Trials and trails

In the wake of the indictments announced in the fatal officer-involved shooting of Sean Bell, 23, the New York City Police Department and local elected officials are taking their examination of the practices of that department to the next level.

The New York Times published an article on discussions that are taking place in the city's communities about improvements people feel are needed by the department. Mayor Michael Bloomberg had been praised by some in holding dialogues with community leaders on issues related to the Bell shooting. Other community leaders and some city officials believe he needs to do much more.


(excerpt)


“It’s been pretty much a clarion call from all around the city that encounters with the police are hostile,” said City Councilman Leroy Comrie, who represents the area where Mr. Bell died.

Saying that Mr. Bloomberg had not pushed the Police Department hard enough to make changes and acknowledge mistakes, he added: “He’s doing the outreach, he’s doing the healing, but it’s after the fact. He’s patching the wound, but he’s not doing the deep surgery required to keep the wound from reappearing.”



Complaints to the city's police commission were up 66% since 2000 and there were more incidents of what community members referred to as racial profiling, especially through stop-and-frisks.




Columnist Bill Johnson with the Rocky Mountain News took what he called a "glass half-full" approach to recent reports coming out about the Denver Police Department.


Report by monitor shows job taken seriously



Even though complaints in Denver are up, Johnson felt there were positive signs in Monitor Richard Rosenthal's annual report on the complaints process and that Rosenthal was filling the role in the accountability process that he had been hired after a long search to do.

Here was one incident Johnson related from the report:


(excerpt)


It gave me chills. It gave me hope. It occurred March 5 a year ago. There was a call of a disturbance. Multiple officers responded and contacted the woman who had placed it. She was drunk.

The officers settled her down, found nothing and left.

Later, a security guard at the building noticed that a lone officer had returned, secreted his patrol car in the back of the building and went up to the woman's apartment.

Thinking this suspicious, the guard made his own call to police.

The two District 1 officers who responded spotted the patrol car. They called in a sergeant. All three were met at the woman's door by the lone officer, who Rosenthal said gave them an "illogical" explanation. They called in Internal Affairs.

It was determined the officer went back to the apartment "with the intent of pressuring the woman to engage in sexual conduct," the report said.

Further investigation revealed numerous other suspicious incidents involving the officer and female citizens, it added.

The officer, charged criminally by the district attorney, resigned.
Minus the booze, that woman could have been my kid. Or yours.

That last statement in Johnson's column hits an important point home and every police officer in every law enforcement agency should take that message home with them as well. The next time any of them feel tempted to go that route, or fail to report another officer that does engage in this misconduct, they should imagine that instead of the woman who is the victim, it is their mother, their daughters, their sisters, girlfriends or other women and take the appropriate steps, acting like the police officers that they were hired to be.

To protect and serve doesn't mean looking the other way when a fellow police officer engages in serious misconduct of this type. Police officers should be willing to report this misconduct and police supervisors should be willing to take these allegations seriously whether by women or police officers and not punish either for being the messengers that their employees are behaving in a way that's highly inappropriate.

Too often this type of gross misconduct doesn't get reported when it happens, or when it does get reported, its victims are thoroughly mistreated by the law enforcement agency involved and the judicial system. Several similar cases have occurred involving Riverside County Sheriff's Department employees both in the department's field operations division as well as its corrections division and are currently being prosecuted? But how many more cases like this are out there?

There is no way to really answer that question, except that police department heads should make it absolutely clear to their employees that this type of misconduct is absolutely unacceptable, and if officers are caught, then they should be fired. There really is no other acceptable discipline, no matter what police supervisors or commanders might say. These officers as have other officers who have been caught committing this form of misconduct taint their agencies through their actions and cause mistrust to increase between the police department and the public it serves.


Johnson also discusses the case of Officer Randall Krouse who tased Kenneth Rodriguez while he was handcuffed, an action that was caught on surveillance video. Krouse and another officer then lied about the incident in their report.

Instead of firing his officer, Chief Gerry Whitman slapped his wrist by giving him a short suspension, spreading the message to the other officers that there was no great punishment for using excessive force and lying about it after the fact. Rosenthal had recommended a longer suspension, but even the city manager backed up Whitman's discipline. So amid the good news, there were incidents that reminded anyone in Denver who read the report of why a monitor was needed in the first place.

Maybe there will be better news next year. Maybe not.

The Press Enterprise wrote a rather one-sided article on the governmental affairs committee meeting yesterday, quoting only the rather disgruntled and grumpy city council members sitting on the committee and one of the two people out of 10 speakers who was in favor of the city council changes. You can read about it here.

Lame duck councilman, Ed Adkison is holding a meeting at City Hall between him and his critics. It will be held at 2:30 p.m. somewhere on the seventh floor. Feel free to drop in and tell him what you think of how the city conducts its business. Oh, and when you're there, ask him if he's absolutely, positively, firmly not running for mayor next year.

It's not the trial of the century, but the misdemeanor turned infraction trial of a Casa Blanca resident, who is mentally ill and mentally challenged, will be heard tomorrow at the Riverside County Civil Courthouse. He is the individual mentioned in the previous post who was stopped in a matter of speaking by two Riverside Police Department officers while walking through a local park and was punched in the face by one of them, allegedly because this officer believed his safety was endangered even while his partner had testified that he was standing by the squad car and watching until the man was knocked on the ground by his partner.

The misdemeanor 148 charge was dismissed today by Judge Gary Tranbarger upon request of the deputy prosecutor and his supervisor on the case. In its place, the Riverside County District Attorney's office amended the complaint to include a PC charge of 415, an infraction. So the case will be tried not by jury, but by judge tomorrow morning because there is no jail time with infractions.

It bounced around five times in Riverside County's overtaxed judicial system but finally found a venue in the civil side of the complex. The scheduling judges in Riverside were so frazzled, they began assigning cases to courtrooms already hearing trials. Then those judges would get upset and kick them back. It's a day spent passing the buck, from one overbooked judge to the next. But this case made it through to see its day in court.