Change for the Better

 Police officers are fixers.  To fix something, you must identify the individual elements, understand their integration, and devise a solution.  Typically, most of an officer's experience is within patrol, so you must have a solution before going home.  As a result, officers tend to be hypercritical and detail-orientated.  It's a good thing for the job, but it is bad for job satisfaction and a bad thing for your personal life.  I find myself falling into this mindset often.  Specifically addressing job satisfaction, roll call, breaks, and meals tend to focus on what is wrong or not going right.  So, being intentional about focusing on the positive aspects of this profession is needed.

In this vein, there is positive change for law enforcement in Cook County, Illinois.  For the majority of my law enforcement career, the attitude of the Cook County State's Attorney's (ASA) office and our sitting judges was that we signed up to be attacked by offenders on the street.  This was reflected by the ASA's absolute refusal to approve aggravated battery to a police officer (Felony level crime), and if it made it past them unless it was horrific, it either was dealt down or dropped with the judge's approval.  Basically, it started with a broken bone, and really, you needed to be shot to have this charge go through approval, not be changed to a lesser charge and have the judge convict.  This was so commonplace that routinely, when we would get a black eye, bloody nose, broken finger, or twisted knee due to the criminal actions of the offender, we wouldn't even call felony review; we would just charge simple battery (A misdemeanor) and go to court, where it would not be upgraded to a felony.

However, it appears this attitude has changed or is changing.  Recently, two of our permanent homeless men were drinking at the rear of an abandoned store.  Both suffer from some significant and untreated mental illnesses, so one got upset at the other and punched him in the eye (For snoring too loud).  My guess, by the way it looked, is he had a broken orbital bone, but while he insisted on being taken to the hospital, he refused any scans but got stitches.  The Asa's will not charge the aggravative battery without a medical diagnosis of significant damage.  When it came time to arrest his buddy for simple battery, he decided while screaming profanity and something...he was hard to understand...at us that he did not want to go without a fight.  The officers had their hands full but were able to get him into custody with very little injury to anyone despite our offender really going for it.  We got him into an ambulance and to the hospital, where it took two full doses of Ketamine to get him quieted down.

A little later, one of the officers came into the report room and pulled up his pants legs.  One side was a small laceration, and the other had a small abrasion.  We reviewed the video footage of the incident, and the offender was purposefully kicking our officer.  I said well, we might as well try to aggravated battery to police officer, but I highly doubt we will get it.

After working the case for two and a half days, the primary reporting officer called felony review...and got it!

Change for the better and something good to focus on.

Story 2 for the Safe-T Act

 

Now to be fair, they supposedly fixed this problem with a rider bill, but I think it illuminates a couple of key concepts of the people that proposed and who support this bill.  It also demonstrates that no law enforcement practitioners were consulted in the creation of the monstrosity.  What drives me totally nuts is that I am part of a profession that is totally data-tracked and data-driven.  You can go to my department tomorrow and FOIA every arrest that I have initiated in my 25-year career and also get each arrestee's demographics, which is something you can do at every department for every officer that has ever served since 1970.  So when there is a belief that cops are just running around using the obstruction of a peace officer charge to either discriminate, rehabilitate, or just for "s and g's," where is the proof?  Mine the data, show the misuse and make corrections, but instead, on the backs of some antidotal stories and anti-police agenda in which the truth does not matter, this section of the Safe-T act came to be.

What they proposed was to eliminate our ability to charge obstruction to a police officer as a single stand-alone charge.  Still, rather they attempted to have an arrestable criminal act that was committed first, and then we could charge obstruction if we had the elements that fit the statute.  What they kept in was we cannot charge resisting arrest if we did first have an arrestable charge that preceded the resisting.  This proof was no prosecutors or police were part of the bill.  You already cannot charge resisting arrest without a criminal act first being committed.  They can't be arrested without first committing a criminal act.  If anyone in my area tried that, it wouldn't have made it past the first court date, and the assistant state's attorney would have called the chief about it.  So they solved a non-problem.  What they were trying to address was the situation in which, let's say, a retail theft charge, an officer attempts to take the offender into custody and resists the arrests.  Later in court, the offender beats the retail theft but is convicted of resisting arrest.  This happens frequently, and I had more than a couple of public defenders argue that he can't resist arrest for a crime he didn't commit.  They always lost that argument because he/she did spin around and tried to punch me in the face in order to get away.  Lossing the original charge didn't change the fact that the offender was attempting to injure or kill the officer to get away.

So here is the story, and this happens often.  Adult mother lives with her adult son and his wife.  The adult son is beating his wife in their back bedroom.  She gets away from him long enough to call 911.  We arrive and find mom standing in the doorway, braced, trying to keep us out. Meanwhile, we can hear the blows raining down on the wife.  Now my ability to make physical contact with another is because I can prove that either I have a detainable offense or articulable claim of health and safety for another.  So in these cases, we warn the mother to move or be arrested.  She does not move, so the first officer takes her into custody for obstruction of a peace officer, and the rest run in to save the wife and arrest her husband.  Now, if you take my ability to arrest solely for obstruction away, what criminal act did she also commit?  There is not one, and the mother is not attempting to harm herself, so I cannot use that reason to make contact with her.  If this had been carried through in the bill, I would still grabbed the mother and moved her out of the way, run in and saved the wife, and charged the husband.  Then later, the state police would have come to the station and arrest me for the battery to the mother since I did not have a legal justification to make physical contact with her...this is how screwed up the bill really is.  

It would have prevented us from removing anyone from our crime scenes, standing at our car door to keep us from exiting the squad and going to the incident, would have allowed the public to keep us inside or outside of any building, and the other thousand of problems it would have created.  When this section was presented for the first time in roll call, the entire room understood the ramifications and the absolute gift it would have been to street gang members and criminals.  But none of this occurred to the writers and supporters, but the criminals certainly knew (a bunch arrested told us they could not wait until January 1, 2023, when we couldn't do anything to them anymore).

One of my sayings has always been, "There are two ways to fight crime, fighting crime or not finding crime" not finding crime is always celebrated as a crime reduction and a budget-friendly act.  Had this gone through, they would have celebrated the reduction of obstruction charges as lowering the crime rate, proving we were abusing the charge, and overlooking all the new unnecessary victims.