Mt. Vernon NY PD illegally strip searched nearly all arrested

December 15, 2024 6:01 PM

A suburban police force in New York strip searched nearly everyone it arrested, DOJ says

From the CNN report:

...Illegal strip and cavity searches continued until at least 2023, the report found. The investigators said that while the practice was “curtailed” during its probe, “we are not confident that these practices have ended.”

Among a catalog of unconstitutional arrests, the DOJ identified a case where officers took the mother of a shooting victim to a police station and interrogated her, even as her dying daughter was rushed to the hospital. The daughter, struck by a stray bullet, died while her mother was in custody. Officers didn’t articulate probable cause for her detention.

NYT: Mount Vernon Police’s Strip Searches Were Unconstitutional, U.S. Says

...It is unclear whether federal prosecutors will continue to pursue legal efforts against the Mount Vernon Police Department after President-elect Donald J. Trump is inaugurated in January, according to Ellen Blain, the former chief of the Civil Rights Unit in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, who helped lead the investigation before leaving the office earlier this year.

posted by y2karl (35 comments total)

OK, so these particular cops are bastards, but I’m sure that’s as far as it goes.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:34 PM on December 15, 2024 [29 favorites]

Jesus christ
posted by latkes at 6:37 PM on December 15, 2024 [1 favorite]

Ungated NYT link.

I've never understood why the US has over 17,000 law enforcement agencies at the state and local levels. Many of those are going to be so small or, for one reason or another, underfunded that it's simply impossible to achieve reasonable standards of policing across the board. To even come close would require funding far exceeding the total budget of many such agencies.

That's not in any way an excuse for the behaviour mentioned here, but the only thing anyone should be surprised about is that it isn't much worse. Actually, it probably is, but who's monitoring those 17k agencies? Nobody is.
posted by dg at 7:05 PM on December 15, 2024 [4 favorites]

More wow...

Yeah that 65 YO and 75 yo woman probably had drugs in their female parts. What complete shit.
posted by Windopaene at 7:26 PM on December 15, 2024 [5 favorites]

It is like a Blair Witch Project style documentary about a secret society police cult. The whole ritualistic cruelty of the thing is a horror movie in real life happening to real people.
posted by y2karl at 9:04 PM on December 15, 2024 [5 favorites]

A werewolf horror movie at that in fact.
posted by y2karl at 9:26 PM on December 15, 2024 [2 favorites]

Mod note: fixed NYT link
posted by taz (staff) at 9:38 PM on December 15, 2024 [2 favorites]

Dg the problem is very very bad and just not well understood in terms of breath and depth. This one may be an outlier because of the odd strip search biz, but I would bet dollars to donuts that most departments are sweeping under the rug or outright encouraging all sorts of abuses.

I agree that centralized organizational control could help some, but even state police forces (or huge forces like LA, Chicago, and New York PD had and have huge systematic abuses). It would need to come with significant improvements in real control of the police agencies by our elected leaders. Which I don’t see likely any time soon if my home state can’t get their state or big city forces under control.
posted by alicebob at 9:43 PM on December 15, 2024 [8 favorites]

This is horrifying. My heart breaks for those affected by the abuse.
posted by M. at 12:04 AM on December 16, 2024 [1 favorite]

Reminder that police departments are political entities concerned with gaining and wielding power. Despite all of the TV shows we have pushing the idea that cops are public servants, the municipalities they operate in have functionally no ways of holding them accountable.
posted by Jon_Evil at 2:53 AM on December 16, 2024 [9 favorites]

Unconstitutional?

Well yes, given the lack of reasonable grounds it sounds like serial sexual assault.
posted by jaduncan at 3:46 AM on December 16, 2024 [6 favorites]

My neighbor is a cop. We live in a small apartment complex. I see him and talk with him regularly. He is, outwardly, an exceptionally good dude. Honorable, on the level, legit. We talk about police abuses and the systemic problems of society that can allow such things, and I know that if all cops were like him, this kind of thing would never happen. But he has seen things, been a part of things, and still puts on the uniform and goes to work.

It messes with my head.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 4:46 AM on December 16, 2024 [9 favorites]

and I know that if all cops were like him, this kind of thing would never happen.

Many cops ARE like him. Complicit.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:41 AM on December 16, 2024 [14 favorites]

Dan Akyroyd's documentary "Nothing But Trouble" covered some stuff like this...
posted by mattgriffin at 6:01 AM on December 16, 2024 [5 favorites]

Cops who go along to get along are part of the problem. Good cops fight or quit.
posted by mattgriffin at 6:03 AM on December 16, 2024 [4 favorites]

I've never understood why the US has over 17,000 law enforcement agencies at the state and local levels

A failure of imagination. If you suggested to even a state governor that every law enforcement agency in the state should be collapsed into a single, integrated, fully professionalized force, they'd think you were an imbecile of the greatest magnitude. So instead we tolerate semi-amateur forces stood up by towns that lack the resources or interest to properly hire, train, and monitor them.
posted by 1adam12 at 6:42 AM on December 16, 2024 [5 favorites]

And no one was punished. No, losing three vacations days or being fired doesn't count. Why was no one criminally charged?
posted by 1adam12 at 6:43 AM on December 16, 2024 [5 favorites]

"The department also suffered from financial mismanagement, which exacerbated pervasive human rights violations rooted in illegal practices and lack of training"

Lack of training, sure.

These cops, they WANT to do the right thing, they just don't know what it is!

We need oversight and accountability, not training for cops.
posted by entropone at 7:13 AM on December 16, 2024 [4 favorites]

Cops who go along to get along are part of the problem. Good cops fight or quit.

Not to be an asshole here, but are any of us innocent? I work in wholesale produce. We don't kill anybody except the migrant workers who get sprayed with dioxin pesticides and develop sarcomas. And etc.

The same could be said of any industry. Healthcare? Education? Non profit sector? They're all rife with abuses. Should no one work in those fields?

It is commonplace to say that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but I would argue that there is no ethical employment, either.

Just to be extremely clear, I am not excusing anyone. I am merely expanding the circle of guilt.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 7:24 AM on December 16, 2024 [6 favorites]

The difference is the cops SEE IT RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM (human rights abuses!) on the daily and don't say or do anything.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:30 AM on December 16, 2024 [10 favorites]

In fact, they cover for each other so it can continue.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:30 AM on December 16, 2024 [9 favorites]

I agree that centralized organizational control could help some, but even state police forces (or huge forces like LA, Chicago, and New York PD had and have huge systematic abuses). It would need to come with significant improvements in real control of the police agencies by our elected leaders.

And what little controls there are, i.e. via the federal justice department, don't work. See: Chicago PD being under a consent decree and just... not doing it.
posted by misskaz at 7:44 AM on December 16, 2024 [1 favorite]

Me, explaining my distaste for cops to my firefighter friend: "Put it this this way: I love firefighters, but if y'all started taking up 30% of the city budget, driving around in armored vehicles kicking the shit out of people you deemed fire hazards, not only failing to reduce the amount of fires, but occasionally setting people on fire, I would lose my enthusiasm for you pretty goddamned quick."
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:00 AM on December 16, 2024 [25 favorites]

Calling Mount Vernon suburban is a stretch. It’s essentially a failed city, jammed between Yonkers, Pelham, the Bronx, and Brownsville.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 8:35 AM on December 16, 2024 [4 favorites]

But we can't defend the police, apparently that would be the worst thing ever according to liberals. The solution is apparently to lavish EVEN MORE money on the pigs because that will fix everything exactly like it has for the past 100 years of ever increasing pig budgets.
posted by sotonohito at 10:00 AM on December 16, 2024 [2 favorites]

But the illegal strip search in 2020 of two women, one age 65 and the other 75, were emblematic of the department’s shortcomings, said the report, which was released Thursday.

Arrested on suspicion of buying drugs, officers searched the women’s car, found nothing, and hauled them into a police station in handcuffs, the report said. Supervisors there approved a fully nude strip search by detectives who “told them to bend over and cough.”

After an internal investigation found that the officers had lied about the pair buying drugs, those involved were docked a few vacation days, the report said.

These cops weren't fired, but any cop that whistleblows would have been drummed off the force. Or worse.
posted by AlSweigart at 10:25 AM on December 16, 2024 [3 favorites]

Police brutality has been a "live" political issue for the electorate for over a decade. Yet our polite demands have not made any impression on policy, unless you count the increased budgets for body cams and sensitivity training. These unaddressed stress fractures will continue to spread through the structure until it falls in on itself.
posted by jy4m at 11:56 AM on December 16, 2024 [1 favorite]

Well yes, given the lack of reasonable grounds it sounds like serial sexual assault.

In a word: rape. In two: mass rape. In three: institutionalized mass rape. May vary by state law but it is what it is.
posted by y2karl at 12:40 PM on December 16, 2024 [6 favorites]

I mean, there's no excuse for Mr Sean Combs, but Mt Vernon is where Mr Sean Combs came up from, yes? they didn't go back to the 80's with these searches, did they

interrogating the mother while her daughter died just reminds me of NOPD and Henry Glover, and how the men who snapped to action to save Henry Glover were beaten by NOPD, after they came to the police for emergency medical help for their friend.
posted by eustatic at 5:27 PM on December 16, 2024 [1 favorite]

We need oversight and accountability, not training for cops.
You need all three. Any one or two of those things are useless on their own.
posted by dg at 7:21 PM on December 16, 2024

Here in Atlanta, "But you said they need more training," has been the standard mainstream defense of building Cop City. Ignoring the fact that the kind of training cops need, in you know morals and ethics, requires only a classroom, not destroying an entire forest to build a fake city to practice warfare in.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:49 AM on December 17, 2024 [2 favorites]

The problem is not that pigs are inadequately trained.

The problem is not a lack of oversight.

The problem is the entire concept from the bottom to the top.

All the training, and oversight, and accountability is just trying to sweep back the tide and is inevitably doomed to fail. You cannot make a system that's designed to produce evil any better by monitoring it, all you can do is waste your time and make the evil a little less aboveboard.

The SOLUTION is to stop having pigs.

Society needs traffic monitors, it does not need pigs.

Society needs government adjudicators, it does not need pigs.

Society needs people to investigate crimes, it does not need pigs.

Society needs people to do mental health checks and deescalate conflicts, it does not need pigs.

And yes, society does very occasionally need an armed response team to actually go forth and inflict violence in a tiny handful of situations where it's actually necessary. That armed response team needs to be kept in a can and kept away from the general public. It does NOT need to be the go to group of people for every damn thing.

Saying "we will have this group of heavily armed steroid abusing rage freak trigger happy sadistic bigots eager to fuck people up do everything society needs" is never going to do anything but produce results like the one we see here. No, not even with oversight or training.
posted by sotonohito at 5:37 AM on December 17, 2024 [7 favorites]

How a police chief groomed a Texas town (WaPo gift, content warning for abuse)
posted by box at 9:35 AM on December 18, 2024 [2 favorites]

There's no doubt predators of all kinds are attracted to positions of power. The scumbag in that story took advantage of the weaknesses in a decentralised system that allowed him to jump from small agency to small agency with no real checking of his history, probably because they all lacked the resources (or perhaps the will) to do so. Even if they had checked, nobody would have said anything because they had just eliminated their problem with the minimum of fuss and didn't want to tie up those scarce resources in lawsuits. It's practically impossible for an organisation with a dozen people to properly deal with these issues, where a unified system would have the resources to ensure he never got into that position of power again. Whether they would have the will to do so is another question, of course.
posted by dg at 2:52 PM on December 18, 2024

Whether they would have the will to do so is another question, of course.

Every cop is either a rapist or a wannabe rapist, so signs point to "they would not have the will to do so".
posted by adrienneleigh at 4:12 PM on December 18, 2024