It started with a pit thread. I held that police are mostly good, another poster held they were mostly bad and it came down to why aren’t there examples of police officers stopping fellow brutality.
So now I’m re-examining my position. I think it could either be confirmation bias (Joe Friday doesn’t get nearly the same press as Officer Beatings), or there’s a lot more rogue, or at least apathetic cops than I thought.
So what’s the straight dope on police brutality? How common is it? Or do we know?
I’m just posting to subscribe. I had thought to start a thread asking how realistic the interrogation scenes in different police dramas were over the years.
British dramas show suspects being interviewed with much emphasis on recording and solicitors being present, from what I’ve seen of The Wire and a French drama, you might find a frostier reception on the other side of both the Atlantic and the English Channel.
I suspect they are not realistic at all. All a suspect has to do is ask for a lawyer and the police more or less have to leave the room. At any rate, the interrogation is over.
Police misbehavior is a natural result of the occupation. Can we point to any time or place in the history of mankind in which government organs authorized to utilize force have not had at least a portion of their members engaged in illicit activity only possible because of said membership in the government entity?
I think things have gotten better in the last hundred years but they still have a very long way to go–in truth until human nature is changed I don’t expect the problem will ever be eradicated.
In the early 20th century you had many police forces who actually acted as enforcement arms for private criminal concerns. Now, you have some police departments where police are “on the take”, but I think we can definitely see how they incidence and degree of corruption, on the whole, has decreased since the 1910s/1920s.
Other occupations have certain types of corruption that are systemic as well. For example in a pizza place, let’s say the store policy is that employees must pay full menu price for any food they eat. That’s typically not store policy in the real world, but it certainly is at some places. How often are the employees going to sneak a slice for free? The answer, at least from anecdotal experience is: as often as they want, because pretty much all of them will do it.
How often will employees at such a store give discounts to their friends, against store policy? How often will they let their friends walk out the store with a free pie? Maybe a little less than they’ll sneak a free slice, but from my experience, the answer is again: as often as they want. A lot of them will do it and none will report it to the owner/store manager.
A bit higher level, let’s say you have a person at a high level of responsibility in a government bureau. They get to sit on the committees that decide which company will be contracted with to provide certain things. There is a formalized RFP/RFQ process that is, in theory, supposed to limit the ability for corruption to materialize. However, let’s say that one of the administrator’s personal friends is the owner of one of the companies who is submitting a bid. Is the administrator going to do everything he can to “put his thumb on the scale” and tilt the process in favor of that company? Well, from my experience in state government, the answer to that is “yes.”
I think there’s less outright corruption & physical abuse today. The biggest concern, IMO, is the trend of “militarizing” police departments.
Nowadays many PDs and SOs have a wide assortment of military gear, which fosters an “us against them” attitude amongst many LEOs. For evidence of this, notice how most LEO like to refer to non-LEOs as “civilians.”
Thanks! That and Martin Hyde’s post have given me something to think about.
Lazy, I think that stands a good chance of showing how much people tend to focus on negatives (not that brutality is anything that should be overlooked). What I’m looking for is statstics about how likely a cop is to commit brutality.
However, it;s more of a data point than I had before so thanks.
Martin Hyde, I’ll agree, but only to an extent. I’ve been an EMT for the last three years, and, as such, have had the chance to interact with many fine, fine police officers. These people are willing to take a bullet for the public. And, on a scene, they look at EMTs and firefighters as a branch of their own. I’ve been confronted by angry families, and had a gun pulled on me by a family member. The officers at that scene took care of that situation as if someone pulled a gun on a fellow officer.
That’s not to say that there aren’t bad apples. There are. There are bad apples in any job. But I believe that most people are fundamentally good, and that most police officers take the professionalism of their job seriously, and are good men and women doing a very difficult job.
Now, I’m not suggesting for a second that you’re saying that all cops are corrupt. And I’d like to think that the good cops outnumber the corrupt ones, and to a high degree. However, it’s the bad ones that give the good ones the reputation that police have.
Outside of Detroit, you are mostly right. New Orleans has been famous for a corrupt police force, though. I suspect there are more corrupt and brutal officers than most people believe.
TV proves they can solve any crime in an hour without ever stepping over the line.
On the YouTube search, I get a message at the bottom suggesting that YouTube has at least made some effort to eliminate duplicates. Many of the “police rescue” hits refer to movie or TV show scenes. Not exactly gold-standard statistics, but at the least it suggests that the problem of police brutality is real and not rare.
IMO, both police rescues and police brutality are spectacular and fairly likely to be videoed, maybe police brutality somewhat less so because of intimidation, and the police taking bystanders into account. Maybe police rescues are more likely to be titled something else.
I admit that the statistic is semi-garbage. Not total, just semi.
I took a trip through youtube videos the other night. Contrapuntal is right, there is a lot of duplicates. When I tried that experiment on google video I got “about 12,200” results for police brutality, and “about 11,000 results” for “police rescue”. However many of links aren’t on topic, like for example some are about the Chillian miners, or a cop being rescued.
Some look damned heroic though, like cops risking life and limb to rescue people.
I guess another problem with this what about “chaotic neutral” cops. Cops who might save life your life, or beat the shit out of you for a parking violation. Such a cop could have entries in both sets.
It’s that the “good ones” disappear when the “bad ones” show their ugly mugs.
It’s when an individual or group of officers violate the public trust and you suddenly have department heads sticking up for them, fellow officers LYING on police reports, and covering up wrongdoing, higher ups and DA’s cutting them slack they would never cut any other member of the citizenry. So where did all the “good” cops suddenly go? Were they all on break?
That circle starts to expand in almost EVERY case.
Cop does something obviously wrong, other cops help or simply ignore it - The circle expands.
Then others lie about what happened, or plead the fifth - the circle continues to expand.
Then the department heads go all ape-shit on the guy who took the video, because of the poor, poor cop who fucked up now has a big spotlight on him, and it’s just all so unfair! They stall investigations, dismiss complaints, etc - the circle is now huge.
Then The DA and mayor and the chief of police all stand had in hand singing cumbaya hoping the whole thing disappears, and won’t affect re-election votes all the while talking about how ALL, I mean EVER SINGLE ONE of their officers is a shining example of virtue! And the circle is so god damned big at this point you could fit Jupiter in it.
Probably most cops who commit acts of police brutality in other circumstances would do genuinely heroic, selfless things. People are complex and the situations they find themselves in make a huge difference. I would generally hesitate to label cops “good” or “bad” based on an incident that happened to become public. There is a huge element of what philosophers call “moral luck” involved.
Well checking Wikipedia found these sources which are better than what I found googling. If I have time tomorrow maybe I can find something in the library.
I haven’t had a chance to look them over well but here’s some interesting quotes I found from those sources on first glance:
If I understand how youtube works, and I very well could be wrong, what it suggests is that some 6,000 odd users have uploaded videos and included the words “police brutality” in the title. Whether that reflects actual incidents of police brutality is another thing.
But let’s go with your conclusion, that police brutality is both real, which I don’t dispute, and rare. My question would be how many police/citizen encounters in total occur in the time covered by the youtube search? In other words, 6,000 events out of how many? The answer to that will tell you how rare it is. Assuming, again, that the videos represent actual, discrete events.
I was suggesting that police brutality was real and not rare. I don’t think you could use that YouTube search to get anything close to a realistic estimate of the rate of incidence of police brutality. It just suggests that the rate of incidence of the sort of cases of police brutality that would be worth posting a video of is in the same ball park as the rate of incidence of police rescues worth posting a video of. Or maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know that much about YouTube searches either. It just seemed to me that this type of sampling could compliment other statistics that have their own flaws.