How An NYPD Officer Can Hit A Teen With His Car In Front Of Several Witnesses And Get Away With It

from the accountability-makes-officers-fear-for-their-job-safety dept

The NYPD has made internal discipline procedures a loop so closed that even its "independent" oversight -- the Civilian Complaint Review Board -- can't get in the door. The NYPD is effectively its own oversight. Decisions made by the CCRB can be overridden by the Police Commissioner. Even if the Commissioner agrees with the findings, recommended punishments can be departed from or ignored completely.

This story of police misconduct springs from this accountability void. ProPublica journalist Eric Umansky lives in New York City. Last year, while trick-or-treating with their daughter, his wife witnessed an unmarked police car hit a black teen. This happened in full view of several witnesses, including a person who worked at a business near the scene of the accident.

“Yeah, I saw a cop car hit a kid,” a waiter told me. He said he had a clear view of it: A handful of kids were running. One of them jumped out into the street and got hit by the police car, “probably going faster than he should have been.” He saw the boy roll over the hood and fall to the ground: “It sounded like when people hit concrete. It made a horrible sound.”

This eyewitness account agreed with what Umansky's wife had seen. But the end result wasn't a plainclothes officer being cited or disciplined for hitting a kid with his car. Instead, it was just a small part of a full-blown police rollout, where officers swarmed the street to run black teens and pre-teens up against the nearest wall.

Apparently, this is how an investigation unfolds. Officers were responding to a report that a group of teen boys had attacked another teen and stolen his cell phone. One of the officers responding was in plainclothes, driving an unmarked car against traffic. This was the officer that hit one of the running teens. A bunch of other teens who just happened to be on the street were picked up by cops and hauled to the station.

Umansky tried to follow up on this incident. The kids arrested by the officers were all released around one a.m. the next morning. They were given no paperwork on their arrests or the names of their arresting officers. Umansky was at the station the night it happened and couldn't get answers from any NYPD personnel.

He called the next day and talked to the NYPD's spokesman, who happens to be a former journalist. This was a dead end as well. The spokesman, Al Baker, simply said the arrested teens were being charged with resisting arrest. But this was the real kicker: the official word from the NYPD was that this was teen-on-car action, not the other way around.

I spoke to four witnesses, including my wife. All of them said they saw the same thing. When I called Baker back, he told me that my wife and the three others were mistaken. The car hadn’t hit the kid. The kid had hit the car.

As his statement put it: “One unknown male fled the scene and ran across the hood of a stationary police car.”

And that was it. The NYPD declared its own officer free of guilt or responsibility. There's still an investigation open, but there's little chance this will result in discipline of the plainclothes officer. In fact, there's little chance it will ever be resolved at all. At this point, the CCRB has 2,848 open investigations. And, as Umansky's article points out, moving these forward is almost impossible at this point.

Since the pandemic started, officers haven’t allowed CCRB to interview them remotely, meaning investigations have effectively stalled. The police unions had objected to doing it over video.

“We won’t do Zoom,” one union spokesman told The City. The CCRB is re-starting in-person interviews soon. It noted 1,109 investigations are awaiting police officer interviews.

Most CCRB investigations aren’t completed, and not just because of police intransigence. The roughly 100 investigators can only handle so many cases at once.

Thanks to the pandemic, the CCRB's budget has been cut, meaning there's even fewer investigators digging into thousands of cases containing allegations against officers who refuse to speak to them.

Even if the CCRB decides it would rather watch a recording of the alleged incident, rather than deal with a more uncooperative witnesses, it's not going to find anything there either. First off, the NYPD stonewalls CCRB request for camera footage. Then it finds some reason to deny the request. If it can't deny the request, the CCRB will receive the footage -- with any redactions the NYPD feels are necessary -- months after it has asked for it.

More immediate access to footage is possible, but it involves having to travel to the precinct to watch the footage while bound, gagged, and heavily-supervised.

CCRB investigators can now go to a room and watch footage. The agreement stipulates that CCRB staff can only take notes. They cannot record anything or use footage they see of abuse that happens to be different from the specific incident they’re investigating. They must sign a nondisclosure agreement.

With all of these unaccountaiblity practices in place, it comes as no surprise the NYPD would claim a person hit by a car driven by one of their officers was actually just an assault on an innocent police car by a person fleeing the forces of justice.

Filed Under: accountability, ccrb, nypd, police misconduct

CBP Employees Obtain New Accountability Shield With 'Security Agency' Designation

from the everyone's-pr dept

Our nation's border security agencies want to be national security agencies. ICE and CBP both made it clear they expected to be treated as Intelligence Community equals and given a seat at the grown-ups' surveillance table. They got their wish. Trump's "extreme vetting" wishes opened the door for the agencies' access to NSA collections late last year.

The CBP's addition to the long list of Intelligence Community agencies gives it another layer of opacity. As Ken Klippenstein reports for The Nation, being added to the OPM's list of exemptions will make it even more difficult to obtain information via FOIA requests.

On Friday, the Trump administration quietly designated the entire Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency, which polices US borders, as a “Security Agency,” according to an internal memo obtained by The Nation.

This puts CBP on the same playing field as secretive agencies like the FBI, DEA, and ATF. While ostensibly only concerned with border protection, the CBP's reach has been extended by its access to NSA collections and its personnel more insulated from accountability by this designation.

The memo states: “I am pleased to announce CBP has been designated as a Security Agency under Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) official Data Release Policy, effective immediately. Previously, only frontline law enforcement, investigative, or intelligence positions held this designation. This policy change now protects all CBP employee names from subsequent responses to Freedom of Information Act requests or other public disclosures for CGP employee data.”

Every CBP employee is now shielded from public scrutiny, no matter how much "security" work they're actually involved in. The memo obtained by The Nation came from a CBP contractor who blew the whistle on this bullshit designation. According to the unnamed source, they came forward to inform the public about an "absurd" designation that gives CBP employees a new layer of opacity they haven't earned.

The memo says this new designation is a reaction to supposed "doxing" of CBP employees via a Twitter account that may have been run by an OPM employee. But it wasn't really "doxing." The information released was pulled from publicly-accessible OPM databases. If this is the case, this doesn't seem to justify unilaterally declaring CBP employees to be more equal than other federal employees not fortunate enough to work for one tasked with bringing President Trump's anti-immigration fantasies to life.

CBP employees aren't special. And they're only "security" personnel in the loosest sense of the word. Just because they're involved in border security doesn't mean any exposure of their personal info would result in decreased employee safety or harm intelligence gathering. For that matter, the CBP isn't really in the intelligence gathering business and it's not known for operating extensive investigations utilizing undercover personnel who could suffer from being "outed" by publicly-available info. This is just opacity creep -- one that spreads from agency to agency like black mold. And it will make holding the agency accountable for its actions even more difficult when the public isn't able to pinpoint who's behind the latest string of abuses.

Filed Under: accountability, cbp, foia, intelligence agency, law enforcement, transparency

New Police Misconduct Database Shows Thousands Of Violations, Very Little Accountability

from the be-bad,-get-paid dept

USA Today has scored a coup. It has partnered with police accountability nonprofit Invisible Institute to obtain misconduct records from around the nation. These paint a pretty bleak picture of American policing -- not just in the number of incidents, but in the number of incidents that go unpunished.

Public records requests have resulted in thousands of documents detailing at least 200,000 incidents of alleged misconduct, along with more than 100,000 internal investigations. The database is completely searchable and leads readers, reporters, researchers, etc. directly to the underlying documents.

Here are the morbid stats this database has produced:

Most misconduct involves routine infractions, but the records reveal tens of thousands of cases of serious misconduct and abuse. They include 22,924 investigations of officers using excessive force, 3,145 allegations of rape, child molestation and other sexual misconduct and 2,307 cases of domestic violence by officers.

Dishonesty is a frequent problem. The records document at least 2,227 instances of perjury, tampering with evidence or witnesses or falsifying reports. There were 418 reports of officers obstructing investigations, most often when they or someone they knew were targets.

Less than 10% of officers in most police forces get investigated for misconduct. Yet some officers are consistently under investigation. Nearly 2,500 have been investigated on 10 or more charges. Twenty faced 100 or more allegations yet kept their badge for years.

The last number is perhaps the most concerning. Without effective deterrents in place, there's nothing stopping officers from spending years under investigation while still earning a paycheck and, possibly, being allowed to directly interact with the public. Some agencies pull the trigger quickly when officers misbehave repeatedly, but the investigation found there are many that almost never pull a cop's certification, no matter how many misconduct complaints/lawsuits they've racked up.

Decertifying law enforcement officers can slow the roll of "gypsy cops" -- ones that wander from department to department violating policies, rights, and laws, traveling under the opacity provided to them by restrictive public records laws and union agreements. But since decertification so rarely happens, the worst cops can land top law enforcement gigs simply by looking for work in small communities unlikely to have the resources to fully investigate candidates for these openings.

That's what happened in a small Ohio town. Amsterdam town officials hired David Cimperman as their new police chief. It was only after he engaged in a shitload of official misconduct that anyone started asking questions.

[Town officials] found forms featuring the mayor’s apparently forged signature that David Cimperman used to add more than 30 officers to the town’s police roster – one for every 16 residents. Many never did any paid police work for the town, logging hours instead for a private security business that state investigators say Cimperman ran on the side. He tried to outfit them with high-end radios. The riot gear and other surplus military equipment he bought with taxpayer money are missing.

One phone call to Cimperman's former boss in New Philadelphia could have prevented this. Cimperman had been fired from that police department for… well, just about everything.

They hired a chief without knowing he’d been fired for perjury, quit a job as his bosses started investigating missing police equipment and was charged with a felony for tampering with police radios to make untraceable phone calls.

Fired twice from one department, Cimperman simply went somewhere and took a position giving him a lot of unearned power. This sort of story has been repeated multiple times around the nation. The records obtained through this investigation show multiple officers with long rap sheets obtaining high-level positions in other departments thanks to years of minimal accountability and the opacity that accompanies so many internal law enforcement documents.

The new database is an invaluable tool -- one that will continue to grow as more records roll in. National exposure of endemic law enforcement problems may nudge a few agencies to clean house and encourage even the smallest communities to vet incoming law enforcement officers and officials more thoroughly.

Filed Under: accountability, police misconduct

Atlanta Cops Caught Deleting Body Cam Footage, Failing To Activate Recording Devices

from the all-the-accountability-a-lack-of-internal-accountability-can-provide! dept

Atlanta, Georgia, August 23, 2016:

Officials are promising more transparency on the part of law enforcement, and greater trust between cops and the community. The body cameras “will strengthen trust among our officers and the communities they serve by providing transparency to officer interactions,” said Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed this past week in announcing a purchase.

Oh, we were all so very young then. Look at us (including me!), pointing to the increasing adoption of body cameras as the ushering in of a new era of transparency and accountability. Didn't take long for this lily to get unceremoniously de-gilded.

Cameras are great tools of accountability. They just can't be controlled and maintained by cops. Two years after promising a better police force brimming with accountable officers steadily working to rebuild relationships with the citizens they police, Atlanta residents are being informed their servants/protectors are cheats and liars.

The audit looked at a random sample of 150 videos from officers’ body cameras. In more than half the cases, officers failed to activate and deactivate their cameras at the required time, the audit said.

Officers also miscategorized 22 of the videos, including a use of force incident. Auditors said mislabeling the videos may have led to some being deleted prematurely.

And the audit said that officers failed to capture two-thirds of dispatched calls between November 2017 and May 2018.

These results shouldn't shock Atlanta residents or readers of this site. It doesn't even shock Atlanta Police officials. Police Chief Erika Shields says she's "not happy" with the results of the audit, but also "not surprised." She excuses her officers actions in the worst possible way:

"I knew that what we are asking of officers is a culture shift."

It's your job to make sure the "culture" actually "shifts," Chief Shields. That it hasn't budged despite the addition of body cameras says a whole lot about the culture at the top of the PD. Whatever discipline Shields has meted out (she only says it happens, not how frequently or severely) clearly isn't enough. And the culture that remains in place in the Atlanta PD is downright nasty.

Auditors identified 64 videos “that were deleted by users who should not have had been authorized to delete videos from the system” from November 2016 to 2018.

Officer use-of-force incident videos are supposed to be handled differently. Supervisors are supposed to upload them and they to be labeled properly in case the department or the public needs to review them later.

But the audit found APD supervisors routinely didn’t understand their responsibilities. One zone supervisor told auditors he was unaware that it was his job to upload use of force videos.

Officers know the system is flawed and abuse it. Those in charge of securing recordings officers may not want retained either don't know what they're doing or are playing dumb when questioned by auditors. At the top of the miserable heap is a chief who has allowed flagrant policy violations to occur under her watch.

An official worth a damn would never express their lack of surprise at this sort of behavior from underlings. There should be shock and dismay at these results, not a shrug of "They're cops, what can you do?" emanating from the top person in Atlanta law enforcement. If that's the official reaction, the next audit will just find more of the same.

Filed Under: accountability, atlanta, body cameras, police

Researcher Says Police Body Cameras Are An Insecure Mess

from the internet-of-cop-things dept

The promise of transparency and accountability police body cameras represent hasn't materialized. Far too often, camera footage goes missing or is withheld from the public for extended periods of time.

So far, body cameras have proven most useful to prosecutors. With captured footage being evidence in criminal cases, it's imperative that footage is as secure as any other form of evidence. Unfortunately, security appears to be the last thing on body cam manufacturers' minds.

Josh Mitchell, a consultant at the security firm Nuix, analyzed five body camera models from five different companies: Vievu, Patrol Eyes, Fire Cam, Digital Ally, and CeeSc. The companies all market their devices to law enforcement groups around the US. Mitchell's presentation does not include market leader Axon—although the company did acquire Vievu in May.

In all but the Digital Ally device, the vulnerabilities would allow an attacker to download footage off a camera, edit things out or potentially make more intricate modifications, and then re-upload it, leaving no indication of the change. Or an attacker could simply delete footage they don't want law enforcement to have.

This is already bad news. We've already seen some evidence that officers have altered/destroyed footage. This attack vector allows almost anyone to do the same thing, all without leaving a trace of intrusion. But the flaws run deeper than this. According to Mitchell's research, some cameras can have their signals intercepted, allowing criminals to locate law enforcement officers or simply eavesdrop on recordings as they occur. It's not just a matter of criminals eluding cops. Hijacking signals obviously has a serious impact on officer safety.

And this is only the problem created by the cameras themselves. Every camera has to interact with another computer system to upload footage. In many cases, they're linked to cloud services as well, which introduce further vulnerabilities. Attackers could use body cams to deliver malicious payloads to law enforcement computer systems or the cloud services used to store recordings.

But underneath everything else runs this crucial part of the justice process: footage is evidence and evidence must be kept intact. Cameras and camera services simply aren't doing enough to prevent evidence tampering. The chain of evidence is relied on to ensure its integrity, but until these vulnerabilities are removed, body cam footage may as well be hearsay.

The bodycams don't have a cryptographic mechanism to confirm the validity of the video files they record either. As a result, when the devices sync with a cloud server or station PC, there's no way to guarantee that the footage coming off the camera is intact. "I haven’t seen a single video file that’s digitally signed," Mitchell says.

The good news is companies were alerted before Mitchell went public with his Defcon presentation. Most are implementing fixes, although a couple of smaller manufacturers refused to comment on the issues. The bad news is these fixes shouldn't have been necessary. The cameras and the services they rely on were put into service without many of these considerations being taken seriously. It appears they're no more secure than an off-the-shelf $30 webcam, even though they're only being sold to law enforcement agencies.

Filed Under: accountability, body cameras, police, security, transparency

Another Police Accountability Miracle: Five Officers, Zero Body Cam Footage, One Dead Body

from the back-the-blue...-into-a-corner dept

We know body cameras haven't been the police accountability godsend some imagined they would be. (I admit I saw a far rosier future when they first started being put into service.) So far, the research jury's still out on the effectiveness of cameras in deterring misconduct and excessive force deployment. And, so far, they've been far more useful to prosecutors than plaintiffs in civil rights lawsuits.

You can put a camera on a cop but you can't change the system that leads to abusive behavior and practices. Nothing's changing much for officers other than the attachment of a lightweight ride-along. Policies may require officers to activate their cameras in nearly every situation, but if no one's willing to hold them accountable for refusing to do so, then nothing's going to improve.

Since law enforcement agencies maintain control of equipment and recordings, there's not much the public can do when critical footage goes missing. Cops learned early on device tampering can reduce discrepancies in paperwork and shore up lies delivered as testimony. What went unpunished when it was just dashcams and body mics has continued forward to swallow the accountability body cams seemed to promise.

For the Albuquerque PD, destroying recorded evidence is allegedly just part of its daily duties. A former contractor employed by the department claimed officers and supervisors routinely altered or deleted body cam footage. It's a serious allegation. And it assumes there's even footage to alter. In the case of the Mary Hawkes, a 19-year-old woman killed by an Albuquerque PD officer in 2014, there was no footage to be had when her family's attorney Laura Ives asked for it.

The narrative provided by the PD when asked what happened to the footage that could possibly have been captured by the five officers on the scene is literally unbelievable. It's a chain of coincidences the world's worst novelist would have been ashamed to hammer together to hold a flimsy story together. Five officers. Zero useful footage of a shooting by police officers that resulted in a person's death.

The sergeant on scene, Brian Maurer, said he believed he turned his camera on during the incident, but the department later said he hadn’t recorded anything. In his deposition, the sergeant testified that his camera had never malfunctioned like that before.

"Never malfunctioned like that before." Unlucky that. But that leaves four officers…

There was another officer who was standing nearby when the shooting happened. He originally said he hadn’t seen the shooting at all. But when confronted with the only images of the shooting that we have — very vague footage from an officer’s lapel camera who was parking his car at the time of the shooting — it was clear that this officer lied about not seeing the shooting.

What did get recorded by this officer (who can be seen pointing a gun towards the shooting victim in the 10 seconds of captured footage) wasn't even enough to fill the camera's default buffer. Taser body cams create a rolling 30 second buffer that's retained when cameras are activated. The reason this officer only had 10 seconds is because he shut his camera off. That's according to the APD itself. Rolling buffer defeated and 20 seconds of footage that would have captured the shooting is now nonexistent.

That leaves three officers.

Yet another officer could have captured important footage of the shooting, but his recording was so heavily pixelated it was impossible to glean anything from the images. No one in the department had ever seen footage corrupted like this before, and APD claimed that this was the result of yet another malfunctioning camera.

Two officers.

The fourth officer said he was recording on his Scorpion camera at the time of the incident, but there was no video on his camera’s SD memory card.

The official excuse here? Another "malfunction" right during the critical moments of a shooting. The APD kept the "malfunctioning" camera in service which went on to live a full and useful life capturing random cop events without another malfunction.

One officer left. And this is the one who actually shot Mary Hawkes.

He claimed that his cord had come unplugged. The department sent his camera off to Taser for analysis, and Taser found that the camera had been powered on within 8 minutes of the shooting, but was powered off in the moments before.

Taser examined the camera and said it was possible a loose cord could have powered it down. It also said it could have been turned off with the power switch. The cord was damaged but did not affect the camera's functionality.

Only a couple of the cameras that mysteriously malfunctioned during the shooting were examined by the PD or Taser. None of the cameras were preserved so they could be inspected by experts to see if the issues could be duplicated or if any footage could be obtained from the "faulty" cameras. The cameras all went back into service despite having proven to be utterly useless when it mattered most.

So, is it likely all of these officers conspired ahead of time to ensure there was no usable record of this shooting? Of course not. These events unfold quickly. And what likely happened is far more nefarious than a conspiracy. All of these cops -- independently -- recognized the developing situation to be the sort that might result in damaging recordings. And they all acted independently to ensure nothing of value to anyone outside of the force was saved.

These five simultaneous "malfunctions" are the product of a corrupt system that values the lives and careers of cops above all else, even the lives of the citizens they're supposed to serve. This is an ingrained mindset that circles the wagons whenever officers' actions might be called into question. When a citizen gets killed, it's a cop's word against the victim's. And the victim can't say shit. The only thing that might leak some inconvenient truths are the body worn tattletales. They might upend the official bullshit scrawled across department paperwork after everyone involved has agreed on a narrative.

That's the way it works. That's the nastiness of US policing. It's the uncanny ability of multiple officers to act defensively in support of their careers while in the middle of a situation so very dangerous they need their guns drawn. They'll defend questionable decisions in court by claiming they had no time to think about what they were doing, but they obviously have enough of a self-preservation instinct to ensure nothing but the official narrative survives an officer-involved shooting.

Filed Under: accountability, albuquerque, albuquerque pd, body cameras, malfunctions, mary hawkes, police
Companies: taser

Recordings Capture Cops Discussing Department's Most Rotten Apple

from the thanks-for-the-convo,-but-what-are-you-doing-about-it? dept

Accountability begins at home. But nothing happens if no one's willing to make the first step. Officers who witnessed another officer's brutal act had plenty to say about it, but apparently not to anyone who mattered.

Recordings obtained through records requests by NJ.com contain three hours of candid conversations between officers about the actions of Cataret, New Jersey police officer Joseph Reiman. Reiman is a military veteran and the mayor's youngest brother. Officer Joseph Reiman is also responsible for 20% of the department's force deployment.

From the time Joseph Reiman was hired in July 2015, the 50-person department logged 115 incidents in which an officer used force, such as a punch, baton or weapon against a suspect, according to documents obtained under the state Open Public Records Act.

Reiman, 31, the brother of longtime Mayor Daniel Reiman, accounted for 24 of the incidents, more than twice as many as any other officer.

The obtained recordings captured the reactions of officers responding to the scene of an arrest handled by Joseph Reiman. When they arrived, they were confronted with a 16-year-old suspect lying face down in gravel with "blood all over the fucking place."

The officers, who have not been identified, remark that this disturbing situation is par for the course for Officer Reiman.

"I've been doing this less time than you but I've never punched anybody in the face like [inaudible]... never," an officer says in the recording.

"That's what I told Jerome last time," another officer responds.

The fact that these complaints never made their way up the chain of command likely has to do with the other officer at the scene: Charles Reiman, another of the mayor's brothers. As the officers leaving the scene point out, there's zero chance anyone in the department would be willing to pursue a case against the mayor's siblings.

The official narrative to explain the events, according to the officers, started at the scene and continued at headquarters: One recalls, "When I was there, they were like, 'Well, he was in a car accident. He was in a car accident.' I'm looking at this kid's face, I'm like, "that ain't a f-----g car accident... the whole side of his face has to be away from his skull and it's like repeated... lump... lump... lump."

Officer Charles Reiman, the middle Reiman brother who was the second on scene, had repeated, "He wouldn't show his hands," the same officer recalls.

"Charlie's already, ya know, writing his thesis," he says.

Another officer can be heard later in a separate recorded conversation,"They are going to blame it on the car accident... Nothin's gonna happen. They're gonna say nothing happen... he didn't have his body camera on."

The officer already knew Reiman's body camera wasn't on and questioned whether anyone's recorded the incident.

"What do you want to bet... they're all sitting around a table right now trying to get their f-----g story straight?" one officer asks after leaving the hospital.

And there it is: the legal defense for Reiman's actions was in development before this second set of officers arrived on the scene. When it's a cop's word against a beaten 16-year-old, "he wouldn't show his hands" tends to give officers permission to handle the situation with whatever level of force they want to, rather than what's actually necessary.

Joseph Reiman is now under indictment for criminal assault. He's still on the payroll while this advances through the judicial system. His history of excessive force is documented. Reiman is also a triple threat: writer, actor, and director of his own body cam footage.

[W]hile the Carteret police force is equipped with body cameras, videos that could tell the full story in some of Reiman's encounters do not exist or have been withheld, and at least one was corrupted, according to NJ Advance Media's investigation

Reiman's actions have prompted some interesting reactions. The most ridiculous reaction is that of Reiman's attorney.

Joseph Reiman's attorney, Charles Sciarra, said in a statement Friday, referring to the police heard in the videos, that these "officers are known malingerers who slow roll to calls like they did on this one, and are cut from the same cloth as the officer in the Florida school shooting who stayed outside the building while those kids were slaughtered."

Even if this were accurate, it would still be an incredibly shitty way to represent your client. It shows you're no better than the person you're representing -- someone willing to toss slurs at cops who don't regularly beat arrestees, and to portray appropriate force deployment as cowardice. But here's the thing: Reiman's attorney is making these accusations when he doesn't even know for sure which officers were captured on the recordings.

Sciarra also called on NJ Advance Media to name the officers so the attorney could "review their pitiful arrest numbers and lack of law enforcement activity as well as their agenda."

Reiman and his attorney deserve each other. Both have the mindset that efficient, brutal policing that steamrolls civilians' rights is the best policing.

The other reaction is (comparatively) much better. A letter from the county prosecutor puts a new person in charge of internal investigations. This "extraordinary measure" was prompted by the department's refusal to deal with mounting excessive force allegations -- a great many of them tied to Reiman and his partner -- and it's apparent unwillingness to conduct required background checks on gun purchasers. As the letter notes, the Cataret PD has spent two years ignoring its background check duties.

The scathing letter sent by Middlesex County Prosecutor Andrew Carey to borough officials --which was obtained by NJ Advance Media Thursday but dated Monday -- orders the recently hired Carteret police director, Kenneth Lebrato, to take over the department's internal affairs unit for at least six months.

[...]

Carey described Lebrato as "uniquely well qualified" because of his experience in the prosecutor's office.

Citing internal affairs issues in the letter, Carey calls current Carteret Deputy Chief Dennis McFadden, who is referred to as the chief in the borough's news releases, "ineffective in executing his official duties."

This may result in more attention being paid to the department's bad apples. Unfortunately, the better apples are only talking to each other, rather than their supervisors or city officials. Then again, the system is rigged against police whistleblowers, who will not only be ostracized, but possibly deliberately placed in danger by their colleagues. In this case, the system is even worse because the two officers involved in the cover-up of this excessive force are related to the top man in town. These officers stated as much on video: no one in the department would be willing to go head-to-head with the mayor's PD siblings.

So, the burden falls on the public. Investigative journalism has forced the system to address long-ignored problems. But this only goes so far, and it only works when journalists are able to apply consistent pressure via records requests (which often involves expensive lawsuits). Public servants are shirking their duties. Cops who have a duty to intervene are refusing to do so. The refusal to engage in internal accountability shifts an undue amount of the burden to private enterprises, who have to pay to perform oversight tasks that the public is paying PD officials to perform. The Cataret PD has been willing to house abusive cops for years, all on the taxpayers' dime. Only now, after being exposed, is it seeking to address its multiple issues.

Filed Under: accountability, bad apple, cataret, charles reiman, daniel reiman, joseph reiman, new jersey, police

Investigation Shows Chicago PD Has Zero Interest In Holding Its Officers Accountable

from the half-decade-wait-for-a-five-day-suspension dept

Why Chicago's Police Force Is A Godawful Train Wreck, Part 192: A Staggering Lack of Accountability.

Even after a Chicago Tribune investigation in March revealed faults with the disciplinary system that had caused officials to lose cases — and after they pledged to track down and finalize those cases — some punishments remain pending.

ProPublica Illinois and the Tribune, collaborating on this story, discovered Levigne's case as reporters tried to determine whether police officials had followed through on their promise.

The previous story detailed how pending punishments for at least 14 officers had been forgotten, and pointed out there likely were more. Police officials have required many of those officers, as well as about a dozen others, to serve punishments — years late — during the past few months, the Tribune and ProPublica Illinois confirmed.

But officials continued to let other old cases stall as they failed to make sense of their own disjointed — and sometimes incorrect — records.

That's just the latest in a long line of travesties committed by the Chicago PD. This follows other such lowlights as the PD operating its own Constitution-free "black site" inside the city, where criminal suspects were taken, detained, and interrogated with zero regard for their civil liberties. When Chicago police officers aren't shooting people and lying about it, they're participating in god knows what other sorts of misconduct after tampering with their recording devices.

The reason it's taken so long for anything to be done about this is a lack of accountability. Those up top feel no compunction to punish officers for misdeeds, often only following through when forced to by public outcry. When it does finally occur, it's years after the fact and often reduced to wrist slap.

The case cited above in the Chicago Tribune report involves Chicago PD officer Brandon Levigne. Levigne pulled a gun on a motorist for supposedly cutting him off in traffic. Levigne was not in uniform. The driver, Brandon Whitehead, called 911, thinking he was being carjacked. Whitehead reported this incident to the Chicago PD. This report was filed in 2006.

Police officials concluded that Levigne had mistreated the Whiteheads, used profanity and lied about it, and they recommended that he be suspended for 60 days. But they didn't follow through, and the officer didn't serve a reduced suspension until just this month, after reporters repeatedly questioned the delay.

It took eleven years for the officer to be punished. And it was a lighter punishment than police officials originally recommended. In the intervening years, Levigne -- who the department had ruled had engaged in misconduct years ago -- was promoted to detective.

The system used to track officer misconduct is archaic and needlessly convoluted -- so much so the system's inability to provide anything resembling accountability appears to be deliberate.

Emanuel fired police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, appointed a task force to propose reforms and revamped the former police oversight agency, the Independent Police Review Authority, or IPRA.

A replacement agency, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, began work Sept. 15.

But COPA must work within the same labyrinthine disciplinary system that has contributed to a lack of accountability. Records are kept on paper and shuffled between the oversight agency and the Police Department.

There is no management system in place to track cases, and they fall through the cracks.

And again, the only reason the CPD is moving forward with long-delayed punishments is due to outside pressure. External investigations by ProPublica and the Chicago Times have resulted in more cases being completed than years of internal management by the department. The new independent oversight board faces the same challenges: a culture deeply uninterested in punishing misconduct and a tracking system so broken it makes a mockery of the phrase "paper trail." One serious complaint finally resulted in a (laughable) punishment more than a half-decade after the fact.

A police spokesman said Stacker served his one-day suspension in April, six years after the warrantless entry. Stacker is currently stripped of police powers and on desk duty in connection with another case, a police spokesman said.

In this case, Officer Stacker announced he would file a grievance after an internal investigation found he had violated citizens' Fourth Amendment rights. But that's all Stacker did. The grievance was never filed and the case slipped into the undertow of the CPD's complaint tracking system, only resurfacing years later with the assistance of outside scrutiny.

The IRPA's help is appreciated but it too has problems following through with investigations and recommendations. Accused officers deliberately screw with the system by promising to challenge rulings or appeal decisions. These moves are never made and the complaints sit in limbo awaiting officers' next moves. When punishments are finally handed down years after the fact, they're often far less than was recommended or agreed to. The appeals that officers never got around to filing are somehow treated as being filed in absentia. And even the reduced punishments are never served.

Officer Jorge Martinez Jr. was accused of drunkenly challenging and taunting a security guard and officers from a Texas police department while attending a wedding reception in Dallas in 2007. He was charged with misdemeanor assault in Texas, but the case was dismissed.

IPRA recommended a 60-day suspension in 2011, but Martinez settled with the city for five days in 2015.

IPRA had no record of getting the settlement agreement that reduced the punishment, so years passed and Martinez never served the suspension. In May, however, a CPD sergeant in the Bureau of Internal Affairs alerted IPRA and Police Department officials that Martinez's disciplinary case was listed as active when it should have been closed long ago, emails show.

Still, nothing happened.

The Chicago PD is an accountability black hole. Plenty of paperwork goes in, but it's never seen again. The CPD won't make any sort of effort, despite handling many of these investigations in house. The independent review board suffers from its outsider status and its relative powerlessness to ensure closed investigations result in the meting out of discipline. There's no reason for the CPD to change. It's gotten along for years with a minimum of scrutiny and its officers have tons of experience in the art of thwarting oversight. If the heads up top aren't rolling, abusive officers further down the organizational chart have nothing to fear.

Filed Under: accountability, chicago pd, discipline, police brutality, police misconduct

Officers With Personal Body Cams Taking The 'Public' Out Of 'Public Accountability'

from the purchase-the-new-Axon-CYA! dept

America's largest sheriff's department is rolling towards an accountability train wreck. Despite years of discussing the issue, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department still has no cohesive policy on body cameras, nor has it taken steps to outfit its officers with the devices.

This less-than-ideal situation is being made worse by deputies purchasing their own body cameras with personal funds.

An estimated 20 percent of Los Angeles County's 10,000 deputies have bought cameras for themselves, according to the county's inspector general. Sheriff Jim McDonnell concedes some deputies have their own cameras but disputes that as many as 2,000 wear them on duty.

Whatever the number, not a single frame of any video from these cameras has ever made it into the public domain.

And therein lies the problem. Body cameras owned by law enforcement officers serve zero public purpose. Any recordings remain the personal property of the officers, who can delete and edit footage as they see fit. The only footage likely to make its way into the hands of the sheriff's department are recordings clearing officers of wrongdoing.

While it may be possible to subpoena this footage for civil suits and criminal prosecutions, there's no guarantee the footage will arrive unaltered, or even arrive at all. Personal body cams are unlikely to be bundled with unlimited storage. Footage will be overwritten often (depending on how heavily the camera is used while on duty) and remains in the control of officers, rather than the department and its oversight.

As is pointed out in the AP article, the use of privately-owned body cameras contradicts DOJ guidance on the matter. A 2014 DOJ report noted private cameras on public employees is an all-around bad idea.

"Because the agency would not own the recorded data, there would be little or no protection against the officer tampering with the videos or releasing them to the public or online," the report said. "Agencies should not permit personnel to use privately owned body-worn cameras while on duty."

The LA sheriff's department makes this worse by allowing the practice to continue without official policies on body camera use. Even the barest minimum of discipline for deleting footage is impossible, as the department is powerless to take action against deputies who vanish away footage containing alleged misconduct.

The head of the local law enforcement union pretty much says the only people benefiting from personal body cameras are the officers that own them.

"It's really a personal preference," [union president Ron] Hernandez said. "The guys we have spoken to have said they thought it would be beneficial for them. They see the value in covering themselves."

Sorry, but that's not what body cameras are for. They may provide evidence clearing officers of misconduct, but body cameras aren't there to create law enforcement highlight reels. While it's great some officers may find the cameras useful for clearing themselves of charges, they are public employees, not private entities engaging in personal enforcement of laws. The footage should be as public as their positions. But this will never happen if their employer is unwilling to craft a solid body cam policy that addresses private ownership of cameras.

As it stands now, the department is allowing its existing policies on evidence handling to act as a stand-in for its non-existent body camera policy. According to these rules, all evidence must be held for two years and turned over on request to the sheriff's department. Supposedly, this will encompass privately-held body camera footage. But it would be much better for body cam evidence to be stored on site where it's immediately accessible and less prone to tampering.

Body cameras are already problematic. They have the potential to be great tools of accountability, but this has been continually stunted by legislators and law enforcement agencies, many of which have done all they can to keep this footage out of the public's hands. In this case, the LASD's lack of forward momentum on the camera front has turned a portion of its workforce into sole proprietors with badges, guns, and a collection of home movies starring residents of L.A. County.

Filed Under: accountability, body cameras, la, los angeles county, personal body cameras, police, public records

NYPD Finally Comes Up With A Body Camera Policy, And It's Terrible

from the more-tech,-less-transparency dept

Nearly four years after the NYPD was ordered by a federal judge to implement body cameras, the department is finally getting around to finalizing its rule set for deployment. Part of the delay is due to the NYPD seeking input from the public -- input it has apparently decided to ignore.

As Scott Greenfield notes, the NYPD gets everything wrong about its policies, applying guidelines that directly contradict the responses received from everyone in New York City not wearing a blue uniform.

The first “big” question is when will cops be required to turn their body cams on, since having them doesn’t actually serve much of a purpose if they’re turned off.

Notice anything peculiar? Like the public wants them on a lot, and the cops, not so much? But this belies the problem: if body cams must be on for “use of force,” will cops call a “time out” when a situation develops where they decide to tune up a guy who isn’t sufficiently compliant so he can flip the switch? Sure. Who doesn’t honor the sacred “time out”?

But then, the “it depends” on witness interviews is somewhat disconcerting. After all, why record witness interviews, since they might say something inconsistent with the cop’s recollection or their testimony in court? That could be unpleasant.

The public also wants expansive footage release policies. Unsurprisingly, NYPD officers do not. From the NYPD's body-worn camera report [PDF]:

Officers and the public were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with this statement: “If a person has an interaction with an officer wearing a  body-worn camera, the NYPD should be required to show that person the footage upon request.” Here is how they responded:

Here are the responses for a similar question, but involving third parties like journalists and advocacy groups making requests for footage:

The split is obvious. The public wants access. The NYPD wants sole control. The "compromise" is this:

[T]he NYPD is refusing to take this step. Instead, it will require footage requesters go through the slow and ill-suited Freedom of Information Law public records process — the same one you’d have to use to get, say, the mayor’s travel records.

To date, when people have used the FOIL process to request footage from the tiny number of body cameras already deployed in an experiment, the NYPD has stood in the way, charging the public exorbitant fees and claiming broad exemptions.

When it comes to New York's open records law, approaching the NYPD for documents is an exercise in futility. The department has been called "worse than the FBI, CIA, and NSA" when it comes to responding to records requests. FOIL lawsuits are minimally effective, as the NYPD is as comfortable with slowly bleeding plaintiffs dry as it is ignoring their requests entirely.

The other twist is this: if you're facing criminal charges and want access to footage of your arrest, etc., you're not going to get any preferential treatment. You also will be forbidden from joining the FOIL line and hearing your request will be ignored in the order it's received. Scott Greenfield breaks this down:

But certainly the defendant is entitled to the video, right?

"There is an important exception with respect to release of body-worn camera footage: if a person is arrested and has a pending criminal case, and seeks body camera footage related to his or her arrest, he or she may not come to the NYPD to circumvent the standard discovery process between the prosecution and the defense. Discovery is governed by New York State Criminal Procedure Law. Criminal defendants are entitled to these recordings under the law, but such requests are handled by prosecutors in accordance with existing criminal discovery practices and procedures."

Discovery? That same criminal procedure process that has been the target of reform for decades because it’s nearly useless?

Unbelievably, the NYPD camera policy gets even worse, and even further away from the public's preferences. Here are the responses given to the question of when officers should be given access to body camera footage. Note that the largest split involves the viewing of camera footage before writing reports.

The NYPD policy sides with the 91% of officers who stated they should be given access before writing reports or issuing statements. The explanation of its decision to run contrary to public opinion cites two things:

1. Plenty of other law enforcement agencies have similarly bad camera policies.

The NYPD body-worn-camera working group has reviewed the body-worn camera policies of nearly 30 police departments. All of them allow officers, without restriction, to review body-worn camera video prior to filling reports when there has not been a significant use of force.

2. NYPD internal investigations are probably the most thorough, serious investigations in the history of internal investigations.

The propriety of this approach requires some understanding of how serious use-of-force investigations proceed in New York City… [two pages of Complicated Hypothetical Situation…]

So, the NYPD will join the 21st century, already in progress, with 1,000 cameras and policies that benefit no one but the officers wearing them. The presumption for footage will be nondisclosure and the only people guaranteed to see the footage will be those who can tailor their narratives to recordings after the fact. The NYPD believes it's the best police force in the nation, if not the world. But it's still far behind several smaller agencies, both in terms of tech adoption, as well as transparency and accountability.

Filed Under: accountability, body cameras, new york, nypd, transparency