Canadian Cincinnatus

The Baltimore Police, Freddie Gray, and the unwritten rules of police work

I used to know a Toronto police sergeant who, on the side, wrote adventure stories. He was a colorful old character and I miss him now that he is gone. One of his recurring themes was the many unauthorized ways that the police employed to get the upper hand on the bad guys.

One of those methods was called ‘deporting’. This was used on a ‘kangaroo’ (a Toronto Police term for bad guy) who needed to be dealt with but who, at the same time, wasn’t doing anything serious enough to bother arresting. In cases like this, what the police did was to drive the ‘roo out to of town into the middle of nowhere, someplace where there was no bus service, and tell him to wait there for the rape squad, who wanted to talk to him. At some point, the perp realized that the rape squad wasn’t coming and he would begin his long walk back home. That walk was his punishment. No courts, no paperwork, and no criminal record. Justice served, quickly, efficiently and cheaply.

This kind of makeshift solution naturally appealed to me. I understand that the Cartesian, hyper-rational society, where every possible contingency has a rule to deal with it, is a fool’s dream. The French Republic attempts to govern itself this way with the end result that everybody goes to Paris to riot whenever anything goes wrong. The Soviet Union, Communist China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia took this ideal to an even further extreme. The results were economic misery and mass murder. The problem is that it is simply impossible to make a rule that governs every possibility. As Hayek correctly pointed out, life is simply too complex. This is where customs, unwritten rules, and ancient traditions come in. An appreciation of the utility of such rules is a fundamental principle of conservativism.

To take an example my Toronto cop friend gave me, suppose you are confronted with a no-goodnik hanging around shop. The merchant wants him gone as he is scaring away the customers. The problem is, he isn’t really doing anything wrong – at least not yet. You could give him a ticket for loitering, but even if he gave you his real name, he has no intention of paying the $35 ticket. The practical solution: you walk up to him and step on his feet. The kangaroo can respond in one of two ways. One, not liking that his feet are being stepped on, he walks away. Two, he takes a swing at you. In this case, you can charge him with assault police. That isn’t a trivial charge and use of force is now justified. Either way, problem solved.

The Baltimore riots got me thinking about this because it seems that the Baltimore Police Department has an unwritten method, analogous to deportation, of their own. It is called a “’rough ride’ — an ‘unsanctioned technique’ in which police vans are driven to cause "injury or pain" to unbuckled, handcuffed detainees, former city police officer Charles J. Key testified as an expert five years ago in a lawsuit.” It seems that a ‘rough ride’ is what caused Freddie Gray’s spinal cord to break, killing him. He was not the first person to be given this treatment:

“Christine Abbott, a 27-year-old assistant librarian at the Johns Hopkins University, is suing city officers in federal court, alleging that she got such a ride in 2012. According to the suit, officers cuffed Abbott's hands behind her back, threw her into a police van, left her unbuckled and ‘maniacally drove’ her to the Northern District police station, ‘tossing [her] around the interior of the police van.’

‘They were braking really short so that I would slam against the wall, and they were taking really wide, fast turns,’ Abbott said in an interview that mirrored allegations in her lawsuit. ‘I couldn't brace myself. I was terrified.’”

Freddie Gray was not the first person to die from this treatment. According to Baltimore Sun article cited above, there have been a number of successful wrongful death suits brought against the Baltimore Police by the next of kin of people taken for a rough ride.

Indeed, in Saskatchewan, the Saskatoon Police were involved in a scandal where a number of natives froze to death in snowbanks after being deported. In Saskatoon, it was standard practice to dump drunk and disorderly natives out of town. Over there, the practice was called ‘starlight tours’ instead of deporting. The problem was they did this in the dead of winter as well as in more temperate seasons. Saskatchewan winters are very cold and the Indians deported were likely very drunk.

The problem here it seems to me is that some of the more dim-witted police officers don’t realize that, while unwritten rules and methods may be tolerated because they help keep the public peace, they have unwritten conditions attached to them. The principal one being that if anything serious happens to the perp - like when a drunk Indian freezes to death in a snow bank, or an arrestee breaks his neck in the paddy wagon and dies or becomes paralyzed as a result - it is on you. Society will then treat you as if that rule didn’t exist. That is the implicit check and balance in our unwritten code of law. Society is willing to tolerate unorthodox and rough police work, but only up to a point. So be careful.

 

Of Sergeant’s-At-Arms and Honour Guards

You know, until yesterday, I though the position of Sergeant-At-Arms in the House of Commons was largely ceremonial – a retirement perk to the politically connected; that the man who wears antiquated costumes and carries a golden mace into Parliament is little more than an actor. One of the gratifying things I learned yesterday, in that otherwise horrible day, is that I was wrong: that it is a serious job, held by a serious man, with long experience as a peace officer, who is also properly armed to face real trouble. He is far more than just a play-actor.

On the other hand, pictures taken at the War Memorial immediately prior to the shooting showed two Canadian soldiers, both real soldiers – not actors, and both armed with serious weapons – the C-7 assault rifle. When the Islamofascist murdered Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, his fellow guardsman could not retaliate. He was helpless in the face of the enemy. The magazines of their C-7’s were empty, no doubt for reasons of safety.

Now in the military, there are many times when it is absolutely necessary for a soldier to not possess any ammunition; for instance, in a training exercise when he must shoot at other soldiers with blanks. In this case, it is absolute necessary for the officers running the exercise to inspect all weapons and magazines to make sure that no live rounds are present that could turn a training exercise into tragedy. Also, the military must keep a tight control over its firearms, magazines and ammunition; otherwise, the army will turn into a grab-bag for black-market gun dealers. Still, if we are going to post men on guard duty, they should be properly equipped to actually do real guard duty.

Now it can be argued that guarding the War Memorial is not ‘real’ guard duty but is just a ceremonial show, much like the redcoats with their black bearskin hats who guard Buckingham Palace. Nothing can be served, so this line of thinking goes, by adding live ammunition into the activity that is more for the benefit of tourists than anything else.

I think the prevalence of this sort of logic speaks volumes about the unseriousness of our society. People who reason like this don’t really believe that there are real threats in the world. These people believe, as Col. Jeff Cooper once pointed out, “that food comes from the grocery store, that safety comes from the policeman, and that bad news is something that happens to other people.” This delusion is inculcated by a too-long period of peace and prosperity. Our primitive minds often cannot handle good fortune. We end up indulging in fantasy.

Atrocities like this remind us that the people of the West need to start getting serious about life. Among other things, one thing we need to do is that if we say we are going to guard something (even if it is just for ceremonial reasons), we should damn well do it for real.

“What ever happened to Peace Officers?”

A good article in the Ludwig von Mises Institute about a foreboding but little-remarked-upon change of terminology: how our police went from being ‘peace officers’ to  ‘law enforcement officers’:

‘Today when we use the term peace officer, it sounds antiquated and outdated. I’m sure most people in the room under 40 have never heard the term actually used by anyone; we might as well be talking about buggy whips or floppy disks. But in the 1800s and really through the 1960s, the term was used widely in America to refer generally to lawmen, whether sheriffs, constables, troopers, or marshals. Today the old moniker of peace officer has been almost eliminated in popular usage, replaced by “police officer” or the more in vogue “law enforcement officer.”’

While I don’t agree with everything the article goes on to say, the distinction it draws is important. The purpose of a ‘peace officer’ is to keep the peace. The purpose of a ‘law enforcement officer’ is to enforce the laws. The difference is that with the former, law enforcement is just a tool, one means among many towards the end of securing the public peace. If the neighbourhood is tranquil and the dogs aren’t barking, there is no need to hand out tickets or make arrests. The officer’s job is done. All he has left to do is to ensure that this situation remains.

It is instructive at this point to review Peel’s Nine Laws of Policing, as derived by Sir Robert Peel, the founder of modern policing:

1. To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.

2. To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.

3. To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.

4. To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.

5. To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion; but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour; and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life. 

6. To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.

7. To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

8. To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.

9. To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.

Some of these principles have been summarized as, “whether the police are effective is not measured on the number of arrests, but on the lack of crime.”

For what it’s worth, in my opinion, the principal reason today’s police deviate so far from this gold standard is the preventative law. From the radar trap located in a ‘fishing hole’, to bureaucratic gun laws, to the War on Drugs - all have conspired to inculcate an attitude of law enforcement among the police. Who cares about the peace? Have you met your ticket quota this month? It is impossible to prosecute a war on a substance that many people freely want to acquire and not have police officers develop the attitude of an occupying army. They can no longer see that “the police are the public and that the public are the police”.

While certain militaristic innovations like SWAT teams are necessary (how many hostage taking situations do we have today, as opposed to the 70’s?), the requisite legal and procedural constraints on their employment were never properly developed, or if they were developed, they were not with the idea of making them consistent with Peelian Principles.

Right now, the police as a profession are highly esteemed by the public. I personally believe that this is largely a holdover of the high crime days brought about by permissive sixties liberalism (“down with the pigs, man!”). But as these bad old days recede into the distance, what people will increasingly see in their minds’ eye when they think about the police is not Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry but the assault troops, dressed in black, who rode around in armored vehicles after the Boston Marathon bombing ordering people to remain in their homes. 

To prevent that fate (and its inevitable consequences for their profession), the police need to return to the time tested principles of Sir Robert Peel - principles that are a necessary foundation of limited, responsible and civilized government - rapidly.