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Comment by mahyarm | Hacker News Reader

That's why they do it, because they don't get fired.

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.

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Cops have tough jobs, the vast majority of police officers mean well and are good people trying to serve their community. I think people in threads like this forget that. But like any group of people there are assholes, we need to have a zero tolerance policy for police officers that violate rights. And for egregious situations we need to hold them even more accountable. Police aren't the law but an agent and servant of it.

That's the complaint I've heard any reasonable person make: the culture of covering up for the disgusting actions of the bad apples implicates far more than the bad actors themselves. It may be beyond any individual cop to change the way the system works, but the culpability doesn't stop at the bad actors themselves.

I can't remember who pointed it out, but someone said that everyone is missing the point when they talk of bad police being a 'few bad apples' and the rest are fine. The full phrase is 'A few bad apples spoil the whole barrel'.

Correct. In addition, someone covering up for a bad apple is, well, a bad apple.

How exactly can a cop in a different precinct/city/state be held responsible for "covering up" bad actors in an unrelated department?

> How exactly can a cop in a different precinct/city/state be held responsible for "covering up" bad actors in an unrelated department?

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.

>the culture of covering up for the disgusting actions of the bad apples

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.

>Cops have tough jobs, the vast majority of police officers mean well and are good people trying to serve their community

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)

Here is NYPD literally painting their own parking spots onto a bike lane:

https://mobile.twitter.com/jooltman/status/65433607376670720...