Police Harassment: Recently, the Chula Vista, California Police Department ran a forum with the local community with the topic being, Community Policing. One of the civilian 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, Sgt. Bennett, obviously a cop with a sense of humor replied: First of all, let me tell you this...its 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 follow: 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 well come out and give somebody some special harassment. Another popular one: Theres 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 drivers licenses and the like. Its lots of fun when you pick them out of traffic for nothing more obvious than running a red light. 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 to determine why they didnt want to talk to us. STATUTES: When we dont 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, theres this book we have that says thats not allowed. That meant I got permission to harass this guy. Its a really cool system that weve 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. Thats another one of those codes. It means, You cant harass me. Its one of our favorites. Hopefully sir, this has clarified to you a little bit better how we harass the good citizens of Chula Vista.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Dec 2014 16:19:38 +0000
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