One of the worst situations can occur when one's social networks and distorted personalities influence local law enforcement and accountability through various interactions and behaviors. While these behaviors were somewhat grotesque there was little to no attempt to ensure overall accuracy of beliefs and actions. I am at a little loss of words and sort of uttered "Oh my." and "Can't be".
While this is speculative at the moment I do believe eventually I might be able to show there has been disparate treatment to many different people throughout the local justice system. The behaviors I have seen just didn't start overnight or in this particular situation. They were learned over time and through careful coordination in what appears an attempt to circumvent the intent of laws.
You may want to review the United States Conference of Mayors published in 2020 a discussion the work 'Transparency and Accountability to Reinforce Constitutional Policing' Its a pretty good article. You also find that there are others out there who believe we should have policing that is designed around certain principles, values and laws.
One of the things the report states is a hinderance is the process of launching an officer complaint. They say that departments try and make these policies difficult in a way that deters filing and doesn't accept even videos of incidents because they are anonymous. There may be chain of custody issues with being anonymous but they do help in understanding and creating more leads.
There have been concerns in many areas that because some communities don't feel protected that reporting crimes will have a retaliatory effect. I think people are afraid of some departments and that was intentionally created by some officers. The power over dynamic limits the ability to catch more crimes through lack of engagement (This I believe I have seen a few times. If you say something critical of someone's bad behavior some of these officers react and gang up on those trying to protect the public from misconduct. This may be a silencing tactic used in clan type enforcements. Alternatively, it could also just be bad practice. Or I guess alternatively there could be an alternative explanation.)
The other issue the report brings up is the purging of documents and issues when they relate to substantiated complaints. I think that is bad news if that happens. While 80% of officers are awesome and do good stuff there are some toxic souls out there that do bad stuff. A predator is a predator and sometimes they gravitate to professions of power. I think it would service this community and many other communities if such records are not destroyed but better utilized. They can be used to improve training and track back crimes if they have occurred. Our current system is a poor design (I think there is a way to work this so even unions might agree if crafted wisely. Maybe not.)
You see these departments wobble in their attempts to maintain the balance between their loyalties to our Constitutional values and their loyalties to their social networks. While they navigate clan or country issues they also create victims along the way through allowing some crimes and misapplication of law. Their perspective becomes jaded and in turn those who are committing crimes are allowed to continue to commit crimes.
When they talk about Justice I think they are confused on what that means. The version they use is an older one where some people in our society are devaluated and others are artificially inflated. The law should never work on the behalf of certain groups and even doubly more important when they shared ethnocentric perspectives harmful to others. The law is for everyone and it should not give a free hand to some engaging in behaviors and then not a free hand those who have an issue with it (See RF).
Because I believe some of these department heads (In one case I think they were involved in the promotion of disinformation.) are aware but are powerless to deal with this issue I think if they had a stronger complaint section. If you notice if you check out their pages there is no place to complain when officers engage in misconduct and that brings complaints right back to senior leadership that has little objectivity (Remember they protected some while crimes were committed and misused those laws to try and cleanse their community). Thus, we cannot say its a truly objective (I didn't see anywhere you could complain maybe you can find it.)
My recommendation is that to best uncover these group of rogue officers is to have more transparency of complaints. Let there be something on their webpage where they can submit a simple complaint and in turn that goes to an objective third party (That would have to be defined. Perhaps a citizens group with no active law enforcement parties involved. Of course department leadership should be aware as well but I feel that unless it is urgent it is important for someone outside the departments to review the complaints to make sure there are no concerns with retaliation and/or manipulation.). When issues and patterns are found they not only inform the department head in writing but also a state counterpart (We can't have this stuff just ignored. They are contributing factors in other victims and crimes.).
Complaints are important because they tell you a lot about how individual officers act and behave when they are not being watched. It also ensures greater transparency of these issues at the top of the department that must decide where their loyalties lay in terms of serving the public or to their fellow officers. A complaint threshold and/or gross violation issue would launch an investigation.
The other thing these departments could do is report the general aggregate findings on their web page. For example, the amount of accusations of lying by officers coded (use a coded system to protect identities), ethnic intimidation, civil rights, hate crimes, helpful, polite, took extra effort, quick to respond, theft, etc. We would have to look up some things that are reported publicly and their recommendations. Likewise, we also want good officers to be highlighted so we want to accept as many praise oriented comments/complaints in order to reward those officers over time as an aspect of performance and improve training to emulate prosocial behaviors. In this case, it looks like they could help themselves by being more transparent with complaints of poor behavior and then acting impartially on those complaints to rectify.
The goal is to make our departments and officers the best they can be. That is difficult if they work in toxic environments where certain rights are mocked and dehumanized. While I don't believe any department does this intentionally I do believe that toxic officers spread their false information and their leadership is relatively powerless to do much about it even though these behaviors are dangerous. Its an issue of integrity of stated goals and ensuring the shadow system isn't primary over the official system.
Maybe in the next article we can discuss where to get access to existing complaints and whether these departments are transparent or make these this information hard to obtain. We can then think of the process of asking for these documents (If its even possible to get them because I'm pretty sure many people would not want them released for a variety of reasons.)
Just so there is no confusion. I'm 100% in support of police and 110% in support of civil rights. Sometimes we have great police but the systems they work in don't always follow normal management protocol. For example, police complaint feedback is just as important as customer feedback. Providing a high quality service to the public is important and that requires consistently adjusting processes, capabilities, and systems to higher levels. Its the politics of it all that sort of mucks it up. We want to rid our city streets of crime and we want our departments to work on the behalf of the American people and not any particular race, or religion, or ideology. We have to create a better system. I say that as a person who really respects the profession of policing and has on many occasions helped them out (I know that they don't understand the depths of that and the depths of that effort. Now we must correct them). More than most people would have ever helped them out. I'm helping them out now again but in a way in which a friend helps a friend when they loose their sense of purpose. The next step is theirs.
In Memory of Bill and Karen.
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