What makes you think the police care about bad press?
The idea that a cop will lose his job for harassing someone is wishful thinking.
They'll start caring a lot more when they lose their jobs and suffer penalties, and it's not hard for it to happen when they do that.
I truly do not understand how you took this away from reading my comment. I even went out of my way to say that it's more complicated than individual honest cops being to blame. You may want to work on your reading comprehension.
This implies to me like you think this culture is prevalent in most police departments. Yet you base this of the events a tiny minority of police departments.
>You may want to work on your reading comprehension.
Try to keep insults off of HN. If I misunderstood you, you should take that as a reflection of your own communication skills and clarify in another comment. Don't just waste everyone's time by just expressing your state of bewilderment.
Depends on the department. My local precinct is across from the subway and parks nearly 100% of their vehicles on the sidewalk. It's on both sides of the street and so bad two people can't pass at the same time.
They've actually even spray painted ranks onto the street, which have now almost faded since they've been doing it for so long. The sidewalk is crumbling under the weight of the cars. At town halls they shrug when asked about it.
Despite being a high density area complete with multiple subway lines and a low crime rate, they do all patrols by car. No foot patrols whatsoever.
Meanwhile other NYPD precincts have different behavior.
A representative streetview link:
https://goo.gl/maps/e2FRX9K56GE2
Keep in mind this is an older streetview image; the parking lot on 50th Avenue next to the precinct no longer exists. There are also usually more police vehicles, though most of them shown in this streetview link are the personal vehicles of officers or the security shop (they are friendly with the police and don't get ticketed or perhaps the cops feel bad about parking this way and writing tickets for others on the same block - either way, no tickets)
https://mobile.twitter.com/jooltman/status/65433607376670720...
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I'd bet it happens very infrequently, and is very newsworthy when it happens. Still not remotely ok though…
I interface with my local police at least once a month, not for recalcitrant reasons; they are good people.
Is this an anecdote? Yes.
Do I like seeing police as a whole cast as evil? No.
In police / court land, bad apple pruning isn't good enough. On top of that the stakes are high and their are legal malincentives that encourage the government to do the wrong things. It's harder to do bad apple pruning with police because of the risk category and their job responsibilities.
I know police as a whole are not evil. I've been let off the hook by police quite a few times, had an officer give me a ride home when I was stranded after walking several miles as a teenager, etc.
Police retaliation happens, though. Corruption exists, etc. It's not a huge stretch to imagine local police retaliating against someone who whips out a cell phone.
Even if the courts won't convict that person of a crime, police can very much exact revenge just by paying more attention to you than they might have otherwise.
Stopping you without cause, searching you without cause, detaining you without reason. There are plenty of ways I could imagine retaliating against a citizen if I was corrupted/otherwise morally compromised, empowered as a police officer, and had a grudge.
tl;dr: I'm not casting all cops as evil, I'm stupid, but not that stupid.
I'm only speculating that this court decision might not stop an officer with a grudge from retaliating against a civilian.
It's perfectly logical, and wasn't intended as a generalization against police. I'm not a cop-hater.
I do not think "How will this look in the paper?" calculates into whether or not an officer issues me a ticket for speeding or lets me go with a warning or attempts to search my car. I don't think it is considered at any point by individual officers, including during the use of force.
I think the decision is based more on behavior such as if I am evasive or cooperative. I am far more likely to get a warning if I am polite rather than argumentative.
This is the nature of criminals, as well. They're fine for the most part, until they break a law. The real problem is that we're allowing a parallel "judicial system" to exist in the first place. One that selectively applies certain rules to certain groups, which is in this case, the police.