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| NEWS > 04 October 2011 |
Other related articles:
An Unusual Case of Deadly Road
Sean Sawyer, 34, a New York City police officer who worked undercover, turned himself in on Monday, about 19 hours after he was involved in a deadly road-rage encounter in East Harlem on Sunday in which a man, Jayson Tirado, 25, was killed. As Al Baker explains in a front-page article, the two motorists began their dispute on the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and continued it after exiting in East Harlem, chasing each other for several blocks.
One of the passengers in the victim’s car told investigators that Mr. Tirado raised his hand, pointed a finger at the officer and said something abou... Read more
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New York Times
04 October 2011
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Puerto Rico Prodded to Get Tough on Police
The discrepancies in the Puerto Rico police logs were hard to miss. Burglaries,
including stolen plasma televisions and jewelry, were coded as mere breaking and
entering. Large-scale thefts of telephone company cables were labeled property
damage.
After months spent investigating, it was clear to Norman O. Torrens, an internal
affairs agent for the Puerto Rico Police Department, that scores of felony crimes in
Vega Alta, in the north, were being intentionally recorded as misdemeanors. The
result was that these crimes were not counted in statistics released by the Police
Department to support its claim that while the murder rate was higher than ever,
other felonies were declining.
“They are lying to the people of Puerto Rico by telling them that crime statistics are
going down,” said Officer Torrens, 37, who was abruptly demoted this summer
after presenting his findings, first to his supervisor and then to officials in Puerto
Rico’s Justice Department. “The bosses are the ones who push this to happen.
The culture here is if you don’t produce, you get nowhere.”
The manipulation of statistics, long suspected by Puerto Ricans, is just one of the
systemic failures that the Police Department must reverse after a blistering report
last month from the United States Department of Justice outlined widespread
dysfunction and civil rights violations.
For decades, the Police Department has operated without much oversight and
officers have maneuvered with little supervision, training or accountability. The
failings, detailed not only in the Justice Department report but also by the
governor’s own monitor, are glaring:
Until recently, not one police precinct had instructions for handling domestic
violence; civilian complaints piled up by the thousands, unaddressed; hate crimes
went unrecognized; continuing training for police officers was unheard of;
officers went unpaid for long stretches; and the Police Department was not
connected to the national crime database, which meant that criminals from the 50
states could easily slip through the cracks here.
Gov. Luis G. Fortuño, a Republican, said in an interview that he was well aware of
the department’s turbulent history and that the problems were worse than
anticipated when he took office in 2009.
“Most of the problems occurred before my time,” Mr. Fortuño said. “I accept
responsibility. My mandate is to change that. But this will take time. It was years in
the making, and it will take years to fix.”
Rooted in the dictate of “la mano dura” — the Puerto Rican version of “get tough on
crime” — the department operated for decades under a system that rewarded
arrests much more than community policing, criminologists say. The result, they
say, is that most Puerto Ricans do not trust or respect the police, including claims
that most violent crime is down.
“This was all predicted 15 years ago, this problem,” said Dora Nevares-Muñiz, a
criminologist and law professor at the Inter American University of Puerto Rico
who sat on a commission that evaluated the Police Department in 2008. “The vision
of the police is not a vision of prevention. The vision is a vision of control, of
intervention after the crime is committed. And even at that they are not efficient.
And then every time the government changes here, they want to reinvent the
wheel.”
Ms. Nevares-Muñiz said the public’s views about the police force had further
deteriorated under Mr. Fortuño, whose New Progressive Party won
supermajorities in the 2008 election. There is a sense, Ms. Nevares-Muñiz said,
that the governor further politicized the Police Department — already an
established tradition — and installed people who were overly eager to please.
This was one reason that ill-trained police officers used too much force on
demonstrators last year in front of the Capitol, she said. The demonstrators were
protesting government layoffs and college fee increases. The other reason is that
Puerto Rico lacked an explicit policy on when and how to use force. The governor
was widely criticized for his handling of the protest.
Favoritism in the department, Ms. Nevares-Muñiz said, had reached the point that
many supervisors no longer relied on exams to promote officers.
This is why, in part, Officer Torrens chose to speak publicly. Rather than being
promoted for his diligence — he had been assigned the task of investigating the
department’s statistics in the Bayamón District — he was returned to patrol duty in
the precinct he had investigated, a tricky turn of events for an internal affairs
officer. He is suing the Police Department for what he said was his wrongful
transfer.
“An officer knows he can get a special job if the boss is able to say that crime is
going down,” said Officer Torrens, who has a record of positive evaluations. “So
with traffic cops, you give tickets. With drug busts, you make arrests, whether the
person has drugs or not. If you don’t arrest, you’re out.”
The governor said he was already working to change the culture of the Police
Department along with its operational nuts and bolts long before the Justice
Department report. Last month, he announced that the police and prosecutors
would now work with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on armed robberies, carjackings and
other crimes in five regions. Those cases will be handled in federal court, and the
regions have been assigned six special prosecutors to expedite the cases.
Mr. Fortuño said he recognized that the department needed outside assistance last
year, so he contracted Robert Warshaw, a career police chief who specializes in
overhauling police departments. The same year, Puerto Rico finally looped into the
national crime database.
Mr. Fortuño said he and his aides also had sought out experts in New York City.
One day after the June 30, 2010, demonstration in front of the Capitol, during
which the police struck protesters with truncheons and used pepper spray, the
governor called to ask Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner
Raymond W. Kelly for help, he said. The city complied.
The governor began in internal investigation of his own last September, when he
appointed an independent monitor to investigate the scope of the failures, a
precursor to the Justice Department report. The conclusion: the department was in
disarray.
Four months ago, Mr. Fortuño replaced the police chief and began phasing in some
of the changes, including better training — 2,000 officers so far have received it
— and a detailed “use of force” policy. The tactical squad, which was often at the
center of abuse accusations, has been cut by half. And promotions are reverting
back to an exams-based system.
Other changes will follow in the next year, including the retraining of all
supervisors and police officers and new software to track statistics and
complaints.
But a few things are not likely to change soon. While police officers finally
received the pay they were due, their salaries — the lowest in the United States
— are not likely to rise with the economy still struggling. The median salary for a
police officer in Puerto Rico is $31,000; in Orlando, Fla., for example, starting
salaries are nearly $42,000. Still, police jobs are coveted on an island where
college graduation rates are low and unemployment is high.
The governor’s critics say they wonder whether the flurry of changes will amount
to anything lasting. After all, they say, the findings did not come as a surprise.
“There had to be pressure from outside for this to change,” said Osvaldo Toledo
Martinez, the president of the Puerto Rican Bar Association and a vocal critic of
Mr. Fortuño. “So it will change because he is now obligated to comply. We have to
believe that people will trust in the police again. But they have to see positive
action right away. If that happens, they will have confidence.”
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