If that's addressed to me, then I'm not sure where you got that impression from. I made no assumption about there being a single principle, what I actually asked was: "What are the principles that American policing is founded on?", which was intended as an open-ended request for information. Yes, I could go and google for it, but I know there are members here with first- and second-hand experience of law enforcement in the US who could give a more reliable account. (In fact, I did google, and did find reference to Peel's principles from some of the bigger US police forces, but that didn't say that they were actually the basis for policing rather than a comparison.) I know a couple of people who have been in the police in the UK, and from them I get the feeling that while adherence to the principles may vary over time, they are always there for reference, something to be returned to when practice drifts too far away from the ideal.

If, as you seem to be suggesting, each local force makes up its own principles, or even does without, then it's not surprising there may be large variations in how they go about their task, even leaving variations in the requirements locally.

FWIW, we don't have a national police force in the UK, either.

Thank you for your response, your text boxed list suggested a different intent in your post. I appreciate the clarification. Based on my discussion with the LE folks whom I know personally, the emhpasis on a theory of law enforcement called "community policing" waxes and wanes depending upon a variety of political influences and the preferences of police chiefs. My sources include the career officer mentioned previously, my brother in law, and 11 members of our local Knights of Columbus Chapter.
2 patrol officers
1 homicide detective
1 detective in the "wife beating and child molesting" department
2 federal officers who mostly chase down parole violaters and keep tabs on child molesters who have served their sentences
2 DPS officers, active
1 DPS officer, retired, who spent years in undercover narco work
1 Federal Agent; Treasure
1 Corrections Officer, county
my FBI agent buddy (RICO & Narco task force) was recalled to the home office (Washington DC) about two years ago.

Each of these gents has a different take on LE, but they are all on board with "professionalization is good!" as a principle. All but two are former military men.

Contrast that with my encounters with county cops in Southern Texas (south of I-10). State Troopers? Professional to a fault. County Sheriff constables and others? Loose around the edges.

In the two trials where I served on a jury the difference in education level, training, and aura/appearance of professionalism between the PD witnesses and the Sheriff's office was marked and I noted in the second trial that the defense attorney badgered that witness with the entire basis being that county peace officers are poorly trained and this guy must have made a mistake.

As it worked out, this tactic wasn't effective, as the local PD's video evidence was a slam dunk, but it was interesting to note that this attorney was aware of the differential between various law enforcement bodies and tried to exploit that on his client's behalf.

When I asked my DPS friend about that, after wards, he shared with me that it was a valid tactic for an attorney since basically, the city PD's and the state can be a lot pickier in whom they hire as they offer a bit better pay and benefits, which counties don't have the budget to do.

My intention was to share the foundation of policing in the UK, which would affect the OP's expectations of how the police should behave. I was wondering if part of the disconnect was that different things were expected of the police in the US. Yes, an awful lot of that may have been implicit, rather than spelt out in my post. :)

Thank you for your response, very interesting.

Pistols were made illegal in 1997 (with specific exceptions). You can have an autoloader shotty (subject to approval and the issue of a home offcie licence) provided it only holds 3 rounds in the mag. If you want to have a rifle then you have to give a very good reason to the police and be in a rifle club (and be rather well off).

I used to be in a practical shooting club in the UK in the 1980s. Great fun...until came the Hungerford massacre and our toys got taken away.

This was what I alluded to in a different thread when I stated that
small departments will be more attractive to the less ambitious and less competent. As well as this, the lack of support and training also will have an impact and on top of this, there is less management oversight with more opportunities for corruption as it would be easier to buy a force of two police officers than, say the entire NYPD.


This is a recipe for budgetary inefficiency as well as injustice.

In the abstract for that paper;

A geographically-resolved, multi-level Bayesian model is used to analyze the data presented in the U.S. Police-Shooting Database (USPSD) in order to investigate the extent of racial bias in the shooting of American civilians by police officers in recent years. In contrast to previous work that relied on the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Reports that were constructed from self-reported cases of police-involved homicide, this data set is less likely to be biased by police reporting practices. County-specific relative risk outcomes of being shot by police are estimated as a function of the interaction of: 1) whether suspects/civilians were armed or unarmed, and 2) the race/ethnicity of the suspects/civilians. The results provide evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans, in that the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is about 3.49 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police} on average. Furthermore, the results of multi-level modeling show that there exists significant heterogeneity across counties in the extent of racial bias in police shootings, with some counties showing relative risk ratios of 20 to 1 or more. Finally, analysis of police shooting data as a function of county-level predictors suggests that racial bias in police shootings is most likely to emerge in police departments in larger metropolitan counties with low median incomes and a sizable portion of black residents, especially when there is high financial inequality in that county. There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.

My guess is that Mumbles is talking about Black friends - who have a similar chance of being shot whilst unarmed as a white has of being shot whilst armed.

UK Police have been found to have unlawfully killed armed robbers when the armed robbers guns were not close enough to be a threat.

Yes, elsewhere I have pointed out how the UK Independent Police Complaints Authority investigates every shooting, and records every time that UK police even draw their Tasers, let alone guns. And that the UK system is far from perfect - and indeed is subject to improvement, but at least there is the attitude that such police actions should be subject to oversight, and that the oversight will be made better when problems are discovered.

Does the paper cost money to download?

Question: was the ethnicity of the officer in each shooting examined as a data point, or not? For example, where I live the odds are that any cop shooting anyone would be Latino/Hispanic. That's because about 3/4 of our peace officers, more in some counties, are of Latino/Hispanic heritage. Also, where I live, the odds that a police officer has a complaint filed against him or her is significantly higher if the officer is black and the filer is Hispanic. There are layers of problems in the relationships between a given community and the PD, or other peace officer, that don't lend themselves to simple explanation. (This info from the 30+ year LE colleague previously mentioned).

The other problem with the study is that I am not surprised to see more crime density, and more violent crime density, and thus a higher likelihood of an encounter with gunplay (not to mention paranoid cops) in our larger metropolitan areas. In the other thread, about the OKC shooting, I think OKC is a big enough metropolitan area to run into that problem (in terms of scale). I am not sure how big, or rather how small, a city or municipal district needs to be for that likelikhood to drop off significantly. This is one of those scaling things (and how so many things do not scale linearly) is likely a tough nut to crack.

The paper is in HTML at the link I gave

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/art...l.pone.0141854

And from the thread that prompted Nessie's initial post here

Amigo, I live in the part of Texas that helped get LBJ elected. For your amusement, look up Jim Wells County and Duval County. I friend of mine's aunt, for example, got charged with voter fraud a few decades ago for trading food stamps for votes. She had a better lawyer than her two associates, both of whom ended up in jail. We live in an area where small time crookery is very common. What's disturbing is when serious drug gangs, like MS 13, start to send tendrils/feelers into our geographic area. (See above, my friend who worked for FBI RICO/Narco team). Small time crooks seem to be a manageable problem but as you noted the county deputy is as likely to be in on it as not.

My apartment got broken into in 1988. I was one of a half a dozen B&E's that night. They eventually found the pair who did it, to include the 19 year old son of the county sheriff. The defense attorney asked me to drop charges, to which I responded with "No. Not gonna happen." It was interesting that my CO got a letter from that attorney's office complaining that I was interfering with a court case. (Our JAG handled it, and I got a phone call from some assistant the DA that this was just standard harassment, don't worry about it).

@Jimbob: thanks. I'll take a look at the piece. I hate to say this but the time period is waaaaaaaaaaay too short. So far, I appreciate the hard work that went into this, but I find their data collection to be missing a vital point: do you understand what I'm saying?

This was in the highlighted portion of the abstract I quoted;

Quote:

There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates

I appreciate that point, and I am not confident with my reading so far that the problem with scaling (and population density) was addressed, though there are a number of "we need more research points" that show an desire to unpack this more effectively. I'll need a few more days to go over this before further comment, since the abstract does not suffice for my concerns. Those concerns are: when we (the missus and I) both retire(prolly within the next decade) do we live in a city or not?
If yes, large medium or small?
Crime rates matter in that decision. A lot.

Those names rang bells, but I hadn't realised it was in connection to LBJ. But, yes, thanks for concrete examples, as opposed to just reason.


<derail - not to do with the US>
As an aside, it is a reason why I dislike list-based proportional voting systems, because as long as a party has sufficient support, they'll get seats and the constituents who actually select the representatives are not the voters, but the party officials. There will tend to be lots of small parties, so coalition governments would be likely, and a small party could decide that the main price of its support would be a minor ministry... regardless of which larger party is in power.

This is conducive to patronage, which could easily lead to corruption.

Personally, I prefer direct elections for representatives but not first past the post but alternative vote, as those dynamics favour the least unpopular candidate, as opposed to the one with the largest plurality of support. This would make it easiest for the constituents to vote out their representatives.

yeah, outside of the bright lights of big cities, a whole lotta skullduggery seems to go on.
Yeah. We still live that fact 'round here. One example of many.

Another remarkable case of small time crookery in the land of not quite right.

Yes, wherever voters don't occasionally change the party in power, patronage breeds. It happens in the UK as well - but arguably less frequent than in the cases you have linked to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._Dan_Smith

This shows you most likely haven't surfed any gun forums associated with NFA firearms in the last two years. :) A search for 41P brings up this; https://www.atf.gov/file/100896/download

The bold portion is the most important part of the new regulation. Prior to this regulation going into force any unlicensed individual who wanted an NFA firearm had to ask the local sheriff for a signature (permission) on the tax stamp application. No reason had to be given for denying the signature. The most common complaint I ever read about was denial of signatures. I never heard of anyone who was able to sue to get a signature.

Imagine a racist CLEO who denied signatures to any race he didn't like. Doesn't take a big stretch of the imagination to believe that it could happen in the USA. Obama was the best thing to happen for gun owners since 1934.

I think that everyone would agree that zero would be a good number to have, but in the real world this isn't possible.

I'd also point out that truly unjustified shootings rarely happen, officers will have a reason for pulling the trigger, the question is not if they could justify the shooting, but whether the reasons given are a) true based on the evidence, and b) a reasonable course of action given the circumstances.

It is extremely rare for a cop to decide to shoot and murder someone for the hell of it it is far more likely that they make an error of judgement in a moment and that leads to them firing when they did not have to, or in some cases accidently discharging a weapon.

Now the reality of the situation is that no Police Department in the world is free of those mistakes. Even here in NZ we have had people killed by the police accidently, for instance the death of Halatau Naitoko in 2009 where a police officer missed the suspect and hit the innocent 17-year old driver behind them. In the UK, probably the most famous case recently was Jean Charles de Menezes who was mistaken for a terrorist after the 22/7 attempted bombings and gunned down on the London Tube. So yes, in reality there will never be a perfect system.

So the real question is, given that no system is perfect, what number do you consider to have become problematic, and what is the justification for that number?

One can have the attitude that zero is the goal, and that any shooting (fatal or otherwise) shall automatically be investigated by a central independent body to determine whether it is justified.

That is how it works in the UK - I can't speak for elsewhere, except that it is certainly not the case in the US.

Shootings in the US are investigated by their Internal Affairs Bureau. For smaller sheriff units and the like that don't have an IAB, police shootings are generally investigated by the State Police.

That makes you:
(1) Wrong
(2) Guilty of hyperbole
(3) Oh, did I mention wrong?

Feel free to keep making stuff up, though, as some of my countrymen make stuff up about people outside of our borders. It's a global hobby, it seems.

Here's hoping that you are a "more humane mikado." If you live in Japan, please be advised that some of the nicest, and most polite, racists I ever met were in Japan. They were Japanese. I was the foreigner/gaijin: I got it. (And completely Off Topic, that trip to Japan cemented my appreciation of Sapporo beer, a six pack of which I just brought home from the store, today. Cheers!).

@PHantomWolf
Now and again, the local DA initiates the investigation on its own.

Yes, which are not independent nor centrally controlled. If they were centrally controlled, we'd have national statistics for the US by default.

That's not how this country works. You really need to take a look at our Constitution, and the 50 state Constitutions, to understand how things work here. The underlying assumptions you carry with you do not fit us.

The battle between state and federal jurisdiction is older than our Constitution, exhibit A being the difficulty in passing agreement on the Declaration of Independence, and Exhibit B being that strange political mess called the Articles of Confederation. I call it growing pains.

There is the DoJ and the FBI. Given the seemingly disproportionate rate of shooting unarmed blacks compared to armed whites, I'd think there is a moral case for investigating police shootings (and any other potential abuses of the system governmental power at any level) to these bodies, just as various state laws were altered from above during the Civil Rights period.

You seem to misunderstand. Every shooting gets investigated. When a cop uses his weapon (at least in our city's PD) he or she is put on admin leave immediately and the circumstances (including the officer's testimony) is looked into. Your assertion that shootings are NOT investigated as a matter of course is borderline offensive. I suppose I ought to excuse ignorance, and I suspect that some investigations are more thorough than others. Not a surprise, as people are involved.

I hope that Bikewer can offer further (and more personally experienced) feedback as his time in LE was not a flash in the pan.

Congress has tried to mandate national statistics.

They were ignored. Basically the cop shops that didn't want to participate in a Congressionally ordered requirement to provide data just flipped them the bird.

But they are often internally investigated as opposed to being investigated by an independent body snd the statistics are not collected.

That's kinda where the problem lies, doesn't it?

All investigations are not wholly independent and impartial.

Why should German cops inform people in Germany of rights they do not have (in exact that form) based on a judgment by a court that has no jurisdiction in Germany?

Besides, the situation in which suspects in the USA need to be mirandized are in Germany commonly NOT handled by police, but by prosecutors and judges.

No cop in the UK has been convicted of an unlawful killing, whether a shooting that was suspect to say the least (de Menezes) or use of force (Ian Tomlinson) or the numerous deaths in custody. There is a chance, finally that cops will be held properly accountable for deaths with the Hillsborough trials.

So the UK is like the USA, cops are very unlikely to be punished for deaths. But they kill at a far lower rate. So, the reason is elsewhere.

The UK. It still has those parties.

There are a lot of different categories to consider, and in an armed society it's inevitable that there will be instances where deadly force is needed to counter armed criminals. But that's not really the heart of the problem; the big concern is the kind of shooting where there's no weapon, and often no crime.

I would argue that any instance of a police officer shooting and killing, or otherwise killing, an unarmed person who is not in commission of a crime should be a "never happen" type of event, that should be considered evidence of a systemic problem that requires remedial action. The deaths of de Menezes and Tomlinson both fall into this category; they're the only ones I can think of in the UK in the last fifteen years, and both are considered major issues. I'm aware of two such incidents in the US in the last couple of months - Magdiel Sanchez and Justine Damond. Somewhere in the 68 instances this year of police shooting people without weapons or who are not known to have had weapons, I would expect there are more instances; and it's worth pointing out that Sanchez would not be counted in this total, since he is considered to have had a weapon, nor would the case earlier this year of a person (whose name I can't recall) shot dead at a traffic stop because the officer believed he was reaching for the concealed weapon that he'd just stated he lawfully possessed.

Zero may not be an achievable number for unnecessary police killings, but it should be a number that serious efforts are made to achieve. As long as unnecessary police killings are routinely excused as the inevitable consequence of the second amendment, this will not happen.

Dave

what number do you consider to have become problematic, and what is the justification for that number?

Sorry, I thought that was obvious from the post. Any shooting of an unarmed person who is not in commission of a crime indicates a problem for which serious remedial action should be taken, because that is a "never happen" level of failure.

Dave

It means are are obligated to defend an officer when he panics and shoots a law abiding black man.

Police agencies vary wildly in regards to size, funding, and level of training. A large, well-staffed and funded department will very likely have a “shooting board” or something similar which is made up of officers/investigators assigned to the “Internal affairs” bureau.

“Internal Affairs” bureaus are often referred to by rank-and-file officers as “the goon squad” or similar epithets. They are not generally known to be the types to sweep things under the nearest rug.
However, in many smaller departments, the investigation of a shooting incident (or any major use of force) may fall to whatever investigative staff the department has, and the internal investigation may not be of the best quality.

It is fairly common for smaller departments to turn over such investigations to a larger department. Locally, with our many small municipalities, the chore is often handled by the St. Louis County police dept, which has high standards and well-trained personnel.

Also, a case can be simply addressed to the county prosecutor, and a complicated case may be referred to the Grand Jury system, which was done in the case of the Michael Brown case in Ferguson.
The Ferguson P.D. Knew they didn’t have the expertise to properly investigate the case so they called in county and the whole thing was referred to the county prosecutor and the grand jury.

It has to be admitted that in many cases around the country, and historically, there existed a “culture” in various departments that was indeed willing to sweep things under the rug, to withhold exculpatory evidence, to not listen to witnesses, etc, etc.
In Chicago, the department sat on the damning videotape of that shooting of the young man with the knife for over a year.
New Orleans was notorious for a long time in regards to corruption... Don’t know if they still have that reputation.

Police departments are often very leery of “civilian review boards” as these boards are political by nature and may be influenced by misinformed public opinion and media pressure. In the Brown case, the “narrative” that this poor, unarmed teen-ager was brutally gunned down for no reason circulated for months before the grand jury issued it’s results.
Some sort of uniform and impartial oversight would seem to be desirable, but getting something that every city, county, state, and backwater municipality would agree on might be difficult.

I am sure that the jury will find on the polices side and those great officers will be back on the streets soon enough.

Just over the weekend, here in Winnipeg we had a police officer shoot a civilian. The victim was armed with a knife and had just stabbed another police officer. The officer survived but the civilian died later in hospital.

Link to the story from CBC Winnipeg: Police watchdog probes shooting that left man dead in The Maples.

On the surface it appears this shooting may have been justified, but it's also possible the police tactical unit made some mistakes when responding to this incident.

In the UK the IPCC is generally not considered political.

https://www.ipcc.gov.uk/page/how-were-organised

Personally, I'd think that there would be a case for the DoJ to be given the responsibility and additional resources to investigate all police shootings as a matter of course.

Respectfully (and thanks for the informative post), can you ever think of any circumstances in which police investigating police will A/ be just, and B/ be seen to be just by the populace?