COMMENTARY By Steven K. Haught, Editor
Splashed across every television in the free world, viewers witnessed the images of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s knee pressed in the head of George Floyd, 46, as he lay on the ground screaming “I cannot breathe” and “Don’t kill me!” until he became motionless.
Bystanders pleaded for Chauvin to stop but he did not. It was as if he was ruthlessly defeating a helpless enemy and the only solution was to silence him to death. All of this violence resulted from a white cop verses a black man over a possible counterfeit $20 bill?
The footage sparked widespread condemnation and massive protests marked by rubber bullets and teargas. Minneapolis’ mayor, Jacob Frey, has said the “officer failed in the most basic human sense”. That would be a gross understatement of the event and outcome.
Floyd’s family called for murder charges, though in the US prosecution and conviction of officers is rare, since the law gives officers wide latitude to kill, and prosecutors often have close ties with police.
However, the system of policing in America is very adept at pandering to the media. The four Minneapolis officers involved in the killing of George Floyd were swiftly fired after the footage of his death went viral. Imagine what might have happened had the event not become national and international news… would there have been any terminations? Would any charges of second degree murder been filed against Chauvin?
That’s the question… what really happens to bad cops, when they are caught, fired and maybe even criminally charged?
Let me get right to the crux of the issue… despite the decision to fire the policeman who knelt on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes, along with three other officers at the scene, it’s uncertain if the officers will face long-term repercussions for the crime and complicity.
“The officers are afforded every opportunity to clear their name and regain everything they lost – their reputation, their status and their jobs,” said Adanté Pointer, a California lawyer who represents police brutality victims. “The family has to endure disappointment after disappointment.”
Ultimately, the police system paints the dead victim as guilty of being in the wrong, not cooperating, resisting arrest, any number of things are thrown at the wall and what sticks becomes the unfair and unjust legacy of the dead person. In this case the biggest issue for George Floyd was being a Black American on that day and coming into contact with a mean spirited and violent white racist cop.
Here’s what going on behind the scenes right now in Minneapolis and every other city where the police unions fight for their brothers in blue.
- Prompt termination is being challenged with intent to overturn the decision of the mayor and civil authorities. In the Floyd case the terminations were swift, but that is uncommon and often doesn’t last.
- Officers can appeal firings, typically supported by powerful police unions. The outcome is frequently decided by arbiters in secretive hearings that never get public review.
- These men have rights too. Some civil rights advocates warn that the men could ultimately avoid legal and financial consequences, leaving the city and Floyd family on the hook for legal defense costs.
- It is entirely possible that one, two or more of these bad cops will continue working in “other police departments” or even win back their positions with the Minneapolis department. Officers in the US are frequently rehired after their termination for misconduct, a problem that experts say increases the likelihood of continued abuse and killings in other jurisdictions.
A recent analysis by a local Minnesota paper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, found arbitrations reversed 46% of police terminations in the last five years. Police chiefs across the US have publicly complained that the process forces them to put officers back on the street after firing them for egregious conduct such as unjustified killings, sexual abuse and lying.
When officers are rehired, “it says they have a license to kill”, says Cat Brooks, an activist in Oakland CA, where transit police killed Oscar Grant in 2009. “If they killed this time, they’ve often killed before or have a history of problematic use of force.” In one Bay Area city with high rates of police violence, there are numerous officers who have been involved in more than one fatal shooting of a civilian.
If the fired officers in Minneapolis don’t win their jobs back, “I think they’ll quietly be invited to work in other law enforcement departments”, Brooks predicted.
Some police departments also knowingly hire officers who were fired in other jurisdictions, says Roger Goldman, an emeritus law professor at Saint Louis University and expert on police licensing. That’s often because the departments are located in smaller cities with tight budgets and can pay a lower salary to an officer who was terminated.
The Cleveland officer who was fired after fatally shooting 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014 was hired by a small Ohio village police department four years later. His new employer defended the decision, noting the officer was never charged.
The Louisiana officer who killed Alton Sterling in 2016 as he was selling CDs outside a convenience store was eventually fired in 2018. But last year, the city reached a settlement with the officer that retracted the firing and allowed him to resign.
“It’s really devastating. You took someone’s life,” Quinyetta McMillon, the mother of Sterling’s son, said in a recent interview. The long process of trying to get justice “impacted us really badly – emotionally, physically, mentally, it was draining”, she said, adding that it was painful to think of the obstacles Floyd’s family will face moving forward, even with the terminations. If fired officers were barred from serving as police, “it would help save a lot of lives”, McMillon said.
Sometimes police chiefs unknowingly hire officers with misconduct histories because of laws that allow officers to keep disciplinary records secret. Other times, they aren’t running thorough background checks, or they determine an officer’s record would not be a liability, said Ben Grunwald, a Duke University law professor.
In a study Grunwald co-authored for the Yale Law Journal, he and another researcher found that an average of roughly 1,100 officers working in Florida each year have previously been fired. They tended to move to agencies with fewer resources and slightly larger communities of color. The fired officers were also twice as likely to be fired a second time compared to officers who have never been fired.
The consequences of this rehiring are severe, said L Chris Stewart, a civil rights attorney based in Atlanta. “If you don’t fear losing your job and you know you have all these different immunities that will protect you, you know you will get away with [misconduct].” He said it was hard not to think of this dynamic when watching the video of the Minneapolis killing as the officer ignored Floyd’s cries for help. An attorney for Chauvin did not respond to a request for comment, and the other officers could not be reached.
Some advocates have pushed for a publicly accessible national database that documents officers’ disciplinary histories, which could help prevent re-hirings that endanger the public. “You can look up what a doctor has done, what a realtor has done, what you and I have done as members of the public, but you have no way to look into the background of a person with a badge and a gun,” according to Pointer.
Marc McCoy, whose brother Willie McCoy was killed by police in Vallejo, California last year, said it was hard when the family learned that the officers involved had previously killed other civilians and been the subject of excessive force complaints. “These laws that you think will lead to the officers’ arrest are actually there to protect them,” he said.
That’s how policing works across America, researchers and activists say, and it’s a process that can drag victims’ families through years of court proceedings and media attention, with minimal relief at the end.
Floyd’s death now under FBI investigation is horrific, but just another example of a black American’s dying at the hands of a white police officer protected by a system that perpetuates violence.
All of this harsh reality begs the question… can anything be done to change the conditions that keep bad cops working as policemen?
This is a crucially important question, not just because bad cops potentially endanger every single one of us, black or white, but also because the best thing we can do to protect good cops is to get rid of the bad ones, so the good ones don’t suffer guilt by association.
South Carolina is one state trying to change the system, hopefully for the better. Their system for dealing with bad cops was about as backwards as you can get. It was way too lenient on bad cops. It was also unfair to good cops who were often wrongly accused of misconduct by proximity and association on the job.
Under the old law, South Carolina police officers fired for misconduct were automatically stripped of their state law enforcement certification. They had no way of appealing unless another police agency hired them. This wasn’t fair to the officers who didn’t actually do anything wrong.
But if another police agency did hire them, the fired-for-misconduct cops were afforded the full power of regular police officers for up to a year, while they appealed their decertification. This meant that officers who should not be officers got to keep on being officers.
The only thing the “old” system had going for it was efficiency: It relieved state officials of having to spend time and money on the appeals process for someone who didn’t want to be a cop anymore.
Compounding the problem was the fact that police agencies sometimes fired officers for misconduct without saying so, which meant those officers were never decertified, and they could be hired by agencies that had no idea about their problems. Which is also incredibly dangerous, and could give honest police agencies a black eye.
All of that changed on May 31, 2018 when Gov. Henry McMaster signed into law H.4479, which flips the old system on its head.
Under the new law, police who lose their South Carolina certification can appeal that decision to the state Law Enforcement Training Council, without having to first convince another agency to hire them — which one hopes would be difficult to do anyway. And they can’t act as police officers again unless or until the council agrees to reinstate their certification.
Critically, it also takes away police agencies’ discretion to decide for themselves whether to let others know they fired a cop for misconduct.
That may to some degree unravel the “good ol’ boy network” of protection and favors passed back and forth between police departments, the prosecutors office and union leadership.
The new law requires the agencies to report misconduct; sheriffs and police chiefs can lose their own certification if they don’t report honestly and accurately.
The old law didn’t even define misconduct. The new does, and the definition contains 11 offenses, from lying to police or in court to “the repeated use of excessive force in dealing with the public or prisoners,” “dangerous or unsafe practices involving firearms, weapons, or vehicles which indicate either a willful or wanton disregard for the safety of persons or property” and “the physical or psychological abuse of members of the public or prisoners.”
The changes are offered as a means of reducing the likelihood that a law enforcement officer leaving one police department because of misconduct could be hired by another department without the allegations being addressed.
If “something like the South Carolina” law had been in force in Minnesota, and Officer Chauvin knowing the potential consequences of his personal actions, would that knowledge have deterred him from putting his knee on the neck of Mr. Floyd until he died? Maybe. Maybe not.
See, I firmly believe that most all cops feel a sense of empowerment from the gun on their hip and the fraternity of cops that protect one another. Policing in America is a major part of systemic racism, there’s no way around that fact. Too much evidence over too many years. Too many black men have lost their lives to too many cops who simply don’t care about the “black man or woman” who suffers violence at their hand.
All cops live within a code of silence, protecting one another, knowing full well that one of their fraternity is a killer. Doing nothing to stop a fellow officer from acts of violence is silent approval of violence. That is racism. If no one stops the bad cops, then those so called good cops are just as guilty before God as if they had caused the black man to die by their own hand.
Here we are in the year 2020, with technologies and data management systems including artificial intelligence, to do anything we can imagine. Yet an integrated national, federal police tracking system does not exist.
We federally track malpractice litigation and adverse licensing actions for physicians, lawyers, stock brokers and other professions, but no such system exists for law enforcement officers… who have the power to take a life and make arrests? What does exist is fragmented, incomplete, lacks uniformity and details of an officer's misconduct.
Immediately, the U.S. Justice Department should be mandated to integrate all state and in some case large metropolitan databases so that the piecemeal network can be used to track police decertification records. The database could then be used by local police departments to check applicants background.
A recent survey discovered that only about 20 percent of police agencies across America even know the database exists. The excuse is inexcusable… “We don’t have the money to advertise it,” said Mike Becar, executive director of the International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Training, which maintains the database. How much is a human life worth?
Lastly, but certainly not the least in this complex problem is the great divider… politics.
Police Unions and their collective bargaining power must change. Just as teachers unions make it nearly impossible to fire bad teachers, police unions make it nearly impossible to fire bad cops.
Black Lives Matter… YES they do. But Democrats who court the black vote, especially in urban areas, have long opposed the very thing that could ensure changes in policing — reforming collective bargaining.
The Duke University Law Journal examined 178 police union contracts and found that "a substantial number … unreasonably interfere with or otherwise limit the effectiveness of mechanisms designed to hold police officers accountable for their actions.”
The contracts often “limit officer interrogations after alleged misconduct, mandate the destruction of disciplinary records, ban civilian oversight, prevent anonymous civilian complaints, indemnify officers in the event of civil suits, and limit the length of internal investigations.” Another study found that “collective bargaining rights led to a substantial increase in violent incidents of misconduct.”
If we want to eliminate violent police misconduct, then we need to eliminate collective-bargaining protections that shield bad cops. If we want to stop police misconduct, the answer is not to defund the police. We need more good cops, not fewer.
But for the left, (“left” here is spelled as Liberal Democrat) it is much easier to go after the police as an institution — or the president, who has no role in setting local police policies — than the local Democratic political leaders and union officials who enter into collective-bargaining agreements that shelter bad cops.
Can we come up with a concept of policing in America where there are fewer killings, and fewer collateral consequences?
In a nation as resilient, creative and influential on the world stage as America is, one would certainly think the problem can be fixed.
Would more and better training solve the problem? No. Better training alone will not reduce police brutality. Police departments across the country have required their officers to attend classes on racial sensitivity and on limiting the use of force. Evidence says those sessions have not worked.
The problem is that cops aren’t held accountable for their actions, and they know it. The number of officers in uniform who will knowingly and maliciously violate your rights is huge. These officers violate human rights with impunity and they don't care who they hurt. They know there’s a different criminal justice system for civilians and for the police.
The “law and order” mentality is so entrenched in the psychology of policing that most of the liberal discussions of the recent police killings of unarmed black men falls to indifference. There is an underlying assumption that the police are supposed to “protect and serve” the population, but that has never been their true mission, at least not all the population..
The "law and order" way of viewing policing is a major part of why solutions elude those who want desperately to see change. Our view of law enforcement in America rests on a misunderstanding of the origins of the police and what they were created to do.
The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at least not as most people understand it. And they were certainly not created to promote justice. They were created to protect the new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid-to-late-19th century from the threat posed by that system’s offspring, the working class.
The police were created to control the working class and poor people, particularly poor black people moving from the south to the cities of the north after the Civil War.
Before the 19th century, there were no police forces that we would recognize as such anywhere in the world.
In the Northern United States, there was a system of elected constables and sheriffs, much more responsible to the population in a very direct way than the police are today. In the South, the closest thing to a police force were the slave patrols, tasked with rounding up runaway slaves.
We shouldn’t expect the police to be something they’re not. They are instructed in the training academies and taught by field experience that their harsh treatment of “law breakers” is rewarded by superiors, peers and politicians — albeit, sustaining the system that ferments brutality and violence.
We ought to know that origins matter, and the police were created by the “ruling class” of America to control working class and poor people, not help them. They’ve continued to play that role ever since.
Their basic job is to enforce order among those with the most reason to resent the system—who in our society today are disproportionately poor black people.
America… has been a “police state" for more than 150 years. You just didn’t know it. Now you do.
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Steven K. Haught, is the founder and managing director at ENCORE! 2.5™ Strategic Solutions LLC, a sales and strategy consulting practice headquartered in S.E. Pennsylvania. He is an internationally recognized author, writer, speaker and publisher; currently publishes—Global Insights & Trends and Renovations4Living; formerly a newspaper executive/publisher/editor; directed an international sales team for an top-tier software company; founder/director of two non-profits including a humanitarian/educational services organization based in S.E. Asia; He wears the victories and battle scars of many business development campaigns, global product introductions and go-to-market initiatives. He holds an MBA in strategic management and a Doctorate in Theological Studies. He can be reached by email at… encore2pt5@gmail.com
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