Why not to recruit Stormtroopers to your police department: Cowtown edition

Fort Worth PD yesterday released another Stormtrooper Recruitment video a video of an officer shooting an unarmed man in the back seconds after he left his patrol car from an incident earlier this year. See coverage from the Startlegram and the Washington Post. This arrives in the wake of viral video showing another Fort Worth officer arresting a mother and child in a dispute about which a Dallas News columnist declared, "It's hard to imagine anyone mishandling a call any worse than this officer." Meanwhile, the local police union president made himself the poster child for the proposed new enhancement for assaulting a police officer after he attacked a CLEAT boardmember in South Padre and fled the scene in September.

Make us proud, Cowtown. Make us proud.

Rudeness or racism? And we should care, why?

The Fort Worth Police chief said he was "disturbed" by viral video showing his officer provoking a confrontation with a woman who called 911 then arresting her when she reacted. But, said the chief, “There’s a difference between rude and racism.” Grits agrees. But there are also similarities between rudeness and racism. For example, if dash-or-bodycam footage showed the same officer isn't routinely "rude" to white folks, that could be revealing. OTOH, if the guy is just rude to people generally and is not guilty of racism, why do you want him representing your department? In fact, why is he on the force in the first place and why didn't his bosses catch it before if that's just generally how he treats people? Which leads to the question, in their routine, day-to-day functions, do Fort Worth PD supervisors discourage these behaviors, or do they or teach them? After all, they're recruiting Stormtroopers, right? (See Grits' earlier commentary.)

The practice of police verbally provoking victims, drivers, etc., lies at the root of a lot of these confrontations and the fact of the matter is, officers are trained to do it. I'm sure that will be the police union's defense if and when the department tries to fire the guy. And there's more than a grain of truth to it. Police officers don't behave that way because they're all racist jerks. They do so because of the training they receive, the culture they work in, and the values and priorities of management, which are expressed through the actions of their employees more than through public statements. The Fort Worth chief is right that the problem may not be racism. But that's a much bigger concern than if this were just a one-off where a single racist slipped through the cracks and made it onto the force.

MORE: From James Ragland at the Dallas News.

Who at Fort Worth PD wore Stormtrooper look better?

Fort Worth PD was the subject of two viral videos this month: One where an officer arrested a distraught woman and her daughter after she'd called 911, and another produced by the department for recruiting purposes featuring a Darth-Vader-backed Stortrooper training to become a FWPD officer.

Who wore the Stormtrooper look better?

One notes that, if State Sen. Konni Burton's SB 271 banning arrests for nonjailable offenses had been in effect, these women couldn't have been arrested.

Hint at possible litigation over Fort Worth PD's acquisition of 'KingFish' fake-cell-tower device

On their March 5 agenda, the Fort Worth City Council considered an item in closed, executive session described only as "Legal issues related to acquisition of KingFish software from Harris Corporation." Harris Corporation is the company that makes surveillance devices with the trade name "Stingray" (see here and here) of which the KingFish system is one model in that line. These are fake cell towers that trick nearby phones into sending their signal through a police surveillance system instead of the nearest, privately operated network. The Obama Administration claims their use should not require a probable cause warrant. Privacy advocates and some courts have so far disagreed. This is yet another situation where technology has leaped far ahead of the legal framework that theoretically constrains it.

What might the Fort Worth City Council be discussing behind closed doors? The only clue comes from boilerplate language on the agenda covering several distinct items which declares that the council will "Seek the advice of its attorneys concerning the following pending or contemplated litigation or other matters that are exempt from public disclosure under Article X, Section 9 of the Texas State Bar Rules, as authorized by Section 551.071 of the Texas Government Code." Does that mean there is litigation pending or contemplated related to the acquisition of the Fort Worth PD's KingFish system, or a settlement offer under Government Code 551.071? If so I'd be interested to know more detail about who is suing who over what! Lately some other jurisdictions have gotten into hot water for failing to disclose to judges that they were using Stingray/KingFish-type technology when they'd only received orders approving traditional pen register/trap and trace devices. Has Fort Worth found itself in a similar situation? ¿Quien sabe?

A titillating tidbit: Perhaps there's a story there waiting to be ferreted out.

Fort Worth is the only non-federal agency we know of in Texas that owns one of these devices, but that's mainly because no one has comprehensively searched for more. Anecdotally, most non-federal agencies that own them appear to have purchased them with grants from the Departments of Justice or Homeland Security but tracking them all down would be a sizable open-records project. I could think of three potential ways to approach it: First, combing through federal grant reports to find agencies that specifically solicited money for the devices, Second, filing open records requests with various agencies for invoices paid to the Harris Corporation, which has more or less cornered the US law enforcement market selling this technology. Finally, at the Yale Law School conference I attended, Dr. Chris Soghoian said he'd had the most luck tracking these devices through their licensure at the Federal Communications Commission. (Federal FOIA's take longer than Texas public information requests, but that may be the most comprehensive route.) Then, once you'd identified owners of the technology, you'd want to check county courthouses in those jurisdictions (and the federal PACER system) for civil litigation and perhaps file a second round of open records requests related to policies, correspondence, etc,. about the device. That'd be a good project for a group with a smart intern or two to assign to it for a semester.

H/T: Chris Soghoian.

SHSU crime lab abruptly shuttered, Fort Worth PD looks to re-open DNA section a decade after failures

The loss of a new fee for service crime lab run by Sam Houston State in Montgromery County will put more pressure on the Department of Public Safety crime labs ad possibly add to their already too-long wait times. Reported the Conroe Courier:

The loss of the Sam Houston State University Regional Crime Lab, which opened in November 2010 in The Woodlands, will mean significant delays for results in testing evidence such as blood-alcohol and toxicology tests, said Assistant District Attorney Warren Diepraam, chief of the Vehicular Crimes Division for the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office.

The crime lab will lose its current home in September because the landlord has found another tenant, said Dr. Vincent Webb, dean of the College of Criminal Justice at SHSU in Huntsville and director of the university’s Criminal Justice Center. ...

With the loss of the SHSU crime lab – which serves more than 70 agencies – Montgomery County now will have to send tests to a Texas Department of Public Safety Regional Crime Lab in Austin, which serves many more clients, Diepraam said.“With the Regional Crime Lab, we got results in a week or two,” he said. “Unfortunately, the DPS lab has a backlog of cases. For drug toxicology tests, it could take six to nine months to get results. That’s a concern to the district attorney that we’ll have people staying in jail while we’re waiting on results.”

From November 2010 to October 2011, the Regional Crime Lab ran 1,034 drug toxicology tests, with 900 of those from Montgomery County, Diepraam previously said. During that same time period, the lab analyzed 4,335 controlled substance evidence items, with 86 percent of them coming from Montgomery County, according to a casework overview by the lab.

Conversely, the Fort Worth PD crime lab hopes to expand capacity in its lab for DNA work, reported the Star-Telegram, after shutting down a decade ago "amid backlogs and accusations of shoddy work and contamination."

The lab's two forensic scientists will begin working cases Monday, crime lab Director Tom Stimpson said Thursday. With the training of three other scientists at least six months away, Stimpson said, he hopes that the Police Department can stop outsourcing most DNA testing within a year.

"The benefit to the department for us really is going to be the turnaround time and the selection of what we can test," Stimpson said. "Now we're in full control of our evidence. We can test what we want and when we want it."

And the savings, he said, will be significant.

Grants cover some testing by the University of North Texas, but the Police Department must pay roughly $250,000 a year to Orchid Cellmark, a Dallas-based company, for other analyses, he said.

Putting a rush on a DNA order costs even more. "With Orchid, because they're a business, we were paying them a premium of about $500 a sample over and above what the regular cost was to have something done within a week or 15 days," Stimpson said.

An in-house DNA unit will also save money for the entire Police Department, because a faster turnaround can mean quicker arrests, he said.

Since Fort Worth was contracting with a private provider for DNA services, their new lab won't take any pressure off DPS' caseload, at least directly, but it will add to the state's overall lab capacity once it opens.

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/07/05/4081673/fort-worth-polices-crime-lab-preparing.html#storylink=cpy