Kansas City PD Presentation Says Every Shooting Investigation Is Handled The Same Way... Unless It Involves A Cop

from the no-bias-here-if-you-don't-count-the-bias-towards-cops dept

The Kansas City Police Department has managed to turn a few heads -- and not in the good way -- with an internal PowerPoint that may as well have been titled "So, You've Killed Someone." The document was obtained during discovery in a wrongful death suit against the KCPD. Back in 2019, Officer Dylan Pifer shot and killed Terrance Bridges, claiming he thought Bridges was trying to pull a gun from his sweatshirt pocket. No gun was found on Bridges.

The presentation [PDF] obtained from Bridges' family's lawyer by the Kansas City Star advises cops of two things: police shootings should be handled like routine criminal investigations to eliminate claims of bias. And police shootings should be handled nothing like routine criminal investigations because they involve cops.

The opening slide makes it clear what the priority is in investigations of shootings by cops: preserving the narrative. It even has the number one next to it.

Upon completion of this block of instruction, the participants will, with the use of handouts and notes, be able to:

1. Identify the best defense again [sic] claims of bias or favoritism in the investigations of officer involved shootings.

You know what's not a top priority? Preserving evidence. That comes behind officer safety.

Supervisors should consider the preservation of evidence as secondary to the safety of the public and department personnel.

The presentation points out that shootings are controversial and claims "police critics" will often claim investigations -- which routinely clear officers of wrongdoing -- are "biased and that police receive special treatment." So, the best defense is a good offense:

The best defense to these claims is CONSISTENCY in how we conduct ALL criminal investigations.

[...]

The best way to do this is to treat the investigation into officer involved shootings LIKE EVERY OTHER CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION.

All well and good, except the presentation spends most of its running time explaining how this sort of investigation won't be treated like a regular criminal investigation.

Does this look like the sort of thing cops offer to non-cops involved in shootings?

Don’t engage the member in detailed conversation about the incident, but you are encouraged to talk with them like you would on any other day.

Make sure that all requests (bathroom, food, drinks, cigarettes) by the involved members are met as soon as possible.

Forget about preserving evidence:

If their recording system is active, have the member mute the mike and mute yours. They will be making calls to FOP [Fraternal Order of Police] and spouses and family. They may be in an excited state and hyperverbal.

And start hiding stuff from journalists:

Park somewhere that responding media will not be able to film the involved member.

But that of course only means the involved cop. The non-cop will have any and all possibly incriminating information immediately forwarded to local media, along with any mugshots the PD happens to have on hand. Information about the involved officer will be much slower in arriving. Much slower than even the involved officer's statement to investigators:

Generally, the member will be permitted up to forty-eight (48) hours to complete such statement…

The presentation then spends a bit of time bemoaning the public's confidence in law enforcement, which isn't at an all-time high. It blames the media (again) for misrepresenting shootings by officers and, again, stresses doing everything by the book to combat this perception. But the book for officers is very different from the book for citizens. And until law enforcement agencies are willing to change that, the rest of what bothers the presenter about public perception isn't going to change.

And this is about the worst possible way you could end an instructive presentation on handling shootings by officers:

There is nothing wrong with being glad to be alive and being okay that you were the winner in a competition in which the winning prize was your life.

Law enforcement isn't a competition with winners and losers. It's a job, an important one, but one that has apparently been handed to people who believe members of the public are enemy combatants and that shootings are just games to be won.

Filed Under: investigations, kansas city, police, police shootings

Police, Police Supporters: Ending Qualified Immunity Makes Being A Cop Too Hard, Somehow 'Defunds' The Police

from the snowflakes-in-bulletproof-vests dept

Last Wednesday, the House passed the "George Floyd Justice in Policing Act," a bill that targets a number of aspects of law enforcement that need improvement, including two that have caused a considerable amount of collateral damage.

The bill [PDF] -- passed by the Democratic majority 220-212 with all but one member of either party voting the way you'd expect them to vote -- bans discriminatory profiling, mandates more training on discrimination, and requires law enforcement agencies to collect data on investigatory activities. It also bans chokeholds and no-knock warrants, both instruments of death still permitted by far too many law enforcement agencies. The on-again, off-again limits on the requisition of military gear via the 1033 program are back on.

There are also mandates for federal officers, finally requiring their use of body cams and dashcams -- something they've avoided doing for years.

But here are the accountability add-ons that are resulting in pushback from law enforcement agencies, their supporters, and (of course) their unions.

Makes it easier to prosecute offending officers by amending the federal criminal statute to prosecute police misconduct. The mens rea requirement in 18 U.S.C. Section 242 will be amended from “willfulness” to a “recklessness” standard.

Enables individuals to recover damages in civil court when law enforcement officers violate their constitutional rights by eliminating qualified immunity for law enforcement.

Officers really don't want to be held accountable for their actions. Thanks to the US Supreme Court, they've been able to avoid personal responsibility with relative ease for years now. Citizens have been able to sue government employees for rights violations since 1871, following the passage of the Ku Klux Klan Act. The Supreme Court didn't create the qualified immunity defense until 1967. So, for nearly 100 years, law enforcement agencies at both the state and federal level operated without this shield and, despite its nonexistence, were not swamped with bad faith litigation.

But the complaints emanating from these agencies following the House's passage of this bill could give listeners the impression this litigation shield has always existed and that any alterations to it would open the litigation floodgates. And the constant threat of litigation would have other negative effects, like deterring people from entering the law enforcement field.

But let's go back to the vote. One Republican rep who voted the "wrong" way swiftly ran to the nearest social media outlet to make sure his voter base knew he never intended to support police accountability efforts.

The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, H.R. 1280, passed 220-212 — although a Republican representative said he'd voted yes by mistake and changed the official record to reflect his opposition.

Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Texas, tweeted that he'd pressed the wrong button and voted for the bill by accident.

Virtue signaling but for avoiding virtuous acts. Nicely done, Rep. Wrong Button.

The bill passed the House, which is held by the Democratic Party. The party has a slim majority in the Senate which may not be enough to move this legislation forward. Nevertheless, the complaints have begun to roll in. And, as is to be expected when legislators target something created out of thin air that solely benefits law enforcement, law enforcement is complaining about the possibility of it evaporating back from whence it came.

The Placer County Deputy Sheriffs Association president says a majority of law enforcement officials are following the rules and if the bill passes, getting rid of qualified immunity will just end up hurting good officers.

“Bad police officers should be held accountable. That’s something we can all agree with. The language in this bill, isn’t a step in that direction,” said Deputy Noah Frederito.

But bad officers aren't held accountable very often. And this neglect often begins in the agencies that employ them. Qualified immunity tends to ensure they won't be held accountable in other arenas law enforcement doesn't directly control. Bad officers get sued. Good officers won't -- or at least, they won't be sued successfully, even in the absence of qualified immunity. In fact, most officers are never sued, so it tends to be the baddest of the bad that find themselves in court trying to explain why violating rights was the best way to conduct law enforcement business.

Here's the National Association of Police Officers with a similar complaint, one that says it's almost impossible for officers to figure out what citizens' rights are and/or how to avoid violating them. It's an appeal to idiocy, written by idiots.

With the change to qualified immunity, an officer can go to prison for an unintentional act that unknowingly broke an unknown, and unknowable, right. Further, the threat of the elimination of qualified immunity has already caused decent, experienced officers and newly hired officers alike to question whether the risks of the profession are worth the noble job of serving and protecting their communities.

It's pretty sad when you openly admit that increased accountability will result in fewer people opting for a law enforcement career. It's almost as if the thing that attracts applicants is the combination of increased power over citizens and extremely limited accountability, rather than any sense of duty to their communities.

Here's another union rep saying pretty much the same thing:

"They want to take our Qualified Immunity away, and we're totally against that."

John Kazanjian, who also serves as the President of the Palm Beach and Martin County PBAs, says it would lead to a slew of lawsuits being filed against individual officers.

"So when they take that away, next thing you know I put a set of handcuffs on somebody, they get bruising on their wrists (and) we're getting sued."

Yes, the existential threat of bullshit lawsuits -- one that Kanzanjian somehow manages to portray as a defunding effort by Congressional Democrats, despite there being no defunding mandated by the law.

He says, in essence, the legislation that's named after the black man who died while in police custody in Minneapolis last May, would wind up defunding the police. That's because, with individual officers potentially facing costly law suits, agencies would have to spend a portion of their funding on lawyers to defend them.

This is something some already do. And it's not even their money. It's the taxpayers' money. That it often comes from city/county funds rather than the departments themselves doesn't change the fact that the money comes from taxpayers. If it starts coming from police departments themselves, it's still not their money and it's still an expense agencies should do everything to limit, which means cultivating a positive police culture rather than just shrugging off misconduct allegations and excessive force deployments.

Others are making the same disingenuous arguments about "defunding the police," knowing that this phrasing conjures images of cop shops going broke and criminals running wild. More importantly, it harms their political opponents.

Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, repeated one of those attacks on Thursday, asserting that the bill would “defund the police” by imposing “mountains of new regulations” that would drain departments’ resources. The attack sought to conflate the House Democrats’ effort with calls by progressive activists to shrink or otherwise pull resources from departments — which the lawmakers in Washington who crafted the bill explicitly rejected.

“Democrats just doubled down as the party of Defunding the Police,” Mr. McCarthy wrote on Twitter.

Again, nothing in this bill strips funds from law enforcement agencies. It does require them to use some of their funds to meet training and reporting mandates, but moving money around isn't the same thing as taking money away.

Two Iowa Congressional reps made the same specious argument two different ways. Here's Representative Ashely Hinson:

Law enforcement officers in Iowa and across this country put their lives on the line every day to keep our communities safe. It’s reprehensible that House Democrats would bring forward legislation to defund police departments while relying on law enforcement to protect our Capitol from imminent threats…

And here's Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks:

The Justice in Policing Act would eliminate qualified immunity, which would make recruitment and retention difficult and increase retirements, decrease the number of officers on patrol, and cost taxpayer dollars municipalities litigate frivolous lawsuits. In effect, this is a backdoor way to defund the police.

Again, no defunding takes place. The second statement is worse, because it again suggests people get into the cop business to access power that's tied to very limited responsibility. When that balance shifts to something a bit more equal, those originally drawn to the more favorable power/responsibility blend exit the workforce. But cops leaving (or failing to ever arrive) isn't "defunding."

The opposition is making their voices heard. And their voices are saying they have no interest in holding cops accountable because… accountability apparently keeps people from becoming cops and keeps employed cops from continuing to be cops. That's a pretty sad admission.

Filed Under: george floyd, police, police brutality, qualified immunity

Whistleblower: Police Officers Celebrated Shooting People With Badge-Bending, BBQs

from the jesus-fucking-christ-can-you-try-not-being-awful-just-for-a-moment dept

There's a lot of competition for Worst Police Force in America. The NYPD is known for its casual approach to human life and its antagonistic approach to public records requesters. The Chicago PD operated its own black site to separate residents from their rights while interrogating them. The Pasco County Sheriff's Department thinks it should be in the business of turning students into criminals. The list goes on and fucking on.

Enter the Vallejo (California) Police Department -- one that has apparently gamified the shooting of residents.

For a generation, a secretive clique within the Vallejo Police Department has commemorated fatal shootings with beers, backyard barbecues, and by bending the points of their badges each time they kill in the line of duty, an investigation by Open Vallejo has found. The custom was so exclusive, some officers involved in fatal shootings were never told of its existence.

First you have to shoot someone. Then the others who are in on this have to determine whether you can be trusted.

Sources say not every officer who kills is invited to participate in the Badge of Honor ritual. The vetting process is stringent, if straightforward. Those who kill meet its first requirement. Those who can be trusted not to talk fulfill the second.

Open Vallejo cites the controversial shooting of Willie McCoy as the impetus for this anonymous whistleblowing. McCoy was shot by Vallejo police officers in a Taco Bell drive-thru, where he had apparently passed out. Restaurant employees called the PD, which sent officers to perform a wellness check. Instead of seeing whether anything was wrong with McCoy, officers surrounded the car and killed McCoy when he awoke and moved one arm towards his shoulder. Vallejo officers fired 55 rounds in less than 3.5 seconds, killing McCoy.

It wasn't the first time Vallejo cops emptied their magazines into someone they were supposed to be arresting or helping. At the tail end of a chase involving an alleged robbery suspect, Vallejo officers shot the suspect -- who was carrying a knife and slowly moving towards them -- 41 times.

According to Open Vallejo's source, one of McCoy's killers -- Officer Ryan McMahon -- got a bend on his "star" for this shooting. This would be his second "bend" in less than a year.

Vallejo police officers love using their guns to solve problems. Even if you doubt the anonymous whistleblower's claims of in-house celebrations for shooting citizens, this statistic is chilling:

At the time of [Captain John] Whitney’s firing, nearly 40% of officers on the force had been in at least one shooting, Open Vallejo research shows. More than a third of those had participated in two or more. The department employs about 100 sworn personnel.

That's well above the 27% of officers who have self-reported firing their weapons in the line of duty. This disparity begs the "chicken or egg" question. Are Vallejo cops violent because there are informal rewards for being violent? Or did this streak of violence lead to the unofficial rewarding of shooting people?

The captain namechecked in this quote was forced out of the department after opening an investigation into the shooting of Willie McCoy. Vallejo's police culture doesn't welcome internal or external scrutiny -- like pretty much every other law enforcement agency in the nation.

Captain Whitney's whistleblowing didn't start there. It wasn't just the Willie McCoy shooting. It was also the blowback from another Vallejo PD failure -- one ignored off by officers and supervisors, including the then-head of the PD.

[Current police union president Mat] Mustard was the lead detective on the 2015 Denise Huskins kidnapping case Vallejo police mistakenly called a hoax.

Whitney says he was in the room when Chief Bidou allegedly instructed Lt. Kenny Park before a now infamous press conference.

"The fact that we've essentially wasted all of these resources for really nothing is upsetting," said Lt. Park during the 2015 presser.

"Chief Bidou told Lt. Park to burn that b****," said Whitney.

Huskins recorded this exclusive statement for ABC7 News: "In their eyes, if you're a woman - you're another "bit**" to burn; if you're a person of color - you're another 'criminal' to kill. It's horrific, and the community of Vallejo deserves better."

That's the mindset of this PD, which has terrorized residents for years under the guise of preserving law and order. This is the way it has always been.

The failure to hold police officers accountable has been an issue in Vallejo for as long as anyone can remember. According to confidential city documents, twenty-five years ago one officer shot another while drinking in a bar, and wasn’t fired. A cop with a drug problem kept his job even after he was caught stealing from evidence lockers and was arrested for prescription fraud. Twenty years ago, a lieutenant told a new officer named Joseph Iacono that, when a suspect runs away, the officer should use enough force to put the man in the emergency room. To see if Iacono could fight, he was placed in a holding cell with an uncoöperative suspect. Iacono is now the department’s Lead Force Options Instructor and, according to the documents, likes to say, “It can’t be awful if it’s lawful.”

The Vallejo PD has cost city residents $16 million in the last ten years. This may not seem like much when compared to the amounts racked up by law enforcement agencies in large cities like Chicago and New York City. But when broken down to a per officer cost, Vallejo takes the lead in costing those paying their salaries the most. And -- despite actions taken by the city's insurer -- police officers continue to make things worse for those that manage to survive their violence.

Police violence has cost the city so much money that, in 2018, the statewide insurance pool that helped pay its legal fees took the unprecedented step of raising Vallejo’s annual deductible, from five hundred thousand dollars to $2.5 million, prompting the city to find another insurer. Vallejo is currently facing at least twenty-four use-of-force cases, which it estimates could cost some fifty million dollars.

Even if Vallejo officers aren't bending their badges in celebration of shooting citizens, they're still shooting citizens far more often than cops in other departments. A lot of whistleblowing has occurred over the years in relation to this department. And so far, it hasn't changed the culture.

The Vallejo PD is out of control. Swapping parts out isn't going to change it. There's a new deputy chief helping preside over Vallejo's squad of uniformed killers but no one should be holding their breath waiting for internal reform. The "new" sub-boss is the same as the old boss: a department rehire. Joseph Kreins presided over the department as chief from 2012-2014. Dusting off someone who failed to control a department for two years doesn't change anything. The city's cops will continue to kill and maim until someone dares to rein them in.

And it appears no one will -- at least not immediately. Between retrofitting a deputy chief and pretending state AG Xavier Becerra -- the same AG who fought a new police accountability law in court -- will get to the bottom of the PD's endemic violence problem, city residents haven't been given anything to hope for. The shootings will continue until law enforcement morale improves.

Filed Under: california, police, police brutality, shootings, vallejo, violence

John Oliver On Drug Raids: Why Are We Raiding Houses For Drug Quantities That Could Be Easily Flushed Down A Toilet?

from the law-enforcement-vastly-overestimating-toilet-capacity dept

John Oliver has demolished many institutions in his time (not literally, unfortunately, in most cases) as the host of HBO's Last Week Tonight. It's rare when a mainstream program chooses to address more esoteric matters often discussed at this website. But Oliver does it more than most and, for that, we truly appreciate him.

His episode from last week dealt with drug raids. Our nation's drug warriors have decided any suspicion of non-violent crime should be met with an uber-violent response, possibly because they've watched just as many Hollywood movies as we have.

When it comes to drugs and drug warrants, it's all hands on deck. Sometimes, law enforcement agencies are able to obtain no-knock warrants, which allow them to enter a residence without announcing their presence in order to "preserve evidence" and limit the possibility of a violent response.

Let's handle the second thing first. There's a lot of evidence that suggests no-knock raids increase the possibility of a violent response because the first assumption a drug dealer might make is that a rival drug dealer/gang is raiding their house to end their lives, take their drugs, and grab a bit more profitable turf. Cops get killed. People get killed.

Now, let's talk about the possibility of evidence being destroyed. We're talking about large amounts of drugs, paraphernalia, and weapons. As John Oliver points out, this is bullshit. Cops are raiding homes without announcing themselves to secure extremely minute amounts of evidence. And that's according to their own justifications:

Yeah, the ruling there was giving you 20 seconds to answer your door is reasonable because you might flush evidence down the toilet, which raises the obvious question here: why the f*ck are we raiding people's homes for an amount of evidence that can be flushed down a toilet?

As someone who has had to unclog toilets multiple times over my 46 years of living (but mostly over my 30 years of being a parent) (I had my first child at 30), the amount of anything it takes to clog a toilet is far less than any amount of anything that would seem to justify a guns-out raid of a premises. And considering the catch-all charge for most raids -- especially when no one can find the drugs officers thought they'd find -- is illegal possession of a weapon by a felon, there's absolutely zero chance anyone's going to be able to flush a gun down a toilet. That's just impossible.

Surrounding a house and providing residents a chance to answer -- rather than destroying doors, windows, nearby toddlers… -- is going to keep most evidence intact. A toilet can only do so much. A surrounded residence will prevent suspects and evidence from being ejected into neighboring yards. Everything else will still remain in place, especially when suspects realize Hollywood has been lying to them about the flushability of large quantities of drugs.

In any event, treating every standard drug warrant service as paramilitary assault on a violent enemy results in -- you guessed it -- violence. People are killed and wounded. Officers are killed and wounded. And this happens whether or not cops hit the right address. In far too many cases, they don't. That's something we won't put up with from the USPS, Amazon, or anyone else we entrust to get our address correct. When cops don't, officials just respond with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. This should be a tragedy and result in a few firings. Instead, it's just the cost of the Drug War -- paid by people who weren't even combatants.

The police hitting the wrong address is completely unacceptable when the stakes are so high. Even Edible Arrangements manages to deliver to the correct address!

When the stakes are life and death, mere competence shouldn't be considered an unreasonable bar for officers to reach. It should be the minimum we expect of them. But it isn't. And cops continue to get more violent despite the Drug War being a multi-decade failure and their escalating efforts having resulted in little more than a long, uninterrupted string of rights violations and deaths. This is unacceptable. And yet, it is not only considered acceptable, but valorous. Hopefully, John Oliver's reach will make more people aware of the injustices carried out with their implicit blessing and prompt further meaningful change in drug policies and law enforcement agencies.

Filed Under: drug raids, john oliver, no knock warrants, police, police brutality

Federal Legislators Take Another Run At Ending Qualified Immunity

from the no-longer-above-the-law,-but-subject-to-it dept

Last summer as protests raged around the nation in response to the killing of an unarmed black man by a white Minnesota police officer, federal legislators offered up a solution to one of the hot garbage problems of our time. A federal police reform bill contained a number of fixes to policing in America, including one crucial element that would make it far easier for citizens to pursue lawsuits over rights violations: the termination of the qualified immunity defense.

Over the years, qualified immunity has morphed from a limited protection for officers to allow them to make split-second decisions in dangerous situations to a blanket excuse for rights violations. Thanks mainly to the US Supreme Court, qualified immunity now shields officers from large numbers of legitimate accusations of rights violations. SCOTUS has shifted the emphasis to judicial precedent, rather than any discussion of the alleged violations brought before federal court judges. As long as law enforcement personnel violate rights in new ways that aren't covered by existing precedent, the officers are allowed to dodge lawsuits, juries, and fact-finding.

The Supreme Court has made it easier for lower courts to dodge questions about rights violations -- and, in turn, prevent them from establishing new precedent -- by forcing them to defer to a limited test that only involves established precedent and a very limited examination of the facts of the case. Only recently has the Supreme Court realized it may have had this wrong. Two remands to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals (the circuit most protective of cops) in the past few months indicate the nation's top court now feels the lower courts have followed its damaging instructions too closely.

So, there may be hope going forward. But it will be slow in arriving and still somewhat limited by the Supreme Court's precedential blanket instructions on QI cases. Nonetheless, there is hope.

What may be faster-acting is some federal legislation. Far too often, courts defer to legislators who seemingly have zero interest in deterring the wreckage qualified immunity has wrought. Asking politicians to go head-to-head with some of their most powerful supporters is kind of a non-starter. But if it's legislation courts are demanding, at least a few legislators are willing to give it to them.

The last effort to eliminate qualified immunity died quietly, even as cities continued to burn. The effort has been renewed by a bipartisan group of legislators who have seen immunity and the damage done and refuse to offer their tacit blessing of this accountability escape hatch by doing nothing. Akela Lacy has more details for The Intercept:

Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, Democrats of Massachusetts, are introducing a bill to fully end qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that protects police and law enforcement officials from civil liability in cases where they are accused of violating someone's constitutional rights.

The "Ending Qualified Immunity Act" [PDF] would do exactly that, building on Rep. Justin Amash's attempt to terminate this bullshit last year, when the irons were hot and setting fire to precinct houses. The bill notes law enforcement has been on the wrong side of history since the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. Since then, law enforcement hasn't bothered to correct its course. It engages in biased policing pretty much all the time and sinks its funding into efforts that reinforce its foregone (and often bigoted) conclusions.

As the bill points out, qualified immunity actually subverts the intention of federal legislators. It was created solely by a single court with no deferral to legislators who had already expressed their intent through this legislation, which created a cause of action for citizens whose rights had been violated.

This doctrine of qualified immunity has severely limited the ability of many plaintiffs to recover damages under section 1983 when their rights have been violated by State and local officials. As a result, the intent of Congress in passing the law has been frustrated, and Americans’ rights secured by the Constitution have not been appropriately protected.

In short, screw qualified immunity. It undercuts the Constitution as well as legislative intent. With this bill, QI would no longer be considered a defense to allegations of rights violations.

It shall not be a defense or immunity to any action brought under this section that the defendant was acting in good faith, or that the defendant believed, reasonably or otherwise, that his or her conduct was lawful at the time when it was committed. Nor shall it be a defense or immunity that the rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution or Federal laws were not clearly established at the time of their deprivation by the defendant, or that the state of the law was otherwise such that the defendant could not reasonably have been expected to know whether his or her conduct was lawful.

This doesn't prevent cops from escaping civil rights lawsuits. They still can. But they can't do it with a motion to dismiss prior to any fact-finding. Instead, they'll have to deal with lawsuits like most civilians have to: by bringing their own evidence and waiting for a judge to rule on the merits. In some cases, this will mean going to trial. And going to trial should never be considered a failure of the system. That's supposed to be the desired outcome. Instead, we've been given years of cops pressing the eject button and simply nodding along as allegations remain unaddressed, even when the courts are still supposed to assume plaintiffs' allegations are true.

This won't be the litigation apocalypse cops will claim it to be. Instead, it will put them on the same playing field the rest of us have to work with. Government employees should be holding themselves to higher standards. This bill only demands law enforcement officers abide by the same rules governing non-cop-related litigation.

Filed Under: congress, police, protests, qualified immunity

New York City Shifting Mental Health Calls From NYPD To Actual Mental Health Professionals

from the keeping-more-people-alive-is-always-a-net-positive dept

In all honesty, we've been asking the police to do too much for years. If we really care about the most vulnerable members of our community, we would stop calling cops to handle it. But for years, that's been pretty much our only option. We call 911 and 911 tends to send cops to deal with people in the throes of mental health crises.

This has worked out badly. Cops aren't trained to handle mental health issues. They're trained to apprehend criminals and meet latent threats with deadly force. People who just need a good doctor are ending up with bullets in them. In far too many cases, suicide threats end with the suicidal person dead. That's not what we want from the police. Unfortunately, that's all they really have to offer. And that's how courts end up excusing cops for, say, tasing a person doused in gasoline, ensuring the latent threat they poised became a reality, killing the person needing help, and burning down the house around him.

Cities are beginning to take another approach to mental health issues. Wellness checks are better handled by mental health professionals. It's a conclusion that seems obvious but is rarely embraced by law enforcement and the local governments overseeing them. There's a time and place for law enforcement response. Someone suffering from mental health issues isn't a police matter. Neither is homelessness. Neither is bog standard trespassing, which often just means someone saw someone where they didn't expect to see someone.

Routing these calls to people trained to respond appropriately works. A pilot program in Denver, Colorado just wrapped up six months of rerouting, resulting in no deaths, no wounding, and no arrests, despite handling more than 350 calls. Police still handle most 911 calls, but even in a part-time capacity, Denver's new mental health response team has shown an improvement over how these calls have been handled historically.

And now it appears the largest police department in the nation will be handing off mental health calls to mental health professionals. The NYPD will no longer be handling some calls related to issues that really don't require a show of force in response. The program was first announced late last year in response to the killing of Daniel Prude -- a man suffering a mental breakdown -- by Rochester, New York police officers.

Mental health workers will replace police officers in responding to some 911 calls next year in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday.

The test program, to be rolled out in two neighborhoods, will give mental health professionals the lead role when someone calls 911 because a family member is in crisis, officials said.

The initiative is modeled on existing programs in cities including Eugene, Oregon, where teams of paramedics and crisis workers have been responding to mental health 911 calls for more than 30 years.

The limited rollout is now expanding to cover one of New York City's largest boroughs.

New York City police will stay out of many mental health crisis calls and social workers will respond instead in parts of northern Manhattan starting this spring, an official told lawmakers Monday.

The test program will begin in three Harlem and East Harlem police precincts that together accounted for a highest-in-the-city total of over 7,400 mental health-related 911 calls last year, said Susan Herman, who heads a wide-ranging city mental health initiative called ThriveNYC.

The program will continue to expand for the next couple of years. NYPD officers will no longer be expected to handle certain calls and will be able to ask for assistance from this unit if a call they respond to requires their assistance.

Officers will still respond to calls involving weapons or "imminent risk of harm." This leeway should keep mental health professionals out of harm's way. But it will also increase the risk that mental health crises will see force -- rather than knowledge and de-escalation -- deployed in response to certain 911 calls.

Still, it's a positive step. The NYPD -- and its union reps -- have been uninterested in seeing EMTs and healthcare professionals insert themselves into this part of the law enforcement equation. And the stats show the NYPD hasn't been as awful at handling health issues as some other police departments elsewhere in the nation. Fewer than 1 in 100 calls resulted in arrest. However, half of those calls ended with hospitalization. This could be a positive. Hospitalization is often the desired outcome in mental health crises. But the stats cited in this report do not break down hospitalizations to show which are due to injuries sustained during arrests/detainments and which were due to appropriate responses to mental health issues.

But overall this appears to be a positive step forward. It has worked elsewhere in the nation so there's no reason to believe this won't be a net gain for New York City residents. Cops don't have all the answers. And they certainly don't have all the training needed to handle problems better addressed by healthcare professionals. Anything that removes these judgment calls from the equation will help more New Yorkers stay alive and unharmed when suffering mental health issues.

Filed Under: 911, mental health, nyc, nypd, police

Why The Problems With Police And Social Media Both Are Symptoms Of The Same Disease: A Failure Of Society To Actually Help Those In Need

from the a-link dept

I've written in the past, many times, about how so many people keep wanting to blame social media companies, or intermediary liability laws, for what are only a manifestation of larger societal issues. Social media is only serving to make evident what was previously hidden. A few weeks ago, we quoted UK tech policy expert Heather Burns noting that intermediary liability laws were being expected to pick up the slack for a wide variety of other failures regarding mental health care, social safety nets, criminal and civil justice issues and more. Basically, a whole bunch of government failures were leading to problems in society, which were then being seen online. And rather than trying to fix the underlying causes of those, people were... blaming the internet. Burns later came on our podcast and we had a great detailed discussion about this issue.

A few days later, I heard a fascinating interview on NPR's Fresh Air. The interview was with Rosa Brooks, a law professor and human rights activist, who joined the Washington DC police force as a reserve officer for a period of four years (for most of the Trump administration). The interview is really quite fascinating on a variety of levels, but one thing stood out to me -- that actually connects back to the point that Burns raised about how we're expecting the internet and intermediary liability laws to fill in for all the massive failures of society. To some extent, Brooks made the same point about the police: we've undermined so many other social safety nets, that we now expect the police to fill in for just about everything else.

This isn't a new idea, of course. Tim Cushing has covered this point over and over again right here on Techdirt, including just recently, in writing about Denver's test to switch to sending out mental health professionals rather than police on distress calls that did not appear to involve criminal behavior, and how it had been a huge success. For many years, Tim has posted other similar stories, where it's just so dumb to send police to deal with a societal failing -- often in the mental health arena, but elsewhere as well.

In the Brooks interview, she notes how silly it is to have armed cops handling traffic stops. So many needless police shootings involve traffic stops where the cops overreact and shoot someone they stopped for some minor infraction. We could easily separate out the roles, and make traffic enforcement done entirely differently, by traffic enforcers who are not police with guns, but have a more administrative role.

And when you combine all of this, you realize that both of these threads really are about the same thing, from different angles. Society has failed to deal with mental health. It has failed to deal with extreme poverty. It has failed to deal with criminal justice and civil justice reform. And those are all creating messes. But rather than expect the government and public policy to actually clean up the messes -- we're dumping them on social media companies... and the police. And both are leading to disastrous outcomes.

Filed Under: mental health, police, safety nets, social media, society

Oracle, Which Promised To Protect TikTok User Data From China, Helps Chinese Law Enforcement Snarf Through Lots Of Private Data

from the oh-look-at-that dept

As you'll recall, last summer there was a whole performative nonsense thing with then President Trump declaring TikTok to be a national security threat (just shortly after some kids on TikTok made him look silly by reserving a million tickets to a Trump rally they never intended to attend). Trump and his cronies insisted that TikTok owner ByteDance had to sell the US operations of TikTok to an American firm. The whole rationale about this was the claim -- unsupported by any direct evidence -- that TikTok was a privacy risk, because it was owned by a firm based in Beijing, and that firm likely had connections to the Chinese government (as do basically all large Chinese firms). But how was that privacy risk any worse than pretty much any other company? No one ever seemed to be able to say.

Eventually, after Trump blocked both Microsoft and Walmart from doing the deal, he "approved" a non-sale, but "hosting" deal with Oracle, whose founder/chair, Larry Ellison, and CEO, Safra Catz, were both big Trump supporters. It quickly came out that TikTok's investors deliberately went hunting for a company that they knew Trump liked, and that's why they asked Oracle.

But, part of the announcement of the "deal" was that Oracle would make sure that US TikTok users had their data protected, and that Oracle would keep that data outside the hands of the Chinese government. That seemed somewhat rich, considering that Oracle's initial rise to being a tech giant was built almost entirely on its close connections to the US government, and specifically the intelligence agencies. But it's become even more rich now that the Intercept reports that Oracle actually has a lucrative business helping repressive law enforcement in China do surveillance work. The long story is absolutely full of totally shocking -- but somehow not surprising -- details. It starts off by noting that Oracle hosted a presentation on its own website, literally describing how it helped police in Liaoning province better sort through all of the surveillance data they collected:

Police in China's Liaoning province were sitting on mounds of data collected through invasive means: financial records, travel information, vehicle registrations, social media, and surveillance camera footage. To make sense of it all, they needed sophisticated analytic software. Enter American business computing giant Oracle, whose products could find relevant data in the police department’s disparate feeds and merge it with information from ongoing investigations.

So explained a China-based Oracle engineer at a developer conference at the company’s California headquarters in 2018. Slides from the presentation, hosted on Oracle’s website, begin with a “case outline” listing four Oracle “product[s] used” by Liaoning police to “do criminal analysis and prediction.” One slide shows Oracle software enabling Liaoning police to create network graphs based on hotel registrations and track down anyone who might be linked to a given suspect. Another shows the software being used to build a police dashboard and create “security case heat map[s].” Apparent pictures of the software interface show a blurred face and various Chinese names. The concluding slide states that the software helped police, whose datasets had been “incomprehensible,” more easily “trace the key people/objects/events” and “identify potential suspect[s]” — which in China often means dissidents.

And, yes, if you're wondering, apparently Oracle is helping police in Xingjiang, where there has been ongoing genocide happening against Uyghur Muslims.

In marketing materials, Oracle said that its software could help police leverage information from online comments, investigation records, hotel registrations, license plate information, DNA databases, and images for facial recognition. Oracle presentations even suggested that police could use its products to combine social media activity with dedicated Chinese government databases tracking drug users and people in the entertainment industry, a group that includes sex workers. Oracle employees also promoted company technology for China’s “Police Cloud,” a big data platform implemented as part of the emerging surveillance state.

Several Oracle materials imply that the company has gone substantially further than marketing to Chinese police, which operate as part of the country’s Ministry of Public Security: One presentation detailing Oracle’s database and data security products contains a slide titled “Oracle and the national defense industry.” That title is followed by a list of multiple Chinese military entities, including the People’s Liberation Army, China National Nuclear Corporation, and China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation. Defense entities are also the apparent target for two additional Oracle Chinese-language presentations, the most recent of which is dated 2015, and for events called the “People’s Armed Police Force–Oracle Cloud Computing Exchange Forum” and the “Oracle Xi’an Aviation and National Defense Industry Informatization Seminar” listed in Chinese on Oracle’s site.

Yikes.

So the whole blasted pitch about taking control over TikTok was about keeping the data away from the Chinese, while at the very same time, the same company is helping Chinese law enforcement scan through tons of surveillance data to better suppress its people?

If you're wondering how Oracle responded to the report, it had a spokesperson claim that the examples in these documents were "theoretical" pitch decks to show how the technology could be used, not how they were being used. But as the article notes, that appears to not be true, and the presentation makes it clear that it's talking about an actual case study, and even points out that the police supplied their own data, which they then analyzed with Oracle's technology.

The article is quite long, but turns up a shocking number of smoking guns:

Some of the Chinese-language presentations on Oracle’s site are labeled “CONFIDENTIAL,” despite being publicly available. It is easy to see why someone might have wanted to keep them hidden. Taken together, they show an extreme willingness to aid in the construction of the surveillance state. One Chinese-language presentation, for example, promotes “Oracle’s recommendation: a more complete platform to meet the needs of public security big data processing.”

[....]

Another pitch depicts a broad array of sensitive citizen data being converted into ones and zeros, including DNA, mental illness records, and other medical information. Still other documents from China boast that Oracle technology can help police trawl internet activity to “analyze potential suspected criminal behavior among hundreds of millions of netizens,” capture license plate data from “tens of thousands of cameras,” and analyze call records to build out criminal networks, then link them to fingerprint and facial recognition images.

Of course, it's not clear if the Oracle TikTok deal will ever happen. It seems that no one was much interested in it beyond the headlines, and the Biden administration doesn't seem keen on enforcing the executive order that created the need for Oracle to step in. And, honestly, after reading this report, perhaps that's much better for the privacy of Americans using TikTok.

Filed Under: china, law enforcement, police, privacy
Companies: bytedance, oracle, tiktok