Here comes the whitewash

Tim Dees, Editor-in-Chief of officer.com, a law-enforcement professionals-specific website, has weighed in on the Sergeant Kuehnlein situation. Dees raises a lot of issues, and I have a lengthy and complex response to his article, so to be fair to Mr. Dees, as well as to provide clarity to my readers, I will repost his entire column from today, with my comments interspersed in bold. Some of my comments I posted in response on their website, and some I did not:


One Nation, Under Surveillance

Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

As if we didn’t need more bad press, a police sergeant from St. George, MO was suspended this last week after his tirade directed at a motorist was captured on videotape. This is unfortunate on several levels, but it should also make for a warning flag for other cops, because the tactics used by the “victim” in this incident are becoming increasingly commonplace.

So now it’s “tactics” for motorists to use the exact same technology that officers use to document encounters, in order to protect themselves from allegations of misconduct, in order to prove that those very same allegations actually happened? We’ve already found that we can’t rely on Sergeant Kuehnlein’s squad cam, due to his mysterious “glitches”.

After watching the entire tape, I would not quibble with the motorist being labeled a victim, because he was most certainly verbally assaulted and threatened with trumped-up and false charges merely for asserting his Constitutional rights. He absolutely was a victim of this rogue officer. Why are you still defending him?

The incident has been a hot topic on the Officer.com discussion forum, where some people might expect the cops there to be defending the Missouri sergeant. For the most part, this hasn’t happened. The prevailing tone is that the sergeant was out of line and unprofessional, but also that he was baited into the incident by someone that was looking to push his buttons, and succeeded.

Too bad there's not a prevailing tone of "That officer is an out-of-control thug who needs to be fired and prosecuted, as he is making our entire profession look bad". Additionally, cut it out with the "baiting" stuff. Declining to answer a question about one's private business is not the same as taunting or harassing. Get it straight, please.

Cops are supposed to be paragons of self-control, and they usually are. But every one of us has a hot button (maybe several), and if that gets pushed, bad things are likely to happen.

If a private citizen's "hot button" gets pushed and they act wrongly, they get punished. The same should happen here.

People who are personal privacy activists decry the proliferation of surveillance cameras in American society. A few years back, the instructor in a video forensics workshop I attended said that the typical person has their image recorded on a surveillance camera 11 times every day. If you live or work in the downtown portion of a large city, you can probably double that; if you work in a high-value terrorist target area, like Washington, DC, you can quadruple it. Cameras placed by government officials are only a fraction of those that will capture your image and activities. There are cameras at every ATM, in most supermarkets and “big box” stores (when I walk into the local grocery, I can check myself out on the flat panel monitor above the entry door), at gas stations, and in convenience stores. Many office buildings have cameras in their elevators, hallways, or overlooking parking lots.

I'm not sure what this has to do with this specific case. We are all on video all day long. I'm not happy about it either, but why should the police be exempt?

Then there are the cameras that just about everyone has with them these days. Cell phone cameras are not just a standard feature on most phones–they’re reasonably good cameras, too. The same cell phones will take passable full-motion video, with sound, and many will act as voice recorders. The point here is that you will have to go to considerable trouble to be in a place where your activities can’t or won’t be recorded for future disclosure.

So, boys, especially you cats in Chicago, let this be a lesson to you: No more "tune-up" sessions where someone might bust you.

The individual in the St. George incident has a camcorder mounted in his vehicle, pointed out the windshield, much like the dash cameras in many police vehicles. He also has a police scanner mounted in his car, and both were activated before he parked in the empty commuter lot in the small hours of the morning, where he was approached by the police sergeant. Now, there is nothing illegal about this setup (in most states, anyway, and presumably in Missouri), but a reasonable person might conclude that the driver was looking for a confrontation.

Says who? The individual had already been the victim of harassment by another department, and had won a settlement for that harassment. I think it’s “reasonable” to assume that he was exercising due caution, in order to avoid any further “misunderstandings”.

When asked for identification, he began questioning the sergeant’s authority to demand it under the circumstances, and the sergeant unfortunately went off the reservation in terms of the threats he made and the language he used to make them. The driver had created that situation carefully, and knew exactly what the sergeant could and couldn’t do. The sergeant was wrong, but he was still being played, and played well.

Why didn't the sergeant know what he "could and couldn't do"? That would seem to be the more appropriate question here. Again, how is it "playing" the officer to assert one's rights in a polite and calm manner?

This is where this proliferation of surveillance becomes a two-edged sword for law enforcement. Video evidence is a great tool for catching crooks, but it can catch cops at their worst moments, too.

It shouldn’t be any big surprise that there is a good sized contingent of people out there who hate the police, and make it their mission in life to discredit, harass, and and/or vex the cops as much as they can.

We don’t hate the police. In fact, we appreciate and respect the job that honorable officers do. What we (I’m speaking for myself here) hate is when people given authority to use deadly force and detention abuse those privileges, and we especially dislike it when other cops carry their water for the abusers just because they’re cops, too. If the people in your profession were more proactive and vocal about getting rid of the “bad apples”, the good and honest police wouldn’t have nearly the image problem that they do.

The individual in the St. George case has gone to a little more trouble than most, but he’s certainly not alone. The stated intention of these crusaders is to stop police harassment and make the public aware of abuses of authority. But when you look a bit more closely, you’ll find that most have some serious problems with living within the law. They’re far less concerned with civil rights violations than they are with intimidating cops into overlooking their transgressions. Hey, it worked for Rodney King–for a while, anyway. They also want to get that sweet revenge. If they can’t jam up the cop that gave them the ticket or arrested them, any cop will do. This guy is now a national media hero for having revealed this shocking episode of police misconduct to the world. The follow-up stories are focusing on skeletons in the closet of the St. George sergeant and his chief. Don’t hold your breath waiting to see any investigative report special feature on the record of the guy in the car.

If there were anything there, and if the officer’s attorney was any good, we’d already know if there were anything negative in the motorist’s past. I highly doubt that the 20-year-old motorist got a friendly judge to expunge a lengthy criminal record, like the officer was able to do. In any event, it’s the officer’s conduct that is under scrutiny, not the motorist’s. Again, why are you still sticking up for this bad cop?

These days, you have to do everything as if you’re going to be on national TV tomorrow night, because you very well might be. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as we should all be on our best behavior, all of the time. And we all know of cops that are routinely abusive, and have no business being cops. But cops are also in the business of dealing almost exclusively with a cohort of people that make their living by identifying and exploiting the weaknesses of others. We shouldn’t let them push those buttons that they are so good at discovering. Even so, I know I’ve let people get to me, and I think just about everyone else has a similar experience or two.
There are some defenses here. First, get into the habit of playing The Court Game. Every time you even think about taking some kind of police action, ask yourself, “What is my lawful authority to do this?” If you’re thinking, “I don’t have to do that,” then use this incident as your example. Did the St. George sergeant have legal justification to demand to see identification? If so, what was that justification? Did he have the authority to order him out of the car in this situation? What was that authority? Instead of dismissing this with “That’s the law,” are you talking about statutory law or case law? Which case or statute do you have in mind? And when was the last time you actually read that case or statute? It’s not unreasonable for people to expect police officers to know the laws they are enforcing, and where the limits to their authority end. The use of intimidation to encourage compliance with orders is a common tactic and one that certainly has its place. The caveat here is that the basis of the intimidation has to be something you can actually do. Don’t make threats that you aren’t prepared to carry out, because eventually someone will force you to do it.

We're in agreement here. That's sound and reasonable advice. Too bad that Sergeant Kuehnlein didn't follow it.

Second, listen to yourself talk to people. Are both your words and your tone professional and composed, or are you shouting and using obscenities? Excitement and agitation can cross-amplify people, so that when one gets loud and profane, the other follows suit. If a disinterested party was watching or hearing the encounter, who would come across as the more reasoned person? Cops don’t have the luxury of anger, even though they constantly deal with people that inspire it. If you allow the other person to make you angry, you have ceded control of the situation to them.

Again, no problem here. Another good and professional point from Dees that Kuehnlein didn't use.

Third, have a way of corroborating everything you say and do. If you have a patrol car camera, use it religiously. The St. George sergeant had a dash camera, but he didn’t activate it, violating his department’s policy.

This is a falsehood. As Joel (Joel Rosenberg, a friend of mine who also responded to the column) stated, the cam was automatically activated by the bubble lights, and Chief Uhrig has admitted that the system was in perfect working order.

The first reaction of the anti-cop faction was that this was to facilitate a cover-up of the sergeant’s actions, or that he had the camera on, then destroyed the recording so it couldn’t be used against him. Either way, it puts him on the defensive. If you don’t have a dash camera, buy a digital sound recorder and keep it in your pocket, activated at all times. You won’t remember to turn it on in a crunch. There are many models that record to a memory card instead of tape, and have capacities much longer than any shift you’ll ever work. The recordings can be transferred to a PC hard disk if you want to maintain an archive.

That's good advice for everyone, not just the police. More evidence is always better, especially if you've done nothing wrong, like the motorist did.

If we use all the video recording devices out there to collect evidence on and convict crooks, they can be a great tool. But you have to know also that you are also under constant, covert surveillance, and that any recording of you doing something wrong, or something that appears to be wrong, will be used to convict you in the court of public opinion, where there are no rules of evidence, there is no discovery, and where the video can be edited so as to make you look as bad as possible. You don’t have to like it–you just have to deal with it.

Just like all of the rest of us great unwashed have to. Welcome to the club.




Notice how nowhere in this entire article does Dees call for Sergeant Kuehnlein to held accountable for his out-of-control actions, only stating that the officer was "wrong". I would say you're not exactly going out on a limb there, Mr. Dees. What would it take for you to advocate that a cop be fired, I wonder?