A bunch of law enforcement stories in the Boston Globe this morning that all come together in my head.
First, there's a ruling by the Superior Court of Massachusetts that witness statements taken by police officers can't be admitted as evidence in court, unless the witness shows up in person to testify. People who agitate on behalf of abused spouses are upset with this ruling, which grew out of a case of a woman who was beaten, but later refused to show up in court to testify against her spouse.
Now, while appreciate the advocates' concern, the problem, as I see it, is with what the responding officers focus on. Instead of recording their own observations of the victim's condition and basing their reports of an incident on their objective assessment, they prefer to simply write down, as best they can remember, what the victim, obviously in an emotionally precarious condition TOLD them. In other words, they are forcing prosecutors to go into court with hear-say evidence, which will never stand up if the defendant's attorney is half-way competent. Not to mention that the police reports are notoriously inaccurate to begin with, and cases often get thrown out because the officers don't show up in court on time, or at all.
So, what it boils down to is shoddy police work. And that's what the court is trying to address by making second-hand accounts in-admissable.
The other story is about the Boston Police Union which is upset that the officers are going to have to list their badge numbers on their reports of police traffic stops. The forms were recently re-designed to help administrators track whether there are an excessive number of stops of people driving while black. Their union argument is that having to provide indentification of themselves would be a form of racial profiling in itself when taken with the racial identification of the driver.
But this is a smoke-screen. If the officers' signatures on the forms were legible (which they are not because they don't want people to know who they are), then it wouldn't be necessary to require their badge number. Moreover, what's really at issue here is management's ability to check on who's doing what. If the supervisors have stop reports identifying the officers, they'll be able to check who's working and who's not. And that's the issue. Police do not want to be told what to do, even indirectly, by a public asking for accounts. So, the racial rationale being pushed in the media is a fraud, IMHO.
Another story is about police training of Iraqis in Jordan and how the whole program is certain to fail, largely because of poor management criteria and poor pay and poor instruction. From other things I've read, much of the training focuses on doing things "by the book" a book that has little relevance on the streets in the US and even less in Iraq. There's a lot of building of "esprit de corps" and less or nothing about learning how to use weapons, or not, making accurate observations, responding in a timely manner (when called), etc.
Of course, the fact that they are not getting paid regularly in Iraq is another matter. Not surprisingly, the op-ed was penned by a female military officer, who also claims that 40% of her class have left the service because of mis-management. She's now going for a PhD at Harvard.
Oh, yes, and Barney Franks is in the news because he's upset that a US Marshall in MA, who didn't show up for work to his politically appointed position, got to sit in his job for five more months after a report by the inspector general suggested he be let go, and didn't get dismissed until the Globe got a copy of the report through an FOIA. Franks is arguing that people appointed to such positions should be qualified with skills that go beyond having driven a GOP Governor around the state. Which strikes me as a valid critique.
Indeed, having properly qualified public servants is, IMHO, a potent issue for Democrats. Can't go wrong on that, especially when the GOP does so much according to the "crony scale."
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Addendum---LTE
The Town of Durham's administrator considers it important that he set goals for the departments he directs and one of his top goals for the Police Department is to make sure that it continues to receive high marks from the organization commonly referred to as CALEA, the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, Inc.
CALEA has an interesting history as an outgrowth of federal revenue sharing, in the form of law enforcement assistance grants in the '80s, which successive Republican administrations in Washington managed to do away with. So, as the money dried up for community policing and other accountability programs, CALEA gradually evolved into a preformance auditing program for which those looking to be certified as meeting standards set by others in the profession pay.
One could say that another social service has been privatized, especially if one assumes that those who pay call the tune. But the premise for selling this program to small departments which, presumably, can't afford to maintain a full-time personnel training staff, is as a risk-management tool. What that means is that being accredited by CALEA is supposed to enable the department to avoid liability, in case it gets hauled into court because of the actions, or inactions, of its employees.
In other words, as a result of training their personnel to certain standards of performance, police agencies are supposed to be able to argue, when one of their own messes up, that it wasn't the department's fault--that, if there was malfeasance or negligence, the perpetrator was just a "loose cannon," sort of like those hapless National Guardsmen at Abu Ghraib.
Now, I'm all for training. In particular, I'm keen on our public servants being able to interact well with the public, being responsive to requests for service, keeping accurate records that will hold up in a court of law, being familiar with the laws they are supposed to enforce (including the Bill of Rights), and being prepared to bring forward suggested adjustments to the law, if what's on the books doesn't work. But it seems to me that in a community such as ours, a university town, these skills ought to be able to be acquired right here. Indeed, when it comes to writing clear reports and keeping accurate records of events, I would argue that no-one should be hired who doesn't already have those skills or cannot readily acquire them.
One of the most common complaints heard in police departments all around the country is that the courts keep throwing out their cases and that this is a large factor in lowering the morale, which the CALEA process is supposed to raise. Well, it's true that many cases are either not filed or thrown out before they are even heard. But one of the primary reasons for that, which doesn't seem to be covered by what CALEA provides, is that the information on which charges and cases are based, the information which the police collect and write down, is often unreliable, incomplete, un-timely or just plain false.
In fact, they often can't even get the simplest automobile accident report right. Which is why most citizens are forced to rely on their own risk management strategy--insurance--without any hope that the bad drivers will ever be taken off the road and the annual carnage on our roads and highways (still over 40,000 dead) will ever be reduced.
Posted by Hannah at August 30, 2005 08:21 AM