Tag Archives: ACLU

Nov 20 2013
13 Comments
General

Excessive use of force cases: who watches the watchmen?

We’re all acutely aware how our reaction to a situation as law enforcement officers may sometimes have significant negative costs associated with them, sometimes in the form of criminal or civil punishment. How many times have we all seen a scenario where an officer used an excessive amount of force and was later sued civilly or sentenced to prison? Unfortunately, pretty frequently. But for every time an officer is reprimanded/fired for using force excessively, how many times did he/she use force excessively prior to this? Is it a sudden break in a person’s psyche that caused them to slip, or was their decent into the darkness of malfeasance a slow, yet loud path? More importantly, how are we as law enforcement professionals reacting to and dealing with the situation at hand?

At the ASU Police Department, no one  at the command level seems to be asking the aforementioned questions (quite frankly, the only questions being asked on the 3rd floor are, “How do we make this blog go away!?”). We’re pretty impressed there seems to be accountability within the officer ranks, but what happens when your command fails you?

One Cpl. is a prime example of an excessive use of force handled poorly at the upper level. Recently, a Cpl. deployed his taser several times on a subject who was restrained and was not an active aggressor. The situation was documented properly, all the ducks were in a row…and then nothing happened (it’s important to note that we are criticizing ASUPD’s response to the situation, not the action itself). At the MINIMUM, why would a department not place the person in question on administrative leave merely to assess the merit of the situation, and to allow that person to mentally recover? No PD that wishes to minimize its legal liability would even dream of letting this person back on the road anytime soon. However, in the parallel universe that is ASUPD, no IA was conducted, and no higher entity reviewed the use of force in this situation.

There are several more use of force incidents that have occurred within the past six months–a rookie officer tasing a subject running away from him, for starters–we know have NOT been investigated by the upper tiers of the department, and definitely not by anyone OUTSIDE the department. There is NO civilian/sworn use of force review panel, NO IAs, and NO information being sent to AZ POST.

Congratulations in hitting a new low, ASUPD; there is no longer even a thin blue line separating line level officers (good guys) from common criminals (bad guys), because command staff has dissolved that line with their inactions and mismanagement.

Welcome to the final frontier of policing, folks.

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Nov 08 2013
3 Comments
General

K9 Disney: another ASU money pit!

Came across this article today about ASU’s shining star: K9 Disney!! According to the article, K9 Disney is SUCH a valuable asset….working football games, special events…and training several hours a day also!

In reality, K9 Disney has been nothing but a huge money pit, taking money away from things the department actually NEEDS (like more officers, new equipment/vehicles, etc). The dog itself was provided by funding through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; however, all her incidental expenses have added up bigtime.

First, ASUPD paid for Det. Parker Dunwoody to go through 10 weeks of k9 handling school. Dunwoody gets a lot of OT and stipends for “training” and taking care of his dog (apparently, wandering around Sun Devil Stadium all day and making your own schedule constitutes “training”?). Also, since the first K9 vehicle Disney had wasn’t good enough, ASUPD recently purchased a brand new, pimped out K9 vehicle! Let’s not forget K9 Disney’s “official” trading cards too, paid for by ASUPD.

The absolute kicker to this situation is that K9 Disney spends most of her time WORKING AT EVENTS THAT AREN’T EVEN ASU RELATED!!! For example, according to this State Press article, K9 Disney Disney”assisted other agencies around the valley, including the Salt River Police and Tempe Police to search for missing firearms and possible bombs” and  “made appearances at the 2011 Super Bowl game in Dallas and the U.S. Open in California. Disney also assisted in the aftermath of the Gabrielle Giffords’ shooting in Tucson. ” Or what about competing in the Desert Dog Regional Police K9 Trials in 2012?

She isn’t available to ASU officer call-outs for assistance, but occasionally works special events on campus…that is when her handler stops reading all the google alerts put out by this blog! (“internet police” isn’t an ACTUAL job!).

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Oct 29 2013
11 Comments
General, training issues

ASUPD’s shoddy rape investigation costs ASU several million dollars.

This just further highlight’s ASUPD’s mistreatment of women. An old article, but worth mentioning:

A former Arizona State student claims that “ASU refused to authorize either a drug screen [or] rape kit for DNA analysis” and “obstructed and shut down the investigation” after she was drugged and sodomized at a Sigma Chi fraternity party. She claims campus police did not interview a single Sigma Chi member, blamed her for “having been forcibly sodomized,” and did it all “to make ASU appear safer than it was.”
   The woman claims that ASU police officers conducted a shoddy, halfhearted investigation to minimize the university’s liability. The woman sued the Arizona Board of Regents in Maricopa County Court, claiming the university violated Title IX by failing to fully investigate her claims.
She claims that ASU knew of “the risk of severe sexual harassment, including sexual assault, of female students at the Sigma Chi house on its campus,” but that ASU sought to use “pressure or policy to minimize sexual assault reports to make ASU appear safer than it was.”
The plaintiff, a former member of Pi Beta Phi sorority, says she went to a toga party thrown by members of Sigma Chi, where she was given alcohol. She was 19 at the time. At the party, she says, Matt Potter, a Sigma Chi member, gave her a drink “that had been spiked with a drug designed to incapacitate her and impair her memory.” She says her memory of the night was impaired by the drink, and that she woke up the next day at the Sigma Chi house with severe rectal pain, without her purse and some of her clothing.
She says two friends and the president of the ASU Panhellenic Council took her to Tempe St. Luke’s Hospital, where a sexual assault examination determined that she had been “sodomized with significant ‘anal injury’ with rectal and vaginal pain, bloody stool, and exposure to bodily fluids.”
She says that despite her injuries and a request from the emergency room physician, ASU police officers refused to authorize a rape kit, drug screen, or a SANE (Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner) examination. She says the officers blamed her for “having been forcibly sodomized.”
She claims that “the reason [ASU] Officer Janda would not conduct a proper investigation of [her] sodomy and sexual assault because she had consumed alcoholic beverages before the assault, was a pretext to minimize ASU’s liability.”
After she was released from the hospital, she says, her sister drove her to Tucson, where she was examined by a physician at Northwest Medical Center Hospital and was found to be a “crime victim” of “sexual assault.” By that time, she says, it was too late to perform a drug screen or rape kit.

ASU’s Office of Student Life, Judicial Affairs interviewed her once, and interviewed only one of her sorority sisters for its investigation, she says. “No Sigma Chi members were ever questioned,” and ASU closed the investigation less than 2 months after the rape, according to the 21-page complaint.”ASU has in recent years systematically and severely underreported sexual assault reports,” the complaint states. “For 2008, ASU reported and posted only four forcible sexual assault reports in its 2009 Annual Security Reports, despite, on information and belief, having received at least several dozen reports. On information and belief, the motivations of ASU police for refusing to investigate [the plaintiff’s] rape and sodomy included ASU’s pressure or policy to minimize sexual assault reports to make ASU appear safer than it was.”
ASU is required by the Clery Act “to report to the U.S. Department of Education, and to post publicly, all reports of sexual assaults made to campus police or its Judicial Affairs or other personnel,” according to the complaint. But ASU never reported her rape and sodomy in its Annual Security Report, she says. And she says the school took no action against Gallagher or Potter or Sigma

This lawsuit alone cause ASU several million dollars due to horrible policies and horrible policing. Yet this officer is still working at ASU and is allowed to train new officers?!

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Oct 29 2013
5 Comments
CLERY, General

Loopholes in Clery Act Reporting: How ASU can skew its crime statistics!

Lengthy but good read from publicintergrity.org, in regard to campus police department’s abilities to skew sexual assault data through Clery Act loopholes.

The Clery Act requires some 7,500 colleges and universities — nearly 4,000 of which are four-year public and private institutions — to disclose statistics about crime on or near their campuses in annual security reports.

Many provisions have evolved since the law passed 19 years ago, but what hasn’t changed is Clery’s requirement that schools poll a wide range of “campus security authorities” when gathering data. That designation includes a broad array of campus programs, departments, and centers, such as student health centers, women’s centers, and even counseling centers. The designation also applies to officials who supervise students — deans, coaches, housing directors, judicial affairs officers, to name a few.

In theory, those stipulations should make for comprehensive crime reporting.

But the data gathering isn’t always meticulous. In fact, a 2002 study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice found that “only 36.5 percent of schools reported crime statistics in a manner that was fully consistent with the Clery Act.” A Center examination of 10 years worth of complaints filed against institutions under Clery shows that the most common problem is that schools are not properly collecting data. Some submit only reports from law-enforcement officials. In August 2004, Yale University became the subject of a complaint after it was discovered to be doing just that. Five years later, the U.S. Department of Education has yet to finish its review; a department spokesperson declined to comment on the pending inquiry.

Other schools submit inaccurate sexual assault statistics — in some cases inadvertently; in others cases, intentionally. Nearly half of the 25 Clery complaint investigations conducted by the Education Department over the past decade determined that schools were omitting sexual offenses collected by some sources or failing to report them at all. In October 2007, the department fined LaSalle University, in Philadelphia, $110,000 for not reporting 28 crimes, including a small number of sexual assaults.

There’s also been misclassification of sexual assaults. Schools can wrongly categorize reports of acquaintance rape or fondling as “non-forcible” sexual offenses — a definition that should only apply to incest and statutory rape. Five of the 25 Clery audits found schools were miscoding forcible rapes as non-forcible instead. In June 2008, Eastern Michigan University agreed to pay the department $350,000 — the largest Clery fine ever — for a host of violations, including miscoding rapes.

Another limitation of the Clery Act: it counts only those crimes occurring on or near campuses, and in school-affiliated buildings like fraternity houses. The initial thinking behind this narrow geographic focus was that off-campus crimes would inevitably be documented by local police, experts say. But that means that Clery statistics don’t include such settings as off-campus apartments, where most campus-related rapes are believed to take place. Last year, Jacqui Pequignot, who heads the victim advocate program at Florida State, recorded just nine sexual offenses on or near campus, as compared to 48 off campus. Pequignot, who estimates that 36,000 of FSU’s 42,000 students live in apartments more than a block from the university, notes that critics often suspect misreporting whenever they don’t see huge numbers of campus sexual assaults. “But sometimes,” she says, “it’s really just about the fact that the numbers are greater off campus.”

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Oct 29 2013
5 Comments
Department morale, General, Staffing issues

“The Bully at Work”; how many of these apply to all you current/former ASUPD employees?

“The Bully at Work” is a pretty informative book by Dr’s Gary and Ruth Namie. In it, they discuss what workplace bullying is, why it occurs, why bullies pick their targets, and how to deal with bullies at work.

To all the current and former ASU Police employees out there, read some of these excerpts and see if they apply to you; for those admin outside of the department, think about how issues like these are affecting employee productivity and retention:

Bullying at Work

  • Bullying at work is repeated, health-harming mistreatment of a person by one or more workers that takes the form of verbal abuse; conduct or behaviors that are threatening, intimidating, or humiliating; sabotage that prevents the work from getting done; or some combination of the three.  Perpetrators are bullies; those on the receiving end are Targets.
  • It is psychological violence – sublethal and nonphysical – a mix of verbal and strategic assaults to prevent the Target from performing work well.
  • The bully puts her or his personal agenda of controlling another human being above the needs of the employing organization.
  • In 62 percent of cases, when employers are made aware of bullying, they escalate the problem for the Target or simply do nothing. 
  • Workplace bullying is a serious threat to:  (18-19)
    • Freedom from fear and trauma
    • Employee health and safety
    • Civil rights in the workplace
    • Dignity at work
    • Personal self-respect
    • Family cohesion and stability
    • Work team morale and productivity
    • Employment practices liability
    • Retention of skilled employees
    • Employer reputation

Understanding Bullies

    • Bullies can be categorized, but individuals who choose to bully can adopt any tactic at any time to accomplish their goal.   [One of these is] The Constant Critic.
      • Operates behind closed doors so that later she or he can deny what was said or done to you.  Extremely negative.  Nitpicker.  Perfectionist.  Whiner.  Complainer.  Faultfinder.  Liar.  Loved by senior management because of his ability to “get those people to produce.”
      • Constant haranguing about the Target’s “incompetence”
      • Demands eye contact when he speaks but deliberately avoids eye contact when the Target speaks
      • Accuses Target of wrongdoing, blames Target for fabricated errors
      • Makes unreasonable demands for work with impossible deadlines, applies disproportionate pressure, expects perfection 
      • Excessively or harshly criticizes Target’s work or abilities 
      • Most bullies work to make themselves well-connected to senior management, executives, or owners.  While Targets focus on prideful work, bullies are busy kissing up to the big bosses. 
      • They have allies – we call them executive sponsors – willing to block punishment for malicious behavior if they are ever exposed.  The big bosses think the bullies can do no wrong.  Targets have a hard time being believed for this reason. 

      Does this sound familiar?!

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Oct 27 2013
2 Comments
General

“Changing ASU for future female officers”

A follow up to the previous post:

Former officer sues

 

Russell says police denied her allegations

 

 by Tim Taylor
published on Thursday, April 29, 2004

The ASU Department of Public Safety has denied accusations of discrimination and sexual retaliation of a former female officer, according to the officer, Jenna Russell, who worked for ASU police at the west and main campuses from October 2002 through September 2003.

ASU police was unable to make any comments on the situation, said Cmdr. John Sutton.

Russell filed a sexual retaliation and discrimination suit against ASU police with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Jan. 26.
In it, Russell reported snide comments about her sexuality, disregard for her authority by a fellow officer and bogus negative reports of her field training. She also said that ASU West denied her a shift transfer when she was having a situation at home.

The EEOC sent Russell a “right to sue” letter on April 19 after deciding not to pursue the case, Russell said. That gives Russell the right to pursue legal action on her own. Russell recently hired Phoenix attorney Jerome Froimson and is continuing with the civil litigation through the courts.

She said that obtaining a job with another police department after taking legal action would be very difficult. “I’m pretty much blackballed after I do this,” she said. “I’m basically kissing my career goodbye.”

Russell resigned last August after she said she received three written reprimands in one day. She referred to those reprimands as “crap.” Her resignation became effective in September 2003.

Russell said ASU DPS’ denial of the accusations is an outright lie.

When the west, east and main campus departments converged in February 2003, she volunteered for what she thought was a two-week orientation. She discovered that she was to complete a 10-week field-training program identical to the one she had done for ASU West.

She completed it in seven weeks. Her scores in both field-training programs were above average, she said.

“I am determined that the truth will prevail, and I am not giving in,” said Russell. “I will make them change the way they treat their female officers in the future.”

https://asuwebdevilarchive.asu.edu/issues/2004/04/29/news/674653?&print=yes

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Oct 27 2013
2 Comments
General

ASU’s issues with female officers and field training date back to 2004!

Former officer alleges harassment

 

Former female ASU police officer has filed discrimination lawsuit

 

 by Amanda Keim
published on Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Jenna Russell dreamt of becoming a police officer since she was 6. She proved to her father that a woman could attain that goal when she graduated near the top of her police class.

But now that she has come forward with the story of harassment she said she received as a female police officer with ASU police, she knows no police department is likely to hire her again, she said.

Russell resigned from the department in October 2003 after what she alleges was more than a year of harassment and mistreatment. She filed a sexual retaliation and discrimination suit against ASU police with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Jan. 26.

ASU Cmdr. John Sutton said the department had been served with a notification to a claim by the commission.

Russell originally was hired as an officer for ASU West in August 2002 after being a reserve officer in the Goodyear Police Department.

“I chose ASU because I wanted that family atmosphere [in the department],” Russell said.

Russell first faced problems when completing field training at ASU West in October 2002. She said that her field-training officer refused to turn off the Howard Stern radio show in the patrol vehicle after Russell repeatedly told him it made her uncomfortable “as a woman.”

After she complained to her sergeant, the department switched Russell’s field-training officer assignment, she said.

Russell said she completed field training with above-ave- rage reviews.

But she said that after her complaints were made, several officers made “snide comments about sexuality.”

One officer allegedly made several comments about Russell’s sex and disregarded her authority when she was the officer in charge. When she tried to confront him about one particular incident, he began yelling and then left his shift, she said.

“If that had been me, I would have been fired the next day,” Russell said.

Superiors ignored Russell’s complaints about the officer’s behavior, she added.

In December, the three ASU campus police departments began to merge into one department. In February, Russell became the first officer assigned to complete an orientation program at the main campus, she said.

Russell said she was told the orientation program would last two weeks, but when she got to ASU Main, she found she would have to complete the same 10-week field-training program she had successfully finished at ASU West a few months earlier.

This time, she passed the program with above-average reviews in seven weeks.

But Russell’s overall field-training evaluation told a different story.

The evaluation was compiled by a sergeant who based the report on an interview with Russell’s field-training officer and written evaluations, Russell said. It said she “had training issues, was insubordinate, did not get along with others and had an attitude problem,” Russell added.

“I couldn’t believe this entire thing was about me,” she said.

When Russell asked her primary field-training officer about the report, he said the evaluation did not reflect what he had told the sergeant.

Despite these problems with the administration, Russell requested a permanent transfer to ASU Main in June 2003.

“The officers I worked with were great,” Russell said. “I love them.

“You rarely have to deal with [the administration] unless there was an issue,” she said.

Russell withdrew her request shortly after the departments merged on July 1. She needed to stay on the graveyard shift at ASU West to accommodate a situation at home, she said.

But instead, ASU West transferred Russell to a daytime shift in August. Russell tried to retain her night shift, but the request was denied.

Even after explaining her situation to superiors and learning another officer with five years of seniority wanted the day shift, Russell’s request was still denied, she said.

ASU police and ASU General Counsel could not comment on specifics of the case due to commission guidelines.

Russell has not hired a lawyer and does not want financial compensation from ASU at this point, she said.

But giving up her career and bringing to light her story will hopefully start to force the department to evaluate its treatment of women, she said.

“I know I’m not going to change the world, but damn it, I’m going to make a dent,” Russell said.

https://asuwebdevilarchive.asu.edu/issues/2004/02/24/news/616044?&print=yes

Sound familiar?

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