To Make Police Accountable, End Qualified Immunity
thebulwark.com
thebulwark.com
Beyond that, the police should be held to a higher standard because we as a society acknowledge that they are trained well enough to walk around with guns and the ability to deprive people of their freedom (even those who are innocent - if you're locked in a cell and later not charged, you don't get that time you spent in a cell back). We should be able to charge Chauvin with first degree murder despite a lack of premeditation, because he was trained to know not to do precisely what he did. If I kneel on a guy's neck and kill him unintentionally it's manslaughter, but if a cop does it, it should be worse because that cop should be expected to know that doing so is not an acceptable form of restraint.
You also got fingerprinted (and probably DNA tested) and your mugshot was publicly distributed and those actions aren't undone.
A police officer is allowed to "panic and fear for their life" and shoot me as a result. I, as a private citizen, am expected to remain cool, calm and composed in the face of multiple guns in my face.
Even more mundane things: if I break a law, "ignorance is no excuse". When cops arrest photographers for shooting in public spaces, I have literally heard government officials explain it away as "We cannot expect our police officers to be constitutional lawyers".
Have you seen that scene from the demonstration in Salt Lake City, where MAGA-man pointed a hunting bow at demonstrators? He was taken down and handed over to law enforcement unharmed. The bystanders displayed extraordinary restraint, no doubt because everything was filmed, and anyone who used deadly force would be harassed for the rest of their lives.
We'd like to see that same standard applied to cops.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/kutv.com/amp/news/local/slc-pro...
We're talking apples and oranges, HarryHirsh, and I don't think you're willing to view this discussion in good faith. Good day.
In my world, "chasing someone with a large sword" sounds like initiating a fight, no? Is the complaint that... he lost it? Because it seems clear that he started it.
A meta point: this is why you need to stay away from sites like The Blaze. The guy with the lethal weapon was "beaten", but it's the protestors who were "violent".
This comment and others like it reminds me of this gem right here: https://twitter.com/Whateverlmao/status/1267132165935923201/...
It thinks he was a total fuckwit.
If police do not know the law, then they should not be allowed to enforce it.
I have no expectation that the average police officer "knows the law", but that same problem should not be used against civilians.
It does stand, however, that an officer should be reprimanded for trying to enforce a law where they don't know the law.
I see that a little like someone yelling "let's abolish gravity" without stopping to consider: "what continues to exist if gravity no longer applies?"
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fen...
Violent crime is a scourge on America, with 15,292 homicides last year, not including non fatal shootings and/or other violent crime. As part of their job, police officers are called to deal with hardened criminals. There is a high level of risk involved. Can we stop for a second and be a tad grateful to the people that keep our neighborhoods reasonably safe?
'You've got a split second to decide whether the suspect is reaching for a gun or not. Make a mistake one way and we'll send condolences to your family, make a mistake another way and we'll throw you in jail for two decades. Make the right choice, and we'll throw another one your way next week'. Who in their right mind would take that kind of a deal? And if nobody in their right mind would do, who's going to keep the tough guys from imposing their own rule at gun point?
Anyway this is an idiotic bullshit argument in the context of George Floyd. The man was on the ground, unarmed with four police there. That police officer wasn't being asked to put his life on the line, so what you're saying is irrelevant.
To be fair, that officer was both fired and was arrested + charged, which in my understanding means neither the (mayor? department?) and the prosecutor do not think qualified immunity is merited in this case.
It does drive us to the important point: where is the threshold where qualified immunity is forfeited?
I'm more interested in hearing level-headed proposals.
Let judges decide what lawsuits are frivolous.
I don't know much about it, but taking "qualified immunity", which is evaluated by prosecutors and DAs, and moving it to a police organization (expecting police to police the police) doesn't sound like an improvement.
Perhaps it would work if it was coupled with some sort of a complete overhaul in the culture of policing, but I don't see how the "culture" changes from the outside.
There are justified situations, and there are grey areas.
And then there are situations whereby a man will have his hands on the top of his head, be kneeling still in the street. And he'll be shot 8+ times by the police.
I can be entirely grateful to the police who do an honorable job. And to those in uniform who condemn egregious injustices by their own. They are doing honorable, good work.
I can simultaneously have a depth of derision and anger for those who see a badge, a uniform, and a gun as an excuse to exercise their latent psychological weaknesses, aggression, etc.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/01/08/most-dangero...
They likely picked the most dangerous ones.
> You've got a split second to decide whether the suspect is reaching for a gun or not.
What are your goal posts for this excuse?
For example: what would an officer have to do to you or your family to make you turn on the officer's actions and demand accountability? It's important to remember that officers frequently demand to see something from your wallet or phone (both of which are located around your belt, where you might have a gun stored).
Also ironic is that police are completely capable of restraining themselves when other officers have guns and when white men carry guns into a state capitol. It's not simply the presence of a gun that police are reacting to.
> make a mistake another way and we'll throw you in jail for two decades.
This is literally the law for civilians. I don't see how you can expect an officer to enforce a law that they, themselves, are not willing to be subject to.
Personally, I think the only question is how much good faith should we give officers in questionable cases of use of force.
> Who in their right mind would take that kind of a deal?
I think every public school teacher in America asks themselves that question every week, but it's still one of the most common professions. People weigh their personal values against the value of their job.
> And if nobody in their right mind would do, who's going to keep the tough guys from imposing their own rule at gun point?
Logical fallacy. The people that are currently officers wouldn't suddenly vanish from the face of the Earth. We would still have private security and parents and teachers and neighbors and business owners and good samaritans.
Police officers are generally very strong proponents of the 2A, whose lobbies love to repeat the mantra "When seconds count, the cops are just minutes away". Without police, the average person would step up and defend themselves more than they do now. Game theory.
I think the biggest problem with US policing in the US is that there are always people who post what you did. It's not a balanced evaluation of what would actually happen if there were more reasonable accountability on police actions but rather "do whatever police unions want because otherwise morale will fall and chaos will reign". Maybe you should consider the morale of the people who see police in their neighborhoods and houses as the same people who are "imposing their own rule at gun point".
[1] https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/05/31/opinion/minnesota-pro...
You cannot say: "Here's a gun, go into that house, physically get that guy to come out, dead or alive, but - if you do it just a little bit wrong, and you kill him the wrong way, you're going to jail forever"
The laws absolutely have to be different for police because we (and that includes you) are compelling them into situations of possible extreme violence, and in some case, constant low level aggression and toxicity.
Officers have to be held to account, but that account is definitely a different.
The argument however, completely misses the point - what matters more is a) the extreme high level of baseline violence in communities which necessitates all sorts of precautions otherwise unnecessary b) guns everywhere and c) just a general attitude towards over-policing and obvious unfamiliarity with the exact nature of how people should be apprehended or not. For example, the fact that 3 officers were on camera while 1 of them was kneeling on someone's neck AND they were knowingly being filmed, means that 'de-facto' it was allowed, ie they felt there would be no repercussions, in which case, the police chief should be out to dry first.
The problem is mass violence, pervasive weaponry and over-aggressive policing - most other things are secondary, if you solve the core problems, much if it goes away.
Surely in most other jurisdictions, like Canada, UK, Germany, Japan etc. the police are treated differently under the law and somehow it works out.
Police have immunity because many cops come from military backgrounds, have operated in chaotic urban and rural environments and know how fragile life is, so they formed a union to protect their interests and skins from the legislative, judicial, executive branches and the public, all of whom from time to time looks for the easiest party to scapegoat; the police.
The public, and you especially, need to understand cops are not gun-wielding process-following soldier robots, they are human beings. If the milwaukee cop saved 100 lives in his career and takes one by accident and there are riots, that's one hell of a double standard to set. The first step to a root cause analysis is taking the officer to a padded room for a thorough psych evaluation.
When you end up with a SWAT Raid of someone's house that goes wrong and their chihwuawua gets shot, that's half the story. A lot of the time the reason you only hear half of the story is to protect someone. A lot of the story is, the population is not as intelligent or well-to-do as the hackernews demographic; to a military strategist, shows of force are an essential mechanism for gaining compliance, and they are probably right about that to an extent.
You have a demographic that is not doing themselves any favors; rioting, assaulting people, looting businesses, burning buildings. This is not a civil way to handle the situation. What I find very interesting this time around is the willingness of the public, especially young kids, to take up arms and defend their neighbors businesses and back up the police. That there is the start of something.
Also; the idea that any cop would have "saved 100 lives in his career" is ludicrous. But even if it were true, it would not justify allowing them to murder without consequence.
In actuality, the pattern we see with Derek Chauvin is more common; 18 complaints on his official record, involvement with 3 police shootings, and never any consequences beyond a reprimand. Until he just casually crushes a dude to death, and people like you are _still_ arguing there shouldn't be consequences.
I would argue that slaves and indigenous populations experienced a violent dictatorship.
I don't think it's actually too much to expect that our officers fix their own culture. I just think it won't happen because they have a toxic tradition of ignoring the cultural cues given by civilian leadership (except the ones that praise police forces no matter how bad they act).
I don't think you can convince a rural Montana rancher that their local Sheriff needs to be retrained because (as they likely see it) gang bangers in Chicago "force" police to be more heavy handed.
I'm all for incentivizing police to improve their own culture, but I'm cynical that it won't happen. I'm all for giving police more funding and better tools to do their job more politely, but they already chew up 40% of all local government spending.
I think the solution can't be "expect policing to change" and has to be something more like "change the policy and show America civilians how our policing expectations are broken".
Americans call the police because a dog is off-leash in a large grassy park. Until we figure out how to tolerate small infractions or at least deal with them without involving law enforcement, there will always be a risk of violence during escalation.
How should people protect their houses/shops when armed criminals try to rob your place?
What about the gov being oppressive? HK would be diff.
Confiscation from lawful gun owners, why, what crime did they commit?
> They aren't using them to defend against tyranny so what good are they.
They are using it to protect their homes and stores from rioters so they are atleast doing something.
Its very easy to say take away their weapons but you dont provide a realistic solution for defending life and property.
Police don't need to bust someone for drugs if we have robust social programs that adequately address poverty and addiction.
Police don't need to harass homeless people if we have robust social programs that adequately address homelessness.
Police don't need to deal with severely mentally ill people who are unpredictable and potentially dangerous if we have robust social programs that adequately address the mental healthcare crisis in this country.
I think you are actually talking about dismantling more than half of the existing criminal statutes. I agree that we should do it, but there's a reason it hasn't been done before: there are still a ton of citizens who believe the only way to deter crime/poverty is a bigger stick, not swapping a stick for a carrot.
> and are not legally obligated to know the law they enforce.
They should be.
I do agree that we need better social programs, but that doesn't excuse police thuggery.
It's time to create mission specialist in large police forces with depth in these areas and to deploy them as teams of 2-4. Yes, there will be shortages in coverage and that is okay.
Mission specialists always existed, they're called detectives.
I would argue we started the militarization of police in the 1970s-1980s when NYC was a festering hotbed of crime and when Miami drug dealers were shooting automatic weapons during turf wars (which was when we started Civil Asset Forfeiture... which allowed police/prosecutors to essentially steal assets from civilians without a criminal conviction).
We gave surplus DoD weapons to police for cheap after 9/11 and judges started rubber-stamping no-knock warrants around 2001, but I don't think that was the only inflection point.
I think that at least part of solution lies in better training on use of force, massively increase training on deescalation techniques, better psychological screening and continuous followups, full-time body cams that don't turn off and are tamper resistant with appropriate logging of metadata to detect misuse-- to the extent that if a complaint is made against an officer and the camera is mysteriously not functional, the disciplinary burden should be moved to favor the complaint. And probably other things too-- this is not meant to be an exhaustive list of reforms.
This happened in the wild west and didn't work out so well.
We sometimes forget that officers get to choose where they want to work and will migrate to the best place for them. The ratio between housing costs and salary (among other quality of life factors) is pretty important to lots of officers and we may end up lowering the quality of officers by only restricting the pool of eligible employees.
One thing the police do where I live is to do community get togethers to get to know the actual people. It helps to reduce anxiety and stress. Yes I live in a "nice" neighborhood so it is easy for me to say may be. But can we not try similar police and public get togethers in the "not so nice" neighborhoods ? Is it not even worth a try ?
Also, be more strict in getting rid of bad apples which I believe this article touches upon a bit. This specific police officer had a history of violence and he should have been under more scrutiny that he was.
Until the respect is mutually created between police and public, no law on the books can prevent these types of unfortunate incidents.
WTF? Srsly, now?
Most police departments do. In the area I work as a paramedic, they certainly are trained in de-escalation.
I also know that some of them just... don't... care.
I've been dealing with mental health patients, got them calmed down, got a plan for dealing with their issues. And then had a cop march back over (who was on scene, saw the initial incident, the de-escalation), and start shouting at the patient over the destruction of property. The patient's property. "Who the fuck do you expect to clean up that broken glass? Selfish asshole. I should make _you_ get on your knees and clean it".
End result? The patient who was compliant and willing to go for evaluation in the back of my ambulance needed to be sedated and narrowly avoided being tased. In the grand scheme of things, worse things have happened. But this was a situation actively under control. And a situation this officer, and only this officer, actively worked to make worse.
That incident resulted in a complaint, though I have no idea what the resolution was.
I personally have come up against one cop like that many years ago and funny thing is that I was actually trying to be compliant. He was just on his own high horse and had made up his mind that I was drunk and forced me to take the breath analyzer test. I remember specifically him asking me in a pissed off condescending way "So you are telling me that this machine is going to show 0 reading??" and I was brave enough to say "yes sir since I didn't have any alcohol for last few days at least". I guess I was lucky he didn't do more. But man, he was pissed when he pulled me over for supposedly tailgating him/his partner (It was 2 AM at night and I was coming home from a long drive and was a bit tired and may have gotten a bit closer than reasonable to his car from behind). He punished me hard for that. We went to court. He argued that I seemed drunk and all I could do was like WTF. The point is that he could have easily pulled me over and just asked me "sir is everything ok since you got closer to my vehicle. " I anyway said "Officer I am sorry that I didn't realize as I am coming from a long drive but I am now prompt and aware". His whole premise was he had assumed I must be high/drunk since it was late at night. That is a bad cop to me.
There are bad apples in Fire and EMS. We are not perfect. But Fire is proud of a heritage cultivated over many long years of honor and trust, and when someone in the Fire Service abuses that trust (be it theft, assault, otherwise), the "thin red line" doesn't fold in to defend him against all insult, real or imagined, but instead ostracize him.
Try yelling at a Walmart cashier. They won't punch you. Try it with your Applebee's waitress. Try it with the towel boy at the car wash. None of them will hit you. This has nothing to do with training and mutual respect, and everything to do with accountability.
I agree with the sentiment of your point, but I would argue it very much is a problem of training.
Police in the USA are (were?) taught to always assert dominance to control the situation. Part of that is with voice and presence/stance, but part of it is escalation of force. If you raise your voice and stand off at an officer, their (traditional) training tells them not to leave your body language unanswered.
I whole-heartedly agree with the lack of individual and department accountability, but comparing to a WalMart cashier does skip over some relevant facts.
[1] https://harvardlawreview.org/2015/04/law-enforcements-warrio...
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Ame...
Or should we discuss some Javascript framework instead?
But the root cause is the economic system on which America is built, and which it enforces throughout the world with its military, and enforces domestically with its militarized police.
Predatory capitalism has run its course for the past 500 years. It’s all about extracting from the poor, and feeding it to the rich, the well connected, and the powerful. In this case, the rich are the white wealthy Americans, and they have been at the top of the ladder for the past 300 years in America.
America needs a new economic system.
What’s the point of making $15/hour, or $30,000/year, when your rent costs you $15,000/year, or 50% of your gross income? You barely have any money left over for other mandatory necessities.
Meanwhile, the oligarchs that owns the stock market and Wall Street, and Fortune 1000 companies, lives lofty lives, and Bezos is about to become the world’s first Trillionaire. And if they fail, and screw up the economy for everyone else, then well, they’ll just get another bailout. The poor ends up paying for it, since costs go up for everyone.
But in an alternate universe, Floyd was arrested because he was suspected of using a fake $20 bill. But somehow, he drives a Mercedes Benz SUV, which is a rather fancy vehicle for someone to be driving, who’s suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill.
The rents are too high. The cost of living is too high.
The wealth distribution is not even. And what we have right now in America, is run-away capitalism, where the rich takes all the money. And the poor, the destitute, and especially the minorities continue to suffer.
This fosters a society where poor people are destitute, And they resort to unlawful things, and the larger society mandates tougher cops and tougher predatory criminal laws. Which feeds ever more on itself, in a vicious cycle, until something finally breaks. And that’s what we have this week, with the death of Floyd, and the nationwide protests.
If you can solve the economic system, then maybe, you can get cops who are not afraid of minorities. But to be honest, I have little hope of either issues ever being solved.
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing
TLDR: any society which refuses to provide social democratic floors to people will increasingly rely on violence to maintain its social order. You can’t expect policing to be the primary means with which we deal with things like the housing and healthcare crisis without disastrous consequences.
I don't buy this argument because it removes agency from law enforcement officers, who -- as a class of people -- very highly buy into the concept of free will.
Right now, police departments have a significant amount of moral hazard. They are expected to behave in a very legal and upright manner, but not all do and those who don't are very rarely held legally or civilly liable. I think doing something like removing qualified immunity (or at the very least just giving DAs tools and directives to prosecute more egregious use of force problems) or putting more of the police officers' wealth at risk (by tying their retirement programs to the funds which pay out for violations of civilian rights).