Body cameras. Dashboard cameras. Mandatory cameras while suspects are being interviewed. Better data collection and reporting to the Bureau of Justice statistics. Creation of a handbook of best practices, developed at the national level. Public grading of police forces, preferably by a private organization, at least initially. Sunshine policies to encourage disclosure.
Federal grants for the initial expenses involved. Federal grants for retraining.
No federal oversight agency yet, until we see how the above works out. I conceive of the above as baby steps, which is the proper place to start for those of cautious temperament. Less so if you are a minority.
Actually, I think encouraging people to follow the law and avoid committing crimes is a fair way to lower police violence. Also, teaching people what to do when pulled over by the police might help. When I see the red & blue lights flashing behind me I pull over as soon as I can safely do so, I roll down my window, I shut off my engine, turn on the interior lights if its night, I put my hands on the steering wheel and don’t move them until the officer asks for my license, registration, and proof of insurance, and remain calm and keep a level voice. And making sure people are better educated about what rights they possess and the powers the police have.
I also think that body cameras for police officers would go a long way towards curbing the egregious behavior of the bad eggs. But remember, we do have a a case recently where black man who was complying with the officer’s orders was shot and it was caught by the officer’s dash cam. So training might have something to do with it as well.
There’s also a long term problem of Negrophobia here in the United States. Black males have been painted as violent thugs for a long time now. I don’t think most police officers are consciously racist, at least not to the level where they want to hurt black people, but there seems to be a fear they have of black males.
Body and dashboard cameras with voice.
Get rid of no-knock warrants.
Reduce military gear.
IMHO the biggest thing to overcome is the mindset of police officers having an Us vs Them mindset. When a police officer deals with nothing but the worst of society it is easier for them to assume all of ‘them’ is the worst.
I was guilty of this in the past being a grunt. When I had a mission that is what mattered. When training with others most of their mindset was ‘how does this help me’. And I was not dealing with the worst of an area most of the time.
Reduce most police officers to peacekeepers. Peacekeepers are assigned an area/neighborhood to interact with. Their job is not to convict or fine but to keep the peace. They would assist police officer/detectives in crime investigations.
Grand juries won’t usually indict police officers when they use violence. If they do, juries will rarely convict. This is a prime example, with the entire confrontation and beat down on video.
Now, if a police officer uses a racial insult or calls a woman a cunt, they stand a good chance of losing their job. If instead they beat the person, they go on paid leave and stay employed. It is odd.
Body worn cameras. Technology and policy in place to ensure the cameras are on while on duty. To the police out there reading this: don’t fear the cameras. They will save your ass in a contested situation.
More dashcams. Full HD, 30fps, 360° exterior view.
Civilian oversight committees. To the police out there reading this: Fear this. It will suck. Your abuses brought this.
Overhaul or significantly reduce the use of civil asset forfeiture. Change the rules so the department that does the seizure will not gain access to any of the loot. Remove the incentive to enrich the department with cash taken from motorists.
Start convicting the abusive police officers. To the police out there reading this: they are the ones messing up your great job.
Change the culture through changes in training and leadership. The Ferguson police approached an angry protest in the same manner the National Guard would respond to a violent riot. They were guns up and aiming at unarmed Americans.
There is a need for SWAT and no knock warrants. But not for the majority of what they are being used for. Eliminate most of them. Due diligence must be performed to justify the use of these extremely volatile and risky dynamic entries. Also to make sure the correct home gets it’s door kicked. And stop shooting the dogs on these raids.
End the war on drugs. There are more obvious ways of dealing with our concerns about drugs. This falls squarely on the federal government.
Well, good to know that the whole “cops with cameras” thing is a no-brainer.
Seriously, how is that not already a thing? It’s good for cops, because they no longer have to deal with people claiming they were abusive or lying, and it’s good for citizens, because they know that cops can’t arbitrarily pick them off as target practice. It’s so obvious. I don’t think anyone can post anything even resembling a reasonable objection. Why isn’t it a thing yet?
Personally, I don’t think that technology is the way to change things in this case.
What needs to be done is a comprehensive culture change- some combination of weeding out the bad apples already in the police force, and a better way to select candidates so as to exclude the cops who are in it for the status and the power-trip (who I think the problem stems from). Also, training in the academies and for the existing cops that they’re part of the community, not separated as cops and “civilians”. (hint- cops ARE civilians, not being military).
I’d also reduce the armament that cops carry- go back to 38 Special revolvers and old-school batons, under the theory that a under-armed cop would likely not start shit, and be more likely to come up with non-violent solutions.
Basically the point would be to de-emphasize the use of force and reinforce the notion that cops are part of the community. I think I’d also require that cops in large cities actually live within the city limits of that city. It doesn’t make sense to me to have cops who aren’t actually part of the communities that they police.
I’ll disagree, strongly, with bump. Technology is absolutely the way to go to begin correcting this problem.
You cannot solve the problem before you have a grasp on what the problem is, and there is - rather obviously, if you spend an hour reading the threads on this board - a great deal of disagreement as to whether there is a problem at all, what cause or causes the problem should be attributed to, and how often this sort of thing occurs.
Without body and dash cameras we have absolutely no solid idea how widespread police brutality is or whether it’s getting better or worse or what the trends and statistics of it are. You can’t begin farting around with the “culture” or deciding how cops should be armed if you don’t even know what the problem is, and let me be absolutely crystal clear; anyone who says they know precisely how much of a problem this is, is full of shit. We have no clear picture of the issue at all. Everyone has a theory but nobody is providing any evidence. Too many cops are ex military or power crazed? Show me the connection between military experience and the likelihood of being in a questionable shooting/beating, please. Maybe that’s true, but the cop who shot Sammy Yatim wasn’t ex-military, and the cop who shot Levon Jones wasn’t ex-military, and the cop who shot Oscar Grant wasn’t ex-military, and I could go on. Those are anecdotes, fine; show me the statistics. I’ve never seen those numbers, and there aren’t any reliable numbers, because for 99% of all police encounters that involve some degree of force we don’t know what really happened. Is this even more common than it used to be? Or are we just hearing about it more?
The solution to any problem BEGINS with gathering information on it. Cameras will not only gather that information but may have the beneficial effect of changing it by virtue of observation, and are - I would guess - going to be an enormous cost saver in the long run. Cameras are cheap these days; the administrative costs of dealing with police abuse claims are very expensive.
Of course cameras are a good idea but I think a more robust internal affairs would be useful too.
Start stripping cops of their pensions for turning a blind eye or falsely defending a bad cop.
I have found police hatred of internal affairs as extremely hypocritical. I have found their “blue wall” to be pernicious to a lawful society. I understand the premise behind protecting cops that might have made a mistake in the heat of the moment and shot an unarmed suspect or soemthing but the blue wall has extended itself to protecting clearly abusive or corrupt cops. Its bullshit and its been going on for as long as I’ve been alive.
If they aren’t military, then they have no business having military equipment, do they?
Technology is already changing the face of policing. Rialto, CA (just a bit down the road from here) has cameras on all their street cops and the changes in just one year have been amazing.
Anyway, camera technology, although useful, does not address the heart of the problem, because it is neither universal in time nor place. In time because it was not earlier available and yet police should still have been virtuous; in place because many countries and districts will never be able to afford to implement such far-reaching technology and yet police ought not to do bad things because they are wrong.
There has to be a sea-change in cops’ attitudes to the public and the members thereof. A reformation of the spirit, enabling grace.
Ironically, around 5 - 10 years ago, Americans were, semi-rightly, decrying Britain as becoming a police state because of all the CCTV cameras our masters were installing on every busy street.
Get rid of qualified immunity for police officers. Make them get malpractice insurance like every other professional. Have judgments paid by the individual officer, or at the most, the pension fund of his/her department. Not by the taxpayers. IOW, have the negative incentives actual affect the agent doing the unwanted behavior. If I could find a way for magistrates to be liable for gross negligence in approving a search warrant, I’d do that too.
I like body cameras. Have the standard for a non-functioning camera be similar to that for a finding of spoilation: the factfinder gets to take the most negative inference that the spoiled evidence would have shown.
Get rid of most SWAT units. Use the ones you have left in only one of three situations: 1) hostage situation; 2) weapon of mass destruction present (thinking something like a nuke or a really large truck bomb—something that would level the neighborhood if set off.); 3) apprehension of a violent fugitive. Look at #3 with a really jaundiced eye. Evidence preservation isn’t a valid reason.
Agree on the war on dope.
Have the scrutiny of police use of deadly force parallel that used when Joe Citizen uses deadly force. If that means the police’s job becomes more dangerous, those are the breaks. Police should not get to offload the dangers of their job onto the citizenry. That said, with the evidence we have now, I don’t see anything wrong with either of the police shootings that are stirring up the St. Louis area.
Great suggestions from most participants so far, IMHO.
There are lot of great ideas here. Another vote for body cams. Every since Zimmerman, my faith in police reports has to turned shat. Even if a cop is honest and non-corrupt, their account of events can be too distorted to trust. Video evidence corrects this distortion.
I also think the public needs to be educated, empowered, and encouraged to hold cops accountable when they act abusively. There is too much ignorance about our rights as citizens. This ignorance breeds a culture of passivity, apathy, and blind support for law enforcement. A culture like this is unable to respond appropriately when police brutality occurs, because knees are programmed to jerk in defense of cops. So there is no pressure for police departments to fire these people, no community support for the victims to press charges or sue, and no correction of the problem.
JesterX - you (and many others) have already decided that the cop in the Brown shooting was guilty. Without first hand knowledge and without knowing what the investigation has turned up. What if the cop was actually justified or what if the prosecutor simply doesn’t have enough evidence to sustain a conviction? Any rational person would have to admit that these are both possibilities.
But to scream whitewash/cover up/conspiracy at an (possible) outcome that you disagree with fosters the “us and them” attitude. You can’t accuse the cops of being wrong for having that attitude and then display it yourself. Well you can, but that’s being a hypocrite. Maybe that cop was wrong, maybe not. Let’s hear the evidence.
As to body cameras- most cops I know say, “Bring 'em on”. When dash cams first appeared cops didn’t want them. Now, the ones that have them wouldn’t be without them. I believe that they have vindicated more cops than they have caught. The ones that don’t like them feel that way not because they are doing something wrong during citizen encounters but because supervisors are using them to nitpick things like not having their hats on.
Having a body cam run constantly and recording the entire shift is a bit Big Brother-ish. Who, in any profession, would want every word they said recorded and available for their bosses to listen to? I know of one trooper who was given a very hard time by a motorist. Back in the car said something to himself like “Now, you get two tickets, asshole” and his mic picked it up. Otherwise, completely professional on the stop. Three day suspension.
We constantly train officers that they need to control their emotions in use of force encounters. But its easier said than done. It hard to not get angry with someone who just spit on you or led you on a high speed chase, or took a swing or shot at you. Or (the big one) challenged your authority. Its human nature. Our policy says an officer who fails to intervene when another officer is using too much force is just as liable as the offending officer. I assume that the same pretty much everywhere.
In my job, we called it camera sense. You had to be aware that you were being recorded.
As you noted, you have to be willing to overlook the petty stuff. Don’t suspend somebody just because they used a profanity.
As for controlling your emotions, I found a camera sometimes made it easier. Not just because I knew I was on camera but because I knew the other guy was on camera as well. As he was swearing at me and threatening me, I knew the camera was recording everything and it would all be used against him. Knowing that he was producing evidence against himself kept me calm and happy.
Did he actually write two tickets? If so, then it sounds like his punishment was appropriate. If not, then that’s unfortunate, but not nearly as unfortunate as a cop getting away with misconduct because he had no camera.
Lots of bad things are human nature. We should hold our police officers to a high enough standard that excessive force, even if the suspect spit on them or something, is severely punished. I know they’re capable of it.
Ride-a-longs! Most departments offer them. Go do one and then report back here with your revised opinions. Pick a Friday or Saturday night for good measure.
Another vote for cameras - HOWEVER, I am highly skeptical of this being a panacea. Case in point, for most all of the incidents of what civilians might call police brutality where the incident was filmed, the resulting court case find the officers not guilty of any misconduct.
On the one hand they end up showing the film to the jury 1000 times frame by frame in slow motion until they are immune to the impact. And they focus on minutia like pointing out where the suspect twitched an eyelid indicating non-compliance with a direct order therefore the officer need to use all force necessary to subdue…blah blah blah.
On the other hand the defense shows that the police training indicates that the force used was within guidelines so how can you prosecute? That is their training, so they were doing what they were trained to do, so it’s NOT brutality! Case closed! So, I would say we also need to redefine guidelines on use of force. Big time.
And finally a radical idea - if you are a police officer you get one shot, literally. If you fire your weapon in any condition or circumstance, even if it is entirely justified and required, you are finished being a police officer. Done. That would change behavior, yah? Yes, it may sound non-sensical and over the top, but considering we are at the exact opposite end of the spectrum now, I say it’s worth a try. Eventually (maybe) we will find a middle ground that works. But for now, I say us civilians should have the benefits of the doubt, not the police.