-Caveat Lector-
Here's an interesting/revealing excerpt from Tucker Calrlson's "The Bell
Curve," (pg. 495):
Washington's white population is densely concentrated among white-collar
and professional groups, with no significant white working - class
neighborhoods.
In the mid 70s the Washington D.C. Police Department installed a residency
requirement for police.
The residency requirement severely restricted the pool of potential white
applicants.
By 1982, 40% of the candidates who took the police admission test failed
it, and the department was having a hard time filling positions.
A new test was introduced in 1985, normed to favor minority applicants.
Standards were so low that that not one student flunked out.
In 1988, the academy abolished its final comprehensive pencil and paper
examination after 40% of graduating recruits failed it. A former academy
instructor says that "I've seen people
diagnosed as borderline retarded graduate from the police academy."
...........Between 1986 and 1990, about a third of all murder cases brought
by the U.S. attorney's office in the District were dismissed often because
the prosecutors were unable to make sense of the arrests reports.
______________________________________
National Review
Inept PD
The fall of the D.C. cops.
By John J. Miller
NR national political reporter
July 31, 2001 8:30 a.m.
National Review
Inept PD The fall of the D.C. cops.
By John J. Miller NR national political reporter July 31, 2001 8:30 a.m.
[From the August 20, 2001, issue of National Review]
Jaywalking may be a petty crime, but on the night of March 30, 1967, it had
disastrous consequences.
At the corner of 13th and U Streets, in the Upper Shaw neighborhood of
Washington, D.C., a young black man tried to cross against the light. Two
cars nearly hit him, right in front of a stopped police vehicle. A white
officer rolled down his window and asked, "Can't you tell the color of a
streetlight?"
The reply came as a string of obscenities, some of it racial.
The cop had intended merely to issue a warning.
Provoked, he was now determined to hand out a $5 ticket. This led to a
scuffle that grew to include several onlookers: A group of black citizens
pitted themselves against white policemen.
There were no serious injuries in the altercation that followed - just a
few minor bruises on both sides - and the jaywalker was carted off to the
precinct house. His name was Marion Barry Jr.
If the decline of the D.C. police department had to be traced to a single
event, the decision to challenge Barry that night is a strong candidate.
In the trial that followed, according to Harry S. Jaffe and Tom Sherwood in
their book Dream City, Barry summoned a long convoy of black and white
character witnesses, who claimed their friend was a responsible member of
the community who never could have done the awful things alleged by the
police.
Barry was already a minor figure in local political life; many in the city
regarded him as a brave man who exposed police racism. Upon acquittal, the
victim became a hero. Eleven years later, the hero became the mayor. And he
was determined to level the D.C. police.
As the country has fixed its attention on missing intern Chandra Levy, it
has also become acquainted with the D.C. police.
Cable-news devotees have witnessed a string of elementary blunders: the
repeated insistence from earliest days that Democratic congressman Gary
Condit is "not a suspect," the inexplicable delay in searching his
apartment, the leaking to the press, and so on.
While it's wrong to judge an entire police force on its performance during
a single investigation - let alone one that may hold further developments -
the Levy case points to a broader, crippling problem: the fundamental
inability of the D.C. police department to carry out many of its duties.
Just a generation ago, the D.C. police department was considered one of the
best in the country. Today its reputation is near the bottom. The story of
its decline is more important than any lurid, momentary fascination the
public has with the Levy case. The D.C. experience serves as a red-alert
warning to cities such as Cincinnati, still recovering from racial riots
sparked by charges of police misconduct earlier this year, and even New
York, which will lose its tough-on-crime mayor, Rudy Giuliani, in a few
months. It is fraught with important lessons for urban centers caught in
the toxic mix of black radical activism and white liberal guilt.
Yet the D.C. story is also a tragedy unto itself. Consider simply the
homicide numbers: 1,500 unsolved murders over the last decade; 225 killings
by alleged repeat offenders, including 125 who had been arrested previously
(most of their charges were dismissed); and an arrest rate badly trailing
that of comparable cities. Two-thirds of all homicides now go unsolved in
D.C. A detective told the Washington Post last year that in some parts of
the city, the force "is spread so thin, you might not get a detective if
there's a murder."
There was a time when crime figures this bad would have been unthinkable.
In 1968, there were about 2,900 officers on the D.C. force; race riots
following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. made plain the need
for more personnel, as buildings just a few blocks from the White House
went up in flames. Troops descended on the city to stop the violence.
President Nixon came into office determined to make sure chaos would not
reign again in the nation's capital. He poured resources into the police
department, even getting the Pentagon to encourage retiring soldiers to
apply for jobs there. The number of cops rose to 5,100 within a few years,
their ranks swollen with veterans. They cut the D.C. crime rate in half,
even as the national crime rate was rising. The homicide closure rate moved
above the 90 percent mark. The city bucked a depressing trend, and showed
that a serious commitment to fighting crime can yield impressive results.
Which is another way of saying the D.C. police had a long way to fall.
In 1978, Barry was elected mayor. He had an animus against the police
force, based not just on the jaywalking incident, but also on a perverse
view of law enforcement in general. He viewed the police not as a force
city politicians were supposed to improve and reinforce, but as an
"occupation army" (as he once put it) that must be restrained. One of his
top goals as mayor was to shrink the police department. Within eight years,
he had chopped it down more than 25 percent, to 3,800 officers. The police
force began to rot from within as well. Training virtually halted.
Equipment problems became so severe that police cruisers used tires
discarded by the Park Police. Many of the best officers grew demoralized
and quit, and the mayor made sure they weren't replaced. He lorded over the
police, insisting that he approve every promotion above the rank of
captain. Choking on patronage, the department became a personal security
force that facilitated Barry's own crimes (though these were eventually
exposed). Most infuriating of all, from a law-enforcement standpoint, was
how Barry reveled in this dubious achievement: The downfall of the police
was marketed as uplift of the people. The only thing that went up, however,
was the crime rate. Barry seemed unconcerned. "I'm not going to let murder
be the gauge since we're not responsible for murders, can't stop the
murders," he said in 1989.
The problems were glaring and getting worse. In 1988, 40 percent of the
candidates eligible to graduate from the police academy failed their exit
exam. The academy moved swiftly to fix the problem: It eliminated the exam.
"I was hearing complaints from our academy staff that they had to teach
people how to read, in addition to how to be police officers," recalls Gary
Hankins, a retired 22-year veteran of the D.C. force and one of the
founders of its Fraternal Order of Police. "We had people who were
functionally illiterate in there. We even located a few people who were
mildly retarded." This would be a challenge in any line of work, but for
law enforcement it poses special problems. Academy graduates, after all,
carry deadly weapons. And the trend away from standards came at precisely
the wrong moment. With criminal rights mounting over the years, good cops
must increasingly understand the fine points of criminal law. That requires
both a high level of education and a native intelligence. If they don't
have it, defense attorneys will run circles around them in court and win
acquittals for guilty men.
Hankins discovered academy entrance exams rigged to promote certain kinds
of applicants: The city granted massive preferences on the basis of race,
sex, D.C. residency status, and whether the candidate had graduated from a
high school in the District. "Once these 'conversion factors' were put in,
people scoring in the 50th percentile on their entrance exams could end up
with a score in the mid 80s," says Hankins. "That's a huge adjustment, and
it meant plenty of people got in because of something other than their
ability." Residency rules are a bad idea just about anywhere; their most
obvious effect is to shrink the talent pool. Under Barry, the city
experienced a period of chronic population loss as members of the black
middle class fled D.C. in droves; this made the problem even worse.
At roughly the same time, the department came under pressure from Congress
to hire more officers. In response, it streamlined the hiring process -
eliminating, for example, all but the most cursory of background checks.
When the public became aware of this, the background checks were
reinstated; but they were suspended long enough for real damage to result.
Scores of D.C. police were arrested on criminal charges in the 1990s. Petty
crime blossomed inside police stations. Dozens of guns were stolen. Many
typewriters were chained to their desks to keep department employees from
ripping them off. Barry's mayoral days started out with irresponsible
accusations of police criminality; toward the end they witnessed a police
department that was, in many ways, criminal.
This is one of the reasons Chief Ramsey, since coming to the force from
Chicago three years ago, has filled the department's top positions with
outsiders. Ramsey wins mixed reviews for his job performance, but virtually
everybody agrees he's much better than any of his recent predecessors. (The
man he replaced, Larry Soulsby, quit in the midst of a corruption scandal.)
There has recently been a big drop in the number of times police officers
discharge their weapons - a figure many law-enforcement experts watch the
way investors track the Dow Jones average. (During the 1990s, the D.C.
police shot and killed more people on a per capita basis than any other
sizeable police force in the country.) The force now has more than 3,600
officers - still far below where it was during its most effective period,
but higher than it was after the deepest Barry cuts, and inching upward.
The graduates coming out of the academy are improved, too.
Recovery, however, is a slow process. "There's still a lot of deadwood from
the Barry years - lots of bad promotions, including promotions of
girlfriends," says one retired detective with many years on the force.
"Those people aren't going anywhere because they make more money in the
police department than they can make anywhere else." Ramsey arguably had an
opportunity to confront this problem at the start of his tenure, when there
was also a new mayor and a financial control board ran most of the city's
operations. That moment has passed, however, and the deadwood continues to
float around the department. Yet it's important to remember that Ramsey,
whatever his mistakes, represents a significant break from the past. As
Fred Siegel of the Progressive Policy Institute puts it, "Moving away from
systematic malfeasance is a big improvement."
One of the ironies of the Chandra Levy case is a complaint muttered
occasionally by black Washingtonians: If she were black, they say, her
disappearance wouldn't win this amount of attention. That's probably true,
but not for the reasons they think. If Gary Condit were a member of the
Congressional Black Caucus, the case would still make the news--but it
would not receive round-the-clock treatment on the cable channels,
precisely because of racial sensitivities. The media would be leery of
focusing too much attention on a potential crime involving blacks, lest
whatever attention it did receive be portrayed as racist.
And this media reflex would be part of the very same impulse that allowed
Barry to rise years ago. The city's white liberals enabled much of Barry's
misconduct, first by their outright support of him, and then by their
refusal to hold him accountable for his actions in office. A disturbing
number of people viewed him as the embodiment of black will in Washington -
a view that placed him beyond criticism. It was not until fairly late in
his tenure, for instance, that the Washington Post - a key player in his
initial success - turned on him. Congress was not much better, managing
merely to pull Barry away from some of his worst impulses while failing to
provide the kind of oversight the city obviously needed.
The legacy is a dysfunctional police department. It may be said that Marion
Barry is one of the worst men ever to serve as a mayor in the United
States. But it must also be acknowledged that when it came to at least one
item on his political agenda - the destruction of the D.C. police - he
succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
================================================================
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html
<A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html";>Archives of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/";>ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
