Evidence Based Policing Quotes

The BLM-antifa narrative that police are murdering black and brown people in epidemic proportions needs to be thoroughly debunked. It is not supported by the evidence or data. This should be the job of the media, but it has been they who fan the flames of racial division through one-sided wall-to-wall coverage. The unending distraction from real issues that can otherwise be addressed through evidence-based policy making has us chasing shadows.

Wolfe regarded him. “Either, sir, you’re an ass or you’re masquerading as one. When there is evidence that you have murdered, there will be not a suspicion but a conviction. If I had evidence that one or more of you is guilty I wouldn’t sit here half the night, inviting you to jabber; I would phone the police to come and get you. Have you anything to say?

My point is that bias is not advertised by a glowing sign worn around jurors’ necks; we are all guilty of it, because the brain is wired for us to see what we believe, and it usually happens outside of everyone’s awareness. Affective realism decimates the ideal of the impartial juror. Want to increase the likelihood of a conviction in a murder trial? Show the jury some gruesome photographic evidence. Tip their body budgets out of balance and chances are they’ll attribute their unpleasant affect to the defendant: “I feel bad, therefore you must have done something bad. You are a bad person.” Or permit family members of the deceased to describe how the crime has hurt them, a practice known as a victim impact statement, and the jury will tend to recommend more severe punishments. Crank up the emotional impact of a victim impact statement by recording it professionally on video and adding music and narration like a dramatic film, and you’ve got the makings of a jury-swaying masterpiece.45 Affective realism intertwines with the law outside the courtroom as well. Imagine that you are enjoying a quiet evening at home when suddenly you hear loud banging outside. You look out the window and see an African American man attempting to force open the door of a nearby house. Being a dutiful citizen, you call 911, and the police arrive and arrest the perpetrator. Congratulations, you have just brought about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., as it happened on July 16, 2009. Gates was trying to force open the front door of his own home, which had become stuck while he was traveling. Affective realism strikes again. The real-life eyewitness in this incident had an affective feeling, presumably based on her concepts about crime and skin color, and made a mental inference that the man outside the window had intent to commit a crime.

When America stood on the threshold of World War II, Hoover continued a friendly relationship with the Nazis dominating Interpol, the Berlin-based international secret police. He’d been obsessed with the “Red menace” since 1919, when he took the helm of the Bureau’s General Intelligence Division. Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Arthur Nebe and other Nazi fanatics were active in Interpol. Even after Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia, Hoover ignored all evidence of Nazi death squads and atrocities and cooperated with the boys in Berlin. When France fell, Hoover exchanged lists of wanted criminals, enclosing autographed photographs of himself. It was not until three days before Pearl Harbor that he called a halt to the fraternization—and then only because he feared his image might be tarnished.

Many people fear that decriminalization and the controlled dispensing of drugs will lead to widespread substance use among people who are now deterred from becoming addicts only by existing legal prohibitions. Like other tenets of the War on Drugs, this view entirely lacks supporting evidence. Any data on the subject points to the opposite prediction. For example, for many decades in the United Kingdom, heroin has been dispensed, under legal supervision, to addicts. The same type of program has been offered on a limited basis in other countries as well, and nowhere has it been found that this measure served in any way to entice unaddicted people into addiction. That is not surprising, given that addiction is a response to life experience, not simply to a drug. People who do not suffer the searing emotional pain that drives hardcore drug addiction will rarely fall into dependency on chemicals, even if these were more readily available — and, once more, public access to habit-forming substances is not being proposed. The call for the decriminalization of drugs for personal use does not imply legal acceptance of drug dealing. Criminalization and prevention are not identical — if anything, the first undermines the other. Paradoxical though it may seem, current drug laws against possession make drugs more readily available to potential new users than decriminalization would. Only the War on Drugs creates the raison d’être of the international trafficking industry, most of whose wealth is based on satisfying the cravings of established drug addicts. Without the exorbitant profits yielded by supplying to addicted users desperate for their substances, the illegal market would shrink to a fragment of its present size. Further, much of the street-level front-line sales force of the illicit drug trade consists of users raising money to support their habit. With the decriminalization of possession for personal use and the medically supervised distribution of drugs, the incentive to sell to new “customers,” including young kids, would largely evaporate. Policing resources could then be concentrated on the remaining large-scale traffickers — if any.

A police officer should legally be able to refuse body mounted electronic devices, based on the extensive range of evidence that biological toxicity is known to occur from long term exposure to their electromagnetic interference (EMI) emissions.

subsequent in-court identification by that witness also is inadmissible unless the government can demonstrate with clear and convincing evidence that the in-court identification was based on the observations of the accused independent of the prior lineup identification.

The issue was whether the exclusionary rule applies when police commit an illegal search based on good faith reliance on erroneous information from another jurisdiction. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the 5–4 majority, held that the exclusionary rule does not apply and that the evidence was properly admitted against Herring.

As eminent police psychologist and fellow ILEETA member Dr. Alexis Artwohl, Phd. has stated, “the goal of use of force investigations is: 1) Maximize the thoroughness and accuracy of the investigation while; 2) Minimizing the trauma to the officer and their families. Dr. Artwohl expounds that the investigator is not getting a statement about what really happened but is rather getting a statement of witness “perceptions.” Determining the reality of the case or the facts of the case is based on physical evidence and these witness statements. Witnesses interviewed can be participants – the officer(s) and suspect(s) as well as observers. Their perception-based statements are based on what they: saw, heard, felt, smelled, their beliefs, attitudes, biases and expectations. Of course the more you able to learn about the person the better your ability to ascertain their influence on the person’s statements. “The person may be telling the truth and they may be lying. We define a lie as they are deliberately and consciously telling you something that is different than what is in their head.” Dr. Artwohl states that oftentimes police officers are disciplined based on an investigators “interpretation of their intent.

Since Paul wasn’t a big conversationalist—he was the anti-Mac, in other words, and today had been the longest she’d ever heard him speak in consecutive sentences—Jena watched the scenery for a while. Then she decided to study the inside of Paul’s truck to see what she could learn about him. Technically, it was exactly like hers and Gentry’s. It had a black exterior with a blue light bar across the top and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Enforcement Division logo on the doors. It was tech heavy on the front dash, just like theirs, with LDWF, Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office, and Louisiana State Police Troop C radios, a laptop, a GPS unit, and a weather unit. In her truck and in Gentry’s, the cords and wires were a colorful tangle of plastic and metal, usually with extra plugs dangling around like vines. Paul’s cords were all black, and he had them woven in pairs and tucked underneath the dash, where they neatly disappeared. She leaned over to see how he’d achieved such a thing, and noticed identical zip ties holding them in place. “Sinclair, I hate to ask, but what are you doing?” He sounded more bemused than annoyed, so she said, “I’m psychoanalyzing you based on the interior of your truck.” He almost ran off the road. “Why?” “Your scintillating conversation was putting me to sleep.” His dark brows knit together but he seemed to have no answer to that. She turned around in her seat, as much as the seat belt allowed, and continued her study. Paul had a 12-gauge shotgun and a .223 carbine mounted right behind the driver’s seat, same as in her own truck. The mounts had hidden release buttons so the agents could get the guns out one-handed and quickly. But where her truck had a catch-all supply of stuff, from paper towels to zip ties to evidence bags to fast-food wrappers thrown in the back, Paul’s backseat was empty but for a zippered storage container normal people used for shoes. Each space held different things, all neatly arranged. Jena spotted evidence bags in one. Zip ties in another. Notebooks. Citation books. Paperwork. A spare uniform hung over one window, with a dry-cleaner’s tag dangling from the shirt’s top button. Good Lord. She turned back around. “What did you learn?” Paul finally asked. “You’re an obsessive-compulsive neat freak,” she said. “Accent on freak.

Critically, the French investigative team would also be given whatever support they required in Ireland, including full access to the original garda murder file. This ensured that the French investigators would have access to all witness statements, forensic reports, the crime scene photographs and the post-mortem examination file of State Pathologist Professor John Harbison. If the French police team had not had access to the Irish files, an investigation would be fatally compromised from the outset. This granting of access was unprecedented. It also confirmed, beyond any doubt, that no action would ever be taken by the DPP over the garda case file in Ireland. Any such action would be critically undermined from the very start by the fact that access to the file had been given to someone outside the Irish judicial process–and would open any future prosecution, even one taken on the basis of new evidence, to an immediate legal challenge based on a breach of process. While it was never confirmed, the astonishing level of access granted to Magistrate Gachon and his police team was clearly the result of consultations between Paris and Dublin at the very highest levels. Even allowing for existing European judicial and police cooperation protocols, journalists covering the case–including myself–felt the level of access given to the French was astonishing.

It’s tempting to think that the male bias that is embedded in language is simply a relic of more regressive times, but the evidence does not point that way. The world’s ‘fastest-growing language’,34 used by more than 90% of the world’s online population, is emoji.35 This language originated in Japan in the 1980s and women are its heaviest users:36 78% of women versus 60% of men frequently use emoji.37 And yet, until 2016, the world of emojis was curiously male. The emojis we have on our smartphones are chosen by the rather grand-sounding ‘Unicode Consortium’, a Silicon Valley-based group of organisations that work together to ensure universal, international software standards. If Unicode decides a particular emoji (say ‘spy’) should be added to the current stable, they will decide on the code that should be used. Each phone manufacturer (or platform such as Twitter and Facebook) will then design their own interpretation of what a ‘spy’ looks like. But they will all use the same code, so that when users communicate between different platforms, they are broadly all saying the same thing. An emoji face with heart eyes is an emoji face with heart eyes. Unicode has not historically specified the gender for most emoji characters. The emoji that most platforms originally represented as a man running, was not called ‘man running’. It was just called ‘runner’. Similarly the original emoji for police officer was described by Unicode as ‘police officer’, not ‘policeman’. It was the individual platforms that all interpreted these gender-neutral terms as male. In 2016, Unicode decided to do something about this. Abandoning their previously ‘neutral’ gender stance, they decided to explicitly gender all emojis that depicted people.38 So instead of ‘runner’ which had been universally represented as ‘male runner’, Unicode issued code for explicitly male runner and explicitly female runner. Male and female options now exist for all professions and athletes. It’s a small victory, but a significant one.

policing is the only field where the word ‘clever’ is an insult​”​.

Isaac Asimov lamented ​“​anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’ ​”​.

Spend enough time with police officers and you soon identify the ‘expert’ group. These are the cops that ‘know’ how to fix the crime problem. Regardless of the issue, they immediately propose a solution with unfaltering confidence. Their pronouncement sometimes starts with the phrase ​“​in my experience …​”​ This can be followed by a lament that if it were not for politicians, prosecutors or senior officers holding them back, they could magically bring tranquility to the community.

am not the only person to have noticed there are only two things coppers hate: how we are doing policing right now, and change.

The police are a paramilitary organization, replete with rank insignia and uniforms. This results in a deference to rank that is often a proxy for experience, even though some leaders have neither extensive street time nor relevant expertise.

Skunk? Was there skunk in Ireland? Taking out an evidence bag, she tried to pinpoint the area it seemed strongest, but it was impossible to tell. In any case, she swabbed a small area from the wall and then the ground, bagged them, and in addition picked up a sample of grit from the same area on the floor. The tower, with its two battered old wooden slat windows, was completely empty, save for some pigeon droppings. As birds didn’t urinate, Reilly already knew the foul smell definitely wasn’t coming from them. Moving tighter into the wall, she began stepping in concentric circles inwards, her gaze scanning the ground area. Then, her keen eye noticed some tiny bluish dots that were slightly incongruous amongst the grit and the droppings. She pulled out her tweezers and, bending low, carefully lifted one up for inspection. With some idea of what it was, she held it to her nose, sniffed, and removed all doubt. Rubber. Reilly’s mind raced, wondering if this was of any significance. Had the killer dropped it? Probably not. Whoever had hoisted that poor man up into the tree and slashed open his torso surely wouldn’t have then gone to the trouble of coming all the way up here to watch him die. Or would he? She craned her neck, looking upwards into the gloom, then made her way to the window. As she did, she let out a breath. There, framed perfectly in the opening as if it were a painting, was the hawthorn tree, the misfortunate victim dramatically hanging front and center. Leaving little doubt in Reilly’s mind that such positioning was completely intentional. It took a while, but eventually the local police managed to arrange for a mobile elevating platform to be sent to the site from the nearest town. The ME, having repositioned the man’s innards as best she could, wrapped the mutilated body in the tarpaulin and, with the platform operator’s assistance, accompanied it down to the ground, where she could examine it more closely. Reilly took a lint roller from her bag, took samples from the body and then concentrated her efforts around the perimeter of the tree, walking in concentric circles around the base amongst the humongous roots poking through the soil. Granted the victim was not a heavy man, but even so, it

The study’s authors concluded, based on their review and analysis of the empirical evidence, that the Seattle Police Department’s decisions to focus so heavily on crack, to the near exclusion of other drugs, and to concentrate its efforts on outdoor drug markets in downtown areas rather than drug markets located indoors or in predominantly white communities, reflect “a racialized conception of the drug problem.”87 As the authors put it: “[The Seattle Police Department’s] focus on black and Latino individuals and on the drug most strongly associated with ‘blackness’ suggest that law enforcement policies and practices are predicated on the assumption that the drug problem is, in fact, a black and Latino one, and that crack, the drug most strongly associated with urban blacks, is ‘the worst.’”88