...the need for a hard look at the cultures within police departments.
June 18, 2016 5:19 PM   Subscribe

Badge of Dishonor: Top Oakland Police Department Officials Looked Away as East Bay Cops Sexually Exploited and Trafficked a Teenager [East Bay Express] According to a stunning set of allegations, a teenage human trafficking victim in the Bay Area was coerced into sex by at least 22 officers over a six month period.
“The scandal is unprecedented: According to multiple sources close to the department and the city of Oakland, and documents obtained by the Express, at least fourteen Oakland police officers, three Richmond police, four Alameda County sheriff's deputies, and a federal officer took advantage of the teenager. (The Express is not publishing her real name because she was a minor when her abuse began.) Three Oakland police officers committed statutory rape of Guap when she was under-age. By the state's legal definition, they engaged in human trafficking. The victim says every law-enforcement agent who had sex with her knew she was a sex worker.”
posted by Fizz (109 comments total) 37 users marked this as a favorite
 
interview with journalists
posted by kliuless at 5:27 PM on June 18, 2016


This series of tweets has been a popular summary of the disaster that is Oakland police leadership. Part of the context here (which the article touches on) is the Oakland police have been under federal oversight for nine years now.
posted by Nelson at 5:29 PM on June 18, 2016 [19 favorites]


Related: Everything You Need To Know About Oakland's Sex Crime Scandal and Firing of Three Police Chiefs in a Week: A complete rundown of all the Express' reports and investigations. [East Bay Express]
posted by Fizz at 5:32 PM on June 18, 2016 [4 favorites]


I hate hate hate having everything I've thought about the OPD confirmed as true.

I suspect before this is all over we'll find out so much worse stuff than the terrible stuff we already know n
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 5:35 PM on June 18, 2016 [12 favorites]


Note that the Oakland PD has had three chiefs resign in 8 days because of scandal. And not the same scandal!
posted by Justinian at 5:51 PM on June 18, 2016 [49 favorites]


I'd like to see less resigning and more firing, followed by prosecution.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:53 PM on June 18, 2016 [85 favorites]


In 1992, Rapper Paris had a song against police where he said a Nina G was raped twice by an Oakland PD officer with the last name Riley. I'm sure Paris is going to catch wind of this story soon, and I would hope somehow they can investigate that too, since it has always seemed much too specific to just be random lyrics. What's the statue of limitations on rape in California?
posted by cashman at 5:57 PM on June 18, 2016 [7 favorites]


i mean i'd like to see their heads on spikes outside city hall but i guess firings and fair trials are ok too.
posted by poffin boffin at 5:58 PM on June 18, 2016 [47 favorites]


What more perfect storm of perverse incentivization is there than the police - prosecutor axis? Each and every person among these groups "have each others' backs" way too much, and there's no firm and established adversarial group other than high-up outsiders that number way too few to effectively counter the corruption (FBI) or impotent potemkin departments (Internal Affairs).
posted by chimaera at 6:00 PM on June 18, 2016 [16 favorites]


Is there something in the water down in Alameda County that turns LEOs down there into the biggest pieces of shit in the universe?
posted by Talez at 6:01 PM on June 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Guess what her mother's job is . . .




Police dispatcher for the Oakland department.
posted by jamjam at 6:06 PM on June 18, 2016 [6 favorites]


Guap, now eighteen years old, said she sometimes slept with cops as a form of protection from arrest or prosecution.

So what, besides the badges, separates the police from the pimps in Oakland?
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:23 PM on June 18, 2016 [11 favorites]


So what, besides the badges, separates the police from the pimps in Oakland?

Pimps are black and stimulate the local economy. Police are white and spend their money in Concord.
posted by Talez at 6:29 PM on June 18, 2016 [65 favorites]


Talez: "Pimps are black and stimulate the local economy. Police are white and spend their money in Concord."

Are Oakland police allowed to live outside of the city?
posted by octothorpe at 6:39 PM on June 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


octothorpe: Yes, to my knowledge, at least in the 1990s. Knew the children of several OPD folks in Walnut Creek, Rockridge, and Concord back then. Higher ranks live in Lamorinda, beat cops in Hayward and Concord. Part of the reason why Contra Costa is (comparatively) more conservative than the East Bay.
Alternatively, they're in Fremont, or Union City.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 6:42 PM on June 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


Somehow shocking and not at all surprising at the same time. ACAB.
posted by rodlymight at 6:46 PM on June 18, 2016 [6 favorites]


Are Oakland police allowed to live outside of the city?

90% of them do.
posted by Talez at 6:49 PM on June 18, 2016 [6 favorites]


Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ.
It's almost unreal but it's not.
I think I need to go vomit, this is truly disgusting.
But not surprising. Which is maybe the most sickening feeling.
posted by Neronomius at 6:49 PM on June 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Pimps are black . . . I think you had good intentions with that sentence, but still.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 6:50 PM on June 18, 2016 [15 favorites]


Are Oakland police allowed to live outside of the city?

Typically when they try do this what happens is the police move into a single neighborhood on a distant edge of the city and it becomes an enclave.
posted by srboisvert at 6:51 PM on June 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


It's strange, there was a feature story about the OPD on the PBS News Hour the other night… but it was about a Stanford study statistically demonstrating racial bias in OPD. They mentioned the sexual assault scandal in passing like, "oh, this police chief we're talking to recently resigned over an unrelated sex scandal" and then nothing more about it was said! Like, holy shit, I know it's nice to have serious, hard evidence of the racial bias anyone who's been paying attention already knew about, but that's really burying the lede!
posted by indubitable at 6:54 PM on June 18, 2016 [9 favorites]


surely this
posted by entropicamericana at 7:00 PM on June 18, 2016 [10 favorites]


Typically when they try do this what happens is the police move into a single neighborhood on a distant edge of the city and it becomes an enclave.

They don't even need to require officers to come from the city for them to form enclaves. All of the officers that do actually live in Oakland live in the hills. I would be honest to god surprised if a single officer came from downtown Oakland. I'll eat my shoe if one lives in Cypress Village.
posted by Talez at 7:04 PM on June 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


It's not clear from the story whether the victim's mother really is a dispatcher for the PD; the Express article only says that she told one of the predator cops this, and the Guardian only cites to the Express. Whoever had responsibility for the victim's care sure did a shit-tastic job of parenting, though. Nothing can excuse what the cops did, but who was looking out for this poor girl?
posted by praemunire at 7:07 PM on June 18, 2016 [3 favorites]


Are Oakland police allowed to live outside of the city?
From talking to an Oakland city staffer, my understanding is that credit check requirements for applicants to the police department mostly kept actual local residents off the force. They told me that many OPD officers were from the other side of the hills, and viewed their work as essentially adversarial. I believe that CFPB has made credit checks illegal for work now, so maybe this will change?

Not soon enough, though.

Maybe this is how Campaign Zero finally comes to Oakland.
posted by migurski at 7:13 PM on June 18, 2016 [7 favorites]


I would be honest to god surprised if a single officer came from downtown Oakland.
For what it’s worth, one does live across the street from us in North Oakland. They’re new to the job, so perhaps not for long.
posted by migurski at 7:15 PM on June 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


Are Oakland police allowed to live outside of the city?

According to an article linked from the Wikipedia page "Crime in Oakland, California", in 2013 8.3% of Oakland's sworn officers lived in the city.

I don't know much about the situation in Oakland, but I have an acquaintance who has a fairly senior (non-political) position with the city of Oakland. Obviously he may be biased, but in his opinion efforts to address the problems with the OPD are greatly complicated by the distrust of the Oakland community by the OPD, which he feels is driven by four items:
  1. The OPD has less than half the number of police officers per 10,000 residents relative to comparable cities (making the OPD feel like they are overworked and under-appreciated),
  2. The vast majority of OPD officers don't live in Oakland,
  3. Political partisanship/distrust stemming from the fact that the OPD rank-and-file as well as senior officers are much more likely to be conservative/Republican compared to the city leadership (Oakland is liberal city dominated by the Democratic party),
  4. The OPD is much whiter than the community they police.
posted by RichardP at 8:04 PM on June 18, 2016 [12 favorites]


I'm not even surprised. I don't even know where to start. Will we ever fix our police? I think the emotion I am feeling is despair.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 8:15 PM on June 18, 2016 [6 favorites]


It's worth noting that the city council of Oakland is not exactly awesome, nor have some of the mayors been good. It's really embarrassing for one of the most important cities of California.
posted by Nelson at 8:23 PM on June 18, 2016 [8 favorites]


From personal knowledge, they live at least as far away as Tracy. 50 miles away on the other side of the Altamont Pass. It is not an uncommon thing for cops to actively avoid the city they work in. Not defecating where one eats.

I believe Guap's step-father is also an OPD dispatcher.

The city has been working very hard to get up to full staffing for the PD. They were within one or two Academy classes of getting there. This is unlikely to help.
posted by ericales at 8:41 PM on June 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Gotta say, as fucked up as it is, it's really validating to see the mayor out there as full of rage as the rest of us are. This is unacceptable. She's not sugar-coating it to play nice with the police union, at least not right now.

Which, by the way, is exactly what Quan did almost as soon as she got into office. Quan's attitude w/rt OPD took a 180 as soon as she was sworn in, which is how we ended up with so much awfulness during Occupy.
posted by suelac at 9:03 PM on June 18, 2016 [10 favorites]


It's been hilarious reading the police apologists try to rationalize this one. Mostly amounts to "what, do you expect cops to be angels?"

This for a group of cops who thought it was OK to pass around an underage girl with 30 of their buddies. You would think cops, who have every opportunity to see how brutal sex work is would be the least likely to have sex with prostitutes. I guess that assumes they all have some measure of human empathy, rather than seeing everyone as a resource to be exploited.

Also ignored during the sex scandal is the fact that the officer who killed himself most likely murdered his wife a year before (he left her alone and she grabbed his revolver and shot herself in the head after a fight, sure, sounds plausible). I wonder how many cops were involved in covering that up.
posted by benzenedream at 9:25 PM on June 18, 2016 [26 favorites]


You would think cops, who have every opportunity to see how brutal sex work is would be the least likely to have sex with prostitutes.

I haven't done sex work, but I have a friend who was a prostitute in NYC for about 10 years, and I follow a number of sex workers on social media because I'm interested in their perspectives and experiences. Police officers using the threat of arrest to coerce them into sex is something they speak of as being quite common. It's something I somehow hadn't thought of but that seemed really obvious once it was brought to my attention.
posted by not that girl at 9:36 PM on June 18, 2016 [36 favorites]


the Oakland police have been under federal oversight for nine years now.

I think if you do the math it's closer to 13 years at this point. This interview with Judge Henderson refers to it having been a decade, and that's from 2013.

Pimps are black . . . I think you had good intentions with that sentence, but still.

Add a knowingly sarcastic "well, everybody knows that" and some scare quotes if it makes it clearer, but what Talez wrote is a concise encapsulation of the institutional attitudes around here.
posted by Lexica at 10:04 PM on June 18, 2016 [5 favorites]


Mod note: As a quick reminder: the reason we so frequently ask people not to do the "ironic racism / sexism" etc. stuff, is that it's not always clear, and tends to lead to big derails. Please try to opt for clarity over sarcasm when discussing issues wherein the real hate speech and ironic hate speech can be really difficult to distinguish, and not everyone knows your personal beliefs. Thanks, all.
posted by taz (staff) at 11:19 PM on June 18, 2016 [23 favorites]


An additional note on residency restrictions. There are few agencies, and I can't think of any in the greater Bay Area, that have any kind of limit. I've known officers from several departments who commute from the far reaches of the Central Valley to the Bay Area. As in, Redding to Oakland or Marin.
posted by ericales at 11:27 PM on June 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


One of the weirdest parts of all of this is hearing new radio ads, in the usual style, for a lawyer saying "Give me a call before your Internal Affairs review."
posted by clorox at 12:38 AM on June 19, 2016 [15 favorites]


I've seen an article where it says at least 35 officers had sex with this underage girl. Doesn't that number seem outrageous or am I just naive? This story must have some real meat behind it or people wouldn't be resigning. It just seems strange that this one girl would have so many people taking advantage of her and there is no one else coming forward with similar stories about these officers. Maybe there are more we haven't heard from?
posted by Foam Pants at 12:44 AM on June 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


Maybe there are more we haven't heard from?

Keep in mind that adult sex workers would have a much harder time proving coercion. And with the misconduct in the department so brazen, how could you possibly trust that the situation would be handled appropriately?
posted by praemunire at 12:52 AM on June 19, 2016 [9 favorites]


Cops could have been her preferred customer base. As one of the social worker types said in the article, ignoring her statements that she was not coerced or forced to perform acts denies her autonomy. I know people are likely to jump on me for saying that it appears that she cultivated these relationships as much as the cops did, but I've known a lot of sex workers, and it is not uncommon to have a niche market.

I'm aware of the inherent problems of power and coercion, and sex with minors, whether or not they are sex workers is illegal, and those cops should be prosecuted.

But, prostitution is a fact, and we as a culture need to find a way to make it safe and legal so that the power is removed from law enforcement.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 12:53 AM on June 19, 2016 [13 favorites]


Where are **ANY** of these fucking "Good Cops" we keep hearing so much about. Face it, the whole damn barrel is rotten at this point.
posted by mikelieman at 1:00 AM on June 19, 2016 [17 favorites]


Where are **ANY** of these fucking "Good Cops" we keep hearing so much about. Face it, the whole damn barrel is rotten at this point.

I've heard people defend the police after the shootings by using the "a few bad apples" excuse. Which is ironic, first of all because they usually defend the individual cops who killed people, but also because they forget the rest of the parable: "A few bad apples spoils the bunch."

I think there are plenty of good cops, at least as individuals, and most places aren't as bad in those regards as Oakland or Chicago or Ferguson. But the culture is the problem, not the cops as individuals, and that culture normifies terrible behavior. The whole "blue code of silence" thing, the idea that cops should defend police officers who break the law or hurt people, is incredibly insidious.

Police officers should be members of the community first, cops second. They need to be AT LEAST as loyal to random members of the community as they are to their buddies in the precinct, but instead they look out for their own. It's worst when the cops aren't members of the community, as is largely the case in Oakland, Chicago and Ferguson. All three cities have police that are A) mostly from other areas, not the city they police, and B) mostly white, in cities that are heavily minority populated. Can it really be that hard to find people from the local communities that want to be police? Are there not plenty of young black men from Oakland who are qualified to be police officers?
posted by Green Winnebago at 1:19 AM on June 19, 2016 [9 favorites]


Cops could have been her preferred customer base. As one of the social worker types said in the article, ignoring her statements that she was not coerced or forced to perform acts denies her autonomy.

If you are underage, you do not have autonomy in this matter. The end. We have, as a society, decided that a 17-yo does not have the completely-formed brain or the life experience to make good decisions when it comes to things like buying drugs and alcohol, buying guns, and having sex. If this were a 30-yo woman, I'd agree with you, somewhat. But the story as stands? Nah. She was raped.

My caveat with the 30-yo hypothetical sitch is that the police are still in a position of power, and it's still coercion. When your "preferred" client base is someone who has practically unlimited power over you, it's really effing hard to say "I'd really rather not have a 3-way with you and your buddy." You just shut up, take it, and pretend it's your own choice because it's the only way you go through each day thinking you have any control over your own life.
posted by greermahoney at 1:32 AM on June 19, 2016 [37 favorites]


"I think cops are fine. They're cute and all, but it's like one less officer that's gonna arrest me," sounds more like a survival strategy than it sounds like genuine sexual desire.
posted by Too-Ticky at 3:16 AM on June 19, 2016 [16 favorites]


it's pretty clear that the reason this story was leaked was to push out Whent. I don't know whether the journalists are on the inside of the politics here or just along for the ride.
posted by ennui.bz at 3:25 AM on June 19, 2016


I think there are plenty of good cops, at least as individuals, and most places aren't as bad in those regards as Oakland or Chicago or Ferguson. But the culture is the problem, not the cops as individuals, and that culture normifies terrible behavior. The whole "blue code of silence" thing, the idea that cops should defend police officers who break the law or hurt people, is incredibly insidious.

It's a bit more complicated than that because cops, in aggregate, also tend to have power over their individual fellow cops. It is yet another thing has led to the City of Chicago paying out over half a billion dollars in the last few years for cop misconduct.
posted by srboisvert at 4:25 AM on June 19, 2016 [7 favorites]


it's pretty clear that the reason this story was leaked was to push out Whent

Yeah, I'm okay with more or less any motives behind pushing out the guy who was running this particular department at that particular time.
posted by Etrigan at 4:25 AM on June 19, 2016 [17 favorites]


From the article that srboisvert linked above:
“From the moment you go into the academy, you are told that the quickest way to lose your job is to go against another police officer,” she said. “It’s always there.”
So often it comes back to this "code". Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting.
posted by Fizz at 5:05 AM on June 19, 2016 [22 favorites]


Mod note: One deleted. Let's skip the sneery personally directed stuff, and counterfactuals.
posted by taz (staff) at 5:29 AM on June 19, 2016


This is horrifying, but i you think that it's limited to Oakland cops having sex with sex workers via coercion...from the articles I've read and documentaries I've seen about sex workers w/r/t cops...generally in cities, this is what the cops are known for. Many, many sex workers have said that cops are their most dependable repeat customers, and many, many say that it's often to get out of charges.
posted by xingcat at 5:52 AM on June 19, 2016 [6 favorites]


Gotta say, as fucked up as it is, it's really validating to see the mayor out there as full of rage as the rest of us are. This is unacceptable. She's not sugar-coating it to play nice with the police union, at least not right now.

That's nice and all, but she should be resigning along with the chiefs.

Seeing some incredibly retrograde things said about sex workers here. Not all sex work is bad just because it's illegal, and it's possible for a 17 year old to have plenty of agency. Note that none of my points make the actions of the officers any less heinous.

As for the residence of officers, it is INCREDIBLY common for officers to live outside the jurisdictions they work in. Where I live in Toronto, 85% live outside the city. Think about it: crooked or not, as a cop, you tend to see the worst parts of the city and its people. You come to view even the statistically safest city as dangerous.
posted by dry white toast at 6:16 AM on June 19, 2016 [5 favorites]


Chicago cops are actually required to live in the city and partly as a result the CPD is more demographically similar to the city it serves than most other large-city departments. Obviously it doesn't stop the cop violence problem, and the police union sues basically yearly to get the law struck down because they DO NOT want to have to live in the city. Chicago is the only city in Illinois where residency requirements are legal; typically police unions and teachers' unions fight then hard in the statehouse. Urban jobs pay well in those professions, but the people who take them don't want to live in urban communities, which means you're paying a huge part of your tax dollars -- and often a large percentage of available middle class salaries in downstate communities -- to suburban communities that don't need them, yet another way cash-strapped, high-tax cities end up subsidizing low-tax wealthy suburban areas. (My city toyed with some limited residency requirements a few years back but our statehouse reps were like, "It's not even worth trying, you have no idea how much campaign money the unions will throw at this.")
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:22 AM on June 19, 2016 [35 favorites]


"and it's possible for a 17 year old to have plenty of agency"

Sure. A three-year old has AGENCY. What it, and a seventeen year old sex worker lack are wisdom and experience.

As has been said, we as a society have agreed that there are some experiences which persons can be too young to participate in, and we try to prevent them, logistically and legally, doing. Driving a car. Smoking. Drinking. Sex.
posted by jfwlucy at 6:58 AM on June 19, 2016 [4 favorites]


Chicago cops are actually required to live in the city and partly as a result the CPD is more demographically similar to the city it serves than most other large-city departments.

There are no easy solutions but there are things that can be done to help improve these situations. Living in the city you serve to protect is one thing.

Think about it: crooked or not, as a cop, you tend to see the worst parts of the city and its people. You come to view even the statistically safest city as dangerous.

Community involvement is definitely another part of this issue. Police officers need to interact with their community: city counsillors, church elders, schools, etc. This is how you start to view the people you protect as productive members of society that can help you further reduce violence and criminal behavior and not as a some kind of criminal statistic. I wish this was something that would happen more in North America.
posted by Fizz at 7:04 AM on June 19, 2016 [14 favorites]


Chicago cops are actually required to live in the city and partly as a result the CPD is more demographically similar to the city it serves than most other large-city departments.

Pittsburgh police are also required to live in the city but that hasn't helped the force be more demographically representative of the city. Only 14% of the force is black while the city's population is almost twice that. And yeah, the police tend to live in the farther out, more suburbanish areas of the city.
posted by octothorpe at 7:17 AM on June 19, 2016


Last time I was in a discussion about police brutality and corruption (probably about Chicago), I got in a side argument about federal orders requiring departments to seek gender parity in hiring; my interlocutor thought that gender parity in cop hiring was really stupid and "did nothing" to improve the departments and was just the feds imposing low-quality cops (i.e., women) on cities for no improvement in the problem (brutality and corruption) so I got off on a little tangent looking into this. And what I discovered was that female cops are basically never involved in brutality complaints; police brutality is a male officer problem (sort of like domestic violence and mass shootings -- not really a "people problem" but a "toxic masculinity problem."). And female cops are statistically highly unlikely to be involved in corruption complaints, even when they're at or close to parity in a particular unit, even when you control for gender in the statistics (and when they were involved, they were almost always the sole woman in a unit, or one of two women in a unit). Now, I would imagine some of that is that the women aren't part of the male-dominated structures of control that allow the corruption; they're kept out of the Old Boys' Club that engages in corruption and theoretically as they get more enmeshed in positions of power they'd be more corrupt. (But don't political statistics from around the world show that women in positions of power are, in fact, somewhat less corrupt statistically than their male peers?)

Anyway, I became like 3/4 convinced that solving the police brutality problem in the US is as simple as creating all-female departments in areas where scandals like this occur. Half my brain is like, "Eyebrows, this is literal crazy talk, there is no way that would be legal, and you would introduce a whole host of other problems, plus the transition would be nightmarish, plus not ALL men are quite so trapped by toxic masculinity and that's unfair to the ones who aren't." But the other half of my brain is like, "Yeah, but it'd probably work."

---

On residency, my city is having a mini-scandal, as part of a much larger corruption investigation, about residency requirements; when they were struck down by the courts around a decade ago (after close to 20 years of non-stop litigation) and many of the cops instantly moved out of the city, apparently a HUGE CHUNK of them started working 6-hour shifts instead of 8-hour shifts, because when they lived in the city, if your patrol assignment was your own neighborhood, it was common to either take lunch at home, or do your paperwork at home for your last hour, and people knew where to find you and dropped by to chat and all, and that's good community policing. Well, having fought for 20 years to NOT have to live in the neighborhoods they policed, some officers were SHOCKED AND APPALLED by the requirement they spend 8 hours a day at work-work instead of being able to go do paperwork in their living rooms, so they just started bunging off work an hour or two early, because it was IMPLIED they only had to be "at work" 6 hours a day or so ... when they lived in the city. And they didn't feel that should change just because they didn't live in the city. And they created this elaborate set of code words to tell dispatch that despite being technically "on patrol" in whatever neighborhood with a theoretical response time of under 5 minutes, they'd actually gone home and they'd be 25 or 35 or 45 minutes away from any call. And literally everyone knew about it and was signing off on time cards and misreporting response times. And now that this has come out and is all over the local press, there are several dudes willing to give quotes to the effect that they are just SO OFFENDED they're expected to BE AT WORK for 8 hours and keep saying things like, "But if I'm HERE for 8 hours and then I have to commute home on my OWN time, my day is nine hours long instead of eight! That's not fair!" The disconnection from reality and sense of entitlement is unreal. Plenty of cops do still live in the city, and plenty who don't did not engage in this, but it was an open secret, and it was an open secret that the brass wasn't going to do anything about it, and it came out as a scandal when a whistleblower got demoted for reprimanding a patrol officer for working days that were barely 5.5 hours and was forced to redact her complaint (hers! female whistleblower!) and she fought the demotion and created a very robust paper trail that eventually became FOIA-able, and got found as part of a scandal about misappropriation of funds and, actually, cops looking the other way on certain prostitution-related offenses involving minors and violence, although it is still an evolving scandal.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:35 AM on June 19, 2016 [125 favorites]


We need about a billion times more federal oversight of police, like yesterday. But if you propose that, the whole right wing assumes it's step one toward Big Brother style dystopia.
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:59 AM on June 19, 2016 [4 favorites]


It's a bit more complicated than that because cops, in aggregate, also tend to have power over their individual fellow cops. It is yet another thing has led to the City of Chicago paying out over half a billion dollars in the last few years for cop misconduct.

Wasn't there a name for a code of silence that impedes authorities and stops them from interfering with illegal actions? Oh yeah, an Omertà. Wasn't there another organization that used Omertàs? I can't quite put my finger on it...
posted by Talez at 7:59 AM on June 19, 2016 [4 favorites]


We need about a billion times more federal oversight of police, like yesterday.

I have an idea actively recruiting more women officers might help, too. (No real basis for saying that, other than I suspect they might be slightly less vulnerable to that same kind of emotion-based loyalty. Coercion and fear of harassment, though, maybe :/)
posted by cotton dress sock at 8:25 AM on June 19, 2016


Here's a great clip from Cat Brooks of the Anti Police-Terror Project on: the OPD, Libby Schaaf's oversight of the OPD, and what needs to be done with the OPD.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 8:39 AM on June 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


Chicago is the only city in Illinois where residency requirements are legal; typically police unions and teachers' unions fight then hard in the statehouse.

It is pretty well known that a significant chunk of the white police officers (and firefighters and civil servants) live in the far northwest part of the city. Basically, as far away from the city as they can legally get even though the CPD median wage is higher than the median wage in every single neighborhood in the city.

(though one intriguing finding was that the first responder heavy neighborhoods had among the worst 911 response times - perhaps because of their edge of city positioning and relatively low crime rates).
posted by srboisvert at 8:40 AM on June 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


Are Oakland police allowed to live outside of the city?

How would any police officer be able to afford to live in Oakland nowadays? Here for more details. Unsourced, but the stat in the piece says that only 9% of Oakland's police force actually lives in Oakland.
posted by blucevalo at 9:24 AM on June 19, 2016


Female cops do PLENTY of sex shaming/ slut shaming their own selves. I don't think women-only is any sort of panacea.
posted by small_ruminant at 10:11 AM on June 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yeah but probably less actual raping.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:14 AM on June 19, 2016 [20 favorites]


Will we ever fix our police? I think the emotion I am feeling is despair.

Allow Richmond to give you some hope. They're not perfect (and it looks like a few of them may have been involved in that same sex scandal) but they were as bad or worse than Oakland 10 years ago and they're definitely not now.

On the other hand, Richmond's population is about 120k, vs 400k for Oakland.
posted by small_ruminant at 10:17 AM on June 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


Also, have been working my way through The Wire this year. Let's just say it's been very relevant to my interests. I think it could have as easily been written about Oakland.
posted by small_ruminant at 10:18 AM on June 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


How would any police officer be able to afford to live in Oakland nowadays?
Cops make great money, especially when OT is factored in. Oakland has expensive parts, and it has cheap parts.
posted by migurski at 10:19 AM on June 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


Also, have been working my way through The Wire this year. Let's just say it's been very relevant to my interests. I think it could have as easily been written about Oakland.

Slight derail: You're not wrong. You could easily plug and play any number of inner-cities and the types of commentary it makes on the subjects of: race, policing, drugs, schools, unions, politics, would still be relevant. Also, do yourself a favour and stop after Season 4. As far as I'm concerned, Season 5 never happened.
posted by Fizz at 10:22 AM on June 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


I wonder whether, taken as a group, cops are more likely to be rapists than the general population.
posted by orrnyereg at 10:28 AM on June 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


I really don't know what to say about this, but the detail that keeps sticking in my mind is that apparently one of these cops had a mattress in the back of his off-duty car, which he used to hook up with this girl in the parking lot of the OPD Station. That is a level of depravity and just general grossness that I can't wrap my mind around. I doubt this piece of shit was living out of his car, so did he keep a bed in there just so he could conveniently hook up with trafficked minors? Could he really not have gone to a motel? Really? This is the kind of behavior I associate with serious bottom of the barrel lowlives, tweakers or other death spiral drug addicts who *are* living out of their cars-- people who have just lost any and all ability or desire to even give the illusion of being able to function in society. Cops acting like a gang, covering up a guy murdering his wife, passing around teenage street hookers around all their friends, yeah, that I grimly accept as the normal state of things, unfortunately. The guy who had some kind of gross teenage sex pad in the back of his fucking car though? In the Station parking lot? Who does that? What does it say about your department's culture of brutality when you aren't just wildly abusing the people you're supposed to be protecting, but your social circle's standards of scumbag behavior are at "homeless dropout, rapidly decompensating" level??? How low can you possibly get?
posted by moonlight on vermont at 10:51 AM on June 19, 2016 [19 favorites]


It said he was sleeping in his car, which I was also entirely confused by and wondered about, since that seems like a basic thing that would be a warning sign and would trigger some sort of intervention or attempt to get the officer help, regardless of whether he was living there or just taking breaks to sleep there. Wouldn't it? Shouldn't it? Bizarre.
posted by limeonaire at 11:42 AM on June 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm being discriminatory. Maybe there should be cops who are among the ranks of the homeless. It seems like it would be hard to maintain order on the streets when one is literally on the street, though.
posted by limeonaire at 11:45 AM on June 19, 2016


How would any police officer be able to afford to live in Oakland nowadays? Here for more details. Unsourced, but the stat in the piece says that only 9% of Oakland's police force actually lives in Oakland.

OPD in particular get paid quite well. And while there's a reason housing prices in Oakland are in the news that's a fairly recent trend.
posted by atoxyl at 12:03 PM on June 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


Re: Eyebrows McGee's excellent comments about recruiting more female officers--I was surprised but really excited when one of my grad school friends applied to become a police officer, because she's politically progressive, works for social justice, a feminist, etc. She did the training and worked as an officer for one year before quitting and getting a job in public/social service/education. When I asked her about her decision to leave, she said being part of the police force was incredibly stressful, fellow officers were sexist and racist, and she felt very unsupported. It took too high a toll on her and her family. Her decision makes total sense, but it showed me what an uphill slog this is.

Yesterday I heard an acquaintance of mine is following this same path...I hope things go better for her. This is the kind of change (more women, more PoC, more progressive people) we desperately need to see in police culture.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:27 PM on June 19, 2016 [19 favorites]


He was sleeping in his car because his actual house is likely 3 hours away. Oakland should be working 12 hour shifts. After factoring in overtime it's not worth it to go home. So he sleeps in his car between shifts and goes home for the weekend.
posted by ericales at 3:10 PM on June 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


We need about a billion times more federal oversight of police, like yesterday. But if you propose that, the whole right wing assumes it's step one toward Big Brother style dystopia.
posted by showbiz_liz

At this point, a different style of dystopia might be kind of exciting.
posted by Iris Gambol at 3:12 PM on June 19, 2016 [8 favorites]


We need about a billion times more federal oversight of police, like yesterday.

Totally agree but in this case it doesn't seem to have mattered at all! As mentioned above: Since a 2003 incident involving alleged police misconduct, the Oakland Police Department has been under federal oversight.

I guess we need real oversight, not lip service.
posted by futz at 4:03 PM on June 19, 2016 [4 favorites]


The [Alameda County] sheriff's office actually blamed Guap for not coming forward. "She never came to our agency with any sort of complaint," spokesman J.D. Nelson told the Express. "We had no way of knowing about this sort of conduct."

I BEG YOUR FUCKING PARDON, J.D., BUT THIS WAS AN UNDERAGED PERSON BEING EXPLOITED.

I mean, really? Really? How completely off-base do you have to be that this is the response to such allegations?

Is Miss Guap being helped? Is there counseling or something that she's getting, something so that she can provide for herself without working on the streets? I understand being free to live your life as you see fit, especially now that she's 18, but I'm not sure that doing sex work on the streets, running from pimps, and having to sleep with cops in the back of a car so as not to be arrested is any sort of life for anyone, much less the kind of life one would freely choose if one can see other options. If I'm talking out of my ass, I know I'll be called on it, and that's OK, but I am not reading here about what help she's receiving, or if her parents are part of this investigation.
posted by droplet at 6:46 PM on June 19, 2016 [11 favorites]


There are still so many unanswered questions about this story. Like, reports keep mentioning that Guap's mother is an OPD dispatcher. I have no idea how this figures into the story, but it's absolutely not an unrelated coincidence here.

Also, did anyone notice how so many of the cops caught trafficking an under-eighteen sex worker (or "merely" trading sex for protection with an of-age one) are rookies from the past three police academy classes? This also can't be a coincidence.
posted by tapir-whorf at 6:56 PM on June 19, 2016 [4 favorites]


Hi everyone. Let me see if I can provide some perspective from the other side of the divide.

I will not offer a defense of the Officers' conduct with Guap. It appears that it was criminal and that they will be prosecuted for it. Depending on ages at the time, for some it may not have been criminal, but I would be surprised if they kept their jobs. There is a difference between "what these cops did was wrong and illegal," and "Police culture is poison and malice without reason, and if we just fire, blame, and prosecute enough of them problems will go away."

I don't work in Oakland and can't speak to the perspective there.

I do live in the city I work in. That's because I like living here. I don't think it has any bearing on my ability as an Officer, nor do I think it's generally relevant. Some Officers on my shift want to live somewhere they can keep animals, or be on a lake, or just have more square footage than they can afford inside the city limits.

Further, it is no fun whatsoever running into someone you've arrested when you're outside of work. I typically don't carry off duty, and I ran into a guy I'd arrested while I was at the grocery store with my fiance recently. It was a misdemeanor arrest warrant and was not acrimonious at all. We saw each other, acknowledged that we'd seen each other, and then we walked past each other. My fiance was around the corner and I appeared to be alone when we encountered each other. Then I had to decide if I went to find my fiance to be able to protect him if need be? Or did I try to stay away from him so our relationship wouldn't be apparent? Should I follow the guy I'd arrested to make sure he didn't get a weapon from his car and come back to ambush me? Etc. And this was a guy I'd had a relatively friendly interaction with. I've had people spend their entire time with me threatening to kill me and everyone I love until they're dragged, screaming, into a cell at the jail.

So. Lots of cops don't want to live where they work. As long as they do their job well I don't see what the problem with that is.

I also think it's hard for people to appreciate the difficulty of addressing sex trafficking, especially for patrol. We have a unit in my agency headed by a particular, very smart and very hard working investigator that relentlessly pursues sex traffickers. When he puts out notices to the agency looking for a particular juvenile, he makes it clear that they are to be considered a victim. I have personally picked up juvenile victims of sex trafficking off the streets. We have a room in city hall we bring them (and curfews in general) to where they're supervised and civilian employees work to get in contact with parents. A county social worker specializing in trafficking and child protection comes in every morning and meets with likely victims and tries to connect them with services.

Two days later, I find the same kid on the streets in the company of the same pimp. I can and do pass that information up to the sex crimes guys. I make the mandated cross report to county. I bring them to somewhere safe and warm where I'm assured every effort is to made to help them escape the streets. Two days later, there they are again.

Most of them are runaways. They're generally running away for a reason, but if you pick up a runaway you can't just hold on to them because you suspect they had a bad home. That's not how the law works. We can't just keep a kid without some basis to believe that the child is in imminent danger, and termination of parental rights requires county child protection services to present a damning investigation to a judge. And as far as I'm aware, the research indicates that outcomes are better for most children who stay in their homes, even if those homes are bad, compared with foster homes.

I do what I can. They've adapted to a set of unfortunate life circumstances by learning skills that have allowed them to survive. Expecting them to immediately jettison everything they've known because some authority figure says it's poison isn't real effective.

"Can it really be that hard to find people from the local communities that want to be police? Are there not plenty of young black men from Oakland who are qualified to be police officers?"

It is unbelievably difficult. A young Officer on my shift gave up literally everything to be an Officer. Immediate family members told him that they hope he's murdered, that his fiance gets raped and murdered. He has had to sever all contact with his family. In all the conversation about modern Policing, the racial proportions of agencies, etc., I don't think I've seen really anyone say anything about the price a lot of minorities have to pay to be an Officer, and none more so than African American Officers, in my experience.

I am white. Some people yell at me because they don't like the Police, whatever. The stuff I hear doesn't hold a candle to the unadulterated vitriol reserved for AA Officers. I'm not sure if there's any research about this, but I would not be surprised if AA Officers are assaulted, injured, and murdered at higher rates than Officers of other races.

In the middle of all this, people like to say super-helpful stuff like "I wonder whether, taken as a group, cops are more likely to be rapists than the general population."

And it's like... if I could psychically share with you the load of rape, kidnapping, and related reports and calls I've taken or helped with in my short career I would. Some really, really bad shit. Not sure what else to say to that.

I do think there's an unavoidable extent to which Officers become separated from the community we serve. Basically every shift I work during the Summer I see humans being violent and awful to each other. I've lost track of the number of times I've been within a block of the gangsters when they start shooting at each other. Aggravated assaults and robberies. I recently arrested a suspect who had, about ten minutes previously, used a razor blade to slice a guy's cheek open from the back of the jaw to the corner of his mouth, so you could see the sides of his teeth all the way back. Re-watching surveillance camera footage of the arrest, he was getting into an argument with another guy and reaching for the knife again when he saw us coming and tried to duck behind cover. The only thing the hostile crowd saw was a white cop putting an apparently unarmed black man at gunpoint and yelling at him to get on the ground. And it would obviously violate the arrestee's rights if I even tried to engage in the futile project of explaining what was going on to that crowd. I can only imagine the firestorm if he'd forced me to shoot him. I really desperately hope I never have to shoot anyone, but working where I do it's a significant possibility.

So there's another youtube video of police brutality, and this is far from he first time I've been in a similar position. Violent criminals seldom hang out on the street corner or alley or parking lot or house or apartment where they just seriously assaulted and/or robbed someone.

I also try to shield my fiance and family from the worst realities of my job, which is pretty common. So the people that we have to talk to about it are each other. And we also happen to be the people that we depend on to save each others' lives.

So, obviously, this comment ranged farther than the narrow realities of the OPD scandal, which is obviously awful. I hope it provided some nuance to the broader discussion about Police culture in America.
posted by firebrick at 10:54 PM on June 19, 2016 [20 favorites]


Eyebrows McGee: And female cops are statistically highly unlikely to be involved in corruption complaints, even when they're at or close to parity in a particular unit, even when you control for gender in the statistics

I would be interested in seeing the research indicating this. Can you provide linkage?
posted by Soi-hah at 12:46 AM on June 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


How do we break the Blue Wall?

Greed.

Any GOOD COP who rats on a BAD COP gets their accrued pension benefits as a reward, and this problem will solve itself.
posted by mikelieman at 3:51 AM on June 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


firebrick, I spent three years in Iraq, and if you told the exact same stories from the perspective of a soldier in an occupied country, I would think "Jeez, this guy needs to lighten the fuck up or he's going to shoot some kid for no good reason." I think that's part of the problem -- your nuance makes it sound more like you barely want to live in your city and actively don't want to be part of some of the communities you nominally serve.
posted by Etrigan at 4:14 AM on June 20, 2016 [9 favorites]


If that's your takeaway from that essay/comment Etrigan, then it doesn't seem like there's much of a possibility of me having a positive impact in conversation with you.
posted by firebrick at 5:08 AM on June 20, 2016 [4 favorites]


if you told the exact same stories from the perspective of a soldier in an occupied country,


The militarization of the **civilian** police, I lay at the feet of Daryl Gates and Ronald Reagan.

Calling me a "Civilian", given that they are not in the military, and are civilians just like me isn't helping anyone but the cop-bros who thrive in a toxic culture.
posted by mikelieman at 6:09 AM on June 20, 2016 [10 favorites]


OPD is a fucking rogue agency that City Hall doesn't control. has been for years.

Oakland cops live out in Transhilssistan ("The Land Beyond the Hills") and just fucking come into The Town to get their cop on. The only thing fucking worse than OPD is is when political street-tantrums direct-actions kick off and they call on "mutual aid" from the surrounding agencies.

Then all the fucking suburban cops get a fucking chubby thinking "WOO HOO, break out the Darth Vader suits and long, wooden sticks, we get to go to Oakland for some fun."

Cops don't wanna live in the community they police? Too fucking bad. Go fucking do something else like sell shoes or work in a print-shop. Because living in a city where the locals view the cops as an outside occupying force (and they act like it) fucking sucks.

A former neighbor of mine was a retired jail guard. He also worked part time as a hospital guard, something a lot of off-duty cops do as well, and they often mistook him for a fellow member of the Blue Wall of Silence, so would say them most scandalous stuff in front of him about life with a badge and gun.

He told me he would ask them "How come y'all live out in Concord and commute into Oakland to work. Don't they need police out In the suburbs?" The most common reply would be a smile and "Oakland is where the action is."

And I say this as someone who called th cops when I got held up at gunpoint 2 blocks from how. What was I supposed to do, call the local anarchist militia, organize a community posse?

It's just that my local police force is pretty much a garbage fire.

I'm pro-union, pro-organized labor. But as a citizen of Oakland, I'm willing and eager to see the Oakland Police Union broken on the wheel and reformed from the ground up. Y'all wanna quit rather than live where you work, go. You signed up for a job of public service. Nobody fucking cares where their shoe salesman lives, and it doesn't affect public safety if the book-binder commutes over the hills.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 8:57 AM on June 20, 2016 [11 favorites]


Re Etrigan's comment on comparing to a military perspective and militarization in general; it should be noted that there is a significant preference for hiring veterans. Most larger agencies, at least in CA, will assign extra points to veterans in their hiring pool.
posted by ericales at 9:48 AM on June 20, 2016


I wonder whether, taken as a group, cops are more likely to be rapists than the general population.

A 2010 Cato Institute report based on media reports of police misconduct found, among other things, that the rate of sexual assaults by police officers was 67.8 per 100,000, compared to 28.7 per 100K for the general population. I'm not sure what the numbers look like if you control for gender; this article claims that male cops sexually assault people at a rate of about 1.5 times the general male population, but doesn't show its calculations. It's easy to find journalism about this phenomenon (e.g. 1, 2, 3), but they usually say that actual data is incomplete and hard to come by, since official institutions don't track these numbers. And presumably sexual assault by cops is even more underreported than sexual assault in general, for obvious reasons.

As a point of comparison, domestic violence is 2-4 times more common among police families.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 10:35 AM on June 20, 2016 [7 favorites]


Further, it is no fun whatsoever running into someone you've arrested when you're outside of work.

I used to believe cops should have to live in the communities they serve. But I think this and similar reasons deserve a little reflection and compassion.

I know of a crime scene investigator who doesn't want to live near the gory murder scenes he helps to document. I know public defenders who live essentially just across the county border because they don't want to know about all the crimes in their neighborhood, much less run into one of their clients or his/her buddy (especially a client whose defense didn't succeed).

Given that first responder work can often be traumatizing, I don't think it's ridiculous for people to want a home that they feel is a refuge. Having some time to retreat from the vigilance required while on duty might make them better, safer officers. I think it's great when a member of the police can live in the community they serve. But I think it's very understandable if they don't want to.

Shoot, when I was a restaurant server, I could never go to that restaurant on my day off because I couldn't stop noticing which tables needed their drinks refilled. How much more intense would it be to feel "always on duty" if your job was to be on the front lines against crime and violence?

I do think the us vs. them mindset is an issue. We don't want officers to feel like an occupying force. And OPD has its specific issues. But I'm nut sure the best answer to that is to require people to live in the city.

Imagine you're at work and across the radio comes a call about a robbery-in-progress at the corner store that your wife often walks to with your baby. Imagine the rush of panic you'd feel. Suppose you find out they're safe at home, but this continues: you hear about each and every crime, major or minor (at least the ones during your shift), at every locale near where your family lives, works, shops, has swim lessons, etc. You hear about it in real time, with an accompanying pulse of fear about whether your family is safe. How do you handle that knowledge and experience? Do you move to the lowest crime area you can possibly find? Do you try to tell your wife where exactly she should and shouldn't go? After a particular wave of shootings, do you get reassigned to that neighborhood so you can catch those assholes?

While it sounds nice to have someone "live in the community they serve," I actually think professional detachment might be preferable. I'm not sure I want cops out there to whom the work is deeply personal, who are flooded with adrenaline and trying to catch the bad guys because their own family's very life depends on it.
posted by salvia at 10:58 AM on June 20, 2016 [4 favorites]


This isn't something that can be easily done, but I think as a country we really need to rethink what the point of police is. That comment by a policeman above makes it clear that we're sending police into situations where (competent, well-funded) social workers would do a hell of a lot more good, and - hell, why aren't cops first and foremost social workers? Why is their primary task just arresting people? They could be so much more to the communities they're supposed to be serving. But it would require a massive overhaul of the entire security apparatus of a massive country so I'm not holding my breath.
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:00 AM on June 20, 2016 [18 favorites]


Word, showbiz_liz. I think it's worth posting this link to this essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates about the problem with expecting people trained in crime-fighting to be social workers.

As a society, I think we certainly will continue to need police to investigate crimes, to respond to active violence, and so forth. But I wonder if the crime-prevention element of policing would be better served by poverty-reduction programs, education, community-building efforts, and other forms of social work. Because having cops driving around in cars doesn't appear to do anything about the root causes of crime, and the antagonistic nature of their interactions with the community actively serves to undercut their attempts to do crime-prevention.

Seems like that would help to prevent them being perceived as an occupying force, as well.
posted by suelac at 11:37 AM on June 20, 2016 [3 favorites]


Any GOOD COP who rats on a BAD COP gets their accrued pension benefits as a reward, and this problem will solve itself.

Orrrrrrr the BAD COPS who are already okay with fraud and criminal activity collude to set up GOOD COPS and destroy their careers for profit.

I mean, they already do it for free, right now. Incentivizing it seems like a worst case scenario for manufactured evidence of malfeasance and multiple "witnesses" who will back up any fictional story.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 12:42 PM on June 20, 2016 [3 favorites]


I hate even comparing military service to police service.
The 'mission' is not remotely the same.

I understand the reasons people do, but you have to be very careful what you conclude.
posted by twidget at 2:01 PM on June 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yes, the thing that everyone, even police, seem to agree on is that policing as a whole is a failed approach to ameliorate social problems, and frequently exacerbates them. Either armed men (gendered language used deliberately) are sent into situations where armed men are worse than useless, or else armed men actively make things worse by using the tremendous power with which they've been invested to victimize people subject to them, either for personal profit or for personal jollies.

The chief reason I see to not disband the OPD immediately is that disbanding the OPD would leave us with a large number of violent unemployed men trained in the use of weapons and accustomed to exerting power over the people around them.

okay, look, I'm going to tell a really silly story, at least put up against the OPD's systematized conspiracy to commit rape, and to cover up for the murder of the wife of one of the rapists.

I have a friend up in Seattle who is pretty into tough blue-collar guys. This led him to date an SPD cop for a little while.

when they broke up, the cop stole his dog. He stole his dog, and he told all his cop friends that he stole his dog, and when my friend asked if he could maybe get his dog back some day, he was informed that trying to get his dog back would be a very, very bad idea.

I mean it's a silly little story, right? but sheesh. don't date cops. they think it's funny to steal dogs.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 3:58 PM on June 20, 2016 [13 favorites]


OPD IME lived that cliché of only being there when you didn't need them. Them and cabs.

There were so many stories about this kind of thing. I witnessed dozens of weird, absolutely unacceptable police actions, and was victim to a few of them.

There's a reason the panthers (and copwatch) existed.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:24 PM on June 20, 2016 [3 favorites]


Regarding residency requirements -- it's not just avoiding an "occupying force" from outside the city, although that's really important: policing is a community function that should arise from within the community and it's really problematic when you have NO cops from within particular neighborhoods. Like, massive failure of representative government problematic; if the authority of the state arises from the consent of the governed, and people in certain communities are given literally no option to participate in one of the democratic government's most basic functions (self-policing), that's a really huge failure of democratic legitimacy and we should take that seriously.

But the other bit that gets elided, that I want to talk about, is tax dollars. These are taxpayer-paid jobs, typically paid for by local property taxes. In general government spending is about the best thing you can do with a dollar -- I pay a dollar on property taxes, the city hires my neighbor to repave the road in front of my house, I get a shiny new road upon which commerce can be conducted and my neighbor gets paid and that $1 does, say, $1.17 of direct work locally plus contributes to economic development overall. Whereas I spend a dollar at Target, maybe 60 cents of that stay local, 20 cents goes to Target HQ, and 20 cents goes to suppliers. (I have wholly invented these numbers but tax dollars are generally your highest-value local multiplier.)

When you have a situation of a poor urban core and wealthy suburbs, especially when those wealthy suburbs are a result of white flight, and so you're looking at a poor black urban core and a wealthy white suburban fringe, the effect of all your cops (and teachers, and firefighters) come from outside the city is that every dollar you spend in local property taxes (the vast bulk of which goes to salaries and benefits for employees; much less goes to actual infrastructure maintenance) is immediately shipped off to the suburban fringe and generates virtually zero economic activity within your city. The tax-rate differentials can be staggering; my Rust Belt city pays a property tax rate of just over 10% on property in the city; the white flight suburb next door pays under 7%. Suburban areas can "free-ride" on their cities in a lot of ways. (I wrote here before about non-profit hospitals cost to city taxpayers and the way outlying, non-city residents are able to free ride on the police costs of having a top-notch hospital in a way that starts to create a property tax death spiral.) It's also galling that in a lot of cities, the city itself is one of the largest employers, and may be one of the few sources of stable middle-class jobs left available, and those taxpayer-paid jobs are all but closed to local residents! No, sorry, you can pay for other towns to have middle classes, but you can't have one yourself.

But one of the really pernicious things that happens when your city employees are non-resident (especially when we're talking poor black urban core/wealthy white flight suburbia) is that it turns straight-up extractive, in such a way that you can draw a direct line from slavery through Reconstruction through redlining and all the deliberately extractive, oppressive housing policies that Ta-Nahesi Coates has written about at length. Allowing your cops to live outside the city doesn't JUST create an "occupying army" effect, but it creates a legal mechanism to take tax money from poor urban residents (at rates far higher than their suburban counterparts pay!) and siphon it directly to wealthy suburban residents, who recycle very little of it back into the urban community they extract it from. It's not an intentional system, no, it's a creation of a million individual people making a million individual decisions, but it arises out of a racist culture and is enabled by quietly allowing racist policies to stand. And it is almost feudal in its effect of outside victorious occupiers coming with the power of the government to extract taxes from serfs who are prevented (first legally and now these days economically) from moving elsewhere. And then using those taxes to pay overseers(/brutality-inclined cops) to overpolice the lives of the serfs who have to pay for the privilege of warrentless stops, racial profiling, racially-discriminatory drug policing, etc. It would be hyperbolic to call it a plantation, but you can see how it's in the same sort of neighborhood and should be offensive to our moral sensibilities in the same way.

That said, and having been through a couple of residency-requirement battles on the city's side, I don't actually think residency requirements work. First off, they're subject to a LOT of gaming of the system and they do tend to create "enclaves" where all the city workers go to live. Secondly, residency requirements mostly arise out of an era where a single city-worker salary could support a family, you could stay in the same job for 30 years, and you would retire with a pretty generous pension. None of those things are standard today, and residency requirements make life very difficult for two-career families (especially when there are tenure or seniority rights involved). If one partner or the other is changing jobs every five years (not unusual at all), it's very hard for one of those jobs to be tied to living within a restricted geographical area, especially with the length of commutes in larger cities. (I've seen several Chicago Public Schools teacher friends struggle with this; they started at CPS when they both worked in the city, but the non-teacher spouse's job has moved halfway to Rockford, and one of them is now commuting commuting two hours by car every day, and the CPS teacher moving to a suburban district closer to the other spouse's work loses tenure or significant seniority, but the other spouse's commute is untenable unless they can move to split the difference ... it's a really hard problem.)

A better answer is probably that the city set a goal of 75% or 80% of cops living within city limits, although that's open to EVEN MORE gaming of the system because now you've got people competing to be the exempt 20%. So probably you have to aim for it not with a strict limit but with incentives of some sort -- city resident employees get an extra $1000 pay, or city employees can knock $250 off their property taxes, or if you're a city resident the city pays for your continuing ed hours but not if you're from outside the city, or something like that. (You'd have to work hard to come up with a benefit that's real and significant, but doesn't create two obvious tiers of employees, especially if you're negotiating with a union.) Which results in incremental gains at best, but that may be the best we can hope for. In the Midwest, a lot of cities are experimenting with "resident officer" programs, where the police department buys and rehabs a house in a less-good neighborhoods and a police family moves in to it as a "resident officer" to live in the city. (Early results are encouraging and unions have been on board.) That's another incremental gain.

---

On recruiting female officers, one of the police departments around here looked at its own overwhelming maleness and failure to recruit women through existing outreach, and also at its problems with DV and juvenile policing and with handling community issues like drug addiction, and their difficulties getting traditionally-recruited officers to take community policing seriously -- so they've been reaching out to social workers (who are overwhelmingly female) and recruiting social workers to attend the police academy. Most of them have already interacted a lot with the local police through their social work, so they know what they're getting in to and whether they can deal with the department culture, and they already know if they're likely to burn out on the work. (They're also helped by the current appalling state of funding for child protective services in this state, which means a lot of social workers are career-stalled and facing yearly layoff rumors.) Anyway, it's just a few officers so far but people have been enthusiastic about it going well. And again, these are officers coming in interested in working in DV or juvenile policing, rather than women being "ghettoized" to those areas, and it's probably not a wildly scaleable idea for a variety of reasons. But it turns out to be easier to turn social workers into cops than to convince existing cops they also have to be social workers, and it's been a fruitful mode of recruiting women to the force, and so far has gone well as an experiment. Another incremental sort of gain more departments could pursue.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:14 PM on June 20, 2016 [19 favorites]



Eyebrows McGee: And female cops are statistically highly unlikely to be involved in corruption complaints, even when they're at or close to parity in a particular unit, even when you control for gender in the statistics

I would be interested in seeing the research indicating this. Can you provide linkage?
posted by Soi-hah at 3:46 AM on 6/20


Me too. Is there research out there or studies that support this statement?
posted by futz at 10:35 PM on June 20, 2016


Generally it came from skimming statistical reports on departments under federal supervision and reading the commentary (just like the DOJ reports, pretty dry, usually lots of stats and some bare factual commentary, but you can tell what the investigator wants to highlight), but here's a few cites to academic work -- Jennifer Hunt (at Rutgers) has done pretty significant research on women in policing (both original work in the US and compilation of statistics from abroad), and one thing from her work that stood out to me was that one of the main reasons male officers resist working with female officers is the male officers' (subjective) belief that female officers are more likely to report corruption. Here's a whole book from 2012 by Marilyn Corsianos on the genderedness of police corruption in the US. (Summary of both women's work -- female cops engage in far less than their "fair share" of corruption in the US.)

Here is a broad international study of women and corruption, concluding that basically across nations and cultures women are far less likely to participate in corruption. (It's quite frequently cited.) Here's a UN report that summarizes research finding that across countries, women are less likely to tolerate or participate in corruption, and that "feminizing public space" is a strategy to reduce corruption that seems to work in the short- and medium-term (while warning that introducing women into power networks where corruption is more available to them may increase their willingness to participate in it; increasing women has to be combined with reforming power structures and systems to work). It has several cites to relevant research.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:01 PM on June 20, 2016 [8 favorites]


Mayor Libby Schaaf's original mid-cycle budget adjustment released in May called for adding a 3rd police academy this year at a cost of $3.17 million. That was before Oakland burned through three police chiefs in a week, and before allegations and evidence surfaced that multiple OPD officers sexually exploited a minor.

OPD's recruitment and training programs have come under criticism for allowing men of poor character to join the force. Younger officers who joined OPD since 2013 appear to be responsible for much of the recent misconduct, including alleged sex crimes.

Councilmembers Rebecca Kaplan and Desley Brooks have responded to OPD's problems by proposing a budget adjustment that would simply "delete" the 3rd police academy and save the city $3.17 million. Under the councilmembers' proposal, this money would instead be spent on early childhood education, renters' rights education, neighborhood jobs centers, a homeless camp pilot program, and other social services.
Town Business: 'Delete' the Police Academy, Fund a Police Commission
posted by Lexica at 12:15 PM on June 21, 2016 [5 favorites]


Oakland police scandal: Sergeant had been previously fired for impeding rape case
OAKLAND -- The veteran Oakland homicide detective who allegedly had his girlfriend ghostwrite a report in a high-profile 2013 murder case was previously fired by the department for impeding a rape case.

Sgt. Mike Gantt, who is on leave and being investigated by the Alameda County District Attorney's Office, was terminated more than a decade ago for showing the police report on a rape to a friend who was in jail for the crime, according to his attorney, Michael Rains. Gantt won back his job through arbitration.

A source with direct knowledge of Gantt's internal affairs case said Gantt also was alleged to have tipped off the rape suspect that Oakland police were going to serve a search warrant on his vehicle to look for a gun possibly used in the rape.
posted by Lexica at 3:14 PM on June 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


Holy shit, Lexica. How on earth did he get his job back?
posted by tapir-whorf at 3:32 PM on June 21, 2016


KRON has unearthed new details on the man just named as acting assistant police chief and some comments he made.…

Multiple Oakland police sources confirm to KRON that they were present when acting assistant chief David Downing used racially insensitive language when referring to the handling of protesters in Oakland.

This happened over a year ago when Downing was a deputy chief, sources said.

One Oakland police source told KRON that they were in a meeting when they heard Downing advocate for using water cannons against protesters and that the then deputy chief Downing seemed oblivious to the racial overtones.

Another law enforcement source told KRON that they were with Downing at a different meeting of Oakland police commanders, and deputy chief Downing suggested using water hoses against protesters as well.

In fact, sources tell KRON that in one of these meetings, an assistant to the federal monitor overseeing the department was present and taking notes.
Sources: Acting Oakland assistant police chief David Downing used racially insensitive language when referring to handling of protesters
posted by Lexica at 8:56 PM on June 21, 2016 [5 favorites]


OPD's recruitment and training programs have come under criticism for allowing men of poor character to join the force.

It's hard for me not to immediately cock my head and look for the racism when I hear talk about character and the like, particularly based on what I know about police hiring and past criminal charges. Not to mention, blaming new hires for problems in a force that are at least a decade old is a little eyebrow-worthy.

I don't want the cops to have an open-door policy on hiring folks with violent felonies on their records, but the tales I've heard about folks getting bounced from hiring based on decade-old offenses make me wonder how much the criminalization of being young and black has impacted police diversity.
posted by phearlez at 8:36 AM on June 22, 2016 [4 favorites]


From the article Attorneys Burris and Chanin Want Feds to Take Over Oakland Police Recruitment and Training:
The attorneys said most of the cops implicated in recent scandals are younger officers who joined the force since 2013.

For example, last December, Oakland police officer Cullen Faeth allegedly forced his way into a stranger's home in the Oakland hills and assaulted a woman. Faeth was reportedly drunk when he carried out the home invasion. Faeth joined OPD in December 2013 after graduating from a lateral police academy.

In February, officer Matthew Santos pulled a gun on a workman in his apartment building while off-duty. He was arrested by the Emeryville police. Santos was a graduate of OPD's 171st Academy in 2014.…

Officers Terryl Smith and James Ta'ai were identified by the East Bay Times as the two officers who quit OPD after being investigated for sexual misconduct. The Express identified officer Giovanni LoVerde as a third officer who has been placed on administrative leave during the investigation. The Express also identified officer Luis Roman as having exchanged text messages wit the girl at the center of the scandal.

Smith and Ta'ai graduated from the 168th Academy in 2013. LoVerde and Roman graduated from the 170th Academy in 2014.

"All these officers are young," said Burris. "This raises serious questions about hiring and recruitment practices."
posted by Lexica at 10:52 AM on June 22, 2016 [2 favorites]




The East Bay Express continues to cover the story: Federal Police Officer Offered to Pimp East Bay Teenager at Center of Oakland Police Sex-Abuse Scandal
A San Joaquin County-based federal law-enforcement agent asked the teenager at the center of the Oakland police sex-crime scandal if he could act as her pimp, according to text messages obtained by the Express.
posted by Lexica at 4:48 PM on July 7, 2016 [2 favorites]




I'm so disgusted.
posted by suelac at 5:11 PM on July 7, 2016


Fired for cause, I hope.
posted by rhizome at 10:45 AM on July 8, 2016


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