Comment by jib | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jib | Hacker News Reader

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The police are not primarily there to solve civil disputes and disagreements. There is a pretty wide area where things are not illegal and possible to convict, but you would probably want to do something.

The police’s mindset (at least the ones I’ve interacted with) is one of three things:

1. Deterrance from crimes to be committed (doesn’t apply here)

2. Achieve convictions for crimes (would also not apply in your situation)

3. Deploy force to break up ongoing altercations (also doesn’t apply)

2 is interesting. Talk about a specific alleged crime with a police officer and they will not be discussing whether it was a crime or not much, nor if the person committed it, they will be discussing whether it can be proven in a court of law or not that a criminal act was committed by a specific person, beyond reasonable doubt. It is a purely pragmatic operation of “how can I provide proof that something occurred that is against this list of rules”.

The police are in no way useless, most people just misunderstand what their job is. Their job is not to dispense justice, or make sure you get your revenge.

In your specific situation it sucked, but from a police point of view what would they do? Is there a crime? Maybe. Would they be able to present a chain of evidence proving beyond reasonable doubt that a crime occurred - most assuredly not. Would a conviction, however unlikely, achieve something meaningful? Nope, the guy would get a fine at most, but would still be working with you.

On the other hand, an employer is fully within their right to fire someone for a situation like that. They do not have the same burden of proof, they can refer to previous records of incidents, and the consequences would better match what you’d want (removal of the hostile environment).

>Their job is not to dispense justice, or make sure you get your revenge.

This shouldn't be the job of HR either.

What you describe is what civil courts are for. From societal perspective, it is their exact purpose: to dispense justice and prevent revenge. If they don't work, they need to be made to work, instead of relegating this function to random people with random training and random incentives following random policies that are ultimately designed to safeguard companies, not employees.

Going through the civil courts is very time-consuming and expensive for all parties involved.

Focusing specifically on the company's perspective, it's also a terrible option from a risk management perspective. It leaves them exposed to the possibility of a very expensive judgment. (Especially if it's a big well-known company that the courts might want to make an example of.) If they can resolve the dispute internally in a quick and satisfactory manner, then that is very much in the company's interest.

Which is exactly why it typically ends up being HR's job. And why it should officially be someone's job.

Framing it this way, I guess the company's internal culture being less dysfunctional because these sorts of problems are more likely to be addressed instead of being allowed to fester is just a happy side effect, but it bears mentioning, all the same.

I mean, Id argue that is exactly the way the system is designed, and it mostly does the job it is designed to do, not just a side effect.

Defining what makes a non-hostile workplace is hard, enforcing it on individuals is harder, so instead delegate that responsibility to each individual company and take action on the company if it does not do that.

In no way is it a perfect system (cue tons of excessively formalized training etc), but it is the best system I know of.

Allowing companies to remove the external force of "If you do not do this, you may face civil action" breaks the model though, so I completely understand why Googlers would like to remove forced arbitration. The risk of that is a contributing factor towards compliance.

Yeah, 100% agreed. Sorry - I was responding specifically to the question of whether HR should be in the loop, and didn't intend to suggest that the civil courts shouldn't also be part of it.

I wouldn't shed a tear if forced arbitration were banned. I can't really see it as not being at least partially an attempt to wiggle out from under the rule of law.

Why do you think the alternative is a conjunction of randomness at every level? Why not

* the people are HR

* trained in sexual harassment prevention and response

* following a transparent policy approved by the board and a union vote (or something like it, for instance an employee rep on the board like they are asking for)

Maybe this isn't the best alternative. I'm just saying, it's not like the choice is between (a) the government works it out and (b) everything is random.

There are lots of things that are inappropriate for the work place and yet aren't illegal.

And employer is absolutely responsible for dispering judgement on inappropriate, but legal things that happen while at work.

If I go to a co-worker and start yelling slurs at them, I should expect the be fired, even if my behavior wasn't illegal. The same is true for inappropriate sexual actions.

The question the parent comment made was not if the law allows an employer to fire someone for a situation like that, but if we want employers to investigate and prosecute crime when the police drop a case. Is that the role that employers should have in society, yes or no?

> They do not have the same burden of proof

That is a key point. At the same time we want the legal system to have a high burden of proof, but then when someone goes free we want someone else with lower burden of proof to step in and let the hammer fall on the guilty. If we changed the law and gave the police the power to fire someone without having a chain of evidence proving beyond reasonable doubt (this which we are asking the HR departments to do), then I would personally trust the police to do a better job with less bias than a HR department of a large company. It would also create a better political environment where the justice system would be discuses without extrajudicial punishment being used openly as an accepted alternative when we find the legal system lacking.

I would argue that allowing the police to fire individuals from companies would be an egregious violation of human rights on par with disallowing free speech.

Do you think that the average HR department would do a better job at it, and if so why?

What would the optimal system be when we want punishment for crimes when the police drops it because there isn't enough proof.

Companies have their own internal regulations, code of conduct, and cultural norms, and HR is ostensibly knowledgeable of these factors, as well as being trained specifically in employment law. Besides that, there are jurisdiction issues that HR aren't bound to -- e.g. if the alleged violation happened during a work trip to Kentucky or overseas, the complainant isn't required to travel to that court (or deal with the feds) to get the matter adjudicated.

But beyond that, I'm curious why you think the police are the gold standard for handling all of society's disputes? Again, let's ignore that the people and groups who constitute the "police" vary significantly depending on jurisdiction; and also, of course, that the police do not make the ultimate decision to press and pursue charges (that would be the prosecutor's office). The police have the power of government authority and protection behind their decisions and actions, but that is orthogonal to whether they are trained and equipped to come to the right and/or optimal decision.

It's no different than a company hiring private guards for security -- guards who are not only willing to do, well, guard duty, but also are familiar with the company's culture and regulations etc, and are (we would hope) specifically and better-trained for the attack vectors that the company faces. It would be absurd to argue, "Well, that company must not have real security threats if they didn't contract with the police to guard their workplaces"

I don't live in the US so maybe this is cultural, but do you really want the legal outcome of crime to be based on local policy and norms? When I hear about sexual assault give jail time in one town and only a slap on the wrist on an other then that sound like injustice. I have always believed that a sign of a healthy legal system in any nation is when common laws are being enforced equally regardless of local provincial customs, norms or policy. If we apply this to internal process of a company it looks odd that one company should have completely different outcome to an other when an employee commits a crime.

And we don't need to use the police. We could invent a new group called peace keepers with different training, but the key point is that crime is defined in a democratic process that is uniformed applied to every citizen and thus the outcome of crime should be equally uniformed.

Private guards has a very clear line between the domain of the police and what they can do, just like the clear line between the military and the police. Private guards do not investigate crime, do not handle evidence, and is not considered part of the legal system. Similarly it seems natural to me that cases which society defines as crime should not be handled internally by any company. Having overlaps where private guards and the military stepping in as police sounds as a terrible outcome and a sign that something is broken in the legal system. Better to then discuss what is broken and fix it so we can return to equal outcomes for all citizens.

> I don't live in the US so maybe this is cultural, but do you really want the legal outcome of crime to be based on local policy and norms?

This isn't about legal outcomes or crimes.

This is about crime. Threating someone with violence is a offense that society in a democratic process has define as illegal with an legal outcome. Sexual assault is a offense that society in a democratic process has define as illegal with an legal outcome.

There is a very clear line between crime and non-crime.

I'll apologize for my confusion. I was working from the context of u/jlb's comment [0]. and from the context of the posted article, in which none of the Google execs have been accused of a clear-cut crime. But the comment from u/shados that started this thread, and to which you are referring to, was talking about "downright criminal acts" [1].

So when we're talking about a "downright criminal act" -- violent assault, robbery, rape, threats to safety, fraud, etc. -- yes, the police should be brought in, for their powers of investigation and arrest, among other things. But then we're basically arguing a tautology -- "Should the police, whose job is to deal with criminal acts, be called in when a criminal act has occurred?"

What I read in u/shados's question, and subsequent comments, was: if an accusation isn't good enough for police standards, why should a company/HR use it as the basis of firing someone? So my line of argument is mostly irrelevant if you believe that companies have the right to fire people for non-criminal accusations. But I guess the bigger discussion is about the line between what constitutes a criminal act, vs. a civil dispute.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355200

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18353824

> If you believe that companies have the right to fire people for non-criminal accusations.

I agree with that. Let the legal system deal with criminal acts, the HR department deal with the policy violations by employees, the unions/department for workers deal with regulative violations by employers, and teacher/medical/ectra boards deal with professional violations. It is when one of those start to overrule the factual findings of each other that we need to discuss if something is broken and need to be fixed.

To connect back to the article and Google execs, here in Sweden we have an additional rule for public positions. A person can be fired from such position if they simply loose enough public trust regardless of factual events. In return for such weak employment protection they usually get payouts if they get fired without evidence of fault. This has the benefit that you don't need to debate if the accusation is true, but rather if the public trust (from media and so on) has been lost. In those cases where the legal system do find someone guilty they simply don't get the payout. I wonder if such system would work nicely to deal with execs in large corporations.

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