Doing It Right
A member of the Rochester (New York) Police Department was killed Wednesday night. I never worked with him, all of the guys I worked with have long since retired, but members of my extended family knew him. I was not in the RPD, I worked at a neighboring department. The last time RPD lost an officer was in the late 1950s, so it is a rare incident for them.
The reason I’m bringing this up is because after Ferguson people need to know that there are places where the police do things right, and if you read the article you will see that the Rochester PD did things right.
There were four shots fired during the incident, only one of them was from a police weapon. Three people were hit, two by the suspect and the suspect by the partner of the dead officer. The officer returned one round in response to being fired on by the suspect, struck the suspect, and arrested him.
I went to the same police academy that trains RPD officers. This is how we were trained to do the job. I would also note that the Mayor of Rochester and the Chief of Police held press conferences on Thursday to inform the public of what happened in the incident. Rochester has had rocky relations with the minority community for a long time, but they are obviously moving to correct things. Informing the public as quickly as possible is vital to improving relations.
4 comments
Sorry to hear about the loss of a LEO in the line of duty. Especially when they are actually doing their job right, as you say.
Yeah. There is a right way, and a wrong way. A shame that the right way is generally 2nd, or last place these days.
The RPD would have looked like the cops in Ferguson not that long ago, so it’s nice to see they have addressed major issues and actually adhering to what was taught at the academy.
The officer who was killed had no reason to suspect a weapon because the only thing they wanted to do with the suspect was talk to him. They didn’t know that he had violated the terms of his parole and there was a warrant out on him. A convicted felon is not allowed to have a gun and that would have been an additional charge added to the parole violation, so the suspect was seeing a long stretch in prison without the possibility of parole.
The biggest problem I see is that police departments have decided that lawsuit settlements are just the price of doing business, and don’t really pay attention to whether they indicate a real problem with an officer or not. The officers themselves don’t care because it’s not their money — they take home the same pay whether the department pays out lawsuit settlements or not. And without any skin in the game nor repercussions afterwards, the officers have no incentives to obey the law.
There has to be skin in the game. If officers who committed these illegal acts and their immediate chain of command lost a pay grade for every lawsuit the department lost, they might have more incentive to obey the law and to properly supervise their officers. If there was an independent police commission responsible for prosecuting officers who break the law, rather than the district attorney’s office that relies on those same officers’ testimony to put people away, the thought of possible consequences might also reduce the incentive to break the law. But the current situation, where a police officer can break the law with near impunity and never have any real consequences, simply isn’t sustainable in a democracy. In a police state pretending to be a democracy, yes. In a democracy, no.
When I was promoted into management I spent my first month attending training on various functions, including one entire week on civil law suits against public agencies. I had the county’s civil attorney on speed dial as we covered the possibilities for law suits after incidents.
If physical force was used the officers involved had to write a Use of Force report that was judged against the standards taught at the academy. We were self-insured on liability, so there were no settlements pushed by an insurance company – we went to court if people didn’t back off. People were ready to sue for just about everything so there months when I spent more time on civil court cases than criminal cases. We didn’t spend enough on defending against civil suits to pay for a month’s premium on the last quote we got from an insurance company for liability insurance, so it was definitely a winning strategy.
To work like it did, people had to know there would be penalties if they screwed up, and there were. There were standards and those standards would be met or else. After a year that was the routine and people did it automatically. No one expected to get away with doctoring reports, so they didn’t. People understood that mistakes could be accepted, but covering up mistakes was never accepted.
What everyone understood was the reality of the time – a large loss would come from our budget which meant pay and job cuts. People understood that.
All major revolutions in modern times have been the result of governments acting as if they were immune from the law. The Magna Carta sort of made it clear that no one is above the law, and people don’t like it when some act as if they are.