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Posted 8/27/19

A WORKPLACE WITHOUT PITY

Doing right by the public might mean doing wrong to the cop

     For Police Issues by Julius (Jay) Wachtel. Policing – especially, of the big-city kind – is a controversy-generating machine that not infrequently lands chiefs between the rock of angry citizens and the hard place of irritated cops. To survive and prosper, law enforcement executives must become adept at mollifying the former without permanently damaging their standing with and authority over the latter. But circumstances and personal quirks (and here we mean the foibles of both citizens and police) can collide in ways that place inoffensive solutions out of reach.

     And yes, we’re writing about Eric Garner. In July, a full five years to the month after his death at the hands of police, the U.S. Justice Department declined to bring charges as it could not prove that officer Daniel Pantaleo, whom a video depicted gripping Garner’s throat, acted “willfully” as the statute requires; that is, with the intent to cause harm. Its action – or some may say, inaction – mirrored an early decision of a New York State grand jury. Issued five months after the tragedy, it concluded that there was “no probable cause” that officers committed a crime.

Click here for the complete collection of compliance and force essays

     That left things up to NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill. New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board had already ruled that officer Pantaleo violated procedures by applying a chokehold, which was forbidden by the agency’s official patrol guide. According to the medical examiner, the officer’s action “restricted Mr. Garner’s breathing” and caused his death. Commissioner O’Neill ordered a departmental trial, which began this past May. Officer Pantaleo did not testify. However, his lawyer insisted that the officer didn’t actually apply a chokehold, and that Gardner’s death was caused by his resistance, compounded by cardiovascular problems and 395-pound weight.

     But the New York City pathologist who performed the autopsy disagreed. Her testimony, that what looked like a chokehold was a chokehold, and that it precipitated a “lethal sequence of events” culminating in a fatal asthma attack, carried the day. NYPD’s judge, Deputy Commissioner of Trials Rosemary Maldonado promptly ruled that Pantaleo had used the banned maneuver and recommended he be fired:

…The credible medical evidence and expert testimony demonstrated that Respondent's recklessness caused internal hemorrhaging in Mr. Garner's neck and was a significant factor in triggering the acute asthma attack which contributed to his death…Accordingly, this tribunal finds that there is only one appropriate penalty for the grave misconduct that yielded an equally grave result -- Respondent can no longer remain a New York City police officer.

     Commissioner O’Neill agreed. On August 19 he fired Pantaleo, leaving a 34-year old officer with thirteen years of experience without a pension or career (he had been twenty-nine with eight years on the job when the incident occurred). O’Neill’s move was praised by politicians, civil libertarians and the (liberal) press. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio proudly announced that “today we have finally seen justice done.” But as one might expect the firing was condemned by the police rank-and-file. A surprisingly “fair and balanced” piece in the New York Times reported that most officers felt Pantaleo got a raw deal. Patrolmen Benevolent Association president Pat Lynch went so far as to accuse the commissioner of choosing “politics and his own self-interest over the police officers he claims to lead.”

     Until that fateful encounter Pantaleo seemed to be doing a good job. He enjoyed a favorable reputation and was not known for misusing force. Commissioner O’Neill had apparently held him in high regard. Even after the firing he praised Pantaleo’s “commendable service record of nearly 300 arrests and 14 departmental medals.”

     Eric Garner was also a known quantity, albeit of a different kind. A chronic petty offender, he had an extensive (if relatively minor) record for crimes including assault, resisting arrest and grand larceny. At the time of the incident he was out on bail for peddling untaxed cigarettes (i.e., “loosies”) at the same spot where he would lose his life.

     Garner’s death took place during a particularly troubled time. Less than a month later, a Ferguson (MO) officer shot and killed Michael Brown, 18. According to the cop, the youth – he had just shoplifted a package of smokes from a convenience store – punched him and made a threatening gesture while trying to get away. Like Garner, Brown was unarmed.

     Police shootings of unarmed black men sparked massive protests and gave rise to the movement known as “Black Lives Matter.” Agencies had no choice but to respond. Police executives quickly dusted off alternatives such as “de-escalation” and wrote and rewrote rules about officer conduct and the use of force. In some agencies these regulations took on encyclopedic dimensions. Check out, for example, Part 3 of NYPD’s three-volume “patrol guide.” (Its use of force section starts at 221-01, which also refined the wording of the ban on chokeholds.) LAPD posted its entire manual online (click here for the index and scroll down to “use of force”).

     To reduce the frequency of problematic field encounters many departments, including LAPD and NYPD, began cranking back on aggressive strategies such as stop and frisk. “Broken Windows,” a dated, academically-inspired approach that encourages police to enforce minor, “quality of life” violations (like hawking loosies) also fell out of favor.

     Shifting enforcement into low gear upset many cops. Disenchanted with the new religion, some  slammed on the brakes, and in some major cities stops and arrests dropped precipitously, far more steeply than what higher-ups had intended. (We discussed these events in a two-parter. See “Police Slowdowns” below.) Slowdowns affected Baltimore after Freddie Gray; Chicago after Laquan McDonald; Minneapolis after Jamar Clark; New York City after Eric Garner; and Los Angeles after a series of perceived anti-cop moves, including the enactment of Prop. 47, an initiative that reduced many felonies  to misdemeanors.

    While there has been some retrenchment, it’s proven wildly uneven. Not every law enforcement executive sipped from the chalice, and many remain committed to enforcing with vigor. Consider, for example, their negative reaction to a PERF recommendation that agencies adopt limits on the use of force that go well beyond the “objectively reasonable” and “split-second” standards set by Graham v. Connor. Bottom line: aggressive strategies weren’t all abandoned. In 2009 LAPD implemented “LASER,” a data-based program that fought gun violence with specialized teams. It remained in effect for nearly a decade (LASER was recently discontinued because of citizen complaints.)

     Well, Los Angeles might be a smidgen too peaceful. In crime-beset Baltimore some residents actually became upset when officers adopted a kinder-and-gentler tone. Here’s an extract from “Driven To Fail”:

At a recent public meeting, an inhabitant of one of the city’s poor, violence-plagued neighborhoods wistfully described her recent visit to a well-off area: “The lighting was so bright. People had scooters. They had bikes. They had babies in strollers. And I said: ‘What city is this? This is not Baltimore City.’ Because if you go up to Martin Luther King Boulevard we’re all bolted in our homes, we’re locked down. All any of us want is equal protection.”

     Confused? Imagine what police chiefs go through as they try to adjust what officers do, and how, to the ever-shifting socio/political/economic landscape of urban America. Yet for all the tweaking, the threat of disaster looms around every corner (i.e., Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Laquan McDonald, Jamar Clark...) In part, that’s because citizens aren’t bound by guidelines. But their habits, propensities and inclinations drastically affects what takes place. Ditto, actually, for the cops. Add in the fluidity of street encounters, top it off with a lack of resources – usually, when they’re most needed – and you have a recipe for disaster. Yes, it has a name. It’s called the “police workplace.”

     What can be done? Let’s self-plagiarize:

• Officer temperament is crucial. Cops who are easily rattled, risk-intolerant, impulsive or aggressive are more likely to resort to force or apply it inappropriately.
   
• Good judgment and forbearance take time to develop. Pairing inexperienced cops may be a tragedy waiting to happen.
   
• Talk isn’t enough. “De-escalation,” a trendy new buzzword, is how most cops have always preferred to do business. But when beats are beset by guns and violence even the most adept communicators might need more than words. Prompt backup is essential. Less-than-lethal weapons must also be at hand and officers should be adept at their use.

     None of this should be news to our readers – nor to any cop. Really, unless one decriminalizes all behavior, occasional tragedies are unavoidable. Yet officers must sometimes be held accountable. Doing so, though, can risk creating an unbridgeable gap with the troops. Commissioner O’Neill rode that see-saw. In a detailed, post-firing speech he blamed Garner for unlawfully resisting arrest and nearly causing himself and officer Pantaleo to crash through a glass storefront. To make his sympathies clear he threw in several “but for the grace of God go I” allusions:

I served for nearly 34 years as a uniformed New York City cop before becoming Police Commissioner. I can tell you that had I been in Officer Pantaleo's situation, I may have made similar mistakes. And had I made those mistakes, I would have wished I had used the arrival of back-up officers to give the situation more time to make the arrest. And I would have wished that I had released my grip before it became a chokehold.

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     Even in the largest police force in the largest city in the land, there’s nothing “routine” about killing a man. Purposely or not, officer Pantaleo arguably applied a banned chokehold. In the end, a consequence was called for. And everyone well knew that anything short of firing could have consumed New York in rioting:

Some officers believe that Commissioner O’Neill sacrificed a single officer to appease the vocal masses. “The price to pay for him standing on his principles and not firing him would have been paid by many other people,” one former chief said Tuesday. An officer in Brooklyn put it more bluntly: “We’d be out there in riot gear.”

     What happened to Daniel Pantaleo was a lot “less wrong” than what happened to Eric Garner. Officer Pantaleo’s discharge upheld departmental policy. It prevented a descent into chaos. And not incidentally, it also let the Commish keep his job.

       In the end, we must accept that the mean streets will occasionally defeat the best efforts of skilled, well-meaning officers working under the most progressive guidelines devised by the most enlightened leaders. Except, perhaps, in Camden. That’s where “more than a dozen officers” followed along as a disturbed man staggered down the street waving a carving knife. They kept their guns holstered, and within ten minutes the man let go of the knife and gave up. That episode (turns out it happened in 2015) was cited as inspiration for newly-released guidelines that emphasize restraint and de-escalation. Some experts have called Camden PD’s written rules the nation’s “most progressive.”

     Well, that’s fine. But more than a dozen cops on one call! Imagine that. Really, just imagine.

UPDATES (scroll)

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RELATED POSTS

When Worlds Collide     Violent and Vulnerable     Punishment Isn’t a Cop’s Job     Urban Ship

Obsession     Repeat After Us     Driven to Fail     Speed Kills     Routinely Chaotic

Police Slowdowns (I) (II)     Three Shootings     Stitch in Time     Is it Always About Race?

De-Escalation     More Rules, Less Force?     Working Scared     A Very Hot Summer

Lessons of Ferguson     Walking While Black (I) (II)     First, Do no Harm     Making Time

Too Much of a Good Thing?

INFORMED AND LETHAL

 Confirmation bias, on steroids

     For Police Issues by Julius “Jay” Wachtel. In Minnesota, to return a verdict of guilty of murder in the third degree – its least severe form – requires proof that the defendant had a “depraved mind”. Here is the statute’s present form:

Whoever, without intent to effect the death of any person, causes the death of another by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life, is guilty of murder in the third degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 25 years.

“Depraved mind” is an expansive, highly charged term for a package of personality characteristics that supposedly lead to noxious behavior. Here is how Minnesota’s high court defined it nearly a half-century ago:

A mind which has become inflamed by emotions, disappointments, and hurt to such degree that it ceases to care for human life and safety is a depraved mind.

Click here for the complete collection of compliance and force essays

     Proof of the defendant’s depravity was one of the challenges faced by Minneapolis prosecutors during the recent trial of former city police officer Mohamed Noor. On July 15, 2017 Noor, 32, a two-year veteran of the force (and of police work) was riding in the passenger seat of a patrol car driven by officer Matthew Harrity, 25, with one year on the job. About midnight they were dispatched to a pair of 911 calls placed by Justine Ruszczyk, 40, who reported hearing noises that suggested a sexual assault was taking place in the alley behind her residence.

     As officers Noor and Harrity cruised slowly through the narrow, dark passageway they saw nothing out of the ordinary. Officer Harrity would testify that they were about to clear the call when he heard a “thump” and a “murmur” and observed that someone had approached his side of the patrol car. Fearing an ambush, he pulled his handgun and pointed it towards the floorboard. But he didn’t shoot.

     His senior partner, officer Noor, reacted differently. At his trial for murder and manslaughter, Noor testified that he heard a “bang.” He then heard his partner utter “Oh, Jesus” and saw him draw his gun. Officer Noor said he observed a woman next to their car with a raised arm. Interpreting her actions as a lethal threat, officer Noor pulled his gun and fired once. It turned out to be Ruszczyk, the caller. She had apparently been seeking to personally contact the officers, something that no one had foreseen. (Click here for the detailed account that officer Harrity gave to State investigators.)

     Ruszczyk’s wound proved fatal. In March 2018 officer Noor was charged with third-degree murder and second-degree (culpably negligent) manslaughter and resigned from the force. Several months later prosecutors added an additional charge of second-degree (intentional) murder.

     Noor was brought to trial on April 1. On April 30, after one day of deliberation, jurors found him guilty of manslaughter and third-degree murder but acquitted him of second-degree murder. Their decision to convict may have been influenced, in part, by prosecutors’ contentions that the alleged “thump” and other noises suggestive of a possible ambush were made up after the fact, and that in any event they were not made by Ruszczyk, as her fingerprints were not found on the police car.

     Three use of force experts testified. Two were called by the prosecution; as one might expect, both concluded that Noor acted unreasonably. One, an ex-police chief, said that a citizen “has every right to go out [to the police vehicle] and be sure that her community is safe.” In contrast, an expert called by the defense stated that “if you wait to see the gun appear, you’re going to be shot with it.”

     Citizen rights aside, approaching a police car in the dead of night seems like a clearly unwise move. But arguing that it justifies being shot dead is clearly over the top. No democratic society could possibly endorse what took place. In the end, Noor’s fate was probably sealed by jury instructions that directed the panel to compare what he did to what a “reasonable” cop should do:

Giving due regard for the pressures faced by peace officers, you must decide whether the officer’s actions were objectively reasonable in the light 0f the totality of the facts and circumstances confronting the officer, without regard to the officer’s own state of mind, intention or motivation. [emphasis added]

In this case, that “reasonable” officer was sitting right next to Noor. Although officer Harrity also considered the unknown woman a “threat”, he testified that he held his fire because he had neither sufficiently analyzed things nor observed the person’s hands.

     But murder? Prior posts have remarked on an apparent inclination to overcharge officers accused of using excessive force so as to make it more likely that jurors will convict on something. That, according to some legal commenters, may be what drove Noor’s prosecutors to prefer murder charges:

You throw a lot of pellets up in the air and you don’t care which one brings down the bird. Obviously you would always like to get (a conviction on) the highest charge but you want to leave at the end of the day with some conviction.

     Noor testified that he saw the woman at whom he fired. Still, his reaction seems by any measure instantaneous. He knew nothing about his human target nor did he see a weapon. That distinguishes this incident from that other notorious Minnesota example, the July 6, 2016 shooting of Philando Castile by Falcon Heights officer Jeronimo Yanez. Yanez stopped Castile’s vehicle because he supposedly resembled an armed robber, then fatally shot him when he appeared to reach for a gun (there was one, but Castile was licensed to have it). Yanez was subsequently found innocent on all charges, including reckless discharge and felony manslaughter.

     Excluding accidental shootings, such as drawing one’s gun instead of a Taser, or involuntarily squeezing off a round because of a startling noise, our Use of Force and Strategy and Tactics sections offer many examples of purposeful yet misguided uses of lethal force (for a few see “Related Posts” below.) If one ranked these episodes according to how much accurate information an officer had before discharging their weapon, Noor’s example would probably be at the bottom.

     Several others would fall close. One is the September, 2016 encounter between Tulsa police and Terence Crutcher, a middle-aged parolee and substance abuser:

Crutcher, 40, had abandoned his truck in the middle of the road and was walking around disoriented. He ignored the first officer on the scene, Betty Jo Shelby, and as backup arrived he returned to his vehicle and reportedly reached in. Officer Shelby, who is white, fired her pistol and another cop discharged his Taser. Crutcher, who was black, was fatally wounded. No gun was found.

     Officer Shelby was charged with first-degree manslaughter. True enough, she acted precipitously and as it turns out, incorrectly. Yet in this uncertain world, officers need some wiggle room. As Noor’s expert suggested, delaying can cost a cop’s life. It was that quandary that likely moved the jury foreperson in Shelby’s trial to draft an extraordinary public letter to explain what the panel knew would be a most controversial acquittal.

     In this imperfect world, officers rarely have complete, accurate information at hand, and what’s known or observed isn’t always helpful. Indeed, it can poison the atmosphere and lead officers astray. Mr. Crutcher’s criminal past and his bizarre, uncooperative behavior made it easy to believe that he would be armed. As for the killing of Ms. Ruszczyk, officer Harrity pulled his gun but didn’t fire. Still, his frightened reaction to her presence affected officer Noor, who would testify that he acted to save his partner. Considered from this perspective, both shootings seem examples of confirmation bias, on steroids. Their clashing legal outcomes might also reflect an understandable tendency by jurors in such matters to focus their search for possibly exculpatory evidence on the suspects, of whom by the time of trial usually a lot is known.

     What can be done to help avoid the needless use of lethal force? Here are some ideas:

• In “Working Scared” we discussed personality characteristics such as impulsivity, which some officers have in abundance, and risk tolerance, which some seem to altogether lack. Attending to these concerns during selection, training and evaluation seems clearly vital.
   
• What happens in police academies is important. Officer safety lectures and training scenarios must be attuned to the realities of the workplace, not left to the imagination of drill instructors. Scaring inexperienced recruits into a “draw first and ask questions later” mentality - essentially the approach that Noor described in his testimony - is part of the problem.
   
• We’ve frequently mentioned, most recently in “Speed Kills,” that procedural antidotes such as keeping one’s distance, taking cover and de-escalating do exist. Of course, in the unpredictable environment of policing, such remedies aren’t always effective or applicable. So here’s a splendid opportunity for tactical geniuses to devise alternatives.
   
• Information is frequently advanced as a remedy. We’ve done it ourselves; for example, by encouraging agencies to keep records on mentally ill and other problematic characters so that dispatchers can inform patrol. But as we warn in this post, knowing more can actually make things worse.

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     So we’re back to our favorite “square one.” Let’s self-plagiarize:

Policing is an imperfect enterprise conducted by fallible humans in unpredictable, often hostile environments. Limited resources, gaps in information, questionable tactics and the personal idiosyncrasies of cops and citizens have conspired to yield horrific outcomes. Still, countless cop-citizen encounters occur every day. Many could have turned out [poorly] but, thanks to very craftsmanlike police work and considerable risk-taking, they’re resolved peacefully.

In a democracy, police officers need to accept more risk than one would prefer. And yes, that means some will get hurt, and that others will die. So where should they set their limits? We can’t expect them to divine a solution. Laws and regulations certainly haven’t done the job, and probably can’t. It may be distasteful, it may be impolite, but if we wish to avoid sending any more cops to prison, it’s a discussion in which police and society must promptly engage.

UPDATES

9/24/20 Protests erupted in Louisville after a Grand Jury did not indict the two detectives whose bullets killed Breonna Taylor during the execution of a narcotics search warrant by four officers at her apartment in March. Officers opened fire when Kenneth Walker, Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend, pulled a gun and shot a detective in the leg as he burst in. Jurors indicted only one officer, Brett Hankinson, for carelessly unleashing a fusillade that endangered other tenants.

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RELATED POSTS

Confirmation Bias can be Lethal     San Antonio Blues     Who’s in Charge?

Want Happy Endings? Don’t Chase     Third, Fourth and Fifth Chances   Speed Kills    Routinely Chaotic

Why do Cops Lie?    Are Civilians Too Easy on the Police?     Three Shootings     Why do Cops Succeed?

A Matter of Life and Death     A Very Rough Ride     Is it Always About Race?     Working Scared

It’s Now L.A.’s Problem     Making Time     A Tragedy, Yes – But is it Murder?     When Cops Kill (II)

A NOT-SO-MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION

Lapses in policing lead to chronic rulemaking. Does it hit the mark?

     For Police Issues by Julius (Jay) Wachtel. How to make police chiefs shudder? Until recently all that was necessary was to utter “pattern or practice.” That dreaded phase is at the heart of a 1994 Federal statute that authorizes the U.S. Justice Department to sue law enforcement agencies in Federal court when it reasonably believes that they have engaged in a pattern or practice “that deprives persons of rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”

     These investigations were conducted by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. And going to court they did. A January 2017 report tallied seventy pattern or practice cases since the dreaded statute’s inception, with a full forty leading to judge-monitored consent decrees (for a list of the more recent cases, click here.)

     Spurred by the April 2015 in-custody death of Freddie Gray, DOJ’s investigation of Baltimore PD is perhaps the most notable recent example. Filed in August 2016, the comprehensive, 150-plus page assessment (summary here) blamed “systemic deficiencies in BPD’s policies, training, supervision, and accountability structures” for the litany of illegal arrests, excessive force and other unconstitutional measures that were directed mostly at African Americans. In January 2017 Baltimore and the Feds signed off on a 200-plus page consent decree that specifies precisely what’s required for the department to reclaim its good standing. Alas, an October 2018 news article reported that the judge overseeing the process felt that Baltimore was falling short and that attaining compliance was very much a work in progress.

Click here for the complete collection of compliance and force essays

     DOJ’s assessment touched on a number of factors that can drive misconduct. Among them is a preoccupation with productivity:

Many supervisors who were inculcated in the era of zero tolerance continue to focus on the raw number of officers’ stops and arrests, rather than more nuanced measures of performance…The continued emphasis on these types of “stats” drives BPD’s tendency to stop, search, and arrest significant numbers of individuals on Baltimore streets—often without requisite legal justification and in situations that put officers in adversarial encounters that have little connection to public safety….[According to the Fraternal Order of Police] numbers drive everything in the BPD, which has led to misplaced priorities. As a result, officers in the BPD feel pressure to achieve numbers for perception’s sake...(p. 17. Also see pp. 41 and 65)

Despite their agency’s avowed intention to “move away from zero tolerance policing”, officers remained convinced that making numbers remained very much in fashion:

Many officers believe that the path to promotions and favorable treatment, as well as the best way to avoid discipline, is to increase their number of stops and make arrests for [gun and drug] offenses. By frequently stopping and searching people they believe might possess contraband, with or without requisite reasonable suspicion, officers aim to improve their statistical output, which will in turn reflect favorably in their performance reviews. (p. 42)

Detailed accounts of citizen-officer interactions gone horribly wrong form the core of the review (for a truly mind-boggling example see the 2014 incident discussed on p. 94.) Clearly, repeat violators were a serious problem. Yet identifying them seemed hit-and-miss:

…in the past five years, 25 BPD officers were separately sued four or more times for Fourth Amendment violations. BPD has likewise failed to identify officers in need of support through its EIS [early intervention system]. For example, one of    the officer-involved shooting files we reviewed revealed that the involved officer—who unloaded his entire magazine at a car driving toward him—had been previously involved in two other officer-involved shootings in the past five years, in addition to a long history of complaints for harassment and excessive force. (p. 136)

However one might feel about the Civil Rights Division’s take-no-prisoners approach, its recognition of the underlying factors that drive officer misconduct lends a weight and authority to its conclusions that a less organic examination couldn’t begin to match.

     Pattern and practice inquiries placed the Feds at odds with local police. Expensive and highly intrusive, they were by their nature a last resort. In 2012 the Obama administration broadened DOJ’s reach with an ostensibly voluntary program entitled “collaborative reform.” Run from the COPS (community policing) office, it offered multi-year clinical partnerships to troubled agencies that feared becoming fodder for the pattern and practices mill. Within five years sixteen departments took up the offer (the sixteenth was St. Anthony, Minnesota, whose officer shot and killed Philando Castile. Baltimore joined in 2014 but got kicked out when Freddie Gray happened and the Civil Rights baddies took over.)

     Collaborative reform assessments focused on several areas, including the use of force, officer accountability, disparities in enforcement, and community “engagement.” To find out if minority groups were more harshly treated, data was also often collected on stops, field interviews and uses of force (click for Spokane; Philadelphia; Fayetteville; San Francisco.)

     Here, for example, were the objectives for Spokane’s review:

• Examine departmental use of force policies and procedures in comparison to national best practices and existing research, identify areas for improvement, and provide recommendations
• Analyze a sample of use of force investigation files from 2009-2012 and identify trends, strengths, and weaknesses
• Examine the role of the ombudsman in use of force investigations in comparison to national best practices and existing research
• Improve SPD organizational culture as it relates to use of force to build trust with the community

    However, unlike Baltimore’s pattern and practices investigation, the collaborative reports we examined didn’t drill down to individual factors such as officer impulsivity, or organizational forces such as pressures to produce arrests. About as close as the Spokane report came was in the appendix. Its “culture” section proposed asking, among other things, “what gets measured in this organization?” and “what measures are the most important?” As one might have expected, the answers were nowhere to be found.

     Still, the agencies that went through the process got nailed with all manners of criticism. For the new, more police-friendly Administration, that was perhaps a bit much. In fact, shortly after his appointment, the new A.G. tried to pull the Baltimore pattern-and-practice consent decree from Federal court, arguing that it contained “clear departures from many proven principles of good policing that we fear will result in more crime.” Ultimately he didn’t succeed (new pattern-and-practice casework, though, seems clearly out.)

     Collaborative reform, though, is fully within the A.G.’s control. In September 2017, as existing collaborative projects came to their conclusion, he ordered a kinder and gentler approach. According to the program’s fact sheet and the A.G.’s official announcement, the adjustments reflect a determination to help rather than hinder police:

Changes to this program will fulfill my commitment to respect local control and accountability, while still delivering important tailored resources to local law enforcement to fight violent crime. This is a course correction to ensure that resources go to agencies that require assistance rather than expensive wide-ranging investigative assessments that go beyond the scope of technical assistance and support.

     About the same time, DOJ released a review of the collaborative reform approach. While the self-evaluation was in large part complementary, concerns were expressed that the Feds were insufficiently attentive to local needs. Did “collaboration” fade away? Had it become “pattern and practices” without a judge?

…a number of people also noted that the meaning of collaboration has shifted since the Initiative’s formal launch in early 2012. The extent of collaboration between the TA team and the site representatives was generally deemed strong at the earlier sites, but some felt it has been decreasing at the later sites.

DOJ’s IG would in time release a massive critique of the agency’s police reform work. We’ll let our brave readers sort through that one.

     On March 18, 2018, six months after DOJ’s retrenchment, tragedy struck California’s capital city. After chasing and cornering a black man who was reportedly trying to break into cars, two Sacramento PD officers (one black, one white) apparently mistook a cellphone for a gun. Their gunfire killed Stephon Clark, 22.

     This tragic event, which spawned massive protests, would have normally led the Feds to open a “pattern and practices” investigation. But these were no more. Ostensibly at the request of local authorities, the State stepped in. California’s Department of Justice announced it would monitor the city’s criminal inquiry into the shooting. It also committed to examining Sacramento PD policies, practices and training methods “to help identify possible ways to achieve safer outcomes for community members and officers alike.”

     Crafted by a team of consultants, lawyers and academics, the massive, highly detailed report was released earlier this year. Its structure closely resembles the Fed’s collaborative approach. Based on eighteen officer-involved shootings between April 2013 and March 2018 (excluding, for legal reasons, Stephon Clark) the near-100 page missive advances forty-nine recommendations in six areas: use of force policies, use of force reporting and investigation, use of force training, officer-involved shootings, community engagement, and transparency.

       We’ll concentrate on shootings. That section produced three recommendations as to tactics (pp. 65-67):

• SPD should ensure its officers are effectively employing cover, distance, and time tactics to minimize the need for deadly force.
• SPD should assess its practices and provide officers with guidance on the discharge of firearms in situations that may endanger bystanders and other officers.
• SPD should ensure its training prepares officers to encounter and detain individuals in a manner that decreases the need for deadly force applications.

     The first suggestion was inspired by a brief account of an unspecified shooting in which a late-arriving officer intruded into what seemed to be a contained situation and, instead of taking cover, promptly used lethal force. The second was based on “several” otherwise unspecified prior incidents in which “the backdrop to the discharge of firearms by officers was extremely high risk, including instances of crossfire.” And the third reflected a “significant number” of otherwise unspecified incidents in which “the individual upon whom lethal force was used was perceived (by the officer) as suffering from mental illness.”

     This approach was characteristic of the report. Where prior incidents are mentioned – and the accounts are either summaries or otherwise exceedingly brief – they are used to propose rules that reflect practices in use elsewhere or endorsed by recognized sources such as PERF’s “Guiding Principles on Use of Force.” For example, Sacramento’s Discharge of Firearm policy is criticized for making no mention of time, cover and distance and for not warning officers that opening fire carries risks to innocents:

No officer can control the environment in which he or she is forced to discharge a firearm. However, officers can be provided with clear guidance on how to determine whether or not a discharge is reasonable, given the potential risks to bystanders that may exist… (p. 66)

     To be sure, keeping one’s distance, fire discipline and so on are commonplace in everyday policing. Considering the often chaotic nature of street encounters, if cops didn’t typically exercise restraint poor outcomes would be far more frequent. As we’ve often emphasized and as Cal DOJ’s report concedes, the wide variety of circumstances and personalities officers routinely face makes “controlling the environment” exceedingly difficult. So providing “clear guidance” is at best an encyclopedic task. That’s why major police departments have resisted adopting PERF’s guidance. They prefer to deal with this complex and thorny area in other ways, as they fear that going substantially beyond the legal minimum – that lethal force be used only in defense of life – might confuse officers and create a nightmare of civil liability.

     Several days ago, on February 12, seven NYPD officers unleashed a barrage of gunfire – forty-two rounds in eleven seconds – at an armed robber. Two veteran officers were caught in crossfire: one, Brian Simonsen, 42, died; the other, Matthew Gorman, 34, was wounded. The 27-year old suspect, a chronic offender, was also wounded. His gun turned out to be a hyper-realistic toy.

     As we mentioned in “Speed Kills,” lapses in the use of lethal force keep happening with regrettable frequency. And it’s not just suspects who are being hurt. What’s to be done? What can be done? We’ve frequently cautioned against campaigns to get tough on crime, which can drive officer decisions in the wrong direction. Most recently, “Cops Aren’t Free Agents” argued against measuring policing with numbers. Yet other than Baltimore’s, which was done by the Feds under the apparently extinct “pattern or practice” banner, the assessments we reviewed ignored pressures to produce. Could it be that cops (outside Baltimore) are immune to the powerful force that affects every other craft and profession? (For your blogger’s paper on point, click here.)

     Yet the NYPD officers weren’t victimized by pressures to produce. They fell prey to decisions other cops made while under stress. A man robbing an occupied store after dark who walks towards officers, gun raised, can definitely provoke a lot of anxiety. But while there is a retinue of prescriptions for dealing with fraught situations (see, for example, “Routinely Chaotic” and “Speed Kills”) far less attention has been directed to differences in how officers respond to stressful events.

     Like other humans, cops differ. Some are less risk-tolerant, others more impulsive or aggressive (see, for example, “Three [In?]explicable Shootings”). Perhaps if someone hadn’t fired that first shot, one cop might still be alive. Are there ways to improve how officers react under stress? “A training method to improve police use of force decision making: a randomized controlled trial” (J. Andersen, H. Gustafsberg, 2016) probed the psychological and physiological factors that affect officer response. It identified three effects of stress: perceptual distortions (e.g. tunnel vision), motor deficits (e.g., loss of fine motor skills) and cognitive deficits (e.g., loss of memory and stored knowledge.) These were addressed through an elaborately devised training program. Results seemed promising: at post-test, trained officers performed significantly better and made significantly better use-of-force decisions than non-trained officers. However, there was no significant post-test difference in physiological arousal.

     A key limitation of Andersen & Gustafsberg was that everything happened in a lab. In contrast, “Can You Build a Better Cop? Experimental Evidence on Supervision, Training, and Policing in the Community” (E. Owens, D. Weisburd, K. Amendola, G. Alpert, 2018) compared post-treatment outcomes in the field. Their intervention was a “supervisory meeting” in which officers working relatively “high-risk” geographical areas were probed in depth, in a “non-authoritarian manner,” about a recent officer-citizen interaction. According to the findings, these cops remained as active as comparable cops who didn’t receive the treatment. However, they became “less likely to resolve incidents with an arrest and less likely to be involved in use-of-force incidents.” That effect was most noticeable in less-troubled locations, where the “probability of being in a risky circumstance” was only moderate.

     It’s an interesting finding. However, arrests that don’t happen because cops become less inquisitive are not necessarily a good thing. While the authors insist that officers “appeared generally indifferent to the meetings,” our personal, practitioner experience suggests that at least a few of the experimental subjects  may have formed a not-necessarily-complementary opinion of the get-together and shared it with their peers. What’s more, precisely how “cause” translated into an “effect” was only vaguely specified. Officers were advised that the meeting’s purpose “was to discuss how the officer used procedural justice during the incident in question.” This approach, which seems a tad loosey-goosey, supposedly encouraged cops to slow down so they would “incorporate new information about [an] event as it unfolded” instead of going on “autopilot.”

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     Well, maybe it did. A previous meta-analysis, though, wasn’t optimistic. “Stress management interventions for police officers and recruits: a meta-analysis” (G. Patterson, I. Chung, P. Swan, 2014) evaluated twelve programs that used techniques ranging from weight training to psychotherapy to improve officer coping skills. While specific goals varied, each study measured physiologic (e.g. heart rate) and/or psychological (e.g. anxiety) and/or behavioral (e.g. drinking alcohol) outcomes.  Unfortunately, none of the categories, once aggregated, yielded statistically significant results. However, the physiological and behavioral interventions did demonstrate “clinically meaningful” improvements. So there is some hope.

     Which finally (mercifully!) brings us to our parting shot. Changing a production-driven culture is no easy task. Neither is moderating the sympathetic nervous system, which controls the “fight or flight” response. That doesn’t mean that we need be endlessly stuck devising rules for police behavior. After all, we know just how far rulemaking takes us in everyday life. Perhaps we can begin by acknowledging the salience of workplace pressures and individual physiological and psychological factors. By making them an accepted topic of discussion and inquiry in law enforcement and academic circles. And by sharing these insights with the greater community, with whom they are certain to resonate.

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