The Law Enforcement Officer Thread

Honestly, there are around 60 to 80 thousand active duty LE Os in the São Paulo Military Police, it is pretty hard to get a general perspective, but I work in one of the most violent and crime ridden regions in São Paulo and my perspective is pretty shaped having to live and deal with a region where a sizable chunk of the population has a criminal record, was or is involved with the organized crime and drug use is so common you'd think it was legal.

You also have to consider two things, there are practically two police forces in Brazil, one responsible for the safeguarding of the public peace and order, which is responsible for the Ostensible, Preventive, Uniformed Patrolling which is the Military Police (where I work) and the Civilian Police, which is responsible for the inquires, investigations and forwarding crimes to a judge of law.

To sum it up, the police that patrols needs to present the occurrences of crimes to the deputy and the deputy has to hear the MP, the victim and the perp to write the Police Report that will be sent to the judge, which then will be sent to a judge. The MP has the power to declare the flagrant arrest but the power to actually arrest someone is with the Civilian Police, which doesn't cooperate with the MP very well and more often than not would gladly screw over the members of the MP if they feel like it.

The first reform that is generating its own share of annoyance is the use of body cams. But not for the reasons you'd assume for US cops.

Body cams are a hot topic here because our Police is a military unit in organization and discipline which means a few things: any conduct, no matter how harmless it is, is subjected to a hard and strict military law code and our administrative internal codes are also pervasive. Which is also is made worse because we have a form of prevarication defined as "failing to perform your bound by law obligations for ulterior motives" as a crime being worthy of being expelled.

First off, our cams are going to be recording audio 24/7 and video on critical moments, like dispatches, body and vehicle searches, high risk situations, altercations with civilians and any situation of public or criminal interest.

Which also means, you can easily be recorded doing inane things like, not wearing your head cover (disciplinary punishment), eating outside designated eating schedules, talking shit about the governor, seniors, officers and the president (I know at least 3 cases where disciplinary actions were involved) or tending personal life issues while on duty. It is often joked that you can't even fart without breaching any of the military law or the internal codes due to how strict and extensive they are.

The problem is that a lot of the force, specially those in the patrolling, are afraid that their superiors will use the remote monitoring, audio recording and live streaming to settle scores or gather enough infractions to open disciplinary actions that may or may not result in expulsions. For example I have 1 First Sgt that no one in the company likes and he built a reputation of stepping on everyone else's backs to prop himself up.

For example, if I was caught saying "holy shit, that son of a bitch of a sgt fucked me over again.]" or "the governor is a fucking bastard, he didn't do anything he promised and has only made our lives worse" are both offenses worthy of expulsion.

The biggest issue with prevarication is related to the what the law says, what resources you have and if you have the means to enforce the law. Long story short, the law obliges you to do a lot, but the state doesn't give you the resources and while you have the means, it isn't feasible to enforce the law.

For example, expired vehicle and driver licenses. The latter is a ticket and you can call a licensed driver to drive away the car. The former? You need to retain the car, call in a tow and send it to a apprehension yard. Is the yard full? Not much of an issue, you can ticket the car and declare lack of means. Yard not full and there is a tow? Tough shit, you are going to probably wait 4 to 6 hours on average because it is only one or two tows servicing the region and they can be anywhere within the city. Usually, we'd get in the car, drive towards the company yard and tell the tow to pick it up there, with the cams we can't because technically, the Military Police does not have the authority to seize vehicles outside of criminal or suspicion of criminal offenses for investigative purposes. This means that doing that you are infringing the (very poorly written) Authority Abuse Laws, which again are either military jail or expulsion.

But cars we can manage, the problem are the drug users. In Brazil, being a drug user is still a crime but one no longer punished by jail. You can still be arrested for drug use but not jailed.

The problem? If you ever walked anywhere near the SP slums, city centers, downtown or pretty much anywhere, you will find people smoking weed, or with crack or cocaine in their pockets. And if you search a car or a person and the camera catches the drug or they tell you that they have drugs on them, it is the duty of the LEO to arrest that person. Normally, we would take the drugs from the person, destroy it and tell them to fuck off and stop using that shit in public. With the cameras we have no choice but to conduct them to Civil Police precinct.

How long does it takes? I'd say the average, based on what I had to present and most of my colleagues also do, around 8 to 10 hours, may be longer if the deputy shifts ends and he passes the task to the next one or if there are any other flagrant ahead of you. Why it takes long? Outright sheer bureaucracy. The precincts don't have drug testing units and instead you have to drive somewhere else, usually in the South of SP to do the tests to see which drugs you are seizing, the amount and all the data involved. The process takes around a couple of hours, plus the hours spent driving there. Then you have to drive the perp to a Medical Legal Institute for them to check if the perp isn't hurt and then drive back. Then the deputy has to hear all parts involved, write the report and then give you the arrest receipt. This is just for the drug use, drug trafficking is that and more and worse.

Keep in mind that we do not get paid for overtime, we do not get a day off unless it is over 6 hours of overtime, the optional day off depends if the company commander allows it or not and during the judge hearing you feel like you are the criminal being investigated due how those rulings are conducted, the fact that the judges don't like the MP and the organized crime in Brazil has a lot of judges in their pockets, means that trafficking gets a lot of leeway with judges, to the point it is pretty hard to keep drug dealers and traffickers actually in jail.

And what does that have anything to do with the body cams? If you catch someone doing drugs or finds drugs during an inspection or search and decides not to act on it because the workload is simply not worth the effort on a crime that doesn't result in prison. You can be expelled from the force.

Another sore point is the work schedule and the pay.

Most of the patrolling forces work on a 12/36 work/rest hours with a 40min break for eating. Might look good but it is really shitty. First your private life is on a tight schedule and depending on where you work you waste a lot of time in transit. And if you work on the night shift from 17h00 t0 05h00, it will wreck your health.

The administration works 5 days with 8 hours work schedules with 2 hours break, but earns around 300 to 400$ less due to the reduced work hours.

Specialized units can work different hours depending of the mode but they get a long and a short week with the 7 days being slit between one week with 3 days of work and 4 of rest and the other with 4 work and 3 rest days.

I guess you can figure out that for the patrol, life is pretty tough. Specially the night shift. For example I am over a year on the night shift and my health is taking a heavy hit, due to the lack of sun exposure, poor sleep schedule, not having many healthy eating options and having to sleep during most of the day and spend most of the night awake.

It wouldn't be so bad if the pay wasn't shit. Surely is very above the average income in Brazil, but that is because the average income is pretty low and SP is one of the most expensive states to live in.

I live alone in a 24sqm studio and sometimes even I had months where I almost ran out of money due to unpredictable expenses and I see colleagues having to sustain their families with their salary. Which isn't enough so they have to work extra ours in security unregistered because it is forbidden by law (but the only business that hires off duty LE Os) and being a LEO excludes you from all other lines of work with the exception of musician, teacher and medic. Or spend 8 hours in the Delegated Extra Activity paid by the city's administration. Which depending on the person, means you can work nearly the entire month non-stop.

For one, work hours and pay could improve.

The work schedule could very well follow a 8/40 schedule with instead of 2 platoons with 12 hours shifts, 3 platoons with 8 hours shifts covering the 24h patrolling schedules.

A pay increase with overtime, night shift compensation and higher hazard pay would be welcome as well.

, Thanks, this made for very fascinating and informative reading

For a general reform. The best thing that could happen would have to change the Brazilian constitution.

Because the constitution forced the separation of the state police forces into the Civil Police and Military Police, there are a lot of conflicts being created from this separation and the Military Police being an auxiliary arm of the nation Military Forces, takes away a lot of rights the M Ps have that other civilian institutes have for granted. For example we can't perform strikes or public demonstrations demanding better work conditions and higher pay.

Our military law is entirely built around crimes committed during active deployment, inside military ground or during training. It translates horribly towards an institution that is in the middle of the civil society and needs flexibility to deal with the daily troubles we have to handle.

With the caveat that the burden of the proof being in the defendant not the accuser. And since the military jail system actually works and we don't get to use the habeas corpus, you can be in jail for 6 months to a year until you prove you are innocent.

There should be a lot of reforms in the Brazilian Police forces, but there is no political will to do so, specially when it is politically feasible to lay the blame on the public security issues on the shoulders of the Military Police and use it as a scapegoat.

The cameras reduced the police lethality to next to zero in a lot of regions. With the argument that "criminals would be afraid of being id'ed, so they wouldn't act", but the reality is that the MP outright quit confronting the criminal elements and basically just stopped policing the areas that they will encounter trouble and just stick to safer areas.

The results are pretty for the politicians who like to claim that they have the least deadly police force in Brazil, but what they don't mention is that in the regions where the cameras have been implemented, armed robberies and theft increased by a quarter of their original values and fist degree murder and murder succeeded or preceded by robberies increased by a third and domestic violence outright sky rocketed. Data I got with the people working for the regional operations command organization.

Our laws are pretty backwards and pretty confusing as well. Our sentencing execution laws and criminal process laws are a mess. To the point you can arrest the same person for theft and robbery multiple times a year because a mistake has been made and the arrest has been relaxed or that the judge decided that the sentence can be carried in limited liberty. Which predictably means that the perps will go back to the streets, continue to do crime or just slip under the grid and never answer for their crimes.

Your point of being penalized for talking shit about the governor, seniors, officers and the president reminded of something kinda similar happening in my country, Indonesia, a few years ago. A military officer (I forgot his rank) got demoted because his wife talked shit about the president in facebook or twitter (I forget again). The reason given is how can he be trusted to lead soldiers if he can't lead his family because everyone know that a father must treat his family like it's a fucking military unit. While I don't like that dude's wife's shit-talking and the reason behind it, I disagree with this punishment because that is just not right in a democratic nation and society.

The situations in Brazil and USA is different, so different results are expected I guess. It is funny that a lot of gung-ho USA police officers use South America and treat their neighborhood like it is in South America to justify their militarism.

Edited by SteamKnight on Apr 27th 2022 at 4:36:57 PM

For misconducts, well. I got the reputation of being a mix of being not very good with lying and being bluntly honest and I am pretty socially unskilled. So if there are anyone doing any serious misconducts as in outright criminal acts, they aren't including me because they are sure I'd spill all out and I am not remotely interested in entering either due to self preservation and outright hatred towards this kind of conduct.

I have a list of people I don't associate myself with because I know they have a reputation of being dirty. Most of them old timers, since the recruits really don't have the connections and are too scared to get into that shit on their own, if they plan to be dirty, though our internal affairs is pretty good at stamping our crooked cops.

For other types of misconducts, the most I've seen is related to physical violence. Like slapping faces or punching the stomachs of disrespectful people, specially the ones we know are involved with criminal organizations.

On my part, I've been extra rough in body searches with non compliant people in order to put them in line for the police diligence required, but nothing outright overt like punching and slapping. Mostly because I know there are cameras everywhere and recordings of M Ps beating people can be sold by the people recording.

I work in the Battalion with the highest police lethality rate in SP, but the area my Company works had almost zero lethality for two years, if not for a case of a reformed Military Police officer who went crazy, murdered his father and mother and essentially committed suicide by cop. My unit has come close of killing someone a few times, but we managed to negotiate or use less than lethal methods and prevent the loss of life.

What is a technical misconduct and practically process fraud, I do see often, is the Lt or the Sgt witnessing a crime and arresting the perp, but tasking their subordinates with presenting and conducting the arrest. Mostly due to the benefit of the service, because the Lt and the Sgt have the only long guns in the area and they are tasked with supervising the troops and providing critical support, so they don't want to spend too much time away from their areas in case they are needed.

Honestly all the misconducts I've seen are disciplinary, like not sticking to your designated patrol routes, shit talking officers, not attending the dress code, being responsible for damaging or breaking the patrol cars (though those are hardly in working conditions) or outright internal drama and power plays.

There is also the being late or missing work, which I did that once out of confusion with my schedule, earned my two months of sheer stress because I could have been expelled anyone else decided to follow through the the procedure.

They use Rio de Janeiro for that. Which is a bad example because RJ could easily be considered a low intensity war on its own right and Brazil is big, it varies a lot from state to state. São Paulo for example is obsessed with being the "exemplary" force with low lethality and low abuse. The problem being that SP is just slight less violent than Rio de Janeiro but the main difference is that there is one large criminal organization the PCC, while Rio has multiple cartels and militias actively fighting to control the slums.

Wanna see the point to the commitment to low lethality? The Battalion commander had a reunion with all the Companies this week, the message? If you kill anyone, even if it is a legit kill without any "hoops". You are going to have your life messed around.

Paraphrasing him: "I am not saying don't kill criminals if your life is at risk. If you have to shoot then shoot, it is better for their mothers to cry than yours, but expect that there will be consequences that will affect your work hours and pay".

I also should act that our units expect a certain quota of body and vehicle searches, with the clear intent of sending a clear message: we are in the area, we are putting pressure on people to stay in line, we are watching around, don't start anything!".

I am fairly conflicted with the body searches, known as stop and frisk, being used in the US to harass minorities. But here vehicle and body searches also are co-related with a noticeable decrease in criminal activity. Under the logic that a patrol car with their highlights on driving by, for the criminals just means they have to merely wait out for it to pass by for them to commit the crime. Meanwhile a the police stopping and conducting searches on suspicious people or performing routine vehicle inspections, sends a clear message that if they have anything illegal or the intent of committing crimes, they will most likely to be caught. So they either don't act or leave for another place.

Edited by AngelusNox on Apr 27th 2022 at 7:00:55 AM

Different methods work for different countries as always. Local conditions vary all around the world.

Edited by TheWildWestPyro on Apr 27th 2022 at 3:54:10 AM

These cases are not as prevalent in Germany as they are in the US, but unfortunately, this time it happened:

A man who escaped from a Mental Health Institute was killed during arrest, after receiving hits to the head

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/german-authorities-probing-mans-death-police-check-84467967

Dear TV Tropes, this week I learned that subduing a 300pd man drugged out of his mind with a psychotic breakdown is insanely hard, that pepper spray really doesn't work on people who are as high as a T-72 turret after being hit by a Javelin, that electroshock contact mode on Tasers aren't remotely effective in obese people because the fat can shield the nerves, that if you are fat and large enough you will need two handcuffs because one is too small to restrain both arms and that medical care will take their sweet ass time to get where they are needed by the police can get there under 4 minutes...

Also, after this a small rope is now a mandatory gear I carry on my backpack because even if you still immobilize someone's arms, you can still get kicked.

Another also. No lethal force needed.

Edited by AngelusNox on May 12th 2022 at 3:24:03 PM

Good job. Sorry that sounded like a bit of a rough subdual especially if you had to do it solo.

Not solo, specially because our doctrine forbids doing this type of stuff without support.

But it took 6 people to restraint him and 3 to keep him restrained until EMT arrived.

Edited by AngelusNox on May 12th 2022 at 3:18:24 PM

Oofta. That was quite the struggle.

Also got egged this week, it just hit the patrol car but it was still an annoying experience specially when my partner stopped near the apartment complex of a colleague to take some of the home crafted goods his wife does.

Wow, that really sucks. Cleaning cars are never fun. I hope those eggs aren't rotten at least.

BTW, I think you should note all of those stuff. Who knows maybe one day in the future you are able to turn your notes into some sort of autobiographical works like The Daily Lives of a Policeman in São Paulo.

That's prime "The Moth" storytelling material right there.

Reading your posts about what you go through as a police officer is really fascinating Nox.

I admit, I've been among those who haven't exactly been empathetic to them lately (the fact that, as a black man, I have to worry about when I'll experience what so many others have doesn't help), but when I read your anecdotes, it kinda helps a lot in seeing the difficulties police officers must deal with. Difficulties that have probably grown much worse, what with the increased scrutiny police as a whole must be suffering in these last two or so years.

I think you really should make some memoirs sometime. It might be a good way to help smooth things out.

I'm more impressed that you actually had the sound of mind to escalate by proportion of force and actually use every tool on your belt except your handgun.

While American cops do have a tendency to draw their handguns as a first-resort, there's also the issue of the news media not reporting on the much more frequent instances of police not drawing their guns because that doesn't lead to headlines with millions of clicks and views.

While that statement may technically be correct, I'm not sure it reflects the situation accurately. Most police officers in the US will go their entire careers without ever firing their service weapon, or even drawing it more than a handful of times. The vast majority of what police do involves "empty hand" tactics, verbal commands, and OC spray.

As noted in exhibit 4–1, the most frequent weapon used by the police was some form of a chemical agent, mostly oleoresin capsicum; it was used in 88 or 1.2 percent of the arrests in this study. The second most frequent weapon was the flashlight, used in 41 (0.5 percent) arrests. Handguns were used by the police in 11 (0.1 percent) arrests; rifles or shotguns were used by the police in 7 (0.1 percent) of the arrests (no officer reported that such use involved discharge of a firearm).[1]

Now, the question of whether police in the US are drawing their guns more than police in other countries can be fairly easily answered. Even at that low rate, US police draw and fire guns more often than police in other developed nations. However, there's an additional factor at play here: there are a lot more armed people in the US than in other countries. Police in the US shoot about 1000 people every year, and of that 100 about 500-600 are armed when they're shot. [2]

Most of what police do in the US is very similar to what Angelus is describing above. Speaking from my own experience, the similarities are pretty incredible. Obviously any death is a tragedy, and it's a fact that there are notable racial biases in the US criminal justice system, but US police really aren't uniquely bad or murderous compared to those in other countries.

I wonder how many of that unarmed 400-500 people were believed to be armed when officers shot them? The high number of firearms in the US is going to be why “I thought he had a gun” happens as often as it does, because that thought isn’t as baseless as it would be in other countries.

I’d also be curious as to how often different countries police deploy firearms when encountering armed individuals. Does the proliferation of guns make US police more or less likely to shoot when they encounter someone with a gun?

I have a video on Whatsapp of a robbery in progress where the perp got fatally shot after pulling an airsoft gun out of his waistline, after being ordered to put his hands over his head and lay down.

Instead he pulled the airsoft gun and got a handful of lead injections.

A few others were some unarmed idiots lunged towards a LEO and got shot after disobeying multiple stop and desist orders and a lot of knife attacks where force escalation went to shit because even the taser is next to useless when someone is sprinting towards you with a knife.

It was legit, but we also got a prelection over how perps are still stupid enough to draw a fake gun and in the split second you don't have enough time to figure out if it is real or not.

About the force escalation, fire arm injuries and lethal force are pretty scrutinized and firing your gun here usually results in pretty heavy legal and administrative problems, even when other weapons being used by criminal elements or disturbed individuals are involved.

Edited by AngelusNox on May 16th 2022 at 5:07:18 AM

Mentally I count imitation firearms as firearms, the same way if police shoot someone with a fake suicide vest you don’t generally say that they shot an unarmed person.

I was thinking more the actual mistaken cases. So the situations where police shoot someone because they thought they were reaching for a gun that didn’t even exist.

Edited by Silasw on May 16th 2022 at 9:23:41 AM

Daniel Shaver, a white man, was shot multiple times after he tried to pull up his gym shorts since they were slipping down from the confusing physical actions a cop was ordering him to perform. The police claimed that they mistook this action for attempting to reach a handgun.

Edited by FluffyMcChicken on May 16th 2022 at 1:52:17 AM

Oh I’m sure we could find a couple dozen specific cases, I was more wondering how they fit into the actual measured statistics.

There's not a ton of data available on that particular topic, but several major metro areas have made their shooting data available for researchers. The results suggest that "intentional error" shootings make up about 10-20% of police shootings:

In these situations, a non-dangerous person was shot in error, sometimes referred to as cell-phone shootings, mistake-of-fact shootings, and perception-only shootings. They note statistics from Los Angeles and Philadelphia that between 2013 and 2017, 14% and 10% respectively, of police shootings involved this type of error. [1]

Unfortunately I'm not sure if there's data of the same nature available for non-US police departments to compare this to. One would obviously expect this type of error to be more common in the US, though.

The best part from that article is the cop basically saying "I shot him because he crawled towards me after he was asked to."

I'm reminded of a similar incident where someone being questioned by cops got shot purely because the two cops were giving him different orders (one saying sit down, the other stand up).

Do cops just think they're being funny? Cause they're not...