International Association Assessing the Police Dept. (2017)
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The Long Beach Police Department (LBPD) held two public sessions this past week in which residents were invited to provide input for an independent assessment of police operations being conducted by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP).
We attended the Aug. 2, meeting at Long Beach City College and congratulated the LBPD for having the courage to expose the department – and the city – to the needed reform possibilities that will hopefully come from this kind of evaluation.
We then offered our comments and recommendations in four key areas of police operations based upon personal observations and investigations that have been published in Beachcomber columns over the past five years.
They follow here:
Use of Deadly Force PolicyThe City of Long Beach has paid out tens of millions in civil claims over use of excessive force lawsuits, especially those involving the taking of human life in officer involved shootings (OIS).
Policy statements on use of force provide the beginning, middle and end for training, tactical, administrative, and evaluative and adjudication processes associated with officer-involved shootings.
Most modern police agencies have publicly published Use of Force Policies grounded in principles that recognize a reverence for human life and state that the taking of a human life shall be at last resort.
For example, the LAPD publicly expresses its core values on this subject with the statement, “Every operation embarked upon by the department, regardless of mission, shall never compromise the indisputable pinnacle of objectives – the reverence for human life.”
The IACP’s Use of Force Model Policy states in part “officers use only the force that is reasonably necessary to effectively bring an incident under control, while protecting lives of the officer and others.”
The LBPD policy – which is not published on the department’s website – states that “officers have the duty to use firearms whenever the necessity exists to protect their lives or the lives of others” – a statement that precludes the use of tactical or less-than-lethal alternatives with no reference to reverence for the value of human life or its taking as a last resort.
It is also known that LBPD training and administrative philosophy is steeped in the discredited “junk science” preached by Dr. Bill Lewinski and his Force Science Institute.
