Police department

“ Train officers on mechanics of community policing and their role in implementing it; Measure and evaluate individual, supervisory, and agency police performance on community engagement, problem-oriented-policing projects, and crime prevention, rather than on arrest and citation productivity. 2. Focus Stop, Search, Ticketing and Arrest Practices on Community Protection FPD must fundamentally change the way it conducts stops and searches, issues citations and summonses, and makes arrests. FPD officers must be trained and required to abide by the law. ”

“ In some cases the local police are seriously remiss in their duties. I have recommended on many occasions, to numerous municipalities, that it is better that the local police be reduced in number but paid sufficiently to assure absolute honesty. I would rather have a police force of two honest men in a town than a police force of 20 men of uncertain integrity.
In my message to the Congress on the state of the nation in June, last year, I proposed that the Military Police Command be eventually converted into a civilian police force under the Department of the Interior. ”

“ While improvement in the police department will incalculably improve the tone of the city’s morals without any change in the statutory standards, nevertheless we have throughout hewn to the line of police reform and not of vice suppression. ”

“ The police has been at all times a sink of abuses and extortions, because, of all departments, it enjoys the greatest facilities for indulging in them. In spite of the particular attention of which it has always been the object, this department, on which all the rest lean for support, has always been so far one of the most defective. In the cities, especially in the capitals, where they are under the eyes of the highest authorities, the force leave—externally—little to be desired. ”

“ While a diverse police department does not guarantee a constitutional one, it is nonetheless critically important for law enforcement agencies, and the Ferguson Police Department in particular, to strive for broad diversity among officers and civilian staff. In general, notwithstanding the above caveats, a more racially diverse police department has the potential to increase confidence in police among African Americans in particular. ”

“ In other directions red tape has been 140abolished and economies brought about; the way has been opened for individual merit in all ranks; steps have been taken to develop and teach better methods; the work of the department has been brought closer to the public. There is a new spirit in the New York Police Department to-day—a spirit certain to develop the public good will and appreciation that is so necessary to the best order of public service. ”

“ Like their comrades beyond the boundary, the City police are largely employed by private individuals; banks, exchanges, public offices, and so forth, gladly put themselves under official protection. It should have been mentioned, when dealing with the Metropolitan Police, that some 1,800 officers of all{257} ranks, from superintendents to private constables, are regularly engaged in a variety of posts outside ordinary police duty. Every great department of State is guarded by them ”

“ He knows the ins and outs of the police department better than one or two of the billy-toters that pass for policemen. For patrol duty he is first-class. He can run with the flying thief, or jump fences with the light-footed crap-shooter, and is always handy and willing. ”

“ In a municipal force an officer can only be required to know thoroughly the situation on his particular beat; if he can inform himself about other districts as well, he is so much more valuable to the department, but he is not expected to do much more than get acquainted with the people under his immediate surveillance. In a railroad police [Pg 8] force it is different, and it is required of the officer that he study carefully the criminal situation in all the towns and villages on the division on which he is stationed. ”

“ FPD has done little to investigate external allegations that officers have not followed FPD policy or the law, or, with a few notable exceptions, to hold officers accountable when they have not. Ferguson Police Department makes it difficult to make complaints about officer conduct, and frequently assumes that the officer is telling the truth and the complainant is not, even where objective evidence indicates that the reverse is true. ”

“ The Prefect of Police has beneath his orders all the police of the capital, or rather of the department to which the capital belongs. This service is divided into two special organisations: Municipal Police and Agents of Security. The “Security” force consists of three hundred agents with the title of inspector, commanded by five chief inspectors, ten brigadiers, and twenty sub-brigadiers. These agents are employed in arresting malefactors, and are viewed with intense hatred by the criminal class generally. ”

“ It is doubtful if the state can give direct out-door help, even medical help, without doing more harm than good. It can only be done wisely by establishing a Bureau of Intelligence in connection with the police department, with offices at each police station, where the names and the numbers of the inmates in every house in the precinct or district would be known, and where, from personal knowledge, a record of all individuals receiving help—as to their circumstances, the amount of aid given, etc.—would be kept. ”

“ Many bills were passed during the session of Legislature, peculiarly obnoxious to the city authorities, but that which excited the most bitter opposition was called the Metropolitan Police Act, by which the counties of New York, Kings, Westchester, and Richmond were made one police district, to be controlled by a board of commissioners, consisting of five members appointed by the Governor and Senate, and to hold office for five years. This board having organized, proceeded to create a police department. ”

“ Everyone in the Metropolitan Police who wants to know anything goes to the Executive Department. And it does a heavy work by the sheer light of common-sense and a meticulous organisation which is ready for anything, for many of its riddles are simply variations of the great one:
"Here are twenty thousand men who must eat and sleep and guard seven hundred square miles and seven millions of people; how can we concentrate a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand swiftly into a particular district to meet an emergency without leaving other places unguarded?" ”

“ Thus, under Graham, we must avoid substituting our personal notions of proper police procedure for the instantaneous decision of the officer at the scene. We must never allow the theoretical, sanitized world of our imagination to replace the dangerous and complex world that policemen face every day. ”

“ This officer attends community meetings, serves as FPD's public relations liaison, and is charged with collecting crime data. No other officers play any substantive role in community policing efforts. Officers we spoke with were fairly consistent in their acknowledgment of this, and of the fact that this move away from community policing has been due, at least in part, to an increased focus on code enforcement and revenue generation in recent years. As discussed above, our investigation found that FPD redeployed officers to 12-hour shifts, in part for revenue reasons. ”

“ In other words, any crime was regarded as conventional, just so the man who committed it got the "mazuma." The principal city offices were held by gamblers and "sure-thing" men. The city councilmen were nearly all saloon or dive keepers, while the police department was recognized as the grandest collection of thugs, crooks and "strong-armers" that had ever been assembled together within the borders of one town. ”

“ Through a little back door, up a stone flight of stairs, into a broad corridor one passes to the offices where are quartered the heads of the most important branch of Scotland Yard—the Criminal Investigation Department, with its wide-reaching organisation stretching beyond the confines of London over the whole world.
It is its business to keep its fingers on the pulse of crime, to watch vigilantly the comings and goings of thousands of men and women, and to bring to justice all those whose acts have made them a menace to society. ”

“ In practice, not all arrests are given incident numbers, meaning supervisors may never know to review them. These systemic deficiencies in oversight are consistent with an approach to law enforcement in which productivity and revenue generation, rather than lawful policing, are the priority. Thus, even as commanders exhort line supervisors to more closely supervise officer activity, they perpetuate the dynamics that discourage meaningful supervision. ”

“ One man told us his ticket payment was due that day. Another woman arrived in the rain with her small child, unsuccessfully attempted to call someone to the window, and left. Even when the court window is technically open, we have seen people standing at the window waiting for a response to their knocks for long periods of time, sometimes in inclement weather—even as court staff sat inside the police department tending to their normal duties. ”

“ In Ferguson, however, officers frequently make enforcement decisions based on what subjects say, or how they say it. Just as officers reflexively resort to arrest immediately upon noncompliance with their orders, whether lawful or not, they are quick to overreact to challenges and verbal slights. ”

“ The government is represented in each department by a public prosecutor. The police officials, who are under the direct control of the minister of interior, also exercise some degree of judicial authority. This force is essentially military in its organization, and consisted in 1901 of 500 officers, 934 non-commissioned officers and 5400 police soldiers. Small forces of local policemen are supported by various municipalities. ”

“ So much for the police in uniform. That in plain clothes, en bourgeois, as the French call it, is not so numerous, but it fulfils a higher, or at least a more confidential, mission. Its members are styled inspectors, not agents, and their functions fall under four principal heads. There is, first of all, the service of the Sûreté—in other words, of public safety—the detective department, employed entirely in the pursuit and capture of criminals, of which more anon ”

“ The comptroller is chosen by popular vote. The city has a pension fund for the benefit of veteran employees of the police and fire bureaus, and a disability fund for the assistance of those killed or injured while on duty. The police administration is, under the director of the department of public safety, in the hands of two coordinate bureaus, police and detective. The fire department is under the control of a chief engineer. ”

“ We commend City officials for beginning to take steps to address some of the concerns we have already raised. Nonetheless, these changes are only a small part of the reform necessary. Addressing the deeply embedded constitutional deficiencies we found demands an entire reorientation of law enforcement in Ferguson. The City must replace revenue-driven policing with a system grounded in the principles of community policing and police legitimacy, in which people are equally protected and treated with compassion, regardless of race. ”

“ Al concerned officers shall be bound to carry out the recommendations given by the authority in respect of matters of initiation of department level inquiry, registration of criminal case etc against a police officer. ”

“ In the documents we reviewed, the meetings we observed and participated in, and in the hundreds of conversations Civil Rights Division staff had with residents of Ferguson and the surrounding area, many residents, primarily African-American residents, described being belittled, disbelieved, and treated with little regard for their legal rights by the Ferguson Police Department. One white individual who has lived in Ferguson for 48 years told us that it feels like Ferguson's police and court system is "designed to bring a black man down... ”

“ When implemented fully, community policing creates opportunities for officers and community members to have frequent, positive interactions with each other, and requires officers to partner with communities to solve particular public safety problems that, together, they have decided to address. Research and experience show that community policing can be more effective at crime prevention and at making people feel safer. ”

“ Enough has been said as to the manner in which the original lack of a detective department has gradually been remedied, and although space does not admit of anything like a full account being given of the various phases through which the financial problem has passed, a subject so vital to the well-being of police cannot be altogether ignored. ”

“ The penal department of any form of civil government must principally consist of two closely allied branches, the judiciary that interprets the law and exacts penalties for its infraction, and the police whose duty it is to enforce the legal code as laid down by the judges, it being in the nature of things that judicial functions cannot exist independently of police functions. ”

“ Remove supervisors who do not adequately review officer activity and reports or fail to support, through words or actions, unbiased policing;Ensure that an adequate number of qualified first-line supervisors are deployed in the field to allow supervisors to provide close and effective supervision to each officer under the supervisor's direct command, provide officers with the direction and guidance necessary to improve and develop as officers, and to identify, correct, and prevent misconduct. ”