Background information

Former police officer turned professor Phil Stinson conducted a national analysis of more than 500 officer arrests for sexual misconduct over a three-year period. He found that half involved on-duty misconduct and noted that off-duty misconduct is often facilitated by the power of the badge or the presence of an official service weapon.

In a second study, funded by the National Institute of Justice and analyzing more than 6,700 officer arrests nationwide during a seven-year period, found that half of police arrested for sexual misconduct were for incidents involving minors.

According to a 2010 Cato Institute review, sexual misconduct is the second-most-frequently reported form of police misconduct, after excessive force.

Research consistently shows that police officers target young women. A 2000 survey of nearly 1,000 New York City youth found that 2 in 5 young women — almost half of whom were black, Latina or Asian — reported sexual harassment by officers.

A 2003 national study of cases reported in the media over more than a decade, conducted by the Police Professionalism Initiative at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, found that 40 percent of reported cases of police sexual misconduct involved teens.

Officers also prey on domestic-violence survivors, who are particularly vulnerable to abuses by people they call on for protection. One officer quoted in an investigative report by the Philadelphia Inquirer said, “I would see women that were vulnerable where I could appear as a knight in shining armor.” He explained, “I’m going to help this woman who’s being abused by her boyfriend, and then I’ll ask for sexual favors.”

Videos

More information, to include citations to the above-referenced studies

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-some-cops-use-the-badge-to-commit-sex-crimes/2018/01/11/5606fb26-eff3-11e7-b390-a36dc3fa2842_story.html

https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article9166184.html

https://samuelwalker.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/dwf2003.pdf

https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1029&context=crim_just_pub

https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/249850.pdf

The good news is that a few simple steps can go a long way towards improving your privacy and security, and that those steps will help prevent abuses by governments and criminals alike.

For the short version of what to do, I would recommend the following:

1. Install the Signal app. It allows for secure, end-to-end encrypted text messaging, group chats, voice calls, and video chats. Then, get your friends to install and use Signal too.

2. Use the TOR Browser. TOR provides anonymous web browsing, blocking trackers and defending against surveillance.

3. Use a strong password for your phone. Simple passwords can be easily broken. If you believe your phone may be taken, turn it off so that fingerprint/FaceID unlocking can’t be used to gain access to your phone.

4. Enable privacy settings on your phone. There are guides for Android and iPhone that go over the various settings.

5. Use a password manager. Using a password manager makes it easy to use strong, random passwords for each website. This is much more secure than reusing the same (easy-to-remember and therefore weak) password on each website. There are numerous commercial and free options.

6. Enable 2 Factor Authentication everywhere you can. 2 Factor Authentication involves using an app such as Google Authenticator to generate a 6 digit code that changes frequently. When you log in, you enter not only your username and password, but the proper 6 digit code. That way, a person who has stolen your username and password cannot log into your account unless they can also access that app on your phone.

For the longer version of what to do to improve your digital privacy and security, see the following videos:

Cruelty and depraved hearts can’t be fixed with training

Some problems can be fixed by training, while others cannot.

A pilot who is unskillful due to a lack of training can have their airmanship improved through additional training. That makes sense, as the pilot desires to do a better and safer job of flying. That is especially true because a pilot (by virtue of their seat at the front of the plane) is actually the first person to arrive at the scene of crash if they make an error. Since the pilot’s doesn’t wish to crash, and does wish to become more skillful, additional training does work to improve pilots. Indeed, it is mainly that additional training – especially crew resource management training – that has led to aviation being so much safer today than it was 50 years ago.

Unfortunately, police brutality is a different story. Police brutality is caused by police officers intentionally setting out to inflict harm upon their victims. Unlike plane crashes that pilots desperately wish to avoid, police brutality is not something that bad cops try to avoid; it is something that those bad cops intentionally do. Unlike plane crashes that are just as bad for the pilots as they are for the passengers, the bad cops who engage in police brutality are not the ones physically hurt. Nor are the cops who engage in brutality generally harmed in other ways, since the legal system protects the overwhelming majority of cops who engage in such misconduct. Taken together, the intentional nature of police brutality and lack of an incentive for police to cease it mean that more training cannot be the solution.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, and since video has many frames (pictures) per second, the following video clips should help drive home the point that the brutality police officers enthusiastically engage in is intentional cruelty, rather than something that can be fixed by training:

Police training actually makes things worse

It is worth nothing that the training given to police is often a very cause of the brutality that police engage in. The “warrior training” that many cops receive teaches them to see the public as the enemy and only serves to increase brutality on the part of the police.  This training teaches police officers to fear the public and to endanger the very people they are sworn to serve and protect by encouraging (often baseless) fear in the minds of cops. More funding for this training would only produce more brutality.

Calls for more training is just a deflection intended to increase police budgets

The calls for additional training are worse than useless, as they really are just attempts to increase police budgets that are already bloated. The $118 billion dollars that was spent on US police in 2018 is astronomical. That is an amount sufficient to exceed MILITARY spending of every country in the world other than the USA and China. With a budget like that, there is no shortage of funds for training.

For more information on the rally and why we held it, see the Quad City Times article, and the facebook page for the event.

Why defunding the police is necessary

Police officers are currently tasked with doing so much more than they are equipped and able to properly do. The police are called upon not only to handle criminal law enforcement, but to respond to people having a mental health crisis, dogs on the loose, civil disputes that don’t rise to the level of needing actual law enforcement, etc. Since police training in the United States tends to range from several weeks to perhaps half a year at the most, it is no wonder that the police officer who responds to all those different types of calls is not very well equipped to properly handle each of those situations. By being a jack of all trades, the modern police officer is a master of none.

Police are not mental health experts. They are not domestic violence experts. They are not animal control experts. They are not equipped to effectively handle a great many problems.  As a result, police officers facing a difficult situation tend to fall back on their training. Since police training includes significant use of force components, and since police culture glorifies use of force, it is unsurprising that police gravitate towards use of force as a means of resolving problems.

More concretely a 22 year old police officer with a badge and a gun is not going to do nearly as good of a job as a trained mental health care worker when it comes to handling a call regarding a person who is having a mental health crisis.  The odds of injury or death for the citizen, the cop, and bystanders is higher when the cop responds to that call than when a mental health professional who is trained in deescalation and is used to spending their days dealing with people in crisis responds.  Similarly, that cop is not nearly as likely to catch a loose dog without injury to the dog, themselves, and bystanders as someone who works at an animal shelter and deals with rowdy dogs every day.  Sending the cop to do that job increases everyone’s risk. The result in every case where a police officer is sent into a situation they are unqualified to handle is unnecessary risk of to members of the public, unnecessary danger for police officers, and more distrust of the police when something bad does happen.

Indeed, a single instance of seeing the police unnecessarily use violence can stick with a person for the rest of their life and make them reluctant to seek assistance from the police in the future. This produces secondary effects that are not good for society. As a simple example, my first memory of the police involved a police officer falsely accusing my parents of shoplifting a baby carrier. The situation was resolved with the police officer acknowledging that my parents had not shoplifted anything, but being detained and seeing that officer rudely treat my parents like they were less than human has stuck with me for decades. That comparatively mild experience (along with many instances of racial profiling I’ve experienced as an adult) still causes me to be apprehensive around the police, so it is is no wonder that people who have seen and experienced much worse are even more afraid of the police. It is no wonder that some people have panic attacks or try to run from the police even when completely innocent.  Indeed, a cycle is created where abuses committed by the police lead to fear and distrust of the police, which in turn manifests in fear or even combativeness with the police, which in turn results in police using more force…

What defunding the police means

Defunding the police means taking some of their responsibilities (and the budget to go with it) away from the police department, and giving those responsibilities to agencies that are better equipped to handle that area.  Instead of having the police handle a loose dog, let’s have the animal control agency (or a local animal shelter) get the call. Rather than having police officers respond to a person having a mental health crisis, we can have trained mental health professional show up. When a homeless person is loitering or aggressively panhandling, an advocate from a local homeless shelter can be given the opportunity to address the problem. To be sure, not every such problem can always be completely solved without the police becoming involved. But most of them can be solved without the police getting involved, and doing so results in better outcomes with less danger for everyone.

Real examples of what happened when the police were defunded

The city of Denver, Colorado has implemented a system of having a van with mental health workers and other trained professional dispatched to nonviolent 911 calls. The program has been a resounding success and more information on it can be seen here.

Camden, New Jersey abolished it existing city police department, shifted law enforcement duties to the county, reallocated resources to other agencies that could assist with mental health and related issues, and as a result saw a 47% drop in violent crime. The doom and gloom about defunding the police leading to violence was entirely unfounded. More on that here.

Don’t buy in to the scaremongering about defunding the police

Defunding the police doesn’t mean that police will be unavailable to respond to violent crime. It doesn’t mean that citizens will be left to fend for themselves. That is not what is being sought.  Don’t buy into the fearmongering. Instead, see defunding the police for what it is – an opportunity to have better-equipped agencies handle things like mental health and homelessness, resulting in better outcomes and greater safety for everyone (including police officers).

Background on the “why are you protesting for this criminal?” retort

When I’ve commented online about police brutality and protests that I have organized in response to that brutality, there are invariably comments made by people who assert that because the person who the police abused had a criminal history, there should be no protests over that instance of brutality. There are similar memes shared online, expressing the idea that if the person who was abused by police has a criminal history then it is wrong to protest that abuse committed by the police. Sometimes these memes will take the form of “[Insert name of police brutality victim] beat up his ex-girlfriend in 2009, why are you all protesting a domestic abuser. Imagine how she must feel about people saying his name like he is a hero.”

Obviously I don’t endorse people committing crimes, but that is not a reason to ignore instance of police brutality and racism, as I’ll discuss below.

Police shouldn’t execute or otherwise abuse anyone

Whether a person is a cancer-curing, Noble-prize-winning, orphan-rescuing hero or a terribly violent jerk, it is not the role of the police to meet out vengeance through unwarranted violence.  A person does not need to be venerated as a hero for us to conclude that the police were wrong for mistreating them. The way I see it, standing against government-sponsored violence against a vulnerable individual is always right – whether that vulnerable individual is someone who I would want to have over for dinner or not.

Remember, the foundation of our existence as a country under the rule of law is that no one is above the law’s prohibitions, and no one is beneath the law’s protections.
This is a pretty simple concept so I won’t spend much more time on it.  We have courts and a criminal justice system to decide whether a person is guilty and what sentence they should receive. Extrajudicial violence from police officers (who are themselves breaking the law and the oaths they took when becoming police officers) is not justice and should always be condemned.

Anyone who still doesn’t get this should look at numerous examples where vigilante “justice” has resulted in terrible atrocities. The lynching of Emmett Till is a good starting point.

The focus on the criminal record of a person wrongfully killed by the police is grasping at straws to find a reason to oppose much-needed social change

Those who are opposed to civil rights progress search for any reason to justify their opposition.  When Colin Kaepernick peacefully and silently took a knee, those opposed to civil rights falsely claimed he was disrespecting American soldiers.  When professional athletes when on strike, attacks were made on their characters. Trying to find ways to smear the victims of police brutality and use that as an argument against protesting that instance of brutality is just another such tactic. Literally every approach taken by civil rights activists to fix the problems of police brutality and racism are met with scorn and derision.

Police manage to arrest many violent, terrible white people without murdering them

I have already written a separate article addressing the fact that police choose to use force more often and with more violence when dealing with black people than when dealing with white people.  In that article I provide scientific evidence to support that conclusion, discus how the studies mirror what I have seen in my personal life as a black man and as an attorney who has represented people who were mistreated by the police, and provide links to that evidence. Read that article here: https://www.learnaboutguns.com/2020/06/17/police-use-of-force-depends-upon-the-race-of-the-suspect/

Violent police pose a danger to us all
A situation where the police are permitted to brutalize someone who they believe has a bad criminal history poses a very real danger to us all. Many of the cases of police brutality that have led to protests involve the police misidentifying an innocent person as a criminal and then using violence against that innocent person.  Any of us (or our loved ones) could be the next innocent person who the police brutalize.  As such it behooves everyone to take a stand against police brutality.

Indeed, the “mistaken identify” risk is so high that police are actually killing each other because they are so violent and trigger-happy.  If those opposed to civil rights actually cared about the well-being of the police officers they claim to back, they would want to see the problem of police brutality fixed so that those police officers would stop killing each other.  More on that issue can be seen in the separate article I’ve written here: https://www.learnaboutguns.com/2020/07/16/police-in-america-are-so-violent-and-trigger-happy-that-they-are-accidentally-killing-each-other/

Finally, given the inherent racism in our criminal courts where many black and brown people are convicted of crimes they didn’t commit, or convicted in factual situation where a white defendant would not have had the conviction go on their record, the fact that someone has a criminal conviction should not be seen as conclusive evidence that they are factually guilty or are a bad person deserving of hatred. I’ve also written a separate article on that point, complete with numerous citations to scientific studies: https://www.learnaboutguns.com/2020/07/05/our-criminal-courts-are-inherently-racist/

Respondeat Superior

Starting with some legal history, Respondeat Superior is a longstanding legal doctrine whose Latin words roughly translate as “let the master answer.” It is a doctrine that uses vicarious liability to make an employer responsible for the actions of a subordinate who is acting at the direction of the employer. In essences, the idea is that a person who is harmed by an employee doing the biding of the employer should be able to hold the employer responsible for that harm.

The crux of Respondeat Superior is that the employer is benefiting from the employee doing their bidding, that the employer has the ability to control the employee through their power to hire/fire/discipline, and that the employee’s bad act was something within the general duties of their employment.

Applying this sort of reasoning to protesters and rioters

It is plainly apparent that the Respondeat Superior reasoning doesn’t fit the scenario when a rioter engages in violence or property damage and then some people try to blame protesters as a whole (or the organizers of the protest who have not committed any crimes). Protests are events that take place in public where anyone can walk up and protest (or commit a crime). The protest organizers and attendees do not employ rioters and cannot control the conduct of random people who show up in a public place at the same time as the protest. Nor are rioters doing the biding of the protest organizers who desperately want peaceful demonstrations. Indeed, the private actions of a looter who is stealing shoes for themselves does not advance the interests of the protest organizer one bit. Protest organizers and attendees cannot fire the rioters the way that an employer can fire an employee, and again cannot exclude them from the public space in which the protest is taking place.

Every aspect of the Respondeat Superior test fails, and so imposing vicarious liability (legally or morally) upon peaceful protesters and protest organizers for the actions of rioters makes no sense. Instead, it is just a means of trying to ignore the much-needed police reform and injustice that led to the protests by smearing the protesters.

Applying this sort of reasoning to police

A place where Respondeat Superior does fit is the police. Police officers are employees of the police department. The police chief and others within the government have the authority to hire, fire, and discipline police officers. Police use department-issued badges, uniforms, guns, cars, handcuffs, etc. When a police officer uses force they are doing so in the scope of their employment, using training that they were given at work. When they exceed the scope of what is proper by engaging in brutality or racism, they are still acting within the time and space of the agency relationship between themselves and the department. Respondeat Superior fits like a glove.

That is all the more true when police chiefs and other governmental actors choose not to fire bad cops who have engaged in misconduct, only to have them commit further abuses. Similarly, police officers who have sworn an oath to uphold the law yet choose to ignore misconduct on the part of other police officers, and themselves culpable.

Conclusion

For all the reasons expressed above, it makes no sense to blame protest organizers and attendees for the criminal actions of a few rioters. However, it does make sense to hold police departments, police chiefs, and other police officers accountable for the actions of police officers who commit misconduct.

Finally, please note that a lot of the so-called “protesters” committing acts of violence and property destruction are either made-up stories or acts of violence/destruction that were later found to be committed by white supremacists who are trying to smear the protesters. More information on that issue can be seen here: https://www.learnaboutguns.com/2020/06/22/white-supremacists-falsely-accuse-black-lives-matters-protesters-of-violence/