[HN Gopher] Why the US military usually punishes misconduct but ...
___________________________________________________________________
Why the US military usually punishes misconduct but police often
close ranks
Author : znpy
Score : 597 points
Date : 2020-06-26 09:12 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theconversation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theconversation.com)
| churchillracist wrote:
| "usually" punishes misconduct.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_LaVena_Johnson
|
| LaVena Lynn Johnson (July 27, 1985 - July 19, 2005) was an E3 in
| the United States Army. She was found dead in her tent. Her death
| was controversially ruled as a suicide, contrary to evidence of
| rape and battery leading many[1] to believe the United States
| Department of Defense covered it up.
| jeffdavis wrote:
| Does the quantity and quality of training play a role?
|
| I don't just mean telling recruits to behave well over and over,
| although maybe that helps, too.
|
| I suspect that training in general makes people behave a little
| better. If you are proud of your abilities, in your element, and
| confident that you are in control, I would like to think that
| results in a better outcome.
| digsy wrote:
| My experience of the non-US military is that soldiers have a
| lot more accountability.
|
| You are told the rules, standards are high and you are held
| accountable by your peers and superiors. Infractions are
| punished and squads are self-policing as you can be punished if
| one of your squad is caught breaking the rules. IE people are
| always looking over your shoulder and you are looking over
| theirs.
|
| And the US military seems very similar. Yes mistakes are made
| and crimes are committed but overall standards are high.
|
| Most cops I see in the US operate on their own (so no squad
| policing) and standards dont seem to be very high compared to
| non-US cops I know.
| hosh wrote:
| Interesting. Following that line of reasoning, I wonder how that
| played out with Chelsea Manning's court martial.
| seemslegit wrote:
| The military is made up from officers and enlisted personnel with
| the former selected and cultivated for higher personal
| characteristics. The police otoh while referring to themselves as
| officers is almost entirely enlisted-class material.
| VLM wrote:
| Not since the 60s. On paper its possible in theory during an
| era of low application numbers to become an officer in an
| obscure location with various waivers if you're lucky, but in
| practice the requirements to actually get hired as a P.O. are
| the same as military OCS.
|
| You pretty much need a clean and successful record with a
| bachelors degree for both paths.
|
| Degree inflation is a real thing, similar to how receptionists
| in 2020 need a degree in "something" whereas in the old days
| high school was enough. Boomer generation cops could get hired
| with a mere high school diploma but that was 50 years ago.
| seemslegit wrote:
| Enlisted-class does not mean uneducated or unskilled (in fact
| the skill is usually concentrated in senior enlisted and
| warrant officer levels) - it means educated for certain norms
| of conduct. What is the police equivalent of West Point where
| an honor code violation would see one expelled ?
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| > _On paper its possible in theory during an era of low
| application numbers to become an officer in an obscure
| location with various waivers if you 're lucky, but in
| practice the requirements to actually get hired as a P.O. are
| the same as military OCS._
|
| Today, the published requirement to apply to the NYPD is 60
| college credits (i.e. a two-year associate's degree). The
| LAPD only requires high-school graduation.
|
| On the other hand, Army OCS requires a four-year bachelor's
| degree.
| GoodJokes wrote:
| but police are also cultivated for uh, "higher personal
| characteristics," like the ability to follow unethical orders
| and kill brown people. So yea, just like the military.
| alecco wrote:
| Not a single mention of police unions.
| mafm wrote:
| Acoording to ethics class during basic training in the Australian
| army, the key difference between soldiers and civilians is that
| military personnel are under a legal obligation to follow all
| _lawful_ orders. The class highlighted that police are (by
| definition) civilian because police are only obligated to obey
| _reasonable_ orders.
|
| So a soldier refusing to carry out a lawful order that would
| result in near-certain death is guilty of a _crime_. A cop
| refusing to carry out the same order is entirely within their
| rights.
|
| And then there was also a lot of discussion of the difference
| between lawful and unlawful orders, My Lai, Nazi Germany, etc.
|
| Some Australian police recently refused to deal with people who
| had covid-19, because they argued it was unreasonably dangerous.
|
| At least in theory, military personnel are held to a much higher
| ethical standard than civilian police.
| k__ wrote:
| A lawful order doesn't have to be reasonable? Why?
| VLM wrote:
| This is pretty basic military law that a lawful order has a
| valid military purpose and is a clear and specific (and its
| generally documented in writing although verbal lawful orders
| do exist).
|
| Reasonable is in the sense of proportionate such as
| "reasonable force". Would a reasonable person do X Y or Z to
| reach a lawful goal?
|
| If you're guarding a nuclear bunker and there are signs
| everywhere about deadly force authorized and someone tries to
| break in, its a lawful order to shoot them although if
| they're a pizza deliveryman it may not be a reasonable order;
| although lets be realistic pizza deliverymen don't normally
| break into nuclear bunkers, so its perfectly reasonable to
| shoot a deliveryman-impersonator commando.
|
| A very off the cuff and unfair comparison is the people who
| decide acceptability of lawful orders are skilled
| knowledgeable bureaucrat lawyer types implementing the
| details of written laws and regs and higher level orders,
| whereas the people who decide reasonableness of orders are
| usually on the knowledge level of jury members. Or lawful
| orders are in the arena of goals, whereas reasonable orders
| are in the arena of how to do it.
| [deleted]
| im3w1l wrote:
| "Tell me what happened, without using any words containing
| the letter e, while standing on one leg"
|
| This is clearly not an order to break any rules or laws. It's
| also silly and unreasonable.
| oehtXRwMkIs wrote:
| Because lawful means based on law, and laws aren't always
| reasonable or even ethical.
| zip1234 wrote:
| A military unit may have to go do something with high
| casualties in order to achieve a higher objective.
| ludamad wrote:
| I wonder at what point you typically realize you've been
| put on a high-chance-of-casualty mission
| Sharlin wrote:
| Usually when you or your unit is told to take point. Or
| more generally, act as a forward element of some sort.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| When your mission prep includes pre-applying tourniquets
| to your arms and legs before you go for a drive.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| "Johnson, stand here and guard the road against the
| approaching enemy" is a lawful order, but it may not be
| reasonable under many different interpretations.
| mafm wrote:
| Because being ordered to do something that might get you
| killed isn't _reasonable_.
| guscost wrote:
| Another difference: The US Army doesn't have a fucking _union_.
| These are public-sector employees who are authorized to use
| deadly force, and they have union representation. How is even a
| single person OK with that?
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Does it mean the US should get a military police?
|
| Such an organization is called "gendarmerie" and it is seen in
| many countries like France, Italy, Spain, Argentina,... usually
| alongside the civilian police force.
| muricula wrote:
| Organizations like the FBI, the Department of Homeland
| Security, the National Guard, and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco
| and Firearms collectively fill a similar role to the
| gendarmeries in other countries. I'm not sure we need another
| armed federal agency to enforce the law.
| pas wrote:
| This seems like a simple case of local prosecutors and juries
| not doing their work. The officers were acquitted in the Rodney
| King trial too. (And that's why currently people are bending
| backwards trying to argue against Quantified Immunity - in
| civil suits! These cases should never even reach that level.
| These should be criminal cases, and the
| police/city/county/state/country should automatically
| compensate the wrongly harmed.)
|
| The federal level should step in and charge/indict officers.
| There might be obvious constitutional issues though. So the
| next best thing could be an oversight system that is actively
| against bias (racial, ethnic, and occupational in case of
| somehow the local system consistently siding with local
| police). Of course it's unlikely that such a law could survive
| for long and still be effective, so this probably some other
| solution is needed - maybe/probably something like tying
| federal funds to implementing better state-level oversight,
| etc.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| One is the interfacing the public. When you are interfacing with
| the public, you have an incentive to look your best. The easiest
| way is to not admitting fault, and the police have plenty of
| power to do that unfortunately. Military to the public is as a
| whole, so internally they don't have these powerful forces acting
| on them.
| fmajid wrote:
| The US Armed Forces' record on prosecuting sexual assault is
| abysmal. You have travesties like this:
|
| https://www.stripes.com/news/emails-show-general-warned-agai...
| austincheney wrote:
| Prosecution of sexual assaults in general is abysmal.
| otikik wrote:
| The article links one study baking the "blue wall of silence"
| claim, but provides only personal anecdotes backing the "US
| military usually punishes misconduct" claim. In fact, the last
| part of the article seems to imply the opposite (due to the
| influence of the current administration).
|
| I think a more appropriate title would have been "When facing
| misconduct, Police often close ranks. How does the US military
| handle it?"
| mattlondon wrote:
| Because in the military, the "enemy" are the
| terrorists/belligerent nation etc. Complaints from
| terrorists/enemy nations etc as they are in a battle situation
| are obviously disregarded. The army serve the public, and fight
| the enemy.
|
| For the police, the "enemy" is the public who are complaining
| about what the police are doing. It is them Vs us.
|
| To quote George W Bush, you are either with us or against us.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Having become very interested in police brutality for obvious
| reasons, I recently finished _Danger, Duty, and Disillusion: the
| Worldview of Los Angeles Police Officers_ [1] by Joan Barker, an
| academic book from 1999 that takes an anthropologist 's view to
| understanding the LAPD after the Rodney King riots, and pretty
| much the only work I could find that tries to understand the
| police officer mindset holistically.
|
| It is utterly fascinating and I highly recommend it, but one of
| the most interesting takeaways (consistent with this article) is
| that police officers quickly become utterly _disillusioned_ with
| the integrity of the police department as an _institution_. They
| complain about unfair recruitment and promotion policies, injured
| officers who become "disposable", an emphasis on quotas instead
| of applying the law consistently, on politicization of policing
| priorities, and above all the city always settling cases against
| police misconduct so that accused officers never get a chance to
| clear their name in court, when innocent.
|
| With this mindset, when they don't trust their own institution,
| the only people they trust are fellow officers -- not captains,
| not management, not the department, not the mayor. Which aligns
| with this article -- that Marines view the Marines as a
| trustworthy _institution_ , while police _don 't_ see their own
| police department in the same light.
|
| Now obviously police misconduct and brutality _exist_ and are a
| huge problem. But the book very much opened my eyes to the idea
| that it 's not only the behavior of police officers that needs
| better standards and accountability -- that treating police
| officers themselves better and more fairly may also be just as
| necessary to achieve full transparency and accountability. What
| if the "blue wall of silence" dissolved because police officers
| trusted their own institution, rather than just each other?
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Danger-Duty-Disillusion-Worldview-
| Off...
| snowwrestler wrote:
| I think it's important to understand the extent to which this
| is a culture, i.e. self-perpetuating in spite of outside
| influences.
|
| While your comment explains the origin of this culture... it's
| generally not as easy to change such a culture as it is to
| maintain it. Once a group of people believe that the rest of
| the world does not understand them or is against them, they are
| somewhat inoculated against efforts by the rest of the world to
| change them.
|
| New officers spend most of their time with older officers, not
| department leadership, not the mayor, not journalists, not
| activists, etc. Older officers teach younger officers how to
| act, and to some extent, what to believe. And, they act
| collectively to punish new officers who fail to adhere to this
| culture.
|
| This is well-enough known to become a storytelling trope: a
| young idealistic officer finds him- or herself facing not only
| criminals, but also the cultural inertia of the disillusioned
| existing police force, as they try to do the right thing.
|
| In many contexts, we accept that organizations have to end, and
| be replaced, to enact meaningful change. Companies go out
| business; political administrations lose elections.
|
| This is why the idea of "abolish the police" or "defund the
| police" might not be as crazy as it sounds on its surface. It's
| not that we don't need people who are paid to investigate crime
| and keep people safe... obviously we do. But police forces _as
| they currently exist_ may have too much cultural inertia to
| evolve the way they need to.
| int_19h wrote:
| Here's one real-world example of ending and replacing a
| police organization:
|
| "As a result of the 'Rose Revolution' of 2003, the government
| began a process of reform by _sacking all the existing
| police_ and creating a smaller force of new recruits, with
| the help of the international community. The reformed police
| force became one of the most well-regarded institutions in
| the country. "
|
| (https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/case-study/siezing-
| mom...)
| lrem wrote:
| Also note this is not about replacing a police force of a
| city. It's about replacing the police force of a country of
| 40 million people.
| rolleiflex wrote:
| Small correction, population of Georgia (the country) is
| ~4 million, not 40 million. I've been there multiple
| times, it's a country trying very hard to become more
| European and less Soviet. I wish them well.
| int_19h wrote:
| To be fair, the cold reboot was their way of dealing with
| the traffic police specifically, not all police.
|
| But still, the scale here is massive - they fired 30,000
| people overall, and half of them on a single day. And,
| just as in US today, the opposition claimed that such a
| disruptive measure would unleash a wave of criminal or
| reckless behavior (on the roads), and a lot of people
| would die as a result. That didn't happen.
| chiphack wrote:
| NYC is running this "experiment" now, with the NYPD
| having disbanded it's anti-crime units, and with many
| reported incidents not being responded to.
|
| New York City's homicide rate has hit a five-year high as
| the amount of people shot has jumped 42 percent compared
| to last year.
|
| Shooting incidents have gone up 86% since last year, and
| the murder Rate has gone up 47%.
|
| It's obviously a result of many different factors, but
| I'm not so sure the same thing that worked there would
| work here.
| freen wrote:
| Any change from approximately zero is large.
|
| Nyc has had several months without a single murder.
|
| When quoting percentages, it is helpful to establish what
| the baseline is and how it compares historically.
|
| Previous "slowdowns" by the NYPD have resulted in a
| drastic reduction in reported crime in NYC.
| https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-nypd-slowdowns-dirty-
| littl...
| jki275 wrote:
| Months without a single murder? Which months?
|
| Some historical data -- 2019 average just under one
| murder per day, 2020 is over one murder per day and up
| significantly from 2019 so far:
|
| https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_stat
| ist...
| Scarblac wrote:
| Disbanding all traffic police also seems to be very
| different from disbanding all anti-crime units.
| maest wrote:
| It sounds to me that:
|
| 1. The NYPD isn't trying to replace their police
| workforce. They've simply stopped policing.
|
| 2. The current social ajd political environment would
| cause a hike in crime-rate regardless of police action,
| and it's not easy to disentangle the effects.
| majormajor wrote:
| To put in very common language here: there are times when
| refactoring would be way more costly and difficult than
| rewriting.
| maest wrote:
| I suspect people here can comprehend the idea without
| requiring a tortured programming-related metaphore.
| garraeth wrote:
| Sounds like the US education system.
|
| Can we do the same thing there as we are doing with the police
| ("defund"/reboot)?
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| This would be a really good explanation as to why the blue wall
| is as pervasive as it is regardless of thr geographical
| location in US. I always wondered about and could not find a
| good reason ( after all, cities have their own PDs - you would
| think there would be maasive differences between them ).
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| Really? Catch-22 implies they military doesn't trust the
| military, or maybe I missed something.
| sukilot wrote:
| The weirdest thing is that police complain so loudly about
| public mistrust of police, when police don't even trust police.
| trianglem wrote:
| Give me a break. Police with the backing of their unions have
| some of the cushiest benefits. It really just sounds like a
| bunch of ungrateful people especially in light of how terribly
| they do their jobs.
|
| How do we truly fix the problem? We dissolve the police union
| and make police jobs less secure. They should feel the pressure
| of the fragility of their employment. It's not like it's a
| skilled position that is hard to fill.
| neonate wrote:
| That's interesting, but may not apply to the difference between
| military and police. My impression, confirmed by a family
| member who was in the army, is that soldiers are typically
| cynical about the military as an institution, and their loyalty
| is to fellow soldiers in their unit. It may in fact be typical
| of people in any large organization that their loyalty is to
| their team and not the institution. We're tribal creatures that
| way. And being subject to danger together strengthens bonding.
| watwatinthewat wrote:
| Former Marine here, and that's definitely true in this
| branch.
|
| I'll say though, those who think it will be better out almost
| always get out when they can. The limitation of those so
| disenchanted with the Corps they think using the GI Bill or
| doing some other work will be better is the end of their
| current contract. It provides a sure out. You have to
| actively convince yourself it doesn't suck enough to be
| trapped another 2-6 years, while other jobs you need to take
| an active role in leaving. Those who stay in think the Corps
| is worth it.
|
| I've been in a couple industries and never seen the same.
| People hate their job/occupation field/company, and stay in
| it for a million reasons. The military is nicely set up to
| spit out those who won't buy into the institution.
|
| I would be curious to compare percentages within military and
| police forces of those who agree that "life would be better
| out, but I don't have a better opportunity out". I'd put
| money on that subsection of the population being much lower
| for military than police (and most to all other industries
| really).
| klenwell wrote:
| > I've been in a couple industries and never seen the same.
| People hate their job/occupation field/company, and stay in
| it for a million reasons. The military is nicely set up to
| spit out those who won't buy into the institution.
|
| That's an interesting point. Some companies, like Netflix,
| are famous for doing something like this. Offering new
| hires a lump sum at the end of their probation if they wish
| to leave.
|
| I know the CEO of a company I once worked for was kinda
| enchanted with that idea. The company went so far to offer
| at one point a severance for anyone who wanted to leave
| within the next month. Small company but I'd guess based on
| what I heard 4-5% of company in the end took her up on it.
| And not necessarily the people she (or maybe just I) would
| have wanted to see leave.
|
| I still thought it was an interesting experiment and not a
| bad idea. Your comment here reinforces that inclination.
| mcguire wrote:
| Out of curiosity, if you found a member of your unit doing
| something illegal, would you report them? Does how illegal
| matter? How about who it is in your unit?
| watwatinthewat wrote:
| I was only in five years but saw lots of reports and made
| maybe half a dozen job-related (DOD order/Constitutional
| related offenses) and one EO-related.
|
| I'd say in general the likelihood of something illegal on
| the job being reported is high, while doing something
| illegal on one's off time (like something alcohol
| related) is much lower, especially among those of similar
| rank. On the former, my workplace had a huge layered nest
| of rules from all levels of organizations, and those
| being broken were taken seriously, though I did have to
| argue with my chain of command on whether certain ones
| needed to be reported. Some of that was due to particular
| bosses.
|
| Personal/Personal time ones, I heard of things that got
| reported and some that didn't. Those are definitely more
| mixed.
|
| On in versus out of unit, I can't really think of much
| mixing with people out of a unit. I think if there is a
| difference, someone is more likely to report on someone
| within one's own unit. From boot camp on, you learn the
| weak link ("shitbag") in your unit is going to get you
| all in trouble, so you need to make sure they're dealt
| with. In my first school after boot camp, there was a
| beach party reported that had underaged Marines among
| them. For like a month, the whole detachment on base,
| maybe 300 Marines, we're not allowed to be out of uniform
| even in our own room, among other punishments. Group/Mass
| punishments mean you either deal with a person who will
| lead to trouble or report them.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| This is an interesting line of discussion. Maybe the more
| relevant difference is group punishment/accountability.
| Could that be ported over the police (ignore the current
| political realities and unions etc ...)
|
| Can you fine a whole precinct for the abusive acts of one
| officer? Would that encourage more self-policing or more
| coverups? What kind of incentives could you build into
| the institution that would encourage "dealing with the
| shitbag"?
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Define: "deal with"
| watwut wrote:
| If you found your collegue does something illegal or
| unethical, would you? What about manipulative or lying
| management? Would you?
|
| Looking at our own companies and institutions, we are not
| eager to deal with own narcissists or quite cool but
| slightly asshole people.
|
| And the stakes for us are much lower and extend to which
| we form emotional ties to collegues is lower (shared
| ennemy, fear and struggle is bound to create those among
| cops).
| chucksmash wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. It makes sense that moving from an opt-
| out model to an opt-in model changes who stays, who goes,
| and how they feel about it but I never would have thought
| of it that way.
|
| Do you think there would be meaningful changes if the
| police moved to using terms of enlistment? I can imagine a
| hypothetical society where signing up to serve as a police
| officer/constable/whatever would be mostly something people
| did for a single term because they felt it was a civic
| duty, or maybe because it let them access govt-provided
| education benefits.
|
| Nobody on the right or left is really at ease with the
| militarization of police forces in terms of equipment,
| tactics, and outlook towards the policed. Even those who
| support harsh policing implicitly support it as something
| to be used against other people; no sane person would
| choose to be on the receiving end of a pre-dawn, no-knock
| warrant themselves.
|
| Given that, it'd be ironic if it was a different sort of
| militarization which improved the state of policing.
| watwatinthewat wrote:
| I honestly can't say I know if moving to opt-in would
| change police forces. I'd guess that military provisions
| of the GI Bill and training towards some tradecraft also
| help make the decision to leave easier. I wonder if there
| is something along those lines that could sweeten the
| deal to get people both in and out with less friction.
|
| Just riffing now, let's say you add benefits the police
| officer can use after a term (versus only retirement type
| benefits that incentivize staying in) and some means of
| assistance into a new occupational field within the first
| term. It would seem the force also gets the added
| benefits of (1) more and a wider range of recruits, (2)
| workers who hate it have incentive to leave or at least
| don't feel/aren't trapped, and (3) just guessing, but I
| imagine the cost of the whole force goes down. Between a
| drop in average time in service of police officers due to
| more dropping out and fewer staying to retirement, the
| cost of the whole police force would drop. The new
| benefits' costs are an offset, though.
|
| Edit: I wonder how an ROTC-type program would do. Make
| the rule police officers need a degree. That gets the
| level of officer up. The department pays for the four
| year degree and perhaps some living stipend, but you
| commit to an equal number of years on the force. As an
| office approaching end of that first term, you're making
| some new-ish public worker pay despite having a good
| Bachelor's degree (and no student loan debt). That gives
| incentive to leave.
|
| Having to graduate first is a definite pro for the
| department, but it does run into problems if the recruit
| student fails a class, doesn't graduate, etc. Not sure
| how you deal with that. Maybe they work a lower level job
| for the department while in school to help offset that.
| austincheney wrote:
| Army officer here. I can speak a bit to this as somebody who
| has conducted a few 15-6 investigations.
|
| https://usacac.army.mil/sites/default/files/documents/sja/15.
| ..
|
| The loyalty of leadership all the way up and down to the
| fresh E5 is generally to the process first and to the favor
| of the soldier second. This ensures the proper steps are
| followed with the necessary supporting documents with keeping
| all parties informed and protected. The goal is benefit or
| improve them opposed to harming a soldier unless the facts
| dictate the soldier has violated a law or is at risk of
| harming themselves or others.
|
| People are generally eager to do what they believe is the
| right thing, which means disclosing all manners of
| information. As an investigating officer my job is to gather
| the relevant facts of an incident, write a report, disclose
| any additionally discovered violations, and provide a
| recommendation to a commanding officer. The commander, in
| consultation with a lawyer, will impose a legal action, order
| a change, or recommend the case to a more appropriate venue.
|
| Never would an investigator falsify a report because they
| will be prosecuted as a criminal. It's simply not worth it to
| protect people who are typically strangers to the
| investigator. After all the system will generally look out
| for the soldier but not at the risk of other people. With as
| much support and aid as the military provides its hard to
| empathize with breaking the law.
|
| Perhaps the biggest differences between the military and
| police that I have observed is that the military attempts to
| resolve problems at the lowest level the law/policy allows.
| Ignoring misconduct is generally a symptom of toxic
| leadership that will eventually grow out of control. There is
| also no risk of civil suits.
|
| For police it appears misconduct is either a slap on the hand
| that means little or the community is throwing the books at
| those guys with life destroying prison time and police can
| also be sued. That imposes a lot of risks that don't exist in
| the military. It's not just the officer that's at risk but a
| law suit on top of a criminal prosecution imposes financial
| harm on their family which adds to the risk pressures.
|
| Also policing entails far greater ambiguity at great quantity
| of decisions than the military typically handles. It's one
| thing to blame a person for something after the fact but it's
| different when you are there in the moment and have to make
| hard decisions under time pressure.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > For police it appears misconduct is either a slap on the
| hand that means little or the community is throwing the
| books at those guys with life destroying prison time and
| police can also be sued.
|
| The bar is _amazingly_ high for a personal suit to even be
| _allowed_ against a police officer. Most unions have it in
| their contract that the department/city/county has to
| assume good faith and defend their officers, including
| defending their 'qualified immunity'. I'd argue that isn't
| a real threat to most officers, and if it is, there's a
| reason behind it.
|
| Similar for me as a paramedic. If I'm operating within my
| scope of practice, within my departments policies and
| procedures, medical direction or my own reasonable clinical
| judgment, I'm not getting sued personally. The County and
| the Department are hit first, and even in the event that
| somehow through that, I'm personally sued, my Department's
| policy is that as long as I was within policy and
| procedure, they and their insurance will indemnify.
|
| It would take something outrageously egregious. Near here
| we had a situation where EMS was called out for a death,
| with no coroner/ME/funeral home available. EMS took the
| body to the fire station for temporary storage, no more
| than a couple of hours at most.
|
| All good so far.
|
| Less good: allowing personnel to practice intubation of the
| body in the hallway, without consent. Allowing _non
| medical_ personnel (front office reception) to also
| practice. Worst: be doing this still when the person's
| family shows up at the fire station.
|
| Even that didn't result in all the lawsuits you'd think it
| might. (Sadly. That was absolutely atrocious, despicable,
| unethical).
| kop316 wrote:
| Heh, this sounds like the Army Version of a Commander's
| Directed Inestigation:
|
| https://www.af.mil/Portals/1/documents/ig/CDI_Guide_18-Febr
| u...
|
| Like you said, the invstigator of a CDI is someone who is
| higher rank than everyone involved (so there's no attempt
| at sway), and someone very far removed from everyone else.
| This way the CDI can provide a fair and impartial judgement
| of a situation and if it should lead to further action.
|
| One of the biggest take aways that I had was when the
| accused was a straight up jerk to me, and made my
| investigation as difficult as they possibly could. I am
| still amazed that someone whose livelyhood was in my hands
| would be so rude to that person. It would have been also
| incredibly easy for me to record facts to sway the
| information I had to the point that the accused would have
| gotten in more trouble (I did not do that).
|
| I say that to put myself into the shoes of a police
| officer. I can only imagine how that would grate on someone
| who had to deal with it on a semi-routine basis.
| austincheney wrote:
| It's probably almost identical. In the Army the
| investigating officer does not have to be a higher grade
| to run the investigation, but a higher grade preferred
| because UCMJ requires a higher grade to charge an officer
| with a crime.
|
| Yeah, witnesses and the accused have always been very
| straight with me because, as you said, their careers are
| in my hands. I believe if somebody were being hostile or
| deceptive with me I would dig deeper.
|
| My biggest learnings from these is be careful what you
| wish for. If somebody is reporting a crime or requesting
| an IG investigation I will be completely objective and
| impartial. However, when you start digging into people
| like that all kinds of incidental unrelated private
| things can shake out from discovery, and if any of those
| things are a violation of ethics there is now grounds for
| a separate additional investigation.
| kop316 wrote:
| I can't talk about police, but some misc. thoughts on why the
| military is different:
|
| - Military does NOT have qualified immunity in the same ways
| a police force does.
|
| - I am an Authorizing Official for DTS (aka, I approve travel
| for other people in my unit). I know very well if I make a
| mistake, I can be personally liable for paying back the US
| government. And I know for a fact that it is checked
| incredibly rigorously. I have made people redo travel
| vouchers if they are off by even a cent, because I will get
| into trouble for it.
|
| - Likewise, I do contracts with civilian companies. Likewise
| with DTS, I can be held personally liable for "directing" a
| company to do something that costs the government money. In
| our required training, they have an example where a
| government person makes an "offhand" remark to use better
| paint (ACQ 201A in case you are curious), because it will do
| better. The entire module is how it ended up costing $20,000,
| and the government almost went after that person to make up
| the difference. This is why if you work with the government,
| and they make a suggestion, they make it absolutely clear
| that it is not to be considered direction.
|
| - The military (in at least it's officers) ingrain the fact
| that the US government holds you in a position of trust. This
| includes faith in your integrity and that you are held to a
| higher standard. Likewise, the military ingrains the idea of
| "perception is reality". The concept is do not even do things
| that could have the perception of compromising your integrity
| or your position of authority. And yes, you can get in
| trouble for doing things that even have the perception of
| wrong doing.
|
| - Investigators (OSI, JAG, IG, etc.) are in very separate
| chains of command, and they take their job very, very
| seriously. There is no "blue wall of silence" to block
| investigations, as that would go very, very badly for the
| individuals involved with that. Same with reprisal. If you
| reprise against an individual who made a complaint (EEO,
| fraud, waste, and abuse, etc), you will be in a much more
| world of hurt than just the complaint. This is re-enforced
| from the top all the way to your first line supervisor.
|
| - For commanders, consider what is shown here:
|
| https://www.af.mil/Portals/1/documents/csaf/afi1_2.pdf
|
| "All commanding officers and others in authority in the Air
| Force are required:
|
| (1) to show in themselves a good example of virtue, honor,
| patriotism, and subordination;
|
| (2) to be vigilant in inspecting the conduct of all persons
| who are placed under their command;
|
| (3) to guard against and suppress all dissolute and immoral
| practices, and to correct, according to the laws and
| regulations of the Air force, all persons who are guilty of
| them; and
|
| (4) to take all necessary and proper measures, under the
| laws, regulations, and customs of the Air Force, to promote
| and safeguard the morale, the physical well-being, and the
| general welfare of the persons under their command or charge.
|
| -Title 10 USC SS 8583
|
| Accordingly, commanders must be above reproach, bothmorally
| and ethically, and exemplify Air Force Core Values and
| standards in their professional and personal lives."
|
| These are not just words on paper. If you hear about someone
| being relieved of command due to a "loss of confidence in
| that individual", it is related to the above quotation.
|
| EDIT: A couple of other thoughts:
|
| - If you look at the oath of enlistment and the oath of
| office (what officer's recite), we obey the lawful orders of
| those above us. We are also told that it is our duty to
| disobey unlawful orders, and if you obey them, say you were
| just obeying orders is NOT an excuse.
|
| - Further down, there was a discussion on My Lai Massacre and
| Guantanamo Bay. When I went to Squadron Officer School (a
| requirement for Captains), we discussed ethics for at least 2
| weeks out of our 6 week curriculum, and we did an extensive
| study of why My Lai and Guantanamo Bay happened (We spent a
| full day on each). This was so we could learn form mistakes
| of our past.
|
| - Anyone in the Air Force will know the "Air Force core
| values". The first one is "Integrity first". https://www.doct
| rine.af.mil/Portals/61/documents/Volume_2/V2...
| cpeterso wrote:
| Thank you for sharing! Your inside perspective of how the
| military's organizational structure was designed is very
| interesting.
| kop316 wrote:
| You're welcome! If you have questions about it I am happy
| to share my thoughts on it.
| neilv wrote:
| Thank you for communicating that here. I spent about a
| decade working in some niches of flight safety. What you
| say matches up with my very positive impressions of the
| sense of integrity and duty that seemed implicit in the
| people and processes.
| kop316 wrote:
| Nice! I spent four years in flight test, and safety is
| truly no joke in the flight test world.
|
| For others, if I named one thing I have seen the Air
| Force care about more than anything else, it would be
| safety. Flight Test investigations are actually very
| interesting, because there are two investigations:
|
| - The safety investigation
|
| - The criminal investigation
|
| NOTHING you say in the safety investigation can be used
| against you in the criminal investigation.You could have
| violated every rule in the book and admit to it in the
| safety investigation, and it will not be used against you
| in the criminal investigation. That is because above all
| else, the Air Force does NOT want whatever happened to
| happen again.
| jki275 wrote:
| Navy has the same regulations on safety investigations,
| for the same reasons.
| GVIrish wrote:
| That's an interesting and I think valuable angle to all of
| this. Trust in institutions is absolutely key to the proper
| functioning of government, but it is also key to maintaining
| ethical behavior in any institution. If you can't trust your
| institution to do the right thing, it means you're less likely
| to speak up when there's wrong doing, and it emboldens those
| who commit wrongdoing. Over time one can see how this system
| calcifies into a culture of unaccountable behavior.
|
| This is why the solution to police misconduct problems is going
| to require systemic change. There needs to be independent
| investigations and oversight of misconduct, and better systems
| to support whistleblowers. Those that are terminated for
| misconduct should not be reinstated and shouldn't be able to
| become officers elsewhere. In the military, you can't re-enlist
| if you've been dishonorably discharged, why should officers who
| abused their power be allowed to regain that power?
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Trust in institutions is absolutely key to the proper
| functioning of government,
|
| There's an entire thesis to be found in "high trust" vs "low
| trust" societies; higher trust overall provides huge
| benefits, as there's less need for checking and defensive
| behaviour, and people can more readily trust others to help.
|
| But a high trust society, built up over decades, represents a
| resource that can be looted by individuals exploiting that
| trust for their own benefit. Or simply sowing mistrust for
| entirely partisan reasons.
|
| The Eddie Gallagher pardon is an egregious part of that: at
| no point has anyone advanced the argument that it was a
| misconviction, the purpose of pardoning him is to signal the
| willingness of the US government to commit war crimes. It's
| hugely destructive of trust for no good reason.
| greedo wrote:
| I know a few old dudes who did a lot of swimming around
| Coronado. They've been out of the service since before the
| turn of the century, all with more than 20 years in.
|
| They've said that someone like Gallagher wouldn't have had
| the career path in the 80s that he had 20 years later. The
| SEALs were smaller, tasked less often, and tighter knit.
| Someone would have had a private talk with him, the culture
| would have helped him direct some tendencies differently.
|
| Now that SOC gets all the funds and glory, the talent pool
| has slipped. The institution has lowered its standards, and
| the old hands have retired, to be replaced with young guns.
|
| This isn't unique to the SEALs and other groups, the entire
| military has been experiencing a degradation in leadership.
| Whether it's the USN that can't buy a decent ship, nor sail
| without colliding with other vessels, to an Army that has
| has wasted so much money on trying to buy new helicopters
| (Comanche), new artillery (Crusader), or even radios. The
| ChairForce can't buy a new tanker properly, and has burned
| through so many airframes flying donuts in the mideast.
|
| When the leadership of institutions fail, the results are
| ugly. We're seeing that across many police departments in
| the US, but it's not limited to just law enforcement.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I think the USA as a whole suffers from a general
| disinterest among the best and brightest to pursue
| important careers.
|
| It's a topic that's on my mind a lot. On one hand, I'm
| disappointed to see important institutions constantly
| lowering their standards, but on the other, I don't want
| these important jobs either.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| For proof, look at the average pay for EMTs (less so
| paramedics). Oftentimes it's minimum wage, and if you
| make more than $12/hr on an ambulance, you're in the
| minority.
|
| While a lot of the transports done are not at all
| critical, I know in my time as an EMT and paramedic of
| all the people that would not make it alive to the
| hospital if not for EMS.
|
| And I started at $9.60/hr 8 years ago as an EMT trying to
| get patient contacts for paramedic school.
| greedo wrote:
| Other than a great marketing job by the US military, we
| don't do anything to attract the best and brightest to
| government service. Reagan did a good job of poisoning
| that well.
| FabHK wrote:
| > Trust in institutions is absolutely key to the proper
| functioning of government
|
| There is this fascinating 2011 paper [1][2] showing that this
| trust is very long lasting: They found more trust in public
| institutions in those areas that had been part of the (well-
| run) Habsburg Empire a century earlier.
|
| [1] _The Empire Is Dead, Long Live the Empire! Long-Run
| Persistence of Trust and Corruption in the Bureaucracy_ [pdf]
| http://ftp.iza.org/dp5584.pdf
|
| EDIT to add:
|
| [2] A summary and nice map:
| https://voxeu.org/article/habsburg-empire-and-long-half-
| life...
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| > why should officers who abused their power be allowed to
| regain that power
|
| Unions.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Ironically this is "broken windows" theory applied to the
| police: if they don't see the rules fairly enforced inside
| their own organisation, how can they enforce them outside?
| tehjoker wrote:
| This article is basically undone by the existence of this
| headline:
|
| "Trump authorizes sanctions against International Criminal Court
| officials"
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/11/politics/icc-executive-order/...
|
| "The latest move comes months after the ICC authorized a probe
| into alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan by US and Afghan
| forces as well as alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity
| committed by the Taliban. It also follows a push by the court's
| Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda to investigate potential crimes
| committed by Israel against the Palestinians -- a prospect about
| which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said they were "gravely
| concerned.""
|
| ...
|
| "The ICC prosecutor Bensouda sought authorization in November
| 2017 to open an investigation into crimes connected to the
| conflict in Afghanistan. According to documents from the time,
| Bensouda's office determined that there was "a reasonable basis
| to believe" that members of the Afghan National Security Forces,
| the US armed forces and the CIA had committed "war crimes,"
| including torture and rape. "
| stefantalpalaru wrote:
| > usually
|
| https://www.gq.com/story/male-rape-in-the-military
| eiji wrote:
| The military is a national organization with a hierarchy
| stretching from the first-day-on-the-job cadet all the way into
| the White House. In the US, almost every police department is
| it's own thing. I'm not aware of any national organization.
| Usually the mayor is the top of the hierarchy. That means a
| faceless bureaucracy, towns and states removed, will deal with
| individual concerns in the military. Not a known person three
| miles from your house.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Yeah having a tight value set and tight enforcement of
| integrity violations among other values is certainly a function
| of the federal structure.
|
| Police don't have that. It's too localized and going beyond the
| current state of affairs requires on a police chief with
| ethical super powers to really enforce things, as it would be
| starting from Base 0 with an Elliot Ness-like reform.
| Shivetya wrote:
| and these same city officials, especially mayors, are
| politically connected to their police departments doubly so if
| they are unionized; not all police are unionized. politicians
| learn real fast to not go up against any organization backed by
| a public employee union. police and educators are the absolute
| worst in this regard.
|
| I keep looking back at how many bemoan corporate money in
| politics and how references that Citizen's United was the cause
| but completely ignore that DNC platform while supporting that
| completely ignores these unions contributing; in fact one
| certain Senator's webpage is explicit in only using corporation
| examples. Hell that same person wants you to pay for the DNC
| and RNC conventions; its criminal we pay for their convention
| security as is
|
| Simple reason, when people are paid by tax coffers that means
| their unions are and in turn it just becomes one giant slush
| fund for politicians who want to remain in power.
| save_ferris wrote:
| Not just that, but much of the hierarchy above police forces is
| opaque if it exists at all.
|
| The Austin PD chief has come under intense scrutiny for his
| department's handling of various arrests and protests over the
| past few months, and after roughly half of the city council
| called on him to resign, it was reported that neither the city
| council or the mayor could legally fire him.[0]
|
| The city manager, which is appointed and not elected, has the
| power to demote the police chief, but the state does not permit
| a police chief to be terminated.
|
| Long story short, none of Austin's leaders have the power to
| fire the police chief.
|
| 0: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/06/18/austin-police-
| chief-...
|
| edit: added reporting
| pjc50 wrote:
| Hence "defund the police": they may not be able to fire the
| police chief, but they _can_ give him an ultimatum to quit or
| have the budget from which his salary is paid reduced to
| zero.
| pc86 wrote:
| That's not even remotely how it works. You can't legally do
| that.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| The city could absolutely cut the police budget to $0.
| klyrs wrote:
| > ... or have the budget from which his salary is paid
| reduced to zero.
|
| That doesn't sound legal -- at the least, he could sue the
| city/state for those wages
| erichocean wrote:
| County sheriffs are similarly "protected", in that they have
| to be voted out in most cases in the next election.
| sukilot wrote:
| That's fine. They are accountable to the electorate who can
| recall them.
| closeparen wrote:
| It's less fine when the electorate consistently delivers
| a mandate to brutalize a minority population, or just
| isn't paying enough attention to such down-ticket races
| to care.
| kanox wrote:
| Creating a new federal body to specifically deal with use-of-
| force by law enforcement could correct many issues by
| conducting investigates in a more impartial manner.
|
| It could also issue nation-wide guidelines such as making it
| impossible to turn off body cameras.
| thephyber wrote:
| > could correct many issues by conducting investigates in a
| more impartial manner.
|
| Police already think that Obama's DoJ was incredibly
| political and it did exactly this[1] when issuing more
| consent decrees (source: police in family). Putting a new
| "Space Force" brand on the box doesn't make officers trust
| either their own brass or the feds more than they did.
|
| There's no solution to a lack of trust here except perhaps a
| massive airing of grievances and more transparency. People
| like me don't trust that police officers charged with crimes
| will ever be impartially prosecuted by the same prosecutors
| who need their hard work on all other cases (departments and
| unions have actually tanked careers of DAs and ADAs who have
| aimed to cross the "think blue line of silence"). In my city,
| the police union used propaganda and threats to scare an
| independent civilian oversight (private attorney acting in a
| public role) into quitting his oversight role.
|
| [1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-the-doj-
| refor...
| fellInchoate wrote:
| Wouldn't a federal body less reliant on a favorable
| disposition from the police be the answer here?
|
| Few are going to welcome more oversight of themselves, but
| it seems more and more like what's required. That oversight
| doesn't seem to work when it's locally based, for all the
| reasons you've outlined.
| LoSboccacc wrote:
| Americans: we don't trust authority, most of our Constitution
| deals with limitations to authorities and opens with a stern
| remainder that power comes from the will of people trough
| armed militias
|
| also Americans: we need more authority to deal with the
| untrustworthy authorities
| brigandish wrote:
| I see you're being downvoted, perhaps for the directed
| satire (something, as a Brit, I enjoy... it is our natural
| habitat:) but it's a legitimate point.
|
| I read a book by Chomsky (I forget which) in which he went
| through why the American democratic system was corrupt. It
| was very compelling. His solution, however, would be to
| "guard the guards" with more state apparatus and a more
| involved electorate. This is where he and I digressed
| because it's obviously pie in the sky and open to the same
| kinds of corruption. Turtles all the way down.
|
| Less is more when it comes to the state - smaller
| government as a principle can be extended to the police by
| defunding and not abolishing. Remove their military
| vehicles, remove their ability to get no-knock warrants and
| other vast overreaches of power, and strengthen the power
| of the citizenry. Has that (less government, more
| individual rights) ever not worked?
| GVIrish wrote:
| I see this much like the Civil Rights Act. There was no way
| segregation was going to be ended without significant
| legislation and enforcement from the federal government.
| Bottom line is that the sort of large scale reform needed to
| end systemic problems of police misconduct is going to be
| extremely difficult to achieve via local reforms. Congress
| needs to end qualified immunity, end civil asset forfeiture,
| increase federal oversight, and potentially write new laws
| governing the use of body cams.
|
| One idea I've seen from police reformers is a 'Missing Video
| Presumption' law. The basic idea is that if the body cam (or
| vehicle cam) footage goes missing and there is a conflicting
| account of events, the court will presume the video would've
| corroborated the civilian's version of events. This would
| give an extremely strong incentive to not turn off cameras or
| sabotage video as police have done in a number of cases.
| int_19h wrote:
| Most large PDs are in urban areas that are either in blue
| states, or that are blue islands in red states. They also
| tend to be the most problematic. So this problem can
| largely be solved at municipal level - if there's political
| will for it.
| kanox wrote:
| A lot of these policing issues seems to come from
| progressive localities so I'm not sure it's even due to
| government unwillingness to solve the issues.
|
| Most organizations are really extremely bad at dealing with
| internal abuses which is why external watchdogs could work
| very well.
|
| Mandatory body cams make a lot of sense but if you need to
| deal with the opposition of 1000s local police unions it's
| not going to happen very quickly.
| GVIrish wrote:
| _> A lot of these policing issues seems to come from
| progressive localities so I 'm not sure it's even due to
| government unwillingness to solve the issues._
|
| Part of the reason for this is that police unions fight
| vigorously against reform and police unions are powerful
| in local politics. That's why some police departments
| ended up getting disbanded by their municipalities to
| restart from the ground up.
|
| It seems like opposition to body cams in general isn't
| strong, but the real fight will come when stronger laws
| are proposed for when body cams need to be on, penalties
| for not having them on, and when footage must be
| released.
| greedo wrote:
| External watchdogs are only as good as their leaders. For
| example, the Seattle PD was recently under a consent
| decree with the Department of Justice over civil rights
| abuses. Yet they still beat the shit out of people
| expressing their 1st Amendment rights.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Military careers are very short, sans being an officer
|
| Police careers tend to be life-long.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Culture of silence comes from the top, or more realistically
| mid-career people who have bought into the system. Your
| proverbial E4 (junior enlisted with some clout) is the same as
| a early but motivated patrolman, and those are the parties that
| do the locker room harassment. But their direction and latitude
| to behave that way comes from that former party.
|
| With that in mind...
|
| The police leadership that condones the integrity violations
| required to stay silent are peers to the E6-8's/O4s-O5s who are
| in the military for 7-14 years and are vectoring towards a
| career. While bad apples exist in those parties, and those
| parties have enough influence to create culture of silence,
| it's never sustainable.
|
| So, life-long careers exist in both for parties with influence
| enough to do a wall of silence, both have similar danger to the
| job, but the military has a fraction of these ethical
| shortcomings police are experiencing.
| VLM wrote:
| It doesn't seem to actually explain anything. I was in the
| military and have some cop friends so maybe I can explain the
| divergent sociology:
|
| Post police academy, AFAIK police never experience collective
| punishment. In the army its normal if someone loses a weapon to
| have everyone doing a few pushups. When you saw your squadmate
| without a rifle, why didn't you ask them wtf they're doing? From
| large to small scale cops experience punishment alone and
| military suffers as a group. Small crime breeds large crime and
| (pardon the pun) military simply self-polices more than cops as a
| leadership style.
|
| I can't blame cops too much as they have to deal with
| demographics where saving face is important and one cop dropping
| another cop for pushups because they lost their summons-writing
| pen is impractical. Which brings up sociological difference where
| the enemy for cops is 40% to 100% of their daily interactions and
| is up close and personal, so screw these guys I'm breaking bad,
| whereas 100% of human interactions in the military is with
| buddies and the bad guys don't speak our language and the
| firefights are at 25 or more yards in a very abstract sense.
| Essentially cops spend most of their time with people who hate
| them so "getting even" makes more sense, whereas military spends
| nearly 100% of their time with friends and why would you want to
| screw over your buddy?
|
| The military bakes corporate style reorganization into the cake,
| you can expect a PCS move around the world every two or so years,
| its very unusual to have TV or Movie style old timers who've been
| in the unit forever. Even in the Reserves if you are in long
| enough to get E-5 or E-6 you're almost certainly going to have to
| move to get that next promotion and higher level leadership
| always rotates even in the reserves. Noobs don't even know HOW to
| be corrupt for the first quarter of their time on station. Its a
| valuable learning experience and filters out people who can't
| learn quickly on the job, which for military is good. Cops on the
| other hand will have some old sgt who's been sitting on the same
| desk for 25 years and the good ole boys network of questionable
| activities formed decades ago and ...
|
| The military is highly paid; civilians don't understand that when
| I got out (a quarter century ago) the current pay rate for me
| would be just under $3K/month, but that's not before tax like
| civilians, that's after getting housing, food, insurance,
| essentially all I have to pay for $3K/mo would be bar bill and
| car expenses. Cops on the other hand get paid approximately as
| much as public school teachers aka F-all not much in a pyramid
| scheme where people scream about the top of the pyramid making
| $100K but realize the top of the pyramid is incredibly small
| (like pro sports salaries) and the base of the pyramid is an
| immense number of people making $50K/yr or often far less.
| Speaking of pyramids, in the military every 5-yr experience E-4
| makes the same $3K/mo after all expenses are paid, whereas with
| both cops and teachers its a pyramid where everyone has to
| compete to get up to that $100K/yr contract, there's a different
| attitude when you're competing vs when you all get the same
| paycheck.
|
| Edited to add another important sociological point: Cops usually
| work alone or in a very small group like two people. Two people
| can keep a secret, even three. The smallest "working group" I can
| think of in the military would be special forces teams with at
| least 4 people, but the rank and file work in groups who can't
| keep secrets. You can't expect to catch a cop who works alone or
| with a buddy, so things get worse and worse until they make the
| news in a big way; whereas the first time someone screws up in
| the military they generally get caught and kicked out so things
| rarely get worse over time.
|
| Note that outsiders think the military to cop pipeline is smooth.
| It CERTAINLY is NOT, and my buddies complain a lot about the
| sociological differences mentioned above along with others.
| Outsiders think they just wear a different uniform, but its
| really a wild cultural shift to go from military to being a cop.
| Maybe its the smallest shift to go from MP to civie police
| compared to other vocations, but its still a big shift in an
| absolute sense.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| This pretty much on the mark. I'd only add that even though the
| military is uber hierarchical, in good unit's it can be seem
| fairly flat. Everyone does PT together every day and when I was
| in the CO would be doing pushups and running with a section
| every morning. It's a closer team and less bureaucratic
| leadership so standards are kept in check by the collective.
| Even though there were pay and rank differences, everyone was
| in it together where in the police it seems very much like
| you're on your own.
| alistairSH wrote:
| _Essentially cops spend most of their time with people who hate
| them_
|
| How much of policing is actually responding to violent crime vs
| traffic infractions or minor spats between neighbors?
|
| That the general populace is afraid of cops is largely of the
| cops own doing. If they weren't power-hungry thugs, even when
| executing traffic enforcement, they wouldn't have this problem.
| VLM wrote:
| I probably failed to be clear enough, sorry.
|
| Imagine walking up to a group of people at work as your job.
|
| If you're a cop, 99% certain someone in that group, if not
| the entire group, is VERY unhappy to meet you. Doesn't matter
| if you're shooting a bank robber in progress or handing out
| speeding tickets or infinite domestic violence cases, nobody
| likes you. Most folks can take being universally hated for an
| entire career plus or minus alcoholism and such, but a
| microscopic minority will fight back leading to massive
| unrest and social problems.
|
| If you're in the military, with microscopic career field
| exceptions, every group you walk up to is your buddies you
| work and party with, who wanna hang out and have fun with
| you.
|
| One job field is going to have occasional fatal anger issues,
| and the other job field is going to have DUI/party-hard
| issues.
| GoodJokes wrote:
| You were clear enough I think. Imagine someone walking up
| to with you with a gun and bullet proof vest. This person
| also represents a clear a history of oppressing and killing
| innocent people for the sole reason of domination and
| imperialism.
|
| The difference between a normal civilian and a cop is that
| essentially at this point, for your own safety, all cops
| should be considered guilty and dangerous. This is logical
| conclusion based on all evidence. If we are going to shut
| down society for something as dangerous as Covid, jesus,
| people should be sheltering in place in fear of the US
| police state.
|
| The problem is that the job of police even exists. It is
| not a justice based institution.
| TheCondor wrote:
| Well they are certainly working hard to make it 99% certain
| that a member of every group hates them... It isn't
| anywhere near that bad though; people come to the police
| for help. There are suburban and small town police that
| probably go days without actually interacting with
| civilians in an official capacity regularly. Maybe some
| sort of rotation system at the state or county level would
| help.
|
| A stark difference is respect. The command of it, the
| teaching of it, really everything. OCS tends to not fuck
| around when drilling proper bearing in to potential
| officers. Enlisted salute officers, period. know them or
| not? It doesn't matter, they are an officer and you show
| that respect. Police arm themselves to demand that respect
| and authority, granted they are sometimes in hostile
| situations and need that but generally they really don't.
|
| I'm disgusted that unarmed people end up dead at the rate
| they do during interactions with the police. I will ask why
| we as a society didn't care that much until now, it's a
| deep culture that formed. Another gigantic difference
| between police and military is that there are safety valves
| and "turning on the military" to solve an issue is a major
| fuck deal, it's a war fighting machine. The police are sort
| of like society's janitor; they get called when a home
| owner doesn't want a homeless camp in the park near their
| home. The police, generally, don't have that many tools for
| dealing with homeless, mentally unstable, drug addicted,
| and otherwise marginalized people. There is supposed to be
| a crime to lock people up, we don't fund mental hospitals,
| etc. if you watch some of the videos it looks like they've
| become very good at fabricating crimes to justify force and
| arrest which are effectively the only tools they readily
| have.
| alistairSH wrote:
| _Police arm themselves to demand that respect and
| authority, granted they are sometimes in hostile
| situations and need that but generally they really
| don't._
|
| I've often thought that police should leave their
| firearms locked in the trunk (or locked in a safe
| installed in the center console area). If they're chasing
| a violent criminal, get it. Making a traffic stop,
| wellness check, or something else, leave it in the car.
| elchin wrote:
| Military, especially Navy SEALs, are a lot more trained than
| police are, so their standards of behavior are higher. In US it
| takes 2-6 months to become a cop. In Germany, for comparison,
| it's around 2-3 years.
| GVIrish wrote:
| Not only that, but to join the military is to join a way of
| life. In the military your conduct is still governed by
| military regulations after you go home for the day. You can't
| just quit the military if you want a new job. You can be
| punished in your career for wrongdoing by one of your
| dependents. Your career can suffer for doing things in your off
| time that aren't illegal (adultery for example).
|
| Not to say the military is perfect by any stretch. You still
| have your portion of GI's committing crimes and scandals at
| various levels of organization. And you still have problems
| someone of a higher rank can get away with stuff because of
| their power over subordinates. But by and large the military
| has much stronger mechanisms to maintain and enforce
| accountability than the average police department.
| chrisbennet wrote:
| We give the police some slack because its a dangerous job. They
| are often paid quite well because its dangerous.
|
| But how dangerous is it?
|
| 1 Logging workers
|
| 2 Fishers and related fishing workers
|
| 3 Aircraft pilots and flight engineers
|
| 4 Roofers
|
| 5 Refuse and recyclable material collectors
|
| 6 Driver/sales workers and truck drivers
|
| 7 Farmers, ranchers and other agricultural managers
|
| 8 Structural iron and steel workers
|
| 9 First-line supervisors of construction trades and extraction
| workers
|
| 10 First-line supervisors of landscaping, lawn service and
| groundskeeping workers
|
| 11 Electrical power-line installers and repairers
|
| 12 Grounds maintenance workers
|
| 13 Miscellaneous agricultural workers
|
| 14 Helpers, construction trades
|
| 15 First-line supervisors of mechanics, installers and repairers
|
| 16 Police and sheriff's patrol officers
|
| Source: https://www.ajc.com/business/employment/these-are-the-
| most-d...
|
| EDIT: Be nice to your fellow HNer's. Also, no one could pay me
| enough to be a policeman.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Something about this list is fishy. Where are the soldiers?
| Also I'm thinking this is just a simplistic comparison with a
| base death rate on the job (ignoring age & co-morbidity
| factors). Police often retire after 20 years so you're looking
| at the majority of the police force being under ~40-50. That's
| a significant point of comparison because other jobs you kind
| of just work until your body fails you (either through extra
| clumsiness, too much labor for the heart, etc). So the manner
| of fatal death & age are super important factors here that are
| ignored.
|
| I don't think it's helpful to say police don't actually have a
| dangerous job. It is perhaps helpful to consider other HNer
| comments like "You couldn't pay me enough to be a cop". That
| might explain the pay difference.
|
| More importantly, the entire framing is the problem. As soon as
| you're looking for reasons to cut officers slack, you're on the
| wrong side. Being a police officer should have at least the
| same seriousness, responsibility, training, & consequences (if
| not more) as being a lawyer, judge, doctor, etc. Probably more
| since they have greater training and capability to end a life
| and put themselves in such situations more frequently (& often
| instigate/escalate such situations whether through their own
| actions or their association with police).
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Where are the soldiers?
|
| I think the rate of death and injury where they weren't back
| to work in a couple of days for US troops in Iraq was a bit
| less than 2 in 100. *
|
| Note that most soldiers work in supply, administration,
| artillery, cooking, running the mail system, and things like
| that, and aren't exposed to any combat at all at any point in
| the careers.
|
| I can imagine refuse collector being more dangerous than
| that.
|
| * Death and Injury Rates of U.S. Military Personnel in Iraq ,
| Goldberg, 2010
| anoonmoose wrote:
| I would not expect soldiers to be included as the potential
| and expectation for death is much higher and generally
| totally different. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread if
| you're in the military you can legally be ordered to do
| something that will 100% result in your death with no ability
| to refuse, which is not true of any of the professions on
| that list.
| hwillis wrote:
| > Where are the soldiers?
|
| They don't even make the list, obviously. The majority of the
| military is non combat for every branch, and only a small
| minority is deployed at any particular time. This isn't WW2,
| soldiers rarely die.
|
| Over the 8 years of the Iraq war 4.5k US soldiers died out of
| 1.4 million troops (300k deployed). That's 40 per 100k,
| compared to 97 for pilots, 64 for metalworkers, and 46 for
| taxi drivers.
|
| The list in op is for the current year. The number of troops
| killed this year was far lower than any point during the Iraq
| war, and they don't come anywhere near the top of the list.
| pluto9 wrote:
| > Where are the soldiers?
|
| Without doing any research, I'm guessing it's one of two
| possibilities:
|
| - They're not in the top 25 because death rate among soldiers
| is low overall. The vast majority of soldiers are clerks,
| mechanics, and other support personnel, many of whom will
| never even deploy. Of those who do, many will spend their
| time on a large base in minimal danger. Those who are in
| danger from combat and IEDs are those who venture outside the
| base frequently (infantry, drivers, combat engineers, etc).
| These are a small fraction of what would be considered
| "soldiers" on a list like this, which brings the overall
| mortality rate down significantly.
|
| - This list doesn't account for soldiers at all because, to
| put it bluntly, calculating this for the military is a pain
| in the ass. Doing it properly would likely require an
| entirely separate and more detailed study and breakdown of
| the data. One reason is because of the variance in jobs.
| Another is because the danger varies wildly depending on
| whether we're actually in a war. Being an infantryman during
| WWII, Vietnam, or in a place like Fallujah circa 2004 was
| risky business. Right now, not so much. It's worth noting
| that the military has its own government-funded life
| insurance program (SGLI) rather than contracting it out to a
| civilian agency. I suspect this is because no civilian
| insurers are willing deal with the unpredictability.
| willcipriano wrote:
| >They are often paid quite well because its dangerous
|
| 2019 median pay for a police officer/detective: $65,170[0]
|
| 2019 median pay for high school teachers (often cited as
| underpaid): $61,660[1]
|
| [0]https://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/mobile/police-
| and...
|
| [1]https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-
| library/mobil...
| wnevets wrote:
| Does that include overtime, holiday pay and pensions? Using
| only a cop's base salary is incredibly misleading.
| goliatone wrote:
| It never occurred to me to compare policemen to teachers. But
| imagine if teachers could levy fines to students and use the
| proceeds to pay their overtime. Or could walk to a child and
| steal their lunch money or whatever they have in their
| pockets (civil forfeiture).
| claudeganon wrote:
| Being a high school teacher is a far worse job than being a
| cop. Cops don't even have to _pretend_ they care about
| helping people.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| High school teachers generally require post-baccaleureate
| education, police officers require a high school diploma, and
| are the only profession I know of where employers have gone
| to court (and won!) to defend using IQ tests in hiring with a
| high score being a _negative_ factor. The latter getting paid
| slightly more represents a very high premium for danger,
| given the difference in entry qualifications.
| _jal wrote:
| That omits overtime, which is a massive component of
| compensation in many departments. It also ignores after-hours
| gigs they can get because they're cops and pensions, which
| not so many get anymore.
|
| OT in Chicago:
| https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/1/14/18343141/editorial-
| re... :
|
| "In 2017, a sergeant who apparently never sleeps made
| $279,612, which included $158,917 in overtime pay. A
| detective made $285,070, including $144,926 in OT. In all,
| according to a Sun-Times report on Sunday, rank-and-file
| police officers in 2017 pulled in about 60 percent of the
| city's overall overtime pay."
|
| Please point me to all the six-figure teaching opportunities.
| leetcrew wrote:
| there are several counties in maryland where a teacher with
| an advanced degree and/or many years on the job can make
| around $100k.
|
| http://www.marylandpublicschools.org/about/Documents/DCAA/S
| S...
| philg_jr wrote:
| Same with eastern PA, Bucks County comes to mind. A
| friend of mine teaches middle school, has her masters
| degree, and makes north of 100k. The property taxes in
| Chester Country, Delaware County, and Bucks County
| definitely reflect the salaries. The schools in those
| areas are generally pretty good, I've heard.
| willcipriano wrote:
| The 90th percentile of "Secondary School Teachers, Except
| Special and Career/Technical Education" makes upwards of
| $99,660[0] per year.
|
| [0]https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes252031.htm
| sudosysgen wrote:
| But it's not just the 90th percentile of cops that get
| OT. They virtually all do.
| [deleted]
| hpoe wrote:
| Nope I'm taking issue with this maybe in large cities
| NYC, Chicago, LA they do, but remember most cops aren't
| in those cities the majority of them are paid for by
| small municipal budgets and aren't having hours and hours
| of OT to bill. Remember the vast majority of cops in the
| US aren't generally violent aren't working in huge cities
| with thousands of people and may only have a couple dozen
| people on their force.
| greedo wrote:
| My neighbor is a cop (sergeant) in a midwest town of
| roughly 300K people. His base salary is $95k, and last
| year he earned $40k in overtime. He's been with the PD
| for roughly 22 years. Police start at $56k. There academy
| training is paid for by the city.
|
| In contrast, teachers start out at $46k, and are required
| to have a BA, plus teaching credential that they pay for
| themselves. The maximum a teacher can earn in the city is
| capped at $88K, and that requires a PhD plus 24 years of
| experience.
|
| If teachers got paid overtime, they'd be the highest paid
| employees in the nation.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| Hi, my hometown is in the Midwest and has about 70k
| residents. The police department budget is two-thirds the
| general fund and increases about six percent year over
| year, for the last five years.
|
| This year they added some building code enforcement
| officers to evict poor people; 95k/year plus benefits.
|
| I think these small town cops are doing just fine with
| their community college associates' degree in "criminal
| justice".
| [deleted]
| whoopdedo wrote:
| > a sergeant who apparently never sleeps
|
| Isn't that a public safety hazard? I'm not sure I'd want to
| trust the judgement of a sleep-deprived workaholic with a
| gun. Either that or if indeed his working hours are nigh
| super-human then maybe that sergeant isn't human at all and
| that salary in the budget is being embezzled.
| Symmetry wrote:
| There was a scandal around here recently about some
| police officer billing the government for weeks where
| they worked for something like 27 hours a day. Which
| would be very unhealthy, I imagine, if there was a way to
| do that.
| xapata wrote:
| Truckers have strict rules about how much driving they
| can do in a 24-hour period.
| jgeada wrote:
| Being a police officer requires no qualifications and barely
| any training, and low intelligence is notoriously preferred
| [0].
|
| Being a teacher requires at least a bachelors degree. The two
| jobs shouldn't even be comparable.
|
| [0] https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-
| cops/st...
| willcipriano wrote:
| That figure includes detectives, who do often have a
| degree[0], removing them brings to total down to $63,150[1]
| for year round work.
|
| [0]https://www.learnhowtobecome.org/detective/
|
| [1]https://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-
| service/mobile/police-and...
| plafl wrote:
| The IQ thing blew my mind, although to be honest "low IQ"
| is not correct since average policemen IQ is slightly above
| average. Suddenly I'm reminded of Brave New World.
| [deleted]
| danieltillett wrote:
| Does any have a reference for the evidence of high
| intelligence make the police more likely to leave the job
| early? I wonder what a police force recruited only from the
| intelligent would be like?
|
| The great thing about IQ tests if you are smart is it is
| easy to pretend to be stupid.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| It would help if 75% of the police force weren't there
| drawing a salary because they need to make money for the
| police force by harassing people for minor traffic
| violations.
| jartelt wrote:
| In Redwood City, police officers start out at $120,000 a year
| (plus a pension). I know mechanical engineers in the Bay Area
| that start out making less than that and do not get a
| pension.
| sjg007 wrote:
| A lot of software engineers in the Bay area make $120k, no
| pension, maybe stock options, maybe a 401k.
| mseidl wrote:
| Most of the deaths are accidents. Actual homicide rate of
| police are 3.0 per 100k vs 5.6 per 100k of regular people.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| A more important question is what is the homicide rate of the
| demographics of people who go into policing. Probably lower
| than 3.0.
|
| It's easy to get a drastically lower personal chance of being
| murdered in the US through simple steps like not being part
| of a gang.
|
| Most Americans on HN aren't going to be murdered at
| 5.6/100000, or even 3.0
| rabanne wrote:
| Can't believe people are citing this data. Comparing homicide
| statistics of people armed with guns being killed vs armed or
| unarmed regular people and thinking cops are safer than armed
| or unarmed regular people? Come on.
|
| How about we account assults? In 2018, 10.8% of sworn
| officers faced assult. Of them, 30.6% sustained injuries. In
| 13.2% of the incident, the attacker was prosecuted.[1] But
| the rate of aggravated assult against regular people is 0.2%.
| Clearance rate is 52.5%. Prosecution rate is much lower.[2] I
| really don't care about your ideology or anything, but saying
| police is a safe job is just stupid. 10.8% of sworn officers
| faced assult _while armed_. Let 's see how things changes
| when police is forced not to be armed.
|
| [1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2018
|
| [2] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018
| learc83 wrote:
| 10.8% faced "assault" is a very misleading statistic
| because "assault" as reported here is completely up to the
| discretion of the reporting officer.
|
| Only ~1/10 of these "assaults" are even prosecuted. If
| prosecutors aren't even willing to charge someone with
| assaulting an officer, it probably wasn't worth calling an
| "assault".
| rabanne wrote:
| Even accounting for that rate, police faces 5x
| "prosecutable assults" more than a "reported assult" on a
| normal person. We don't know what "prosecutable assult"
| statistics on a normal person so we can't compare them
| directly, but the rate is approx. 67%[1]. Clearance rate
| is 52%, so it shows that while policing in US, you get
| approx. 15x more chance of facing "prosecutable assult".
|
| [1] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/scpdvc.txt
| sukilot wrote:
| Unfortunately, a police assaulting a civilian, wherein
| the civilian victim performs any act of self defense down
| to and including bleeding on an officer counts as a
| prosecutable assault on the officer.
| learc83 wrote:
| >15x more chance of facing "prosecutable assult".
|
| Several issues with that statistic.
|
| 1. Police are much more likely to report an assault than
| average citizen is. Just by the nature of their job, very
| nearly every single assault against a police officer is
| likely to be reported.
|
| 2. Once reported, an assault against a police officer is
| much more likely to be prosecuted because courts,
| prosecutors, and juries place much more weight on the
| testimony of a police officer than an average citizen.
|
| 3. "Assault" is a very broadly defined crime. Generally
| assault doesn't actually require a physical attack, so
| using it as a metric for "danger" is dubious.
|
| Assault usually only requires someone to do something
| that makes the victim think they were in danger of being
| physically attacked. Police officers are trained to be
| hyper aware of threats, and they know that the legal
| definition of assault is different than the colloquial
| definition, so the police (and prosecutors) have a much
| broader view of what qualifies an "assault" than the
| general public does.
| greedo wrote:
| Cops are also looking to throw the book at a hookup, with
| the help of willing prosecutors. We've given cops the
| benefit of the doubt for decades, and only now with
| widespread phonecams are we seeing the truth.
| int_19h wrote:
| And it's not just assault, either.
|
| There was one famous case from Ferguson, where a guy was
| charged with destruction of property, because he bled on
| the uniform of the four officers who were beating him in
| the cell they've just thrown him in, after he complained
| about conditions.
|
| (The reason why the victim was in jail in the first place
| was because they arrested him after incorrectly
| identifying him as a target of an outstanding arrest
| warrant. Filing the property damage charges allowed them
| to keep him in cell for another week, until he could
| procure the bond money.)
| mountainboot wrote:
| I have seen so many videos of cops beating up a person and
| then charging that person with assault. These statistics
| are meaningless.
| rabanne wrote:
| I've seen so many videos of cops being beat up. These
| statistics are facts. By the way, I was being sarcastic.
| brightball wrote:
| I believe that ranking shows based on statistics but the real
| X-factor in Police vs everything that ranks above them is
| "other people" or your sense of control of the situation.
|
| Think about why many people are fine with driving but fear
| flying, despite flying being significantly statistically safer.
| The difference is that when you're driving, you feel in
| control.
|
| The same is true of all the professions listed as more
| dangerous than police here. If you're following your training
| and the safety protocols that go with it, safety isn't a huge
| concern with any of them.
|
| For police, they respond to 911 calls and serve arrest
| warrants. A huge part of their job is getting called to
| potentially dangerous scenes with people who may or may not be
| armed, may be violent, may fire at them, may ambush them, etc.
|
| This is a recent national story from my hometown that
| illustrates it.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/us/south-carolina-police-...
|
| I can't imagine being more fearful about logging than worrying
| that something like this would be on the other end of one of
| the dozens of 911 calls I'm asked to respond to each day.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I can't help but think of this xkcd https://xkcd.com/795
|
| The title is conditional risk. The characters reason that since
| very few people die of thunderstorms, they don't need to take
| any precautions.
|
| The point is of course, that the reason that so few people die
| of lightning is that people are sensible and avoid danger. And
| that if you are reckless then you will be at much higher risk
| than the average person.
|
| I'm not saying that this is necessarily the case here. But it's
| a hypothesis that I think needs refutation.
| 6510 wrote:
| The danger also scales with the number of aggressive assholes
| wearing the same uniform. It is like any job where your
| coworkers don't do their job. Eventually you will be held
| responsible for their results. When the boss asks you about it
| you might be reluctant to point out your coworkers since you
| still have to work with them.
| PopeDotNinja wrote:
| I used to sell life insurance. Dangerous careers would be more
| expensive. When I was an agent in 2004-2005 in the USA, being a
| police person was not considered dangerous enough to warrant a
| rate increase. As a professional wrestler, you'd be lucky to
| get life insurance at any price.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I'd love to see what would happen if cops had to carry
| doctor-style malpractice insurance, instead of the taxpayers
| picking up the bill for abuse settlements.
|
| "You've beaten enough innocent people your premiums are going
| from $500/month to $50,000. Your choice."
| leesalminen wrote:
| I think we're going to start seeing this. Colorado just
| enacted a new law yesterday that removes qualified immunity
| from officers. Officers can now be sued personally for
| civil rights violations. They're going to need insurance.
| Let the actuaries decide who's a good and who's a bad cop!
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > They're going to need insurance.
|
| Liability from criminal acts is generally legally
| uninsurable for very strong public policy reasons, even
| without a conviction of the crime, and deprivation of
| rights under color of law is already a federal crime.
| (And many of the other things at issue with police abuse
| --murder most obviously--are more specific state and/or
| federal crimes, as well.)
|
| There's a space of insurable liability without QI, but
| it's not actually the space of most interest in the
| police abuse discussion.
| mokus wrote:
| Isn't QI specifically an immunity against civil suits?
| _jal wrote:
| Yes, it is specifically about civil suits. It is no
| shield against criminal accusation - it only protects
| them from their victims, not their masters.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Liability from criminal acts is generally legally
| uninsurable for very strong public policy reasons...
|
| OK, but cops are also subject to civil suits, as well as
| the legal fees themselves. It'd be a start.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > OK, but cops are also subject to civil suits
|
| _Civil_ liability for ones own _criminal_ acts (at least
| wilfull ones, and often wilfull rather than merely
| negligent acts more generally) is often prohibited (the
| exact boundaries differ by jurisdiction), for very strong
| public policy reasons, and the vast majority of the acts
| of concern with police abuse are (very frequently
| unprosecuted, but that 's not material when it comes to
| whether the civil liability is insurable) both willful
| and crimes, not mere negligence in either the general or
| professional malpractice sense (almost always intentional
| deprivation of rights under color of law and/or
| conspiracy against rights, and very often
| wilfull/intentional violent crimes on the assault to
| voluntary manslaughter to murder spectrum.)
|
| Drawing analogies to medical malpractice misses the fact
| that medical malpractice covers mistakes that fall short
| of the professional standard of care, but don't cover
| when someone who happens to be a doctor just decides to
| murder someone.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| No! The whole point of removing qualified immunity is
| they no longer need to take criminal actions to be sued.
| Anything they do can be subject to a civil suit which the
| cop will now need to defend against.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The whole point of removing qualified immunity is they
| no longer need to take criminal actions to be sued
|
| No, it is so accountability no longer, in practice,
| relies on public prosecutors choosing to file criminal
| charges. The acts of major concern are criminal acts,
| that are routinely unprosecuted (in some cases, this
| might be just because of the civil vs. criminal standard
| of proof differences, but it's very clear that there are
| a lot of cases of prosecutorial favoritism to law
| enforcement, whether because of the working relationship
| that the two institutions naturally have or for other
| reasons.)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I'd love to see what would happen if cops had to carry
| doctor-style malpractice insurance, instead of the
| taxpayers picking up the bill for abuse settlements.
|
| Then taxpayers would pick up the bill for the higher salary
| demands of officers due to the cost of insurance, and then
| the police unions would lobby for targeted tort reform to
| limit their liability and insurance costs on the basis that
| it would save the taxpayers money, and succeed, and the
| structural problems that foster abuse would manage not to
| be dealt with at all, and the victims even worse off.
| That's what.
|
| "Let's absolve ourselves of liability"--which is what this
| amounts to unless it's a cop proposing it--is just an
| excuse to avoid addressing the problem.
|
| (Doctor's malpractice insurance is not _instead of_ their
| private or public employer being liable as usual under
| principles like _respondeat superior_ or just plain direct
| liability for acts aligned with bad policy or direction,
| and only covers professional negligence, not criminal acts.
| Mere police malpractice, is--while also an issue, to be
| sure--not the focus of concern here, and the acts involved
| are the kind for which it is generally illegal to insure
| liability for, for good reasons. Insurance for liability
| incurred through murder is not a thing, and I don 't think
| anyone who has thought it through wants it to be a thing.
| Except maybe prospective murderers.)
| Symmetry wrote:
| What matters for changing behavior is the marginal impact
| of a police officer's actions on their income, not the
| average income of a police officer. Even if all police
| officers would be paid more by the current amount that a
| city dishes out in damages each individual officer would
| still face an incentive to reduce their excessive use of
| force to increase their own take home pay. Which is
| exactly the incentive we're going for here.
| loeg wrote:
| There needs to be some collective or individual cost to
| being a bad cop or the incentives aren't there to behave
| well. That could be financial, it could be prosecutors
| actually charging cops; there are many avenues that would
| help align incentives. Of course cop unions will fight
| this every step of the way.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > There needs to be some collective or individual cost to
| being a bad cop or the incentives aren't there to behave
| well
|
| Sure, cops should not benefit from QI, at least as
| currently constructed (a more limited form may be
| appropriate and arguably even Constitutionally necessary
| from a due process perspective), and that may make merely
| negligent acts something they can, and may even be
| required as a condition of employment, to cover with
| insurance. That isn't _instead of_ their public employer
| being liable (the absence of QI for private employees
| doesn 't negate _respondeat superior_ ), nor does it mean
| that the important acts (which are intentional crimes) at
| issue in the present discussion of police abuse would
| (without major and undesirable changes in public policy)
| be insurable. That would actually _dilute_ the goal of
| effective cost to being a (deliberately) bad cop.
|
| I don't have a problem with direct liability for cops.
|
| I have a problem when what is proposed is that _as an
| excuse for absolving public-agency liability_ , or when
| it is suggested that civil liability for the intentional
| violent crimes at the core of the abuse discussion should
| be made insurable (which has the same problem as QI with
| only public agency liability, since then the agency
| effectively is self-insuring the crimes and dealing with
| individual costs of employees in it's hiring and firing
| policies.)
| dynamite-ready wrote:
| Interesting idea... The resultant increase in salary may
| in fact attract better police, and that could head off a
| large range of systemic problems itself.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Or the increased salary might constrain the headcount of
| police departments and keep them below the staffing level
| where they have the resources to bother mostly law
| abiding citizens over minor stuff. Either way it's a win.
| golem14 wrote:
| Sure, but there's someone managing a budget and has to
| decide to either hire 2 good cops or 1 expensive bad cop.
|
| The next step might be that departments have to publish
| their insurance rates, like the recent hospital bill law.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Sure, but there's someone managing a budget and has to
| decide to either hire 2 good cops or 1 expensive bad cop.
|
| They already have to do this when the agency is liable
| and the cops aren't because of QI; which is equivalent to
| the agency self-insuring and managing risk through
| personnel policies and decisions.
|
| Making the major crimes involved insurable would _negate_
| any benefit from making cops individually liable by
| eliminating or restricting the scope of QI.
| ardy42 wrote:
| >> I'd love to see what would happen if cops had to carry
| doctor-style malpractice insurance, instead of the
| taxpayers picking up the bill for abuse settlements.
|
| > Then taxpayers would pick up the bill for the higher
| salary demands of officers due to the cost of insurance,
| and then the police unions would lobby for targeted tort
| reform to limit their liability and insurance costs on
| the basis that it would save the taxpayers money, and
| succeed, and the structural problems that foster abuse
| would manage not to be dealt with at all, and the victims
| even worse off. That's what.
|
| Maybe that could be addressed by modifying the proposal
| to require that departments buy malpractice insurance
| _individually_ for each of their officers, and make sure
| the cost of that insurance shows up on the budget of
| whatever department or team the officer is a member of.
| Basically make it more expensive (on a predicable,
| ongoing basis) to employ bad cops than good ones, which
| hopefully would then factor into personnel decisions.
| jld wrote:
| Make the officers buy it personally. Have cities pay
| officers 110% of the base rate, such that officers with
| clean records get a bonus based on it. Those whose rates
| go up will pay the difference or leave the force.
|
| BTW, I hate that America has become so neoliberalized
| that I end up needing to consider how to build a profit
| motive into having cops not violate constitutional
| rights.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Unfortunately not everyone has the same sense of duty and
| the respect for life. Since "these bad apples" don't get
| punished anyway, and since the system is evidently
| useless from removing them from ranks, one alternative is
| to hurt them where it really hurts them, their wallet. I
| don't know of this will push the half-dirty in police
| forces to go all the way to the dark side since they will
| feel that society owes them and they need to make up for
| the reduction on their disposable income.
| craftinator wrote:
| Well said. I too find it disturbing that upholding
| Constitutional Rights has become a defensive position
| against people who have sworn to uphold the Constitution
| against all enemies foreign and domestic.
| orange_fritter wrote:
| Wouldn't this incentivize police to even further suppress
| reporting of incidents?
| jjk166 wrote:
| Those who don't report incidents within x days of the
| first report should forfeit their 10% bonus for some pay
| period y to a pool to be split among those who do report
| incidents in the time frame, with those who report
| earlier receiving larger portions than those who report
| later.
|
| It thus is always in everyone's individual best interest
| to try to identify incidents and report them as quickly
| as possible.
| mac01021 wrote:
| What does neoliberalism have to do with it?
| andrekandre wrote:
| i think they are saying that because, in the neoliberal
| era, markets and market-based incentives are the go-to
| tool for solving problems
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _I hate that America has become so neoliberalized that I
| end up needing to consider how to build a profit motive
| into having cops not violate constitutional rights._
|
| The sort of person who makes a good cop isn't motivated
| by money. You don't pay him to be a cop, you pay him so
| he can be a cop. So he can pay his bills while deriving
| job satisfaction from duty, honour, etc. The same way the
| really good programmers are in it for the love of the
| craft.
|
| The instant you bring commercial incentives into it you
| drive away the people you really want. That's why the
| military don't do it. And why tech goes toxic when the
| techbros show up.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| But you're not paying them more to be a cop. For the good
| cop they get paid a little more, they buy the insurance
| with the money, nothing really changes.
|
| For the bad cop they get paid a little more and pay _a
| lot_ more for the insurance, so that it eats too much of
| their salary and they have to quit and find another job.
|
| The people who are in it for honor and duty aren't going
| to be the ones paying the higher premiums, right?
| ardy42 wrote:
| >> I hate that America has become so neoliberalized that
| I end up needing to consider how to build a profit motive
| into having cops not violate constitutional rights.
|
| > The sort of person who makes a good cop isn't motivated
| by money. You don't pay him to be a cop, you pay him so
| he can be a cop. So he can pay his bills while deriving
| job satisfaction from...
|
| That's likely also true of many classes of _bad_ cops, as
| well (e.g. deriving job satisfaction from dominating
| others /exercising power over them).
|
| I also think your kind of missing the point. I
| interpreted the comment on neoliberalism to be critiquing
| the idea that institutional solution to every problem has
| to be some kind of system involving money and markets.
| Basically, why dick around with insurance and budgets to
| dis-incentivize the employment of "cops who violate
| constitutional rights" when you should have an
| institution that's capable of just removing bad cops like
| that _simply for the violations themselves_.
| vkou wrote:
| Tech was toxic long before techbros showed up. RMS'
| problematic behaviour drove a lot of people away from the
| FSF, and he's never struck me as a man motivated by the
| fat stacks of cash.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| I can't even get personalized life insurance, so I think
| there's little chance of this working. At my height and
| weight, I'm considered "overweight" BMI, and they charge
| me for it. But I'm at 12-14% bodyfat with a 30" waist. I
| have diet logs to prove how healthy I eat, and training
| logs to prove how much I workout.
|
| I can't even find a life-insurance insurer that will
| measure my waist to add context to my BMI despite the
| clear predictive information that contains and I get
| penalized for having more lean body-mass despite the fact
| that it is also predictive of longevity.
| kansface wrote:
| They'd behave more like doctors who order hugely expensive
| tests, procedures, and medicine they know patients don't
| need for the purpose of indemnity. They'd never admit to
| mistakes which could be used against them in the court of
| law. Frivolous lawsuits would abound, and doubly so when
| successful suits impugn the integrity of officers'
| statements in criminal court (even after the fact). The
| policy holders would settle to save money because court is
| more expensive on average. In other words, we'd expect them
| to stop policing in general.
| balfirevic wrote:
| Here is one idea along those lines, Constitutional small
| claims court: https://www.cato.org/blog/constitutional-
| small-claims-court
| crazyjncsu wrote:
| This is already very much a thing that has driven
| improvements: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/22
| /705914833/epis...
|
| In fact, there have been many such forces, technology being
| o a big one, which have driven many such improvements over
| the years. It just isn't moving fast enough to save
| everyone.
| tdeck wrote:
| In some cases departments have cleaned up their act (a bit)
| because of no longer being able to afford liability
| insurance:
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/insura
| n...
| GrinningFool wrote:
| Maybe a hybrid model where basic malpractice insurance is
| included in the job, but if your premium raises you pay the
| difference.
| opo wrote:
| As user dragonwriter points out there are a number of
| reasons this likely won't help very much.
|
| I'd love to see all complaints of brutality and all deaths
| caused by police be investigated by a different
| organization (maybe a state level org) and if cops are
| found to be brutalizing/murdering people they are fired or
| arrested depending on the severity of their actions.
| on_and_off wrote:
| - independent investigations not carried by the police (to
| be honest I did a double take when I read that the US do
| things this way... my original country also has a systemic
| police brutality problem but we still have a completely
| separate branch of the police to investigate this kind of
| things)
|
| - the end of qualified immunity
|
| These 2 would already help a lot.
| cycomanic wrote:
| That's such a weird typical US way of looking at it. Find a
| way of using money to solve it.
|
| Why not treat it as what it is, a criminal matter. If a non
| police officer would repeatedly beat up people the person
| would be in jail. And they would likely not get their job
| back. It's really as simple as treat police officer like
| everyone else.
| thephyber wrote:
| You're not wrong, but the US currently has a problem
| getting legislators to write laws that are effective.
|
| Also doing this nationwide would require up to 18,000
| different jurisdictions to write similar laws and change
| other law to homogenize the laws they already have.
| Police unions are extremely effective at watching
| legislators when they propose bills and have strong
| lobbying efforts (combination or money for election
| campaigns, money against election campaigns, public
| relations, and the ability to threaten strikes which
| scares citizens into pressuring politicians to back off
| their positions).
|
| In short, there's a reason that we look to money to solve
| part of this problem and that's because it's far more
| likely that money will solve it in the US political
| system than good thoughtful legislation despite the
| pressure of 1.1 million law enforcement officers (and
| their families and their "blue line supporters" and their
| social media campaigns).
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Even a firefighter. I asked about life insurance on my
| personal policy, mentioned my career.
|
| "That's fine. As long as you're not a smoke jumper."
| (parachute into isolated wildland fires to get ahead of the
| fire).
| hef19898 wrote:
| Insurance rates are such an underrated source for risk
| assessment.
| hypewatch wrote:
| Are they? What's the alternative that gets all the
| undeserved attention?
| Buldak wrote:
| Well, in this case, the testimony of cops and politicians
| themselves
| jasonjayr wrote:
| Simple Death rates?
|
| Insurance rates are developed by financially-motivated
| actuaries that consider a whole bunch of variables in
| order to create market-efficient rates.
| sigwinch28 wrote:
| Though not always reliable (see: credit default swap
| pricing in the lead up to the financial crash in 2007/8).
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| A credit default swap is not an insurance contract;
| you're in the world of 'buyer beware' not 'utmost good
| faith'.
|
| Even the monoline insurance wrappers around the various
| credit products were very atypically constructed
| insurance contracts.
| kansface wrote:
| Not the swap itself, but the assessments provided by the
| ratings agencies.
| nabilhat wrote:
| The original source is the Bureau of Labor Statistics [0],
| which is a bottomless rabbit hole of detail.
|
| Data quality side note... Others have pointed out before that a
| primary work related risk for nearly all of these professions
| is transportation. That's why the only landscapers we see on
| this list are the supervisors: supervisors are on the clock
| while they're behind the wheel, the workers aren't. Reading
| this data in a meaningful way requires consideration of
| transportation related risks.
|
| [0] https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshcfoi1.htm
| xapata wrote:
| Leading cause of death for peace corps volunteers is (was?)
| motorcycle accidents.
| panzagl wrote:
| There's a continual mental impact of always dealing with the
| nasty side of humanity that I think often gets overlooked-
| everyone is always lying to you or hiding something, and you
| get to see a large number of dead kids and wasted lives.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| This is exactly right. Growing up, my dad was a police
| officer. The mental part of being a cop dramatically affects
| officers and their families.
|
| Eventually, my dad got very injured on the job and had to
| quit. The mental part is what injured him the most.
| greedo wrote:
| And a lot of the corrosiveness that cops have to suffer is
| from other cops. Racism, bigotry, sexism, homophobia,
| xenophobia etc. If you're smart, you're excluded by IQ tests
| since departments prefer to avoid you.
|
| This ends up altering your worldview as an "Us versus Them"
| where there are cops and there are criminals. Everyone else
| is a potential criminal. Everyone is given side eye. The
| system is rigged, so why not put in for extra overtime. Bump
| up your salary the last three years so that your pension goes
| from a $90k/year basis to $175K.
|
| And if you think cops are out to protect you? What a joke.
| Cops are out to protect themselves first. They've been
| glamorized since the 1980s as "foot soldiers in the war on
| crime." Their unions have fought to protect the "few" bad
| apples, when the bunch is rotten.
|
| They go through the motions of "protecting" us, but that's
| just paperwork. Showing up and taking some notes. If you've
| ever had anything stolen, you'll know what I mean. The cop
| will write down some information, maybe give you his biz
| card, then that's the last you'll hear of it. They never do
| any leg work/investigation, unless it's something mandated by
| their bosses.
|
| Defund needs to happen soon. Spend the money on drug rehab,
| mental health, etc. We need less than half the cops we have,
| and no damn PD needs an MRAP.
| panzagl wrote:
| I mostly don't agree with this as I know too many cops. The
| racism is tricky- if the only X people you saw were
| criminals, without any balance on the positive side it can
| very easily get into some sort of loop. And lots of places
| are like that in the US, for a variety of reasons- the cops
| see the bad side of X, without a balance of neighbors and
| other helpful examples to counterbalance. They're part of
| the problem, but they're also caused by the problem.
| steve76 wrote:
| Breachers on a SWAT teams take their job into consideration
| when clipping their fingernails. Thousands of hours of intense
| training. Complete devotion or death. How many on your list
| take their job that seriously?
|
| Also go across the southern border, where a police officer is
| murdered everyday. You contribute to that through drugs and
| human trafficking. If we do what you say, that gets worse, and
| that comes here.
|
| "What explains these two armed forces' divergent attitudes
| toward bad behavior?"
|
| In war, the first lesson you learn is you are going to die
| here. It's quite a sobering attitude, like living in a hospice.
| Why beat someone up when you can just burn down their aircraft
| carrier with napalm, likely dying horribly or crippling or
| maiming yourself for life doing it.
|
| Police, the only rule is just come home. Contain the violence,
| protect the public, don't escalate as you live there. People
| deserve the policing we get. No riots, no SWAT teams, not even
| locks on doors if people can lay off the elephant tranquilizer.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| I would have no problem with being a police officer in iceland,
| but certainly in the US. I get why they don't want to give up
| their guns, especially now, but that has consequences for
| policing work. If you can assume your "victim" to be unarmed,
| you approach the situation differently.
|
| So I do think it is a quite dangerous job there to be honest.
| Moreso than the ones you mentioned. Some time ago deep sea
| fishing was the deadliest job. Would still prefer it from a
| risk assessment perspective.
| dTal wrote:
| Regarding this often-cited argument of "people can own guns,
| so cops need them" - in a situation with a gun, does it
| actually _help_ if the cop also has a gun? Now you have a
| gunfight on your hands. By analogy, people are allowed to own
| rocket launchers as well (it 's true!) but that doesn't mean
| every beat cop should carry one. What's the actual problem
| with disarming the police completely, and having them call in
| a SWAT team in the rare event that someone actually threatens
| a cop with a firearm?
| michaelt wrote:
| If you can easily get a $500 device that makes 95% of cops
| stop chasing you, wouldn't every rational violent criminal
| buy one?
|
| I suppose it could work if 95% of the police were engaged
| in something other than apprehending violent criminals...
| freeone3000 wrote:
| According to
| https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rpa11.pdf ,
| approximately 8.2% were "reported crime emergency". So,
| in effect, 91.8% of all police contact with the public is
| something other than apprehending criminals _at all_.
| Nursie wrote:
| > I suppose it could work if 95% of the police were
| engaged in something other than apprehending violent
| criminals...
|
| I would be surprised if apprehending violent criminals
| was more that 5% of the job, personally. Wouldn't you?
|
| To the downvoters; it is your right to do so, but think
| about it - Police are on patrol, taking reports of crimes
| that happened previously, they guard things, they help
| keep order at sporting events, they're on hand for
| political events. They're being traffic cops, white
| collar cops, they appear in court, all sorts of
| activities. And there's paperwork.
|
| I would be very surprised if at any one time more than 5%
| of cops, or for a cop on average, more than 5% of their
| time was directly "apprehending violent criminals". It's
| important they do so, of course.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It's even lower than that in most of the US where cops
| are basically waiting around for something to happen most
| of the time. But the narrative is bullets flying every
| time they enter the war zone of placid suburbia.
| greedo wrote:
| Cop work is exceedingly boring. If you ever do a ride-
| along, you'll see how boring. And with a ride-along, they
| try to show you the exciting stuff since it's a
| recruitment method. Lots of driving around, lots of
| running tags, lots of looking for something meaningful to
| do when it's dark and not much is happening. Idle hands
| are the Devil's workshop etc etc.
|
| https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-
| bastard...
| deepakhj wrote:
| There's absolutely no benefit to shooting an officer as a
| criminal. You instantly become added to America's most
| wanted list and the courts will throw the book at you.
| michaelt wrote:
| You don't need to draw and shoot a gun if merely having
| one visible makes the cops get out your way and await
| backup.
| greedo wrote:
| Nah, cops will just gun you down if they "think" you have
| any sort of firearm.
|
| Watch this video. The cops don't see a gun, they think he
| has one because of the call, but they don't see one. The
| minute his hand goes towards his waste, they blast him...
|
| https://www.abqjournal.com/1380152/apd-man-shot-by-
| officers-...
| sukilot wrote:
| Which is good. It means we can avoid violence, collect
| evidence for an easy conviction (such as videoing a
| firearms violation) and apprehend criminals safely using
| trained SWAT forces.
| kube-system wrote:
| That might not be a marginal deterrent if the criminal
| has already committed significant crimes.
|
| [murder suspect] + [doesn't fight] = [life in prison],
| [no chance of escaping]
|
| [murder suspect] + [does fight] = [life in prison], [non-
| zero chance of escaping]
|
| This is actually a reason we might want to reduce
| sentences for some crimes. 'Tough on crime' laws make
| criminals more brazen.
| packetlost wrote:
| Some crimes, sure. I don't think (intentional) murderers
| should be getting released back into the public very
| quickly though
| vanattab wrote:
| Criminals committing acts of violence often are not
| acting based on rational reasoning. Often it based on
| emotion/fear /anger.
| ryan93 wrote:
| So if a guy pulls a gun on the cops they are supposed to
| hide while he shoots until SWAT gets there? Its reasonable
| to have cops with no guns when encountering a gun is
| incredibly rare.
| noobermin wrote:
| Another option essentially is to move certain functions
| away from police, such as traffic enforcement (use more
| cameras and non-armed officers who need not be police)
| certain kinds of house calls like for the mentally ill to
| be done by social workers, and such. The police can be
| reserved for violent, life-or-death situations.
| PJDK wrote:
| Just to extend on this - this is how it's done in the UK.
|
| Specifically in London the regular police are not armed.
| Armed police patrol the city in cars - if you're in the
| city you can identify these cars as they have a big yellow
| spot on the windows and there is an officer in the back
| seat. The aim is to be able to respond to a request within
| 8 minutes.
|
| During the London bridge attack the attackers were shot
| dead by armed police 9 minutes after the first call to the
| police.
| rabanne wrote:
| In 2018 and 2019, there were over 30,000 assaults on
| police officers in UK.[1] In 2017 and 2018, there were
| over 110,000 assults on police officers in US. You can't
| just adopt this in the US, policing is more dangerous in
| the US.
|
| [1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2017
| https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2018
|
| [2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/u
| ploads/...
| PJDK wrote:
| Has anyone done any deep analysis of this kind of thing.
|
| Of those assaults, what impact did the police officer's
| gun have on the situation?
|
| You can imagine an example where the gun is an asset -
| for example if the officer encounters an ongoing
| potentially deadly assault and then can shoot the
| perpetrator.
|
| But I feel like more often the gun is a liability, an
| unarmed person is held at gunpoint and becomes violent -
| the police officer is left with the option of shooting
| the person or letting them get away. If they were using a
| batton/cs spray/taser (options available to regular
| British police) they then have many more options
| available to them.
| throwaway1239Mx wrote:
| As of 2020, the US population is ~327000000. The UK
| population is 63000000 [Source: Wikipedia]
|
| Now, do some division. That's ~1 assault on a LEO per
| 2990 people in the US and ~1 assault on a LEO per 2100
| people in the UK.
|
| So assaults on LEO per capita are 26% greater in the UK.
|
| Of course, it is also important to look at the number of
| LEOs in each state (in the sense of country, not US
| state).
|
| From [0] there are ~686000 LEO in the US, or 1 per 479
| people. From [1], there are ~123000 LEO in the UK, or 1
| per 512 people.
|
| So there are 6% fewer LEO per capita in the UK than the
| US, but the assaults on LEOs happen 26% more often per
| capita.
|
| So how is it more dangerous in the US again?
|
| [Edit: forgot sources! my bad.]
|
| [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/191694/number-of-
| law-enf... Actually, https://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-
| service/police-and-detect... suggests 808,000 LEO in the
| US, which makes the per-capita LEO even higher in the US.
| Population data is hard.
|
| [1] https://fullfact.org/crime/police-numbers/
| rabanne wrote:
| I know simple math, thank you. As I pointed out in the
| other reply, the rate of assult to US police, who are
| armed and more hostile to you is only about 25% lower
| than UK police where the majority of them don't carry a
| firearm. Actually we don't know the proseuction rate so
| we don't even know it's that lower.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| The stats I'm looking at say there are ~65m people in the
| UK and ~330m in the US. So about 5x the number of people.
| If that's true (5x people) and the assault stats are true
| (3.6x assaults), then policing more dangerous in the UK.
|
| (this feels off to me.. am I doing my math wrong?)
| mrec wrote:
| Those figures don't look like they're adjusted for
| population. US pop is about 5x UK's.
| evanpw wrote:
| The US population is more than 4x bigger than the UK, and
| seems to also have more police per capita, so those
| numbers would imply that policing is safer in the US.
| (Which I don't quite believe; more likely those assault
| numbers are incomparable or just wrong).
| rabanne wrote:
| I wanted to point out that the rate of assult to US
| police, who are armed and more hostile to you is only
| about 25% lower than UK police where the majority of them
| don't carry a firearm.
| dmurray wrote:
| This is also how it's done traditionally in Ireland, the
| regular police aren't armed but there is a "Special
| Branch" of detectives, usually plain clothes in unmarked
| cars.
|
| Recently they've been sneakily expanding the use of armed
| police though. In Dublin, I see more and more cars marked
| "Armed Response Unit" which have regular cops with guns.
| And just last week a detective was shot and killed with
| his own gun while doing a traffic stop. There's been a
| massive PR blitz about how good a guy this cop was, but
| zero discussion about why the duties of armed police have
| now been extended to include road traffic policing. I
| suspect it's planned to arm more and more of them and I
| wouldn't be surprised if the British followed the same
| slippery slope.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Yeah, that is something that always puzzled me. German
| police is armed, always. Seeing unarmed police always
| strikes me as strange.
|
| Have to agree, so, that a gun not carried cannot be used.
|
| Just out of curiosity, is police violence and
| discrimination a problem in Ireland? Outside of Northern
| Ireland, off course.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Not particularly, Irleand is a relatively homogeneous
| country. There has been an uptick in the last few years
| in drug gang related murders due to a feud between two
| pretty brutal drug cartels (the leader of one now
| controls an international cartel from Dubai and rather
| outrageously is the promoter behind the Tyson Fury Vs
| Anthony Joshua heavyweight boxing fight). I think this
| has probably lead to an increase in gun carrying by
| Gardai (Irish police service).
| hef19898 wrote:
| Thanks! Very interesting bit of information regarding the
| cartrlys and the Fury vs. Joshua fight.
| rabanne wrote:
| I'm seriously wondering whether this is a form of sarcasm
| or a bait. 10.8% of sworn officers faced assult in 2018[1],
| while armed. Cops threatened by people with or without
| firearm is not that rare. In 2018, 2,116 sworn officers
| were not only threatened but actually got shot(!) by a
| firearm.[1]
|
| [1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2018
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| An assault? An assault is anything, and they slap charges
| such as Resisting Arrest on every one of their victims to
| help prosecutors stack charges.
| sacred_numbers wrote:
| 2,116 officers were assaulted with a firearm, but only
| 6.1% of those 2,116 were injured in the assault. That's
| approximately 129 firearm injuries. That means the rate
| of non-fatal firearm injuries is approximately 16.1 per
| 100,000. In 2012 the rate of non-fatal firearm injuries
| from assault was approximately 15.67 per 100,000 for the
| general population. When adjusted for the sex
| demographics of the police (88% male) the rate is 24.93
| per 100,000.
|
| Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4700
| 838/#!po=19...
|
| Edit: It looks like the non-fatal firearm injury rate for
| officers is actually 23.6 per 100k. I had the wrong
| number in the denominator because not all police stations
| responded to the FBI survey.
| rabanne wrote:
| You know you're comparing people fully armed and cautious
| people versus the general population, right? Also it's a
| biased comparison because the 2,116 could have been shot
| where the rate of "could have been shot" is much lower in
| the general public because obvious reasons.
| rrss wrote:
| You know that you failed to understand your own source
| and therefore claimed a number of officer shootings ~16x
| higher than reality, right? And 'sacred_numbers was kind
| enough to correct you?
| [deleted]
| nrclark wrote:
| In most states, the legal definition of assault doesn't
| even require physical contact.
|
| Trying to shove a police officer and miss? Assault.
| Stepping on their shoe while being arrested? Battery, and
| also probably assault. Spitting on a police officer?
| Battery, and probably aggravated assault.
|
| It's very misleading to claim that 10% of police officers
| were assaulted in 2018. That might be true in a strict
| legal sense, but most of them probably walked away from
| their "assault" without so much as a bruise.
| austincheney wrote:
| I suspect, and I don't have any numbers, the occurrence
| rate of encountering a concealed rocket launcher when
| performing a traffic stop is quite low.
| blaser-waffle wrote:
| > By analogy, people are allowed to own rocket launchers as
| well (it's true!) but that doesn't mean every beat cop
| should carry one.
|
| They can own rocket launchers the same way they can own
| private jets. They're comparatively rare, expensive as
| hell, and utterly unrealistic for the average person. It's
| a bad analogy.
|
| Meanwhile, regular long-arm firearms and handguns are
| insanely common in the US, comparatively cheap, and often
| very practical to carry or store in vehicles. The US has a
| crazy level of per capita gun ownership, like 120 guns for
| every 100 people. Gun ownership isn't rare, and disarmed
| police are going to get killed haggling after heavily armed
| civilians.
| tengbretson wrote:
| > By analogy, people are allowed to own rocket launchers as
| well (it's true!) but that doesn't mean every beat cop
| should carry one.
|
| This would only seem relevant if your knowledge of weapons
| came from movies or video games where "bigger = better".
| gridlockd wrote:
| Of course it helps to have a gun if your opponent has a
| gun, because both of you now have a risk of getting shot.
|
| If I _know_ you don 't have a gun because you're one of
| these unarmed cops, I can completely dominate the
| situation. I can make you stand on one leg and do a
| recital.
|
| > By analogy, people are allowed to own rocket launchers as
| well (it's true!) but that doesn't mean every beat cop
| should carry one.
|
| Rocket launchers are not anti-personnel weapons and no
| ordinary criminal carries them or would be expected to
| carry them. The best weapon to neutralize a threat wielding
| a rocket launcher is not another rocket launcher, it's a
| rifle.
|
| Should we arrive at the situation where criminals routinely
| arrive in armored personnel carriers or tanks, _then_ we
| can talk about arming the police with rocket launchers.
| sukilot wrote:
| Right, so police need body armor, not handguns.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| 30-40% of police officer deaths aren't gun-related, they're
| traffic accidents[0] with another 30% being "job related
| illness"[1]. And in some years traffic accidents is the
| leading cause of deaths.
|
| About 50~ police officers die via guns per year. The police
| kill about 1,000 citizens per year via guns though[2].
|
| [0] https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/leo/default.html
|
| [1] https://nleomf.org/facts-figures/causes-of-law-
| enforcement-d...
|
| [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/po
| lic...
| raxxorrax wrote:
| I do actually believe that in case of deep sea fishing
| routine may be the source of many accidents as well, pretty
| similar to driving.
|
| But there are other factors that I consider dangerous.
| Imagine you actually do have to shoot someone. Even worse
| if it is an accident where you panicked because your feared
| for your life.
| marcoperaza wrote:
| It's worth noting that while every unjustified shooting is
| one too many, the vast vast majority of shootings by police
| are unambiguously justified. The US has a lot of violent
| criminals, many of who are bold enough to even try to kill
| police officers.
| minikites wrote:
| What evidence leads you to this conclusion?
| marcoperaza wrote:
| Both of these statements can be true: 1) the vast
| majority of shootings by police are justified, and 2)
| there are way too many cases of excessive use of force by
| police, including shootings.
|
| You can look at the reports. They don't usually leave
| local news, if they even make it there, because there is
| nothing remarkable about them. People have done
| aggregations of the data. I'm not saying it's going to
| convince you if you're already convinced otherwise.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/10/2
| 4/o...
|
| "But only a small number of the shootings -- roughly 5
| percent -- occurred under the kind of circumstances that
| raise doubt and draw public outcry, according to an
| analysis by The Washington Post. The vast majority of
| individuals shot and killed by police officers were, like
| Snyder, armed with guns and killed after attacking police
| officers or civilians or making other direct threats."
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Frankly, that's incredibly difficult to believe. When the
| cameras are off, police lie about the circumstances to
| make their violence seem justified. (Or even when the
| cameras are _on_ -- for example, the NYC police union has
| opposed the firing of Eric Garner's murderer.)
| gnusty_gnurc wrote:
| This is technically a conspiracy theory right?
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Would you say it's a conspiracy theory that politicians
| lie? If not, why so for police?
| gnusty_gnurc wrote:
| Conspiracy theory: you claim they're colluding together
| but you have no evidence of it.
|
| Yes this easily fits a lot of things said about
| politicians.
|
| They can be obviously corrupt/"bad" without collusion or
| being somehow inherently evil.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| _> Conspiracy theory: you claim they're colluding
| together but you have no evidence of it._
|
| The entire point of the article is to investigate why
| there's so much evidence of police colluding to hide
| misconduct.
| craftinator wrote:
| Maybe not backed by evidence, but definitely a reasonable
| extrapolation. Basic logic and social analysis will
| inform you that the role a police officer has attracts
| two mentalities: those who very strongly want to uphold
| law and help people, and those that enjoy abusing power
| and controlling people. Obviously these lie along a
| spectrum, and there is some overlap.
|
| Anecdotally, I know many of the bullies from my high
| school ended up being police. They enjoyed the power and
| feeling of beating and subjugating their classmates, and
| they found a job that pays well and gives them
| fulfillment.
|
| Let me posit this: if you were that type of individual,
| what better job is there to have than being a cop? Also,
| if you had that job, would you incriminate yourself after
| abusing your power, or would you lie, knowing that police
| protect their own and are often given the benefit of the
| doubt?
|
| I think it's extremely naive to assume that the situation
| isn't exactly as I described above. The real question is
| what is the ratio of abusers and bullies to helpers and
| law upholders.
| gnusty_gnurc wrote:
| > I think it's extremely naive to assume that the
| situation isn't exactly as I described above. The real
| question is what is the ratio of abusers and bullies to
| helpers and law upholders.
|
| And ignoring all the unsubstantiated claims you're making
| - it's completely compatible and most likely that the
| ratio is overwhelmingly good cops with a few abusers, and
| generally if/when present, concentrated in specific
| localities.
|
| The generalization that cops are inherently predisposed
| to evil or something is bizarre, unhelpful and polarizing
| - not to mention inflammatory to all the cops that are in
| fact lawful and in many ways more honorable than most
| citizens in terms of sacrifice, risk, and social good.
| craftinator wrote:
| We simply don't have any data of quality that could
| substantiate any claims on this subject. So all claims on
| it are unsubstantiated.
|
| > it's completely compatible and most likely that the
| ratio is overwhelmingly good cops with a few abusers, and
| generally if/when present, concentrated in specific
| localities.
|
| What is your reasoning? Not only is this an
| unsubstantiated claim, but it also comes with no logical
| reasoning describing how you reached this conclusion,
| unlike my original post.
|
| > The generalization that cops are inherently predisposed
| to evil or something is bizarre, unhelpful and polarizing
| - not to mention inflammatory to all the cops that are in
| fact lawful and in many ways more honorable than most
| citizens in terms of sacrifice, risk, and social good.
|
| You call this idea bizarre, inflammatory, and state that
| cops are in fact lawful and more honorable than most
| citizens. You haven't given any evidence to support this,
| nor have you explained any type of reasoning or logic for
| how you arrived at this conclusion.
|
| I find this very ironic and hypocritical, as you directly
| accused me of making unsubstantiated claims; I at the
| very least provide logical reasoning, while you fail to
| provide anything other than vacuous conclusions.
| gnusty_gnurc wrote:
| > So all claims on it are unsubstantiated
|
| > I at the very least provide logical reasoning, while
| you fail to provide anything other than vacuous
| conclusions
|
| At least you're admitting to a priori reasoning and using
| that to conclude generalizations about an entire
| profession.
|
| A cursory search tells me there's around 1 million law
| enforcement officers in the US. Like all conspiracy
| theories - what are the chances there's widespread and
| indefensible corruption such that all of them are
| complicit but very little ever leaks?
|
| Clearly we see cases of indefensible abuse (as we'd
| expect in law enforcement given a population of 300+
| million people), but perceived prevalence of abuse seems
| to be hysterically skewed towards "ubiquitous evil" when
| social media, etc. broadcasts local incidents directly
| onto everyone's radar where people are primed to view
| everything in terms of their preconceived narratives and
| worldviews.
| craftinator wrote:
| I preceded my reasoning by stating that there wasn't good
| data; I'm not sure why you point that out as if it were
| some new development. In the lack of good data, logical
| reasoning is the only framework for generating a
| hypothesis. Am I wrong about that? Other than a priori
| reasoning, what should I have used; the same style of
| baseless claims that you make?
|
| And if I was generalizing across an entire profession, I
| clearly did NOT state that the entire population of
| police is rampant with abuse. I extrapolated from well
| known understandings in economics that people who are
| attracted to the incentives provided by being a police
| officer indicate that some police officers will be amoral
| bullies who take pleasure in wielding unmitigated power
| over people, while others will be those who take pleasure
| in helping people and upholding the law. Feel free to
| reread my comments completely.
|
| You still have provided no logical reasoning for your
| conclusions. I'd really like to hear why you think what
| you think.
|
| > A cursory search tells me there's around 1 million law
| enforcement officers in the US. Like all conspiracy
| theories - what are the chances there's widespread and
| indefensible corruption such that all of them are
| complicit but very little ever leaks?
|
| What are the chances that people who have immense power
| and immense protection from legal action will become
| corrupt? Quite high really.
|
| Is your argument at this point summed up as "they haven't
| been caught misbehaving at scale, so let's generalize
| their entire profession with the benefit of the doubt"?
| gnusty_gnurc wrote:
| > Is your argument at this point summed up as "they
| haven't been caught misbehaving at scale, so let's
| generalize their entire profession with the benefit of
| the doubt"?
|
| I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt. I'm saying
| that it's reasonable to assume that complete information
| suppression by a conspiracy of bad actors across
| independent localities is likely impossible. This is why
| most conspiracy theories are false. Information
| suppression is hard and even more rare is uniform
| behavior across many thousands of individual police
| departments.
|
| It's definitely true that police act in their self-
| interest and corruptly sometimes. But _sometimes_ is a
| term that represents vastly different circumstances with
| tons of different causations, effects, etc. Just saying
| "cops are unaccountable power-abusers" is simplistic,
| unproductive, offensive and wrong. There's an opportunity
| for conversation about reform, but the rampant
| groupthink, stereotyping and dogmatism is killing it.
| craftinator wrote:
| > I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt. I'm
| saying that it's reasonable to assume that complete
| information suppression by a conspiracy of bad actors
| across independent localities is likely impossible. This
| is why most conspiracy theories are false. Information
| suppression is hard and even more rare is uniform
| behavior across many thousands of individual police
| departments.
|
| The only one in this thread that has mentioned either
| conspiracy theories or complete information suppression
| is you. You responded to this comment:
|
| "Frankly, that's incredibly difficult to believe. When
| the cameras are off, police lie about the circumstances
| to make their violence seem justified. (Or even when the
| cameras are on -- for example, the NYC police union has
| opposed the firing of Eric Garner's murderer.)"
|
| With the following:
|
| "This is technically a conspiracy theory right?"
|
| I don't know how you arrived at "complete information
| suppression" from the first comment. I think that most
| cops, like most drivers, would lie to protect themselves.
| I also think that some portion of cops don't NEED to lie
| to protect themselves, because they aren't people who
| abuse their powers. There is some unknown portion,
| however, that became police because they enjoy the
| opportunities for power and domination over others, and
| use their power to abuse others.
|
| > It's definitely true that police act in their self-
| interest and corruptly sometimes. But sometimes is a term
| that represents vastly different circumstances with tons
| of different causations, effects, etc.
|
| This sentence is in line with my conclusions throughout
| this discussion. It is something we agree on. This is an
| argument along a spectrum; I've given solid logical
| reasoning for why I think there is some percentage of
| police that are amoral and abusive, namely that it is the
| MOST attractive job for people of that persuasion, and I
| am a first-hand witness of it with n=~7.
|
| What I am still waiting for is any sort of logic behind
| claims you've made that are of this ilk:
|
| "most likely that the ratio is overwhelmingly good cops
| with a few abusers, and generally if/when present,
| concentrated in specific localities."
|
| Where's your reasoning for why cops are overwhelmingly
| good? You keep blasting a message without providing your
| reasoning. You've seen my reasoning, as I've repeated it
| several times now, but provided none for your claims.
| Please do so now.
| minikites wrote:
| >The real question is what is the ratio of abusers and
| bullies to helpers and law upholders.
|
| The ratio is tilted heavily in favor of abusers and there
| has been ample evidence showing this since the dawn of
| modern policing. Modern policing descended from slave
| patrols and it shows. The militarization of police is a
| more recent abomination, but not the root cause.
|
| There is a third category beyond abusers and "law
| upholders": those who stand by and do nothing, thereby
| enabling the abusers and silently endorsing their
| behavior.
| craftinator wrote:
| > The ratio is tilted heavily in favor of abusers
|
| This has been my personal experience, but I don't know of
| any statistics that capture this, so I don't think we can
| make that conclusion at this moment.
|
| However, from my time in the Marine Corps, which also
| attracts some people who are amoral dominators, I can say
| it very much depends on the culture. The Corps pushes
| personal accountability and camaraderie very strongly in
| its culture. I witnessed people who were professed
| racists change in just a few months to accepting all skin
| colors, people who were completely self-centered
| narcissists turn into strong team players. It didn't work
| all the time, and wasn't uniform across the service, but
| a strong, zero tolerance culture can mold people into it.
|
| > There is a third category beyond abusers and "law
| upholders": those who stand by and do nothing, thereby
| enabling the abusers and silently endorsing their
| behavior.
|
| When I listed categories, I should have made it more
| clear that it's really a spectrum with opposing values on
| either end. People who stand by and do nothing would lie
| more towards the middle, not having a strong enough
| valuation of justice to step in and stop it, but not a
| strong enough desire for power abuse to join in. A random
| person on the street could have a strong sense of justice
| but still not condone police brutality by standing idly,
| but I think you are right that a police officer is
| responsible for violence by not attempting to circumvent
| it; stopping violence like that is the REASON they have
| special legal protections.
| DFHippie wrote:
| Also, the police omerta business means the law upholders
| knuckle under to the bullies or get driven out of the
| force.
| gnusty_gnurc wrote:
| Kind of like the Illuminati. Or Bill Clinton's
| criticizers - speak up and he orders a hit! /s
| craftinator wrote:
| Ah, never mind, don't bother responding to my comment
| above. I didn't realize that you are just trolling.
| gnusty_gnurc wrote:
| > police omerta business
|
| IDK I consider blanket generalizations about policing in
| the US as the mafia or something to be trolling...
| craftinator wrote:
| You responded to a reasonable argument based on
| understandings of incentive with:
|
| > Kind of like the Illuminati. Or Bill Clinton's
| criticizers - speak up and he orders a hit! /s
|
| No argument, but references to the Illuminati and
| assassinations. Not a whole lot of credibility to stand
| on, and definitely no reasonable discussion.
| greedo wrote:
| Hell, when the cameras are on, they plant evidence and
| make threatening comments about killing African-
| Americans, and judges...
| newacct583 wrote:
| > the vast vast majority of shootings by police are
| unambiguously justified
|
| Is that so? What counts as "unambiguously justified" to
| your eyes? I don't see how this squares. I mean... let's
| pick "the dead subject initiated lethal violence first"
| as a reasonable proxy for what you're talking about.
|
| You're saying that in situations where someone attacks a
| police officer, the police are 1000/50 == _twenty times_
| more likely to win that deadly confrontation than lose?
| Really? They 're well trained, they aren't that good
| shots.
|
| I think the jury is very much out on that assertion. In
| this era of pervasive video, we're finally getting a look
| at a decent fraction of these confrontations, and a
| shocking number are not justified at all, much less
| "unambiguously". I don't see how you can reasonably
| assert that all the unmeasured ones must be...
| piokoch wrote:
| "You're saying that in situations where someone attacks a
| police officer, the police are 1000/50"
|
| Are you claiming that it would be "more fair" if this
| ratio was different? Should it be 50/50? I think not, I
| assume that at least some members of this 1000 were
| indeed dangerous criminals, not innocent citizens
| murdered by cruel police officers?
| newacct583 wrote:
| The question wasn't about "fair", it was about
| "justified". And... yeah? The police aren't assassins or
| solidiers. They aren't _supposed_ to kill anyone at all.
| When it happens, it 's a tragedy that is _supposed_ to be
| avoided.
|
| So when must it happen? Well, when they need to defend
| themselves, I guess. So yeah, I think that kill ratio
| becomes an important point of evidence as to how dire the
| need for defense was. If you come to me and tell me that
| the police are dying as fast as the criminals, then OK,
| fine, I'll buy that those are just shootouts. If it's 2:1
| in favor of the police, then I guess I'd be OK with that
| and rationalize it as the police being better trained and
| more worth preserving. Four to one? Maybe.
|
| _TWENTY_ to one? Come on. That 's not reasonable on its
| face.
| pnw_hazor wrote:
| They are supposed to kill every criminal that tries to
| kill them.
| nitrogen wrote:
| It would be better to capture those criminals and
| dismantle their networks.
| dwater wrote:
| No they aren't. They are not mercenaries. They are
| supposed to arrest every suspected criminal and prevent
| those suspects from committing acts of violence. They are
| allowed to use violence to prevent loss of life, but they
| are not supposed to kill anyone.
| spolster wrote:
| No, they are supposed to arrest every criminal that tries
| to kill them. Sometimes they have no choice but to shoot
| (and maybe kill) someone to protect themselves or others,
| but that is not the goal.
|
| The inverse is true though. They are _not_ supposed to
| kill any person that doesn 't try to kill them.
| marcoperaza wrote:
| Again, the set of actions that would drive a reasonable
| person to use deadly defensive force is much larger than
| those where the subject is actually (with perfect
| knowledge) trying to kill the officer. E.g. a suspect
| might shoot at cops in order to get away, not actually
| trying to kill the officers.
| newacct583 wrote:
| Shouldn't we hold police to a slightly higher standard
| than what random-sally-with-a-gun is expected to do?
| Isn't that the whole point of having police in the first
| place: that we trust them with powers we don't give to
| ourselves?
| marcoperaza wrote:
| What from the perspective of the police officer is
| reasonable grounds to fear for his life, is going to be a
| larger number of situations than those where someone is
| actually, with perfect knowledge, making an attempt on
| his life. Or put another way, people do things with
| (e.g.) the intention of injuring/obstructing/etc. and
| escaping, but that a reasonable person would interpret as
| being an attack on their life. If you wave a gun in
| someone's face, they are in their rights to shoot you,
| even if you had no intention of ever firing it.
| newacct583 wrote:
| > If you wave a gun in someone's face, they are in their
| rights to shoot you, even if you had no intention of ever
| firing it.
|
| That is absolutely not the case. If so, there would be a
| bunch of very justifiably dead 2A protesters and some
| cheering hippies. You would NEVER say that about a white
| man holding a 5.56mm and yelling at someone outside your
| local state house.
|
| Where exactly did you get that logic? Brandishing a
| weapon is a crime. Bearing one is not. The difference is
| squishy, and in _neither_ case are you reasonably allowed
| to kill someone.
|
| The only reason that makes sense to you is because you
| have a preconceived notion of whether the person "waving"
| the gun has a life worth preserving or not.
| marcoperaza wrote:
| You took one very strange interpretation of the word
| 'wave' and really ran with it into a very ungenerous
| interpretation and attack. I'm not going to engage with
| that.
| newacct583 wrote:
| I interpreted it, and explained so, as "brandishment",
| which is the legal term of art for exactly that act of
| displaying a weapon in a threatening way. I submit that
| if you meant something different, you're the one who
| needs to clarify.
| deschutes wrote:
| The Seattle police department releases bodycam footage of
| lethal encounters. I'd encourage you to watch some of the
| controversial ones and draw your own conclusions.
|
| What's been interesting to me is that the narrative that
| develops between the event and the video release almost
| always survives the video even though the video
| challenges the narrative.
|
| For example, somewhat recently spd killed a man that was
| brandishing a knife. Reports indicated he was shot in the
| back, causing an uproar. The video footage shows that the
| suspect was twisting and lunging towards them when shot.
| newacct583 wrote:
| To be clear: citing one episode in Seattle against the
| dozens and dozens of "less justified" killings isn't
| really making the case the "vast majority of police
| killings are justified".
|
| FWIW: I'm in the region, follow these things, and don't
| remember that episode. I'd be curious to follow a link to
| that video if you have it.
|
| _Edit: I found
| it:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8lebkOR_M4
|
| You are deliberately misrepresenting that video! The
| shots are fired at 1:06, and the guy was, MAYBE in the
| process of stopping and turning toward the police. He was
| not facing them, at all. There is absolutely no "lunging"
| happening. His arms are tight to his sides, the knife
| isn't even visible, much less extended. And the shots are
| fired from WELL out of arms range, maybe 8-9 feet away.
| Hell, if you told me he was trying to surrender I'd half
| believe it. I'm looking at this and thinking... sorry,
| that killing was needless. He wasn't a threat. Or wasn't
| enough of a threat to make it worth killing him over._
| deschutes wrote:
| After watching the video again I stand by the
| description. At that position in the video the man faces
| them and has his knife arm fully extended before the
| shots are fired. There is a second perspective following
| the first that shows this more clearly.
|
| Given he yells "you're going to have to fucking kill me"
| seconds prior to being shot it's hard to interpret any of
| that as a surrender.
|
| The other controversial killing in recent memory is a non
| compliant armed man. The body cam footage is inconclusive
| on this one to me. The man certainly doesn't seem like a
| threat because he's on the ground. However, he was
| struggling and armed with a pistol. They gave him many
| opportunities to surrender.
| newacct583 wrote:
| I just stepped through it again, and you're spinning like
| crazy. He doesn't extend that knife. He doesn't face the
| police until after he takes a bullet in his side. He
| never got within knife range. He never approached the
| police.
|
| He did not have to be killed. You're really telling me
| that we can't ask for three more seconds to let him drop
| the knife or actually approach an officer with it?
|
| And that's the problem with this logic. You want to allow
| absolute hair trigger aggression by police officers. And
| when you allow that, you get innocent people killed.
| Because the cops can't make that decision correctly every
| time, and if you train them to shoot first, they will.
|
| This guy didn't have to die. I don't know what was in his
| head, but I know he didn't have to die.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Is there some independent research on the subject that
| you're referring to? Note that the bar for "legally
| justified" is _extremely low_ [1], so it would be nice to
| see some kind of audit that doesn't rely on legal
| rulings.
|
| [1]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Tamir_Rice
|
| > An FBI review by retired agent Kimberly Crawford found
| that Rice's death was justified and Loehmann's "response
| was a reasonable one."
| thinkcontext wrote:
| WaPo did a whole series of articles on police shootings a
| few years back. Part of that was creating a database of
| all police fatal shootings since, unbelievably, none
| existed.
|
| One of their articles looked at every fatal police
| shooting in 2015 and looked at the circumstances. They
| found 30% occurred when the victim had pointed or
| brandished a gun, 28% when they had fired a gun and 16%
| when they had attacked some other way. They identified 5%
| to have occurred in a manner likely to cause public
| controversy.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/10/2
| 4/o...
| [deleted]
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| If these figures were accurate far more police would die
| in shootings every year.
| packetlost wrote:
| No, because police are trained to not get into situations
| where they are at greater risk whenever possible (and it
| doesn't endanger others). Like it or not, a significant
| part of officer training in the US is for 'combat-like'
| scenarios that are active and violent, and risk
| management, and it's at least partially to keep the
| number of officer deaths down. That and they're basically
| allowed to shoot someone who maybe has a gun and looks
| like they're drawing it, which may also contribute
| towards the relatively low number of gun-related officer
| deaths. It also results in more people getting shot than
| need to.
|
| And as others in the thread have said, it's actually
| really really hard to accurately shoot a target with a
| gun, and the number of non-fatal gun-related injuries
| probably far outweigh the fatal ones.
| int_19h wrote:
| Some anecdotes to illustrate.
|
| "The officers with SWAT and dynamic-entry experience
| interviewed for this book say raids are orders of
| magnitude more intoxicating than anything else in police
| work. Ironically, many cops describe them with language
| usually used to describe the drugs the raids are
| conducted to confiscate. "Oh, it's a huge rush," Franklin
| says. "Those times when you do have to kick down a door,
| it's just a big shot of adrenaline." Downing agrees.
| "It's a rush. And you have to be careful, because the
| raids themselves can be habit-forming." Jamie Haase, a
| former special agent with Immigration and Customs
| Enforcement who went on multiple narcotics, money
| laundering, and human trafficking raids, says the thrill
| of the raid may factor into why narcotics cops just don't
| consider less volatile means of serving search warrants.
| "The thing is, it's so much safer to wait the suspect
| out," he says. "Waiting people out is just so much
| better. You've done your investigation, so you know their
| routine. So you wait until the guy leaves, and you do a
| routine traffic stop and you arrest him. That's the
| safest way to do it. But you have to understand that a
| lot of these cops are meatheads. They think this stuff is
| cool. And they get hooked on that jolt of energy they get
| during a raid.""
|
| "Narcotics investigators had made a controlled drug buy a
| few hours earlier and were laying plans to raid the
| suspect's home. "The drug buy was in town, not at the
| home," Taylor says. "But they'd always raid the house
| anyway. They could never just arrest the guy on the
| street. They always had to kick down doors.""
|
| "The thing is, when law enforcement officials face
| suspects who present a genuine threat to officer safety,
| they do tend to be more creative. When the FBI finally
| located Whitey Bulger in 2010 after searching for him for
| sixteen years, the reputed mobster was suspected in
| nearly twenty murders and was thought to be armed with a
| huge arsenal of weapons. Of all the people who might meet
| the criteria for arrest by a SWAT team, you'd think
| Bulger would top the list. He was also aging, in poor
| physical health, and looking at spending the rest of his
| life in prison. If ever there was a candidate to go out
| in a blaze of cop-killing glory, it was Whitey Bulger.
| And yet instead of sending a tactical team in to tear
| down Bulger's door, the FBI did some investigating and
| learned that Bulger rented a public storage locker. They
| called him up, pretending to be from the company that
| owned the facility, and told Bulger someone might have
| broken into his locker. When he went to the facility to
| investigate, he was arrested without incident. Why can't
| investigators handle common drug offenders the same way?
| A big reason is a lack of resources. If your department
| is serving several drug warrants a day, you just aren't
| going to have the personnel to come up with that sort of
| plan for each one. A second reason is that drug offenders
| simply aren't all that likely to shoot at cops, and it's
| easier to use violent tactics against people who aren't
| going to fire back. It's by no means a universal rule,
| but often when police do face a genuinely violent suspect
| like an escaped fugitive with a violent history, a
| suspect in a series of violent crimes, or a barricade or
| hostage situation, they don't immediately storm the
| place. They set up a perimeter or try to figure out other
| ways to make the arrest safely. This again isn't possible
| with drug warrants--there are just too many of them. But
| because drug dealers aren't all that dangerous, it works
| out to raid them instead."
|
| (all from Radley Balko's "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The
| Militarization of America's Police Forces")
| marcoperaza wrote:
| A police officer is murdered every week on average. I
| imagine the numbers for those shot at is much higher,
| since most gunshot wounds don't result in death and most
| shots probably don't result in hits.
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| They shot about 20 people dead every week though. Compare
| that Germany or the UK where it can take decades for the
| police to kill that many people.
| renewiltord wrote:
| And a police officer murders 3 people a _day_ on average,
| then, in comparison?
| marcoperaza wrote:
| In one weekend, over a hundred people were shot in
| Chicago by criminals. I'm not sure you appreciate how
| many extremely violent, dangerous criminals there are in
| the US.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I think I appreciate it well enough to stay far away from
| Chiraq.
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| I hope you see the difference between people not being
| able to trust law enforcement and not being able to trust
| gangsters.
|
| This crime is in many ways the result of the violence of
| the police which means other citizens are afraid to call
| and cooperate with the police. Exactly what you need to
| reduce this crime.
|
| Similar stuff happened in Iraq. When civilians could not
| trust the American occupying force then militias and
| terrorists filled the power vacuum.
| sukilot wrote:
| So maybe 30-60% are clearly justified.
| brohee wrote:
| Since they kill 1000 people a year (as cited early in the
| thread, didn't look it up), that would leave 400-700
| controversial killings, or 1-2 per day on average...
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| Police routinely falsify reports, if this was really
| true, it would not be the same officers involved in
| shootings again and again.
| larrywright wrote:
| Slightly related: I saw a comment the other day by
| someone who had somehow managed to blame Obama for the
| rise in violence against minorities, with the
| rationalization being that "we didn't have all of these
| problems until Obama was in office".
|
| It's a classic case of correlation != causation. Smart
| phones with video cameras in them became ubiquitous
| during Obama's time in office. Similarly, bodycams became
| more commonly used by the police. That's the difference.
|
| This has been happening all along, we just couldn't prove
| it until now.
| beefalo wrote:
| Also the ubiquity of auto-uploaded videos and
| livestreaming. Only in the last few years has virtually
| all video recording become online first. Before all
| police had to do was take a person's phone away to hide
| their actions.
| larrywright wrote:
| That's a great point. Oddly enough it works the other way
| too. My neighbor is a detective and told me that a young
| lady livestreamed herself looting Target. Shared it on
| Facebook.
| codr7 wrote:
| Says who? From what I've seen I'm pretty sure many could
| be avoided using a different approach/mentality.
| tengbretson wrote:
| You're welcome to try it.
| blaser-waffle wrote:
| You're looking at deaths, not shootings.
|
| I posit that cops have body armor, training, and generally
| are equipped to take bullets, so to speak. Only 50 officers
| might have died, but if 1500 were shot, that makes the 1000
| civilian fatalities look different; civvies aren't wearing
| vests.
| GVIrish wrote:
| That's a good point, but the corollary of that is, how
| many people were shot by the police but didn't die?
|
| And going one step further, we've seen the stat for
| yearly police gun homicides but as far as I know there
| are no reliable statistics for how many people are killed
| by police by other methods. How many people are dying
| from chokeholds, from beatings, from having medical
| attention withheld?
| hef19898 wrote:
| It is not just shootings, violence comes in many forms.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| > _That 's a good point, but the corollary of that is,
| how many people were shot by the police but didn't die?_
|
| ... and how many times did the police miss the unarmed
| suspects they were shooting at and hit innocent
| bystanders?
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2013/09/15/justice/times-square-
| police-s...
| pluto9 wrote:
| Don't forget this one: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-
| news/ups-hijacking-gun-battl...
|
| There's even a video of this incident that shows them
| using occupied civilian vehicles for cover.
| joncrane wrote:
| >About 50~ police officers die via guns per year. The
| police kill about 1,000 citizens per year via guns
| though[2].
|
| There's a KD ratio joke in here somewhere.
| larrywright wrote:
| Are there any statistics on officers who are shot but not
| fatally? With the widespread use of body armor, you'd
| expect that would drive fatality numbers down.
| oblio wrote:
| What does Iceland have to do with anything? Those numbers are
| from the US.
| kube-system wrote:
| I really haven't really heard anyone, even protestors, claim
| that police in the US should give up their guns. The recent
| high profile cases of deaths haven't been by gun, but with
| bare hands. Mostly, the discussion is around if/when deadly
| force should be used, no matter the implement.
| vanattab wrote:
| Ummm... I mean the protesters around here want the Police
| completely disbanded...
| kube-system wrote:
| That doesn't mean there won't be police. Other cities
| have disbanded their police departments. All have been
| replaced with a new police department. The idea is to
| replace a poorly run department when reform isn't good
| enough. The idea isn't to have a completely unpoliced
| city.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/09/us/disband-police-camden-
| new-...
| ajayh wrote:
| Camden City PD was disbanded to reduce the costs of
| salaries and benefits with new union contracts. The CNN
| article doesn't even contain the word 'union'.
| kube-system wrote:
| That's beside the point. My reason for linking the
| example was to illustrate that departments have been
| disbanded before and it's a more aggressive strategy for
| change than attempting to reform an existing department,
| not a call for lawlessness.
|
| "disband the police" fits on a sign, but it's an
| incomplete statement.
| jberryman wrote:
| I agree with that impression, and actually find it really
| puzzling that disarming police isn't a central message. I
| think it's very likely that if the police on George Floyd
| had been unarmed that eventually the bystanders would have
| intervened (at least I hope).
| scottoreily wrote:
| Found the delusional power hungry fascist. What's it like to
| lack complete empathy?
| Semaphor wrote:
| So it feels more dangerous to you. I'd assume it's because
| the danger is so far out of your control?
| woah wrote:
| Are you saying that the stats posted above are wrong? Based
| just on your imagination? Or do you have some information
| about shortcomings in how they were collected?
| raxxorrax wrote:
| No, I didn't say that they are wrong. My imagination is
| unlimited of course.
|
| A shortcomming I see here is that the danger is reduced to
| fatalities as average over the whole profession.
|
| There certainly are areas in the US where policing is
| extremely safe, everyone knows you by name, sponsors you a
| donut from time to time and is happy to see you. I would do
| it without a problem and this is probably true for most
| officers. But allow me to specify, I wouldn't want to be a
| police officer in urban areas with focal points in crime.
| user982 wrote:
| _> I would have no problem with being a police officer in
| iceland, but certainly in the US. I get why they don 't want
| to give up their guns, especially now, but that has
| consequences for policing work. If you can assume your
| "victim" to be unarmed, you approach the situation
| differently._
|
| Iceland has a fairly high guns-per-capita number, with about
| one gun for every third person. An odd choice to use as an
| example of a country safe due to an unarmed populace.
|
| _> So I do think it is a quite dangerous job there to be
| honest. Moreso than the ones you mentioned. Some time ago
| deep sea fishing was the deadliest job. Would still prefer it
| from a risk assessment perspective._
|
| "I see your data, and I willfully ignore it."
| jaxx75 wrote:
| > one gun for every third person.
|
| I would suspect it's a high rate of long guns, not hand
| guns.
| de_watcher wrote:
| not hand guns... you mean footguns?
| blaser-waffle wrote:
| "Longarms" or "long-arms" generally refers to rifles and
| shotguns, as opposed to handguns.
|
| It's an important distinction, as something on the order
| of 80-85% of gun violence in the US -- rape, murder,
| robbery, suicide, etc. -- are with handguns.
|
| Attempts to ban handguns have met stiff resistance,
| though, e.g. Heller v DC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D
| istrict_of_Columbia_v._Heller
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| That's still less than 1/3 the per-capita number of guns in
| the US.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Almost all deaths deep sea fishing are from mistakes. Many
| deaths from policing are people intentionally trying to
| kill you.
|
| Maybe that comes into play. With deep sea fishing , if
| you're careful enough, you can drastically lower the death
| rate - it's in your hands. Not so with policing.
| chrisbennet wrote:
| My Dad was a lobsterman for 12 years and just being
| careful is not enough to "drastically lower your death
| rate" for a profession fisherman unfortunately.
|
| You can't control how long you've been awake. You can't
| control a rogue wave the sweeps you off the tail of the
| boat. Professional fisherman have enormous respect for
| the sea.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| You can control your wakefulness with certain drugs that
| are very common on commercial fishing boats.
|
| You can improve your odds of not being overswept by using
| your tethers appropriately and wearing proper protective
| gear which many people forego because it's less
| comfortable to work in.
| chrisbennet wrote:
| I hadn't thought of that but you're right.
| codr7 wrote:
| Are they really? It seems likely to me that many are
| simply reacting to being cornered and threatened. Taking
| the behavior of the police out of the equation makes the
| answer useless.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| A major part of their job is arresting people who usually
| don't want to be arrested. Yes, I'm sure some police
| over-escalate a situation and end up dead for it, but
| that's probably not the norm.
| codr7 wrote:
| Probably not? It's not like there's a lack of evidence
| out there now that everyone has a camera in their pocket.
|
| From what I've seen it looks highly likely that their
| behavior is a big part of the problem.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Are you the type of person who thinks the world is much
| more violent today than it was 50 years ago?
| prepend wrote:
| It reminds me of Taleb's Extremeistan vs Mediocristan. I think
| it was in Fooled by Randomness.
|
| For police the danger comes in spikes with mostly non-dangerous
| work. For a lumberjack the danger is evenly distributed.
|
| So I think for police, it's the constant low probability of
| great danger.
| growlist wrote:
| I knew a really nice guy that ended up working in forestry in
| the US, and tragically died after backing into a powerline
| whilst up a tree in a harness cutting branches. Working with
| trees is so dangerous.
| chrisbennet wrote:
| I would think logging would be less dangerous now. When a was
| growing up in Maine, loggers cut down trees with the chainsaw
| and pulled the trees into the wood yard with a tractor like
| skidder (skidah in Maine-speak).
|
| Now, they are more likely (I think) to use a machine that clips
| the tree off (like scissors) and takes the branches off.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >They are often paid quite well
|
| Big cities, yes. Small towns and rural areas, not so much.
| National average is around $60k/year - but the variance is high
| (from $30k to $120k - depending on the area).
|
| >But how dangerous is it?
|
| The numbers don't tell the entire story. There's a difference
| between danger coming from negligence vs from a chance of
| murder by another human. Soldiers coming back from Iraq
| suffered high numbers of PTSD, even though the mortality rate
| would probably be similar to one of the dangerous jobs you
| listed. Not only that Police have to deal with the darkest
| sides of society, including scenes of murder, rape and violence
| even against the most innocent of our society - like children.
|
| 'Police' is a type of job that is closer to the military
| example I gave, than to a logger or fisherman.
| frank2 wrote:
| I would worry more about PTSD than about death or injury if I
| was a cop.
|
| Almost getting killed tends to cause PTSD, but the tendency is
| stronger if someone intentionally tried to kill you.
|
| And doing violence to another person is also potent cause of
| PTSD.
|
| For those 2 reasons, I would expect rates of PTSD to be higher
| among cops than among the other 15 occupations you list.
|
| I would also worry that the habit of suspicion needed to be
| effective as a cop would be bad for my marriage and other
| relationships. In other words, I would worry that the work
| might make me pathologically cynical.
|
| Finally, some people really enjoy having power over others and
| using that power to inflict pain. Even if the other
| disadvantages of police work did not exist, it might be wise
| for me to avoid it just to pessimize the probability of my
| needing to work with someone like that. It is a complicated
| issue, but certainly I find such people distasteful and suspect
| that most adults in my country (the US) share my distaste.
| wwright wrote:
| I would argue that this applies to the people being policed
| as well, if not more so. A black man has little recourse if
| he is assaulted by a police man, or if his wife or child is
| killed by them. Families are torn apart by drug laws and
| prison pipelines.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >A black man has little recourse if he is assaulted by a
| police man, or if his wife or child is killed by them
|
| To be clear, those are not statistically significant
| events. In fact, they are insignificant at the population
| level, and there is no discrepancy across racial lines (as
| in, the numbers do not show Black Americans being targeted
| more than other demographic groups).
|
| One of the challenges is that if a demographic group
| disproportionately engages in criminal activity (more or
| less), then it will necessarily have a disproportionate
| negative (or positive) interaction with the entire judicial
| system (police and courts) - but you cannot fix that with
| police reform. You can still make the case for Police
| reform and there are a lot of places of improvement (e.g.
| the practice of 'swatting' should NOT be a thing - police
| and judges that issue these warrants should be MORE
| discriminatory !!!), but that will not lessen the
| proportion of negative interactions.
|
| >Families are torn apart by drug laws and prison pipelines.
|
| That has NOTHING to do with police. Police enforce laws on
| the books - typically municipal and state laws. Most cities
| have progressive Democratic leadership (from mayor, to
| council, to police chiefs) and those cities also had the
| biggest issues with protests against police brutality.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| There is more to the story of those statistics you refer
| to:
|
| https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-statistics-dont-
| cap...
|
| One needs to look at who the police are choosing to
| interact with to understand the denominator properly. The
| numbers seem to show that they are biased towards
| interacting with black people.
| iratewizard wrote:
| The same article bashing a wide range of crime statistics
| uses even shallower statistical misdirection to support
| its argument.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| It demonstrated in a very straightforward way how the
| given statistic can result from very different underlying
| realities, and then provided evidence of the less obvious
| possibility. The fact that police stops of black people
| are less likely to find contraband than those of white
| people seems rather significant.
| macspoofing wrote:
| I get it and I have no disagreement with qualifying the
| numbers. It's a very complicated issue, but, if it is in
| fact true, when controlled for all other factors, if a
| particularity defined demographic group engages in
| disproportionate amount of criminal activity (less or
| more), then wouldn't you expect that that would filter
| down to the individual interactions?
|
| If an individual police officer is choosing who to frisk
| (or interact with), and the only things they have to go
| on are visible superficial characteristics (i.e. age,
| gender, ethnicity, clothing, etc.), and the global fact
| that those characteristics are statically correlated with
| more or less crime, that would be impossible for an
| individual to control their biases.
|
| We know this is a painful exercise, because people are
| not just those superficial characteristics, and it's
| unfair for an individual to be singled out for those
| characteristics - but that's the ONLY information
| available to the officer.
|
| The officer cannot control their bias, because if they
| try, they will either over or under compensate and
| because they are human. It's why we have double-blind
| trials and the scientific method - we know even well-
| meaning humans cannot control their biases. And this
| isn't an example of racism, because it could clothing or
| gender that trigger the frisk (I guarantee you that men
| are stopped more than women - WHY?!?!?), but aspect of
| human cognition. The only way to control for that is by
| introducing a non-biased random decision maker. For
| example, in airport security, there will be a device that
| will randomly flag passengers for extra screening.
| Perhaps something like that should be the case in these
| 'stop-and-frisk' policies? But even that has limited
| value. If a particular neighborhood with issues of crime,
| is dominated by an ethnic group, even random sample will
| involve disproportionate 'harassment'.
|
| A while back Sam Harris had a debate with an airport
| security expert on profiling in airport security[1]. Sam
| Harris advocated for profiling and security expert was
| not. Sam Harris was 100% wrong and didn't admit it. The
| security expert talked about how proper airport security
| should work (and the problems with profiling and how to
| control for that). That debate has analogues to this
| conversation, because police should adopt some of those
| strategies because profiling is socially painful and
| breeds resentment and has limited success ... and
| individuals will not make the right decision in context.
|
| [1]https://samharris.org/to-profile-or-not-to-profile/
| joshuamorton wrote:
| > if a particularity defined demographic group engages in
| disproportionate amount of criminal activity (less or
| more), then wouldn't you expect that that would filter
| down to the individual interactions?
|
| What you're asking is "is it legitimate to discriminate
| against individuals because of the demographic group to
| which they belong".
|
| I realize that it's not obvious that that's the question
| you're asking. But when reframed in that way, my answer
| is obviously no. You should engage with an individual if
| you have evidence of a crime or suspicious activity.
| Existing while black is neither.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Sam Harris advocated for profiling and security expert
| was not._
|
| I don't think "profiling" by itself quite captures what
| Harris was arguing for. He was arguing for profiling
| based on a characteristic--being a Muslim--that _can 't
| be directly observed_. This was a key point of Schneier's
| rebuttal. So Harris's version of profiling isn't workable
| even if we admit that the characteristic in question does
| increase the probability of the person causing harm.
|
| The profiling done by police does not have the same
| problem, because the characteristics involved are
| visible. However, visible characteristics are not limited
| to the ones you note: they also include behavior. So your
| statement that visible characteristics like age, gender,
| ethnicity are the ONLY ones available to the officer is
| not correct. The officer also sees what the people are
| doing and whether it looks suspicious, the people's body
| language, and so on. It is not unfair to single out
| people for their behavior.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| I could have been a bit more clear in my summary. The
| article cites statistics that claim a higher rate of
| police stops of Black and Hispanic people are unfounded
| than those of white people. If true, this is evidence of
| police targeting practices that are disproportionate with
| actual underlying criminal activity rates.
|
| Taking a step back to look at the historical context...
| The brutal wake of slavery and ingrained systemic racism
| are primary contributors to heightened criminal activity
| we see in some predominantly black neighborhoods. Black
| people didn't collectively choose to live in worse
| conditions with high crime rates... After unlocking their
| literal chains, a savagely racist society pushed them in
| that direction.
| jtbayly wrote:
| At the jail I go to, there is more concern expressed by the
| prisoners about the destruction caused by the drugs than
| the drug sentences.
| Uberphallus wrote:
| Because that's the narrative that gets your sentence
| reduced and what any lawyer would advise: from now on,
| publicly you'll condemn the drugs that got you here.
| jtbayly wrote:
| No. You have no clue.
|
| It's because they are mourning their lost years, their
| failing health, their dead friends, their dead parents,
| their dead cousins and brothers and sisters. Oh, and
| their dead wives, girlfriends, and children. And probably
| more often than anything else, their fear that they will
| just go straight back to doing it all again when they get
| out, just like the last time they got out.
| majormajor wrote:
| > No. You have no clue.
|
| > It's because they are mourning their lost years, their
| failing health, their dead friends, their dead parents,
| their dead cousins and brothers and sisters. Oh, and
| their dead wives, girlfriends, and children. And probably
| more often than anything else, their fear that they will
| just go straight back to doing it all again when they get
| out, just like the last time they got out.
|
| For a lot of drugs, it's not the drug that killed all
| those people and tore apart those connections, it's the
| illegal nature that causes violent black markets and
| heavy policing.
| jtbayly wrote:
| It's not violence and police that are killing them where
| I live. It's drugs. I'm not saying the jail system is the
| solution, but let's not kid ourselves about what's going
| on.
| jolux wrote:
| I can see that perspective and also say that I think what
| it speaks to is that we don't provide a better systemic
| solution to drug addiction than imprisonment, which is an
| embarrassing failure of American culture and society.
| wasdfff wrote:
| While thats true, I can't imagine the slow bleed that ptsd
| from working 50 hour weeks of stress can do to the human
| brain. It would be a surprise if you retired and weren't
| screwed up after decades of that imo.
| ryandrake wrote:
| How about the slow bleed of living your entire life
| knowing you're always one random police encounter away
| from being shot. The whole law enforcement system creates
| a slow bleed of stress and trauma on both officers and
| citizens.
| [deleted]
| wwright wrote:
| Oh no, cops are fucked over for sure. They suffer in many
| ways themselves. They also benefit in other ways, and IMO
| are not innocent, but they are definitely fucked over by
| how we do policing.
| eloisant wrote:
| Does that really happen that often? Police officers getting
| "almost killed"?
| dopamean wrote:
| No it actually doesn't. This is anecdotal but... my father
| in law is a police officer in a city with 1.2 million
| people and the way he talks you'd think officers were
| dropping like flies. I looked it up and in the last 150
| years 20 officers have died while on duty in his police
| department. Many were traffic accidents. One was a heart
| attack.
| tw04 wrote:
| I often (disgustedly) hear "it's a war out there". The
| only "war" that is equivalent to the current policing in
| the US is the occupation of the axis post WWII. It's
| absolutely a war, but it's a war where the natives are
| being raped and pillaged by the occupying force with no
| recourse because they already lost.
|
| I'd be willing to wager the source of violence in
| police|public interactions is the public in less than 5%
| of interactions, probably less than 1%.
| ntsplnkv2 wrote:
| The police have been made good by decades of "good cop"
| "bad guy" TV dramas.
|
| I mean look at Law and Order, or Chicago PD, or Blue
| Bloods. There's a token episode about police brutality or
| corruption that is "solved" by the "good apple" standing
| up to them.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Good apples get fired, harassed, and stripped of pension
| for breaking the code of silence.
| jfengel wrote:
| I found it disturbing to discover that my local cemetery
| has a memorial already up for local officers killed in
| the line of duty. The only name on it is a police dog.
| There is a lot of empty space.
|
| I'm sure this came from a salesman at a law enforcement
| expo who has been selling these to every community in the
| country. It suggests a national narrative where the
| police are convinced that people are plotting to kill
| them at every moment, and even if none actually have,
| it's only a matter of time.
|
| Every encounter with police begins with hostility. You
| know they're armed. You know they're assuming you are,
| too. I can only imagine how that's magnified for people
| who "fit the profile" solely because of the color of
| their skin.
| int_19h wrote:
| The sources of that narrative are very prominent. Here's
| one.
|
| https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/jun/05/architect-
| of-c...
| CompanionCuuube wrote:
| > Police officers getting "almost killed"?
|
| Your comment only addresses dead, not almost killed as
| the comment you are replying to.
| david38 wrote:
| You don't have to almost die to get ptsd. You can get it
| from * responding to a bad domestic violence call *
| responding to a bad child abuse call * getting attacked by
| someone on PCP where you ended up shooting him five times
| because he wouldn't stop coming until you physically blew
| out his knees * any situation where death feels possible,
| but unlikely, in the way that car accidents can cause ptsd
| because you thought you would die, but car technology makes
| it unlikely for that type of accident.
|
| In all these cases, watching the amount of damage someone
| has taken can easily cause ptsd.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| This is undoubtedly true. But EMTs, firemen and emergency
| physicians encounter trauma every day on the job and we
| don't hear them taking it out on wives, children and the
| general public. What gives?
| pnw_hazor wrote:
| Good points. PTSD stressors can come from minor traffic
| stops too, since while it may be rare, they can turn into
| a lethal situation in a blink of an eye.
| [deleted]
| polishdude20 wrote:
| I think on that last point it would be dangerous if everyone
| that that way. What the police need are honest good and moral
| cops who are not afraid to stand up to their colleagues.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Almost getting killed tends to cause PTSD, but the tendency
| is stronger if someone intentionally tried to kill you.
|
| I'd be more concerned about being the first on scene of
| traffic accidents, fires, etc, especially those involving
| kids. I have vivid visions of stories I've been told from
| first responders, so I can only imagine it is worse for them.
| _iyig wrote:
| Would you say there's a difference in kind between the risk of
| death due to equipment failure or negligence, versus the risk
| of another human being actively trying to kill you? They seem
| different to me, but I'm not sure how to reason about the
| difference.
| mseidl wrote:
| The actual homicide rate of cops is almost half of the normal
| population.
| _iyig wrote:
| Interesting. Do you have a link? Those numbers are hard to
| Google, all the results I'm getting are for deaths caused
| by the police vs. of police themselves.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Death-by-person probably less controllable than death-by-
| equipment-failure. But, in reality, I'm not sure that it is.
| There are processes/procedures to reduce the likelihood of
| both.
| _iyig wrote:
| This is exactly what I'm struggling with. Intuitively, the
| idea of another person trying to injure me sounds scarier
| than a harness failing or tree falling. People can be a lot
| more unpredictable than gravity or metal fatigue. But then
| again, the safety of loggers and roofers depends not only
| on their own gear & diligence, but also on human co-workers
| who can be just as unpredictable. Versus violent criminals,
| at least the co-workers aren't actively and creatively
| malicious (usually).
| aetherson wrote:
| I agree that being a police officer isn't as dangerous as cops
| would have you believe, but aggregating statistics for the
| whole profession probably hides some spikes of larger danger.
|
| Lots of cops work essentially desk jobs. Lots of cops work in
| safe, quiet jurisdictions. They're pulling down the average,
| while cops who are responders to 911 calls in high violent
| crime areas pull it up.
| cycomanic wrote:
| There is a statistic somewhere (my googlefu can't find it at
| the moment), that shows that in less then 1% of the cases
| where police are called there is actually even the chance to
| intervene. In otherwords in 99% of the cases they come after
| the (possible) crime and are really just taking a statement.
| Still they walk into every situation with their hand on their
| gun.
|
| Often enough situations escalate because of that. I believe
| many situations would be much saver if the officers would not
| carry guns. Call the armed units for cases where it's
| warrented, like e.g. in New Zealand.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > 16 Police and sheriff's patrol officers
|
| Also of note, the primary reason police are even this high is
| for the same reason as truck drivers -- traffic accidents.
| coronadisaster wrote:
| Did anything happen to the soldiers (and their officer) shown
| killing civilians in Wikileaks' Collateral Murder video [0]? What
| about whoever ordered that drone strike on a wedding [1]?
|
| 0. https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/
|
| 1. https://www.newsweek.com/wedding-became-funeral-us-still-
| sil...
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| On [0]: as far as I know, the U.S. armed forces instigated an
| internal review immediately after the events in the video. The
| review determined that the use of force was consistent with the
| prevailing rules of engagement, and so there wasn't any
| disciplinary action.
| coronadisaster wrote:
| Does that sound right to you?
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| I really don't know. I think it's a bit more nuanced than
| some of the commentary around it suggests, particularly
| stuff that was based on the original Wikileaks selective
| cut.
| nicwolff wrote:
| It's the culture - but that starts with the leadership. These
| videos are messages to the entire fleet from the head of all US
| Naval operations, three weeks ago and then yesterday. The first
| is a call to humbly listen, and the follow-up presents the voices
| of sailors, to be heard:
|
| https://www.dvidshub.net/video/754884/cno-message-sailors-ju...
|
| https://www.dvidshub.net/video/757420/starts-with-us
|
| Have you seen anything like that from police officials?
| rafiki6 wrote:
| Great article and I think it talks about a lot of fundamental
| reasons, but not the primary "why". The way most police
| organizations are setup is already contentious with the
| population, where as the way that the military is setup is
| contentious with other countries and their militaries rather than
| the immediate population. That already means police are provided
| perverse incentives. How do you measure the success of a police
| department? It's a common issue in all security circles.
| Considering that most if not all police departments are usually
| receiving funding at a regional or local level, where the
| government can't just print money to keep their existence going,
| you now have an organization that needs to justify it's existence
| by making arrests, giving out tickets and essentially maintaining
| the reason for their existence. The military really doesn't have
| that problem. The strength of the military is usually directly
| tied to the existence of the established order. It is military's
| that over throw governments and bring in new ones.
|
| The military also has little to no interactions with the
| population. They are almost entirely focused on foreign
| populations and enemies. When abu ghraib happened, the military
| acted swiftly. It was a major PR nightmare for the US. The
| government needed the population's support for the war. So they
| cleaned up.
|
| And that is really what the major differences are.
|
| TLDR;
|
| Military -> little interaction with populace, existence tied to
| government, needs populations support to do War which is major
| measure of success
|
| Police -> funded without unlimited money, needs to justify their
| existence, direct interaction with populace, naturally in
| contention with population
| cobbal wrote:
| So what you're saying is that we need more militarization of the
| police?
| squarefoot wrote:
| When I was in the military I was taught about esprit de corps,
| loyalty, camaraderie etc. but they stressed that any order that
| goes against humanity must not be followed. Fortunately I never
| had to test that on my own ass, however I'm sure that the Police
| protecting their bad apples has nothing to do with that. Loyalty
| and esprit de corps must never ever go beyond the law, otherwise
| they become essentially like the mafia's code of silence, that
| is, a crime that covers other crimes. If I see a cop doing that,
| I cease to consider him as a cop as he just became a criminal
| wrapped in uniform.
| glenstein wrote:
| I have frequently seen police compared unfavorably to the
| military in recent weeks. I have never served, but everything
| I've seen about how the military handles use of force and how
| it handles incidents of violent misconduct suggest a standard
| that police units, at their worst, do _not_ adhere to.
| shrubble wrote:
| Was it the low-level soldiers or the higher-ups who created the
| plans for torture at Abu Ghraib who were publicly shamed,
| humiliated and then jailed?
| hef19898 wrote:
| The higher ups created it, the average soldier was sacrificed
| for it. Doesn't change the fact, that the military has
| apparently better internal controls, better training and better
| rules of engagements. Even for some sorts of police work. The
| US military. Quite telling if you ask me.
| idoubtit wrote:
| > the military has apparently better internal controls
|
| Source?
|
| The video "Collateral Murder" which made Wikileaks famous is
| one of the many proofs of that the US military doesn't apply
| much control on their engagements. The army had a video of
| the helicopter crew that shot unarmed civilians, including
| reporters and children. The crew obviously had fun killing
| them. They used offensive words and gamer slang. And the army
| lied to the press in order to protect the murderers.
|
| You may also read the many NGO reports about misconducts,
| torture, and civilian killings in Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan...
| The internal controls almost never do anything unless a high
| level of media pressure applies.
|
| The US army may have internal controls when the victims are
| Americans (bullying, etc), but apart from this... some lives
| are more equals than others.
| [deleted]
| hef19898 wrote:
| There were comments on another thread from soldiers being
| deployed to Bagdad during the surge. Citing rules of
| engagement, and these were a lot more stringent and de-
| escalating than police actions against protests in the US.
|
| Also true that US forces are the least restraint forces at
| the moment. Because all you said is true. And yet, it seems
| to work at least as good for the armed forces as it does
| for police. Only that the former is an occupation force on
| foreign soil, while the latter is nominally there to serve
| and protect the public.
| austincheney wrote:
| One video is a poor qualifier of an organization comprising
| millions of people over the past 25 years.
| scarface74 wrote:
| What I find so strange is that while I am no supporter of the
| military complex in the US, all of my ire is directed at the
| civilian oversight and not the military itself.
|
| The military generals wanted to close bases that it didn't need
| and that they thought was wasteful - the government wouldn't
| close them because of the job loss.
|
| The military leaders have said one of the biggest threats to our
| democracy is our ballooning national debt - I can't find a quote
| from a general but you will find plenty of pro-military sites
| that agree. But yet the civilian government ignores the threat.
|
| The military has plenty of weapon programs that it would love to
| mothball. But again, Senators are worried about job loss and they
| keep making weapons and selling them to foreign governments.
|
| The government can spend billions on weapons that the military
| doesn't need and private contractors but won't equip soldiers
| with what they need.
|
| There have been plenty of stories about how the civilian
| government has recently put soldiers health in danger for photo
| ops and exposing them to Covid unnecessarily.
| (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/magazine/navy-captain-cro...)
| user_0x wrote:
| This also goes for global warming etc. The military is a really
| interesting institution when it comes to politics in the US,
| and undoubtedly anywhere really.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I can't really say that I disagree with anything on a meta
| level in recent history that the military has done or that
| military generals have said that wasn't a direct result of
| incompetence, greed, or just wrong headed ideology by the
| civilian government.
| user_0x wrote:
| as it should be in a civilian society.
| scarface74 wrote:
| True. But why can't we say the same about the police?
| yostrovs wrote:
| Strangely, the word "union" doesn't appear in the article.
| Considering that it is the police unions that create the system
| within which police officers are protected, I believe their power
| and tactics need to be examined.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _police unions that create the system within which police
| officers are protected_
|
| Police unions exacerbate the problem. But they aren't the root
| cause. Their leadership is supported by the rank and file. And
| police unions act much more antagonistically in comparison with
| other public unions.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| That's because it's focused on root cause.
|
| Unions are boogeymen for these issues. They advocate for
| members by design so that is easy to do. The problems affecting
| police in states that prohibit collective bargaining for public
| employees or where private police are the same.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >They advocate for members by design so that is easy to do
|
| And in their blind advocacy for members they are advocating
| for things that are at odds with what is good for the people
| their members are supposed to serve therefore they are a
| problem that needs to be solved and cannot be left out of
| this.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| So what? Change the law.
|
| Civil service employees don't make policy, nor do their
| unions. A union can demand 25% raises and get 2.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Police unions are a good indicator of how deep the problem
| runs. Police union bosses are elected. Google "police union
| boss" if you want to see a spittle flecked shouting goon
| defending the worst police behavior. This is the guy who won
| the most votes. This is how we know it is not "a few bad
| apples."
|
| Nevertheless, the union is a symptom of a very deep problem
| that will not be solved by half measures. If you build a true
| public safety service to replace the police, you can expect
| their union to look normal, not like a big city police union.
| onefuncman wrote:
| If you get rid of bad cops you don't have to do anything to fix
| the unions.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| But you have to fix the unions to get rid of bad cops, since
| the unions _prevent_ bad cops from being gotten rid of.
| [deleted]
| fchu wrote:
| Given how police as an institution is failing, I wonder if there
| is a way to "reboot the system" (#RebootThePolice?) in a way that
| prevent bad culture to reproduce within.
|
| Like building a new corps of police ("NeoPolice") alongside
| existing police with same responsibilities, but with a more
| stringent process on recruiting, training, internal culture,
| values, etc. And have it slowly supplement the old, dysfunctional
| police.
|
| Some rationale: - When something is really broken, non amount of
| repair can fix it, you need a new thing. Shifting some policing
| responsibilities to other institutions (eg Defund the Police)
| might reduce the negative impact of a failing institution, but
| doesn't fix it. - We need a transition plan if we defund/abolish
| the police, and so far there is none to replace the police core
| responsibilities (around the use of force) - New competition
| drives innovation, and having a new police force can shine the
| line on how much better our experience of the product can be,
| driving further change.
|
| It'll require strong, sustained leadership to build those
| institutions from scratch which will be difficult, given how
| police is mostly a local institution and the resulting outcome
| can vary greatly.
|
| (For the curious, check how Brazil transitioned to a new currency
| to stop inertial inflation:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidade_real_de_valor Similar
| mindset, albeit for a completely different domain)
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Given how police as an institution is failing_
|
| I don't think we can consider "police" as a single institution,
| or in isolation. The character of the police in a particular
| locality depends on the local government of that locality. If
| the police are corrupt, it is because the local government is
| corrupt. That is going to vary widely from locality to
| locality, and fixing it cannot be a matter of simply changing
| the police alone; it has to be a matter of changing the local
| government.
| 7532yahoogmail wrote:
| Great read and better distinction
| awal2 wrote:
| You know an organization is corrupt AF when someone can use it to
| make the US military look like a bastion of accountability.
| redm wrote:
| I think they are more similar than not. The military does have
| mechanisms to investigate and punish misconduct, but so do the
| police, internal affairs departments. I believe the difference is
| internal vs. external initiation of claims. I don't see the
| military being very open to criticism from non-military
| personnel, in other words, they close ranks too. I think its more
| to do with tribalism.
| john-shaffer wrote:
| > "A soldier is reasoning agent," a military court explained in
| the 1991 case U.S. v. Kinder, in which a soldier who killed a
| civilian was convicted of murder on the grounds that his
| superior's order to do so was obviously illegal and should have
| been reported.
|
| This reference appears to be completely wrong. The case it links
| to is an appeal of drug dealing convictions.
|
| The phrase "A soldier is a reasoning agent" appears in the 1973
| case U.S. v. Calley [1] appealing Calley's conviction for murder
| at My Lai.
|
| [1] https://casebook.icrc.org/case-study/united-states-united-
| st...
| frogpelt wrote:
| How many government organizations (especially unionized ones) get
| rid of or otherwise deal with bad performers?
|
| Instead of pointing out the military as the rule and police
| officers as the exception, maybe we should consider that the
| military is the exception.
|
| Teachers, federal employees, and government employees at all
| levels of local government are known for being able to keep their
| jobs long after they should have been fired or disciplined.
|
| The egregiousness of bad policing is that many times they are
| breaking laws. But honestly, there are gray areas. The police are
| allowed to hit some people. They have to shoot some people. So
| it's not a huge leap to assume that some of them will overstep
| their bounds. And when they do, the union will back them, and
| their colleagues will back them. And we'll hear how underpaid
| they are (just like teachers).
|
| And they keep their jobs, just like bad teachers.
| mchusma wrote:
| I've come to believe public sector unions in their current form
| just shouldn't exist, as they exacerbate these kinds of problems.
| It is the Union's job to protect members, and the only group who
| is by design trying to make this happen.
|
| I can't see the benefit to having an organization whose role it
| is to fight the public (citizens) in order to improve the lives
| of a group granted a monopoly over a function (e.g. use of
| force/policing). With private company unions, there is at least
| market pressures that solve some issues.
|
| (I am not against all forms of representatation for workers, and
| think unions should exist but be more like "hollywood agents",
| and sell their services to individuals. The power to strike
| always still exists if you can convince the individuals it is a
| good idea.)
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| I take issue with this statement/argument based on the fact that
| there have been several people in jail for releasing material to
| wikileaks that revealed the grotesque amount of Human Rights
| violations, not least of which the video showing how some
| soldiers will kill in cold blood: Collateral Murder.
|
| This ended up seeing Manning get thrown in jail, be tortured for
| years in isolation, as well as having attempted suicide several
| times while in jail (again! after getting a communicated sentence
| by Obama)_the last time for refusing to testify against others
| involved. And Assange has also had to suffer a confined
| existence, been dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy and placed
| in jail and still awaits trial while his health and mental health
| have deteriorated, I'd say his near 8 year amount of torture as a
| direct result of the Military trying to cover up misconduct
| showed the World just how perverse both systems really are.
|
| I'm not even going to get into things like the use of Contractors
| like Black Water/Xe, or black-sites/rendition camps, and spies.
|
| All I will say is read Jeremy Scahill's work, this pro-Military
| narrative seems entirely jingoistic and akin to 9/11 ahead of the
| invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, I have vets in both wars in my
| family and have seen the consequences first hand, to me and
| alarming as the tensions between the CCP and the US are
| accelerating.
|
| Just so its clear, I despise the CCP but War is not a solution or
| an option we should accept.
| varjag wrote:
| There 's really few tyrants left Assange has not been willing
| to support, screw him.
| FpUser wrote:
| Would you apply the same logic (screw them) in regards to
| world powers? None of them ever hesitated to support tyrants
| when it did suit their goals.
| varjag wrote:
| ...yes? Is that a trick question?
|
| Supporting tyrants against their people on some feeble 18th
| century concept of 'sovereignty' is why we have the crisis
| of the last decade in the first place. Freedom for everyone
| or screw it all.
| FpUser wrote:
| "feeble 18th century concept of 'sovereignty'" - you are
| willing to do away with the borders? "Screw it all" also
| sounds very practical
| varjag wrote:
| I will do away with concept of sovereign, a non-elected
| owner of a territory. Non democratic countries are not
| real countries.
|
| And screw it all is a right attitude, uncomfortable it
| may be to gatekeepers of freedom realpoliticking in their
| safe countries.
| lobotryas wrote:
| Wait, you actually want "America world police"? And who
| decides what is or is not democratic? In your world, what
| would you do against Saudi Arabia (I assume you'd see
| them as not democratic and thus not a real country)?
| FpUser wrote:
| The "world police" is already here. Look at all the
| downvotes as soon as someone disagrees with the party
| line. Democracy my a$$.
| FpUser wrote:
| "Non democratic countries are not real countries." Lemme
| up the ante. Countries without free medicine and
| guaranteed basic income are not real countries". Someone
| need to come and teach them a nice lesson. "Screwing"
| will help as well.
| wwright wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what is the "crisis of the last
| decade?" Honest question here, I'm personally not aware
| of any "crisis" that hasn't been ongoing for several
| decades before the 2010s.
| varjag wrote:
| The world-wide rise of authoritarian right, propelled by
| refugee crisis, which in turn is a consequence of
| appeasing tyrants.
| austincheney wrote:
| That is completely and deliberately out of context. Manning
| released greater than 750,000 documents and almost all of them
| had nothing to do with violence of any kind. So much out of
| context that whistleblowing was never raised as any form of
| defense by Manning's civilian attorney.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| You're taking issue with something I said, but proving my
| point for me. He shouldn't be subject to this torture for
| releasing cables. Collateral Murder was unclassified, but in
| the reactionary affairs of the Military Police it was as if
| he is the one who did it all. He was doomed to damnation for
| convictions he felt he had, and had to suffer for doing so.
|
| I'm not sure how some of you are attributing this when there
| is a clear paragraph denoting what they were doing was a duty
| to anyone who actually believes in what the US is asking you
| to do when you join its ranks: protect the Constitution,
| which includes informing the People of what is being done
| with their taxes as well in their name that ultimately makes
| the world less safe.
|
| But he did not release the Collateral Murder video, it just
| ran simultaneously in the news cycle as Wikileaks cable
| releases were being run and got more attention than how a
| Secretary of State's role was to make way for US corporations
| to get stronger footholes into emerging S. American Countries
| in return for certain 'diplomatic' favors , and how the
| Intelligence agencies spied on them in the process.
|
| Seriously, read Jermey's work, as well John Perkins' book
| Confessions of an Economic Hitman, this was regarded as the
| norm even before the cables were ever released by many
| sources.
|
| So, to be clear: Manning and Snowden alike released
| classified information regarding Cables or internal documents
| of how Intelligence agencies operate in and outside the US
| and respectively have been crucified for it.
| rovolo wrote:
| I think you're referring to Manning and not Snowden in your
| first paragraph because you reference the 'Military
| Police', so you should s/he/she/.
| GordonS wrote:
| With the military, it ses to depend on the _scale_.
|
| If it's one bad actor, they'll get court marshalled. If it's
| several (e.g. Abu Graib; possibly misspelled), or if it's
| systemic (e.g. no care whatsoever for collateral damage, such
| as shooting civilians or bombing schools and hospitals), then
| the powers that be will stop at _nothing_ to cover it up or
| play it down.
| fhqghds wrote:
| The take away from this should be:
|
| Look how fucking horrible behavior can be when even when the
| organization has a publicly stated stance of holding members
| accountable, and occasionally actually does so.
|
| Now imagine the fucking horrible behavior that doesn't even
| manage to get surfaced in an organization that takes a public
| stance of not holding members or itself accountable.
|
| The military is far _far_ from perfect. The police still manage
| to be worse. And that 's fucking terrifying.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > The military is far far from perfect. The police still
| manage to be worse. And that's fucking terrifying.
|
| Having been personally subject to police violence for my life
| as an activist several times: I only sort of agree, which is
| why I said look as Jermey's work and draw your own
| conclusion.
|
| I can tell you right now: my experiences do not even remotely
| compare to that of the normal civilian in Vietnam or Laos
| during those wars, I went to school with many of the children
| of that generation and it would be outright offensive if I
| tried to compare our experiences; let alone that of the Iraqi
| or Afghani people who are living in a literal nuclear waste
| land due to the constant bombing and use of depleted uranium
| munitions on their land while being 'shocked and awed' into
| submission.
|
| Many of who I'm sure would tell you were just as oppressed by
| the Saddam regimes as well as the 'Taliban' but have found
| themselves in perhaps the worst of all possible situations in
| a horrible Humanitarian crises as they were 'liberated' by
| the US. While the world continues to ignore that.
| astine wrote:
| Chelsea Manning was not involved in the "collateral murder"
| leak.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > Chelsea Manning was not involved in the "collateral murder"
| leak.
|
| True, he testified and said it was an unclassified video.
| You're right. However, the ire of the State was such that
| you'd think it had been, and that's the point. How can
| whistle-blowers like Manning or Snowden be treated in this
| manner when all they're doing is exposing the material that
| should be afforded to every citizen to scrutinize, and if I'm
| honest if we did we would stop calling the US anything but
| yet another Empire with all the Human Right's violations that
| they all commit. Moreover, he isn't alone: so many from
| Binney, Drake etc... This is systemic Imperial decree that is
| masked as Law when in reality we've been here before with the
| Pentagon papers and Daniel Ellsberg.
|
| In short, I don't think there are 'good guys' in this
| narrative of Police vs Military and both need to be vastly
| reformed.
|
| From the very inception of this country, its General who led
| the Revolution stated that Government is a necessary evil,
| and should be regarded as such with certain vanguards that
| protect the People from the eventual Tyranny (even his own)
| that they all succumb to. Jefferson then went on to enshrine
| into the Deceleration of Independence and his philosophy
| leading up to his presidency, which was underwhelming by his
| standards of radical, and fringe Idealism he had supported up
| until then.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Manning and Snowden should never be compared as
| whistleblowers. Snowden has so much moral high ground in
| the form of responsible disclosure compared to Manning that
| it does him a disservice to put him in the same sentence as
| Manning.
| [deleted]
| dogman144 wrote:
| Really good article, but misses a large part of why military
| self-enforces well: integrity above all is a, or _the_ value that
| is stressed-stressed-stressed.
|
| The reasoning goes that while any UCMJ violation short of the big
| ones (abandoning post, AWOL, murder, etc.) is recoverable from
| with regards to career impact by a PCS (change bases you're
| stationed at), a new commander, whatever, the ONLY thing that
| will really sink you is lying.
|
| You can recover from all sorts of failures. What you will never
| recover from is lying on a sworn statement about that failure.
|
| Enforcement of UCMJ proves this out. Officers and Enlisted both
| follow this in various ways from small infractions to things that
| involve UCMJ. The service academies only have 1 non-crime that
| will really get you kicked out: honor violations. Etc. etc.
|
| The interesting background aspect is Army values get pounded into
| you from Day 0, and Integrity is one of them. Legitimate
| corrective action will go around violating them from Basic
| Training all the way through the last day of your career. Not a
| lot of other orgs take organizational value lists that are on the
| proverbial office wall quite so seriously.
|
| I'm almost positive the police do none of this approach, but also
| they don't have a federal police force really to enforce it top-
| down like the Army does.
|
| edit grammar
| dx87 wrote:
| I think another reason could be the wide latitude you have in the
| military to punish someone without any official paperwork. If
| someone did something wrong, you could punish them with physical
| exercise, cleaning duties, taking away weekend liberty, etc., all
| without any paperwork. When you don't have to worry that you're
| going to ruin someone's career every time you punish them, it's a
| lot easier to keep them in line.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| I was thinking the opposite: the US military has "up or out",
| where one has to advance to stay in, tending to weed out bad
| apples in the officer corps. As far as I am aware, police have
| nothing similar (and furthermore, don't rotate). So my
| assessment is that it's much easier to get along to go along in
| US police forces than in their military.
| LanceH wrote:
| The big problem with up or out is that officers eventually
| become politicians (literally connected to politicians) with
| the pseudo-immunitiy that politicians seem to enjoy.
| Prosecutors just choose not to prosecute, or they just retire
| in lieu of what should be jail time.
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