I think a good first step would be having a dedicated, aggressive agency that specifically investigates police. The agency should be separate from any police department. The idea that a local internal affairs department, or local prosecutor is going to effectively investigate their friends, co-workers and officers that they routinely work with is naive at best. In my profession (law), there is a well funded group of experienced attorneys who work for the Office of Bar Counsel. The only thing they do is investigate reports of bad lawyers. They are evaluated solely on their ability to do so. Their authority is state wide so they are less likely to be familiar with the people they are investigating. They have broad authority to gather documents and evidence. Failure to cooperate with the investigation has negative consequences. Lying in the investigation has negative consequences. When they find that someone has failed to follow the rules, they make recommendations from further training to disbarment. It clearly does not stop all bad lawyers. But it certainly encourages good behavior from good lawyers, and reduces the likelihood that bad lawyers will be able to hide their actions forever.
If police want to keep their actions from being judged by non-police, they should be held accountable to a similar agency. No more “we have investigated ourselves and found we have done nothing wrong” from a local internal affairs department, or even worse, from a local police chief in smaller departments.
Anyone who thinks my earlier suggestion is unreasonable, shouldn’t be a cop. Like I said, no shame, not everyone is tough enough. However, before there is a rush for the door, remember that policing isn’t even in the top ten (maybe top twenty) of the most dangerous professions. Those people with the “them or me” attitude shouldn’t be cops. Especially with the “them” that gets shot, turns out to be unarmed. Given the legal precedents that LEOs don’t have a professional, legal obligation to protect the public and that it is acceptable to select against candidates who have performed too well on intelligence tests, we’re just not talking about our best and brightest in society. Basically, good pay, easy work, social status, low physical risk, and virtually ZERO accountability doesn’t necessarily attract bad people, but it sure as Hell doesn’t keep away the worst.
It is legal to have a knife or even a gun. 'Murika loves its guns. If it is legal to have guns, you can’t go around shooting everyone that has a gun. How many of the officers involved had guns? If it is justifiable to shoot someone because they have a gun, bad for cops. What if it is always justifiable to shoot someone who brandishes a gun or points it at you . . . yeah, that would be bad for cops as well. It may well be inappropriate to put LEOs and civilians on equal footing like this, but that’s because it is inappropriate. The LEOs are the ones with training, backup, state-issued authority. They should not be held to the same standard, but to a higher one.
Unless it is a cop. Somehow, that isn’t an assault with a deadly weapon because he felt threatened due to me having a gun, or being near a gun, or not being near a gun he just thought I had a gun. I guess I deserved it for making him think I had a gun.
Can we at least bring cop pay into parity with roughnecks and pipe-fitters? Because I grew up around that lot and they are MUCH tougher than these effete American cops who (if their post-citizen-murder accounts are believed) are afraid of EVERYTHING AND EVERYBODY ALL. THE. TIME. Policing is obviously safer, easier, and you’re not as scrutinized as much. But, people working in process plants and oil rigs don’t mind hard work and danger. They just don’t want to live on cop pay and probably don’t get off on bullying people.
American police being so famously aggressive with gunfire isn’t something I would expect to increase dangerous criminals’ propensity to surrender peacefully. And gunfire from LEOs can and does kill civilians. There is little sense of proportionality in policing here. Not long ago police pursued robbery suspects, a hostage, and the driver of a highjacked UPS truck. They discharged hundreds of rounds, in heavy traffic, in pursuit of a large, slow-moving, vehicle trackable via GPS. Cops were hiding behind people’s cars, with citizens still in them. Both robbers were killed, as well as the hostages. No police fatalities, so I assume they considered this a successful mission.
They already don’t testify against fellow officers so nothing changes on that front. What can change would be how the officer is dealt with internally. A lot of bad police are rehired. Maybe their union and other departments would be less willing to go to bat for bad apples who keep causing their departments money. Certainly other officers would probably be more proactive in curbing bad cop’s actions. Also, the culture from the top would probably be more focused on policing methods that are less likely to get the department sued.
The problem is there is no accountability (or at least precious little). The police themselves don’t, well, police themselves. Indeed, they almost always cover for each other making justice very difficult to achieve. Particularly when the DA also has their back.
Your complaint about “collective punishment” applies to the taxpayers who have to foot the bill for a bad cop’s actions. Usually we see to it that the people who committed the bad act are the ones punished for it. Given the above I am not sure how else you make the police liable for their actions.
I would start with this idea, which is wrong most of the time.
A big problem with how police interact with the community is that they demand compliance, and when they don’t get it rapidly, they escalate to force.
There is a time and place for force, but a pregnant woman who is sitting in a car not going anywhere isn’t it. When faced with intransigence but no danger, the response should be: wait.
She’ll get out of the car eventually. I mean, come on. She’s pregnant, so by the time the ticket has been written she probably already has to pee.
People who are having a moment of self-righteous indignation will cool down. The vast majority of them will eventually do what is being asked without any force. We should train police to just sit patiently and talk in a non-threatening way. This will require that we hire more police, since it will take them longer to accomplish their jobs sometimes. And, you know, by all means, if we want to make there be an incentive to not do this, make part of their punishment be based on the amount of time we had to wait for them. Make a highway patrolman sit on the side of the road for two hours because you wouldn’t sign the damn ticket? You get 2x50 hours of community service tacked on to your ticket.
But the idea that we should train agents of the state to taze people when they’re just being petulant and not actually presenting any kind of danger because we need to speed up the processing of a minor crime is horrifying.
This is a conclusion, not a fact. The cops were not required, by law, physics, nor employment agreement to physically overpower a pregnant lady and electrically shock her multiple times because she didn’t sign a document.
I know it sounds wacky to say maybe we shouldn’t run 50,000 volts through a pregnant lady and grind her face into the pavement because she drove 32 in a 20 zone and refused to put pen to paper when told to do so, but that’s my position.
It’s only the unimaginative person who really doesn’t give a fuck about anything but enforcing compliance that thinks these cops had no choice but to taser this lady in the neck until she passed out.
Except one is not required to sign a traffic ticket in Washington so your entire premise is flawed and reduces to “Cops making up laws”
Except in this case the money wasn’t seized and stored, the cops didn’t report it on the inventory sheet so it cannot be returned to the owner. They stole it.
Says who? You? Who the hell are you? This is Great Debates, not IMHO. You offer no cites or cromulent real world experience to your absurd position and then demand that it is correct? Pfft.
Your standard would include about 99.9% of the population. Even the most ardent pacifist could find it insane to not be allowed to defend ones self against an obvious imminent lethal threat. By your standard a police officer could not stop an active shooter until such shooter was shooting at the actual officer. And then maybe, right? :rolleyes:
I completely agree with this. Police in the U.S. escalate to deadly force far too easily. They frequently appear to looking for an excuse to shoot people, instead of looking for a reason to not use deadly force.
I think any police officer who shoots a civilian should be as thoroughly investigated as if I would be if I were to shoot someone. This includes prosecuting and jailing them if the shooting cannot be fully justified.
If this drives people away from policing, so much the better. Most of our current police seem to revel in the power trip they get by being armed in the first place.
Right. No rolleyes. Better than the current situation in which the police get to execute civilians with impunity.
Is there any evidence for this? Any at all? I’m sure that American police believe this to be true, which is why they are so quick to shoot. They get bullshit training on how fast a person can supposedly run over to them with a knife, and that’s why it’s so important to immediately shoot people if they appear to have any weapon on their person, or even anything that looks like it might possibly be a weapon.
The pendulum has swung far, far over to the point that police now tend to shoot first and ask questions later. Their top priority is not public safety, but their own personal safety. This overwhelming concern for their own safety, combined with the power trip most police seem to have and the overreaction they typically exhibit when their authority appears to be questioned,* leads to the situation we have now. I’m a white male, and I fear the police in our country today. If I were a minority, I would be terrified of them.
We train our soldiers in occupied areas of foreign countries that it is counter-productive to shoot the civilian population. You don’t win “hearts and minds” by shooting everyone who you think might be armed. It’s time to train our police the same way – then arrest, prosecute, and jail them for an unjustified use of deadly force, with none of this “qualified immunity” bullshit.
This isn’t the first time I’ve said this. As I wrote last year:
*This even extends to mundane interactions with the police. In my job, we are forced to hire police for traffic control for construction projects. The police get to decide how many officers are needed for a given job (which is an obvious conflict of interest), and they personally get overtime pay for doing nothing (typically either shooting the bull with the other officer, or sitting in their squad car). In order to get them to do the job they are being paid for (i.e. actually directing traffic), we had to hire a retired police officer to serve as a liaison with the police, because it is all but impossible for a civilian to get a police officer to do something they don’t want to do. So if I get word that the police are sleeping in their car instead of directing traffic, I have to call our liaison, who calls the private duty police coordinator, who may or may not counsel the officer. We have been warned to never question a police officer ourselves – nothing good would come of that. :rolleyes:
Whether they do their job or not, we still have to pay, approximately $100/hour per officer, plus another $15/hour for a squad car, with a minimum charge of 4 hours. This is one reason why utility construction in roadways is so expensive.
