Monday, September 14, 2009

Wenstrup:  Police should be monitored by “undercover people”

Posted by Justin Jeffre

Brad Wenstrup:  “I’m in favor of situations like New York did, where police are monitored by undercover people to see how they’re treating people.”

There has been some question recently about whether GOP mayoral candidate Brad Wenstrup really advocated for having undercover agents work to monitor police behavior.  Take a look at this 33 second video clip, and hear it straight from his mouth!

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Citizens Against Joe Deters says:
14 Sep 2009  at  09:15 pm | #

Wenstrup Won’t Win. These politicians think that they can say anything to get elected. It appears they talk out of the side of their necks depending on what crowd…

.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) says:
14 Sep 2009  at  09:56 pm | #

Many department stores hire “secret shoppers” to evaluate their employees. It assures objective feedback, and can provide valuable third party input. Strikes me as a reasonable tool for developing an excellence focus within the organization. Go Brad!

.Cincy..Capell. says:
15 Sep 2009  at  02:44 am | #

Ask any cop what cops think about internal affairs officers-cops call them the rat squad. Put some undercover ‘rat squad’ cops within the ranks and I guarantee that you will destroy the moral and cohesiveness of the department. Cops will suspect each other, including their partners-the man or woman who their lives might well depend upon. Yea, great idea. I’m no fan of the way that the CPD is managed, but this is a lousy idea.

.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) says:
15 Sep 2009  at  03:52 am | #

It is my understanding that the Wenstrup campaign has tried to back away from this statement.  Why are their rumors circulating that The Beacon made up the accusation?

Here is the proof.  Right out of his mouth.

Undercover Citizen says:
15 Sep 2009  at  12:45 pm | #

Not sure what NYC program he’s talking about, but how does one go “undercover” to monitor police?  Would applying the “secret shopper” approach mean that we should call in a ficticious crime and evaluate the police’s response?  Or perhaps, the police dispatcher also calls a local citizen to send them to the crime scene to observe.

If he’s talking about the Civilian Complaint Review Board (http://www.nyc.gov/html/ccrb/home.html), that’s hardly “undercover”.

NtotheC says:
16 Sep 2009  at  09:22 am | #

If he is talking about a system like the Civilian Complaint Review Board, doesn’t the city already have one of those? the Citizen Complaint Authority?

.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) says:
16 Sep 2009  at  03:02 pm | #

Wenstrup wasn’t talking about the Citizen Complaint Authority. From Kevin Osbournes article in CityBeat.

“There’s always opportunity in any city to try to improve police-community relations, and a lot of that is based on trust,” Wenstrup said. “We sometimes within our medical practice will make a phone call and schedule an appointment to see how that goes. Is it a smooth process, is it the way we want it to be? How can we improve ourselves?”

New York had a similar program involving police, where people on the street would engage with cops and evaluate their performance, he added.

“It’s human nature, in the back of your mind if you think you’re being evaluated perhaps, that you might do your job a little bit better,” Wenstrup said. “But I also think that it can provide some statistical positives for the police force, where they can point to the evaluations if they do good. It can be a win-win to have some type of internal monitoring and that doesn’t take place based only on complaints.”

JE says:
21 Sep 2009  at  09:57 am | #

And perhaps Dr. Wenstrup remembers the fully unreleased private Linder report where rank and file vented their frustrations…....and are still unheard. Anyone have the full release that will share it?  Probably not.  While helpful, it would be political poison to the person releasing.

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