Recently I was asked why I became a police officer and what advice I would give to a person considering joining a police department. Here’s what I wrote:

Like pretty much everyone else who ever did it, I became a police officer out of a desire to help people. I felt that the most important service that government provided was public safety, and I wanted to participate in that effort.

Nothing that I saw during or after my law enforcement career changed my view.

The first bit of advice I would give to someone planning on entering the field today is to have a Plan B.

Law enforcement is the most difficult, complex, and draining job in America. It is also a young person’s job. Law enforcement is physically demanding, emotionally scarring, and psychologically debilitating. Some people can do it for a career – twenty years or more – but some can’t. The most miserable people I have ever met were middle-aged cops who were financially and emotionally trapped in a job that they had come to despise. It’s a fun job when you are 23, but when you are 43, the foot chases, the wrestling matches, and the endless family fights lose their appeal.

Sadly, too many officers remain on the job, even when they would much rather leave, because they have nowhere else to go. They make decent money as police officers – especially with overtime and part-time opportunities, though those take time away from their families – but they have no skill that’s saleable anywhere else. Private sector police jobs – we call them security guards – don’t pay much better than minimum wage, and movement from department to department is difficult. Agencies will always hire an experienced officer, but they almost always make you start at the bottom of the pay scale. If you’re a sergeant or lieutenant, you will almost certainly have to take a demotion in order to move to another department.

So, you should have an exit plan before you embark on your law enforcement career. Ideally, your plan is another marketable skill or ability that can help you move on if you decide that it’s time to go. You might not need it, but having options is always a good thing.

My personal view is that police departments should recruit more like the military. Officers should join for an initial tour – five or six years – and after that, if it’s working out, the officer can apply to extend their employment. The department can then decide if the officer’s performance warrants continuation. If not, the officer is released with a nice severance package – some combination of cash and educational assistance/job training benefits perhaps – and a sincere thank-you letter.

Second, be aware that the essence of police work is dealing with people. All kinds of people. Not people just like you, and certainly not just people who think you’re great. One of the biggest surprises for me in my law enforcement experience was the number of officers I worked with who didn’t like talking to people. That’s the job. To be good at police work and to find it fulfilling and rewarding, you have to love people – in all their various ages, sizes, shapes, colors, levels of intelligence, personalities, political persuasions, religious affiliations, and economic status. You have to truly want to help them. All of them.

Third, realize going in that you don’t know anything about law enforcement. Despite watching numberless police and detective movies and a million episodes of “Cops,” hardly any Americans know what police work is truly like. And, for the most part, actual cops won’t tell them.

Here’s a quick list of things to keep in mind:

1. You will work without supervision. If that’s a problem – and for a lot of people it is – think twice about a job in law enforcement. You have to be self-motivated and self-disciplined. It is likely that your organization will provide neither.

2. You will be untrained, ill-equipped, and unready for many of the things you will have to do. Police are the go-to government agency to respond to an enormous variety of social, economic, public health, medical, and criminal incidents. Why? Because they are available 24 hours a day and they make house calls. And, of course, in the short-run, from the city’s perspective, it seems cheaper. In the long run it is not cheaper, but that’s not how the city looks at it. Municipal and county budgets have to balance every year, so the city has no interest in hiring the mental health specialists, social workers, youth counselors, mediators, marriage counselors and housing specialists that they really need. They would rather place all those problems on the shoulders of the police. And training, equipping, and preparing the police to handle these issues properly would be very expensive, so they don’t even try.

3. You will be exposed to violence or the threat of violence pretty much every day. Most of the time it won’t be directed at you. but every day you will witness the limitless capacity that humans have for inflicting physical and psychological damage on other humans. Over time, this will affect you in ways that you cannot predict and probably won’t understand. You will almost certainly have some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Be ready for it.

4. You are not part of an occupying army. When you are working, the people around you all day are your neighbors. Think of them that way. Hardly any of them really want to hurt you. Most are happy to see you. You have to protect yourself, but that doesn’t mean that you need to “dominate” every encounter. Try to treat everybody with respect. The city is not a hellscape of violence and terror when you are not around. Most people are good nearly all of the time. Almost everybody just wants to get along.

January 21, 2021

Photo: Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams joins a prayer circle during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. Photo credit: Cleveland.com

Calls for major police reform are nothing new.

From Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts to reform the New York City Police Department in the late 1890’s, to President Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice in the 1960’s, to President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21^st Century Policing in 2014-2015, efforts to improve police professionalism, root out corruption, and improve police performance have been a  constant feature of American law enforcement for more than a century.

But such efforts have always faced opposition, and while many police departments today are far more professional, diverse, responsive, and community-focused than in the past, problems remain.

Reform advocates and law enforcement leaders together recognize problem areas where reform is most needed, including accountability and transparency, excessive use of force, discriminatory stop-and-frisk practices, inadequate training, and police militarization. They also agree that significant police reform will require a community-wide effort. Law enforcement agencies will not be able to do it on their own, and community organizations will not be able to force change. Only a cooperative effort will result in sustainable and effective reform.

But today there is no national consensus on the need for reform, let alone for its direction. American law enforcement is highly decentralized – there are more than 18,000 separate police agencies in the United States – and many, if not most Americans believe their local police departments are effective.

Often, of course, this is the case. But many of the ills of modern American policing are hidden from view of most citizens. Americans in general – exposed to many decades of TV and movie cops, but almost totally unfamiliar with real police – have little understanding of how police in this country actually perform their jobs.

Police themselves are not much help. Law enforcement culture highly values secrecy, autonomy, forcefulness, and an us-versus-them worldview, hardly conducive to open discussion of police performance.  Individual officers and their departments are loath to discuss the way they actually operate and the underlying beliefs that drive their behavior.

So, while many Americans seem to agree on the necessity for some police reform – The George Floyd video has had an enormous impact – there is much less understanding of what types of reform are really needed.

“I don’t think most people have any sort of fundamental connectedness to law enforcement, and I think we are at a place now where we are talking about making changes, but the average citizen has no clue of the foundation of how law enforcement works and what should be changed,” said Sophia Hall, Supervising Attorney at Lawyers for Civil Rights.

Hall was a panelist on a recent WGBH virtual forum on Police Reform, part of that station’s series of discussions on ‘The State of Race.’

A better understanding of law enforcement is necessary for an informed communitywide discussion of police reform, said fellow panelist Dominique Johnson, Senior Director of Community Engagement at the Center for Policing Equity. The conversation we need to have is about how do police departments work, said Johnson.  “How do you engage people to understand and educate them around the systems of public safety so that they can make informed decisions.”

Calls for defunding the police are misleading and counter-productive, said panelist Milton Valencia, political reporter for the Boston Globe. “It’s not so much getting rid of police, it’s not so much getting rid of the police budget, its more reimagining what we do with our resources and where they’re devoted to,” said Valencia.

“Instead of 911 calls being automatically diverted to police systems… especially mental health cases, we need to look at other ways to redirect community social service programs so that it’s not always the police responding,” said Valencia.

Boston City Councilor Andrea Campbell said that ‘defunding’ the police does not mean abolishing police departments. “But it does involve reallocating a significant amount of resources from our police departments to programs, issues, and initiatives and individuals that are doing the work on the root causes of violence,” she said. “We have to focus on eradicating poverty, mental health, trauma support, jobs, economic opportunity, and there are a lot of programs and individuals doing this work who are struggling right now to find resources to do that work, and that’s just unacceptable when you think about our police department is over $400 million in terms of their budget and an overtime budget that’s over $70 million, and it keeps going up and you ask why?”

Police are called on to replace gaps in the nation’s social services safety net. But they are untrained and ill-equipped to provide the services that people need.  The results can be disastrous, for citizens and the police. “Most Americans do not realize that nearly fifty percent of fatal police encounters involve a victim who is living with a mental health issue, with a disability,” said Hall.

It is important to remember that law enforcement problems are structural and systemic, said Hall. The blame for many problems with police performance cannot be laid at the feet of individual officers.

Ronald L. Davis, former Director of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) in the Department of Justice, believes that reform efforts must focus on the operational systems that guide law enforcement. “Rank-and-file officers do not decide organizational policies and practices,” Davis wrote in 2016. “Nor do officers establish hiring standards or have the power to administer discipline. They also do not decide whether an agency embraces crime-reduction strategies that result in racial disparities. Yet when disparities or other systemic problems do occur, rank-and-file officers are quickly demonized and blamed for those outcomes. There is no question that rank-and-file officers must be held accountable for their actions. However, if the systems in which they operate are flawed, even good officers can have bad outcomes.”

“If we are to achieve real and sustainable reform in law enforcement,” continued Davis. “Our focus must shift from the police (those individuals sworn to uphold the law) to policing systems (the policies, practices, and culture of police organizations).”

Despite difficulties, efforts at police reform are continuing. Voters in at least six states approved police reform measures in the election earlier this month.

November 23, 2020

Sustainable police reform won’t be easy and it won’t happen by cutting funding for police departments, says the former chief of the San Diego Police Department.

“It’s not about defunding the police,” said retired chief Shelley Zimmerman. “It’s about refunding the community.”

Police have become the last resort for handling many social problems that have nothing to do with criminal behavior, said Zimmerman. But society has so far failed to provide the resources to deal with problems like addiction, homelessness, and mental illness. As a result, these problems land on the shoulders of the police.

“It’s not a crime to be homeless,” she said. “But how do we help? Regrettably, jail is sometimes the only provider. That’s wrong.”

“We need to focus on repairing or rebuilding our social safety net,” she said, “to allow for intervention long before a person is in crisis and turns to the police.” This is not a problem that can be solved by law enforcement, she said. “The solution has to come from all parts of society.”  

Reform will cost more money, not less money, said Zimmerman. “Don’t take away funding for the police, but provide funding for other critical services.”

Zimmerman delivered her remarks remotely as part of Case Western Reserve University’s Siegal Lifelong Learning program. A former Clevelander, she served as the first woman police chief of a major American city from 2014-2018. Zimmerman had served more than 30 years as a San Diego police officer when she was tapped to become the department’s chief in 2014. Her instructions from the mayor were explicit: ‘Turn the department around.’

At the time, the San Diego department was reeling from a series of sexual misconduct scandals involving officers. Zimmerman immediately pledged to instill a culture of excellence, down from the top and up from the bottom.

One of her first actions was to invite the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct an independent assessment of the SDPD to identify critical issues and begin the process of restoring community trust in the department.

Zimmerman knew that real change would take time and would need to be continually refreshed. It would also require the active support of the various factions within the police department – police officers, supervisors, civilian employees, union officials – as well as the community at large. “The more people you bring to the table, the better the outcome,” she said.

She wasted no time getting to work. Within a year she had terminated 11 officers and many others had resigned or retired under threat of termination. It was perhaps a testament to the dire straits the department found itself in that the union did not resist her efforts. “All they insisted was that each officer receive due process,” said Zimmerman.

Enforcing standards of conduct and performance was critical, she said.  “It does no good to have high standards if you do not enforce those standards.”

Though police departments everywhere – including San Diego – are facing questions and criticism over their use of force, Zimmerman said the use of force by police is much less common than most people think. In 2016, less than 1 percent of all San Diego police calls (0.9 percent) resulted in police use of force, she said.

She believes that continuous improvement should be the goal of all police departments. Police today must be adaptive, willing and able to learn and re-learn constantly, community-focused and global in their thinking, she said.

Most importantly, police must see themselves as part of the community.  At San Diego’s police academy, she said, “We teach community policing philosophy. We are not an occupying force. We need the support and cooperation of our community.”

November 21, 2020

Completed my virtual presentation for the annual conference of the International Association of Emergency Managers on Wednesday. The talk went pretty well, though doing it virtually was a little strange. Apparently, the internet service we have at home provides us with fairly low bandwidth and we were operating right on the edge of connectivity. But we shut off everything else in the house that was drawing bandwidth – plus all the lights and the washing machine, just to be sure – and we managed to squeak by.

The conference was supposed to be in Long Beach, CA, but was conducted virtually as a result of the ongoing pandemic. When it was originally scheduled, I seriously considered taking the train from Ohio to California, just to do it. I am not afraid of flying – though no power on Earth could have gotten me into a Coast Guard helicopter back in those golden days when I served in that perpetually cash-strapped organization – but a couple of days on a train, with nothing to do but sit around, read, and watch America’s post-industrial landscape roll by through the large unwashed windows, sounded pretty good.

The title of my talk was ‘Same Planet, Different Worlds: Bridging the Gap Between Law Enforcement and Emergency Management.’  Since I have worked in both fields, it was a topic that I was quite familiar with. The main point of the talk was that although law enforcement and emergency management may seem similar, they are in fact virtually opposites in several fundamental ways.

Except for the handful of people who actually do it, no one in this country knows anything at all about emergency management, but most people – having seen a million episodes of ‘Cops’ – think they understand American law enforcement. Most people, of course, are mistaken.

Here’s a quick introduction to law enforcement in America:

American police departments use an organizational model and administrative practices developed in the period just after the civil war. That is, the Abraham Lincoln/Robert E. Lee civil war, not the impending civil war that will be starting any day now. If you look at the organization chart from virtually any large police department from 1930 and compare it to the same department’s organization chart today, you will not see a significant difference. You might not see any difference at all. The highly bureaucratic and severely hierarchical organization of police agencies makes them virtually impervious to innovation.  Good thing the nation hasn’t changed much since 1870.

The last great technological innovation in American law enforcement was when they put two-way radios in police cars – around 1935.  If you need a police officer today, the process is exactly the same as it was during Franklin Roosevelt’s first term. You call a central dispatch center on a telephone, someone answers, and they use a radio to send a police officer to your location.  There have been lots of technological advances since then – computer-assisted dispatch, DNA analysis, COMPSTAT, automated license plate readers, and so on – but these are process improvements on the margins. The fundamental concept of operations of American law enforcement hasn’t changed in nearly a century.

Police are the only government employees – you know, deep state bureaucrats – who are empowered to kill Americans, with the possible exception of executioners at state and federal prisons. Of course, since most states refuse to reveal who actually performs lethal injections, we don’t really know who most executioners are.  But, in any case, executions are rare – 22 in 2019 – while police kill about 1,000 of their neighbors and fellow citizens each year. That might not sound like many, and in a country of 330 million maybe it isn’t, but every police extrajudicial killing is a failure of the criminal justice system. And American police kill far more citizens than do police in any other modern industrialized nation. American police have a lot of assigned responsibilities, but they are not supposed to be juries, judges, and executioners. But while police are empowered to take your life – and their actions may or may not be seriously reviewed if they do – entry requirements for law enforcement jobs in America are frequently the same as entry requirements for minimum wage retail or food service jobs. Given the enormous authority and discretion we bestow on police, you might be pleased to know that in Ohio police officers must complete 737 hours of state-mandated training to be certified. That might sound impressive, until you learn that barbers in Ohio must complete 1,800 hours of training to be certified, and cosmetologists must complete 1,500 hours. But that’s probably not something they mentioned on ‘Cops.’

November 20, 2020

It’s not about racist cops.

There are racists in every occupation.  But the vast majority of them work for organizations that do not tolerate racist behavior and do not hesitate to hold their members accountable for their actions. Perhaps someday we’ll be able to say the same about America’s police departments.

American law enforcement is broken. This might come as a surprise to some residents of leafy suburbs and quiet small towns. But their police departments are not immune. Today, a ‘warrior cop’ mindset, a near-total lack of accountability, poor discipline, insufficient training, inadequate funding, and a toxic subculture that fetishizes toughness, secrecy, and victimization have severed the bonds between police and many of the communities they are sworn to protect.

Difficult, dangerous, and psychologically destructive, there is nothing easy about police work.  American police straddle the fault lines where the tectonic plates of American society – violence, race, inequality, poverty, drug abuse, and social malfunction – grind away. Police are problem solvers, report-takers, counselors, and, when real trouble threatens, blue-clad rescuers. They need to know the law, the rules of evidence, de-escalation techniques, first aid, conflict resolution, and dozens of other subjects. Most importantly, police are empowered to use violence in defense of the community, and we expect them to make life and death decisions in split seconds, with only the sketchiest information.

But the complexities of police work don’t excuse brutality, racial discrimination, and other misconduct. In fact, the critical nature of the work makes poor performance far less tolerable.

Holding individual officers accountable for misconduct is necessary, but it is nowhere near enough. To make real progress, we need to hold police agencies accountable and force them to implement needed reforms. Since the 1960’s, numerous local and national commissions have made recommendations for improving American law enforcement, but as a nation we have never demonstrated the will to make changes.

We can do better. As Harry Truman once said, “The country has to awaken every now and then to the fact that the people are responsible for the government they get.”  We can’t leave it to those most frequently victimized. And we can’t leave it to the police.

Not that they are unwilling to change. Police agencies across the nation have pursued reform for decades. Today, police forces are significantly more diverse than they were 30 years ago, crime prevention is data-driven, rules governing use of force have been adopted, citizen review boards are common, and community policing programs are widespread. Many departments are working hard to improve.

But fundamental problems remain.

Too many police see themselves as warriors, rather than guardians. They are occupiers, not members of the communities they patrol. Police organization, training and tactics reinforce this mindset.

Politically powerful police unions, ill-conceived qualified liability, and uncritical support from misguided ‘law-and-order’ advocates have virtually eliminated police accountability, demoralizing committed officers and destroying public trust and confidence in their agencies.

Police training at all levels is insufficient. The complexities of the job, the critical nature of the work, and the risks we assume if police fail are not reflected in the amount of training police officers receive.

Our low-tax, no-frills approach to government is starving police agencies and is killing Americans. Low pay, lack of equipment, and too few officers are daunting obstacles to high performance.

Working almost entirely beyond the view of their supervisors, police officers are rarely subject to organizational discipline. In many departments, rules, regulations and procedures are routinely ignored.

Police subculture emphasizes aggressive policing, maintaining complete control of every situation, never showing weakness, and an ‘us versus them’ worldview.  A perfect recipe for violent confrontations.

We know the problems and we’ve been suggesting solutions for decades. Real change won’t be easy and it won’t be fast. But it can happen. It’s past time we started.

May 30, 2020

Recently, two Cleveland men who had been wrongly imprisoned for more than 30 years were freed when a key witness against them recanted his earlier testimony.

News accounts of the story emphasized the decades the men were imprisoned for the crime they didn’t commit. But when I heard more details of the story, I was struck by the fact that they had originally been sentenced to death. Only a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1978 that declared Ohio’s then-capital punishment statute unconstitutional saved their lives.

Of course, in 1981 Ohio passed a revised death-penalty law and has conducted executions sporadically ever since.

The story of the two released men – and of a third man who was convicted with them but had been paroled after serving a mere 28 years – was told by author Kyle Swenson in his book, Good Kids, Bad City.

In the book, Swenson writes that before investigating this case, he had always assumed that the criminal justice system had safeguards or guardrails to prevent innocent persons from being sentenced to death. I suspect that many Americans believe that as well.

Unfortunately, they are not correct.

The American criminal justice system works largely as designed.  But few people understand what it was actually designed for. And it can’t stop a wrongfully-convicted person from being executed.

Actually, to say our system was ‘designed’ at all is something of a misnomer.  The criminal justice system that we use – more accurately, the systems, as each state writes its own rules of criminal procedure – has evolved over many centuries. The rules and procedures we use today have been cobbled together from disparate parts, leftover theories, good ideas, rampant prejudices, and lofty assumptions over a period of 400 years.  The oldest parts of our criminal justice system predate the United States Constitution by centuries.

So, what is the purpose of our criminal justice system?  Discover truth? Dispense justice?

Unsurprisingly, no.

The overriding purpose of our system is to reach a decision, hopefully while protecting the rights of the accused.  We need a way to decide how to handle allegations of criminal conduct and we want a system that minimizes the possibility that innocent people are convicted.

If the purpose of the system was to understand what really happened – to discover the truth – our rules would be a lot different. First, there’d be no such thing as inadmissible evidence. Any information or evidence that could help determine the truth of an allegation would obviously be allowed.

Also, we wouldn’t have an adversary system.  If we wanted truth, we’d have a system where the state, the victim, and the defendant worked together to find out what really happened. We wouldn’t use a system where each side has an incentive to obscure the truth and discredit certain information.

So, our system does work. There are no ties. Every case is ultimately decided, one way or another.  But truth, justice, and even fairness are not part of the deal.

Which brings us to the death penalty, an irrevocable act that ought to be taken very seriously. There is no argument in favor of the death penalty that can overcome the fact that our criminal justice system is neither intended to nor is capable of discovering the truth. The question then becomes, how many innocent people are we willing to kill to preserve a punishment whose deterrent effects are unclear?

See also: Does the Death Penalty Deter Crime?

https://deathpenalty.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=000983

April 5, 2019

During my so-called career I spent more than twelve years as a law enforcement officer, including nine years as a police officer in Cleveland, Ohio.

Law enforcement is a remarkably educational occupation. And the lessons you learn are sometimes burned into your psyche.  Not everyone has the opportunity to work in law enforcement, so for those who never donned the uniform, here are a couple of things I learned during my law enforcement career:

1. It’s not personal. 

Don’t make it personal, be professional.  You are not the most important person in everyone else’s life.  What other people do usually has nothing to do with you. When you put on a uniform, everybody you encounter will respond to the uniform, not to the person inside.

2. Life is unfair.  

No surprise here, but it bears repeating. Not everybody has the same opportunities. Some kids have doctors and lawyers for parents, others have knuckleheads or drug dealers. No one gets to choose their parents or the circumstances in which they will live their early years. Bad things do happen to good people. Victims aren’t always at fault. Disease, disaster, and death are random, and life can be tragically short.  People don’t get the life they deserve, they get the life they get. 

3.  Violence is never the answer.

It’s just not. As Americans, we’re surrounded by violence: physical, verbal, emotional, economic. We glorify it. Violence is pervasive at the movies, on TV, on videogames, at school, and next door. Police are empowered to employ violence in the interest of public safety, not because they want to, or because they are well-trained or well-prepared to do so, because mostly they aren’t, but because there is no one else. Whatever the short-term effects of violence, the long-term effects are always negative. Always. That doesn’t mean that police should never employ violence, even deadly force.  The reason the police exist is because somebody has to be authorized to use violence in support of the public good. But there is always a cost – to the community and to the officer.

4.  Everybody just wants to get along.

Maybe not everybody, but certainly the vast majority of people. It doesn’t matter where they live. It doesn’t matter how they look.  It doesn’t matter where they came from or where they want to go.  Most people just want to live their lives peacefully with dignity and respect. 

5.  People who live in the ghetto didn’t create the ghetto.

Don’t blame them.  Widespread disinvestment, loss of jobs, illegal dumping, greed, redlining, housing discrimination, inferior schools, industrial pollution, and all the other things that make some neighborhoods highly undesirable were not caused by the people who live there today. Large-scale economic, political, and social forces acting over decades created the inner cities that we struggle with today.  The people that live in the inner city – and the people that live in other areas of the community – are victims of these forces, not perpetrators.

6.  There are two sides to every street.

And two sides to every story. The first story you hear is not likely to be the complete story. So, it is important to withhold judgement or a decision until everyone else gets their say.

7.  The truth is out there. Way out there.

Good luck finding it. Police officers quickly learn that the people they are talking to are frequently less than honest. When the police are called to adjudicate a dispute, usually everyone involved is at least partially at fault, but that’s not how they are going to tell it.  (“So, you say she walked up to you and just whacked you with a baseball bat for no reason at all. Are you sure you didn’t say something to her first? Are you sure nothing at all happened before she hit you?  You know, she says it wasn’t quite like that…”)

Not everyone lies to the police all the time, of course, but it doesn’t take long before new police officers realize that they need to be skeptical of just about everything anyone tells them. Sometimes people misunderstand or misinterpret what they see, and sometimes they simply don’t want to tell the truth. And a few people seem entirely incapable of telling the truth. In the long run, this is pretty unhelpful to police-community relations and the mental health of police officers.

8.  Evil exists.

The human capacity for inflicting pain, suffering, and terror on other humans is, apparently, infinite. Although they get a lot of attention, spectacular incidents of depravity are rare. But casual evil – thoughtless, self-serving cruelties intended to damage another person – happen every day. 

9. So does kindness. 

Compassion, generosity, and kindness are more common than evil, although, as a cop, you probably wouldn’t know it.

10.  Criminals are regular people, except when they are not.

There are people who, for whatever reason, are simply unable to live decent lives.  They lie, steal, cheat, threaten, and abuse at every opportunity. While they are a very small percentage of the population, they commit the vast majority of crimes.  If your town has 100 burglaries a year, it doesn’t have 100 burglars.  It probably has two or three burglars.

But even the burglars next door are regular neighbors most of the time.  They shop at the same stores as you, put out their trash on the same days, and root for the same sports teams.

And most people who commit crimes are not actually career criminals.  They are people who made a pretty bad choice, or maybe a couple of bad choices, but they are not irredeemably bad. There is no criminality gene, no neighborhood where everyone is a criminal, no racial, ethnic, religious, or economic group that is composed entirely of criminals.

Of course, these are things that I learned, or had reinforced in my time as a police officer. My experiences are specific to a particular department at a particular time, and cannot represent the enormous variety of law enforcement experience. Other officers, with different backgrounds, different life experiences, and different perspectives would create a different list.

March 1, 2019

Photos from the Cleveland Police Historical Society

In 1975, when 12-year-old Edward Vernon told police he couldn’t identify suspects in a daylight murder that he claimed to have witnessed, angry detectives threatened to arrest his parents unless he identified the killers.

That threat set in motion a years-long chain of misconduct, incompetence, fear-based silence, and official malfeasance that resulted in the wrongful incarceration of three men for a total of 106 years.

More than 35 years later, prompted by a 2011 newspaper account of the trial that pointed out obvious discrepancies in Vernon’s testimony and described the shoddy police investigation, Vernon recanted his story, leading to the release of two men who had been imprisoned for more than 35 years for a crime they didn’t commit. At the time it was believed to be the longest wrongful incarceration in U.S. history.

The author of that 2011 newspaper article was 25-year-old Kyle Swenson, a reporter for the weekly Scene Magazine in Cleveland. Today, Swenson is a reporter for the Washington Post, and yesterday he spoke at the Cleveland City Club about the case, which he has written about in a new book, Good Kids, Bad City.

No physical evidence linked 17-year-old Ronnie Bridgeman, 18-year-old Rickie Jackson, and Ronnie’s 20-year-old brother, Wiley Bridgeman, to the robbery and murder of money order salesman, Harry J. Frank, on the sidewalk in front of a white-brick inner city convenience store in Cleveland’s predominantly black east side on May 19, 1975. The prosecution’s case depended entirely upon the testimony of a 12-year-old neighborhood child who told police he saw the crime. The three young men had alibi witnesses who told police that the arrested men were not at the store during the crime. Two witnesses to the crime failed to identify the suspects. Other neighborhood residents told detectives that the young men were innocent, and several residents provided police with the names and descriptions of other men who were said to have committed the murder. Even the FBI provided police with the names of other possible suspects.

But while some leads were investigated by Cleveland detectives, their follow-up was perfunctory. They were focused on the three young men in custody and seemed uninterested in information that might clear them. There was still no physical evidence to link them to the crime.

Despite the weakness of the prosecution’s case, all three men were convicted and sentenced to death. They escaped execution only because the United States Supreme Court struck down Ohio’s death penalty law in 1977.

Because the three young men had requested separate trials, their sentences were not identical. Thus, in 2003, twenty-eight years after being arrested for a crime he did not commit, Ronnie Bridgeman was released on parole. But his brother, Wiley, and their friend, Rickie, remained in prison.

By the time he was freed, Ronnie Bridgeman had changed his name to Kwame Ajamu in an effort to distance himself from his past. But he couldn’t escape from the reality that his brother and friend remained wrongly incarcerated. Ajamu began contacting people who might help him in his efforts to free Wiley and Ricky. In 2011 he contacted the young reporter, Swenson.

As Swenson recalls, he was not immediately convinced that Ajamu’s story was true. Even an inexperienced journalist knew that many people lie to reporters. At the time, Swenson told the City Club audience, “I was less jaded than I might be today.”

But after meeting Ajamu; listening to his story over a series of interviews; studying trial transcripts, police case files, and other documents; and talking to dozens of people about the case; Swenson became convinced of Ajamu’s innocence.

One person who would not talk to Swenson was Edward Vernon, whose testimony convicted the three men. Vernon had overcome drug addiction, which Swenson said was connected to the fear and guilt he felt about his role in the convictions. Vernon was afraid that if he became involved in the case again, he would relapse.

But even without Vernon’s help, in 2011 Swenson published a detailed account of the crime, the trial, and its aftermath in the weekly Scene Magazine. And nothing happened. Vernon would not come forward and recant his testimony and the legal system was unmoved.

“I thought there would be some redress,” said Swenson. “That something would happen. I felt that I had let Kwame down, that the story hadn’t done what we wanted it to.”

But the story had caught the attention of attorneys at the Ohio Innocence Project. They believed Ajamu, Jackson, and Bridgeman were innocent, and that Vernon was the key. They pressed him to come forward, and in 2014, he did. In November, 2014, Vernon spent a harrowing day testifying at a court hearing. He recanted his earlier testimony and withstood hours of aggressive questioning by a district attorney. As a result, Jackson and Bridgeman were freed.

Vernon testified that his participation in the original trials had ruined his life. He had told detectives that he couldn’t identify the three men. But detectives had threatened to jail his parents if he did not identify them. “You don’t know how much pain and suffering I have been going through throughout these years,” he said in court. “You and nobody else knows. You can ask a thousand questions and it is still not going to free me from the pain and the hurt and the lies I had to live.”

Today, Ajamu, Bridgeman, and Jackson are free men. They have received compensation from the State of Ohio for the time they spent in prison, and a lawsuit they have filed against the City of Cleveland is pending. They have forgiven Vernon. “You can’t live with that hate for decades,” Ajamu told Swenson.

This story is not just about a kid who lied, said Swenson. “This case was a system failure.”

When he first began talking to Ajamu, Swenson was unconvinced. He had thought that the criminal justice system had guardrails to prevent people from being wrongfully imprisoned. But nothing as solid as a guardrail exists. The safety features that do exist were simply inadequate.

Like any system failure, the sequence of events that led to the wrongful conviction was lengthy. Had things been done differently at any point in the failure chain, the outcome could have been different. Had the police been better trained, or had detectives been more diligent, had the detective’s supervisors noted the discrepancies in the case, had the prosecutor been willing to question the police investigation, had neighborhood residents not been afraid to tell the police what they knew, had defense attorneys presented a better defense, had the jury demanded more proof than the testimony of a frightened 12-year-old, had any of these things happened, three innocent men might have been spared decades in prison.

It is chilling to think that had the death sentences remained in effect, all three men would have been executed.

“One of my fears,” said Swenson, “is that people would see this case as old history, that things like this don’t happen anymore. But that’s not the case at all. These cases are not old. They are still happening.”

For a comprehensive account of the trial, investigation and aftermath, see Good Kids, Bad City, by Kyle Swenson: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250120236

February 20, 2019

The most powerful position in any police department is patrol officer.

While chiefs and deputy chiefs and commanders can set policy, decide budget priorities, discipline members, and apportion resources, it is the patrol officer – almost always working without supervision – who determines how effective or ineffective the police department will be.

Law enforcement agencies may not be the only organizations in which power flows upward, but they are certainly one of the few.

Don’t let the use of military ranks fool you.  Police departments are among the most unmilitary organizations in America. In the U.S. Army, soldiers go where they are sent by the organization. When they leave the FOB or the post or wherever, they are going out to conduct a specific mission.   The actions of individual soldiers are coordinated within the squad, the actions of individual squads are coordinated within the platoon and the actions of individual platoons are coordinated within the company. Soldiers receive intensive training, – vastly more than police officers – their missions are planned in detail, and they are under near-constant supervision by more experienced and knowledgeable personnel.  None of these things are true about law enforcement officers.

When an incident occurs, and police officers arrive on the scene, it is the first officers there – virtually always patrol officers – who take the initial action and set the stage for whatever follows.  Whoever shows up later – sergeants, lieutenants, SWAT, detectives, etc.- can only build on the foundation laid down by the individual patrol officer who was there first and who might be the least experienced, lowest-paid member of the entire organization.

Because of the unpredictability and complexity of law enforcement operations, and the overriding need to respond as quickly as possible, police departments do not have the option to plan their responses in detail. Every police officer has experienced arrival at a chaotic scene, not knowing what happened or who to believe, receiving conflicting information from various strangers, and having to make an instant decision about what to do without access to the lawyers, advisers and other policy-makers of the organization.  It is no wonder that one of the absolute imperatives of police culture is to support the actions by the person on the scene, regardless of how the situation ultimately turns out.

Finally, when considering who has the real power in a police department, think about how departments employ deadly force.

If you are going to be shot by a police officer, it is not going to be because the chief, in consultation with his highly experienced command staff and the prosecutor, having reviewed all applicable rules, regulations and laws, decided that in the interest of public safety you should be eliminated.  It will be because a patrol officer, whose training was limited by budget constraints, who has only the sketchiest information about what you are doing or who you are, who may not be able to see you clearly in the dark or the rain, who has seen countless victims of violent crime, who knows that he or she is alone, and who has only fractions of a second to decide how to respond to what he or she sees, made the decision to shoot.

January 2, 2019

Image: Cleveland, Ohio police recruits, 2019, Cleveland.com