It’s generally standard practice (and recommended by the International Association of Chiefs of Police) for police departments to provide anonymous forms allowing citizens to make complaints against individual officers. It’s a good idea because someone who’s just had a bad experience with a cop is generally going to be intimidated if forced to deal with another cop when making the complaint.

It’s a pretty common problem. After the New York City botched no-knock raid that killed 57-year-old Alberta Spruill in 2003, dozens of people came forward to relay their own stories of being woken up in the middle of the night to flashbangs and assault weapons, only to have police discover they had raided the wrong addresses. Few knew just how prevelant the botched raids were because police at the scene had threatened them, warned them, or told them they had no recourse. They did, though that recourse, NYC’s Civilian Complaint Review Board was largely toothless and impotent when it came to investigating no-knocks.

All of which brings me to this: A watchdog group (run by a former police officer, incidentally) took a tour of nearly 40 South Florida police stations in search of a complaint form and videotaped the results.

Makes for interesting viewing. The follow-up (click the story next to the one linked above in the video player) contains reactions from police chiefs, as well as an interesting racial profiling test.

If you ask me, the undercover investigator is needlessly antagonistic at times. But that still doesn’t excuse the reaction from several of the police officers, which range from dismissive to rude to confrontational to damn-near criminal.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 24th, 2006 at 1:28 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.