I don't agree with ACAB, but I do agree that there is a lot of dirty behavior out there that shouldn't be swept away with a weak, reductionist call to "childish reductionism."
What's your argument here? That corrupt police who run protection rackets are worth it because they will, in the end, actually protect your family from gangs of 100+ people?
Even with guns, minimum wage people aren't gonna want to be heroes and risk their lives protecting the money of their boss, when threatened at gunpoint.
Even if they're willing to pull the trigger, your average 7-Eleven employee is no Navy Seal and won't react well under gunpoint pressure and might end up shooting some innocent bystander or himself.
Just giving guns to everyone is bad idea on so many levels.
I don't think this point gets plastered everywhere in the entirety of the world enough.
Most humans don't want to shoot other humans. The few who have murder fantasies do, but other than that nobody wants to take a life. The concept of just arming everyone isn't a positive nor even a remote solution.
It's obscene how angry "constitutionalists" get about doing something that was so important to the very fabric of the constitution that they did it ten times by the end of the convention, including the literal "Bill of rights" which was considered essential.
Almost like they don't actually care about the constitution.
It won't be anytime soon because this desire is more concentrated in a few highly populated states and the less populated rural states can stonewall it. Hence the desire to fight over the meaning of the second rather than amend and clarify it.
"The right to an abortion is not explicitly and specifically in the Constitution, therefore it doesn't exist".
(I recognize some of the "issues" with Roe v Wade, tangential/orthogonal to that of access to medical services...)
"The right to purchase arms is not explicitly and specifically in the Constitution, but must exist despite that, because how else could you bear arms?"
Just like how, for Justice(hah) Thomas, same-sex marriage is a state's right/decision, but interracial marriage... isn't.
Why do several Supreme Court Justices state that they are originalists, and the Constitution is sacrosanct, when the very people who wrote it said that it wasn't, and was to be "reviewed and updated to the needs of the times as a living document"?
"This document is correct and perfect in every way. Except the bit where the authors say it isn't."
>Just like how, for Justice(hah) Thomas, same-sex marriage is a state's right/decision, but interracial marriage... isn't.
Banning interracial marriage was deemed unconstitutional based on the 14th amendment. The 14th amendment doesn't have any text about same-sex marriage. That's why it's left up to the states. (10th amendment)
>Why do several Supreme Court Justices state that they are originalists, and the Constitution is sacrosanct, when the very people who wrote it said that it wasn't, and was to be "reviewed and updated to the needs of the times as a living document"?
The constitution has methods to amend it, that's what a living document means, not that some political party gets to decide what it means on a whim.
Roe v Wade was legislation from the bench. The current court undid that, and are basically shredding any Sua Sponte legislation that comes before them.
The Second Amendment is centuries old. The current interpretation of it is only a decade or two old. For centuries before that, other interpretations prevailed - the oddball is the current radical one.
If one more person tells me 'the ship has sailed' or some other hopeless cliche of the moment - yes, the smart trend of the moment is despair! - about anything .... The radical gun people sure don't think that way, and their positions are obvious, absurd horsecrap. The only problem is you (and many like you) quitting.
You could mail order a machine gun until the 1930s and nonviolent felons could buy guns up until the 60s ( violent ones too a few decades before that ). Not much to challenge federally on some of these points until recent history.
Also the bill of rights werent fully incorporated upon the states until well past the signing of the Constitution. In this context it's kind of silly to compare backwards vs many regulations that simply didn't exist or had no incorporated protection.
Is there somewhere that documents this history? My understanding is that the current interpretation is a new(ish) idea promulgated by the NRA, etc. starting around 1980.
The Bill of Rights point seems like a long stretch.
The most significant acts restricting arms federally are the NFA (1934) which was a (at the time onerous) tax because they weren't sure they had constitutional power for many other methods of regulation.
The other was the GCA passed in 1968.
After the passing of the NFA was the beginning of many modern era challenges such as US v.no legal counsel of dead guy (Miller). Unsurprisingly the undefended dead guy with no counsel lost setting a long precedent and the rest of NFA is history.
Most humans with a gun pointed at them would take the option. Meeting deadly force with deadly force is far from a murder fantasy, in fact, self defense is an exemption to murder statutes, and for good reason.
I don't want to shoot other humans. I've been in a situation where I nearly needed to, and I'll never fail to be equipped to do so. I had to shoot a cat about a year ago, and I'm still a bit fucked up about it. A human would be so much worse, and that's not something I want to experience.
I have no guilt, because it needed to be done. It's just emotionally traumatic. With a human, it's far more hurtful to the soul; no matter how much they needed shooting, they are fundamentally the same as you.
Having a gun pointed at you is a threat to your life, not “the money of your boss”. Minimum wage or not, their life has value, and they should be to defend it by meeting deadly force with deadly force.
Your scenario starts with a gun pointed at the person. How much training do you believe is required such that an otherwise ordinary person "win" a gunfight when their gun is holstered and the opponent already has them in their aim?
The article is about the MPD forcing businesses to hire off-duty cops or risk losing their business license, rather than an actual security problem requiring security guards.
I'm a 2A fan but if i were a worker and asked by my boss to do this i'd say no thanks. Going toe to toe with an armed criminal isn't in the job description, if it were i wouldn't be interested in the position.
This has nothing to do with capitalism and everything to do with enforcing law and order. People aren't stealing bread and milk to survive. Notice what products are behind plexiglass in large cities, its not food/essentials. District attorneys across the country are refusing to prosecute crimes like retail theft.
Yeah, I just bet if I go down to Sparrows Point and try to breeze in the front door of the Amazon DH there I'll get in no problem. And what's that have to do with a Minneapolis protection racket, anyway?
If you read The Fine Article, you will see it's not actually about security, but about police corruption - pressuring business owners of a certain skin color to hire off-duty cops as security under threat of losing their business license, when white business owners didn't appear to have the same requirements to operate.
The business owner quoted in the article goes on to say that a lot of the time the cops they had to hire weren't even there - they had minimum pay requirements for every shift they "worked" even if they left early or just sat in their car doing nothing.
"a gang" implies youth staking out territory, going up against other gangs, etc. Mafia implies it's a lot more subtle, someone coming up to a business going "Nice place you got here, would be a shame if something were to happen to it". Protection racket (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket).
The cops in concert with some city employees are running a protection racket.
But I think it's a bit more like a crime family or maybe a corrupt political machine than it is like a gang.
If businesses want to hire security, they should. But it shouldn't be a requirement of having a business. It comes off like the boss of the crime family telling you "I just want to get my beak wet". Like they're shaking down the small businesses.
Already we've got two top-level comments who think this article is about crime. It isn't. It's about corrupt police shaking down small business owners under threat of losing their business license.
ETA: Please give the pedantry a rest. Of course I know police corruption is criminal. That's not what the people talking about "crime" are talking about.
This is precisely why DAs are elected officials. It's supposed to work this way, in theory. The people vote in the officials who enforce the laws in the manner they wish. In practice, DA elections seem totally ignored.
The problem is lack of voting and civic engagement.
Usually that's because the local PDs exercise their union coffers to ensure that candidates are a minimum level of friendly. If not, there are multiple cases where the police have either directly threatened a candidate or simply did a work stoppage in order to craft a narrative.
There is a way - file a civil suit. That won't have the possibility of sending people to jail, but does have the possibility of financial damages being awarded that are higher than you'd see in a criminal case.
That has not just qualified immunity, but also straight up standard sovereign immunity. On top of that, the courts are very much against messing with prosecutorial discretion. They view it as a separation of powers issue.
Sort of, but not in a way you'd expect. It presupposes that they don't know what's good faith or not without explicit cases on the subject in that jurisdiction. So qualified immunity squashes new cases that haven't been exactly covered, but also typically doesn't create new case law on that subject meaning that police can continue doing that 'possibly' bad behavior.
Oh, man... That is a disappointing way for things to work. So how would one go about pursuing a complaint in a way that would get case law to exist for a specific scenario?
We have a way. In most states the Attorney General can assign a prosecutor to pursue local corruption cases. The AG is an elected office accountable to voters.
However, the prosecutor often is beholden to local police departments to prosecute other unrelated crime. Most DAs don't have the ability to bite the hand that feeds them.
If a DA comes out and says "hey, I'm investigating a racket that is put on by local cops" those local cops (and their union) will fight tooth and nail to remove that DA, no matter how effective their other investigations are. If that AG or DA is out of a job, and try to spill the beans, they can be threatened, or ignored outright by local media or other prosecutors who have legitimate reasons to not rock the boat.
Organized corruption begets more organized corruption.
They want you to think like that because it’s good for business…and since our prison population exceeds that of Russia or any other country (per capita), it appears that business is good…
Business is definitely good as the private prisons market makes a killing anywhere they’re allowed to operate. It’s as if there was a vested interest in having a huge carceral population for some reason.
Are you kidding? The first sentences of this article sound like a textbook protection racket, which is one of the most seriously handled federal crimes in the US. Then it turns out this is city mandated, and of course since they're cops they operate outside of the law.
The "you're going to work with this guy" is obviously illegal, and part of the racket. I wouldn't be surprised if there was value exchanged there along with it.
You understand that protection rackets will 'work' with government officials, right? That this is part of it? And they'll try to codify their existence as much as possible.
And even if it was completely legal, its very obviously bad, and that's why its illegal in the first place and we try to combat such outcomes, which is part of the point of the article.
> It's about corrupt police shaking down small business owners
I don't believe that there's ever been any other kind of cop. Certainly not outside of fiction. By prefixing the adjective "corrupt" though, you're certainly buying into it.
Have you never read the headlines where the entire police union tries to extort the entire city? "If we don't get enough cops on the street, bad things will happen". Hell, even more explicitly in Minneapolis after Floyd. Sometimes in the comments here there are hints of people extorting themselves with stuff like "if we didn't have cops, it'd be chaos!".
The linked shakedown is relatively mild by comparison. That feeling you feel is the same as when the tapeworm hooks its jaw pincers into the inside of your gut. But sure, let's just hope for a more gentle tapeworm.
Modern policing in the US is pretty terrible in terms of systemic corruption. If you add up the costs of, for example, overtime and detail fraud, it puts normal property crime in the shade.
I am not envisioning any society in particular. Instead, I would ask you a question. It's a little contrived, so bear with me.
Imagine a situation that you could plausibly find yourself in where you would feel the need to contact the police. It need not be a 911 call, though those are fine too. Imagine how that would go down... the time of day you contact them. Where you would be when it happened. How you would describe the situation to them.
In this scenario, what is it that they do to help?
Whatever you think happens in that situation, everything I've read over the decades I've been reading about this lead me to believe that there is nothing they would ever do to help anyone reliably/consistently.
If your bike was stolen, well fuck you. Why do you even bother to report that. They will neither recover it, nor ever punish the person who stole it.
If your home was burglarized, the same. With your car, they'll take the report at least so you can claim insurance, but they will be surly and do so only begrudgingly because if they fail to take those reports to any great degree, there will be a political shitstorm that eventually catches up with them.
Are you in fear of your life? They might show up and shoot you. Your dog's in even more danger.
Did you see one on the street and ask for directions because you were lost? In Baltimore, that can cause them to point guns at you, scream obscenities, and run you off (and this is considered by some to be a particularly fortunate outcome).
The least risky encounter for most of us, is when we're being ticketed, when they're just doing revenue collection.
From what I can tell, the outcomes I describe aren't atypical. They've always got more important things to investigate (big drug busts), so the crimes that you and I care about are ignored, and they don't seem to act as a deterrent in any meaningful way. You just have several social filters on your brain that allow you to maintain the illusion otherwise.
And, for the record, this embodies what most people meant when they said, "Defund the police." Not, "Get rid of the institution of law enforcement." Instead, "Lower funding so that the remainder is forced to be put towards necessary tasks which the police are actually effective at," reducing their ability to engage in the kind of paid apathy or harassment the GGP describes, and freeing up funding for preventative social programs. If you believed it was the former, well, you are not immune to propaganda. And no one in their right mind, even on the ACAB side, wants police to go away entirely. You don't delete a containment board.
If "defund the police" actually means "reform the police" then why not just say reform the police? And also why burn down police stations?
I think most people who want to "defund the police" plan to live in a place where the police haven't actually been defunded. "Defund the police" is a luxury belief.
Because people have been saying, "Reform the police," for decades, and what generally happens when a "reform the police" candidate gets in office is that the police get more money for "training." So, it's not an unconsidered slogan: the problem with "reform" was that it was resulting in wealthier law enforcement that was still corrupt. Time to be more explicit about what needs to happen: do not "reform." Defund.
1. They self-fund. All confiscated cash is for keeps. If they're not allowed to keep it by state law, they're welcome to call in feds who will do the bust and give them 80% as a finders fee.
2. They extort cities into not "defunding". They don't want it, and they play hardball.
> nd no one in their right mind, even on the ACAB side, wants police to go away entirely.
No one's ever accused me of being in my right mind, but I am asking quite seriously... what would happen if they did? I have reason to believe "not much, good or bad".
In the places where things are horrible, they'd remain horrible. When SF has no retail stores because they can't handle the shoplifting, that'd remain true. And in the suburbs where things are boring, things would stay boring. If your car is stolen, you'd still never get it back. If your bike was stolen, same. If your home was broken into, no one would be caught. And if you were murdered, your murder would go unsolved just like before.
I just told you about a case of a murder in a suburb that was solved. Murderers are caught all the time in the US. Are you claiming that because police don't solve 100% of murders in the US, we should consider police fundamentally useless?
Some people are so privileged they think the police do nothing, the prisons are only filled with the wrongfully convicted, and crime isn’t really a problem.
That being said, I’m all for attempting the experiment, preferably far from me.
> Some people are so privileged they think the police do nothing
They do plenty of things. And I'm glad I'm privileged enough that I never suffer them doing things.
No, I started the conversation out talking specifically about "the things they do what we would actually want them to do".
This is because, were they gone, we wouldn't have to worry about them doing "the things they do that we never want done to ourselves, or to anyone else".
You're just confused. It's a confusing subject. You're not used to thinking about these things, no one wants you to contemplate them too carefully.
You must live a sheltered life to think this. Viewing an entire group of people as evil or inherently bad. People like you are the reason why progress in the area is so hard. You don't understand the reality of the job.
You actually need the sheltered life to not think this. You've only had the smallest interactions with them, in the circumstances where you had the slightest little misfortune to get a traffic ticket or where they were feeling generous that day.
It's bizarre. "Why can't that internet weirdo see that the police are awesome and society would fall apart if they were gone?" only works if you've not paid attention to what the police are doing because you get to be 50 miles away when they're doing it.
Are you a troll account? I can't imagine someone being so obtuse, this must be a joke. You continue to paint any pushback as some bad faith, exaggerated caricature in order to support your silly ideas. The fact of the matter is most people trust most police, that is evidenced in polls after polls, in every community.
The people who are most affected by reduced policing are the marginalized communities where crime is rampant.
He's correct that if you remove police from a well-off suburb not much will happen, because they mainly do tickets and domestics, and who really cares if a couple is fighting?
But when police are removed from neighborhoods where crime is an issue, it immediately and directly affects those who live there, and not in a good way.
Like in San Francisco, where the chief of police states publicly that having your window broken and your parked car trashed is just the price of living there?
Like when those big inner cities become food deserts because the retail stores start locking up the toothpaste and cans of soup behind glass cabinets a few months before they close down entirely and move out?
You think that those places could get worse than they are, and that the cops (who don't do anything to stop any of these crimes as they happen, or to deter them in any way because they're too busy concentrating on the drug war that brings in confiscated cash they get to keep) somehow prevent things from becoming even worse?
It's difficult to reconcile the idea that you live on the same planet that I do, and that (presumably) you have done so for many years.
Do you actually think most police aren't chasing thieves because they have to go bust some drug dealers in order to steal their cash?
Like, you really believe that? Please tell me you don't. This must be a joke.
SF basically told their police to stop going after small time thieves after 2020. The result has been mass mobs of stores and a huge increase in theft. They voted for these polices to raise the bar at which someone can be prosecuted, so police do nothing.
Jesus, do your research (and not on left wing Twitter lol)
I've made sarcastic posts before, go through my comment history.
But this is one of my most sincere postings, I'm being serious, and I'm trying to point out something that others have trouble discerning and recognizing.
I can see how it would be more comfortable for you if you could think me a troll.
> You continue to paint any pushback as some bad faith,
You should ask yourself why your good faith is so bad for everyone. "I'm just doing what I've always done" is lame.
I've taught my children from a young age that we must never come to the attention of the police. That they are not friends or heroes. That, should they show up and we can't just disappear back into the background... whatever bad things might have been happening are likely to get worse.
That if, for instance, someone is trying to murder them, they must handle it themselves. That if we are stolen from, our belongings are gone for good.
You though, you're welcome to continue to live in your illusions, and god help you if those ever melt away like fog on a sunny day.
> The fact of the matter is most people trust most police,
Most birds think the spider-tailed viper is a convenient meal. Their consensus in the matter isn't very inspiring though.
I don't disagree with most of this. The answer is definitely not simply, "Lower the budget," least of all because, as you say, they have other sources of funding. The loss of LEOs on corners probably wouldn't do much for crime rates, either, true.
But I will also answer the question you posed (in the form of an unfinished short story from a few years ago that I dropped because I realized I was doing more telling than showing (also because it's kind of terrible):
Dude, nobody expects a random cop to spend a month trying to track down a $200 bicycle. That's not their job.
Your views are extremely myopic. Low-income neighborhoods around me are asking for MORE police because of how things have gotten. It's literally only suburban people who are insulated from crime that are saying dumb things like "defund the police"
May I assume you don't live in the US midwest Bible belt?
A friendly officer drove 10 minutes to pull out a slim jim and unlock my car for me. I thanked him. Normal stuff.
A lady's car broke down in an intersection. A police car put their lights on to keep us safe while 3 or 4 random people pushed the car to safety.
I often call dispatch to report accidents, debris on the road, or anything else that would warrant police help.
I have friends who have been tied up in the legal system with drugs and similar crimes around here. When they sober up, they admit that the cops have a hard job and treated them respectfully.
They protect. They serve.. it's honestly very simple. Not all police are lazy/corrupt/ego-driven maniacs. Not around here anyway.
Minneapolis Police Department is like 75% suburbs resident (that is, they don't live in the city). They also are "dropouts" or didn't make the bar of getting in the suburban police departments (cushier jobs, more integrity needed), so they are shit cops that go into Minneapolis, fuck up their jobs in the best case, and drive home to the suburbs.
Minneapolis is a very "young" city. It's only now getting actual generations of people that lived and grew up in the city, it used to be a city where all the suburbs people moved into the city. The first run "suburbs" are still actually suburbs, so you drive about five miles and you are in a suburb, while if you're in downtown Chicago, you have to go like 30 miles before you run into suburbs-like existence.
I grew up white trash in Indiana. I never really drank, didn't do drugs, but the sort of shit that I'd get pulled over for is hilarious now that I have 30 years distance.
The other guy's comment where he's telling his feel good stories, they serve more as a sort of mythology about heroic cops that people tell themselves, they're not even proper anecdotes. He wants to believe, so he tells us some stories, and it doesn't much matter if they're true. They're what you want to hear.
But if you care to check out the reality, go see what they're doing about burglaries in some hotspot. Go ask someone with a stolen bike or car what treatment they do get. Go check on where the resources, time, and manpower are spent. It's not on any of the crimes you care about. But I suppose a cop doing the AAA thing for free somehow makes up for that.
The police have shown up to mediate between my sister's abusive boyfriend and my parents, arrested him for beating her and put him in jail, investigated and caught murderers that killed in my parents' neighborhood, etc.
If I had been the one to call the police in any of those situations, I would expect that they did what they did, which was show up and provide a threatening presence to decrease the risk of further uncontrolled violence.
I don't mean to phrase this as an emotionally hostile reaction to your idea. Sometimes people hide their reasons for thinking something and then bring them out after drawing the person they're arguing with out into the open. That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm merely pointing out that sometimes I need a situation to be dealt with by violent people with resources, and that's what they do.
I agree with you that they won't help with break-ins or with bicycle theft. But I would like them to be able to, because I don't like break-ins or bicycle theft and I'd like the people who to that to be put in "societal time out". This would require an agent permitted to detain someone with violence to investigate and catch people committing bicycle theft and break-ins.
Can you please make your substantive points without swipes or snark, as the site guidelines ask? When other people are mistaken, it's enough to provide correct information. Getting frustrated and lashing out spoils this.
It's shocking, but it is probably happening all over the country. In USA there is a shortage of workers, including security workers, and police benefit from that.
Some of the allegations amount to corruption, some just business realities. This is a job for FBI to figure out.
You have to scroll far past the accusations of racism and outrage to reach the story here:
> Here’s how the off-duty work program works: Some businesses — like large nightclubs — are required by the city to have security, which until 2020, sometimes had to be off-duty Minneapolis police officers.
Nightclubs often are required to have security beacuse they are a nuisance to the surrounding area and the taxpayer shouldn't be picking up the tab because you decided to overserve your customers. The off duty cop requirement is the only odd part here in my view and that appears to be gone now.
> Nightclubs often are required to have security beacuse they are a nuisance to the surrounding area
How many night clubs are located in non-urban residential areas? The commercial properties near them would be closed because, you know, they operate during the day and night clubs don't.
> the taxpayer shouldn't be picking up the tab because you decided to overserve your customers
The solution to overserved customers is to not overserve them, not to have off-duty cops or security there to manage them after the fact. This is quite easily remedied by having the cops come by and fine them until they stop doing it. The fines will pay for the enforcement, so the taxpayers will be fine. By paying off-duty cops to manage overserved customers you are making real law enforcement improbable and making the problem worse.
> The off duty cop requirement is the only odd part here
Strange to qualify with 'only' when it is a major point of the piece.
I'd be OK if they closed entirely, but barring that I demand they pay the costs of externalities they create. One method of doing so would be hiring private security. They should also have to carry a bond to pay out for any DUIs, violence, vandalism, domestic violence or sexual assault that they are a co-conspirator of.
Let's extend your logic - should a gas station convenience store also carry that bond? I mean, you can buy a box of beer at the gas station and go home and be violent.
> You understand that any visible intoxication is overserving a customer right?
No, it's not. Continued service of someone who is visibly intoxicated, however, is.
I understand the tenets of responsible service of alcohol, and that as a server, you are meant to stop service immediately at that point.
Realities, however, are more nuanced.
I teach new EMTs and paramedics, and one of the discussion points is around informed consent and implied consent. Every class has a scenario or two where a student inevitably says to or about a mock patient, "Well, you have been drinking alcohol so I have implied consent to treat you" or similar. "So, because he's had a drink, he can't refuse medical advice/treatment?" "Right."
"So I can go to a restaurant, have two glasses of red wine with dinner, and be legally allowed to drive a motor vehicle home, but not legally make decisions about my own health?"
RSA education is generally more black and white, but even with your comment above you show that it is easy to misinterpret. It is not a case of "if your customer is visibly intoxicated, then you overserved them", because they weren't intoxicated until that point (all else being equal, if someone sits on a bar stool and orders 4 shots of tequila to start and downs them all in front of you, then reasonability applies, of course).
I've been to community meeting with neighbors complaining about drunk bar customers urinating, sleeping, barfing on their lawns; making noise late into the night; fighting; etc.
About security specifically, bar fights are a cliche and alchohol makes people violent. Are we going to pretend that isn't an issue?
Unfortunately corrupt cops aren't limited to just one legal fig leaf for collecting payments, or even to operating inside the bounds of the law at all. Even this specific article discusses four or five different towns with varying flavors of this corruption problem; it focuses on Minneapolis probably just because that's where the newspaper is based out of, not because that's the only place where cops do a protection racket.
it may well be suspicious, but this is just how news articles are written [these days?]. exciting controversial claim at the front, explanation for why you should feel a certain way about said claim, some dross, maybe a tweet, then—if you're lucky—maybe, languishing at the back of the article will be some facts and a source.
> That smells just a little bit like racism to me.
No, it smells like a claim of racism. But claims of various 'isms is so common now it's lost all meaning.
I'm more interested in why the focus is seen to be on corrupt cops, and not on the fact that the damn city required it!
If you've got a corrupt city, is it any wonder that the cops are going to be corrupt too? You can't fix the cops without first fixing their paymasters.
Why do you summarily dismiss (and recommend that other people dismiss) the multiple viewpoints in the article suggesting that the law you’re mentioning was unfairly targeted at immigrant owned establishments? It’s absolutely part of the story. Is it really that hard to believe that a corrupt way of enforcing a law might intentionally be targeted at people who are less likely to feel empowered to fight it?
The DOJ has to start actually doing its job and completely dissolving these corrupt police departments and rebuilding them. Thats the only way we're going to get rid of corrupts cops like this.
Given the shortage of cops, I am not sure there is the appetite for this. Politically, cops shaking down businesses people associate with trouble seems more palatable than exacerbating the police shortage.
I'm not sure what is the role of police here. If their role is to extort citizens I see no reason to keep them around. Or you think corrupt cops also protect some neighborhoods? Maybe for a nice price? I can rent my own thugs instead and I bet they'd be cheaper.
I cannot imagine any real-life situation where police or thugs would need to kill "on my behalf". Armed terrorists shooting at people can be shot down already without much complications, and all the rest can and should be arrested.
Here one solution that could fix shortage and quality in police departments. I see a lot of college educated people that can't find jobs. Raise the requirement for being a cop to need 2 to 4 years of college and hire all the college people looking for work. That will also fix most of the corruption problems. I bet a lot of college graduates would kill for a pension right about now.
What makes you think this would solve the corruption problem? Cops aren't corrupt because they're dumb, they're corrupt because the institutions they are part of allow and reward corruption. Without some mechanism to change that culture, simply adding more members to it will only bolster it. College degrees don't have anything to do with it.
> I bet a lot of college graduates would kill for a pension right about now.
Literally! They might but that doesn't make it a good idea. We don't need more police we need to change the role of police in our society.
Do you know any cops? I know quite a few. Most of them are dumb as bricks and very easily succumb to their base instincts. They also have very over inflated egos. Thinking they know more than their citizens they're supposed to be protecting. Do you know who runs these departments? The ones with the most over inflated egos who literally think that they are in a war with their own citizens. They are also the ones that easily fall for conspiracy theories. I know we want to think its elitiest to require a college degree to do a job. But I don't think it is. Its a filter to get less of these type of people.
Surprisingly I actually do know a lot of cops. They do use the language you're talking about, they view non-cops as too weak and cowardly to do what is "necessary," the violence that they do. They also tend to be fairly unsophisticated sure but they understand what they're part of. And plenty of them are smart, and those tend to be officers in my experience.
But I simply reject the premise that any of this is caused by lack of education and can be corrected by shifting the selection criteria. You need a certain amount of moral flexibility and malice to stay a cop for long, and that will be just as true of college graduates. Policing attracts all kinds of people as it is, but it only retains the ones it can mold into a particular nasty usefulness.
What shortage of cops? Come to NYC, you'll see a seemingly infinite number of them parked on sidewalks/in bus lanes/bike lanes, hanging out in the subway on their phones, directing traffic where perfectly good traffic lights exist, harassing street vendors, etc. All while funding is being cut for actual public goods.
There's no shortage of cops. There's a severe problem of misallocated resources. Their overtime budget alone could take every homeless new yorker off the streets, harden the city to climate change and create humane conditions for the influx of migrants from increasingly destabilized parts of the globe.
I always think of The Big Lebowski (I know, I know, I'm hardly original), when LAPD tells him to come pick up his stolen car from the police impound and he asks if they have any leads on who might have stolen it:
"Leads, yeah, sure. I'll just check with the boys down at the crime lab, they've got four more detectives working on the case. They got us working in shifts! Leads! [laughing] Leads!"
A shortage means not enough to achieve the desired outcome. In the example of New York, the very wealthy and heavily policed city, even a very cursory google search will show you the NYPD's own clearance statistics reporting, and the many articles written about the same, that show while police spending has increased, violent crime clearance rates have decreased.
Police do not function to keep us safe (nor are they legally obligated to protect us), their sole purpose is protecting capital.
Perhaps if we asked police to do less, paid them less, and eliminated their impunity to function as an occupying gang, they would be less violent and people would hate them less, and they'd be able to hire more easily.
"The DOJ has to start actually doing its job and completely dissolving these corrupt police departments and rebuilding them"
Not trivial, considering a substantial percentage of elected officials are dead-set against allowing the DOJ to actually fight this kind of thing. They only approve of law and order when the law and/or order is pointed at very specific types of criminals or protests.
People forget that corrupt police departments are tolerated because they help exert racist and class-based preferential enforcement/harassment/suppression.
Porbably why the police unions are so staunchly supported by conservatives, because in the city the police's primary job is to protect affluents and their property values from the "ghetto".
So the likelihood of some DOJ reformation is slim. The dems in power won't rock that boat (the local governments are usually democratic) and the reps won't because of the real purpose of city police as described.
LOL. Yes, the corrupt DOJ is going to suddenly have a moral compass. State issues are state issues. There's zero reason to involve the federal government. Clean up your own state and stay out of others who have voted the right people in.
I do not have magical powers that would cause the FBI (or any other component of the DOJ, come to that) which would cause them to act in morally positive ways by simply imagining "how it should be".
If there is a "how it should be" when it comes to the DOJ, which seems very doubtful, there exist no humans on planet Earth who could implement it. Even more so, it would be impossible to know how to implement it without thoroughly and profoundly understanding the various failure modes. In other words, you're even doing the "examining the way the world should be" wrong.
I know of a local Volunteer fire Dept that went that way; started having the head guy and a couple of his big cousins go around and tell people how much the VFD needed support, and how flammable their house or business looked.
Couple months after that started, the guy's house burned down. I heard the trucks came out twice, the second time there were more people responding and the police got into the guy's barn with a major weed grow. Not sure what the whole story was but the VFD moved and became a different entity after that.
The moral is that neighbors enforce the character of the neighborhood. Not cops.
>The first ever Roman fire brigade was created by Crassus. Fires were almost a daily occurrence in Rome, and Crassus took advantage of the fact that Rome had no fire department, by creating his own brigade—500 men strong—which rushed to burning buildings at the first cry of alarm. Upon arriving at the scene, however, the firefighters did nothing while Crassus offered to buy the burning building from the distressed property owner, at a miserable price. If the owner agreed to sell the property, his men would put out the fire; if the owner refused, then they would simply let the structure burn to the ground. After buying many properties this way, he rebuilt them, and often leased the properties to their original owners or new tenants.
One could say he was giving the owners a chance at recovering some value rather than nothing. Also, it’s probably a more apt analogy for modern US hospitals: when you’re having say a heart attack you can’t exactly “price shop”.
But the slanted history point of view is that he started fires, so he can buy the distressed property. hospitals don't have an incentive to give you a heart attack.
Medical errors happen all the time and often are preventable with better processes. Just don't invest in reducing the error rate and boom, more business.
They do have an incentive to tell you your house is on fire (I.G. prescription drugs, and the like), but they don't actively set houses on fire because they don't have 100% market capture to the patients.
What? There's no overlap between Crassus' strategy and the VFD's strategy as described above. The VFD asked you to pay recurring fees just in case your house ever caught fire, and when someone decided that was unlikely, they made it more likely by setting fire to his house.
Note that in this strategy, if someone's house catches fire, that's bad for the fire department, and on top of that it looks like they just committed a crime. The fire department is in the business of threatening people until they pay for a service that the fire department hopes it will never need to provide.
Crassus' strategy is completely different; he operates an actual fire department whose services are not available to other people. If your house catches fire, he'll buy it from you.
Theoretically, Crassus could benefit from arson too, but he really doesn't need it.
Crassus is in the business of buying things that have very little value to the seller (who has no way of extinguishing fires) but have a much higher value to him (because he does have a way of extinguishing fires). Unsurprisingly, this is very profitable for Crassus. But what's the similarity?
I do not know if the VFD would have or did indulge in arson. That was certainly the implication I felt when they were speaking to me. Which was amusing because I'd had to go out and take the dogs off them to let them out of the truck to talk in the first place.
I puzzled and annoyed them by confessing poverty, but offering to volunteer skilled labor. Apparently the firehouse didn't need wiring or network or anything :)
"White male, age 17–25" is an entire trait. "Homosexual" is a *part* of a trait: "Alcoholism, childhood hyperactivity, homosexuality, depression, borderline personality disorder, and suicidal tendencies". It's significant because of the other descriptors it's grouped with in that trait. It would be weird to have "homosexual" as a trait on its own, but it's obviously weird to group it with these other descriptors in a single trait.
This report [1] is specific to "Firefighter Arson", so they're looking for things to screen for during hiring for firefighters. The section you'll be interested in is on page 20: "PREVENTION OF FIREFIGHTER ARSON". They list some actions departments have taken: background checks for arson; requiring an affidavit the applicant hasn't conducted arson; "scared straight" lectures on the consequences of being jailed; and screening firefighters with a questionnaire.
But yeah, the profiling section some sound like a way to pathologize arson. I found the motivation section and case studies more interesting. The only corroboration from the case studies is for the age; there's no evidence included for the personality traits.
I'm curious, how do they actually figure out who is behind a forest fire? Or even suspect that it was a criminal act in the first place. Finding who is behind a burnt house is one thing, but a whole forest is a lot of terrain to cover for proof!
They don't need to cover the whole forest, usually the fire is first seen when still small. But it's a lot of work, I don't know how often they are successful:
(I also know that forensic fire investigation for house fires/criminal investigations is basically a made up art with extremely unreliable results - not sure how much that overlaps with wildfire investigations).
I’ve always wondered, even in criminal cases, even here in France. Do they pin it on someone? Crime is prone to be pinned onto someone, it calms the populations, and it doesn’t matter whether he did it because he’s in jail, so of course he’s angry.
I personally know someone whose lawyer asked him for a large sum in cash in the 7 minutes before a trial, in the antichamber of the court.
Correct, the head of the VFD had his house burn down. The 2nd fire starting after they'd been out there once already the same night made me suspicious, but i never heard nobody brag about it.
> Santamaria was later required to come up with security plans outlining the number of officers needed per night. The officers insisted on getting paid cash, she said. She feared if she didn’t oblige, she’d lose her license.
> Eventually, another officer helped schedule off-duty work: Derek Chauvin. He worked security at her club for 17 years.
> ...
> She sold the club in 2019. When Santamaria saw Chauvin pinning George Floyd on the pavement in the video that shocked the world, she recognized both, because Floyd worked as a bouncer inside the club in 2019.
That is an interesting connection. I didn't know that they worked together.
When I learned that I was suspicious that Chauvin was settling some personal score (and that explained why Floyd seemed to believe that Chauvin was going to kill him), but I don't know if any evidence for that came to light. Possibly an under-investigated angle, I'm not sure.
I wonder what combination of "they get shot with a gun lifted from an evidence locker" and "the IRS descends upon the local police department for widespread tax evasion" would have happened if the victims of the shakedown rackets simply reported the cash payments like any other wages.
One theory I read is that Floyd and Chauvin were part of the same counterfeiting ring operating out of that club, and Chauvin murdered Floyd in order to keep him quiet. (Recall that Floyd was originally arrested for suspected use of a counterfeit $20 bill.) I think maybe part of the idea was that nightclubs are interesting to counterfeiters because they deal with so much cash.
(Racism still plays a big part in the Floyd story even if this is true -- Chauvin presumably thought he could get away with it, and his fellow officers mostly didn't try to stop him.)
If you can only think of a single example of the police being excessively violent against a white person, then you are woefully under-informed. I'm not surprised though, I blame the media.
You can probably draw some broad, population-level conclusions from statistical data that shows more police violence against minorities, though some can be explained by other socioeconomic factors as well. In general, I'd say that American police are simply violent to everyone.
You're asking me to believe that this man feels a certain way and committed a racist murder based on a general tendency? Even if I grant you the ridiculous premise that this tendency is real, that line of thinking isn't close to sound.
I see I'm getting downvoted here by the typical good dogs, but this has always bothered me about the incident. The racism was presented to us by the media with no explanation, and most people just took it to be fact. No curiosity, no convincing required. I've asked several people, nobody is able to make a case that's even remotely compelling, similar to how you failed to do it here.
>The racism was presented to us by the media with no explanation
There were hours and hours and hours of explanation. You just decided that you didn't like the explanation and decided to ignore the facts. Assuming you're asking in good faith which is extremely doubtful. You're being downvoted because the murder happened 3 years ago, Chauvin was convicted by a jury of his peers, and its not worth anyone's time to explain it personally to someone who is "just asking questions". You take the time and do your own research.
He was convicted of murder, I don't question that. He was not convicted of racism.
If it's so obvious and self evident and I've merely ignored the facts, surely you could explain it to me succinctly. You can't, of course, because you don't know why you believe it, and there is reason to believe it.
So whenever anyone suggests a racial motive in a specific case, where this is no supporting evidence in that case, your stance is to just go along with it, because racism pervades our society?
There is a difference between recognizing that racism exists, and saying that racism is at the root of a particular problem (rather than "merely" something that also exists).
This is one of the big problems with this kind of stuff, because as soon as racism merely exists it becomes completely taboo to offer any other sort of explanation as the root cause.
> You're asking me to believe that this man feels a certain way and committed a racist murder based on a general tendency?
No, no. This man might have had other motives for his murder too. I’m merely saying a contributing factor is that society (and the law/police in specific) seem to be more accepting of violence when committed against minorities.
Chauvin was obviously in the wrong from pretty much every angle, but the chances of the a person actually dying under those circumstances are actually fairly small. If it was an intentional pre-meditated murder then it was either an incredibly piss-poor plan or some 4D chess master move.
That said, it's certainly possible he simply wanted to be a dick to Floyd, possibly just for incredibly petty personal reasons, or something like that.
From what I understand he was convicted for second degree murder, specifically "unintentional second-degree murder while attempting to commit felony assault". So he may not have intended for George Floyd to die, but he did intentionally assault George Floyd who died as a result. So that's not intentional premeditated murder, but it's nevertheless a form of murder.
(He was also simultaneously convicted for third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter, but not first-degree murder.)
Fascinating to learn that George Floyd and the cop who murdered him worked at the same nightclub for a while, and that the cop ended up also being charged for not paying taxes on the ~10k he earned under the table at the nightclub.
I'm not here to shill for the police, but in my former city, it was not unusual for certain kinds of businesses which had a history of being the source of rowdy behavior to be required by the community board to take certain measures to prevent that. It didn't mean they had to hire former police, but they had to show preventative measures were taken above and beyond state level licenses requirements if the board, which had a right to refuse their liquor license, was fed up with the amount of police activity there.
It's a valid response to say the board should not have had this much power, but the point is that it isn't necessarily a racket.
I mean, you're basically describing hiring a bouncer. I've never heard of a bouncer being required, but that does make sense if otherwise they're calling the police all the time.
It makes sense even if they don't. Places like that have externalities, and they shouldn't be offloading their rowdiness onto people who live next door.
I think the idea that the enforcers of law (the ones that show up in guns and armor) can compel people to hire them for security work is a very, very conflicted interest. Very mafia-like.
Yeah, and that's where the crime angle to this comes into play. Are the businesses really the "source of rowdy behavior", or is it actually the people who frequent those particular establishments? And if the latter, shouldn't that be the city's responsibility to deal with those people to make sure they aren't able to continue to repeatedly act in a disruptive manner requiring a police response? Why are they making the businesses pay for private security?
Though as others have pointed out, bouncers have been a thing forever, so maybe I'm off base here...
Bouncers are there to keep your customers safe, so they don't go elsewhere and never come back. You don't need to mandate bars have bouncers. They want bouncers.
There is a Walmart in my metro area that is responsible for like 80% of all police calls within their municipality. This is the same Walmart that leeches off society in other ways like paying sub-living wages so that employees need to rely on social safety nets to survive. I'm not sure if they have to hire private security, but this is a prime example of a business that should be securing itself or changing location.
To me that actually sounds like a clear example of a business that shouldn't have to hire private security. At least with bars you can claim that the bar is indirectly responsible for instigating the distributive behavior by serving people alcohol. I don't know how you make that argument for a Walmart.
I suppose an argument is that if they stop undercutting the prices of smaller businesses, then the rowdy behavior wouldn't gravitate toward them, it would be more evenly distributed. But letting the police focus 80% of such efforts there (instead of forcing some sort of change that blurs their focus) might not be a bad thing.
In my state municipalities are required to spend 25% of their budget on police. So effectively 20% of the tax base of the municipality is being used to police Walmart. Walmart isn’t the only business in town, there are lots of businesses, convenience stores, restaurants, you name it - they share what’s left after Walmart, and it doesn’t seem fair.
They should be mandated to hire private security. If they are utilizing the majority of the resources available but aren't willing to pay the real costs of that, well, they need to suck it up and pay.
I thought the US was like the most advanced nation in the world? And businesses are supposed to pay for their own security instead of relying on police? What next? Families of murder victims should cover the cost of the investigation?
ITT: people defending the actions of a corporation owned by a family worth over 230 billion USD.
Businesses should expect that society protects them, sure. But those same businesses can't then go and bribe the government to cut worker protection laws, labor laws, can't slash wages and expect that the government covers the costs of labor, etc...
If Walmart paid their workers lavishly, gave them huge pensions, didn't engage in far-right lobbying to diminish worker protections, didn't demolish the proverbial Main Street all across America, sure, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt and say that we should cover their security costs. But look at their actions over the last 35 years....they've enriched themselves greatly as a corporation, bribed the government, and told regular Americans to pound sand.
Walmart is able to provide cheap goods because it can strong-arm providers into taking a loss or operating at a break-even point just for the chance to sell at Walmart. It can also provide cheap goods because they pay their workers jack shit and instruct employees to use government subsidized healthcare and insurance.
It's totally possible to provide good pay, healthcare, etc... to employees, still have healthy enough margin % to make Wall Street happy, keep the C-Suite well paid, all while providing a great service at competitive prices to consumers. Maybe not enough to enrich the owners to a quarter trillion dollars in net worth, but plenty enough to keep the ship going. Case in point: CostCo. Whole Foods prior to Amazon was another.
Have you ever been to a small town in America? Outside of a few regions, Walmart is all they have...so that sort of nixes points 2 and 3.
Regarding point 4, and your quoting of me - yes, people have. And some have been lucky in that they've made themselves multigenerational wealth in doing so. The guy who founded Costco did it, and made himself over a billion dollars. However, the Waltons have hundreds of times that amount. You can make a billion by doing right by everyone, or hundreds of billions by doing right by everyone not named you. I know what number I'd be content with, not sure about you though. (Hint: if you give me a billion dollars, I'm retiring tomorrow)
Regarding point 5, Walmart IS however responsible for spending vast amounts of money (generational money) over the years to enact some pretty anti consumer and anti worker laws throughout the country. It IS responsible for funding some crazy far-right politicians. It IS responsible for paying its workers so little that they are "encouraged" to go on food stamps and apply for section 8 housing.
> Have you ever been to a small town in America? Outside of a few regions, Walmart is all they have...so that sort of nixes points 2 and 3.
Yeah, I've lived in them. My dad was in the AF, and (to save money) my parents would shop on the nearest AF base, which was maybe 30 miles away. They'd go once every 2 weeks or so and fill up the car with groceries.
The indisputable point is people prefer to shop at Walmart. Nobody makes them.
> A new report issued Tuesday shows that Walmart and the Walton family that founded and controls the company have dramatically increased their political contributions over the last decade and that the vast majority of those contributions have gone to Republicans and right-wing causes, including anti-gay, anti-environment and pro-gun politicians and causes. The report asserts that Walmart, the world’s largest private employer, and the Walton family have spent over $17 million in federal elections and millions more on state and local initiatives. Since the 2000 election cycle, more than $11.6 million—69% of Walmart and the Waltons’ contributions—has gone to Republican candidates and committees. At the same time, 83% of the Waltons’ contributions, including their contributions to Super PACs, went to Republicans.
> The report further underscores Walmart and the Waltons’ turn to the right and shows that political contributions doesn’t simply stop at supporting Republicans; in 2008, Jim Walton gave $75,000 to the Arkansas Family Council Action Committee, which at the time was supporting a ballot measure to prevent gay families from adopting. Meanwhile, 94% of the Walton family’s contributions to candidates from 2000 to 2012 went to those who were opposed to or silent on the issue of marriage equality.
Uh, yes, they are. They all sit on the board, and collectively own a majority of the company's stock IIRC. You're also not remembering that the company literally bears their family name. Multiple Walton family members are on the board, and the 1st, 2nd and 5th largest shareholders of the company's stock are Waltons. Those 3 shareholders collectively own roughly 42% of all outstanding shares.
They also donate not out of the good of their hearts, but to protect and grow their economic interests, which is primarily the value of Walmart's stock.
We are criticizing the government, not defending Walmart.
The idea of equal protection under the law is much bigger and more important than a corporation that sucks. Every business should have equal access to law enforcement regardless of how big they are.
If law enforcement sucks, it is simply not any private company’s job to address the problem.
If a corporation donates heavily to anti-government think tanks, funds several union-busting operations, sponsors politicians that write laws that would exempt that corporation from having to pay tax.....then we're not criticizing the government, we're calling the corporation out for antisocial behavior.
If I run a company, make bank, and then use that money to engage in lobbying that would see public services cut significantly, I shouldn't get to whine that those same public services (which includes policing) should be protecting my private interests first and foremost.
In many of the places Wal-Mart has the most problems, both police and private security are sharply limited in what actions they can take against shoplifters. And places like California, Oregon, and Washington won’t prosecute for crimes under about $950.
What do you propose Wal-Mart do in these localities?
A lot of people are under the impression that these stores can just eat the cost with insurance, which is, of course, an absurd notion because then the insurance company is losing too much money and will raise the premiums. Then Walmart, etc. can't afford the insurance unless they close their most problematic locations.
People engage in a lot of magical thinking to justify theft since it seems like a harmless act. Thieves are just trying to feed their families! Insurance will cover it! Etc.! It's really unfortunate, they're going to learn the hard way as not only Walmart but other retail stores in their areas flee.
No, insurance doesn't have to cover it, because even in these cases where large retailers are crying about theft, it's still not the primary cause of shrinkage in their businesses! Grocers still lose more product to employee theft or just breaking stuff during handling.
Even in California where there's some conspiracy theory about how "It's the DAs fault the police aren't doing anything", as if it's the police's responsibility, or even their jurisdiction, to pick and choose who should go to jail.
Cops should be bringing in people violating the law even if nobody ever went to prison!
At least one source gives shoplifting as the plurality of shrinkage at 36%, with employee theft close behind at 30%. But if theft isn't prosecuted, this would seem to affect incentives for both shoplifting and employee theft.
No, this puts "shoplifting" on the same level as "employee theft" and "literally just doing a bad job" in terms of losing $100 billion (this is actually a global number) last year. IE, brick and mortar retail reported losing about $35 billion to shoplifting.
Out of $6 TRILLION (Just in the US!) worth of brick and mortar retail sales in the same year, in an industry that claims 2% profit margins on the low ends.
All the fuss over shoplifting is just noise. Consider that the same survey which produced those numbers also showed that a full 16% of ALL merchandise sold in retail is returned, yet we don't have news channels blaring all over that we are in a crisis of unfit products.
It's a narrative, and a bad one, to blame greedy price increases on a STABLE total rate of shrink, one that has been roughly 1.5% for over a DECADE. The cost of shrink has been factored in to the price of goods forever.
>IE, brick and mortar retail reported losing about $35 billion to shoplifting.
>Out of $6 TRILLION (Just in the US!) worth of brick and mortar retail sales in the same year, in an industry that claims 2% profit margins on the low ends.
So shoplifting is 29% of net profits? I'm sorry, which side of this argument are you on, exactly?
It's still a class A misdemeanor though and they will arrest you for it.
Also it becomes a felony if any theft has been committed more than 3 times: `(D) the value of the property stolen is less than $2,500 and the defendant has been previously convicted two or more times of any grade of theft;`
In those other states its hard to get the police to even respond to shoplifting calls let alone make an arrest. And even if they did, the prosecutors will dismiss the charges or give them a slap on the wrist (which is why the cops don't bother anymore).
It's not unheard of in the US. The missing person case of Jennifer Kesse in Orlando, FL comes to mind. Her parents even had to file a lawsuit against the police because they refused to cooperate with private investigators after failing to make progress on the case.
Well, banks hire private security guards, have stong safes (well, back when they handled cash) etc under practical pressure and pressure from their insurers. They don't rely solely on the police.
On the other hand a lemonade stand will generally rely entirely on the police and on peoples' good nature. I sure hope they aren't armed!
So on the spectrum between the two, don't we want a society where almost all interactions don't rely on private security guards?
I feel like there has been an explosion of private security guards over the past 30 years, but I do see them in old movies so I don't know if my impression is correct.
Seems inevitable when it replaced all the other retail stores with merchandise you can steal. Where else would I go to steal something in a small town with a Walmart?
It doesn't take a lot of extremists to cause a security threat; "lone wolf" scenarios are absolutely something Jewish places of worship have to worry about. Not just in Germany, and doubly so this week.
Germany had a far-right coup attempt brewing late last year:
> German authorities on Wednesday arrested 25 people suspected of plotting to use armed force to storm parliament and violently overthrow the state, marking one of the country’s largest-ever raids targeting right-wing extremists.
> Those arrested included a 71-year-old German aristocrat, a former lawmaker from the right-wing Alternative for Germany party and at least one former armed forces member, according to the public prosecutor and officials.
Not insensitive. It’s a bit of a special case. It avoided being burned in 1938 because it was already planned to be sold to the city, thought it was still damaged. Then it came to fame in 1994 when the first arson attack on a synagogue since 1938 was attempted. A second attack happened in 1995 and those responsible were never found.
It was completely restored in 2020, which was when the small police station was also added, and has been in active use as a Synagogue again since then. I’d love to see it now, as I have only been inside before the restoration started (guided tour), but I need to figure out how as it’s normally closed to the public behind an electronic gate.
> Is violent antisemitism still so prevalent? Did denazification fail so badly?
We’ve certainly had our issues, with several big scandals just in recent times, but it’s now once again getting worse in line with right wing extremist ideologies gaining ground world-wide. Jews are, as it has always been in history, getting fucked in particular with both Nazis and some of the extremist Islamic immigrants hating them, and of course also some of the left.
Walmart hourly salaries start at 14-19 an hour depending on location. They also abide by all the rules. What are you comparing it to? Mom and pop shops that have kids working there in getting paid under the counter at a lower wage?
14-19 an hour is atrocious in 2023, and of course most of these employees are limited to part-time hours so the company can avoid paying for benefits, all while advising employees to use food stamps. Medicaid is rarely available to such employees because they will often make barely too much income to qualify so they try going without insurance. It's despicable and frankly so is anybody defending such arrangements.
You should look into overpolicing and how it impacts those summary statistics; in brief if you look you will find someone breaking a law but bad behavior in one group gets ignored as an exception whereas in another group each incident is treated as emblematic and needing strong corrective action.
In my experience both groups are full of pretty similar young men, which makes questions like yours pretty obviously loaded; why are you expecting one to be measurably different?
"You should look into over policing and how it impacts those summary statistics"
This may have been the case 10 years ago, but we have started defunding the police in many major cities. Have we seen a change in crime stats?
"if you look you will find someone breaking a law but bad behavior in one group gets ignored as an exception whereas in another group each incident is treated as emblematic and needing strong corrective action"
I think if you look at what's actually happening, you might change your opinion on this.
"In my experience both groups are full of pretty similar young men, which makes questions like yours pretty obviously loaded; why are you expecting one to be measurably different?"
This may be your experience, but probably not reality. I don't really think they care about theory and statistics when there are shootings and violent behavior on certain nights of the week.
"we have started defunding the police in many major cities."
Is a statement so detached from reality I don't even know where to start. Which major US cities have had their police budget removed, or redirected in whole towards social services and rehabilitation?
I don't think you read the article, they were not force to provided better form of security to keep their licence, they were force to hire MPD during business hours. At high costs, under weird pretence of minimum numbers of hours, and most of the time were gone doing MPD work while being paid by the business... This is mafia behaviour.
This is also true in Orange County, Florida. I was surprised when I found out via a friend that was a deputy there that the uniformed police working at bars were being paid by the bar, and it was required that they had a certain number of them on duty. They too were getting paid $50-60 an hour.
Friend of mine runs a drone photography business (think instagram people on vacation or house photography for real estate). The city requires he hire an off duty cop for $100/hr to “manage the set” and the minimum time per engagement for this rent-a-racketeer service is four hours. The shoots are usually about 30 minutes.
That sounds so far from the realm of being in anyway necessary, and not just outright racketeering that you/your friend should contact local media, the DOJ or both.
That’s a good way to get your business license paperwork lost.
Edit: not sure why the downvotes here. If you’re a small business owner you are trying to get through your day and your day gets a lot longer if you piss off casually corrupt city officials who can shut your business down by slow walking needed paperwork. This is a group that happily added 200% to your operating costs via ransoming your business license for a thinly disguised bribe. You think they won’t retaliate if you put them on the spot publicly?
I think that if what you were describing was true, a federal DOJ investigation would result in a lot of people spending time in federal prison, and your friend walking away with enough money that your friend can drone all he wants from a private beach in the Bahamas while you both sip mai tais.
So yes, they can retaliate against your friend. And your friend can retaliate against them and the difference is that their retaliation will cost your friend a few hours and a few hundred bucks, but your friend's retaliation will put them behind bars and destroy their careers and probably imperil their pensions.
The DOJ being notificed could result in a lot of people spending time in prison. It could also result in no action. Retaliation by local officials could be limited to a few hours and a few hundred dollars of lost income. It could also be a lot worse. Based on my personal experience I certainly wouldn't bet a few hundred dollars on the former in either case.
While I normatively agree with you that that’s the way it should work, that isn’t how these things go. This kind of pseudo corruption is extremely common because it’s easy to make shitty arguments that pass first inspection (oh we need the police there for public safety, think of the children, oh a bird! look over there!). They drag it out into a years long appeals process where they grind the plaintiff down and eventually they settle for no wrongdoing and attorneys fees and change, and now you get your business license back and have a hostile local PD.
is GGGP's comment about being forced to hire PD officers as security any different than the forced requirement that film producers in Los Angeles are required to hire ex-LAPD as security, that has been going on for years?
while the article i reference is from ~2008[0], as an LA resident living in Hollywood, i see examples of retired LAPD guys every week "guarding" film sets even in 2023:
Such talk has angered Todd -- who estimates that he makes $100,000 a year working on film sets -- and the other 150-odd retired cops who have the required LAPD-issued permits to assist movie and TV productions.
and
Melissa Patack, a vice president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, said a wholesale change from retired to off-duty, active LAPD officers would seriously undermine the ability of directors and producers to stay on schedule and budget. Retired officers, who are not subject to the LAPD’s strict overtime limits, can remain on set for the typical 12- to 16-hour days. Patack imagines a scenario where producers instead would have to hire multiple crews of off-duty police officers and disrupt shoots to switch them.
why on earth is there a REQUIREMENT that a film set's producers hire one of retired 150 LAPD officers? based on my many viewings of these ex-LAPD guys, all they do is lounge around on their motorcycles -- not materially different behavior than a regular security person who similarly lounges around, yet is presumably paid much less than an ex-LAPD officer.
it's not just the cops that are corrupt, it's the people who require you to hire them.
> the other 150-odd retired cops who have the required LAPD-issued permits
I'd love to see whether it's at all possible for someone who isn't a LEO or retired try to acquire these permits, and just how brazen they are that this is a racket for cops.
Thanks for surfacing this. While your friend has better things to do with their time, I hope someone with the time and money to challenge this will try to run a drone photography business just to levy this lawsuit in Florida. If I lived in Florida I might be intrigued.
Or it's because too many drone pilots were more than obnoxious. I'm a drone pilot myself and there's no way some of the shots on r/drones are even remotely close to being legal.
So that’s regulated by the FAA and I applaud enforcement efforts on that front. A local PD scalping overtime isn’t going to know a class bravo from his asshole so I don’t see the connection. Local PDs don’t have the knowledge or jurisdiction for this stuff.
Not drone law specifically, yes, but to serve as a contact point for "concerned" neighbors. Yes, it's nuts, but IMHO it's a knee-jerk response to an increased number of complaints.
This ordinance sounds like it was created to discourage people from flying drones and photographing residents without their permission. If I had to guess, some hobbyists probably tried to claim what they were doing was business-related. So, the city decided to set a high bar.
Hobbyist flying is not covered under these rules. You can still fly non commercial under the applicable FAA rules as anywhere else. This is just a petty local shakedown. They could come and yell at you I guess but there're no laws that would back that yelling up. The only stick here is the business license.
We have a bunch of off-duty police here in the southeast US that do traffic control for churches, HOAs, etc. Not the same as security, I guess, but tangentially related.
I always wonder how this is legally allowed. The idea of using taxpayer vehicles, training, equipment, etc. to control traffic while also leveraging the power of the badge to hold authority seems legally questionable, but IANAL.
In the UK, I believe that if you organise a large event that needs police coverage, you pay the Police force to provide on-duty officers. This seems a lot less open to corruption because it would be based on a standard price list that was public, and the officers received the same as they would doing any other duties.
I know that's how it worked at some events my Dad organised in the 90s. I can't find anything about this on any Police force website, so it might be that it doesn't work like that any more.
Oh, hey, I'm not saying off-duty police officers can't do side gigs. I'm more questioning them using publicly funded resources and authority to do so.
Anyone can try to direct traffic, but cops are paid to do it because they get the car and flashing lights (and I assume the ability to ticket/arrest violations) while still collecting side money.
It'd sort of be like me using my company's laptop/servers for side work, I guess.
You would have to prove that trained non-off-duty citizens were prevented from supporting, otherwise you would implement a policy where you shrink the number of people that can take said position and that increases cost for tax payers.
For a lot of the above-board police charges in the US the prices have gone up a lot. Anecdotally, I remember this thread where cycling race organizers talk about how the biggest cost for road races is always police. That's to be expected, but a lot of them mention that those costs have gone up a lot recently
That's wild. Personally, I see that (cyclists hiring police officers for route clearing) as a _valid_ implementation of this. Churches/neighborhoods hiring off-duty police officers daily just ease congestion? Seems like a stretch to use publicly funded resources, to me.
Yeah when you need to effect road closures for sure you're costing the municipality something and should have to pay something for that. The congestion easing on otherwise-normally-functioning roads certainly feels shady.
There was a discussion about this on another HN thread today. [0]
As you've said, the contact is with the police force not with the individual officers, who get paid the same as they would for any other duties.
There was a whole court case [1] about when the police could charge for this sort of coverage, which codified the current arrangement that, at football matches, they can charge for the officers in the stadium but not for the ones outside it.
In the UK, while police are allowed to have outside jobs, any outside employment must be approved by the force, and as a matter of policy security work is banned. Similarly, security guards aren't allowed [2] to be special constables (people who work as part-time unpaid police officers).
Those are likely reserve officers. Reserve officers are generally part time and are used for additional manpower for events or recurring security so that normal patrol officers aren't short staffed.
Generally the private entity pays the city, which then pays the cop. In many states private entities can't stop/redirect the flow of traffic legally so they hire off duty cops to do so.
That's my point - seems like private police with both public authority and resources. These officers are directly benefiting churches, private neighborhoods, etc. by providing public services benefitting private institutions.
It's advantageous for police to be present at large gatherings, from a traffic control point of view it prevents accidents with other members of the public that would cost the municipality even more money to respond to.
Also from a security standpoint as people physically fighting or potentially someone looking to do harm with a weapon would both reflect badly on the community and their events, and also require even more of a response.
So if the event organizer is paying for that security from off duty / reserve officers, the community is getting that extra protection essentially for free, whereas they would have had to pay other officers likely for overtime if it wasn't paid for by the event.
This isn't a story of racism but a story of power. It's not that white racists in power want to coerce non-white business owners but that people in power want to exercise that power to advance their own agendas. This same stuff happens to white business owners who aren't part of the inner circle.
Vultures picking what away at parts of a corpse they can.
You see so many examples of this, just straight parasitical behavior, in at least American society. I don’t think the U.S. is economically where the Soviet Union was when it fell, but it’s rapidly approaching the civic dysfunction and deep corruption. You have to wonder, is this the fall of an empire or something like the corruption of the late 1800s and early 1900s, that created a backlash that corrected it and led to more prosperity? Dunno. We’ll see, if the vultures leave anything behind.
It's dangerous to extrapolate too much from the early 1900s because the US not being ground zero for two World Wars, therefore able to serve as an industrial core to help rebuild the destruction, created economic opportunity the likes of which one hopes we never see again.
Lacking that destruction creating a huge market for American business, it's hard to predict what happens if America lets its domestic capitalism go off the rails in terms of service to its people again.
Federal and State governments are the biggest parasites with their armies of useless Admin workers. Incidentally, big Govt is also the main driver of malaise-causing inflation.
Start to starve them, redirect that labor/capital to useful endeavors and watch productivity and consumer confidence skyrocket.
Yes there are so many signs that what we have is a house of cards but like stock markets, even in real life, things can remain crazier way longer than they should.
One one hand the law and order is missing and on the other hand the people that make the laws are so divided. The people who should protect lack credibility on one hand and are demonized on the other hand. On one hand we do want to encourage rehabilitation of people who made mistakes and on the other hand some of those make businesses so hard to run. And when we make mistakes, let's say with liberal policies or the conservative side, there is no course correction since it takes elections and then maybe multiple cycles ... we have completely forgotten thr "apologize, fix the mistake and move on" method of working. We say we don't have monopolies but big business has all but killed individual initiative.
I think our fall, if it ever happens, will be magnificent. If it does not, that will be quite crazy too, at least for the bottom of the pyramid.
> The people who should protect lack credibility on one hand and are demonized on the other hand.
The former leads to the latter. Despite media (both fictional and non-fictional) largely carrying water for law enforcement, they just can't help but paint themselves in an incredibly unsympathetic, uncharitable light. [1]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/09/13/1199352063/seattle-officer-re... - a bodycam recording[2] of the SPD union VP speaking to the president shortly after an SPD officer ran down a woman using a crosswalk, by doing 74 in a 25 zone, at night, with no sirens. He didn't brake until after he hit her.
[2] Since she was 26, according to our fine boys in blue, her life had 'limited value'. This is what the guild's leadership think of the people they are supposed to 'protect and serve'... When the cameras are rolling.
When you're actually behaving like a demon, is it any surprise that you're demonized[3] for it?
[3] Demonized isn't even the right word. They'll face no consequences, as the SCC is both incapable, and entirely unwilling to reign in these animals.
I don't think cops extorting marginalized people is new, sadly. I actually think cops making life hard for people of color is the tradition of cops in america, all the way back to the slave-catching days.
I hope the latter. Many people are sick of corruption, but often they react to imaginary conpiratorial instances and ignore the corruption that is in plain sight.
Doesn’t sound that different from traffic control details in Massachusetts.
While I don't know the details of their agreements first hand, I believe they are required by law to be off-duty cops, they are expensive, and have something like a 6 hour minimum.
What I can validate is that they are usually seen chatting with people or sitting in their car rather than doing a single thing to help streamline traffic or in the interest of safety.
Their union props up laws by saying it needs to be someone experienced and couldn’t be a cheaper certified citizen (as it is in many other states) but the net effect is that you get someone who is entitled and complacent.
Came here to mention this. It's the biggest shakedown of all time in Massachusetts.
They are required to do all these jobs that most states don't require them to do. They are extremely expensive, like 10x what a construction worker costs to wave flags on the side of the road. And the police don't even really pretend to do the job most of the time. They are off on the side of the road drinking coffee and playing with a smartphone.
What I have seen is lots of contractors will try to do things on the sly to avoid having to hire the police detail. E.x. a tree cutting crew that is technically going to block the road even briefly. The police detail will cost more than the work crew costs, so the contractor will try to sneak it in, otherwise the customer avoids having the work done completely or can't afford it. Even if the tree cutting takes 15 minutes the property owner would have to pay an entire shift's pay for the police detail.
In the case of the original article though.. rowdy night clubs having to have police on board is no different than police being present in a school a large sports gathering.. it makes sense as those situations can be a powder keg waiting to go off.
Anytime I drive through VT or NH it's amazing how well the construction workers direct traffic, and they don't get to charge $100 an hour or whatever the police actually charge.
I plan live events these days and the off duty cop shakedown is so real. Good luck getting really any permit. “Oh you’re hiring private security? We don’t think your security plan is sufficient to keep everyone safe.”
Neither party is obligated to the interests of the people living in this country. I'm not saying this is necessarily bad advice but there are some problems that require actual citizens to do something aside from vote.
Yeah, I mean, nobody knows how to skirt the law better than cops, and they of course never exactly phrase it in such a way as to be extortion. It’s bullshit, and I’ve talk to people from all over the country and I think it’s pretty pervasive. But my business relies on permits that they sign, and it just feels like I could probably spend a lot of time and money and ruin myself fighting it, over what is really a relatively small tax.
I suppose that’s how they continue to get away with it. We’re all hoping someone else falls on their sword.
I think this kind of defeated attitude enables this behavior. You should expect good behavior by default from public officials, normalizing the idea that this kind of corruption is deviant (even if it is more common than that) and expect punishment. Even as a bystander you can help influence opinion, expectations, and standards.
This is a good tactic in many other situations as well.
> exactly phrase it in such a way as to be extortion
extortion is unrelated of the exact words used but the intend
that clever phrasing can make you avoid extortion charges or similar is a common misbelive
if a cop gets away with a clear extortionist behavior it's because the prosecutor lets them and uses formulation as a shallow excuse not because clever formulations protect you from the law
I guess I live in a different world. I have run multiple large beer events. (4 or 5,000ppl at the last one) These get approved by our city and state. All I have ever been asked is if we have a security plan, not any details, just that one exists. And it's sort of in passing, usually after the we need a copy of your insurance requirement. There were not any requirements to hire an officer. I still choose to hire 3 off duty officers but that is my choice as the event host. I also call them individually as I have met many of them over time and they are worth every penny. They aren't even expensive compared to other services required.
You choose to hire off-duty police and don't have the same experience as the person who didn't choose to hire off-duty police...
I'm positive that corruption like GP described is able to coexist with scenarios like yours where everything's above board, but given you are hiring the off-duty police voluntarily, you haven't established that there wouldn't be repercussions for not doing so.
There is absolutely zero repercussions, I hire them after all licensing approval. After the point of any city or state interference. I have run some of the smaller 400-600ppl events with zero police.
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 333 ms ] threadI'd like to see how well you handle 100 people ganging up on you and your family if true Mad Max style anarchy starts.
and at the same time criticizing the
Childish reductionism?
In fact, both are almost inevitably true on any given day on both the best and the worst situations.
The key is ensuring that the balance is on the good side. This requires distributing power, not allowing it to concentrate in too few hands.
Even if they're willing to pull the trigger, your average 7-Eleven employee is no Navy Seal and won't react well under gunpoint pressure and might end up shooting some innocent bystander or himself.
Just giving guns to everyone is bad idea on so many levels.
Most humans don't want to shoot other humans. The few who have murder fantasies do, but other than that nobody wants to take a life. The concept of just arming everyone isn't a positive nor even a remote solution.
That’s because most of the rest of the world doesnt respond to gun crime with arguments that the solution is to issue more guns.
The issue isn’t that the constitution cannot be changed. It’s that people are brainwashed into thinking it shouldn’t change.
Almost like they don't actually care about the constitution.
(I recognize some of the "issues" with Roe v Wade, tangential/orthogonal to that of access to medical services...)
"The right to purchase arms is not explicitly and specifically in the Constitution, but must exist despite that, because how else could you bear arms?"
Just like how, for Justice(hah) Thomas, same-sex marriage is a state's right/decision, but interracial marriage... isn't.
Why do several Supreme Court Justices state that they are originalists, and the Constitution is sacrosanct, when the very people who wrote it said that it wasn't, and was to be "reviewed and updated to the needs of the times as a living document"?
"This document is correct and perfect in every way. Except the bit where the authors say it isn't."
Banning interracial marriage was deemed unconstitutional based on the 14th amendment. The 14th amendment doesn't have any text about same-sex marriage. That's why it's left up to the states. (10th amendment)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/fourteenth_amendmen...
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/tenth_amendment
>Why do several Supreme Court Justices state that they are originalists, and the Constitution is sacrosanct, when the very people who wrote it said that it wasn't, and was to be "reviewed and updated to the needs of the times as a living document"?
The constitution has methods to amend it, that's what a living document means, not that some political party gets to decide what it means on a whim.
What does it have to say about the Supreme Court legislating from the bench?
If one more person tells me 'the ship has sailed' or some other hopeless cliche of the moment - yes, the smart trend of the moment is despair! - about anything .... The radical gun people sure don't think that way, and their positions are obvious, absurd horsecrap. The only problem is you (and many like you) quitting.
Also the bill of rights werent fully incorporated upon the states until well past the signing of the Constitution. In this context it's kind of silly to compare backwards vs many regulations that simply didn't exist or had no incorporated protection.
The Bill of Rights point seems like a long stretch.
The other was the GCA passed in 1968.
After the passing of the NFA was the beginning of many modern era challenges such as US v.no legal counsel of dead guy (Miller). Unsurprisingly the undefended dead guy with no counsel lost setting a long precedent and the rest of NFA is history.
The business owner quoted in the article goes on to say that a lot of the time the cops they had to hire weren't even there - they had minimum pay requirements for every shift they "worked" even if they left early or just sat in their car doing nothing.
But I think it's a bit more like a crime family or maybe a corrupt political machine than it is like a gang.
If businesses want to hire security, they should. But it shouldn't be a requirement of having a business. It comes off like the boss of the crime family telling you "I just want to get my beak wet". Like they're shaking down the small businesses.
And it's hard to argue that they aren't.
* https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/la-is-investigating...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynwood_Vikings
For if you remove the police, the residents will eventually establish their own "gang", which eventually becomes the police.
Any sufficiently organized crime is indistinguishable from government.
ETA: Please give the pedantry a rest. Of course I know police corruption is criminal. That's not what the people talking about "crime" are talking about.
> about corrupt police shaking down small business owners under threat of losing their business license.
would be a crime...
That just means the DA's likely in on it and the criminality is systemic. Doesn't mean the activity becomes legal.
What we really need in this country is a way to prosecute which bypasses the DA since this type of thing seems to be becoming more common.
This is precisely why DAs are elected officials. It's supposed to work this way, in theory. The people vote in the officials who enforce the laws in the manner they wish. In practice, DA elections seem totally ignored.
The problem is lack of voting and civic engagement.
The last time this was discussed was in 1982, with an 8-1 decision that strengthened qualified immunity.
If a DA comes out and says "hey, I'm investigating a racket that is put on by local cops" those local cops (and their union) will fight tooth and nail to remove that DA, no matter how effective their other investigations are. If that AG or DA is out of a job, and try to spill the beans, they can be threatened, or ignored outright by local media or other prosecutors who have legitimate reasons to not rock the boat.
Organized corruption begets more organized corruption.
They want you to think like that because it’s good for business…and since our prison population exceeds that of Russia or any other country (per capita), it appears that business is good…
Systemic corruption is endemic in the US, but that’s very different from individual FBI agents taking bribes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
I’m the Dirty Hippie Freak and I endorse this message.
You understand that protection rackets will 'work' with government officials, right? That this is part of it? And they'll try to codify their existence as much as possible.
And even if it was completely legal, its very obviously bad, and that's why its illegal in the first place and we try to combat such outcomes, which is part of the point of the article.
I don't believe that there's ever been any other kind of cop. Certainly not outside of fiction. By prefixing the adjective "corrupt" though, you're certainly buying into it.
Have you never read the headlines where the entire police union tries to extort the entire city? "If we don't get enough cops on the street, bad things will happen". Hell, even more explicitly in Minneapolis after Floyd. Sometimes in the comments here there are hints of people extorting themselves with stuff like "if we didn't have cops, it'd be chaos!".
The linked shakedown is relatively mild by comparison. That feeling you feel is the same as when the tapeworm hooks its jaw pincers into the inside of your gut. But sure, let's just hope for a more gentle tapeworm.
Imagine a situation that you could plausibly find yourself in where you would feel the need to contact the police. It need not be a 911 call, though those are fine too. Imagine how that would go down... the time of day you contact them. Where you would be when it happened. How you would describe the situation to them.
In this scenario, what is it that they do to help?
Whatever you think happens in that situation, everything I've read over the decades I've been reading about this lead me to believe that there is nothing they would ever do to help anyone reliably/consistently.
If your bike was stolen, well fuck you. Why do you even bother to report that. They will neither recover it, nor ever punish the person who stole it.
If your home was burglarized, the same. With your car, they'll take the report at least so you can claim insurance, but they will be surly and do so only begrudgingly because if they fail to take those reports to any great degree, there will be a political shitstorm that eventually catches up with them.
Are you in fear of your life? They might show up and shoot you. Your dog's in even more danger.
Did you see one on the street and ask for directions because you were lost? In Baltimore, that can cause them to point guns at you, scream obscenities, and run you off (and this is considered by some to be a particularly fortunate outcome).
The least risky encounter for most of us, is when we're being ticketed, when they're just doing revenue collection.
From what I can tell, the outcomes I describe aren't atypical. They've always got more important things to investigate (big drug busts), so the crimes that you and I care about are ignored, and they don't seem to act as a deterrent in any meaningful way. You just have several social filters on your brain that allow you to maintain the illusion otherwise.
I think most people who want to "defund the police" plan to live in a place where the police haven't actually been defunded. "Defund the police" is a luxury belief.
1. They self-fund. All confiscated cash is for keeps. If they're not allowed to keep it by state law, they're welcome to call in feds who will do the bust and give them 80% as a finders fee. 2. They extort cities into not "defunding". They don't want it, and they play hardball.
> nd no one in their right mind, even on the ACAB side, wants police to go away entirely.
No one's ever accused me of being in my right mind, but I am asking quite seriously... what would happen if they did? I have reason to believe "not much, good or bad".
In the places where things are horrible, they'd remain horrible. When SF has no retail stores because they can't handle the shoplifting, that'd remain true. And in the suburbs where things are boring, things would stay boring. If your car is stolen, you'd still never get it back. If your bike was stolen, same. If your home was broken into, no one would be caught. And if you were murdered, your murder would go unsolved just like before.
And I don't know how anyone can not see that.
That being said, I’m all for attempting the experiment, preferably far from me.
They do plenty of things. And I'm glad I'm privileged enough that I never suffer them doing things.
No, I started the conversation out talking specifically about "the things they do what we would actually want them to do".
This is because, were they gone, we wouldn't have to worry about them doing "the things they do that we never want done to ourselves, or to anyone else".
You're just confused. It's a confusing subject. You're not used to thinking about these things, no one wants you to contemplate them too carefully.
It's bizarre. "Why can't that internet weirdo see that the police are awesome and society would fall apart if they were gone?" only works if you've not paid attention to what the police are doing because you get to be 50 miles away when they're doing it.
He's correct that if you remove police from a well-off suburb not much will happen, because they mainly do tickets and domestics, and who really cares if a couple is fighting?
But when police are removed from neighborhoods where crime is an issue, it immediately and directly affects those who live there, and not in a good way.
Like when those big inner cities become food deserts because the retail stores start locking up the toothpaste and cans of soup behind glass cabinets a few months before they close down entirely and move out?
You think that those places could get worse than they are, and that the cops (who don't do anything to stop any of these crimes as they happen, or to deter them in any way because they're too busy concentrating on the drug war that brings in confiscated cash they get to keep) somehow prevent things from becoming even worse?
It's difficult to reconcile the idea that you live on the same planet that I do, and that (presumably) you have done so for many years.
Like, you really believe that? Please tell me you don't. This must be a joke.
SF basically told their police to stop going after small time thieves after 2020. The result has been mass mobs of stores and a huge increase in theft. They voted for these polices to raise the bar at which someone can be prosecuted, so police do nothing.
Jesus, do your research (and not on left wing Twitter lol)
But this is one of my most sincere postings, I'm being serious, and I'm trying to point out something that others have trouble discerning and recognizing.
I can see how it would be more comfortable for you if you could think me a troll.
> You continue to paint any pushback as some bad faith,
You should ask yourself why your good faith is so bad for everyone. "I'm just doing what I've always done" is lame.
I've taught my children from a young age that we must never come to the attention of the police. That they are not friends or heroes. That, should they show up and we can't just disappear back into the background... whatever bad things might have been happening are likely to get worse.
That if, for instance, someone is trying to murder them, they must handle it themselves. That if we are stolen from, our belongings are gone for good.
You though, you're welcome to continue to live in your illusions, and god help you if those ever melt away like fog on a sunny day.
> The fact of the matter is most people trust most police,
Most birds think the spider-tailed viper is a convenient meal. Their consensus in the matter isn't very inspiring though.
But I will also answer the question you posed (in the form of an unfinished short story from a few years ago that I dropped because I realized I was doing more telling than showing (also because it's kind of terrible):
https://pastebin.com/QW6nHTGr
Last paragraph is the most important part. Hence, "containment board."
Your views are extremely myopic. Low-income neighborhoods around me are asking for MORE police because of how things have gotten. It's literally only suburban people who are insulated from crime that are saying dumb things like "defund the police"
A friendly officer drove 10 minutes to pull out a slim jim and unlock my car for me. I thanked him. Normal stuff.
A lady's car broke down in an intersection. A police car put their lights on to keep us safe while 3 or 4 random people pushed the car to safety.
I often call dispatch to report accidents, debris on the road, or anything else that would warrant police help.
I have friends who have been tied up in the legal system with drugs and similar crimes around here. When they sober up, they admit that the cops have a hard job and treated them respectfully.
They protect. They serve.. it's honestly very simple. Not all police are lazy/corrupt/ego-driven maniacs. Not around here anyway.
Minneapolis is a very "young" city. It's only now getting actual generations of people that lived and grew up in the city, it used to be a city where all the suburbs people moved into the city. The first run "suburbs" are still actually suburbs, so you drive about five miles and you are in a suburb, while if you're in downtown Chicago, you have to go like 30 miles before you run into suburbs-like existence.
>They protect. They serve.. it's honestly very simple. Not all police are lazy/corrupt/ego-driven maniacs. Not around here anyway.
They are not, but departments are unwilling to get rid of the bad ones most of the time.
You can assume they're not white. (Or that they've experienced economic insecurity.)
The other guy's comment where he's telling his feel good stories, they serve more as a sort of mythology about heroic cops that people tell themselves, they're not even proper anecdotes. He wants to believe, so he tells us some stories, and it doesn't much matter if they're true. They're what you want to hear.
But if you care to check out the reality, go see what they're doing about burglaries in some hotspot. Go ask someone with a stolen bike or car what treatment they do get. Go check on where the resources, time, and manpower are spent. It's not on any of the crimes you care about. But I suppose a cop doing the AAA thing for free somehow makes up for that.
If I had been the one to call the police in any of those situations, I would expect that they did what they did, which was show up and provide a threatening presence to decrease the risk of further uncontrolled violence.
I don't mean to phrase this as an emotionally hostile reaction to your idea. Sometimes people hide their reasons for thinking something and then bring them out after drawing the person they're arguing with out into the open. That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm merely pointing out that sometimes I need a situation to be dealt with by violent people with resources, and that's what they do.
I agree with you that they won't help with break-ins or with bicycle theft. But I would like them to be able to, because I don't like break-ins or bicycle theft and I'd like the people who to that to be put in "societal time out". This would require an agent permitted to detain someone with violence to investigate and catch people committing bicycle theft and break-ins.
I am almost certain that qualifies as "crime".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Some of the allegations amount to corruption, some just business realities. This is a job for FBI to figure out.
You forgot the asterisk always required when one hears the phrase "shortage of workers*" --> "shortage of workers for the wage being offered."
> Here’s how the off-duty work program works: Some businesses — like large nightclubs — are required by the city to have security, which until 2020, sometimes had to be off-duty Minneapolis police officers.
Nightclubs often are required to have security beacuse they are a nuisance to the surrounding area and the taxpayer shouldn't be picking up the tab because you decided to overserve your customers. The off duty cop requirement is the only odd part here in my view and that appears to be gone now.
How many night clubs are located in non-urban residential areas? The commercial properties near them would be closed because, you know, they operate during the day and night clubs don't.
> the taxpayer shouldn't be picking up the tab because you decided to overserve your customers
The solution to overserved customers is to not overserve them, not to have off-duty cops or security there to manage them after the fact. This is quite easily remedied by having the cops come by and fine them until they stop doing it. The fines will pay for the enforcement, so the taxpayers will be fine. By paying off-duty cops to manage overserved customers you are making real law enforcement improbable and making the problem worse.
> The off duty cop requirement is the only odd part here
Strange to qualify with 'only' when it is a major point of the piece.
You could give most people a beer an hour or so and forget about bottle service. Mixed drinks would have to contain less than a shots worth.
I'm on board but the nightclubs won't be.
Let's extend your logic - should a gas station convenience store also carry that bond? I mean, you can buy a box of beer at the gas station and go home and be violent.
No, it's not. Continued service of someone who is visibly intoxicated, however, is.
I understand the tenets of responsible service of alcohol, and that as a server, you are meant to stop service immediately at that point.
Realities, however, are more nuanced.
I teach new EMTs and paramedics, and one of the discussion points is around informed consent and implied consent. Every class has a scenario or two where a student inevitably says to or about a mock patient, "Well, you have been drinking alcohol so I have implied consent to treat you" or similar. "So, because he's had a drink, he can't refuse medical advice/treatment?" "Right."
"So I can go to a restaurant, have two glasses of red wine with dinner, and be legally allowed to drive a motor vehicle home, but not legally make decisions about my own health?"
RSA education is generally more black and white, but even with your comment above you show that it is easy to misinterpret. It is not a case of "if your customer is visibly intoxicated, then you overserved them", because they weren't intoxicated until that point (all else being equal, if someone sits on a bar stool and orders 4 shots of tequila to start and downs them all in front of you, then reasonability applies, of course).
About security specifically, bar fights are a cliche and alchohol makes people violent. Are we going to pretend that isn't an issue?
That smells just a little bit like racism to me.
Is it really that far fetched that a bunch of corrupt cops are maybe racist too?
No, it smells like a claim of racism. But claims of various 'isms is so common now it's lost all meaning.
I'm more interested in why the focus is seen to be on corrupt cops, and not on the fact that the damn city required it!
If you've got a corrupt city, is it any wonder that the cops are going to be corrupt too? You can't fix the cops without first fixing their paymasters.
> I bet a lot of college graduates would kill for a pension right about now.
Literally! They might but that doesn't make it a good idea. We don't need more police we need to change the role of police in our society.
But I simply reject the premise that any of this is caused by lack of education and can be corrected by shifting the selection criteria. You need a certain amount of moral flexibility and malice to stay a cop for long, and that will be just as true of college graduates. Policing attracts all kinds of people as it is, but it only retains the ones it can mold into a particular nasty usefulness.
It's lack of ethics and morale.
I worked at a university. The corruption was constant and funny because of the trivial numbers in financial gain terms.
How would adding a college degree requirement make more people want to do it?
There's no shortage of cops. There's a severe problem of misallocated resources. Their overtime budget alone could take every homeless new yorker off the streets, harden the city to climate change and create humane conditions for the influx of migrants from increasingly destabilized parts of the globe.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/us-experiencing-police-...
"Leads, yeah, sure. I'll just check with the boys down at the crime lab, they've got four more detectives working on the case. They got us working in shifts! Leads! [laughing] Leads!"
Police do not function to keep us safe (nor are they legally obligated to protect us), their sole purpose is protecting capital.
Perhaps if we asked police to do less, paid them less, and eliminated their impunity to function as an occupying gang, they would be less violent and people would hate them less, and they'd be able to hire more easily.
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/crime-without-punishmen...
Not trivial, considering a substantial percentage of elected officials are dead-set against allowing the DOJ to actually fight this kind of thing. They only approve of law and order when the law and/or order is pointed at very specific types of criminals or protests.
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Porbably why the police unions are so staunchly supported by conservatives, because in the city the police's primary job is to protect affluents and their property values from the "ghetto".
So the likelihood of some DOJ reformation is slim. The dems in power won't rock that boat (the local governments are usually democratic) and the reps won't because of the real purpose of city police as described.
Hoover's DOJ?
I wish I could believe that your comment was ironic. If it is, then touche, you got me. It's really good.
Root Cause: Examining the way the world is, rather than how it should be, as per the parent comment's point.
If there is a "how it should be" when it comes to the DOJ, which seems very doubtful, there exist no humans on planet Earth who could implement it. Even more so, it would be impossible to know how to implement it without thoroughly and profoundly understanding the various failure modes. In other words, you're even doing the "examining the way the world should be" wrong.
Couple months after that started, the guy's house burned down. I heard the trucks came out twice, the second time there were more people responding and the police got into the guy's barn with a major weed grow. Not sure what the whole story was but the VFD moved and became a different entity after that.
The moral is that neighbors enforce the character of the neighborhood. Not cops.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus
Note that in this strategy, if someone's house catches fire, that's bad for the fire department, and on top of that it looks like they just committed a crime. The fire department is in the business of threatening people until they pay for a service that the fire department hopes it will never need to provide.
Crassus' strategy is completely different; he operates an actual fire department whose services are not available to other people. If your house catches fire, he'll buy it from you.
Theoretically, Crassus could benefit from arson too, but he really doesn't need it.
Crassus is in the business of buying things that have very little value to the seller (who has no way of extinguishing fires) but have a much higher value to him (because he does have a way of extinguishing fires). Unsurprisingly, this is very profitable for Crassus. But what's the similarity?
I puzzled and annoyed them by confessing poverty, but offering to volunteer skilled labor. Apparently the firehouse didn't need wiring or network or anything :)
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/fires-set-by-firefigh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefighter_arson
I count a total of 14 traits that they looked at[1]. Why is that one, and only that one, significant in your opinion?
[1] Including the trait of being white. And male.
But yeah, the profiling section some sound like a way to pathologize arson. I found the motivation section and case studies more interesting. The only corroboration from the case studies is for the age; there's no evidence included for the personality traits.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190811142354/https://www.usfa....
https://www.nwcg.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pms412...
(I also know that forensic fire investigation for house fires/criminal investigations is basically a made up art with extremely unreliable results - not sure how much that overlaps with wildfire investigations).
I personally know someone whose lawyer asked him for a large sum in cash in the 7 minutes before a trial, in the antichamber of the court.
If so, I agree that vigilante justice is one underappreciated ways that social norms are enforced.
> Eventually, another officer helped schedule off-duty work: Derek Chauvin. He worked security at her club for 17 years.
> ...
> She sold the club in 2019. When Santamaria saw Chauvin pinning George Floyd on the pavement in the video that shocked the world, she recognized both, because Floyd worked as a bouncer inside the club in 2019.
That is an interesting connection. I didn't know that they worked together.
Surprising. It came out fairly shortly after the incident that they were at least known to one another on some level through that security job.
This is more simply explained by the fact that Chauvin was in fact killing him.
(Racism still plays a big part in the Floyd story even if this is true -- Chauvin presumably thought he could get away with it, and his fellow officers mostly didn't try to stop him.)
What makes you think that?
I see I'm getting downvoted here by the typical good dogs, but this has always bothered me about the incident. The racism was presented to us by the media with no explanation, and most people just took it to be fact. No curiosity, no convincing required. I've asked several people, nobody is able to make a case that's even remotely compelling, similar to how you failed to do it here.
There were hours and hours and hours of explanation. You just decided that you didn't like the explanation and decided to ignore the facts. Assuming you're asking in good faith which is extremely doubtful. You're being downvoted because the murder happened 3 years ago, Chauvin was convicted by a jury of his peers, and its not worth anyone's time to explain it personally to someone who is "just asking questions". You take the time and do your own research.
If it's so obvious and self evident and I've merely ignored the facts, surely you could explain it to me succinctly. You can't, of course, because you don't know why you believe it, and there is reason to believe it.
This is one of the big problems with this kind of stuff, because as soon as racism merely exists it becomes completely taboo to offer any other sort of explanation as the root cause.
No, no. This man might have had other motives for his murder too. I’m merely saying a contributing factor is that society (and the law/police in specific) seem to be more accepting of violence when committed against minorities.
That said, it's certainly possible he simply wanted to be a dick to Floyd, possibly just for incredibly petty personal reasons, or something like that.
From what I understand he was convicted for second degree murder, specifically "unintentional second-degree murder while attempting to commit felony assault". So he may not have intended for George Floyd to die, but he did intentionally assault George Floyd who died as a result. So that's not intentional premeditated murder, but it's nevertheless a form of murder.
(He was also simultaneously convicted for third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter, but not first-degree murder.)
Its actually closer to 20k/year.
It's a valid response to say the board should not have had this much power, but the point is that it isn't necessarily a racket.
Not one from a specific 'company'.
Though as others have pointed out, bouncers have been a thing forever, so maybe I'm off base here...
Businesses should expect that society protects them, sure. But those same businesses can't then go and bribe the government to cut worker protection laws, labor laws, can't slash wages and expect that the government covers the costs of labor, etc...
If Walmart paid their workers lavishly, gave them huge pensions, didn't engage in far-right lobbying to diminish worker protections, didn't demolish the proverbial Main Street all across America, sure, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt and say that we should cover their security costs. But look at their actions over the last 35 years....they've enriched themselves greatly as a corporation, bribed the government, and told regular Americans to pound sand.
It's totally possible to provide good pay, healthcare, etc... to employees, still have healthy enough margin % to make Wall Street happy, keep the C-Suite well paid, all while providing a great service at competitive prices to consumers. Maybe not enough to enrich the owners to a quarter trillion dollars in net worth, but plenty enough to keep the ship going. Case in point: CostCo. Whole Foods prior to Amazon was another.
2. Nobody makes anyone buy from Walmart.
3. Nobody makes anyone work for Walmart.
4. Anybody is free to spin up a competitor to Walmart.
5. Walmart is not responsible for government wealth transfer programs.
> It's totally possible to provide [...]
You and anyone else are free to do so.
Regarding point 4, and your quoting of me - yes, people have. And some have been lucky in that they've made themselves multigenerational wealth in doing so. The guy who founded Costco did it, and made himself over a billion dollars. However, the Waltons have hundreds of times that amount. You can make a billion by doing right by everyone, or hundreds of billions by doing right by everyone not named you. I know what number I'd be content with, not sure about you though. (Hint: if you give me a billion dollars, I'm retiring tomorrow)
Regarding point 5, Walmart IS however responsible for spending vast amounts of money (generational money) over the years to enact some pretty anti consumer and anti worker laws throughout the country. It IS responsible for funding some crazy far-right politicians. It IS responsible for paying its workers so little that they are "encouraged" to go on food stamps and apply for section 8 housing.
Yeah, I've lived in them. My dad was in the AF, and (to save money) my parents would shop on the nearest AF base, which was maybe 30 miles away. They'd go once every 2 weeks or so and fill up the car with groceries.
The indisputable point is people prefer to shop at Walmart. Nobody makes them.
Name one "far right" law Walmart got enacted.
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/issues?...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/walmart-lobbyists_b_3632526
On the far right front, here's what I found:
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Walmart_and_Politics
https://www.ufcw.org/press-releases/new-report-on-political-...
> A new report issued Tuesday shows that Walmart and the Walton family that founded and controls the company have dramatically increased their political contributions over the last decade and that the vast majority of those contributions have gone to Republicans and right-wing causes, including anti-gay, anti-environment and pro-gun politicians and causes. The report asserts that Walmart, the world’s largest private employer, and the Walton family have spent over $17 million in federal elections and millions more on state and local initiatives. Since the 2000 election cycle, more than $11.6 million—69% of Walmart and the Waltons’ contributions—has gone to Republican candidates and committees. At the same time, 83% of the Waltons’ contributions, including their contributions to Super PACs, went to Republicans.
> The report further underscores Walmart and the Waltons’ turn to the right and shows that political contributions doesn’t simply stop at supporting Republicans; in 2008, Jim Walton gave $75,000 to the Arkansas Family Council Action Committee, which at the time was supporting a ballot measure to prevent gay families from adopting. Meanwhile, 94% of the Walton family’s contributions to candidates from 2000 to 2012 went to those who were opposed to or silent on the issue of marriage equality.
The report is archived here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130715154825/http://makingchan...
They also donate not out of the good of their hearts, but to protect and grow their economic interests, which is primarily the value of Walmart's stock.
The idea of equal protection under the law is much bigger and more important than a corporation that sucks. Every business should have equal access to law enforcement regardless of how big they are.
If law enforcement sucks, it is simply not any private company’s job to address the problem.
If I run a company, make bank, and then use that money to engage in lobbying that would see public services cut significantly, I shouldn't get to whine that those same public services (which includes policing) should be protecting my private interests first and foremost.
What do you propose Wal-Mart do in these localities?
People engage in a lot of magical thinking to justify theft since it seems like a harmless act. Thieves are just trying to feed their families! Insurance will cover it! Etc.! It's really unfortunate, they're going to learn the hard way as not only Walmart but other retail stores in their areas flee.
Even in California where there's some conspiracy theory about how "It's the DAs fault the police aren't doing anything", as if it's the police's responsibility, or even their jurisdiction, to pick and choose who should go to jail.
Cops should be bringing in people violating the law even if nobody ever went to prison!
https://lithospos.com/blog/shrinkage-in-retail-and-how-to-pr...
Together this puts theft at a solid majority (66%) of shrinkage.
Out of $6 TRILLION (Just in the US!) worth of brick and mortar retail sales in the same year, in an industry that claims 2% profit margins on the low ends.
All the fuss over shoplifting is just noise. Consider that the same survey which produced those numbers also showed that a full 16% of ALL merchandise sold in retail is returned, yet we don't have news channels blaring all over that we are in a crisis of unfit products.
It's a narrative, and a bad one, to blame greedy price increases on a STABLE total rate of shrink, one that has been roughly 1.5% for over a DECADE. The cost of shrink has been factored in to the price of goods forever.
You should definitely go to YCombinator and use this valuable perspective to start a brick and mortar retail firm
>Out of $6 TRILLION (Just in the US!) worth of brick and mortar retail sales in the same year, in an industry that claims 2% profit margins on the low ends.
So shoplifting is 29% of net profits? I'm sorry, which side of this argument are you on, exactly?
For comparison, in Texas, the misdemeanor limit is at $2,500.
https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PE/htm/PE.31.htm
Also it becomes a felony if any theft has been committed more than 3 times: `(D) the value of the property stolen is less than $2,500 and the defendant has been previously convicted two or more times of any grade of theft;`
In those other states its hard to get the police to even respond to shoplifting calls let alone make an arrest. And even if they did, the prosecutors will dismiss the charges or give them a slap on the wrist (which is why the cops don't bother anymore).
Just like in California.
https://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/Prop47FAQs.pdf
Citation needed
On the other hand a lemonade stand will generally rely entirely on the police and on peoples' good nature. I sure hope they aren't armed!
So on the spectrum between the two, don't we want a society where almost all interactions don't rely on private security guards?
I feel like there has been an explosion of private security guards over the past 30 years, but I do see them in old movies so I don't know if my impression is correct.
They are experimenting with putting police stations INSIDE the store, now.
https://www.grocerydive.com/news/Atlanta-Walmart-reopen-stor...
Germany had a far-right coup attempt brewing late last year:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/12/07/germany-coup...
> German authorities on Wednesday arrested 25 people suspected of plotting to use armed force to storm parliament and violently overthrow the state, marking one of the country’s largest-ever raids targeting right-wing extremists.
> Those arrested included a 71-year-old German aristocrat, a former lawmaker from the right-wing Alternative for Germany party and at least one former armed forces member, according to the public prosecutor and officials.
It was completely restored in 2020, which was when the small police station was also added, and has been in active use as a Synagogue again since then. I’d love to see it now, as I have only been inside before the restoration started (guided tour), but I need to figure out how as it’s normally closed to the public behind an electronic gate.
There is a Wikipedia page, but only in German: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synagoge_L%C3%BCbeck
> Is violent antisemitism still so prevalent? Did denazification fail so badly?
We’ve certainly had our issues, with several big scandals just in recent times, but it’s now once again getting worse in line with right wing extremist ideologies gaining ground world-wide. Jews are, as it has always been in history, getting fucked in particular with both Nazis and some of the extremist Islamic immigrants hating them, and of course also some of the left.
https://fortune.com/2023/09/08/walmart-cuts-starting-wage-ne...
In my experience both groups are full of pretty similar young men, which makes questions like yours pretty obviously loaded; why are you expecting one to be measurably different?
This may have been the case 10 years ago, but we have started defunding the police in many major cities. Have we seen a change in crime stats?
"if you look you will find someone breaking a law but bad behavior in one group gets ignored as an exception whereas in another group each incident is treated as emblematic and needing strong corrective action"
I think if you look at what's actually happening, you might change your opinion on this.
"In my experience both groups are full of pretty similar young men, which makes questions like yours pretty obviously loaded; why are you expecting one to be measurably different?"
This may be your experience, but probably not reality. I don't really think they care about theory and statistics when there are shootings and violent behavior on certain nights of the week.
Is a statement so detached from reality I don't even know where to start. Which major US cities have had their police budget removed, or redirected in whole towards social services and rehabilitation?
Have we? https://youtu.be/3irrROBg7Sg?si=MRDyPOEC2q0SR13O
Edit: not sure why the downvotes here. If you’re a small business owner you are trying to get through your day and your day gets a lot longer if you piss off casually corrupt city officials who can shut your business down by slow walking needed paperwork. This is a group that happily added 200% to your operating costs via ransoming your business license for a thinly disguised bribe. You think they won’t retaliate if you put them on the spot publicly?
So yes, they can retaliate against your friend. And your friend can retaliate against them and the difference is that their retaliation will cost your friend a few hours and a few hundred bucks, but your friend's retaliation will put them behind bars and destroy their careers and probably imperil their pensions.
So if your story is true, contact the DOJ.
while the article i reference is from ~2008[0], as an LA resident living in Hollywood, i see examples of retired LAPD guys every week "guarding" film sets even in 2023:
Such talk has angered Todd -- who estimates that he makes $100,000 a year working on film sets -- and the other 150-odd retired cops who have the required LAPD-issued permits to assist movie and TV productions.
and
Melissa Patack, a vice president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, said a wholesale change from retired to off-duty, active LAPD officers would seriously undermine the ability of directors and producers to stay on schedule and budget. Retired officers, who are not subject to the LAPD’s strict overtime limits, can remain on set for the typical 12- to 16-hour days. Patack imagines a scenario where producers instead would have to hire multiple crews of off-duty police officers and disrupt shoots to switch them.
why on earth is there a REQUIREMENT that a film set's producers hire one of retired 150 LAPD officers? based on my many viewings of these ex-LAPD guys, all they do is lounge around on their motorcycles -- not materially different behavior than a regular security person who similarly lounges around, yet is presumably paid much less than an ex-LAPD officer.
it's not just the cops that are corrupt, it's the people who require you to hire them.
[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-may-16-me-films...
edited because i messed up the formatting.
I'd love to see whether it's at all possible for someone who isn't a LEO or retired try to acquire these permits, and just how brazen they are that this is a racket for cops.
I always wonder how this is legally allowed. The idea of using taxpayer vehicles, training, equipment, etc. to control traffic while also leveraging the power of the badge to hold authority seems legally questionable, but IANAL.
I know that's how it worked at some events my Dad organised in the 90s. I can't find anything about this on any Police force website, so it might be that it doesn't work like that any more.
Anyone can try to direct traffic, but cops are paid to do it because they get the car and flashing lights (and I assume the ability to ticket/arrest violations) while still collecting side money.
It'd sort of be like me using my company's laptop/servers for side work, I guess.
e: some random source I found -- of course the answer to the question is avoided, other than "it's for the officer's safety" https://www.al.com/on-the-road/2009/12/post_17.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/Velo/comments/us0ciu/cost_to_put_on...
As you've said, the contact is with the police force not with the individual officers, who get paid the same as they would for any other duties.
There was a whole court case [1] about when the police could charge for this sort of coverage, which codified the current arrangement that, at football matches, they can charge for the officers in the stadium but not for the ones outside it.
In the UK, while police are allowed to have outside jobs, any outside employment must be approved by the force, and as a matter of policy security work is banned. Similarly, security guards aren't allowed [2] to be special constables (people who work as part-time unpaid police officers).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37912396 [1] https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2013/115.html [2] https://www.met.police.uk/car/careers/met/police-volunteer-r...
Generally the private entity pays the city, which then pays the cop. In many states private entities can't stop/redirect the flow of traffic legally so they hire off duty cops to do so.
Seems sketchy to me.
It's advantageous for police to be present at large gatherings, from a traffic control point of view it prevents accidents with other members of the public that would cost the municipality even more money to respond to.
Also from a security standpoint as people physically fighting or potentially someone looking to do harm with a weapon would both reflect badly on the community and their events, and also require even more of a response.
So if the event organizer is paying for that security from off duty / reserve officers, the community is getting that extra protection essentially for free, whereas they would have had to pay other officers likely for overtime if it wasn't paid for by the event.
You see so many examples of this, just straight parasitical behavior, in at least American society. I don’t think the U.S. is economically where the Soviet Union was when it fell, but it’s rapidly approaching the civic dysfunction and deep corruption. You have to wonder, is this the fall of an empire or something like the corruption of the late 1800s and early 1900s, that created a backlash that corrected it and led to more prosperity? Dunno. We’ll see, if the vultures leave anything behind.
Lacking that destruction creating a huge market for American business, it's hard to predict what happens if America lets its domestic capitalism go off the rails in terms of service to its people again.
What?
Federal and State governments are the biggest parasites with their armies of useless Admin workers. Incidentally, big Govt is also the main driver of malaise-causing inflation.
Start to starve them, redirect that labor/capital to useful endeavors and watch productivity and consumer confidence skyrocket.
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
One one hand the law and order is missing and on the other hand the people that make the laws are so divided. The people who should protect lack credibility on one hand and are demonized on the other hand. On one hand we do want to encourage rehabilitation of people who made mistakes and on the other hand some of those make businesses so hard to run. And when we make mistakes, let's say with liberal policies or the conservative side, there is no course correction since it takes elections and then maybe multiple cycles ... we have completely forgotten thr "apologize, fix the mistake and move on" method of working. We say we don't have monopolies but big business has all but killed individual initiative.
I think our fall, if it ever happens, will be magnificent. If it does not, that will be quite crazy too, at least for the bottom of the pyramid.
The former leads to the latter. Despite media (both fictional and non-fictional) largely carrying water for law enforcement, they just can't help but paint themselves in an incredibly unsympathetic, uncharitable light. [1]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/09/13/1199352063/seattle-officer-re... - a bodycam recording[2] of the SPD union VP speaking to the president shortly after an SPD officer ran down a woman using a crosswalk, by doing 74 in a 25 zone, at night, with no sirens. He didn't brake until after he hit her.
[2] Since she was 26, according to our fine boys in blue, her life had 'limited value'. This is what the guild's leadership think of the people they are supposed to 'protect and serve'... When the cameras are rolling.
When you're actually behaving like a demon, is it any surprise that you're demonized[3] for it?
[3] Demonized isn't even the right word. They'll face no consequences, as the SCC is both incapable, and entirely unwilling to reign in these animals.
While I don't know the details of their agreements first hand, I believe they are required by law to be off-duty cops, they are expensive, and have something like a 6 hour minimum.
What I can validate is that they are usually seen chatting with people or sitting in their car rather than doing a single thing to help streamline traffic or in the interest of safety.
Their union props up laws by saying it needs to be someone experienced and couldn’t be a cheaper certified citizen (as it is in many other states) but the net effect is that you get someone who is entitled and complacent.
They are required to do all these jobs that most states don't require them to do. They are extremely expensive, like 10x what a construction worker costs to wave flags on the side of the road. And the police don't even really pretend to do the job most of the time. They are off on the side of the road drinking coffee and playing with a smartphone.
What I have seen is lots of contractors will try to do things on the sly to avoid having to hire the police detail. E.x. a tree cutting crew that is technically going to block the road even briefly. The police detail will cost more than the work crew costs, so the contractor will try to sneak it in, otherwise the customer avoids having the work done completely or can't afford it. Even if the tree cutting takes 15 minutes the property owner would have to pay an entire shift's pay for the police detail.
In the case of the original article though.. rowdy night clubs having to have police on board is no different than police being present in a school a large sports gathering.. it makes sense as those situations can be a powder keg waiting to go off.
I suppose that’s how they continue to get away with it. We’re all hoping someone else falls on their sword.
This is a good tactic in many other situations as well.
extortion is unrelated of the exact words used but the intend
that clever phrasing can make you avoid extortion charges or similar is a common misbelive
if a cop gets away with a clear extortionist behavior it's because the prosecutor lets them and uses formulation as a shallow excuse not because clever formulations protect you from the law
I'm positive that corruption like GP described is able to coexist with scenarios like yours where everything's above board, but given you are hiring the off-duty police voluntarily, you haven't established that there wouldn't be repercussions for not doing so.