Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Were the Cop Killings Bound to Happen?
Law Enforcement & Crime / People / Politics Robert Gammon — Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 11:29 AM
As more information is revealed in the shooting deaths of four Oakland cops, it's starting to become clear that the tragic incident was emblematic of a police department that's badly off track. There's even an argument to be made that Saturday's bloodbath, or something similar to it, was bound to happen. The root problem is that OPD's crime-fighting culture is ass backwards. For years now, the department has been obsessed with suppressing crime, and no longer makes solving crimes a top priority. This unfortunate shift not only has resulted in a dramatic increase in crime in recent years, but there's convincing evidence that it ultimately led to last weekend's unnecessary deaths.
Let's review what's been reported so far. At the time of the shootings, Lovelle Mixon, a 26-year-old ex-felon, was wanted on a no-bail warrant for violating his parole. Yet Oakland police had detained him in the days before the killings, and then let him go free. Why? Sources told the Chronicle that he gave a false name and so they didn't know who he was. If that were not bad enough, it's now clear that police didn't really need to know his name at the time to arrest him. The reason is that they were in possession of a sketch that investigators now say was a "pretty dead-on" resemblance to Mixon. The sketch was created with the help of a 12-year-old girl whom Mixon allegedly raped earlier this year. Nonetheless, police gave Mixon a free pass. And then finally, on the day before the killings, police got a positive DNA match that linked Mixon to the brutal rape of the girl. However, nothing was done, because there was already the no-bail warrant for Mixon's arrest and the lead investigator in the rape case went home.
In other words, police arguably had several chances to grab Mixon before Saturday. If they had, the tragic killings could have been avoided. But solving crimes just isn't something the department does well anymore. It's no longer in its culture. As this newspaper and others have documented, Oakland police have had for many years the worst record of solving violent crimes of any large city police department in California. It didn't always used to be that way. In the mid and late 1990s, the department's record for solving crimes was quite good. Not surprisingly, that era was followed by historically low crime levels. But then after the department turned away from solving crimes to suppressing them - targeting "hotspots" with the security-guard approach to policing - crimes shot up dramatically.
How bad has it gotten? Let's look at rape. From 2005 through 2007 (the last year in which complete data is available on crime solving), there were 911 reported rapes in Oakland. Police, however, solved just 86 of them, or 9.4 percent, according to stats from the state Department of Justice. In short, more than 90 percent of the rapes that occurred in the city - not counting all the rapes that were never reported - went unsolved in the last three years. The rapists literally got away with it over and over again. In that context, it's not surprising that police would allow someone like Mixon to slip threw their fingers. That's what happens in Oakland.
So if OPD has abandoned good old fashioned detective work, how's the crime suppression, the cracking down on bad guys, working out? Well, it may have led to more bloodshed last Saturday. From all indications so far, it looks like OPD brass acted rashly when they ordered the department's SWAT team to storm the apartment Mixon was hiding in. By then, it was too late to save two of the officers - they were already dead. But police might have avoided three more deaths if they stepped back, taken a breath, and found a way to solve the problem. Instead, without knowing what was going on inside that apartment, they sent in the SWAT team, which broke down the door, and tossed in some shock grenades, prompting Mixon to open fire and kill two more cops, before cops killed him.
Comments (4)
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Now that the hype and hoopla has died down. We ought to ask "Forensic Files" to come to Oakland and conduct the investigation to find out what the odds are of one man killing four police officers and wounding one in two different locations. What are the odds of that happening??? What does that look like? Help me out here.
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"There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do do not want to lose their jobs." --Booker T. Washington
If the cops waited and Mixon blasted a couple civilians in the building the author would be blaming the cops, there is no wrong answer with people from the either extreme.
Also the reason crimes do not get solved in the crappy parts of town is that 1. the honest witnesses are scared of the animals getting revenge on them 2. the "don't snitch" mentality of the people that live there. The cops can not solve crimes when the people who witness them will not talk to the cops. The entire article was nonsensical.
Its time liberal low life's to stop "blaming the victim"
You keep trying to make this Oakland PD's fault. NYTs reported cousin Jermaine Mixon as eyewitnessing parolee Lovell Mixon with a handgun weeks earlier. Had Jermaine been law-abiding, Lovell Mixon would have been picked off quietly by properly alerted police long before the current police shootings. Cousin Jermaine also knew Mixon was pimping, a career which requires repeated rapes to condition unwilling females to prostitute unpaid for the pimp's profiting. No further crimes were needed to get Lovell off the streets back then. Uncle Mixon was on the cellphone with Lovell seconds before the first cops were gunned down. Sister Mixon was in the apartment with Lovell for two hours as police combed the blocks around the murders looking for him. Various Mixons knew about the assault rifle and guns available to Lovell. The fault is in the criminals and in their support group, not in the police and their support group. Try to get it straight.
Now you have some facts wrong above. A small percentage of people does the majority of the crimes. 90% of the rapes didn't get solved (yet), but 10% of them did, and that 10% involved the same rapists who did most of the other 90%. Rapists got caught and went to prison even though many of their other rapes were not solved or pinned on them. Lovell was suspected in five rapes but did who knows how many others not yet connected to him? Lovell's rapes got "solved" regardless of what the statistics say -- he won't be raping again any time soon, will he?
Support the police and then they can get the Lovell Mixons off the streets without gunplay. The man should have been wearing a cellphone-GPS ankle-bracelet 24/7 every second of his parole. He should have paid for it himself, not the taxpayers. It's not the OPD's fault he wasn't wearing one -- it's YOUR FAULT, for not mobilizing the public to make him wear one. You are the one who chose media as a career, so do your job and get the violence out the system by supporting the police earlier in the process, where it's non-violent. You waited until it blew up and you participated in delaying the non-violent solution which could have avoided violence. Look in the mirror, Mixon-supporter, and admit that it's your fault that five people died.
The issue is not cops & robbers, blacks v whites: the issue is that there is one sociopath like Lovell Mixon to every two dozen of the rest of us. Sometimes the sociopaths are wearing badges and sometimes they are shooting at badges but the total percentages never change, 4% conscienceless killers and 96% of us. It takes an iron fist to control the sociopaths, but heaven help us when the sociopaths control the iron fist (as in Mao, Stalin, Saddam, Cheney). Sociopaths who happen to be employed in the place where they can do the most mischief as newsmedia would like to fuzz up the issues so that sociopathy is not discriminated out, but hyper discrimination is exactly what is needed. There are sociopaths who need weeding out of OPD and there are sociopaths needed to be ripped out of the civilian neighborhoods. Let's not paint entire social groups as bad when every social group has its own 4% to deal with. Even 4% of newsmen are psycho nuts.
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