Baltimore State Attorney Drops Dozens of Cases: Body Cam Shows Drug-Planting
baltimore.cbslocal.com
baltimore.cbslocal.com
There is no substitute for someone who's intent is to try and get away with things, and someone who's intent is to serve a cause, be of service, and not get away with anything.
So really, we should build a system where the intent of transparency is paramount, not just transparency itself.
Two things immediately come to mind.
1. Super-incentivize snitching. Reward whistle-blowers to the point where it becomes an easy decision. Not only monetary, but with honor and with medals. Make it the new "right thing to do" in public service. Fight corruption. Easy sell.
2. Super-disincentivize ulterior motives and their actions. Treat crimes by officers as far more severe and malicious than of non-officers. And they are. So if a police officer murders a civilian, punishment should be 10x or 100x. Same with stealing a slice of pizza or ignoring a stop sign.
The point isn't that we should punish officers more. The point is we should all raise them to higher standards, and the officers themselves should willingly accept that higher burden of responsibility.
It should be their responsibility to not profile or discriminate based on appearances of anyone or their car. It should be their responsibility to preserve life at all costs, even at a higher risk to themselves.
And this will deter crookedness and incompetence. If an officer cannot do their job, they shouldn't. And if an officer thinks they can get away with anything, they shouldn't. Being a cop or even buying a cop like in the movies should not pose any criminal opportunities.
They did this behind the Iron Curtain. At one point in Romania, 30% of the population were regularly reporting to the Secret Police. Wonder what the percent of false positives were?
If all is well, the system would be open enough that the whistle blower can blow their whistle in the open. And everyone would support the investigation, and the parties on both sides. Eventually truth does need to exist regarding the why and what was reported.
Although, this wouldn't work where:
1. There are still enough bad guys who would punish this person in the locker room.
2. Situations where everyone is breaking the law, but enforcement is always with discretion. Like ebay where most listings violate something but aren't given a look until "someone" reports them. Or like overlooking jaywalking until someone of "interest" starts walking.
There must be other scenarios, but we can be on top of them.
I, with all my good will, can "blow a whistle" on a person I don't like, subconsciously or not. Just because I don't like him. And the defence of whistle blowers is exactly that - a good will.
Look around.. Something's gone completely wrong. Everyone is angry and there is decreasing value placed on kindness and decency. In fact, selfishness is increasingly a virtue. Observe how POTUS behaves. I don't care what side you're on, there is nothing normal or healthy about that level of chaos, narcissim, and mean-spiritedness. Yet, this is the leader of the free world? It's a sad reflection of where we are.
We can set up all the incentives and disincentives we can imagine but, as the saying goes, "you can't legislate morality". Until we deal with that issue, we'll continue to see all manner of its manifestations.
Literally, if you told me that something was being added to our food or water supplies to produce the odd effect that normalizes the madness that's happening, it would be completely plausible.
You have Trump confused with Merkel.
Ironically even the counter-measures we come up with (Law & Order in a thousand variants/ various dreams of a big Swage elsewhere/Migration & New Beginnings elsewhere) only enhance and propel the problem of a tribe switching to a war-economy.
We are obviously in the process of finding various solutions. David Brins Panopticum of everyone. Permanent social records, that will not forget and will not be silent on your crimes, making you a social outcast for genocidre.
Cheap entertainment, that reduces the effect of social self-devaluation of unemployed citizens.
May we out-live this interesting times.
Re: item 1, Baltimore is the birthplace of the "Stop Snitchin'" movement, a heavily distributed and well marketed street campaign defining a dynamic that a wiki entry can't possibly describe accurately. The bigger point is that it had a counter-campaign on the police side which retaliated against it, and that thinking got ingrained in the troops. In other words, officers stick together and no policy change will realistically affect that.
After the Baltimore riots, there was a change on the police side - cultural change, not policy or regulation based one. As a result, homicide rate shot up through the roof and appears to be rising year after year. This behavior is a defensive mechanism and so incredibly tribal - not something you can set through policy, short of replacing 3,000 cops.
To that point, most of Baltimore PD cops DO NOT live in Baltimore. They travel to work from outside. In other words, despite having 3,000 job positions in the city, they couldn't fill them locally so they expanded outward, allowing officers to take cruisers home as a commuting incentive. Think about evaluating that factor - would you want to employ cops who live in your neighborhood, or ones from a neighboring town? Would there be a difference? Then think what would happen if you didn't have a choice.
Re: item 2, you're describing lex talionis, which we as a society abandoned centuries ago. You can't practice treating crimes differently based on who the person is, even if they're cops.
In Baltimore, there are 3,000 cops for 600,000 citizens. Median cop salary is $50k and it's a dangerous and difficult job. Tons of them turn to overtime work to make ends meet and are drained of energy (look up Baltimore Sun overtime database if curious). Meanwhile, the vast poor citizens there have a median income of $30k. That's an indicator of why people turn to crime and its volume. Living in the city is prohibitively expensive (sweet mercy, the property taxes are terrifying - it's no incentive to buy a house there.)
It's really messy.
As much as I want to agree with this statement, I can't help but feel that it's highly problematic in some sense.
When it comes to court cases (IANAL, but this is my understanding), law enforcement officials' testimony is treated with a certain measure of elevated credibility (there's SCOTUS precedent for this, but I can't seem to find the cases). Violation of that trust - as in this case - should be penalized, but I don't know what kind of remedy would be appropriate.
I think the solution wouldn't be to charge robbery twice as hard for cops, but to have an additional charge. Something like 'abuse of federal trusted power' or something like that which would carry its own penalties. This, i think, wouldn't cause the strict separation of penalties that could be problematic, but it would address the problem of people entrusted with federal power abusing it.
But isn't that common practice? Someone with prior convictions will get a harsher sentence.
By that same logic it's conceivable that someone might receive a harsher sentence based on being held to a higher standard.
> It's really messy.
Agreed.
Practically, our juries can, and do.
The "whistle-blowing" there was a tool to socially lift oneself. And "10x punishment" is exactly what makes such lifting possible.
1. Pay for officers should be high without overtime.
2. Stop militarizing everyday law enforcement.
3. Body cams on at all times. Cameras on police cars should be on at all times.
To me, the mere act of wanting the authority to arrest and shoot your peers means you are the last person I want to have that power.
Honestly, I doubt this is true for most values of "many".
I'm a straight white male in a first world country with no criminal record. I have a good job and am a well-behaved citizen. I've lived all over this country and my experiences with the police have been uniformly negative.
Thugs interested in proving to everyone that they're in charge, that's all they are.
and these were guys who, when off-duty, wore t-shirts with aphorisms like
"kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out"
and
"join the Marines, travel to exotic places, meet interesting people, and kill them"
----
i have a (completely untested) hypothesis, that police forces which require officers to be trained as EMTs and police officers (San Jose?) have far lower incidence of claims and proven instances of incidence of excessive force, abuse of authority, etc.
Besides which, you really think that people only become cops for the power? No one ever honestly wants to protect and serve their community? There's a lot of problems with American police right now, but it can be so much worse.
At this point, I should mention that I personally dislike cops, and have had really bad interactions with them, including one blaming another's suicide attempt on me. But I also know it isn't universal.
If you do want to arrest and harm folks, no, you shouldn't be on the force. There are other way to sort out these folks or make the behavior different. Pass actual laws protecting folks from such things. Give cops more education. Have laws that make sense. Hire enough police so that they have more time away from folks that are doing harm. Have cops do more work on things that are socially uplifting - where they have contact with good people - and pay the cops for this. Require they are respectful. Require they take the abuse we expect call center and retail employees to take (like being told to fudge off, yelled at, and generally called names). Require police to live in the areas they are policing. Make sure the laws are fair and that we fairly police different sorts of areas. And so on.
Along with these implementations, I would like to see just an AA in psychology, and require at least 12 units of law, including a course in constitutional law.
Just a high school diploma is not enough.
Pay is high for police officers. At the median they're earning nearly 70% more than the overall median US income.
Median pay for all police officers is near $62,000 now. [1] Versus the median for all jobs, closer to $37,000.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/police-and-detect...
some cases in california were called into question as there were cops with 100k pensions,but california suffers from lots of government employee pension tricks. these are not limited to just California and are busting the budgets of many cities and now even some states.
but with regards to this Baltimore issue, he damn well best serve time for this and everyone on that call should be off the force.
it might just be time for, if you camera malfunctions your arrests are not valid if it one vs one in testimony.
4. The video is archived for at least 90 days, with 360 being preferable.
5. The video is immediately encrypted when it is stored and should only be accessible by the district attorneys office.
Why the need for such a high level of secrecy?
From outside of the US, the picture I get of the police force and the bodies that control them is they have a tendency to try and keep things secret.
I would have though a more open system would instil a much higher level of public confidence in that policing system.
There really is a case to be made in keeping the video private; however, police often have to process your private information and the officers have privacy considerations themselves. I really wrote that with this in mind, as I think it's a strong hedge against the "officer privacy" argument. You _will_ constantly record on duty, and that information _will_ be kept private hopefully giving us the best of both worlds.
There's also an evidentiary and performance monitoring considerations. I don't want police to have access to their own video when making sworn statements, research has shown that this can bias and alter these statements which are incredibly important when establishing frame of mind in a courtroom. I also don't want police captains to have the ability to spy on their staff and use the cameras as a backdoor way to monitor the performance or judgement of officers on the street.
To that final point, you _want_ officers to be able to look the other way in certain circumstances.. they aren't a group that should be blindly applying the letter of the law, in my opinion, by keeping the video private you serve to protect this important discretionary relationship between officers and the public.
However, I don't think access to the video should be controlled by the district attorney or by the state, instead it needs to be more transperant.
For example, lets assume someone in the public has a run in with the law and that results in charges being laid.
At that point, the accused should be able to appoint an attorney who then arranges for immediate access to video from the arresting officer(s) camera.
That process should be quick and fast, not slow and obstructed as it currently appears to be.
First things first, one should always be able to view video of their own police interactions, as should their attorney. They should feel free to show it to family and friends. The district attorney is often viewed as part of the police and working with them closely... and they are political because they are an elected position. If we can't have more public access, it is easy to abuse such power. If the public can show family and friends their interactions, it can lead to change in the way folks are treated. And so on, in the same sorts of thinking.
That said, I don't think they should be made absolutely public without some sort of control and balance. I think it would be wrong for domestic violence calls to be made to the public. I fully support keeping folks' identities private unless they are found guilty in court. I'm going to guess there are prudent exceptions to this, mostly with public figures and safety.
Although these days, they don't even need to prove you're a criminal to steal your money with civil asset forfeiture, they just need to be able to find your money.
^ Unfortunately, many of them see everyone who isn't a cop as a bad person - either a threat, or a criminal.
Another reason to plant evidence is if you just brutalized someone. Beating an innocent person for the crime of mouthing off to you/being black looks bad. Beating a junkie carrying a tenth of an ounce of weed... Well, they were a criminal, so it's all good.
And why wouldn't they plant evidence? Your co-workers won't rat you out, nobody will believe the the guy you arrested, and in the unlikely event that you are stupid enough to be planting drugs in front of your own body camera, you will get a paid vacation.
I think that's part of it. But there's also the effect that the Baltimore system/culture, the police, the politicians, the DA/prosecution, the prisons, all evolved on top of a forced labor system. Yes, slavery. The system is inherently designed to preserve that dynamic between the enslaved population and the non-slave population. It captures kids in their youth, puts them in juvi for-profit prisons, which limits their options for work in their adulthood which then puts them at risk to re-enter the jail system (forced labor) in their adulthood. Michael Wood, a former marine and former Baltimore police officer provides an interesting collection of data. His interview here shows how the system works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5nPyf-0UMc Listen to him talking about the "Knockers", a special class of police officers.
Taking the amtrak from DC-NY at least a few years ago there were literally miles and miles of entire blocks of abandoned townhouses.. I imagine a google street view would be a good way to see this..
Also relateed - just finished binge watching HBO's 'The Wire' - though fiction and maybe jazzed up a little, it seems fairly accurate to get a picture of how messed up things are/can be based on what I absorbed 3rd hand from living in nearby DC for a good while..
But these cameras have a 30 second buffer, and are always recording to that buffer. The buffer is stored when the start button is pressed. That is how he got caught.
So if your camera is off, and you found a stash of drugs. Just press the start button. It'll record you finding the stash 30 seconds earlier.
That's actually why that button exists. So officers have a recording when it's needed unexpectedly.
However, not to excuse falsifying evidence, the 30s buffer example you mention wouldn't cover the case where you found the stash more than 30s earlier and have already disturbed with the otherwise valid crime scene..
I'd imagine in some sort of hot pursuit situation it would be pretty easy to do this and forget the button, especially if you've been working for years without them..
FTA: "So maybe this was a reenactment based on a true story. This scenario, which is where I would place my money ..."
It's just a guess. And I'm not entirely convinced by the argument that (also FTA) "people in Baltimore City don't get prosecuted for a stash of drugs"; because right in the first paragraph, he says "A man was arrested related to this ... he had been in jail for the past 7 months." In other words, even if the police knew they weren't going to get a prosecution, they could have just wanted to punish this guy, or try and get him to "confess", or who knows what.
Paying people to catch criminals incentivizes them to create criminals.
• if you arrest drug offenders, you can seize their assets for the budget
• if someone you dislike conveniently has drugs on them, you can deal with them
• you won't be held accountable
0: The New Jim Crow - Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness 1: https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/bmbab8/the-police-officer...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14811601
My comment at the time:
> What sometime happens in cases like that is that the officer's previous arrests are gone through, and many of them thrown out as unsafe
If so, why not name the cops involved here?
Always-on cameras definitely help in case of bad interactions with people stopped on the street, since those can't be scripted. But anything you can do ahead of time - not so much. It's trying to have a technical solution to a social issue.