As a statement of fact, that’s not really true. It varies from state to state and even within states. I live in Missouri and our county Sheriff is elected, but the nearest city’s police chief is hired by the city’s elected leaders. Another city in the same county may elect their police chief.
SWAT units are civilian; yet their job by its nature requires a lot of technology similar to military commandos.
As a matter of realpolitik, any elected police head who talks about cracking down on wrongdoers will lose the police union endorsement and therefore the election.
Are you aware that batons, if they are allowed today, are generally considered higher levels of force with higher chances of serious injury than some of the items you’d take away (like tasers and pepper spray)? You aren’t underarming someone by giving them a baton as the only non-lethal tool. You increase the severity of force when the baton is used (instead of a lesser tool).
The solution is body cameras and to come down on offending officers like the fist of an angry God. The can be zero tolerance for officers who forget to turn in their cameras or accidently erase footage. I truly believe must cops are good, honest people and that 1% gives the others a bad name. But with that said, the change must come from the inside. No more cops protecting cops. They need to turn in the bad ones so this crap stops.
The police have separated themselves from the public. In most cities, there are no cops walking the beat and, therefore, no opportunity to actually meet the people (and maybe understanding) the people they are policing. They ride around in cars (1 or 2 cops to a car) looking for whatever is on their hot list for the night.
Even they way they dress separates them. The dark uniforms and 50 or so pounds of equipment they wear (guns included, of course) do not make them seem friendly or in anyway helpful to people needing help. In Denver, we pay the police extra money to get dressed and undressed (don and doff) because of all the extra crap they wear.
We do have an independent organization to investigate incidents but very often their decisions are reversed by the ‘Civil Service Board’ so that fired police are now back on the force (although possibly in non enforcement positions).
Police departments should be headed by civilians responsible to the mayor of the city, or an elected board.
Bob
that doesn’t address the current state of police training. All it does is get them off the hook faster when protocol is followed.
There are different models of engagement in other countries that could be adopted but as it stands now officers in the US are taught to bring situations under control without regard to the nature of the offense. It doesn’t matter if you’re a bank robber or a jay walker. Refuse a lawful order and you get slammed to the pavement.
Or pepper-sprayed. Mace and tasers are the panaceas for all disagreements now.
The attitude that a lot of cops have is that they can make any demands they want, and people are obligated to comply. Anything “lawful” is fair game, is the assumption. But the problem with this thinking is that it allows cops to harass and intimidate people with impunity, because those behaviors taken individually aren’t against the law.
In the omnibus thread in the Pit, someone posted a video of a guy waiting in a parking lot drinking ice tea with his buddy filming him. When he’s accosted by a cop demanding to know what he’s drinking, the guy shows him the can and even allows the cop to read the ingredient statement so he can see that it’s alcohol-free. But the cop still demands that the beverage be handed over to him. The guy gets exasperated and resists, and in retaliation the cop tells him he has to leave the premises. When the guy doesn’t leave immediately because he’s fuming in anger, the cop throws him to the ground and arrests him for trespassing. All of this shit was caught on tape.
This situation didn’t result in police brutality, but it very well could have if the guy had twitched suspiciously while he was being taken down. Fucked up thing was that the whole conflict began because a cop demanded information that was unnecessary and invasive. His harassment was “lawful” though because it’s not illegal to ask someone questions about what they’re drinking over and over again, and the cop has the power to arrest someone if they refuse to leave private property.
Going back to the body cam thing: It is not enough that cops record their interactions with people. What should also happen is that on a periodic basis, the recordings need to be audited by a 3rd party. Not only should the reviewers make sure that for every written record of an arrest or stop there is a associated video clip, but the clips should be assessed for unlawful conduct as well as “lawful” but abusive behaviors like unnecessary questioning, frivolous stops, and gratuitous commands.
1- Body cameras on all cops, all the time. The technology is there, it gives the good cop protection from false accusation and the bad cop gets to live with the consequences of his actions.
2- Integrate the police force to represent the community it serves. We can’t have mostly white police working mostly black neighborhoods and expect good results.
3- Get rid of all the silly military hardware and uniforms. Just because you can get all these toys and costumes doesn’t mean you need to play soldier.
4- Legalize some drugs based on objective medical criteria. The war on drugs has done for street gangs what prohibition did for the mob.
5- Spend money on infrastructure to put people to work rather than throw currency at millionaires in hopes that they let some coins drop to the rest of us. More employed people means fewer criminals and less violence.
Few things:
- More professional police forces. There are still far, far too many very small police forces. They are accountable to extremely low population rural counties, small towns and cities and universities. They often pay very low wage (less than $30k/yr) for starting officers. Lack of a professional organization + low pay, and I really don’t think there’s much reason to expect a professional police force. For less than $30k/yr, so what if they get fired, they can clear that working at a gas station.
The smaller, lower paid police forces are also the ones most likely to hire young men with only high school diplomas (guys who bother getting a four year degree have a much better chance of going to a bigger/better department where the starting pay is around the $45k or so that I believe is the national median starting pay.)
How do we get here? I’d say on a State level States need to take it upon themselves to abolish all police forces serving communities under x size, and create State Police detachments to perform community policing in those areas.
We also want to require all police officers to have graduated from college for a few reasons, mostly because I think someone who has been exposed to college for a few years and the various life changes that involves is going to be a more professional and effective LEO, and it filters out the people that are too lazy/stupid and who just want to jump from being a HS football player to tackling/beating people for a living.
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More monitoring. Body cameras etc. For you guys who are thumping your chests over “zero tolerance” for failing to turn on a body camera you only do that reasonably if you are willing to build professional police forces, which means no more small town police, higher pay for police serving those areas and dramatic expansion of State police forces. I’m not sure where the technology is but I’d prefer a system that isn’t based on officer interaction at all. For example perhaps a microphone that when it registers some sort of talking or sound above a certain amount it automatically turns the body camera on and leaves it on for five minutes (refreshed anytime it records a new sound past the threshold.) Additionally some sensor would also turn on the camera anytime the officer’s gun came out of the holster. I suspect battery life may limit this at the moment, but that’s the direction I’d like to see us go in.
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No more public sector unions. [Aside: Public sector unions are against the common good and even FDR said so, public sector employees collectively bargain to exploit all of society and are thus intrinsically immoral and undesirable.] In the specifics of police departments their unions are the single biggest problem with police officer discipline and changing police procedures. They have no intrinsic right to unionize, and it should be taken away. All of the labor law extant actually did not provide for unions, it was Presidential action that expanded organization rights to Federal employees and many States followed suit. But there is no enshrined Federal law that requires State and local police forces be permitted unions, and they should be abolished along with all government unions. The military isn’t unionized and neither should the police be.
No, police abuse isn’t a valid reason for union busting. Public employees should be able to negotiate for wages, benefits, and work safety issues just like anyone else. And what does the military have to do with it, other than elicit the “oooh, the troops” response from some?
Someone else may have already pointed this out, but I suspect police overzealousness is incentivized by using arrest frequency as performance metrics.
On one hand, I can see the value in using quotas to grade officers. Stopping this could result in cops just sitting in their cars all day snacking on donuts.
On the other hand, it’s easy to see how weighting this metric too heavily puts a lot of pressure on cops to bust people for crimes. A lazy cop will take the easiest way out by creating conflict where there was none, just to have a excuse to arrest someone. And so you get harassment. And when people react badly to the harassment, then comes police violence. And then the victims get arrested and the cop who started the mess gets a gold star.
Cops that protect the peace by being peaceful themselves will not be able to compete with their more aggressive brethren. That is sad.
If body cams become the norm and there is an auditing process to act as a check for abuse, this problem could be mitigated. If officer has a stellar arrest record, but an audit of his videos show that 8 out of 10 of his interactions were precipitated by intrusive policing, then he needs to suffer penalties for that. No gold star. An officer with a mediocre arrest record should be rewarded if 10 out of 10 his interactions are deemed professional, non-hostile, and reasonable.
To be clear, I’m not saying I’m against cameras or technology with respect to police violence, but rather that I don’t think it’s an effective long-term solution. It’s a way to gather information, and to some degree, keep cops honest.
But it’s not going to do much other than keep the jerks from doing anything on camera that would get them in trouble. It’s not going to change any relationships between the cops and the communities they serve, unless you start nit-picking every cop’s interactions with the community, which is absurd, and likely counter-productive.
Technology might be a sort of like a brace on an injured knee, or surgery to cut out damaged cartilage, to use an analogy. What I’m suggesting is more like rehab, physical therapy and general fitness, in that if we choose police better, we train them better, and we engage them in the communities more, the need for technological solutions will be diminished.
bump makes some valid points. However, I think the relationship between many communities and their police departments is so damaged that these body cameras will be necessary for quite some time until there is some degree of mutual trust between police and community.
I agree.
I’ve already said, either in this thread or the other one currently running about police abuses, that we need to change the “blue wall” culture that permeates the police forces, and that we need to get unions on board with getting rid of bad cops.
But this is not a binary option, whereby we have bad unions or no unions. I believe that it’s possible to create a system whereby we have unions that look out for the genuine and reasonable interests of law enforcement—including pay and conditions, hours, pensions, and even the questions of misconduct and termination—while also being willing to get rid of bad cops.
I’m a member of a public sector union (California Faculty Association), and that union does some good stuff for us generally, and for individuals within the union. But i believe that my union should be able to protect some of the conditions that make my work life bearable, without being able to protect me from being fired due to malfeasance or incompetence.
I understand that creating a system where this is the case would require changing the culture of some unions, and also changing the mechanisms by which they work, but it’s a solvable problem.
Anyone can sue. Many local governments are risk averse. They will make a settlement regardless of the facts. So what you are advocating would very likely punish all of those who actually do their jobs and reward the lazy. It does not necessarily go after anyone who does wrong.
Not true. Usually only the county Sheriff is elected. In more rural areas those under him may handle most of the policing in the area. In the more built up areas the county sheriff’s office handle mostly issues relating directly with the court and not what you usually think of as police work. The heads of local police departments are usually appointed by the mayor. Of course throughout the country there are variations…
Suggestion: Next time, don’t turn aside from the path of reason into the fever swamp of nonsense.
The “exploit all of society” claim is nonsensical, except insofar as anyone and everyone who seeks a larger slice of the pie for himself does so, and in any case is (at best) a distraction from the topic at hand or (at worst) a cynical attempt to exploit the topic at hand in order to ride a personal hobby-horse.
I don’t know, maybe consider why the military isn’t allowed to unionize and you will answer your own question. Military service members are last I checked the single largest group of Federal employees.
There is simply no reason that public sector employees should be allowed to unionize, and the very people that created labor rights in this country recognized that the relationship between a government and its citizens, even when it employs those citizens, is never the same as between private management and labor and is thus never an appropriate place to allow a small group of citizens to threaten to deny essential government services in exchange for more money. That in effect allows government bureaucrats to legislate tax increases, destroying the entire foundation of our concept of elected government legislators being in charge of those issues.
The fact that you are able to repeat this over and over does not magically make it true.