Reflections on the Tucson Police Department
Generally speaking people either know police officers in their family and social lives or they don't and if it is the latter then all the information from news events which are mostly negative. Everyone I know who is in law enforcement or knows a lot of law enforcement officers admits that there are some bad officers in every department.
Forty (seems like yesterday) years ago I married the widow of a Thai police officer who was shot in the line of duty. You might think that put us in the 100% police are good side of the equation but he was shot by another policeman. Her husband was a Serpico type who refused to shake down the street vendors for money (a very common problem in the third world, it was the self immolation of a street vendor in Tunisia that ignited the Arab Spring). While arresting a thief who was complying another officer shot him under the pretence that the thief was reaching for his gun.
So we have a certain sympathy for police because simply doing their job exposes them to risks that other jobs don't. That sympathy also creates a shield for bad cops to exploit. I have several hundred LEO clients but only a few that were municipal police. Whenever we did talk about the quality of their force (which didn't happen a lot) every single officer surprised me by saying (regardless of the department) that there were some very bad actors in their department, every single one. While we didn't talk about racists per se they would invariably talk about "lazy" cops who had bad practices and cut corners and that was a real danger. Yesterday a video was posted about someone who either had mental issues, was deranged on drugs or both and for 3 minutes they tried to talk him in getting into an ambulance. He was walking in the street and not cooperative but not dangerous either. A second unit arrived the officer got out and within a few seconds tasered the guy. That is the kind of thing I would often hear about.
About 5 years ago I got a dozen referrals for officers in the Tucson Police Department. For those that want to defund the police departments here was what every single officer told me then.
Morale at the Tucson police department (Tucson is a heavily Democratic city where most offices are filled with Democrats who run unopposed) was at the worst level possible.
1) The key issue was pay. They were entering the sixth year of no cost of living adjustments, even though it was promised every year. If you have the same job for 6 years and get no cost of living adjustments then you are working at about 25% less than when you started given inflation.
Starting pay was terrible, at $ 39 k ( I think it has moved up to about $ 45k now).
2) The second issue was disciplinary action. The department had a rule that they had to make one traffic citation a day. Officers that didn't make it were getting memos to the file that would kill any chance of moving up. The problem, all of the officers would say, is that most days the field patrol was so understaffed that they were running from one call to another with large distances in between. All of the officers stated that even if they were rushing to another call but saw someone roll through a stop sign without a complete stop they would do a quick stop to get the requirement out of the way. All of them said that they issued tickets for trivial issues in order to meet their daily ticket quota.
All of the officers entered the Tucson PD so that they could get the experience to then move to a smaller city or suburb nearby where the pay would be more and the job less stressful. I never talked to a police officer who planned to make it a career in the TPD. The best officers were able to move on, the worst ones stayed.
3) Third issue was the nature of the calls. During the day the number one issue was traffic accidents, especially those that involved running red lights, accidents with distracted drivers and collisions with pedestrians and bicyclists.
At night (when most officers worked) the number one issue was domestic violence. I was shocked at how much of the time officers (half were women) were going to homes where some drunk guy was beating the shit out of his wife or girlfriend. I would guess that they stated that half of the calls they answered at night and on the weekend were domestic calls which, for them, were the most dangerous given the mixture of alcohol and the wide availability of guns in Tucson.
My take is that if we want to have better officers then we needed to pay more, that without that the good officers would move to better jobs nearby.
The issue is at heart a management issue, better recruitment, clearer and more transparent procedures, civilian board of review, constant training to instil patience and more hiring among minority communities. I could have gotten a skewed view from the dozen Tucson Police Department but the image I got was that a major part of the Tucson Police Officers day (night) was spent in domestic disputes and a very large number of women are getting punched out on a regular basis.
Curious on what the statistics say
https://ncadv.org/statistics
•On average, nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States. During one year, this equates to more than 10 million women and men.
•1 in 4 women and 1 in 9 men experience severe intimate partner physical violence, intimate partner contact sexual violence, and/or intimate partner stalking with impacts such as injury, fearfulness, post-traumatic stress disorder, use of victim services, contraction of sexually transmitted diseases, etc.
So this pretty much backs up the anecdotal feed I was getting. A huge demand for police calls in the US is because of violence against women by men. It seems to me that a progressive approach would be improve police departments and not make a vulnerable population more vulnerable.
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