this doesn't apply to California. California's police unions do very well in salary/pension demands and in court.

Update on January 31, 2012: link above is outdated--try this one: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/09/nyregion/metro-news-briefs-connecticut-judge-rules-that-police-can-bar-high-iq-scores.html

"Judge Peter C. Dorsey of the United States District Court in New Haven agreed that the plaintiff, Robert Jordan, was denied an opportunity to interview for a police job because of his high test scores. But he said that that did not mean Mr. Jordan was a victim of discrimination."  

Hayward Police Settles Harassment Case for $5 million

Hayward Police Department settles harassment case for 5 million dollars:

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12561714

The lawsuit was settled through the city's insurance companies, which are responsible for paying it. City officials said the settlement will have no effect on the city's general fund or income from Measure A, a utility users tax approved in May.

City Attorney Michael Lawson estimated that the city spent about $500,000 on the case since it was brought forward in November 2007.

Casper said the amount of the settlement indicated the insurance companies "recognized the problems the city has historically had with women being treated fairly at the police department. Close to $5 million is not an amount paid unless someone has recognized years of wrongdoing."

Surprisingly, the amount was paid through an insurance company. Many cities are self-insured, but perhaps Hayward was small enough to get an outside insurance policy. Even though the city paid the settlement monies through an insurance company, taxpayers will still suffer (beyond the half a million dollars spent on legal fees). After all, the insurance company will raise the city's insurance rates, and the higher premiums will be paid by taxpayers.

Police Kill 350 People Annually

The SF Chronicle recently had an interesting story about police officers killing others in the line of duty. According to the SF Chronicle, police officers kill 350 people annually and tend to get acquitted of murder charges. Full story here.

In contrast, fifty-seven (57) law enforcement officers were feloniously killed in 2007. See FBI chart here. Another chart indicates that eighty-three (83) officers were accidentally killed in 2007, mainly because of traffic accidents.

Officers appear to die at a rate of 140 per year, while killing 350 people per year. Do law enforcement officer have safer jobs than most people think?

Update: I finally researched my theory about whether police officers have relatively safe jobs. My findings are HERE.

[Note: this post has been edited since its publication.]

Cops and Robbers

In today's SJ Merc (October 27, 2007, page 2B), John Woolfolk talks about police officer pay in San Jose:

Basic pay for a San Jose officer is now $108,167, excluding overtime; with benefits, the total cost comes to $147,614.

Note that the basic salary excludes overtime pay, which can be substantial. The SJ Police Department is now asking for a 4% raise. Each 1% in raises costs San Jose taxpayers 1.9 million dollars each year. If the city is inclined to grant any raise, it should be in the form of a higher salary, which can be more easily tracked than benefits. The costs of increased benefits, such as pensions, are almost impossible to determine until they become due.