Personally their behavior doesn’t surprise me. Like others have said there are good and bad cops. However, I’ve never seen one. I’m sure there around. My experience has shown them to be bullys and complete assholes.
In a congested place like Dade county, I can see asking where the alleged offence took place; why would one police department waste time taking a complaint against an officer from another department? On the other hand, I have no doubt that police officers do close ranks against complaints, threats, etc., etc. I also have no trouble believing that retaliation in the form of traffic tickets can and does take place.
OK, here’s the skinny:
- Most of the cops in the first video were Sergeants. Most of them WOULD be the first step in the chain of command to determine if a complaint had merit. Just because a citizen files a complaint does not AUTOMATICALLY mean it’s a valid one.There’s a reason that 38 police departments reacted the same way, because it’s very likely policy to have the Sgt. or acting watch commander address these complaints FIRST, no matter what the IACP has to say about it.
(sidenote, perhaps the newsteam should look into CALEA first. They’re the agency charged with actual accreditation of LE agencies.
- See below for a sampling of police departments that handle officer complaints the same way…
Sacramento CA Internal Affairs
Gloucestershire Constabulary, UK
3. If you’re unwilling to talk to a department supervisor about an officer complaint, then why should they deal with you?
- Cops are targets for unwarranted and/or false complaints, so of course before anyone writes anything down, they’re going to want to hear the facts of the matter, because once it’s on paper, it’s too late to change it.
People expect police to be nice harmless fuzzballs, but they’re not, and should not be expected to be. Were the cops in the videos dickheads? Youbetcha. So what? If those plants the newsteam sent in had actual complaints, my guess is that they would have been treated differently, but trying to mess with a person whose career success (read:staying alive) hinges on realizing when he or she was being messed with is, as we found out, a losing proposition.
The racial profiling bit? Again, while it sucks, profiling (both racial and otherwise) is a valid tool for law enforcement, like it or not. Should the guy be pulled over just for being black? Hell no. Do I believe he was? Not sure. Will I take the word of an anti-cop activist over that of a trained cop? Not on your life.
What really got me was, the policeman who was intimidating one of the “complainers” kept claiming he could do it because in his words “It’s a free country”. Hmmmmm. Let’s see. A guy with a badge, gun, nightstick can do and say whatever he pleases because “It’s a free country”, but nobody can file a complaint. I got it. Animal Farm. Everyone is equal, but some are MORE equal. That cop should be fired. Some of the others were even worse. Why don’t they screen out the bad ones, or at least do something about the ones who slip in?
Then they were trained poorly. They created a difficult situation where there was none. I understand that not all complaints have merit. So what? If nothing else, allowing the person a safe place to write down their complaint may well give them the time to calm down.
I can’t find where in this site it says anything about complaint forms. Can you please show me where they are mentioned?
I believe that we can take it as a fact that many, if not most police departments, don’t have a complaint form. (Although some of your links do mention other means of getting the attention of a higher-level muckedy-muck.
Because there is no way that the department supervisor can possibly be seen as a “brother” to the police officer in question, right? Because there is no way that s/he can’t be acting unprofessionally, right?
In your first link (among others), they are quite clear in stating that one of the outcomes is that the officer is exhonorated. So, once it’s on paper, it is appearently not too late to change the situation.
That is only your guess. Unless you know more than I do from the video, you have no facts upon which to make even an informed guess. OTOH, we have video evidence of officers being rude, acting threatening in demeanor, making threats of tickets, and one idiot who was making a very threatening gesture by unstrapping his gun.
What would have been the outcome of the supervisor saying “We don’t have a specific form. Would you be willing to write out as much as you can remember and swear to its accuracy by making a brief statement?” and handing the person a piece of paper and a pen? That should give the complaintant a place to vent, and pause to consider that last bit. It also gives the officer a chance to interact further with the complaintant and get more information out of him.
In the videos, it was obivous that the kid didn’t want to talk with the cop. If a real complaintant acted as such, giving him or her a piece of paper might actually serve to get him to try to talk to the cop. Every thing that I saw in the videos showed me that the officers in question were not trying to help the person. They heard “complaint” and became defensive.
I would bet pounds to pesos that the officers we saw on the video were never given adequate training in dealing with complaints. This whole would have completely dissappeared with a different tactic. This is not a question of a piece of paper; it is a question of whether this particular course of action is effective at easing police-community relationships.
Don’t take the word of the activist. Please take into account the actual evidence in the video. a.) the officer’s stated reason for pulling over the activist was that he was weaving (the video refutes that claim.) b.) running the same car in the same neighborhood with a white kid driving did not result in the white kid being pulled over. c.) one of the “anti-cop activisits” was a former peace officer.
You obviously haven’t taken a moment to read most of your own links. Although these sites don’t discuss a complaint form, the majority of them discuss the chance to submit a complaint in writing.
From Sacramento:
The first step is to call, write, come in person or
visit us online:
Internal Affairs Division
Sacramento Police Department
5760 Freeport Boulevard
Sacramento, CA 95822
Hours: 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Mon - Fri
Phone: 916-808-2290
(after hours: 916-264-5471)
Mailing Address:
5770 Freeport Blvd. Suite 100
Sacramento, CA 95822-3516
Web Page: www.sacpd.org
A complaint may be made ANY time of day or
night. You may come in person to address your
concern, or you can call or write – anonymously,
if you wish.
From Round Rock, Texas:
Formal complaints against Police Officers are accepted in writing and signed by the person making the complaint. You may make an appointment with the Internal Affairs Office to arrange and complete that process. Just as citizens who are arrested must be notified of the charges against them, Police Officers must also be notified and provided a copy of the complaint prior to any potential employment action.
From Greenville, SC:
Report the complaint to the Commission on Fire and Police Practices in writing at: City of Greenville, PO Box 2207, Greenville, SC 29602.
From Oxford:
please com to the Oxford Police Department, 101 East High Street, and request a “Complaint Against Personnel” statement. Complaints must be completed by anyone directly involved in the action or witness to the action resulting in the complaint.
Sounds like a complaint form to me.
From Dallas:
Texas law requires that all complaints against police officers must be in writing and signed by the person making the complaint. Just as citizens who are arrested must be notified of the charges against them, police officers must be given a copy of the complaint before any disciplinary action may be taken.
So, the first manner in which you’ve represented your profession poorly is by failing to read your own cites.
Because the complaint may deal with a close associate of that officer and complaintants should have a means of making written complaints that will be reviewed by the Internal Affairs department without being subject to the summary decision or dismissal of a seargent. People should plainly have the right to make a written complaint to a seperate entity within the force such as internal affairs rather than simply an immediate supervisor.
Finally, go fuck yourself for being a racist asshole cop. I’m certain that there are plenty of good cops out there, even a strong majority, but I’m confident that you aren’t one of them. You’re not sure why exactly he was pulled over? Well, it wasn’t for speeding, and it wasn’t for swerving (again the cop seemed to be doing plenty of that), it was rather obviously for committing the crime of driving while black.
Your immediate dismissal of a cop-watchdog agency in the face of clear documentary video evidence against the officer (not the word of an officer) shows just why a lot of people don’t like cops. Do everyone including your fellow officers a favor and find a career more suited to your limited abilities. Port-a-potty technician?
I only saw four officers really do anything that would twist my panties. Three were from the same place.
The Miami Lice lookalike that went to the stations in the dark after 5:00 PM, just to ask THAT question, when all the sectaries and desk jockeys are gone, would make me sit up even if I was just a furniture store salesman. Refusing to make sure that they understood (when they came back because they had obviously quit listening after the word ‘complaint’ that he just wanted to know how to do it and to assure them that he just wanted to know how, which he mumbled a lot or was silent after saying it just once, and acted funky to boot. I kept thinking how he was acting like most meth-heads I have run into.
I think he should have been told to come back between 9-5 to talk to the chief unless it was an emergency. And since he sorta said it was just a question, They should have said, “Nope, don’t have one. Come back in the morning.”
I’m betting that if this was reversed, and the police were doing this to a civilian, most here would be yelling entrapment…
Now in part two, the driving while black was silly to do. They should have just tailed the guy, called all the others in the area to watch him also, just like they do to bikers and let it go.
Actually, they only had to follow him less than a mile to get a real stoppable offence because 99% of people don’t know all the laws and you’ll do something in less than a mile. Then they can’t get stuck on profiling.
No ticket, no warning, just a loss of 10 minutes. *Big Whoop, be a biker for a while. *
The stop they made was stupid and they should be called on being such dumb asses that they didn’t take time to make it work.
But then again, this is Florida. snerk
I’m going to be an overly excited math student* now and try to actually apply what I’ve been learning in stats. If we assume a normal distribubtion on the proportion of police stations where the officers were douche-bags and we assume perfect sampling, then we can use our 14/38 to construct a confidence interval. I can say with 90% confidence that between 24% and 50% of all police stations in our population have officers that are douche-bags.
That being said, I wouldn’t put our population as the nation’s police stations. Our sample is limited to police stations in southern Florida, so I would say that 24% to 50% of police stations in southern Florida have officers that are douche-bags. If you want to use a population that is nation-wide, then the sampling sucks. It obviously would not be a simple random sample.
-Mosquito
*Disclaimer: I’m currently only in my second semester of statistics…it is 400 level statistics, so it’s taught at a rigorous pace, but I am not by anymeans a statistician by trade, nor do I wish to be.
One good thing to come out of all this is the wide exposure the story is getting now. MSNBC.com linked to it this morning. That was my intention by posting it here as well, I want people to see what happens out there. We have enough problems in the world without having to worry about the cops too. If enough people see this maybe that will make it tougher for cops to get away with that kind of behavior. I know its a hard, thankless job. I know dealing with the criminal element day in and day out can do bad things to your emotions. But we need people, professionals, who can do the job and do it well. What we don’t need is bullies with badges running around and making life difficult for people who aren’t even breaking the law. If this thread and all the other publicity the story is getting makes it harder for cops to get away with that kind of behavior then I can at least say something good came of it.
Heh, I was debating myself on whether or not to run these. (IANAstatistician; but I have had some stats experience.) Just curious: where did you get your numbers for the total population size? (i.e. # of stations/dept. in USA vs Florida) Why would you say that the sampling sucks for nation-wide? I mentioned that the socio-economic differences between the stations was wide enough that it might be a decent sample. Of course, rules/regs outside of Fl will completely influence the results. Lastly, my only ahem stat was to say that “a good number of stations in the country do not have a specified method of taking citizen complaints.” Weasel-wordy to the extreme, but, without a better list of states’ rules and regs on complaint procedures, it’s the best I could do.
To this end, the appropriate ratio is 35/38. And given that cities will have more than one station, this is weighted on departments, not precincts or stations as I thought earlier. The best that I can do (how stats are applied to oceanography are a bit different than how they are applied to surveys, I think) is to say that I would not be surprised that even 82% of all police depts do not have a form. If the actual number is much lower, then we have conclusive proof that south Florida police stations are not a representative sample.
(BTW, I discounted the 14/38-douchbag correlation out of hand, as 14 people is a horrible representation of the total # of cops. I am sure the number of stations that have at least one douchebag is closer to 100%, but that’s another story.)
I used a confidence interval formula that simply assumes “a very large population” I think, technically, the population is assumed to be infinite, but in practicality, it is assumed that the population is merely large. I didn’t actually think about how many police departments were in the actual population. After a quick count (counted by hand from Florida police department links…I could have miscounted by one or two), there appears to be forty-eight departments in Florida. With a population of this size, I would either go with my interval, or check out ten more stations and find the exact number for the population.
I didn’t like the idea of using samples from one region to represent the entire country because it isn’t even close to a random sample. Just like I wouldn’t use average SAT scores of one state to represent the average SAT scores of the country, I wouldn’t just use police department data from just one region to represent that of the country’s police department. Statistically, it just doesn’t make sense.
-Mosquito
My links, threemae, served to point out that the policies ALSO included complaining in person. Just because the forms didn’t exist, doesn’t mean an"in-writing" format doesn’t exist. The stringers they sent into the field were sent to ellicit a specific response. They got their story, at the expense of the truth. Fact is, if these dickheads had an ACTUAL complaint, they could have submitted it in writing, they didn’t.
** May deal with? You’re bloody well full of assumptions aren’t you? No matter WHO you complain to about an officer, the complaint goes UP the chain of command to someone who can take action. Some departments do it different than others. And every department has a way of submitting a written complaint, Step 1. Write down complaint.
Step 2. Send it to the police department.
Not every department is large enough to have their own internal affairs department. So it goes, again, up the chain of command.**
** Threemae, respectfully, you don’t know thing one about me or how I do my job. Your confidence that I’m “not one” of the good ones is ill placed. Your assumptions, on the other hand, speak to your abject lack of knowledge about the subject. **
Now, as loathe as I am to actually do it, I’ll quote white house Madman Don Rumsfeld…
**1. I know that a cop “watchdog agency” isn’t a sufficient remedy to deal with bad cops, and that their agendas are generally based on an emotional response to an incident wherein all the facts aren’t known, or at least shared.
- I know that I don’t know why that chap was pulled over, but I do know that there has to have been a reason. No cop wants to jeopardize their career just to pull over a black guy just for being black (this of course is not to say that DWB doesn’t exist, and not to say it’s not a stain on the decent cops everywhere).
I also know that I don’t know if the test was circumstantial or scientific, and if we saw ALL of the video, or just what the news crew/ “watchdog group” wanted us to see.
Finally, Fuck you right back.**
Fact is that none of the truly assholish behavior being pitted here relates to simply not having a form, but to harrassing people making complaints. The thing that is pissing people off is that the cops in the video are insisting upon being told right away what the complaint is. Why do these particular assholes need to know what the complaint is and why cannot they simply tell the complaintant to submit the complaint in writing? You’re backpedaling because you didn’t bother to read your own cites and moving from, “because it’s very likely policy to have the Sgt. or acting watch commander address these complaints FIRST,” to claiming that these are examples of agencies that permit the submission of written complaints. If you’re still not following, here’s a clue-by-four for you:
-Requiring that the complaint be explained to the on duty Sgt.
-And allowing a complaint to be submitted in writing
Are mututally exclsive.
Again and again, how can you prove that this man was not pulled over just for being black? We have video evidence of the black man’s driving behavior immediately prior to being pulled over, we have evidence of the officer going out of his way to identify the driver as black via a light, and when pulled over the officer refuses to provide a reason for pulling the man over.
Your defense is that we simply must take it on faith that this wasn’t a clear example of racial profiling because you say so on the basis of exactly zero evidence. Exactly how is it that you propose answering questions such as, “do the police target black peope unfairly?” without emperical observation of police behavior? Is the badge some sort of religion?
Thing is, it’s not being Pitted. (But it’ll be moved there in just a moment, so keep your guns strapped.) This thread was started in MPSIMS, so any insults and Fuck Yous are verboten here. I understand getting heated about this (well, okay, maybe I don’t understand entirely), but you need to be aware of the forum in which you’re posting.
All that said, this thread really belongs in the Pit, so I’ll move it there; you guys can have at each other at that point.
Forms or no forms, that’s not the issue here. Its the way the person persuing the complaint got treated which was just plain bad no matter what other issues are in contention.
The secondary issue I see is how complaints are taken. The police departments in the video would have all complaints taken by an officer in the same deaprtment as the alleged rule-breaker. No way is that unbiased or worthy of anyone’s trust. Before I had seen this video I assumed that any complaint against the police would be handled by an internal affairs officer who’s job it would be to police the police. Not so apparently and that is one major problem right there. Police departments should have an independent body that sees to it that the cops themselves don’t break the law, complaints against them are taken seriously, and that people who go “against” the police are protected. Until that situation changes we are always going to have cops like in the video protecting and serving themselves above everyone else.
That was my point and that is why 14 is not indicative. Even the 38 isn’t. The OP was trying to paint all cops with a wide brush and it backfired.
(FBI Uniform Crime Report 2004)
Using a round number of 17000, let’s fire up the calculator. Hmmm…14 agencies represents approximately 0.08% of those agencies. Well, let’s try 38…now we get approximately 0.02% of those agencies. Those are not statistically significant results. We are talking the extreme left of the bell curve, where it has barely cleared the axis.
Have you ever considered tattooing “A FEW BAD APPLES” on your fucking forehead?
-Joe
Clothahump, believe it or not, 0.02% of the total population is actually a good number for a statistical poll. As I mentioned earlier, it would not surprise me that upwards of 80% of departments do not have a particular form for a citizen complaint*. I am not making a statement about how the 14 more aggressive officers are an indication of the attitudes of all peace officers across the country (although, I understand that others in this thread are).
To quote myself, tho:
*I was able to calculate a 90% CI of 82% and up for departments w/o a form, based on a sample size of 38 out of 18,000 (left the number at work). Since there are not many more departments in Fl, this survey would be a sampling of a wide variety of kinds of departments. The only thing that would skew my results are if there are rules and regs in different states that would influence the numbers.
Oh crap, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. I thought we were in the pit by virtue of the OP nature and I guess I got mixed up with the other pitting of police going on right now in the Pit. I would have been much more reserved in my wording if I had realized that it was MPSIMS.
Sorry, Buttonjockey, skipmagic, etc.
I think the report is suspect. The undercover video was shot by members of an anti-cop group and it aired during sweeps. They also got two of their most important facts wrong: the Miami-Dade PD has a complaint form online in three languages and the Broward Sheriff’s Office has an online commendation form which presumably can also be used for complaints.