Interesting and surprising if this happens. Note that they're just announcing their intent to disband, it's not an actual vote, but there's some pretty strong language here. The article also notes the mayor is opposed to disbanding.
I would rather see police reforms and a rethinking of priorities than disbanding police altogether. But if it happens (a big if) perhaps Minneapolis will provide a rare natural experiment.
I would argue that it is hard to have a much less rotten police force than the city in general. It seems quite crime ridden from the statistics. Maybe if you draft the policemen from other areas or cities?
Perhaps it is just me being less pessimistic about human nature. I think as an institution policing needs reform, but it can happen in a more gradual way. Not everyone in a bad system is a bad person, and people are remarkably morally flexible under pressure to fit in. Improve the institution and I believe you can improve the people inside it.
I admit that with the surprising, to me, deplorable recent behavior of the Buffalo PD, I am more sympathetic to the idea of total replacement. So I’m interested to see whether this goes anywhere in Minneapolis.
This experiment is indeed rare and very interesting. I hope they will gather data during and after the transformation so that other cities can make more informed decisions in the future.
a) I'm incredibly happy to see that the masses still have a voice
b) I'm not positive this is the right solution, but it could be, and it will be fascinating to see how it plays out and whether it's something that could work everywhere
The masses have a voice in proportion to the degree to which they control where their taxes go. The power of the purse is remarkable, because you can destroy (almost) any instutition by simply defunding it (which is also why any attempt to circumvent that power, e.g. Executive re-purposing of funds, should set off huge blaring alarms.)
And when it comes to "what congress can do" I'd argue that it's 90% about allocation of funds -- because it doesn't matter what the law is if there is no money to enforce it.
You could argue the US has a debt as large as it does because it has the strongest military on Earth. Who is going to enforce the debt collection?
Using this logic and the destabilization of US military the natural answer is another highly militarized government.
So where there is lawlessness there is opportunity for authoritarianism whether that’s a gang, police, US military, or foreign adversary.
We need to be smart about change and boil the frog, not get into a fight we cannot win, otherwise society will descend into authoritarianism likely ran by the most experienced and powerful authoritarian.
The fact that the debt is deliniated in US controlled currency is what protects us. Now, our stability, partially due to our military allows that to happen. But it isn't necessary to avoid being collected on.
Nobody actually thinks that we can have no law enforcement. That doesn't mean that disbanding systematically corrupt departments and rebuilding from scratch isn't a good idea.
Sure. When an organisation is totally broken, ripping up and replacing isn’t alway the worst solution. See the Stasi, for instance, or for a less dramatic shakeup, the RUC.
"Other cities are still struggling. Kansas City, Columbus, Phoenix, and Birmingham saw homicide rates reach new highs in 2017. In Baltimore, homicides hit a new per-capita peak."
If I have to place bet, the fate of Minneapolis will be similar to that of Baltimore.
I agree. It’s worth a try to try a systematically different approach since the current policing practices are not working. People are afraid of change but it’s clear that maintaining the status quo is detrimental so it’s time to figure out alternative solutions.
It doesn't matter if this is the right solution, what matters is that they're willing to substantially change things to improve them. If they're wrong, they can change it again.
It very much matters if this is the right solution. If it's not, they could make things substantially worse than they already are. This is a serious decision whose consequences should not be taken lightly. Lives and livelyhoods are on the line.
Whether this really is the right solution... I don't know. We'll find out in time. I sincerely hope it is for the sake of all citizens of Minneappolis and the surrounding area.
Indeed, Americans need to realize that almost everything about our society is a bad first draft, in need of prompt replacement. People reflexively defend existing institutions, but the more I've thought about it over the years, the more I've realized there's almost no aspect of American life worth preserving. Police departments might be a good place to start, but most American cities also need to address structural deficit, disposable built environments, persistent segregation, absurd jurisprudence, and more.
>but the more I've thought about it over the years, the more I've realized there's almost no aspect of American life worth preserving
There is so much about America that is worth preserving. One easy example right off the top of my head is the law and culture that enables people to peacefully demonstrate like they are today. Even discussing the idea of doing this in many countries could get you killed - or worse! That's another amazing thing (again, just off the top of my head), in America the worst punishment we have is death, and even that is outlawed in many places. The idea of an internment camp[0][1] is not even considered.
Scores of videos in the last week show police brutally beating regular citizens who have assembled peacefully. Recent events are proving the First Amendment sounds great on paper, but is utterly worthless when people actually try to exercise that right.
Sure, we don't _currently_ have internment camps, but we used to have them and the current president, when asked point blank by Time magazine, refused to rule out using WW2-style internment camps for muslims. So there's that.
Freedom of expression is one of those things that I'd prefer to keep, but we can see that it is stronger on paper than in practice. In practice, if you gather in the capital city to bring your grievances to the government, unidentifiable mercenaries will gas you. And if you are a journalist reporting in front of your local police station some cop will shoot you in the head with "non-lethal" rubber ball, leaving you without eyes, or teeth.
It is the institutions of American that need to be dismantled, because are an implementation that doesn't reflect the founding ideals of our country.
Those are for people who are specifically not here legally and therefore don't recieve the full protection of our constitution and laws. While I vehemently disagree with these camps, there's no reason to assume a re-born America's laws would apply to people who are not citizens/legally accepted into its borders. A fix for these camps would be to guarantee the same protections we Americans enjoy to people who come here illegally, which can be accomplished using the current framework we have today.
> Those are for people who are specifically not here legally and therefore don't recieve the full protection of our constitution and laws.
What's the point in calling them 'human rights' if they only apply to Americans. The US Bill of Rights does not make any reference to citizenship or legal immigration status in the 6th or 8th amendments (which seem particularly relevant). Not to mention you still need due process to prove the person does not have legal immigration status in the first place.
There isn't really any ambiguity here, unless the law specifically targets citizens or people with a valid legal immigration status the law protects illegal immigrants as well.
I'm not very well versed in US law but it's my understanding you can't shoot a man down in the street for jaywalking because he's a criminal and thus not protected by the law.
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
It does not define "human rights". It defines some legal rights of people within the jurisdiction of the document - not some global notion of "human rights"
Human rights are legal rights. Human rights vary by jurisdiction. For example, the The Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) administers Ontario provincial law.
You should read up on who's in these camps. Most are asylum seekers. Applying for asylum is legally recognized under the Geneva Convention. Hell, I just watched a documentary where an asylum seeker was asked to come to the Tijuana/SD border for his asylum interview, thrown into detention ICE, and then transferred from one center to another before finally being deported a year later. He was imprisoned for asking for asylum, not being in the US illegally.
The tile is What Happened to a Dream Deferred. During the QandA the director told us how she had to get involved because the subject that applied for asylum was arrested at the interview. Then moved through many detention camps. This is done so their immigration lawyers can't find them and represent them during the hearings. I found this to be really shocking.
Applying for asylum is legally recognized under the Geneva Convention
Only at the first border reached. So, only Canadians, Mexicans, and those coming by water directly from their nation of origin are even theoretically eligible.
People on HN thrown "Geneva Convention!" (sic) around like it's a magic amulet. There are multiple conventions with multiple articles, and the USA isn't even a signatory to all of them. When people argue random Geneva Conventions nexus for some element of policy without stating a specific Convention and Article, assume that they're bullshitting you. It's like a lazy Support rep saying, "it's in the manual... somewhere."
I can only assume you've awakened, Rip Van Winkle style, from a extended sleep - not only one so long you missed dozens of people getting severely assaulted by the police and hundreds of people being held for extended periods of time (>24 hours) without charge, but so long that you apparently also missed the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II.
You also missed Trump musing on the idea of Muslim internment camps, so "not even considered" is a long bow. We might also include "kids in cages" while we're at it.
There are plenty other worse countries, but this seems like a rather low standard for a victory lap ("Freer than China! Less repressive than Belarus!").
>the more I've realized there's almost no aspect of American life worth preserving
I would suggest living in a third or second world country without outside support. I had your same mindset, and did that for a few years. I could not wait to come back.
Actually it was living abroad in a third world nation that soured me on America. Bringing my children back to the USA was painful to me and disappointing to them.
Even so, the third world is not our standard. We’re ready for the version two improvements by virtue of the iterative process, and our own expectations for ourselves.
East Berlin used to be second World, but many of my American friends moved there because they were tired sick of being harassed by their own country brutality and would never go back.
Even many African countries are safer than the US if you are black.
On the other side, one of the most annoying kind of tourist you can find in my city, which is Rome in Italy, are Americans.
They lack the basic notions about "respecting others cultures and habits"
I sure have, Venezuela. No water, constant power failures, gas at 8-12 USD per gallon (controlled by the military police$$$, though that is a recent development), minimum wage at 5USD per month. Food at international prices. Basically non-existent judicial system. Police brutality several notches above what you see in the US.
So out of the 200+ countries you could have compared the US to you chose a failed state. There are many other 3rd world/developing countries who have fully functional governments.
Venezuela is in the state it is because, you know, US has tried to undermine its independence for decades.
Anyway, I've been to US several times and food, outside of the big city, is of very low quality.
Gas is pretty expensive in Europe too, is to discourage its consumption and favour power efficient vehicles.
And btw, Venezuela is one of the larger producer of oil in the world, but US seized its control for a long time and when they nationalised it, US supported coups and the rise of the actual presidency and their brutal police.
One day you'll start to feel responsible for what you did, and if you don't, the World will make you.
Obviously not every other country is the same. The situation is not that the US does everything one way, and the entire rest of the world does it another way; there are about 200 different countries, and they all do things differently in some ways. Some countries get most things right, some get most things wrong, but most countries get some things right and some things wrong.
There's a lot to learn and improve by looking at how other countries solve their problems.
This was also the topic of Michael Moore's Where To Invade Next. Instead of taking other countries' oil, the US should take other countries' ideas, and Moore had a couple of suggestions for interesting ideas from other countries, like school lunches from France, prison system from Norway, etc.
Bullshit. If you had really lived there, you would know that Venezuela's problems are mostly caused by USA-imposed sanctions. The police are so "brutal" that they have let the would-be coup leader and CIA contractor Juan Gauido prance about the nation unmolested for a couple of years now. How many poor black Venezuelans have died under the knees of Venezuelan cops in the last month?
Or even Western Europe. I’ve lived in the UK, and it absolutely gave me an appreciation for many aspects of American life.
For example, municipal government and school boards. Yes they can go bad. But as the protestors in Minneapolis are showing, the city is extremely responsive because it is local.
If there was a similar protest in Birmingham (UK), I can’t imagine the city disbanding the police department under any circumstances.
It might result in parliament taking action. But the idea of independent municipal government is very lacking.
Municipal governments in England are very much subordinate to Parliament.
There’s a reason Blair was so pathetically and stupidly pro-American. America actually has a lot to offer.
Not my America. It has problems, sure. But it's the place where people line up to get in. The place where multinationals that hire lots of international colleagues are headquartered. A super-power, and one that has good intent at least as much as any other super-power.
I'm proud of my America, even if it does have warts (some of them ugly.) I have confidence we'll get better in the future.
Realistically, that's what will come from "abolishing" the police.
That's not necessarily a bad thing! A big problem with existing departments is decades of corruption, poor leadership, and entrenched policies. Tearing the department down and rebuilding it from scratch—even if you end up with a similar size as before—gives you the opportunity to remove the excesses/abuse. You can also do things like hiring more specialized positions and firing all the bad officers (because if the department is gone, the union can't protect them).
This is underappreciated. It's hard to seriously change organizations in less than a decade when employees have long tenures.
Opinions and behaviors are only truly malleable at the beginning of careers, and later change is fighting against the inertia of old timers' "Let me tell you how it's done."
Which isn't only negative. Esprit de corps is what holds together people doing tough jobs for long careers.
But if you want to say "No more of that. Now we're doing this" then a rebuild isn't a bad idea.
How would they go about doing this in practice? Are they going to fire the entire police force, and recruit new people from scratch? If that is the case, can the current cops apply? How would they make sure bad cops from the current force don't get recruited again?
A simple first step would be to maintain a national level open registry of fired cops and bad behavior reports. At minimum, if a cop gets fired, then he can't go to the next county and get a job
> A simple first step would be to maintain a national level open registry of fired cops and bad behavior reports. At minimum, if a cop gets fired, then he can't go to the next county and get a job
This is the kind of baby steps solution that is completely not the answer even if it's part of a solution for one of the problems. This is systemic and with strong opposing forces (current police officers and their unions, as one example), you can't believe that a database of bad cops would be enough if they aren't even being fired for the abuses being committed right now, if there is already a system of protecting bad police officers why do you believe that they simply wouldn't fire or prosecute even less abuses to avoid a harsher punishment?
I've not researched enough to delineate a step-by-step process of dissolution of the police but there are enough parallels in history and similar experiences to be studied.
The little I've read about seem to include that previous police officers can re-apply but would need to go through the new revamped hiring process. Such hiring process would be defined by citizens' organisations, experts, human rights organisations and so on. There is enough scientific knowledge in that, there are enough police services in the world that use them, it's a matter of shaking the status quo and removing the old roots that US policing stems from.
This can't be achieved by steps if the roots of it are deeply rotten, you gotta understand that.
I think applying to cops something along the lines of what we have for professional engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc. could be a solution.
All cops nationally would be required to have a license from this organization in order to do some "reserved acts", like arresting someone, using force, firing a taser, etc. Any complaint about cops would be evaluated by this organization, and could result in the suspension / revocation of their license. There would be a strong emphasis on deontology, and the organization's explicit mission would be to protect the public.
This would probably have a similar effect overall to what you're describing, but it'd be more of a whitelist than a blacklist.
I tweeted about this a week ago being from the area. It helped the city get rid of officers that the police union were protecting not fire-able. Further, it helped the city (which had declared bankruptcy) get rid of police pensions negotiated decades ago that were draining city coffers.
How does firing people get rid of pensions? That sounds pretty wrong - punishing every cop by taking away their pension because of the act of one? Why would anyone join the police at all if that's possible?
Disbanding and replacing a PD eliminates the old police union contracts.
Those lopsided contracts are at the root of the impunity and violence we've seen over the past week.
Many cities have made extraordinary contractual concessions, including:
- Secrecy clauses. Officer Bob might have 31 excessive force complaints against him, but the city is contractually forbidden from making that information public, or in some cases even retaining the records after X months.
- Arbitration for firing. Those clauses can be shockingly strong. The Philadelphia PD fired an officer for having Nazi tattoos. They were forced to reinstate him after arbitration. https://twitter.com/dburbach/status/1269638494466514955
Those clauses and more often add up to police that are effectively unfireable and therefore not under meaningful civilian control. Witness the head of a NYC police union taunting the mayor and openly flaunting the Right to Know Act / announcing that officers will be covering up their badge numbers.
Camden got a start fresh with no pre-existing police contract. For many cities, that's potentially worth a lot.
I don't understand why there isn't a professional license required for LEOs.
I'm a paramedic. If I harmed a patient once (let along 31 times), my card would get revoked and that would be that. A cop, meanwhile, is likely to face no consequences at all, and in the absolute "worst" case scenario, they would just get a job in the next town over.
Paramedics and police are at opposite ends of the union representation spectrum. Paramedics have no union and are thus treated like livestock. The police have the strongest unions in America and are thus largely untouchable.
You're conflating allegations of harm vs harmed. Given your position is just assisting the person and not enforcing the law(which the person does not want the cop to do against them), you are magnitudes less likely to have allegations made against you.
Allegations aren't an objective historical fact. They can and are used to spite.
> Officer Bob might have 31 excessive force complaints against him
A complaint is an allegation. It's not a confirmed incidence of bad behaviour.
Using Chauvin as example (17 complaints), From WAPO:
> A summary of the complaints against Chauvin posted by the department offers no information on why they were filed, and police declined to comment on the nature of the cases. Sixteen of the complaints were closed without discipline. The remaining complaint resulted in two letters of reprimand against Chauvin, according to the summary.
A letter of reprimand for excessive force should be the end of a police office's career in law enforcement (a similar incident would certainly be the end of my time as a paramedic).
It’s important to note these provisions are given to police in lieu of salary increases. Citizens and elected officials could choose to raise police wages, attract better candidates and not substitute legal concessions for salary increases. When cities are trying to cut costs, these “free” provisions can seem like a no brainer, as opposed to giving in to wage increases.
1. I don't begrudge the police union for negotiating for all this. It's their job, just like it's the job of my city to play hardball with negotiations.
2. Police are some of our best paid public servants.
I don't think anyone is against more police, but rather the tactics used and how that money is spent. Twenty years ago, police deploying tasers was an outlier. In 2020, it's become normalized and happens thousands of times a year. There's no reason we can't have better trained, restrained police at the same or greater budget. It's the tactics that are in question, and qualified immunity which allows bad actors to do as they please with little-to-no impact to themselves (thanks to local governments picking up the tab).
Let's not pretend we didn't just see 57 police officers resign from a volunteer position because two of their own were caught on camera pushing a 75-year old man to the ground and held accountable because "just following orders".
One thing that must happen is we must impose enhancements to penalties for crimes committed by law enforcement/police.
Assault, battery, theft, etc., by a police officer is inherently worse than that by an ordinary citizen. They have abused the immense power, privilege, and trust of their position and there should commensurate consequences.
NPR carried a segment talking about making free market liability insurance mandatory for police, with departments only paying the average rate.
There needs to be a neutral third party to assess risk, because all of the current stakeholders are biased (executive government, judicial government, community organizers, police unions).
Can't speak for anyone else, but I'm against more police. I think communities would be better served by an increase in social workers in most cases. Drug usage and homelessness won't be solved by imprisoning people and forever branding them as criminals. You need bridge housing, treatment programs, and services for these people. And an educational system that is well funded, regardless of the community it serves. I think criminalizing social issues has proven to be pretty ineffective, generally harmful, and really expensive. I'd recommend checking out "The End of Policing" for a thoughtful, well-reasoned argument for decreasing the number of police.
The ebook is free: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing
> I think communities would be better served by an increase in social workers in most cases
I couldn't agree more. I think there's an appropriate ratio of police/population, though I don't think I'm even remotely qualified to speak on that subject. But when I think about the "police/prosecutorial/prison-industrial complex", I can't help but hope that the only real path to a long-term solution is actually giving a shit and genuinely wanting to help people get better, vs "justice".
I am fine with more police if we entirely redefine police to mean social workers, counselors, community assistants, etc.
And if they didn't carry guns nor drive unmarked cars. Police should be seen and they should be seen interacting positively with the community, not patrolling in a gradient of (un)identifiable vehicles.
Unfortunately, there are now so many care workers that many people with issues are getting fed up with all the people that come to their house for all kinds of help (think a care worker for finance, one for mental issues,one for physical issues,one to help the person get back to work, one for the kids etc. etc.)
So if there will be a shift from 'police as is', to more like a care worker system, this would be something to consider.
But other than that, it seems to work well. The police is considered your friend. They pretty know each of the people that have issues or who ever committed crime.
They continue to offer help to them,but will make sure they also get off the streets when they become a potential threat.
There continues to be a lot of criticism from certain groups within our country that wants the police act tougher, but I think the majority of people are happy with how the police does it's job here.
I am an American living in Netherlands, and policing is very different here. Think Dutch police (or at least Amsterdam police) have a much more positive impact on neighborhoods than American police (or DC / San Francisco police). I have seen more mediation and deescalation between neighbors from police in a few years in the Netherlands than decades in America.
This is a tangent, there also seems to be way, way less paperwork in routine police work in the Netherlands than in America.
Hey no offense but tour analysis of how police works un the NL is a best partial. NL is under investigation of countless NGO for having structural racisim, relationships with far right parties and high level corruption within the police force, you can have a look to reports from the league of human right for exemple. Also social helpers system is going nowhere as you have to wait an average of 15 years to get social housing, and in the meanwhile if you're out of options you gotta go into expensive homeless shelters that would make living in the streets desirable given how bad they are, if it wasn't illegal. NL's state build a nice image of nice police and nice social help, but that's an image, reality is far from that
There is also a wijkagent - "neighborhood cop". Actual policeperson (with gun and all) that has "office hours" when they are walking around the neighborhood talking to people (even just for a chat) at the playgrounds, business owners and so on. People come to them with problems. There is a website where you can look up wijkagent for each neighborhood. Sometimes they're also active on Twitter, FB... Works quite well
It's very important that police is connected to the community they police, and cares about that community. My impression of police in the US is that that is rarely the case in cases where this police brutality occurs.
I'm fairly happy with Dutch police. They're visible and approachable. They're not perfect; there was a case in the 1990s where they cracked down unreasonably hard on a peaceful student protest. And in that case, it turned out that many of those cops were indeed looking forward to a fight, which is a dangerous and harmful attitude. Those instances are fairly rare, though.
Even so, no tear gas, no beatings, and despite the protesters resisting as much as they non-violently can, the police are not using any violence beyond pulling and shoving them into the bus.
(It's surprisingly hard to find anything online about events before 2004. This was all over the news at the time, but now it looks like it never happened. My quality newspaper lacks proper archive functionality for searching more than a year ago. Search engines and Youtube have never heard of this, frequently returning 0 results.)
@malnourish has a good point, though. Quite often police respond to calls that require a social worker or mental health professional. And in some of those cases, the police decides that a bullet is the best solution to the problem that they are equipped to provide. Many problems require very different solutions, and many police officers are not equipped to provide those solutions. That is a major problem.
Either police officers need to be trained as social workers and mental health professionals, or part of their work needs to be taken over by those that have that training.
Every country has unmarked cop cars in use alongside high visibility marked cars. Every country has armed officers in addition to unarmed officers.
Given the US has liberal gun laws, how would that even work? It's shortsighted & reactionary unless you want people who are already in dangerous situations to be lambs led to the slaughter because you'd like to think you live in a unicorn reality.
I agree with all your points; and while we’re on the subject of optics reform, I have an entirely unsubstantiated pet theory that if we made police uniforms pink, we would see abuse of power drop substantially - the idea being to create a very different (visual and emotional) image of what a police officer is and what they do, and the pink specifically serving the dual purposes of a) reminding police that their job is less about force and more about supporting the community, and b) filtering out any men whose sense of masculinity is so withered/warped that they’d take issue with the standard uniform of a highly-esteemed servant of the community.
> Let's not pretend we didn't just see 57 police officers resign from a volunteer position because two of their own were caught on camera pushing a 75-year old man to the ground and held accountable because "just following orders".
I have a slightly different take on this, and to be clear, seeing that video was absolutely shocking and made me feel nauseous and even light-headed.
The officers were part of a unit that was specially trained by FEMA to do exactly what they did;
> "The unit’s training is part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA’s, Field Force Operations course. It’s a three-day training which covers skills including baton-holding positions, mass-arrest procedures, and riot-control formations, according to the website." [1]
Suspending the officers is deflecting the blame from where it really lies. The state (politicians) deployed that team to do exactly what they did, and knew or should have known that people would be hurt as a result of those tactics.
I guess you could imagine some sort of active riot scenarios where people are under attack by a mob, and where those tactics are specifically necessary to essentially rescue hostages..., but the situation they were actually deployed into was not remotely that from what I understand.
I think of it this way. When we look back at Tienanmen Square, do we blame the person driving the one tank at the front of the column, or do acknowledge that every driver in every tank was not strong enough to refuse to follow those orders, but ultimately the leaders of the regime are to blame.
That's why I think making the story about the officers is actually missing the point, and further blaming the other 57 officers who resigned doubly-so. The officers are resigning because they are being hung out to dry to take the blame for the leader's mistakes. I was hoping to see the "57 officers resign" story used to pivot the blame onto the police and political leadership rather than reinforcing the notion that the blame is just on bad actors / bad apples.
There are systemic issues with the system, and this is a perfect example of where officers are being trained to act in exactly the wrong way, and then being deployed inappropriately. These weren't rogue officers. The criminal case to charge is not so much assault by an individual officer, but reckless endangerment by the people who made the decision to deploy an aggressive riot control team out into the general populace.
> When we look back at Tienanmen Square, do we blame the person driving the one tank at the front of the column, or do acknowledge that every driver in every tank was not strong enough to refuse to follow those orders, but ultimately the leaders of the regime are to blame.
Both. It's the whole "just following orders" thing. It's not an excuse. You (the officers) know for a fact that it's wrong to push a 75-year old man down to the ground like they did. You don't need anybody to tell you that, and no training manual is going to tell you that it's ok or not ok to do so.
The 57 officers resigning, good. They aren't quality police officers that we need on a police force. It doesn't matter what training tells you - and if they can't see that, then good riddance. There are plenty of people out there who can make fine police officers.
Hiring more police is not a problem, as long as you fire all the old dysfunctional police, and get rid of all the mechanisms that kept dysfunctional police in place for all those years.
If you fire tons of bad cops and you want good cops, you're going to have to hire them.
I think a lot of it comes from opinion pieces such as this one https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... which makes incredibly confident and general statements from a very small sample size, while there are many success stories of successful complete rewrites
> Also, "Most software at Google gets rewritten every few years."
That's hardly point in favor, given Google's "reputation" for long-term support and stability, and the sheer amount of engineers that they can throw at literally every problem.
It's directly comparable. It didn't work so well in Ukraine either, which has an educated, Western society. They disbanded and "rebuilt" their police force to step away from Russian influences.
Corruption came back, but in the meantime, a lot of operation efficiency was lost.
Swapping out a police department is much like swapping out a dev team - you are losing a LOT of tribal knowledge, and you have few guarantees that the new dev team won't make their own, potentially different, mistakes. They also lack experience in the domain.
Right, what they are asking for is oversight on budget and practices, except that doesn't sound nearly as exciting as "abolish the police departments!". If they are actually asking to abolish the police departments, that's painfully naive.
No, that's not what police abolitionists are asking for. That's what police reformists are asking for. These are not the same. I posted another comment on this post with plenty of references if you want to read up on the difference.
How? Is Minneapolis also disbanding it's entire civil beaurcracy? Is Minneapolis also blacklisting the current police from other jobs? Are they letting the current police take home any equipment they currently have access to?
Your Ukraine comparison is slightly better, but "corruption came back" doesn't address whether the move was beneficial or not. Nobody expects the result of disbanding the police to be a perfect racism free police force.
We don't know yet, which is the point and why myself and others in this thread are expressing what would otherwise be considered useful and healthy skepticism. Given the general rhetoric of the activists, the scene with the Mayor yesterday when he said he doesn't support disbanding the police, and how easily an extreme position gets support online it's totally plausible that one of the conditions for "disbanding" the police and rebuilding it is that current officers are blacklisted from re-hire. The civil bureaucracy is up for grabs too, as the protesters announced yesterday their political goal is to remove the mayor from office. That may be the right thing to have happen, but thinking that the city's bureaucracy won't be "disbanded" and "reformed" is I think a bit naive. It's certainly possible.
>The civil bureaucracy is up for grabs too, as the protesters announced yesterday their political goal is to remove the mayor from office
The removal of one public official is nothing like the deBaath party decision. Acting like there is a possibility this situation mirrors Iraq is ridiculous.
Sure, I'm well versed in what happened in Iraq believe me. I'm not making a direct comparison here. I'm merely saying that a reboot of the civil bureaucracy is within the realm of possibility, not that we're going to see some kind of "deDFL-ification" of city hall.
> One officer kicked a handcuffed suspect in the face, leaving his jaw in pieces. Officers beat and pistol-whipped a suspect in a parking lot on suspicion of low-level drug charges. Others harassed residents of a south Minneapolis housing project as they headed to work, and allowed prostitution suspects to touch their genitals for several minutes before arresting them in vice stings.
> These and more substantiated incidents, detailed in court records and police reports, help explain a saying often used by fellow cops to describe the style of policing practiced in the Third: There’s the way that the Minneapolis Police Department does things, and then there’s the way they do it “in Threes.”
I live in an area with a bad police department. I've never seen our police care about crime. To be frank, I'm not sure how I'd be any worse off without them. I suspect we need some of the higher-end investigative units (e.g. detectives who solve murders and similar), but the run-of-the-mill police units seems like a waste of my taxpayers dollars. I'd support disbanding our police in an instant.
Camden had the most violent crime in 2019 [1], but are around the 12th highest population in NJ in 2017 [2]. They are the 10th most dangerous city in the country [3] as of 2020 according to neighborhood scout. The FBI ranked it #1 in 2012. [4]
Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but good stats. From #1 ranked dangerous country in 2012, a disbandment in 2013, and #10 today seems at least somewhat successful to me
I think firing the police force and starting from scratch is plenty reasonable, given the things I've heard. However, this reform sounds like it goes further and will change how law enforcement is handled in Minneapolis at a fundamental level. It's blowing away the entire organization, not just the staff.
I'll be very interested in how this works out for them and how similar the new solution ends up being to the old one. I suspect it won't be as different as many commenters are suggesting.
Have they released any details about how they expect the new solution to be different?
Camden is in the top 0.2% of American cities in terms of per capita crime rate, according to the googling I just did. Not a great recommendation there.
But this was true of Camden before its police reform as well. From the linked article:
> He led the city’s high-profile pivot to community policing from 2013 until last year and oversaw what turned out to be a steep decline in crime. Homicides in Camden reached 67 in 2012; the figure for 2019 was 25.
Wouldn't that suggest that the problem hasn't been solved? That there is some other issue?
I'm not familiar with Camden or the reforms, so maybe there are other metrics by which things have improved. However, "top 0.2% of American cities in terms of per capita crime rate" is an awfully condemning statistic.
> He led the city’s high-profile pivot to community policing from 2013 until last year and oversaw what turned out to be a steep decline in crime. Homicides in Camden reached 67 in 2012; the figure for 2019 was 25.
That's significant improvement. Waiting until you can "solve crime" seems unproductive.
The city had already started out with an extremely high crime rate and it dropped significantly after the PD was disbanded and remade. It hasn't gotten to typical levels but I don't think people are expecting magical results here. People want a useful police that treat them with respect and that doesn't use any opportunity to terrorize them and murder them. You know, like the police in every other first world country.
A lot more crime happens, nobody reports it though. Just like in the Bay Area for car thefts. Very underreported because we are discouraged from making reports and after the 3rd break in, don’t even bother reporting. Everyone using Camden as a success on Social media is mistaken.
Poor people hurt the most, while rich and upper middle class likely never has to call the police
Armed police roaming the streets don't solve car break-ins. I specifically mentioned car break-ins in my comment below[1]. I want the police department as we know it to be disbanded so we can have real solutions to real problems.
No one is saying stop solving crimes. Minneapolis may disband their police department, and get out of the union contract. But they aren't going to stop solving crimes. The lack of crimes being solved currently is explicitly mentioned as a reason for disbanding current police department, and looking for smarter solutions.
Armed police who are specifically ordered to not interdict fleeing property criminals (the rule of engagement for most Bay Area police departments) and not respond to break-ins at all, even for fingerprints certainly won't solve car break-ins.
So, you end up with stupid posturing shit, like having two units sit in their cars with lights flashing, stationary, in one mostly-empty parking lot a night, like SCPD does by the Chili's on El Camino near Lawrence.
Milton Friedman said one of the most important aspect of capitalism, more than the profit motive, was that bad companies are allowed to fail & better company can fill the need.
It sounds kind of crazy on the surface but it makes sense - what else would you do if you completely lost faith in the police force to do its job effectively? It would probably seen easier to disband it and replace it with something else than to try and reform such an organization.
- Ticketing revenues no longer fund the department
- Expanded auditing of violent calls
Unfortunately, the greater group of protesters is incapable of understanding nuanced policy or democratic change. I fully expect MN to swing red this election as a result of this.
All those things have been tried and reform is more limited. The biggest problem is that unions protect all the bad applies in "solidarity" so even with body cams and abundant evidence of brutality nothing happens.
If you actually think body cams help, ask yourself why Derek Chauvin felt comfortable murdering George Floyd in broad daylight while being filmed.
- What happens when the bodycams are off? Is the officer fired and jailed?
- What happens when an officer fails the pysch eval? Are they fired?
- Who oversees the corruption reporting? How do you know they are not corrupt too? They surely can't be part of the police dept.
- Reduce/eliminate drug penalties: The problem is racism where drugs are often used as the excuse. Why is there no racism training in your list? Or de-escalation training?
> Unfortunately, the greater group of protesters is incapable of understanding nuanced policy or democratic change.
This is extremely rude and invalidating of large efforts put forward by the protesters to look at all options, think outside the box, and make real change. Some protesters have even been re-writing the police and city budgets themselves to see how things might turn out.
> What happens when the bodycams are off? Is the officer fired and jailed?
If an officer's bodycam is turned off and there is a confrontation, the officer should be assumed guilty in any dispute. It should be the officer's responsibility to ensure their bodycam works, just as it is the officer's responsibility to ensure their gun works.
Our system doesn't assume criminal guilt under any circumstances, by design, and that's a good thing. Everybody accused of a crime has the right to a trial, even cops.
Let me expand on what I wrote: From a professional perspective, you should be assumed guilty, and probably loose your job, if you are accused of something and your body cam was not on. Because even if the accuser is lying, why was your camera off?
From a legal perspective, I think a cop without a body cam should be given the exact same rights as a private citizen, including around the use of force. The right to use force comes with responsibilities, like having a body camera.
And when standing in court as a private citizen, a body cam which just happened to get turned off at the exact time of the incident should be viewed with extreme suspicion. Not proof in itself, but a very serious black mark.
That's not entirely true. There are a category of legal defenses called "affirmative defenses" [1] where you are presumed guilty and have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt something that makes your typically unlawful conduct lawful. Self-defense, insanity and fair use are common affirmative defenses.
I would expect affirmative defenses to be fairly common in trials involving police; there's typically not a lot of argument around whether an officer assaulted/killed someone, just over whether the use of force was authorized.
That being said, I would be more in favor of changing jury instructions to indicate that the lack of body cam footage can be seen as an incriminating factor. Not that it 100% means that they are guilty, but that it can be considered suspicious circumstantial evidence. Much in the same way that you cannot be compelled to self-incriminate, but that juries are allowed to interpret invoking the 5th amendment as incriminating.
The statement "the greater group of protesters is incapable of understanding nuanced policy or democratic change" is extremely rude. It's also wrong. It definitely violates HN guidelines in at least 3 different ways.
They made a low-effort post of ill-advised, out-of-touch suggestions and ended with lobbing direct insults at huge swaths of people.
What about adding mandatory personal liability insurance for all cops, just like what doctors have to pay into? Then when they mess up, they are personally on the line instead of the taxpayer.
Mob is as smart as the most stupid person in it. Read some ‘Psychology of mob’ by Le Bon. This has been in public domain knowledge for over 100 years. Hitler read that book, allowed him to have full control of the mobs. Seriously, good read. Also would be nice not to have so many ignorants angry at facts at HN.
It sounds to me like you have no idea what's going on in Minneapolis. The city has passed laws to require those things. The police department has sued, stonewalled, and flat out ignored those laws. This is the next logical step - when they won't obey the law, remove them entirely.
A huge part of the problem in Minneapolis is the police union resisting any kind of reform. Unfortunately the most expedient way to get rid of the union is to fire _everyone._ Hopefully other police forces recognize this as a reminder to choose their battles more wisely.
The doc is really weird. It picks and evaluates dimensions that obviously will improve after disbanding the police, but doesn’t try to address the question if the actual safety will improve. Instead it looks at whether disbanding the police will “ challenge the notion that police increase safety?” wtf. Also hard to believe that more training and bodycams have negative effect on actual quality of policing and safety. Any data to support this?
> Also hard to believe that more training and bodycams have negative effect [...]
The police use body cameras for real-time facial recognition of the policed [1]. It 100% has, and explicitly is, a negative effect. It was a right of center “reform” on the police that did nothing but further expand the power (and future of abuse of power) of our policing institutions.
Now you would have to argue that real time face recognition is truly and solely a bad thing. If used correctly it can help reduce the violence in communities, catch child molesters, rescue kidnapped kids etc. Finally it would help defund the police as it can increase its efficiency.
only thing I can see facial recognition doing is causing police forces to constantly single out individuals for previous crimes by removing their anonymity from the police force.
this doesn't improve safety it causes a feedback loop where the person targeted will struggle to move to a normal life.
Just to be clear, I’ not in favor of facial recognition. However as a society we need to make informed decision and not to pick some random cons just to dismiss ideas that we dont like. I would be very disappointed if engineer, even junior, showed your attitude towards problem solving.
> I would be very disappointed if engineer, even junior, showed your attitude towards problem solving.
What attitude is that exactly? Some semblance of a code of ethics? I think you are drastically underplaying the "random con" of a realtime facial recognition surveillance network of body and CCTV cameras.
People have to be confronted with the use cases of the technology they build prior to building it. Ignorance, naivety, and a post-hoc "I didn't know it would be use as such" is just ethical negligence.
That's so much of what a metropolitan police force does that that's functionally equivalent to a disbanding, assuming they don't all resign in protest of being held accountable.
Did you just advocate for tearing apart the current policing paradigm and then wind up with "Unfortunately, the greater group of protesters is incapable of understanding nuanced policy or democratic change"? That's a wild ride of a post right there.
How do you think what's happening will differ from what you're suggesting?
Disbanding the force is more important than everything on your list.
As others have said, once you lose institutional control, and the mayor and the police chief have both effective said that they have lost this, than small reform don't matter.
Plus Minneapolis PD has a strong reputation as one of the most corruption in the nation.
TL;DR When a cop is fired there are several safety nets that can reinstate them. If I remember right, the union reinstates ~45% of fired officers. Neither the Chief nor the mayor have the LEGAL power to even fire bad actors in the police department. They literally cannot do anything about the problem within the law.
I think you are missing what I am saying. The person I was responding to said the police cheif and mayor has lost control. If they have then they failed at their job and should be replaced.
This does not mean that other things should not also be done.
I beleive getting rid of / modifing the police unions would be beneficial. Fixing the whole qualified immunity issue would also be good. But I also think police need representatives to protect them from false accusations or from being railroaded. Maybe that is from a union or maybe its from something else.
There's a severe financial side to it all as well...
The city budget funds the police, which funds the union, and they donate their money to the attorney general, mayor, and city council members. Often when they don't get the budget they demand, police will openly retaliate against local businesses and residents who did not support their budget.
I don't think it will work. Minneapolis has one of the highest crime rates in the country, just as Baltimore did, and that city saw crime rates rise even higher after protests led to tighter regulations on the Police ... but I don't live in Minneapolis and so I'm curious to see how it will turn out. I support this as a great social experiment.
Fair enough. The devil is in the details of course. But I am skeptical that the crime rates would drop if there is less policing since the crime rates are not caused by police.
> I am skeptical that the crime rates would drop if there is less policing since the crime rates are not caused by police.
About that...
>When New York police officers temporarily reduced their “proactive policing” efforts on low-level offenses, major-crime reports in the city actually fell, according to a study based on New York Police Department crime statistics.
An alternative interpretation is that crime rates are so high because police spending is the wrong way to deal with the problem. Money that could be spent on drug treatment programs is instead being spent 10x on a paramilitary organization that openly admits and jokes about its policy is to shoot first and ask questions later.
Historically police department reorganizations have actually often involved increases in "policing," in addition to structural changes in what "policing" looks like...
My sense is that most (but not all) of the people cheering this on are like you. They don't live there, they have no family there, and they have no ties to the city or the state. Spoke with a childhood friend last night, and he's leaving the city and moving to Minnetonka once his lease is up in August. Everyone else he knows is doing something similar. Obviously this is all anecdotal, and like you said we get to watch a massive experiment play out in real time. With the advent of more virtual work, people are going to bail on places where they see risk as too high. I don't live there anymore, was born in Iowa, but grew up in Minneapolis and moved there when I was 5. People, especially in tech it seems, have an element of optimism that's useful in most situations. I don't share that in this case. We've approached a sort of social contagion where if you don't support the most extreme positions you are shamed (literally, like the Mayor was).
I feel this way about San Francisco. I'm getting out this month, and I'm not coming back until I have to. I can leave without a COL salary adjustment so long as I stay in the state. I imagine lots of other people are doing the same thing as me. There's little point to staying in the city as a renter if you don't have to go into the office. There's almost no point in staying if you can't go into the office, even if you wanted to.
We're also helping out everyone else by leaving if you think about it. Landlords will be forced to reduced rents even further for the people who can't leave but don't qualify for aid, and aren't lucky enough to be in a rent-controlled unit.
It’s interesting that we never consider the status quo to ever be an extreme. Perhaps part of why these root-to-branch efforts seem so extreme is because the Overton window has been shifted so far to the right wrt Criminal Justice we’ve lost perspective.
American policing is not exactly a shining beacon of civil achievement. It has a long history of being both problematic and largely ineffectual at establishing law & order within the confines of the US constitution.
When violent crime started dropping precipitously in the 90s researchers scrambled to figure out the recipe so it could be repeated and amplified. Ultimately they came up empty handed. Interestingly, the Environmental Lead Hypothesis emerged as a likely cause (especially because the pattern can be seen across different countries, cultures, and criminal justice systems) but does have its own share of detractors.
But regardless, we don’t actually have solid evidence our current approach to law & order is even effective. It’s largely a faith-based system. And it’s performance is abysmal... So we should be open to “radical” change as micro-optimizations aren’t going to help us here.
The Overton Window is as far left as it ever has been such that drug possession is becoming more decriminalized, sentencing and bail reforms have recently passed, and body cameras are more prevalent than ever before.
Reduced policing in Baltimore after Freddy Gray's death has led to more than 100 extra murders of black men per year.
Baltimore police have willfully chosen to disengage with community policing. There was no real “reduction in policing”.
Their budget has also risen by about $60 million since Freddy Gray. No real change in department culture other than low officer morale.
This is an example of the more “moderate” police reform in action: no fundamental change to police structure, just some new training and procedures. It didnt work. Officers hate it so they pouted and disengaged.
I still live in Minneapolis and most people that I know want to stay.
Everyone who watched the video knows George Floyd was murdered, but the MPD and its union still want to fight their termination and all charges.
MPD response to protesters has been incompetent, callous, and malicious. The majority of MPD are suburban Trump supporters and like all Trump supporters they can't stand progressive places like Minneapolis. The last straw for me was when the MPD police arrested a reporter in broad daylight on live TV.
Cities live and die based on those with real roots in the city. Which is why it’s largely not worthwhile to shape city policy on the desire of “tourists” who are either transient or “if 1 bad thing I don’t like happens I’m leaving immediately”
All public sector unions should be banned, I'm not going to fight you on that one. But, again, I just don't share this optimism.
>The majority of MPD are suburban Trump supporters and like all Trump supporters they can't stand progressive places like Minneapolis.
Maybe things have changed since I moved away in 2013, but this wasn't true back then. Both parents of one of my classmates in elementary school were cops and lived in South Minneapolis. If it is true today, that seems to suggest an interesting selection bias no? Either MPD only hires surburban Trump supporters or only these suburban Trump supporters want to sign up to be cops in the city. In either case, and like I mentioned above, we get to watch a neat little experiment play out in real time if we're going to disband the MPD and rebuild it.
It was true, even back then. In 2015, only 5.4% of the MPD lived within city limits. [1] This isn't a recent change, and IMO it's a major driver of the "occupier"/"us vs them" mindset many cops in the MPD appear to have. (example: [2])
As another commenter pointed out, Over 90% of MPD has been from outside the metro for a long time.
Sounds like you never really knew what's going on here. The MPD is incompetent and wiping the slate clean is not an extreme position to many people here.
But the high crime rate and low rate of actually solving and punishing crimes reinforces the argument. It’s worth comparing various police-related statistics between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Police across America do indeed have systemic problems, but Minneapolis does seem to belong to a handful of truly bad police departments.
What could go wrong? Lunatics are running the asylum it seems. Authority is always here. Disband the police and you will get another arbitrary authority (being gangs, some kind of political repression, and so). There already are no-go zones in Europa where the police don't go anymore, believe me, you wouldn't want to live there.
If you don't want the official police anymore, why not starting with your place, your home and your family?
There exists a decent real world example of "a tale of two police strategies" in two demographically similar cities: Juarez and El Paso. Juarez and El Paso are situated across from each other along the U.S.-Mexico border. In some ways they are the same city, with many residents traveling across the border each day. Juarez is the second most deadly city in the world, at over 100 murders per 100K population [1]. El Paso has just 3.3 murders per 100K population [2]. The difference is that the police and legal system work better in the U.S. compared to Mexico. In many parts of Mexico, gangs run the streets, and officials are either in bed with gangs or often intimidated by gangs [3]. That's what fills the power vacuum in the absence of effective policing.
The power of Mexican drug cartels is scary. Someone like El Chapo is essentially above the law. The only reason he's still in prison is because he as extradited to the US.
At least in the case of George Floyd, one of officers was charged with murder, the other three with aiding and abetting, so they're clearly not lawless gangs. We'll see what happens at trial, but this is a fair level of scrutiny for what happened; if police faced charges like this every time one of these deaths happened, they'd be a lot more careful.
This is a big reason why I'm in favor of police body cams. In an innocent until proven guilty legal system, it's too easy for people to get off by saying "he lunged at me and I defended myself."
> coroner
Really? I assume you mean the country medical examiner. He ruled the death a homocide. I think people want there to be a simple explanation like "he was choked," but it was actually pretty complicated because of drugs in his system, underlying heart disease, and covid-19. I honestly think both reports are generally true, and there's enough room for difference of opinion in the exact cause of death that I'm not concerned by the different conclusions.
Do you (or others) actually believe this statement, or are you being contrarian to make another point?
If you do, what sort of experience / data leads one to believe that policing in western societies are top-line equivalent to the strong-armed lawlessness that exists in many failed states around the globe. Genuinely curious.
The data that we have is racial bias in stop and frisk (no evidence of crime before the stop), bias is traffic stops, bias in tickets being issued for the same offense, racial bias in sentencing.
Not to mention that almost every case that came to trial against police came about after video came out. Before the video, they tried to cover it up.
How many times have we seen recently that when “the few bad apples” were fired and/or charged, “the good cops” objected?
I agree that the risk of disbanding a police department is underappreciated and there are some scary alternatives that can form. This isn't an action people should be taking or proposing lightly. I'm worried it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Gangs breed in places where basic needs aren't being met. Poverty and economic despair drive people both to join gangs and to buy from them. A big part of this movement involves re-allocating the enormous budgets that many of these police departments have, towards social services like affordable housing, education, and rehabilitation programs. In theory, those programs could treat the problem at the source.
People in middle-class neighborhoods refrain from stealing and shooting people not because they have superior moral fiber, but because their needs are met, and therefore crime isn't in their best interest.
> What could go wrong? Lunatics are running the asylum it seems. Authority is always here. Disband the police and you will get another arbitrary authority (being gangs, some kind of political repression, and so). There already are no-go zones in Europa where the police don't go anymore, believe me, you wouldn't want to live there.
> If you don't want the official police anymore, why not starting with your place, your home and your family?
Europa? I hope that’s a typo and not a dog whistle. I’ll assume good faith but your comments in this thread have a lot in common with views promoted by Identity Evropa and other white supremacist groups. Just in case you weren’t aware of the ambiguity in a typo like Europa.
Sorry, it's because I am French, my English is not that good yet.
My country (France) is sinking: daily violence, ethnic gangs, religious fanaticism, tribalism, women being harassed daily in the streets. It's really scary for the future actually.
So when I read comments on HN about disbanding the police, it seems to me that some guys in here have lost touch with reality. It's not because you are a good person with moral values that all people in the world are like you.
If an apartment block were riddled with termites, asbestos, and concrete cancer, the people saying that it should be demolished aren't proposing that the residents revert to sleeping under the stars in the empty lot left behind.
Likewise, the people proposing that the MPD be abolished aren't saying that Minneapolis should go without a police force, just that they need a whole new one, without the legacy of the old one.
Interesting...though they are talking about replacing the MPD with something ("a new transformative model") at least, not leaving the lot empty, to continue the metaphor.
I mentioned this solution in a comment the other day. The NCAA gives sports programs the 'death penalty' when the 'loss of institutional control' [0] is so great the only fix is to disband and start over. Having it as an option is a good thing. The people in charge can't use an 'I didn't know' defense, because that itself is evidence of loss of institutional control.
I also argued that about equifax. Corporate death penalty is extremely underutilized. Organizations die all the time due to missteps they inflict on themselves, it shouldn't be controversial to apply the same outcome when they inflict harm on others.
Not so much the data probably, but some of the services. I was thinking more business / consumer sides split. Of course given what sort of data shows up in my credit report (annoyingly outdated) I'd be okay with them being shut down too.
Unfortunately, I fear that the NCAA no longer really believes this is a viable option for programs that are large enough. Penn State football should've been given the death penalty over the Sandusky scandal IMO, but I don't think we'll ever see a large football or basketball program ever get that kind of punishment again, unfortunately.
The NCAA's only major death penalty was given to SMU and it devastated the local economy so much, with many restaurants, for example, going bankrupt, that they will never do it again. And SMU has been flagged for violations since then, also. The collateral damage is tremendous and the result after the calamity, as in Animal Farm, is not much different.
Additionally, "lack of institutional control" often means someone loses their career because of something done by someone else that took great pains to hide their malfeasance.
How do you quantify the damage to those harmed by the original violations? Isn’t that where the blame should be placed, on those who did the harm, which called for the enforcement?
What, exactly, does it mean to disband a police department? Fire everyone and hand over policing responsibilities to the state? Permanently or temporarily?
I can understand the sentiment of the people behind those writings, but it doesn't really answer my question. What will replace the Minneapolis police department if it's disbanded?
Many (most?) of its current responsibilities and funding can be given to social workers, traffic wardens, and other people not armed with guns, but that doesn't obviate the need for officers of the government to enforce the law. Laws can change and become less strict, but we will always need some form of police.
The goal of disbanding the police is so that you can rebuild it from the ground up. It does not mean 'no police ever', it means clearing out the weeds by the roots so that they don't choke the new trees you're trying to plant.
guerilla's comment about police abolitionists says that the police would be abolished, that is, not exist anymore. That's not realistic, and I assumed "disbanding" meant what you said.
But how would that work in practice? What happens in the interim? Does another PD take over temporarily? Are any members of the old police force allowed to re-join the new one? What happens to cases currently under investigation?
I saw a comment that said that Camden, NJ disbanded its PD and the county PD expanded into the city, so I guess that's one option.
In Canada, if a city's police service is disbanded, I think the provincial police service (if there is one) or federal police will automatically take over. In Ontario, that would be the Ontario Provincial Police, but most of the country is policed by the federal RCMP (Canada has a single criminal code).
They didn't really have the county PD expand into the city. They created a brand new PD, rehired a lot of the old people, named it the county PD (I guess for optics), had new management etc, had drastically different training, priorities, slogans, etc that focuses on the community and not on murdering people when they twitch.
Abolishing the police means abolishing it. Nothing will replace it. Crime will be prevented by eliminating its causes and there will be some mechanisms to deal with last resort cases. The articles explain this.
I sure hope the mechanism for last resort cases isn't men and women in uniform with guns, because then social workers will be very unwilling to approach any potentially violent situation without the not-police-uniform-gun-men there.
Sorry to be cynical, just the experience of a police officer in a place where social services are funded far, far better than the US - police don't want to deal with mental health all the time, but being the agency of last resort makes it very easy to abdicate responsibility to.
Indeed, I think it helps to understand what police authority and responsibility is exactly and then one can more easily see what variations are possible. See my response to the comment sibling to yours.
No, first, like re-callable community self-defense who would answer to competent managers of specific situations rather than being incompetent managers of situations themselves, be internal rather external to the community and be re-callable at any time rather than essentially having immunity.
It's a mistake to assume that police abolition means pacifism. It's also a mistake to assume the use of violence means policing.
The rest of the original title was, "[and] Invest in Proven Community-led Public Safety". That part may be even more interesting, at least on the surface. I'm really curious what it means. Minneapolis could become a testbed for radical new approaches to this problem.
im not sure how i feel about this. "fire everyone" is too large a scope, but "charge 1-4 officers with murder" is too small a scope.
both measures are too extreme. firing everyone is only useful if you restructure the training pipeline and system of accountability, but if you do that you dont need to fire everyone.
i suppose a nuanced approach is outside public reactionary purview so this is probably the better option. charging 1-4 officers with murder without changing the leadership accountability, culture, or anything really will have very negative impacts on policing.
Where are you getting the idea that they will fire everyone? That is how the nation of Georgia handled it but it doesn’t mean that’s how Minneapolis will. They said rebuild they system from the ground up, which means restructuring the system of accountability, not necessarily everyone loses their job.
The US has lots of different police forces – city police, county police, state police. Many other countries have more centralised policing with fewer levels. I think, a smaller number of bigger police forces might promote more professionalism, more professional management, oversight by more experienced politicians (state political leaders tend to be more experienced and capable than local political leaders, especially when talking about smaller cities). That would suggest abolishing city-level police forces and merging them into the county-level police force, even abolishing county-level police forces and merging it all into state police.
The problem is that there is no organization that is incentivized to uncover or investigate police crimes.
All other portions of government have cross-checks to stop people breaking the law. The police don't, and cover for one another.
There needs to be an organization that has clear and direct incentive to prosecute abuses by the police, that doesn't have a century+ long tradition of violence, selective enforcement, racism, and murder.
The state of New South Wales (NSW), Australia has a Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC) [1], which is a body legally separate from NSW's law enforcement agencies–NSW Police Force, which is the main state police force; NSW Crime Commission, which specialises in organised crime and other serious crime–and which is tasked with investigating law enforcement misconduct. (In Australia, there is no local law enforcement, only state/territorial/federal.) The LECC doesn't prosecute itself, but can investigate cases and refer them to state prosecutors for prosecution. It isn't perfect, but it is better than nothing. Maybe the US could copy the same idea?
(Also, separately from the LECC, there is also an Inspector of the LECC, whose job is to investigate misconduct by the LECC themselves.)
Part of me wants to ask “but who investigates the Inspector of the LECC?” But I’ve dealt with Elixir and I know that supervision trees rarely need to be very deep in practice
But it would seem far more feasible to build an organization like that to oversee one unified police force than to have n tiny organizations to oversee n small local police forces. If you'd try to mix levels (one central org cross-checking n small forces) everybody involved would inevitably confuse their role with a central coordination hierarchy and the original intent would get lost.
For the FBI, there is such an organization. The FBI Inspector General investigates malpractice committed by FBI officers. However, the scope of their ability to fix problems in the FBI is limited because prosecutors rarely take up cases against law enforcement. They also hold FBI officers accountable by writing reports for congress. Again, the usefulness of this is limited by the unwillingness of Congress to act on this information.
(Inspectors General exist for for every federal agency)
It has to be an organization separate from any specific police agency, with prosecutors solely devoted to prosecuting police crimes, complete with their bonuses and careers linked to convictions complete with scummy plea bargaining behavior.
There also has to be new crimes of negligence for things like 'body cam turned off' or 'records suddenly missing' and so on.
More frequently, we have county Sheriffs, not police. And their duties are quite distinct; only recently have they come to resemble police.
Shrievalty is more concerned with the functioning of the courts: sometimes holding suspects before trial (and maintaining jail facilites), ensuring the security and order of the court, protecting jury members from violent coercion, capturing fugitives, etc.
Patrolling and "preventative" enforcement is not a traditional role for the Sheriff.
Many US counties have unincorporated areas, in which county sheriffs have full police patrol responsibilities. Often, that authority also extends to incorporated areas (villages/towns/smaller cities) which are too small to have their own police departments and rely on the county for all policing functions.
In Westerns, the Sheriff is investigating everything from petty thefts to murders. In many places, that was all the police they had.
Is that historically accurate? Pretty much, yes. The modern concept of a police force only began in the 19th century, and at first they only existed in larger cities.
As separate police forces were established, Sheriffs began to perform less policing functions, and yield more of that jurisdiction to the newly established police forces. But, in many rural parts of the US, county sheriffs are the only local law enforcement, performing all police functions, and the same was true 150 years ago. The innovation of separate police forces never arrived in underpopulated rural areas.
So I think the history is the opposite of what you think–sheriffs performing general policing functions actually used to be more common than it is now.
Where I live, County level officials are the folks who implement state policies. For example XYZ County Department of Family services investigate child abuse for the state.
We even have a saying “counties are merely agents of the state.”
This is a Midwestern thing. The south has strong, independent counties.
The moral is that States, counties, and municipalities aren’t just “levels.”
In my state, there really is no state government above the county level (outside the state Capitol that is.)
There is an exception for law enforcement: we have state troopers and state department of investigation.
I am Indian, so I don't have an idea of the state of the administration/police in USA. However, I disagree that centralization is the solution. Accumulating power in hands of few is how you end up being a pseudo-democracy like India/Brazil/Myanmar.
By centralizing the police force, USA might end up might an entire state police force supporting a leader with autocratic tendencies, like what is currently happening in India.
In Australia, there are no local police forces (county or city), only state and federal police. In that sense, Australian police are much more centralised than US police. And yet, I don't think Australian police are overall significantly more corrupt than US police. (Yes, Australian police do have corruption problems; but more than US police does?)
Degree of police centralisation is similar between India and Australia. India does have city police departments, but they form part of and are subordinate to the state police, rather than being independent agencies like in the US–as such, the state governments exert more control over them than local governments. And Australian state police forces have local divisions too (Police Districts, Area Commands, etc).
Rather than India's police corruption problems being due to police centralisation, I think they are likely due to India's broader corruption problems, whose causes are much more complicated than anything merely to do with the organisation of its police services.
I doubt anyone will adopt a scientific approach, namely, before the experiment begins, figure out what it is you're going to measure, how you're going to measure it, and then announce a threshold for "this got us what we wanted" versus "this was a mistake."
That's been tried for years and clearly hasn't worked. Incremental reform has failed when you have corrupt unions and entrenched cultures.
Yes, you should usually try to incrementally fix bugs in a codebase. But sometimes it's so mired in technical debt that you're better off throwing the whole thing out and starting from scratch.
> That's been tried for years and clearly hasn't worked.
Are you implying there haven't been improvements at all? Seriously, if you say things like this, you should need to provide some statistics. I'm pretty sure we're at all time lows for police killing unarmed people (don't know where I saw the statistic but this is why I'm so skeptical of the above statement).
Looking at the police brutality over the past 2 weeks, including blatant attacks on journalists and peaceful protestors, makes it clear that they have not been "reformed."
So you keep decades old code in production, trying to fix bugs in obsolete languages and architectures?
I would start a new project in a modern language or framework that's relevant for the environment and make my job a lot easier. Sure there's gonna be bugs, but its easier to fix when I actually built the system and documented it well.
I mean if I had an elevator that occassionaly plunged people to their deaths I'd be past trying to patch the bugs and calling in a completely different elevator company.
Also, large monolithic systems get replaced constantly. The projects that get in trouble has more to do with project management and change management, the code is just tangential.
"We've been patching bugs in this elevator software for years and people are plunging to their deaths at lower rates than they used to. Give us a couple more decades and we will have this all fixed."
I might suggest ripping out the elevator and just putting in some stairs.
My guess is there's a contract with the current MPD and police union that currently hampers all attempts at reform. This would no longer present a problem if they started over from scratch.
The stumbling block is the police union president, Bob Kroll. Who has an outsized influence over the police. Also pretty consistent white supremacist, doesn't even try and hide it.
It's probably more like deciding that your organization is simply incapable of writing software (which I've seen before).
The typical next step is to outsource it to an outside organization that will cost 3x as much and produce software of far lower quality. It's a win, though, because the exec's can point their fingers at them, perhaps even sue them, and in any case proclaim loudly that nothing could have been done. (And also, that they should get their bonuses anyway.)
The headline is accurate, but perhaps a bit misleading. A synopsis:
The Minneapolis Police Department has had a long string of scandals, and gradual reform doesn't seem to be working. A majority of the city council seem to have decided to rebuild/replace the department in its entirety.
This seems pretty reasonable. It's not some wild eyed anarcho-libertarian plan to try and build a society without coercive force (perhaps sadly, if you lean that way...); it's just an announcement that a dysfunctional government department is going to be reorganised slightly more thoroughly than was previously planned.
"...MPD announced last year the discovery of 1,700 untested rape kits spanning 30 years, which officials said had been misplaced."
This leads me to think that there are some objective metrics by which a police department's performance can be measured. For a department to have 1,700 untested rape kits (vs. nearly 2500 rapes reported in 2019) seems outrageous, even if it represents a low percentage of total reported. Why wouldn't a police department ensure that every reported rape with evidence collected is properly followed up? They say many or all of these kits were misplaced, which simply leads to more questions about procedures, policies, and internal discipline.
It seems that a standardized approach to department evaluation and oversight is needed. Corporations employ internal accounting personnel, external auditing personnel, and then submit to audits by the IRS. If there were a similar approach to oversight for police departments, with data made transparent as it is for public companies, perhaps most those 1,700 women would have justice.
The rape thing is tricky though. Very unlikely they were really "misplaced". That answer sounds like an attempt to avoid the real, much harder discussions about the rape case pipeline.
Go investigate this for yourself if you don't believe me, but there are good and difficult reasons why very few rape cases go to prosecution. It's not a US problem or a Minneapolis problem, the same things are found throughout the world.
Core problem: a huge number of rape allegations are false compared to other crimes. It all starts from there. In anonymous interviews police will normally claim about 50% are false. There have been academic studies that reach similar numbers. There are also a lot of rather motivated studies that try to claim it's much lower, but when you dig into the methodology there are usually big problems and it's clear they've started with a pre-determined conclusion.
So how can a PD end up with 1,700 untested rape kits? Easy. A woman walks in and claims she's been raped. The police administer a kit. They also do a bit of investigation, probe her testimony a bit. She changes her story and renounces the claim. This happens all the time, it's an extremely frequent way for these cases to end. There are even pie chart breakdowns in some of these studies for the top reasons for renouncing an allegation, for example, it's often a tactic used as part of a fight, when the couple make up she goes and admits it wasn't true. Or the claims fall apart under investigation and she admits she was lying.
So the police shelve the kit. It's not worth sending it off to the lab when the claimant already did something that ensures no successful prosecution will ever occur. At the same time it's evidence so they don't destroy it.
One day someone finds the big pile of untested rape kits and goes crazy. OMG evidence of institutional sexism at the police, how can this be justified. Some police manager looks at the data for the reasons and decides "the kits are untested because we think 1,700 women lied to us" isn't going to go down well and doesn't want to start that argument, because a whole lot of very angry people, wrongly and delusionally, believe women never lie about rape. So they come out with this nonsense about them being "misplaced" and hope it'll blow over.
Low rape clearance rates are mentioned in the article as evidence of poor performance at this PD, but it's a bit vague as to what they mean. What you see though is that this particular crime has very low clearance and prosecution rates globally. When people drilled into loss rates at different parts of the case pipeline, they found there are no easy answers and no ways to change things beyond the obvious one of relaxing standards of proof to make it easier to put men in jail.
The problem is American gun culture and the probability that any call might turn into a violent one. Other countries don't have that problem so they can send unarmed social workers with higher confidence, over a life time of calls, they're going to see retirement. In America that isn't the case and responders need a gun because everyone has guns and you need to have sustainable system for keeping order that ensures, over the long tail, peace keepers stay alive. This is probably an unpopular opinion in a time of police abuses but it's orthogonal, it just means our police need to be extremely well trained and disciplined because we built a society that is inherently more dangerous (and this costs a lot of money which we're now defunding).
Would it help if murdering unarmed peace keepers or whatever had extreme punishment attached? Even criminals can be trained. Kill an unarmed peace keeper, your life is effectively over.
That would require a constitutional amendment, because right now that’s first degree murder, usually a capital crime, and making the punishment worse than that would violate the 8th amendment.
The protests and the surprising violence from the PDs have actually shown the value of 2A. If anything, I'd vote for disarming police, except maybe a few special units, because most of them are emotionally unstable and can't be trusted with guns or any sort of power. If you think about who the most cops are, they are just a bunch of dudes that would normally be some retail workers, but with a few months of training they are given the license to kill. Obviously, most of them can't handle this level of responsibility.
"Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis retreated on Saturday through a sea of protesters yelling, “Go home, Jacob, go home!” and “Shame! Shame!” after he refused to commit to defunding the Police Department."
He says no to the abolition of the PD, not defunding.
I highly recommend Jane Coaston of Vox for a follow. Her recommendations are:
1. End qualified immunity
2. Curtail the power of police unions
3. We need fewer laws
I don't think I could agree harder with this. It sounds like the "disband the police" movement is an elaborate implementation of #2. Now we just need #1 and #3.
I don't think taking weapons away is enough. Police aren't trained to provide long-term solutions to domestic violence, homelessness, mental illness, or drug addiction, which are often tasked with solving. The typical solution law enforcement offers to these situations is to jail someone. Rightly, people don't want to go to jail and the situation escalates. And as we're witnessing all over the US, the police are often responsible for this escalation, and that escalation leads to violence.
I think we need people trained in non-violent intervention who can offer long-term solutions to the problems these people are experiencing. Why not just replace a patrolman with a social worker who can call the actual police should the situation escalate?
I don’t necessarily disagree, but I think a lot of the situations you describe need a peace officer with legal authority to arrest. They mostly don’t need deadly force, and I think the walking threat of deadly force that gun carrying cops represent changes the situation often for the worse.
Is she a journalist or a social/political activist? Shouldn't she pretend to have a bit of objectivity and not become part of the news itself?
Twitter has been the greatest tool to expose the news industry and journalists for what they are. Propagandists and political activists with an agenda.
That said, I agree with those recommendations. I'll add one more. Police departments should almost exclusively hire from the communities they "serve" and/or require police officers to live in the community that they "serve".
The idea that the corporate press has ever been different is a myth. Do you really think the corporate press gave Reagan a fair shake? Do you know the history of the bull shit William Randolph Hearst pulled? It's always been like this. It's just before we didn't have social media where they could be called out on their bull shit in real time. Coaston is biased but she's open about that bias and makes a noticable effort to be fair to her opposition.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] threadI would rather see police reforms and a rethinking of priorities than disbanding police altogether. But if it happens (a big if) perhaps Minneapolis will provide a rare natural experiment.
Why? Surely any new policing entity will entail the philosophy of reform and keeping the rotten part around would be detrimental.
Maybe they should have hired from within the community instead.
I admit that with the surprising, to me, deplorable recent behavior of the Buffalo PD, I am more sympathetic to the idea of total replacement. So I’m interested to see whether this goes anywhere in Minneapolis.
b) I'm not positive this is the right solution, but it could be, and it will be fascinating to see how it plays out and whether it's something that could work everywhere
And when it comes to "what congress can do" I'd argue that it's 90% about allocation of funds -- because it doesn't matter what the law is if there is no money to enforce it.
Using this logic and the destabilization of US military the natural answer is another highly militarized government.
So where there is lawlessness there is opportunity for authoritarianism whether that’s a gang, police, US military, or foreign adversary.
We need to be smart about change and boil the frog, not get into a fight we cannot win, otherwise society will descend into authoritarianism likely ran by the most experienced and powerful authoritarian.
Camden disbanded their police department and has seen crime drop: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/01/what-happened-to-crim...
Disbanding the police doesn't mean no public safety measures. It means disbanding the department and rebuilding a new approach to public safety.
Nobody actually thinks that we can have no law enforcement. That doesn't mean that disbanding systematically corrupt departments and rebuilding from scratch isn't a good idea.
"Other cities are still struggling. Kansas City, Columbus, Phoenix, and Birmingham saw homicide rates reach new highs in 2017. In Baltimore, homicides hit a new per-capita peak."
If I have to place bet, the fate of Minneapolis will be similar to that of Baltimore.
You're just spreading FUD.
Whether this really is the right solution... I don't know. We'll find out in time. I sincerely hope it is for the sake of all citizens of Minneappolis and the surrounding area.
Apparently Camden, NJ did a version of this in 2013 with a fair amount of success: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-04/how-camde...
There is so much about America that is worth preserving. One easy example right off the top of my head is the law and culture that enables people to peacefully demonstrate like they are today. Even discussing the idea of doing this in many countries could get you killed - or worse! That's another amazing thing (again, just off the top of my head), in America the worst punishment we have is death, and even that is outlawed in many places. The idea of an internment camp[0][1] is not even considered.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps
[1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/17/20861427/india-...
"Scores of videos in the last week show police brutally beating regular citizens who have assembled peacefully."
Those are two different groups of people.
Freedom of expression is one of those things that I'd prefer to keep, but we can see that it is stronger on paper than in practice. In practice, if you gather in the capital city to bring your grievances to the government, unidentifiable mercenaries will gas you. And if you are a journalist reporting in front of your local police station some cop will shoot you in the head with "non-lethal" rubber ball, leaving you without eyes, or teeth.
It is the institutions of American that need to be dismantled, because are an implementation that doesn't reflect the founding ideals of our country.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/22/us/ice-detention-coronavirus-...
https://www.insider.com/report-detention-centers-use-disinfe...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/border-fac...
https://archive.is/bxmYQ [WaPo]
Do you have a citation on that? I don't think that's true. ICE detains a lot of people here legally, including citizens.
https://www.google.com/search?q=american+citizens+in+ice+det...
Regardless, ICE should be obeying international laws for human rights, which they are not.
It seems to me that ICE is meant to intimidate entire groups of people regardless of their citizenship or legal status.
What's the point in calling them 'human rights' if they only apply to Americans. The US Bill of Rights does not make any reference to citizenship or legal immigration status in the 6th or 8th amendments (which seem particularly relevant). Not to mention you still need due process to prove the person does not have legal immigration status in the first place.
There isn't really any ambiguity here, unless the law specifically targets citizens or people with a valid legal immigration status the law protects illegal immigrants as well.
I'm not very well versed in US law but it's my understanding you can't shoot a man down in the street for jaywalking because he's a criminal and thus not protected by the law.
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
The word 'comment' doesn't appear in your comment, but that's still what it is.
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
You should read up on who's in these camps. Most are asylum seekers. Applying for asylum is legally recognized under the Geneva Convention. Hell, I just watched a documentary where an asylum seeker was asked to come to the Tijuana/SD border for his asylum interview, thrown into detention ICE, and then transferred from one center to another before finally being deported a year later. He was imprisoned for asking for asylum, not being in the US illegally.
The tile is What Happened to a Dream Deferred. During the QandA the director told us how she had to get involved because the subject that applied for asylum was arrested at the interview. Then moved through many detention camps. This is done so their immigration lawyers can't find them and represent them during the hearings. I found this to be really shocking.
People on HN thrown "Geneva Convention!" (sic) around like it's a magic amulet. There are multiple conventions with multiple articles, and the USA isn't even a signatory to all of them. When people argue random Geneva Conventions nexus for some element of policy without stating a specific Convention and Article, assume that they're bullshitting you. It's like a lazy Support rep saying, "it's in the manual... somewhere."
If you compare that right to any other country in the West, it doesn't look so peaceful and free.
You also missed Trump musing on the idea of Muslim internment camps, so "not even considered" is a long bow. We might also include "kids in cages" while we're at it.
There are plenty other worse countries, but this seems like a rather low standard for a victory lap ("Freer than China! Less repressive than Belarus!").
I would suggest living in a third or second world country without outside support. I had your same mindset, and did that for a few years. I could not wait to come back.
East Berlin used to be second World, but many of my American friends moved there because they were tired sick of being harassed by their own country brutality and would never go back.
Even many African countries are safer than the US if you are black.
On the other side, one of the most annoying kind of tourist you can find in my city, which is Rome in Italy, are Americans.
They lack the basic notions about "respecting others cultures and habits"
Anyway, I've been to US several times and food, outside of the big city, is of very low quality.
Gas is pretty expensive in Europe too, is to discourage its consumption and favour power efficient vehicles.
And btw, Venezuela is one of the larger producer of oil in the world, but US seized its control for a long time and when they nationalised it, US supported coups and the rise of the actual presidency and their brutal police.
One day you'll start to feel responsible for what you did, and if you don't, the World will make you.
There's a lot to learn and improve by looking at how other countries solve their problems.
This was also the topic of Michael Moore's Where To Invade Next. Instead of taking other countries' oil, the US should take other countries' ideas, and Moore had a couple of suggestions for interesting ideas from other countries, like school lunches from France, prison system from Norway, etc.
Good joke. Reference?
For example, municipal government and school boards. Yes they can go bad. But as the protestors in Minneapolis are showing, the city is extremely responsive because it is local.
If there was a similar protest in Birmingham (UK), I can’t imagine the city disbanding the police department under any circumstances.
It might result in parliament taking action. But the idea of independent municipal government is very lacking.
Municipal governments in England are very much subordinate to Parliament.
There’s a reason Blair was so pathetically and stupidly pro-American. America actually has a lot to offer.
I'm proud of my America, even if it does have warts (some of them ugly.) I have confidence we'll get better in the future.
And I guess I could say the same about every country in Africa. NOTHING WORTH PRESERVING. Oh look suddenly people have their eyes bulging out.
https://www.tapinto.net/towns/camden/sections/law-and-justic...
That's not necessarily a bad thing! A big problem with existing departments is decades of corruption, poor leadership, and entrenched policies. Tearing the department down and rebuilding it from scratch—even if you end up with a similar size as before—gives you the opportunity to remove the excesses/abuse. You can also do things like hiring more specialized positions and firing all the bad officers (because if the department is gone, the union can't protect them).
This is underappreciated. It's hard to seriously change organizations in less than a decade when employees have long tenures.
Opinions and behaviors are only truly malleable at the beginning of careers, and later change is fighting against the inertia of old timers' "Let me tell you how it's done."
Which isn't only negative. Esprit de corps is what holds together people doing tough jobs for long careers.
But if you want to say "No more of that. Now we're doing this" then a rebuild isn't a bad idea.
A simple first step would be to maintain a national level open registry of fired cops and bad behavior reports. At minimum, if a cop gets fired, then he can't go to the next county and get a job
This is the kind of baby steps solution that is completely not the answer even if it's part of a solution for one of the problems. This is systemic and with strong opposing forces (current police officers and their unions, as one example), you can't believe that a database of bad cops would be enough if they aren't even being fired for the abuses being committed right now, if there is already a system of protecting bad police officers why do you believe that they simply wouldn't fire or prosecute even less abuses to avoid a harsher punishment?
I've not researched enough to delineate a step-by-step process of dissolution of the police but there are enough parallels in history and similar experiences to be studied.
The little I've read about seem to include that previous police officers can re-apply but would need to go through the new revamped hiring process. Such hiring process would be defined by citizens' organisations, experts, human rights organisations and so on. There is enough scientific knowledge in that, there are enough police services in the world that use them, it's a matter of shaking the status quo and removing the old roots that US policing stems from.
This can't be achieved by steps if the roots of it are deeply rotten, you gotta understand that.
All cops nationally would be required to have a license from this organization in order to do some "reserved acts", like arresting someone, using force, firing a taser, etc. Any complaint about cops would be evaluated by this organization, and could result in the suspension / revocation of their license. There would be a strong emphasis on deontology, and the organization's explicit mission would be to protect the public.
This would probably have a similar effect overall to what you're describing, but it'd be more of a whitelist than a blacklist.
Disbanding and replacing a PD eliminates the old police union contracts.
Those lopsided contracts are at the root of the impunity and violence we've seen over the past week.
Many cities have made extraordinary contractual concessions, including:
- Secrecy clauses. Officer Bob might have 31 excessive force complaints against him, but the city is contractually forbidden from making that information public, or in some cases even retaining the records after X months.
- Arbitration for firing. Those clauses can be shockingly strong. The Philadelphia PD fired an officer for having Nazi tattoos. They were forced to reinstate him after arbitration. https://twitter.com/dburbach/status/1269638494466514955
Those clauses and more often add up to police that are effectively unfireable and therefore not under meaningful civilian control. Witness the head of a NYC police union taunting the mayor and openly flaunting the Right to Know Act / announcing that officers will be covering up their badge numbers.
Camden got a start fresh with no pre-existing police contract. For many cities, that's potentially worth a lot.
I'm a paramedic. If I harmed a patient once (let along 31 times), my card would get revoked and that would be that. A cop, meanwhile, is likely to face no consequences at all, and in the absolute "worst" case scenario, they would just get a job in the next town over.
You're conflating allegations of harm vs harmed. Given your position is just assisting the person and not enforcing the law(which the person does not want the cop to do against them), you are magnitudes less likely to have allegations made against you.
Allegations aren't an objective historical fact. They can and are used to spite.
Apples and oranges.
> Officer Bob might have 31 excessive force complaints against him
A complaint is an allegation. It's not a confirmed incidence of bad behaviour.
Using Chauvin as example (17 complaints), From WAPO:
> A summary of the complaints against Chauvin posted by the department offers no information on why they were filed, and police declined to comment on the nature of the cases. Sixteen of the complaints were closed without discipline. The remaining complaint resulted in two letters of reprimand against Chauvin, according to the summary.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/29/officer-cha...
2. Police are some of our best paid public servants.
Let's not pretend we didn't just see 57 police officers resign from a volunteer position because two of their own were caught on camera pushing a 75-year old man to the ground and held accountable because "just following orders".
Assault, battery, theft, etc., by a police officer is inherently worse than that by an ordinary citizen. They have abused the immense power, privilege, and trust of their position and there should commensurate consequences.
There needs to be a neutral third party to assess risk, because all of the current stakeholders are biased (executive government, judicial government, community organizers, police unions).
I couldn't agree more. I think there's an appropriate ratio of police/population, though I don't think I'm even remotely qualified to speak on that subject. But when I think about the "police/prosecutorial/prison-industrial complex", I can't help but hope that the only real path to a long-term solution is actually giving a shit and genuinely wanting to help people get better, vs "justice".
And if they didn't carry guns nor drive unmarked cars. Police should be seen and they should be seen interacting positively with the community, not patrolling in a gradient of (un)identifiable vehicles.
Unfortunately, there are now so many care workers that many people with issues are getting fed up with all the people that come to their house for all kinds of help (think a care worker for finance, one for mental issues,one for physical issues,one to help the person get back to work, one for the kids etc. etc.)
So if there will be a shift from 'police as is', to more like a care worker system, this would be something to consider.
But other than that, it seems to work well. The police is considered your friend. They pretty know each of the people that have issues or who ever committed crime.
They continue to offer help to them,but will make sure they also get off the streets when they become a potential threat.
There continues to be a lot of criticism from certain groups within our country that wants the police act tougher, but I think the majority of people are happy with how the police does it's job here.
This is a tangent, there also seems to be way, way less paperwork in routine police work in the Netherlands than in America.
I'm fairly happy with Dutch police. They're visible and approachable. They're not perfect; there was a case in the 1990s where they cracked down unreasonably hard on a peaceful student protest. And in that case, it turned out that many of those cops were indeed looking forward to a fight, which is a dangerous and harmful attitude. Those instances are fairly rare, though.
I was thinking more of this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIwrdriLiZc
(It's surprisingly hard to find anything online about events before 2004. This was all over the news at the time, but now it looks like it never happened. My quality newspaper lacks proper archive functionality for searching more than a year ago. Search engines and Youtube have never heard of this, frequently returning 0 results.)
How would you ask a police officer to react to a criminal brandishing or firing a gun in public or at him?
How would you ask detectives to work cases against gang leaders if they cannot conceal their identity?
... from Latin politia "civil administration," from Greek polis "city"
Either police officers need to be trained as social workers and mental health professionals, or part of their work needs to be taken over by those that have that training.
> And if they didn't carry guns nor drive unmarked cars.
Every country has unmarked cop cars in use alongside high visibility marked cars. Every country has armed officers in addition to unarmed officers.
Given the US has liberal gun laws, how would that even work? It's shortsighted & reactionary unless you want people who are already in dangerous situations to be lambs led to the slaughter because you'd like to think you live in a unicorn reality.
I have a slightly different take on this, and to be clear, seeing that video was absolutely shocking and made me feel nauseous and even light-headed.
The officers were part of a unit that was specially trained by FEMA to do exactly what they did;
> "The unit’s training is part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA’s, Field Force Operations course. It’s a three-day training which covers skills including baton-holding positions, mass-arrest procedures, and riot-control formations, according to the website." [1]
Suspending the officers is deflecting the blame from where it really lies. The state (politicians) deployed that team to do exactly what they did, and knew or should have known that people would be hurt as a result of those tactics.
I guess you could imagine some sort of active riot scenarios where people are under attack by a mob, and where those tactics are specifically necessary to essentially rescue hostages..., but the situation they were actually deployed into was not remotely that from what I understand.
I think of it this way. When we look back at Tienanmen Square, do we blame the person driving the one tank at the front of the column, or do acknowledge that every driver in every tank was not strong enough to refuse to follow those orders, but ultimately the leaders of the regime are to blame.
That's why I think making the story about the officers is actually missing the point, and further blaming the other 57 officers who resigned doubly-so. The officers are resigning because they are being hung out to dry to take the blame for the leader's mistakes. I was hoping to see the "57 officers resign" story used to pivot the blame onto the police and political leadership rather than reinforcing the notion that the blame is just on bad actors / bad apples.
There are systemic issues with the system, and this is a perfect example of where officers are being trained to act in exactly the wrong way, and then being deployed inappropriately. These weren't rogue officers. The criminal case to charge is not so much assault by an individual officer, but reckless endangerment by the people who made the decision to deploy an aggressive riot control team out into the general populace.
[1] - https://cdp.dhs.gov/find-training/course/PER-200
Both. It's the whole "just following orders" thing. It's not an excuse. You (the officers) know for a fact that it's wrong to push a 75-year old man down to the ground like they did. You don't need anybody to tell you that, and no training manual is going to tell you that it's ok or not ok to do so.
The 57 officers resigning, good. They aren't quality police officers that we need on a police force. It doesn't matter what training tells you - and if they can't see that, then good riddance. There are plenty of people out there who can make fine police officers.
If you fire tons of bad cops and you want good cops, you're going to have to hire them.
Fascinating parenthetical. Sounds like they dissolved the city PD organization and expanded the county PD. I don't know what Minneapolis plans here.
Also, "Most software at Google gets rewritten every few years." https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.01715.pdf
That's hardly point in favor, given Google's "reputation" for long-term support and stability, and the sheer amount of engineers that they can throw at literally every problem.
There's a consensus against pointless rewrites, but that's different.
Corruption came back, but in the meantime, a lot of operation efficiency was lost.
Swapping out a police department is much like swapping out a dev team - you are losing a LOT of tribal knowledge, and you have few guarantees that the new dev team won't make their own, potentially different, mistakes. They also lack experience in the domain.
How? Is Minneapolis also disbanding it's entire civil beaurcracy? Is Minneapolis also blacklisting the current police from other jobs? Are they letting the current police take home any equipment they currently have access to?
Your Ukraine comparison is slightly better, but "corruption came back" doesn't address whether the move was beneficial or not. Nobody expects the result of disbanding the police to be a perfect racism free police force.
The removal of one public official is nothing like the deBaath party decision. Acting like there is a possibility this situation mirrors Iraq is ridiculous.
It’s possible the PD will be rebuilt in a nicer form, but that’s not guaranteed.
It’s just as likely the PD will be absorbed into the County Sheriff.
Is the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office better?
Probably, at least in the case of the specific precinct that killed George Floyd.
https://www.startribune.com/third-precinct-served-as-playgro...
> One officer kicked a handcuffed suspect in the face, leaving his jaw in pieces. Officers beat and pistol-whipped a suspect in a parking lot on suspicion of low-level drug charges. Others harassed residents of a south Minneapolis housing project as they headed to work, and allowed prostitution suspects to touch their genitals for several minutes before arresting them in vice stings.
> These and more substantiated incidents, detailed in court records and police reports, help explain a saying often used by fellow cops to describe the style of policing practiced in the Third: There’s the way that the Minneapolis Police Department does things, and then there’s the way they do it “in Threes.”
They're very highly compensated too.
Yep, sure seems like a success story....
[1] https://nj1015.com/the-10-most-violent-cities-in-new-jersey-... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_municipalities_in_Ne...
https://www.newjersey-demographics.com/cities_by_population
[3] https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/blog/top100dangerous
[4] https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/2012/10/compared_to_cities_...
https://www.tapinto.net/towns/camden/sections/law-and-justic...
> Homicides in Camden reached 67 in 2012; the figure for 2019 was 25.
yes, I would call almost a 2/3rds reduction in homicides a success
I'll be very interested in how this works out for them and how similar the new solution ends up being to the old one. I suspect it won't be as different as many commenters are suggesting.
Have they released any details about how they expect the new solution to be different?
> He led the city’s high-profile pivot to community policing from 2013 until last year and oversaw what turned out to be a steep decline in crime. Homicides in Camden reached 67 in 2012; the figure for 2019 was 25.
I'm not familiar with Camden or the reforms, so maybe there are other metrics by which things have improved. However, "top 0.2% of American cities in terms of per capita crime rate" is an awfully condemning statistic.
That's significant improvement. Waiting until you can "solve crime" seems unproductive.
Poor people hurt the most, while rich and upper middle class likely never has to call the police
No one is saying stop solving crimes. Minneapolis may disband their police department, and get out of the union contract. But they aren't going to stop solving crimes. The lack of crimes being solved currently is explicitly mentioned as a reason for disbanding current police department, and looking for smarter solutions.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23451939
So, you end up with stupid posturing shit, like having two units sit in their cars with lights flashing, stationary, in one mostly-empty parking lot a night, like SCPD does by the Chili's on El Camino near Lawrence.
- Mandatory psych evals half-yearly
- Anonymous corruption reporting
- Reduce/eliminate drug penalties
- Eliminate civil forfeiture
- Ticketing revenues no longer fund the department
- Expanded auditing of violent calls
Unfortunately, the greater group of protesters is incapable of understanding nuanced policy or democratic change. I fully expect MN to swing red this election as a result of this.
Please elaborate.
If you actually think body cams help, ask yourself why Derek Chauvin felt comfortable murdering George Floyd in broad daylight while being filmed.
- What happens when an officer fails the pysch eval? Are they fired?
- Who oversees the corruption reporting? How do you know they are not corrupt too? They surely can't be part of the police dept.
- Reduce/eliminate drug penalties: The problem is racism where drugs are often used as the excuse. Why is there no racism training in your list? Or de-escalation training?
> Unfortunately, the greater group of protesters is incapable of understanding nuanced policy or democratic change.
This is extremely rude and invalidating of large efforts put forward by the protesters to look at all options, think outside the box, and make real change. Some protesters have even been re-writing the police and city budgets themselves to see how things might turn out.
If an officer's bodycam is turned off and there is a confrontation, the officer should be assumed guilty in any dispute. It should be the officer's responsibility to ensure their bodycam works, just as it is the officer's responsibility to ensure their gun works.
I think bodycams themselves are fantastic tools—but like most technology, they cannot by themselves fix a human problem.
Ftfy
From a legal perspective, I think a cop without a body cam should be given the exact same rights as a private citizen, including around the use of force. The right to use force comes with responsibilities, like having a body camera.
And when standing in court as a private citizen, a body cam which just happened to get turned off at the exact time of the incident should be viewed with extreme suspicion. Not proof in itself, but a very serious black mark.
I would expect affirmative defenses to be fairly common in trials involving police; there's typically not a lot of argument around whether an officer assaulted/killed someone, just over whether the use of force was authorized.
That being said, I would be more in favor of changing jury instructions to indicate that the lack of body cam footage can be seen as an incriminating factor. Not that it 100% means that they are guilty, but that it can be considered suspicious circumstantial evidence. Much in the same way that you cannot be compelled to self-incriminate, but that juries are allowed to interpret invoking the 5th amendment as incriminating.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_defense
They made a low-effort post of ill-advised, out-of-touch suggestions and ended with lobbing direct insults at huge swaths of people.
This is a totally uncalled for generalization. That aside, most of the items you've listed work against the policies that police abolitionists are fighting for. Here's a good explanation: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59ead8f9692ebee25b72f...
The police use body cameras for real-time facial recognition of the policed [1]. It 100% has, and explicitly is, a negative effect. It was a right of center “reform” on the police that did nothing but further expand the power (and future of abuse of power) of our policing institutions.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2017/03/22/real-time-face-recogniti...
this doesn't improve safety it causes a feedback loop where the person targeted will struggle to move to a normal life.
What attitude is that exactly? Some semblance of a code of ethics? I think you are drastically underplaying the "random con" of a realtime facial recognition surveillance network of body and CCTV cameras.
People have to be confronted with the use cases of the technology they build prior to building it. Ignorance, naivety, and a post-hoc "I didn't know it would be use as such" is just ethical negligence.
How do you think what's happening will differ from what you're suggesting?
As others have said, once you lose institutional control, and the mayor and the police chief have both effective said that they have lost this, than small reform don't matter.
Plus Minneapolis PD has a strong reputation as one of the most corruption in the nation.
https://www.startribune.com/minnesota-police-officers-convic...
https://www.patrickburnslaw.com/Articles/Business-Law-Articl...
TL;DR When a cop is fired there are several safety nets that can reinstate them. If I remember right, the union reinstates ~45% of fired officers. Neither the Chief nor the mayor have the LEGAL power to even fire bad actors in the police department. They literally cannot do anything about the problem within the law.
This does not mean that other things should not also be done.
I beleive getting rid of / modifing the police unions would be beneficial. Fixing the whole qualified immunity issue would also be good. But I also think police need representatives to protect them from false accusations or from being railroaded. Maybe that is from a union or maybe its from something else.
The city budget funds the police, which funds the union, and they donate their money to the attorney general, mayor, and city council members. Often when they don't get the budget they demand, police will openly retaliate against local businesses and residents who did not support their budget.
Police unions are the modern day mob, and they are the reason why reform hasn't budged in this country for decades.
About that...
>When New York police officers temporarily reduced their “proactive policing” efforts on low-level offenses, major-crime reports in the city actually fell, according to a study based on New York Police Department crime statistics.
https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti...
reducing the abuses committed by police department is a benefit to society, even if the reported crime rate rises (up to a point, of course)
We're also helping out everyone else by leaving if you think about it. Landlords will be forced to reduced rents even further for the people who can't leave but don't qualify for aid, and aren't lucky enough to be in a rent-controlled unit.
American policing is not exactly a shining beacon of civil achievement. It has a long history of being both problematic and largely ineffectual at establishing law & order within the confines of the US constitution.
When violent crime started dropping precipitously in the 90s researchers scrambled to figure out the recipe so it could be repeated and amplified. Ultimately they came up empty handed. Interestingly, the Environmental Lead Hypothesis emerged as a likely cause (especially because the pattern can be seen across different countries, cultures, and criminal justice systems) but does have its own share of detractors.
But regardless, we don’t actually have solid evidence our current approach to law & order is even effective. It’s largely a faith-based system. And it’s performance is abysmal... So we should be open to “radical” change as micro-optimizations aren’t going to help us here.
Reduced policing in Baltimore after Freddy Gray's death has led to more than 100 extra murders of black men per year.
Their budget has also risen by about $60 million since Freddy Gray. No real change in department culture other than low officer morale.
This is an example of the more “moderate” police reform in action: no fundamental change to police structure, just some new training and procedures. It didnt work. Officers hate it so they pouted and disengaged.
Everyone who watched the video knows George Floyd was murdered, but the MPD and its union still want to fight their termination and all charges.
MPD response to protesters has been incompetent, callous, and malicious. The majority of MPD are suburban Trump supporters and like all Trump supporters they can't stand progressive places like Minneapolis. The last straw for me was when the MPD police arrested a reporter in broad daylight on live TV.
>The majority of MPD are suburban Trump supporters and like all Trump supporters they can't stand progressive places like Minneapolis.
Maybe things have changed since I moved away in 2013, but this wasn't true back then. Both parents of one of my classmates in elementary school were cops and lived in South Minneapolis. If it is true today, that seems to suggest an interesting selection bias no? Either MPD only hires surburban Trump supporters or only these suburban Trump supporters want to sign up to be cops in the city. In either case, and like I mentioned above, we get to watch a neat little experiment play out in real time if we're going to disband the MPD and rebuild it.
[1] https://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/03/20/police-officer-resi... [2] http://www.citypages.com/news/minneapolis-police-officer-urg...
Sounds like you never really knew what's going on here. The MPD is incompetent and wiping the slate clean is not an extreme position to many people here.
If you don't want the official police anymore, why not starting with your place, your home and your family?
ah, you privileged HN folks.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate [2] https://www.areavibes.com/el+paso-tx/crime/ [3] https://apnews.com/231aec4552f040e49095f77968e6345c
When two police were fired and charged with assault for shoving a 77 year old man. 49 other officers resigned in protest.
There are plenty of cases where police acted inappropriately. Like raiding the wrong house and shooting a lady while she was sleeping.
https://www.npr.org/2020/05/13/855705278/sleeping-while-blac...
And nothing happens. The entire system is corrupt.
This is a big reason why I'm in favor of police body cams. In an innocent until proven guilty legal system, it's too easy for people to get off by saying "he lunged at me and I defended myself."
> coroner
Really? I assume you mean the country medical examiner. He ruled the death a homocide. I think people want there to be a simple explanation like "he was choked," but it was actually pretty complicated because of drugs in his system, underlying heart disease, and covid-19. I honestly think both reports are generally true, and there's enough room for difference of opinion in the exact cause of death that I'm not concerned by the different conclusions.
If you do, what sort of experience / data leads one to believe that policing in western societies are top-line equivalent to the strong-armed lawlessness that exists in many failed states around the globe. Genuinely curious.
Not to mention that almost every case that came to trial against police came about after video came out. Before the video, they tried to cover it up.
How many times have we seen recently that when “the few bad apples” were fired and/or charged, “the good cops” objected?
People in middle-class neighborhoods refrain from stealing and shooting people not because they have superior moral fiber, but because their needs are met, and therefore crime isn't in their best interest.
> If you don't want the official police anymore, why not starting with your place, your home and your family?
Europa? I hope that’s a typo and not a dog whistle. I’ll assume good faith but your comments in this thread have a lot in common with views promoted by Identity Evropa and other white supremacist groups. Just in case you weren’t aware of the ambiguity in a typo like Europa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement
My country (France) is sinking: daily violence, ethnic gangs, religious fanaticism, tribalism, women being harassed daily in the streets. It's really scary for the future actually.
So when I read comments on HN about disbanding the police, it seems to me that some guys in here have lost touch with reality. It's not because you are a good person with moral values that all people in the world are like you.
Likewise, the people proposing that the MPD be abolished aren't saying that Minneapolis should go without a police force, just that they need a whole new one, without the legacy of the old one.
There’s plenty of precedence for replacing a broken police force with one which actually works properly.
[0] https://www.ncaa.org/governance/institutional-control
I argued at the time the the "corporate death penalty" was the only appropriate remedy for the Equifax breach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_dissolution
Over free pitchers of beer the undergrads are regaled with tales of hazing and wild parties...giving them the template to start shit all over again.
Additionally, "lack of institutional control" often means someone loses their career because of something done by someone else that took great pains to hide their malfeasance.
Shopping trip on the left wing dime anyone?
1. https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/06/police-abo...
Some more references:
1. https://www.8toabolition.com/
2. https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1268547515038806018
3. https://twitter.com/TravelingNun/status/1268510966116954114
Many (most?) of its current responsibilities and funding can be given to social workers, traffic wardens, and other people not armed with guns, but that doesn't obviate the need for officers of the government to enforce the law. Laws can change and become less strict, but we will always need some form of police.
The goal of disbanding the police is so that you can rebuild it from the ground up. It does not mean 'no police ever', it means clearing out the weeds by the roots so that they don't choke the new trees you're trying to plant.
But how would that work in practice? What happens in the interim? Does another PD take over temporarily? Are any members of the old police force allowed to re-join the new one? What happens to cases currently under investigation?
I saw a comment that said that Camden, NJ disbanded its PD and the county PD expanded into the city, so I guess that's one option.
In Canada, if a city's police service is disbanded, I think the provincial police service (if there is one) or federal police will automatically take over. In Ontario, that would be the Ontario Provincial Police, but most of the country is policed by the federal RCMP (Canada has a single criminal code).
Sorry to be cynical, just the experience of a police officer in a place where social services are funded far, far better than the US - police don't want to deal with mental health all the time, but being the agency of last resort makes it very easy to abdicate responsibility to.
Like police?
I read the article and Twitter threads. They don't explain it.
It's a mistake to assume that police abolition means pacifism. It's also a mistake to assume the use of violence means policing.
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing
both measures are too extreme. firing everyone is only useful if you restructure the training pipeline and system of accountability, but if you do that you dont need to fire everyone.
i suppose a nuanced approach is outside public reactionary purview so this is probably the better option. charging 1-4 officers with murder without changing the leadership accountability, culture, or anything really will have very negative impacts on policing.
All other portions of government have cross-checks to stop people breaking the law. The police don't, and cover for one another.
There needs to be an organization that has clear and direct incentive to prosecute abuses by the police, that doesn't have a century+ long tradition of violence, selective enforcement, racism, and murder.
(Also, separately from the LECC, there is also an Inspector of the LECC, whose job is to investigate misconduct by the LECC themselves.)
[1] https://www.lecc.nsw.gov.au
(Inspectors General exist for for every federal agency)
There also has to be new crimes of negligence for things like 'body cam turned off' or 'records suddenly missing' and so on.
This is very, very rare.
More frequently, we have county Sheriffs, not police. And their duties are quite distinct; only recently have they come to resemble police.
Shrievalty is more concerned with the functioning of the courts: sometimes holding suspects before trial (and maintaining jail facilites), ensuring the security and order of the court, protecting jury members from violent coercion, capturing fugitives, etc.
Patrolling and "preventative" enforcement is not a traditional role for the Sheriff.
For example, Polk County Sheriff (Florida) seems to be busy arresting people for DUI – https://tampa.cbslocal.com/2020/06/06/sheriff-grady-judd-54-...
Sacramento County Sheriff's (Calfornia) has a homicide bureau – https://www.sacsheriff.com/Pages/Organization/CID/Homicide.a...
Erie County Sheriff (New York) has a drug squad which regularly carries out undercover buy operations – https://www2.erie.gov/sheriff/index.php?q=narcotics-unit
Washington County Sheriff (Oregon) has a traffic safety unit – https://www.co.washington.or.us/Sheriff/FightingCrime/Patrol...
Many US counties have unincorporated areas, in which county sheriffs have full police patrol responsibilities. Often, that authority also extends to incorporated areas (villages/towns/smaller cities) which are too small to have their own police departments and rely on the county for all policing functions.
But I think that the distinction is still important as we talk about abolishing police.
Police, as an institution, are very new. Much newer than Sheriffs.
Is that historically accurate? Pretty much, yes. The modern concept of a police force only began in the 19th century, and at first they only existed in larger cities.
As separate police forces were established, Sheriffs began to perform less policing functions, and yield more of that jurisdiction to the newly established police forces. But, in many rural parts of the US, county sheriffs are the only local law enforcement, performing all police functions, and the same was true 150 years ago. The innovation of separate police forces never arrived in underpopulated rural areas.
So I think the history is the opposite of what you think–sheriffs performing general policing functions actually used to be more common than it is now.
We even have a saying “counties are merely agents of the state.”
This is a Midwestern thing. The south has strong, independent counties.
The moral is that States, counties, and municipalities aren’t just “levels.”
In my state, there really is no state government above the county level (outside the state Capitol that is.)
There is an exception for law enforcement: we have state troopers and state department of investigation.
Neither are a substitute for local police.
By centralizing the police force, USA might end up might an entire state police force supporting a leader with autocratic tendencies, like what is currently happening in India.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_JNU_Attack
Degree of police centralisation is similar between India and Australia. India does have city police departments, but they form part of and are subordinate to the state police, rather than being independent agencies like in the US–as such, the state governments exert more control over them than local governments. And Australian state police forces have local divisions too (Police Districts, Area Commands, etc).
Rather than India's police corruption problems being due to police centralisation, I think they are likely due to India's broader corruption problems, whose causes are much more complicated than anything merely to do with the organisation of its police services.
Throwing out a system and starting afresh would likey introduce new bugs/systemic failures that aren't currently present.
Is addressing and correcting each specific feature/SOP not an option?
Yes, you should usually try to incrementally fix bugs in a codebase. But sometimes it's so mired in technical debt that you're better off throwing the whole thing out and starting from scratch.
Are you implying there haven't been improvements at all? Seriously, if you say things like this, you should need to provide some statistics. I'm pretty sure we're at all time lows for police killing unarmed people (don't know where I saw the statistic but this is why I'm so skeptical of the above statement).
I would start a new project in a modern language or framework that's relevant for the environment and make my job a lot easier. Sure there's gonna be bugs, but its easier to fix when I actually built the system and documented it well.
Also, large monolithic systems get replaced constantly. The projects that get in trouble has more to do with project management and change management, the code is just tangential.
"We've been patching bugs in this elevator software for years and people are plunging to their deaths at lower rates than they used to. Give us a couple more decades and we will have this all fixed."
I might suggest ripping out the elevator and just putting in some stairs.
(there must be some programmer war-stories out there about code that has somehow rewritten itself to restore a previously fixed bug)
The typical next step is to outsource it to an outside organization that will cost 3x as much and produce software of far lower quality. It's a win, though, because the exec's can point their fingers at them, perhaps even sue them, and in any case proclaim loudly that nothing could have been done. (And also, that they should get their bonuses anyway.)
We'll see.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/minneapolis-city-council-m...
The Minneapolis Police Department has had a long string of scandals, and gradual reform doesn't seem to be working. A majority of the city council seem to have decided to rebuild/replace the department in its entirety.
This seems pretty reasonable. It's not some wild eyed anarcho-libertarian plan to try and build a society without coercive force (perhaps sadly, if you lean that way...); it's just an announcement that a dysfunctional government department is going to be reorganised slightly more thoroughly than was previously planned.
This leads me to think that there are some objective metrics by which a police department's performance can be measured. For a department to have 1,700 untested rape kits (vs. nearly 2500 rapes reported in 2019) seems outrageous, even if it represents a low percentage of total reported. Why wouldn't a police department ensure that every reported rape with evidence collected is properly followed up? They say many or all of these kits were misplaced, which simply leads to more questions about procedures, policies, and internal discipline.
It seems that a standardized approach to department evaluation and oversight is needed. Corporations employ internal accounting personnel, external auditing personnel, and then submit to audits by the IRS. If there were a similar approach to oversight for police departments, with data made transparent as it is for public companies, perhaps most those 1,700 women would have justice.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2019/07/nati...
Go investigate this for yourself if you don't believe me, but there are good and difficult reasons why very few rape cases go to prosecution. It's not a US problem or a Minneapolis problem, the same things are found throughout the world.
Core problem: a huge number of rape allegations are false compared to other crimes. It all starts from there. In anonymous interviews police will normally claim about 50% are false. There have been academic studies that reach similar numbers. There are also a lot of rather motivated studies that try to claim it's much lower, but when you dig into the methodology there are usually big problems and it's clear they've started with a pre-determined conclusion.
So how can a PD end up with 1,700 untested rape kits? Easy. A woman walks in and claims she's been raped. The police administer a kit. They also do a bit of investigation, probe her testimony a bit. She changes her story and renounces the claim. This happens all the time, it's an extremely frequent way for these cases to end. There are even pie chart breakdowns in some of these studies for the top reasons for renouncing an allegation, for example, it's often a tactic used as part of a fight, when the couple make up she goes and admits it wasn't true. Or the claims fall apart under investigation and she admits she was lying.
So the police shelve the kit. It's not worth sending it off to the lab when the claimant already did something that ensures no successful prosecution will ever occur. At the same time it's evidence so they don't destroy it.
One day someone finds the big pile of untested rape kits and goes crazy. OMG evidence of institutional sexism at the police, how can this be justified. Some police manager looks at the data for the reasons and decides "the kits are untested because we think 1,700 women lied to us" isn't going to go down well and doesn't want to start that argument, because a whole lot of very angry people, wrongly and delusionally, believe women never lie about rape. So they come out with this nonsense about them being "misplaced" and hope it'll blow over.
Low rape clearance rates are mentioned in the article as evidence of poor performance at this PD, but it's a bit vague as to what they mean. What you see though is that this particular crime has very low clearance and prosecution rates globally. When people drilled into loss rates at different parts of the case pipeline, they found there are no easy answers and no ways to change things beyond the obvious one of relaxing standards of proof to make it easier to put men in jail.
He says no to the abolition of the PD, not defunding.
1. End qualified immunity
2. Curtail the power of police unions
3. We need fewer laws
I don't think I could agree harder with this. It sounds like the "disband the police" movement is an elaborate implementation of #2. Now we just need #1 and #3.
https://twitter.com/cjane87/status/1267898762845880321
If a situation warrants firearms, it should at least warrant a radio call to the station for armed backup.
I think we need people trained in non-violent intervention who can offer long-term solutions to the problems these people are experiencing. Why not just replace a patrolman with a social worker who can call the actual police should the situation escalate?
Twitter has been the greatest tool to expose the news industry and journalists for what they are. Propagandists and political activists with an agenda.
That said, I agree with those recommendations. I'll add one more. Police departments should almost exclusively hire from the communities they "serve" and/or require police officers to live in the community that they "serve".