Kontextmaschine

10th October 2016

Photo reblogged from left unity with 1,912 notes

dagwolf:

chicanochamberofcommerce:

asgardreid:

cardozzza:

ghettablasta:

Read code of silence here.

#StayWoke

A criminal gang operating inside another criminal gang… wild

Wheels within wheels

when even american cities have their own deep states

highly recommended.

I’ve been following this blog on the Chicago police for some time, called Second City Cop.

It’s a cop blog, which is about what you’d expect, but it’s also basically a labor blog, so it’s got the angles you’d expect on that, about how the fucking idiots running things are fucking idiots trying to screw us, so there’s some interesting laundry aired.

One thing I’ve picked up from there is that Chicago is a little unique - like I once said, the Machine never fully lost control of the police and one of the fundamental anti-corruption measures: hiring and promotion by neutral ranked civil service examinations (rather than at-will by management that might seek or reward allies) was never fully implemented. For one, there’s a really halfassed scandal going on just recently where some lucky duckies including IIRC the girlfriend of someone important was just given a test, or the answers to look at, ahead of time. For two, past that there are apparently straight-out “Merit” slots in each promotion class for people with clout (the longstanding Chicago term for political pull) so they don’t even have to bother.

So keep that in mind, but even then there are some things worth highlighting about the incentives facing police applicable and important even beyond Chicago as the country ponders police reform.

First, “they promote you for your silence”, but more especially the bit about how they were given unpleasant graveyard shifts with no overtime and take-home cars.

Overtime is a huge part of a lot of police take-home pay, often half or more (and can affect things like pensions if they’re say based on the highest-paying year or years reached in a career). So the ability to approve overtime on shifts, or eligibility for special assignments (sports games, parades, filming locations, holiday events that can be worth double time or more, as per contract) is a big lever of control over police.

(Also, this means though people fume about police under investigation being on paid leave, the pay doesn’t include overtime which can be a hardship felt as a punishment for people who i.e. have planned for it against fixed expenses like mortgages.)

The take-home car, well, in addition to being a perk in its own right, that helps gate access to external sources of support - “courtesy” rental rates at apartments that want a visible police presence, in-uniform security at private events - where cruisers are a big part of the “showing the flag” effect sought.

(If you’re like “where do they find the time for these side jobs?” keep in mind a lot of police are on particular schedules with a lot of days off - 4 10 hour days followed by 3 off, or 12 hour shifts with 15 days off of every 30.)

SO, basically there are some pretty big carrots and sticks that are completely off the civilian radar. And what do you do about that? The more levels of monitoring and review you put on scheduling and overtime decisions the less quick-response flexibility (the mantra of the CompStat age) you have.

(This could be eased a bit by hiring up a buffer of new recruits… who draw salaries… and benefits… and incur training costs… and insurance… and pensions, which are a huge looming problem in a lot of places. Not to mention giving the union more foot soldiers.)

But going hands-off allows supervisors to wildly increase or cut individual officers’ income and quality of life at will. You give someone that lever, they’ll find things to do with it.

The second focus worth noting here is the way police can inflict retribution against each other indirectly by doing nothing, just not backing each other up, and expecting the nature of the job to eventually throw some blows that land unblocked.

One variant being to leave them to go on dangerous assignments and then not offer backup if they encountered violence. That’s a classic, here’s Joe Serpico talking about being left to get shot in the face and bleed out in the ‘70s.

Another variant being that public complaints or lawsuits that a department would normally and successfully defend against would go uncountered and yield judgments that the officer involved be fired, fined, demoted - all difficult or impossible to do directly due to civil service protections and powerful unions - or in the case of criminal charges, even imprisoned.

And okay let’s set aside the median cop who as far as I can tell in calm moments has a notion that there is a thing as “too far” but any non-police agent is likely to set that bar too low to practically achieve things the public and political actors demand just as vehemently. Past him, even the ones in the more anti-abuse end of things seem convinced that gratuitous accusations are par for the course, given that people are frequently upset at police who take even by-the-books police action against them and that’s the official venue to seek redress.

So that sets up a problem for today’s movement against police abuses, which is if you build political pressure to show results - as measured by police officers convicted or subjected to discipline, how do you prevent this from empowering police corruption to clean house of dissidents, to support and approval from the very media and nonprofit watchdogs who take it as their duty to fight corruption? (God knows pressuring the police to show numbers has yielded less than stellar outcomes before.)

Because honestly, that strikes me as the path of least resistance. Crackdowns can be and are co-opted. (When California decided to build more prisons and send more people there for longer, the Mexican Mafia co-opted it to dominate the street drug trade by first establishing domination within the prison population [well, the Hispanic part] and issuing orders to gangbangers on the outside with threats of retribution or reward if and when they’re imprisoned in turn.)

So how do you prevent that? Putting the decision how and which cases to pursue out of department hands, that’s coherent, but how and which cases to defend? How would that work? What else?

(As far as I can tell the cop answer to both these questions is “Unions.” Which, that’s a point! The things cop unions do that reformers don’t like - reflexively defend all officers in all situations, fund legal defenses and media campaigns more full-throated and perp-smearing than a body subject to official pressure and using public funds might? Appeal to notions of solidarity to get other officers to use their positions and expertise to support the defense even in the face of management directives? Negotiate contracts that include high baseline pay and benefits, and provisions that make it difficult to establish cases against officers? Those are all felt, by cops, as safeguards against police corruption, and as much as that’s used as a convenient stalking horse there is something there. So what do you do about that?)

Source: twitter.com