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 |  Subject: Via Anarcho-Capitalists' Forum: The Great Police Violence Cover-Up  Wed Dec 03, 2014 12:31 am | |
| It’s a federal law, but most departments refuse to divulge data on cop shootings.
“I have a 20-year-old son, and I have a 12-year-old son, and I’m so afraid for them. … This is about a war machine. It is us against the [expletive] machine!”
—Rapper Killer Mike
Perhaps the saddest thing is: We don’t really know what the truth is. We don’t really know if Killer Mike—his voice breaking on stage this week after the Ferguson grand jury decision—is correct in his perception that America’s police departments are less protectors of the peace than monstrous “war machines” leveled against the nation’s poor and minorities.
Certainly we are seeing those kinds of sentiments expressed in protests in cities across the country, which are so reminiscent of previous bursts of inner-city rage—after the 1991 beating of Rodney King in L.A., or the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo in New York. But no one knows for sure how serious the problem is—now, or then—because there simply are no reliable national data on police violence in the United States. The data are lacking because police departments keep almost all those numbers to themselves, in defiance of a 20-year-old federal law—the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act—requiring the Justice Department to compile an annual report on “the use of excessive force” by police.
The story of the various failed national efforts to compile and release such data—or to obtain any reliable numbers on violence by police officers at all—is just another dimension of an issue that Monday’s grand-jury decision threw into relief: a sense that police departments across the country are simply not held accountable enough. Whatever the particular circumstances that led a grand jury to decline to indict Darren Wilson, police officers are typically given the benefits of all doubts in the use of force and are rarely prosecuted, criminologists and other experts say. And because a substantial portion of these alleged police abuses of law and justice appear to be directed against blacks and other minorities in certain communities—not the white-dominated power structure in their own communities—it rarely becomes a notable issue, at least until a Michael Brown-type killing provokes enough violence and outrage in the streets for the TV cameras to pay attention.
All we have is anecdote, rumor and innuendo of the kind that came out after a grand jury declined to indict Wilson in the Aug. 9 shooting of Brown. Statistically, it is rare for a police officer to be indicted, much less convicted, for the use of violence. According to Bowling Green University professor Philip Stinson—who recently submitted a research project funded by the Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) titled “Police Integrity Lost: A Study of Law Enforcement Officers Arrested”—in the seven years from 2005 to 2011 there were only 59 arrests of on-duty police on charges of aggravated assault with a gun recorded in the entire country. Of those, only 13 resulted in convictions. Why so few? “Police work is by nature violent, and the on-duty violence of police officers is rarely regarded as criminal—even when it is,” says Stinson.
Stinson says he was able to compile these numbers only through the sophisticated use of Google’s news search engine, bypassing unreliable and tightly held police department data. Little else exists in the way of truly national data. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program collects data from the roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the country to compile statistics about crime and law enforcement, and yet here too police departments are not required to submit data on what they consider to be justifiable homicides by officers.
But given the average number of dubious shootings in any given year—most recently the killing of a 12-year-old boy wielding a BB gun in Cleveland—many criminologists say it’s clear that there is a serious problem, especially in minority neighborhoods, that has not been quantified. “If there’s smoke, there must be fire there,” says Sam Walker, an expert on police accountability at the University of Nebraska.
Despite the high incidence of so-called "black-on-black" crime that has led some law-enforcement officials to justify a heavy police presence in minority neighborhoods, the issue is not necessarily racial. “It’s not a black or white issue. It’s a blue issue,” Frank Serpico, the former New York City detective whose efforts to expose corruption were made famous in a 1973 movie starring Al Pacino, said in a telephone interview. “The fact is that police have never been accountable,” said Serpico, who in the decades since his retirement from the NYPD has become an advocate for police whistleblowers and greater restraint on the use of force. “In my day, and I’m sure it’s true today, they used to say a district attorney could indict a ham sandwich if he really wanted to. But they didn’t get that in Ferguson. So what erupted in Ferguson is not just about Ferguson. This thing has been a long time coming.”
More: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/11/the-great-police-violence-cover-up-113190.html#.VHergovF-So?ml=m_mm
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Anarcho-Capitalist, AnCaps Forum, Ancapolis, OZschwitz Contraband
“The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner
"Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann |
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