October 15, 2013, 9:13 am
From the awesome Ken White at Popehat:
NYPD Officer Craig Matthews complained about an illegal quota system for stops and arrests. As anyone familiar with NYPD culture could predict, he experienced retaliation from his superiors for doing so. When he sued, the NYPD hit him with an argument that's outrageous but very likely legally correct: it's your job to report misconduct, so the First Amendment doesn't prohibit us from retaliating against you for doing so.
Wait, what?
The Association of Lawless Broomstick-Fetishist Brown-Person-Groping Can't-Shoot-Straight Thugs has a point. Because their employer is the government, public employees have limited First Amendment rights to be free of employer retaliation for their speech. But in in Garcetti v. Ceballos the Supreme Court said that right protects speech on matters of public concern unless the speech is part of a job duty:
We hold that when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline.
Thus in Garcetti the Court said a Deputy DA had no right to be free of retaliation for pointing out perjury in an arrest warrant application because doing so was his job. I explained how this doctrine works — and how courts have made an exception for professors at public colleges — in this post.
The result is that an entity like the NYPD can argue that its officers are required by their job to report unlawful activity by their superiors and fellow officers, and that therefore their act of reporting such misconduct enjoys no First Amendment protection.
March 16, 2012, 12:32 pm
Scathing report on how NY police gamed the process to improve their reported crime numbers. Nothing in this should be the least surprising to anyone who watched a few seasons of The Wire.
These are not just accounting shenanigans. There were actions the directly affected the public and individual liberty. People were rounded up on the street on BS charges to pad arrest stats while real, substantial crimes went ignored in a bid to keep them out of the reported stats.
There is one part in here that is a good illustration of public vs. private power. People who fear corporations seem to have infinite trust for state institutions. But the worst a corporation was ever able to do to a whistle blower was fire him. This is what the state does:
For more than two years, Adrian Schoolcraftsecretly recorded every roll call at the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn and captured his superiors urging police officers to do two things in order to manipulate the "stats" that the department is under pressure to produce: Officers were told to arrest people who were doing little more than standing on the street, but they were also encouraged to disregard actual victims of serious crimes who wanted to file reports.
Arresting bystanders made it look like the department was efficient, while artificially reducing the amount of serious crime made the commander look good.
In October 2009, Schoolcraft met with NYPD investigators for three hours and detailed more than a dozen cases of crime reports being manipulated in the district. Three weeks after that meeting—which was supposed to have been kept secret from Schoolcraft's superiors—his precinct commander and a deputy chief ordered Schoolcraft to be dragged from his apartment and forced into the Jamaica Hospital psychiatric ward for six days.
May 18, 2010, 1:59 pm
For "the Wire" fans, here is a real life episode of a recurring theme on that show -- arrest quotas and metrics creating incentives for bad behavior by the police.
The new recordings obtained by the Village Voice reinforce both sets of allegations made last March. The implications are pretty startling: As a matter of policy, NYPD seems to be encouraging its officers to harass innocent people, even to the point of arresting and detaining them for non-crimes (the city had a record 570,000 stop-and-frisk searches last year). At the same time, the department may be pressuring some officers and citizens to downgrade actual crimes"“even serious ones"“or to not report them at all.
In short, officers are rewarded for petty harassment, but punished for documenting felonies. Here is one irritating practice among many:
About those numbers: While only about one tenth of 1 percent of the stops yielded a gun (at present it's nearly impossible to legally carry a gun in New York), the practice has helped drive up the city's marijuana arrests from 4,000 in 1997 to 40,000 in 2007. Marijuana for personal use was actually decriminalized in New York during that period. But you still can't display your pot in public. So the police simply stop people, trick them into emptying their pockets, and then arrest them for displaying marijuana in public.
Read the whole thing in Reason.
