Being a cop showed me just how racist and violent the police are (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Being a cop showed me just how racist and violent the police are (2014)

washingtonpost.com

114 pointsjseliger61 comments

Related article [1] shows the absurdity of how cops "think". The officer in this article believes that he does have unlimited power and it should never be threatened by the citizenry.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/08/19/...

His very own words in the same article contradict your claims.

I am aware that corrupt and bully cops exist. When it comes to police misconduct, I side with the ACLU: Having worked as an internal affairs investigator, I know that some officers engage in unprofessional and arrogant behavior; sometimes they behave like criminals themselves. I also believe every cop should use a body camera to record interactions with the community at all times. Every police car should have a video recorder.

The 3 subsequent sentences after your cherry-picked quote are:

> And you don’t have to submit to an illegal stop or search. You can refuse consent to search your car or home if there’s no warrant (though a pat-down is still allowed if there is cause for suspicion).

> Always ask the officer whether you are under detention or are free to leave.

> But if you believe (or know) that the cop stopping you is violating your rights or is acting like a bully, I guarantee that the situation will not become easier if you show your anger and resentment.

So this officer "agrees" with the ACLU's recommendations to LE agencies. Great. That doesn't mean anything in the real world. If you stand up for your rights, you will be beaten mercilessly.

He's basically saying "don't submit to illegal police activity, but if you resist us in any way, legal or not, you will be beat.

Maybe he's saying you should resist in a way that doesn't overtly display anger and resentment.

There's a difference between a descriptive statement and a normative statement. "The tiger will bite you if you approach it" is a descriptive statement. "The tiger will bite you if you approach it, and rightfully so" is a normative statement.

All of the statements you quoted are descriptive statements. Just because someone makes a descriptive statement doesn't mean that they endorse the behavior in any way.

Related to my other comment, I think we need individual police to submit to, and eventually desire, continued intensive training on the topic of justice. Perhaps it can start in one town: fire all the officers that don't happily attend classes on justice.

Training isn't the issue, lack of punishment is. They know what they're doing is wrong.

This is probably a very practical truth. Nonetheless, there seem to be a lot of police who are actually saying the wrong things (as well as doing the wrong things), and I have to think they don't quite know right from wrong.

I think they know what is "wrong" in the sense that they ought to be punished for it, and they see themselves not being punished for it (except for "free vacations"), hence they see their personal (not incredibly developed) morals above that of the morality enforcement mechanisms society puts on them. They probably override what we see as decency by simple reasonings ("those people have no idea what it's like on the street"), and they're addicts trippin' on that power and moral superiority.

They may have forgotten, but they knew when they started; you forget when you're not punished. The issue is lack of consequences.

Don't apply the bad logic of one cop to every single cop in existence

I've been at a loss as to where to ask this question, so maybe HN will come through. Are there any sheriffs/prosecutors/cities doing innovative work to improve our justice system? I would think there must be someone out there doing brave and smart work within the system to achieve better justice.

Unfortunately, I don't hear much from anyone like that. Instead it's appalling quotes from the prosecutor in the Tamir Rice case (we don't second-guess police) and the "Making of a Murderer" series (we should have locked him up before the crime) and on and on.

According to the articles these things don't enter the justice system at all - they're "handled" locally by the police force itself.

Even though, I might not understand clearly just how justice system and police force are separated in US, anyone care to enlighten me?

Disclaimer: I've never been a cop, but I have several close friends who are.

Generally speaking, this means disciplinary action (e.g., time off without pay) and accompanying documentation. While that may not sound that bad, there are a few things that add teeth:

1. Cops make OK money compared to an average citizen, but not GREAT money. Their retirement is often tied to employment with a particular city, county, etc. Too many disciplinary actions, or one really big one, will result in being fired, meaning you've also lost your retirement investment.

2. If you want a better/higher-paying job within the department (detective, SWAT, aviation, etc.), you have to get internally hired for it. If your record is tainted by documented misconduct, you're probably never going to get promoted.

3. The law enforcement community is small and paperwork follows you everywhere. Getting fired or being un-promotable will probably be known to other departments if you try to get a job somewhere else. This is why e.g., Darren Wilson had to change careers even though a grand jury cleared him of criminal wrongdoing [1].

References:

1. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/04/darren-...

> 1. Cops make OK money compared to an average citizen, but not GREAT money. Their retirement is often tied to employment with a particular city, county, etc. Too many disciplinary actions, or one really big one, will result in being fired, meaning you've also lost your retirement investment.

Well, you just have to look at SF's salary database to see that cops don't make "OK money", but "pretty good" money.

http://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2014/san-francisco...

Or, if you just want all employees with "police" in the name or title: http://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=san-fran...

According to Wikipedia [1], SFPD is highest-paid department in the US. According to the BLS [2], the 2014 median pay for a police officer was $58,630. Compared to society as a whole, that's ok money, but not great money.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Police_Departmen...

2. http://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/police-and-detecti...

It is great money once you consider that the massive gold-plated final-salary pension entitlements after 20 years roughly double their salaries compared to someone who has to save for his retirement himself.

My understanding is many (most?) cop pension plan payouts are based on the highest paid year. So every cop does something called spiking, they do a ton of hours and turn their $100K/year job into a $200K/year job and get retirement based on the $200K/year. Or they get promoted to a higher paying job just before they retire so the pension is based on the higher pay.

That makes for a pretty pleasant life style, 20 years and you retire to a sweet, sweet pension.

Social Security offers a much better model, what you get back is based on what you put in, you can't spike it.

Here's just one article, you can find lots with the google:

http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/?p=35211

There is a UCLA academic who has 50+ police departments enrolled in his statistical effort to understand and correct policing inequities regarding race.

http://www.npr.org/2014/12/14/370792960/taking-on-racial-pro...

This may be small compared to fixing the entire justice system, but all new recruits the the SF police department attend a ropes course where all belayers are high school students. They're not just any high school students, but those who couldn't make it in a traditional school setting, and are getting a last chance to finish high school at the outdoor school in San Bruno.

Seems like this program is nudging things in the right direction by helping new police officers and local teens start their relationship with some mutual trust and understanding.

Sounds like a great initiative.

Brilliant! I want to hear more about these things in the news.

A friend of mine ran white water rafting camps to bring troubled city kids and the city police together.

He told me once that it were always the police officers who caused trouble. Not listening to instructions, not cooperating with anybody, wanting to control everything, quick with physical confrontation. He got disheartened after a while.

He even mentioned cops that he knew from when they joined the force. He said the cops started out with ideals and simply get corrupted by the system until they are - quote - "just like the rest of them".

There are good cops out there for sure; probably the majority. Maybe serving in the city is too much to take and police officers become cynical?

In my encounters with the police (thankfully very few) I have never met a nice or even reasonable cop - but again my sample set is very small.

Radical idea here: Appoint civilians to a once per lifetime tribunal post of maybe a year to oversee investigation of police misconduct allegations.

By making a once in a lifetime post you avoid the people becoming "part of the system" and you avoid unscrupulous people seeking long term benefit from the role.

As long as police are investigated and tried by people who are part of the same system they are, there will never be fairness.

If law enforcement truly do serve and protect civilians then they should be accountable to civilians.

In addition law enforcement should be treated exactly like civilians are if they are found guilty. No protective custody and no special treatment.

This is exactly the kind of thinking we need. Intense, local citizen involvement should be a great start (and should be default, anyway).

>> Appoint civilians to a once per lifetime tribunal post of maybe a year to oversee investigation of police misconduct allegations.

But cops are violently against civilian review boards. They'd rather police themselves. I wonder why...

The police opposition to civilian review boards is rather understandable given widespread ignorance about when police can legally detain, search, arrest, and use force. This is compounded by the often ugly nature of police work, even when the police involved used good judgement and acted lawfully. That isn't to say that non-police are incapable of adjudicating accusations of misconduct. However, political appointments or direct elections do nothing to ensure that members of these boards have the knowledge and judgement necessary for the task. Of course the police unions are opposed to these people having disciplinary powers.

It's a heavy accusation to say that "police are racist and violent". Maybe it's true, and generalizing all police as "racist and violent" is an acceptable thing to say because it's a systemic issue.

I understand that the choice of headline was in part motivated by maximizing clicks, but if I were a cop I probably would be repulsed by this headline. This made me stop and think for a bit.

About cultural criticism: I'm reminded that accusations like "the Japanese are xenophobic", or "The Chinese are rude" are OK (if said delicately) because these are criticisms of culture, not race (wait... are these the same?).

It seems taboo though, to make sweeping generalizations of some other cultures, in particular minorities. Is this because of a lack of "fairness", or that cultural majorities are far more prone to reductive stereotyping? I'd be interested to hear HN's thoughts on this.

Anyway, appointing a special, third-party prosecutor to excessive force cases is an excellent idea. I liked what the article had to say.

And what would be the incentives of such a prosecutor? They're appointed by, say, a mayor, or a governor - if they do a "good" job of prosecuting brutality, are they going to get a further appointment to a judgeship, or get enough support from the police union to pursue an elected office? How are they going to get good staff when they can't promise them any advancement inside that office, and doing too good of a job precludes them from being employed in a proper prosecutor's office?

Effectively all you've done is established an organization specifically dedicated to sweeping up messes.

The headline isn't saying all police are violent and racist, it is saying that in his experience of being a cop he saw the degree to which police were. He more explicitly makes this distinction in the article.

I've never experienced the stuff he talks about directly but based on my interactions with the police and those of people I know I totally believe that there is a portion of the police that act inappropriately on a routine basis. Why the police force at large feels these people should be protected from the consequences of their behavior or even shielded from any public criticism is beyond me.

I am reading "Rule for Radicals." It's the bible for social social. One of the core tenets is that people will only act on polarized issues.

I hate it when people misquote facts or sensationalize an opinion. But the book teaches these tactics are necessary and gives historical examples.

Link to the book: http://amzn.to/1R2ihZQ

Thanks! This book looks interesting.

>> It's a heavy accusation to say that "police are racist and violent".

Unless you're or have been at the receiving end of police brutality and racist policing, you'll never understand why they're generally considered racist and violent. They are truly a legal criminal gang.

Not that every cop is a criminal, but if a cop is decent and refuses to play by their "code", he/she will not survive for too long.

The culture does not tolerate "rats".

Unfortunately there are some careers that are sought after by sadists.

Those people who deeply enjoy inflicting pain on others. They seek out avenues and careers where they can best get their fill of other people's suffering.

In some sort of order I would rank them as ISIS henchman, dictator special guard, military police prison guard, military police, civilian prison guard and last is the civilian police. I am not talking that all police are sadists, far from it. Just a small fraction are. But many more than other careers ( outside dentistry lol )

Many western militaries put a lot of effort into screening out sadists, so I don't mention them, but if the screening did not occur then they would warrant a place.

So unfortunately to some extent the police will always be a prime target for very unpleasant people. Sadists also identify with other sadists and form secret groups within organisations, much like other deviants like paedophile rings.

Military style pre screening techniques should be implemented along with the additional oversight mentioned in the article.

http://www.theonion.com/article/insecure-frustrated-bully-wi...

I recommend Netflix's Making a Murderer to anyone interested in our criminal justice system.

I wonder... "Many have suspected it, but now it appears to be official: police departments refuse to hire applicants with high IQ scores. Critics of law enforcement have long suggested that police officers tend to be selected for their lack of critical thinking, but news that department hiring processes officially disqualify high-scoring applicants might still come as a shock to many. While a rare exception to the rule might slip through the cracks, if you are too smart, police departments simply won’t hire you." http://countercurrentnews.com/2014/04/police-officially-refu...

I have a feeling this will be an unpopular position, but ultimately, I don't think the solution will be to prosecute more of the bad actors (although I do think that should happen).

The author seems to think that the "system" either can't be changed or that any changes that could happen won't improve things. I disagree. Here are some things I think could improve things by changing the system:

1. Reduce the scope of what we consider "criminal" behavior.

2. Stop/reverse the escalating militarization of police forces

3. Involve police officers more in the community.

There are plenty of other things that can change the nature of the relationship between police officers and the citizens of their communities.

2 through 3 are very popular opinions. 1 is somewhat popular.

4. Disarm nearly all civilians AND police

5. Make secure live streaming from public locations cheap, easy, and hard to block

He is not talking about today's Saint Louis PD. If he joined the force in 1994 and was there for 5 years, he's recounting events that happened 17 or more years ago. A lot can change in (almost) two decades -- or not change, of course.

Also that same time St. Louis PD just getting over the era of peak of violent crime, which St. Louis was very much affected. Those were not good days. Things are better, but that doesn't mean we dont' need cops around here doing all kinds of different tactics to maintain order.

Some people think that their peers are going to be well behaved in all cases if only they have their basic needs handled. That's very much not the case. And criminals are just as diverse in thinking as normal people. Meaning some criminals are scared to get caught, others are ready to fight, others NEED to be intimidated or they will escalate to worse and worse. And some escalate no matter what you do.

Cops deal with all these people. And once you meet them day after day and see what they are capable of, you grow a lot of different types of muscles and mental street smarts and tactics to handle and combat them.

It might be worth considering these two things:

a) cops deal with criminals, by and large. I've personally witnessed how their thinking changes from objective to "they are all thugs". It's part of the job, I don't know how to fix that.

b) The more inequality we have the more criminals we will have. You can't pay people $7/hour and expect them to not turn to crime. The "recovery" has pushed a bunch of older people into minimum wage jobs - they can't survive at that level of pay.

>> a) cops deal with criminals, by and large. I've personally witnessed how their thinking changes from objective to "they are all thugs".

Do they view the criminals on Wall Street the same way, or is that thinking reserved for a particular segment of society?

From what I've seen, they are just putting all the people that look like people they have arrested into the same basket. If they arrested bankers all day then they would start thinking all bankers are crooks. But they don't arrest bankers, they arrest poor people (in general).

After a while, wearing a hoodie and being poor appears to be enough to make them think you are guilty. It's depressing.

The only shift in attitudes will come when "make it home safely" is correlated with good rather than bad behavior.

Is it really racist, or simply a psychological phenomenon? Conformity and group think.

Racism is at the root of it. The rest are just secondary.

Understand that law enforcement is what society used to maintain law and order during slavery and all through the Jim Crow days.

The mindset has not changed.

I challenge that.

Where does racism come from? How does racism develop? We don't born with racism as an instinct, so it cannot be considered as "root" because the root is not racism, it is merely of symptom of something else. Pick WW2, a lot of Germans weren't racist and probably friends to many non-German people, but then they were convinced and after conformity kicked in many became racists.

If you don't believe that racism is at the root of it all, perhaps using "discrimination" instead of racism will make things clearer.

You see, discrimination (or favoritism) is what humans do. It's innate and it takes a higher state of consciousness to not be influenced by it. Even that is no guarantee.

Racism is discrimination at the level of racial groups. When it takes place within a racial group, it's plain old discrimination or nepotism.

Before Northern Europeans came to these lands, discrimination was not a foreign concept. Neither was it where those Northern Europeans came from. After all, that was what caused most of them to leave in the first place.

So when one race (native Americans) met another racial group (whites), discrimination became racism. It's what humans do. Animals, too, and just as violently.

When black Africans were brought here, it's only natural that they were discriminated against. It's what humans do.

We'll always find one reason or the other to discriminate. Be it skin color or religion. We can't help ourselves.

What the Nazi's did in Germany, and what happened here (extermination of Indian tribes, slavery and Jim Crow), is when discrimination became state sponsored (it is now the law of the land).

And society only gets to that point when the majority allows a small band of ignorant bums to impose their twisted ideas on everybody.

This can lead to a very lengthy discussion, but it's enough at this point to state that yes, humans are born with this ability to discriminate. Racism is when it takes place between members of different racial groups.

Do you mean, is conforming to racist group think "really racist"? That's maybe an interesting intellectual question, but in the end, does it really matter?

If I interpret it correctly, yes, if you are not a racist to begin with, a really nice college graduate (yeah, perhaps ex-cop) joining your dream job, and a few years later you are among of the cops assaulting a minority, why?

It matters because you have to find who is influencing the non-racist. Remove bad blood, find ways to block bad blood from forming. Perhaps naive to think it will work, I don't know, not a social psychologist :-)

Some are racists because of PST. Some are racists because they grew up in a very negative environment. Some, perhaps, are just nut, I guess. The rest, I don't know.

The submission went from top spot to 25th within the span of minutes.

It's a shame that HN readers don't want to read about and discuss the important social issues of our time, and flag everything that doesn't fit a narrow range of topics.

I didn't flag it, but given the way these threads tend to degenerate, can you blame people for being tired of it?

Hacker News hasn't exactly proven capable of reasonable discussion of certain topics, and the police seem to be one such topic. The discussion itself isn't what HN wants to avoid, but the emotion and bile that often surrounds the subject.

Also the racism topic.

What racism? It's a pipeline problem.

Yes... but police brutality and conspiracy tangents got really toxic in the last couple of threads about Ian Murdock, so I wouldn't be surprised if some people just don't want to go anywhere near it right now. Unfortunately, I think it only takes a few flags to have a significant effect over upvotes, and there isn't an option to only flag a topic only for yourself.

Article should be titled "Being a cop showed me just how racist and violent a lot of the police in St. Louis were". This article is relying on the author's personal experiences in the force and fails to bring any hard statistics.

While there is certainly a problem with racism in Police Departments this article fails to find the ultimate source of that racism, and without truly understanding where Police racism is coming from the authors solution of "We need harsher punishments and better oversights" doesn't guarantee it will fix the problem.

Like with the public in general, only a small (but very loud) percentage of the Police are bad people. Bringing harsher punishments down on the Police is not the answer. By their very nature the Police need to do things that put dangerous people in harms way for the safety of others. If they are not allowed to do that without thinking that they're going to get punished for it, they will not be able to do their jobs effectively.

There are definitely cases where bad Police do bad things, and they DO get punished for it, but just like every other person in America they are innocent until proven guilty, and it can take a long time before a case can be put together. By that time the media (and the Public's attention) have been pointed to the next "Police tragedy".

Hard statistics are plentiful. Do a web search.

I'm sure they are, however none are listed in this article.

Yes, welcome to the Washington Post, where everything remotely containing racism gets front page, factual or not. They'd put up a story about a grandma hearing a slur from outside her window above a story about a jet plane crash any day of the week.

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