Democracy for Vancouver

how many students can you taser in a day?
how many wrists can you break in 24 hrs?
how many guns can you plant…?

Participating in sports such as football, weightlifting and boxing has long been part of the culture within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. But deputies have recently been playing some new games — on-duty enforcement competitions that have police watchers across the country crying foul.

One recent competition, described in an internal Sheriff’s Department e-mail obtained by The Times, was called “Operation Any Booking.” The object was to arrest as many people as possible within a specific 24-hour period.

Other one-day competitions have included “Operation Vehicle Impound,” a contest aimed at seizing as many cars as possible. And another challenged deputies to see how many gang members and other suspected criminals could be stopped and questioned.

The prize for winning was nothing more than “bragging rights,” said Lt. James Tatreau, who helped organize the events that involved teams of deputies patrolling the southeast Los Angeles cities of Lakewood, Bellflower, Paramount, Artesia and Hawaiian Gardens. The station is one of 23 that make up the nation’s largest sheriff’s department.

“It’s just a friendly competition to have a little fun out here,” Tatreau said. It was Tatreau who sent the e-mail about the booking contest Aug. 15. Tatreau said he viewed the games, which began in July, as a morale booster for overworked deputies who, because of staffing shortages, are required to work four overtime shifts a month.

But police accountability experts, civil libertarians and defense attorneys condemned the practice, saying that it trivialized traumatic encounters such as arrests and having a car impounded, and raised questions about deputies’ motives in taking such actions.
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“We’re not doing anything wrong,” Tatreau said. “No way, no how did anyone encourage officers to falsify a report or an arrest.”

But you did encourage them to think of arrests as points, and arrestees as quarry in a game. And that’s not funny, that’s sick.

There is a growing culture of impunity among police officers and rentacops; maybe the real impact of the Rudy Giuliani/9-11 synthesis is the spread of Rudy’s policing policies across the country.

[emphasis added.]