In Leaked Recording, Austin Police Chief Tears Into Commanders For Fatal Shootings, Use Of Excessive Force
from the burning-his-own-system-to-the-ground dept
If police culture is truly going to change, it needs to start at the bottom. Years of DOJ investigations and consent agreements have done almost nothing to root out the deep-seated problems found in many law enforcement agencies. The change has to come from within each department -- a much longer, slower process that requires those leading the reforms to put their careers on the line. They will be opposed by many of their fellow officers and villainized by police unions for any attempts to bring more accountability to policework.
There are probably more law enforcement officials out there with the same mindset as Austin (TX) police chief Art Acevedo. Unfortunately, very little of what they've done or said makes its way into the public eye without being strained through several filters. Acevedo's private comments to Austin PD commanders, however, arrive in the form of a leaked recording.
Acevedo was addressing the criticism he took for firing Geoffrey Freeman after the officer shot and killed a naked, unarmed, mentally-ill 19-year-old as he ran down a residential street. Acevedo addressed many issues during this talk and made it clear the APD isn't going to keep heading down the same limited-accountability road and end up just another law enforcement agency more known for its misdeeds than its law enforcement efforts. (h/t PINAC)
“I have given nine years of my life to the Austin Police Department,” Acevedo told his commanders. “Nine years aren’t going to go down the drain because we have people in this room that don’t want to do the hard lifting, that don’t want to be the bad guys. Sorry, we have to be the bad guys sometimes.
And the problem ain't the cops. It's the leadership.”
Directly addressing the shooting, Acevedo had this to say:
“If you can’t handle a kid in broad daylight, naked, and your first instinct is to come out with your gun, and your next instinct is to shoot the kid dead, you don’t need to be a cop. I don’t give a shit how nice you are,” Chief Acevedo told the group.
“The union got all pissed off because I fired Freeman. Some of you might have gotten pissed off. I’m going to tell you right now. If we have another Freeman tomorrow, that is what’s going to happen.”
He also addressed another controversial arrest -- one Acevedo only heard about after he started being questioned by media reps about it. "Contempt of cop" arrests will apparently no longer be tolerated.
“I am sickened that somehow people are still trying to justify Richter,” Acevedo said on the recording. “Nobody wearing stripes, or bars or stars should even think about justifying a woman — that the reason that woman got pulled out of that car is because she had the audacity to tell him to hurry up."
"She wasn’t going with the program,” he said. “You know what? Millennials ask questions, so get over it. If you are going to order somebody to do something, you better have a damn good reason if you are going to take them to jail.
“That was such an easy stop to de-escalate.”
Acevedo followed this up with something his commanders (and officers below them) can't have been happy to hear: massaging the paperwork to generate an exculpatory narrative is bullshit.
“Who cares what [Officer Richter] wrote?” Acevedo said. “Because I think we have this attitude, of I’ll just cover it in the report and I’ll be good to go … Anybody can do creative writing. Does that make sense to you guys?”
While these comments may have been spurred by recent events, Chief Acevedo is actually in the middle of an ongoing effort to reform his police department. The Austin Statesman points out that eleven internal affairs investigations have been opened on APD commanders in the last two years, leading to six reprimands and "several" resignations.
While resignations are hardly the ideal outcome, they're a better solution than allowing a poisonous influence to remain in the department. True, this move sidesteps accountability, but the intended outcome is still reached: the removal of a "bad apple," or at least a "bad apple" enabler.
Chief Acevedo will probably find himself out of a job, though. Complaints against him are already bubbling up from the lower ranks, with some commanders accusing him of refusing to consider their input. This may actually be a feature rather than a bug. Those complaining about his refusal to listen aren't providing much detail about the content of their input. If much of it was just more of the usual -- attempts to lower accountability for themselves and the officers they command -- it's hardly surprising Acevedo isn't implementing their ideas.
This is the sort of leadership America's law enforcement agencies need: commanders who are willing to start gathering up the slack given to officers over the years. Unfortunately, this can often lead to damaged or destroyed careers, which is why we see so few officials willing to do what Acevedo is doing. There's almost nothing to be gained personally from doing so, and an almost infinite amount to lose.
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Filed Under: accountability, art acevedo, austin, excessive force, police, police violence
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Credit where it's due
This here would seem to be an excellent example of the mythical 'Good Cop'.
Hopefully he manages to clean up some of the more blatant rot before he gets pressured to 'retire' or 'look into other job opportunities', because it sounds like those under him are not happy about his radical idea that police are not in fact special snowflakes that can do whatever they want with impunity.
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Re: Credit where it's due
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Possibly another good cop.
Another non-mass-media report: Cop Stops Fellow Officer From Choking Handcuffed Man, Then She Was Beaten and Fired
As one commenter put it: A cop fired for obstruction of murder
(Or ex-cop.)
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Makes me consider moving to Austin
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Re: Makes me consider moving to Austin
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Leadership
Source photographyisnotacrime: "Then, Austin City Manager Marc Ott reprimanded Acevedo for insubordination, docking him five days pay worth $4,000 for speaking with community activists about working together to solve problems,…"
In my opinion, leadership do matter
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Re: Leadership
Punished for simply talking to the public about working together. Talk about a perfect example of how corrupt things have gotten and how antagonistic the city/police are towards the public...
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Re: Re: Leadership
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Re: Re: Leadership
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And it is spreading. Agent provocateurs in Canada and Europa, arming of the police in Norway, statistic stuffing policing, and assaults by unmasked and masked police. It deteriorates so quickly its scary!
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Unless he is to expose something I would guess that he won't be assassinated. And then as a last resort and in a plausible way. Michael Hastings were scared, his investigations lost, he ended up dead, and it might have been an accident.
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While he has done some positive things, the negatives he has brought to Austin make him irredeemable. Ask any homeless person in Austin who they fear the most. Their answer will always be: "The cops".
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Pestering the week
Gangs of school athletes getting really provoked by someone being week "in their face" every day, police getting riled up by people staying homeless, police and SWAT teams going ballistic over citizens being afraid of them when they brandish deadly weapons at them. It is a nationwide domestic problem.
The hundreds of thousands of rape kits the US government doesn't bother to analyze is another. The "hope" president were a blank.
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Looks like we have someone willing to try to save the Barrel.
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stomach to endure the bile below him
the bigger bile pile is always the other direction.
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Irony
some commanders accusing him of refusing to consider their input.
Well, when you consider that what he was trying to do was precisely to take account of the input of those that they deal with (the public) it seems that these commanders don't get irony.
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Doing the right thing is never easy.
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Wow, a cop I can repect.
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If you go just north of the city to Williamson county then you get the exact opposite where they frequently pull people for extremely minor infractions or things that aren't infractions at all. They'll often run "checkpoints" that aren't checkpoints where they put 4-5 cop cars at an intersection and just start pulling people over for all sorts of reasons.
It makes Avevedo's conviction and standing up to do the right thing all the more impressive.
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This is all theater
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...will likely wind up like Vince Foster.
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balance it out
http://www.mystatesman.com/news/austin-police-chief-art-acevedo-punished-david-joseph-case/jJe FhtPnQWralVw4sSmjAO/
https://www.change.org/p/lee-leffingwell-fire-chief-art-acevedo
http://www.texasm onthly.com/the-daily-post/austin-police-chief-art-acevedo-had-a-bad-weekend/
Now in all fairness those articles (and the petition!) could be written by people with axes to grind. But the fact remains that without the actions of Acevedo and his officers, there wouldn't be anything to write about in those cases. Again about the importance of applauding the good points, there has been plenty of press pointing out his achievements as well. (I'll admit I didn't look as much for the "praise" articles, as I'm not a huge fan of Acevedo being a former Austin resident)
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2010/04/01/Austin-chief-Art-Acevedo-took-a-3410
Disclai mer: Grains of salt and all that for all links presented.
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