Appear homeless, get a ticket, and Dallas PD will make up a job for you
My friend Elle calls Dallas the land of big hair and fake boobs. She could say big boobs but then people might think she’s speaking of the Dallas police. The latest screwy situation has a sergeant encouraging ticketing officers to falsify information on tickets. From the mostly great Dallas Morning News:
A Dallas police sergeant who supervised officers at the center of an inquiry into problematic ticket writing practices is now himself under investigation.
Internal investigators are scrutinizing Sgt. Walter Clifton, in part, after finding that the 30-year department veteran instructed officers to make up occupations on citations as a way to obscure that people were homeless.
It seems that Sgt. Clifton mistakenly thought that judges would refuse to issue arrest warrants for homeless people and so made up jobs for them. He sent out a memo with some recommendations and encouraged officers to come up with their own. What a sense of humor he had! He suggested that suspected prostitutes be called Human Relations Clerks, suspected drug addicts be called Pharmacology Specialists, and suspected thieves be called Property Disposal Technicians.
A Dallas County district attorney said that tampering with a government document is a third degree felony. Sgt. Clifton is has enjoyed a blemish free career until now so I doubt he’ll have to worry about such a charge. He credits his solution to the misperceived problem of unsigned arrest warrants for aiding police with the burglary problem.
“As a result of this act by the judges, officers were not able to get burglars off the street,” he wrote.
In an undated memo obtained by investigators, Sgt. Clifton told his officers that they should “feel free to come up” with their own alternative occupations as “long as court services would not likely see through the title and figure out they are in fact ‘homeless.’ ”
Sgt. Clifton told investigators that he believed that his directive had helped police combat the “burglary problem.”
We can all probably guess how this will end up. I see a bigger budget and more cops in DPD’s future. And that’s unfortunate because all they really need to do is end stupid programs like that one which has them busting women for providing unlicensed massages so they can get out and do some real police work. Then they can arrest people when they actually commit a crime instead of making up jobs for the ticketed homeless suspected of crimes.
Great catch, Miche. I find this to be absolutely abhorrent. Not only are these cops falsifying official documents, they are also violating the 5th, 6th, and 14th Amendment rights of the homeless thus accused, by placing their “jobs” into categories based upon an unproven assertion of criminal activity.
That cop should definitely be fired.