ICPPUL > Police > Conflicted

 

Ways ICCPUL Police may be conflicted:

• police departments are a revenue center in many communities, resulting in badly motivated police actions.
• police have an incentives to raise revenue (salty language) through civil asset forfeiture when their departments benefit from the proceeds.
• The “War on Drugs” sucks in minorities on minor weed charges.  This generates more demand for police and prisons.
• contests to generate DUI arrests based on faulty field sobriety tests
• there is an incentive to justify budgets by “activity”.
• some police receive kickbacks from tow trucks which police call even when they are not needed or they may even be employed punitively.
• officers are sometimes incentivized to compete to have the most number of arrests and are able to nitpick to manufacture faulty evidence.
• political leadership such as mayor have incentive in looking good to their base (which can include real estate owners).
• police do not have a strong incentive to address serious crime if reporting crime results in the statistics being counted against them.
• Sometime the “system” doesn’t care about the “crime” so long as it get your money.
• police systems sometimes twist “broken windows” policing into punching down on poor/minorities.
• at the same time as minor infractions are clamped down upon, more significant crimes may not be taken seriously.
• police sometimes enforce the interests or feelings of the powerful, rather than the law
• when complaints are made against them, they typically investigate themselves and find no wrongdoing

 

 

Civil asset forfeiture is an extreme example of conflict-of-interest in policing.

How much policing abuse would be curtailed by requiring all proceedes of policing be designating to pay down the national debt rather than fund the agencies that originate it?

 

Stephen Lara started out distrusting banks.  Now he distrusts police too.

They targeted him because he was driving under the speed limit while he waited to pass a truck..

In another case, on officer said that even after a drug dog alerts, they don’t find anything in 9 out of 10 cases.

After too many false positives, the dog and handler should be retired.

 

• That tactic is called the lookey loo swocheroo. When three or four cops search at the same time. Each spending a couple of moments in every area until one of them miraculously finds something that one of the others planted. Ask me about the “blue balloon trick” or the “smear the drug scent on the taillight and tell the jury its for fingerprints” trick
• Usually when innocent people are treated as criminals, they become scared and uneasy (understandably too), then its a short spurt into “obstruction” or “resisting” charges. This man was smart and calm, and avoided that trap. Not before being humiliated on the roadside, though.
• A former CHP officer was speaking at one of our motorcycle group monthly breakfasts. Being retired and “off the clock” must have made him more comfortable talking about “routine traffic stops”. He actually said: “It’s not about what we find in your car, it’s about what we leave in your car”.