Demilitarization of police dead in the water

The demilitarization of the police in the wake of Ferguson is going nowhere according to Bloomberg News.
Even by Washington's amnesiac standards, the efforts to reform the 1033 program that makes military gear available to police departments faded absurdly fast.  Politico published a report about how "substantive action on the federal level is an uphill battle," and that lobbyists for the cops were likely to save the military gear program.
So they did. While the National Sheriffs Association declined comment, the Fraternal Order of Police made executive director Jim Pasco available to talk about how the skeptics—like Paul—were defeated.
"Nothing much has happened except that some members of Congress had kneejerk reactions to the optics of Ferguson or the rhetoric of Ferguson," said Pasco. "They thought there was something problematic about the equipment they saw on the streets. In the intervening period, some of them have come to see that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It’s not what the equipment looks like, it’s what its utility is."
According to Pasco, FOP members reached out to "maybe 80 percent of senators and half the House." Since militarization was at the greatest risk in the Democratic Senate, the disparity made sense. As McMorris-Santoro reported, the departing Senate's blockade on Republican amendments made it impossible for Paul to attach anything to a passable bill. And the clock's basically run out for reform. A new Congress is coming in, but the FOP doesn't see it as particularly likely to dismantle 1033.
"I'm not, for example, optimistic about Rand Paul or whasisname from Georgia—Rep. Hank Johnson, the real scholar," said Pasco. (Johnson, a Democrat from the Atlanta area, infamously asked a witness in the House Armed Services Committee if the island of Guam might one day capsize.) "We wouldn’t be talking about Ferguson if it wasn’t for the fact that a white police officer shot a young black man, but a lot of people didn’t want to jump on that specifically. They jumped on this militarization issue because it made them look like being in the mix on Ferguson without being in the mix on Ferguson. Rather than be proponents of good public policy, they were practicing that tactic of political opportunism."
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Grand Juries rarely indict police officers, not so for everyone else

The failure of a grand jury to bring back an indictment is extremely rare, according to the website FiveThirtyEight.com.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.

Ferguson Police officer Derek Wilson’s case was heard in state court, not federal, so the numbers aren’t directly comparable. Unlike in federal court, most states, including Missouri, allow prosecutors to bring charges via a preliminary hearing in front of a judge instead of through a grand jury indictment. That means many routine cases never go before a grand jury. Still, legal experts agree that, at any level, it is extremely rare for prosecutors to fail to win an indictment.

“If the prosecutor wants an indictment and doesn’t get one, something has gone horribly wrong,” said Andrew D. Leipold, a University of Illinois law professor who has written critically about grand juries. “It just doesn’t happen.”

Cases involving police shootings, however, appear to be an exception. Reuben Fischer-Baum has written, we don’t have good data on officer-involved killings. But newspaper accounts suggest, grand juries frequently decline to indict law-enforcement officials. A recent Houston Chronicle investigation found that “police have been nearly immune from criminal charges in shootings” in Houston and other large cities in recent years. In Harris County, Texas, for example, grand juries haven’t indicted a Houston police officer since 2004; in Dallas, grand juries reviewed 81 shootings between 2008 and 2012 and returned just one indictment. Separate research by Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip Stinson has found that officers are rarely charged in on-duty killings, although it didn’t look at grand jury indictments specifically.

There are at least three possible explanations as to why grand juries are so much less likely to indict police officers. The first is juror bias: Perhaps jurors tend to trust police officer and believe their decisions to use violence are justified, even when the evidence says otherwise. The second is prosecutorial bias: Perhaps prosecutors, who depend on police as they work on criminal cases, tend to present a less compelling case against officers, whether consciously or unconsciously.

The third possible explanation is more benign. Ordinarily, prosecutors only bring a case if they think they can get an indictment. But in high-profile cases such as police shootings, they may feel public pressure to bring charges even if they think they have a weak case.

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Philadelphia police shootings down 75%

Deadly police shootings in Philadelphia have fallen by 75 percent over the last year as the Police Department has implemented a number of steps to reduce the use of lethal force, reported the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

So far in 2014, police officers have shot and killed three people. By the same date last year, they had killed 12. And in 2012 by this date, officers had killed 16.

In a wide-ranging interview this week, Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey said he hoped that the trend reflected the department's shake-up in training and tactics, which range from adopting a "statement on the sanctity of human life" to emphasizing "reality-based" weapons training for officers.
Ramsey met with federal officials to go over a draft of a new Department of Justice report examining the Police Department's use of deadly force. A Police Department spokesman said they reviewed key points of the report and the feasibility of the federal recommendations. In May 2013, the commissioner invited the federal experts to examine the department's practices as part of a "collaborative review." The request followed a Philly.com report that documented a spike in the number of police-involved shootings despite a citywide drop in crime. As the new policies have been phased in, the total number of shootings to date - fatal and nonfatal - has plummeted from 48 in 2012 to 35 in 2013 and to 18 so far this year, according to the department.

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Maryland inmate: 'This is my jail'

A Maryland inmate Tavo White reportedly made $16,000 a month from smuggling drugs and cellphones into prison with help from accomplices, according to Metro.uk.
An FBI wire tap captured White saying, ‘This is my jail. You understand that,’ and claiming to control everything from contraband to mob hits within the prison.
White showered the female guards with gifts including cars and diamond rings. Four of those guards – Jennifer Owens, Katera Stevenson, Chania Brooks and Tiffany Linder – allegedly fell pregnant to White while he was behind bars
Owens had ‘Tavon’ tattooed on her neck and Stevenson had ‘Tavon’ tattooed on her wrist.
The details came to light after authorities busted a major smuggling ring inside the prison – and 13 female prison guards, seven inmates and five co-conspirators face racketeering charges.
Guards allegedly smuggled drugs and mobile phones into prison in their shoes for the ‘Black Guerrilla Family’, a gang which also operates on the streets of Baltimore.
All 12 officers have been suspended without pay, and the department is moving to fire them.
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Florida cans corrections secretary

Michael Crews, the embattled secretary of the Florida Department of Corrections, announced he will step down, after months of scrutiny involving abusive corrections officers, suspicious inmate deaths and a poor record of inmate healthcare delivered by private contractors, the Miami Herald reports.
Crews’ exit had been rumored for weeks.
It comes amid allegations of widespread agency corruption and the failure of Crews’ top law enforcement officer, Inspector General Jeffery Beasley, to investigate wrongdoing in the prison system. Crews’ deputy, Tim Cannon, will replace him on an interim basis. Crews, the sixth prisons chief in eight years, presided over the state’s largest agency, with 101,000 inmates, 56 prisons and 21,000 employees.
Florida's action comes only weeks after Mississippi's Corrections Commissioner Chris Epps  was indicted for corruption.
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Report: Federal BOP overcrowded and disfunctional

Michael Horowitz, the inspector general for the U.S. Department of Justice, issued a report which examines a range of issues in the Federal Bureau of Prisons and Justice Department, including civil rights enforcement, cyber security, management and law enforcement oversight, reported the Birmingham News.
Despite the fact that the inmate population dropped for the first time in decades, however, Horowitz noted that current projections indicate that prisons will be 38 percent over capacity by fiscal year 2018 - higher than today.
The $6.9 billion budget for the Bureau of Prisons in fiscal year 2014 was 25 percent of the Justice Department's discretionary spending, up from 18 percent in fiscal year 2010. The prison system has the most employees of any agency within the Justice Department, including the FBI, and is second only to the FBI in spending.
"First and foremost, the BOP must pursue strategies to reduce prison overcrowding," the report states. "It must also provide effective oversight of privately managed contract prison facilities, reduce the incidence of inmate sexual abuse, and prevent the smuggling of weapons and contraband into prison."
Sentencing reform advocates seized on the report as evidence that the federal government must do more to prevent long incarcerations of nonviolent criminals.
"Overcrowded federal prisons stuffed with nonviolent drug offenders are not only a waste of money, but eating away at public safety funding for other divisions within the DOJ," Families Against Mandatory Minimums counsel Molly Gill said in a prepared statement. "Building more prisons is not the answer, and back-end fixes like compassionate release, clemency, and expansion of earned time credits can only do so much. Reforming mandatory minimum sentences is cheaper, safer, and smarter than every other option on the table."
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New Hampshire has fastest growing incarceration rate in the country

In the past two decades, New Hampshire’s crime rate has remained steady. It has one of the lowest violent crime rates in the U.S., and the state’s population has only grown by about a fifth.

But over that period, the number of state and federal inmates in New Hampshire has almost doubled according to Time. Its main prison in Concord is routinely overcrowded. And last year, the prison population grew at a faster rate than any other state in the country.

As the number of incarcerated Americans inched up for the first time in four years, the prison population in small, largely rural New Hampshire grew faster than any other state. The 8.2% increase in the Granite State topped second-place Nebraska’s 6.8% rise and far outpaced the 0.3% national increase in the number of inmates, according to figures released this fall by the U.S. Department of Justice.
A bipartisan effort in New Hampshire was meant to cut a prison population that had been growing for decades. According to the New Hampshire Department of Corrections, state prisoners increased from 287 in 1980 to 1,250 by 1990 and 2,847 by 2008. A policy called Truth in Sentencing, which reduced early releases for inmates based on good behavior, contributed to that growth. The Justice Reinvestment Act, as the 2010 law was known, undid many of those guidelines.

 

 

 

 

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