The Real Meaning of the FBI Director's Comment on Viral Videos and Crime
Friday, 06 November 2015 00:00 By Tim Tolka, Truthout | Op-Ed
James Comey, director of the FBI, testifies before the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence on Capitol Hill in Washington, July 8, 2015. (Doug
Mills / The New York Times)
At the University of Chicago last Friday, James Comey stated that police
leaders and elected officials have been telling him in private that the
spike in crime is because police have become apprehensive about being
recorded and therefore have begun sitting in their cars while crimes occur.
Comey indirectly suggests that communities of color can have a choice
between either insecurity or injustice, peddling the idea that filming cops
is causing an increase in crime, which implies that the cameras - the only
form of protection from or documentation of police abuse - have to go in
order to coax police out of their cars. Police leaders seem to hope that
allowing crime to flourish will make citizens rethink their push for police
accountability, which they mischaracterize as a "war on police," and settle
for safety. It's a false choice, because their aggressiveness - or
"proactive policing" - does not keep crime down.
The logic is fuzzy, and the NY Times editorial board was right to attack the
argument, because cops refusing to do their jobs is not the fault of
activists; it is the fault of those officers who have so injured trust that
residents hate and fear police. Moreover, as the NYPD "slowdown" at the
beginning of this year demonstrated that police making dramatically fewer
arrests does not necessarily correspond to any increase in crime.
Nevertheless, Comey did well to inform the public that the nation's police
are conducting an informal public sector strike, because this move flies in
the face of the Justice Department's push for "community policing" and the
message from President Obama that police misconduct is something the nation
must face. The message from law enforcement is "We're having none of your
reform," despite the recent concessions on mass incarceration announced by a
group of liberal police leaders.
What is the difference between what Comey calls "police restraint," i.e.
sitting in their cars as crimes take place, and a strike of safety service
employees, the "blue flu" of the '60s and '70s? The former involves inaction
while on duty while the latter involves calling in sick en masse. No one has
drawn attention to the parallel of a police-orchestrated stay-in-the-car
strike referred to by Comey and the "slowdown" the NYPD orchestrated during
the PR war of the militant New York Patrolman's Benevolent Association with
Mayor de Blasio. This is important to note, because the role of the police
unions in stalling reform has not been at the forefront of the debate on
police reform, where it should be. Additionally, there was no increase in
crime during the "slowdown" in New York, contrary perhaps to Patrick Lynch's
expectations.
In 1974, during a conference of the International Association of Police
Chiefs, the last speaker, William P. McCarthy, former First Deputy
Commissioner of the NYPD, warned against a national union, arguing:
"No union, regardless of contract, can ever totally abdicate the strike .
The idea of 400,000 armed officers responsive to leaders not put in power by
vote of the general public is so frightening that I hope such a union never
emerges."
Unfortunately, future leaders of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) coveted
the political influence McCarthy found threatening "to the basic structure
of our society," and would work to make McCarthy's nightmare a reality we
are now living.
Comey is one of the few white law enforcement leaders who will even
partially acknowledge how racist US law enforcement has been since its
inception in slave patrols. He doesn't actually say this, but he hints at
it, and refers to the FBI's harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr. What he
leaves out is that today his agency is similarly harassing the Black Lives
Matter movement and that far from "maniacs about the rule of law," the FBI
has conducted counterterror investigations that rely on entrapment in 95
percent of convictions. However, the FBI under Comey appears a little bit
more responsive than before, regarding the FBI's eighth (out of 10) priority
of police misconduct; he promises, at least, to begin collecting data.
The FBI might also start using its data to refute the magical claims now
made about a "war on police" every time an officer is shot or kills himself,
because the public should know that officers are three times more likely to
kill themselves than to be killed by someone else. When Officer Joseph
Gliniewicz staged his suicide to look like a homicide, Jim Pasco, executive
director of the national Fraternal Order of Police, blamed Black Lives
Matter, saying, "There's a hostile element within the community at large...
And there's this ubiquitous social-media effort to discredit all police
officers because of the extraordinarily rare misconduct by a very few."
The FOP appears to be a union, but it is also an insurer, a lobbyist and a
political machine. As a private association composed of current and former
administrators of the security forces of the state, the FOP has a unique
status and function: It is an issue-oriented special interest group
operating as an advocacy organization in lawsuits, filing amicus briefs for
officers who shoot in the back, but also setting its stamp of approval on
political candidates, even in judicial races.
Can US police do their work without downgrading violent felonies to
misdemeanors, as police in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles have been doing
in order to create the appearance of a decrease in the crime rate, without
secret black site detention centers like Homan Square (which was apparently
devised by Chicago Police Department for torturing suspects), without stop
and frisk, and without mass incarceration (which Comey defended at the
University of Chicago)? There is no denying that the institution of US
policing is at a crossroads, and the public is demanding transformation, not
just reform.
However, the white leadership of the police unions are dead set against even
small reforms and gestures of accountability. Their endorsements and
campaign donations need to be repudiated by voters so that they become
politically toxic. If the status quo of brutality and impunity remains, it
will be time to start talking about dismantling hundreds of corrupt law
enforcement agencies that survive off drug forfeitures, disparate arrests
and ticketing of people of color.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
TIM TOLKA
Tim Tolka is a research editor at Standard & Poor's Capital IQ and the
author of a forthcoming book on federal consent decrees and police reform,
Under Color of Law: Police brutality, civil rights, and federal intervention
in Ohio. He received his Bachelor's in Humanities from the University of
Colorado at Boulder and his Master's in International Affairs from American
University's School of International Service. He lives in Charlottesville,
Virginia. Twitter: @coloroflawbook.
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The Real Meaning of the FBI Director's Comment on Viral Videos and Crime
Friday, 06 November 2015 00:00 By Tim Tolka, Truthout | Op-Ed
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reference not valid.
. James Comey, director of the FBI, testifies before the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence on Capitol Hill in Washington, July 8,
2015. (Doug Mills / The New York Times)
. At the University of Chicago last Friday, James Comey stated that
police leaders and elected officials have been telling him in private that
the spike in crime is because police have become apprehensive about being
recorded and therefore have begun sitting in their cars while crimes occur.
Comey indirectly suggests that communities of color can have a choice
between either insecurity or injustice, peddling the idea that filming cops
is causing an increase in crime, which implies that the cameras - the only
form of protection from or documentation of police abuse - have to go in
order to coax police out of their cars. Police leaders seem to hope that
allowing crime to flourish will make citizens rethink their push for police
accountability, which they mischaracterize as a "war on police," and settle
for safety. It's a false choice, because their aggressiveness - or
"proactive policing" - does not keep crime down.
The logic is fuzzy, and the NY Times editorial board was right to attack the
argument, because cops refusing to do their jobs is not the fault of
activists; it is the fault of those officers who have so injured trust that
residents hate and fear police. Moreover, as the NYPD "slowdown" at the
beginning of this year demonstrated that police making dramatically fewer
arrests does not necessarily correspond to any increase in crime.
Nevertheless, Comey did well to inform the public that the nation's police
are conducting an informal public sector strike, because this move flies in
the face of the Justice Department's push for "community policing" and the
message from President Obama that police misconduct is something the nation
must face. The message from law enforcement is "We're having none of your
reform," despite the recent concessions on mass incarceration announced by a
group of liberal police leaders.
What is the difference between what Comey calls "police restraint," i.e.
sitting in their cars as crimes take place, and a strike of safety service
employees, the "blue flu" of the '60s and '70s? The former involves inaction
while on duty while the latter involves calling in sick en masse. No one has
drawn attention to the parallel of a police-orchestrated stay-in-the-car
strike referred to by Comey and the "slowdown" the NYPD orchestrated during
the PR war of the militant New York Patrolman's Benevolent Association with
Mayor de Blasio. This is important to note, because the role of the police
unions in stalling reform has not been at the forefront of the debate on
police reform, where it should be. Additionally, there was no increase in
crime during the "slowdown" in New York, contrary perhaps to Patrick Lynch's
expectations.
In 1974, during a conference of the International Association of Police
Chiefs, the last speaker, William P. McCarthy, former First Deputy
Commissioner of the NYPD, warned against a national union, arguing:
"No union, regardless of contract, can ever totally abdicate the strike .
The idea of 400,000 armed officers responsive to leaders not put in power by
vote of the general public is so frightening that I hope such a union never
emerges."
Unfortunately, future leaders of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) coveted
the political influence McCarthy found threatening "to the basic structure
of our society," and would work to make McCarthy's nightmare a reality we
are now living.
Comey is one of the few white law enforcement leaders who will even
partially acknowledge how racist US law enforcement has been since its
inception in slave patrols. He doesn't actually say this, but he hints at
it, and refers to the FBI's harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr. What he
leaves out is that today his agency is similarly harassing the Black Lives
Matter movement and that far from "maniacs about the rule of law," the FBI
has conducted counterterror investigations that rely on entrapment in 95
percent of convictions. However, the FBI under Comey appears a little bit
more responsive than before, regarding the FBI's eighth (out of 10) priority
of police misconduct; he promises, at least, to begin collecting data.
The FBI might also start using its data to refute the magical claims now
made about a "war on police" every time an officer is shot or kills himself,
because the public should know that officers are three times more likely to
kill themselves than to be killed by someone else. When Officer Joseph
Gliniewicz staged his suicide to look like a homicide, Jim Pasco, executive
director of the national Fraternal Order of Police, blamed Black Lives
Matter, saying, "There's a hostile element within the community at large...
And there's this ubiquitous social-media effort to discredit all police
officers because of the extraordinarily rare misconduct by a very few."
The FOP appears to be a union, but it is also an insurer, a lobbyist and a
political machine. As a private association composed of current and former
administrators of the security forces of the state, the FOP has a unique
status and function: It is an issue-oriented special interest group
operating as an advocacy organization in lawsuits, filing amicus briefs for
officers who shoot in the back, but also setting its stamp of approval on
political candidates, even in judicial races.
Can US police do their work without downgrading violent felonies to
misdemeanors, as police in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles have been doing
in order to create the appearance of a decrease in the crime rate, without
secret black site detention centers like Homan Square (which was apparently
devised by Chicago Police Department for torturing suspects), without stop
and frisk, and without mass incarceration (which Comey defended at the
University of Chicago)? There is no denying that the institution of US
policing is at a crossroads, and the public is demanding transformation, not
just reform.
However, the white leadership of the police unions are dead set against even
small reforms and gestures of accountability. Their endorsements and
campaign donations need to be repudiated by voters so that they become
politically toxic. If the status quo of brutality and impunity remains, it
will be time to start talking about dismantling hundreds of corrupt law
enforcement agencies that survive off drug forfeitures, disparate arrests
and ticketing of people of color.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Tim Tolka
Tim Tolka is a research editor at Standard & Poor's Capital IQ and the
author of a forthcoming book on federal consent decrees and police reform,
Under Color of Law: Police brutality, civil rights, and federal intervention
in Ohio. He received his Bachelor's in Humanities from the University of
Colorado at Boulder and his Master's in International Affairs from American
University's School of International Service. He lives in Charlottesville,
Virginia. Twitter: @coloroflawbook.
Related Stories
"Prison Inflicts Mass Violence": Bill Ayers Interviews Maya Schenwar
By Bill Ayers, Truthout | InterviewPolice Are Granted Abusive Powers By a
System That Condones Their Actions
By Mark Karlin, Truthout | InterviewPolice Brutality: Can It Really Be
Fixed?
By Malik Shabazz, Speakout | Op-Ed
Show Comments
