Posts tagged Milwaukee

Siege mentality

Last month, POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine published another ill-tempered tirade by retired L.A. cop Dean Scoville in the magazine’s Patrol Tactics section. (You may recall Sergeant Scoville from his previous ill-tempered tirade in which he openly praised police brutality against captive prisoners.) This most recent tirade, Four More Cops Killed: Where Is The Outrage? launches into this subject with the following claims of imminent and growing danger that people (non-police) pose to government police:

Shortly before I retired, I openly speculated that we were on the cusp of a new era where people would increasingly bring the fight to us. Moreover, I said they would prove to be greater threats, less predisposed to gangsta-style shooting and actually recognize the significance of sight alignment and trigger control.

I also noted that technology has helped the people who want to kill us develop better eye-hand coordination and tactics via video games and other poor man’s combat simulators, …. They have also become more sophisticated in their choice of weaponry, and are fast becoming better armed than us, accessorizing with everything from laser sights to cop-killer bullets.

… More recently, economic stress, racial strife, a resurrection of militia types, and spillover from Mexican cartel activity have made this toxic cocktail even deadlier.

— Sergeant Dean Scoville (2009-12-01), POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine: Four More Cops Killed: Where Is The Outrage?

He closes the article with the following credo:

Yes, I believe that the job is increasingly dangerous. And it is made more so by what is put out there about it.

(This is used as a springboard for a couple pages’ worth of rambling complaints against society at large for our willingness to embrace anti-cop sentiments and stereotypes, with a special focus on the alleged anti-cop drum beating of Hollywood, rap music, and those segments of society who have fundamentally failed to hold their own [sic] accountable — and, just so we’re clear, by those segments of society, Scoville means niggers,[1] Also, I guess he’s pissed off that Dick Wolf decided to cast Ice-T as a cop in Law and Order: SVU.)

Scoville’s claim that being a government cop is increasingly dangerous is not an isolated claim. For example, down in the comments section on the article, another retired government cop, mtarte, writes:

I’m retired now and still wish I could do the job, but today’s cops are in much more dangerous situations than ever before.

— mtarte, in re: Sergeant Dean Scoville (2009-12-01), POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine: Four More Cops Killed: Where Is The Outrage?

In Milwaukee, by way of explanation for why Milwaukee Police Department had begun arming regular patrol cops with semiautomatic rifles:

It’s obvious that our officers are facing an increasingly dangerous threat to their safety as well as the safety of the community as represented by these weapons ….

— Police Chief Ed Flynn, quoted in Officer.com (2009-04-24): Milwaukee Police Increase Firepower

CRIPT Academy, a tactical training outfit for government cops, says that it:

… provides cutting edge training, information, and service that is continually updated to adapt to today’s fluid environment which is becoming increasingly dangerous for those professionals that must operate in harm’s way.

— Officer.com Directory: CRIPT Academy Mobile Training Teams

If you spend much time at all reading articles and public statements by government police, you’re likely to see this received factoid over and over again. Time never alters it; things only get more and more dangerous. No matter what year it is, it’s always this year that’s poised to become the most dangerous year for police ever; in 2007, in an article on how government cops can better confuse detained Suspect Individuals about their rights to refuse searches, former government cop and government prosecutor Devallis Rutledge offered the following:

So far, 2007 is the deadliest year for law enforcement officers in nearly three decades.

— Devallis Rutledge, POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine (October 2007): How to Justify Officer Safety Searches

The thing is that all these claims are false. Both in factual detail and in overarching narrative. They could easily have been discovered to be false by taking even a cursory glance at statistics about police deaths in the line of duty. In fact, 2009, when Dean Scoville declared the job to be increasingly dangerous, was the safest year for government police in the U.S. since 1959, in terms of absolute numbers of police officers killed while on duty. With only a few exceptions, the number of government police killed on the job had been decreasing steadily for the past 35 years. Here’s the annual data for the past 35 years, as reported by the Officer Down Memorial Page yearly reports.[2]

Year Total line-of-duty deaths Deaths from violent attacks
(Excluding terrorist attacks.)		 Total violent deaths adjusted to 2009 population
1974279149215.48
1975240148211.93
1976202117165.92
1977189108151.63
1978215109151.42
1979214120164.87
1980210113153.44
1981201105141.18
1982194100133.18
198319392121.41
198418483108.59
198517985110.23
198617880102.79
198718284106.97
198819485107.26
19891967998.75
19901627187.76
19911487591.47
19921707286.60
19931638398.53
199418086100.84
19951857789.22
19961436473.30
19971777686.00
19981766673.82
19991514954.18
20001635560.13
20012426772.45
20021596367.41
20031475154.22
20041645658.99
20051645456.37
20061565455.84
20071936566.56
20081384242.62
20091204949.00

Or, if you prefer, here’s the chart. The blue line represents the absolute number of cops killed that year in the line of duty; the yellow line best represents the overall danger to cops from violent attacks (specifically, the number killed in violent attacks against police, adjusted to the U.S. population at the end of 2009).

It shows three lines, each sinking steadily with occasional upticks, for the total number of police deaths, the total number due to violent attacks, and the total number of violent deaths adjusted for 2009 population.

Coming back to Devallis Rutledge’s deadliest year in nearly three decades, it’s true that 2007 saw a sudden jump in the number of police killed, compared to 2006. (The next two years saw a sudden drop back to the trend of decreasing police deaths.) But the main reason for that was a jump in deaths due to automobile accidents and other accidental deaths; the number of cops killed in violent attacks — 65 total — was less than the total number killed in 2001, let alone the much higher rates of violent deaths in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. And in fact, if you adjust for the increases in the total population, and the absolute number of police on the streets, it turns out that the increasing safety of government police over the past 35 years is only the tail end of a general trend that has been going on since 1921. (The temporary uptick in violent police deaths from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s never ended up producing more per-capita violent deaths than there had been in 1935.) Following the yellow line, you can see that 2008 and 2009, at the tail end of this trend were the safest years to be a police officer in over 110 years.

Here's a chart showing three lines, each sinking steadily with occasional upticks, for the total number of police deaths, the total number due to violent attacks, and the total number of violent deaths adjusted for 2009 population. The yellow line, representing the number of violent deaths of cops adjusted for U.S. resident population, shows the steepest and most consistent decline, with 2008 and 2009 lower than any other years else on the chart.

In other words, it’s never been safer to be a cop in America than it has been over the past 2 years. Yet boss cops, spokespeople for the government police, and articles written by cops and for cops, constantly repeat the demonstrably false claims that criminals are more violent than ever before, and that government cops somehow face more danger on their patrols now than they ever have before. That this is a complete lie would be obvious to anyone who had spent 15 minutes perusing the police’s own institutions and resources for honoring their fallen comrades. The interesting question, then, is what kind of purpose the constant refrain of this unfact from government police serves — what it means when ever-more-heavily-armed government cops keep insisting on a completely mythical ever-present, ever-increasing danger to their politically-sacred persons, in spite of the evidence of the senses and the consistent trends over the last century of historical reality. When you see heavily-armed, well-protected men trying so very hard to psych themselves up to believe in a growing danger that does not actually exist — and when this constantly repeated Big Lie is used to slam pop-culture for any attempt to portray any abuse of police power; to swat down real-life complaints about police belligerence or invasions against civil liberties; to explain the alleged need for assault rifles, tanks, cordoning off strategic hamlets in inner cities, and a niche industry in warrior mindset trainings — I couldn’t much blame you if you did see some real danger in this concerted effort to inculcate and reinforce a consciously-constructed, fact-resistant permanent siege mentality among patrol cops. But not danger for the cops.

Do you feel safer now?

[1] These cop haters are often composed of those segments of society who have fundamentally failed to hold their own accountable, the likes of whom celebrated the King riots, the O.J. acquittal, and the Oakland shootings. This is followed up by out-of-left-field references to Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Earl Ofari Hutchinson.

[2] If you’re interested in getting the dataset in spreadsheet format, just drop me a line and I’ll send it along. For what it’s worth, if you compare thse figures with figures from other sources, like the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund annual statistics, the numbers are typically very similar, but differ by a few. I presume that this is from differences over which agencies to count as law enforcement officers (Officer Down, for example, counts MPs deployed on overseas assignments.) In any case, the numbers tend to reveal the same trends over time. I used Officer Down’s numbers because they provided an easily-accessible breakdown on causes of death over the years they covered.

See also:

Public schooling #2: Criminal texting

(Story thanks to a private correspondent.)

In Wauwatosa, Wisconsin (a suburb of Milwaukee), a 14 year old girl was detained by the police at her high school, interrogated, searched by a male police officer, arrested for disorderly conduct, then body-searched by a female police officer, in order to find a cell phone that it turns out she was hiding in her pants. The charge is that she was sending text messages in class after the teacher told her to stop, and then hid her phone from the teacher when the teacher tried to confiscate it.

Oh my God! Quick, call the cops, before somebody gets hurt!

As far as I know, there has not yet been any public mention of why the Dean Of Students And Head Football Coach thought it was appropriate to escalate the situation into a police interrogation or to launch this ridiculous investigation of a student’s inattentiveness in class. Here’s how Jeff Griffin, the school’s pig-in-residence, justified browbeating, busting and humiliating a 14 year old girl over a minor classroom management issue:

Back in Mr. Swittel’s office [REDACTED] was confronted with the fact that her teacher and two friends said she had a phone out in class. [REDACTED] continued to deny having a phone. She stated she does not own a phone and her dad’s phone is at home.

[REDACTED] was advised she was under arrest for disorderly conduct. She was told her disruption in class with the phone out, the refusal to obey the teacher, and her not telling us the truth is what got her arrested. [REDACTED] was asked again about the phone and she was also told she would be searched incident to the arrest.

— Jeffrey S. Griffin, Wauwatosa Police Department Incident Report Number 09-003386 (2009-02-11), courtesy of The Smoking Gun

Please note that in the view of School Resource Officer Jeffrey S. Griffin, disrupting class by silently sending text messages, or disobeying a teacher’s requests in the classroom and then lying about it to try and cover it up, is not a pedagogical matter; it’s a police matter, and in fact a criminal offense for which you can be forcibly detained, hauled off, arrested, and fined up to $5,000.

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Masculinity Studies 101: Color Coding

Today’s lesson comes to us (thanks to Feminist Law Professors) from a recent trend-story from Ananova on gun stores’ efforts to draw women in as customers:

Firearms shops in the US are stocking pink rifles and shotguns to encourage girls to get into shooting.

A report in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel says the Gander Mountain hunting store in Waukesha stocks several pink guns.

They include a Remington 20-gauge shotgun with a pink and black stock emblazoned with the slogan: Shoot like a girl if you can!

Store manager Chris Hanson said the guns were aimed, so to speak, at girls and women interested in hunting.

He said the shotgun, and a Crickett rifle with a bright pink stock, were both selling well.

In Baraboo, Jim Astle, owner of Jim’s Gun Supply in Baraboo, has been coating guns in pink and other colours for four years. His 12-year-old daughter owns a pink camouflage shotgun.

Females want to shoot guns, but they want them to look pretty, too, he said. Guys could give a rat’s butt what their gun looks like.

Now, if it were true that guys emphatically don’t care what their gun looks like, then you would expect that a guy would be just as happy to carry a gun that looks like this:

an AR-15 assault rifle painted pink

… as he would a gun that looks like this:

an black AR-15 assault rifle

I encourage you to give any gun-loving male that you happen to know the choice between the two, and see whether he is really indifferent to how his gun looks.

Most men actually have very strong preferences respecting fashion, appearance, color, and so on. Male society enforces these preferences as prevailing norms for masculinity, vigorously and often violently. Anyone who pays a few second’s worth of attention to branding in pop culture can find this out, if he or she did not already know it. But because men and their preferences are treated as the default case, especially when it comes to echt-male pursuits such as shooting, these strong preferences are rendered invisible, whereas women’s are marked out for special observation and remark. This has the further effect of allowing men to pose as especially pragmatic, as if they are coolly unconcerned with pursuits and preferences that they characterize as both feminine and frivolous. Even though, in fact, they have similar pursuits and similar preferences with which they are no less concerned.