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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Until police are jailed for this, nothing will improve.

What's the US equivalent of the Independent Police Complaints Commission?

There is no national body that oversees police, but Chicago has the Independent Police Review Authority. However IPRA rarely upholds complaints against police (it's staffed by ex-cops and other people connected to the police), and recently an investigator was fired after finding a shooting unjustified[1].

[1] http://www.wbez.org/news/city-fires-investigator-who-found-c...

"Since its 2007 creation, IPRA has investigated nearly 400 civilian shootings by police and found one to be unjustified."

Alrighty, then...

If you're interested in other things IPRA 'investigates', some people have FOIA'ed Chicago police misconduct complaints and created visualizations based on the data[1].

[1] http://invisible.institute/police-data/

Devils advocate but wouldn't they investigate every shooting incident, so you'd expect the vast majority to be clean.

I know every discharged weapon in the UK is followed by immediate officer suspension and investigation, and I suspect very few are actually ruled as bad and rightly so.

> There is no national body that oversees police

We have a national body. It's called the citizenry. But, sadly, few people are rising up because it isn't happening in their back yard, or to their children.

Sure there will be comment threads on HN or some Facebook liking, but these are weak responses, and without more, change will come very slowly, and in the meantime thousands more will be trampled on, abused, violated or murdered.

The majority of people who are rising up are only the marginalized people who are the primary victims of police abuse and injustice. All you have to do is look on Twitter and look at the color of people who do the most tweeting about police injustice.

There is no way this would or could continue if a significant amount of the privileged population rose up.

Marginalized people can still vote. The problem is they tend to vote for the people who are causing the problem, or at least not solving the problem.

Has this been proposed at all? Is there anything weird about american policing/law that would mean a national, federal agency wouldn't be able to take on this role?

It would be unconstitutional for the Congress to pass laws taking full oversight of state and local police (it's not one of the Congress's enumerated powers, and per the Tenth Amendment 'The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.').

Sometimes police are found to have violated federal civil-rights law, but that is a bit of a sketchy backdoor.

The Right Thing would be for each state to create such a commission, and for the Congress to create one for federal law-enforcement agencies.

Actually, ensuring that states provide equal protection of the laws to all persons, that states do not deprive persons of life, liberty, or property without due process, and that states do not abridge the privileges and immunities of US citizens is an enumerated power of Congress; see the Fourteenth Amendment, particularly sections 1 and 5.

You make a good point. I suppose one might be able to justify such a commission on that basis (although that itself indicates the problem with the post-Civil War order).

It can be done. The DOJ does this on a case-by-case basis. And FBI has jurisdiction to investigate some of these things. Bernie Sanders has suggested requiring all police killings to be investigated.

Most Constitutional rights extend to people against the states. So if your civil rights (due process, etc) have been violated, it's against federal law.

It's problematic to expect relief for any but the worst abuses from FBI or indeed from any part of DoJ. They're all cops, and they're not going to be eager to police other cops. A more effective organization would be completely separate, and probably staffed by attorneys who had never served as prosecutors.

It would be difficult (maybe impossible?) to do given the US's Federal system of dividing powers between State governments and the National government. The Federal Department of Justice investigates, but the only power they have is to sue local police departments in court and make them agree to stop their unlawful behaviour.

Local police are not immune to federal law. They do have some protections, but many local cops are in federal prison.

The US Department of Justice does some of this. They sue for civil rights violations, often resulting in a "consent decree" where they either take over the police department or place them under a variety of restrictions.

Ferguson just agreed to one: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/27/464610005/...

"The reality is that we do not wash our own laundry - it just gets dirtier. "

- Serpico

This would be much easier to implement at the state level. Aside from a few specific instances with the DOJ such as the consent decree mentioned elsewhere, the federal government does not have any authority over local police departments such that it can do much of anything.

I think it is clear we need a national body to oversee police.

Part of what stops police from routinely infringing civil rights in the pursuit of justice is the legal doctrine that evidence obtained illegally is inadmissible, as is all evidence gained from further (lawful) investigation based on that evidence [1]. what is needed is a law that operates in a similar way, that states that in any lawsuit or complaint against the police, there is a presumption of guilt on the part of the police officer in the event of 'malfunction' of monitoring devices. The only way to make the police comply is to make it in their self-interest (or at least in the interests of the city that would regularly have to pay out presumptive damages) to make sure they are working.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree

Edit: typo

> ...or at least in the interests of the city that would regularly have to pay out presumptive damages...

Key challenge with this strategy is the big latency between paying out damages and consequences for the police officer or even department. The bigger the metro, the bigger the latency. Large metro budgets can temporarily cover for the few million dollar payouts that happen to make the daunting gauntlet all the way through to a final, no-appeal judicial judgement, even a few every 3-5 years over a long, long period of time. There is a natural impedance in metro political circles to "protect" the police unless an incident is sufficiently egregious.

I'm believe this adverse behavior pattern won't stop until a legal concept similar to the corporate veil is established for police officers (all the way up to and including police chiefs). Some kind of legal doctrine that spells out when certain conditions are met, individual officers must be deprived of city and departmental support; their "blue veil" so to speak is "pierced". They can still obtain support from private sources like the union, but they are on as much the same footing as a civilian as can be legally established. As a society we can hash out what those conditions are. Some might argue just destroyed dashcam data is sufficient. Others might argue for a much, much higher bar.

> Although the Constitution of the United States does not cite it explicitly, presumption of innocence is widely held to follow from the 5th, 6th, and 14th amendments. See also Coffin v. United States and In re Winship. [0]

One does not sign away Constitutional rights because they become a police officer.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence#The_f...

What if consequences based on the presumption of guilt where limited to immediate termination and being placed on a list barring the accused from working as a police officer in the future? Is presumption of guilt allowed if there are no criminal penalties?

Then just make it an 'administrative ruling' so that the Constitution no longer applies. That is all the fad with prosecutors these days (same reason being put on the SO registry can be retroactively applied/extended without it violating ex post facto laws).

"Presumption of guilt" - that's not going to fly is it?

I think the selective absence of evidence where it would normally exist is something that a jury (or investigating organization) should consider within the totality of the evidence presented. That way we can go start from a point of innocence and work our way through.

Why are there options to turn the audio off anyway? In the grand scheme of things what you are trying to protect by turning off audio is likely much less important than the criminal behavior that is coming under scrutiny.

"turning off" might be accomplished by something like breaking or unplugging the mic, or hiding it in the glove box (as was listed in the article). You are giving the officers unrestricted access to these vehicles for large segments of time; there's basically no way to physically prevent them from messing with the equipment, especially if there are no consequences for doing so.

If you don't want additional scrutiny, are you going to sign a contract with a supplier of recording equipment that can't be turned off?

> The only way to make the police comply is to make it in their self-interest (or at least in the interests of the city that would regularly have to pay out presumptive damages) to make sure they are working.

Part of the problem is that it becomes the cost of doing business for a city. What should happen is that the individual should have to pay those multi million dollar fines out of pocket. Of course, the people who are suing for money know that they'll get more money if they sue the city.

The city should budget an amount for each year in payouts. Start with the average amounts over the past 5-10 years plus 10%. When all of the complaints for that year have been settled, anything left goes out to the department as bonuses.

We've got sticks that don't seem to be working. Let's throw some carrots in as well.

Good performance -> good bonuses.

As I argued elsewhere here, I believe a stronger incentive would be to come after pay and pensions for police units whose officers have cost the municipality millions in lawsuits. Instead of friends and coworkers trying to protect each other for abuses of power, they will instead take on the role of protecting their families' livelihood. You would be less likely to abuse your authority if your entire department and their retired friends are more incentivized to distance themselves from you than to cover you up.

While your idea sounds great in theory, what I believe would happen would be a stronger blue wall of science. They wouldn't report anything and would side with their own as not doing so could risk their family livelihood. IMO, a better solution would be to require officers to pay their own liability insurance, similar to medical malpractice. Let an indep 3rd party set rates, then you can price out the worst officers and the payouts come from the 3rd party and not the tax payers. Then the officers would want the bodycams as they would protect them. Imagine if a doctor did something wrong and said, oh whops, i guess the patients chart disappeared. They would be uninsurable after that point, same with a cop.

Wow, great idea. Probably even better than mine. The only problem I can point out is that over time budget increases (for they always increase) could be partially set aside to bury the insurance cost and effectively shield the department from the damage of higher premiums.

awesome idea, kind of similar to the idea that financial market firms were much more prudent when they were partnerships, whose top members had most of their self-worth tied up in that company. Once outside shareholders owned the stock, it made it much more sensible to make big bets, if you win you get a huge bonus, if not, they cant take away all the money you made in previous years.

Glad you agree. I think there are plenty of good suggestions for police reform, but I can see how things like body cameras can descend into messy micromanagement (what's a minimum uptime? What are the penalties? What about mistakes?).

Make bad behavior a huge disincentive and police departments will largely sort themselves out. If they are empowered to make their own decisions as to how to do so, they will be more willing to adapt. At the moment there is huge pushback from the public about police abuse, and cops are understandably frustrated by a public - that doesn't go into harm's way on a daily basis - trying to tell them how to do their jobs.

How will those big payouts happen without the evidence from body cams?

They already do. Bystander cameras, CCTVs, even witness reports have done a great deal to secure absurd amounts of taxpayer money for police brutality lawsuits.

I still think we should have body cameras, but the primary focus should be better policing, not camera compliance alone.

They do on extremely rare occasions, but it is clear that the level of misconduct is far higher than is ever prosecuted.

On the subject of camera compliance - if an officer deliberately evades camera compliance, as a huge proportion do, we have clear evidence that that officer believes they do not have to follow policies and procedures in general. That is corruption.

While this might provide incentive to comply, making individual occurrences more rare, I think it would also provide greater incentive to cover up abuse once it has already occurred.

It depends on who gets punished. If nobody but crooked cops can be proven to have covered up a crime, then only they are punished. But like murder and possession of child pornography, knowledge of someone's criminal act legally complies the observer to turn that person in or they will be charged with conspiracy.

You can cover up one or two crimes but not all of them. Eventually things get found out. You could help someone get away with something once, but if it's ever found out, you could potentially be charged with everything your buddy is up for, go to prison, and come out broke and jobless.

But the only public protests I hear about these things are from #BlackLivesMatter people. And when pursuing it from their perspective, it gets treated as a racism problem rather than a problem of institutional power being out of balance. We can't look at how the police routinely abuse power when we've got the lens focusing on how the police abuse black people.

(Lest I be accused of racism and/or insensitivity: yes, racism adds another dimension to the problem. But I think that a proper solution to the broader problem would also serve to curtail race-related abuses. Yet it seems impossible to suggest this in public discourse without being attacked by SJWs.)

Thank you. People think they're doing double advocacy by tying the issue to race. What they're really doing is framing the issue in a way that makes it seem completely irrelevant to the median self-absorbed voter.

The US Department of Justice can investigate local police departments.

They have investigated several of the local departments that have been in the US national news in recent years, with some actual improvements coming out of the investigations.

The curious thing is that police-forces are paid for by state and local taxes. Why is no one advocating cutting their funding until come into compliance with certain higher standards?

Because that's "being soft on crime" which will lose you an election here. The propaganda machine makes it very hard to oppose the police.

So what you are telling me is that the people are being represented by who they elect. If the people want hard on crime to the point of violating civil rights and they get what they want, what is the issue? That a minority has to suffer because of the will of the majority... that is an inherent issue with democracy.

Isn't there a quote that goes something like: People are ruled by the government they deserve.

That might be true if you ignore the distorting effects of propaganda. What the people want, and what they can be made to believe they want through targeted media campaigns selling lies are not the same thing. Small groups with money can have out sized influence that distorts democracy in the short and medium term.

> Isn't there a quote that goes something like: People are ruled by the government they deserve.

Minority groups aren't.

Go after pensions and overtime pay (for bs like court appearances) to compensate for lawsuits and the costs to society (hospital treatment to abused citizens) instead of regular day-to-day funds and you can hardly be called soft on crime. I think the more accurate term is "fiscally conservative."

> can hardly be called soft on crime

Anything anti-police will be called soft on crime by the police union; politics doesn't care about reality, only about perception.

The opposition can easily spin the union as being soft-er on crime. Cop-on-civilian crime is still crime.

If perception is all that counts in politics (and it is), use the opportunity to smear everyone connected to crooked cops, especially politicians. Use language like "state-sponsored murder" to rile up state-skeptical conservatives, who provide most of the police union support. If you have connections to the press, run stories like "Could Your Mayor Kill You (And Get Away With It)?" or if you're buzzfeed, "6 Ways Your Mayor Could Kill You (And Get Away With It)" or even "Your City's Death Squad (And The Lawyers Who Help With Murder)"

Make people afraid for their lives and angry of the administration and it will put the administration on the defensive, which weakens the "soft on crime" tactic considerably. Once you've tapped into emotional reaction, it's hard to steer the brain back to logic.

Because if we do that the police become more susceptible to bribery. We can't simply punish whole departments for individual conduct. What we have to do is catch individual cops breaking their cameras and then fire them.

People likely fear reprisals

Some states or localitis have things that might be parallel, but there is no single US equivalent.

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