What to Read This Week
1. “San Jose Police Union Executive Director Charged With Attempted Illegal Importation Of Fentanyl Analogue.”
The San Jose Police Officers Association called her “grandma.” But while most nanas are busy baking cookies, Joanne Segovia was cooking up a scheme that involved importing dozens of packages of illegal fentanyl and more than 4,000 opioid pills into the United States—disguising the contents with labels such as “chocolate and sweets”. Then, allegedly, grandma sent little care packages to drug dealers across the United States.
The criminal complaint spells out the details of the years-long investigation, which was led by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Though Segovia told agents that she “never ordered or received prescription medications through the mail” and “wouldn’t even know where to start,” investigators captured an alleged receipt from Segovia’s computer monitor.
Why do the investigators believe the computer in question is Segovia’s?
It turns out she makes a better cop than criminal. From the complaint: “Several items are visible in the area in front of the monitor, including a San Jose Police Officers’ Association letter opener with a business card containing Segovia’s name and notes containing apparent Police Officer Association related codes.”
The complaint also contains an image of a shipping label, with the return address of the San Jose Police Officers’ Association, which led the investigators to allege that “the use of the shipping label indicates that Segovia used her office as part of her purchasing and distribution of controlled substances.”
This isn’t the first time a leader of a police union broke the laws that they are sworn to protect. Just this year, The New York Times reported that Edward D. Mullins, president of the New York Police Department’s Sergeants Benevolent Association, engaged in his own nearly two decade campaign to defund the police when he pleaded guilty to “fraudulently reimbursing for about $1 million that he spent on luxury items and meals at high-end restaurants”. And, last year, as NBC news reported, “Patrick Rose, the former president of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association charged with raping and abusing six children over nearly three decades, [plead] guilty.”
2. “In Chicago … gun possession arrests are rising as shootings go unsolved.”
For The Marshall Project, Lakeidra Chavis and Geoff Hing published a feature story that revolves around how the Chicago Police Department allocates its resources to tackle gun violence. In short, the department prioritizes the front end strategy of taking guns off of the street over the backend strategy of solving shootings and murders. That could be a grave mistake.
Here are a few key excerpts from The Marshall Project piece:
“In Chicago, the race to get guns off the street often begins with a police stop. Officers just need a pretext to search someone … The smell of “fresh cannabis” wafting from an open window. Tinted windows. A missing license plate. Police reports show that the list goes on … Authorities tout these arrests as an effective crime-fighting strategy. ‘Each gun recovered, regardless of how, is a potential life saved,’ said former Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown in a press conference last year … A Marshall Project analysis found that from 2010 to 2022, the police made more than 38,000 arrests for illegal gun possession. These arrests — almost always a felony—doubled during this timeframe.”
But:
“Recent research shows that most people convicted in Illinois for felony gun possession don’t go on to commit a violent crime, and the majority of those sentenced to prison for gun possession don’t have past convictions for violence … Officials justify the focus on confiscating guns as a way of curtailing violence. But these tactics have not substantially reduced shootings in Chicago. In fact, as possession arrests skyrocketed, shootings increased[.]”
What happens when the percentage of police resources devoted to gun violence focuses too heavily on gun possession and too little on solving shootings and murders?
That’s our third item:
3. “For the past several years, the Chicago Police Department has solved an average of 50% of the city’s homicides per year. But that number, known as a clearance rate, is even lower for Black victims.”
For WTTW, Chicago’s PBS affiliate, Brandis Friedman anchored a nightly news segment on the failure of the Chicago Police Department to solve the city’s murders. As the headline suggests, the chance that the Chicago Police Department solves a murder is at best a coin-flip. Here’s the full segment:
Ms. Friedman’s reporting relied heavily on a new report from Live Free Chicago, the research and advocacy arm of an umbrella organization comprised of Black churches. The report analyzed homicide clearance rate data in Chicago and found that “the police districts with the lowest rates of homicide clearance between 2019 and 2021 were districts with majority persons of color: District 10, District 7, and District 3, at 36%, 37%, and 38%, respectively.” In other words, for roughly every three people who pick up a gun, pull the trigger, and take someone’s life in Chicago, the police allow two of them to remain on the street without any consequences.
As Justin Nix, a criminology professor at the University of Nebraska, told the New York Times in 2021, “unsolved murders and nonfatal shootings means justice denied to the victims of those crimes and their families … A low clearance rate, especially for these most serious of crimes, might be interpreted by community members as a signal that the agency (1) doesn’t care about or (2) is not very good at keeping them safe.”
And that’s the double-whammy of focusing more resources on getting guns off the street than on solving actual shootings and murders: over-policing on the front end decreases community trust in the police and makes it more difficult to get the witness cooperation that solves crimes; then, when the police fail to solve most of the murders that happen in a neighborhood, the residents lose even more faith in the police.
The same New York Times article explains that “solving murders is critical [for reducing gun violence, because] the certainty of being caught seems to act as a deterrent, while the punishment levied does not.” Fortunately, the research shows that “one key to solving a murder is straightforward: devoting more hours to it …. Investing more resources into finding and talking to witnesses, collecting evidence and clearing both murders and nonfatal shootings could be one way of helping to reverse the recent rise in murder across the nation.”
The upshot, then, is that tackling gun violence requires refocusing police resources to spend more time on solving shootings and murders.
That’s why a robust bipartisan majority of voters agree that “police departments should shift a significant portion of their internal resources to prioritize investigating and solving the most serious offenses like shootings and murder.” And three-in-four voters agree that city governments should “should use their budgeting power to ensure that police departments are making solving serious crimes like shootings and murders their top priority.”