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Burned by a Hot Mic
My most recent piece over at PJ Media concerns a police incident that occurred last April in Roswell, GA, outside Atlanta. Please read the column, but I can summarize it here by saying that a Roswell police officer caught a woman driving recklessly and arrested her, but not before conferring with a colleague about the option of giving the woman a ticket and releasing her.
On an apparent lark, the two officers used a smartphone “coin-toss” app to aid in the decision. When the app suggested they release the woman, they disregarded it and arrested her anyway. Dashboard and body camera footage of the incident was leaked to a local news station, which aired it as though it had uncovered a major scandal. In the end, the two involved cops were fired, the reckless driver had her case dismissed, and the chief of the Roswell Police Department went in full grovel mode, hiring an outside consultant to do an assessment of the agency.
In the piece I argue that the firing was excessive, and that the officers deserved no more than a talking-to from their sergeant about being circumspect in their speech when the mics are hot. You may find it shocking, but there can be a number of factors an officer weighs before deciding to make an arrest and no cop wants the deliberations made public.
It is a given that when an officer encounters someone wanted for a serious crime, that person is going to be arrested under any circumstances. But when the offense is of a minor nature, an officer has discretion in choosing which course of enforcement to take, if any. And the factors the officer weighs don’t always have something to do with the law or department policy. Police officers typically work 8-, 10-, or 12-hour shifts, and as they near the end of a shift an officer begins to consider the possibility of overtime. Some cops may welcome it, hoping for some extra pay or comp time; others, say, those with plans after work or a court appearance the next day, may try to avoid it. So the scofflaw may suffer or catch a break depending on the demands of an officer’s schedule.
And the factors to be weighed may be even more extraneous. A cop might be presented with a minor offender who is sick or injured, the arrest of whom would require a visit to a local hospital. Some cops would go to any lengths to avoid this, but others might be keen on the chance to spend some time with the nurses, especially if the weather is particularly hot or cold. But the last thing any cop wants is to be on video talking about how he made an arrest because he wanted to pass some time out of the weather flirting with the nurses.
As I said in the column, the cops in Roswell got a raw deal, but their downfall should serve as a warning to others. Defense attorneys, the media, and the cop-haters are eager to misconstrue an offhanded comment made during the course of an arrest regardless of how inconsequential it might be. For cops today, every day is The Truman Show.
Published in Policing
Just up the road from me.
Girls just want to have fun.
Spineless bosses!
Are the biggest problem. A professor does the right thing, e.g. telling a student in a speech class that wearing hot pants while delivering a formal academic paper might not cut it–this happened at Purdue–protests about slut shaming or some such ensue, and groveling from administration and even the professor follows as the day the night. Same at corporations. At least the Soviet citizens had the excuse that they would be shot, and worse, if they didn’t confess at their show trials. Here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.we do it voluntarily. Sad.
The power to arrest and incarcerate someone, even if for a short duration, is one that has tremendous potential to wreck lives. It can cost people their livelihood, their reputation, leaves families scrambling to care for kids, and so on. Obviously it’s often necessary, but for police officers to even consider leaving that decision to a coin flip, or base it on their need for overtime, is a major abuse of power. If they cannot articulate a public safety rationale, or other legal justification, it should not happen. We are free people, for God’s sake.
This is a training issue, it is not a pivotal moment in the law enforcement universe. How much money had been invested in their training. A reprimand, a few days unpaid suspension, and if necessary some time spent with an FTO.
I had a different incident as an FTO. I spotted a vehicle in a park after the 10 PM vehicle curfew. I told my trainee to turn on the takedown lights. I recognized the driver as a supervisor, and he was a vindictive horse’s rear end. I told my trainee to stay in the car. This supervisor, and his girlfriend, not his wife by the way, listened to what I told them, that it was time to leave. He got snarky, and I just said you know the rules, and then walked away.
I knew he could hurt my probationary trainee, but he couldn’t hurt me. My trainee asked me about what I said, I told him don’t worry about it, let’s find something else. One of the joys of police work.
If people want policing without humanity, it will be available in “the near future”. Personally, I prefer my cops to be real humans with sense a humor and forgiveness.
If by “voluntarily” you mean at the risk of having your life ruined by becoming unemployable or hounded by the baying mobs on social media….
Good luck with recruiting, Roswell . . .
I prefer my cops to refrain from casually toying with people’s lives, but that’s just me. No one else is bothered by this?
I get that there is going to be some gallows humor on serious matters (we all do that), and that cops are humans and make mistakes, etc.. but Jack seems to be defending this behavior (the coin toss app), by mentioning that cops apparently do even worse things (arresting people in order to get more overtime, flirt with nurses), and that the real problem is that they face scrutiny in how they make the decision to arrest, that they might have to publicly justify it on some legal basis.
I don’t think he says they arrest people for overtime. But rather that when a situation presents itself where they must make a judgment call about arresting and whether they want to do it they factor things in like their own personal convenience into the calculation. So they aren’t creating excuses for overtime they are presented with the opportunity for it and they have to decide whether to take it or not.
I think the question isn’t how a cop makes a decision at one particular point, but if they have a pattern that might be questionable. Do you always let ladies off with a warning, but ticket guys? Do you always take the opportunity to go chat with the nurses? Do you never arrest anyone if it is near the end of your shift and you don’t have too? In one individual case it isn’t a sign of anything a repeated pattern could indicate issues either of the clarity of regulations or of the individual officers commitment to doing their job well.
You almost think that they deserved to be fired for being stupid. The next incidence of stupid could actually be dangerous.
These cops didn’t leave it to a coin flip. Indeed, they disregarded the result of the coin flip. As for when cops make an arrest, the desire for, or the wish to avoid, overtime is just one example of factors that can influence a cop’s decision. But the first thing a cop considers is whether the elements of a crime have been committed. The more serious the crime, the fewer extraneous factors considered in deciding whether or not to slap on the cuffs.
Its not voluntary. Good jobs are hard to come by and you have to feed your family. Hard to do that with no job, your career destroyed and no chance to be employed again. Every good villian knows that if you put a gun to a person’s head there is a good chance they will tell you to go screw yourself. You threaten their spouse’s and kids’ lives and they will cave every time. The Lefts SJWs are very good villains indeed.
This ridiculous. The cops did absolutely nothing wrong. All this did was encourage people to use this technique more in the future.
Fair point. Still, nothing brave about groveling to keep your position, merely human and understandable. And if those with power (CEOs, TV Editors, College presidents) stuck by principles they proclaim and refused to give in to the baying mobs, the mobs would lose their force. They did it once with lynch mobs, I think. Alan Dershowitz is an example of what I mean. Yes, he does have tenure and stature–but he has also paid a price and, hopefully, educated those willing to learn about civil liberty.
They disregarded it in favor of arresting her. Look, if they intended to arrest her all along, had good reasons to do so, and were just joking around, no big deal. But if they did truly have a cynical or cavalier attitude toward the decision to arrest or not arrest, that is an abuse of authority, and they should be held accountable.
As I mentioned before, though it should go without saying, it’s a big deal to get arrested, a serious deprivation of a free citizen’s liberty, time they can never get back, etc… It’s troubling to know that extra-legal factors, ones that have nothing to do with the conduct of the arrestee, play a role. I recognize it’s inevitable to some extent, and I know most cops are very professional and do things the right way, but I have no problem with the media, or defense counsel, or anyone else playing a watchdog role over those decisions. That helps preserve our liberty.
Just for the record she was doing 80+ MPH on a wet road that was posted with a 45 MPH speed limit. She could have been arrested on a reckless endangerment charge, a traffic crime because it involved a vehicle. Or she could have been issued a traffic violation for speeding. A very expensive traffic violation because normally the fine depends on how many MPH you are driving over the posted limit.
The coin flip app was not used in the drivers presence, the driver was unaware of it until the media reported the story. I’m not faulting the media for reporting the story, but I only found one article that reported how fast she was driving in a 45 zone.
The driver committed a crime, the officers didn’t.
Regardless of how a person feels about the apparently cavalier attitude of the officers, the fact remains that the driver got off scot free and the police were cashiered; that is not justice.
This bothers me a lot just by itself.
Who leaked it? Is such leaking a crime? Just how micro- can we afford to micro-manage our cops?
That is most peculiar. Apparently the driver that was pulled over didn’t hear the joke and only found out about it by “news reports.” It doesn’t strike me as the sort of thing the two cops involved were likely to share with anyone. Who else was there?
What seems likely to me is that it was someone who reviews footage – who probably shared it with someone else who then leaked it.
Both of those people need to be given the opportunity to seek employment elsewhere.
Seems to me you had two cops here who either didn’t remember they were on camera or remembered and assumed their supervisors would enjoy their joke with them. Not good. Sorry if I missed it, but is there any information on their length of service or record of previous discipline?