mesha,
Thank you for sharing this correspondence. What's a shame in my view is that so many police officers and politicians who hand them their marching orders seem to feel they need to waste taxpayer resources going after people like this drug dealer who are simply trying to earn a living, instead of focusing on bringing to justice people who are killing, robbing, burglarizing, and otherwise actually initiating force against others.
There is no community consensus that activities like using or selling drugs, prostitution, or sleeping on the street or in the park, should be criminalized. It is not these activities themselves that are the problem -- it is well known that when you criminalize a consensual activity, you create a black market, and black markets attract violence and real crime. This is a major reason why activities like drug sales and prostitution get a bad reputation with some segments of the public.
Meanwhile however, making citations and arrests for which a community consensus does not exist is quite possibly the #1 factor causing the poor relations between the police and much of the community. It results in many people not liking or trusting the police, and not having any desire to cooperate with them in apprehending real criminals, which means of course that the crime problem is worse than it would be if we had a police force that all peaceful residents could feel represents them.
There are many other smaller actions that could be taken by the SFPD and/or government officials which could substantially increase goodwill in the community. A few include:
• Automatically giving people involved in an incident, or the relatives of a victim, copies of the police report, instead of making them contact the police later and pay a fee in order to obtain a copy of something that should be theirs by right.
• Not putting anyone in jail who has not been duly convicted of a crime unless an officer signs his or her name to a public statement that the person represented an immediate threat to public safety (such as being mentally unstable or drunk and disorderly). Otherwise we are allowing an abrogation of the fundamental legal principle of treating people as innocent until proven guilty. Innocent people should not be put in jail, and if they are, they should be compensated by the police department for the trauma and for the loss of their time.
• Requiring officers to carry business cards with their names, badge numbers, and precinct information, and to give such a card to anyone who asks for one.
• Requiring officers to immediately respond either "yes" or "no" to anyone who asks a police officer whether he or she is being detained, or is free to leave a scene. Officers have been known to refuse to answer such questions as a means of illegally detaining persons against their will who are not in fact under arrest.
• Implementing a "zero tolerance" policy for police officers, politicians, and law enforcement agents to be given special privileges not available to other members of the public, such as the recent revelations by the Orange County register that government employees have been dodging millions of dollars in traffic fines via the possession of special exempt license plates (see http://www.ocregister.com/articles/dmv-police-confidential-2011354-program-records ). Some cops were so arrogant as to openly admit to the newspaper to giving "professional courtesy" to other government employees in not citing them. Official tolerance of this kind of corruption erodes the public's trust in the police and in government.
• Printing the badge numbers of officers in large, football jersey style numbers on the backs of their uniforms, so that persons who believe they observe an officer or officers acting inappropriately can readily identify those officers from a distance without putting themselves in danger or possibly interfering with the officers' duties by getting too close. Awareness and discipline of rogue officers, and making sure that those on the force consistently adhere to the highest standards of professional behavior is in the clear interests of the municipality, the public, and all good and honest officers, as well as being a matter of public safety.
• Showing a willingness to conduct policing in an open and transparent fashion including all police incidents in police blotter data which is given to media outlets, instead of cherry-picking those incidents which make the police and the department look good, and to also post this information in a regular and timely fashion at each precinct where it can be viewed by members of the public, including the names of all officers involved in each incident.
Sincerely,
((( starchild )))
Outreach Director, Libertarian Party of San Francisco