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Seattle Times reported last Tuesday that police officers are
becoming increasingly reluctant to confront criminals in that city's
black neighborhoods, for fear of becoming involved in controversial,
racially charged incidents. The story, by Times staff writers
Alex Tizon and Reid Forgrave, quotes several Seattle cops who admit
to holding back in their enforcement efforts rather than risk being
labeled as racial-profilers or worse. One officer, 17-year veteran
Eric Michl, put it this way: "Parking under a shady tree to work
on a crossword puzzle is a great alternative to being labeled a
racist and being dragged through an inquest, a review board, an
FBI and U.S. Attorney's investigation and a lawsuit."
Saturday's Cincinnati Enquirer reports a similar trend among
that city's police officers. In April, Cincinnati endured days of
rioting after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed
black man during a foot pursuit. The officer, Stephen Roach, was
indicted for the shooting and is awaiting trial, but there has been
another, more subtle impact on the rest of the city's cops: Arrests
have decreased by 35 percent. The Enquirer article makes
no mention of it, but experience tells me this decline in arrests
is mirrored in a similar rise in crime.
Keith Fangman, president of Cincinnati's Fraternal Order of Police,
issued this warning in the organization's newsletter: "If you want
to make 20 traffic stops a shift and chase every dope dealer you
see, you go right ahead. Just remember that if something goes wrong,
or you make the slightest mistake in that split second, it could
result in having your worst nightmare come true for you and your
family, and City Hall will sell you out."
And that, gentle readers, fairly well sums up the state of law enforcement
in United States of America at the dawn of the 21st century. Police
officers everywhere are coming to realize that if they leave their
shady spots and their crossword puzzles only for as long as it takes
to take a few crime reports every day, their pay will be exactly
the same as it would have been had they risked their hides by going
out and arresting the people committing the crimes. Lingering somewhere
in the recesses of the typical street cop's mind is the chilling
thought of being run through the wringer Officers Michl and Fangman
so aptly describe. Make a wrong move at work today and you might
have Jesse Jackson or — shudder! — Al Sharpton leading
a horde of no-justice-no-peace lunatics across your front lawn tomorrow.
Imagine opening your front door to get the paper some morning only
to be greeted by a pompadoured fat guy in a sweat suit carrying
on and leaving Krispy Kreme wrappers all over the yard. The very
thought of it is enough to put you off your feed.
In addition to the horrors cops everywhere are facing, we in the
LAPD have been burdened with an additional disincentive to proactive
police work: a disciplinary system gone mad. Officer Mitzi Grasso,
president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, writes on
the impact of the system in the June edition of The Thin Blue
Line, the Protective League's newspaper. She cites a case in
which two officers on patrol saw some suspicious activity in an
alley, then made a U-turn to investigate. The people in the alley
fled as the officers approached, but the officers were later summoned
to the station to be accused of making an illegal U-turn and driving
too fast in the alley. One officer was suspended for ten days —
at a loss of about $1600 in salary. His partner, an exemplary officer
and former Marine, refused to lie down and accept such punishment;
he resigned from the LAPD and accepted an offer from a suburban
police department. Ask yourself: How eager will that suspended officer
be the next time he sees something suspicious in an alley?
One hears these tales everywhere LAPD officers gather these days.
Approach any group of cops in the hallways of the downtown Criminal
Courts Building and they'll regale you for hours with similar stories.
And in any such gathering you're sure to find at least one cop who
has applied for a job with some other department. Even at full strength,
the LAPD has one of the lowest officers-per-capita ratios in the
country. But the department is currently at least 1,000 officers
below its budgeted strength, and every month we lose more officers
to resignations and retirements than we can hire to replace them.
The official line parroted by LAPD chief Bernard Parks and his sycophantic
command staff is that the robust economy has made private-sector
jobs more attractive than police work, but this canard ignores the
fact that the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, presumably operating
in the same economic environment as the LAPD, has had no difficulty
filling its vacancies. Indeed, there are reports that as many as
1,000 current LAPD officers are attempting to trade their blue uniforms
for the Sheriff's Department's green and tan.
I'm hoping to hold out for better times, but Dunphy may soon be
one of them.
(*Jack
Dunphy is the author's nom de cyber. The opinions expressed are
his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management
.)
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