Salon.com > Police

The way to curb police abuse

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:03:00 +0000

The NYPD is mired in yet another scandal this week — one of many in the last 12 months — over Commissioner Ray Kelly’s participation in a controversial police training video.

Some politicians and policy analysts are calling for a new independent agency to oversee the NYPD — something Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the city won’t do.

MetroFocus looked at the problems with the NYPD’s current monitoring system and, for comparison, at how other cities have used independent government watchdogs to reduce corruption.

A Troubled Run for the NYPD

The most recent scandal emerged last week, when NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne admitted that Kelly had participated in the filming of the highly controversial police training movie, “The Third Jihad” — a claim Browne had denied just a day before.

How the feds fueled the militarization of police

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 14:00:00 +0000

The militarization of America's metropolitan police forces was on full display in recent months as police from Los Angeles to New York cracked down on Occupy protests, decked out in full SWAT gear and occasionally using strange pieces of military hardware.

Less well known is that police forces in small towns and far-flung cities have also been stocking up on heavy equipment in the years since Sept. 11, 2001.

In spite of strained city and state budgets in local years, the trend has continued thanks to generous federal grants. According to a new story by the Center for Investigative Reporting, $34 billion in federal grant money has financed the past decade's shopping spree.

To learn more about the trend, I spoke with G.W. Schultz, who co-authored the story with Andrew Becker. (Also worth a look is the slide show accompanying the story.)

Mayor Bloomberg’s army

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has his own army! No, it's not a private security firm, like Blackwater. It's actually, according to the mayor, the New York City Police Department.

Bloomberg, again threatening vaguely to make that presidential run that the American people are decidedly not calling for, told MIT last night that he doesn't even need to be president, because all of his autocratic desires are fulfilled by running America's most populous city as his private fiefdom.

“I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world. I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom’s annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have,” Mayor Bloomberg said.

I'm not entirely sure what he means by having his own "State Department." The city's independent nonprofit tourism agency, maybe? But he didn't mention that his army also comes with its own international (and questionably legal) intelligence-gathering apparatus, just like the CIA and FBI, except without any sort of oversight, congressional or otherwise.

Daily News cheers Occupy Wall Street raid, until Daily News reporter is arrested

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:07:00 +0000

When the NYPD, on Mayor Michael Bloomberg's orders, raided and evicted Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park last night, the editors of the New York Daily News, the city's ostensibly liberal tabloid newspaper, cheered.

"Bravo to Bloomberg's Occupy Wall Street eviction," goes the headline on its editorial published this morning.

The fact that the eviction was done in violation of a court order doesn't bother them:

The amorphous agglomeration known as Occupy Wall Street had transformed a space intended for open community access into a round-the-clock shantytown — and they claimed that the First Amendment guaranteed their right to do as they pleased.

This is not constitutional wisdom. This is self-important, self-indulgent bilge. And a Manhattan Supreme Court justice who ordered a halt to the eviction pending a hearing needs to emphatically so state.

Police beat Occupy protesters at UC Berkeley

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:03:00 +0000

(UPDATED BELOW)

This video taken Wednesday on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley shows some of the most extreme incidents of police violence during the Occupy movement:

The affiliation of the officers in this video is not entirely clear (I've asked the man who shot it for more details and will update if I hear back). We do know that both campus police and Alameda County sheriffs were involved in the effort to evict Occupy protesters from Berkeley's campus yesterday.

"The police will always assess the situation and do what they feel is appropriate and safe," UC Berkeley spokeswoman Janet Gilmore told a local ABC affiliate last night. "Obviously we would like to end this as peacefully as possible, with a minimal number of arrests. But, you know, you have to respond to the situation that's presented to you."

Our militarized police forces

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 22:40:00 +0000

The Atlantic has a good piece on one of those subjects that I am slightly obsessed with, the ongoing militarization of American police forces. As a New Yorker, I am accustomed to being greeted by cops bearing assault rifles bravely monitoring the morning commute, which is more than slightly jarring, but the depressing thing is that that sort of sight quickly becomes normalized.

As former peace officer and Iraq veteran Arthur Rizer and co-author Joseph Hartman write, the police arms race has very clearly spread well beyond the urban borders of the only cities to actually be targeted by foreign terrorists.

Now, police officers routinely walk the beat armed with assault rifles and garbed in black full-battle uniforms. When one of us, Arthur Rizer, returned from active duty in Iraq, he saw a police officer at the Minneapolis airport armed with a M4 carbine assault rifle -- the very same rifle Arthur carried during his combat tour in Fallujah.

The extent of this weapon "inflation" does not stop with high-powered rifles, either. In recent years, police departments both large and small have acquired bazookas, machine guns, and even armored vehicles (mini-tanks) for use in domestic police work.