Lack of police accountability cost taxpayers a lot of money

Since I originally wrote about Hawthorn police officers shooting a man's dog as they arrested him and later claimed they acted to defend him from his own dog in July, I've been attempting to follow up with the story every couple of weeks.

My google searches haven't resulted in much luck, other than to learn Leon Rosby, the dog's owner, was charged with six counts of criminal action for his role leading up to his arrest and for subsequently threatening witnesses who recorded and released additional video footage of his actions that day.

But I've been less interested in learning his fate and more interested in learning about what happened to the police officers involved in the shooting. They were removed from street duty shortly after footage of the incident went viral, but that's about as much as I can find on google about their fate.

The Hawthorn Police Department has a long history of police misconduct and paying its citizen large civil settlements for those acts of misconduct, but it's probably safe to assume that the three officers faced very little disciplinary action for their role in the shooting of Rosby's dog.

It's very rare police officers are held accountable for their actions while on duty, no matter how unreasonable.

This 2007 study showed that between 2002 and 2004, civilians filed 10,149 complaints of excessive force, illegal searches, racial abuse, sexual abuse, and false arrests against officers in Chicago. Only 19 of the 10,149 complaints led to a suspension of a week or more. Other findings from that study showed that the chance of meaningful abuse for a police brutality complaint was less than three in 1,000; only one of 3,837 charged illegal searches led to meaningful discipline and not a single charge of false arrest (planting drugs, guns, etc.) over this three-year period led to an incident of meaningful discipline.

So it should come as no surprise that earlier this month Cook County prosecutors decided not bring criminal charges against a Chicago police officer who fatally shot an unarmed man nearly two years ago. This article outlines that incident in detail, but quick highlights are provided below (Quoted from the article linked above):

* The death of Flint Farmer in June 2011 was the third shooting -- the second fatal shooting -- in six months by Officer Gildardo Sierra, a patrolman in the Englewood district. It was so disturbing that it prompted police Superintendent Garry McCarthy to tell the Tribune that he considered the shooting a "big problem" and to acknowledge the department had erred by allowing Sierra back on the street given the previous shootings.

* In December, the city of Chicago settled a lawsuit brought by Farmer's estate for $4.1 million without admitting wrongdoing.

* Still, Cook County prosecutors said their two-year investigation of the shooting showed that Sierra had reason to believe that Farmer was armed and posed a threat of "great bodily harm." They said that although Sierra fired his weapon 16 times, hitting Farmer seven times -- including three times in the back -- they did not think they could show that the shooting was unreasonable, a key component of proving that Sierra had committed a crime.

* The shooting occurred shortly before 2 a.m. on June 7 when Sierra and a partner responded to a call of a domestic disturbance allegedly involving Farmer and his girlfriend.

* Prosecutors said Farmer, 29 and unemployed, pointed his burgundy cellphone at Sierra, prompting the officer to fire all 16 rounds from his handgun. A patrol car that arrived during the brief confrontation captured video of Sierra as he stepped onto the parkway, walked around the injured and unarmed Farmer in a semicircle and fired three more shots.

* An autopsy by the Cook County medical examiner's office showed that the three shots in Farmer's upper back were the fatal wounds.

* Before Farmer's death, Sierra had wounded a 19-year-old man in a shooting in March 2011 and killed Darius Pinex, 27, in January 2011. All three shootings took place after midnight in the impoverished and crime-ridden Englewood and West Englewood neighborhoods.

* Sierra later admitted that he drank "multiple" beers before he went to work that night, but the city waited more than five hours to give him a breath test, according to a court filing by an attorney for the slain man's estate.

* Prosecutors said their investigation showed that all 16 shots -- all that Sierra's Sig Sauer semi-automatic handgun could hold -- were fired within 4.2 seconds as Sierra moved laterally from the street to the sidewalk, the gun ejecting the spent shells as he moved. That allowed prosecutors to chart a probable sequence of events and also to understand that Sierra was reacting rapidly under dark and difficult conditions.

* Sierra told investigators he feared for his life because he believed Farmer had a gun. Under state law, police officers can continue firing at a suspect until they believe the threat has ended.

* "We try to put (Sierra) in context. We try to put the victim in context. We try to put the shooting in context," Jack Blakey, chief of the office's special prosecutions bureau, said.

* Farmer's had a criminal history. He was identified him as once being a member of the Gangster Disciples and revealed that his blood-alcohol content at the time of his death was .142, nearly twice the legal limit.

* Their letter to McCarthy made no findings adverse to Sierra. And in an interview they said the fact that Sierra had been drinking before starting his shift that day and then later lied about it were not crucial. His blood-alcohol level when tested five hours after the shooting -- a delay that raised questions about how aggressively police pursued the case -- was zero. Prosecutors said there was no evidence he was impaired at the time of the shooting.

Police have a right to protect themselves from danger while interacting with dangerous criminals, or even people they do not know yet to be dangerous. No one has an issue with officer safety, but I do have an issue with the lack of police accountability displayed in the two instances above.

Unfortunately, headlines from across the country are filled with stories similar to these weekly and as the numbers from the 2007 study referenced above show, these are not standalone instances. They are becoming the norm across the country. That should cause citizens across the country concern.

It should cause people concern that outside LA officers can shoot a man's dog as they arrest him and justify it on protecting that same man. It should cause more concern that a police officer in Chicago fired 16 shots at a man in less than five seconds, including three fatal shots in the man's back as he laid on the ground, and that wasn't unreasonable to anyone who looked into the matter.

It's not Officer Sierra's fault that he mistook Farmer's cellphone for a weapon and felt the need to protect himself. But it is his fault he fired three shots into Farmer's back as he laid on his stomach. At that point, the threat to Sierra's safety had been removed. At that same point, Farmer's death crossed the line from police service to police misconduct. In the rest of the country, shooting a helpless man three times in his back as he lays on the ground is known as an execution. Unless you do it while wearing a badge.

Sierra had been involved in two other shootings in a short period of time leading up to Farmer's death, which was his third shooting incident in six months and second shooting that resulted in a fatuity.

Police authorities have since admitted that Sierra shouldn't have been on street duty so close after the previous incidents but that the department had no way of tracking officers' shooting records.

It's most concerning that police shoot so many people in Chicago that their department has no way to track such incidents.

That's a lot of people getting shot by police. And it might help explain why city taxpayers have already paid more than $50 million for civil lawsuit settlements for police misconduct.

One would think that a police officer firing his or her weapon at another person would be a significant enough of an incident to result in a report or some sort of tracking system, especially one that leads to a fatality. The fact that this does not appear to be the case at police departments speaks volumes on the lack of police accountability.

Several companies keep track of the number of times their employees show up late to work or simply refuse to show up at all. Police departments can't be bothered to keep track of the number of times their officers show up and kill someone in the line of duty.

UPS probably has a way to track accidents and traffic violations its drivers commit, which would likely be considered serious incidents at UPS. They would likely know if a driver had been involved in a handful of traffic accidents in the last few months, especially if one of those led to the death of another. They likely wouldn't keep sending that driver back on the road to get in more accidents and kill more people.

Pizza companies probably don't have a method to keep track of the number of pizzas employees' burn each month. If you make a lot of pizza, some of them are going to get burnt. No big deal. Throw the burn one out, start over and move on. Burnt pizzas aren't worth keeping track of.

The city of Chicago's police department apparently thinks of the member of its community its officers shoot in the same way pizza managers regard burnt pizzas. That's a problem.

It's also problematic that county prosecutors found there was no evidence found that Sierra was impaired at the time of the shooting due to the fact he wasn't required to test his blood-alcohol level until five hours after the shooting despite drinking "several" beers before coming to work that night.

Investigators and prosecutors wanted to put the officer and Farmer in the right "context." Apparently, that context includes making it OK for an officer to come to work after drinking some amount of beer and to continuing firing his weapon at a man who is laying on his stomach unarmed, then to be tested for alcohol five hours later.

The department, the city and the county could have taken a stand against police brutality and drawn a line in the sand of what is acceptable and not acceptable behavior in a case that is a lot clearer than other shooting incidents. In doing so, the department and county could have held Sierra accountable for his actions. Instead, the city wrote Farmer's family a $4.1 million check.

$4.1 million dollars go do a lot of things in every city in the country. It could also fund more than enough additional police training to help reduce these occurrences from occurring. Taxpayers shouldn't have to keep bankrolling the unnecessary abuse and killing of its own citizens by the very people they pay to protect them.

Chicago taxpayers aren't alone in paying for the continued abuse of power displayed by their police department. New York City settled $185.6 million in claims involving the NYPD in FY 2011. Oakland taxpayers paid more than$13 million during the same year.

Closer to home, the city of Nampa paid its police officers to golf. And then paid $189,000 to the officers who accused their police chief of allowing the department to operate under a general lack of accountability.