The Bad Cop Database

[Henry Rogue]

The Bad Cop Database

A radical new idea for keeping tabs on police misconduct.

By*Leon Neyfakh

The largest organization of public defenders in the country is building a “cop accountability” database, aimed at helping defense attorneys question the credibility of police officers in court. The database was created by the Legal Aid Society, a New York–based nonprofit that represents an average of 230,000 people per year with a staff of more than 650 lawyers. The database already contains information about accusations of wrongdoing against some 3,000 NYPD officers, and is being used regularly by Legal Aid lawyers. The ambition behind the project is to create a clearinghouse for records of police misconduct—something the NYPD itself does not make public—and to share it with defense lawyers all over the city, including those who do not work for Legal Aid.

At a time when police departments around the country are*being criticized*for a*lack of a transparency,*the arrival of Legal Aid’s database represents a bold attempt to systematically track officers with a history of civil rights violations and other kinds of misbehavior, and thereby force judges, prosecutors, and juries to take the officers’ past actions into consideration when adjudicating cases. If a defense attorney can successfully call into question the credibility of an arresting officer, she might be able to convince a judge to let a defendant out of jail without bail, or maybe even to dismiss the case entirely. Information about an officer’s past misconduct can also serve as a bargaining chip during plea negotiations with prosecutors.

Take someone like Detective Sekou Bourne, for instance, who is*currently being prosecuted*in the NYPD’s administrative court for allegedly frisking a woman improperly in East New York and unlawfully entering her home in April 2013 after concluding, mistakenly, that she had crack cocaine in her hand. According to Justine Luongo, the attorney-in-charge of the Legal Aid Society’s criminal practice, a search for Bourne’s name in the Legal Aid database brings up reports on this incident, along with records of seven civil rights lawsuits that have been filed against him. The fact that all of those cases ended in settlements, Luongo said, could be useful information for defense attorneys next time prosecutors try to build a case against someone based on Bourne’s testimony. (A call to Bourne’s attorney was not returned.)

Cynthia Conti-Cook, a former civil rights lawyer, joined the Legal Aid Society last spring with the idea for the database, officially known as the Cop Accountability Program, already in mind. The reason she wanted to build it, she said, is that typically, when a criminal case begins, there’s a “big red arrow that says ‘criminal’ pointing to the defendant” and not much a defense lawyer can say other than “my client denies the charges.” With the database, a lawyer can quickly discover records of past misconduct by the accusing officer—if they exist—and with that information in hand, can “start shifting that red arrow toward the police officer, by showing that they’ve also been engaged in activity that deteriorates their credibility.”

“It takes the judge’s attention away from what your client did wrong to get here, and puts more of a burden on the police officer to prove that your client actually did something,” Conti-Cook said. That matters, she added, because “more and more, in this broken-windows climate, the main and sometimes only witness in a case will be a police officer.”

According to Luongo, lawyers at Legal Aid are encouraged to be comprehensive in uploading information to the system, which means including complaints that ended up being dismissed or that could not be substantiated, and making note of those outcomes. It’s up to the lawyers who use the database to determine whether and how to present the information they find in the database in court.

The contents of the Legal Aid database have been harvested from a variety of sources, including documents*known as Brady letters*that are submitted by prosecutors before trial as part of their obligation to disclose exculpatory material to the defense. Prosecutors usually submit Brady letters at the “eleventh hour,” said Conti-Cook, meaning right before trial is set to start, and often defense attorneys put them in their file, maybe use them once during the proceedings, and then never think about them again. The database, Conti-Cook said, is about “taking that institutional knowledge and figuring out a systematic way of sharing it with everyone.” *

Other sources of information include civil lawsuits filed against the city, criminal trials in which a police witness was deemed not credible by a judge, and news reports about police wrongdoing. Information also comes from grievances that New Yorkers have filed against individual officers with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, a city agency that investigates and prosecutes police misconduct. Once a week, interns from the Legal Aid Society are dispatched to take notes on public hearings at the CCRB, then incorporate any valuable tidbits they hear into the database.

The rest of the article at link. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/02/bad_cops_a_new_database_collects_information_about _cop_misconduct_and_provides.1.html

P.S. It’s been a while since I've logged in to RPF, though its never been far from my mind. Looks like there's been a reorganization of the forums. No more general politics?

[Matt Collins]

www.policemisconduct.net

[jmdrake]

I remember somewhere someone posted a graphic showing that the cops involved in the Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice killings all had prior records of extreme misconduct.

[GunnyFreedom]

P.S. It’s been a while since I've logged in to RPF, though its never been far from my mind. Looks like there's been a reorganization of the forums. No more general politics?

U.S. Political News (http://www.ronpaulforums.com/forumdisplay.php?23-U-S-Political-News) is what became of General Politics.

[Cleaner44]

Now this is an awesome free market idea! The government likes to create massive databases to keep track of all of the good and law abiding people of the United States, well we should do the same. Imagine a wikipedia article on every crooked politician, cop, CPS worker, etc.

[tod evans]

One group of government employees tax-ticks compiling a list of other government employees tax-ticks in order to use it to report to a third set of government employees tax-ticks........And this is supposed to help the average Joe how?


Personally I have no faith at all in government fixing herself.

[libertarianMoney]

I may be mistaken but I believe a better free market version of this was taken down by the government.

It was a rate a cop site where anyone could review cops. That site wasn't exactly primed for accurate ratings on cops but I have a feeling I'd trust it a whole lot more than this database. Anything the police unions allow to exist will probably end up being a fun little circle jerk.

[Henry Rogue]

One group of government employees tax-ticks compiling a list of other government employees tax-ticks in order to use it to report to a third set of government employees tax-ticks........And this is supposed to help the average Joe how?


Personally I have no faith at all in government fixing herself.
I suppose defense attorneys are generally considered private, although the industry is completely dependent on the existence and coercive nature of the state.

[tod evans]

I suppose defense attorneys are generally considered private, although the industry is completely dependent on the existence and coercive nature of the state.

An "officer of the court" is an officer of the court no matter what brush he's painted with........

[Henry Rogue]

An "officer of the court" is an officer of the court no matter what brush he's painted with........

I didn't know they held that title, just shows you how little i know about their scheme. Anyway, it doesn't hurt to bring awareness to this article.
Stay Free my friend.

[DamianTV]

Dig Deeper...

People do not see the world for what it is, people see the world the way they see themselves. This is bad news when it comes to Cops. Many Cops are dirty, dishonest, agressive, and a laundry list of abusive types of behaviors. These Cops know what they are, even if they lie about what they are to everyone else. When they go out on the streets, they see the ordinary person as they see themselves, and think the ordinary man is a criminal because many Cops know themselves to be criminals. They project their perceptions of guilt on to people who have committed no crime. As a result, they think that these people will commit crimes unless they try to enforce some measure of control, just as they think they would do some wrongdoing if not for other Cops reigning in the very same wrongdoings they commit. The Cops think like criminals because they are criminals, thus see everyone else as criminals. They look down their noses at us and not up at the architects of their misguided behaviors. The inevitability is that once the Cops have become the things they despise the most in the world, the Criminals, a Downward Spiral occurs. The more criminals they see amongst the people, the more wrongdoing they commit against the people. They know what they do against many people is wrong, even if they are not held accountable for their aggresses, thus see themselves as being an even worse form of a criminal than they were before, and the level of violence caused by their self perceptions only becomes worse. They see themselves worse for every action they commit, and every action they commit feeds back into how they see themselves.

These Bad Cops do need to be reigned in. Prison however is no solution as it only further degrades their self perceptions and encourages further psychotic behaviors. I think one possible solution is not to challenge the Cops with force, but persuade them to change the way they see themselves, so that they stop looking at everyone as criminals. We can acknowledge that they think they are "doing good", but the consequences of their actions is causing the Downward Spiral. "I think that you think that to be true". It isnt an affirmation or acknowledgement that abuses they commit are valid or moral. It is an acknowledgement of their Normalcy Bias. However, helping Cops to understand the circular thinking that they are trapped in may help free them from that thinking. Make no mistake that this Circular Thinking that occurs inside the minds of Cops is flat out BY DESIGN. Idea needs a lot of work to be implemented and applied, but may be very effective in disarming potentially dangerous "Bad Cops" before they conduct their bad actions. It is how we defeat violence without violence when applied in a way that they can understand.

[Mach]

I suppose defense attorneys are generally considered private, although the industry is completely dependent on the existence and coercive nature of the state.

Go to court one day, make sure to sit up in the front row nearest the prosecutors table/s, and it depends on the layout in your courtrooms, but sit there and listen to the prosecutor and the defense attorneys making deals one on one, without the defendant present, it is sick, most defense attorneys have no desire at all to go any further with the case, so everything is dictated by the prosecutor. You will probably hear a joke or two during the day about the "lowlife" defendant by the defense attorney and/or how they're going to make their money either way and get chuckles from the prosecutor.... it is all a joke.

I have to say, this was a lower court... eh-hem.... I mean, it probably would be..... so maybe defense attorneys in more serious cases would be a little more serious, but I wouldn't count on it.