-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. 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