Ken has always shared Cooper’s affliction of “why say in 5 words what could be said with 30?”Originally Posted by GJM
Ken has always shared Cooper’s affliction of “why say in 5 words what could be said with 30?”
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I got more out of the video than that. He isn’t dissing cops, he’s pointing out the new reality cops are facing. I’ve found Ken to be a Ken observer of what’s going on in our country and the world.
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In Atlanta there was a solid 2+ week period last summer where calls were not being responded to. You can probably find clips online where dispatch is essentially saying "Bueller?" and getting static in response. Even after that epic bout of blue flu response times were terrible and many calls never answered.
Knowing what happened in ATL, I question what the stats say for ATL and other areas that enjoyed mostly peaceful protests.
My agency responded to that one I think… good ‘ol Brass city.Waterbury Connecticut yesterday. Police Supervisor meets 3 juveniles in stolen car after they robbed kids at the morning bus stop. Really really sad that our society has devolved to this level! There was no attempt to stop the juveniles they managed to stop themselves with the use of the police Tahoe. Of course they fled the scene on foot.
Quoted states are national. Local stats vary.
I think we've had a spike in robbery and in San Francisco they had a similar spike in other property crime. But those are localized; the national trends are much more subdued. Most of the country saw the 2020 riots on the teevee and not live.
I don’t know about national. As somebody who reviews a lot of paperwork, I call bullshit on no crime spikes locally.
Some biases about my not-data: I live in a small jurisdiction. Two or three extra murders would be a huge spike percentage-wise. The county I live in averages about 10-15 homicides per year of varying types (including vehicular, intentional, and overdose-related). The two counties I work in (with a combined population roughly equivalent to the one I live in) average roughly the same between the two of them. In my jurisdiction, the vast majority of aggravated assaults are domestic assaults with an aggravating factor (strangulation, weapon used, etc.). I’m excluding those from my comments because they’re “normal.” I also don’t have hard numbers by type for many things.
- In the six weeks following our first “safer at home” order, we saw nine declared homicides in the county I live in. So, pretty much an entire year’s worth. That brings us right up to George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing summer of protests, though some national tensions were already brewing (Breona Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery). Several of them were downright brazen. Two weeks in, a certain segment of the population knew exactly what a withdrawal from proactive policing meant (at the time it was due to COVID fears). I’ve seen multiple body cams with some version of a conversation going “yeah, I’ve got warrants. Jail won’t take me. Ya’ll already tried that last week.”
- My primary work county saw five murders - not just homicides - between this Labor Day and the second week of October. This coincided with a renewed COVID fear, for what that’s worth (Delta variant and resultant hesitancy of jails to hold/accept inmates). Up until then, we were the quiet county in my office. We’d scraped by with no murders for the year.
- During summer 2020 (Memorial Day to Labor Day), the primary county I work in saw four robberies, none of which were overtly drug related. We might see one or two a year. Maybe. Robbery just isn’t something that happens often here outside of drug rips due to population distribution.
- Burglaries of residences - and lesser crimes, for example a person in the home where we cannot prove entered to steal - have massively increased. In our first appearance court, we could reasonably expect 3-5 burglaries per week on the docket. I’m regularly seeing upwards of ten. Every week. This is in a county of 60,000.
- Auto burglaries are through the roof. I have no way to quantify it. We’re seeing folks hitting multiple neighborhoods per night. We generally catch them using a stolen credit card, if they’re solved at all. Vandalisms of motor vehicles (catalytic converters) are bad enough that the legislature passed a special law about it. That’s if they don’t just steal the car outright. One crew spent this summer hitting church vans.
- As we sit at the end of 2021, my team has approximately a 20% higher case count in our trial court than we did in December 2019. The primary food groups there are theft, drugs for resale (fentanyl, heroin, and meth), child sex abuse, burglaries, and violent crimes. We’re not screwing around with misdemeanors if at all possible unless they’re DUIs, because those always get fought tooth and nail. Every person on my six-person team except for our newest hire has at least five homicides assigned to them, either as first or second chair. Five of us are assigned to death penalty cases. We are overstretched. It’s known.
My thoughts on contributing factors:
- The prisons are doing everything in their power to cut folks loose early. They have a “safety valve” release authority due to overcrowding. They’ve been in the appropriate emergency status for over 20 years.
- Our legislators are absolutely trending towards policies which discourage incarceration. The things I can now revoke a probationer’s sentence to serve for are 1) absconding supervision, 2) a new Class A misdemeanor or felony arrest. You can fail to report, get a graded sanction, and go on about your merry way. You can not show up to intake, take your graded sanction, and go on about your merry way. I can put you in jail for nine months or the balance of your sentence (whichever is less) if you manage to fail four separate drug screens.
- Coinciding with that, our probation officers now have to beg the central office to issue violations of probation. It used to be that the easiest way to put somebody in prison was to put them on probation first (yes, I know how that sounds - but candidly, it was a strategy that worked well in cases where your proof wasn’t what you wanted it to be). That is no longer the case. Probationers know this.
- When they’re sentenced to serve, inmates will only serve a fraction of their sentence before they’re allowed to exercise their “right” (as one judge recently ruled) to parole. This matters because taking certain folks out of circulation just plain works, particularly in small communities like mine. In my state, you have to either have six prior felonies or commit a number of listed offenses in order to be required to serve more than half your sentence. It’s downright ridiculous.
- Criminals thrive in a decline of proactive policing. My area is still mostly pro-law enforcement, though there are an increasing number who have lost trust in the criminal justice system and the police (frankly, for some of them - particularly victims - they have damn good reason to). For us, “depolicing” came from COVID. The jails wouldn’t take misdemeanors for a solid year, and they went back to that this fall. Police spent most of 2020 twiddling their thumbs and not being the proactive officers I know them to be. I watched one guy rack up seven separate evading warrants last summer. Seven. Because he knew the police wouldn’t chase over a misdemeanor, and even if they did, the jail wouldn’t take him on a misdemeanor. He knew that last part because he was granted early release on his misdemeanor sentence the month prior.
- Economic tension is what it is. Combined with drug abuse, it’s a driver of property crime. There’s good money to be made stealing guns, tools, wallets, electronics, and all sorts of other stuff from unsecured cars - particularly when it’s hard to get caught. Meanwhile, the local fast food joint is cutting open hours because they can’t get staff - and they’re offering $16/hour, which is close to the pay that the local factories start at.
This is me, in a rural, conservative part of the country. I can’t imagine what some of you are dealing with when you add in a DA’s office that doesn’t give a damn and a population who wants you gone.
Thanks for posting that, @ssb. That was eye-opening.
And thanks for hanging in there and doing a difficult job - one that desperately needs doing.
No offense, but where do you work? In the SF Bay Area, Ken's comments are very much on point. Keep in mind, the last three weekends, I've been running nighttime, in progress burglary scenes, some of occupied residences, chasing crooks with K9s, mutual aid and drones. This is unheard of in the safest city of 10k+ population in the US in my 30 year career.
I care, and I work my ass off to catch crooks, but he's not wrong. We are losing the cops that hunt bad men. All of the new guys at my Department have figured out that no arrests means no problems. And, I can't blame them. I'm not going to accept that because I am a crusty, old hairback sergeant that loves putting criminals in jail. I get where you're coming from because I can't bring myself to slow-roll stuff and take a report. But, I don't make the rules. And, the rules have changed. So, I'm retiring a year early. The juice isn't worth the squeeze.
I received a text notification tonight, I'm off, of a call that had a high likelihood of an OIS occuring. I went and mixed a cocktail; two years ago I would have hopped in the shower and gotten ready to roll out and relieve the on-duty WC and take over patrol while the incident goes on. The badguy gave up and no OIS occurred, so I went back to my cocktail, Hendrick's rocks, BTW.
As Pat Rogers used to say, policing is regional. And, in this region, we are the bogeyman.
This article is from 2020. Apparently its even worse this year.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/police-off...ry?id=71773405
"Police officers killed surge 28% this year . . . "
This article goes at it from the angle of the 2020 civil unrest being identified as the cause of it. Perhaps. I sense that many criminals as in every day criminals may feel more emboldened to shoot it out. Not sure, but if that's a thing, the macro societal "tone" may have an effect.
But if one angles it to racial issue protests and unrest that is one thing.
But does it not appear that the not necessarily career criminal types but just the run of the mill ne'er do wells of all races and specifically white are likewise more oriented to flip out and shoot it out? Seems like it to me. The "willingness" just seems turned up.
Is there any data on whether rifles are factoring in more heavily in shootouts? In quite a few shootings where multiple LEOs are shot (killed and wounded); sometimes from domestic call related ambushes, I don't see any word on the BG's weapon but my expectation would be there are a lot more rifles used than historically. I'm I FOS re that?
https://www.cbs46.com/news/4-georgia...cd20ba161.html
ATLANTA (CBS46) — Four law enforcement officers have been killed in the state of Georgia in the last 3 months and 8 have been killed so far this year.
I'm not seeing any obvious path out of this. In a society in which IMO the dominant ethos is selfishness and it cuts across pretty much all demo's and political affiliations - I don't see a path. I used to think a national catastrophe could focus the American mind and soul but that may now be proven to not be the case.
“Remember, being healthy is basically just dying as slowly as possible,” Ricky Gervais
@ssb referenced probation violations. Most of the people actually sitting in our jail are in for a probation violation rather than the criminal offense for which they were originally sentenced. Often, the warrant results from a technical violation and courts let their cases sit for 30 days or so. They get released as soon as their case makes it to a courtroom. Other times, the probation violation is their getting arrested for something else.
There is a general sense among the criminal element that there will be no real consequences for their actions, and spending a few nights in jail is nothing but overhead, just like you paying your electric bill.
The difference is that their "job" will still be waiting on them when they get out.
I had an ER nurse in a class. I noticed she kept taking all head shots. Her response when asked why, "'I've seen too many people who have been shot in the chest putting up a fight in the ER." Point taken.
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