That subject line comes from the email that Internal Affairs detective Chris Dunn, who was investigating the shooting of Nathaniel Sanders, sent when he figured out that he could use Sanders’ prior criminal history to justify the fact that APD shot the 18 year old young man while every officer on the scene had apparently forgotten to turn on their dashboard camera.

Which, as Chief Acevedo said, raises a few red flags, as IA’s job isn’t to be scary-smart about “making a causation” that excuses a shooting, it’s to investigate the truth of what happened. If Internal Affairs is on the record as trying to provide justifications when the police, um, shoot young black teenagers with no evidence of wrongdoing, then it surely does a bit of damage to their credibility as an institution.

Luckily, Acevedo agrees, and the detective was fired yesterday. But isn’t it kind of disturbing that we have to consider the facts that A) the memo leaked and B) Acevedo responded correctly to be luck?

Labels: APD, art acevedo, nathaniel sanders II, police violence

posted by Dan   permalink   0 Comments

Obviously sex and guns are things that tend to get a lot of attention in America, and when you combine the two in such a picture-perfect way – including, of course, the opportunity to run a gratuitous shot of a smiling blonde woman with an exposed midriff and tiny miniskirt and still calling it news – you’re likely to find a wire story with legs long enough that it’ll run in Kansas City. But this story of Midland County sheriff's deputies being fired and/or suspended without pay for handing a service weapon – an assault rifle, no less – to a waitress at a Round Rock restaurant and asking her to pose for a “Chicks Who Love Guns”-style photo was noteworthy to me for a reason that had less to do with the picture of the pretty lady in question, or even the potential public safety hazard that would be caused if it became standard operating procedure for sheriff’s deputies throughout the land to turn over their assault rifles to any woman unfortunate enough to find herself in an occupation that required her to flirt with them in order to make a living.

No, what I found noteworthy about this is that it’s pretty much the only time I can remember the police actually arresting each other.

I’ve been reading lately about cases like Daniel Lozano, who was exonerated of attempted murder charges thanks to the work of a private investigator who proved that the officer who arrested him lied about whether Lozano fired first. Or Dewey Pressley, the Florida officer who was caught lying on camera about the cause of an accident, and whose punishment, after weeks of public outcry that followed the video becoming a YouTube sensation and national news, was a brief paid suspension. Or the case in Philadelphia, where a police officer assaulted a woman in a convenience store – again on camera – and who then sent three fellow officers in to the store in an attempt to convince the store’s proprietor to hand the tape over to them. None of the officers who tried to retrieve the tape were found to have committed any wrongdoing, and punishment for the assaulting officer was left undetermined.

And then there’s this case in Round Rock.

Williamson County gets a tough rap for being particularly unyielding when it comes to crime, and that’s rarely something that we celebrate. From my observations and experience, that too often translates into kids who’re busted with a joint having the book thrown at ‘em, as they used to say.

But it is kind of refreshing to hear that these deputies, after requesting “some form of professional courtesy”, were instead told that it didn’t work that way, and arrested.

No charges were filed, but that’s reasonable – they didn’t actually commit a crime, just a major professional and ethical (not to mention public safety) violation. The punishments ranged from a letter of reprimand for the deputy who was part of the party, but who opted to stay inside rather than go out for the pictures, to short suspensions without pay for the ones who watched as it happened, to firing for the one who gave the assault rifle over to the waitress.

That seems more or less fair to me. The thing that seems to get lost in all of the thin blue line, “professional courtesy” concepts is that the people who are being policed need to trust the people charged with policing them. If we’re to accept that the police can shoot at us and fabricate a police report, or rear-end our cars and claim in a sworn affidavit that we hit them, and then face no punishment more severe than a brief paid vacation, respect for their authority diminishes. Witness this comment from the Statesman article about the PI in the Lozano case:

Last time I was called for jury duty I stated clearly and unequivocally that everything cops say, whether under oath or not, are very likely to be lies. Most of the other prospective jury members nodded in agreement when I said it. It’s clearly a majority opinion among the populace now. The police have totally lost credibility in this state. It’s going to take a very long time before the police regain any sort of credibility in Texas.

Now, I’ll admit that this case in particular is more or less a circus. Like I said – I don’t really care about the picture (though I do feel kinda icky about the inherent power imbalance of a group of police all joining in to convince a young woman to take a sexy photo for them) and I suspect that the woman, despite being handed an assault rifle as thou gh it were a toy, did not really represent much of a threat to public safety. (The presence of the three other deputies, who presumably had kept their weapons, probably negated any threat she may have posed if it had all been a clever ploy on her part to wreak havoc throughout the streets of Round Rock with a machine gun.) But it does help a bit to know that there are consequences – at least some of the time – for police who break the rules. If we can trust that the police are being held to a standard, it serves to restore some of the credibility they’re lacking. Circus or not, that’s a good thing.

Labels: abuse of power, cameras, police violence, recording, williamson county

posted by Dan   permalink   0 Comments

I read last week in the Statesman that APD officials are reviewing their patrol car camera policies in regards to when officers must turn on their devices. The paper claimed that the new policies will likely require officers to film any incident in which they detain or try to stop a suspect, and will also likely require backup officers to also record incidents.

Police officials are also reviewing whether an officer's failure to follow the policy should fall under disciplinary guidelines. (As an aside, I have never handled a DWI case on either side of the bench where an officer forgot to turn on his or her camera to record a person walking the imaginary line.)

This policy review comes after the fatal shooting of Nathaniel Sanders II by Senior Police Officer Leonardo Quintana, whose camera was not recording when he fired at Sanders. If I were an officer who found myself in a deadly situation and believed my actions were justified, I would definitely want that recorded as the video would serve to protect and exonerate me. And, if the shooting was not justified, Mr. Sanders' family and the rest of our community deserves to be told the truth.

I commend the APD top brass for reviewing these policies and hope that they do implement policy that requires all potential stops and detentions to be recorded.

Even better, I would like to see the cameras automatically activated as soon as their overhead lights or sirens are turned on or as soon as they respond to a dispatch. Or a type of rotating digital loop like security cameras use in which the camera is constantly recording. Surely we're technologically capable of that.

Labels: abuse of power, APD, cameras, leonardo quintana, nathaniel sanders II, police violence, policy, recording

posted by Kristi Couvillon   permalink   0 Comments

I was at a cookout this weekend, and got dragged into a conversation about Kathryn Winkfein, the 72-year old woman who was tasered twice by Travis County sheriff’s deputy Chris Bieze during a traffic stop. The story’s pretty controversial for a couple reasons: One, it, um, involves a 72 year old woman being shocked by the police. Two, the woman was literally asking for it. You can hear on the video that the words out of her mouth that immediately preceded the tasering were, “go ahead, I dare you.”

So, she didn’t get a lot of sympathy from the cookout crowd. A lot of talk ensued from the gathered 20- and 30-somethings about old people who think that the rules don’t apply to them, and what else was the officer to do, and she shouldn’t have gotten so belligerent. (The video also features a shot of her telling him “Give me the f**king thing and I’ll sign it already”, in reference to the speeding ticket that started the confrontation.)

Thing is, none of that is relevant here. What’s relevant is that this isn’t what tasers are for. The police don’t have tasers to teach lessons to people who think that they’re above the law. They don’t have tasers because police officers, when they’re not sure how to handle a situation, need to be able to shock a suspect. They don’t have them to punish people for being belligerent, or even to give people who ask for it what they deserve.

The APD, when introducing tasers a few years ago, hired medical experts Edward Racht and Pat Crocker to assure citizens of the weapons’ safety. They drew their research from two reports, including one by a British doctor named Anthony Bleetman, who was at the time the only independent doctor who had done a peer-reviewed study on the subject. The APD has since widely ignored the key item outlined in the report:

“Police officers are legally and morally required to use the lowest level of force necessary to control a situation and to de-escalate at the earliest opportunity. Use of force options start with good communication skills, then escalate from unarmed physical skills (holds, restraints, strikes), deployment of incapacitant sprays, up to the use of batons. At present, when facing levels of threat that exceed the capacity of an officer deploying a baton, there remains only the use of a firearm. Police agencies have searched for "less lethal" weapons to fill the operational gap between the baton and the gun."

Or, as it’s put more succinctly at the conclusion:

“The Advanced TASER is to be used only as an alternative to firearms and any outcome measures should be considered in this context.”

The medical reports that were used to determine the taser’s safety explicitly state (and are consistent with Amnesty International policy on torture) that the weapons are only to be used when the officer’s only other choice is to shoot the suspect.

We can pretty safely assume that Bieze wouldn’t have shot Winkfein if he hadn’t had a taser. So all the rest – whether she was acting like she didn’t have to follow the rules, whether she deserved it, whether she’s responsible for escalating the situation (she is) – all of that is irrelevant. What’s relevant is that the taser was a disproportionate response, and that it was misused.

And that’s true in many taser situations, not just this one. It’s true of the don’t tase me, bro kid. The taser wasn’t sold to the public as a cool new way for police to zap suspects. It was sold as a way for them to stop people who would have otherwise been shot.

EDIT: Furthermore, APD policy specifically outlaws the use of tasers on a suspect like Ms. Winkfein. From the Austin Police Department Policy On Taser Use document:

The TASER will not (emphasis theirs) be utilized under the following circumstances:
a. Against any subject already handcuffed.
b. The suspect is fleeing from officers for a misdemeanor or non-violent offense (emphasis mine), unless the suspect is armed and poses an immediate threat to the officer or another person.
c. Against persons displaying passive resistence (passive resistance means a subject offers no physical resistance to arrest, simply goes limp, or makes no overt act of aggressive behavior)
d. When flammable liquids or gases are pregnant.
e. Against a woman who is obviously pregnant, a child, which by physical stature and size appears to be under the age of 14, a disabled individual, or an elderly individual (emphasis mine), as defined by section 22.04 of the excessive use of force involving the device.

Now, the Travis County Sheriff’s Department is a different entity than APD, and I’m not sure that this document applies to them (I’m the non-lawyer in the office – any of the lawyers want to chime in?), but regardless – if APD finds it important to enumerate restrictions against the use of tasers on people involved in misdemeanor offenses and the elderly, then there’s really no reason to believe that it’s totally safe and warranted to taser a 72-year old when the Sheriff’s Department does it.

(graffiti image via Lola May’s Flickr stream)

Labels: APD, police violence, tasers, Travis County Sheriff's Department

posted by Dan   permalink   0 Comments