POST:The Comedians Who Train Cops

POST is an agency within the California Department of Justice. The acronym, POST, is an abbreviation for the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training. It may be all of of that, but it is more than that, for it is a pillar in the perpetuation of prejudice. It is also, by law, the critical vehicle through which changes to police training, adopted or adapted from lessons learned, from data-collection, will be implemented. They have a cute phrase to describe it. They will be "informed by data" or something that sounds like that (even as they preside over or ignore the manufacture of false data.) But even now, and for 12-20 years, POST has been an instructor and purveyor of prejudice; it is a propagandist. It must be brought to heel. How? I have no answer but shall try to find one.

The California Department of Justice; the parent of POST, is a Law Enforcement Agency. Its head, the California Attorney General is the State's top cop. Even so, or despite this fact, a cop has been placed in charge of implementing a law geared to ending Racial Profiling, by cops. A fox is in charge of guarding the henhouse.

When first I observed the Attorney General's presentation to the assembled throngs for the initial RIPA meeting, he began with a lie. He claimed that racial profiling data had not been collected before, conveniently ignoring the large California cities, Los Angeles and Oakland, that have collected data under court supervision for over 10 years. He, the Attorney General forgot the large agencies that had collected data, voluntarily, some for over 20 years. This includes the largest of them all, the CHP. It also includes The City of Sacramento, a municipality that has not bothered to examine its collected data for ten years (I, and the public, know the results of that neglect, but all are reassured that SPD operations are now being monitored or supervised by the CA-DOJ.) 

 'I liked him before not well, but now I like him much worse.'

The Attorney General has presided over the enactment and implementation of a collection of regulations and protocols that,  if they were not designed to emasculate or neuter AB 953, an intelligent deliberate design could have done no better. But I have raced ahead of myself. This is about comedians: this is about POST.

One of the first RIPA-Board meetings was held in San Diego, in July 2017. POST was proudly present but its presentation was putrid. The presentation was begun with a boast that the video that was to follow was award-winning. The videos message is that racial-profiling is a perception; not a reality. The video, is contained in a Youtube item, identified as RIPA Board Meeting, San Diego Part One. Watch  it, if you can, if you dare. Perhaps, the baleful look of the attendee, in the foreground, communicates enough.

This Youtube link is to a most eloquent response to the filth that POST has been teaching for 12-20 years. 

Soon after, insulted, un-surprised but not enraged, 1, by a communication  posted on its web-site, asked POST to remove its award-winning tripe from the police-training curriculum. I was promptly ignored. That was almost two years ago. I asked again, but more in earnest, on April 24, 2019 @3:00PM. Now POST is out of time. I have been patient. 

As the table, built from the examination of almost 1 million California records (912,505) shows,  racial-profiling, as defined by California law is real. Blacks are stopped, on average, more than twice population presence, but have, by far, the lowest citation rates —a strong indicator that stops are constitutionally infirm. The other post-stop actions speak for themselves. 

In a non-public meeting of THE STOP DATA AND EVIDENCE-BASED RESEARCH SUBCOMMITTEES, held on February 2, 2019, the minutes of which were partially memorialized as follows:

Deputy Chief Kathy Lester from SPD commented that the agency has a 20-year history of stop data collection and analysis. Lamberth Associates conducted study assessing driving demographics and vehicle stops approximately 10 years ago. The study found that the frequency with which the agency stopped the black civilians was about twice as high as the driving population and Hispanics was close twice as much as well.

Doubtless Sacramento's analyses were defective, and lacking in depth and diligence or was ignored, for the marauders in police ranks were easily identifiable; all 207 of them.  Perhaps, the analyses, about which Deputy Chief Lester spoke, are non-existent; mere figments of her imagination. In any event, they served no purpose; they did no good.

I regret that the CA-DOJ did not have Deputy Chief Lester stand in the stead of the man from POST, when the RIPA board met in San Diego. But comments such as Lester's are never made by LEA-types, in public fora. Prejudice needs privacy to fester and to nurture and to prepare for the blossoming, blooming and production of its bile; only the manifestation is public.

I hope that you, like me, perceive that numbers never lie, but Post does and has won awards for it; more or less like the Attorney General, who, so far, has won nothing, but I wish him well in his anti-Trump sallies.

Sometime within the next 30 days POST will be invited to "Show Cause" why the data and its product, the within table, are wrong; i.e. why they should not be ordered to recall their award-winning video, and discontinue training and other means of disseminating the foul and false propaganda that the award-winning video preaches.