Month: September 2018

September 22, 2018

Yesterday Binghamton Mayor Richard C. David, Binghamton Police Chief Joseph T. Zikuski, and the Broome County District Attorney Stephen J. Cornwell Jr. launched a joint offensive to denounce those who have protested local police brutality. Standing in front of deep ranks of police officers, they jointly met the press to reject any public charges of the unnecessarily violent arrest of a 5’ 2” Black woman outside the YWCA.

As the press dutifully reported, Police Chief Zikukski was “outraged” at any criticism.   DA Cornwell sternly exclaimed that “there is only one, only one conclusion that can be made! There was no misconduct by the police officers involved.”  Mayor David proudly confirmed that “after reviewing the videos, I can say without hesitation, the officers responded and acted appropriately.”  The DA agreed: “You would have to be from another planet to come up with any other conclusion.”

Why such language and why such a show of force?

The city, county, and police do face a common problem:  community complaints of police violence are escalating all across the country. That’s true locally as well.  In less than a month we have seen three instances of community mobilization against police violence, two backed by video and bystanders’ accounts (one on the harsh detention of Black/disabled children here and the YWCA’s account here).  As in the past, the city, county and police refuse to release any of their surveillance or body-cam footage and rules for them. Even the local media is blinded, the city having rejected (as usual) an attempt by the local press to get a copy of the police’s videos through a freedom of information act.  So much for transparency and oversight.

This should put an end to liberal reformers’ hopes for body cameras, which is now a $ billion industry.  In the wake of Ferguson and increasing exposes on police brutality, many reformers called for police forces to adopt body cameras.  When they know they are under observation, so the argument went, people, even police, behave better.  And public confidence in the police would be reaffirmed.  Or so the argument went.

Data from surveys of large urban police forces soon undercut these assumptions, as they showed that police wearing cameras used force and faced public complaints at the same rate as officers without cameras.  Meanwhile police-controlled cameras rise in ever greater numbers among us, backed forcefully by the Mayor and his allies, including in the past SUNY-Binghamton President Harvey Stenger (who faced his own protests in 2017 over giving $1 million for more police and cameras in town).

When the Mayor tells us “body cameras captured everything at the YWCA from start to finish from multiple angles without favor or bias,” we should demand: let the community see it, all of it, all the time. When city officials proclaim the lack of bias in policing we should ask:  open up to public oversight the data on stops, arrests and bail by race, gender, age—something city and and county officials have rejected forcefully in past years. What are they hiding?

The one statistic we do have isn’t reassuring: diversity in their ranks.   At the Broome County Jail, the Correctional Officer force is 97.5% white.  As for the city’s police force, this is what the Press and Sun-Bulletin reports: “Among the ranks of the 138-member Binghamton Police Department, 13 officers are women and three are black. If the department reflected the city’s demographics, 69 officers would be women and 21 would be black.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Late yesterday Roderick Douglass posted a news story on how the “Endicott Police Mistakenly Tase Disabled Bystander, Causing Heart Attack.”   As Douglass reports, witnesses state that Devon Johnson, an Endicott resident, rushed to scene of a car accident last Sunday, removed a victim from the car, and waited for first responders. Searching for a Black man who fled the scene on foot, the police grabbed Johnson—another Black man. While his partner frantically told them he had a pacemaker, he was tased several times.  He had a heart attack, and was taken to UHS hospital.  The police charged Mr. Johnson with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, and his partner with disorderly conduct.

This is the third time there has been public community protest about police violence in recent weeks.  The first focused on Binghamton officers who on August 11^th roughly handled and detained a 13 year old girl and a developmentally challenged 14 year old boy.  This was captured on video. The second, also on video,  involved the abusive treatment and arrest of a Black woman outside the YWCA.  A large public demonstration on August 17th protested the first; the second led to a public rebuke from the YWCA for the violent, public escalation of a dispute that had resolved itself until police arrived on the scene.

There are some elemental truths here.  If you call the police, expect an armed and often fearfully violent response. That is how police are trained to respond to every call, as senior officers and police research groups themselves report.  If a Black or Latinx person is involved, expect a racially-biased response:  data and studies from across the nation continually document this.  If the incident involves a person with mental health problems or substance use disorders, expect the criminalization of the individual, their incarceration, and, in too many cases, their death.

Can we imagine different outcomes? Can we employ community forces trained in de-escalating, rather aggressively exacerbating, domestic and family disputes? What might happen if persons with mental health problems were met by counselors rather than armed police? Is it possible to imagine giving persons who want drug treatment access to it, rather than repetitive confrontations with the police followed by stints in jail (or worse, death by overdose)?

Op-ed published in the Press and Sun Bulletin, September 16, 2018, (they provided the new title) with additional references here (see end of text below).

Schools Don’t Need More Resource Officers

Recently, the Press & Sun-Bulletin reported District Attorney Steve Cornwell’s accelerating effort to place yet more police in our schools.

We’ve seen this before: in the 1980s and 1990s, the DARE drug prevention program put officers in the nation’s schools at a cost of over $1 billion. By 2000, it was clear the program was completely ineffective, and it collapsed. As one mayor put it, it was a fraud upon the public and public education.

As school budgets tighten, parents and teachers might wonder if shifting resources once again from educational programs to police supervision of students is wise. The DA, in announcing the expansion of the Student Resource Officers, surely thinks so: “… with their backgrounds, training and field experience, our School Resource Officers have dealt with issues related to children, domestic violence, drug abuse and violence — these experiences and lessons are invaluable to the schools and students.”

But is this the case? Does the experience of retired police officers with adult violence, SWAT teams and undercover drug operations help solve the real problems of youths and our schools?

Empirical studies show that there is little evidence that having armed police in school corridors prevents drug use, bullying, and disruptive or even violent behavior. Does it really make sense to turn a scuffle among students into an assault charge, or acting out in class into a suspension and a charge of disorderly conduct? Are these police matters, or problems to be resolved by parents, teachers and those trained in effective alternatives to detention and incarceration?

What we do know is that schools with SROs have fewer resources, especially counselors, to address students’ social, emotional and discipline needs. SRO schools also refer kids to the juvenile legal system at a rate five times greater than schools without SROs, with poor, black and Latino students far more likely to be suspended, expelled or drop out because of unevenly applied, punitive policies.

Do we really need another 10 years to find out what doesn’t work? Can we afford it? Can our youths?

William Martin is a founding member of Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier and teaches at Binghamton University.

Additional references (not in newspaper):

Multiple long-term studies chart the failure of DARE to change students’ use of drugs;  one study  suggested that DARE students were more likely than their peers to experiment with drugs and alcohol.  See among others:

• Steven L. West and ^,Keri K. O’NealPhD, “Project D.A.R.E. Outcome Effectiveness Revisited,” American Journal of Public Health, October 10, 2011. Conclusion: D.A.R.E. is ineffective.
• S T Ennett, N S Tobler, C L Ringwalt, and R L Flewelling, How effective is drug abuse resistance education? A meta-analysis of Project DARE outcome evaluations.”, American Journal of Public Health 84, no. 9 (September 1, 1994): pp. 1394-1401,
• And recent press report summaries: Christopher Ingraham, “A brief history of DARE, the anti-drug program Jeff Sessions wants to revive,” Washington Post, July 12, 2017,
• Denis P. Rosenbaum, and Gordon Hanson, “Assessing the Effects of School-Based Drug Education: A Six-Year Multilevel Analysis of Project D.A.R.E.,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 35, no. 4 (November 1, 1998): 381–412,
• Deanna N.Devlin, Mateus Rennó Santos, Denise C. Gottfredson, “An evaluation of police officers in schools as a bullying intervention,”Evaluation and Program Planning, Volume 71, December 2018, Pages 12-21. Conclusion: “SROs do not have an effect on bullying in schools. Policy implications of these findings suggest that programs that focus on components such as teaching social and emotional competency skills, improving relationships between students and adults, and creating a positive school environment may be more effective in reducing bullying than a security procedure such as the use of SROs. Alternative programs should be explored to mitigate bullying and improve the well-being of students.”

And on where DARE is most deployed, and on the need for alternatives, see for example

Ebony Slaughter-Johnson, Karen Dolan, Myacah Sampson, Report: Students Under Siege, July 24, 2018, Institute of Policy Studies. Among their conclusions:

• Schools with school resource officers (SROs) refer children to the juvenile legal system for “disorderly conduct” at a rate almost five times that of schools without SROs.
• Recent research indicated that even one suspension can double the likelihood that a student drops out of school.
• Black students, who during the 2013 to 2014 school year represented 15.5 percent of the public school student population, were 46 percent of those punished with multiple suspensions outside of school.
• According to Kids Count, which uses data from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, for the 2013-2014 school year, nearly three million students in U.S. public schools experienced in-school suspension, and nearly three million students experienced out-of-school suspension. This trend continues for the 2015 to 2016 school year.

 

 

On Saturday September 8th another case of Binghamton Police Department violence on a Black woman was reported by the YWCA on their facebook page.  Local press reports provide the official view and the charges the woman now faces, and a report in the BU campus newspaper. The woman is in the Broome County Jail, where protests  against the treatment of women in the new $6 million wing continue. This takes place only a few weeks after a strongly supported local rally against police violence organized by Progressive Leaders of Tomorrow (PLOT). And of course the history is much longer if often invisible:   Binghamton University Students  rallied in 2017 support of Black female students’ mistreatment by the BPD as well (and lack of University support in pressing complaints with the BPD). And then back in 2013 students and community protested the beating of a Black student by Dillinger’s staff while the police looked on,  and….  

July 6 2018 Press & Sun-Bulletin In September 2015, local food workers, social service providers and community organizers packed a county legislature meeting in protest. Their aim: to reverse the county’s plan to outsource food preparation for the county jail and Willow Point Nursing Home to an out-of-state corporation. To let profits determine basic food service, protesters argued, courted disaster. Complaints from Willow Point soon grew and became public: food was cold, inadequate and delivered late. Recently, the county finally announced it was terminating its contract with Aramark. It was a wise decision. What comes next is likely not. The county now proposes to contract with the French firm Sodexho for feeding elderly and disabled residents at Willow Point, and with Florida-based Trinity Corp. for those in the county jail. It appears the same abuses will be repeated. Sodexho has the contract for Binghamton University, where complaints over high prices, low part-time wages and poor service are common. Unlike BU students, our vulnerable seniors at Willow Point cannot go to an alternative. Even more vulnerable are those in the county jail, filled as it is with hundreds of unconvicted persons (persons without a conviction or sentence), most of whom are there only because they cannot afford our high local bails for nonviolent charges. Publicly available news reports and state investigations tell chilling stories about how the incarcerated will fare. In Michigan, where Trinity replaced a disastrous experiment with Aramark as well, the firm was fined $3.7 million for failing to provide even the most basic food. Trinity workers smuggled in contraband and had sexual relations with prisoners. Hunger strikes and riots spread across the state system. In Colorado, hunger led to a riot, and in Georgia, prisoners in Trinity-run facilities resorted to eating toothpaste and syrup packets. Next month, Michigan’s Republican governor is returning to state-run kitchens. Broome would be wise to do the same, returning jobs to local workers and permitting direct, local oversight. Past and current county executives and legislators refuse this option, stating that we can’t afford it and need cheaper food and lower labor costs. A much more effective way to contain county spending would be to cut the radically increasing corrections budget. In recent years, we have spent $7 million on an unnecessary jail expansion (built to house 600 persons, with now less than 430 county prisoners) and hired over a dozen new corrections officers — while cutting back on community health facilities and funding. This makes little fiscal sense given that 80 percent of those in the jail struggle with mental health and addiction issues, and return to us without long-term treatment options. Our elderly, disabled and incarcerated all need basic services. To give monopoly contracts to private, profit-driven corporations, with little or no public oversight, risks repeating expensive, past mistakes. We deserve better. Rozann Greco is a re-entry specialist with the Walk With Me Program. Bill Martin is a professor at Binghamton University. Sue Ruff is advocacy director at the Southern Tier Independence Center.