The Truth About Police

Militarized police departments can use excessive force against you, have no duty to protect you, seldom solve crimes, and conduct surveillance of your Constitutionally protected activities, while they use their access to confidential databases to stalk, threaten and harass you. If the police do arrest you, they can lie to you in an effort to trick you into confessing to a crime you did not commit, and police will frequently lie about you in their reports and in their testimony before the courts (misconduct so common that it has become known as "testilying"). Police abuse, corruption and misconduct is so pervasive that the majority of Americans no longer trust the police.

*** Police Violence and Brutality ***

    The year 2020 brought to the forefront national concerns about police violence, abuse and corruption. Following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of major cities and small towns across the nation to protest this death, and the deaths of so many others, at the hands of police, in minority and under-represented communities. CNN (September 4, 2020) reported that "About 93% of racial justice protests in the US since the death of George Floyd have been peaceful and nondestructive". When police intervened in these racial justice protests, "they used force such as tear gas, rubber bullets or pepper spray in more than half of those demonstrations, according to the report. More than 5% of protests linked to the Black Lives Matter movement were met with force by authorities, compared to 1% of other demonstrations" [such as protests over the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions].
    
    Death at the hands of police in the United States is a serious problem, with approximately 1000 people every year dying by police violence. Databases such as ‘Mapping Police Violence’, ‘Killed By Police’, and the ‘Washington Post’s Police Shooting Database’ attempt to track and analyze these police killings. 

Just a few names (there are many others) of unarmed people that were killed by police:
Aiyana Stanley-Jones – May 16, 2010
John T. Williams – Aug 30, 2010
Robert Ethan Saylor – Jan 12, 2013
Dontre Hamilton – Apr 30, 2014
John Crawford III – Aug 5, 2014
Michael Brown – Aug 9, 2014
Dante Parker – Aug 12, 2014
Tanisha Anderson – Nov 13, 2014
Tamir Rice – Nov 22, 2014
Akai Gurley – Nov 20, 2014
Eric Garner – Jul 17, 2014
Freddie Gray – Apr 19, 2015
Walter Scott – Apr 4, 2015
Brendon Glenn – May 5, 2015
Daniel L. Shaver – Jan 18, 2016
Alton Sterling – Jul 5, 2016
Paul O’Neal – Jul 28, 2016
Justine Damond – Jul 15, 2017
Kameron Prescott – Dec 21, 2017
Manuel Ellis – Mar 3, 2020
Breonna Taylor – Mar 13, 2020
George Floyd – May 25, 2020
    
    In 2019, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America reported that "Police violence is a leading cause of death for young men in the United States. Over the life course, about 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police. Risk of being killed by police peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for men and women and for all racial and ethnic groups. The average lifetime odds of being killed by police are about 1 in 2,000 for men and about 1 in 33,000 for women. Black women and men and American Indian and Alaska Native women and men are significantly more likely than white women and men to be killed by police. Latino men are also more likely to be killed by police than are white men." Amnesty International stated in 2020 article 'A deadly force: Police violence in the USA' "All 50 US states and the District of Columbia fail to comply with international standards on police use of lethal force. Thirteen states also fail to meet the lower standards set by US constitutional law on the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers, while nine states and the District of Columbia have no laws at all on the use of lethal force [by police] – including Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming."
    
    In a 2015 article, the Guardian reported that 'US police kill more in days than other countries do in years'. Five years later, in 2020, CNN reported that 'American police shoot, kill and imprison more people than other developed countries'.

*** Police Militarization More Than Doubles Deaths At The Hands of Police ***

    The US Department of Defense 1033 program makes excess military equipment, including weapons and vehicles, available to local LEAs. The consequences of this militarized police mentality can be deadly, especially for black Americans.  There appears to be a correlation between militarization and police violence. A 2017 study analyzed spending by police departments against police-involved fatalities. Summarizing their results in The Washington Post, the authors of the study wrote: “Even controlling for other possible factors in police violence (such as household income, overall and black population, violent-crime levels and drug use), more-militarized law enforcement agencies were associated with more civilians killed each year by police. When a county goes from receiving no military equipment to $2,539,767 worth (the largest figure that went to one agency in our data), more than twice as many civilians are likely to die in that county the following year.”

*** Police Surveillance ***

    We are living in an age of dramatic technological progress. That progress has brought us many conveniences and advantages, but one result has been a rash of new spying and surveillance technologies. These include new or greatly improved imaging devices, location-tracking technologies, communications eavesdropping systems, and new means of collecting ever-more-granular data of all kinds about individuals and their activities.

    Police mass surveillance practices undermine the presumption of innocence and is a growing concern among critics of government over-reach and corruption. From cellphone spying to facial scanning technology to massive data farms, it’s no secret that the U.S. government is gathering ever-increasing amounts of personal information about its citizens. Mass surveillance today is far less expensive and labor intensive than it used to be. The rate at which technology is growing also has completely outstripped current laws that regulate the use of such technologies. It’s problematic because so much of this surveillance is opaque. Take, for instance, government aerial surveillance. After the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, some people noticed small, low-flying planes circling above protesters. Later, the Associated Press reported that the surveillance equipment on these sorts of planes were used “without a judge’s approval” and that fictitious companies were used as fronts by the FBI to fly these planes.

    Government surveillance increasingly depends on private companies to handle sensitive information, which is a worrisome trend. Companies such as Amazon Web Services provide cloud computing infrastructure for intelligence-related government agencies. Palantir Technologies Inc. analyzes mountains of data, helping agencies including the CIA, National Security Agency, FBI and local police departments identify trends that may identify known criminals, but all too often target minority communities and individuals exercising their Constitutionally protected rights. 

    A search of your electronic life is not your only concern. Government agents can infiltrate private, political, and activist organizations. We saw an example of this illegal infiltration of these organizations in the case of Panagacos v. Towery, 782 F.Supp.2d 1183, 1191 (W.D. Wash. 2011) where personnel from the Joint Base Lewis-McChord Protection Division’s Anti-Terrorism Office, in Washington state, infiltrated organizations opposed to the war in Iraq.

    According to an article in the Olympian Newspaper, Ex-worker at JBLM Collected Activist Data “A former Joint Base Lewis-Mc-Chord employee who spied on war protests in Olympia helped compile detailed information on protesters, including their names, photos, addresses and, in some cases, Social Security numbers, according to 133 pages of law enforcement records released by the City of Tacoma.” The documents detail years of surveillance of protest groups by Joint Base Lewis-McChord and the South Sound Regional Intelligence Group. The detailed information collected about the protesters continues to be stored by area law enforcement agencies to this very day.

    Police surveillance is not just about gathering evidence of criminal activity. Police surveillance is also a form of harassment used against an individual in a malicious attempt to reduce the quality of a person's life so they will: have a nervous break-down, become imprisoned, institutionalized, experience constant mental, emotional, or physical pain, become homeless, and/or commit suicide.

    Harassment of this type is common when the government is targeting political opponents and activists. Heidi Boghosian, the former director of the National Lawyers’ Guild, wrote in her book, Spying on Democracy: “A civilian employee of the Fort Lewis [now Joint Base Lewis-McChord] Force Protection Division in Washington State struck up friendships with many peace activists. For at least two years, he posed as an activist with Port Militarization Resistance (PMR), a group in Washington opposing the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions. He gave information about planned protests to his supervisor..., who wrote threat assessments that local law enforcement officials used in harassment campaigns that included “preemptive arrests and physical attacks on peaceful demonstrations, as well as other harassment”. One individual was arrested so many times that his landlord evicted him... In the words of the government agencies involved, they aimed to neutralize PMR through a pattern of false arrests and detentions, attacks on homes and friendships, and attempting to impede members from peacefully assembling and demonstrating anywhere, at any time. Harassment was systematic and pervasive. PMR participants were arrested not just locally, but in other venues, including the Denver Democratic National Convention in 2008 and a San Francisco protest at which they were the only ones arrested... The case revealed that today’s military has continued to engage in COINTELPRO-type operations and shows the extent to which the lines between the military and civilian law enforcement have blurred. Forces now used against ordinary people engaged in free speech and protest include, increasingly, weapons and tactics used by the U.S. military for combat missions. The drift from passive intelligence gathering to offensive counterintelligence is one manifestation of the difference between civilian law enforcement principles and the military’s exclusive focus on defeating perceived enemies through combat, propaganda, and covert operations... The role of civilian law enforcement, in theory, is to protect the public and the Constitution whereas the role of the military is to identify the enemy and neutralize them... When the military starts identifying peaceful dissenters here as the enemy, God help us all.”

*** Trust of the Police ***

    For the first time in its 27 years of measuring attitudes toward the police, a 2020 Gallup poll  found that a majority of American adults do not trust law enforcement. The survey, conducted by Gallup from early June to mid-July 2020, found that confidence in the police had fallen five points, to 48 percent, from the year before. Gallup, started tracking the public’s confidence in the police in 1993, said this was the “first time in the 27-year trend that this reading is below the majority.” While this was the first time that the Gallup poll found that the majority (less than 50 percent) of Americans did not trust the police, in each year, from 1993 – 2020, that the poll was conducted over 40 percent of Americans expressed a lack of trust in the police.  
    
    According to a Cato Institute report, "Thirty-eight percent (38%) of Americans report they've been officially stopped by a police officer in the past five years: 20% say they've been stopped once, 9% say they've been stopped twice, and another 9% say they've been stopped three or more times (August 2016 survey)." If we accept that approximately 40% of Americans have had some non-consensual contact (were stopped) with the police, and approximately 40% of Americans express a lack of trust in the police, may we assume that contact with the police breeds mistrust of the police? The Cato Institute report continues that overall 67% of Americans were satisfied with their encounter with the police (thus 33% were unsatisfied). There was also a division of satisfaction with the police; 70% of Whites reported being satisfied with the police contact, 67% of Hispanics reported being satisfied, but only 50% of Blacks were satisfied with their interaction with the police.

*** The Police Have No Duty to Protect You ***

    Barring some special duty, such as the state police having a duty to protect the governor of a state, the police have no duty to protect you or any other individual in the state. “Neither the Constitution, nor state law, impose a general duty upon police officers or other governmental officials to protect individual persons from harm — even when they know the harm will occur”, said Darren L. Hutchinson, a professor and associate dean at the University of Florida School of Law. “Police can watch someone attack you, refuse to intervene and not violate the Constitution.”
    
    The cases most frequently cited to support this position are Warren Vs The District of Columbia, 444 A.2d. 1, D.C. Ct. of Ap. (1981), DeShaney vs. Winnebago, 489 U.S. 189 (1989) and Town of Castle Rock vs. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005), in each of which the Court held that police agencies are not obligated to provide protection of citizens. In other words, police are well within their rights to pick and choose when to intervene to protect the lives and property of others — even when a threat is apparent.

*** The Police Seldom Solve Crimes ***

    According to a November 2020 report by Pew Research, fewer than half of the crimes reported to police in the United States are solved. “ In 2019, police nationwide cleared 45.5% of violent crimes that were reported to them and [only] 17.2% of the property crimes that came to their attention.” This percentage of unsolved crimes has remained relatively stable for decades. In 2020, the Huffington Post also wrote: The Police Aren’t Very Good At Their Main Job: Solving Crimes. "One of the most common arguments you see made against the notion of “defunding” the police is: “Well, who are you going to call if someone burgles your home or attacks you?” And yet a quick look at crime statistics makes it pretty clear that calling the police in those situations doesn’t do you much good anyway."

    According to an August 2020 article by Shima Baughman, Professor of Criminal Law, University of Utah: Police solve just 2% of all major crimes.
    
    The small percentage of crimes solved by the police shows that current police procedures are not very effective, but of greater concern is that when police do “solve” a crime they too often convict the wrong person. Police perjury and official misconduct are frequently used to gain convictions and close cases, showing a complete disregard for whether the person convicted is actually guilty of the crime. 

*** Police Drug Dogs Are Less Accurate Than A Coin Flip ***

The Fourth Amendment protects a person’s right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. One of the tools law enforcement most often uses in ways that potentially violate this right is that of the drug detection dog. Normally, without emergency circumstances, an officer must have probable cause to search a person’s belongings, such as their car or house. Drug dogs are used by law enforcement to provide that probable cause where none exists.

The accuracy of drug dogs is less accurate than a coin flip. NPR (2011) reported that “Drug-Sniffing Dogs Are Wrong More Often Than Right”.

A 2011 study by the University of California Davis (UC Davis) found that “Explosive- and drug- sniffing dogs' performance is affected by their handlers' beliefs”.

A 2019 report by the Washington Post found that “Multiple analyses of drug-dog alerts have consistently shown alarmingly high error rates — with some close to and exceeding 50 percent. In effect, some of these K-9 units are worse than a coin flip.”

 

*** Police Perjury and Official Misconduct ***

    An article on Vice stated: Cops Are Liars Who Get Away with Perjury.
Misrepresentation, deception, and outright lying appear to be part of a police officer’s job description, so much so that the term “testilying,” is now common vernacular for police falsifications. Police perjury is the act of a police officer knowingly giving false testimony. It is typically used in a criminal trial to "make the case" against defendants believed by the police to be guilty when irregularities during the suspects' arrest or search threaten to result in their acquittal. It also can be extended to encompass substantive misstatements of fact to convict those whom the police believe to be guilty, procedural misstatements to "justify" a search and seizure, or even the inclusion of statements to frame an innocent citizen. More generically, it has been said to be "lying under oath, especially by a police officer, to help get a conviction." 

    It is clear that you cannot trust the police to always tell the truth or to write accurate and unbiased reports. Furthermore, government agencies can use their police powers to target and harass anyone. As a police commander at Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM) in Washington State once said “You don’t have to actually have done anything wrong, we just have to make it look like you did.” Even if the police don’t win their case in court, they can and do use bogus citations as a means of harassment and retaliation.
    
    Norm Stamper, a former Chief of Police for Seattle, WA, wrote in his book To Protect and Serve: How to Fix America’s Police, “For anyone who has practiced criminal law in the state or Federal courts, the disclosure about rampant police perjury cannot possibly come as a surprise. “Testilying” – as the police call it – has long been an open secret among prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges.” Stamper continued, “In my professional experience, there are too many cops who become habituated to lying... Even as they put innocent people behind bars, or in the ground.”

  “Sadly, deception is all but robotic in many police departments...” wrote Stamper. It is an all too common practice for police to lie in their testimony to the courts, in probable cause statements used to obtain warrants, and in their investigative reports forwarded to the prosecutor. Even if the police don’t intentionally lie, they can misinterpret, make inaccurate reports, or fail to include exculpatory information. The law requires that exculpatory information be disclosed to defense counsel in a criminal case (See: Brady v. Maryland: 373 U.S. 83 (1963)), but the police can easily “lose” information that does not support the charges they are trying to make against you.
    
    In his book A Toast to Silence, Peter Baskin, an attorney with more than 50 years’ experience, wrote that the police method “consists of the universally recognized and approved practice of deception, manipulation, misrepresentation, and any and every trick, tactic and seductive lie in order to get people to talk and give evidence against themselves”. Regent Law School Professor James Duane wrote in his book You Have the Right to Remain Innocent: “Do not think for a minute that you can trust a police officer who seems to be open minded and undecided about whether he will arrest you after you are finished with an “interview” – the police are trained to act that way, to get you to talk with them for many hours until you finally give up in exhaustion.” Laura Coates, CNN Legal Analyst and former Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia wrote in her book You Have the Right: “A police officer can try to trick you or lie to you or mislead you to get you to confess something...”
    
    The Innocence Project reports that 2-5% of people serving time behind bars are innocent. With about 2 million people incarcerated in the U.S., a 2% innocence rate would be equivalent to 40,000 wasting their lives in jail or prison. Approximately 20% of people wrongly incarcerated because of false confessions.  Saul Kassin, a professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, explained that a typical [police] interrogation can take up to four hours, but false confessions cases have had interrogations of up to 20 hours. “People have a breaking point. And time breaks people down,” Kassin said. “Time brings with it fatigue, a deprivation of certain need states. Particularly important is that people being interrogated are sitting alone in a room; no friends, no family, not a lawyer present.” Police are trained to use methods of deception, intimidation and manipulation to circumvent your Constitutional Rights.
    
    Despite common misconceptions, trials aren’t actually where most cases are decided. More than 97% of  criminal cases result in plea deals. The use of pleas is understandable. Because of the sheer volume of daily cases, the criminal justice system would be backlogged and inefficient if it were exclusively trial-based. But when due process is uprooted in the name of efficiency, bad things happen. In plea bargains, the accused are too frequently coerced into pleading guilty, even when they aren't. A study released by the American Psychological Association found that the earlier a defendant submits to the prosecutor and accepts a plea, the more lenient his punishment will be. And defendants often aren't privy to the evidence against them during the bargaining phase, making it difficult to make a good-faith decision. Prosecutors often take this as an opportunity to greatly exaggerate the dirt they’ve got on the defendant, pushing innocent people to plead guilty for crimes they didn’t commit. The government protects itself from the consequences of unfair indictments through absolute immunity, which largely shields prosecutors from being sued for any wrongdoing. But those who make a living building cases for indictment should be just as indictable as the general public. Without accountability, there is less incentive for them to act with principle. (USA Today, April 4, 2019)
    
    Police misconduct accounts for around 40% of false convictions. Police perjury, entering false information into official reports, manufacturing or planting evidence are all forms of police misconduct that result in convictions of people who have committed no crime. In 2019 USA Today reported that more than 85,000 police officers were investigated for misconduct. Dishonesty is a frequent problem. The records document at least 2,227 instances of perjury, tampering with evidence or witnesses or falsifying reports. There were 418 reports of officers obstructing investigations, most often when they or someone they knew were targets. Less than 10% of officers in most police forces get investigated for misconduct. Police departments often work to cover-up misconduct within their ranks. And when there is an investigation, the records of their misconduct are filed away, rarely seen by anyone outside their departments. Police unions and their political allies have worked to put special protections in place ensuring some records are shielded from public view, or even destroyed.

*** Police Abuse Confidential Database Access to Stalk Innocent People ***

 
    According to the Associated Press (AP), "Police officers across the country misuse confidential law enforcement databases to get information on romantic partners, business associates, neighbors, journalists and others for reasons that have nothing to do with daily police work... the AP’s review shows how those systems also can be exploited by officers who, motivated by romantic quarrels, personal conflicts or voyeuristic curiosity, sidestep policies and sometimes the law by snooping. In the most egregious cases, officers have used information to stalk or harass, or have tampered with or sold records they obtained.

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reported that police in California are abusing their access to the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS). Police have used their access to "stalk their ex-partners, gain advantage in custody proceedings, and screen potential online dates. In one of the worst incidents, an officer allegedly attempted to leak records on witnesses to family of a convicted murderer."

*** Do Police Add Any Value to the Community? ***

    The can be little doubt that police reduce crime in some communities, but as an article in the Washington Post pointed out, they are not the only ones that can do it.

    “Decades of criminological theory and growing evidence demonstrate that residents and local organizations can indeed “police” their own neighborhoods and control violence — in a way that builds stronger communities. This isn’t about citizen watch groups. When neighborhood organizations engage young people with well-run after-school activities and summer jobs programs, those young people are dramatically less likely to become involved in violent activities. When street outreach workers intervene, they can be extremely effective in interrupting conflicts before they escalate. When local organizations reclaim abandoned lots and turn them into green spaces, violence falls. When community nonprofits proliferate across a city, that city becomes safer…. What if these alternative actors received the same resources the police do? The Metropolitan Police Department in Washington,  D.C. for example, operates with an annual budget of close to $580 million and a workforce of 4,400 full-time employees.”

    While it is true that police do sometimes deter crime, and do provide some benefit to the communities that they serve, it is also true that the current police and criminal justice structure in the United States does a great deal of harm.


(This article was originally published by JBLM Cop Watch at: https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2021/01/17/18839419.php) We have re-posted it here with minor edits.)