Policing the police

Transparency, oversight key to building citizen trust, effectiveness of operations

A bad portal is opening in America.

The problem: the out-of-control rise of white cops arbitrarily killing black males. 

I’ll start by saying that most police/citizen encounters are nonviolent, and most cops in Tulsa and elsewhere rarely even pull out their guns in a typical year. But across the country and in Tulsa, the number of pullovers and encounters between cops and minority folks is outsized—it has become a part of the social ecology.

Rogue policing, particularly with regard to race, has been a reality for some time. But our new obsession with cell-phone video, social media and “see it now” kinetics has simply made it hyper visible. It’s a little like the creepy, sudden illumination of bugs in a squalid apartment when the lights get turned on: we are seeing part of the longstanding underbelly of policing, America-style.

In Tulsa, the problem manifested via the recent killing of Jeremey Lake—a biracial kid whose death was allegedly perpetrated by an off-duty white Tulsa cop who has been charged with homicide and is currently free on $825,000 bail. And I don’t have to tell readers about the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., or the killing of Eric Garner via an illegal police chokehold in Staten Island, N.Y., are other recent high-profile examples, but they are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Excitingly, what’s also emerging in many of the affected communities is an aggressive countermove against arbitrary police violence—among community activists and others—most notable in Staten Island after the Garner incident, and more recently with the aggressive protesters in the Brown case in Ferguson. We need a similar movement in Tulsa. We need to explore dramatic ways of improving civilian oversight of police operations. It’s part of what local democracy and accountability are all about.

The Ferguson crisis, grim as it is, has spawned another good thing:  a re-examination of what keen observers call the hyper-militarization of policing in America. When I first saw the Ferguson “event” on the news, I thought I was seeing scenes from the Gaza Strip or video from some Russian/Ukrainian separatist battle. That’s because the scene in Ferguson was littered with armored vehicles, assault rifles and police officers in fatigues. It’s striking, and it brings to the forefront a troubling trend in contemporary policing in America. Radley Balko, a writer and police historian, has written a fabulous new book on this topic, “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” which I happened to be reading as the Ferguson “event” got under way. He examines how the unrest of the 1960s, followed by Nixon’s war on drugs, Reagan’s war on poverty, Clinton’s COPS program, and the post-9/11 security state under Bush and Obama has expanded and empowered police forces at the expense of civil liberties.

Transparency is paramount

In a town that has great promise but many challenges, a police department must be transparent, allowing it to harness the energy, insight and special perspective that outsiders sometimes bring to even the most complex work, including policing. We got some accidental insight into how radical openness could work for Tulsa during the Good Friday killings a couple of years ago: the Mayor, TPD Chief Chuck Jordan, City Councilor Jack Henderson and a slew of ordinary citizens quickly gathered the information required to rapidly pick up a couple of suspects (convicted last December) who were killing black folks more or less at random.

Organizing police operations in as transparent a fashion as possible would not only produce additional confidence in what TPD officers are doing and how they’re treating everyone across the various tribes that make up our community, but it’s also consistent with emerging evidence on the value of  rich “client” feedback to business and public sector managers.

An emerging movement in city planning and technology circles called the “network city” is working its way across the planet. You can find a very thoughtful (if slightly aged) piece on these technologies and their import for Tulsa in a piece by Tulsa blogger Michael Bates in the March 2012 issue of This Land Press titled “Government 2.0.” Wiring cheap sensors to major street segments, bridges, water/sewer works, traffic lights, storm water outlets, sidewalk segments, etc. to ascertain their “health”—using feedback from digital sensor systems—could transform the cost, effectiveness and agility of local government. One guru in the police science and accountability movement has suggested using body video cameras (BWV). David Harris of the University of Pennsylvania wrote a big piece on this new option a couple of years back in the University of Pittsburgh Law Review.

“Given universal trends in technology for digital devices to become more capable and smaller over time, recording systems for police have become so small that, instead of mounting these units on police car dashboards, you can now mount them on police officers themselves.”

We can make use of body-worn video and related technologies to give TPD and our citizenry spectacular insight into policing operations—what’s getting done, what isn’t getting done and how one of our most essential services might be improved by making it radically transparent.