What a difference a month can make.
The Greensboro City Council voted down a resolution that would have required police officers to have a consent-to-search form signed before conducting a consent search.
The vote was Mayor Nancy Vaughan and Councilmembers Marikay Abuzuaiter, Nancy Hoffmann, Goldie Wells and Sharon Hightower against and Councilmembers Tammi Thurm, Justin Outling, Michelle Kennedy and Yvonne Johnson in favor of requiring the signed written consent forms.
The council discussed the matter at length with Hightower definitely the councilmember on the bubble. At times she said she was in favor of the resolution and at times against. All the other councilmembers had their positions staked out, so it was a contest to see who could convince Hightower to vote with them and the noes won.
Police Chief Brian James, who was opposed to the resolution, was allowed to speak more on the topic than he was at either of the work sessions on the topic.
Hightower said that the real issue that nobody was discussing was the disparity in traffic stops for African Americans.
Wells said that having a written consent form signed would not change the disparity in traffic stops.
Wells also noted that of the comparable cities in the state, Greensboro was the only one where all the officers were equipped with body worn cameras. She said, “What better evidence is there than seeing something.”
Hoffmann noted that the police officer’s actions were already being documented by the body worn camera video and said, “It almost feels antediluvian to go back to paper and pencil or paper and pen. We are almost into the second quarter of the 21st century.”
Requiring written consent forms was Thurm’s baby. She brought it up almost a year ago and pushed for a work session on the topic for about six months. She supported the resolution requiring signed written consent forms but said she didn’t like the loophole that allowed the police officer to document the consent with the body worn camera video if someone consented to the search but refused to sign the form. She said that her fear was “that the loophole would become the norm rather than the rule.”
At the August work session that the City Council held on requiring signed written consent forms, the vote was 6-3 in favor of having the city manager prepare a resolution requiring signed consent forms for the Sept. 15 meeting.
Both Vaughan and Hoffmann voted in favor of having the resolution prepared and then voted against the resolution.
The Greensboro Police Officers Association had strongly opposed the resolution.
After the written consent form motion failed, Vaughan made a motion that would require standardized language that would inform the person that it was a voluntary search, they had the right to refuse and that at any time they could revoke their consent and the search would stop. Consent searches will be documented, as they are now, with body worn camera video and incident reports completed by the officer after the search or after a request to search is denied.
That motion passed by the same 5-4 vote that the resolution requiring signed written consent forms failed.
Too bad Greensboro refuses to release controversial footage from police body cams regularly. Will footage be required as evidence in all cases of traffic stops? Many times officers decide when and where their cameras record. It is not surprising lawyer Rossabi representing the police organizations had “Mandate Mayor” and “my husband was pulled and plead guilty to having an illegally purchased and illegally concealed hand gun while speeding on New Garden” and “downtown property owner that votes city money for cleaning/fixing riot damage that happened right in front of police body cameras with minimal arrests”.
No personal rights when you live under these hypocrite fascists.
Woah, hold on there Alex. All Body cam footage, since it is evidence, is available on discovery to any defendant. All BWC footage can be reviewed at the police department by anyone recorded in a video even if they are not charged with anything. State law, not the city of Greensboro or the Police, prohibits publicly releasing the footage but you can view it privately if you are on tape. Everything is on the police city web page if you would bother to look it up.
Officers do not get to decide when to turn cameras on either. That is written out in their directives, which are also available online if you want to go to read them.
The union has also publicly said that they are for the release of camera footage. I think Hammer has mentioned that a few times. You can look that up too.
But I get and agree with your overall point that city council is pretty bad right now. They change positions more than a leaf in the wind.
Disparity by its true definition is not a bad thing when the stops are legitimate. The Police are stopping whoever breaks the law. Last I checked that is their job. If you don’t want to be stopped, don’t break the law.
But when other data shows pretty clearly that white people are more likely to break the law than black people then that disparity is a pretty bad great american problem.
What is this “other data” you casually throw out there? How about a source and not by numbers, by percentage of population? By raw numbers whites might, and I stress might, have the numbers, but that’s because they make up the majority of the population. If you drill down to violent crime though, and focus on percentages rather than the raw volume, I think young black males hold the top position as both victim and suspect. The fact is the majority of violent crime is black on black crime. Our murders in Greensboro being the prime example. Almost entirely black victims killed almost exclusively by black suspects.
So, if I’m following you correctly, you believe that it is 100% okay for police to stop every single black person for going 41 miles per hour down Holden because you think that there is a higher chance of a black person being a violent criminal than a white person so we should stop all of the black people. And, since we know that it tends to be white people that commit embezzlement, fraud, etc. you would be 100% okay with every single white person that makes more than $50k a year to be audited by the IRS and sentenced to time in jail for failing to cooperate (or just shot, because you know, law and order!)?
That’s the disparity we are talking about.
The “other data” refers to data about delinquency behaviors in youth. On self-report measures, white youth are more likely to admit they have/will participate in delinquent behaviors such as assault and theft. On actual arrest records, white youth are just as likely to encounter police as black youth for these delinquent behaviors. However, on punishment, white youth are much less likely to be incarcerated and are more likely to get a less severe punishment than black youth.
Let’s go further, observing identical crimes in which only the race of the accused was altered, people are more likely to assign a more severe sentence to a black person than a white person – this was experimental research which is also supported by data in arrests and sentencing.
Let’s go further, majority group (Whites) tend to over-estimate the “white-collar” crime by Whites and under-estimate the “blue-collar” crime by Whites. In this case, this results in white people disproportionately and inaccurately believing Whites are less prone to violent crimes than they truly are.
Speaking to your notes about body cam above there are a lot of conditional statements there…..
1. You can only review it if you are in the footage. So it couldn’t all be reviewed to test the hypothesis that there is, in fact, disparity in how police interact with people of different ages, races, sexes, and other backgrounds.
2. You say officers do not get to decide when to turn cameras on. Yet, it is most often the officer that has to physically turn the camera on – regardless of what the directive says the officer still has to do the action. I’m not sure if Greensboro or most police forces have cameras that turn on automatically.
3. If the police union is publicly for the release of camera footage then why isn’t in their police contracts when they privately negotiate those terms? And, as police unions regularly do with sensitive evidence, why don’t they just leak the videos if they so publicly want it available?
You are making a bunch of leaps there sport. I did not say or imply any of those things. I simply said that the homicide data supports the hypothesis that black on black crime drives violent crime numbers. The chief’s focus is on reducing violent crime. He puts the officers where they can impact that crime, so they get put into minority neighborhoods.
To put is simply, there is no string of violent assaults and homicides in Irving Park, so there are fewer cops there. There is however, a string of violent crimes and homicides in the south east crescent of Greensboro. So that is where the cops go and where they focus their efforts. It is not rocket science, nor is it racist. it is using limited resources as effectively as possible.
In even simpler terms, if your butt is on fire, don’t throw water on your face. Put the water where the fire is.
Regarding your other points, I’m going to make a leap and assume you must be from up north or something because in NC “unions” have no legal power and never have. Officers don’t get to “contract” anything and there are no negotiations. It is a “right to work state”, which means you can be fired just about any time for anything. There is no collective bargaining etc. And if an officer leaked video in a right to work state? Well, I’ll let you guess what would happen… plus it is a crime to leak body cam footage, which means the cop would get charged.
And yes, the cameras turn on automatically under certain circumstances, but can be manually activated and if officers fail to do so, as stated in the online directives, they get in trouble for it, which could include getting fired. So there is plenty of accountability even if you do not get to conduct your own personal review from your untrained eye of every officers actions.
Finally someone got through to the idiots on city council – thank you Chief James. I guess it takes a black man to convince a black woman what is fair and truthful – God forbid that racist Hightower hear anything she doesn’t like by a person whose color is other than black! ALL LIVES MATTER. INCLUDING WHITE PEOPLE, YA’LL.
This is a classic example of overreach. The city council has no business voting and dictating what rules the department employees adhere to. That’s the job of the department head, in this case the Police Chief. The Chief writes policy, administers policy and is responsible for all aspects of the employees under him. The council should never have even been involved in a discussion about this publicly. If this is something they would like addressed, sit down and talk to the Chief and let him address it. Doing it the way it was done further divides the community and only throws fuel on the fire. I hope the citizens remember this fiasco along with others at the next election. I know I will !!