How does this play for those who think that the majority of cops are bad? From that link:
8% is pretty low and I hope that is true. But the article itself still claims that with that 8% number that is still one incident per officer out of every 200 officers per year. I’m somewhat skeptical because that one in two hundred officers commit abuse per year is the very bare bones aspect of the problem. That excludes all the cops who got off and all the cops who were never reported. Any cop can tell you that in many crimes (like burglary) only about 20-30% of them are reported and of those only about 50% get an arrest and conviction. With some crimes like child molestation 95% are never reported. I would assume the same applies to police brutality. As a guess I’d figure 1 in every 30-50 cops committing abuse of civilians once a year is more realistic than 1 in 200 when you factor in all the cops who are never reported or not convicted.
That article also stated that civilian oversight committes caused more complaints, which they should.
“Almost one-fifth of large municipal police departments had a civilian complaint review board or agency within their jurisdiction. Those with such a civilian board had a high rate of complaints than those without such a board, 11.9 versus 6.6 complaints per 100 officers.”
Human rights watch admits that this is a serious problem and has recommendations for it.
Also there was a thread here a few months ago showing an undercover video a news station took. They sent someone into police stations and had him ask about how to fill out a form to complain about police conduct. In several of the situations the police refused to help the person and in some the police tried to intimidate the person out of reporting police abuse. So you have several filters.
-people who don’t think what happened counts as abuse
-people who never report brutality
-people who were intimidated out of reporting brutality
-people who were abused but didn’t see the officer held accountable
Naturally the opposite happens too, officers are reported for things that were not crimes and some were held accountable for lawful use of force.
Thats not to say all cops are evil, but we are not done reforming law enforcement. The old days of police openly torturing someone like they did in the 1930s seem to be over, but reforms still need to be made. Just that the 1 in 200 figure is the very bare bones aspect of police brutality.
Only 40-50% of crimes are reported to the police. You’d assume the same applies to crimes committed by the police and that the number is lower. Combine that with the questionably low conviction rate of 8% and you end up with a number far higher than 1 in every 200 officers commits an abuse of civilians per year.
Sorry Jeffrice but 25 yrs of journalism should have taught you anyone policing themslves will be generall exonerated. Cops bitching about occasionally getting criticism is not proof of fairness. They dont want at at all ever. Its us against them . You are not enough of a police appologist to please them, but you still find ways to minimize their affronts.You are a police appologist. I will not accept that police have a right to assault citizens. I do not accept them covering up police crime. No way I can accept them as being fair.
A few years ago I was involved in union activity.; One of the executives hit a guy walking the line. The police refused to take a police report. They said go to police station and file one. We went 4 times and the report kept disappearing. It was clear justice was not being served. We know who they work for and it is not the citizens.
I don’t think calling him an “apologist” is warranted. He may have more of a pro perspective to some of our cons, but I see no attempt to deny the possibility that there are too many bad cops out there, or minimize the negative impact they can have.
:smack:
Sometimes I think it’s worse that my dad has my password for my account.
My fault. Bad Trevor.
Aha! I knew it! Bhind every post that cops are crap is yet another experience in which a minor incident wasn’t treated like the federal crime somebody thought it should be. Why on God’s green earth would you want to file a police report because some hot-headed desk jockey smacked a picketer? What did you want, for the guy to go to prison? What did the picketer(s) do to provoke the attack? (Sorry, I gotta’ ask – just me being skeptical.) The cops were trying to tell you that your pissant little complaint wasn’t worth their time and frankly, as a taxpayer, I don’t think it was either. You walk a picket line (yeah, I did it in college for something I believed in deeply and still do) and you take a fist in the snout, and you stand there and bleed and let the bastards see that you’re willing to bleed for the cause. Otherwise, shut the hell up and get back to work.
Where is **Oakminster ** when I need him!?
It isn’t part of the police’s job to pass judgement. If a law was broken, it is their duty to investigate no matter how insignificant. If assault were too petty to be worried about, there wouldn’t be laws against that sort of thing.
Personally, if it were me, I wouldn’t have, but someone who wants to file one is perfectly within their right. And if it were one of my friends or family I’d want the hot-head to be held accountable for his actions. Why should he get a free pass because he was emotional?
Short of self-defense, there is no justification for assaulting someone.
Again, it’s not their job to decide which crimes get reported and which don’t.
Despite my agreeance with this particular stance, it’s still within a person’s right to report an assault.
The minor and of course imaginedi problem was an injury. It had legal ramifications if it didnt heal. But he probably required head thumping or maybe he wanted an ass kicking. And cops are the ones to do it.
I do not think the majority of cops are bad. But, they protect the ones that are. That is anathema to every thing they stand for. Are we interested in justice or not. They should get no special treatment at all. Bad cops should be rooted out.
Quite the contrary, police officers in the field and in the office are given tremendous discretion concerning what reports to pursue and which ones to not pursue, based on seriousness of the alleged offense and available personnel at the time. In cases of chronic staffing shortages, many minor offenses get short shrift. Everybody wants every crime investigated and solved; nobody wants to pay the taxes required for that kind of coverage. Yeah, cops make snap decisions in the field. They get paid to do that. People need to know more about police work before they start stating definitively what cops are and aren’t supposed to do.
Honestly, if you’ve never heard of the White Night Riots, I have to question if your knowledge of the history and character of the SFPD is reliable.
To be clear, I’m not at all anti-police, nor do I have any serious beefs with the way the police department in San Francisco is currently run. I was just objecting to your portrayal of the SFPD as innocent little lambs unfairly slandered by Clint Eastwood. They’ve had their share of brutal and unjustified actions against innocent citizens as well, even if not on the same scale as Chicago or Alabama.
Said discretion is precisely the problem.
It isn’t their duty. They are sworn to uphold the law, not make judiciary calls.
So, why should some underpaid, overworked cop get to decide whether or not my particular case is important enough to be investigated? That’s exactly the self-promoting system of corruption people are railing against.
No, apparently they get paid to lord their authority over the people they arbitrarily decide not to protect and serve.
And people need to know more about the other side of an argument before they pompously dismiss it as unknowledgeable.
As horribly unfair as I am. I have played softball with a team of cops and fireman for years… I do not dislike cops. Most are extremely professional and are good people. I have argued with them face to face about protecting bad cops. They just do it. They dont think it out because if something goes wrong they want to be protected too. They do look away when a cop steps over the line. Most of them do say theyhave a limit., or claim to. I have heard stories of cops carrying an unmarked weapon or knife to cover a bad shooting. But the fact is most never pull out their guns.
There is a cop in the nearest big city around here who got booted off the force. He had killed 6 citizens in self defense. The coincidence got too much. I believe he was prosecuted.
Five people too late.
A cop recently got killed in my city. It was the first one in 40 years. he was off duty and not in uniform when it happened.
In that time several party store clerks have been killed.
Yes, but when th “other side” makes its lack of knowledge so obvious, dismissing it isn’t pompous, just a matter of course. You try to refute my remarks by listing what you wish were true.
Cops are not automotons who switch into enforcement mode every time they detect an infraction. The state trooper who pulled me over for doing 5 mph over the speed limit has the discretion to raise the tolerance to 7 or even 10 mph, depending on conditions. The officers who pull two drunks apart in an alley fight have to decide on the spot who goes to jail and who doesn’t, whether to call an ambulance or leave it up to the guy who’s bleeding. They decide whether to cover the auto accident at the scene or have you file a desk report the next day, and if they do decide to cover the accident, they decide whether to issue a ticket, depending on whether there is enough evidence to support that ticket.
The most extreme discretion is when a cop pulls a gun; he or she has the discretion of whether to pull the trigger or not.
When discretion is taken away, everybody who slides off of a slick road gets a ticket, not because the cops chose to do it, but because somewhere, some cop made a choice a citizen doesn’t like and the city council decides to micro-manage the police department.
Do cops abuse that discretion? Of course, and I’ve already said so. And cops just don’t seem to understand that police work is like every other kind of public contact – piss off a customer once, and you’ve lost that customer’s good will for years, sometimes decades. The cops on the street have no concept of public relations. Will one single police officer read any of the posts in this thread? Of course not. Dialogue is not something cops are in love with.
By the way, Miller, I do remember reading about Harvey Milk’s murder and the preposterous defense mounted by Dan White’s attorney. San Franciscans can be as guilty of jury nullification, it appears, as Los Angelenos. I do remember there was violence in the aftermath of White’s sentencing, but it was not portrayed in any of the mainstream media as revenge by the police. Whether this was a failure by the media or brilliant PR by the city, I don’t know, but my bias is toward the former, since the latter requires more intelligence than is found in any City Hall.
As for portraying the SFPD as “innocent lambs,” that was not my intent, but rather that the punishment (Eastwood’s movies) didn’t fit the crimes, real or imagined. I suppose it has to do with proximity – most people in America would be surprised to learn that Denver has, throughout its history, suffered police corruption and criminality as bad as or worse than any in the country. Familiarity, it seems, really does breed contempt, and with good reason.
Discretion during the process of doing their duty and discretion of when they do their duty are two different things.