Whipped Cream Difficulties

After 18 months, countless hours of debate, and several public meetings (one of which interfered with the Austin Citizen’s Police Academy graduation, not that I’m BITTER or anything), the Austin Police Department finally has a non-interim chief…

…Punch Rockgroin! Brian Manley.

As I’ve said before, he seems to me to be a good guy with a truly macho name and a good leader with local ties. We’ll have to see how his tenure plays out, but I am cautiously optimistic.

In other news, the felony perjury and misdemeanor official misconduct charges against Joel Abelove, the district attorney of Rensselaer County (in upstate New York) have been dropped.

I would have sworn I wrote about this at the time, but apparently I didn’t. It’s rare to see a sitting DA charged with a crime, and the backstory is interesting.

In April of 2016, a man named Edson Thevenin was stopped by police in Troy on “suspicion of drunk driving”. The stop escalated, there was a “brief chase”, and somewhere in there a police officer became pinned between his cruiser and Mr. Thevenin’s car: Mr. Thevenin was shot eight times and killed.

After the shooting, Mr. Abelove, a Republican, quickly convened a grand jury, something that the attorney general’s office believed was intentionally meant to ensure that the officer, Sgt. Randall French, did not get charged in the killing. Mr. Abelove had also conferred immunity on Sergeant French before the grand jury voted, Mr. Schneiderman’s office said, and was alleged to have lied to a separate grand jury about another immunity case.

I can see two ways of spinning this: former AG and known abuser Schneiderman was peeved that the state couldn’t go after a cop who was involved in a shooting, and tried to take it out on the DA instead. Or: Abelove was trying to manipulate the grand jury system and cover for a cop in a bad shooting.

Mr. Schneiderman, a Democrat who resigned in disgrace last month after allegations that he had physically abused romantic partners, was empowered to investigate Mr. Abelove under a 2015 executive order from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. The order allowed the state attorney general to serve as a special prosecutor for investigations into the deaths of “unarmed civilians caused by law enforcement officers.”
In the case of Mr. Thevenin, Mr. Cuomo issued a second executive order that allowed Mr. Schneiderman to specifically examine Mr. Abelove’s handling of the investigation, including “its grand jury presentation.”

What led to the decision to drop the charges?

Justice Jonathan D. Nichols questioned the scope of the authority included in the Thevenin executive order and ruled that the attorney general’s office “was without jurisdiction and hence unauthorized to appear in front of the grand jury,” in relation to the perjury charge.
“The court finds the integrity of the grand jury was impaired in this case,” Justice Nichols wrote. “And impaired to the extent that prejudice to the defendant is clearly possible.”

The long slog towards hiring a new police chief in Austin appears to be coming to an end.

First we had to wait for a new city manager. Then, once we got a new city manager, he (Spencer Cronk) had to figure out what he wanted to do about filling the job.

Now he’s got finalists.

Oh, did I say “finalists”? I meant “finalist”: interim chief Flint Ironstag Brian Manley.

Chief Manley has a lot of community support, especially after the Mad Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight incident. However, his selection isn’t final:

…sources say he will make clear he plans to seek input from citizens and civic groups through a series of meetings and other events before making a final decision on whether to appoint Manley or open the job nationally.

Personal opinion: I like Fist Rockbone. He hasn’t said anything yet that really annoyed me, he’s a St. Ed’s grad, and he’s a local guy who knows the city. I think it’s about time for the department to be led by someone like this.

In other news, the Statesman ran a big investigative story over the weekend:

Spisak, Gibbons and Murray are among 10 former cadets with a broad range of life and professional experiences who did not complete the academy training course — two were kicked out — and spoke in recent months to the American-Statesman.
They say what they were being taught at the academy is out of step with reforms being promoted by the Austin Police Department publicly and in law enforcement agencies across the country. To them, the training course for rookie Austin officers is unnecessarily aggressive — a climate they fear pervades the force of 1,800 officers and spills onto the street.

I haven’t sorted out how I feel about this yet. On the one hand, these are people who didn’t make it through the academy complaining about the training.

On the other hand, despite my hanging out with the cops, I’m still somewhat on the side of Radley Balko and others: policing has become increasingly militarized and aggressive, and needs to get back to fundamentals.

On the gripping hand, I think there’s a lot of truth in what the training officers say, and what I’ve heard in my interactions with them. Policing is, by nature, an agressive act: you’re dealing with people who don’t want to go to jail. Of course they’re going to fight you, and you need to be prepared for that. You need to be prepared to fire a shotgun, hit the target, and deal with the recoil, even if you are a small-framed woman. (The woman who runs Austin’s CPA program probably weighs 120 pounds, soaking wet and with full duty gear. She’s been a police officer for 20+ years, doing some of the toughest stuff imaginable, and can kick your butt eight ways from Sunday.)

“We are sorely disappointed in you as a group,” he yelled. “We’ve got people showing up who have lived in Austin, Texas, for a (expletive) year and still don’t have the right address on their driver’s license. Guess what? You’re showing up at the Police Department and you’re violating the (expletive) law. Grab your water bottles and get the (expletive) outside.”

He’s absolutely right. Cadets have plenty of advance warning before they show up to the academy, and they know what they’re getting into. There’s no reason for them to show up not squared away.

The other thing I hear training officers say: they’re dealing with entire generations of people who have never been in a fistfight. They have no idea what it’s like to take a punch, or get into a physical confrontation. Not only have they never done it, they’ve been actively discouraged from doing it all of their life. And the academy has to teach them to get past and through that. You can’t quit if you hurt a rib or got punched in the face. You have to keep going, or else you will die. Or your partner will die. Or both of you will die.

I’m not one of those people who blindly says “Oh, the cops have a dangerous job” as an excuse for bad behavior. Yes, it is dangerous (not so much so as commercial fishing, for example) but I still want my police to behave properly, and treat everyone with dignity and respect up until the point they forfeit that right. Then I want them to end the threat as efficiently and humanely as they possibly can. To steal an old CHL saying, “Be polite, be professional, and have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”

And frankly, I’d be a lot more sympathetic to some of these complaints if the other side didn’t pick some of the worst possible examples to promote.

This is one of my recent favorites:

By most indications, he was exceedingly straitlaced. He dressed well, usually wearing pullover polo shirts and tightly belted cargo pants. Once a week, he went to a barbershop to get a haircut and a manicure. He was so meticulous about keeping his house clean that he asked visitors to take off their shoes before coming inside so they wouldn’t track dirt across the carpet. “Red even had the toilet paper coming out over the top of the roll,” said Tommie Albert, an older man in the neighborhood who’d known Batiste since he was a boy. “He said it looked better than toilet paper coming out from behind the roll.”
Batiste regularly visited his aging parents to check on them. A few times a week, he went to see his girlfriend, Buchi Okoh, their eighteen-month-old daughter, and Okoh’s five-year-old son from a previous relationship. Okoh, a striking, gregarious woman in her early thirties, worked in sales at a Cadillac dealership. On occasion, Batiste would take her to a nice restaurant, but most of the time they stayed home and played with the children. Okoh told friends that her boyfriend was a budding real estate developer, buying and renovating small homes. He was a good man, she said, intelligent and ambitious. He read self-improvement books like Do You!: 12 Laws to Access the Power in You to Achieve Happiness and Success, by the hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons. He was determined to make something of himself, “to be the best person he could possibly be,” Okoh said, “building his life the right way.”

And the profile goes on. Why is Batiste being profiled in Texas Monthly?

He and his criminal gang executed multiple armored car guards to steal cash they were using to refill ATMs. Batiste allegedly stood off at some distance with a rifle and shot the drivers guards, then his partners drove up, grabbed the cash, and drove off.

I swear I wrote about the end of this story, but I can’t find it now. Briefly: HPD got a tip and ambushed Batiste and his gang. Batiste got out of his car with a rifle and shot at the HPD officers: HPD returned fire and killed him.

At a detention hearing, when asked about other robberies Batiste had carried out, Jeffrey Coughlin, a young FBI agent who had helped lead the investigation, remained cagey, declaring that the FBI “at this time” was only connecting Batiste to the two armored car robberies in March and August of 2016. However, shortly after the December shoot-out, Houston police chief Art Acevedo, who had been briefed on the FBI’s investigation, announced at a press conference that there was a “high probability” that Batiste was involved in all of the murders of Houston’s armored car messengers over the previous two years, including the shooting of Alvin Kinney, in February 2015.

TM wants you to feel sorry for this man, and his woman and children. TM apparently doesn’t want you to feel sorry for Alvin Kinney, Melvin Moore, David Guzman, or the unnamed messenger who was wounded but not killed.