Do you know why bad behavior is rampant among police officers in the United States? Are they not among the best trained in the world? How many people still believe they are the best with police brutality becoming a common feature?
Akatarian research has revealed certain systems that may be responsible for those bad behaviors, especially when dealing with races other whites.
The top three reasons on the list are Qualified Immunity, Confidential Records, Police Unions and Fear-based Training.
Revelations from recent images and video footages of police brutality shows how Police disproportionately mistreats black and brown people compared to whites. Police is more likely to act professionally when dealing with whites than other people of color.
Qualified Immunity
This is a legal concept that has helped American police escape prosecution for a lot of bad behavior, many of which results in death of a civilian.
Qualified immunity means a public official is immune from lawsuit unless their exact conduct has already been ruled unconstitutional in a previous case.
Plaintiffs must show that their constitutional rights were violated and that those rights were “clearly established.” And according to the Supreme Court, “the clearly established law must be ‘particularized’ to the facts of the case.”
For instance, an employer refuses to hire a qualified candidate simply because that candidate has no experience working for the employer. How can they get experience unless they have previously worked for the employer?
Akatarian learnt that a Judge can throw out a case simply because of a tiny variation. For example, A federal appeals court dismissed a civil-rights lawsuit filed against a Georgia deputy who tried to shoot a family’s dog, but instead hit a 10-year-old boy, Dakota Corbitt, lying down on the ground.
Instead of having to face a $2 million lawsuit for excessive force, Coffee County Deputy Sheriff Michael Vickers was entitled to “qualified immunity” for his actions and cannot be sued in federal court, according to the ruling of Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in July, 2019.
This is because there has never been a previous case when a cop was trying to shoot a dog and then hit a 10year old kid.
Although, there is a Bill in congress to end qualified immunity, but there is low enthusiasm about its being signed into law. This is because of what people termed as the President’s mindset about police brutality.
Confidential Records
Even if cops do get to face consequences, there is no record available for reference to a previous misconduct. Police get to keep record of misconduct confidential in most US States.
But no other organisation has that loophole to erase all traces of previous misconduct.
“People have data about who went to a movie last weekend or how many books were sold or how many cases of the flu walked into an emergency room. And I cannot tell you how many people were shot by the police in the united states last month, last year or anything about the demographics.”
James Comey, former FBI director said at a hearing in 2016
Researchers and reporters looking into alleged crimes and acts of violence by police officers, all turned to Bowling Green State University, BGSU, criminologist Philip M. Stinson.
Stinson, 50, built a database tracking thousands of incidents in which officers were arrested since 2005. His data has shown that even the few police officers who are arrested for drunken driving are rarely convicted and that arrests spike for cops who have been on the force 18 years or longer. This is contrary to prior research showing it was mostly new officers who were acting out.
Training
Seth Stoughton, Law Professor, University of South Carolina said American police are some of the best trained in the world. But what they are trained to do is the problem.
Stoughton, a former state investigator, told Patriot Act that Police officers are trained to not hesitate or complacent. “Be ready to act instantly, not react. Sometimes even before a threat fully manifests. New cops are made to see people around them as potential threats.”
Police department allegedly spends 8 hours training officers in conflict de-escalation and 129 hours training them with weapons and fighting.
Dave Grossman, the self acclaimed proponent of kilology has taught police that they are natural born killers. “you are men and women of violence…if you properly prepare yourselves, killing is not that big a deal.”
Police Unions and Prosecutors
The Unions don’t just work to get cops better pay. Many of their contracts shield bad cops from legal consequences.
Adam Gross, Police Oversight Working Group, told AlJazeera that police contract itself institutionalizes the private understandings among police officers that make it harder to identify and root out bad behavior.
Police Unions secure paid leave for cops who kill, make it impossible to investigate anonymous claims and protect the identities of violent officers.
Sometimes, district attorneys find it difficult to bring charges against officers because of a reciprocal relationship.
Prosecutors are the ones that charge cops for crime, but they also need cops for investigations, to produce witnesses and to testify in Court themselves.
Micheal Eric Dyson, Professor, Georgetown University noted that prosecutors are the ones that determine whether or not a police person is held accountable for whatever offense or infraction.
“But prosecutors depend upon the police and as a result of that they cannot hold them to account. Its like a collusion. If I don’t have their backs now, the next time around they are not gonna have mine.”
Micheal Eric Dyson
A clear example of collusion happened when Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley received $10,000 from Fremont’s police union for her re-election campaign. The donation came while her office investigated three officers’ actions in the fatal separate shootings of two people in 2017.
The three police officers were subsequently cleared of wrongdoing. One of them, Sgt. Jeremy Miskella, is president of the police union.
O’Malley’s campaign reported the donation from the Fremont Police Association on Nov. 8, 2017. Less than a month later, on Dec. 6, O’Malley’s office cleared Fremont Officer James Taylor of any wrongdoing in the fatal shooting death of Nana Adomako in February of that year.
And on Feb. 13, 2018, O’Malley’s office cleared Miskella and Detective Joel Hernandez in the killing of a 16-year-old pregnant Antioch girl, Elena Mondragon, on March 14, 2017.
