This essay first appeared in Cliterati on September 7th; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.
As I’ve previously explained, a large part of the process of writing my blog consists of scanning Twitter (and emails from readers) for likely stories:
The majority of sex work-related items end up in my weekly “That Was the Week That Was” [TW3] news summary, which normally appears on Saturday; other interesting stories appear in my weekly “Links” column, which normally appears on Sunday. Some are worth quoting in a longer discussion, and others aren’t noteworthy enough to get any coverage in my work at all. But every once in awhile a story comes along which is so interesting, funny, horrible, odd or whatever, that I like to analyze it at length.
When I feature a story in a TW3 column, it appears under a subtitle which refers to an earlier, topically-related essay (and contains a link to that essay for further reading). But sometimes I find a story which defies categorization; usually this is because it contains so many different elements that I’m not sure what heading to file it under, so I end up just picking the one I feel is the most important and perhaps noting the others via links. However, I recently discovered an item for which the sheer number of overlapping, intersecting areas of interest constituted a story in itself. Rather than quote the mainstream media’s parrotlike repetition of what the police claim happened (which is itself one of the points I wish to make), let’s instead look at the more objective way it was reported by Elizabeth Nolan Brown in Reason:
…Florida resident Bobbey Jo Boucher went with her 10-year-old daughter to a neighbor’s barbecue and left the girl there when she headed to work, instructing her to go back home when it was over. When the girl didn’t return within a few hours, her grandmother called the…Sheriff’s Office, which called Boucher at work. When the line was somehow disconnected—Boucher says accidentally, police say she hung up—Boucher wound up arrested for obstructing justice. The daughter was fine…she was going to play at church with some neighborhood kids….[who] had left from the barbecue and were riding there on the church bus when police stopped it…Officer Nicholas Carmack…”[reported that another cop claimed that Boucher]…stated ‘I have to get on stage’ and hung up the phone”…a 10-year-old girl who maybe lied to a bus driver to go play with friends at church, who has been out of her working mother’s sight for all of about 2.5 hours, and on whom a missing person report hasn’t yet been filed…[was quickly located by the cops]…and that should be that. But, no, someone must be punished. Officer Carmack really wanted to…take a trip down to [the strip club where Boucher worked] for more information…and he was obstructed by them finding the “missing” child perfectly safe and nearby first…The whole report just oozes with so much condescension …that I feel a little bit slimy reading it. At every point where it’s possible, the cops assume Boucher is a bad, unconcerned mother…Boucher…was eventually arrested, taken to…Jail, and charged with resisting without violence and obstruction. No matter how it shakes out, she already had to miss work, post bond, and owes $78 in “investigative costs recovery”…
The very first point that needs to be made here is that there is no situation, no matter how mundane or extreme, that the police cannot make worse; it is therefore an extremely bad idea to call them for any reason whatsoever, because once they are called they cannot be uncalled and there is a very high likelihood that some innocent person or animal will end up harassed, beaten, tased, pepper-sprayed, arrested, caged, robbed, charged with felonies, murdered or all of the above. In the situation at hand, if the grandmother had heeded this simple principle the child would have eventually come home, possibly been fussed or punished for going off without permission, and the family would not have lost the money the cops’ violent pomposity has already cost them and will continue to cost; Boucher and the child are both very lucky the cops didn’t decide to assault them.
Next, Boucher belongs to not one but three separate groups upon whom American society in general and the police in particular are wont to pour derision: black people, single mothers, and sex workers. Any one of these would probably have resulted in Boucher’s having a harder time with the cops than (for example) a white, married teacher would, and the combination is so likely to lead to evil from the twisted minds of government thugs that one must wonder whether the grandmother was entirely in her right mind when she picked up the phone to call them.
Furthermore, we have recently seen the rapid growth of a dangerous trend of the state involving itself in what used to be considered the province of the family; police and other official busybodies now routinely insert themselves between parent and child, and in the past few months we’ve seen a rising number of cases in which police (especially in Florida) arrest mothers for failing to keep their children under a level of surveillance and restriction of movement more appropriate to a prison than to an ordinary neighborhood. It’s impossible to know where this will end, but it’s rapidly reaching the point where the only sane and reasonable course of action will be to refrain from having children at all. This, however, won’t keep the police away; criminalization of ordinary parental decisions with which any fatuous imbecile with a title disagrees is only a subset of the larger problem of universal criminality.
Finally, there’s the issue I referenced before the quote: the mainstream media no longer question anything the police say, no matter how stupid or self-evidently biased. The New York Daily News credulously parroted the police report, adding insult to injury via editorial inanities like “jiggle joint”, and everyone else obediently fell in line behind so as to generate pageviews at the expense of yet another victim of our terminally-bloated police state. And it’s a safe bet that the majority who read such pap really believe that they, as “good parents” and non-sex workers, are totally safe from the djinni they have allowed to escape his bottle with the promise that he’s only going to go after the “bad people” they don’t like.
That’s practically one of my mantras.
A word of advice though.
If you say it during an interview on prime time television about deaths in custody you can expect a lot of blowback.
Yet during my numerous subsequent run ins with cops when I questioned their reason for existence I still kept on encountering the smug response “If you got robbed you’d be the first to call us”. As if.
Heck, from what I hear they’re even inserting themselves between mothers and their foetus (especially in Florida). I mean, how intrusive can you get?
Then they’ll insert themselves between you and your birth control.
Don’t carry too many condoms ladies.
The only sane and reasonable course of action is to refrain from having police at all.
You’re pretty good at what you do Maggie, but sometimes you just let the cops off too lightly.
Oh, I’m totally with you there; I believe the police should be totally disbanded. But since that won’t happen in our lifetimes, not having kids removes one of the most effective means of their violently inserting themselves into the lives of real people. I advise hysterectomy or vasectomy as soon as one can possibly afford it: guys, I understand it’s not hard for you to get, but ladies, they’ll try to talk you out of it (especially if you’re young and child-free). You’ll probably have to keep repeatedly going to the doctor claiming pathologically-painful periods for a couple of years, then they’ll relent and let you actually decide what you want to do with your own body. I had mine at 28 and have never regretted it, despite the fact that I really did (stupidly) want kids.
The other gender always has it easier doesn’t it?
In my case it took four years of hassling a succession of GPs until in the end I threatened to have it done during a trip to India before I finally got my vas aged about 23.
I’ve got to admit that protecting myself from authorities wasn’t a consideration though. I never wanted kids. I care about them too much to give them a father like me.
Oh, dear, I apologize! I was under the impression that docs hassled guys who wanted vasectomies much less than they hassled women who want hysterectomies, at least in the US! Maybe it’s different in Australia?
Our doctors are thoroughly trained in the principles of non-discrimination.
They’re equal opportunity patronising arseholes.
There’s an innovation in Australian policing that you can expect to see in the US soon if it’s not already there.
When called out to a domestic or mental health incident, before you gun someone down you need to shout “Taser! Taser! Taser!” (a mandatory warning here). Then during the inquest you just have to say that you meant to use non-lethal force but in the confusion accidentally grabbed your Glock instead.
If you don’t shout the warning, no problem. Just say you did. Your partner will back you up and be believed by the coroner and media no matter how many other witnesses deny it.
In the United States, the similar shouted absolution of responsibility is “stop resisting”. Cops here are so dedicated to it that on videos of incidents where people have died or been totally disfigured by violent beating from half a dozen cops, one can clearly hear them repeating “stop resisting” like a mantra while pounding on the inert piece of meat that was, until they began to inflict their ministrations, a human being either surrendering or lying incapacitated on the ground from an earlier taser attack or pepper spray blast.
Jesus. It’s like some sort of obscene religious ritual.
If there’s one thing I deliberately inflicted on myself that was more traumatic than working with sex offenders and their victims it was the death in custody cases. Paradoxically, it was seeing what they do to both the victims and, afterwards, their families that ensured I’ll never be scared of the cops again. No matter what they can do to me, I’ve seen worse.
I just can’t get aboard any train that says … “NEVER”.
I have issues with cops … but mostly I recognize them as institutional problems rather than problems with individuals. I mean – I have a lot of good friends, who were Marines or Sailors I served with, who got out of the military and became cops. They do a great job.
They didn’t get into it for the “power” … they got into it for basically the same reasons they volunteered for the military – because they’re “defender types” and believe in doing good things and serving a cause bigger than themselves.
I’m not talking about the New Orleans cops. I never knew any of those guys while I was in the military. NOLA cops are fucked … but then again … so is EVERYTHING in Orleans Parish.
So I tend to think most problems stem from urban areas.
Have I had issues with cops? Certainly … but they were mostly issues where the cop was just being an ass and deliberately disrespecting me. I’m sure the ones I’ve had issues with – were trying to “provoke” me. Well, I’m smarter than that.
So I’ll continue to advise people, if you’re in deep trouble – call the cops. The statistics are certainly on your side that everything will work out. Yes, there are horror stories – but they aren’t the “rule”.
I’m with you here. Honestly, I think the majority of the problems with the police could be cleared up if it was mandatory for arrests to be video taped to be considered valid- its not hard, just issue a camera/badge and equip all police cars with a camera. (Laws preventing the media from publishing these videos untill after the court case is resolved would also not be remiss). Surveillance isn’t going away, so we might as well make it work for both sides.
Maybe it’s different over there – I’ve seen a few extraordinary vids of police ultra-violence from the US – but here what happens when you get someone showing up in court looking like he just went ten rounds with Ali and blaming cops for bashing him is that the cell video gets accidentally taped over, or the recorder develops a sudden unexplained technical problem or they just take him somewhere they know isn’t covered by cameras.
They already routinely take off their badges before they do something particularly nefarious so having a camera in it won’t help much (tip: If you’re at a demo and all the cops start pocketing their badges it’s time to run).
What you’ve got to remember is any measures you take to bring cops into line have to be enforced by someone. And who do you think’s gonna do that. Politicians? The judiciary? Other cops?
That’s why it needs to be required by law- no video, no conviction.
I’m not saying it will fix everything, videos can be doctored, ect, but it can’t be worse than right now, when whatever lies are written in the police report can over rule witness testimony and lack of hard evidence.
No need to doctor the vids. Obviously there’s a limit to how much video the courts can demand. You just don’t do the nasty shit while you’re doing the actual arrest. If something embarrassing does get on the arrest vid, lose it and do a retake.
video taping the incident doesn’t seem to help. The judge are more that willing to play footsies with the police, completely disregard all the evidence and end up saying what the internal police report determined. Usually that the dead victim had it coming to him
See above reply- Its not just that it must be video taped, the video must be presented in court or no conviction.
I think alphapig’s point is that even if the video shows the most blatant abuse and the police come up with the most ridiculous explanation possible the courts will accept what they say. I’ve seen the most ridiculous and obvious lies accepted by courts when they come out of a cops mouth (even more so if obviously rehearsed ones come out of two cops mouths). It’s routine in fact.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that even though you don’t find too many cops with Nobel Prizes in science they are human and they are adaptable.
Any simple, formulaic response to police malfeasance will be systematically circumvented almost immediately. You might catch the lazy and the unlucky with it but not enough to make a difference.
If you want to keep cops in line you have to use something just as well resourced and powerful as the cops themselves. Then you’ve probably got two problems. Best to just abolish them.
The job attracts a disproportionate number of sociopaths but primarily the problem is institutional, krulac.
Unfortunately the institution eventually seeps into the individual.
I’d number two former cops among friends of mine and got on well with maybe half a dozen or so I had to interact with for various reasons but it seems to me the only ones who held on to their integrity in the end were the ones who jumped ship.
At least one guy I knew and got on well with – he introduced me to his family at a conference once, including his stunning daughter – kept his personal integrity but got more and more tortured about his professional integrity the higher he rose and the more shit he had to put out under his authority. He just tried so hard to get everyone to like him but the job kept forcing him to do such disgusting things he kept alienating people who had trusted him. He stuck his neck out quite a bit to try to get cops to work with demonstrators instead of against them and to block plans to implement NYC style zero-tolerance policing in Sydney but he always ended up doing some shit thing like sending sniffer dogs into schoolyards due to pressure from above and lost all the goodwill he’d spent years building up. At one meeting he regaled us all with his plans for community policing in the inner city and when I reminded him some of his boys had just blown away an innocent, unarmed 22 year old then terrorised his friends and that no-one was going to forget that in a hurry it looked like he was gonna cry for a minute.
And the internal politics of police forces are excruciating – here at least. I never had trouble finding pretty high ranking informants because they were all so dead set on screwing each other. That’s one reason the Australian media disgusts me so much. They’ve all got good sources and know what’s going on but do you think they follow it up and report it? Well, a few shock jocks do, but only to advantage their own mates in the force who tend to be the worst of the bunch.
It’s a shit job. It should be abolished for the sake of the cops themselves as much as for the rest of us.
You have hard statistics on this assertion … or is this a “gut feel” … or just something you deduced from multiple anecdotes?
A gut feel based on the pointless cruelty I’ve witnessed so many times as well as the fact that two of the worst bullies I knew at school ended up in the force.
But yeah, I was using what’s meant to be a technical term (albeit a very loosely defined one) colloquially.
The definition of sociopathy isn’t loose, it’s just difficult to diagnose: lack of conscience.
But that is not only an individual trait. It can be fostered by an organization. The Waffen SS might be the most prominent example, but it’s far from the only one.
Well, if you ask me a definition based on a subjectively allocated scoring of a list of widely interpretable questions is a loose one.
And as most mental health professionals seem to think it has unknown or untestable innate physiological correlates (usually related to pathways to the hypothalmus) the suggestion it can be induced by environment would seem to make the definition even looser.
Regarding the definition you offer – how much of a lack? And what’s a conscience anyway? Lots of people (e.g. young kids) have a lack of awareness of a moral dimension to their behaviour but would not qualify as sociopaths whereas some sociopaths are doubtless aware of it but weigh it far differently to others.
My old (1970s) psychology textbook defined sociopathy/psychopathy in terms of dulling or absence of emotional content relating to social interactions. It struck me at the time as also applicable to autistic people but I don’t think many would count them as sociopaths.
Incidentally, the SS did not only recruit people without conscience. It is not even clear whether they had that preference. Instead, they put their recruits through “training” that can only be called systematic, sadistic torture to make them ruthless killers and absolutely obedient. There are some (not many) reports from former SS men that came forward much, much later when they had found some peace with what had happened to them and what they had done.
The police forces are universally indoctrinated as well, more so in a Police State. Of course, the larger and more “urban” the force, the more systematic this indoctrination. It consists of “us vs. them” rhetorics, lying no-matter-what to protect other policemen, overblown reports of the dangers to them, martial training and equipment, etc. If, in the next stage of the US Police State, killing bothersome citizens becomes routine, I have no doubt the Nazi methods of training KZ guards and SS killers will be rediscovered and effectively utilized.
Quite sad, but this story repeats itself time and again. Those human beings that are suitable for wielding power, usually do not want it and hence do not have it. Those that want is eventually corrupt themselves and subsequently all others under their power.
It might be worth remembering that by the war’s end the SS was a very large, heterogeneous organisation with many different functions and training regimes, not all of which were associated with abuse or war crimes.
One of Australia’s most prominent anarchist pacifists is Hans Kung, a former SS NCO awarded the Iron Cross with bar while still a teenager. He was part of Otto Skorzeny’s unit and knocked out several T-34s with panzerfausts during the failed counterattack on Budapest in early 1945. He still has nightmares about the screams of the burning tank crews.
His autobiography is very frank and according to him his indoctrination was primarily via his family (mostly his mother) and the middle class community he grew up in. The way he describes it his SS training sounded much less extreme than the sort of thing you see in movies about the US Marine Corp.
There’s a very big difference between the SS and the Marines though.
The SS lost.
Well, yes. The training I refer to might have been specifically for SS KZ guards and was decidedly not end-of-war. Also, towards the end of the war, structures broke down, so whatever the people recruited then got in training is likely not what was actually intended fro them.
I think you’ll find a lot of power seekers aren’t megalomaniacs but are just regular folk caught up in the dynamics of an organisation they belong to. They accumulate a little power to protect themselves from internal political intrigues and that attracts more attention and intrigue to them, requiring them to acquire more power …
There’s an excellent 1980s ABC TV miniseries called Scales of Justice that gives a very convincing portrayal of that dynamic operating within the NSW police and political establishment.
I tend to think those who avoid institutional power wielding are like me. They aren’t suitable to wield it, they just know that no-one is and refuse to make an exception for themselves.
Much of our current “police problem” is the emphasis on the paramilitary aspect of police work, and the black and white, right and wrong type of thinking that having “soldiers” in the street rather than “peace officers” entails.
Part of the problem is that the “justice” system has to fill all of those private prisons somehow, Which means making things illegal, then tightly enforcing that law, in order to keep as many people as possible in prison.
Finally, the biggest problem is that the United States has always had a two-tier system of justice, that Chief Justice John Marshall complained about in the decision for Marbury v. Madison. If you are rich, you get one type of justice, weighted to give the best outcome possible for you. If you are poor, you get the other type of justice, weighted to give the worst possible outcome for you.
Unfortunately, with about 4% of the population being psychopaths/sociopaths, there is no way to avoid having some form of law enforcement to protect us from those people, if no one else. To take the law into our own hands is not the answer: Aeschylus demonstrated that 2500 years ago in the last play in his Orestes trilogy, “The Furies.”
The prisons themselves are an even bigger problem. They’re criminogenic. So if you can get a kid into a prison for a short period for something minor there’s a good chance you’ll get a regular customer for life.
Well, being a psychopath doesn’t make you a criminal. It can make you a company director instead. I’d be surprised if the prison population of psychopaths was notably higher than that ‘in the wild’. I’ve known lots of prisoners and none I can think of strike me as psychopathic. Those who work in prisons are a different matter though. In any case, ‘psychopath’ is such a flexible term and the psychopath index such a flexible tool I don’t think figures like 4% mean squat. There’s no objective biomarkers for it, you have to rely on the answers given by the subject and the examiners interpretation of them.
And places with minimal access to institutionalised law enforcement don’t have notably higher crime rates than the most over-policed. If anything it’s the contrary.
There’s not much use in ‘solutions’ that make the problems worse.
I absolutely agree with your first point. (No, the world is not coming to an end.)
The second is that 4 years is the best guess of clinical psychologist Martha Stout of Harvard–after many years of practice, see her book “The Sociopath Next Door,” and Donald Black, MD, University of Iowa med school, after many, many years of practice, including in Iowa’s penal system, see his book “Bad Boys, Bad Men.” And they both agree that not all sociopaths;/psychopaths are in prison: lots in the corporate boardroom and government, including law enforcement.
There are decent, honest cops out there,not many but some, but they either have the patience of Job or quit after a few years because of the BS.
As to incidences of criminal acts and law enforcement, you are left with the too many rats in a cage problem. Too much population, more criminal/antisocial acts. Less population, fewer acts. The crime rate began to go down in the U.S. in 1992. Why? Because Roe v. Wade had reduced population pressure in the poorest neighborhoods.
Best I leave the views of the forensic psychologists alone. My prison work left me with a pretty firm opinion of them and, frankly, I think I prefer the cops. From the treatments they apply to sex offenders to the tools they use to assess dangerousness to the papers they write and present at conferences to the decisions they make about medication to the advice they give mental health tribunals to their ‘criminal profiling’ I find very little science or humanity in what they do. A heck of a lot of authoritarianism though, albeit with a face of bogus concern. And a heck of a lot of BS too.
Or the job eventually turns them. There’s a lot more decent, honest rookies than veterans.
I read a similar claim in Freakonomics.
When I was studying criminology that idea wasn’t even in the mix, with the stabilisation of the crack epidemic the most popular of quite a few competing theories. (Many were holding tight to economic ones such as employment rates despite the fact they just couldn’t get the figures to match up).
The problem with both those theories is that the decline in recorded violent crime happened across the majority of OECD countries at pretty much the same time (obviously not from as high an initial level as the US) and the others didn’t have crack epidemics or Roe vs Wade.
The Roe vs Wade one is very convenient as there is no agreed age at which criminal tendencies develop (as opposed to manifesting in crime figures) so you can cherry pick your data from a wide spread of years.
BTW, the theory that matches the international figures best is the phasing out of lead in petrol and the corresponding drop in lead levels in the high density inner city environments that produce the most violent crime.
Relative lead levels in the bodies of offending and non-offending populations don’t support this theory however, although testing of cognitive functions thought to be affected by lead exposure do so to a moderate degree.
From what I have read about this, the “lead in petrol” theory is pretty convincing. In several countries in Europe, this is the only thing that could be identified as the probable main cause. Also, the symptoms of lead poisoning are a very good fit. The lead-levels in offenders and non-offenders need not be correlated, all it takes is that some lead increases your risk somewhat, by some loss of emotional control.
You may not need a good fit for correlation but you need either a dose related or threshold related response and neither seems to be the case, so if it’s lead it’s probably more complex than simple exposure.
At an AIC conference I attended a paper was presented suggesting it’s psychosocially mediated. That direct exposure itself wasn’t the important bit but rather the effects it had on the community as a whole (e.g. degraded parenting skills and education standards, greater cultural acceptance of violence, etc). I read a copy of the paper but missed the presentation and don’t know if there’s any good evidence supporting the theory.
But yeah, as you say the reduction in environmental lead exposure and reduction in violent crime are a very good fit right across Europe, Japan and Australasia. Unfortunately English language criminology is very US-centric and when you look at US rates by city the crack epidemic was an even better fit until the crime rates continued to decline well after crack markets had stabilised, so the lead theory was shoved into the background.
The worst fit of all was always zero tolerance policing but if you read media reports of about a decade ago you could be forgiven for thinking there was rock-solid proof behind it.
Yes, you do need some kind of threshold-response, but on an individual base. And for that you need to know exactly how likely individuals would have been to become criminal without the lead. That data is not available for obvious reasons. The psycho-social effect is likely also there and contributes.
That the US ignores (to its detriment) the rest of the world is nothing new.
Lead is pretty bad stuff that messes people up in various bad ways. I might have been exposed myself by way of solder (I have been tinkering with electronics since my early teens) and only became aware of the risk about 15 years ago, when a new spool of solder I bought had a warning on it to wash hands after touching it. That lead to some research and since them I have been buying lead-free exclusively, despite its otherwise worse properties. Before that I never saw any warnings or cautions, it seems nobody cared. RoHS was direly needed.
It doesn’t need to be individual. If there’s a threshold response you would expect to see relatively sudden reductions for given age groups from particular areas as the centre of the sensitivity bell curve drops below the threshold then a trailing off in effect as you get towards the edge of the bell curve again. But instead you see pretty smooth reductions across all age groups since the early 90s with proportional declines in older cohorts running ahead of the younger ones (again, not what you’d expect if either accumulated lead dose or the damage caused by it was to blame).
It looks more like some kind of cultural change (albeit quite possibly a lead mediated one) that has hit diverse countries at about the same time. Or if it’s a toxin it’s something that washes out more readily than lead.
Or there are too many confounding variables and more research is necessary. Now where’s my grant?
Sorry, I meant to write four percent, not 4 years.
Don’t you just hate it when your brain checks out without telling you.
Lead in paints and tetraethyl lead in gasoline was not phased out in U.S. completely until late 1970’s, 1978 if I remember correctly. Please tell me where you get your info with a link please?
As mentioned above, most of my info on the decline in violent crime comes from memory. When I was studying criminology in 2000-2002 it was probably the most controversial issue in the field and I’ve lost count of the number of lectures, seminars and conference papers I saw on it. There was a constant stream of US criminologists coming out here to flog their pet theories.
This Mother Jones article covers the most popular theories with their strengths and weaknesses fairly well (with references), though it understates the correlation by US city with the crack epidemic which was a particularly good fit for east coast data.
The link between lead and violent crime was just being seriously examined when I started winding down my criminal justice activism around 2007 and while there was plenty of speculation it was almost all retrospective studies trying to match graphs of dropping rates with either changes in car design (i.e. implementation of catalytic convertors), consumption of leaded petrol by country, the relevant laws on lead in petrol by jurisdiction or EPA figures on environmental lead by city. From the little research in the field I still follow the theory seems to have been firming up since then.
If you want to check out what studies are currently around, Google is your friend.