I’d start by looking at overseas policing and taking lessons from them. Look at basing around something like Peelian principals. Find and adopt practices that discourage corruption, just one easy example here is to do away with overtime, cops become salaried and receive TOIL if they work extra hours but are not incentivized to make work. Actually ask questions and study things like, does carrying a gun all the time make an officer safer, in every circumstance? Is it situational? Does it make the public safer? Etc. Build a new curricula around these principals and findings from your studies, with state level police colleges for training. Then start building out a new state wide police service that over time absorbs the functions of various municipal and county departments. Existing officers who want can go through training and continue their careers in the new service, assuming they qualify. Set up an independence conduct commission to be overseen by the public, selecting a jury at random to review cases. (Not an elected position.)
And of course, never stop actually asking the questions how can we improve what we are doing with the principals we have set out.
That's basically like a complete software rewrite. If you don't change the environment this works in you end up with the same set of problems eventually. There are a ton of things that could be done to improve american policing. But it's just for ideological grandstanding. This is pretty much the same with healthcare. It's clearly f..ed up but just used as a partisan tool for to win voters.
To be honest, I don’t think a clean slate would solve the problem. Around the world, police lie. Salesmen lie. Politicians lie. Developers lie. Watchdogs lie. Generals lie. Priests lie. And innocent people get hurt.
You are right that you can’t eliminate it from the system with reform. But I don’t think a “clean slate” will do any better either. The goal is marginal improvements, better checks and balances, etc. If you can’t stop a man from lying, the next best thing is to be sure you can catch him.
...and qualified immunity really needs to be gotten rid of, at least in its current form. there's no reason why a cop having a bad day should be able to ruin your life. also consider that as an citizen that's probably untrained in firearm use, you're liable for stray bullets that hit your neighbor when you shoot at a home intruder, while a cop is trained and on the clock, but has no such liability at all.
You're saying that everyone lies except for "innocent people"? Where are these innocent people you speaketh of? There's no such thing as "innocent people." Everyone lies their asses off, everyone. There is no such thing as innocent.
They could raise the requirements to become a cop, and change the structure of organization.
1. Require at least a bachelor's degree in anything.
2. Nix all paramilitary training.
3. Make each cop civilly/criminally legally liable for for their third screw up.
4. Hire only people over 25.
5. Dissuade military personal, including veterans, from thinking they have a job waiting for themselfs after their stint is up. (We do not need miitiary trained soldiers. We need Sociologists, and Psychologists.)
6. Cameras should be on every cop, without a way to turn the devise off. (Any complaints could then be verified by a third party.)
7. Get rid of all out little police squads. A cops would be federally licensed, and trained. Preferably stationed where they are needed. In my county of Marin, most are not needed.
8. And let's be honest. Most Cops are just Revenue Collectors. They are not going to be there to save our lives. To anyone saying, there won't be enough people applying for the job. Come on? There are a lot of people whom would like to become Police Officers. It usually those people, people who just want an honest job, whom are not hired. Get rid of all the cowboys, and hire level headed people. Ban all high speed chases, unless it involves a kidnapping. Require all police to obey every road law we are expected to abide. Make all uniforms Orange, or Pink. At least we could see them comming, and the bright colors might make the right people apply?
9. I'm not going to debate. I'm sick and tired of looking in my rear view mirror, or trying to figure out what hedge they are hiding behind. I'm as white as they come. I can't imagine what minorities have to put up with.
We as citizens are perfectly capable of handling people lying to us...we do it with children, coworkers, salespeople, advertising, etc. Why is the standard response to fix the police. Obviously, they shouldn't lie, there should be consequences but the solutions don't start there.
This works because people believe cops. Reporters take police reports as truth until proven otherwise. Juries (and judges) take the word of cops over the accused. The public generally treats things said by police as correct even despite evidence to the contrary.
I would posit that we are the problem because the actions of the cops don't work unless we presume they are telling the truth.
Fix the cops, sure, of course (especially 2, disarm them). But fix our society's interaction with them as well.
> I would posit that we are the problem because the actions of the cops don't work unless we presume they are telling the truth.
The problem is that we've built the entire system on the assumption that we can believe them. Admit that assumption could be wrong and it all falls apart.
Suppose the cops say they found drugs on you. You say they planted them. If we believe the cops, you go to jail. If we admit that there have been documented cases of cops planting drugs on people and call that reasonable doubt, nobody goes to jail. You can't have laws against drug possession, or anything else where you don't at least have a victim to corroborate what the police are alleging.
Which is presumably what we need to do, but now we have to fight all the people who want to make it illegal to possess anything that crooked cops could plant on you.
You do not want police to be "Sociologists, and Psychologists". That is what social workers are for.
A lot of police work is drudgery. So do not ask them to all be qualified with college degrees. It should be a job any honest person can do.
I get your fed up ness with the current set up, but rethink what policing is, what it is for, and why is a better approach than to make police do even more (social work)
Here in Aotearoa the top police officer (we have a national system, generally) is big on "policing with consent". It means that the community must support the police for them to be effective.
It is a big change for us, and it may not stick. The last commissioner put paramilitary police with automatic rifles into Māori communities (poor and coloured). Not long ago teh police and "Māori gangs" would have what amounted to set piece brawls on a semi regular basis.
I still hate the fucking pigs, but I am old and grey. Perhaps the next generation will do better, here
> Dissuade military personal, including veterans, from thinking they have a job waiting for themselfs after their stint is up. (We do not need miitiary trained soldiers. We need Sociologists, and Psychologists.)
I seem to remember a high-profile case where a veteran was calm under pressure and didn't shoot a suspect (even when he would be legally justified to do so). That's obviously only one data point, but it's enough to make me question this assertion at face value.
In many western european states the training to become a cop requires a 3-year academic stint at police school. The bar seems much lower in the united states.
I don't understand why lying by police, prosecutors or misbehavior by judges is not made into a serious crime that gets punished very harshly. These people are entrusted by society with a lot of power, often over death and life, so the standards should be very high.
No. The complaint is about different rules being applied to cops or prosecutors. Not just enforcement.
There is no qualified immunity for civilians. The cops and prosecutors can lie, civilians can't. A cop can shoot merely when he feels afraid, that excuse don't apply to civilians. Stuff like that.
Then you have judges who should be impartial, but do in fact treat accused cops and prosecutors differently.
America's eccentric localism: there's no Federal Inspectorate Of Police to come in from out of town and do the prosecution. Within the local power structure the abuse of power is propped up because it supports power.
There are a whole slew of federal laws that federal officials could use to charge local corrupt police officers. They just choose not to, because the FBI are cops too.
If you were correct, police departments around the world would be equally corrupt. But living in different cities and countries will quickly persuade you that's not the case.
Marginal improvements can work if the people making the improvements agree on what "improvement" is. But expecting corrupt cops to get serious about stopping corrupt cops is different. A clean slate (plus structural improvements) may be your best bet.
Checks and balances don't work when the entire system is for the injustice. This isn't an issue with the system, but it's an issue with the people and how they feel police should be used against marginalized groups. Even when caught, every step of the system works to shield police from any form of accountability.
Until police are subject to criminal perjury prosecution this won't stop. Until police can't say "we'll stop doing our job if any prosecutor prosecutes us" that won't change.
Look up mumia abu jamal. My memory is hazy, but tldr he's a black panther in the 70s in philly and a cop gets shot on the same block while he's there. every bit of evidence is against him being the perp, and the courts even acknowledged the police tampered with evidence (!!!), but he just managed to get a death penalty commuted or some stupid shit like that, to a life sentence about 10 years ago.
don't get tangled up in the criminal court system if he cops do toilet you.
They do a good job protecting the property of the wealthy by harassing the "undesirables" to move to designated areas, and that's why certain parts of town are "ghetto". It's a bit of an unspoken rule that as long as the dirty peasants stay in the ghetto they'll be less likely to be harassed. You generally won't be asked where you're going or why in the sketchy part of town, but looking the wrong way and straying in to a nicer part of town... you'll have 3 cruisers on you in 5 minutes.
As long as the police have the support of the upper class, it doesn't matter that the majority of us have lost all faith in the police.
The author shows via census data and historical research that there were towns all over America where Black people weren't allowed after sundown. This happened from the end of Reconstruction up to the civil rights era. A large amount of that was never documented, so we don't know the mechanisms. But for the places where it was, this ethnic cleansing was often directly enforced by the police or tacitly supported by them when they ignored white intimidation and violence.
Growing up in western Michigan, I had never heard of this. But it turns out many towns I was familiar with were examples of it.
shows cops planting MJ after searching the car when they don't find anything. And as always, the internal affairs division finds no evidence of wrongdoing and the officers are still on patrol.
What you're talking about is an issue but I'd suggest deleting this or updating it to a more accurate example.
This case was debunked a while back. The cops removed an item from their car and put it back after realizing that it was nothing. The victims of the search weren't charged with anything to begin with (why would the cops plant evidence that they weren't going to "find" later to charge them with).
I actually have to give props to this department for how quickly and how well they responded to this situation and how the cops didn't escalate things when the driver started shouting about the bag to the cop. It's kind of the bare minimum but I guess that's what we've come to expect. I also hope the department will be as quick with responding in cases where the cops actually did make a mistake but I don't have high hopes.
"Mr. Cordero’s door-knocking produced quick results. He obtained a doorbell security video from the house across the street. The footage was from a bit of a distance, and it was hardly clear what was happening, but it was obvious that Mr. Cordero had not done what he had been accused of."
this is the solution. start using the ubiquitous tech & cameras to pin them down. no more trusting taxpayer-funded bodycams and self-regulations.
Absolutely. The fraternity of police says police officers should ask their superior officers in a certain wording if answering the questions is required as a part of their job duty.
I remember seeing a round table discussion with 3 or 4 former US Attorney General's. The moderator asked them not about people having interactions with Law Enforcement and they all said - just speak honestly about what happened. The moderator then asked what they would tell their children and they all said, "Shut up, don't get involved and if you don't have a choice ask for a lawyer."
They all recognized that having "civilians" help was vital for investigations but they also saw that there a very real chance of getting caught up in millstone that was doing the grinding.
I am not trying to excuse bad policing but in the US this is a chimera.
You have the police, some are corrupt, some are a bad fit for the job, some are lazy and stupid, and some are run-down and underpaid.
You have prosecutors making their careers on win/loss records and being tough on crime so they can make judge or DA. Ibid for politicians with tough on crime, drugs, etc.
You have the prison system which has become big business, exploiting prisoners, their families, the legal system, and taxpayers. They do nothing to offer a real chance at reform, are dangerous and breed more hardcore criminals and victims.
You have the media which at it's mildest still runs with "if it bleeds it leads", middle of the road "true crime" podcasts and series, and at it's most exploitive preys on scaring the shit out of people (nancy grace is a good example) that 'the bad men are coming for your daughters' and we have to absolutely destroy criminals at all costs.
Then there is the populace who under no circumstances will forgive or trust anyone (background checks, public offender lists, mugshots) who has been convicted of a crime (really in the US these days you don't even need to be convicted, just accused of certain crimes and it is a defacto life sentence).
I am not saying policing shouldn't be reformed but that is one small step in fixing a very large problem but it is a very convenient target to lay all the blame on, and it feels good and just because it is an easy answer that is popular because in the US we are really all culpable.
You hit the nail on its head with how widespread the issue is. When people say policing needs to be reformed, I think they're referring to the system as a whole. But also, policing is the source of a lot of these issues so if you fix the issues with the source then you can cut off the downstream supply.
Totally, let's focus on each of them - I don't think there's a gestalt overall approach that will solve this problem, but chipping away at each of these many problem areas might make some progress.
Like many things, you can't create a "static system" and get perfect results. That's what Checks And Balances are about in the Constitution. That's what iterative development is about. That's what iterative marketing/sales is also about.
Most of the time, expecting a one-time, static, created thing to "fit" or "match" or "perform" well is moronic.
Whenever you have a manager who wants things that have never been done (e.g. advertising, tech design, etc.) to be 100% perfect a priori (e.g. a Waferfall project plan), you will always fail.
Iteration and feedback loops are the magic solution, along with having some "decent" and "obvious" good planning. An EE would call this a PID controller: predictive, reactive and presently aware forms of correction.
So having restrictions on IQ for police is a self-evident form of "bad planning".
Not having proper independent correction with truth and teeth, is an example of "bad feedback".
So good policing must be a "process" and not some static imagined state based on statistic or metrics that don't have ties to anything related to the mission and goals (e.g. hiring minorities for no other reason but that you want minorities rather than on merit!)
I'm not exactly an ACAB kinda guy, but this directed towards a guy who was clearly taking a passive stance:
> You ain't pushing up on me, boy? You ain't pushing up on me, you hear me? Fight! Fight with me! Fight! Fight! Look at me! Fight! Fight! It's just me and you, baby! It's just me and you! You move, that dog bites you.
Sure, maybe that cop was the lone psychopath in the group. But why did the other cops not step in and do something?
60 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadAnd of course, never stop actually asking the questions how can we improve what we are doing with the principals we have set out.
You are right that you can’t eliminate it from the system with reform. But I don’t think a “clean slate” will do any better either. The goal is marginal improvements, better checks and balances, etc. If you can’t stop a man from lying, the next best thing is to be sure you can catch him.
This discourages the casual deceiver, but also identifies the motivated.
Google LAPD gangs.
You're saying that everyone lies except for "innocent people"? Where are these innocent people you speaketh of? There's no such thing as "innocent people." Everyone lies their asses off, everyone. There is no such thing as innocent.
1. Require at least a bachelor's degree in anything.
2. Nix all paramilitary training.
3. Make each cop civilly/criminally legally liable for for their third screw up.
4. Hire only people over 25.
5. Dissuade military personal, including veterans, from thinking they have a job waiting for themselfs after their stint is up. (We do not need miitiary trained soldiers. We need Sociologists, and Psychologists.)
6. Cameras should be on every cop, without a way to turn the devise off. (Any complaints could then be verified by a third party.)
7. Get rid of all out little police squads. A cops would be federally licensed, and trained. Preferably stationed where they are needed. In my county of Marin, most are not needed.
8. And let's be honest. Most Cops are just Revenue Collectors. They are not going to be there to save our lives. To anyone saying, there won't be enough people applying for the job. Come on? There are a lot of people whom would like to become Police Officers. It usually those people, people who just want an honest job, whom are not hired. Get rid of all the cowboys, and hire level headed people. Ban all high speed chases, unless it involves a kidnapping. Require all police to obey every road law we are expected to abide. Make all uniforms Orange, or Pink. At least we could see them comming, and the bright colors might make the right people apply?
9. I'm not going to debate. I'm sick and tired of looking in my rear view mirror, or trying to figure out what hedge they are hiding behind. I'm as white as they come. I can't imagine what minorities have to put up with.
We as citizens are perfectly capable of handling people lying to us...we do it with children, coworkers, salespeople, advertising, etc. Why is the standard response to fix the police. Obviously, they shouldn't lie, there should be consequences but the solutions don't start there.
This works because people believe cops. Reporters take police reports as truth until proven otherwise. Juries (and judges) take the word of cops over the accused. The public generally treats things said by police as correct even despite evidence to the contrary.
I would posit that we are the problem because the actions of the cops don't work unless we presume they are telling the truth.
Fix the cops, sure, of course (especially 2, disarm them). But fix our society's interaction with them as well.
The problem is that we've built the entire system on the assumption that we can believe them. Admit that assumption could be wrong and it all falls apart.
Suppose the cops say they found drugs on you. You say they planted them. If we believe the cops, you go to jail. If we admit that there have been documented cases of cops planting drugs on people and call that reasonable doubt, nobody goes to jail. You can't have laws against drug possession, or anything else where you don't at least have a victim to corroborate what the police are alleging.
Which is presumably what we need to do, but now we have to fight all the people who want to make it illegal to possess anything that crooked cops could plant on you.
Prohibition didn't work for alcohol and it doesn't work for any of the other drugs. It only leads to corruption and organized crime.
You do not want police to be "Sociologists, and Psychologists". That is what social workers are for.
A lot of police work is drudgery. So do not ask them to all be qualified with college degrees. It should be a job any honest person can do.
I get your fed up ness with the current set up, but rethink what policing is, what it is for, and why is a better approach than to make police do even more (social work)
Here in Aotearoa the top police officer (we have a national system, generally) is big on "policing with consent". It means that the community must support the police for them to be effective.
It is a big change for us, and it may not stick. The last commissioner put paramilitary police with automatic rifles into Māori communities (poor and coloured). Not long ago teh police and "Māori gangs" would have what amounted to set piece brawls on a semi regular basis.
I still hate the fucking pigs, but I am old and grey. Perhaps the next generation will do better, here
I seem to remember a high-profile case where a veteran was calm under pressure and didn't shoot a suspect (even when he would be legally justified to do so). That's obviously only one data point, but it's enough to make me question this assertion at face value.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/west-virginia-cop-fired...
There is no qualified immunity for civilians. The cops and prosecutors can lie, civilians can't. A cop can shoot merely when he feels afraid, that excuse don't apply to civilians. Stuff like that.
Then you have judges who should be impartial, but do in fact treat accused cops and prosecutors differently.
Marginal improvements can work if the people making the improvements agree on what "improvement" is. But expecting corrupt cops to get serious about stopping corrupt cops is different. A clean slate (plus structural improvements) may be your best bet.
"I Abolished and Rebuilt the Police. The United States Can Do the Same."
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/11/abolish-police-georgia-...
There, I've solved human nature. That easy folks.
and btw, Floyd overdosed on fentanyl, it's literally in his coroner report, pls stop making him martyr for the cause.
YouTube is full of videos of police caught planting evidence.
You’d think it would destroy all police credibility everywhere but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Check out this example:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_RSsGqhhXMU
don't get tangled up in the criminal court system if he cops do toilet you.
As long as the police have the support of the upper class, it doesn't matter that the majority of us have lost all faith in the police.
The author shows via census data and historical research that there were towns all over America where Black people weren't allowed after sundown. This happened from the end of Reconstruction up to the civil rights era. A large amount of that was never documented, so we don't know the mechanisms. But for the places where it was, this ethnic cleansing was often directly enforced by the police or tacitly supported by them when they ignored white intimidation and violence.
Growing up in western Michigan, I had never heard of this. But it turns out many towns I was familiar with were examples of it.
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/08/26/sundown-towns-bla...
https://youtu.be/FChlMRFEZWQ?t=180
shows cops planting MJ after searching the car when they don't find anything. And as always, the internal affairs division finds no evidence of wrongdoing and the officers are still on patrol.
This case was debunked a while back. The cops removed an item from their car and put it back after realizing that it was nothing. The victims of the search weren't charged with anything to begin with (why would the cops plant evidence that they weren't going to "find" later to charge them with).
I actually have to give props to this department for how quickly and how well they responded to this situation and how the cops didn't escalate things when the driver started shouting about the bag to the cop. It's kind of the bare minimum but I guess that's what we've come to expect. I also hope the department will be as quick with responding in cases where the cops actually did make a mistake but I don't have high hopes.
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-video-evidence-idU...
I'm sure there's real cases of course, just this one isn't a good example...
And to GP's point, here's an NYT investigation into a suspicious arrest from 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrfZuPFrH8A
Do you know what would work? Putting cops in prison for perjury.
"Mr. Cordero’s door-knocking produced quick results. He obtained a doorbell security video from the house across the street. The footage was from a bit of a distance, and it was hardly clear what was happening, but it was obvious that Mr. Cordero had not done what he had been accused of."
this is the solution. start using the ubiquitous tech & cameras to pin them down. no more trusting taxpayer-funded bodycams and self-regulations.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution
https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE
Even the police will not talk to the police.
They all recognized that having "civilians" help was vital for investigations but they also saw that there a very real chance of getting caught up in millstone that was doing the grinding.
You have the police, some are corrupt, some are a bad fit for the job, some are lazy and stupid, and some are run-down and underpaid.
You have prosecutors making their careers on win/loss records and being tough on crime so they can make judge or DA. Ibid for politicians with tough on crime, drugs, etc.
You have the prison system which has become big business, exploiting prisoners, their families, the legal system, and taxpayers. They do nothing to offer a real chance at reform, are dangerous and breed more hardcore criminals and victims.
You have the media which at it's mildest still runs with "if it bleeds it leads", middle of the road "true crime" podcasts and series, and at it's most exploitive preys on scaring the shit out of people (nancy grace is a good example) that 'the bad men are coming for your daughters' and we have to absolutely destroy criminals at all costs.
Then there is the populace who under no circumstances will forgive or trust anyone (background checks, public offender lists, mugshots) who has been convicted of a crime (really in the US these days you don't even need to be convicted, just accused of certain crimes and it is a defacto life sentence).
I am not saying policing shouldn't be reformed but that is one small step in fixing a very large problem but it is a very convenient target to lay all the blame on, and it feels good and just because it is an easy answer that is popular because in the US we are really all culpable.
Most of the time, expecting a one-time, static, created thing to "fit" or "match" or "perform" well is moronic.
Whenever you have a manager who wants things that have never been done (e.g. advertising, tech design, etc.) to be 100% perfect a priori (e.g. a Waferfall project plan), you will always fail.
Iteration and feedback loops are the magic solution, along with having some "decent" and "obvious" good planning. An EE would call this a PID controller: predictive, reactive and presently aware forms of correction.
So having restrictions on IQ for police is a self-evident form of "bad planning".
Not having proper independent correction with truth and teeth, is an example of "bad feedback".
So good policing must be a "process" and not some static imagined state based on statistic or metrics that don't have ties to anything related to the mission and goals (e.g. hiring minorities for no other reason but that you want minorities rather than on merit!)
> You ain't pushing up on me, boy? You ain't pushing up on me, you hear me? Fight! Fight with me! Fight! Fight! Look at me! Fight! Fight! It's just me and you, baby! It's just me and you! You move, that dog bites you.
Sure, maybe that cop was the lone psychopath in the group. But why did the other cops not step in and do something?