Big cities throughout California continue to be roiled by police issues. Oakland and San Francisco have gotten the most attention because of high-profile

But the two iconic Bay Area cities are hardly alone in having police problems.

In Sacramento, last month’s release of a video showing officers’ July 11 killing of Joseph Mann, a mentally ill African American who was carrying a knife, has shaken public faith in the Police Department. The agency refused to provide the video or to offer key details about the incident until forced to by the Sacramento Bee’s release of a surveillance video on Sept. 20. It was revealed that before officers shot Mann 14 times, they tried to run him over, though he appeared no immediate threat to anyone.

A casualty of the controversy may be the Sacramento Community Police Commission, which formed last year partly in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Last week, the chairman of the commission — Sacramento pastor Les Simmons — abruptly resigned. At a press conference, he said the commission’s lack of authority to subpoena witnesses and conduct independent investigations left him feeling he was “not being relevant and true to my community.” The panel is essentially a city advisory body.

Days before the Bee released the video, Sacramento Police Chief Sam Somers Jr. announced he was retiring in December, when new Mayor Darrell Steinberg takes office. Somers insisted his decision was unrelated to his officers’ fatal shooting of Mann. But the Sacramento Bee reported that Somers wasn’t comfortable with the new era in which police are routinely called on to defend and justify their actions.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Police Commission — which has the level of authority that Simmons wants in Sacramento — has broken with Police Chief Charlie Beck over two police killings in 2015. On Sept. 20, a near-unanimous board ruled that both cases violated LAPD’s use-of-force guidelines. In one case, James Joseph Byrd — a 45-year-old white man with a history of mental illness — was shot to death after throwing a beer bottle that hit a police car. In the other, Norma Guzman — a 37-year-old Latina with a history of mental illness — was shot to death while brandishing a knife and approaching officers.

Beck offered a particularly vigorous defense of his officers’ handling of the Guzman case. But commissioners — and members of the public — repeatedly questioned why officers didn’t use a Taser to subdue the woman.

L.A. officers must ‘choose your life or your job’

This drew a fierce counterattack from the LAPD union, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, on its website:

Run away. If a police officer is confronted by a suspect with a weapon, those entrusted to set policies for the Police Department believe officers should run away. That’s the recent finding from the Los Angeles Police Commission which has turned Monday morning quarterbacking into a weekly agenda item at the three-ring circus they preside over every Tuesday morning. …

The Commission is becoming nothing more than a politically motivated rubber stamp for the warped worldview of a handful of activists that they pander to. …

The message the Los Angeles Police Commission is sending to officers confronted with a violent and dangerous suspect is clear: You can save your life or save your job, but you cannot do both. You choose.

The Police Commission dismissed the union criticism and followed up last week by approving new policies meant to reduce civilian deaths and to promote transparency. The policies require significantly more information to be released about shootings involving officers; an increased emphasis on role-playing training using “real world” scenarios; and regular evaluations of how serious incidents that don’t end in tragedy are handled to develop a best-practices approach to scaling down confrontations with individuals.

Commissioner Steve Soboroff — the only member to side with Chief Beck and defend the fatal shootings of Boyd and Guzman — joined in the unanimous vote to force changes on the LAPD.

The first of the policies was Gov. Jerry Brown’s 2011 decision to “realign” the corrections system and shift 30,000 prisoners from state institutions to county jails. With many county facilities as overcrowded as state prisons, this led to an estimated release of 18,000 people who were incarcerated in California. The second was state voters’ 2014 approval of Proposition 47, which reclassified some drug and property crime offenses from felonies to misdemeanors, which also led to more convicted criminals avoiding getting locked up. It was strongly supported by the governor.

What’s been the effect? That is a crucial question, given that California’s violent crime rate jumped significantly in the first half of 2015. In California’s 68 cities with populations of 100,000 or more, violent crime increased by 11 percent, according to statistics compiled by the FBI.

This suggests that “realignment” and Prop. 47 might have a cumulative effect. A December 2013 report by the Public Policy Institute of California downplayed any link between a smaller increase in violent crime in 2011 and 2012 and the effects of “realignment”:

We find that California’s crime rates increased between 2011 and 2012 — violent crime went up 3.4 percent and property crime went up 7.6 percent. These rates vary widely across the state, with California’s 10 largest counties generally seeing greater increases in crime than in the state overall. However, despite this pattern of increase, crime rates remain at historically low levels in California today.

 

How does realignment relate to the recent uptick in crime? Our analysis of violent crime finds no evidence that realignment has had an effect on the most serious offenses, murder and rape. The evidence on robbery is more uncertain, with a possible indication of a modest increase related to realignment. California’s overall increases in violent crime between 2011 and 2012 appear to be part of a broader upward trend also experienced in other states.

Did reducing felonies help ‘the crooks win’?

Now, 17 months after Proposition 47’s adoption, opinions are beginning to harden on its effects.

In November, Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell depicted the initiative as a well-intentioned failure. And on PoliceOne.com, a website on police issues, a December opinion piece declared “the crooks won.”

Inmates are fans of Prop. 47 because it keeps them out of jail, allowing them to keep using illegal drugs and keep committing crime. Even if they miss their court date (which in turn gives them a warrant), inmates know the crimes and the misdemeanor warrants will not keep them locked up long. Inmates view misdemeanors as “not a big deal” and shrug their shoulders. It does not matter that there are hardworking citizens who are being victimized. Criminals usually never show remorse or empathy for their victims. Criminals have a great way of decriminalizing and minimizing their crimes. With Prop. 47, the state and the criminals both are doing just that.

But William Lansdowne, a veteran California police chief, strongly challenges this assessment in an op-ed posted Thursday by the San Francisco Chronicle:

Since Prop. 47 passed, critics have tried to scapegoat it for a rise in crime, but there’s no evidence proving such an assertion. As the former police chief for San Diego, San Jose and Richmond, I know all too well that every shift in crime must be addressed. There is nothing more important than public safety. But in paying close attention, we need to be honest about the facts and avoid misleading the public.

‘The studies are not done and the results aren’t in’

Others suggest that both McDonnell and Lansdown are too quick to draw conclusions:

Keramet Reiter, a criminology professor at UC Irvine, said the ballot measure has been used by critics as a “convenient scapegoat” for the rise in crime. The reality, she said, is more complicated in a state that is undergoing broad changes to its criminal justice system, including a massive shift of inmates from state prisons to local jails.

 

The Los Angeles Police Department has reported a double-digit increase in property crime so far this year, but Chief Charlie Beck said it is premature to fault Proposition 47.

 

“The studies are not done and the results aren’t in,” Beck said.

That is from a November Los Angeles Times report.

The rise of Big Data has led to many changes in policing strategies in recent years, most notably in New York City, where the NYPD uses algorithms to predict likely trouble spots. But big-think arguments over why crime has gone down sharply over the last 25 year have actually gotten more complex, not less. Last year, Vox detailed 16 different theories explaining the phenomenon.

Los Angeles’ police department isn’t alone in leaning hard on the use of data. Over the past several years, law enforcement officers around the country have turned to numbers-crunching to help solve — and even prevent — crime. From Washington on down to the municipal level, the trend has been clear.

The idea is simple: Collecting large amounts of information can aid the Department of Homeland Security and a small-town police department alike. Powerful conclusions can be drawn from data compiled from crime reports, emergency calls and the like.

But as L.A.’s experience shows, there are perils. First, human error can slip by undetected, causing cities and citizens to put misplaced confidence in numbers and trends.

Second, more deliberate “mistakes” can be made, fostering a kind of false confidence with potentially damaging consequences.

Third, cities and police forces themselves can fall into patterns of misconduct that good-looking data is used tacitly to justify.

All three of these problems have worked their way into the LAPD’s use of big data.

Misclassified crimes

In a bombshell story, The Los Angeles Times revealed the results of an exhaustive report into misuse of data on the force. From Sept. 2012 to Sept. 2013, L.A. cops “misclassified nearly 1,200 violent crimes” that included “stabbings, beatings and robberies.”

In fact, almost “all the misclassified crimes were actually aggravated assaults” that wound up “recorded as minor offenses.” The result? The crimes “did not appear in the LAPD’s published statistics on serious crime,” which “officials and the public use to judge the department’s performance.”

In interviews, current and retired police officers gave the Times two different explanations for the systematic discrepancies. Some said they were merely “inadvertent.” For others, however, “the problem stemmed from relentless, top-down pressure to meet crime reduction goals.”

As the Times explained, top cops “set statistical goals” for crime reduction at the beginning of every year. That overarching plan leads to the creation of smaller, but just as data-driven, objectives. “As part of that process, the department’s 21 divisions are given numerical targets for serious crimes each month.”

Instead of taking the emotion and uncertainty out of reducing crime, however, at least one source suggested the opposite began to happen. Since the numbers became paramount, opportunities arose to use terminology to change what it was the numbers indicated. Crime could appear to decrease, not by pushing the numbers down, but by altering the classifications that made sense of the numbers.

Official reaction

Initially, the LAPD balked at the Times’ report. Officers had already been pulled into a controversy by the Daily News, which recently questioned city murder statistics. The Daily News wanted to know why the LAPD had reported such low rates of crime-solving. (Chief Beck had gone on record saying cops had solved substantially more murders than reported to federal and state authorities.)

After first promising to “open up the books,” Deputy Chief Kirk Albanese backtracked, claiming the LAPD’s inspector general, Alex Bustamante, would dig into the matter and publicly present his findings to the Police Commission.

Bustamante confirmed he would be reviewing that matter. But he also announced he would lead an investigation into several years of statistics to shed light on the misclassifications of crime that Times report had uncovered.

That includes a full investigation into COMPSTAT, the centerpiece of the LAPD’s big data program. Bustamante told the Daily News that he’d far exceed the scope and detail of the Times investigation, in a “much more expansive” look at “thousands and thousands” of cases.

In the event that wrongdoing is found, the LAPD has indicated those responsible will be disciplined. A larger question remains, however. If big data-driven policing is here to stay, what steps must be taken by officials to restore the trust of Angelenos and their elected representatives?