Tag Archives: Police

HOW COPS HARASS CITIZENS — THE WETASKIWIN, ALBERTA WAY

Police harassment is a serious issue. No one wants to be hassled by the cops. That’s true, but the vast number of contacts between the police and the public are really good. However, there’re rare times where some cops overstep their civil boundaries and exercise questionable behavior when dealing with citizens. Then, there’s time for fun.

Most police harassment complaints are trumped up or leave something out about what started the conflict. Over my years in policing, I can honestly say I never saw a case where an officer intentionally went overboard without there being some sort of provocation on a citizen’s part. Maybe that’s because I’m from Canada where we’ve got polite policing down to a science—especially our red-coated Mounties who start reading suspect rights with a “Sorry”.

I won’t say legitimate police harassment doesn’t happen. But, I will say there’re usually two sides to a story. Speaking of stories, I got a laugh the other day when a friend shipped me a letter from Wetaskiwin’s local newspaper. For those who’ve never heard of Wetaskiwin, it’s a small town 40 miles south of Edmonton, in the Province of Alberta in western Canada. Like so many Canadian prairie towns, Wetaskiwin has the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) maintaining their right.

They’ve also got an RCMP Sergeant with a great sense of humor. Part of the Wetaskiwin, Alberta RCMP detachment’s community service is maintaining a newspaper crime page. This article was so bang-on that I had to steal the content and post it on DyingWords. With no apologies for plagiarism or copyright invasion, here’s how the good Sergeant replied to this reader question:

“I’d like to know how it’s possible for police officers to continually harass people and get away with it?”

Sergeant Dooright: “First off, let me tell you this—it ain’t easy. In Wetaskiwin and rural surrounding areas, we average one cop for every 505 people. Only about 60 percent of our cops are on general duty (or what you might refer to as “general patrols”). This is where we do most of our harassing.

The rest are in non-harassing units that don’t allow them to contact with day to day innocents. And, at any given moment, only one-fifth of the 60 percent of general patrols are on duty and available for harassing people. The rest are off duty. They don’t want to be bothered harassing people on their own time.

So, roughly, one cop is responsible for regularly harassing about 6000 permanent residents at any given time. When you toss in the commercial business and tourist locations that attract people from other areas, sometimes you got a situation where a single cop is responsible for harassing 15,000 people a day. Or maybe even more.

Consider this—your average cop’s eight-hour shift runs 28,800 seconds long. This gives that cop only two-thirds of a second to harass a person. Then they have just another third of a second to sip a Tim Horton’s coffee, scarf a donut, and then find a new person to harass. This isn’t an easy task. Far from it.

To be honest, most cops aren’t up to the challenge day in and day out. It’s just too tiring. What we do is utilize some trade tools to help narrow down those people we can realistically spend time giving quality harassment.

PHONE: People will call us up and point out things that cause us to focus on a person for special harassment. For example, “My neighbor is beating his wife” is a code phrase often used. This means we’ll come out and give somebody some special harassment. Another popular one is, “There’s a guy breaking into a house.” The harassment team is then put into action.

CARS: We have special cops assigned to harass people who drive. They like to harass the drivers of fast cars, cars with no insurance, or drivers with no licenses and the like. It’s lots of fun when you pick them out of traffic for nothing more obvious than running a red light. Sometimes you get to really heap the harassment on when you find they have drugs in the car, they are drunk or have an outstanding warrant on file.

LAWS: When we don’t have phones or cars and have nothing better to do, there are actually books that give us ideas for reasons to harass folks. They’re called “Statutes”. These include the Crimes Act, Summary Offences Act, Land Transport Act and a whole bunch of others.

Laws spell out all sorts of things for how you can really mess with people. After you read the law, you can just drive around for a while until you find someone violating one of these listed offenses and harass them. Just last week, I saw a guy trying to steal a car. Well, the book says that’s not allowed. That meant I had permission to harass this guy.

It is a really cool system we’ve set up, and it works pretty well. We seem to have a never-ending supply of folks to harass. And we get away with it. Why? Because, for the good citizens who pay the tab, we try to keep the streets safe for them, and they pay us to “harass” some people.

Next time you’re in small-town Wetaskiwin, Alberta, Canada, give me the old “single finger wave”. That’s another one of those codes. It means, “You can harass me.” It’s one of our favorite harassment go-aheads—and I love getting away with it.”

REAL CRIME WRITING FROM A REAL DETECTIVE

By day, Adam ‘R’ is a true-to-life, serving Detective. By night, he advises screenwriters and novelists on realism in their craft. Every day Adam lives in the policing line-of-fire and today he shares his thoughts on DyingWords.

Did you see the story about the Detective Sergeant that can’t sleep until the case is solved? You know the one, where this maverick cop breaks all the rules to nab the crook… because this time…it’s personal?

It’s not only cliché, it’s not reality. Detectives work heinous cases every single day and yet they balance their case loads with their regular lives away from work. They still pick up groceries, spend time with the kids, pay bills, and try to remember to put the trash out just like everyone else, regardless of how sickening, depressing, or exciting their work life is.

If you don’t intend to delve into your detective’s personal life, you should probably ask yourself: Are the circumstances of your story’s “case” really going to cause your detective to be so emotionally invested? Convince your reader that this case is something special. It needs to be for it to be plausible that your detective forgets about the rest of daily life.

Next, there’s the maverick cliché. It takes far more than workaholism and a lacking social life to be a great detective. It takes knowing “the rules” inside and out, and being the best at playing WITHIN those rules! Detectives are investigating law-breakers; they generally shouldn’t be the ones breaking the law. Breaking the rules usually means letting the bad guy go free eventually.

As the author, you should understand the consequences your detective faces for not playing by the rules. Just as you want to keep your story moving, real detectives don’t want to waste time when a life is on the line or a suspect might be moments from getting away.

So how do we play by the rules and keep the tempo up? Just like your brilliant detective, learn when the Miranda Admonishment and search warrants are required and what the exceptions are. Research the legal term “exigent circumstances” to learn when your detective can legally boot the suspect’s door without a search warrant.

Another tool your detective should be familiar with is a “telephonic search warrant”.

To obtain that search warrant quickly, your detective doesn’t need to run back to the office and start typing. Armed with an audio recorder and a telephone, your detective can get a prosecutor and a judge on the phone and verbally explain the probable cause for the search warrant. Once the judge says the warrant is approved, your detective can now legally bust down the door. There is obviously a little more to the real legal paperwork process after the recorded phone call, but consider it another tool your fictional detective has for doing things the real way.

You’ll notice that I keep referring to your protagonist as a “Detective.” It’s important to note that “Detective” is usually a formal rank, one that is one step above a uniformed patrol officer. The rank is often abbreviated as “Det.” and is often equivalent to a Corporal. A detective’s main responsibility is to follow up on the investigations that are started by the uniformed officer’s initial response to a crime.

One of the departures from reality that authors commonly make is to give their investigating protagonist a rank higher than Detective, usually to make the character seem more important or experienced. The reality is the higher the rank your character holds, the less likely s/he is to be actually playing an active role in the investigation. Or worse, s/he is more likely to be a controlling micro-manager that the subordinate Detectives dislike.

The rank of Sergeant (or Detective Sergeant) is that of a line-level supervisor, overseeing a team/squad/bureau of Detectives. The Detective Sergeant is the one that will be reviewing all of the incoming reports from the patrol division and assigning workable cases to the Detectives s/he supervises. The Det. Sgt. usually reviews and approves search warrants or reports before being officially submitted. Most importantly, the Det. Sgt. is the one who acts as a buffer between the Detectives and Management.

The rank of Lieutenant (or Detective Lieutenant) is usually considered middle-management. Think of Lieutenants as the spreadsheet obsessed bosses that are mainly worried about budgets and statistics, just like any middle-manager found in the corporate world.

If you’ve chosen a specific department for your character’s employment, do the research on their rank structure. For example, LAPD has multiple tiers of Detective Rank, such as D-2 or D-3. Some agencies don’t utilize the Lieutenant rank. In the United States, West Coast police agencies rarely have “Majors” or “Colonels” as titles in their rank structure, whereas those ranks are more common in Eastern and Southern states.

If your character is a Det. Sgt., a Det. Lt., or a DCI (for our UK authors), you might be overshooting his or her rank versus the true assignment. None of this is to say you shouldn’t use artistic license in your storytelling.

However, nailing the realities of the police work aspect will make the suspension of disbelief a little easier when the rest of your story leads somewhere a little more off the wall.

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Adam R. is a real-life, serving Detective in Southern California who also provides technical advising to authors and screenwriters. Adam asked that his last name be masked out of caution for conflict of interest. To learn more about the realities of police work, and how it applies to creating realistic fiction, visit Adam’s blog:

http://www.writersdetective.com/

Follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/writersdetctive

POLICE BRUTALITY

Police brutality is an ugly term that we don’t want to hear. Unfortunately it’s part of the necessary and sometimes nasty business called policing. Fortunately, though, it rarely occurs.

What triggered this post is an email from Kristen, a DyingWords follower, who wrote –

I’m a sophomore in high school and we are in the process of writing a research paper. My topic is about the use of force by police and I was wondering if you could just give some pros and cons about police brutality, it would help me tremendously.

I was a cop for a lot of years and I’m not going to pretend that cases of police brutality don’t occur. I can say that I never, personally, saw a case of truly excessive force although I’ve seen some pretty violent struggles during arrests. Occasionally officers went a little overboard (myself included) during the heat of the moment, but I never saw a case where someone got thumped out where they didn’t instigate it themselves.

First the question “What’s the definition of police brutality?”

I did a little Googling and got this definition from good ol’ Wikipedia:

Police brutality is the wanton use of excessive force, usually physical, but can also occur in forms of verbal attacks and psychological intimidation by a police officer. It is one of several forms of police misconduct, which include: false arrest, intimidation, racial profiling, political repression, surveillance abuse, sexual abuse, and police corruption.

There’s a fine line separating the justified use of force in effecting a lawful arrest and what would be deemed excessive. Virtually all jurisdictions allow police officers to use “as much force as is necessary” in their powers of arrest. Any force beyond what is necessary can be considered an assault and officers can be held criminally responsible for applying excessive force.What would be considered excessive to the point of being brutal, cruel, or savage would have to be weighed on a case by case basis and a close look at the particular circumstances.

I’d have to say that real police brutality would be something more than just mere excessive force where an individual officer got a little carried away. Probably the best definition would be “an unacceptable act of violence used by agent(s) of the state on civilized citizen(s)”.

Over the years the majority of police brutality claims have come from riot, protest, or strike incidents where the police have weighed in with clubs and beat defenceless citizens. Some of these had racial overtones. Unfortunately, there are also many incidents where a single individual has been brutalized at the hands of police officers.

The Rodney King case from Los Angeles in 1991 is one of the highest profile cases of true police brutality.

King was a construction worker who became nationally known after being beaten by LAPD officers following a high-speed chase. A witness videotaped the takedown which showed four officers surrounding King, several of them striking him repeatedly with fists and batons, while other officers stood by. The footage was aired around the world, inflaming outrage in cities where racial tensions were high, and raising public concern about police treatment of minorities.

Four officers were charged with assault with a deadly weapon and use of excessive force. They were acquitted at state level which triggered the 1992 Los Angeles Riots in which 53 people were killed and over 2,000 were injured. The acquittals led to the federal government’s obtaining grand jury indictments for violations of King’s civil rights. The four officers were tried in federal court with two being found guilty and imprisoned. The other two were again acquitted.

Vancouver, Canada, is not without a black eye from police brutality.

Robert Dziekanski was a Polish citizen who was Tasered five times by four Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers during an arrest at Vancouver International Airport in 2007 and died at the scene. This too was captured on video by a bystander and showed that several of the Taser applications took place when Dziekanski was in handcuffs on the floor.

A massive investigation took place which recommended that the officers not be criminally charged for using excessive force. This was not well received by the public who demanded an independent inquiry. This took place over a two year period resulting in the judge severely chastising the officers for not only their brutality but in their deceit during the inquiry. These officers are currently going through perjury trials and may well end up in jail – not for assault – but for lying to the inquiry.

One of the biggest criticisms in police brutality accusations is the lack of impartiality when the police investigate themselves. Most jurisdictions now have agencies of independent oversight, however those are not without flaw as they rely on investigative expertise by hiring ex-police officers. The Independent Investigations Office in British Columbia, for instance, is horribly dysfunctional and over half the staff have been fired or quit.

There’s also a number of citizen-based watchdogs. Some are simply anti-authority cop-haters with an axe to grind or left-wing, bleeding heart, civil rights groupies.

One of the seemingly credible groups is Copwatch. It’s been around since 1990 and is a network of activist organizations in the United States and Canada that observe and document police activity while looking for signs of police misconduct and brutality.

My experience is that the vast majority of police officers are very sensible, controlled people who have a difficult job. The sad reality is that individual cases of police excessive force still occur and will always occur. Most are incidents where tempers flare and things get carried away.

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