This story may seem new, but as the items that follow indicate it has some sad precedents in the case of Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, inexplicably one of Obama's top advisers on police matters.
NY Times - Roughly once a week, 390 times over the past eight years, Philadelphia police officers opened fire at a suspect. The shootings involved 454 officers, most of them on patrol. Almost always, the suspects were black. Often, the officers were, too.
Fifty-nine suspects were unarmed. Officers frequently said they thought the men — and they were almost always men — were reaching for a weapon, when they were actually doing something like holding a cellphone.
Only a handful of major departments regularly publish statistics on police shootings, and those that do are not always consistent. That makes comparing the records of police departments difficult. But even with such spotty figures, Philadelphia stands out when compared with the public data in other cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. In many years, Philadelphia saw more police shootings than New York, a city with five times the number of residents and officers....
Charles H. Ramsey, Philadelphia’s police commissioner, requested the Justice Department inquiry after a philly.com article in 2013 revealed that while crime was down, the number of officers firing at suspects was on the rise. At the time, Commissioner Ramsey said he considered the department’s policy on lethal force to be an industry “best practice.”
The Justice Department report, however, found repeated flaws. It describes a department where training is weak, oversight is spotty and shootings are all too frequent.
Officers are not routinely given less lethal tools like stun guns and receive inadequate training on how to defuse situations without violence. “Instructors should train students not only when and how to use force, but when and how not to use force and to de-escalate, verbally and tactically, if appropriate,” the Justice Department wrote.
Philadelphia is the nation’s fifth-largest city but maintains the only police department that has more than 1,000 officers and does not offer a field training program for new officers. Instead, the Justice Department said, new officers are assigned to foot patrol. “As a result, recruits can be thrown into situations where their only guidance comes from their rookie partner,” the report found. Patrol officers accounted for 93 percent of the shootings. The average age of the officers was 33.
Commissioner Ramsey has emerged recently as a national figure in the policing debate. He leads President Obama’s policing task force, which recently made recommendations on how to improve trust between law enforcement and minorities. “I wasn’t selected because the president thought we had the perfect police department,” he told reporters on Monday.
Fifty-nine suspects were unarmed. Officers frequently said they thought the men — and they were almost always men — were reaching for a weapon, when they were actually doing something like holding a cellphone.
Only a handful of major departments regularly publish statistics on police shootings, and those that do are not always consistent. That makes comparing the records of police departments difficult. But even with such spotty figures, Philadelphia stands out when compared with the public data in other cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. In many years, Philadelphia saw more police shootings than New York, a city with five times the number of residents and officers....
Charles H. Ramsey, Philadelphia’s police commissioner, requested the Justice Department inquiry after a philly.com article in 2013 revealed that while crime was down, the number of officers firing at suspects was on the rise. At the time, Commissioner Ramsey said he considered the department’s policy on lethal force to be an industry “best practice.”
The Justice Department report, however, found repeated flaws. It describes a department where training is weak, oversight is spotty and shootings are all too frequent.
Officers are not routinely given less lethal tools like stun guns and receive inadequate training on how to defuse situations without violence. “Instructors should train students not only when and how to use force, but when and how not to use force and to de-escalate, verbally and tactically, if appropriate,” the Justice Department wrote.
Philadelphia is the nation’s fifth-largest city but maintains the only police department that has more than 1,000 officers and does not offer a field training program for new officers. Instead, the Justice Department said, new officers are assigned to foot patrol. “As a result, recruits can be thrown into situations where their only guidance comes from their rookie partner,” the report found. Patrol officers accounted for 93 percent of the shootings. The average age of the officers was 33.
Commissioner Ramsey has emerged recently as a national figure in the policing debate. He leads President Obama’s policing task force, which recently made recommendations on how to improve trust between law enforcement and minorities. “I wasn’t selected because the president thought we had the perfect police department,” he told reporters on Monday.
Progressive Review, 2002 - The [DC] city council committee report on the unconstitutional and illegal behavior of Chief Ramsey and his force during the September 2002 demonstrations is a rare case of truth triumphing over spin in this fair city. The committee, headed by Kathy Patterson, did what it should: find out the facts and lay them on the table. Of course, there is little likelihood that anything will be done about them.
It has long been our hunch that Ramsey, Terrance Gainer and Odie Washington were brought in to establish Chicago style martial law on the capital colony whenever deemed necessary. It was clear that no one in authority at either the local or national level would complain if they broke the law or ignored the constitution. The result was the worst policing of demonstrations since the 1971 police riot under Chief Jerry Wilson.
Patterson's committee has been the first official voice raised in objection and deserves every citizens' gratitude.
David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post - D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey and other police officials conspired to deflect blame and cover up evidence of their wrongdoing during the mass arrests of anti-globalization demonstrators in September 2002, according to a D.C. Council committee that investigated the incident. The Judiciary Committee criticized police for not telling protesters to disperse during the demonstrations and then arresting them for failing to obey the nonexistent order. Hundreds of protesters and bystanders were arrested. In the months afterward, Ramsey changed his account of whether he had approved the arrests, according to a copy of the committee report obtained yesterday.
The investigation found fault with the police department's handling of demonstrations dating back to 2000. The report challenges the force's use of undercover officers to infiltrate protest groups, saying some continued surveillance after organizations were found to be generally law-abiding.
"The mayor of the District needs to turn the police department around," said Kathy Patterson (D-Ward 3), who led the investigation. "Turn the police department away from spying on our residents and away from arresting people because of their political views."
Ramsey reacted angrily yesterday when told of the report's conclusions. "That's bullshit," he said. "If they're challenging my integrity, that's just total BS."
Excerpt from the report - The investigation by the Committee on the Judiciary into the policies and practices of the Metropolitan Police Department in handling demonstrations has found:
Metropolitan Police Department use of undercover officers to infiltrate political organizations in the absence of criminal activity and in the absence of policy guidance meant to protect the constitutional rights of those individuals being monitored.
A pattern and practice of misrepresentation and evasion on the part of leaders of the Metropolitan Police Department with regard to actions by the Department.
Repeated instances of what appear to be preemptive actions taken against demonstrators including preemptive arrests.
Failure of the Metropolitan Police Department to effectively police its own members for misconduct associated with demonstrations.
Failure of the Metropolitan Police Department to acknowledge and to protect the rights of individuals to privacy, and to free speech and assembly.
Carol D. Leonnig, Washington Post- An internal police investigation into the roundup of protesters and bystanders at a downtown Washington park last September found that all 400 people were wrongfully arrested. The internal report, released yesterday by order of a federal judge, also said that a federal police official on the scene had earlier warned D.C. police that the mass arrests would be improper. The report revealed significant contradictions between what top city officials have said publicly about the controversial Sept. 27, 2002, arrests at Pershing Park and what they knew privately about the tightly held investigative findings. In a confidential memo to Mayor Anthony A. Williams in March, D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey acknowledged that his assistant chief ordered arrests of everyone in the police-cordoned park -- without giving an order for protesters to disperse -- and that police had blocked people who wished to leave.
Washington City Paper - Mass protests, of course, are routine in Washington; large anti-war demonstrations are planned for this weekend. Asked if he would do another Pershing Park [last September's illegal mass arrest and mistreatment of both protesters and people just passing by], Ramsey doesn't hesitate in responding, "We probably will," he says, smiling. "We probably will.". . .
At a late-afternoon victory lap before the media, Ramsey took to the bouquet of microphones assembled in front of police headquarters and rattled off the one statistic that mattered-the number of arrests for the day: 649. He praised his force for performing "very well." There was already a buzz about Pershing Park-something about arbitrary arrests. "We gave warnings," Ramsey said, Mayor Anthony A. Williams smiling behind him. "We followed everything by the book!". . .
As video footage and first-person accounts show, the park events constitute one of the most serious collective violations of civil rights in this city since the Vietnam War era-or at least since the last major anti-globalization demonstrations, in April 2000. Protesters and bystanders, nurses on their way to a convention, lawyers on their way to work, a woman training for a bike race-all rounded up, seized without warning, without orders given, and arrested en masse. They were then tied up like farm animals for hours.
The next day, in the Washington Post, Ramsey described the scene at Pershing Park this way: "Ain't it a thing of beauty. To see our folks up there ready to go."
No one is calling that day a thing of beauty anymore. No one is even calling the arrests worth pursuing. The D.C. Office of the Corporation Counsel, the city agency charged with pursuing the Pershing Park cases, declined to prosecute a single demonstrator caught up in the police's dragnet. "We no-papered everything in Pershing Park," explains Peter Lavallee, the Corporation Counsel's communications director. "We did not feel in the cases that came from Pershing Park-that the witness statements and the evidence that we had [presented] probable cause that a crime was committed and/or that a specific individual committed a crime."
Progressive Review - Jim Ridgeway reported in the Village Voice following one of the police riots that occurred during demonstrations in the reign of Charles Ramsey, "Demonstrators brought a class-action suit in Federal District Court in D.C., claiming they were surrounded by cops, arrested, handcuffed, and held up to 13 hours on buses and then at the police academy gymnasium for up to 36 hours. While at the gym, the protesters say, they were handcuffed one wrist to the opposite ankle."
Washington City Paper - In January 2005, the city paid out $425,000 to seven Pershing Park victims, part of a settlement that also required a letter of apology from Ramsey to the plaintiffs.
Progressive Review - On September 22, 1997, Shirley Allen's brother, accompanied by a local sheriff, arrived at the door of her Roby, IL home to take her to a hospital for a mental evaluation. According to the brother, Byron Dugger, Allen had become depressed, paranoiac, and delusional since her husband died in 1989. Allen met the pair with a 12-guage shotgun and insisted that Dugger was not her brother.
There then began a 39-day stand-off during which, according to Lois Romano in the Washington Post, "state police officials tried to lure out Allen with tactics reminiscent of the government's botched assault in 1993 on a religious compound near Waco, Tex. -- they cut off her electricity and water, tossed in a tear-gas grenade, pelted her with bean bag bullets and blared Barry Manilow at all hours.
"Allen shot at the police twice, and her plight became a rallying point for national anti-government activists who charged that Allen's rights were being violated. The national media descended on the tiny farming village of Roby. Police estimated that the siege cost taxpayers upwards of $20,000 a day -- or about half a million dollars.
Among the techniques: police "threw canisters of pepper spray into the house and sent in a police dog carrying a listening device. Allen shot the dog through the nose." ....
A month and a half later, the State Journal Register reported: "A hearing was held in the Christian County Circuit Court on December 16,1997, in the case of Shirley Allen. At that hearing, a report was received from Dr. Bruce A. Feldman, a psychiatrist associated with the Christian County Mental Health Center, stating that Ms. Allen does not present a danger to herself or anyone else at this time and, therefore should not be committed. Based upon Dr. Feldman's report and Illinois law which provides for a person to remain at his residence pending an examination and hearing, Ms. Allen's attorneys, Lindsey E. Reese and William Conroy, requested that she be released during the pendency of the case. This request was granted without objection and Ms. Allen has been released from McFarland Mental Health Center as of noon." The Post reported the story as well.
Almost precisely 5 months later, the Washington Post reported that DC's police chief, Charles Ramsey (a former Chicago deputy police commissioner) planned to hire the director of the Illinois State Police as his assistant police chief. There was no mention, however, of Terrance Gainer's leading role in what the Post itself had described only months earlier as "reminiscent of the government's botched assault" on Waco. Nor was the incident mentioned in the paper's pro-police hype concerning the recent Washington demonstrations. Nor has the Post explained why a former director of the Illinois State Police suddenly ended up working as a deputy to a police chief overseeing a city that is only 4% as large as Illinois. It's all just gone down the memory hole.
The Ramsey-Gainer police style -- based on the far cruder and more abusive traditions of Chicago, where one of the leading police histories is titled "To Serve and Collect," -- was unlike almost anything the capital has seen. There have been a few exceptions, such as notorious police riot of 1971, when local cops arrested 12,000 peaceful protesters in the largest mass arrest in American history. But on the whole, and especially under black police chiefs, the department has been more honestly and less abusively run than, say, those of Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and LA.
And it was not just demonstrators and blacks who noticed. The Washington Post eventually ran a story on Gainer under the headline "Ramsey's No. 2 Is Ranked No. 1 In Unpopularity: Police Resent Gainer's Role." Among the points the story makes:
Gainer is white; Ramsey and about 65 percent of the force are black. "What we have here is a black guy gets the job of chief of police, then he gets his white friend to go tell all the police officers what to do, and most of those police officers are black," said Ronald Hampton, president of the National Black Police Association and a former DC officer.
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