The Federal government should exclude these non-cooperating departments from the 1033 program[1] then. I hate it when Democrats just throw up their arms and act exasperated; there _is_ a way here. Withhold FBI's cooperation from these departments too then.
For decades now the Dems have been lame ducks surrounded by snakes. They have no vision, no popular mandate, and no idea how to use the bully pulpit. They're too busy putting band-aids on an ever-growing cancer to actually do anything anymore. The Republicans have directly attacked every cornerstone of our democratic and electoral systems, from the ballots to the courts to the schools, and have made huge victories all across. The Dems, meanwhile, just keep chugging along pretending like it's still the 90s. No meaningful reform will come from them. Authoritarianism, here we come.
We've already asked you not to post like this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29000160). We ban accounts that do this repeatedly, and you've unfortunately been continuing to post ideological flamewar comments and otherwise breaking the site guidelines. That's seriously not cool here.
I fear the line between a political "discussion" and "flamewar" here may be quite thin, and not easily distinguished for the layperson. There is not a neat separation between politics and technology/surveillance/policing/violence anymore, and in this day and age remaining apolitical isn't really a possibility for anyone who engages even shallowly with society at large. The tech world has been dragged kicking and screaming into the rest of society, and with it, the messiness of culture and politics and values. There's no going back.
This story in particular is inherently about the intersection of technology, culture, and politics, the exact sort of thing any good hacker SHOULD be interested in. Whether it's Stallman, Linus, the EFF, Mozilla, Snowden... there is no such thing as apolitical, value-less technology anymore. What good is code in a bubble? Technology has impacts on society, and society impacts technology.
If the goal is to restrain the discussions here to only technologies that have no obvious political connection, the realm of theoretical comp sci as opposed to anything applied or public-facing, well... that's unfortunate, but that's your call.
I hope you will reconsider this viewpoint, but I doubt my single voice holds any sway in the grand scheme of things. You and others probably want to prevent this place from becoming like r/worldnews, which I understand, even if I don't completely agree.
I don't think I can do what you're asking for -- remain apolitical in the face of political technologies -- without completely sacrificing the spirit of meaningful discussion. Too many of the world's evils are created and maintained by people who just work on technology without thinking of their larger repercussions, and I cannot in good conscience do the same.
Anyhow, you're probably sick of hearing stuff like this. I shall refrain from further posting, and return to lurking, and not further disturb your community. Thank you for a fun few months.
> I fear the line between a political "discussion" and "flamewar" here may be quite thin, and not easily distinguished for the layperson.
Sure, it's not always obvious, but in the case of your GP comment it was. That comment was clearly on the wrong side of the line. Not a borderline call.
Yep, they should also be put on a 'no fly' list that excludes them from any Federal Law Enforcement Grants or Funding, which is a large part of many police dept budgets. For instance, it's how the Federal government enforces speed limits in all 50 states, by only giving highway funding to states that comply.
Hell, don't just cut off funding & cooperation for not participating, tax them also - as in if they don't want to participate, the need to pay fees to the FBI, perhaps the amounts related to the costs of FBI staff gathering the same data about them - i.e., either provide the data, or pay to have it provided for you.
That should get the attention of a few mayors, town/city councilpersons, if not just the police chiefs noticing the holes in their budget.
Those programs should be stopped entirely whether or not they comply butni also argue that these uncooperative departments should have all federal aid cut off until they comply. Maybe go as far as to cut off any federal funding to that municipality (no idea how much federal money these places get) in order to get them to start doing something about their terrible policing practices.
The problem is that most local PDs would be considered organized crime in any other context (violent gangs and extortion rings within police departments have been well documented). Most don’t want the FBI involvement and are perfectly happy to extort the citizens of their cities for protection.
I routinely tell anyone that will listen that the US police forces are our most active domestic terrorist organization. People do not want to listen to the truth.
Right; and because they effectively control the legal system, there is zero accountability. Some cops in my area were murdering drug dealers in order to steal their cash and got caught red-handed. They didn’t even lose their jobs, much less go to jail.
What concerns me is the lack of attention everyday policing problems get. It's an "ignore it and it will go away problem" at best, or it's an "it only applies to the poor, stupid, addicted people who can't control themselves, and have to be treated like animals anyway" non-problem, based on dehumanizing the victims.
Somehow we've decided that we don't care about accountable policing, almost certainly because no-one realizes how big of a problem it is, and that happens for a wide variety of reasons (#1 is that if you complain about the police in the US, 95% chance you'll get ignored, and 4% you'll get blamed, 1% chance anyone takes it seriously, and 1 in a 1000 chance anything at all happens.
Where do you see that this is a required program? The only requirement described is for the program itself. It's failing to meet its own requirements and thus it's shutting down.
In the USA police power generally belongs to the states. The FBI can't just arbitrarily order state and local police to participate in their programs.
> The GAO report also says the Justice Department has largely ignored a requirement included in the 1994 crime bill to “acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers” and “shall publish an annual summary of the data acquired.”
Maybe I'm reading this wrong but I read this as "the collection is required by the crime bill passed in 1994". Even if it's not, the FBI surely has carrots and sticks they can use to force participation.
> Even if it's not, the FBI surely has carrots and sticks they can use to force participation.
But some agencies will resist anyhow because they are anti-Fed. Many rural areas have a giant mistrust of the Federal gov't. Incentives will just make them double-down. You know, the Culture Wars.
To get near 100% compliance would require both a strongly-worded law and strong enforcement.
Congress controls federal spending, not the FBI. It's not impossible, but I think it would be difficult to get legislation to impair the states' sovereign police power through Congress and the inevitable court challenges in the unlikely event such a bill were passed.
On a more important note though, perhaps you should back down a bit from your authoritarian stance. It's not a good thing when your first reaction to people disagreeing with you is coercion justified by a complete lack of empathy.
You seriously just called me authoritarian for wanting to use the power of congress to compel police forces to provide more transparency so the public can know how well the system is or isn't working? Congress, the people we actually get to vote for, should have some ability to be a check on the power of the people we don't get to vote for but can shoot us dead or kick the crap out of us without consequences.
I don’t know where you live, but in my state sheriffs are elected and police report to elected officials. Your exceedingly emotional response indicates clouded judgment.
You’re advocating for the federal government to seize authority that the sovereign states never granted it. It’s the textbook definition of authoritarianism.
Emotional? Not even a little. Slightly flabbergasted, perhaps.
The federal government gives away money and equipment to local police departments. Aside from the strawman tangent you went off on with regards to congress having to make some laws, all I suggested was that maybe the feds could just, you know, not give that money to the departments if they don't want to cooperate.
That's not even a little bit authoritarian. The local departments are completely within their rights to finance their budgets the old fashioned way and continue to be unaccountable, or at least accountable to their local citizens. Which is how it ought to be anyway. Funneling it through the feds is a terrible way to have any accountability.
Congresses can absolutely use the power of the federal purse to encourage policies at the state level. This is one the features of federalism and happens all the time. Most famously, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 removed 10% of federal transportation funds allocated to any state that did not raise the drinking age to 21. This was challenged and upheld by the SCOTUS in South Dakota vs Dole.
1984 was a long time ago. Jurisprudence on the subject has since developed. Here[1] is a case from this year limiting the federal government's ability to use funding to force compliance with federal policy.
What's your stance on sanctuary cities not enforcing federal immigration law then? How about marijuana laws? Seems like the response is that local and state authorities can ignore these federal mandates all they want. You don't get to have it both ways and ask for enforcement when you side with certain laws and ignore it otherwise.
It's even more striking than that. This FBI program isn't even a federal mandate for the states, but rather a mandate for the DoJ. For the states it's just a request. By definition a request can be declined.
Immigration and marijuana restrictions on the other hand are actual laws that were passed by Congress and signed by the President.
While police power generally belongs to the states, state and local police get tons of money from the federal government. It should be at least possible to withhold that money from non-compliant agencies.
>The FBI can't just arbitrarily order state and local police to participate in their programs.
In practice the federal government has a huge amount of influence over what states do because they are one of the most important sources of funding of many state programs, and they can and do set conditions for getting that money.
Police departments get billions of dollars of resources from the feds. There are already conditions to getting it, requiring that police report when someone is shot as a condition of federal funding is absolutely something that could be done without any new law or regulation.
> they can and do set conditions for getting that money.
The courts have set significant limits on the conditions that can be set[1]. Perhaps such withholding would pass legal muster, perhaps it wouldn't, but I guarantee you it would be challenged. Look at the defund sanctuary cities executive order court challenges[2][3]. There's plenty of precedent for the federal government to not be able to withhold funds because local agencies won't cooperate.
It's not the answer, and it's not obvious this is going to happen.
>“I’d be surprised if they didn’t make 60 percent,” said Bill Brooks, chief of the Norwood, Mass., police and a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police board of directors. He said a key problem is that many agencies that have no force incidents are failing to input “zero reports” each month, so the agency is counted as not participating. The IACP has long supported the data collection, and low participation numbers “make us look like we’re hiding something, when in reality I don’t think that’s the case.”
Police are a much more effective tool for enforcing government policy (especially the unpopular ones) if the citizenry distrust and fear them.
Police who the citizenry can be confident will respect their rights are much less useful as a deterrent to those considering violating "hard to convict on". Making the public not want to even interact with the police has a force multiplier effect.
An 'us vs them' narrative between citizens and government is really really unhealthy. We are all on the same team after all. It is completely reasonable to do the vast majority of, if not all, police work without being untrustworthy and unaccountable. The US Government is based on checks and balances - accountability.
We're really, really not. Read up on the history of policing (in particular, in the UK and the US), come back to me, and then try to say that with a straight face.
A good source (ignore the inflammatory title and focus on the quality of references) is "Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America" by Kristian Williams.
I'm talking about policing in the US. I'm talking about US citizens all being on the same team as US citizens.
I don't and won't trust the police, but it does not have to be that way and the problem is not on my side. I get it, but unless you are talking about civil war we really are on the same team, and theoretically live under the same laws - I get that isn't always the case in practice. Again, does not have to be this way.
> An 'us vs them' narrative between citizens and government is really really unhealthy.
Yes, and when we eliminate it from the portion of government responsible for law enforcement by destroying the toxic culture of policing in this country (founded largely in various strains of racism), we can then relax it on the public side.
But even more unhealthy than mutual hostility is when the the armed agents of government have an “us against the them” attitude toward the people, and the people having a submissive, trusting attitude to the armed agents of government.
We are not. Many on HN are in favor of laws I'd shoot a lot of people to not live under. There are many fundamentally incompatible world views that exist in the US in sufficient number to dictate public policy if concentrated in a jurisdiction.
I agree most policing, probably all policing worth doing, can be done with accountability and there is no fundamental reason an us vs them dynamic must exist. However, so long as American society is sufficiently heterogeneous that the people passing the laws, the people in favor of the laws and the people who the laws are being enforced against are often different groups there will be a strong "us vs them" dynamic.
I don't trust the FBI with the way its been politicized and used as just the political police for the left. I am glad that police organizations are resisting this.
To be fair, I've worked at federal agencies on the receiving end of FOIA requests and for every reasonable and actionable request there are a number of unhinged, overreaching, and ill-defined requests that all were handled with due process. These ones tied up limited resources delaying responses for all requests. It was a poisoned well.
But your point is well taken and I have no doubt in some situations FOIAs have been slow-walked to dissuade criticism.
There is a huge amount of documented history of FOIA games a google search away.
I have zero patience for public employees treating the public with contempt. I know it is a hassle, but dealing with the nutters is part of the job. Public employees that treat the public with contempt need to find a different way to feed themselves.
I'm not saying it's a clear cut thing, and reasonable people can disagree about the reasonableness of an individual FOIA request in the gray areas. A decent public servant will give folks the benefit of the doubt even when they clearly have political motives. But, I don't see any reason to give any benefit of the doubt to people submitting FOIA requests on vaccine microchips, or chemtrails, or conspiratorial nonsense like that.
> But, I don't see any reason to give any benefit of the doubt to people submitting FOIA requests on vaccine microchips, or chemtrails, or conspiratorial nonsense like that.
Gov officials don't have to give the the benefit of the doubt. But gov officials do have to respond in a timely and accurate manner to the requests. In this case, that probable means running the equivalent of a ctrl+F over various explicitly enumerated databases for "vaccine microchips" or "chemtrails" and replying "sorry, zero results".
In my experience we treated the nutty requests with full respect -- but they tied up the system. We had a full office dedicated to responding to requests but it still was a slow process.
It was a poisoned well in the sense that it was the public with unreasonable requests that messed it up for others in the public.
Most of the games I've seen were at local and state level where the sheriff or police chief would just say "nah" or ignore with no accountability.
Ain't seen what dedicated Sovereign Citizens can come up with when they decide to go all mountain-of-paperwork on an agency, have you? Any amount of time spent on those is a waste of time, and they absolutely deserve contempt.
This is an AGI-hard problem that's roughly equivalent to "convert arbitrary free-form natural language text into a program that queries over arbitrary databases, email servers, or even physical records".
Actually, even worse than that, because FOIA requests are often written by non-lawyers trying to sound like they're lawyers. So the free form natural language text is horribly tortured pseudo-legalese.
1) Yep, difficult to start digitizing everything but that’s well understood.
2) Not if you build the system in (1) to ensure that happens.
3) I am saying we should start making basically everything subject to FOIA unless it’s part of an established process (like bid discussions) that would delay that.
Not saying it’s easy. I am saying it’s not the set of problems in the grandparent comment if you build your systems to fail open.
>“I’d be surprised if they didn’t make 60 percent,” said Bill Brooks, chief of the Norwood, Mass., police and a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police board of directors. He said a key problem is that many agencies that have no force incidents are failing to input “zero reports” each month, so the agency is counted as not participating. The IACP has long supported the data collection, and low participation numbers “make us look like we’re hiding something, when in reality I don’t think that’s the case.”
Doesn't seem like there's anything malicious here. Looks like a misunderstanding. The FBI needs 60% participation in order to publish their numbers and they're currently at 57%. I see no reason that they won't easily exceed that threshold.
I can believe it's an honest mistake. Citizens don't always know this, but in many states, law enforcements officers have a monthly quota they have to try to reach. That quota is usually around 15, split between their duties. Therefore, if they spend 15 or 16 bullets on a teenager, that leaves them 0 reports left to make. Efficient system, huh?
There is widespread use of non judicial punishments by police officers. Police regularly punch, kick, or otherwise cause pain on people with no repercussions or reporting. People engaged in constitutionally protected activities are often subjected to intimidation and brutality with no recourse. Oddly Americans widely believe the myth that they are free. It’s weird. You aren’t free if you can’t safely exercise your rights to police officers.
People can be arrested solely for resisting arrest. Police routinely yell “stop resisting” in order to justify use of force. Police rarely arrest other police even for clearly criminal acts like domestic violence. There is a serious policing problem in the U.S.
There are indeed Nations that are a "Rechtsstaat" or a "state of law".
Also you don't need to compare something to the worst of the same category.
This is easy and lazy.
Compare things to something better, or there is no progress.
Since you use the german word of Rechtsstaat, let me just say that Germany has major problems with power abuse among the police as well. As a white middle-class person, I only experienced it once myself, but it is what my immigrant friends consistently tell me, and I do tend to believe them. A major difference between the US and Germany is that this abuse is far less deadly usually.
A rage-inducing example in recent years was the case of Sven W., who was beaten, abused and insulted by police for being gay. After complaining, he was then dragged in front of the court as the accused by the local DA multiple times. (https://www.queer.de/detail.php?article_id=39308)
Therein is the main difference between Western European police and American police. Our police can kill for the most part without repercussions. Also our prison system is more barbaric. We don’t have universal healthcare so even the act of healing from police violence can cost money.
I have used the German word because it is used in the English Wikipedia.
Germany has a lot of problems and is in Not a „Rechtsstaat“.
Germany is not, for example, allowed to file an arrest warrant on the EU layer because the „Staatsanwaltschaft“ (the people who can file it) are assumed under politicians - directly.
In my experience Americans largely are ignorant about the rest of the world. I believe most Americans think the U.S. is the freest country in the world. It’s a myth. It is this myth that question. I don’t question that we are freer than many counties.
I grew up in an American colony in Panama called the Canal Zone. I remember when my home town was given to Panama and we were patrolled by Panamanian police. During the Noriega troubles the police were openly hostile to Americans. I remember what it was like to deal with Panamanian police. My attitude with dealing with police in the U.S. is essentially the same as it was when dealing with the police of a dictatorship.
This is like saying other people are suffering more than you so your suffering is moot. Let's not tolerate injustices just because others have it worse.
No it's not. It's pointing out the absurdity of saying that people aren't free because police can arrest, and in the cas of violent offenders, kill people. If that's the case then nobody is really free. Every country has a police force that has authority to use lethal force.
Of course somebody in North Korea is less free than somebody living in the US. And of course it doesn't mean that we shouldn't address those cases where the police use force without just cause.
>It's pointing out the absurdity of saying that people aren't free because police can arrest, and in the cas of violent offenders, kill people
I like how you had to add "in the case of violent offenders", even though the GP was talking about peaceful Americans excercising rights. Was Daniel Shaver a violent offender? What about Philando Castile?
No, in other countries, police do not act like a cartel, and yes they are in-fact more free.
He was pointing a rifle out of the window of his hotel room which caused people to dial 911. The police are going into this situation with the belief that Shaver is armed. The police shot him after he reached for his waistband after being told to keep his hands up.
> What about Philando Castile?
The officer was charged and prosecuted, and the jury found him not guilty. What more do you want done? Kidnap the officer and imprison him extrajudicially?
Police do get charged when they kill people without a credible threat presented to them. The conviction of Derek Chauvin presents a clear example of this. You listed two examples of people who probably would still be alive with better police, out of the thousand or so people killed by police each year. The overwhelming majority of people killed by police are presenting clear danger. The instances to the contrary are noteworthy because they aren't the norm.
Was it a real prosecution in the Philando Castile case? Did the prosecution and judge really give an unbiased effort?
Consider this. Philando was legally exercising his right to carry a gun and informed the officer of this. He was then killed with impunity. Is it really a right to carry guns if you can be killed for doing so by the state with no repercussions? What is truly astounding is silence of all the 2nd Amendment folks at this fact. I’m sure Philando’s race had nothing to do with their silence.
Police rarely suffer consequences for their bad acts.
> Was it a real prosecution in the Philando Castile case? Did the prosecution and judge really give an unbiased effort?
As far as I know, yes. If you have any evidence to the contrary please share it. Do you have any reason to think otherwise besides the fact that the verdict isn't what you desired?
> He was then killed with impunity.
With impunity? The officer was charged and prosecuted. That's literally the opposite of impunity.
> I’m sure Philando’s race had nothing to do with their silence.
Curious that you follow this line of reasoning when ~~you~~ the previous commenter supplied a counterexample of a white person being shot under near-identical circumstances.
I didn’t supply any examples. You have me confused with someone else. Daniel Shaver wasn’t armed and therefore is not an example of someone exercising their 2nd amendment right and being killed by police. You did not address the point made in the last paragraph.
I live in Saint Paul and there were criticisms of the judges instructions to the jury. I have no idea of the validity of the criticisms but prosecutors have been known to go lightly against defendants they sympathize with. He was killed with impunity because the person who killed him was not punished. Well, not in any meaningful or commensurate way.
> I didn’t supply any examples. You have me confused with someone else.
Noted, and the previous comment has since been edited to reflect this correction.
> Daniel Shaver wasn’t armed and therefore is not an example of someone exercising their 2nd amendment right and being killed by police.
I think my point still stands, and is perhaps even stronger. How does the contrast between police killing an armed (legally armed, but armed nonetheless) black man and the police killing an unarmed white man demonstrate racial bias?
> He was killed with impunity because the person who killed him was not punished. Well, not in any meaningful or commensurate way.
The government attempted to punish the police officer. But we live in a country with checks and balances, and the jury did not convict. Again, what more do you want the government to do? Send in goons carry out extrajudicial punishment?
I think you should reread my comment. I made no claims, references, or insinuations about racial bias amongst police. That Daniel Shaver was not armed is precisely why he is not relevant to my point. His race does not matter since he wasn’t armed. That 2nd amendment rights advocates did not clamor for justice for Philando is telling and I think motivated by racial considerations. It’s not a right if the police can kill you with impunity when exercising that so called right.
Philando was killed with impunity. There is no disputing this fact. It’s irrelevant that he was prosecuted because the fact remains that police killed a man who did nothing wrong with virtually no consequences. By and large police know their misconduct goes unpunished and this is a very bad thing.
>You listed two examples of people who probably would still be alive with better police, out of the thousand or so people killed by police each year.
I don't know how you square this fact with
>If that's the case then nobody is really free. Every country has a police force that has authority to use lethal force.
You are free to argue the technicalities of each individual case, but the fact of the matter is Americans do live under violent state apparatus that does not exist anywhere in magnitude to other comparable OCED nations. It's not hyperbole to say that Americans enjoy less freedoms than their democratic counterparts. You asking "what more can be done, the courts found him innocent" in the face of clear injustice is eye-opening; if that's case every country is free - after all if the courts of Supreme Leader Kim said so, what more can you do?
"Got a lump on my head and a boot print on my chest
From what the guys in here call "the Tillamook County lie detector test"
Well I did my best but as you mighta guessed
It's a tough test not to fail
I'm sitting here waiting in the Tillamook County Jail"
-Todd Snider, 'Tillamook County Jail', from his 'East Nashville Skyline' album.
There was definitely a self-policing movement in the 70s and 80s; the state-run police didn’t like it very much. Mumia Abu-Jamal is still in prison for trying to protect a community member from an abusive police officer.
Yes, and the officer was assaulting Mumia’s brother with deadly force (cop had his gun out too and shot Mumia). Whether you believe Mumia is guilty comes down to your views on the role of police and their responsibility to the communities they serve, which is why he’s often referred to as a political prisoner.
Who polices the police? Frank Miller didn’t come up with that out of thin air, there was a very real national conversation about community policing in the late 70s which the state police cracked down on through violence, then the Reagan years of law and order killed the conversation for anyone who didn’t want to end up in prison or dead.
Do you really believe a black man in the early 80s would instigate a fist-fight with a cop? There was a documentary a while back too that makes this case. [1]
Not that I think it’s a good idea, but it seems pretty simple. Just enforce it like the mandatory insurance requirement. Add a field to tax returns and fine people who don’t have a gun.
Again, mandatory gun ownership is stupid. But it’s relatively easy to enforce at scale.
Freedom is defined by what you can get away with. Not by what is entrenched in law. Your free to rob a bank and defend yourself in court. Your just not entitled these "freedoms."
This is what has always amazed me about the political party which are very much supposed to be for smaller government yet it whole heartedly supports the police in almost every instance. The police are a militia with almost complete power over life and death and very limited oversight. They can literally kill you for any reason and 9 times out of 10, that's it, case shut. We investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong. I would think the party of less government control would be all for more police oversight and a reduction of police power. Instead they fly 'thin blue line' flags and campaign on 'back the blue'. I really don't get it. I don't state this to attack that political group, I just very much don't understand.
So far I'm not convinced there is other than the one manufactured in the media. Far left attempts at revamping police have largely failed from what I have seen (ex. Minneapolis, which is a rather left leaning city). But I'd love to see actual evidence to the contrary. As in cases where police defunding/change has actually been voted in/implemented in the U.S.
Defund the police is a loser of a political campaign and really does not make sense. Democrats are targeting the far left with that and losing the middle. What makes sense is reducing the power of police unions to essentially negotiate police powers and an increase of independent police oversight and use of force investigations. Mandate body cameras, and force them to release them promptly via public information requests, no exceptions. Get rid of qualified immunity.
Edit: With that said I am pro police and think they perform a vital role in society. They do a job very few people want to and deal with the worst of us. I just don't want them to have immunity from the very laws they are supposed to enforce.
"Defund the police" is a far-left position that people tried (and failed) to get Democrats as a whole to accept. I find it weird that people keep getting the cause-and-effect there backwards.
Leftist ideas don't get very far in US politics because our "left" party is pretty centrist. Every time something "socialist" gets passed (like the ACA), it's super watered-down by folks from both parties and often stripped of key provisions (as is the case with the ACA) that made it at least somewhat workable.
If anywhere did defund the police, aside from police tactics to prevent that (see my other post in this conversation), it would only work if the social services were stepped-up to work toward crime-prevention (instead of crime-punishment, which is what police do), which isn't generally talked about in conjunction with defunding the police because "defund the police and replace it with a not-racist crime-prevention strategy involving community and social engagement and support" doesn't roll of the tongue.
That's interesting, but what does it have to do with what I commented above? That comment got a few downvotes, and I don't really understand the connection between what I said and this article, but that usually means I'm not understanding something.
I don’t think there’s a meaningful divide in “support for the police.”
Maybe in pro police stickers and social media posts, but if you look at legislation and policy I think there’s clear support of police from the current party in power as well as the previous.
There's absolutely a meaningful divide along party-political lines on confidence in the police and belief that they are doing a good job in protecting the population from crime.
James Carville said, on PBS News Hour, that defunding the police was a losing strategy, which effectively told the voters where the establishment (even the left-leaning establishment) stands.
US politics are conservative. The "left" is middling-at-best.
There's also the concern of how police react to the "defund" movement. There have been a ton of accusations that the police slow down on purpose when their budgets get threatened because an increase in visible "crime" (in quotes because I don't think homelessness should be criminalized, but seems to be the underlying factor of a lot of what gets called crime near where I live) gets all sorts of people to call for an increase in funding.
What I meant is that both parties fund the police so it seems like pew polls don’t seem to affect policy much.
Biden literally pushed crime bills way back when. And I don’t have any hope that the democrats will pass any police reform given they control Congress and the executive. There’s such easy reform too that could be done by executive order like stopping police from purchasing military equipment or linking funding to reporting police violence stats.
It isn't helpful to pretend that the LAPD and NYPD are somehow the fault of conservatives. The fact is the largest police forces which receive the most criticism are mostly free of conservative input into how they are ran.
Okay, conservatives control the unions. That's what you're going with? And also the unions are more powerful than the legislature.
Alternative hypothesis. The executive and legislative branches of government in these areas have completely screwed up law enforcement over the last few years but successfully ran a scapegoat campaign to blame the police.
The unions are absolutely more powerful than the executive. That's true of basically every government union. Teacher, cops, road workers, etc. Not just functionally, but politically.
Your hypothesis would have to be based on some type of facts. HOW did those branches screw up policing? What policies did they enact that changed the shape of policing in their cities, and how did those changes "screw things up".
Keeping in mind that crime rates, even today, are at historic lows.
Conservatives control those police departments even though conservatives have effectively no power over the civilian government in those cities. Just look at the outcomes of union leadership elections. The difficulty of effective civilian oversight over police departments is basically the root cause of all policing problems in America.
Large cities would probably be well-served by copying the US constitution's solution to this problem by making the Mayor also the Chief of Police (or something similar). After all, NYC/LA are larger than the US was in 1776, and, in terms of size, those PDs are the same order of magnitude as the Continental Army.
> Large cities would probably be well-served by copying the US constitution's solution to this problem by making the Mayor also the Chief of Police (or something similar). After all, NYC/LA are larger than the US was in 1776, and, in terms of size, those PDs are the same order of magnitude as the Continental Army.
An interesting approach that I haven't come across before. Do you know of any legal/constitutional/poli-sci analyses of this solution for cities or greater-metropolitan-areas?
What do you even mean by control? The legislature makes the laws the and the mayor often appoints the police commissioner. Just because the job often appeals to conservatives doesn't mean they get to set policy, law, and not get fired if they piss off the mayor or city government.
If you think city government "runs" the police forces in large cities, you may not be paying full attention. I invite you to look at what happened when, in late 2014, Bill de Blasio went on the record with the observation that he told his biracial son to be careful around the police.
Two police officers were killed (in completely unrelated circumstances) shortly afterwards, and the NYPD patrolman's union representative declared that the mayor "had blood on his hands". Subsequently, police officers at the funeral turned their back to the mayor and a massive bout of the "blue flu" affected the city, with arrests down 90% vs the previous year over the holiday period and into the new year.
Police unions also donate millions of dollars to state political candidates in order to diffuse oversight responsibilities of the NYPD.
I don't recall the exact dates those events took place but the New York state senate was not in democratic hands in 2014. Republicans won the majority in the 2014 general election. Prior to that, the IDC worked with the republicans and that coalition had control.
Even if democrats had been in control at the time what difference would that make? The GP was pointing out the police union and NYPD actively being against the people in civilian oversight roles.
There are three major police unions in New York City. The Police Benevolent Association (which represents line officers), the Detectives' Endowment Association (detectives) and the Sergeants Benevolent Association (supervisory officers).
In 2020, the leader of the New York City Police Benevolent Association, Patrick Lynch, endorsed Trump in the presidential election, and appeared at the Republic National Convention to support him.
The Sergeants Benevolent Association also endorsed Trump; their leader at the time, Ed Mullins, appeared in an interview on Fox News with a QAnon mug, but has since left the position after his home was raided by the FBI. Prior to that, he was docked vacation time after he tweeted a screenshot of confidential police records concerning the mayor's daughter.
The Detectives' Endowment Association endorsed ... please attempt to suppress your surprise ... Trump as well.
In short: if your perspective is that police unions are run by liberals simply because they're unions, you are not paying attention to the facts.
Not really, support for reducing police is actually quite small among both liberals and conservatives. Only 25% of liberals want to reduce police in the US [1]. 34% want more police and 40% don't want either more or less.
Pretty much both left and right support the police. Only some extremists don't. All those cities that defunded in the police in enthusiasm are busy refunding the police today.
What have I polarized? If one group is openly for more police regulation and one is not, then its already politicized. Calling for less polarization does not fix this? Your point is very much a strawman.
Their branding is all about being the protectors of individual freedom. Sure, they want government power concentrated toward the local end of the spectrum, but they also—say—they want less government power in general.
Individual freedom is championed more by libertarians than by Republicans as a whole, especially on matters such as policing, criminal justice, recreational drugs, immigration, and LGBT issues. The Libertarian Party does not have a strong presence in the two-party dominated U.S., so many libertarians in the U.S. subscribe to a major party (Republican or Democratic) that emphasizes the libertarian positions they are most interested in, at the cost of opposing other libertarian positions they consider a lower priority. Far from ideal, but some believe it is the best option in the short term until this two-party system evolves into something better.
If police can't do their job, which is restrain criminals and protect the general public, because they're hamstrung by ticky-tacky legalisms at every turn then they... won't do their job.
> This is what has always amazed me about the political party which are very much supposed to be for smaller government yet it whole heartedly supports the police in almost every instance.
There's a world of difference between what someone says and what someone does.
AKA: Never listen to what a politician says, only pay attention to what they do.
> I would think the party of less government control would be all for more police oversight and a reduction of police power. Instead they fly 'thin blue line' flags and campaign on 'back the blue'. I really don't get it.
You only won't get it if you listen to what they say. If you just look at the voting record and ignore anything non-binding you'll see pretty quickly that this is a party of Big Government and Thought Control (via Doublespeak).
What they say is finely tailored to their voting base, which is largely ignorant of what they actually do.
> I really don't get it. I don't state this to attack that political group, I just very much don't understand.
"Are you the party that believes in the right to bear arms because you're distrustful of all authority and what if we need to overthrow the government someday? Or do you believe that cops are civil servants and we should trust their version of events whenever they shoot a black man for looking like he might have a gun?"[0]
There is nothing to get. You are assuming conservatives are engaging in good faith when they are not. They want to control the lives of people and impose violence on people who are against this. There are many contradictions and this is one of them. It is only a contradiction if you accept their premise.
its not just the right. Any one (or group) that insists on using government to force their views on others must accept the (potential) use of violence to enact the change.
> They want to control the lives of people and impose violence on people who are against this
Considering there is only one party that wanted and actively wants to destroy people’s lives for not locking the boot and accepting mandates of big pharma…
The Right is really about maintaining existing power structures, meaning property, businesses, and religion. The police oppose all of the things that would challenge those, including both petty crime, and non violent protests alike. Therefore, the police and the Right agree on most issues and on the response. Naturally if the police overreach in their authority, it is very likely to be ignored or given the benefit of all doubt.
A part of the right yeah for sure but lots of us are not I am an Evolian and I detest a lot of what modern conservatives stand for BUT considering what the modern left gives me as options sadly I have to side with republicans in some instances
That's such a simple notion yet I was in my 30's when I read an article (wish I could find it but it wasn't necessarily unique) that basically said "the most fundamental definition of conservative is desire to keep status quo; the most fundamental definition of progressive is to change status quo". This goes a long way to explain both the motivations and the behaviour, but also why/how many seemingly disparate groups come together under these large Right/Conservative/Republican vs Left/Liberal/Democrat banners.
It also explained to me why in most countries I've been to, the "Right" comes together and unites whereas "Left/Liberals/Progressives" have multitude of semi-in-fighting parties: "Stay the same" is more universal than "Change!" (change to what ? )
This made sense up until Trumpism. Now, it can no longer be said that the red team is "conservative" in the actual sense of the word, despite ongoing usage of the label. While the indignant rabble rousing has been there for decades (eg Rush Limbaugh), moving it onto the main stage and trying to do things like discredit and disrupt the election process (regardless of its validity!) is about as anti-conservative as you can get. The best explanation I've come up with is that they were conservative, then they got angry because things changed anyway, and now they want to disrupt society so that their prescriptions can make sense again.
(spoken as a libertarian who has no love for the system and would love to disrupt it, but not like that. sheesh)
This becomes interesting in post-communist countries. Trying to keep the communist status quo... is that right or left? From your perspective right (and I believe you make a good point), but they will identify as left, and their opponents will identify as right.
Indeed, in postcommunist nations you are more likely to see a division between left-leaning traditionalist conservatives and right-leaning progressives. This was much more obvious decades ago. As time went on, left and right sort of lost meaning. Right now in Poland, Hungary and Romania, there is a resurgence of right-leaning to right-extremist conservatives.
I wonder if this is because right-leaning is a more natural fit for conservativism?
The right has plenty of people who see police as evil agents of the state the same way there's a sub group on the left who see the police as evil protectors of capital.
It's an interesting lesson in HN demographics that pretty much all the replies to your comment are examples of out-group homogeneity.
> This is what has always amazed me about the political party which are very much supposed to be for smaller government yet it whole heartedly supports the police in almost every instance.
That's because the Republican ideology is actually not about small government. If you trace their ideology's history, you'll find it's about limiting the government's ability to protect the most vulnerable so as to create an environment that's ripe for exploitation by existing wealth holders. Every Republican political stance is either in service to this greater goal or propaganda stating that the US is exceptional (and you should feel good about the status quo as a result!).
They're not actually for that, it's just rhetoric for their followers. What the Republicans are actually for is authoritarian state power, a society entirely for the wealthy and ethno-christian values.
"small govt" is just a talking point used to justify cutting social spending and bailouts for wealthy donors.
The right (and the left to an only _slightly_ less degree) represent the elite in this country. The elite use the right and the left for several purposes.
The right exist to cut their taxes, extract subsidies, maintain global military dominance, and control the population. They use jingoism, religious zeal, and race/gender wedge issues to form their voting bloc. Elites have an ironclad hold over the hierarchical Republican party. <-- this is where the support of the police comes in.
The left exist to maintain the illusion of a functioning free democracy, to enact necessary reforms as tolerated by the right, to extract subsidies, to impose market entry barrier regulation, and to keep the economy upright. Elites have a strong control over the Democratic party, and tolerate their lack of control over the rest of it for the "illusion of a functioning free democracy" reasons, etc.
This is the reason that the elections are so close. Elites control the elections with campaign finance, and will only pay the exhorbitant costs of elections to the degree that they can maintain control: ideally with a president + 1 of the congressional halls (they own the supreme court already), but if they don't have the president they want, they have enough flunkies on the democratic "center" to maintain status quo until they have full control, and get what they need passed.
The elites only pay for 51% victories. So all the elections are 50% +/- one point.
I abhor calling these people "elites", it is a term of political science and economics, from two areas of study completely beholden to sucking the teats of the rich for status and approval.
You're referring to the administrators of the Democratic and Republican parties as the "left" and the "right." It's better to be specific when we talk about these things, because they're far less philosophical than material. This is about two tiny private clubs; US parties don't even have memberships, they have donors, employees, volunteers, and candidates who can apply to run in party internal elections and to associate themselves with the party in general elections.
I think this quote identifies it all and summarizes quite well.
Frank Wilhoit: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
My fav. Milton Friedman often use to say that "Democracy is not about winning 51% of votes, it is about finding 5% of people who say they will vote for you if you take up their pet issue and they do not care how you vote on other issues. Then you selected another 5% of people with some other pet issue and so on. Together it should come to 51%".
What you are describing however is the opposite of this. People do not care how horrible a policy being proposed is, if it does not impact them or their loved ones. The conservatives who are flying "thin blue line" are the same people who are claiming that Jan 6 capitol riots were actually orchestrated by FBI and other branches of law enforcements. Conservative love for cops is not based on principles but it is more of a trick to "own the libs". Sooner or later the cops are going to come for the conservatives, for example Biden sending FBI after parents of schoolchildren will eventually be a template for states and cities to target conservatives of different stripes and you will quickly see those "thin blue line" flags going down.
Note how people who smoke marijuana are "addicts" and "junkies" who should be thrown in a pit as per many conservatives even though most of these "junkies" are productive members of society. But when it comes to opioid crisis they claim it is a "health crisis" for which "big pharma" must be held accountable. No one calls the addicts "junkies" or insists they should be sent to jail even though some of them are addicted to a point where they simply can not function normally.
People may like the idea of small government, but that's probably the top issue of only a handful of Connor Roy types and college libertarians, and tangible issues like "property values" or "safety" probably matter a lot more to real people, and that cuts across party lines. For example, look at the racial segregation of every city in the US [0]. Nearly every city solidly votes for Democratic candidates (I personally am solidly liberal), but our cities are still brutally segregated. There are systemic reasons for this (namely in the Jim Crow era, the govt's FHA started a program that underwrote home loans and its criteria explicitly penalized areas where Black people lived, attended schools, or could easily access [1], and by backing home loans only to white people, the consistent, dramatic increase in home values created a massive racial wealth gap [2] that preserves segregation and trapped millions of Black Americans into clusters that could then be denied equal resources) and the side effects of asymmetrically depriving millions of people of many good choices is that a disproportionately large of that subpopulation (yet still extremely small percent of the entire subpopulation) will make bad choices (eg to rob or engage in violent crime). Hence the divergence between a cities political values on a national level and on a local level (ie quiet acceptance of segregation and the corresponding enforcement mechanisms).
This isn't to say Dems are worse than Republicans; a far larger percent of Republicans are explicitly opposed to even hearing about these grotesque racial injustices, let alone attempting to correct these injustices.
TL,DR: people don't form their beliefs from grand principles; we've evolved to pick positions that help us satisfy needs (ie from Maslow's hierarchy of needs). If we want less police brutality, we should endure the cost needed to repair the injustices of the past, rather than what we are doing (ie perpetuating that injustice).
It’s because republicans want the police to uphold their values (subjugate minorities, maintain their power etc.) which the crooked cops currently do. If the cops as a general monolith actually upheld the law and treated everyone equally, republicans would turn on them in an instant.
Do you have a citation for your claim "There is widespread use of non judicial punishments by police officers. Police regularly punch, kick, or otherwise cause pain on people with no repercussions or reporting. People engaged in constitutionally protected activities are often subjected to intimidation and brutality with no recourse."
I know this is a popular trope in certain political circles but I'd like to see some evidence. There are a lot of weasel words in that statement.
What is a “weasel” word? I suspect from the usage of that term that no amount of evidence I present will persuade you. Evidence of the problems I alluded too are easy to find. I get no income from the following link.
I’ve done so twice. Here’s a third one. I’m not your researcher and have no desire to do the work for you beyond what I’ve done so far. Everyone has a right to avoid uncomfortable truths.
Are you asserting that domestic violence is "non judicial punishments" or that it's violating the general populations right to peaceable assembly?
Is there a domestic violence problem in the police force? From the evidence you're presenting, possibly. Is that evidence "There is widespread use of non judicial punishments by police officers. Police regularly punch, kick, or otherwise cause pain on people with no repercussions or reporting. People engaged in constitutionally protected activities are often subjected to intimidation and brutality with no recourse."? Absolutely not.
This is why I'm asking you for your sources. The argument that you're putting forward is specious. The lack of particulars is a dead giveaway. When pressed, you're falling back on statistics that have nothing to do with your argument.
I expect hackernews users to be more reasonable than this.
I made a series of assertions. One of them being that police rarely police themselves. I used the domestic violence problem amongst police forces as evidence of this. Nowhere did I state anything along the lines that this fact has anything to do with police engaging in widespread violence against people they encounter.
Do your own research. It’s easy to find studies about police violence they commit in the communities they patrol. But one has to wonder if police commit violence at home at a much higher rate than the general population is it surprising they commit violence against people they arrest?
You literally wrote "There is widespread use of non judicial punishments by police officers." and "People engaged in constitutionally protected activities are often subjected to intimidation and brutality with no recourse." Forgive me if I assumed the second statement was in regards to the police and that isn't what you meant.
Do you have evidence for either of those statements?
Increased domestic violence may very well lead to increased violence at work. You haven't presented any evidence to indicate that.
Are you asserting that domestic violence is "non judicial punishments" or that it's violating the general populations right to peaceable assembly?
Now you write:
You literally wrote "There is widespread use of non judicial punishments by police officers." and "People engaged in constitutionally protected activities are often subjected to intimidation and brutality with no recourse." Forgive me if I assumed the second statement was in regards to the police and that isn't what you meant.
Obviously these two statements I wrote have to do with police and violence they perpetrate. Equally obvious is that these statements are separate to my claims about police not policing themselves where I used domestic violence they inflict with impunity as evidence of that statement.
You are welcome to believe that police commit widespread violence against their families but not against the people they arrest. It seems an unreasonable position to be in but you are free to have it.
It's stuff you pad a fairly absolute statement with so that you have a technically true position to retreat to if people assert your fairly absolute statement out for being false.
Are you the author of the above linked tweet storm? If so I suspect from your "Lesson 1" that you're not very receptive to easy-to-find studies to the contrary of your position.
Books often times contain useful information and can be used to present arguments and evidence from a wide variety of sources. I highly recommend the reading of books. I cited other sources. They are easy to find. You should have no trouble finding them yourself.
I know this is a popular trope in certain political circles, it's weasel words used to shirk accountability or scrutiny.
The article is literally about the Police's failure to comply and submit documentation of all uses-of-force. In the vacuum of any official documentation, the only thing we have to go by are citizen reports.
If you watch pretty much any video upload to social media about officers harassing citizens you'll see intimidation by the threat of violence and from actual violence. You'll see whenever someone is taken into custody they're handcuffed and that officers use that opportunity to inflict some physical pain on the individual.
Do you not see the circular logic in asking for official data that is evidence of police excessive force on a thread about police failing to share official data of excessive force?
Your attitude is exactly what the anti-transparency police unions are trying promote: "No official evidence, so inaction is justified until that's available"
I'm asking for any kind of evidence. It doesn't have to be official.
There's nothing in what I'm saying that is calling for inaction. I'm asking OP for the evidence they're using to form their argument. Their argument is full of vague words alluding to an epidemic of police violence. If that is the case, show some evidence.
It has been provided numerous time. A simple web search will give you more links to studies. Do your own research. You’ve spent a lot time not reading the links provided and not doing your own research. Clearly then you have no real interest in the topic.
You haven't posted a single piece of evidence for your initial assertions. You continue to post the same studies about increased domestic violence amongst police officers. That is not evidence for your initial statements.
Frankly, I cringe every time I see someone come back smartly with the pithy reply "got any citations"? I know the burden of proof is on the person making the claim, but what I see here is really a dressed up "nuh uh!"
If you disagree, just give your rebuttal providing any evidence or citations you please.
I'm not even trying to rebut OPs argument. If they have evidence for their claim I would love to see it. I see the claim that there is an epidemic of police violence and extra judicial punishment in many different places on the internet. When I press for evidence, I typically get a response like "bro, don't you see the videos on social media". That seems rather anecdotal to me and I'm interested in real numbers. I am genuinely interested in how people are coming to the conclusions they are coming to.
Part of the problem is the difficulty in gathering that evidence. Law enforcement routinely fails to report at all levels. The GAO slammed the DOJ for it's failure to do so for the last 5 years.
Police supporters routinely say "show me the evidence" while going out of their way to prevent that evidence from being collected or reported on.
Just because someone hasn't tabulated everything into a nice spreadsheet or interactive graph on the NYT doesn't mean people can't form opinions. There's plenty of evidence that law enforcement are covering it up by the continued stone walling and repeated failures to report at all levels.
Your entire reply to me (sans the first two sentences) would have been a much better reply to the OP because it clearly states your skepticism to the claim but signals you are willing to change your mind given a certain type of evidence. That is something I will always respect.
This is much better than your coy ploy, which resulted in an edifying digression into what the quaint term "weasel words" means (though I actually did 'lol' at the realization we're probably of the same generation).
Finally, I sincerely apologize because I am sort of picking on you (but really picking on the maneuver) because I am so generally nauseated by what I consider an all-too-frequent conversational rebuttal that results in tedium rather than light shed on the matter.
edit: I saw that you were down-voted, so I up-voted you. I think you have a valid point of view (though I may not agree) and I see no reason why anyone should be down-voted for dissension, especially when you lay out clearly what it takes to change your mind.
This is an absolutely fair criticism. I see that this reply is better than my first reply. My hope was to shed light on the matter and not get sucked into a tedious argument about what weasel words are.
I'm honestly not sure what to believe when it comes to these claims. A lot of the claims that I see seem to be based on what are clearly outliers. I am actually interested in seeing what the numbers look like for use of force. I am interested in how people go about deciding what to believe, especially in this time of misinformation on the internet.
> If you watch pretty much any video upload to social media about officers harassing citizens you'll see intimidation by the threat of violence and from actual violence
Everyone knows it happens. The claim that needs citation is that it is "widespread", happens "often" and "regularly". What that claim really needs is more specificity on what those words mean.
> The article is literally about the Police's failure to comply and submit documentation of all uses-of-force. In the vacuum of any official documentation, the only thing we have to go by are citizen reports.
Has someone compiled those citizen reports into a database?
The proportion of what media dedicates time to (this includes social media) is not proportional to how often those things happen. In fact, it's often the opposite. Sensational, rare and objectionable things get disproportionate coverage.
The topic database needs to exist. Instead of shutting it down for lack of compliance, it needs consequences or incentives attached to produce the desired behavior.
As it is now, there's literally nothing to gain for the police to voluntarily report these incidents. It can only hurt them. It'd be like asking you to publish how often and how much you drink alcohol and offering no incentive or consequences. Why would you do that? It'd only invite scrutiny.
> The proportion of what media dedicates time to (this includes social media) is not proportional to how often those things happen. In fact, it's often the opposite. Sensational, rare and objectionable things get disproportionate coverage.
That's historically been the case when it comes to mainstream media and often used to dismiss claims of excessive force by police as exceptional. However with social media we can see that it's not an isolate or exceptional thing but rather a common every day occurrence.
Though I've never been arrested or accosted by the police, I have been on the receiving end of their abuse of power many times in my life. I know first hand that the police and legal system abuse their power to penalize individuals who do not offer full compliance and blindly accept their asserted authority.
In the face of anecdotal evidence to support an assertion you don’t believe what do you do? Do you provide evidence that the anecdotes are inconsequential? Do you do your own research and look up studies by criminologists and others? Or do you just say “show me the evidence”? Isn’t it worth at least a little bit of effort to see if there is a policing problem?
Yes, my anecdotal experiences have biased me. And based on the abundance of reports on social media and the repeated failure by law enforcement to report on or provide any evidence to the contrary, I'm inclined to believe my experiences aren't isolated and that the experiences on social media aren't isolated but rather the tip of the iceberg.
> However with social media we can see that it's not an isolate or exceptional thing but rather a common every day occurrence.
I don't see that we can call it a "common, every day occurrence". We have no idea if it's common, that's what the database was/is for. Because of the amount of interactions, excessive force incidents could be and exceptional, every day occurrence. We simply have no idea. Social media hasn't clarified anything about the _rates_ of the incidents, it's only allowed insight into specific incidents that probably would have been swept under the rug in the past.
I've grown tired of ineffective policies to regulate the police. The penalty for lying under oath should be a prison sentence for perjury, not a stint on the Brady list. The penalty for excessive force should be a prison sentence for assault, not an internal affairs investigation with a month of vacation. Any use of force causing any injury at all should at least be presented to a grand jury, where impartial jurors, pulled from the public that these police are supposed to serve, can determine the reasonableness of the force used and can move to indict if necessary.
We don't need any more laws, programs, investigations, or data trackers. We already have enough of those to go by....we just need prosecutors that will put cops in prison.
Maybe the FBI should start by lobbying to get rid of absolute immunity for their constitutional violations (minus Bivens, which the SC has been making more and more irrelevant) before supervising local police.
The statement at the bottom confused me: "The compliance with the reporting has reached close to 60%" but "zero incident reports" may lead to non-compliance (bad SQL queries ... anyone?) ... what scared me: When only 40% of all police departments file zero incident reports ... that mean that 60% of all departments had violent incidents.
I think the 40% is what you should be worried about. The police are supposed to have a literal monopoly on violence. One should expect _some_ violent incidents. Remember, this isn't an "unjustified" use-of-force database, it's for all use-of-force incidents. The purpose is to be able to compare different departments number of incidents to help identify possible problem areas through comparison.
If 40% of police departments are "never" using force, they are obviously lying.
What's the point to asking the accused to join the project to report their own wrongdoings? Even the fully benevolent and conscientious people instinctly feel difficult to admit wrongdoings. This whole thing sounds like a shim.
217 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 314 ms ] threadWonder who wrote... oh wait.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/09/why-police-pay-nothing-for-m...
Democrats have gone from victory to victory.
If that’s good or bad depends on your point of view.
In case you haven't noticed, that's about to be overturned.
Democrats have gone from victory to victory.
Lol, are you sure you're not employed by the DNC? Victory for whom, the American people, or the politicians and their friends?
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I fear the line between a political "discussion" and "flamewar" here may be quite thin, and not easily distinguished for the layperson. There is not a neat separation between politics and technology/surveillance/policing/violence anymore, and in this day and age remaining apolitical isn't really a possibility for anyone who engages even shallowly with society at large. The tech world has been dragged kicking and screaming into the rest of society, and with it, the messiness of culture and politics and values. There's no going back.
This story in particular is inherently about the intersection of technology, culture, and politics, the exact sort of thing any good hacker SHOULD be interested in. Whether it's Stallman, Linus, the EFF, Mozilla, Snowden... there is no such thing as apolitical, value-less technology anymore. What good is code in a bubble? Technology has impacts on society, and society impacts technology.
If the goal is to restrain the discussions here to only technologies that have no obvious political connection, the realm of theoretical comp sci as opposed to anything applied or public-facing, well... that's unfortunate, but that's your call.
I hope you will reconsider this viewpoint, but I doubt my single voice holds any sway in the grand scheme of things. You and others probably want to prevent this place from becoming like r/worldnews, which I understand, even if I don't completely agree.
I don't think I can do what you're asking for -- remain apolitical in the face of political technologies -- without completely sacrificing the spirit of meaningful discussion. Too many of the world's evils are created and maintained by people who just work on technology without thinking of their larger repercussions, and I cannot in good conscience do the same.
Anyhow, you're probably sick of hearing stuff like this. I shall refrain from further posting, and return to lurking, and not further disturb your community. Thank you for a fun few months.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
> I fear the line between a political "discussion" and "flamewar" here may be quite thin, and not easily distinguished for the layperson.
Sure, it's not always obvious, but in the case of your GP comment it was. That comment was clearly on the wrong side of the line. Not a borderline call.
That should get the attention of a few mayors, town/city councilpersons, if not just the police chiefs noticing the holes in their budget.
What concerns me is the lack of attention everyday policing problems get. It's an "ignore it and it will go away problem" at best, or it's an "it only applies to the poor, stupid, addicted people who can't control themselves, and have to be treated like animals anyway" non-problem, based on dehumanizing the victims.
Somehow we've decided that we don't care about accountable policing, almost certainly because no-one realizes how big of a problem it is, and that happens for a wide variety of reasons (#1 is that if you complain about the police in the US, 95% chance you'll get ignored, and 4% you'll get blamed, 1% chance anyone takes it seriously, and 1 in a 1000 chance anything at all happens.
In the USA police power generally belongs to the states. The FBI can't just arbitrarily order state and local police to participate in their programs.
> The GAO report also says the Justice Department has largely ignored a requirement included in the 1994 crime bill to “acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers” and “shall publish an annual summary of the data acquired.”
Maybe I'm reading this wrong but I read this as "the collection is required by the crime bill passed in 1994". Even if it's not, the FBI surely has carrots and sticks they can use to force participation.
But some agencies will resist anyhow because they are anti-Fed. Many rural areas have a giant mistrust of the Federal gov't. Incentives will just make them double-down. You know, the Culture Wars.
To get near 100% compliance would require both a strongly-worded law and strong enforcement.
On a more important note though, perhaps you should back down a bit from your authoritarian stance. It's not a good thing when your first reaction to people disagreeing with you is coercion justified by a complete lack of empathy.
That is a brazen redefinition of authoritarian.
You’re advocating for the federal government to seize authority that the sovereign states never granted it. It’s the textbook definition of authoritarianism.
The federal government gives away money and equipment to local police departments. Aside from the strawman tangent you went off on with regards to congress having to make some laws, all I suggested was that maybe the feds could just, you know, not give that money to the departments if they don't want to cooperate.
That's not even a little bit authoritarian. The local departments are completely within their rights to finance their budgets the old fashioned way and continue to be unaccountable, or at least accountable to their local citizens. Which is how it ought to be anyway. Funneling it through the feds is a terrible way to have any accountability.
This is is not authoritarianism.
[1] https://www.sfcityattorney.org/2021/03/04/final-victory-for-...
Immigration and marijuana restrictions on the other hand are actual laws that were passed by Congress and signed by the President.
In practice the federal government has a huge amount of influence over what states do because they are one of the most important sources of funding of many state programs, and they can and do set conditions for getting that money.
Police departments get billions of dollars of resources from the feds. There are already conditions to getting it, requiring that police report when someone is shot as a condition of federal funding is absolutely something that could be done without any new law or regulation.
The courts have set significant limits on the conditions that can be set[1]. Perhaps such withholding would pass legal muster, perhaps it wouldn't, but I guarantee you it would be challenged. Look at the defund sanctuary cities executive order court challenges[2][3]. There's plenty of precedent for the federal government to not be able to withhold funds because local agencies won't cooperate.
[1] https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20170323_R44797_36eb380...
[2] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/361297-federal-j...
[3] https://www.sfcityattorney.org/2021/03/04/final-victory-for-...
>“I’d be surprised if they didn’t make 60 percent,” said Bill Brooks, chief of the Norwood, Mass., police and a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police board of directors. He said a key problem is that many agencies that have no force incidents are failing to input “zero reports” each month, so the agency is counted as not participating. The IACP has long supported the data collection, and low participation numbers “make us look like we’re hiding something, when in reality I don’t think that’s the case.”
Police are a much more effective tool for enforcing government policy (especially the unpopular ones) if the citizenry distrust and fear them.
Police who the citizenry can be confident will respect their rights are much less useful as a deterrent to those considering violating "hard to convict on". Making the public not want to even interact with the police has a force multiplier effect.
We're really, really not. Read up on the history of policing (in particular, in the UK and the US), come back to me, and then try to say that with a straight face.
A good source (ignore the inflammatory title and focus on the quality of references) is "Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America" by Kristian Williams.
I don't and won't trust the police, but it does not have to be that way and the problem is not on my side. I get it, but unless you are talking about civil war we really are on the same team, and theoretically live under the same laws - I get that isn't always the case in practice. Again, does not have to be this way.
Yes, and when we eliminate it from the portion of government responsible for law enforcement by destroying the toxic culture of policing in this country (founded largely in various strains of racism), we can then relax it on the public side.
But even more unhealthy than mutual hostility is when the the armed agents of government have an “us against the them” attitude toward the people, and the people having a submissive, trusting attitude to the armed agents of government.
I don't even know what that would look like. I'm not aware of any time in the US when it's been true, certainly.
We are not. Many on HN are in favor of laws I'd shoot a lot of people to not live under. There are many fundamentally incompatible world views that exist in the US in sufficient number to dictate public policy if concentrated in a jurisdiction.
I agree most policing, probably all policing worth doing, can be done with accountability and there is no fundamental reason an us vs them dynamic must exist. However, so long as American society is sufficiently heterogeneous that the people passing the laws, the people in favor of the laws and the people who the laws are being enforced against are often different groups there will be a strong "us vs them" dynamic.
Eg: Just do a FOIA request - wait 50+ days for the response - by which time some new bullshit is going on and everyone forgot the last one.
Not just police but other government regulatory agencies too
But your point is well taken and I have no doubt in some situations FOIAs have been slow-walked to dissuade criticism.
I have zero patience for public employees treating the public with contempt. I know it is a hassle, but dealing with the nutters is part of the job. Public employees that treat the public with contempt need to find a different way to feed themselves.
Some well documented stories:
https://www.propublica.org/article/delayed-denied-dismissed-...
Gov officials don't have to give the the benefit of the doubt. But gov officials do have to respond in a timely and accurate manner to the requests. In this case, that probable means running the equivalent of a ctrl+F over various explicitly enumerated databases for "vaccine microchips" or "chemtrails" and replying "sorry, zero results".
It was a poisoned well in the sense that it was the public with unreasonable requests that messed it up for others in the public.
Most of the games I've seen were at local and state level where the sheriff or police chief would just say "nah" or ignore with no accountability.
Actually, even worse than that, because FOIA requests are often written by non-lawyers trying to sound like they're lawyers. So the free form natural language text is horribly tortured pseudo-legalese.
2. Still more is subject to FOIA but requires by-hand PII filtering before release.
3. TONS of stuff that's not subject to FOIA/sunshine passes through .gov Exchange email servers.
2) Not if you build the system in (1) to ensure that happens.
3) I am saying we should start making basically everything subject to FOIA unless it’s part of an established process (like bid discussions) that would delay that.
Not saying it’s easy. I am saying it’s not the set of problems in the grandparent comment if you build your systems to fail open.
Doesn't seem like there's anything malicious here. Looks like a misunderstanding. The FBI needs 60% participation in order to publish their numbers and they're currently at 57%. I see no reason that they won't easily exceed that threshold.
Things like this usually are the way the are because someone wants them that way.
People can be arrested solely for resisting arrest. Police routinely yell “stop resisting” in order to justify use of force. Police rarely arrest other police even for clearly criminal acts like domestic violence. There is a serious policing problem in the U.S.
https://twitter.com/samswey/status/1180655701271732224?lang=...
By more meaningful measurements, Americans enjoy quite a lot of freedom. By your definition, essentially nobody in the world does.
Also you don't need to compare something to the worst of the same category. This is easy and lazy. Compare things to something better, or there is no progress.
A rage-inducing example in recent years was the case of Sven W., who was beaten, abused and insulted by police for being gay. After complaining, he was then dragged in front of the court as the accused by the local DA multiple times. (https://www.queer.de/detail.php?article_id=39308)
Germany has a lot of problems and is in Not a „Rechtsstaat“. Germany is not, for example, allowed to file an arrest warrant on the EU layer because the „Staatsanwaltschaft“ (the people who can file it) are assumed under politicians - directly.
I grew up in an American colony in Panama called the Canal Zone. I remember when my home town was given to Panama and we were patrolled by Panamanian police. During the Noriega troubles the police were openly hostile to Americans. I remember what it was like to deal with Panamanian police. My attitude with dealing with police in the U.S. is essentially the same as it was when dealing with the police of a dictatorship.
Of course somebody in North Korea is less free than somebody living in the US. And of course it doesn't mean that we shouldn't address those cases where the police use force without just cause.
I like how you had to add "in the case of violent offenders", even though the GP was talking about peaceful Americans excercising rights. Was Daniel Shaver a violent offender? What about Philando Castile?
No, in other countries, police do not act like a cartel, and yes they are in-fact more free.
He was pointing a rifle out of the window of his hotel room which caused people to dial 911. The police are going into this situation with the belief that Shaver is armed. The police shot him after he reached for his waistband after being told to keep his hands up.
> What about Philando Castile?
The officer was charged and prosecuted, and the jury found him not guilty. What more do you want done? Kidnap the officer and imprison him extrajudicially?
Police do get charged when they kill people without a credible threat presented to them. The conviction of Derek Chauvin presents a clear example of this. You listed two examples of people who probably would still be alive with better police, out of the thousand or so people killed by police each year. The overwhelming majority of people killed by police are presenting clear danger. The instances to the contrary are noteworthy because they aren't the norm.
Consider this. Philando was legally exercising his right to carry a gun and informed the officer of this. He was then killed with impunity. Is it really a right to carry guns if you can be killed for doing so by the state with no repercussions? What is truly astounding is silence of all the 2nd Amendment folks at this fact. I’m sure Philando’s race had nothing to do with their silence.
Police rarely suffer consequences for their bad acts.
As far as I know, yes. If you have any evidence to the contrary please share it. Do you have any reason to think otherwise besides the fact that the verdict isn't what you desired?
> He was then killed with impunity.
With impunity? The officer was charged and prosecuted. That's literally the opposite of impunity.
> I’m sure Philando’s race had nothing to do with their silence.
Curious that you follow this line of reasoning when ~~you~~ the previous commenter supplied a counterexample of a white person being shot under near-identical circumstances.
I live in Saint Paul and there were criticisms of the judges instructions to the jury. I have no idea of the validity of the criticisms but prosecutors have been known to go lightly against defendants they sympathize with. He was killed with impunity because the person who killed him was not punished. Well, not in any meaningful or commensurate way.
Noted, and the previous comment has since been edited to reflect this correction.
> Daniel Shaver wasn’t armed and therefore is not an example of someone exercising their 2nd amendment right and being killed by police.
I think my point still stands, and is perhaps even stronger. How does the contrast between police killing an armed (legally armed, but armed nonetheless) black man and the police killing an unarmed white man demonstrate racial bias?
> He was killed with impunity because the person who killed him was not punished. Well, not in any meaningful or commensurate way.
The government attempted to punish the police officer. But we live in a country with checks and balances, and the jury did not convict. Again, what more do you want the government to do? Send in goons carry out extrajudicial punishment?
Philando was killed with impunity. There is no disputing this fact. It’s irrelevant that he was prosecuted because the fact remains that police killed a man who did nothing wrong with virtually no consequences. By and large police know their misconduct goes unpunished and this is a very bad thing.
I don't know how you square this fact with
>If that's the case then nobody is really free. Every country has a police force that has authority to use lethal force.
You are free to argue the technicalities of each individual case, but the fact of the matter is Americans do live under violent state apparatus that does not exist anywhere in magnitude to other comparable OCED nations. It's not hyperbole to say that Americans enjoy less freedoms than their democratic counterparts. You asking "what more can be done, the courts found him innocent" in the face of clear injustice is eye-opening; if that's case every country is free - after all if the courts of Supreme Leader Kim said so, what more can you do?
-Todd Snider, 'Tillamook County Jail', from his 'East Nashville Skyline' album.
This is how it worked pre-organized state run policing in most of the western world.
Wikipedia claims he is in jail for shooting a police officer in the back and face. He died too.
Who polices the police? Frank Miller didn’t come up with that out of thin air, there was a very real national conversation about community policing in the late 70s which the state police cracked down on through violence, then the Reagan years of law and order killed the conversation for anyone who didn’t want to end up in prison or dead.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumia_Abu-Jamal:_A_Case_For_...
From what I have read, the brother was not shot.
Again, mandatory gun ownership is stupid. But it’s relatively easy to enforce at scale.
Second, police are local. Generally conservative opposition is to large federal government. This is a purely subjective take, I'm not taking sides.
Edit: With that said I am pro police and think they perform a vital role in society. They do a job very few people want to and deal with the worst of us. I just don't want them to have immunity from the very laws they are supposed to enforce.
If anywhere did defund the police, aside from police tactics to prevent that (see my other post in this conversation), it would only work if the social services were stepped-up to work toward crime-prevention (instead of crime-punishment, which is what police do), which isn't generally talked about in conjunction with defunding the police because "defund the police and replace it with a not-racist crime-prevention strategy involving community and social engagement and support" doesn't roll of the tongue.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/did-the-heritage-foundati_b_5...
If you could clarify, I'd really appreciate that.
Maybe in pro police stickers and social media posts, but if you look at legislation and policy I think there’s clear support of police from the current party in power as well as the previous.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/13/republicans...
US politics are conservative. The "left" is middling-at-best.
There's also the concern of how police react to the "defund" movement. There have been a ton of accusations that the police slow down on purpose when their budgets get threatened because an increase in visible "crime" (in quotes because I don't think homelessness should be criminalized, but seems to be the underlying factor of a lot of what gets called crime near where I live) gets all sorts of people to call for an increase in funding.
Biden literally pushed crime bills way back when. And I don’t have any hope that the democrats will pass any police reform given they control Congress and the executive. There’s such easy reform too that could be done by executive order like stopping police from purchasing military equipment or linking funding to reporting police violence stats.
Alternative hypothesis. The executive and legislative branches of government in these areas have completely screwed up law enforcement over the last few years but successfully ran a scapegoat campaign to blame the police.
Your hypothesis would have to be based on some type of facts. HOW did those branches screw up policing? What policies did they enact that changed the shape of policing in their cities, and how did those changes "screw things up".
Keeping in mind that crime rates, even today, are at historic lows.
Large cities would probably be well-served by copying the US constitution's solution to this problem by making the Mayor also the Chief of Police (or something similar). After all, NYC/LA are larger than the US was in 1776, and, in terms of size, those PDs are the same order of magnitude as the Continental Army.
An interesting approach that I haven't come across before. Do you know of any legal/constitutional/poli-sci analyses of this solution for cities or greater-metropolitan-areas?
Two police officers were killed (in completely unrelated circumstances) shortly afterwards, and the NYPD patrolman's union representative declared that the mayor "had blood on his hands". Subsequently, police officers at the funeral turned their back to the mayor and a massive bout of the "blue flu" affected the city, with arrests down 90% vs the previous year over the holiday period and into the new year.
Police unions also donate millions of dollars to state political candidates in order to diffuse oversight responsibilities of the NYPD.
Even if democrats had been in control at the time what difference would that make? The GP was pointing out the police union and NYPD actively being against the people in civilian oversight roles.
In 2020, the leader of the New York City Police Benevolent Association, Patrick Lynch, endorsed Trump in the presidential election, and appeared at the Republic National Convention to support him.
The Sergeants Benevolent Association also endorsed Trump; their leader at the time, Ed Mullins, appeared in an interview on Fox News with a QAnon mug, but has since left the position after his home was raided by the FBI. Prior to that, he was docked vacation time after he tweeted a screenshot of confidential police records concerning the mayor's daughter.
The Detectives' Endowment Association endorsed ... please attempt to suppress your surprise ... Trump as well.
In short: if your perspective is that police unions are run by liberals simply because they're unions, you are not paying attention to the facts.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/26/growing-sha...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/12-major-us-cities-top-annual-homi...
There's a world of difference between what someone says and what someone does.
AKA: Never listen to what a politician says, only pay attention to what they do.
> I would think the party of less government control would be all for more police oversight and a reduction of police power. Instead they fly 'thin blue line' flags and campaign on 'back the blue'. I really don't get it.
You only won't get it if you listen to what they say. If you just look at the voting record and ignore anything non-binding you'll see pretty quickly that this is a party of Big Government and Thought Control (via Doublespeak).
What they say is finely tailored to their voting base, which is largely ignorant of what they actually do.
"Are you the party that believes in the right to bear arms because you're distrustful of all authority and what if we need to overthrow the government someday? Or do you believe that cops are civil servants and we should trust their version of events whenever they shoot a black man for looking like he might have a gun?"[0]
[0]The Card Says Moops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMabpBvtXr4&list=PLJA_jUddXv...
Considering there is only one party that wanted and actively wants to destroy people’s lives for not locking the boot and accepting mandates of big pharma…
It also explained to me why in most countries I've been to, the "Right" comes together and unites whereas "Left/Liberals/Progressives" have multitude of semi-in-fighting parties: "Stay the same" is more universal than "Change!" (change to what ? )
(spoken as a libertarian who has no love for the system and would love to disrupt it, but not like that. sheesh)
I wonder if this is because right-leaning is a more natural fit for conservativism?
It's an interesting lesson in HN demographics that pretty much all the replies to your comment are examples of out-group homogeneity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity
That's because the Republican ideology is actually not about small government. If you trace their ideology's history, you'll find it's about limiting the government's ability to protect the most vulnerable so as to create an environment that's ripe for exploitation by existing wealth holders. Every Republican political stance is either in service to this greater goal or propaganda stating that the US is exceptional (and you should feel good about the status quo as a result!).
"small govt" is just a talking point used to justify cutting social spending and bailouts for wealthy donors.
The right exist to cut their taxes, extract subsidies, maintain global military dominance, and control the population. They use jingoism, religious zeal, and race/gender wedge issues to form their voting bloc. Elites have an ironclad hold over the hierarchical Republican party. <-- this is where the support of the police comes in.
The left exist to maintain the illusion of a functioning free democracy, to enact necessary reforms as tolerated by the right, to extract subsidies, to impose market entry barrier regulation, and to keep the economy upright. Elites have a strong control over the Democratic party, and tolerate their lack of control over the rest of it for the "illusion of a functioning free democracy" reasons, etc.
This is the reason that the elections are so close. Elites control the elections with campaign finance, and will only pay the exhorbitant costs of elections to the degree that they can maintain control: ideally with a president + 1 of the congressional halls (they own the supreme court already), but if they don't have the president they want, they have enough flunkies on the democratic "center" to maintain status quo until they have full control, and get what they need passed.
The elites only pay for 51% victories. So all the elections are 50% +/- one point.
I abhor calling these people "elites", it is a term of political science and economics, from two areas of study completely beholden to sucking the teats of the rich for status and approval.
Frank Wilhoit: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
[1] https://twitter.com/heerjeet/status/1002266261529690112?lang...
What you are describing however is the opposite of this. People do not care how horrible a policy being proposed is, if it does not impact them or their loved ones. The conservatives who are flying "thin blue line" are the same people who are claiming that Jan 6 capitol riots were actually orchestrated by FBI and other branches of law enforcements. Conservative love for cops is not based on principles but it is more of a trick to "own the libs". Sooner or later the cops are going to come for the conservatives, for example Biden sending FBI after parents of schoolchildren will eventually be a template for states and cities to target conservatives of different stripes and you will quickly see those "thin blue line" flags going down.
Note how people who smoke marijuana are "addicts" and "junkies" who should be thrown in a pit as per many conservatives even though most of these "junkies" are productive members of society. But when it comes to opioid crisis they claim it is a "health crisis" for which "big pharma" must be held accountable. No one calls the addicts "junkies" or insists they should be sent to jail even though some of them are addicted to a point where they simply can not function normally.
This isn't to say Dems are worse than Republicans; a far larger percent of Republicans are explicitly opposed to even hearing about these grotesque racial injustices, let alone attempting to correct these injustices.
TL,DR: people don't form their beliefs from grand principles; we've evolved to pick positions that help us satisfy needs (ie from Maslow's hierarchy of needs). If we want less police brutality, we should endure the cost needed to repair the injustices of the past, rather than what we are doing (ie perpetuating that injustice).
[0] https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/us/census-race-ethnicit...
[1] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Feder...
[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/weal...
I know this is a popular trope in certain political circles but I'd like to see some evidence. There are a lot of weasel words in that statement.
https://www.amazon.com/Police-Wife-Epidemic-Domestic-Violenc...
https://www.fatherly.com/love-money/police-brutality-and-dom...
Is there a domestic violence problem in the police force? From the evidence you're presenting, possibly. Is that evidence "There is widespread use of non judicial punishments by police officers. Police regularly punch, kick, or otherwise cause pain on people with no repercussions or reporting. People engaged in constitutionally protected activities are often subjected to intimidation and brutality with no recourse."? Absolutely not.
This is why I'm asking you for your sources. The argument that you're putting forward is specious. The lack of particulars is a dead giveaway. When pressed, you're falling back on statistics that have nothing to do with your argument.
I expect hackernews users to be more reasonable than this.
Do your own research. It’s easy to find studies about police violence they commit in the communities they patrol. But one has to wonder if police commit violence at home at a much higher rate than the general population is it surprising they commit violence against people they arrest?
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2...
Do you have evidence for either of those statements?
Increased domestic violence may very well lead to increased violence at work. You haven't presented any evidence to indicate that.
Are you asserting that domestic violence is "non judicial punishments" or that it's violating the general populations right to peaceable assembly?
Now you write:
You literally wrote "There is widespread use of non judicial punishments by police officers." and "People engaged in constitutionally protected activities are often subjected to intimidation and brutality with no recourse." Forgive me if I assumed the second statement was in regards to the police and that isn't what you meant.
Obviously these two statements I wrote have to do with police and violence they perpetrate. Equally obvious is that these statements are separate to my claims about police not policing themselves where I used domestic violence they inflict with impunity as evidence of that statement.
You are welcome to believe that police commit widespread violence against their families but not against the people they arrest. It seems an unreasonable position to be in but you are free to have it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
Are you the author of the above linked tweet storm? If so I suspect from your "Lesson 1" that you're not very receptive to easy-to-find studies to the contrary of your position.
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/26/982391187/study-body-worn-cam...
I know this is a popular trope in certain political circles, it's weasel words used to shirk accountability or scrutiny.
The article is literally about the Police's failure to comply and submit documentation of all uses-of-force. In the vacuum of any official documentation, the only thing we have to go by are citizen reports.
If you watch pretty much any video upload to social media about officers harassing citizens you'll see intimidation by the threat of violence and from actual violence. You'll see whenever someone is taken into custody they're handcuffed and that officers use that opportunity to inflict some physical pain on the individual.
Your attitude is exactly what the anti-transparency police unions are trying promote: "No official evidence, so inaction is justified until that's available"
There's nothing in what I'm saying that is calling for inaction. I'm asking OP for the evidence they're using to form their argument. Their argument is full of vague words alluding to an epidemic of police violence. If that is the case, show some evidence.
Again, there is no comprehensive official data bout this: hence the reason for this story. Case studies and incomplete data are all we have.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/23/us/in-tamir-rice-shooting...
https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/20/us/philando-castile-shooting-...
I'm sorry, but it's starting to feel like you're being willfully obtuse.
If you disagree, just give your rebuttal providing any evidence or citations you please.
Police supporters routinely say "show me the evidence" while going out of their way to prevent that evidence from being collected or reported on.
Do you understand that you're saying "there really isn't any data to base it on, just believe me."
This is much better than your coy ploy, which resulted in an edifying digression into what the quaint term "weasel words" means (though I actually did 'lol' at the realization we're probably of the same generation).
Finally, I sincerely apologize because I am sort of picking on you (but really picking on the maneuver) because I am so generally nauseated by what I consider an all-too-frequent conversational rebuttal that results in tedium rather than light shed on the matter.
edit: I saw that you were down-voted, so I up-voted you. I think you have a valid point of view (though I may not agree) and I see no reason why anyone should be down-voted for dissension, especially when you lay out clearly what it takes to change your mind.
I'm honestly not sure what to believe when it comes to these claims. A lot of the claims that I see seem to be based on what are clearly outliers. I am actually interested in seeing what the numbers look like for use of force. I am interested in how people go about deciding what to believe, especially in this time of misinformation on the internet.
Everyone knows it happens. The claim that needs citation is that it is "widespread", happens "often" and "regularly". What that claim really needs is more specificity on what those words mean.
> The article is literally about the Police's failure to comply and submit documentation of all uses-of-force. In the vacuum of any official documentation, the only thing we have to go by are citizen reports.
Has someone compiled those citizen reports into a database?
The proportion of what media dedicates time to (this includes social media) is not proportional to how often those things happen. In fact, it's often the opposite. Sensational, rare and objectionable things get disproportionate coverage.
The topic database needs to exist. Instead of shutting it down for lack of compliance, it needs consequences or incentives attached to produce the desired behavior.
As it is now, there's literally nothing to gain for the police to voluntarily report these incidents. It can only hurt them. It'd be like asking you to publish how often and how much you drink alcohol and offering no incentive or consequences. Why would you do that? It'd only invite scrutiny.
That's historically been the case when it comes to mainstream media and often used to dismiss claims of excessive force by police as exceptional. However with social media we can see that it's not an isolate or exceptional thing but rather a common every day occurrence.
Though I've never been arrested or accosted by the police, I have been on the receiving end of their abuse of power many times in my life. I know first hand that the police and legal system abuse their power to penalize individuals who do not offer full compliance and blindly accept their asserted authority.
https://www.law.virginia.edu/system/files/faculty/hein/armac...
I don't see that we can call it a "common, every day occurrence". We have no idea if it's common, that's what the database was/is for. Because of the amount of interactions, excessive force incidents could be and exceptional, every day occurrence. We simply have no idea. Social media hasn't clarified anything about the _rates_ of the incidents, it's only allowed insight into specific incidents that probably would have been swept under the rug in the past.
We don't need any more laws, programs, investigations, or data trackers. We already have enough of those to go by....we just need prosecutors that will put cops in prison.
We need separate state level prosecutors who solely go after crimes committed by the police.
Makes me sad.
If 40% of police departments are "never" using force, they are obviously lying.