We’ve got a story about how noted speculator Dennis Kefallinos quit paying taxes on the Civic Theater, sending it into tax foreclosure. At auction, the winning bidder turned out to be his daughter, Dionysia Kefallinos. 

Dennis himself continues to bid at the annual tax auction — openly violating Wayne County’s own rules. But what’s rich is that Dennis could theoretically file a claim for the county’s profits on the Civic Theater sale. While his business manager said that hasn’t happened, the situation raises important questions about who benefits from this system. 

Plus, three months after going on strike, employees at Marathon Petroleum’s refinery in Southwest Detroit reached a deal with the oil giant and ratified a seven-year agreement. The contract includes wage increases and maintains employee health care and pensions. 

In other news, the city reached a $30,000 settlement (paywalled) with the family of two children killed by a driver fleeing police in 2015. The family’s lawyer said the meager settlement was “better than nothing” and that the family will continue to suffer indefinitely after the crash killed Michaelangelo and Makiah Jackson, who were 6 and 3 years old at the time. We’re curious to know how closely Detroit police officers adhere to the department’s current pursuit policy — which is supposed to limit chases to “the most serious crimes.” 

In order to catch liars, the ancient Chinese would sometimes give the accused a mouthful of uncooked rice during interrogation—and then ask the person to open wide. Dry rice would indicate a dry mouth, considered evidence of nervous guilt—and sometimes grounds for execution.

The notion that lying produces observable physical side effects has stuck with us, and one man thought he’d cracked the science of lie detection in the 1920s, amid a truly modern boom in crime. This was the era of Prohibition, dominated by bootlegging gangsters—Chicago alone was said to be home to 1,300 gangs—and some police departments adopted increasingly brutal tactics to wring the truth out of suspects: beating and burning detainees with cigarettes, or depriving them of sleep. Unconstitutional but widely applied across the nation, according to a major report commissioned by then-President Herbert Hoover, these techniques did result in confessions—many of them highly dubious. 

One police chief in California thought he could usher in a new era in which science would make the interrogation process more accurate and humane. August Vollmer of the Berkeley Police Department was a committed reformer who began recruiting college graduates to help professionalize the force. His interests dovetailed with those of John A. Larson, who had recently received a PhD in physiology from the University of California, Berkeley, and had a passion for justice. Larson joined the Berkeley force in 1920, becoming the first rookie in the country with a doctorate. 

Vollmer and Larson were particularly intrigued by the possibilities of a simple new deception test pioneered by William Marston, a lawyer and psychologist who would later earn fame as the creator of Wonder Woman, with her famous Lasso of Truth. (Marston unofficially used the test on some criminal defendants during probation proceedings.) Larson spent punishing hours creating a far more sophisticated test, tinkering in his university lab on an odd-looking assemblage of pumps and gauges that he would attach to the human body using an arm cuff and chest strap. His device would measure changes in pulse, respiration and blood pressure all at once, during continuous monitoring of a subject under interrogation. Larson believed the contraption would flag false answers via distinct fluctuations etched by a stylus onto a revolving drum of paper. An operator would then analyze and interpret the results. 

By the spring of 1921, Larson unveiled the machine he called a cardio-pneumo-psychogram, and later simply a polygraph, a nod to the multiple physical signals recorded by the stylus. A San Francisco Examiner report later said it looked like some mix of “a radio set, a stethoscope, a dentist’s drill, a gas stove” and more, all arranged on a long wooden table. However ramshackle it appeared, Larson’s innovation, with its continuous battery of measurements, leaped beyond all previous attempts to track the body’s involuntary responses. In a frenzy of sensationalist reporting, the press dubbed Larson’s polygraph a “lie detector,” and the Examiner swooned: “All liars, regardless of cleverness, are doomed.” 

Larson himself didn’t quite buy the hype. As he tested the invention, he found an alarming error rate and grew increasingly concerned about its official use. And while many departments across the country embraced the device, judges proved even more skeptical than Larson. As early as 1923, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled polygraph results inadmissible at trial because the tests were not widely accepted by relevant experts. Still, cops kept using the machine. Larson watched in dismay as a former colleague patented an updated version of the idea in 1931. 

While Larson’s original machine collected dust, imitators with sleeker modern versions proliferated, all hewing roughly to the same parameters as Larson’s—and millions of people were subject to testing. During the Cold War, the State Department used polygraph tests to oust alleged Communist sympathizers and gay employees from the federal government. Many innocent government workers lost their livelihoods, while others who were eventually exposed as treasonous—including the infamous spy Aldrich Ames—managed to dupe the tests. For his part, Larson got a medical degree and spent his remaining career as a psychiatrist. Yet he was forever soured on the polygraph, eventually describing the device as his very own “Frankenstein’s monster,” unable to be controlled or killed. 

In 1988, Congress finally passed a law generally banning private employers from requiring the test, though some government agencies still turn to it for screening, and police may use it on suspects as an investigative tool under certain circumstances. 

“It’s an instrument of great hope but also great pain,” says Kristen Frederick-Frost, curator of modern science at the National Museum of American History, where Larson’s original polygraph anchors an exhibition, “Forensic Science on Trial,” open through next summer. In the 1930s, the Berkeley Police Department almost tossed the machine in the trash, but Vollmer thought it might one day have historical value and saved it. In 1976, the Berkeley Police Department donated it to the Smithsonian, where it sat in storage for decades. Over the past five years, seven conservators have helped to revive its motley parts for display. Some of the rubber and plastic had become stiff and degraded. Other parts were fragile, grimy or missing. The paper was seriously compromised. Today, though, “it doesn’t look like an old dusty thing that nobody cares about,” says Janice Stagnitto Ellis, the museum’s paper conservator. “It looks vital.” 

This country's plan for climate change is cops and cop cities

property theft

Broken Windows and Broken Policing

from 8 August 2020

Rudy Giuliani’s ‘zero tolerance’ attitude to community policing was rooted not in right-wing talking points, but in the liberal politics of the Civil Rights era.

In 1982, George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson published an article in the Atlantic which transformed policing in the United States.Titled ‘Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety’, it argued that city police should aggressively clamp down on low-level street disorder – panhandling, prostitution, loitering ‘youths’ – in order to prevent more serious crime. Responding with enthusiasm, police departments across the US began implementing their own ‘broken windows’ or ‘zero tolerance’ strategies, saturating poor neighbourhoods with police and dramatically escalating their arrest rates for minor offences. 

Broken windows policing was a critical driver of mass incarceration in America. Yet, significantly, its origins lay not in the feverish cries for ‘law-and-order’ from conservative firebrands such as Barry Goldwater, or President Reagan. Rather, the idea arose out of liberal attempts to reform law-enforcement after the urban uprisings of the 1960s. Indeed, Kelling and Wilson rooted their Atlantic article in research they had undertaken at the Police Foundation, a think-tank established in 1970 to help pioneer ‘community policing’ in cities across America.

In the four years after 1964, a wave of urban rebellions swept across the US, often precipitated by racist acts of police violence: over 150 cities erupted in 1967 alone. The Kerner Commission, established that year by President Lyndon B. Johnson to uncover the causes of the disorder, concluded that for many African Americans the police ‘have come to symbolize white power, white racism, and white repression’. ‘The fact is’, the report added, ‘many police do reflect and express these white attitudes.’ 

For liberal lawmakers and some police officials, the solution lay in strengthening the links between local law enforcement and the communities they served. This meant officers getting out of their patrol cars and familiarising themselves with the neighbourhoods they policed. In many cities, police began attending community association meetings, giving talks at local schools and offering ‘ride alongs’ for curious local residents.

Drawing together this nascent community policing movement was the think tank Police Foundation. Established in 1970 with a multi-million dollar grant from the Ford Foundation – a left-leaning philanthropic organisation – the Police Foundation was designed to act as a catalyst for liberal police reform nationwide, providing funds and expertise to reforming police chiefs across the country. With the federal government largely focused on bolstering police arsenals with new weaponry and equipment, Ford hoped to assist the emerging community orientated approaches.

Initially, rank-and-file officers greeted the Police Foundation with disdain. Its community policing projects were viewed as ‘soft’; a shadow of ‘real’ police work. Many also pointed to its links with the Ford Foundation; Ford had spent the 1960s assisting the Civil Rights movement in America (even funding a few ‘Black Power’ groups), acquiring a reputation as a home for ‘bleeding heart liberals’. Its transition into police reform was therefore regarded with intense suspicion: ‘When an organization having a history of financing Black Powerites sets up an agency to develop more modern police forces’, one Ohio newspaper observed bitterly, ‘the police had better watch out.’ 

Ford worked hard to counteract this notion that its efforts were a threat to police power. The Police Foundation was set up as a separate entity and the board staffed with high-ranking police officers and conservative academics. This signalled the Foundation’s intention to work with police in the quest for reform; reform was necessary, but it had to be done in a way ‘acceptable to the law enforcement community’. This, however, limited the kind of reform the Foundation was able to contemplate; by opting to work within the law-enforcement community, its influence now depended on the cooperation of the police. 

During the 1970s, the Police Foundation collaborated with local police departments on a series of experiments into community-orientated patrol. Led by George Kelling, these suggested that foot patrols reduce crime. By walking through the neighbourhood, the police were better able to work with its residents; it encouraged them to enforce order in the streets, creating an atmosphere less conducive to serious crime.

This emphasis on ‘order-maintenance’ policing formed the basis of Kelling and Wilson’s 1982 Atlantic article, ‘Broken Windows’.To justify this shift in police practice,they sketched a vision of low-level urban disorder left unchecked: ‘If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.’ This then attracts ‘drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers’, creating an intimidating atmosphere that breaks down community controls – ultimately allowing more serious crime to flourish.

‘Broken Windows’ offered a vision of community safety with an enhanced role for the police. While some sociologists have since cast doubt on the theory, many police and politicians adopted it with enthusiasm. Broken windows-style policing offered departments a way to increase their funding, power and discretion and offered elected officials a ‘scientific’ and more enlightened mode of crime control that could tackle voter concern over street crime.

The strategy soon swept across the US. Kelling and Wilson’s article directly informed mayor Rudy Giuliani’s ‘zero-tolerance’ policing initiative in New York City during the 1990s, which saw the NYPD aggressively enforce misdemeanour laws against public drinking, graffiti and turnstile-jumping. Giuliani’s apparent success ‘cleaning up’ New York City received global attention and the broken windows strategy was embraced by US mayors across the political spectrum. 

Reflecting later in life, Kelling remained adamant that his theory was a pioneering example of ‘community policing’. When it was applied in practice, however, he acknowledged that police had sometimes used the strategy to stop, frisk and arrest increasing numbers of Americans – focusing their efforts disproportionately on Black communities. During the War on Drugs of the 1980s and 1990s, it was also used to legitimise the aggressive sweeps of entire neighbourhoods. And from New York City to San Francisco, broken windows policing drove a shift towards punitive solutions to a range of social problems, including homelessness, addiction and mental health.

Calls for the ‘defunding’ or ‘abolition’ of the police have grown in recent months. In contrast to these demands, the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has instead pledged more money for the police: $300 million for enhanced ‘community policing’. As the history of community policing shows, the strategy has not always been effective at restraining police power. By leaving reform largely in the hands of the police, the strategy was rapidly co-opted into a mechanism that knit the police ever more tightly into certain neighbourhoods, often leading to a cycle of surveillance, arrest and incarceration.

Sam Collings-Wells is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge studying policing in the Empire and the UK. {read}

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