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The Good Cop Get Donut; The Bad Cop Get No Donut
Polls are very popular on Ricochet. One of my favorites was “Which ten albums would you take with you if you were to be stranded on a deserted island?” or something like that. My first thought was to ask where the electricity is coming from to power the CD player?
So in light of the Bad Cop, No Donut essays I thought I would offer another poll: what laws are valid and need to be enforced, and-or what laws need not be enforced? When should an officer respond to a call for service and when should an officer decline a call for service?
I have some personal experience with these questions. One night, I pulled-over someone for making a left turn on a street that had a prominent “No Left Turn” sign posted at that intersection. The driver of the BMW was pretty snotty; BMW and Prius owners usually have attitudes (anecdotal evidence). I was informed by the driver I should be looking for burglars. I told him that the last burglar I caught told me I should be looking for people making illegal left turns (half true: I did catch one the week before, but he said no such thing).
The driver demanded the phone number to the mayors office, so — being a helpful police officer — I gave him the phone number. A week later a Sergeant said; “Watt, I need to talk to you for a moment. Do not give anyone the phone number to the mayors office.” Apparently the mayor did not want to hear from his constituents, at least not that one.
If you decide to participate in this poll you might want to read this New York Times piece on the Supreme Court decision in a Colorado case of whether police have an obligation to respond to calls for service:
Published in GeneralThe appeals court had permitted a lawsuit to proceed against a Colorado town, Castle Rock, for the failure of the police to respond to a woman’s pleas for help after her estranged husband violated a protective order by kidnapping their three young daughters, whom he eventually killed.
…
The theory of the lawsuit Ms. Gonzales filed in federal district court in Denver was that Colorado law had given her an enforceable right to protection by instructing the police, on the court order, that “you shall arrest” or issue a warrant for the arrest of a violator. She argued that the order gave her a “property interest” within the meaning of the 14th Amendment’s due process guarantee, which prohibits the deprivation of property without due process.
But the majority on Monday saw little difference between the earlier case and this one, Castle Rock v. Gonzales, No. 04-278. Ms. Gonzales did not have a “property interest” in enforcing the restraining order, Justice Scalia said, adding that “such a right would not, of course, resemble any traditional conception of property.”
Although the protective order did mandate an arrest, or an arrest warrant, in so many words, Justice Scalia said, “a well-established tradition of police discretion has long coexisted with apparently mandatory arrest statutes.”
I’m surprised no one has commented on the Supreme Court decision in the essay. What if the ruling concerned firefighters that refused to answer a call to a house-fire?
I’ve seen the phrase selective enforcement, yet isn’t that what many people are asking for concerning their own encounters with police officers?
The difference I think comes down to this: a firefighter only has to respond to specific calls, where a police officer has a far more broadly defined mission. Firefighters put out fires, that’s why they are there. A police officer has to “keep order” or “keep the peace”, etc., it’s not the same thing.
If the police were required to respond to every crime (from minor traffic violations right up through armed robbery in progress) the way firefighters are, then you’d need a substantially larger number of officers.
A firefighter is, to stretch some analogies, a specific tool for a specific purpose, called out only when needed. You just cannot say the same of police.
You yourself hinted at the difference above with your story of the cyclist with the TV. His behavior, while odd, may not have been illegal yet the officer smelled a rat. The officer exercised a judgement under the aegis of his commission by apprehending the cyclist.
The further implication of the Court’s decision, though, is a recognition that the police cannot be everywhere at once. If you were in a situation where you saw 2 people being mugged at opposite ends of the street, which incident would you choose to stop? Making the police obligated to stop a crime would put you, in that situation, on the liability hook for not stopping both – the one you were unable to protect would be able to sue or prosecute you. This again would entail either a massive over-policing, or flat out giving up on the job, hence the protection afforded by the court.
The fact that police have no legal obligation to protect civilians is extremely old news.
Aaron and Sal’s exchange has prompted another question from me (particularly as it pertains to NYC). Seems to me that ‘profiling’ should be against the law, but how does one argue with the results and the drop in crime in certain high risk neighborhoods? Is it a fair trade-off for the safety and well-being of the residents in these parts of the city?
However, Doug, profiling against BMW drivers should always be against the law. :)
It’s also a question of, as I said about enforcement of laws, “predictability”.
If there was a much higher than “zero” probability that my local firefighters might arbitrarily decide not to respond when I call them, my expectation and particularly my behavior is going to change.
Similarly, if my expectation of the police (or other enforcement power of the government – FTC, IRS or whomever) is that they are going to arbitrarily decide which laws to enforce or not, and when to do so, that also affects behavior.
To go back to my traffic signal rant – since people know the probability of receiving a citation for pushing a yellow light is effectively zero, they keep pushing those lights. If the police made it a point to pull over a percentage of people every day at randomly selected intersections throughout the city, people would behave differently – which upon reflection would seem to argue against my point about “arbitrary” enforcement, since the chance of getting caught would still be vanishingly close to zero. I’ll need to think about that.
Wait – red light cameras! Non-arbitrary, virtually 100% enforcement. People hate them. And I’ve seen studies that they actually increase the number of accidents because people are more likely to slam on the brakes when the light changes thus get rear-ended.
The big problem with such cameras actually is a bit more complex.
The best way (and don’t ask me for the sources now, but I have seen them) to reduce intersection accidents is actually to increase the yellow time as this lets the intersection clear, particularly for left-turners and people who speed up at a yellow. Both simulations and in-field studies have confirmed this.
However: Frequently the installation of red light cameras is accompanied by a reduction in the yellow time, and this increases the accidents at such intersections. The cameras are also extremely profitable as cities get to keep almost all of the takings.
I detest red light cameras. They are nothing but a revenue producer, especially for the camera provider. The largest share of the revenue goes to the manufacturer of the camera. I also detest photo radar vans because, at least in Oregon’s case a sworn police officer must man the van. That is not productive use of a trained officer’s time.
It can be 2-3 cycles of the lights at a particular left hand turn I know where the cars in the turn lane back up 10 deep and commercial trucks like to turn left too.
Witnessing the rate at which cars enter the turn lane and the rate at which cars exit the turn lane, the city planners who set the light duration for the protected left hand turn got it wrong. I know better, so I help them out a bit by pulling into the intersection and turning a the earliest (or latest) opportunity. I try to be safe, so if I can’t squeeze a turn in between traffic flow, I will wait for it to stop when the light is red.
Mixing the ideas of selective enforcement and red light cameras, if the laws are so byzantine and numerous that we don’t have enough police officers to enforce them all, then we must prioritize.
If preventing and deterring people from running red lights is really our priority, then we should have real live human beings (not remotely attended cameras) patrolling visibly in police cars.
In short, I don’t like the automation of policing duties. If we can’t police what matters, then we need more cops. If we get to the point where robots can do our policing for us, then the laws will crush us all.
I wonder about this as well.
Interrupting the Conversation Here
The story about the lawsuit against the police for not tending to the restraining order the mother took out against the father who ultimately kidnapped the children (the story that Doug linked to in the original post):
If we cannot provide protection, perhaps every judge should keep a stack of handguns under the bench and he or she should place a gun on top of the restraining order and say, “Here. Take care of yourself. We can’t get to your house on time. You have a God-given right to defend your life and that of your children. Do so.”
Carry on. :)
Police officers like anyone else profile. When I saw people that could not obey even the least of traffic laws, sometimes multiple violations in the space of minutes I started to remember that I might be pulling-over someone who might be an ex-con. Ex-cons can’t obey the big laws, much less the little laws. I worked most every shift at night. I could not tell if the driver was White, Black, Asian, or Hispanic. The driver could have been an Alien, the Alex Jones Prison Planet or Coast to Coast Area 51 Alien. Leftists profile. Just check out the You Tube Wal-Mart videos.
In a more serious discussion of profiling I’ll give you an example that is more specific to Oregon. Drivers would get their license’s suspended in Oregon. They would cross the Columbia River and obtain a Washington license and plates before the suspension was placed in the DMV computer. When you work a neighborhood for any length of time you start recognizing vehicles. When you see a vehicle on a regular basis that has Washington plates and is either parked or moving around the neighborhood on a regular basis (especially between 2200 hours and 0400 hours) you wait for them to commit a traffic violation and then pull them over. Why, because most of them have no liability insurance, which is why they were suspended in the first place. The second reason is their suspension is still valid in Oregon. Finally, in many cases they have outstanding warrants. Sounds unfair, well wait until someone who has no liability insurance hits your vehicle. In many cases they weren’t suspended in spite of stellar driving skills.
:)) Thanks for the PM and for comment #42 and #43.
No need to thank me E. What is happening in NY under Blasio is disconcerting. Years of hard work is being undone. Street officers are angry and confused. Morale will plummet and citizens of the City of NY have a right to be worried about what the future holds.
I’ll be the first to admit that “Bad Cop, No Donut” essays bother me. I’m not as eloquent as I would like to be when describing what I have seen as a police officer. I can give you the nuts and bolts of what I looked for when I was on the streets and tasked with trying to maintain some sense of order in the universe.
It is much more difficult trying to explain the emotions of a group of firefighters and two police officers that cannot look at each other while a Fire Bureau Chaplain is telling you that two little boys died of smoke inhalation long before the flames reached their bodies.
I cannot explain why I get angry when someone uses the phrase “victimless crime” when I watched pimps literally dragging young women out to the sidewalk to turn tricks.
I cannot adequately describe going to a domestic dispute where a husband and wife have beaten each other senseless and their 12 year old son after letting you into the house sits down and plays a classical recital on the piano to try and drown out the screams of anger and the sounds of body blows he heard before we arrived.
There is much more to police work than most people understand, and to be quite honest I didn’t have too much extra time to violate your constitutional rights.
Infinite leeway for the police (or the state) delivers tyranny to the populace. That leeway comes about as a result of laws and regulations always being added and supplemented, and never coming off the books, so police (and the likes of the TSA) can make up “laws” on the spot and get away with it.
In my city, police look for whites to arrest, and will not arrest black thieves, even they they are caught red handed.
Police gain trust when they act in transparently fair-minded ways.
Re selective enforcement of traffic laws: My brother was driving recently on the highway and hit a patch of ice. The car spun, blasted through the median, and was totaled. (My brother was very shaken, but physically OK.) A week later, he received a citation in the mail — for driving on the wrong side of the road.
I slid off the road once in a rainstorm and got a ticket for driving too fast for conditions. A co-worker of mine was all mad when he lost control on a snowy day and ended up on the crash absorber thingie and the state billed him for the cost of moving it and inch or two back into place.
You’re offended because people talk about the “problem with police officers” in general when it’s likely a situation of a small proportion of bad eggs creating all the problems. That’s fair, and a common problem. When we identify as something we open ourselves up to general criticisms that have nothing to do with us personally.
One solution is to reduce your identifications and refuse to be offended because people are obviously not talking about you, and instead identify with a set of ideas. This is difficult but can be psychologically beneficial if you can pull it off.
This is the type of cite I don’t understand and it is one I would never write. All the officer needs to do is write an Incident Report on the damage done to the median and record your brother’s insurance info in the IR. If the state wants to file an insurance claim for the cost of repairing the median then all the info is there. There was no intent to drive on the wrong side of the road and no one was probably more surprised than your brother on finding himself on the wrong side of the road. I’m glad your brother was okay after the accident.
Thanks, Doug. The problem is that these citations undermine confidence in the legitimate use of discretion when issuing citations. It feels like a racket — contesting the ticket costs more than paying it, once you factor in court fees and time off from work.
Another, older anecdote: back around ’68-’70, my dad was a river guide at the Boy Scout camp on the Snake River–they would go from like Jackson into Yellowstone, IIRC. One of their guests was a SLC police officer who related the following tactic:
He would back his patrol car right up to the door of the men’s restroom in Liberty Park, so anyone was trapped inside. This building still existed when I was a kid–concrete block with no windows, just openings with some rebar across them. He would then throw a tear cas cannister into the restroom and “Oh, god, you should hear those faggots screaming in there and banging on that door to get out!”
Whether he performed this chore in response to a specific complaint, or just on an occasional basis to discourage that “activity” I don’t know. But he made it sound like something he did several times.
In a weird way, he was cutting these guys a break, though. Yes they had to go back to their moms or wives or bosses and come up with some explanation for why they looked all messed up (‘s allergies, I guess), but had they been cited, they would have had public lewdness or something on their record, and they would have had a whole lot more ‘splainin to do.
Well he probably saved some marriages and family relationships and jobs. Sexual offense convictions in those years could mark someone for the rest of their lives. In an even weirder sense he probably believed they weren’t beyond changing their behavior. He may also have been trying to move them into somebody else’s district.
I had a similar incident to your brothers accident. I was on my way to get a cup of coffee at a convenience store. After getting the coffee I drove back down the same road and noticed one of the telephone poles had been hit. There was a stump and the top part of the pole was leaning at a 45° angle supported by the wires that were still attached to the poles on either side the pole that had been hit. Telephone poles are numbered. I recorded the number of the pole and asked the dispatcher to notify the phone company.
Less than a mile later I found a 67 Ford Mustang stopped on the side of the road. The driver was rocking back and forth trying to force open the driver’s door with his shoulder. I told him to try getting out on the passenger side. While he was climbing out I walked to the front of the car. There was big “V” between both headlights and the radiator was filled creasote stained splinters. The driver was 17 years-old. “I asked him what happened to your car?” He replied; “I don’t know.” I told him to take a look at the front-end of the car. There was silence. I then told him let’s pretend that we just met and we’ll start with the same question; “What happened to your car?” This time the reply was; I hit a phone pole, My dad is going to kill me. I’m not allowed to drive his Mustang, he just finished restoring it. My parents went to bed early so I thought I would drive the car around for a couple of hours and put it back into the garage.
I called the dispatcher and asked for a case number on the damaged phone pole. I asked the kid if his dad had ever punched him or his mom. The answer was no. The car was drive-able so I told him to put the car back into the garage. If your parents are still asleep show them the car in the morning. I handed him a business card with the Case# written on the card for the damaged pole. I informed him he would have to fill out an accident report for the DMV and your dad will have to contact his insurance company. The telephone company will get a copy of the case number so make sure you give your dad the card. Your mom will be grateful that you survived, give her a hug. Your dad will be grateful you are still alive, he probably isn’t going to give you a hug. You are lucky to be alive. Tell them the truth, I think you have indulged in enough deception to last you for another 12 months.
I did not cite him because I was going to give mom and dad a chance to straighten him out.
Much my take as well.
I wish police chiefs and sheriffs would press legislators for smarter/fewer laws. Obviously, this is difficult in systems where the police chief serves under the mayor, etc., but my impression is that publicly-elected sheriffs don’t use their mandates effectively this way.
Well done! Did you ever hear anything afterwards?
He was a decent kid. I gave him the second chance to tell me the truth because I knew he was scared and shaken from hitting the pole. Once I was sure his dad wasn’t going to beat him I made the decision to let him and his parents handle the aftermath of taking the car without permission and the financial consequences of hitting the pole.
If he had persisted in the lie I would have cited him for hit and run which is a traffic crime and not just a traffic violation. The kid was lucky the pole broke if it hadn’t he could have been seriously injured or killed. I never saw him again.
Unfortunately, for many people they would love it if police were to selectively enforce – at least if it were selective in their favor.
A few years ago, I don’t remember the details so this is just a rough sketch, the Cook County sheriff refused to enforce eviction proceedings in some cases (I remember him having somewhat of a point). While it was reported for sure and the policy ceased rather quickly, I don’t remember there being an uproar and I even heard some assent from various unexpected quarters.
Whatever the merit of his reasoning, the sheriff should not have it in his discretion to refuse to enforce a duly authorize law wholesale; if changes need to be made then the legislative function should make them. His options were to enforce the law or to resign if he couldn’t conscientiously proceed with enforcement. He did neither. I’m not sure how that was eventually resolved, but my surmise is that this was problematic enough that even the machine applied some pressure on him.
On the other hand, I’m glad that individual cops have some discretion when it comes to individual cases. Sometimes people deserve a break, and sometimes people deserve the hassle they get. Sometimes cops can serve both of those purposes efficiently, quietly, inexpensively, and accurately. Sometimes they’ll get it wrong. Tradeoffs.