Droning away: Which agencies requested FAA permission for spy drones?

Which Texas police agencies  and  educational institutions have requested permission to  use unmanned drones from the Federal Aviation Administration? Reports Texas Watchdog, via EFF:

Texas is home to many: the Houston and Arlington police departments; the Texas Department of Public Safety; the Hays County Office of Emergency Management in San Marcos; Texas A&M University Corpus Christi; Texas A&M – Texas Engineering Experiment Station in College Station and Texas State University in San Marcos

Further,

See a map of the agencies given permission to fly drones here.

EFF officials also obtained a list of private drone manufacturers authorized to fly drones domestically.

Houston PD property room failing at customer satisfaction

Houston PD continues to either lose evidence from its property room or sometimes sell or destroy without consent from the owner, including crime victims and their families, reported the Houston Chronicle. The article ("HPD track record with seized property takes another  hit," April 30) focuses on the stuggle of a drowned woman's family who was shocked to learn HPD had auctioned off her personal effects a year and a half before the trial date of her boyfriend who was accused of killing her (he was acquitted). Said her mother, "They stole from my deceased daughter. They're doing the same things they arrest people for." Here's reporter James Pinkerton's overview of the problem:

Houston police have a long history of mishandling property in their control, including a case resulting in a landmark 1990 federal appeals court ruling that held lax HPD policies made it easy to violate a citizen's constitutional rights against unlawful seizure of their property.

The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a jury's award of $147,779 to a Houston couple whose stereo equipment, video recorder, cameras, jewels, gold coins, hunting rifles and other property had been seized by Houston police. When the couple obtained a court order for the property's return, they learned most of it had been sold in two auctions and the rest was converted to police use. 

In 2007, two HPD property room supervisors were suspended after 35 firearms turned up missing from the property room, including two that had resurfaced in the possession of criminal suspects. In 2004, HPD acknowledged that evidence from 8,000 criminal cases, going back to the 1960s, had been found in 280 boxes that were improperly labeled and stored. 

Houston Police Chief Charles McClelland ,,, said employees of the department's $13 million property room are not perfect. But he noted the 59,000-square-foot property room, which opened in June 2009, earned certification from the International Organization for Standardization in October, the only police property room given that certification. 

"We have human beings working in the property room," McClellend said. "People make mistakes. People in your business make mistakes. No one's perfect, and when you're dealing with that type of inventory of property and evidence, something can go to the wrong place, get mislabeled." ... 

Capt. Charles Vazquez, who heads the HPD property room, said there are 380,000 separate items currently in storage, and employees know where the "overwhelming majority" are located. "I'm not saying we could get every single item," he said.

Grits was particularly interested to learn that only a fraction of evidence released from the property room actually makes its way back to it rightful owners. "Last year, police checked in 65,000 items and disposed of another 24,000 items, including 8,200 returned to their owners. The other items were either auctioned off, donated to charity, converted to police use, destroyed or returned to the HPD division that checked them in." Some of that is because of drug evidence destroyed, but I'll bet a  more detailed investigation or audit into what happened to the rest of the evidence, particularly that which was "converted to police use ... or returned to the HPD division that checked them in," would be instructive.

It's difficult to accept the "nobody's perfect" excuse from management for such a recurring problem. This isn't a one off. When you're dealing with processes involving that much property and data (especially when it's other people's property), the system needs adequate checks and redundancies to make sure evidence isn't lost or improperly disposed of.  Ask inventory trackers at Walmart, or for that matter UPS. With technologies and processes available in the 21st century, the only reason these systems aren't more professionalized is that management and budget writers haven't prioritized their upgrade.

Too often police property rooms are an employment backwater within law enforcement agencies, frequently a place where officers are assigned when they have disciplinary problems or have been deemed unfit for field duty. (Charley Wilkinson of CLEAT boasts that many police union locals have been organized by disgruntled employees assigned to the property room as punishment.) I've no knowledge of specific staffing patterns at HPD, but frequently professionalism in this area is diminished by the (often accurate) perception among officers and management that property room duty amounts to second-class status, contributing to sloppy evidence retention practices. Grits would prefer to see property rooms run by dedicated, civilian professionals instead of sworn officers. Managing inventory is something big companies do all the time with far lower error rates and superior customer satisfaction.

See related Grits posts:

• Dallas DNA exonerations expose evidence retention flaws
• Senate bills encourage retention, testing of old DNA evidence
• 'The DNA's over there ... right next to the jelly': Problems with evidence preservation in Texas
• Using DNA in nonviolent offenses would swamp crime labs, evidence rooms
• 'Missing evidence among military crime labs new problems'
• Big D: Shopping Mecca
• Sex toys, guns walk away from Houston evidence room
• Nueces County cleaning up evidence room mess; how many others are just as bad?
• Police evidence rooms are 'red-headed stepchildren' of law enforcement, Integrity Unit told
• Galveston, Brazoria Counties react wisely by dismissing cases after evidence thefts
• Evidence retention failures thwart pursuit of innocence claims
• Enough weapons missing from Houston's property room for a 21-gun salute
• 500 guns missing from TX police evidence room in 'illegal firearms trafficking scheme'

Deconstructing data on police deaths

Okay, here's a strange one. The headline in the New York Times Monday read: "Even as Violent Crime Falls, Killing of Officers Rises," reporting "a 25 percent increase" in 2011 in police officer homicides "and a 75 percent increase from 2008. Startling data, huh? But the truth is more complex. While police officer deaths did rise in 2011, they've also dramatically declined so far in 2012, as Radley Balko pointed out over the weekend. Here are the data for 2012 so far compared to last year via the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund:

Law Enforcement Officer Fatalities
Preliminary 2012 Numbers
April 11, 2012

	2012	2011	% Change
Total Fatalities	31	59	-47%
Firearms-related	11	26	-58%
Traffic-related	12	19	-37%
Other Causes	8	14	-43%

Why wasn't THAT the news hook? Such preliminary data were good enough to hype last year. IMO the answer is that sensationalistic bad news draws more readers than stories about positive trends. Journalists have a natural schadenfreude that encourages them to frame stories in the most alarming ways, but good news travels slowly, even during the 24-hour news cycle.

In this case, the Times also cherrypicked the data a bit. Dating the 75% increase from 2008 obscures the fact that on-the-job officer deaths were much higher in 2007, when 189 officers died on the job compared to 141 in 2008. This graph depicting the long-term pattern on officer deaths shows the recent "trend" hyped by the Times is really more a regression to the mean:

Police Officer Deaths in the Line of Duty, 1961-2011

So the tendency analyzed in the Times is a bit of a construct. Reporters could just as easily have said the total number of police officer deaths declined 8.5% compared to 2007, but would Times editors have considered that news "fit to print"?

In addition, limiting their stat to police homicides ignores most on-the-job police deaths, which much more frequently happen because of accidents, often in traffic. In 2010, for example, 153 officers died on the job nationwide, but the FBI data on which the NY Times based its analysis counted 56 officers "feloniously killed" that year. So when calculating the increase in the Times story, most on-the-job police deaths weren't counted.

Anytime you're analyzing statistics involving such small numbers, special care is warranted. With more than 700,000 sworn officers in the United States, these small fluctuations are not necessarily statistically significant. Notably absent from the Times story was any analysis by a statistician on whether these short-term data fluctuations are meaningful. Instead, the article is filled with speculation about the reasons for a trend that may or may not exist.

Being a police officer is not remotely the most dangerous job out there, nor even the most dangerous government work. Excluding soldiers who die in combat, garbage collectors rank highest among government workers in the likelihood they'll be killed on the job. The people picking up your trash put their lives on the line every day and are more likely not to make it home at night than their brethren in blue. But one suspects we won't any time soon see a New York Times headline memorializing their sacrifice.

Police quietly expanding warrantless cell phone tracking

The New York Times this weekend had a feature on the dramatic growth in cell-phone tracking by law enforcement based on thousands of pages of documents obtained by the ACLU from local police departments, reporting that:

While cell tracking by local police departments has received some limited public attention in the last few years, the A.C.L.U. documents show that the practice is in much wider use — with far looser safeguards — than officials have previously acknowledged.

The issue has taken on new legal urgency in light of a Supreme Court ruling in January finding that a Global Positioning System tracking device placed on a drug suspect’s car violated his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches. While the ruling did not directly involve cellphones — many of which also include GPS locators — it raised questions about the standards for cellphone tracking, lawyers say.

The police records show many departments struggling to understand and abide by the legal complexities of cellphone tracking, even as they work to exploit the technology.

In cities in Nevada, North Carolina and other states, police departments have gotten wireless carriers to track cellphone signals back to cell towers as part of nonemergency investigations to identify all the callers using a particular tower, records show. 

In California, state prosecutors advised local police departments on ways to get carriers to “clone” a phone and download text messages while it is turned off.

At the end of the story, there's a brief discussion about pending reform efforts:

Congress and about a dozen states are considering legislative proposals to tighten restrictions on the use of cell tracking.

While cell tracing allows the police to get records and locations of users, the A.C.L.U. documents give no indication that departments have conducted actual wiretapping operations — listening to phone calls — without court warrants required under federal law.

Much of the debate over phone surveillance in recent years has focused on the federal government and counterterrorism operations, particularly a once-secret program authorized by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks. It allowed the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on phone calls of terrorism suspects and monitor huge amounts of phone and e-mail traffic without court-approved intelligence warrants.

Clashes over the program’s legality led Congress to broaden the government’s eavesdropping powers in 2008. As part of the law, the Bush administration insisted that phone companies helping in the program be given immunity against lawsuits.

Since then, the wide use of cell surveillance has seeped down to even small, rural police departments in investigations unrelated to national security. 

“It’s become run of the mill,” said Catherine Crump, an A.C.L.U. lawyer who coordinated the group’s gathering of police records. “And the advances in technology are rapidly outpacing the state of the law.”

This is an issue I'd like to see the Texas Legislature address in 2013, preferably creating a warrant requirement for obtaining personal information including location from people's cell phones. This practice will be abused without rigorous court oversight and strong laws protective of personal privacy.

As an aside, the Times continues to misstate the effect of a recent SCOTUS ruling on police placing GPS trackers on cars, insisting the court found "that a Global Positioning System tracking device placed on a drug suspect’s car violated his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches." In fact, SCOTUS ruled only that placing a GPS tracker on your car is a search, and did NOT go so far as to say it was an unreasonable one. The ruling was exceptionally narrow in that regard, and for some reason most of the media have overstated what the court actually said.

MORE: See ACLU's writeup of documents they received under open records.

East Austin needs more family-centered approach to crime than touted by neighborhood groups

A story yesterday in the Austin Statesman ("East Austin neighborhoods want downtown-style safety measures," March 31) voiced proposals from neighborhood associations near Grits' own residence in central east Austin aiming to crack down on repeat offenders in the same manner as an aggressive campaign against repeat offenders downtown. As often happens, tragedy heightened the rhetoric and political urgency of activist critiques. The article opened:

A fatal shooting this month at 13th and Chicon streets has riled several neighborhood association leaders, who say they want to see certain downtown public safety measures expanded to central East Austin, where a struggle to stop prostitution and drug activity has continued for decades.

Police and officials with the Travis County district attorney's office said an initiative is in the works to curb crime in the area, which is notorious for outdoor sales of narcotics at all hours of the day. But they declined to discuss specifics.

For many residents, the most significant challenge is putting away the dealers who keep coming back to the streets even after multiple arrests.

"Prosecution is the problem," said Lee Sherman, president of the Kealing Neighborhood Association, which is bordered by 12th Street, Chicon Street, Rosewood Avenue and Comal Street.

He and members of at least four nearby neighborhood organizations said that for months they have been pushing Austin police and district attorney officials to create an enhanced prosecution program in central East Austin similar to the one in the downtown entertainment district that targets repeat offenders and other violators.

But neighborhood efforts have been to little avail, Sherman said.

"We have been actively seeking these changes for years and years and years, and this is an example of what happens when they are not applied," Sherman said of the latest killing near his home. "If any area needs these tools, ours does. I don't understand how our area keeps getting left out of these types of programs."

District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg said they are "just in the planning stages" of creating an action plan in central East Austin.

"It might not look exactly like the downtown initiative," she said. "It has to be tailored to the needs of the area and what the crime statistics show us, but we will absolutely include the neighborhoods in the conversation."

The euphemism "enhanced prosecution" means in practice that "district attorney officials comb through reports filed by Austin police officers patrolling that zone and look for cases that qualify for tougher punishment," according to the Statesman.

Grits for one is glad to see the DA isn't automatically acquiescing to neighborhood groups on this because transplanting hyper-punitive strategies from the Central Business District to east Austin would be a terrible idea. I've lived just a few blocks away from the area suggested for expanded enforcement for the past 22 years and have had a front-row seat witnessing many of the cited problems. IMO just jacking up enhancements and sentences after the fact exacerbates the underlying, crime-causing dynamic. Why not seek out approaches for intervention - like the "High Point" or "drug-market intervention" (DMI) model (see a manual [pdf] on the idea from the USDOJ) - rather than a straight-up crack down? After all, how many different public officials over the years have announced their own version of "zero tolerance" initiatives in the area? (The "drug free zone" signs in the area for years have been viewed by the neighborhood as a source of ironic humor.) Central east Austin has one of the highest ratios in the city of children with incarcerated parents. Cracking down is a big part of how this neighborhood got where it is today. The High-Point approach is more family and neighborhood based, involving engaging the family and community leadership in keeping a young person out of "the life," using the threat of immediate prosecution as a strong, immediate motivator. Here's a good summary of the process in micro from The Economist:

POLICE watched seven people sell drugs in Marshall Courts and Seven Oaks, two districts in south-eastern Newport News, in Virginia. They built strong cases against them. They shared that information with prosecutors. But then the police did something unusual: they sent the seven letters inviting them to police headquarters for a talk, promising that if they came they would not be arrested. Three came, and when they did they met not only police and prosecutors, but also family members, people from their communities, pastors from local churches and representatives from social-service agencies. Their neighbours and relatives told them that dealing drugs was hurting their families and communities. The police showed them the information they had gathered, and they offered the seven a choice: deal again, and we will prosecute you. Stop, and these people will help you turn your lives around.

The drug dealing that underlies much east Austin street crime is not of the high-end variety but instead mostly operates at the subsistence level, where a minimum wage job would generally be quite competitive if they were available. As Stephen Leavitt famously demonstrated in Freakonomics, drug dealing doesn't pay much and most drug dealers live with their parents  (an observation that applies in spades to central east Austin, in this writer's observation). So the High Point model has great potential if it successfully engages, parents, grandparents, pastors, and other who are influential in young people's lives. The DA's Office still has the option to prosecute if somebody continues to commit crimes (as some inevitably will), but the approach has a good track record and seems more tailored to the particular needs of central east Austin than merely enhanced sentences for young offenders.

Public intoxication, hypothetical harms, and 'contempt of badge'

The Austin Statesman today published a story ("Public intoxication laws too fuzzy, critics say," March 27) questioning Austin PD's alleged use of public intoxication charges as "contempt of badge" and detailing the loosey goosey standards under which the law is enforced. "I can't believe the haphazardness with which they're arresting people for public intoxication," former DA candidate Mindy Montford told the paper. "You'd be hard-pressed in the penal code to find another crime as subjective as this one."

Montford said most offenses in the Texas penal code include some stipulations about a suspect's mental state, such as whether they acted recklessly or intentionally. They also put the burden of proving the offense's veracity on prosecutors.

But the public intoxication charge has none of this, Montford said, especially when compared with the state's laws against driving while intoxicated. "When you compare the two, the amount of evidence that goes into a DWI" is massive, she said, such as a field sobriety test and breath or blood alcohol tests. "There's none that goes into P.I."

Attorney David Gonzalez said he has represented college students who drove to the entertainment district downtown, had some drinks, decided it was best not to drive and then were arrested for public intoxication while walking home.

Gonzalez said the public intoxication charge is "the only law on the books that allows hypotheticals."

"Hypothetically, they could trip and fall down, so they're a danger to themselves or others," he said. In all other crimes, from theft to murder, a criminal act has to have been committed to justify a charge, he said.

While public intoxication is only a class C misdemeanor, meaning it is punishable by a fine not to exceed $500, it is also an arrestable offense and one that could cause problems at job interviews and other situations, attorneys said.

The offense accounts for a significant number of arrests for a Class C misdemeanor. "Austin police made about 5,600 public intoxication arrests last year, according to data obtained by the American-Statesman through an Texas Public Information Act request. In the past five years, the department has typically made between 5,500 and 6,000 arrests annually, except in 2009 when that number rose to 6,730 arrests, according to the data."

Austin police gave 26% fewer traffic tickets in 2011

It turns out Austin's decline in the number of traffic tickets given out last year was even greater than Grits had supposed according to the city's recent racial profiling report (pdf), which I noticed via this story by Patrick George in the Austin Statesman. Grits has earlier reported that tickets processed in municipal court in Austin had declined from roughly 233,000 to 205,000 from 2010 to 2011 - part of a statewide trend.

The racial profiling report shows Austin officers last year gave far fewer tickets last year. "Austin police officers made 179,882 motor vehicle stops in 2011 compared to 232,848 in 2010," according to the city's racial profiling report. One caveat: That's comparing calendar year to calendar year whereas the Office of Court Administration is measuring the fiscal year (September to August).

Still, that's an amazing 26% fewer tickets from year to year! Said the report: "Overall, the number of stops is lower in 2011, in part, because the Highway Enforcement Command shifted its mission from citywide traffic enforcement to a focus on the major highways such as IH-35, MoPac and 183. As a consequence, the number of traffic citations declined from 224,662 in 2010 to 165,757 in 2011, a 26% reduction. The overall number of motor vehicle stops also decreased by 23%." That has trickle down effects at the jail and throughout the court system because so many arrests originate at traffic stops.

Austin also saw the number of consent searches at traffic stops decline last year, from the highest total since they began tracking in 2010 (19,519) to a more modest 2011 total (11,719)), for a 40% drop.

I went to check the same data source for other cities and was disappointed to see this on the TCLEOSE website: "Note: The link to the 2010 Racial Profiling reports from the TCLEOSE website is no longer available on-line, but may be purchased for $35 (CD disk) through Open Records Request." That's pointless. How much space does it take to archive past years' reports for comparison? I might go ahead and get a couple of years worth for comparison purposes, but that's gratuitous. At least leave the last 3-5 years of reports online to supply some context for the annual data.

• Most larger Texas police departments wrote fewer traffic tickets in 2011
• Why are Texas cops writing fewer traffic tickets?

Pedestrian deaths in Austin and the trouble with drawing conclusions from small numbers

One seldom-discussed drawback with data-driven policing - particularly when its used in mid-size and smaller cities - is that small statistical samples often make drawing valid inferences problematic, and here's a good example: Writes reporter Brenda Bell, "auto-pedestrian deaths are up in Austin, even as deaths from other vehicular collisions are falling. Last year marked an 83 percent increase in pedestrian-bicyclist fatalities; there were 22, compared with a dozen in 2010." Bell reported Sunday that "This year, eight people, including one walking his bike, have already died in collisions with motor vehicles. All but one happened after dark or at dusk. One-third were hit-and-runs."

While certainly it's accurate to say there was an 83% one-year increase, when the numbers are so small that means very little as far as identifying a statistical trend of increasing deaths, and the story didn't include prior years' data. On Sunday Bell did report that "Auto-bike fatalities have averaged one per year over the past seven years," but that means the year you have two it's a hundred percent increase. Is that meaningful data, or just random fluctuation? You see the same issues with murder trends and other infrequent events. Media will report a one-year increase with tremendous drama as a possible trend, even during periods like we're in now when long-term murder rates are declining. When numbers are so small, you need multiple years of data to perform a probative trend analysis, which of course doesn't make for the most attention-grabbing news story.

Perhaps the most obvious death-causing trend evidenced in the stories is that a significant proportion of pedestrian deaths in Austin happen along Interstate 35, which for significant stretches (especially north of 51st Street) is difficult to cross legally on foot and is flanked by extremely busy frontage roads. This datapoint reinforces my sense that jaywalking can be better addressed via traffic engineering solutions that make it safer for pedestrians to get where they're going. If you're walking any significant distance along the access road on I-35, it's likely because you have no other choice.

Another notable trend mentioned is bicyclists being hit after dark, which might argue for efforts narrowly aimed at improving safety equipment. (I see cyclists these days with flashing lights on their bikes instead of reflectors that make them MUCH easier to see after dark.) Cyclists' deficient equipment can be addressed with a variety of tactics from public education, warnings or tickets for equipment violations, improved lighting for dangerous intersections and popular bike routes, etc..

For the most part, though, the city should address these mainly as traffic engineering questions as opposed to law-enforcement concerns. For example, would auto-pedestrian/bike accidents downtown be reduced by creating the proposed Nueces Bike Boulevard? (See here [pdf] for more detail.) Quite possibly. A fascinating and telling map of recent auto-pedestrian/bike accidents accompanying the story shows a large number downtown, though some are concentrated on the east and west entry corridors. Those wouldn't be affected by a north-south route on Nueces, which more aims to reduce accidents on, say, Congress and Lamar.

Instead, Austin PD took a one-size-fits-all enforcement approach, employing a hammer in lieu of a scalpel. In a highly unpopular two-week crackdown last October:

Pedestrians got 1,336 citations and warnings, for offenses such as failure to observe traffic signals, panhandling or stepping into roadways midblock. Drivers got 174.

That lopsided scorecard is par for the course. Between 2008 and 2010, Austin police issued nearly 11,000 citations for violations of auto-pedestrian laws; only 7 percent went to drivers.

Ticketing cyclists may prompt them to get better equipment for biking at night - just handing out lights might even be better - but jaywalking will always be a function of convenience and opportunism. Focusing significant resources on ticketing them IMO is just silly. Meanwhile, as for Austin's much-ballyhooed "3 foot rule" that's supposed to protect "vulnerable" road users?

A city ordinance passed in 2009 requires vehicles to keep at least 3 feet away when passing a "vulnerable user" — a bicyclist, motorcyclist, pedestrian or runner. On four-lane roads, motorists are supposed to yield the lane entirely.

Austin police have issued just eight citations — four per year — under that law.

So that was a bust. Now they're going to try using police as pedestrian "decoys" to ticket motorists. But with 11,000 citations for auto-pedestiran laws over three years and a supposed increase in the problem just now, it doesn't seem like the enforcement-only approach gets to the heart of the problem. Assessing tickets and fines for petty offenses while telling the public it's for their own protection comes off as self serving as it is patronizing in an era when municipal tickets are viewed as a lucrative revenue source.

To be fair, the city does have $13.5 million in bond money available "for projects to enhance mobility and safety for pedestrians, bikers and disabled people," which should do a lot more to prevent deaths than giving pointless tickets to jaywalkers. Certainly it will do more than APD's various proposals for new city bonds at ten times the cost.

Police Chief Art Acevedo told the paper he thinks this trend - which nobody can really say is a trend yet - results from the declining moral character of the citizenry: "Drivers think (pedestrians) don't have the right to cross the street, and pedestrians think they can jump out at the last second," he said. "It used to be ... that when a pedestrian set foot in an intersection, that people stopped. I think it's a commentary on society that we've lost that respect," adding that we're all a bunch of drunks Austin is "one of the heaviest drinking cities in the country."

For Grits' part, I think it's a commentary on Austin PD that, although the chief and the union complain constantly they don't have enough uniformed officers, when they get them they want them deployed ticketing jaywalkers while the civilian APD crime-scene unit doesn't even investigate a majority of burglaries for lack of manpower. And it's perhaps a commentary on the local media that police pronouncements of an "increased rate of pedestrian fatalities on Austin streets" are accepted as valid based on such a limited dataset. (If earlier years' numbers of pedestrian deaths are higher than 12, it might almost seem like the data was cherrypicked.)

These two stories give us insight into Austin PDs traffic enforcement tactics but in many ways for Grits raise more questions than they answer. Once we've seen the number of pedestrian deaths by year, preferably per capita, over a longer period of time, perhaps it would be safer to draw conclusions about trends.

Lege committee told model eyewitness ID policy mostly well received

The House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee held a hearing this week on the implementation of its eyewitness identification legislation and invited just one witness: Rita Watkins from Sam Houston State University - whose team at the Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas drafted the model policy mandated under HB 215, a bill authored by the outgoing chairman of the committee, Pete Gallego, who is leaving the Lege after 22 years to run for Congress.

Surprisingly, there was really only one question (with a few variants) posed to Watkins: They wanted her to respond to the letter from McAllen police chief Victor Rodriguez, discussed in this Grits post. Watkins told me later the committee hadn't communicated to her to prepare for that line of questioning, but she answered well, perhaps in part because LEMIT had already prepared a extensive FAQ (pdf) responding to the Chief's unfortunately ill-informed concerns. Plus, she's been through a long process which included convening a "working group" prior to writing the model policy that included both Chief Rodriguez and your correspondent (in my role at my day job working for the Innocence Project of Texas). Then they held a public hearing at the capitol before finalizing it. At this point, Rita and her staff have been all the way around the block on this subject, and from my observation she's handled her critics - myself included, at some points in the process - with admirable aplomb.

Bottom line: The Chief wishes the bill had not passed and does not understand it, falsely believing (or at least portraying) that his department is required by law to adopt the "model policy." They're not. It's just a recommendation. If he doesn't like it, he can adopt something else. LEMIT did what the Legislature told them to do: Write a "detailed written policy" with specific "procedures" for a number of different aspects of eyewitness identifications based on scientific research and established best practices. The committee seemed satisfied with Watkins' answers and didn't appear to give much credence to the McAllen chief's oddball letter once she explained his various misconceptions.

Anyway, it sounds like there's not a major groundswell out there among law enforcement in opposition to the model policy, at least so far. Watkins said she'd been surprised to receive just eight phone calls from police chiefs about the model policy after it was published. Five of them were congratulatory, she said, and the other three were from Chief Rodriguez. Though LEMIT dubbed its response to Rodriguez an "FAQ," apparently as a practical matter those weren't questions being asked all that frequently.

Police, defendants, social media and internet privacy

The Dallas News had an interesting item this week behind the paywall about police officers getting into trouble for outing misconduct or criticizing one another via social media and online message boards. The story opened:

The online message board postings read, at times, like a typical teenager attacking a classmate.

“She has an attitude problem and is all mouth,” wrote “Eskimo88” in one December post.

“SHES AN IDIOT,” he wrote in another, referring to the same person in a post the next day as “bat [expletive] crazy.”

But the posts weren’t made by an angry adolescent. They were published on a members-only local law enforcement message board, undergroundcop.com, by Dallas police Public Integrity Detective Jeff Baum, according to public records. He made the postings in reference to a since-fired officer whom Baum’s unit investigated for criminal misconduct.

The revelation that Baum is “Eskimo88” could threaten the credibility of pending criminal cases against former Sgt. Stormy Magiera, who is accused among other things of lying about a December Dallas robbery in which police believe she was trying to buy prescription drugs. And the case highlights a culture among some officers of gossip, rumor-mongering and personal attacks that can have career-threatening consequences in the Internet era.

“We are seeing people lose their careers over a posting on Facebook, whether it was about a crime that they went to or about another officer or about a citizen,” said Harvey Hedden, executive director of the International Law Enforcement and Trainers Association.

It's been quite the trend in recent years for police to mine social media for information about defendants, but I haven't seen it used as often to allege police misconduct. That said, allowing such unfettered, anonymous carping by employees in a criminal justice setting can become corrosive and harmful. I know Grits shut down some TYC/juvenile justice strings because of exactly that type of unproductive, personal sniping against non-public figures, and it's unsurprising, if disappointing, that the online culture in some police departments isn't much better.

Perhaps relatedly, the blog Liberty and Justice for Y'all has a post on a unanimous Court of Criminal Appeals ruling which confusingly seemed to adopt a three-pronged standard from a Maryland case for authenticating that online postings actually came from a specific individual and not just someone using their computer or posing as them. However, wrote B.W. Barnett, "While the State failed, in the Tienda case, to use any of the methods articulated by the Maryland Court of Appeals, the CCA nonetheless held, that based on the circumstantial indicia of authenticity, the State created a prima facie case that would justify submitting the ultimate question of authenticity to the jury." So the court invokes a standard, then fails to follow it, but allows the evidence in anyway, declaring those methods are not exclusive. That, my friends, is outcome-based jurisprudence: Pick the outcome you want then pull a reason out of thin air to justify it.

In any event, the Tienda case will make it easier to establish the identities of police officers on sites like undergroundcop.com just like it makes it easier to prosecute workaday criminal defendants. In an odd sense, the police commenter Eskimo88 and the defendant in Tienda had somewhat aligned legal interests, at least as far as favoring a precedent that maximally protects internet privacy, forcing the state to prove authorship definitively as opposed to circumstantially.

What you say online, even anonymously, is increasingly likely to get you in trouble on the job or even with the justice system. I don't know that we've yet reached "the end of anonymity," but Internet privacy - for cops and citizens alike - certainly hangs by a tenuous thread.

Most larger Texas police departments wrote fewer traffic tickets in 2011

I think we're unraveling a trend here. After the Dallas News reported the surprising news that the number of traffic tickets issued by Dallas PD has dramatically declined, Grits found that tickets statewide have declined as well, or at least those processed in municipal courts. So Charles Kuffner at Off the Kuff looked at Houston's data and found HPD issued 200,000+ fewer tickets in FY 2011 than in 2010, more than a 20% one-year decline. This inspired Grits to compile the number of tickets issued over the last two fiscal years in some of the largest Texas cities and remarkably, the number of new traffic cases in municipal court are dropping nearly across the board:


I'd asked before what might be causing this and now I'm even more curious. These are remarkable numbers considering Texas' population has continued to grow and Texas cities have big budget incentives to write more tickets, not less. And why is San Antonio an outlier? I find the whole situation surprising and puzzling.

Check out your town's numbers if they're not on the list above. See here for FY 2010 data by city, here for FY 2011.

Why are Texas cops writing fewer traffic tickets?

A story by Scott Goldstein at the Dallas Morning News ("Dallas police tickets fall by tens of thousands," Feb. 28, behind paywall) opened:

Dallas police issued almost 59,000 fewer tickets last fiscal year than in the previous year, continuing a dramatic decline that could equate to millions of dollars less in city revenue, according to public records.

Police officials in Dallas, as in other cities reporting similar declines, offer several possible explanations for the decline in citations, most of which are generated by traffic stops.

They also emphasize that the number of traffic stops has gone up by tens of thousands, even as the number of tickets has dropped.

“We’re more interested in traffic stops, not necessarily citations,” Dallas Police Assistant Chief Tom Lawrence said. “The issuing of citations to a driver has always been the discretion of the officer, and we continue to be that way. We’re not going to change that.”

Tickets issued dropped by 67,000 in fiscal 2007-08, an additional 43,000 the next year and 18,000 in 2009-10. The total in fiscal 2006-07 was about 479,500, compared with 292,683 last year.

Lawrence said more than half of last year’s decrease is attributable to a 30 percent cut to a grant that financed officer overtime to work traffic enforcement exclusively in specified areas.

Police officials said that the federal grant is funneled through the state and that they did not know why it was cut.

Officers have other possible reasons for the decline in tickets.

Some officers say they are reluctant to write as many because they aren’t getting overtime pay for court appearances and because the citations they do write have gotten increased scrutiny from supervisors after ticket-writing scandals in recent years.

In addition, traffic unit personnel have been assigned recently to crime-fighting initiatives rather than strict traffic enforcement duties.

The decline comes as the city has seen an unprecedented eight straight years of overall crime reduction. For most of that time, the size of the force was steadily rising, thanks to a hiring push.

What's remarkable is not just this year's drop but the overall 39% decline since '06-'07. Wondering if the same trend is occurring statewide, Grits pulled the total number of new, non-parking traffic cases filed in municipal courts in recent years from the Office of Court Administration's annual reports. I was surprised to find that FY 2011 numbers reported represented a remarkable drop of more than 600,000 traffic tickets per year, more than 10%, compared to FY 2008:

Total new non-parking traffic cases filed statewide in Texas municipal courts:

2006: 5,711,966
2007: 5,581,607
2008: 5,749,780
2009: 5,684,813
2010: 5,521,029
2011: 5,148,510

Some police departments - notably Austin's - view traffic stops as their primary anti-crime strategy, particularly in so-called "hotspots," so I was surprised to notice that trend. It has budget implications, certainly, but more importantly, what is causing it? Are police deployment patterns changing, and if so, how and why? Perhaps the price of gas and a depressed economy are just making people drive less, which could make the trend meaningless if the economy picks back up. Perhaps Dallas' remarkable drop explains a disproportionate share of the total. OTOH, perhaps other cities, like Big D, are scaling back traffic enforcement in tight budget times because of limited resources. Or maybe there's something bigger going on, just as we've witnessed a steady drop in index crime rates over the last two decades.

Why are Texas cops writing fewer traffic tickets? What do you think is going on?

News flash: Cop calls Grits a liar

Grits is a liar, says Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo! Go here to read why then come back here for, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story.

Let's start by quickly granting what was incorrect  in my original post about getting stopped twice Friday night a week ago with my granddaughter on the way home from roller skating (an account which received, much to my surprise and without my assistance, an almost absurd amount of social media attention until eventually the Statesman picked it up). Throughout, with the chief's approbation, I declined comment.

Basically two things I wrote were flat-out wrong, both of which are detailed in an Update/Correction posted at the end of the original item on Friday. First, I recalled an officer pulling his taser out when in fact his hand hovered over his weapon but it remained holstered. After I finally got to see some of the video for myself, I posted a correction. I also posted another correction: I originally thought the deputy constable (the first officer who detained us) had called in the rest of the cavalry and assigned blame to her when I shouldn't. Turns out, she did the right thing and IMO it was APD who overreacted, an opinion which explains why the chief is mad.

What's still in dispute? Mostly red herrings. I never alleged police brutality nor misconduct. In fact, in the comment section and more than a few emails to reporters I insisted there was none. I did say in the post I was "roughly cuffed." And if the tape rolls long enough (I don't know what was released to the media) at some point I asked them to loosen the cuffs as they were cinched up tight enough to be painful - a small thing, perhaps, if it's not you, but a "lie"? To his credit, one of the officers loosened the cuffs shortly before I was released.

Acevedo also pretends in the Statesman article that his officers stopped us because I refused to identify myself to the deputy constable. In fact, the deputy constable's written report, which the chief let me read in his office but would not give me a copy of, she said she stopped us, asked Ty a few questions, seemingly did not think the situation required further investigation and had begun to return to the Millenium Center. It was then that APD was told a deputy constable was on the scene, and they had her patched through via dispatch. Moments before APD was about to roll up on us, the deputy constable told APD that she'd spoken to us, gave them the child's name, told them I was her grandfather, and began to run toward the scene. She never told APD I did not identify myself before I was handcuffed, so that fact-bite was irrelevant. (Judging from the one-sided account, Acevedo apparently did not release the constable's written report, nor the dispatch tape of her saying that to APD along with the materials he gave the Statesman Friday.)

What aspects of my original recitation were correct? Well, basically everything else. Despite Acevedo's inflammatory attack on my credibility, not much is actually in dispute. Someone called 911 when I left the Millennium Center with my granddaughter. I was stopped not once but twice. I did, in fact, allow the Constable to question Ty and she left understanding that I was Ty's grandpa. We were then stopped by several APD officers. I counted six cars initially, with three more arriving soon thereafter and a supervisor arriving later. Acevedo didn't dispute any of that. I was handcuffed. Ty was taken away from me, pulled into a police car and questioned. We were not immediately released. Some minutes later, after they finally called my wife and daughter, we were let go without an apology. And the child had numerous questions and opinions about the incidents that I tried to accurately recollect.

So, on the basis of one factual error which I readily owned after seeing the conflicting video, I am a liar, says the chief. The strangest part is, Acevedo brought me into APD headquarters Thursday afternoon to meet with him and his staff, proposing that we do a media interview together and try and make all this a "teaching moment" for the public (his words). He was upset that the issue was being discussed without him getting to "frame" it. I'd turned down more than two-dozen requests for media interviews on this topic, from every local print and TV outlet to Anderson Cooper, but because the media frenzy had gotten so out of hand even without my participation, after mulling it over with the family, I agreed to do a joint interview with him (now decidedly not happening).

My first hint that Acevedo was about to show me an especially Janus-faced visage came Friday afternoon, when he began leaking emails and launching personal attacks on a local listserv through his favorite stalking horse, retired Texas Monthly publisher Mike Levy. Then Saturday in the paper he's calling me a liar. "Teaching moment" my ass.

It would be convenient for him if I were. Grits has been a bit of a thorn in the department's side dating to the mid-'90s when I co-founded a political action committee that successfully pushed for the creation of Austin's Police Monitor Office and ran a website publishing police misconduct reports from the department garnered under open records. So taking this opportunity to try and discredit me personally must have been just too tempting to pass up.

Did I intentionally make up the drawn taser? Of course not, no more than a witness who falsely identifies a suspect by mistake. In 2001, I helped pass the legislation to require cameras in police cars, for heaven's sake, I knew full well the incident was being taped! I said what I remembered and remembered that detail wrong. Vision and memory is not the same as a videotape. Anyone who follows innocence issues knows much of our vision of constructed from memory and witnesses make mistakes. Carl Reynolds from the Office of Court Administration once recounted how, after he and several others were accosted in a robbery in Atlanta, he "learned later that [he and his] colleagues ... did not even agree on the number of young men." Were some of them lying? I don't think so. Neither was I, and I'm man enough to admit I was wrong. Hence the correction.

Similarly, I was wrong to assume the deputy constable called in the cavalry. With 20/20 hindsight, having reviewed all the materials the chief showed me (which is more than the press has seen so far), she's the one who did it right, investigating a serious allegation without needlessly scaring a child or applying more restrictive force than was necessary to contain the situation. She also told APD moments before they detained me that she'd spoken to the child, gave them her name, and said I was her Grandpa. My apologies for my original, false interpretation, both to the deputy and Constable Danny Thomas' shop.

Many, many people have asked whether I will sue or file a complaint, so let me reiterate here, just as I said in the blog comments and in writing to Chief Acevedo and Ms. Osborn (though somehow she didn't find it fit to print): "Not only am I not going to sue the police, I doubt anyone even violated APD policies so a complaint wouldn't do much either - they're TRAINED to respond like that, which is my main beef with what happened. This wasn't a bug in the system, it's a feature."

As I said in Grits comments and to the Chief, both face to face in front of a roomful of brass and in writing, I don't believe what those officers did violated any law, departmental policy or court ruling, and in fact it likely conformed to APD's training and the expectations of their supervisors. I never said otherwise. It was completely "by the book." But there are some really good books that may not be completely appropriate for a five-year old. I'm not saying don't investigate, I'm saying exercise some self-restraint, discretion and common sense, like the deputy did. When your investigation is happening in front of a small child and there's no immediate threat, I prefer the deputy constable's book to APD's approach. That's the full extent of any policy criticism I have on the incident.

What bugs me most about the Statesman article wasn't some cop calling me a liar - that happens twice a week if you read Grits comments. No, what gets my goat is the chief spent nearly two hours glad handing me on Thursday and never once called me a liar, never once alleged bad faith, said he wanted us to move forward to respond together, blah, blah, blah. Then the next day he ropes in some in-the-can Statesman reporter, dripping out partial information to do a hatchet piece.

There are many types of courage in the world. The kind of courage to confront criminals on the street is certainly one type. Then there's the courage required to admit a mistake. And there's having the grit to look a man in the eye and say the same things to his face that you do behind his back. Or perhaps that last one has become an outdated virtue?

RELATED: Just so Grits can say they've been published as prominently as the original post, here are the two corrections I appended to the original blog post on Friday:

UPDATE/CORRECTIONS (2/17): Yesterday afternoon I had the opportunity to review the documentation, video, audio and police reports related to this incident in Art Acevedo's office and heard his pitch why this blog post was unfair. There are really only two corrections I'd make having now seen the videos and other documentation Chief Acevedo showed me yesterday. (I'm probably going to write about it again over the weekend.) First, I recollected in the blog post that an officer had a taser drawn and from the video the officer's arm was only crooked and prepared to draw. It happened in a flash and like many eyewitnesses, when under a perceived threat, my mind filled in some pieces erroneously, I'll be the first to admit in light of the video evidence. It was not an intentional error. That said, I correctly perceived that all of a sudden a LOT of cops were on us out of nowhere and if I'd made any sudden or untoward moves I'd be tazed or worse. I think it wasn't unreasonable for either of us to feel threatened by them rolling up on us like that.

The other error was that the original post cast unfair blame on the deputy constable. Her report said that after we'd spoken, she was heading back to the Millenium Center thinking the incident was over when the dispatcher patched into the constable's frequency because they'd heard from the Millenium Center she'd gone after us. In the dispatcher's audio, she tells APD just before they roll up on us that she'd spoken to us, gave them Ty's name and told them I was her grandpa. Though I blamed her (unfairly) both at the scene and in the initial post, falsely thinking she'd called in the cavalry, she did not. In fact, in the scheme of things she got it right. Basically two departments with overlapping jurisdictions responded to this complaint: One came at us based on a community policing approach where she walked up calmly, asked a few questions, and according to her report was satisfied and had begun to return to her shift until she heard on the radio APD was coming. By contrast, APD handcuffed first and asked questions later. That's the big difference between the two departments' approaches.

More allegations against APD crime lab

The Austin PD crime lab may be getting more scrutiny from the Forensic Science Commission, reports Patrick George at the Austin Statesman, this time based on a rare complaint from another lab which is challenging APD's drug testing results:

Another complaint has been filed against the Austin Police Department's crime lab, this time by an independent lab in North Texas that claims it received different results than the Austin lab when testing the same drug evidence.

Crime lab officials in Austin said they received the complaint filed by Integrated Forensic Laboratories in Euless, between Dallas and Fort Worth, late last week.

Austin police and lab officials have begun looking at the complaint this week and are preparing a response, said Bill Gibbens, the lab's forensic manager. Gibbens said he hopes to send a response to the Texas Forensic Science Commission by Friday.

It is the second complaint the Austin lab has faced this year. In January, a former crime lab scientist who was fired last year alleged that lab administrators do not have proper accreditation and that drug evidence was not analyzed before reports were submitted.

Gibbens said the latest complaint deals with two separate pending criminal cases from 2010. Because they are moving through the courts, he said, he could not discuss the details .

After the Austin police lab submitted its drug evidence tests to the courts, the suspects' attorneys asked for a second opinion from the independent lab in Euless, Gibbens said. That lab returned different test results than the Austin lab, he said.

"It's a difference of opinion in how we report substances," Gibbens said.

Gibbens said he's not sure how common it is for one lab to file a complaint on another lab. "It's the first time it's happened to us," he said.

Lynn Robitaille, the general counsel for the Texas Forensic Science Commission, said that it was the first time she had seen one lab file a complaint on another since she started there in December 2010. The commission was created by the state Legislature in 2005.

Robitaille said the commission's complaint screening committee heard the matter Friday. When they meet again in March, they are expected to recommend whether the commission should investigate the matter.

I wonder if the allegations of drylabbing (submitting results without having done the testing) and the incongruous lab results are related? If you submit results without testing the evidence, that would certainly open the door for another lab to come out with different findings.

Me, APD, and 'Babysitting While White,' Part Deux

A few years back Grits posed the question, "Is babysitting while white reasonable suspicion for police questioning?" after my granddaughter and I were detained and questioned at length in my neighborhood on suspicion of some nefarious deed (it was never quite clear what). In that incident, the police were pretty clear I was stopped solely because Ty, like her mother (who came to live with my wife and me when she was a child) is black, while I'm an almost stereotypical looking white Texas redneck. At the time, Grits was amazed that three squad cars were dispatched to question me for walking down the street with a child of a different race, detaining me for no good reason and scaring the bejeezus out of then-two-year old Ty.

Last night, though, Ty and I got the full jump-out-boys treatment, making our earlier interaction with Austin PD seem downright quaint. It could only have been more ridiculous if they'd actually arrested me, which for a while there didn't seem out of the question. (This is a personal tale much more than a policy analysis, so if you're only interested in the latter, don't bother to read further.)

Our story began at the Millennium Youth Center in central east Austin, which is a city-owned rec center just a few blocks from my home of 22 years. Ty, age 5, often spends the night with us on Fridays to give Mom and Dad a night off, and we'd taken her there to go roller skating after dinner out as a reward for a week's worth of excellent behavior scores in kindergarten.

Perhaps at 7:40 p.m. or so, after she'd had her fill of skating (if the event were put to music, the appropriate theme song would have been "Slip Slidin' Away"), I asked Ty if she'd like to walk home and let Grandma take the car. It was cool but pleasant out, and we were just a short distance from the house, with a city-bike path where we often walk dogs together taking us most of the way there. She was elated: This sounded like a big adventure, and within moments she was bouncing off the walls with excitement, making me think a walk home was just the thing to burn off some energy before bed time.

This was a terrible mistake on Grandpa's part. Not because we live in a relatively rough neighborhood. I know many of my neighbors, saints and scoundrels alike, and I did not and do not fear becoming a crime victim walking that route, even with a five year old in tow. No, apparently the only folks Ty and I had to fear were in uniform.

Our interaction with law enforcement began after we left the Millennium Center on foot, with the giddy five year old racing ahead and me trotting along behind admonishing her to stay out of the parking lot and stop when she gets to the sidewalk, don't run into the street, etc.. She was in a good mood, obeyed, and we held hands crossing the street and as we walked down the bike path toward Boggy Creek and back home.

Then behind us I heard someone call out, though I couldn't make out what was said. We stopped to look back, and there was a dark silhouette crossing the street who Ty thought was calling out to us. We waited, but then the silhouetted figure stopped, crouched down for a moment, then took a few steps back toward the rec center, appearing to speak to someone there. I shrugged it off and we walked on, but in a moment the figure began walking down the path toward us again, calling out when she was about 150 feet away. We stopped and waited. It was a brown-suited deputy constable, apparently out of breath from the short walk.

She told me to take my hand out of my pocket and to step away from Ty, declaring that someone had seen a white man chasing a black girl and reported a possible kidnapping. Then she began asking the five-year old about me. The last time this happened, Ty was barely two, and I wasn't about to let police question her. This time, though, at least initially, I decided to let her answer. "Do you know this man?" the deputy asked. "Yes," Ty mumbled shyly, "he's my Grandpa." The deputy couldn't understand her (though I did) and moved closer, hovering over the child slightly, repeating the question. Ty mumbled the same response, this time louder, but muffled through a burgeoning sob that threatened to break out in lieu of an answer.

The deputy still didn't understand her: "What did you say?" she repeated. "He's my Grandpa!," Ty finally blurted, sharply and clearly, then rushed back over to me and grabbed hold of my leg. "Okay," said the deputy, relaxing, acknowledging the child probably wasn't being held against her will. (As we were talking, a car pulled up behind her on the bike path with its brights on - I couldn't tell what agency it was with) Then she pulled out her pad and paper and asked "Can I get your name, sir, just for my report?" I told her I'd prefer not to answer any questions and would like to leave, if we were free to go, so I could get the child to bed. She looked skeptical but nodded and Ty and I turned tail and walked toward home.

Ty was angrier about this, even, than I was. "Why is it," she demanded a few steps down the path, stomping her feet and swinging her little arms as she said it, "that the police won't ever believe you're my Grandpa?" (Our earlier run in had clearly made an impression, though she hadn't mentioned it in ages.) "Why do you think it is?," I asked, hoping to fend her off with the Socratic method. She paused, then said sheepishly, "Because you're white?" I grinned at her and said, "That's part of it, for sure. But we don't care about that, do we?" "No," she said sternly as we walked across the bridge spanning Boggy Creek just south of 12th Street, "but the police should leave you alone. It's not right that they want to arrest you for being my Grandpa." More prescient words were never spoken.

Just as Ty uttered those words, I made her hold my hand so we could trot across 12th Street amidst the sporadic, Friday night traffic, waiting for a police car to pass before heading across just west of the railroad tracks. Literally my intentions were - the moment we made it safely across the street - to resume our conversation to explain to Ty that nobody wanted to arrest me for being her Grandpa, that that wasn't against the law, and that the deputy had only stopped us to make sure Ty was safe. But we never got a chance to have that conversation.

As soon as we crossed the street, just two blocks from my house as the crow flies, the police car that just passed us hit its lights and wheeled around, with five others appearing almost immediately, all with lights flashing. The officers got out with tasers drawn demanding I raise my hands and step away from the child. I complied, and they roughly cuffed me, jerking my arms up behind me needlessly. Meanwhile, Ty edged up the hill away from the officers, crying. One of them called out in a comforting tone that they weren't there to hurt her, but another officer blew up any good will that might have garnered by brusquely snatching her up and scuttling her off to the back seat of one of the police cars. (By this time more cars had joined them; they maxxed out at 9 or 10 police vehicles.)

I gave them the phone numbers they needed to confirm who Ty was and that she was supposed to be with me (and not in the back of their police car), but for quite a while nobody seemed too interested in verifying my "story." One officer wanted to lecture me endlessly about how they were just doing their job, as if the innocent person handcuffed on the side of the road cares about such excuses. I asked why he hadn't made any calls yet, and he interrupted his lecture to say "we've only been here two minutes, give us time" (actually it'd been longer than that). "Maybe so," I replied, sitting on the concrete in handcuffs, "but there are nine of y'all milling about doing nothing by my count so between you you've had 18 minutes for somebody to get on the damn phone by now so y'all can figure out you screwed up." Admittedly, this did not go over well. I could tell I was too pissed off to say anything constructive and silently vowed to keep mum from then on.

As all this was happening, the deputy constable who'd questioned us before walked up to the scene and began conversing with some of the officers. She kept looking over at me nervously as I stood 20 feet or so away in handcuffs, averting her gaze whenever our eyes risked meeting. It seemed pretty clear she was the one who called in the cavalry, and it was equally clear she understood she was in the wrong.

A supervisor arrived and began floating around among the milling officers (I have no idea what function most of those cops thought they were fulfilling). Finally, she sidled up to repeat the same lecture I'd heard from the young pup officer who'd handcuffed me: "When we get a call about a possible kidnapping we have to take it very seriously," etc., etc.. By this time, though, I'd lost patience with that schtick. Interrupting her repetitive monologue, I explained that I could care less how they justified what they were doing, and could they please stop explaining themselves, focus on their jobs, and get this over with as soon as possible so Ty and I could go home? She paused as though she wanted to argue, then her shoulders slumped a bit, she half-smiled and replied "Fair enough!," wheeling around and issuing inaudible directions to some of the milling officers, all of whom appeared to continue doing nothing, just as before. Not long after that they released us.

Ty told me later that back in the police car she'd been questioned, not just about me but about her personal life, or as she put it, "all my business": They asked about her school, what she'd been doing that evening, to name all the people in her family, and pressed her to say if I or anyone else had done anything to her. Ty was frustrated, she said later, that they kept repeating the same questions, apparently hoping for different answers. She didn't understand why, after she'd told them who I was, the police didn't just let me go. And when it became clear they wouldn't take her word for it, she began to fear the police would take me away and leave her alone with all those scary cops. (I must admit, for a moment there I felt the same way!) On the upside, said Ty, when they were through questioning her one of the officers let her play with his flashlight, which she considered a high point. Don't you miss life being that simple?

Part of the answer, of course, to Ty's Very Good Question about why I wasn't released when she confirmed my identity is that I was in handcuffs and she was in police custody before anybody asked anyone anything. "Seize first and ask questions later" is better than "shoot first," I suppose, but it's problematic for the same reasons. I found out later police had told my wife and Ty's mom that I'd refused to let them question the child - a patent lie since they'd whisked her away into the back of a police car while I was handcuffed. I wasn't in a position to refuse anything at that point.

How hard would it have been to perform a safety check without running up on me like I'm John Dillinger and scaring the crap out of a five year old? I didn't resist or struggle, but they felt obliged to handcuff me and snatch the kid up for interrogation away from any adult family member. Nine police cars plus the deputy constable all showing up to investigate the heinous crime of "babysitting while white."

Moreover, there was no apology to be had at the end of this charade, to me or to Ty. They interrogated the child but no one tried to comfort her beyond handing her a flashlight to play with. And when it was over, not one of those officers, the supervisor included, thought to take a moment to try to explain to the child what had happened, why they'd behaved that way toward her family, or why they'd treated her grandpa like a criminal. They just opened up the door to the squad car as the cuffs were coming off me and Ty came running back and lept into my arms with such force it almost knocked me down.

After the cuffs were off, I said nothing to the APD cops as I carried the child away toward home. But I did pause when I passed the deputy constable - who still could barely look me in the eye - to say aloud to her, "You knew better. This is on you."

Ty was understandably shaken by the incident, and as we walked home she told me all about her interactions with the officers and peppered me with questions about why this, that, everything happened. She said she tried to be brave because she knew I'd get into trouble if the police didn't believe her (she was right about that!) and she was especially scared when she thought they weren't going to accept her word for it. Poor kid.

As we turned onto the last block home, two of the police cars that had detained us passed by and Ty visibly winced with fear, lunging toward me and wrapping her arms around my leg. I petted and tried to comfort her, but she was pretty disturbed and confused by the whole episode. Luckily, it also left her exhausted so she was out like a light soon after we got home, half an hour past her bedtime. This morning she stated bluntly that she had decided not to think about it - a practice my wife encourages when bad things happen - and it seems to be working. She's her normal happy self, though at the park this afternoon she wanted to pretend we were hiding from kidnappers. But I hated for a five-year old to be subjected to such an experience. I'd like her to view police as people she can trust instead of threats to her and her family, but it's possible I live in the wrong neighborhood for that.

UPDATE/CORRECTIONS (2/17): Yesterday afternoon I had the opportunity to review the documentation, video, audio and police reports related to this incident in Art Acevedo's office and heard his pitch why this blog post was unfair. There are really only two corrections I'd make having now seen the videos and other documentation Chief Acevedo showed me yesterday. (I'm probably going to write about it again over the weekend.) First, I recollected in the blog post that an officer had a taser drawn and from the video the officer's arm was only crooked and prepared to draw. It happened in a flash and like many eyewitnesses, when under a perceived threat, my mind filled in some pieces erroneously, I'll be the first to admit in light of the video evidence. It was not an intentional error. That said, I correctly perceived that all of a sudden a LOT of cops were on us out of nowhere and if I'd made any sudden or untoward moves I'd be tazed or worse. I think it wasn't unreasonable for either of us to feel threatened by them rolling up on us like that.

The other error was that the original post cast unfair blame on the deputy constable. Her report said that after we'd spoken, she was heading back to the Millenium Center thinking the incident was over when the dispatcher patched into the constable's frequency because they'd heard from the Millenium Center she'd gone after us. In the dispatcher's audio, she tells APD just before they roll up on us that she'd spoken to us, gave them Ty's name and told them I was her grandpa. Though I blamed her (unfairly) both at the scene and in the initial post, falsely thinking she'd called in the cavalry, she did not. In fact, in the scheme of things she got it right. Basically two departments with overlapping jurisdictions responded to this complaint: One came at us based on a community policing approach where she walked up calmly, asked a few questions, and according to her report was satisfied and had begun to return to her shift until she heard on the radio APD was coming. By contrast, APD handcuffed first and asked questions later. That's the big difference between the two departments' approaches.

AND MORE: See a followup post here.

Dallas DA defies court order, refuses to reveal police criminal histories

The Dallas DA last week refused to comply with a court order to turn over criminal histories of police officers, the Dallas News reports this morning (behind paywall), resulting in a contempt order and a contentious appeal:

The Dallas County district attorney’s office is battling a judge over whether prosecutors should routinely research and disclose the criminal histories of police officers who testify.

Criminal Court Judge Julia Hayes has on at least two occasions in recent weeks ordered prosecutors to determine the criminal background histories of police officers testifying in her misdemeanor court so that the information can be shared with defense attorneys. The district attorney’s office has refused, saying the law forbids handing over the information.

Hayes ordered a prosecutor held in contempt for refusing to comply with her order. In response, the DA’s office on Friday petitioned the 5th District Court of Appeals in Dallas to compel Hayes to withdraw the order about the records of officers.

Hayes, a Democrat in her first term, and public defender Elizabeth Perry, who is representing a defendant charged with family violence, declined to comment.

Defense attorneys say they worry that the law allows prosecutors to hide the background of police officers.

Defense attorney J. Michael Price II said that prosecutors already run the records of civilian witnesses and jurors and that he doesn’t see a difference in including officers.

“I think truthfully, they don’t want to run them because they don’t want to be in the position of finding that dozens of officers or more may have criminal backgrounds,” Price said.

The DA's Office, though, says the feds won't allow them to perform such searches:

A September 2001 letter from the U.S. Justice Department that prosecutors attached to their petition said that producing the records — even under a court order — violates federal law because it is an invasion of privacy. The letter was written to the Texas Department of Public Safety after a court order requested similar information in another Texas county.

The letter says that there is a difference if a criminal history already exists in the prosecutor’s case file. But the courts cannot compel prosecutors to create the information.

 I must confess, when we're talking about information in possession of the state, I don't see much difference in whether the info is in a database or in the prosecutor's file. It's well-established law that the state may commit a "Brady" violation, for example, even if law-enforcement never shared the information with prosecutors. And if it's true (as I'm almost sure is the case) that prosecutors run criminal histories of other witnesses, I don't particularly understand why police witnesses should get a pass.

Also, it's interesting that the letter in question is from September 2001, since almost immediately after that the feds began scaling back privacy restrictions and allowing much more widespread sharing of data among law enforcement in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. And I'm surprised, if the DA's position is accurate, that there's not a prior appellate case on point  as opposed to some decade-old administrative memo.

Should police officers' criminal history be revealed to defense attorneys? If not, why not? And what criteria might distinguish police from other witnesses for whom prosecutors routinely run criminal histories?

Did APD detectives commit felony investigating Morton-Baker cold case?

Police can lie to suspects to get a confession; that is well established law. But what, exactly is a lie?  As it turns out, that was well established law, too, at the time Austin PD officers allegedly crossed the line to hoping Mark Alan Norwood would confess to the murder of Debra Baker. Austin police "doctored" a forensics report to try to get Norwood - now the prime suspect in the Christine Morton murder case for which her husband, Michael was falsely convicted and spent 25 years in prison - to confess to murdering Baker, reports Tony Plohetski this morning in the Austin Statesman ("Austin police use of doctored DNA report in interrogation raises questions," Jan. 29):

As his defense lawyers were working to free Michael Morton from prison because of a wrongful conviction that raised questions of prosecutor misconduct, Austin police doctored a crime lab report to use during the interrogation of a suspect in a related case, the American-Statesman has learned.

Austin police officials and Travis County prosecutors confirmed last week that they are looking into the techniques investigators used as they questioned Mark Alan Norwood during lengthy interviews in September.

The detectives used what Police Chief Art Acevedo called "an investigative prop" when seeking information from Norwood in the 1988 bludgeoning death of Debra Masters Baker in her home.

Officials at the state crime lab told Austin police cold case investigators that DNA tests had linked Norwood to the crime scene, officials said. But investigators did not yet have the written report, so they took a DNA report from a separate case, altered it to indicate it was from the Baker case and showed it to Norwood during the interrogation, officials said. Acevedo said the scientist who conducted the test also had authorized them to share the result.

Norwood didn't confess and has not been charged in Baker's death but remains a suspect, according to Austin police.

Norwood's lawyer and legal experts said they do not think the officers' actions will impede the case because Norwood did not confess, but several raised concerns about whether the detectives' actions may have violated laws on evidence tampering. 

So if cops can lie, what's the problem here? Well, altering documentary evidence goes a bit beyond lying, and is clearly prohibited under not just one but two separate felony statutes. Thus, Chief Acevedo's artful attempt to re-frame the document as "an investigative prop," rather than an actual crime-lab report doctored to suit investigators' needs.

Lying to suspects, while clearly legal, isn't always a great idea and can have its own harsh, unintended consequences. Nobody should know that better than Austin PD, which has a long, inglorious history with false confessions, most famously with Christopher Ochoa's and Richard Danziger's false convictions, not to mention with the botched Yogurt Shop murders investigation, in which details of the crime scene were leaked and police obtained more than 50 false confessions, likely including the men they prosecuted for the crime. APD has a track record of reacting in a frenzy in high-profile cases to put maximum pressure on a suspect. (Witness Chief Acevedo's congratulatory comments to the community after public pressure apparently prompted a suspect's suicide: "I personally want to thank the people of Austin," he said. "We put pressure on this person with that community outpouring.")

Against that backdrop, doctoring lab reports to manipulate suspects strikes Grits as par for the course at APD, and indeed Chief Art Acevedo essentially defends the practice as well as the integrity of the investigators. Plohetski notes that:

Police are generally allowed to deceive suspects during interrogations in an effort to get a confession, but the creation of a false government document to use in such interviews raises legal questions. A March 2010 decision by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals threw out the confession of a man in San Antonio after a detective obtained the statement by using a falsely created report showing the suspect's fingerprints were on a gun used in a homicide.

Tony might have cited not only the 2010 Court of Criminal Appeals case throwing out a confession when it was obtained with a fabricated document, but also Texas' Penal Code Sec. 37.09, which defines felony evidence tampering, in relevant part, as when someone "makes, presents, or uses any record, document, or thing with knowledge of its falsity and with intent to affect the course or outcome of the investigation or official proceeding." Under that provision, evidence tampering is a third degree felony garnering as much as 2-10 years in prison, plus assorted fines, fees, etc..Or prosecutors could potentially apply Sec. 37.10 of the Penal Code, Tampering with a Government Record, which applies a similar penalty to anyone who "makes, presents, or uses any record, document, or thing with knowledge of its falsity and with intent that it be taken as a genuine governmental record." Allegedly making up a phony lab report for use in an interrogation (one assumes they did it "to affect the course or outcome of the investigation") tracks almost exactly the language of activity made illegal under the Penal Code.

It should be said, these were not rogue detectives but instead the activity in question is apparently routine departmental pattern and practice. Indeed, the detectives in question, reports Plohetski, were ordered by their supervisor to manufacture the document.

The story quotes County Attorney David Escamilla saying he will take any appropriate action, but if these two penal code provisions are indeed the applicable law, one would expect it prosecuted in district court as a felony by DA Rosemary Lehmberg, whose office commendably uncovered the alleged misconduct. However, reports Plohetski, Lehmberg asked Escamilla "to oversee the inquiry because of the assistant district attorney's involvement in the case." (Grits hopes that doesn't mean he'll limit the investigation to misdemeanors; I don't understand why the prosecutor's role explaining the law to APD would require the DA Office's recusal.)

Surely the relevant felony statutes were taught to investigators during their training (if not, you can be sure ignorance of the law, in this case, will be treated by the civil service system as an excuse). Both existed long before the 2010 court ruling, though Chief Acevedo acts in the story like this is something new under the sun that would have changed departmental practices had he known about it. Either way, it's the actual fabrication of the document that may get detectives in trouble (or, IMO more likely, not). If detectives had told Norwood a lie about the report's contents and he believed it, they'd fall well within the realm of legality, whatever one may personally think about the tactics of deception in interrogations. But they allegedly went several steps further.

Whatever excuses Chief Acevedo wants to make for his detectives, the law limits them just like everybody else. And if it turns out detectives were never trained on these longstanding penal code provisions, much less recent court rulings governing Texas interrogations, he and his command staff may need to find a mirror to accurately place blame for Austin PD instructing its detectives to commit felonies in the course of a cold-case homicide investigation.

MORE: See a Statesman editorial on the topic.

Peer pressure promoting police binge drinking begins in academy

Tanya Eiserer at the Dallas News has a crackerjack story on the hot-button topic of alcoholism and law-enforcement culture ("They drink when they're blue: Stress, peer pressure contribute to police's alcohol culture," Jan. 16, behind paywall). Here's a notable excerpt:

Drinking is part of the police culture.

“They drink a lot, and they drink together,” said John Violanti, a research associate professor at the University at Buffalo and a former New York state trooper who studies police stress and alcohol use. “It’s part of the macho image, part of being a cop.”

Experts on police, and many officers, say cops drink because of peer pressure and high stress levels. They get into trouble with alcohol because they feel invulnerable and, as society’s helpers, are less likely to show weakness by seeking help. As mores change and technology advances, they’re more likely to get caught and their colleagues less likely to risk assisting them in covering up their problems.

The article is filled with examples of officers binge drinking with other officers then getting in serious accidents. The story opened with these anecdotes:

Kelly Beemer drank heavily at a South Dallas bar before hitching a ride home in a squad car, where she fired a gun through the floorboards.

Rachel Nicely downed margaritas at a Greenville Avenue bar before climbing behind the wheel, hitting a parked car and being arrested for drunken driving.

Jesus Cisneros had eight beers and four shots at a birthday party and later slammed his city vehicle into another car, killing the driver.

All were police officers with promising careers. All drank heavily with other off-duty officers on the day they got into trouble.

Their careers were ruined.

Other tales included an officer who showed up at a SWAT assignment with alcohol on his breath and later, in another incident, was found passed out in a running city vehicle with a can of Foster's in his lap. Despite those lapses, he was allowed to remain on the force eleven more years until another DWI forced his resignation. So some of these issues arise form lax police management giving second and third chances to chronically alcoholic officers, even when they drink on the job.

A treatment provider said that "suppressing trauma and stress" is a root cause of alcoholism in law enforcement, but it's also clear that peer pressure to participate in police drinking culture begins well before officers ever hit the street. According to one expert quoted, "Rookies are indoctrinated into the brotherhood in blue and the culture of alcohol consumption at the police academy." One of the ex-Dallas officers interviewed said that's where her problems started:

Former Dallas police officer Shelly Pierce said in an interview that she drank a lot while in the academy and afterward. She typically drank, off duty, with other officers and a shared expectation that it was going to be a wild night.

“When we go out, we’re going out,” said Pierce, who lost her job over a 2006 drunken-driving arrest. “We’re getting drunk. We’re going to be the loudest. All the attention is going to be on us. … It’s because of that whole ‘shock and awe’ thing. I’m going to be the one that shocks.”

Laura Brodie, a California-based psychologist who worked with the Los Angeles Police Department’s employee assistance program, said she has found a lack of moderation prevalent in the police culture.

“It’s all or nothing,” she said. “When they get into drinking, they start competing in their drinking.”

First-rate reporting by Eiserer on a seldom-discussed subject. As she'd reported in a 2009 story, roughly 89% of police suicides (which occur far more frequently than deaths in the line of duty) involve alcohol abuse, so this subject not only impacts the safety of the public (nobody wants a drunk in uniform wielding a gun or arrest authority) but also the officers themselves.