From the New York Times-“New Orleans Police Taught To Police Each Other”, and the picture of two female officers accompanying the article reads “A new police training program in this city teaches officers to intervene if they see colleagues engage in unethical behavior.”
Isn’t this an open acknowledgement that the unofficial position(until now) was to look the other way?
How necessary is this training in other major cities?
There is always a temptation among police to cover for each other. It used to be much worse. Read Serpico, the NYPD was practically mafia like at one point.
If they’re doing training, it’s a CYA exercise by the brass. It isn’t going to have any effect.
No, not at all.
In theory, you are supposed to report this sorta stuff to a superior officer of Internal Affairs, who are specially trained for it. That’s that was it was supposedly done for decades.
but it does give them the option to be “re-trained” down the road when they’re found to have not reported unethical behavior.
Follow-up question: Is this type of training a waste of time if upper management deems it necessary to put out a false image to the public that nothing is wrong with the way their police are operating, and bury most/all reports about malfeasance?
In my experience, cultural traits, such as the blue wall of silence that has developed in police organizations throughout the country, are much more difficult to change than some “training” or workshops. Successfully prosecute some officers for “conspiracy to …” type charges for their roles in covering up the misdeeds of their fellow cops would be a much better start, but I see that as unlikely, to put it mildly.
What do you mean, “at one point” ? Police started as just another gang, only one on the side of the State. It still is.
Have you got a better alternative?
I agree. Probably a lot of cops are told when they start that if they see bad behavior to report it. But then they see other cops committing bad behavior and no one treating it like a big deal, so they don’t report it. No sense in reporting if nothing is going to happen, so the cops need to see that something will happen.
The New Orleans police has a history of serious difficulty with weeding out undesirable applicants. I guess this initiative is their attempt at dealing with the result.
And when there is a horrible bad thing in the the hood or china town or little mexico or whatever and everybody clams up when the cops show up to fix this mess…because…well tribalism…
Yeah, tribalism sucks.
Bad tribalism.
Lets just not pretend it is just with the cops.
Think of it as reinforcing something they already knew.
When you see a sign like this it’s not intended to introduce the concept of wearing seat belts. It presumes people are aware that wearing seat belts is a good idea. They just need to be reminded to apply what they know.
Go check out literally anything written by Dr. Zimbardo. The vast majority of people in the world are neither all-good nor all-evil, and can be easily swayed one way or the other by the people they interact with. Police are especially vulnerable because they have to deal with conflicted value systems. It is extremely easy to rationalize doing the wrong thing, because there are so many perverse incentives built into the system to promote closing cases and making arrests. And asking people to turn in their friends (whom they rely on for their own safety) is never an easy thing to do.
All available research on the subject indicates that people *do *need training and reminders. They need to be given positive and realistic role models. They need unambiguous moral codes that help them decipher conflicted motives and contradictory imperatives. They need to frequently be reminded about what avenues they have to report corruption. It shouldn’t be necessary, but it is.
Nobody is pretending anything. I just thought a thread titled “Don’t Tribalism Suck Lots And Lots?” would be too fucking vague, and there’s nothing wrong with focusing in on a specific area-it doesn’t mean there aren’t problems elsewhere.
You’re wrong to attribute refusal to talk to the police to tribalism.
People refuse to talk to the police for two big reasons.
First, they believe it won’t make a large difference to the outcome of the legal proceedings, but they know that they will be subject to reprisals from criminals without any protection from the same police. It’s a vicious cycle, but the start of that cycle was the historical ignoring of crimes in which the race of the victim was disfavored.
Second, they live in communities in which people don’t trust the police to be fair. They expect that police involvement will, as often as not, lead to more trouble instead of less. And, for much of history, they weren’t wrong. That’s changing, but these kinds of attitudes change more slowly than the policing.
Neither of those reasons applies to cops refusing to report on their own misconduct.
in the nypd the the corruption was built in from basically its beginnings under what became known as “the clean graft” system
but the new Orleans pd has been a half step from federal takeover for about 30 years now…
I’m in a mega-corp. You’d think there’d be an implicit expectation that insider trading, kickbacks, conflict-of-interest, and industrial espionage were no-nos, but all folks on payroll including the executives have to take mandatory training on all of this.
And mine sent an email to all this week from the Security folks reminding us of stuff like “don’t lie on your expense reports” (six people fired this year, in two different cases - a group of four, one of two). A lot of our computer use policies are CYA (since streaming and having music in your computer are both forbidden, they could fire at least 95% of the employees based on that combo), but “do not submit the same ticket five times” is pretty basic!
I’m reminded of an old comedy skit:
“The first rule for all doctors is ‘Do No Harm’”
“they need a rule for that?!”