Uh huh. Here’s yet another reason why there is distrust out there about law enforcement “protecting and serving” everyone equally.
Los Angeles Police Department officials announced Tuesday that they investigated more than 300 complaints of racial profiling against officers last year and found that none had merit — a conclusion that left members of the department’s oversight commission incredulous.I’m sure the vast majority are claims that cannot be proven since you have to prove the officer’s intent to say, pull over a black driver more often than a white one. But the LAPD has a sorry history, and that makes it difficult for some to believe the outcome of the report.It is at least the sixth consecutive year that all allegations of racial profiling against LAPD officers have been dismissed, according to department documents reviewed by The Times.
Of course it’s hard to prove, but none of the cases had any merit? Come on, let’s be real. The problem here is that the profiling is less about race in some instances, but a focus on a particular demographic (dressed in hip-hop wear, in the “wrong” neighborhood, etc.), and in that case, you will end up with young minority youth getting pulled over or searched more often. When does a law enforcement officer’s “hunch” cross the line into straight-out bias — remember, as Francis Holland pointed out in an earlier post, you can be a black police officer and be color-aroused. Check out the comments in the LAT article’s thread — they run the gamut.In February, the inspector general released a report that concluded investigators frequently failed to fully investigate citizen complaints against allegedly abusive officers, often omitting or altering crucial information.
The report, and extensive media attention, sparked calls by commissioners for a review of the complaint investigation process. The issue of racial profiling reaches back into one of the department’s darkest periods. Since 2000, the department has been working to implement scores of reforms included in a federal consent decree that stems from the Rampart corruption scandal. As part of the decree, the department is required to gather and analyze racial data involving vehicle and pedestrian stops.
But conclusive figures that might indicate whether systemic racial profiling is a problem in the LAPD have remained elusive. Department and city officials early on acknowledged that the raw data collected by officers when they make a stop are unhelpful because they do not include factors such as the race of the officer, the predominant race of the neighborhood in which the stop was made, and whether the stop resulted in an arrest and conviction.
The question here is about the effort to curtail the bias. Collecting all the data about the officer and the suspect/victim doesn’t
20 Responses to “LAPD report: 320 racial profiling cases and none had merit”
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We just had a case here in NY where a search by a police officer was thrown out because it appeared that he was racial profiling. He had stopped a young black man on the street, searched him, and found a gun. He claimed that the search was legal because he noticed that the way the young man was walking was the same way he walks when he is carrying his weapon. He did have to admit that he had searched at least 50 young black men using this reasoning and this was the first gun he had found. And then the NYC cops wonder why young black men don’t trust them.
I wish we would teach officers to profile behavior (which does work), and maybe that would get them to stop profiling race (which does not).
Maybe they have an Infinite Improbability Drive in the Internal Affairs department.
Maybe the officers are not doing anything wrong.
Maybe the people involved smell easy money.
Maybe the investigators refuse to see evidence.
After dealing with police from a number of jurisdictions, I would have to say their instincts are pretty good. Not all of what they believe is true but everyone has that. Painting the police with a broad accusation of malfeasance is as bad as saying all blacks are shiftless, lazy, watermelon eaters.
Living way too close to LA, the LAPD and its sorry track record are all too visible around here.
And, BTW, the LA County Sheriff’s Department doesn’t have a very good reputation either.
I don’t know if William Bratten (as current Chief of Police) has really been an improvement or not, although probably anybody would be an improvement over Daryl Gates.
Being a cop is often an ugly job, no doubt about it. But when your force has the (bad) reputation of the LAPD, it’s got to be much worse than usual.
We’ve talked a lot about taser abuse, but the LAPD was using the “choke hold” to do the same kind of thing years before the taser, and causing even more “mysterious” deaths of suspects.
Other low lights include Rodney King, the Rampart scandal, the gratuitous use of police dogs on suspects, and their complete impotence during the 1992 riots after the acquittal of the Rodney King Beating officers.
The riots were really “interesting”. It wasn’t until Katrina hit NOLA that I remember seeing such a callous approach to handling a bad situation. Officers were deployed basically to protect police stations and city buildings while basically just watching everything else go to hell. The only thing it lacked was Daryl Gates getting up and claiming “nobody could have predicted this”, and of course, they had been preparing for just such a possibility since the trial of the officers began. Sad/stupid/evil…
I don’t know why the culture of the LAPD is so impervious to change. It’s just amazing to me how resilient the negative stuff is. Black and Hispanic officers are just as bad as white officers, which indicates to me it’s the LAPD culture that’s racist, separate from the race of the officers.
What a fucking mess…
Mold, do you live anywhere within the influence of L.A.? The LAPD’s shitty (and well-earned) reputation has been alive and documented for the last 40-years, and I understand a lot of the bad culture stuff goes back way further than that.
Are there people who will try to take advantage of the situation to play the lawsuit lottery? Sure. But that doesn’t mean every single incident of racial profiling is without merit…
Nope, I’se on the other Left Coast. So I would have no underground info on the officer behaviors.
The Rodney King debacle and Rampart scandal are hardly “underground,” Mold. I’ve never lived anywhere near California and am familiar with them.
Well, Mold, I did live in LA, and I saw the LAPD in action. They have a well-documented shitty history and it’s entirely deserved.
Mold, you’ve also said you live in Whitey Whitesville– could you possibly think about whether you know jack about the lives of real minority people, rather than media portrayals of them?
I know Pam has been encouraging people to speak up even if it means putting their feet in their mouths. But that doesn’t mean people don’t then tell you you need to know more about the subject.
That’s the sixth consecutive year. So that means, give or take, 2000 complaints of racial profiling. And not one of them substantiated. That’s just stupid. Everybody knows that’s not credible. If the LAPD had even the slightest tinge of sense, they’d recognize that admitting a few complaints were well-founded would let them dismiss the vast majority without drawing such clear derision and loathing.
The only explanation I can see is corruption pervasive enough that any officer disciplined for profiling would be able to point under oath to dozen of colleagues not disciplined, and that no one wants to start the ball rolling.
Of course, the rest of the city is stonewalling too:
They know who made the stop, but nowhere in the personnel files is any mention of an officer’s race? They know where the stop was made, but gosh, no one has any idea of the racial makeup of the surrounding neighborhood ? They know who was stopped and when, but have no idea of whether they were subsequently arrested and convicted? Is there an SQL programmer somewhere in Los Angeles with 15 minutes to spare?
I don’t know if William Bratten (as current Chief of Police) has really been an improvement or not, although probably anybody would be an improvement over Daryl Gates.
I think he has been an improvement — look at this year’s May Day protests as compared to last year’s (”Hey, let’s beat up Latino reporters while they’re standing in front of the news cameras doing their broadcast — no one will notice!”) but it’s sllloooooowwww because they’re trying to change a culture that’s been entrenched for a minimum of 30 years, and even longer if you look at Parker’s record. I really hope Bratton doesn’t give up and move on to another city, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
I’ve always got a pretty good vibe from Bratten. But then again he served as Police Commissioner under Giuliani. OTOH he left in 1996.
It is definitely an ugly job, and coming in from the outside doesn’t make it easier to be accepted by the LAPD lifers. But they really had to get somebody from the outside (again - Willy Williams was the first outsider, but didn’t work out too well). The problems are just too deep to allow yet another insider to cover things over from the top…
I thought that Miles Davis announced to the LAPD that if they catch a black man that is driving a Porsche, that he is probably him and that yes, he does own a Porsche.
I thought it funny and a little too bizarre…
But in the post Rodney King era, way to close for comfort…
Bratton did indeed serve under the unspeakable Giuliani, but Rudy got rid of him because he was too independent. Also, I think Rudy was afraid Bratton might run for mayor. The replacement, Howard Safir, was a cypher, whose wife called in detectives on some poor woman she got into a traffic altercation with.
I also thought that I read that so many cases at the airport security line turned out to ne racism too…
I guess you can’t judge a book by its cover after all…
I’m sure the local coyotes would rule that none of the recent cat disappearances and deaths resulted from anything other than “natural causes”. quell surprise.
…although probably anybody would be an improvement over Daryl Gates.
A one-celled organism would have been an improvement over Gates. Remember when the LAPD was criticized for choking black men to death, and Gates opined that so many black men were dying in chokeholds because their arteries were narrower than those of “normal people”?
Then I Googled around and discovered that not only was Abner Louima assaulted on Bratton’s watch, apparently Bratton defended the cops who did it. One can only hope he learned a lesson from that, but I’m not optimistic, knowing cops.
Pfft, yeah, and Saddam got 100% of the vote. “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes“, anyone?
Oh, and Mold, the problem is not that most cops are bad, because that is clearly not the case. The problem is that that vast majority of good cops always, always, always closes rank around a fellow cop, no matter what.