I agree with you that they need to be held to a higher bar, however, I would argue that they are absolutely nowhere near paid enough. May be in major cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, etc. but for most of America, police are grossly underpaid.
Most Americans are grossly underpaid. The subject of pay has no bearing on this article, or the parent comment, though.
Edit: Reading comprehension issue on my part...I wrote this comment before my first cup of coffee. As others have pointed out, the parent comment does mention pay, and I was wrong about the parent comment. I stand by the core message in my comment about pay in general, but clearly I missed the mark here.
The parent comment says they are well paid, the BLS has police officers and detectives grouped together at 67k per year. For contrast the often cited as underpaid high school teacher is listed at 62k. The average across all occupations is 41k.
Police often have benefits packages that few would try to negotiate with a straight face. They typically have an excellent pension and full medical. They also typically rack up a lot of overtime. $67k/year isn't bad when your savings and medical is already taken care of and you still have the prospect of overtime or privately hired side gigs.
The same is true about teachers with the exception of the side gigs and overtime, however summers off allow for similar casual employment opportunities.
A large number of teachers need second jobs, that hardly strikes me as highly-paid especially as many(most?) teachers have master's degrees.
Further, "summers off" is not really correct given curriculum development, PD, grading and the like which often extend far past the end of the semester.
Most teachers only have a bachelor's degree according to BLS, the same level of education required to be a detective. Most of my high school teachers used the same curriculum year after year, even including the USSR on maps they would hand out with instructions to ignore it handwritten on the top of the page. None did any grading over the summer as school was out and no work is being produced by students.
My point here is that groups in the US often say either teachers are underpaid and cops are overpaid or the other way around but a simple Google search shows they make about the same. I've never found someone making this claim that could tell me how much either made, just that it was either too much or too little.
If you feel teachers are undervalued, fine but teachers being underpaid and cops overpaid simply isn't logically consistent.
> If you feel teachers are undervalued, fine but teachers being underpaid and cops overpaid simply isn't logically consistent.
I'm not making this claim. But this statement has no logical problems, at least not as stated. Just because they might be paid a similar amount (or even if teachers are paid more) doesn't mean that the statement isn't logically consistent.
For example, Lebron James gets X and Nico Mannion gets paid Y (which is much less than X). Many still argue that Lebron is underpaid and Nico maybe overpaid. They deliver different value, and there's the notion of scarcity to provide the level service they provide.
If you think the average teacher (or some percentage of teachers) provides more value then the average cop, then you could make that statement and it not be logically inconsistent.
Unfortunately both have civil servant types of roles, which are hard to valuate in terms of financial impact.
Becoming a teacher requires significantly more education than a police officer. In addition, teachers work long, unpaid hours often to create classes and to correct assignments.
I also think teacher's need to be held to a higher bar. Not that they do a bad job on average, but when they do there appears to be little accountability. But that's completely irrelevant to the article.
Please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments to HN. We ban that sort of account because we're trying for at least a bit of a different internet discussion here.
Personal attacks are particularly not allowed, so please don't do that again—regardless of how wrong anyone else is or you feel they are. You may not feel you owe them better but you definitely owe this community better if you're participating in it.
>However, they rarely live where they work, which should change
That's a feature not a bug.
When you have a lot of unfair and unjust laws you need jackboots with no stake in the community in order to enforce them.
My state has some fancy words for justifying and obfuscating it but this is how they justify their policy of assigning state cops far away from their hometowns and residences for the first decade of their career. They want the cops to police the way the state wants them to police. They don't want them to think about what's best for the people being policed.
This is true, but I'd rather move to a society where the police officers have aligned interests to treat people as they want to be treated and the community as theirs too. Ending civil asset forfeiture, war on drugs, over incarceration, and qualified immunity would do a lot to nudge them.
Taken alone this quote is frightening. A man seemingly died because an officer thought it was acceptable to play this ruse, that could have (and did this time) devastating effects.
Deception is a technique often used during interragation. This leads to MANY issues including false confessions. Illinois at least recently passed a law disallowing police to lie to minors (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/31/us/Chicago-police-interro...) but that leads to the question of why is it not okay to lie to minors but it is okay to lie to the handicapped, mentally ill, the elderly or even an adult with full mental capacity (whatever that means)?
In theory, to get people to inadvertently give out evidence thereby furthering justice and protecting people. I'm not sure how well this translates to practice.
Well, I'm theory again this applies to any case in which a cop is interrogating someone who isn't simply free to go, for that there must be probable cause of something illegal.
My understanding is that there is a class of criminals who are so bad, yet so gifted, that you couldn’t hope to prosecute them without deception. So in Canada at least, police can do things to civilians that would be called obstruction of justice if we did them to the police.
In a nutshell, we can stay silent so who cares?
The problem with that is that everyone should care. By the nature of their jobs, police deal with people with a variety of disabilities, levels of education and language comprehension. I don’t know that it’s reasonable to expect people to have the presence to remain silent. Yet if they don’t, we’ll happily incarcerate them. I don’t like crime but I hate innocent people being punished for crimes they didn’t commit.
Pleading the 5th wouldn't be an issue if I didn't lose my job in the process and didn't have to leverage my own legal costs knowing I'm innocent. That is why I like the german legal system where prosecutors are much choosier over cases and also reimburse the defendants for being held if found innocent.
Very well said. As Immortal Technique said, in the North American legal system, "it's better to be rich and guilty than poor and innocent." If the state chooses to prosecute, it's impossible (edit - for most people) to match their resources unless you're both incredibly lucky and prepared to have to start over from $0 after the trial with no job.
At the very least, an employer cannot fire you unless there is a guilty verdict (plea or not). Like that should be a basic worker protection. Companies shouldn't be allowed to fire you based off of state speculation.
If you plead the 5th, there is almost a 100% chance a cop is going to arrest you. Lawful or not, a cop can do that and charge you with whatever they want to. Doesn't mean it will stick, but you can still end up in jail.
Likewise, say it happens on a Monday. Your work is gonna wanna know where you are. They can definitely get away with firing you simply for getting arrested due to "At Will Employment" since you can't really go to work while in a jail cell.
While pleading the 5th protects you from the government forcing confessions or something similar, it doesn't save your job.
You know, I'm not so mad at them for lying. It's a useful tool... what really gets me is when they charge/imprison people for lying --not under oath. Like the FBI did to mrs. Stewart. They could not get her on their original charge, so they got her for "lying to a federal agent". That's bullshit.
Here is the thing. Lies are a tool and the interrogator needs to be skilful with this.
Just like with a hammer you can fix or break something if you don't wield the tool correctly.
When they lie, those statements are constructed to pull informations out that would otherwise be hidden. If the lie is constructed with leading facts it might end up lead into false confessions (thats bad).
Investigator can include false info during the 'lie' to try to spot a false confession (covering for someone else, or even confusion and stress and wanting to get out of hostile environment).
Bad investigator will lie and force a confession facts onto suspect. As already mentioned some people might crack under stress of the situation and go into fight or flight - 'get me out of here I will tell you anything' - because they were fed actual crime facts, suspect will use those to construct a confession that will look like a real thing. That practice is something people should get fired over.
It isn't just police, people who feel like they are in authority have always used the lie to achieve specific outcomes. I have observed it often enough that I simply do not trust words from people in authority and I have to observe if their actions correlate with their words.
Has anyone else noticed that lying has just become commonplace nowadays?
People will just lie to make their lives easier.
In one day, I counted and was given like 3 lies from people in businesses. I mean they MAY have not know they were lying but these are relatively smart people who were making simple lies that just about anyone would know were lies.
And why they were lying was understandable, they just didn't want to discuss things with the customer, but still this idea of lying to make life easier doesn't sit well with me.
Obeservation sfrom my lifetime so it's purely subjective observation.
From my observation historically, people would at least try to weasel around the truth.
Now they just lie!
True! That's an easy way to get away with lying just feign ignorance. No one can prove otherwise.
The consequences for being a dumbass are way less than the consequences for outright lying.
Since there's not way to prove one way or another it comes down to PRINCIPLES instilled in people to value the truth, principles from my limited observations that seem to be viewed as less important nowadays.
The truth is an obstacle to forcing ones values on the world.
Hence, why it seems to me like we're entering a 'post-truth society'.
Interesting side note however, according to the legal system, ignorance of the law is not an acceptable way out of crime, because the law, by necessity, places as high a value as possible on finding the truth.
This reminds me of the lie detector scene from the wire[0]. I love that show and thought this scene was clever and funny. After reading this it has me wondering if cultural touchstones like this glorify what’s actually something pretty devastating.
Not related to the link, but why do people say "die by suicide" now instead of "committed suicide"? Suicide by definition is killing yourself, taking your own life, i.e. taking deliberate action to end one's own life. The passive wording of "died by" seems entirely contradictory to the definition of "suicide", as if the person didn't actively do it themselves, in which case it's not suicide.
I think the language of "committed suicide" and "attempted suicide" are holdovers from the time when suicide was a criminal offense.
Some mental health advocates have argued that that language is needlessly stigmatizing, and prevents people from talking about the root issues that can lead to suicide. Accordingly, many newspapers have changed their style guides.
I guess I just don't see how that changes anything. Semantically, if you do it yourself, it's committing suicide. I would say "committed suicide due to bullying/depression/etc". The matter has no impact on my life, just found it a curious change that I've only noticed recently.
I don't understand why police are not required to carry liability insurance. It seems like one of the few solutions that would have bipartisan support.
Something weirdly similar happened to a family member of mine.
The police came to the door and arrested him on a hit and run charge, but he hadn't been in an accident. They browbeat him into confessing over the course of an hour but they didn't believe he'd actually been in an accident in the end because he couldn't even confess correctly, he didn't know where the accident had happened, the color or make of the car he supposedly hit, what time it happened etc.
We later found out that someone had hit and run this woman and she, and I quote "drove around until she found the person who did it." We found this out because she filed an insurance claim even after all of this-- AAA told her to go pound sand.
--
Also, police are just weird. Another family member wanted to be a police officer, and he did the physical and made it through the interview process-- part of which was explaining any tickets you had gotten. He had 3 tickets-- the interviewer agreed he had 3 tickets, he explains them all, then the interviewer asks, "What about the one after that?" He calmly explains that there were just the three. The interviewer persists, "But what about the one after that?" He calmly explains what "last" means and how it conflicts with the "one after that." This went on for a few minutes with the police offer pretending not to understand what was going on and being belligerent.
I suppose the point was to see if they could get him riled up? But it spooked him so much he declined the academy. They even called back every 3 months or so for years with better offers.
those are both terrible stories about law enforcement. I'm glad your brother's life wasn't ruined, because there are plenty of stories about people that weren't as lucky (and undoubtedly more locked in prison we'll never know about)
58 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadEdit: Reading comprehension issue on my part...I wrote this comment before my first cup of coffee. As others have pointed out, the parent comment does mention pay, and I was wrong about the parent comment. I stand by the core message in my comment about pay in general, but clearly I missed the mark here.
I don't know about you but the curriculum absolutely wasn't the same each year with my teachers, it couldn't be.
Beyond that, overtime is paid for cops and unpaid for teachers.
It's true that they don't do much work over the summer, though they have to come in 2-3 weeks in the summer more than the students.
If you feel teachers are undervalued, fine but teachers being underpaid and cops overpaid simply isn't logically consistent.
I'm not making this claim. But this statement has no logical problems, at least not as stated. Just because they might be paid a similar amount (or even if teachers are paid more) doesn't mean that the statement isn't logically consistent.
For example, Lebron James gets X and Nico Mannion gets paid Y (which is much less than X). Many still argue that Lebron is underpaid and Nico maybe overpaid. They deliver different value, and there's the notion of scarcity to provide the level service they provide.
If you think the average teacher (or some percentage of teachers) provides more value then the average cop, then you could make that statement and it not be logically inconsistent.
Unfortunately both have civil servant types of roles, which are hard to valuate in terms of financial impact.
I also think teacher's need to be held to a higher bar. Not that they do a bad job on average, but when they do there appears to be little accountability. But that's completely irrelevant to the article.
Personal attacks are particularly not allowed, so please don't do that again—regardless of how wrong anyone else is or you feel they are. You may not feel you owe them better but you definitely owe this community better if you're participating in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>> I would argue that they are absolutely nowhere near paid enough
> The subject of pay has no bearing on . . . the parent comment
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/374-seatt...
That's a feature not a bug.
When you have a lot of unfair and unjust laws you need jackboots with no stake in the community in order to enforce them.
My state has some fancy words for justifying and obfuscating it but this is how they justify their policy of assigning state cops far away from their hometowns and residences for the first decade of their career. They want the cops to police the way the state wants them to police. They don't want them to think about what's best for the people being policed.
I know a cop outside of Redding, CA (not near any major cities), and he has more money than he knows what to do with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull
I'm not asking for cops to be held to higher standards. Just equality under law. Either lower the bar for us or raise it for them, I don't care.
A higher bar would be nice. But equality under law would be a nice start.
Taken alone this quote is frightening. A man seemingly died because an officer thought it was acceptable to play this ruse, that could have (and did this time) devastating effects.
In a nutshell, we can stay silent so who cares?
The problem with that is that everyone should care. By the nature of their jobs, police deal with people with a variety of disabilities, levels of education and language comprehension. I don’t know that it’s reasonable to expect people to have the presence to remain silent. Yet if they don’t, we’ll happily incarcerate them. I don’t like crime but I hate innocent people being punished for crimes they didn’t commit.
Likewise, say it happens on a Monday. Your work is gonna wanna know where you are. They can definitely get away with firing you simply for getting arrested due to "At Will Employment" since you can't really go to work while in a jail cell.
While pleading the 5th protects you from the government forcing confessions or something similar, it doesn't save your job.
When they lie, those statements are constructed to pull informations out that would otherwise be hidden. If the lie is constructed with leading facts it might end up lead into false confessions (thats bad).
Investigator can include false info during the 'lie' to try to spot a false confession (covering for someone else, or even confusion and stress and wanting to get out of hostile environment).
Bad investigator will lie and force a confession facts onto suspect. As already mentioned some people might crack under stress of the situation and go into fight or flight - 'get me out of here I will tell you anything' - because they were fed actual crime facts, suspect will use those to construct a confession that will look like a real thing. That practice is something people should get fired over.
People will just lie to make their lives easier.
In one day, I counted and was given like 3 lies from people in businesses. I mean they MAY have not know they were lying but these are relatively smart people who were making simple lies that just about anyone would know were lies.
And why they were lying was understandable, they just didn't want to discuss things with the customer, but still this idea of lying to make life easier doesn't sit well with me.
Even objective scientific facts and statistics are completely disregarded.
The consequences for being a dumbass are way less than the consequences for outright lying.
Since there's not way to prove one way or another it comes down to PRINCIPLES instilled in people to value the truth, principles from my limited observations that seem to be viewed as less important nowadays.
The truth is an obstacle to forcing ones values on the world.
Hence, why it seems to me like we're entering a 'post-truth society'.
Interesting side note however, according to the legal system, ignorance of the law is not an acceptable way out of crime, because the law, by necessity, places as high a value as possible on finding the truth.
[0]https://youtu.be/AJ5aIvjNgao
Some mental health advocates have argued that that language is needlessly stigmatizing, and prevents people from talking about the root issues that can lead to suicide. Accordingly, many newspapers have changed their style guides.
The police came to the door and arrested him on a hit and run charge, but he hadn't been in an accident. They browbeat him into confessing over the course of an hour but they didn't believe he'd actually been in an accident in the end because he couldn't even confess correctly, he didn't know where the accident had happened, the color or make of the car he supposedly hit, what time it happened etc.
We later found out that someone had hit and run this woman and she, and I quote "drove around until she found the person who did it." We found this out because she filed an insurance claim even after all of this-- AAA told her to go pound sand.
--
Also, police are just weird. Another family member wanted to be a police officer, and he did the physical and made it through the interview process-- part of which was explaining any tickets you had gotten. He had 3 tickets-- the interviewer agreed he had 3 tickets, he explains them all, then the interviewer asks, "What about the one after that?" He calmly explains that there were just the three. The interviewer persists, "But what about the one after that?" He calmly explains what "last" means and how it conflicts with the "one after that." This went on for a few minutes with the police offer pretending not to understand what was going on and being belligerent.
I suppose the point was to see if they could get him riled up? But it spooked him so much he declined the academy. They even called back every 3 months or so for years with better offers.