Disagree, I think. I seem to recall that the NYPD is actually pretty good, so I'm inclined to follow its lead.

You think we shouldn't be firing people for blowing away unarmed civilians?

It just seems to be such a clear indication to me that the shooter is bad at his job in a very important way, and should go and do something else, that doesn't involve making hard decisions about when to shoot people.

2: absolutely. Occasionally, you actually should lock them up. And sometimes it's just a reasonable response to a really bad situation. But often these things are pretty strong evidence for incompetence. I think the reason they keep their jobs is that, unlike TV, for most cops it is extremely unusual to use their weapon. They don't train enough for this soft of thing, and they know it. That doesn't make it ok though.

3 -- that is "the reason shootings like this occur", not "the reason they keep their jobs", which has more to do with NYC politics.

Occasionally, you actually should lock them up.

Yeah, as in the Abner Louima sort of situation.

And sometimes it's just a reasonable response to a really bad situation.

Oh, sure, reasonable mistakes are possible. But pointing a gun at a carfull of drunks coming out of a strip clup at three in the morning for no good reason, and then blowing them away when they try to flee isn't a reasonable mistake -- that's a fuckup from start to finish.

4: yes, I wasn't clear about that was I. As for the job keeping; It's weakly analagous to a bridge collapsing and killing people, but saying that *most* of the bridges the engineer had designed were fine, so we shouldn't really worry about it too much.

The line I heard around the time of the Diallo shooting (if memory serves) was something like, If we fire the officers who shot Diallo, this will make other officers afraid of using their weapons, including in situations where they are legitimately in danger.

7: which is such bullshit.

Send them (the cops) out with only one bullet apiece. That way they can still do their jobs but they'll be much more careful about (a) only shooting actual bad guys, and (b) making sure each shot counts. No more 31 shots from a 16-round gun for you, Officer Rambo.

This is tricky, and I don't know anything about it. Are there patterns in wrongful-shooting cases the way there are patterns in medical malpractice (that is, a huge % of malpractice is committed by a small % of physicians)? If so, I'm all for a strict liability approach, where, hey, you got the wrong answer, so we're taking your gun away, and it doesn't matter how exulpatory the situation might look. I wouldn't be too surprised, though, if it turned out that *everyone* is bad at the job of making these decisions, and that many of the bad incidents are spread out almost randomly among cops unlucky enough to blunder into bad circumstances.

Random anecdote: a few weeks ago I was in an ER when the cops brought in an unstable man who had threatened them with two knives and a gun. He got tasered, and I kept thinking how he was lucky to avoid getting shot. The cops were sort of verbally razzing him but he was being treated really well, all things considered.

Disagree, I think. I seem to recall that the NYPD is actually pretty good, so I'm inclined to follow its lead.

Okay, scmt is insane. Good to know.

6, 8 -- Yeah. It's like saying "If we fire the engineer whose bridge collapsed, this will send a message to engineers that they should not design bridges."

10: I think the cops involved in the Diallo and Louima cases had prior records of abuse. Cannot back that up however.

It's at least very plausible to think that these cases are not like bridge-building in ways that matter to the argument.

Are there patterns in wrongful-shooting cases the way there are patterns in medical malpractice (that is, a huge % of malpractice is committed by a small % of physicians)?

Depends on the city, I think -- I remember a Malcolm Gladwell article touching on the Ramparts thing in LA, where exactly that pattern showed up (well, civilian complaints, not wrongful shootings). But SCMT, lunatic that he is, is right in that the NYPD isn't terrible as these things go and wrongful shootings are rare enough that I think it's very unlikely for the same officer to be involved in two of them.

The point of firing them isn't so much to prevent the same incompetent from shooting the next guy (although that too) but to encourage cops generally not to pull idiot moves like this.

I take your point Labs, but this seems like a situation where we should err on the side of strict standards rather than fairness to individual cops. What we want are cops who are very reluctant to fire their weapons, and part of how we get that is in having consequences for mistakenly doing so, even if the mistake is apparent only in retrospect.

(The deeper problem here may be that cops have internalized the belief that their lives are more valuable than others'. We citizens are allowed to think that, but they're not allowed to think that; just the opposite.)

14 gets it exactly right.

11: Ask your neighborhood ACLU guy. For bonus points, compare and contrast with LA or DC or (gawd help us all) New Orleans.

The growth of SWAT teams etc. is also pretty depressing, too, as the way they operate makes violence & mistakes more likely. I'll try and find an article I read claiming that the growth in that direction is pretty much completely driven by departments `keeping up with the joneses', and not by real or even percieved (outside the department) need.

"Mr. Bell drove the car half a block, turned a corner and struck a black unmarked police minivan bearing several plainclothes officers.

Mr. Bell's car then backed up onto a sidewalk, hit a storefront's rolled-down protective gate and nearly struck an undercover officer before shooting forward and slamming into the police van again, the police said."

If the acount is acurate, the victim wasn't unarmed. He was using his car as a weapon.

To expand on this -- the story here is of police not being careful. They acted in an unnecessarily aggressive and frightening fashion toward a bunch of people coming out of a bar in the middle of the night, and had no plan for what to do if their targets reacted badly other than to shoot them. That's not a snap misjudgement, that's a badly formed plan that was formed in a situation that wasn't an emergency until the police chose to make it one. There should be zero tolerance for that sort of thing.

If the acount is acurate, the victim wasn't unarmed. He was using his car as a weapon.

Cause and effect, irregular. Someone who didn't look like a cop pointed a gun at the car. The driver (predictably) panicked. It was his bad luck that the car he ran into was also full of cops. There's nothing to let us infer that he was trying to do harm.

14: sure, that's why I said `weakly'. But it isn't a completely bogus comparison because while both examples demonstrated incompetence, there is vast difference in both training and socialization of the people doing the work about the avoidance of such errors.

18: So if you only shoot up a bachelor party and kill the groom once in awhile, there need be no consequences?

They may be better than DC, LA and NO, but there's still plenty of room for improvement.

I think its important to remember that one of the main reasons that cops who shoot people for illegitimate reasons almost never go to jail or even lose their jobs is that the legal requirements for use of force are so minimal, and that the continuum of force model that US police agencies use gives the benefit of the doubt to the officer using violence in almost every situation. The policies, procedures and training regimes are almost always built around extraordinarily vague wording, which is used to justify almost any violation, no matter how egregious, when an inquest is conducted. All the police lawyers have to prove is that the officer had a "reasonable" "suspicion" that there was a "threat", and its all swept under the rug.

The other issue, as I see it, with the continuum of force model, is that while it tends to justify ever-increasing amounts of violence on the part of the police, there's no corrallary policy along the lines of "if an officer uses his or her nightstick illegitimately, he or she is more likely to use his or her pistol illegitimately." Here in the Twin Cities, we have one notorious "thumper", Lt. Mike Sauro, who's committed almost every conceivable offense, yet he continues to be employed, mostly because he's been able to appeal any discipline or firing to a special Veterans' Board which has ultimate jurisdiction over peace officers who are also military veterans. Every time Sauro has beaten or killed someone, he manages to slip out from under any consequences. In a more rational model, there'd be some kind of three-strikes-you're-out for brutal cops.

Oh well. Abuse of power comes as no surprise.

20: I linked to an older story. This is more recent; while the police are still saying that the car hit the police van and the undercover cop (who, again, does not appear to be injured), it looks as though the precipitating event was the policeman pointing a gun at them, and that the guys in the car were trying to get away.

(BTW, if you're going to comment again, could you pick a more specific pseud? Spell your middle name backwards. Spell someone else's middle name backwards. But it's hard to keep up a conversation with 'an irregular'.)

This detail seems noteworthy:

The white detective who squeezed off 31 of 50 shots at three unarmed men outside a Queens strip joint had a clean record, never fired his gun in the line of duty and was known as a good street cop.
His unblemished history left fellow officers puzzled yesterday over what led the 12-year veteran to get down on one knee and empty two clips on the darkened Jamaica street early Saturday morning.

Which detail? That he had a clean record, or that he reloaded?

27: Let's hope he resigns if not forced out. That's one thing you don't seem to hear much of, but I don't know if it's because it doesn't happen or because it isn't publicized.

IIRC, there are very clear patterns, most of which were well publicized after the Ramparts case, as LB mentioned. Training makes difference. Well trained cops are less likely to do this. A corollary: cops who have been put on the street in a hurry by a law and order politician who wanted to say "I've put 100,000 new cops on the street" are far more likely to commit abuses. This is exactly what happened in the Ramparts case.

Also, you need a recruiting mechanism that screens out sociopaths. LB said rather blithely in the initial post that cops are sociopaths. Well, some are. In general 1% of women and 3% of men are sociopaths or have some sort of failure of empathy disorder. They will actually cluster in professions that allow them to act sociopathically unless measures are taken to stop them. Really, having 3% of your cops be sociopaths is unacceptable. And it actually takes work to get the number of sociopathic cops down to the number in the general population.

Another account from the Daily News, this one is opinion:

The same facts and statements suggest the three young men in the car who repeatedly tried to crash past an unmarked police van did so in their own mistaken(ed: what the hell?) and panicked belief they were in mortal danger. One was climbing into the back of the car when he saw a tall figure in street attire approach in the early morning darkness.

"Yo, my man, come here, my man, let me holler at you," the figure was heard to call out.

The tall figure was holding something black by his side.

"He's got a gat! He's got a gat! Be out! Be out!" the young man climbing into the car shouted.

The figure was an undercover cop, but by one witness account neither he nor his comrades announced themselves as police officers until after Sean Bell tried in vain to drive away and six to 10 shots were fired.

"That's when somebody started shouting, 'Police! Police! Put your hands out! Put your hands out!'" recalls witness China Flores.

The shooting only intensified.

As the party was in their car, trying to leave, an undercover officer pulled a gun on them and told them to stop -- they tried to drive away, hitting an unmarked minivan full of police, and possibly the undercover officer (who does not appear to have been injured) and then the police started shooting.

This is the story now? When I read about this the day after, the story was a planclothes cop was following them, after one of the men in the car, one of the groom's friends, that is, had a verbal altercation with another party and mentioned going to get his gun. Then their car allegedly took off, rammed the van, backed up, and then rammed it again before all the officers opened fire.

Hmm. This, if true, will make me more sympathetic to the cops and an irregular's view in this case.

The undercover detective who fired first had been monitoring the group in the club. Once outside, the detective heard Mr. Guzman say "Yo, get my gun, get my gun," and head with the others to his car, according to police. The undercover officer followed the group on foot, then positioned himself in front of their car.

According to the person briefed on the accounts, the detective, his police badge around his neck, then pulled out his gun, identified himself as a police officer and ordered the occupants to show their hands. They did not comply, the person said, but instead gunned the car forward, hitting the undercover officer and, seconds later, an unmarked police minivan. The undercover officer fired the first of 11 shots, yelling, "He's got a gun! He's got a gun!"

20: From the story linked in 26:
But Saturday's shootings may have violated department rules, which largely prohibit officers from firing at vehicles. According to police guidelines, officers can fire only when they or another person is threatened by deadly physical force, but not if that physical force comes from a moving vehicle alone.

"The theory is that if the cops have time to set up a clean shot, they have time to get out of the way," said Eugene O'Donnell, professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "The cops shouldn't be firing unless they have a clean line of fire. If they have the time to establish that shot they probably have time to get out of the way."

Which sounds like a pretty sensible policy to me. Even if "the car is being used as a weapon" which is in no way clear, even if we are to believe the police account verbatim, then doesn't firing at a moving vehicle, possibly injuring or killing the driver, stand an awfully good chance of increasing the danger to police, suspects and bystanders by introducing an uncontrolled, probably speeding, vehicle into the mix?

I remember an FBI agent discussing just this kind of situation, and pointing out that there are almost no analogous problems in FBI-arrests, because when FBI policy says "don't just haul off and start blasting away at anything that moves" they actually MEAN it.

28: That the officer who fired most of the shots had never fired on duty before. If nothing else it suggests that zero tolerance wouldn't have helped this situation, especially if this guy fired first (but there's no indication that that was the case).

LB said rather blithely in the initial post that cops are sociopaths.

Did not, I said they aren't sociopaths.

When I read about this the day after, the story was a planclothes cop was following them, after one of the men in the car, one of the groom's friends, that is, had a verbal altercation with another party and mentioned going to get his gun. Then their car allegedly took off, rammed the van, backed up, and then rammed it again before all the officers opened fire.

Right. The thing is, of course, that this story makes no sense at all, given that the guys in the car were unarmed, and hadn't had any sort of altercation at all with anyone in the van. The current story makes a lot more sense, don't you think?

Are there patterns in wrongful-shooting cases

I've read that there are. Related anecdote: the guy who tasered the UCLA student had been fired from the Long Beach police force and twice suspended for other excessive force situations at UCLA. No way that guy should still be on the job.

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about or defending this particular case. The point isn't about fairness, really, although there's an argument there as well. It could be that making these shoot-or-not decisions is like being an airport baggage screener: it's psychologically impossible to do it well given the way the situations arise. (That would be suggested by a random distribution.) If so, then you're not going to get better policing from stricter standards.

There are also going to be revenge effects from an Oggedian standard, I suspect. (E.g., more refusals to go into dangerous areas.)

Again, these are just uninformed musings.

36: Sorry, that was a typo. I hope the context makes it clear that I meant to say aren't, because I was correcting you.

Once outside, the detective heard Mr. Guzman say "Yo, get my gun, get my gun," and head with the others to his car, according to police.

The thing is, (a) there's no good reason to think this was true. After all, he didn't have a gun, did he? And (b) even if the guys in the car had been armed, think about how the cops handled it -- can you think of a better way to start a shootout or a dangerous car chase? Arrest them when they're on foot -- when they're in a car, leaving, and nothing bad has happened seems like a stupid time to start pointing guns at them.

It could be that making these shoot-or-not decisions is like being an airport baggage screener: it's psychologically impossible to do it well given the way the situations arise. (That would be suggested by a random distribution.) If so, then you're not going to get better policing from stricter standards.

I would suggest that this is not the case, and that strong evidence that it is not the case comes from the well-known city-by-city differences in police personalities. The NYPD was historically known for being a reasonable and prudent police force, highly skilled at backing off and not exacerbating dangerous situations (if you look back to the late 60's, my understanding is that riots in NY were better and less violently contained than in other cities). I don't want to badmouth anyone else's city particularly, but my general impression is that, say, LA cops for example, have historically been very very scary tense people, not so good with the calming stuff down.

I've gotten the impression over the last decade or so that the NYPD is losing contact with that tradition, and I think raising standards like this is a way to get back there.

39: Oh, in that case I get you. Sure, when I said they aren't sociopaths I meant that the overwhelming majority of them aren't. When you get a monster like what was his name, Volpe? The guy who raped Louima with a plunger, and give him a uniform and a gun, they're terrifying.

(a) there's no good reason to think this was true. After all, he didn't have a gun, did he?

back in HS, i was involved in an altercation where both a guy of my party and the other party went to "get guns" that didn't exactly exist. it's scare-the-other-guy strategy.

And if it is true that the guy flashed a bade, yelled police, and then the suspects charged with their car - then it seems to me that they have good reason to think that the suspects *are* taking deliberate actions that could result in an officer dying.

apologies for my terrible use of pronouns.

Are you suggesting that they deserved to be shot as punishment, or that shooting them was necessary to prevent them from injuring someone? To be clear, I don't think the former is valid under our system of law, and I don't think there's any evidence that the latter was necessary.

this sounds like a situation where Chris Rock would come in with some "how not to get shot by the police" advice.

That the officer who fired most of the shots had never fired on duty before. If nothing else it suggests that zero tolerance wouldn't have helped this situation

What? If the officer had the expectation that he would lose his job, he might not have fired this time either.

As for Michael's cite, "Yo, get my gun, get my gun," --they were in a club, it's not unlikely that the officer misheard. In the event, there was no gun, was there? The (nonpolice) witness says the undercover policeman did not identify himself.

i really don't have much of a notion of "deserve", and I hadn't thought the idea of "punishment" was at issue here, and I can't answer the second question b/c I don't know enough about the situation. Could they officers have gotten out of the way or not? I don't know.

It's the same thing as supporting the Iraq War -- if we don't do this fucking stupid war now, that'll set a dangerous precedent of erring on the side of not going to war.

Perhaps the occasional killing of innocents isn't a bug, but a feature.

Yeah. The police won't shoot you if, when a man with a gun on a dark street outside a bar waves something shiny at you and yells that he's a cop, you have the sense and self-possession to freeze rather than flee. Because they can't be expected not to kill you if you try to get away from them.

Even if we accept that the guy "flashed a blade" or yelled "get my gun," there's no excuse for opening fire on a moving vehicle in a crowded area. "Get" my gun means that the guy does not have a gun at the moment. He may have it in the car, or he may be driving to get it. You do not shoot unless you see a fucking gun. And a knife is not a gun, nor is a knife flashed by someone who is in a moving vehicle an immediate threat to cops standing outside that vehicle.

if the officer had the expectation that he would lose his job, he might not have fired this time either

When your buddy starts firing, do you back him up or do you dither until you're absolutely sure of what's happening? Neither's a perfect choice, but I'd lean towards the former.

Could they officers have gotten out of the way or not? I don't know.

Visualize the situation, and try and figure out how it could be true. The cop wasn't hurt, and he was on a street with other cars and obstacles -- this wasn't a car tearing around an empty parking lot trying to run someone down. Again, these guys were leaving before the cop tried to arrest them -- the police aren't allowed to kill you just for fleeing.

You know, police officers who shoot someone could be fired (or sent to jail) in the case where it was unjustifiable, and re-assigned to copwork that doesn't involve the public if they show themselves to be accident-prone. I'd love to see the sociopaths fully punished; there must be middle ground between firing and returning-to-patrol for the cops who demonstrate that their training didn't take.

Is there a clear narrative yet of what actually happened?

Is there a clear narrative yet of what actually happened?

I expect there never will be.

What? If the officer had the expectation that he would lose his job, he might not have fired this time either.

I simply can't believe that this consideration would be a significant one. There are already plenty of reasons that society provides not to fire a gun at somebody frivolously, even reasons which apply to cops. "You might lose your job" has got to rank below many already-extant reasons.

I thought the motivation for the zero-tolerance rule was simply to rule out any possibility of error. "Even if we think you made an honest mistake in killing that unarmed suspect, it's a chance we're unwilling to take. It's a desk job for you from now on."

Also, I would love to see more of an ethic where cops feel like they have to protect every civilian in order. First bystanders, and where there aren't bystanders, the bad actor is the next civilian they have a responsibility toward.

I for some reason cannot access the NYT, so I'm at a disadvantage here. To be clear, right now I'm just suspending judgement. I'm unclear on 53 b/c I don't have an accurate picture of what happened. I do know that "flee" doesn't seem to be the right word. If they were just trying to "flee", why did they ram the van twice?

52: Well you certainly don't fire your weapon without a clear idea of who you are firing at, and why. Ever. And at no time do you fire your weapon unless you or someone else is under immediate threat. It isn't at all clear that this situation ever met those criteria.

`backing your buddy up' never consists of firing just because he is firing.

The van was blocking their car in.

That's when the undercover put his right leg up on the hood of the Altima and began screaming that he was a cop, the sources said. (ed: other witnesses dispute that he identified himself)
The cop was leaning over the hood of the car to try to see the hands of the people inside and make sure they didn't have any guns, they said. But Bell floored the gas pedal and headed for the cop(ed: the cop who had his foot on the car), the sources said, striking him and badly cutting his knee.
One of the Altima's passengers - who possibly had a gun - jumped out of the back of the car, the sources said.
Around the same time, an unmarked Toyota Camry driven by a plainclothes police lieutenant and another cop behind him pulled up, but overshot Bell's car. A police van with an officer and the narcotics detective then managed to block Bell's car in.

56: I expect there will be a clearer narrative once the other victims are recovered enough to talk. There may be arguments about the veracity of their story, but it will be more information.

If they were just trying to "flee", why did they ram the van twice?

Think about it. Nothing in the story indicates that they had had any hostile interaction with the van or anyone associated with the van -- they don't have any motivation for a random attack on the van. It seems pretty clear that what was going on was that they were trying to get past the van blocking them in -- fleeing the cop pointing the gun at them.

60 shouldn't be read that I think that's what happened, it was a general response to 52

In weighing stories like this, the assumption should be that the police used excessive brutality unless it is decisively proven otherwise.

(I cultivate views like these primarily to avoid having to serve on a jury.)

There are already plenty of reasons that society provides not to fire a gun at somebody frivolously, even reasons which apply to cops. "You might lose your job" has got to rank below many already-extant reasons.

The thing is that the decision to fire the gun isn't necessarily the frivolous decision. The decision to stop a car full of people who you do not know to have committed any crime but are leaving a bar in a bad neighborhood in the middle of the night by putting your foot on the hood and screaming at them (whether or not you scream, or they understand that you have screamed, that you're a cop) is a frivolous decision, and one that knowing you're risking your job over it might encourage you not to make.

Why were so many officers with vehicles waiting outside the strip club?

62. This isn't "fleeing", which is just running away. If you're blocked in, it's impossible to flee. You can fight your way out, but you can't "flee". So that's what they did, they tried to fight the officers and get out of there. Perhaps it was justified, but you're loading the argument when you phrase it as the officers shooting them as they fled.

Carful

If you're blocked in, it's impossible to flee. You can fight your way out, but you can't "flee".

This is what makes it such horribly incompetent policing. There wasn't an emergency until the police created one -- there were a car full of people trying to leave.

A reasonable thing to do, if the police thought there was a good reason to arrest these guys (possibly having overheard a reference to a gun) would have been for a number of cops (there seemed to be enough around) to arrest them before they got into the car. Once they were in the car, the police had created a situation where if the guys in the car reacted to a screaming cop pointing a gun at them with anything other than calm surrender, that someone was going to get hurt. A car is a weapon, and a scared person trying to get away in a car while other people try to stop him is going to hurt people.

They fired 50 rounds at a stationary car from very close range and hit it 21 times. Never mind whether it was justified or not, that's just incompetent. The other 29 rounds went... who knows where. (Well, the neighbours who were diving out of line of sight know where some of them went.)

These men need to be suspended until they can demonstrate better weapon handling skills, never mind the whole "murder" thing.

66: The decision to confront the men was made well enough in advance that backup arrived in time.

As far as I can tell, here's what happened. The men left the club, pursued by the undercover officer. They walked two blocks to the side street where their car was parked. After they got in the car, the undercover officer puts his foot on the hood and points a gun at them. An unmarked police backup car then speeds onto the side street, intending to block Bell's car but apparently passing it. Bell hits the gas and knocks over the undercover officer, but the minivan is already turning into the side street and he collides with it. Bell backs up, hitting a shop's gate. At this point the undercover officer thinks Bell is going to hit him again, shouts "He's got a gun" and starts shooting. Bell tries to get around the minivan but instead hits it again. The occupants of the minivan jump out and start shooting at Bell (one of them is the guy who shot 30+ times).

Exactly -- the way the cops handled it created the maximum possible potential for violence. The thing is that they didn't have any particularly strong reason for arresting these guys at all -- a policeman thought they heard one of them say something about a gun, that's it. If they couldn't set it up to arrest them safely, without this kind of a circus, the responsible thing would have been to let them go.

If it isn't already abundantly clear, this means that there were 2 cops behind Bell shooting in the direction of the other 3 cops. So the cops in the minivan probably correctly assessed that they were being shot at, they just didn't realize who was shooting at them.

As to what happened to the rest of the bullets:

In the ensuing barrage, one shot struck the window of a house, another a window at an AirTrain platform, injuring two Port Authority police officers with flying glass. It appeared that the Altima was struck by 21 shots, fewer than half of the number fired, the police said.

Bell took 3 bullets, Guzman took 11 and Trent Benefield took 3. It's unclear whether these are counted among the 21 that hit the car.

71 seems reasonable. I wonder why they did it? Why would cops be so gung-ho about snatching a guy with a gun? It seems so small-time. Is this a broken-windows mutation?

and neil, thanks for the reconstruction.

73: Don't know. My guess is that it was a combination of stupid and stubborn -- they missed the chance to make an arrest quietly before the guys got in the car, and then figured that civilians are responsible for obeying the police, so that if anything bad happened as a result of the sloppy arrest, it was the civilians' fault.

I haven't sorted out my feelings on this yet but it annoys me to think that this will surely be turned into a Ripped From The Headlines episode of Law and Order in two months' time.

Law and Order should go with a less sensational tagline. Vigorously Adapted From the Headlines.

The deeper problem here may be that cops have internalized the belief that their lives are more valuable than others'.

It's the idea that "force protection" is the highest goal, which is related to the increase in "professionalism" and the para-militarization of polices forces. They're no longer your neighbor who happens have the job of enforcing the laws, they're The Police.

Which is not to say that's entirely irrational in an age where the rowdy kids have AKs and Glocks handy. It used to take real effort to turn a Fanner 50 into a zip-gun.

The decision to stop a car full of people who you do not know to have committed any crime but are leaving a bar in a bad neighborhood in the middle of the night by putting your foot on the hood and screaming at them (whether or not you scream, or they understand that you have screamed, that you're a cop) is a frivolous decision, and one that knowing you're risking your job over it might encourage you not to make.

I think this gets at the nub. There are a series of police activities that make it more likely that police will end up shooting people. LB's example in the citation above seems obviously bad -- putting your foot on the hood of a car, screaming at them, not clearly identifying yourself as a police officer, and doing all of the above in the absence of evidence of criminal activity. Sure, that activity should be disciplined. And it should be disciplined regardless of whether or not it results in a fatal shooting. The difficulty is that some subset of activities which lead to an increased risk of a shooting that are *also* those that will lead to reduction of crime and the arrest of criminals. For example, the NYPD's notorious stop-and-frisk policy no doubt led to more situations in which police were brought into hostile contact with the citizenry. If this source can be credited, however, it is also the case that between 1 in 8 and 1 in 10 of those stops led to arrests. Even if we deny that the stop-and-frisk policy is an example, it seem likely that many policies likely to increase the risk of violent conflict also likely yield better law enforcement outcomes.

There are (at least) two questions here. One: where should the balance be set between better law enforcement and higher risk of violent police-civilian interaction? How you answer this question probably depends a lot on who you are, and how you perceive the relative risk of being a victim of crime and the victim of police-civilian violence. Two: when a police officer makes the wrong call (either going over the balance, or being unlucky after behavior that is, in fact, appropriate), how should he be punished? I understand there's a relationship between the two, but I am not wild about the prospect of the using the second issue as a tool to resolve the first. This just seems like making the cop on the street the fall guy for systems-level decisions. On the second topic, considered alone, Fontana's point here seems important here. Maybe most police shootings happen because there are some cops who are more likely to make bad decisions. Maybe most police shootings happened because all cops are likely to make some bad decisions because these decisions are hard, and everyone screws up sometime. If the latter is true, a high penalty simply creates loser-take all lottery of blame in which the cops unlucky enough to get in a bad situation lose their livelihood and everyone else pretends the problem is bad apples. If the latter is false, then firing police officers involved in civilian shootings makes lots of sense. As I understand the current system, there is an attempt to resolve bad cop vs. unlucky cop on a case-by-case basis through formal review.

[[as an aside, pace LB's 41 it does not seem to me that different police personalities by municipality provides strong evidence that blame for a wrongful shooting can be assigned to a 'bad cop' as opposed to 'bad luck.' Consider municipality X with passive policing, and low rates of police-civilian violence, and municipality Y with more aggressive policing and correspondingly higher levels of police-civilian violence. We would expect that city Y would have a different personality, and that a given cop in city Y is more likely to be involved in a wrongful shooting. We would have no evidence, however, that most of the wrongful shootings in city Y are done by bad cops (that is ones who are more likely to make bad decisions) or that they are done by good cops who make the average number of bad decisions but who are unlucky. Either could be the case.]]

Doesn't one of Gladwell's book of anecdotes have relevant material for this discussion?

79 is an example of what I was talking about in 7 -- it does not soundlike obviouss horseshit coming from baa; this may be because I am a poor reader of argument and too easily lulled into complacency by polished phrasings.

81 may be the greatest compliment I have ever received.

Agreed with Baa's (1), but not so sure about (2). After all, the reason cops carry guns and have the power of arrest is because the system invests them with that authority; therefore, the cop on the street *does* represent system-level decisions, like it or not. One of the things that always irks me about these cases is that when the system in the person of cop A fucks up, the consensus seems to be to treat cop A no only as an erring individual, rather than as a representative of the system, but actually to treat him better than an erring individual would be. If you or I shot up a car full of people because we thought one of them said something about a gun, we'd be in jail.

Hrm. If I've followed you, I think you're making the phrase 'systems level decisions' do more work than it can in excusing bad decisionmaking by police. That is, if what the police did to Bell this weekend was done by-the-book, precisely as they were trained, I would agree that the training is bad, and that the people responsible for the training should be fired rather than the individual cops, who under those circumstances would be scapegoats rather than incompetents. I don't think that this is the case (see minneapolitan's 34, quoting this "But Saturday's shootings may have violated department rules, which largely prohibit officers from firing at vehicles. According to police guidelines, officers can fire only when they or another person is threatened by deadly physical force, but not if that physical force comes from a moving vehicle alone."), but if it were, you'd have a point -- fix the policies, don't fire the cops.

But organizations have cultures, as well as specific policies, and my belief from reading this and similar stories over the last decade is that the NYPD has developed a culture which is overly tolerant of error that places civilians at risk. A policy decision not to tolerate such errors, and to fire officers who make severe errors of that type, is a systems level decision that should have the effect of changing that culture. (And the current policy of not firing such officers is a policy decision that supports it.)

80. yeah, i think the Tipping Point says that most police-brutality-type-things are caused by a small percentage of cops.

Generally, NYPD officers are restricted from consuming alcohol, but detectives working in undercover operations are allowed to consume up to two alcoholic drinks to preserve their cover.

how many joints/bong hits can they smoke?

(This is completely irrelevant, but people say 'gat' for 'gun' again now? What, they're all reading Hammett or something?)

Just to elaborate a bit in response to BPHD's 83, one thing I had in mind was the (not very good) analogy with medical malpractice. Briefly, as I understand MM, if you can show what you have done was "standard of care" you are usually off the hook. The logic: we can't expect the doctor to to the best thing in every given case, but we can expect the doctor to do what is the usual standard. Now let's imagine that the usual standard -- set by the AMA, or some panel of experts, or whomever -- is just really bad. Or let's say the AMA has decided the new standard of care for some procedure should be a method that produces a lot less morbidity, but incrementally greater mortality. It doesn't seem like the right response in either case is to ramp up penalties on a doctor who makes a fatal error. If we can show that the doctor was negligent (didn't do standard of care) or was incompetant (did standard of care, but was inexcusably clumsy in execution) those are reasons to think we should pull the doctor's license. But absent those things, it seems like an unfair response.

I neglected to mention in 86 that at least one of the undercover cops had been drinking.

And apparently NYPD policy also states that cops cannot fire on a moving vehicle unless someone in the vehicle is firing on them -- i.e. it doesn't matter whether they were "using the vehicle as a weapon."

I was wondering about 87 too, except with reference to "lines of blow".

I haven't read baa's comment, but I'm sure I agree with it.

LB, I'm pretty sure "gat" has been workable slang for "gun" since the 80's at least -- if indeed there was a period where it was not in use.

89: I think that would be a good argument if these cops had been acting by-the-book, whatever the relevant book is. My understanding (again, see minneapolitan's 34) is that they were not.

93: Oh. Well, I never claimed to be in touch with anything, particularly slang. (Buck was just on a grand jury -- did anyone else know that cocaine is now 'krill'? He apparently stopped the proceedings to ask 'You mean what whales eat?')

85: I doubt it. I think a lot of people with middle class upbringing really understimate how badly many police behave toward people who they perceive as incapable of effectively complaining. I'm perfectly willing to believe that most of the more egregious harm is done by a small number of people. On the other hand, I've witnessed enough casual brutality and worse in enough different cities that I find it difficult to believe it doesn't generalize. I am of course still cautious about generalizing it.

79: you have to be careful with the assumption that `more aggressive' results in `better law enforcement'. It isn't at all obvious that this is true.

84: Again working from limited experience, but I'd have to say that the culture problems are far harder to fix than policy problems -- and the many forces have deep culture problems.

Baa did nod to the possibility that the two things might not always be correlated, but you're right to point it out again. There's a dsquared post somewhere (actually, I think it was on that poor Brazilian guy the London police shot) pointing out that while there's a tendency to assume that whenever you want to improve some quality X in a situation, that you're going to have to make tradeoffs, but that that isn't necessarily the case. If the system you're working with isn't on the bleeding edge of efficiency, then it may be perfectly possible to just improve it, without having to give anything else up.

93: I'm just about certain I've heard "gat" used to mean gun in old Westerns.

I know it's old slang, I just hadn't realized it was current again. It sounds to me like something you'd fire before hopping onto the running board of your roadster.

100(!): I'm pretty sure I have heard it in hip-hop lyrics going back a few decades. But hip-hop is not really my thing so I couldn't give you examples.

A-and, I don't think of old Westerns when I hear it -- I always think Chicago gangster movies.

First Google hit for "my gat" is a hip-hop site.

99: this is deeply true of optimization in general, but seems counterintuitive to many (most?) people. As is the tendency to identify any one feature and trade-off as an independent axis that can be adjusted without concern about all the other variables. Usually things are correllated.

More examples.

89: Cautious agreement--LB's 84 makes sense to me. Yes, if the standard of the department is (hyperbole alert) to shoot first and ask questions later, and the cops are following that standard, then it isn't the cops who are the problem: it's the department/administrators/training. The people who made those decisions should be fired.

That said, if you have a situation where the "standard of care" is really bad, it's probable that *all* your cops, or at least most of them, need to be taken off active duty for retraining. Moreover, surely police are, or should be, as responsible as soldiers are for upholding some kind of professional standards: saying "my boss told me to shoot babies" isn't really an excuse anywhere, is it?

I believe that 'gat' (short for "gatling") moved back into contemporary street argot from Iceberg Slim's "Pimp, The Story of My Life". This book was, as you may know, very influential on the LA gangster rap scene, particularly via Ice T, who adopted his nom de guerre as an homage to Iceberg Slim.

I'm also extremely dubious about 79. "Aggressive policing" i.e. jacking up any young person of color who's in the wrong place at the wrong time is the sort of policing that's practiced in my neighborhood. It has absolutely no effect on serious crime, from what I can tell, since there is still plenty of curbside drug dealing, prostitution, gambling, domestic violence, muggings, inter- and intra-gang violence, etc. The one effect it almost always has is that it makes anyone who "fits the description" exceedingly reticent about calling the police, even in those very rare situations where they might be able to ameliorate a bad situation.

With regard to the stop-and-frisk issue, how many of those arrests were for serious crimes? I don't have the statistics, but upon stopping and frisking someone on the streets of NYC, what are the possible probable causes for making an arrest? I doubt many of those arrested were carrying stolen bearer bonds, or evidence of a terrorist plot. More than likely, the vast majority were arrested or cited for fairly minor crimes -- a concealed knife at the worst, more probably a marijuana pipe or a small amount of drugs.

With the Bell murder, I think we see another very predictable effect of this sort of policing. The officers involved felt that they were justified in unloading fifty rounds in the vague direction of a moving vehicle because they view groups of young black men as their primary targets, i.e. "they must be guilty of something". The young black men, growing up in a context in which the brandishing of a weapon (whether by police or civillian) is a strong indication that a young black man is about to get shot, panicked and tried to extricate themselves from the situation as quickly as possible.

The cause and effect relationship that I see operating here is outside of my value system. When we make the police unaccountable, except in cases where they have strayed so far beyond the bounds of decent behavior that their transgressions are impossible to ignore (e.g. the Louima scandal), then we create a situation where illegitimate use of force is not an aberration, but the norm.

108: I've certainly seen enough illegitimate and even illegal use of force to be worrisome.

The militarization of policing is an independent force. Small-town PDs feel that they've arrived once they have a SWAT team. There was a hostage incident (man-wife) here in Wobegon a couple years ago, and they ended up with ~10-20 cops from 15 miles around, and the whole block cordoned off.

Nothing ever happens here. The police are bored to death. I went into a nearby liquor store awhile back, and the owner had stepped out out leaving the cash register and store unwatched. It was 5-10 minutes before he came back. Where else are you going to see that?

Oddly, we also have a sarin terroist here in town, but he's done his time and paid his debt to society.

It may come as no surprise that i have several friends in command positions at our local PD, fairly good sized, whith a swat and even a helicopter. After Rodney King, the Captain told me that many cops had been in high speed pursuits, and your adrenaline pumps big time. So he understood the feelings of the officers involved, but he clearly stated that there was no excuse for what they did. I for one would not like to be a cop, especially in those adrenaline filled situations, where you must act perfectly or someone will get hurt, or worse, killed. But I also think we have a big problem giving a gun and a badge to someone who really, really wants a gun and a badge. LAPD is famous forbeing understaffed, and therefore more violent.

110: TLL, I agree ... quite beyond the problems of aculturation, there is a problem of economics. Police work in general doesn't pay that well, doesn't train that well (these are probably related) and in some areas is chronically understaffed. In that situation I'm sure it's hard to turn people away, even if you should.

111: Yes, and it's a disturbing trend. Once you have such a force, you tend to use it, and using it can often make things worse.

I haven't (yet) read all of the comments.

ogged in 16:

(The deeper problem here may be that cops have internalized the belief that their lives are more valuable than others'. We citizens are allowed to think that, but they're not allowed to think that; just the opposite.)

I've never understood why we citizens were supposed to think that. One hears about notorious cop-killers on the 11 o'clock evening news. It seems to me that the lives of cops ought to be considered less valuable--if anything. I don't really think that's true as a moral matter, but I do as a legal matter.

We pay police money to be in dangerous situations. They take that on willingly; you shouldn't get extra time for killing a cop as opposed to a civilian. My views may be colored by the fact that usually a cop killing occurs in teh context of some other felony which bumps it up to first-degree murder right away. (Of course police are goign to be around during a violent felony or a bank robbery that goes bad.)

there's a tendency to assume that whenever you want to improve some quality X in a situation, that you're going to have to make tradeoffs, but that that isn't necessarily the case

I agree with this. I don't think the proper response to the police shooting an innocent man is to say "that's how the cookie crumbles if you want to fight crime." Rather, it's to figure out how to run a police department that can fight crime and not shoot innocent people. Indeed, if I recall the history of the NYPD in the late 90s, arrests rose without a concomitant rise in police shootings.

What I think isn't clear is what is the best way to punish police for wrongful shooting. Sacking cops who screw up certainly sends a message. Just as would stripping the license from surgeons when their patients die on the table. We don't do that in medicine because we understand that surgery is the type of thing where a screw up can kill a patient, and that is in some way in the nature of the job even if we think that aspect can and should be minimized. We only pull a surgeon's license when he is incompetent or negligent. And that determination requires due process of some kind. As I understand it, that's the way the police work now. I don't really know if the standard for this determination are stacked in favor of the police, although it wouldn't surprise me.

Right, but death is a potential complication from any surgery, and the patient has to sign consent forms. Being shot is not a potential complication of going out to a night club, or walking home in the wee hours. It's a remarkably poor analogy.

And I'm not advocating a total abandonment of any sort of due process review -- there are forgivable errors, even forgivable errors that result in the deaths of innocents. (A guy from my high school was nearly killed by a cop. He had been playing Assassin with one of those little plastic pellet guns, which he'd painted black to look scarier because he was a moron, and a cop stopped him and asked to see the gun. As he was showing it to the cop, and explaining that it was harmless, the cop's partner came around the corner and saw a big bearded guy pointing a real-looking gun at his partner, and did the full-metal "FREEZE! DROP YOUR WEAPON!" routine. If the guy I knew had gotten shot, it would have been a tragedy, but not really the cop's fault.)

But I don't hear firing discussed as a response to even culpable fuckups, which this looks like to me. The Diallo cops had no good reason for having their guns out at all; I'll buy that they made an 'innocent' mistake, in that they didn't mean to kill an unarmed man, but it was an incompetent mistake. And they still have jobs (or at least weren't fired for killing Diallo). This looks like the same level of error. That sort of incompetence should have penalties.

I also have a story involving cops and those pellet guns.

If certain police officers have shown themselves to be incompetent at jobs involving guns, would you be okay with the department's moving them to pushing around paper in an office? I'm talking about stupid mistakes, not criminally negligent ones.

I guess my thinking is, why should they? What's the point of providing a haven where people who have demonstrated that they can't reliably do their jobs competently get the same job-title and pay without having to do the job?

If you're talking about someone six months from retirement, I could see it, but in general it doesn't seem justified.

119 The point is such a policy is more likely to be enforced thus getting dangerous officers off the streets.

Seriously? The idea of firing someone for incompetence is fundamentally too heartbreaking for a big strong manly organization like the NYPD to deal with? If there really are actual barriers to firing incompetents (this is clearly something that would have to be negotiated with the union, etc.) getting them off the streets is better than nothing.

But it's not as desirable. Half of the reason for firing cops in this position is to make sure that those particular idiots won't hurt anyone else, but the other half is pour les encouragement des autres; I want police to think of making bonehead moves that endanger people as something that will mess up their own lives, rather than a route to a boring but cushy job.

w-lfs-n seems to be out, so I'll do it:

"pour encourager les autres"

I do have to say that I was somewhat encouraged to hear that there are two investigations into the Queens shootings: an administrative one conducted by the NYPD and a criminal one conducted by the DA's office.

I agree with the various comments pointing to the paramilitarization of police forces and the emphasis on force protection as major contributors to this sort of thing. And with LB, as (almost) always. One possibly silly thought about changing organizational cultures: how about giving medals to officers who defuse potentially lethal situations without shooting? When an organization has a systemic case of testosterone poisoning, how do you go about convincing people to take pride in not shooting some stupid civilian/potential perp/random dark person even when they could legally get away with doing so?

122: That will entirely teach me to try to remember anything in a language I don't speak at all.

Alternatively, it could be "pour l'encouragement des autres." I've forgotten which the exact quote was.

The second is closer to what I remember, but of course I don't have any idea.

On checking, Google says the first was right.

The most dangerous jobs are still mining, logging, farming, and maybe fishing, with taxi-driving and convenience-store clerking coming right behind. (Correct me if I'm wrong). Policemen and firefighters have dangerous jobs, but not the most dangerous jobs, but they have political leverage, and policemen have guns in their hands.

127: maybe the UK is onto something.

pour encourager les autres may not be the worst way to run a Navy, but it's a lot closer to what the police did to the people in the car than anything that's either a) a good way to run what is supposed to be a liberal institution, or b) likely to fly in the face of the very politically powerful policemen's organizations.

I think they're no longer doing the unarmed police thing, if that's what you mean. Remember that poor Brazilian guy?

121 Come on, it is practically impossible to dismiss any New York civil servant for incompetence. Look at teachers, the best that can be done is to assign them to the rubber room. Why should cops be any different?

129: You really think there's something alien to the goals of a liberal institution in firing people when they screw up their jobs badly enough to kill someone? If not for that, when can you fire someone?

It is possible that it might be a problem getting this sort of policy in the union contract, but you never know until you try.

130: I thought it was still split. It was mostly facaetious.

I know that most (all?) forces have an immediate inquiry anytime a weapon is fired. What about a lesser mandatory justification any time it's drawn? I just thought of that so it's probably stupid but don't immediately see a problem with it.

131: Right. Bad management is an unchangeable fact of nature. Or at least it is inevitably the fault of the closest union. It is not impossible to design a dismissal-for-cause procedure that both protects the rights of the accused and allows for incompetents to be fired; where this doesn't happen, the problem is the people running the system.

I think the Brazilian guy was the victim of an "elite armed squad" - the British police are by and large unarmed. Of course they have a much different approach to policing in general, some parts of which seem unlikely to fly over here.

A plan to test a system using microphones to detect gunshots and point security cameras at the location from which they came so that people at a police station could see the shooter start running away and have a higher chance of catching them got shot down because the local supervisor was afraid that it would be used to catch people breaking into cars and thereby unjustly punish those who commit essentially victimless crimes. Or so I recall.

131: Ok, if that is a strictly practical barrier to it, what about a strictly practical solution: Derate them to another (related) civil service job, lower pay scale and no possibility of reinstatement. Meter maids or something, if need be.

follow on to 133

I was joking not because the UK model of unarmed beat police plus various tactical groups is a bad one, but because I can't see any practical way of converting to a system like that here.

Oh, pour encourager les autres was said (by Voltaire) in reference to Admiral John Byng who was given a difficult task and probably not enough to do it with, failed in said task, and then was executed for "failing to do his utmost". He's generally considered to have been used as a scapegoat by Admiralty, with a bit of consideration that while maybe he shouldn't have been executed, it motivated the rest of the Navy, so it might have been worth it.

It's that last part that I think is illiberal, and along the lines of shooting someone who doesn't pull over, because while they may not deserve it, it's much better for society for people to pull over when police officers ask them to rather than think they can run.

134 Actually it would appear to a problem with democracy which has an obvious tendency to favor special interests over the general good. The people running the police department (or the school system) do not have the power to rewrite civil service laws protecting workers even if they wanted to.

138: See 124 -- I remembered neither the quote, accurately, nor the context. The point here would be not to fire people for failing to do the impossible, or for excusable screwups like shooting an idiot kid who's painted his toy gun black and is pointing it at your partner, but to fire them for unreasonable or culpable incompetence as means of communicating that such incompetence will not be tolerated.

139: Right. You want to quote me the section that forbids firing for incompetence?

127.--I recently heard on the radio that more garbage collectors die on the job in a year than either firefighters or police officers. Hit by cars, mostly.

Why should cops be any different?

Because when cops fuck up, people die?

Anyway, teachers do lose their jobs whenever there's a public relations brouhaha.

138: It's not as if those are the only two options (shooting them or they get away), nor that `pulling them over' is the same as ambiguous actions from an undercover cop.

Even in your limited scenario, society would be perfectly well served by: you can try and run off but you're unlikely to get very far.

143: In the case of perceived impropriety, even without any real evidence at times.

last two were me.

144: I think you're misreading 138. Jake wasn't actually advocating shooting people who don't pull over.

147: ah, you're correct. sorry Jake.

Exactly. I'm not advocating that at all - it was an effective way to run the Royal Navy, but is a shitty way to run society at large. I think that it's useful for there to be reasonable disciplinary actions, up to and including being fired / sent to prison, for screwing up.

But the number of organizations that are actually run this way is very small. It's very hard to get fired from an engineering job for doing nothing, and we don't even have union representation. I think that expecting this from the police is maybe a bit much.

(And I don't think that LizardBreath was suggesting arbitrarily firing police officers who make possibly forgiveable mistakes, not least because she explicitly said so. But it was one of those cases where the mostly obscure analogy chosen is actually almost exactly the opposite of what was desired, which I have an annoying inability to let go. I apologize, LB.)

Dude, quoting something inaccurately, in a language I don't speak, with a context I can't remember, is the height of dimwitted pretentiousness. I got off easy.

(In other words, no hard feelings.)

141 143 145 In theory teachers can be fired for "just cause". In practice it is almost impossible even for acts worse than simple incompetence. See this for example.

Again, I think there are two points here being confused. One, should it be possible to fire police for incompetence/nelgigence. All say (I hope!) yes. Two, is being involved in a wrongful shooting itself evidence of incompetence/negligence. This point is what is brought into question by FL's argument about randomness. It's not obvious that only bad cops make bad decisions. In the original post LB notes that people who make honest mistakes should be fired if they are terrible at their jobs. True. But making an honest mistake with really bad consequences isn't evidence that you are terrible at your job. This is all the more true if your job is one where honest mistakes often lead to really bad conseqeunces.

The missing step in the argument is most police shootings are done by bad cops (that is, ones who often make mistakes, or who were acting recklessly) not by cops who make the average number of mistakes but get unlucky. For all I know, this may be true.

Of course, the *reason* cops are rarely fired for incompetence (or non-performance) is due both to ideology but also, as James Shearer notes, to a strong bargaining position/civil service protections.

And my point, which I think you may have missed, is that in the discussion of whether a shooter is a bad cop or an unlucky cop tends to focus on whether the cop is a criminal or made an honest mistake. And I'd like to see that there's room for an awful lot of 'honest mistakes' from people who are bad cops -- not evil cops, but bad at their jobs -- and that category of mistakes shouldn't be winked at because they aren't malicious.

[Not read the whole thread so this may be pre-Weiner-pwned ...]

There's also the wider issue of police training and policy. Cops can be 'good' cops in the sense of acting as they were trained to act but be following a set of policies that are, on balance, bad. It's certainly my impression that, for example, they are prepared to tolerate quite a high risk of civilian and/or perpetrator deaths in return for a reduced risk of police deaths.

The UK is also pretty bad in this respect -- there have been a couple of recent cases where, imho, the police involved should have been on murder or manslaugher charges.

yeah, I agree that malice isn't the only firing offense.

Right, I don't think we disagree all that much -- we've just been focussing on different aspects of the problem.

So we all agree that the problem is unions? Comity!

Sexual unions.

157: Wouldn't a CL ad looking for people to beat you be a better way of getting the same results, ogged?

Why would I have a stranger beat on me when my blog buddies are willing?

The problem is that women represented by unions aren't thin enough to be pretty.

Interesting blog, certainly more dignified than most on the subject here in NYC.