“On a Monday night in August 2016, Tony Timpa, a 32-year-old Dallas resident, called 911 to report that he was “having a lot of anxiety” about a man he feared would harm him. Timpa mentioned that he had received several psychiatric diagnoses—schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, and anxiety disorder—but had not taken his medication that day. After police arrived in response to that call and other reports of a man behaving erratically near 1728 West Mockingbird Lane, Timpa yelled, “You’re gonna kill me!” He was right.
Timpa, who had already been handcuffed by a security guard, died while being pinned to the ground face down by several police officers for about 15 minutes, during which time he pleaded with them to stop and cried for help over and over again. The officers, while intermittently showing signs of compassion, joked about Timpa’s predicament and the possibility that they had killed him.
This week, in a decision that vividly illustrates how difficult it is to hold cops accountable for misconduct under a federal statute that authorizes lawsuits against government officials who violate people’s constitutional rights, a federal judge granted qualified immunity to those officers. Whether or not they violated Timpa’s Fourth Amendment rights, U.S. District Judge David Godbey ruled, the law on that point was not “clearly established” on the night he died.
The circumstances of Timpa’s death are broadly similar to what happened when George Floyd was suffocated by Minneapolis officers on May 25, a horrifying incident that provoked nationwide protests and calls for police reform. One of the proposed reforms is the abolition of qualified immunity, a court-invented doctrine that blocks federal civil rights claims when plaintiffs cannot identify sufficiently specific precedents. Godbey’s decision shows how formidable that barrier is.”
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“Recall that the cops ostensibly were there to help Timpa, who was obviously freaking out and according to his family was “suffering drug-induced psychosis.” The officers clearly recognized that Timpa was intoxicated, since they repeatedly asked him what drug he was on, and he told them he had taken cocaine. Yet they proceeded to restrain him for 15 minutes in a position that made it difficult for him to breathe. Given the circumstances, Timpa’s “resistance,” which the officers repeatedly described as “squirming,” was perfectly understandable. Godbey’s framing suggests that someone who panics because he is being smothered to death thereby justifies the use of force that caused him to fear for his life.”
“Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents and U.S. marshals dressed in military gear and brandishing large weapons have been stationed in Portland since around the start of the month, per an executive order from President Donald Trump. The feds are allegedly there to protect national monuments and guard against potential domestic terrorism.
Instead, this deliberately intimidating gaggle of outside “law enforcement” officers has been agitating peacefully assembled people who are merely exercising their constitutional rights. This has included shooting one man directly in the head with an impact munition of some sort (sending him to the hospital and necessitating facial reconstruction surgery) and, reportedly, forcing protesters into unmarked vans.
According to an internal Homeland Security memo, “federal agents facing backlash for their militarized approach to Portland were not specifically trained in riot control or mass demonstrations,” The New York Times reports.
That doesn’t bode well for the idea that they were sent in with mitigation in mind.
Despite federal agent actions last week, large Portland protests continued over the weekend…
…and so did federal agents acting in unnecessarily hostile and abusive ways ”
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“Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler told CNN on Sunday that “they’re not wanted here, we haven’t asked them here, in fact we want them to leave.””
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“Oregon Gov. Kate Brown has suggested the feds’ presence was a “deliberate effort to provoke.” She told The Washington Post “that her contacts with Trump administration officials about the situation had convinced her that ‘they are not interested in problem solving,’ and this has ‘nothing to do with public safety.'””
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“Oregon’s Department of Justice is suing the DHS, the U.S. Marshals Service, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the Federal Protection Service. The lawsuit, filed in federal court on Saturday, alleges that “they seized and detained Oregonians without probable cause,” explains Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum.”
“Police unions in general have become the most vocal interest group opposing criminal justice reforms and especially reforms to police discipline and use of force. Historically, they have, unlike most unions, been profoundly conservative institutions that uphold a particular white ethnic, “law and order”-focused variant of right-wing politics. They have been among Donald Trump’s most fervent allies; Kroll spoke at a Trump rally in 2018, and the International Union of Police Associations has already endorsed Trump for reelection.
The foregrounding of police unions’ role in the warping of American law enforcement has also prompted some difficult conversations on the left. The presence of a segment of a union movement that’s unapologetically right-wing and hostile to Black communities has tested the limits of solidarity from more left-wing unionists.
As long as police forces exist, police unions will exist in some form as well, even if just as political pressure groups. It is therefore natural to think that reforming police unions in some way must be part of the broader agenda of changing policing in America. They are among the biggest stakeholders in the way the system works now; without addressing their power, other reforms may never get off the ground.”
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“Most police union experts I spoke with, though, fell in the middle: They believe that police unions can be usefully reformed without being abolished.
There are a number of possible models for this kind of reform. The organization Campaign Zero, co-founded by activists DeRay Mckesson and Samuel Sinyangwe, has been a leader in pushing for police union contract transparency; much of the research above relies on contracts they’ve surfaced publicly.
They recommend a bevy of contract changes, most of which involve removing provisions included in many union contracts or state laws known as Law Enforcement Officers’ Bills of Rights (LEOBRs), which provide similar protections to police officers as contracts do but are implemented as state legislation instead. Problematic provisions in contracts and LEOBRs include mandates that delay interrogations of officers (as Rushin highlighted), the ability to appeal to an arbitrator partially chosen by the police union, and bans on investigating misconduct that happened more than 100 days in the past.
Rushin has proposed allowing the public to observe collective bargaining between the police and state governments. That way, the public can exert pressure on city leaders not to yield to police union demands about discipline. A 2017 Reuters investigation found that in a number of cities, such as San Antonio, city leaders have given police unions concessions as an explicit trade-off for not offering high pay or limiting pay cuts. “If that trade-off is publicly visible, that our failure to compensate is causing cities to give significant concessions on discipline,” Rushin notes, then public pressure might force the city to increase police salaries rather than reducing accountability.”
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“Suppose that a FedEx deliveryperson pushed you onto the sidewalk, causing a head injury when you fell. The deliveryperson would be liable in a civil suit, and so would FedEx. But it’s different with government. Qualified immunity generally protects police officers and other public employees from lawsuits; meanwhile, a principle called “vicarious liability” protects police departments and city governments from such lawsuits. Fisk argues that Congress should reverse Monell and allow governments to be held liable for police officers’ misconduct.
The most dramatic reform, short of outright abolishing collective bargaining rights for police unions, is one that Harvard’s Sachs suggested sympathy toward and the Boston Globe has editorialized in favor of: limiting police unions to simply bargaining on wages and hours, not on discipline. This change is already the law in Massachusetts. (Fisk argues this would go too far. “There’s two sides to the contract; why are we focused only on what unions are asking for rather than focusing on what cities are asking for?” she says.)
Reforming police unions is hardly the only important task in efforts to reform the police generally. But there is an emerging consensus that something significant has to change in these organizations. If not, they will remain unaccountable lobbies that frustrate even mild efforts to reform police departments and save the lives of unarmed civilians.”
“The GOP bill requires additional disclosures about the use of force, codifies reporting requirements on the use of “no knock warrants,” provides incentives for chokehold bans and makes lynching a federal crime.
The Democratic proposal, led in the Senate by Booker and Harris, would ban chokeholds and no knock warrants in federal drug cases. It would also limit qualified immunity for police officers to make it easier to sue police — something Democrats argue is key to holding police officers accountable for misconduct, but which most Republicans won’t consider.”
“while there is a strong research base for believing that having police on the beat reduces crime, these same studies find that the aggressive “suspicious behavior” stops and stop-and-frisk tactics that have poisoned police-community relations have no real crime-fighting value.”
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“there’s a substantial literature in economics and sociology arguing that more police on the beat equals less violent crime. One effort to quantify this precisely is a 2018 Review of Economics and Statistics article by Aaron Chalfin and Justin McCrary. It estimates, based on a big set of police and crime data from large and midsize cities between 1960 and 2010, that every $1 spent on extra police generates about $1.63 in social benefits, primarily by reducing murders. One needn’t take this literature as gospel truth, but one of the go-to scholars on the abolitionist position should be able to — and want to — counter the prevailing academic claim that investments in policing pay off in reduced violent crime.”
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“American policing needs to change. And there’s at least some reason to think that reducing the scope of policing can and should be a big part of that change. Fairly mild policy changes undertaken over the past few years have delivered results in terms of fewer police killings of unarmed people, and there’s reason to believe that plenty of opportunity exists for further reform.
But policing is important. There’s evidence that the number of police has an effect on crime, especially violent crime. And when crime soars, not only do the direct victims suffer but we run the risk that economically diverse cities will unravel as people with means flee to the suburbs.”
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“Patrick Sharkey, a Princeton sociologist who is clearly sympathetic to the goals of the defunding movement, writes in a Washington Post piece arguing for a greater role for local leaders and communities in containing violence that “those who argue that the police have no role in maintaining safe streets are arguing against lots of strong evidence. One of the most robust, most uncomfortable findings in criminology is that putting more officers on the street leads to less violent crime.””
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“the importance and efficacy of what police officers do doesn’t hinge on believing they’re angels. The number of officers patrolling the street has an effect on the murder rate.”
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“European countries have higher rates of problematic teen drinking, as well as a higher rate of cirrhosis deaths. What’s true is that drunkenness is less problematic in Europe because there is more mass transit and fewer guns, so the range of possible alcohol-related harms is narrower.”
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“laxer pot rules mean more pot consumption. Laxer alcohol rules mean more alcohol consumption. And laxer heroin rules would likely mean more heroin consumption. One can certainly make a case for this (criminalization has not been a rousing success story), but it requires some real argument.”
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“Many faddish implicit bias trainings don’t really seem to work. But there are promising results from several different procedural justice trainings. More to the point, Vitale himself says that “in some ways training is actually part of the problem” because “in recent decades, the emphasis has shifted heavily toward officer safety training.” Instead of receiving training that creates an exaggerated sense of threat (police work is dangerous, but officers’ death rates are lower than for fishers or roofers), police should be provided with deescalation training (which has been found to be at least somewhat effective) and, more importantly, required to use it with real consequences for officers who don’t.”
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“collective bargaining agreements make it extremely difficult to fire police with records of misconduct. Those who are dismissed are often ordered to be rehired. And police officers who are permanently fired — which, to be clear, means they have passed a high bar for badness — often get hired at other jurisdictions. Meanwhile, the “qualified immunity” doctrine immunizes police for civil penalties for misconduct.
Per what records are available, a relatively small number of officers are committing most of the misconduct, but studies show that bad behavior can spread like a virus to peer officers. Getting rid of the worst 5 percent of officers could eliminate an enormous share of the misconduct, halt the spread of bad norms throughout departments, and open up new hiring opportunities to create more diverse forces.”
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“As the defund debate has played out in the public sphere, an idea has taken hold that not only should America spend more on social services but that the police are the reason we can’t or won’t do that.”
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“police spending is a relative drop in the bucket of state and local government budgets; at the federal level, it’s even smaller.”
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“It’s true that the government should be spending more on housing and mental health programs and that doing so would probably reduce crime. But it would probably reduce crime by freeing up officers to do more police work. And there’s no particular reason the money for it has to come out of police departments. If you compare the United States to Europe, the reason Europe has a more generous welfare state is a much higher overall level of spending — not that the US has overfunded the police.”
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“The problem with America’s police officers is that they’re too unaccountable and lawless, operating with too much job security and a sense of impunity, not that there are too many of them.”
“A three-word slogan is not a detailed policy agenda, and not everyone using the slogan agrees on the details. The basic idea, though, is less that policing budgets should be literally zeroed out than that there should be a massive restructuring of public spending priorities.”
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“there are people, like Brooklyn College sociologist Alex Vitale, who favor police abolition. In practice, however, while Vitale supports legalizing a wide range of currently illegal activity, he still envisions things like “sex work that’s regulated just like any other business.” At some level, the way business regulation works is that if you’re sufficiently defiant of the rules, the police will lock you up. And under questioning from Mother Jones’s Madison Pauly, Vitale is cagey about questions like how we are going to handle murders in a zero-police society.”
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“The “defund” slogan dances ambiguously between abolition-type schemes and just saying officials should spend less money on policing at the margins. The Black Lives Matters #DefundThePolice explainer page argues that “law enforcement doesn’t protect or save our lives. They often threaten and take them.” By contrast, a Justin Brooks op-ed at the Appeal titled “Defund the Police Now” is an extended argument for spending somewhat less money on crime control and somewhat more on social services, as a win-win resulting in less crime, less punishment, and less police violence against civilians.”
“In 2018, as a gunman murdered 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Sgt. Brian Miller, a sheriff’s deputy with the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, hid behind his police cruiser, waiting 10 minutes to radio for help. For his failure to act, Miller was fired. The official cause was “neglect of duty.”
Last month, however, Miller was not only reinstated but given full back pay. His 2017 salary was more than $138,000. Miller had challenged his firing, and, as The Miami Herald reports, he had done so with the full backing of his union.”
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“This is what police unions do: defend the narrow interests of police at the expense of public safety. They exist to demand that taxpayers pay for dangerous, and even deadly, negligence. And although they are not the only pathology that affects American policing, they are a key internal influence on police culture, a locus of resistance to improvements designed to reduce police violence. To stop bad cops and police abuse, we must tackle police unions.
In case after case, police unions have defended deadly misdeeds committed by law enforcement. In 2014, for example, New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo put Eric Garner in a chokehold for selling loose cigarettes. As a result of Pantaleo’s chokehold, Garner died. Garner’s last words were, “I can’t breathe.”
The incident, caught on video, helped galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement. A grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo, but five years after Garner’s death, he was fired from the force following a police administrative judge’s ruling that the chokehold was, indeed, a violation of department policy.
Pantaleo had violated his police department’s policy in a way that resulted in the death of a man who was committing the most minor of offenses. Yet when he was finally fired, Patrick Lynch, the president of the Police Benevolent Association, Pantaleo’s union, criticized the city for giving in to “anti-police extremists” and warned that such decisions threatened the ability of city police to do their jobs. “We are urging all New York City police officers to proceed with the utmost caution in this new reality, in which they may be deemed ‘reckless’ just for doing their job,” Lynch said.”
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“Forthcoming research out of the University of Victoria’s economics department finds that the introduction of collective bargaining produces somewhat higher compensation for police officers. It does not correlate with a reduction in total crime—but it does eventually correlate with higher numbers of killings by police, especially of minorities.
In other words, the research finds about what you’d expect given a public sector workforce with unions set up to protect police officer compensation while limiting discipline and oversight. Police get paid more, yet the public is no safer—and it’s even at greater risk of violence by police.”
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“consider the case of Camden, New Jersey. For decades, the city was among the most violent in the country, plagued by one of America’s highest murder rates and commensurate levels of property crime. In 2012, with the murder rate approaching record highs, The New York Times reported, police acknowledged “that they have all but ceded these streets to crime.” City officials said the police union was to blame. Union contracts made hiring officers prohibitively expensive. The cops on the payroll were being paid too much and they weren’t getting the job done.
So the city made a novel decision: Fire the police. All of them.
That year, Camden began the process of terminating hundreds of officers and hiring a new force initially made up of less expensive, non-union labor, controlled by the county.
It was a decision meant to address both budget and crime problems. Naturally, the police union opposed the plan, saying it was “definitely a form of union-busting.” City officials, the union said, were relying on a reform that was “unproven and untested,” putting faith in an agency that did not yet exist.
By many measures, however, the unproven and untested new police force worked. After disbanding the city police and reorganizing under the county with lower pay, plus adding focus on rebuilding trust with the community (which is among the nation’s poorest), murders declined. The city is still dangerous compared to some others, but there’s been clear progress in terms of reducing crime and improving community relations. Over the weekend, as residents took to the streets to protest disparate and abusive treatment in black communities, Camden police officers marched with the protesters.”
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“Unions aren’t the only problem plaguing American police forces; there are plenty of other reforms worth pursuing, from demilitarization to ending qualified immunity. But they have consistently proven to be a force of organized resistance to calmer, safer, less aggressive policing”
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“Police are public servants granted enormous power over the citizenry. They are tasked with protecting the public and serving their interests. Police unions, in contrast, are tasked with protecting police and serving their interests—even in direct contravention of serving the public. That distinction makes them a barrier to reforms aimed at improving public safety and increasing oversight of how law enforcement behaves. If union-busting is what it takes to reduce the pernicious influence of today’s police unions on policing, then it’s time to bust some police unions.”
“I’ve heard some suggest that the recurrent problem of racial bias in our criminal justice system proves that only protests and direct action can bring about change, and that voting and participation in electoral politics is a waste of time. I couldn’t disagree more. The point of protest is to raise public awareness, to put a spotlight on injustice, and to make the powers that be uncomfortable; in fact, throughout American history, it’s often only been in response to protests and civil disobedience that the political system has even paid attention to marginalized communities. But eventually, aspirations have to be translated into specific laws and institutional practices — and in a democracy, that only happens when we elect government officials who are responsive to our demands.
Moreover, it’s important for us to understand which levels of government have the biggest impact on our criminal justice system and police practices. When we think about politics, a lot of us focus only on the presidency and the federal government. And yes, we should be fighting to make sure that we have a president, a Congress, a U.S. Justice Department, and a federal judiciary that actually recognize the ongoing, corrosive role that racism plays in our society and want to do something about it. But the elected officials who matter most in reforming police departments and the criminal justice system work at the state and local levels.”
“Reuters analyzed 252 federal appellate opinions from 2015 to 2019 where law enforcement defendants claimed qualified immunity. The courts ruled in the police’s favor in 57 percent of the cases.”
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“Under the 50-year-old doctrine of qualified immunity, police and other government employees are shielded from lawsuits where the civil right they allegedly infringed hasn’t been “clearly established,” or where a reasonable officer wouldn’t have known about it.”
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“On its face, qualified immunity is supposed to protect public officials from frivolous lawsuits related to their official job duties, but the confusing precedent has been construed so pedantically by some courts that plaintiffs must find precedents that match the exact circumstances of their case. Qualified immunity effectively short-circuits civil litigation against individual police officers, ensuring that the cases never make it to trial or settlement.”
“A California police officer had already shot three people on the job before he was caught on video for beating up a suspect.
The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) released a statement this week about the use-of-force incident which occurred on April 27. According to the statement, Officer Frank A. Hernandez and another officer responded to a trespassing call in the Hollenbeck area. The officers asked the suspected trespasser to leave the property.
A bystander’s video shows the suspect standing with his hands behind his back just before Hernandez mercilessly beats him.”