Obstáculos a la reforma de las prácticas de la policía.
Insinuación :La mejor solución es volver a barajar jerarquía policial .
Un oficial de Baltimore habló a una muchedumbre sobre el veredicto de no culpable en el caso de Freddie Gray .desplazarse hacia abajo para traducir la página al idioma español
Last
week, Baltimore prosecutors dropped all remaining charges against three
officers accused in the killing of Freddie Gray in April 2015. Gray
died of a neck injury sustained while he was transported — shackled and
handcuffed, but unbelted — in a police van, setting off weeks of
protests and riots against police brutality, especially killings of
unarmed black men. The latest acquittals mean that none of the six
officers charged in the case will be punished.
Here’s
a paradox: Anthony Batts, the police chief when Gray was killed, was a
star reformer, widely admired for the progressive, enlightened
strategies he had used as chief in Oakland and Long Beach, Calif., ideas
he was trying in Baltimore. One innovation Batts championed was
procedural justice, the policing strategy I wrote about
last week. It’s based on the idea that people follow the law when they
believe authorities have the right to tell them what to do, and
authorities earn that right by treating the public fairly and with
respect.
The
thought may be counterintuitive, but much research shows that
procedural justice works. It’s a radical departure from maximum force
policing; it argues that tactics the public widely perceives as unfair
and demeaning actually create more crime, because they diminish
the legitimacy of the law. Police departments throughout the country
are starting to use it; it was the first recommendation of the President’s Task Force on 21st-Century Policing last year.
Both
Tom Tyler and Tracey Meares — Yale Law School professors who are the
leading researchers and proponents of procedural justice — told me last
year that Batts in Baltimore and Garry McCarthy in Chicago were among
the police chiefs most dedicated to the strategy.
That
was in April 2015. Three months later, Batts was out. McCarthy was
fired in December. Gray’s death and the killing of Laquan McDonald in
Chicago in 2014, along with rising murder rates, have made Baltimore and
Chicago national symbols of police brutality and incompetence. (And in
Baltimore, continued impunity. We’ll see about Chicago, where the man
suspected of killing McDonald has been charged with murder.)
What does this say about procedural justice? If the idea is so transformative, why are Chicago and Baltimore so broken?
The
short answer is that procedural justice is an important tool, but it
works slowly. Much else needs to happen simultaneously if the police are
to earn a community’s trust and use that legitimacy to bring down
crime.
Here’s the long answer:
All
institutions resist reform, but police forces are among the most
difficult to change. “Those are relationships and attitudes between
police and public that are literally hundreds of years in the making,”
said David M. Kennedy, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal
Justice who directs the National Network for Safe Communities. “The idea that one can completely reset all of that in a year or a couple of months is not reasonable.”
In other words, Batts might have been too progressive — he never gained the support of a distrustful rank and file. Reform doesn’t happen in a straight line.
McCarthy,
too, tried some good things. The department developed a multiday course
in procedural justice and taught it to every Chicago police officer.
Lieut. Bruce Lipman of the Chicago police, who has since retired, led it.
Unusually for a training that doesn’t involve firearms, 93 percent of
officers trained rated it good or excellent. Wesley Skogan, a professor
of political science at Northwestern University, studied the course’s
effects and found it had changed police attitudes.
But
when I interviewed Lipman last year, he also said that department rules
and norms didn’t reflect the training. He said there was only one
department policy, on gang control, that used procedural justice
techniques. “That’s the only place in any of the orders that it
appeared,” he said. “What are you doing in your department to show
police officers this is the way to do business? Do you promote it? Have
it written into your policy? Or are you still doing the stop-and-frisk
police? You can say it, or you can do it.”
McCarthy spoke often with minority communities. He was frank about abuses. He continued programs like Project Safe Neighborhoods and CeaseFire Illinois, both of which have been shown to reduce shootings and homicides in the neighborhoods where those policies are used.
In 2014, Chicago had the lowest levels of violence in half a century. But the next year, homicides rose by 12 percent, and so far this year they are up 50 percent from the 2015 rate.
Nevertheless, there is sustained progress on police shootings. Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority,
a civilian agency, reports that this year police shootings have
dropped, and complaints of excessive force are down. The department has
provided more Tasers and training police officers in using them,
increasing their use of Tasers instead of shooting in many cases.
Officers are also taught how to de-escalate confrontations without
violence.
Still,
the latest killing was just last Thursday, when two officers shot an
18-year-old man who had sideswiped their vehicle in a stolen Jaguar.
There was no report that the man was armed. The Chicago Tribune reported a witness statement that he was killed while running away from the police.
The
CeaseFire and Safe Neighborhoods programs have brought down crime, in
the neighborhoods using them, and Safe Neighborhoods have been shown to lower recidivism among its participants. But only very rarely can any such program show a citywide effect.
In
many departments, procedural justice risks becoming one more in a
series of halfhearted reform efforts; the police force institutes
training and some rule changes, but makes no real attempt to integrate
the programs into broader practices.
And even if a force did employ it fully, crime rates would be unlikely to fall quickly.
Meares
compares it to fighting obesity. Imagine a successful, proven strategy
to get people to lose weight by eating more fruits and vegetables. Now
imagine that two years after that strategy began, many people using it
were still obese. We wouldn’t declare it a failure. We would recognize
that obesity is a complex and long-term problem with multiple causes
that requires many successful strategies at once. So we might even see a
need to expand its use.
That’s
even more true of crime. Many things affect crime rates, and there is
no agreement among experts about which factors have been most important
in the two-decade drop in crime we are still enjoying. Common sense and
decency tell us that procedural justice is a step in the right
direction. We can’t go back to treating entire communities as felonious.
Police
abuses are a different matter. Forces that use procedural justice well —
teach it to their entire force, integrate it into rules, consider it in
evaluations and promotions — can expect to see less everyday
mistreatment.
But
other department policies also affect police behavior and community
trust. Few are as harmful as widespread stop-and-frisk. In 2011 the New
York Police Department carried out 650,000 such stops. More than 90
percent of those stopped were nonwhite.
And a vast majority of stops were a waste of time: In 88 percent, the
police found nothing. They found guns in just one of every 500 stops,
according to the New York Civil Liberties Union.
That
was the peak, a decade into the mayoralty of Michael R. Bloomberg; but
then it began a decline that accelerated in 2013 after a federal judge
found such stops discriminatory. The judge ordered changes that included
oversight by a federal monitor. Last year, instances of stop-and-frisk
in the city dropped to 23,000 — less than 4 percent of the 2011 number.
And major crime hit another historic low, even though the most serious
crimes, such as homicide, rape and robbery, rose slightly. (Homicides
and shootings have resumed dropping this year.)
Baltimore
and Chicago have used stop-and-frisk far more intensively than New
York. At the peak of “zero tolerance” in 2005, the Baltimore police made
108,000 arrests — one for every four residents, but highly concentrated
in young black men. A vast majority of those arrested were never
charged; the purpose was purely to intimidate. In April, Batts’s
replacement as commissioner, Kevin Davis, told Baltimore’s WYPR that zero-tolerance policing “didn’t work and arguably led in part to the unrest that we experienced in 2015.”
And
in the summer of 2014, Chicago was stopping people at four times the
rate of New York City at its peak, according to an American Civil
Liberties of Illinois analysis of police data on stops that did not end
in arrest. (Stops have dropped since, as a result of a lawsuit and
public outrage over other abuses.)
Last year, Skogan led a survey of a representative sample of
Chicagoans. He found that 68 percent of young black men reported being
stopped in the past year. Minorities were more likely than whites to
report being treated badly during investigative stops — handcuffed,
roughed up or threatened. For African-Americans, that treatment included
physical force or threats to use a weapon about half the time. Officers
reported being pressured by their superiors to come back daily with
more and more stops — what Skogan called “round up the usual suspects”
policing.
Skogan
also asked people how much they trusted the police. For whites, trust
in the police was at the same high level for people who had been stopped
and those who hadn’t. But black people’s trust was 25 percentage points
lower than whites if they hadn’t been stopped, 50 points lower if they
had. That’s a major blow to the legitimacy of the law. Procedural
justice proponents would argue that stop-and-frisk could create more
crime than the stops prevent.
Procedural
justice is designed to improve the everyday interactions between the
police and the public. But it can’t touch the most serious abuses, such
as shootings of unarmed men, which are carried out by a small number of
the worst cops — who are then often shielded by their departments.
In
October 2014, a Chicago policeman shot 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16
times. McDonald was walking away, posing no threat, and he was shot
several times after he was already down. The police stood by false
statements by the shooter that McDonald tried to attack him, and the
department held on to the damning dash-cam video for 13 months until a
court ordered its release.
The
first-degree murder charges brought against the shooter, Jason Van
Dyke, were the first such charges brought since 1980; the Chicago police
who kill people are almost never disciplined in any way.
Meanwhile,
in Baltimore, where no one will be found guilty for Gray’s death, the
state’s attorney, Marilyn Mosby, argued that the cases failed because
she had to rely on the police to investigate their own. Her office
“could try this case 100 times and cases just like it, and we would
still end up with the same result,” she said at a news conference.
Procedural justice won’t help here; what’s needed is accountability.
Jamie
Kalven is a Chicago writer and activist with a long history of
investigating police abuses. He uncovered a man who said he witnessed
the McDonald shooting, and the damning autopsy report showing that
McDonald was shot 16 times. (Here is his exposé in Slate.) He also founded a journalism production company, the Invisible Institute, which holds conversations with minority teenagers about their interactions with the police.
“Young
black men say repeatedly that when they have an encounter with the
police, mostly random stops, they know two things going into the
encounter,” said Kalven. “First, the police have all the power. And
second, if anything happens, they won’t be believed. They have no means
of curbing that power, addressing grievances, no means of being heard
when something happens.
“The
procedural justice stuff is fine in itself,” Kalven said. “But
accountability should have priority. If people don’t have confidence
there are limits to police power, the absence of that confidence just
undermines initiatives like procedural justice — if it doesn’t impeach
them altogether.”
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