Handcuffed

What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

Malcolm K. Sparrow

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780815727828
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Corruption politique et inconduite

Whatever happened to community and problem-oriented policing?  How the current crisis in policing can be traced to failures of reform.The police shooting of an unarmed young black man in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014 sparked riots and the beginning of a national conversation on race and policing. Much of the ensuing discussion has focused on the persistence of racial disparities and the extraordinarily high rate at which American police kill civilians (an average of roughly three per day).Malcolm Sparrow, who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School and is a former British police detective, argues that other factors in the development of police theory and practice over the last twenty-five years have also played a major role in contributing to these tragedies and to a great many other cases involving excessive police force and community alienation.Sparrow shows how the core ideas of community and problem-solving policing have failed to thrive. In many police departments these foundational ideas have been reduced to mere rhetoric. The result is heavy reliance on narrow quantitative metrics, where police define how well they are doing by tallying up traffic tickets issued (Ferguson), or arrests made for petty crimes (in New York).Sparrow’s analysis shows what it will take for police departments to escape their narrow focus and perverse metrics and turn back to making public safety and public cooperation their primary goals. Police, according to Sparrow, are in the risk-control business and need to grasp the fundamental nature of that challenge and develop a much more sophisticated understanding of its implications for mission, methods, measurement, partnerships, and analysis.

ONE

Introduction: The Crisis in Policing

These are tumultuous times for policing in America. Thanks in part to the almost ubiquitous presence of video cameras, the American public has recently had the chance to see the very best and the very worst of police conduct.

At the scene of the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15, 2013, Boston police officers and other emergency workers instinctively ran toward the site of the explosions to help the injured and take control of the scene, even while nobody knew how many more bombs there might be. Video footage made plain to all the classic courage of first responders reacting to a traumatic situation with professional discipline and putting their own lives at risk for the sake of the public they serve.

Three days later, on April 18, MIT patrol officer Sean Collier was shot dead in his patrol car by bombing suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who were apparently seeking to acquire weapons and perhaps provoke a major confrontation with police. In an extraordinary display of public appreciation for police officers and the dangers they face on a daily basis, more than 10,000 people attended Officer Collier’s funeral.

On April 19 Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed during a gun battle with police in the streets of Watertown, Massachusetts. He had been shot several times by police and then run over by his brother, who was fleeing in a stolen SUV. One MBTA police officer was shot and nearly died from blood loss. The surviving brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was found later hiding in a boat in the backyard of a Watertown home and apprehended.

Scores of law enforcement officers from federal, state, and local agencies had flooded into the area and cooperated in the search. When it was all over, local residents—who had voluntarily heeded the police request to “shelter in place”—emerged from their homes, gathered on street corners, and spontaneously applauded as buses full of law enforcement officers passed by.

During that week in April 2013, nobody seemed to have anything but praise for the courageous and selfless way police conducted themselves in the face of those extraordinary dangers.

But 2014 and 2015 brought to public attention a series of incidents, many of them video-recorded on the cellphones of passersby, that appalled the public, astonished many, and raised troubling questions about the quality and nature of policing in America. Several incidents involving the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers, albeit in different jurisdictions, came in quick enough succession to be perceived as a pattern and to prompt national debate.

The pattern was pretty much established after two high-profile incidents just three weeks apart: the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and of Eric Garner in New York City. Public concern over the issues raised drew commentary from the president, led to the establishment of a presidential task force, resulted in investigations of patterns of police conduct by the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, and spawned protests against police violence—particularly against minorities—that spread across the nation far beyond the cities directly involved.

As soon as the pattern was established, every subsequent incident where police used force then drew unprecedented levels of public and media scrutiny as the public searched for answers to some very basic questions: Do police regularly abuse their powers and use excessive force? How widespread is such abuse? How much is it targeted on minority and poor communities? Why can police not be held accountable even in those instances when their actions appear patently criminal?

New York City, July 2014

On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner died after being detained in Staten Island by officers of the New York Police Department. His arrest (for selling cigarettes illegally on the street) was captured on video, and appeared to show Garner being held in a chokehold for about fifteen seconds and being brought to the ground. The use of chokeholds contravenes NYPD policy. Once on the ground he complains repeatedly, “I can’t breathe,” but the video shows no signs of police providing or calling for medical assistance. Garner died shortly afterward, and the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office concluded that Garner, who suffered from asthma, died partly as a result of the chokehold. Eric Garner was black, and a father of six.

Ferguson, Missouri, August 2014

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old black man, was shot dead in Ferguson, Missouri, by a white police officer, Darren Wilson. This incident was not recorded on video. Brown was unarmed when he was stopped by Wilson. In defense of his own actions, Officer Wilson stated he feared for his own life when Brown reached for his (Officer Wilson’s) weapon. Wilson subsequently resigned from the police department. No charges were brought against him as a result of the local investigation into the shooting or as a result of a second investigation conducted by the Department of Justice.

Each of these incidents produced its own curious aftermath. In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio publicly expressed his concerns about police violence and sympathy for the protesters. He told how he had advised his own biracial son to “take special care” any time he interacted with police, which the police unions interpreted as suggesting police were dangerous and to be feared. The unions lambasted the mayor for failing to support them adequately, and hundreds of NYPD officers later turned their backs on the mayor during the funerals of two NYPD officers ambushed and killed in December 2014.¹

In the days following the death of Michael Brown, protests in Ferguson turned violent and images of police in riot gear using armored personnel carriers and other military-style equipment fueled public perceptions of police as militaristic, armies of occupation, ruthlessly crushing both protest and criticism in the name of crime control.

Other incidents followed quickly, reinforcing public perception of an alarming pattern.

Cleveland, Ohio, November 2014

On November 22, 2014, a twelve-year-old African American boy, Tamir Rice, was shot dead by police in a city park in Cleveland, Ohio, while playing with a toy gun. Two police officers, Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, were responding to a public complaint of a “male sitting on a swing and pointing a gun at people.” Rice was shot dead by Officer Loehmann within two seconds of the patrol car arriving on the scene. The officers reported that Rice had failed to respond to their shouted warnings, and had “reached toward a gun in his waistband.” Multiple witnesses contradicted this account in their grand jury testimony, and video evidence makes clear Rice had no time to react at all to any warnings that might have been given, as he appeared to be shot even before the police car had come to a halt.

Under a rarely used Ohio law, activists and community leaders appealed directly to the Cleveland Municipal Court for the officers to be arrested and indicted. Presiding judge Ronald B. Adrine, having reviewed the video evidence, found probable cause to charge Officer Loehmann with murder and his partner with negligent homicide.² Whether the officers will be charged, and with what offenses, depends on the outcome of a grand jury investigation.

North Charleston, South Carolina, April 2015

On April 4, 2015, a black man, Walter Scott, was shot dead by North Charleston police officer Michael Slager following a routine traffic stop for a defective brake light. Scott fled on foot, possibly because he was afraid of going to jail for failing to make child support payments.³ A video taken by a bystander captured the later stages of the foot pursuit and clearly showed Officer Slager discharging eight rounds from his service weapon as Scott was running away from him. Five of the bullets hit Scott, who died at the scene.

We learn more about the problem of police violence and how it can persist and might be covered up when a video only surfaces after some significant delay. That allows time for the police to provide their account of the incident before the video evidence is available, and possibly before they even know that any video recording exists. In the case of Walter Scott’s death, it took more than two days before the video became available to authorities. Feidin Santana, who captured the shooting on his cellphone camera, initially kept quiet about the video, fearing retribution, but was angered when he heard the police account of the incident and made the recording available to Scott’s family and to the media.⁴

Presumably Officer Slager, in providing his initial account of the incident, had no idea that any video existed. He claimed that Scott, during a scuffle, reached for the Taser on his (Officer Slager’s) belt, and that he (Slager), therefore, felt his own life was in danger. He immediately gave an explanation over the police radio—“Shots fired and the subject is down; he took my Taser”—knowing that such transmissions are recorded, hence, putting his story on the record.⁵

Without the video evidence, that story might well have stood. But the video became public on April 7, showing Slager repeatedly firing at Scott as he ran away, and Slager was arrested within a few hours and charged with murder.

The video of Scott’s shooting immediately went viral, of course, along with the revelations about Slager’s original and clearly false account. For the general public, the case raises serious concerns about other police incidents not captured on video, where there is little or no objective evidence about what happened, and where officers provide similar justifications for shooting an unarmed person. How often do stories such as Slager’s get told? What chance is there that investigations into officer-involved shootings—typically conducted by detectives from the same department (that is, by the involved officer’s own colleagues)—will actually establish the truth? How widespread is the practice of lying to conceal police abuse of force?

It would be interesting to know some basic facts and figures. For instance, how many times a year do American police officers shoot unarmed suspects and subsequently justify their actions by claiming they felt their own life was in immediate danger, either because the suspect appeared to be about to pull something out of a pocket or, in the course of a scuffle, the suspect seemed to be reaching for the officer’s own weapon? In the absence of witnesses or video evidence or contradictory forensic evidence, such accounts are unlikely to be refuted. Such incidents would normally end up classified as justifiable homicides—or, to use the peculiar language of the police profession, as “good shootings.”⁶

The fact of the matter is that we have no idea how often this happens, as the United States does not gather any reliable national statistics on officer-involved shootings, or on other deaths at the hands of police, or on deaths that occur in police custody. Federal databases exist, but submission of those data by law enforcement agencies remains voluntary and is, consequently, acknowledged to be woefully incomplete.⁷

Why can the United States not produce reliable statistics on the number of civilians shot and killed by police? The usual explanations point to the difficulty of categorizing incidents in sufficiently consistent ways to make the figures meaningful, as well as the cost and difficulties involved in gathering data from the roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies that operate in America. But it seems incongruous that the U.S. federal government manages to report annually and nationwide (through the Uniform Crime Reports) on matters such as burglaries, larcenies, robberies, and sexual assaults—where all the same definitional complexities and data collection difficulties apply—but they cannot do the same when it comes to officer-involved shootings despite the fact that these events are much less numerous, somewhat easier to define, and much more significant.

In an attempt to fill the information vacuum, the Washington Post began compiling a database of every fatal shooting by police in 2015, as well as of every officer killed by gunfire in the line of duty. The study focused only on fatal shootings, and, therefore, did not include other deaths at the hands of police, or deaths in police custody, or nonfatal shootings. Even so, the Post’s tally as of December 24, 2015, was 965, which equates to roughly 2.7 people shot dead by police, on average, per day.⁸ This is more than double t...