Cops Charged After Dashcam Video Released

Image courtesy of Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

If you haven’t seen it yet, the below dashcam video of a New Jersey man being stopped, beaten, and otherwise abused by police — without any apparent justification or cause, as it turns out — is pretty disturbing to watch. 

According to a New York Daily News article about the incident, Marcus Jeter, the man being arrested in the video, was pulled over by police who accused him of fleeing and attempting to take one of their firearms during a struggle. None of which was true.

Alleged Police Misconduct Caught on Tape

Jeter had this to say about what happened during the encounter:

“The next thing I know, as he’s coming around the car, the glass gets busted and all the glass goes in my face,” Jeter told WABC. “My hands are up. As soon as he opens the door, one of the officers just reached in and punched me in the face. As he’s trying to take my seatbelt off, he’s elbowing me in my jaw. And I’m like ‘Ahhh!’ and he’s like ‘Stop trying to take my gun! Stop resisting arrest!’”

Police initially charged Jeter with several felonies, all of which could have landed him in prison for as much as five years.  But all those were later dropped after an alleged police cover-up was disclosed.  Several officers involved have since been charged with a variety of crimes stemming from the incident, including assault and falsifying reports, after a second dashcam video was turned over to Jeter’s defense attorney. It shows pretty clearly what actually happened that night.

And, the only crimes it appears to show are those being committed by the police.

One of the officers has already pleaded guilty to a “tampering” charge, but the cases against two other officers are still pending. I’m willing to give the officers the benefit of the doubt, of course, just like any other accused person. It’s important for all the facts to come in and to wait and see what a judge and jury determine to be true about what happened that night.

But, I also can’t fathom why any cop anywhere would be okay with assaulting and verbally abusing an innocent person, arresting him without probable cause, charging him with crimes he never committed, lying about all of this in police reports, and then believing that somehow he would get away with it.

To me, that’s not only about an individual officer’s willingness to engage in illegal, unethical, and antisocial behavior, but also smacks of an overall culture of corruption. The officers must have felt they could act with impunity, if indeed they did do what they appear to have done in the video and what’s been alleged in the formal charges against them.

Either that, or there’s some other reasonable explanation that hasn’t been revealed yet.

It’s awful to think what might have happened to Jeter had his attorney not requested the video, or had police not released it. An innocent man would likely have gone to prison for doing nothing more than running across some cops with an apparent axe to grind.

Have a safe weekend!

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Of Technology, Policing, and Corruption

At first I was disappointed that this week’s episode of This American Life was a rebroadcast from 2010. I’m glad I listened anyway, though, because it was an excellent podcast about people who refused to remain silent, even when it was in their best interest to simply shutup.

Image courtesy of Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Of the two stories, the most riveting was about Adrian Schoolcraft, a former New York City police officer who secretly recorded his conversations with fellow officers and police administrators for nearly a year and a half back in 2008 and 2009.

The aftermath of that — multiple internal affairs investigations, a book about corruption in the NYPD based on the recordings, and Schoolcraft himself being thrown into a mental hospital by a deputy chief to silence him — is incredibly compelling.

The tapes also figured prominently in the recent court decision declaring the NYPD’s stop and frisk practices to be unconstitutional.

Graham Rayman wrote about the tapes and their content in a series of articles for the Village Voice back in 2010:

They reveal that precinct bosses threaten street cops if they don’t make their quotas of arrests and stop-and-frisks, but also tell them not to take certain robbery reports in order to manipulate crime statistics. The tapes also refer to command officers calling crime victims directly to intimidate them about their complaints.

As a result, the tapes show, the rank-and-file NYPD street cop experiences enormous pressure in a strange catch-22: He or she is expected to maintain high “activity”—including stop-and-frisks—but, paradoxically, to record fewer actual crimes.

This pressure was accompanied by paranoia—from the precinct commander to the lieutenants to the sergeants to the line officers—of violating any of the seemingly endless bureaucratic rules and regulations that would bring in outside supervision.

In other words, the tapes reveal the dysfunctional backdrop against which policing occurred in at least one New York City precinct in recent years. Other retired NYPD officers have confirmed the same types of issues in their precincts as well, but the overall scope of any problems in the NYPD isn’t clear.

An unexpected driver (for me, at least) of this reported dysfunction is the use of statistical information to predict and prevent crime. Compstat, the NYPD’s ground breaking approach to so-called “hot spot” policing, turns out to be one of the villains in Schoolcraft’s tale.

Image courtesy of nokhoog_buchachon / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

What should be a tool to effectively manage police resources and direct them at trouble spots in the city became instead a weapon wielded against police officers to control and monitor their work on the one hand, and as a set of troublesome facts to be manipulated and minimized by administrators on the other.

It’s a troubling reminder that research, technology, and information is rarely neutral in its application. Political interests often trump the truth, and Schoolcraft’s ordeal is a graphic example of that.

Society too often views technology as a saviour. Unfortunately, it can’t replace the human element, at least not in policing.

What are your thoughts? Can we use technology to reduce police corruption (police body cameras?), or is that just yet another blind alley?

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