phoenix police department – Techdirt (original) (raw)

from the flow-my-tears,-the-union-rep-said dept

As all DOJ investigations of law enforcement agencies are, the one targeting the Phoenix, Arizona Police Department was scathing in its assessment of the department’s officers and tactics.

It led off with this, before providing graphic details covering everything from routine abuse of force to unchecked biased policing that led the DOJ to conclude “PhxPD uses race or national origin as a factor” when enforcing everything from traffic laws to quality-of-life statutes.

Officers use unreasonable force to rapidly dominate encounters, often within the first few moments of an encounter. Officers fail to employ basic strategies to avoid force, like verbal de-escalation or using time or distance to slow things down. PhxPD’s training has encouraged officers to use force when it is not lawful to do so, and to use serious force to respond to hypothetical, not actual, danger.

Also covered in the report: officers turning off body cameras, officers caught on camera conjuring up probable cause for an arrest, officers beating/tasing/shooting compliant and, in far too many cases, handcuffed individuals.

And, like every DOJ investigation of a law enforcement agency, the Phoenix PD brought this on itself. It could have policed itself, but it chose instead to take the path of least resistance, allowing officers to indulge their worst urges and biases until the DOJ was forced to step in.

Now, that it has, the same cops (and the union reps that enable them) are complaining the report is unfair, that any attempt to increase accountability will lead to a mass exodus of officers, and that yet-to-be-submitted consent decree will starve the city of officers and allow the criminal element to run amuck.

These are the words of the self-proclaimed saviors — the “heroes” walking the thin blue line between civility and chaos:

Federal oversight could tank officer retention in the Phoenix Police Department, according to a survey released Wednesday.

The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association’s survey of 1,186 Phoenix Police officers found that 56% were considering leaving in the next three to six months.

Yep, that’s a bunch of cops threatening to quit because it will be slightly more difficult to violate rights and get away with it in the future if (and it’s still an “if”) a consent decree is agreed to by the city of Phoenix. These are the words of absolute children who think the best response to additional responsibility is run away from it.

Meanwhile, the president of the union, Darrell Kriplean, has decided the best response is pure delusion.

Essentially, he thinks the DOJ is incapable of holding Phoenix Police accountable for rights violations.

“We should be beholden to our community members and our city council folks that the community elects to oversee our department,” Kriplean said.

He said the Phoenix PD is a self-assessing and self-correcting agency.

I only slightly agree with the first assertion. There have been dozens of DOJ investigations and consent decrees. I can’t think of a single one that has resulted in sustained accountability. As for the rest… if the Phoenix PD was really a “self-correcting agency,” the DOJ would never have opened a civil rights investigation. Kriplean isn’t saying anything credible. He’s just saying what he thinks officers as consumed by self-delusion as him want him to say.

And he closes (at least for the quotes in this report) with another set of outlandish and internally inconsistent claims:

“They’re not out there arresting people because, at any given moment, if someone complains at the handcuffs were too tight, they’re now being pulled into an internal affairs investigation,” Kriplean said. “That’s why violent crime spikes.”

In essence, Kriplean is claiming officers are already engaged in “quiet quitting,” albeit a cop-specific version that means not doing your job at all because you’re no longer interested in working for the Phoenix PD. And they’re apparently doing this ahead of a consent decree that has yet to be put before a judge, city officials, or the PD itself.

Meanwhile, another police union leader in the area was saying vague things about the report and the still-not-inevitable consent decree:

“The Department of Justice, based on their own numbers, has a 30-year track record of totally disastrous failures,” said APA President Justin Harris. “Why bring that into this city?”

Maybe so. But ask yourself this: were these failures because the DOJ is incompetent? Or were these failures due to law enforcement agencies resolutely refusing to embrace additional accountability and/or decrease the number of civil rights abuses perpetrated by their officers?

At least this report adds this bit, which refutes claims about impending criminal apocalypses made elsewhere by other law enforcement reps and officials:

There is little conclusive evidence that consent decrees cause increases in crime, but research does indicate that they can improve accountability in police departments, and public satisfaction with those departments.

That contradicts the claims often made by police officers and officials anytime there’s more accountability in play. Not that they don’t always return to this talking point, despite the lack of evidence to support their assertions.

And then there’s this talking point, which always seems to rear its head no matter what party controls the White House and who’s heading the DOJ:

“This tactic is nothing more than an irresponsible and unprofessional smear campaign against the men and women who have continued to courageously serve the community amidst dangerous and inflammatory rhetoric by political activists and violent attacks from criminals,” said Kriplean.

Bro, this isn’t an op-ed composed by the Attorney General. This is the outcome of an investigation that lasted more than two years. What’s detailed in the report actually happened. It can’t be a “smear campaign” when it depicts things that occurred and utilizes stats and reports generated by police officers and their enforcement efforts. And while the language in the report is (necessarily) harsh at times, there’s nothing “political” or “inflammatory” about publishing a report on a federal investigation.

I, for one, hope half the department quits. Those walking away from the job just because they’ll have to do better at it don’t deserve to be police officers. If a dearth of officers results in higher crime rates, Phoenix residents need to remember cops walked away from the job because they didn’t want to do if it required respecting constitutional rights. And if the city has trouble attracting replacements, that says far more about the people attracted to law enforcement careers than the specifics of the job itself.

Filed Under: arizona, civil rights, department of justice, doj, phoenix, phoenix pd, phoenix police department, police accountability, police misconduct

DOJ: Phoenix PD Officers Routinely Violated Rights, Deployed Unjustified Deadly Force

from the if-you're-getting-investigated,-you've-done-something-wrong dept

Every report delivered by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division can be described as “scathing” or “damning.” There are simply no exceptions to this rule. It’s not like the Civil Rights unit picks a US law enforcement agency out of the hat and then initiates an investigation. (Maybe it should? I mean, I’m sure there’s plenty of police misconduct flying under the radar at any given moment.)

No, if the DOJ opens an investigation into a local law enforcement agency it’s because that law enforcement agency has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons for months or years. And such is the case with the Phoenix, Arizona police department.

The investigation was announced in 2021, with the DOJ noting the PD routinely violated a decision delivered by the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court forbidding governments in the jurisdiction from arresting or fining homeless people for the “crime” of being homeless. It also noted there was more than a hint of a deep-rooted misconduct problem — one that definitely wasn’t made any better by the PD’s mass purge of internal investigation records back in 2019.

The DOJ’s report [PDF] goes further than these initial hints that something’s rotten in Phoenix. It says officers routinely deploy excessive and unreasonable force. It arrived at this conclusion despite the PD’s lack of up-to-date use of force records.

Officers use unreasonable force to rapidly dominate encounters, often within the first few moments of an encounter. Officers fail to employ basic strategies to avoid force, like verbal de-escalation or using time or distance to slow things down. PhxPD’s training has encouraged officers to use force when it is not lawful to do so, and to use serious force to respond to hypothetical, not actual, danger. P

More specifically, officers fire weapons at people who pose no immediate threat. Then they continue to shoot at people long after they’ve been rendered unable to pose a threat. Officers escalate situations seemingly for the sole purpose of deploying deadly force. And when they’re finally out of bullets, they delay rendering aid to those they’ve wounded. Two cases detailed in the report involve officers shooting suicidal people who only posed a threat to themselves. In another incident, officers shot a woman 10 times and did not render any medical aid until more than nine minutes after they had shot her. In another case, they waited fifteen minutes to provide any aid to a person they had shot.

If officers aren’t shooting people, they’re Tasing them, beating them, choking them, or firing non-lethal munitions at them from close range. And just because it’s less-than-lethal doesn’t mean its a reasonable use of force.

In one incident, a group of officers shot 40mm foam rounds, a Taser, and over 20 Pepperballs at an unarmed man within 20 seconds of announcing their presence. The officers planned to take the man into custody for two open felony warrants related to probation violations. They surrounded a storage facility where he stood outside a unit repairing a bicycle. One officer yelled, “Hands!” seconds before firing Pepperballs and yelling, “Get on the ground!” While the officer continued to pelt him with Pepperballs, another officer struck the man with a 40mm impact round. The man turned away, screaming. Then, a third officer advanced and fired a Taser, incapacitating the man. As he fell—nearly hitting his head on the wall of the storage unit—an officer fired another 40mm round.

Officers routinely engaged in violence against people who were never given enough time to comply with shouted, sometimes-contradictory orders from officers. In some cases, the order given to the person was immediately followed by an act of violence. Just as routinely, officers’ reports portrayed their use of force as “justified” due to the person’s supposed “refusal” to comply with their orders.

Then there’s stuff like this, which covers multiple areas of the DOJ’s damning report, all in a single anecdote:

In one example, two officers used excessive force after stopping a bicyclist who ran a red light. The man allowed the officers to search him. As one officer checked the man’s pockets, the man appeared to move something from one hand to the other. The officers grabbed him, told him to put his hands behind his back, and then pulled him to the ground. The man asked, “What am I under arrest for?” An officer said, “For not obeying a police officer.” The officers appeared to recognize they lacked a lawful basis for arresting the man, and one said, “We need to develop PC [probable cause].” Both officers then muted their body-worn cameras. PhxPD arrested him for resisting arrest and possession of marijuana. County and city prosecutors declined to pursue the charges.

There’s a lot more along these lines if you’ve got the stomach for it. Officers routinely violating protocol and internal policy to hogtie people in positions that increased their chance of death. Officers siccing dogs on cooperative arrestees and letting the dogs chew on them while they placed them in handcuffs. Officers continuing to punch, kick, or otherwise physically harm people who were already handcuffed.

Part of this is due to training. Too much of it, surprisingly. As the DOJ notes, Phoenix PD training materials actually encourage this sort of behavior. The chaser is everything else: a systemic failure to discipline officers and officers’ refusal to report force deployment.

There’s also a long section about the PD’s tactics when dealing with the city’s homeless population — efforts that directly contradicted a precedential court ruling by the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court. And, like far too many law enforcement agencies in the United States, minorities are the most frequent targets for police harassment and violence.

PhxPD uses race or national origin as a factor when enforcing traffic laws. Officers cite a disproportionate number of Black and Hispanic drivers when compared to violations recorded by neutral traffic cameras in thesame locations. PhxPD also enforces traffic laws more severely against Black and Hispanic driver than it does against white drivers engaged in the same behaviors.

PhxPD enforces alcohol use offenses and low-level drug offenses more severely against Black, Hispanic, and Native American people than against white people engaged in the same behaviors.

PhxPD enforces quality-of-life laws, like loitering and trespassing, more severely against Black, Hispanic, and Native American people than it does against white people engaged in the same behaviors.

Another 20 pages or so is given over to discussing the Phoenix PD’s retaliatory actions against anti-police violence protesters and others engaged in protected First Amendment activities the officers didn’t care for.

Sadly, this is par for the course for DOJ investigations. Every law enforcement agency investigated by the DOJ has pretty much the same list of problems. This clearly shows there’s something wrong with cop culture in general. It’s not a byproduct of the environment these officers work in. No matter where the agency is located, the same sort of violence, abuse, and frequent rights violations are uncovered.

This will start the long, expensive, and pretty much ineffectual process of reforming the Phoenix Police Department. A federal monitor with be put in place and the city will agree to a consent decree. It will make things better in the short term, but very slowly and incrementally. And the most likely outcome will be a lot of nothing. Once the decree is lifted, most agencies tend to go back to doing what they’ve always done: pretend they’re a law unto themselves until the next round of investigations begin.

Filed Under: arizona, civil rights, department of justice, doj, investigation, phoenix, phoenix pd, phoenix police department, police accountability, police misconduct

Phoenix Cop Sues Department To Block Investigation Of Officers' Questionable Social Media Posts

from the sometimes-good-things-happen-to-bad-people dept

Free speech doesn’t mean speech free of consequences. A person can be fired for saying things their employer doesn’t agree with or feels reflects badly on it Things get a little more complicated when the employer is the government, but the end result of the added complexity is generally that government employees have fewer protections for their speech, rather than more. That’s a direct side effect of being employed by the government, which gives employees the power to control private citizens’ lives through laws, policies, and regulations.

A Phoenix cop, whose bigoted social media posts were swept up in the Plain View Project’s database, is unhappy that his questionable posts have resulted in him possibly suffering from the consequences of his actions. Sergeant Juan Hernandez of the Phoenix PD believes he shouldn’t be disciplined for his posts, which included sharing anti-Muslim content on multiple occasions. Meg O’Connor of the Phoenix New Times has more details.

“The most common name for a convicted gang rapist in England is… Muhammed,” reads a Facebook post once shared by Phoenix Police Sergeant Juan Hernandez.

The post was one of 11 made by Hernandez that ended up being published this past June as part of a database of bigoted Facebook posts made by police officers nationwide.

[…]

Hernandez has shared numerous anti-Muslim memes on Facebook, including posts from conspiracy websites titled “The End of the Christians in the Muslim World” and “Young Christian Girl Repeatedly Raped by 15 Muslims Then Murdered [READ HERE].”

Sergeant Hernandez doesn’t want to be punished by his employer for these posts. In fact, he doesn’t even want to be investigated. His lawsuit [PDF] has been filed mid-investigation in hopes of receiving an injunction blocking him — and other police officers — from being investigated for their social media posts. It’s somewhat of a class action complaint as well, with Hernandez attempting to sue on behalf of all other members of his union (Arizona Conference of Police and Sheriffs).

Hernandez alleges the investigation is improper and suggests (probably correctly) the only reason he’s being investigated is because of the Plainview Project’s database.

Despite the fact that the Facebook posts were online for years, prior to the Plain View Project publication, no one from the Phoenix Police Department or the City of Phoenix ever identified Plaintiff Hernandez’s postings as alleged violations of any PPD or Phoenix policy.

If he’s correct, it says more about the Phoenix PD’s inability or unwillingness to keep tabs on its officers’ social media posts than it does about the alleged impropriety of the investigation. Like many other law enforcement agencies around the nation, the Phoenix PD appears to have been caught off guard by its officers’ online behavior. This doesn’t necessarily make the investigation improper. It just makes it extremely belated.

As the lawsuit notes, the PD claims the posts “brought discredit” to the agency and it was for this reason — not the PD’s social media policy — that it was seeking to punish him. Hernandez claims he’s been an exemplary officer — something backed up by the PD’s inability to specify any other time where he failed to be a good cop.

Defendant Disotell and other PSB personnel present at the investigative review process meeting were unable to provide any examples of any situations in which Plaintiff Hernandez acted without “moral integrity” or failed to “work cooperatively, courteously, but firmly with all segments of the public” (quotations from the discipline investigation) other than the Facebook posts that were the focus of the investigation.

This is another failure by the Phoenix PD. Meg O’ Connor of the New Times appears to know more about Sergeant Hernandez than the PD’s investigators.

As Phoenix New Times previously reported, Hernandez was added to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Brady list back in 2004 (the Brady list is a list of police officers who are so notoriously unreliable and dishonest that prosecutors must disclose the officer’s reputation to defense lawyers).

Hernandez claims the PD’s social media policy is impermissibly vague. It may be, but it does appear to clearly state that officers will be held responsible for any speech the department considers improper.

When using social media, Department personnel should be mindful their speech becomes part of the worldwide electronic domain. Therefore, adherence to City and Department policies is required in the personal use of social media. Employees are prohibited from using social media in a manner that would cause embarrassment to or discredit the Department in any way.

“Embarrassment” is an incredibly vague term, one that could be used to punish critics and whistleblowers, as well as cops who engage in hateful speech. This part is a bit more specific, but still remains pretty vague.

Department personnel are free to express themselves as private citizens on social media sites to the degree that their speech does not impair working relationships of this Department, are detrimental to the mission and functions of the Department, that undermine respect or public confidence in the Department, cause embarrassment to the Department or City, discredit the Department or City, or undermine the goals and mission of the Department or City.

The policies are problematic. And Sergeant Hernandez — Brady list member and incautious social media user — may ultimately prevail. He’s asking for a restraining order preventing the Phoenix PD from continuing its investigations of officers found in the Plain View Project’s database. He has a good chance of securing this.

While free speech protections are more narrow for public employees, they’re not completely erased. A bigoted cop’s Facebook posts are protected speech. Even with the social media policy applied, they’re likely still protected from the department’s attempt to punish him. Vague wording generally tends to result in findings of unconstitutionality, and a policy that would similarly prevent good cops from criticizing government agencies and policies won’t hold up under judicial scrutiny.

This doesn’t mean cops should be allowed to harm the department’s relationship with the public by engaging in hateful behavior online. It just means the department will have to be far more specific about what sort of online behavior it won’t tolerate. Matters of public concern are pretty much off limits, and the Phoenix PD might have a hard time convincing the court Hernandez’s posts weren’t at least somewhat related to topics of national debate like immigration and international terrorism.

I don’t like to defend bad cops but I’m far more averse to policies that threaten free speech protections. The public can draw its own conclusions about Sergeant Hernandez’s character from the content he chooses to share. But can he be punished or fired for it? That’s not nearly as certain. If the Phoenix PD doesn’t want to be the employer of bigots, perhaps it should start firing cops when they’re deemed too untrustworthy to testify in court, rather than offer up an internally-incoherent response to a negative news cycle.

Filed Under: free speech, investigation, juan hernandez, phoenix, phoenix police department, police, social media