What joins all these disparate stories is an underlying legal structure that allows police near total discretion to initiate violent interactions and interpret what is and isn’t criminal against them ex post facto. The American Constitution Society describes these as “cover arrests,” intended “to help justify or explain an officer’s use of force or other exercise of authority,” something the group argues has become dangerously widespread. These cover arrests are regularly upheld by courts by virtue of broadly vague and inconsistent laws governing police behavior. Washington D.C.’s law are characteristically unclear, with the misdemeanor class of assaulting a police officer defined as a anyone who “without justifiable and excusable cause, assaults, resists, opposes, impedes, intimidates, or interferes with a law enforcement officer on account of, or while that law enforcement officer is engaged in the performance of his or her official duties…” This description leaves almost an alarming variety of physical interaction open to being called as misdemeanor assault, and has been used to prosecute and convict a man for holding onto his steering wheel while a police officer tried to pull him out of his car to a woman who refused to take her hands out of her pockets. With laws so broad and trials often depending on competing testimony of officer and the accused, we have built a culture where a police officer interpret anything other than total compliance as criminal, justifying even further violence. Efforts to curb improper police behavior must always be deferred, dealt with ex post facto through a prejudicial bureaucracy that is barely functional. A study from the University of Chicago found that out of 10,149 formal complaints made against Chicago Police Department, only 19 resulted in suspensions of one week or more. In New York, complaints against police officers are handled by an independent organization, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, but NYPD largely ignores its findings, with one survey finding 64% of cases recommended for administrative trial resulted in no disciplinary action. Almost half of the most serious disciplinary recommendations were reduced to verbal admonishment and loss of vacation days. A 2010 survey of police misconduct found that officers are much less likely to be charged with a crime than civilians in contested cases.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 16:22:28 +0000
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