What To Read This Weekend
1. New Poll: Voters Overwhelmingly Believe That Police Officers Under Investigation For Domestic Violence Should Not Be Allowed To Keep Their Weapons.
A tragic story out of Alabama captured national headlines: Megan Montgomery, the wife of Hoover Police Officer Jason McIntosh, arrived at a hospital emergency room with a gunshot wound in her arm. She told doctors and nurses treating her wound that her police officer husband had shot her during an argument. Officer McIntosh’s police department originally confiscated his personal firearm pending investigation of the domestic violence claim.
But a state-level law enforcement agency—the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency—ordered the police department to give McIntosh his gun back despite an active restraining order and pending domestic violence charges. Tragically, as NBC News reported, two weeks later, “he used the gun to shoot and kill her during another late-night dispute.”
Police departments across the country differ on whether to take possession of an officer’s department issued and / or personal firearm during an investigation of a police officer accused of domestic violence. For example, Omaha and Tampa Police Departments allow on-duty police officers to continue to possess their firearms while other departments—like the Austin and Boston Police Departments—confiscate the officer’s firearms under the same circumstances.
To gain insight into how the public views this issue, Protect and Serve commissioned a national survey of likely voters, which found that voters overwhelmingly support confiscation of all weapons, both personal and department issued.
Indeed, 73% of voters believe that an officer should “not be allowed to keep any weapons” while that officer is “under investigation for a credible allegation of domestic violence.” That majority includes 81% of Democrats and 64% of Republicans.
2. “Of Nearly 100 Homicides, Kansas City Police Have Solved Just 32 Killings This Year. Why?”
That’s the headline of a Kansas City Star article from last week, which as reporters Glenn Rice and Katie Moore point out, translates into “a clearance rate of about 33%.”
As Rice and Moore report, “Kansas City has struggled with low homicide clearance rates for years … In the summer of 2020, when the city was on its way to setting a record for homicides, police recorded a clearance rate of 43%. That was the same as the average end-of-year clearance rate for the previous five years.”
The KC-Star notes that the city has “long struggled” with “a strained relationship between police and community members,” which, as Marijana Kotlaja, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, explained, drives a doom cycle—“mak[ing] it more difficult to hold people accountable for committing violence, which lowers the clearance rate. Which makes citizens even more skeptical and less likely to cooperate. And the process repeats.”
Rice and Moore attributed to the Kansas City police chief a similar sentiment—that “some witnesses do not want to come forward and cooperate with the police.”
But this whole line of thinking does a disservice to homicide victims and their family members. Police Departments that devote the time and resources necessary for solving murders do in fact solve murders, strained relationships between the police department and the community notwithstanding.
As Jeff Asher, a researcher and former CIA staffer, wrote for The New York Times, the “research suggests that … one key to solving a murder is straightforward: devoting more hours to it, which usually involves more investigators.” Asher also cites John Skaggs, a retired detective for the Los Angeles Police Department—a city not known for stellar police-community relations—saying that “diligence and manpower” are the “most important factors.” Likewise, a “study from Philip Cook, Anthony Braga, Brandon Turchan and Lisa Barao also points to allocation of resources as the most important factor.”
The bottom line: It’s not strained community relations that prevents police departments from solving murders, but rather the failure to prioritize “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.”
This is true when a police department has a high murder clearance rate, but it is especially true when a police department—like Kansas City’s—is letting two-thirds of the city’s murders go unsolved.
3. Police Misconduct Undermining Community Trust:
In Mississippi, “Deputies Accused Of Abusing Black Men Are Fired By Rankin County Sheriff.” For The Associated Press, Michael Goldberg reports on the firing of six Rankin County Sheriff’s deputies accused of “beating [a pair of men], assault[ing] them with a sex toy and shock[ing] them repeatedly with Tasers in a roughly 90-minute period.” One of the men told investigators that one of the deputies “shoved a gun in his mouth and then fired the weapon, leaving him with serious injuries to his face, tongue and jaw.” Here’s more from The Associated Press report:
“[The firing] announcement follows an Associated Press investigation that found several deputies who were involved with the episode were also linked to at least four violent encounters with Black men since 2019 that left two dead and another with lasting injuries… The Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation into the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department after the episode.”
In Virginia, “Indictment: Culpeper County Sheriff Took Bribes For Deputy Appointments.” For ABC news’ local affiliate in Charlottesville, Virginia, Will Gonzalez reports on a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into Culpeper County Sheriff Scott Howard Jenkins who is accused of “accepting bribes totaling at least $72,000 in exchange for deputy assignments in his county.” Here’s more from ABC news:
“[Jenkins is accused of] accepting bribes in the form of cash and campaign contributions from at least eight people, two of whom were undercover FBI agents, since at least April 2019. In return for the bribes, Jenkins offered the sworn law-enforcement position of auxiliary deputy sheriff and issued Culpeper County Sheriff’s Office badges and identification cards, which come with the authority to carry a firearm in all 50 states without a permit…”
In Florida, “Beach Town Cops Use City’s Jail to ‘Discipline’ Toddler For Potty Accidents.” For the The Daytona Beach News-Journal, Mark Harper reports on an internal probe of two Daytona Beach Shores Public Safety Department officers, Lt. Michael Schoenbrod and Sgt. Jessica Long, after they brought their “3½-year-old child having difficulty getting potty trained” into the “Daytona Beach Shores Public Safety Department on successive days… handcuffed [the child] and placed [the boy] in a jail cell [until] the boy promised to never again poop his pants…” Instead of expressing remorse, Lt. Schoenbrod told a Department of Children and Families caseworker that the boy “was crying” and thus “I was getting the response I expected from him.”