\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRead code of silence\u00a0here.
\n#StayWoke
\nA criminal gang operating inside another criminal gang\u2026 wild
\nWheels within wheels
\nwhen even american cities have their own deep states
\nhighly recommended.
\nI\u2019ve been following this blog on the Chicago police for some time, called Second City Cop.
It\u2019s a cop blog, which is about what you\u2019d expect, but it\u2019s also basically a labor blog, so it\u2019s got the angles you\u2019d expect on that, about how the fucking idiots running things are fucking idiots trying to screw us, so there\u2019s some interesting laundry aired.
One thing I\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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 \u201cMerit\u201d slots in each promotion class for people with clout (the longstanding Chicago term for political pull) so they don\u2019t 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, \u201cthey promote you for your silence\u201d, 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\u2019re 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\u2019t 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 - \u201ccourtesy\u201d rental rates at apartments that want a visible police presence, in-uniform security at private events - where cruisers are a big part of the \u201cshowing the flag\u201d effect sought.
(If you\u2019re like \u201cwhere do they find the time for these side jobs?\u201d 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\u2026 who draw salaries\u2026 and benefits\u2026 and incur training costs\u2026 and insurance\u2026 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\u2019 income and quality of life at will. You give someone that lever, they\u2019ll 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\u2019s a classic, here\u2019s Joe Serpico talking about being left to get shot in the face and bleed out in the \u201870s.
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\u2019s set aside the median cop who as far as I can tell in calm moments has a notion that there is a thing as \u201ctoo far\u201d 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\u2019s the official venue to seek redress.
So that sets up a problem for today\u2019s 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\u2019re imprisoned in turn.)
So how do you prevent that? Putting the decision how and which cases to pursue out of department hands, that\u2019s 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 \u201cUnions.\u201d Which, that\u2019s a point! The things cop unions do that reformers don\u2019t 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\u2019s used as a convenient stalking horse there is something there. So what do you do about that?)
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