Personally, I think discretion, as long as it’s not abused, should be available to decision makers. Strict unbending rules are not ideal. In other words a little abuse is acceptable, a lot of abuse should not. I’m sure some people are uncomfortable with that. However I feel that lack of latitude leans tyrannical and fascistic.
Most counties I’ve been to permit police latitude (and in some cases way more than a little latitude) and there are places where a victim can decide on civil consequence (receive $$) or proceed with criminal case (potential jail time).
This view really only works if you consider the police as a whole a respectable & valuable workforce, and capricious enforcement to be a deviation from that norm.
The problem is if you view the police as they actually act over time, the uncertainty and cruelty is basically designed in. They are part of a long term and slow motion terror campaign against the most vulnerable members of our society. Whatever they should be, that is consistently how they act, and any power we give them should be considered within that reality. There is no power they have ever been granted that they have not chosen to use for tremendous harm and personal gain.
On the whole, I would consider the police a valuable workforce with some reservations. The vast majority are not performing egregious violations of civil rights. What we see in the news are the exceptions.
That said, I don't see a usable alternative --even considering the abuse. It's a human system--and maybe a remote robotic AI assisted system would be worse-- so it suffers from human fallibility.
A system without police is worse. You will have gangs and vigilantes take over who will be worse than police forces (yes, I know police in Venezuela are indistinguishable from violent gangs --but I'm talking about most police forces in advanced economies). Without a police force you get what we saw in the Wild West and what they got in Somalia --gangs and warlords and outlaws and whatnot.
I'm not saying don't strive for improvement -what I am saying is we must allow discretion (an example of what happens with lack of discretion is what happens with mandatory sentencing)
Even in China, you want a police force over no police and the police in China are even less concerned with civil rights and offer more discretion to the "right" people. In Russia, I would say it's closer to a draw as they are pretty corrupt, but your gangs are still worse.
Thinking in idealistic fashion is an okay exercise but we also need to face reality and the reality is that people cannot "police themselves" adequately.
> The vast majority are not performing egregious violations of civil rights. What we see in the news are the exceptions.
I can not see it this way, and I have earned that honestly. I have lived much of my life in poverty and addiction and across decades and dozens of interactions, not a single cop treated me with dignity and respect while I was homeless. Now I can code, can afford a dentist and $300 boots, and we get along fine! The violations are not the exception, they are build in to the system. The violations against people like you, against who I am now, those are exceptions. But in general? No.
I'm not arguing for lawlessness here. I am saying we should not be funding a hostile paramilitary force to harass the citizens we have already failed in other ways.
When I was young I too had encounters with them and it was less than ideal. But I also feel that without them there society would be worse off. Yes, there can be improvement and they definitely need to better weed out bad apples (they need to better detect criminals within their ranks --just like the clergy needs to and schools need to). But also realize they are doing what society is asking them to do. Allowing some discretion is what allows them to ignore homeless in the park or in a ditch or wherever the locality finds unofficially permissible. If they followed the letter of the law in many places, they'd have to call in the paddy wagon way more often.
The larger issue is how do we manage a society to follow accepted norms. Most jurisdictions have elected to choose a police force, but smaller ones --not sure how extendable that is-- use councils or elders or whatnot. These can also end up in weird derailments on occasion.
In large societies, the US, India, China, Panama, etc., with many strangers living among each other in large settlements, how do we, uhhh, "police" the population? Or how do we manage the population from infringing/violating each other's rights?
So, I don't know, necessarily. I'm not a sociologist or philosopher or anything else that would give me particularly strong insight on how we can structure society to meet our goals. But that doesn't discredit my discernment that policing as we have it is overall a harmful system that needs to change so significantly that it will be unrecognizable from it's current form.
> Or how do we manage the population from infringing/violating each other's rights?
Do we manage it now? Do police do that? If they do the US should be one of if not the safest country in the world. Is it? The very clear evidence is that police don't accomplish this goal, or that this is not the goal of police.
My belief, earned through experience, is that keeping us safe, "preventing crime" is not what police do. And what they is do is not something we should want or endorse. Yes, we will need "policing" the norms of society, management of the boundaries between individual rights, reaction to transgressions against them. But what we have isn't effective at that anyway, so why are we so invested in keeping it? We can do better and the police themselves have no interest in helping us figure out how.
You said you were not arguing for lawlessness. I'm struggling to understand how you would enforce the laws in the absence of a police force. Would citizens go around enforcing the laws themselves? I could see that easily creating a problem worse than what we have now.
Right, so you give some leeway but have oversight. It very well could be that the PBA cards are given out too freely. Maybe officers let too many people with broken lights off the hook or tear up too many parking tickets.
I definitely would like to see better parking enforcement and more official cars get towed. I'd be all for that, no question.
> It very well could be that the PBA cards are given out too freely.
I can't see a legitimate reason for PBA cards to be given out at all. If leeway is going to be given it should be given based on the situation (not the person). Friends/family of the police should not be given more leeway.
I have no problem with that. However, I guess in theory, someone is vouching for the cardholder --so it provides more information than just giving someone a lookover. Kind of like a "precheck".
For things related to car maintenance I think there should be a special class of tickets available, a "Provide proof you fixed the problem by {date} or pay {fine}$", they already informally exist (I've known a few people who got a ticket along with the officer's email and told if they provide proof the officer will cancel the ticket).
This would take needing discretion out of the question, and also provide better incentive to the driver than "I hope the same cop doesn't pull me over again and remember they already gave me a warning".
The space that allows people to be awful is the same space that allows them to be wonderful - discretion to step outside the bounds of the laws as written and act on them as they believe to be moral or ethical.
I won't disagree with you on the point that we have numerous examples of police abusing this.
I will note that we are primed by our current medium to only see the examples of them abusing this.
I think we should pay cops enough that free coffee and snacks isn't necessary, but obviously that's a much smaller issue than having a two-tier justice system that gives different results for "friends of police" and "ordinary taxpayers."
When I worked at a large corporation, HR gave us a lecture about not accepting any gifts over $25 or something. I would like to live in a world where police departments function with at least a similar level of integrity.
People don't give cops free coffee because they think police are so underpaid they can't afford a cup out of their own pocket. They do it because they know that police enforcement and assistance is inconsistent and based largely on mood and favoritism, and are doing what they hope will put them on the right side of that.
When I say I'm willing to pay police more, it's not because I'm worried they can't afford donuts.* I'm saying this because I would like to have a more professional police force and I'm willing to raise compensation as a carrot in exchange for enforcing higher standards (i.e., basic standards of ethical behavior that are table stakes for white collar employees in large corporations.)
Right now most police pay is bad, but police get a basket of official and "unofficial" benefits to make up for it. We should eliminate the unofficial ones and offer real compensation in exchange.
* Although, yikes, I paid $7.50 with tax for 1/2 dozen donuts at Dunkin yesterday, so maybe this isn't trivial.
Ah I see, that does make sense. I would offer that they already are very professional and effective at their purpose, it's just that their actual purpose is very different from their stated purpose.
Paying them more won't bring them more in line with what we wish the police did though. They will just continue to terrorize the vulnerable and protect capital because that is their actual role.
Police officers make pretty good money, although I would advocate for more base pay with higher bar to entry and a broad change in culture to be more pro-actively helpful and less violent. Austin $62k-102k for low level officers, before overtime. Most police departments in metropolitan areas seem to offer lots of overtime potential, which can sometimes triple an officer's pay if they work an admittedly incredible number of hours. But it does happen that low level officers take home over $200k in LCOL cities like Houston.
At best, PBAs are indirect bribery. The PBAs take that money to defend police misconduct in the rare cases that their misconduct ends up on court. Relative lack of corruption is what distinguishes egalitarian societies.
Cops shouldn't accept free coffee and snacks. Just as politicians shouldn't accept gifts. That's corruption.
Someone in my extended family got caught seriously drunk driving in Mississippi, and probably because he was a neatly-dressed, well-spoken white guy, the court clerk subtly hinted that a $2000 donation to the county sheriff's department benefit fund would confirm to all concerned that he was indeed a nice, civic-minded young man who shouldn't have his life ruined over a silly mistake.
He wrote that check, and ended up pleading guilty to reckless/careless driving (can't remember which), which carries far fewer long term consequences than a DUI.
As for an explanation, this tracks with the five factor moral foundations model[1] and specifically with the loyalty (and possibly authority) factor(s). There's a profound difference between those who primarily conceptualize morality through individualizing foundations(care & fairness) and those who primarily conceptualize morality through factors(loyalty, authority & sanctity)[2].
The police are systemically biased toward selecting for members who favor authority and loyalty. It should come as no surprise that those values are reflected in behavior like this.
Personally, I'm curious to engage with and hear from those who hand out such favors. How is it justified?
Yet another example of how our policing in this country is beyond broken. These cards are disgusting and what they represent is the exact opposite of what police should stand for.
I hate our current state of law enforcement (local and federal) that essentially lets "enforcers" pick which laws they enforce and who they enforce them against. The ability for police to utilize "discretion" might sound like a good thing but I think it's not. If they enforced the laws equally and universally we would see that some (perhaps many) laws need to be stricken from the books because of how many people are regularly breaking them. Instead the police get to pick so if you piss them off they might write you up for a minor infraction that they ignore 99% of the time. The police should not have this power.
Another example of police getting to decide if they want to do their jobs are not is what happened to the CA DA Chesa Boudin. He came in and tried to implement various criminal justice reform policies and the police didn't like that so what did they do? They stopped doing their jobs. They let crime rise to the point that civilians, incorrectly, assumed the DA wasn't doing his job and they recalled him. Let that sink in, a DA tried to make changes and the police decided to just not do their job in order to make him look bad so they could get him effectively "fired" and they didn't have to make any reforms/changes. That's absolutely disgusting. Just imagine trying to pull a stunt like that were you work and think about how well it would go over. Police are not a protected class, they should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us but instead they are held to almost no standard at all.
We need massive police reform in the US and it's becoming even more clear that there is little worth "saving" from our current system.
This is essentially the argument that "All Cops are Bad"; some few cops are bad, but all cops willingly participate in a system that protects and enables those bad actors. The US military is a good comparison, they routinely dishonorably discharge soldiers who misbehave or fail to behave in honorable ways; police seem much less able to manage themselves in the same way. (Not that the US military doesn't have its own share of problems, nor do they always kick out the people they should, but they seem to have a better culture of doing so than most US police forces. Both could certainly be improved further.)
That's certainly funny, given the gusto with which many PDs emulate military structure and behavior. The one thing they could really stand to learn from the military? Nah, we're good, they say.
Same with the employment of firearms. Most serviceman would be brought before a courts martial if they used the same tactics and justification common in US police departments.
I'm a left-leaning grow-in-SF person who voted to recall Boudin. I've had Progressive friends tell me to my face that I was fooled by the police.
Okay, for the sake of discussion, let's say that your presentation of the story is roughly accurate. (Let's ignore what the Asian political bloc was saying, they were fooled by the police too, in this scenario; and let's ignore all the folks who worked for Boudin in the DA office and then came out against him. Ignoring all that...)
So the police don't want to work with this DA.
They say the rise in crime is due to him being soft on crime.
We vote him out.
Next, one of two things will happen: crime will go down, or it stays the same or goes up.
If crime goes down, great! That's what we want, yeah?
But if crime goes UP then-- Aha! --we then know that Chesa Boudin wasn't really the factor after all and the police were playing games with the data and enforcement, eh?
And that plays (back) into the hands of the Progressive bloc, no?
If the concern is police was artificially increasing crime through intentional lack of enforcement, your outcomes aren’t right
If DA exits, and crime increases, then it probably wasn’t the police artificially fiddling with things (because they would revert to norm after exit). But then whatever the DA was doing was apparently working, so his exiting isn’t so great.
If DA exits, and crime decreases, then:
1. If police were artificially meddling, and stopped meddling after exit, then this is what we’d expect
2. If police were not artificially meddling, and DA was the cause due to soft-on-crime, then this is what we’d expect
If DA exits, and crime stays the same, then artificial meddling and DA policy either didn’t occur, or had no impact.
Item 1 of crime decrease is not what “we” wanted. Item 2 is a good outcome. But I don’t see how you’d differentiate in this simplification.
The police said that they couldn't do their jobs because the DA wasn't prosecuting.
The Progressive bloc said that the police were fudging the reported numbers and shirking their duty just to make the DA look bad. (Pretty strong accusations IMO.)
But we don't really have the data. The Progressives claim is that the official figures are cooked. But anyone who has spent time here has seen the crime for themselves. So which is it? Are the cops doing their job but the DA lets the criminals walk? Or are the cops lying and shirking their duty to get rid of a DA who is willing to prosecute their misconduct?
In the event, we voted the DA out. The Asian-American political bloc and many Democrats went with the police version of the story, and the Progressives said that they (we) were all just bamboozled by the Republicans and the Police.
So now if crime does not go down after removing Boudin then the Progressive bloc will be handed a PR victory (not a real victory, because more crime is bad even if it helps your side politically, eh?)
Here's a great read about corruption https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/19/corruption-rev... , it's a review of the book "Thieves of State", but it also has a lot of amazing insight about corruption around the world, and how it undermines public trust and even makes the fight against terrorism harder.
Sir Robert Peel – Metropolitan Police of London – 1829
The Peelian principles summarize the ideas that Sir Robert Peel developed to define an ethical police force. The approach expressed in these principles is commonly known as policing by consent. In this model of policing, police officers are regarded as citizens in uniform. They exercise their powers to police their fellow citizens with the implicit consent of those fellow citizens. “Policing by consent” indicates that the legitimacy of policing in the eyes of the public is based upon a general consensus of support that follows from transparency about their powers, their integrity in exercising those powers and their accountability for doing so.
3 CORE IDEAS
The goal is preventing crime, not catching criminals. If the police stop crime before it happens, we don’t have to punish citizens or suppress their rights. An effective police department doesn’t have high arrest stats; its community has low crime rates.
The key to preventing crime is earning public support. Every community member must share the responsibility of preventing crime, as if they were all volunteer members of the force. They will only accept this responsibility if the community supports and trusts the police.
The police earn public support by respecting community principles. Winning public approval requires hard work to build reputation: enforcing the laws impartially, hiring officers who represent and understand the community, and using force only as a last resort.
9 Policing Principles
To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
To recognize always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behavior, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
To recognize always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing cooperation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
To recognize always that the extent to which the cooperation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
To seek and preserve public favor, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humor, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public cooperation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
To recognize always the need for strict adherence to po...
46 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadMost counties I’ve been to permit police latitude (and in some cases way more than a little latitude) and there are places where a victim can decide on civil consequence (receive $$) or proceed with criminal case (potential jail time).
The problem is if you view the police as they actually act over time, the uncertainty and cruelty is basically designed in. They are part of a long term and slow motion terror campaign against the most vulnerable members of our society. Whatever they should be, that is consistently how they act, and any power we give them should be considered within that reality. There is no power they have ever been granted that they have not chosen to use for tremendous harm and personal gain.
That said, I don't see a usable alternative --even considering the abuse. It's a human system--and maybe a remote robotic AI assisted system would be worse-- so it suffers from human fallibility.
A system without police is worse. You will have gangs and vigilantes take over who will be worse than police forces (yes, I know police in Venezuela are indistinguishable from violent gangs --but I'm talking about most police forces in advanced economies). Without a police force you get what we saw in the Wild West and what they got in Somalia --gangs and warlords and outlaws and whatnot.
I'm not saying don't strive for improvement -what I am saying is we must allow discretion (an example of what happens with lack of discretion is what happens with mandatory sentencing)
Even in China, you want a police force over no police and the police in China are even less concerned with civil rights and offer more discretion to the "right" people. In Russia, I would say it's closer to a draw as they are pretty corrupt, but your gangs are still worse.
Thinking in idealistic fashion is an okay exercise but we also need to face reality and the reality is that people cannot "police themselves" adequately.
I can not see it this way, and I have earned that honestly. I have lived much of my life in poverty and addiction and across decades and dozens of interactions, not a single cop treated me with dignity and respect while I was homeless. Now I can code, can afford a dentist and $300 boots, and we get along fine! The violations are not the exception, they are build in to the system. The violations against people like you, against who I am now, those are exceptions. But in general? No.
I'm not arguing for lawlessness here. I am saying we should not be funding a hostile paramilitary force to harass the citizens we have already failed in other ways.
In large societies, the US, India, China, Panama, etc., with many strangers living among each other in large settlements, how do we, uhhh, "police" the population? Or how do we manage the population from infringing/violating each other's rights?
> Or how do we manage the population from infringing/violating each other's rights?
Do we manage it now? Do police do that? If they do the US should be one of if not the safest country in the world. Is it? The very clear evidence is that police don't accomplish this goal, or that this is not the goal of police.
My belief, earned through experience, is that keeping us safe, "preventing crime" is not what police do. And what they is do is not something we should want or endorse. Yes, we will need "policing" the norms of society, management of the boundaries between individual rights, reaction to transgressions against them. But what we have isn't effective at that anyway, so why are we so invested in keeping it? We can do better and the police themselves have no interest in helping us figure out how.
> as long as it’s not abused
That ship has long since sailed. The police have proven more times than I can count that they absolutely cannot be trusted not to abuse this.
I definitely would like to see better parking enforcement and more official cars get towed. I'd be all for that, no question.
I can't see a legitimate reason for PBA cards to be given out at all. If leeway is going to be given it should be given based on the situation (not the person). Friends/family of the police should not be given more leeway.
This would take needing discretion out of the question, and also provide better incentive to the driver than "I hope the same cop doesn't pull me over again and remember they already gave me a warning".
https://www.rpmlawca.com/blog/2020/january/how-to-handle-a-f...
I won't disagree with you on the point that we have numerous examples of police abusing this.
I will note that we are primed by our current medium to only see the examples of them abusing this.
The current policing system is non-functional without discretion because nearly everything is criminalized with overly harsh punishments.
Police are pretty terrible arbiters of discretion, but I would rather have that than the current laws enforced.
I am much more concerned about over enforcement than under enforcement.
So this is really not that big of an issue in the grand scheme of things.
I mean, cops usually get free coffee and snacks. Is that an issue?
When I worked at a large corporation, HR gave us a lecture about not accepting any gifts over $25 or something. I would like to live in a world where police departments function with at least a similar level of integrity.
Right now most police pay is bad, but police get a basket of official and "unofficial" benefits to make up for it. We should eliminate the unofficial ones and offer real compensation in exchange.
* Although, yikes, I paid $7.50 with tax for 1/2 dozen donuts at Dunkin yesterday, so maybe this isn't trivial.
Paying them more won't bring them more in line with what we wish the police did though. They will just continue to terrorize the vulnerable and protect capital because that is their actual role.
Looking at my city, Most officers make more thank 300K. Sergeants and Lieutenant make more than 400K, and the chief makes more than 550k
https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2020/
Cops shouldn't accept free coffee and snacks. Just as politicians shouldn't accept gifts. That's corruption.
He wrote that check, and ended up pleading guilty to reckless/careless driving (can't remember which), which carries far fewer long term consequences than a DUI.
The police are systemically biased toward selecting for members who favor authority and loyalty. It should come as no surprise that those values are reflected in behavior like this.
Personally, I'm curious to engage with and hear from those who hand out such favors. How is it justified?
1. Graham et al., 2013; https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2184440
2. Graham J., Haidt J., & Nosek B. (2009)
I hate our current state of law enforcement (local and federal) that essentially lets "enforcers" pick which laws they enforce and who they enforce them against. The ability for police to utilize "discretion" might sound like a good thing but I think it's not. If they enforced the laws equally and universally we would see that some (perhaps many) laws need to be stricken from the books because of how many people are regularly breaking them. Instead the police get to pick so if you piss them off they might write you up for a minor infraction that they ignore 99% of the time. The police should not have this power.
Another example of police getting to decide if they want to do their jobs are not is what happened to the CA DA Chesa Boudin. He came in and tried to implement various criminal justice reform policies and the police didn't like that so what did they do? They stopped doing their jobs. They let crime rise to the point that civilians, incorrectly, assumed the DA wasn't doing his job and they recalled him. Let that sink in, a DA tried to make changes and the police decided to just not do their job in order to make him look bad so they could get him effectively "fired" and they didn't have to make any reforms/changes. That's absolutely disgusting. Just imagine trying to pull a stunt like that were you work and think about how well it would go over. Police are not a protected class, they should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us but instead they are held to almost no standard at all.
We need massive police reform in the US and it's becoming even more clear that there is little worth "saving" from our current system.
Or go do some research.
I'm a left-leaning grow-in-SF person who voted to recall Boudin. I've had Progressive friends tell me to my face that I was fooled by the police.
Okay, for the sake of discussion, let's say that your presentation of the story is roughly accurate. (Let's ignore what the Asian political bloc was saying, they were fooled by the police too, in this scenario; and let's ignore all the folks who worked for Boudin in the DA office and then came out against him. Ignoring all that...)
So the police don't want to work with this DA.
They say the rise in crime is due to him being soft on crime.
We vote him out.
Next, one of two things will happen: crime will go down, or it stays the same or goes up.
If crime goes down, great! That's what we want, yeah?
But if crime goes UP then-- Aha! --we then know that Chesa Boudin wasn't really the factor after all and the police were playing games with the data and enforcement, eh?
And that plays (back) into the hands of the Progressive bloc, no?
If DA exits, and crime increases, then it probably wasn’t the police artificially fiddling with things (because they would revert to norm after exit). But then whatever the DA was doing was apparently working, so his exiting isn’t so great.
If DA exits, and crime decreases, then:
1. If police were artificially meddling, and stopped meddling after exit, then this is what we’d expect
2. If police were not artificially meddling, and DA was the cause due to soft-on-crime, then this is what we’d expect
If DA exits, and crime stays the same, then artificial meddling and DA policy either didn’t occur, or had no impact.
Item 1 of crime decrease is not what “we” wanted. Item 2 is a good outcome. But I don’t see how you’d differentiate in this simplification.
The police said that they couldn't do their jobs because the DA wasn't prosecuting.
The Progressive bloc said that the police were fudging the reported numbers and shirking their duty just to make the DA look bad. (Pretty strong accusations IMO.)
But we don't really have the data. The Progressives claim is that the official figures are cooked. But anyone who has spent time here has seen the crime for themselves. So which is it? Are the cops doing their job but the DA lets the criminals walk? Or are the cops lying and shirking their duty to get rid of a DA who is willing to prosecute their misconduct?
In the event, we voted the DA out. The Asian-American political bloc and many Democrats went with the police version of the story, and the Progressives said that they (we) were all just bamboozled by the Republicans and the Police.
So now if crime does not go down after removing Boudin then the Progressive bloc will be handed a PR victory (not a real victory, because more crime is bad even if it helps your side politically, eh?)
Now that we're all being dragged kicking and screaming into the fray, I suppose I'll have to form an opinion.
Until I do, the Peelian 9 Principles appear to be a good starting point. (Copypasta below.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
--
Sir Robert Peel – Metropolitan Police of London – 1829
The Peelian principles summarize the ideas that Sir Robert Peel developed to define an ethical police force. The approach expressed in these principles is commonly known as policing by consent. In this model of policing, police officers are regarded as citizens in uniform. They exercise their powers to police their fellow citizens with the implicit consent of those fellow citizens. “Policing by consent” indicates that the legitimacy of policing in the eyes of the public is based upon a general consensus of support that follows from transparency about their powers, their integrity in exercising those powers and their accountability for doing so.
3 CORE IDEAS
The goal is preventing crime, not catching criminals. If the police stop crime before it happens, we don’t have to punish citizens or suppress their rights. An effective police department doesn’t have high arrest stats; its community has low crime rates.
The key to preventing crime is earning public support. Every community member must share the responsibility of preventing crime, as if they were all volunteer members of the force. They will only accept this responsibility if the community supports and trusts the police.
The police earn public support by respecting community principles. Winning public approval requires hard work to build reputation: enforcing the laws impartially, hiring officers who represent and understand the community, and using force only as a last resort.
9 Policing Principles
To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
To recognize always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behavior, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
To recognize always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing cooperation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
To recognize always that the extent to which the cooperation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
To seek and preserve public favor, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humor, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public cooperation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
To recognize always the need for strict adherence to po...