The media has reported that the officer involved in the death of George Floyd had racked up 18 formal complaints against him over 18 years of duty.
This was presented without any context.
For context, how often does a typical police officer have a formal complaint filed against him?
Zillions.
And before you think that’s being obnoxious, understand that a multitude of citizens file formal complaints over even the most minute’ issues. It is a very easy process to do.
I was late for work. How dare he write me up for going 72 in a 35
I was only going to be parked there for 10 minutes. How dare he write me a parking ticket.
Any officer that has zero complaints is probably not doing his job.
My point is, you have to narrow your scope about what kind of complaints. Simply having multiple complaints doesn’t mean any of them have merit. Because, and I am sure you won’t believe this, they are all looked in to. Overlooking or under investigating any complaint falls on the shoulders of the administration of each individual agency.
None of this is, in any way, in defense of that officer in Minneapolis…
And, BTW, in the last 5 months all those first three were filed against me.
Yes, complaints can easily be filed, and many are unfounded. (But lots more are filed against parking enforcement!)
I remember reading in the real-life book that The French Connection movie was based on, the criminal gangs retaliated against the hero officers by having a huge number of complaints filed against them, either to eventually get them fired/transferred, or just to keep them busy answering complaints thus keeping them off the streets.
Isn’t that the truth.
Parking cite fines are way less than moving violations, they don’t go on you driving record putting your license in danger, and they don’t raise your insurance rates. Yet people file complaints about them 100-1 compared to complaining about getting into a speeding ticket.
Also, people complain about parking violators way more than they do about crazy drivers. We don’t get that many complaints about speeders. But if there is a car without a proper tag parked in a handicap spot I guarantee some beazle neck will be on the phone screaming within 5 minutes.
In some places, there is a good reason for there to be a lot of complaints about parking violations: I’ve seen a parking meter that had an hour paid for, expiring and getting ticketed at 56 minutes. It’s not like we were the only people to ever use that meter, so I’m sure that city got a lot of perfectly justified complaints stemming from it. And the college I went to deliberately oversold parking passes to the point that, on a typical day, there were twice as many people trying to park as there were legitimate parking places (but plenty of illegitimate places that would have been perfectly fine, had they not been officially declared illegitimate).
Fewer complaints about speeders also makes sense: Just because the speeder is here right now, doesn’t mean you have any idea where he’ll be once an officer shows up, so there’s a limited amount you can accomplish with such a complaint. At best, you can grab a photo of the license plate, but there’s not going to be much the cops can do with that, either. But when a car is parked illegally, it’s likely to be there for a while, and may well still be there when the cops show up and see it.
I figured as much, which is why I asked.
I think anybody who interacts with the general public long enough is guaranteed to encounter a few entitled assholes here and there who will lodge a bitter complaint against them over some imagined or even concocted slight. This is even more likely for the police, whose job description includes doing legitimate and reasonable things to people that those people don’t want done to them.
Understood. My thought was that “18 complaints in 18 years” isn’t much of an indictment without understanding what’s typical for a police officer - and as you point out, it’s also important to know the nature of those complaints.
The media, AFAIK, have only been reporting the number of complaints against him. I haven’t heard anything about the nature of those complaints. Is the latter not a matter of public record?
The #1 thing cops get disciplined or fired for is violating their agencies written standard operating procedures. Even if a situation turns into a complete ball of shit if the officer followed SOP odds are extremely high he/she will be ok.
Which is why the first question the brass ask themselves when a complaint is filed is “did the officer violate policy in this incident”. If the answer is no then there are other factors to consider: could the officer have taken a different but acceptable course of action? Is the way we deal with such situations sound or could changes be made? And so on. There is an actual checklist they go down for each formal complaint.
18 complaints that turn out to be baseless is nothing. 1800 baseless complaints is nothing. It’s that 1 complaint that has merit that can land you in a trick bag.
I’ve had several baseless complaints lodged against me over the years. I had one in 2012 that had merit. I released some property to the wrong person. It was an honest mistake but had I done just 1 extra thing I was supposed to it wouldn’t have happened. I got my ass chewed and a written reprimand that stayed in my file. It also set my pay step increase back 6 months. So it was a costly error. My point is, if an officer does actually screw up there usually are consequences. If the agency fails to discipline an officer for wrong doing that failure is on the agencies back not the officer that got away with it.
I can believe it after watching the reality show Parking Wars. I can’t believe how many people justified their illegal parking with,“But I wanted to park there so I should be allowed to.”
beazle neck?
Heh. What took you so long?
This is slang for a crabby old woman. She has an over abundance of wrinkled skin that hangs down her neck (it’s not a double chin, just a bunch of loose skin) and it bobbles about while she’s bitching about something and it looks like a turkey going on a gobble tirade. She rants on and on about something that is either no biggie or has already been taken care of. In other words, the senior citizen version of “Karen”.
This is just slang amongst ourselves, not official terminology. Nothing for anyone to get pissy about.
There’s videos on YouTube where people go into police stations to make complaints about a specific officer and the cops working the desk basically harass them until they leave or even threaten the complainer.
My dad has often recalled a newspaper article from decades ago about a senior citizen who boarded a bus without a free-ride pass (to which he was entitled because of his age). The bus driver was being an officious prick about it, insisting that the old guy needed to leave the bus or the cops would be called. And so the old guy sat down on the bus to wait, and the driver parked the bus and called the cops. My dad has always remembered this line from the article:
“One of the few benefits of being old is that you can take the time to be difficult.”
The cops showed up to talk to the driver, and the old guy further back on the bus declared “over here officers, I’m the desperado.” In the end, the cops gave the driver a ration of shit for being such a dick about the whole thing, and gave the old guy a ride to the bus depot where he could obtain the all-important bus pass.
I’m guessing go-jillions as well. And it is sad because the powers that be have to sift through the bullshit ones to get to the ones with merit.
As a lawyer who is sometimes appointed to indigent criminal defendants, I always lay out the facts for a client. They have you dead to rights on something that could have you spending the rest of your life in prison. They are offering seven years. If you want to fight this at trial, I will fight for you, but the chances of conviction are very high and I strongly advise you to accept this deal.
After about year three of his incarceration, I will get an ethics complaint filed against me stating that I “forced” him to take the deal and refused to fight for his innocence.
It looks like he was reprimanded twice. I would not think it was a danger sign.
You may be interested in this.
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I saw one of those. IIRC it was a reporter from Florida and the desk officer took it upon himself to act as a gatekeeper to decide if the complaint was warranted. When the reporter kept insisting he just wanted to have the form the officer threatened him with tresspassing (since he would tell the officer hat the complaint was about and he was asked to leave). The reporter left and the officer followed him out continuing to give him shit.
This is a surprisingly serious problem. Ordinary complaints to police of assault or whatever from the public have a high strike rate. Chances of charges are pretty good.
But complaints against the police have a very low strike rate for the reasons mentioned up thread.
Being an investigator of low strike rate stuff is very difficult. The temptation to default to the idea that the next file is going to be rubbish exactly like the previous fifty is high. There are so many of them that they have to be triaged by low level staff who are more vulnerable to the problem.
And trying to fix it by having more eyes on the problem often makes things worse. If you know there are lots of people also looking at a problem it’s easy to convince yourself to slacken off because someone else will pick up any mistakes. But everybody assumes someone else will pick it up, and the failure of other people to pick things up creates its own inertia.
I recall a complaint against a public servant who was a thief. His schtick was that although he was a low level clerk in the public service, this was just a publicity thing to make him appear humble. In reality he was a very wealthy prince, a member of a Pacific Island royal family. And he really did seem to have wealth (because he was a thief). He even got to the point where he would constantly take absences from work to attend to ‘royal duties’.
He had groomed his supervisors so they were too ready to accept that there was ‘nothing to see here.’ The supervisors all became invested in this preposterous lie. The original complaint naturally had undeveloped, low grade evidence, as these things always do at the beginning. Watchdog let it pass because it was just one more improbable allegation among hundreds crossing the desk. Turns out the guy was taking millions in a payroll scam.
The low strike rate problem is a very hard problem to fix. It takes a special type of person to treat every unique case on its merits, and not default to being distracted into a false set of expectations by the flow of vast numbers of unmeritorious complaints
A high number of complaints, by itself, may or may not indicate a problem. I know of officers who were complete jerks and rude to many (or even most) of the people they contacted. I know of others who I would consider professional, pro-active officers who went looking for criminals and found them. More arrests are going lead to more complaints, whether founded or not. Career criminals know that filing a complaint may take some of the heat off of them and put it on the officer, at least for a while. With the advent of body cameras, both misconduct by officers and baseless complaints by citizens will both go down. At least that’s the theory. Most officers I know wouldn’t be without the cameras.
The brass should also ask follow-on questions for more serious situations. “If the officer did not break policy, but the situation did not end well, does our policy need to be changed?” and of course “What effects would that policy change have?”
It seems like some departments try to explain away the entire situation by “The officer didn’t break policy.” Ok, great, so maybe he is off the hook. But the Brass is now on the hook to explain why the policy is not deficient. Maybe it is fine. Maybe it is not. But someone needs to think about it and be able to explain it.
Around here I have never seen the Brass back themselves into that trap. It is always “You can’t second guess the officer on the spot”