CABL Forum - Police Harrassment

Recently, the Chula Vista , California Police Department ran an e-mail forum (a
question and answer exchange) with the topic being, "Community Policing."

One of the civilian e-mail participants posed the following question, "I would
like to know how it is possible for police officers to continually harass people
and get away with it?"

From the "other side" (the law enforcement side) Sgt. Bennett, obviously a cop
with a sense of humor replied:

"First of all, let me tell you this...it's not easy. In Chula Vista , we average
one cop for every 600 people. Only about 60% of those cops are on general duty
(or what you might refer to as "patrol") where we do most of our harassing. The
rest are in non-harassing departments that do not allow them contact with the
day to day innocents. At any given moment, only one-fifth of the 60% patrollers
are on duty and available for harassing people while the rest are off duty. So
roughly, one cop is responsible for harassing about 5,000 residents. When you
toss in the commercial business, and tourist locations that attract people from
other areas, sometimes you have a situation where a single cop is responsible
for harassing 10,000 or more people a day.

Now, your average ten-hour shift runs 36,000 seconds long. This gives a cop one
second to harass a person, and then only three-fourths of a second to eat a
donut AND then find a new person to harass. This is not an easy task. To be
honest, most cops are not up to this challenge day in and day out. It is just
too tiring. What we do is utilize some tools to help us narrow down those people
which we can realistically harass.

The tools available to us are as follows:

PHONE: People will call us up and point out things that cause us to focus on a
person for special harassment. "My neighbor is beating his wife" is a code
phrase used often. This means we'll come out and give somebody some special
harassment.

Another popular one: "There's a guy breaking into a house." The harassment team
is then put into action.

CARS: We have special cops assigned to harass people who drive. They like to
harass the drivers of fast cars, cars with no insurance or no driver's licenses
and the like. It's lots of fun when you pick them out of traffic for nothing
more obvious than running a red light. Sometimes you get to really heap the
harassment on when you find they have drugs in the car, they are drunk, or have
an outstanding warrant on file.

RUNNERS: Some people take off running just at the sight of a police officer.
Nothing is quite as satisfying as running after them like a beagle on the scent
of a bunny. When you catch them you can harass them for hours.

STATUTES: When we don't have PHONES or CARS and have nothing better to do, there
are actually books that give us ideas for reasons to harass folks. They are
called "Statutes"; Criminal Codes, Motor Vehicle Codes, etc...They all spell out
all sorts of things for which you can really mess with people. After you read
the statute, you can just drive around for awhile until you find someone
violating one of these listed offenses and harass them. Just last week I saw a
guy trying to steal a car. Well, there's this book we have that says that's not
allowed. That meant I got permission to harass this guy. It's a really cool
system that we've set up, and it works pretty well. We seem to have a
never-ending supply of folks to harass. And we get away with it. Why? Because
for the good citizens who pay the tab, we try to keep the streets safe for them,
and they pay us to "harass" some people.

Next time you are in my town, give me the old "single finger wave." That's
another one of those codes. It means, "You can't harass me." It's one of our
favorites.

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."

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