WEEKLY MATERIALS -- SLIDE SHOWS UPDATED EACH WEEK
Week 1 - Development of American policing
Weeks 2 & 3 - Police role and subculture
Police Issues Oakland: How Could it Happen? Kicking a Suspect When Hard Heads Collide
COPS: Caught in the Act Clips 2 ("Narcotics Activity") and 3 ("Fast and Stupid")
Week 4 - Selection and training
Slide show Forming police behavior
LASD academy problems: OIR Report LASD hiring standards problems: OIR report
"The Academy" Season Two: "Black Monday"
Police Issues Resources, Selection & Training: Sheriff Baca's Police Academy
What Should it Take to be Hired
Police Issues posting on Compstat: Liars Figure
Police Issues postings on Mike Carona, OCSD: Carona Five, Feds One Mission Not Accomplished
Accountability? Not if You're a Sheriff
Weeks 9 & 11 - Policing paradigms
Police Issues Strategy & Tactics
Chicago PD Community Policing & Problem-Solving program - evaluation
Weeks 12 & 13 - Special Problems
Police Issues: Strategy & Tactics Terrorism
1976 Church Committee on domestic spying abuses: COINTELPRO: Report Statements and testimony
Extract
"COINTELPRO is the FBI acronym for a series of covert action programs directed against domestic groups. In these programs, the Bureau went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action defined to "disrupt" and "neutralize" target groups and individuals. The techniques were adopted wholesale from wartime counterintelligence, and ranged from the trivial (mailing reprints of Reader's Digest articles to college administrators) to the degrading (sending anonymous poison-pen letters intended to break up marriages) and the dangerous (encouraging gang warfare and falsely labeling members of a violent group as police informers).
This report is based on a staff study of more than 20,000 pages of Bureau documents, depositions of many of the Bureau agents involved in the programs, and interviews of several COINTELPRO targets. The examples selected for discussion necessarily represent a small percentage of the more than 2,000 approved COINTELPRO actions. Nevertheless, the cases demonstrate the consequences of a Government agency's decision to take the law into its own hands for the "greater good" of the country.
COINTELPRO began in 1956, in part because of frustration with Supreme Court rulings limiting the Government's power to proceed overtly against dissident groups; it ended in 1971 with the threat of public exposure. 1 In the intervening 15 years, the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.
Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that. The unexpressed major premise of the programs was that a law enforcement agency has the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order."
Week 14 - Ethics, Accountability & Misconduct
Ethics, Accountability & Misconduct slide show
Police Issues Resources, Selection & Training: At Least They're Consistently Lousy
Police Issues Conduct & Ethics: What Does it Take to Get Fired?
Ex-Commish Leaves Carona in the Dust Accountability? Not if You're a Sheriff
Rampart scandal
Articles, etc.: Frontline report New Yorker magazine article Perez transcripts
LAPD: Board of Inquiry - report OIG homepage LAPD website
LAPD Independent Review Panel: Full report
LAPD/US Dept. of Justice: Consent Decree homepage
Weeks 15 & 16 - Use of Force
Ethics, Accountability & Misconduct slide show
Police Issues Use of Force