1. Pay for officers should be high without overtime.
2. Stop militarizing everyday law enforcement.
3. Body cams on at all times. Cameras on police cars should be on at all times.
Pay is high for police officers. At the median they're earning nearly 70% more than the overall median US income.
Median pay for all police officers is near $62,000 now. [1] Versus the median for all jobs, closer to $37,000.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/police-and-detect...
some cases in california were called into question as there were cops with 100k pensions,but california suffers from lots of government employee pension tricks. these are not limited to just California and are busting the budgets of many cities and now even some states.
but with regards to this Baltimore issue, he damn well best serve time for this and everyone on that call should be off the force.
it might just be time for, if you camera malfunctions your arrests are not valid if it one vs one in testimony.
4. The video is archived for at least 90 days, with 360 being preferable.
5. The video is immediately encrypted when it is stored and should only be accessible by the district attorneys office.
Why the need for such a high level of secrecy?
From outside of the US, the picture I get of the police force and the bodies that control them is they have a tendency to try and keep things secret.
I would have though a more open system would instil a much higher level of public confidence in that policing system.
There really is a case to be made in keeping the video private; however, police often have to process your private information and the officers have privacy considerations themselves. I really wrote that with this in mind, as I think it's a strong hedge against the "officer privacy" argument. You _will_ constantly record on duty, and that information _will_ be kept private hopefully giving us the best of both worlds.
There's also an evidentiary and performance monitoring considerations. I don't want police to have access to their own video when making sworn statements, research has shown that this can bias and alter these statements which are incredibly important when establishing frame of mind in a courtroom. I also don't want police captains to have the ability to spy on their staff and use the cameras as a backdoor way to monitor the performance or judgement of officers on the street.
To that final point, you _want_ officers to be able to look the other way in certain circumstances.. they aren't a group that should be blindly applying the letter of the law, in my opinion, by keeping the video private you serve to protect this important discretionary relationship between officers and the public.
However, I don't think access to the video should be controlled by the district attorney or by the state, instead it needs to be more transperant.
For example, lets assume someone in the public has a run in with the law and that results in charges being laid.
At that point, the accused should be able to appoint an attorney who then arranges for immediate access to video from the arresting officer(s) camera.
That process should be quick and fast, not slow and obstructed as it currently appears to be.
First things first, one should always be able to view video of their own police interactions, as should their attorney. They should feel free to show it to family and friends. The district attorney is often viewed as part of the police and working with them closely... and they are political because they are an elected position. If we can't have more public access, it is easy to abuse such power. If the public can show family and friends their interactions, it can lead to change in the way folks are treated. And so on, in the same sorts of thinking.
That said, I don't think they should be made absolutely public without some sort of control and balance. I think it would be wrong for domestic violence calls to be made to the public. I fully support keeping folks' identities private unless they are found guilty in court. I'm going to guess there are prudent exceptions to this, mostly with public figures and safety.
Along with these implementations, I would like to see just an AA in psychology, and require at least 12 units of law, including a course in constitutional law.
Just a high school diploma is not enough.
To me, the mere act of wanting the authority to arrest and shoot your peers means you are the last person I want to have that power.
Honestly, I doubt this is true for most values of "many".
I'm a straight white male in a first world country with no criminal record. I have a good job and am a well-behaved citizen. I've lived all over this country and my experiences with the police have been uniformly negative.
Thugs interested in proving to everyone that they're in charge, that's all they are.
and these were guys who, when off-duty, wore t-shirts with aphorisms like
"kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out"
and
"join the Marines, travel to exotic places, meet interesting people, and kill them"
----
i have a (completely untested) hypothesis, that police forces which require officers to be trained as EMTs and police officers (San Jose?) have far lower incidence of claims and proven instances of incidence of excessive force, abuse of authority, etc.
Besides which, you really think that people only become cops for the power? No one ever honestly wants to protect and serve their community? There's a lot of problems with American police right now, but it can be so much worse.
At this point, I should mention that I personally dislike cops, and have had really bad interactions with them, including one blaming another's suicide attempt on me. But I also know it isn't universal.
If you do want to arrest and harm folks, no, you shouldn't be on the force. There are other way to sort out these folks or make the behavior different. Pass actual laws protecting folks from such things. Give cops more education. Have laws that make sense. Hire enough police so that they have more time away from folks that are doing harm. Have cops do more work on things that are socially uplifting - where they have contact with good people - and pay the cops for this. Require they are respectful. Require they take the abuse we expect call center and retail employees to take (like being told to fudge off, yelled at, and generally called names). Require police to live in the areas they are policing. Make sure the laws are fair and that we fairly police different sorts of areas. And so on.