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nostromo

Minneapolis Chief of Police: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medaria_Arradondo

Seattle Chief of Police: http://www.seattle.gov/police/about-us/about-the-department/...

St Louis Chief of Police: http://www.slmpd.org/chief_of_police.shtml

Atlanta Chief of Police: https://www.projectq.us/atlanta/atlanta_police_chief_erika_s...

Chicago Chief of Police: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brown_(police_officer)

Oakland Chief of Police: https://climaterwc.com/2019/07/17/san-mateo-police-chief-sus...

People on HN seem to have a cartoon villain view of police, so I thought I'd share a few faces of police leadership in effected communities.

View on HN

It's crocodile tears. Police chiefs knew all along about the deplorable amount of racism and casual violence on their forces, they just chose to ignore them. Now the political winds are shifting and they have to go along to keep their jobs.

Change does not require looting and beatings does it? Wouldn't looting and beatings simply give the police more power, and be counter productive against making police more accountable?

Looters and those who bash people's skulls in are opportunists who don't care about change. The ones that want change see their opportunity slipping away.

Yeah that's what people said for twenty years. So people wrote letters and went to court and the media. Turns out that didn't work.

Actually, have you seen Daniel Shaver's killing? No riot. Outcome: that policeman collects a pension and rests easy at home. So it is established your technique doesn't work.

When the good things don't work, eventually you get the bad things. That's not even through people changing. It's through the people changing. I remember reading in the WSJ or the NYT about one particular time in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's recent history when there was a bit of tension between their young firebrand wing and their older mellower leaders (though both were still religious). At the time, the older leader was in hiding (on account of the military looking for him) and there was a bit of violence so he came out to appeal for peace and was promptly arrested. This had the predictable effect of weakening the mellow side and turning the organization more radical (or so the article predicted).

So you don't have to turn people into rioters, you can just destroy the credibility of everyone calling for peaceful resolutions by dismissing them out of hand repeatedly. Eventually no one will listen to them. And then the only people with power in those groups are the firebrands. A complete own-goal if you're looking for peace.

Regardless of the effectiveness of peaceful protests over the past 20 years, violent ones are even less likely to see change. Those already on the fence or against the issue will just use it as an opportunity to dismiss it all as thugs interested in chaos, no matter that the majority are peaceful.

Can't dismiss it now. Every major corporation and most congressional lawmakers are now pushing for reform.

Especially worth looking at Rep. Joyce Beatty who is a 70 year old black woman who got peppersprayed with the protesters. An elected lawmaker was attacked by the cops. Think about it.

Looting and violence give them a path to dismiss it. It's risking the ground gained through mass protests.

i would say it is short term gain, but longer term police and businesses will just leave black neighborhoods leaving them even more broken and poverty stricken, meanwhile the politicians will keep them on welfare and drugs to bring in the vote

not a happy cycle

Peaceful Protest: Nothing

Violent Protest: Guy got arrested

It's already achieved more, so I think we're good here. But the truth is that this is out of control of individuals. The system of groups of people responds to the stimulus in predictable ways. This was unavoidable.

40 hour work week resulted from violent protests. it's pride month, ask your gay friends. Most change does. Look up Haymarket affair.

Everything you casually take for granted people had to die for.

If the change hasn’t happened yet, what other options are left? Looting? Probably not. Protests until meaningful reform occurs? Might help if nothing else has.

A government is supposed to be afraid of the electorate (Jefferson). They’ve lost that fear, and you see that trickle down from legislators all the way to law enforcement.

The electorate induces fear by holding the ability to give and take power from the government. They make their demands known by being loud. The vast majority of us have been guilty of being silent when our neighbor is desperately imploring the government for change. I am guilty of silence, and I regret it and will make my demands known.

All of this does not mean that the reasonable peaceful path is not effective. It just tells us citizens must take part.

It is yet to be determined if looting and violence can result in change. What is most likely is that the government uses this to justify greater oppression.

“If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.” - Victor Hugo

They burnt down the police station and we had an arrest 8 hours later.

It works, and we should keep doing it until the lesson is learned.

The lesson will not be learned. The only thing that will happen is that even more excess force will be justified, and our civil liberties will go away in the name of order and safety.

The problem is that decades of peaceful protesting went ignored. Remmeber how kneeling during the national anthem against police brutality got mocked?

The police and police wives in my family were the loudest mockers of the kneeling protests, which were perfectly quiet and peaceful.

  "Blacks commit crimes at higher rates than others."
  "It's not a police problem, it's a crime problem."
  "I don't want to hear this crap when I get home from work."

> Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. -- John F. Kennedy, 1962

The inaction of police to reform themselves and elected officials to reform the laws that govern them is incentive to make it much easier for domestic terrorism to thrive.

Getting mocked was its method of operation. Politicizing a sporting event is controversial and controversy brings media coverage. The fact that it got a lot of media coverage meant that it was doing something.

> Change does not require looting and beatings does it?

Just how long do you think the civil rights movement has been a thing? 50 years of doing things the way the white people demanded - peaceful protests, sit ins, black political leaders. Yup, it helped, it went down, but it never solved the problem, and I see no indication that it would have on a reasonable time scale. And the whole time you've got people STILL saying "no not like that. No you can't kneel at a football game. Shut up and dribble. Shut up and sing."

Nah. The money to pay back damaged shops should come straight out of the police budget for two reasons: 1. Failure to stop police brutality. 2. Failure to deescalate peaceful protests, in fact, for doing the opposite and firing on peaceful protesters and driving them to riot.

Absolutely disgusting the videos coming out of the last three days. A few burnt out targets is a small price to pay for popping the eyes of multiple people, for tear gassing little girls, for running over protesters, for letting go white people firing arrows at protesters. The cops are lucky it didn't get even more violent. They're damn lucky nobody snapped after getting shot by paintballs on their own porch and started firing back.

They will not listen just because a couple thousand people break windows and light things on fire. They will instead tell us there is no choice but to make this more of a police state.

The only thing that may work is to get everyone to use their voice. Historically, probably only a tiny fraction of the population have used their voice. The vast majority of us need to stop being silent.

> They will instead tell us there is no choice but to make this more of a police state.

Let them try...

You don't understand the power the government can wield if there is "justification" for it. The only way to have the government serve us instead of control us is to be loud, in the majority, and peaceful. At least in a country like the US.

What you're saying hinges on the people never stepping outside the bounds of what the US government deems acceptable.

Consider that the US government deems what we want (no more police brutality) unacceptable, by definition, we need to work outside the system to solve the problem.

It's similar to 2a people I've met that think that somehow the constitution guarantees their right to overthrow the US government if it becomes tyrannical. That's absurd. The US government would never let itself be overthrown. There's no internal system for such a thing.

The US government will also never fall to external forces, unless we are nuked. Their power far exceeds what most of the general population can imagine. The only way to change life as a citizen is to get the majority of the population on your side and to be loud. And if you get criminal or violent for no reason (there's a difference between directly fighting against police brutality and beating a small business owner senseless because he doesn't want you robbing him) the government will easily squash you.

> (there's a difference between directly fighting against police brutality and beating a small business owner senseless because he doesn't want you robbing him)

Fyi this is an example I often see spoken of, and then when it gets linked to it's actually a man that was charging at protesters with a sword unprovoked.

It's not just about what the US government deems acceptable, it's about what the US people deem acceptable. There's a breaking point where the general public will start demanding that looters be shot as a matter of pure self-defense - and as you can see in right-leaning media outlets, some people are already there.

According to Donald Rumsfeld, looting is a normal step on the road from oppression to freedom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGGrS0VPrbc

Hey that's not fair, that's from 2015! What does he think now? Don't just judge a man forever by his past actions!

It's from 2003.

I just looked at the first date I saw on the youtube page, ha, sorry.

The police could stop the protests instantly by changing how they deal with racist officers and officers who kill people. They would rather escalate the situation than make these changes.

Being a police officer is a difficult, thankless, dangerous job, yet critical for a functional society.

You don't get the same resources, respect, or pension of the military. If you are let go/fired, you have little chance of finding something comparable close by.

It's not healthy for the psyche to be put into harm's way for an entire career span. There is probably a lot of untreated PTSD going on. It's not surprising that they are very leery of policies that would put them or fellow officers at risk, or be guinea pigs for policies pushed down from above.

People get awkward or remain guarded around police in social settings, so law enforcement tends to fraternize with each other and their families.

None of this makes for an environment that promotes transparency.

I'm not making any judgements for or against any of the events that have transpired. But I have sympathy for everyone involved. I suspect that the police-public dynamic will never be changed without a significant cultural shift in attitudes.

I guess this is just another one of those problems that almost every other western democracy has figured out that is simply impossible to fix in the US.

It's probably a given that other western democracies have less police-related violence. Which countries have the best systems?

I suspect the impass will be worked around rather than fixed. Quasi-police will take on some law enforcement duties. Technology will intercede in a big way. Our public anonymity is probably already out the door.

I wouldn't be surprised if many looters are tracked and identified even with face masks, even retroactively.

> ... yet critical for a functional society.

Citation needed.

This article[1] from during the NYPD "slowdown" of 2015 suggests we actually don't need police as much at Blue Liners claim.

[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/1/6/7501953/nypd-mayor-arrests-unio...

>> Being a police officer is a ... thankless ... job

Police officers are regularly held up as heroes, and often afforded special privileges in everyday life.

If anything, they are irrationally worshipped.

You say this, and yet crime went down when NYPD went on strike.

I'm not saying we get rid of all cops... But I also don't see any reason for them to have an Ironman suit for every officer.

Police are praised as heros and, when you count the pension, make 5x more money than the typical immunology PhD student (without whom we would likely literally be entering a new multi-century dark age).

Lots of people do hard society-critical jobs that take an emotional/physical toll at wages far below that of a typical officer. Only one of those occupations has a serious violence problem.

I can’t even imagine a world where there are protests in the streets asking immunology PhD students who have no pension and make 19K a year with a college degree to stop killing people. And there will never, ever be a parade for those folks.

Stop excusing police. They are paid better than most for the job they do, even if most of that comp is back-loaded.

I couldn't believe when they found the salary of the San Jose policeman that shouted "fuck you bitch" at a protester it turned out to be something like $250,000. Like holy fuck I thought bayarea frontend engineers were paid a lot, god damn. Dude looked 25 years old!

At the risk of sounding like I'm defending a guy I think should have been fired for conduct unbecoming an officer, I looked at the breakdown of his compensation. To be accurate, his total compensation (not just salary, but includes health benefits and probably things like reimbursements, uniform, etc); last year was closer to $230k. The $250k was the previous year. Remember that police unions have strict employment contracts where all of their overtime must be paid (they don't just make salary and work a variable number of hours).

SJPD has been chronically understaffed since at least 2008 when there were large layoffs. The department prefers to hire fewer officers, but work the existing ones longer hours (hence lots of overtime).

Definitely not excusing any behavior by the police. But if you lump all officers, departments, and cities together you are never going to get anywhere with reform.

I only have a vague idea what police officers make. Generally, I avoid begrudging anyone's salary.

Being a police officer isn't a dangerous job, it isn't even in the top 10 of most dangerous jobs in the US. No one thanks the 7-11 clerk for the danger they put themselves into so you can buy a Slurpee at 2AM in the morning. No one thanks the crab fisherman who risk their lives so you can enjoy "all you can eat" snow crab legs at Red Lobster.

There's lots of extremely brutal jobs that are thankless. People who pick your food. Visit central California during summer where people are picking produce in 100+ degree weather for 10 hours day. It's hard back breaking work.

Being a police officer is a well paid job with a pension where most of your day is filling out paperwork.

From a quick Google search, this article lists sherriff/police officer at 14th most dangerous job: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/2018/01/09/work... The most common cause is intentional injury by another person. The police, like everyone with power needs accountability. But I don't know if being overpaid is the core problem.

If anything better pay would attract better cops.

Cops have guns and close to complete immunity to do whatever they want. They've been getting more and more militarized in the last couple of decades. They really, really don't need you to defend them.

Governments naturally fear giving protestors what they want as it validates this course of action and may lead to more protests.

Sure thats the Seattle police chief, but who leads the police union?

This guy: https://youtu.be/b6cJQ1XBH8M who fits the cartoon villain side of things

I thought this exact point when I saw the parent.

There are two public faces to every department anytime an officer-involved story hits the news.

The police chief is a slick salesperson to put the department in the best light and is accountable to the mayor / city council. The union leader is the slimy salesperson who always paints the suspect/chief/mayor in the worst possible light and who constantly repeats the refrain "the job is hard", "we are only human", "followed standard department procedure", etc. There are a number of notable union leaders who are detestable caricatures of cartoon villains.

After re-reading this, I think I left out some detail about the purpose of the Union leader.

They have a fiduciary responsibility to protect the union (the members and the dues). They are not accountable to or elected by the public (in their role as union leader).

That said, they don't have to be cartoonish villains, but frequently are because their role is to pull heartstrings for police officers, not for the civilian/victim in the narrative.

Meanwhile, in Seattle:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/gu3qq1/cop_just_ca...

How would you describe the sheriff casually tossing the tear gas grenade as anything but cartoonishly evil? How would you describe his co-workers, holding the line, without even looking twice at his behaviour?

Seattle PD maced a child and the officer who did it faced no repercussions. Is the Chief of Police a toothless position? The only other conclusion is that maybe GP should consider removing Seattle's Chief as a supporting example.

I would consider macing children to be "cartoonishly evil."

> Is the Chief of Police a toothless position?

Kinda.

In big cities in states with strong union laws, the burden is very high for cause to fire an officer. Even when there is a firing, the officer can appeal and sometimes be reinstated. It opens the department up to liability if they don't wait for the normal "follow the evidence, build the case" flow.

When there are big protests in big cities, the regional police departments actually share officers. I would bet that about half of officers on the riot line in Seattle were actually from surrounding suburbs or from the state police. I don't think Seattle's chief can fire one of those officers; he would have to do an inter-agency thing that I'm sure is pretty complicated.

Also, the chief has to walk a thin line of perverse incentives. He needs the department to be functional and to do that, he can't be seen as making an example of an officer (for "morale" reasons). He also has to consider that police officers will leave a department in droves and the chief ends up with more problems if crime rises due to "bad management" of the department.

This summary is really interesting. Thank you for laying out an explanation for me.

And earlier today, SPD invited, met with, and knelt in solidarity with a group of peaceful protesters at the East Precinct on Cap hill. Once the photo op was done, they started macing and gassing the protest.

There was no looting, no vandalism, no riot, no burnt cars in that area. Nobody was behaving violently. It took ten seconds for a peaceful protest to turn into an assault on the public.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/gv0ru3/this_is_the...

Local news ran this video, cutting the first 20 seconds out, and blamed the crowd on starting violence.

If the Chief's are good, why aren't the cops good? And more specifically, why are their peers complicit when one "makes a mistake", which is an incredibly generous statement when the incident involves losing a human life. Pointing to a few good eggs doesn't bless all of them.

Nostromo, I'm the CEO of Nickelodeon, and I want to thank you for sharing this. I've directed my team of animators to re-work their characters to better match reality. The people shooting at you in real life should be in Paw Patrol too!

I thought Paw Patrol had already covered this:

"‘Paw Patrol’ Writers Defend Episode Where German Shepherd Cop Shoots Unarmed Black Lab 17 Times In Back"[1]

[1]: https://entertainment.theonion.com/paw-patrol-writers-defend...

The Onion.

>People on HN seem to have a cartoon villain view of police

What could possibly give people that impression?

https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/gu3s6j/poli...

"Police commanders ... WANT mayhem"

That's what I responded to. I'm curious if you truly think the people that I listed want to see their home towns on fire.

If it increases their power and budget - sure! It's not as if they were personally affected.

> I'm curious if you truly think the people that I listed want to see their home towns on fire

When given a choice to protect murderous cops or prevent a fire, they chose to protect the murderous cops. All the cops have to do is go to jail, get a court date, post bail and sit at home. Why can't a cop that murdered someone be that inconvenienced?

Most Police Don’t Live In The Cities They Serve: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-police-dont-live-i...

Chicago: 88% of police live in city

St Louis: 59%

Atlanta: 14%

Minneapolis: 10% (white officers: 5%)

Seattle: 12%

Oakland: 9%

Also, certainly in Minneapolis—and likely elsewhere—the police chief doesn't seem to have nearly as much control over rank and file officers as the union head does. This story gives more texture: https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/05/minneapoli...

Philadelphia takes a split approach. See below:

The city has mandated residency requirements for nearly all city employees since the 1950s, but police and some other public workers are exempt, The Philadelphia Tribune reports. Approximately 30 percent of Philadelphia police officers live outside of Philadelphia, according to Acting Commissioner Christine Coulter.

In 2010, the police union won the right for officers who have five or more years of experience to live outside the city limits. Those terms have been in effect since 2012. Firefighters and sheriff’s deputies with five or more years of service were allowed to live outside of the city in 2016.

And apparently the union head has a history of complaints against him, one for wearing a "white power" patch: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.insider.com/president-minne...

I'm a broken record on this, but this is yet another example demonstrating that it's basically impossible to compare cities along political borders. "Chicago" covers 234 sq/mi at the center of Chicago, whereas "Minneapolis" covers about 54 sq/mi of the center of Minneapolis, so an officer in Minneapolis and one in Chicago could be living and working in nearly identical environments -- they may, for example, both be living in an old, majority white inner-ring suburb a couple miles from Downtown and policing a majority black area they have no history in -- and the Chicago officer would be counted as living in Chicago, but the Minneapolis officer would not be counted as living in Minneapolis.

Their day-to-day experiences, their relationship to the communities they serve, their physical distance from Downtown, the built environment of their own neighborhoods, the socio-economic make-up of their friends and family -- and on and on and on -- could be practically identical, but we'd count them differently in your list.

What that ellipsis elides completely changes the meaning of the quote. The pro-police forces referred to don't necessarily include the commander. If the original person was talking about the police, would they not have used the term "police forces" instead? The fans aren't the team.

Painting everyone with that same brush is not constructive. There are systemic issues to be dealt with here, but that doesn't mean every cop in the system is a murderer waiting to happen.

While true, from a game theory point of view you should be making the assumption that they are villainous. Likewise, you also need to assume that every interaction the deal with can result in them being attacked. From that position you can then start to create reasonable legislation and rules to protect both sides.

Yeah, I'm sure Arradondo is calling the shots vs Bob Kroll

Also, you don't understand the institutions involved if you highlight these examples. Police, police unions, district attorneys, etc. It's not simple

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking

Above, they cherry-picked a few cops that just happen to be the chief of police. It's not that simple.

You don't understand the institutions involved if you highlight these examples. Police, police unions, district attorneys, etc. It's not simple.

>cherry picking

Baseless accusation. The protests are mostly in the blue-voting cities, and the GP's list is representative.

[edit]

Here is how it works:

Minneapolis, Chief of Police: nominated (...) by the Mayor of Minneapolis (Betsy Hodges) [1]

Seattle, Chief of Police: [n]ominated by Mayor Jenny Durkan [2]

St Louis, Comissioner of Police: appointed as the 35th Commissioners of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department on December 28, 2017 by Mayor Lyda Krewson [3]

Atlanta Chief of Police: Mayor of Atlanta Kasim Reed announced on December 1, 2016, that he had chosen Shields [4]

Chicago Superintended of the Chicago Police Department: The City Council on Wednesday voted 50-0 to appoint former Dallas Police Chief David Brown to lead the Chicago Police Department [5]

Oakland Chief of Police: Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf announced Monday that she has appointed former San Mateo Police Chief Susan Manheimer as Oakland’s interim police chief [6]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medaria_Arradondo

[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/carmen-be...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hayden_Jr.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Shields

[5] https://news.wttw.com/2020/04/22/david-brown-confirmed-chica...

[6] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-Mayor-ap...

>The protests are mostly in the blue-voting cities

Yes, in the cities where most people in this country live.

Where people are most educated.

Where most minorities live.

But sure, them darn demz, at it again.

This is what happens when your understanding of politics doesn't have a material basis. You think the color coding of ruling power means something.

It's the cops on each force they cherry-picked. The fact that they are chief of police means nothing, but that you don't understand the institutions involved and how they work. This stuff is in front of SCOTUS and congress right now. It's not simple and it is very broken.

> The list of police chiefs & other officials is solid.

The list is solid ignorance of the institutions involved. It focuses on race of one part of police leadership and not police violence and the racist actions of many cops. Highlighting police chief race is a racial argument in the least and may be even a racist argument.

The list of police chiefs is solid.

I share your concerns over Qualified Immunity (and other problems). The relevant discussions are here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23379910 ("As Qualified Immunity Takes Center Stage, More Delay from SCOTUS")

and here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23386260 (a subthread of this discussion)

[edit]

>It focuses on race of one part of police leadership >Highlighting police chief race

Excuse me? Where are you going with this?

I've updated my post with clear, sourced information on how the police leadership got put in their respective roles, to clearly indicate how it works.

The examples are mostly appointment by the (locally elected) major or by the (locally elected) city council.

> The relevant discussions are here

Squirmy

I thought it was a decent effort to point out content in the most relevant place.

The relevant site guideline is to assume that others are commenting in good faith.

I thought it was lame. I broke the guidelines. I assume bad faith from everything that person wrote. You should probably report me.

I also assume bad faith from you so you can add that to your tattling.

This is a pretty cynical post, but I'm not going to downvote/report it.

I actually really like the guidelines of this site. @dang and the other administrators do a good job at keeping the conversation mostly civil and the guidelines are great principles and rules to aim for that end.

Maybe if you assume bad faith of a post (anywhere on social media), it might be time to skip over it or take a break.

I'm listening to the RabbitHole podcast[1] right now which is a pretty interesting analysis by the NYTimes of how social media / online content fuels impactful psycho/social impact on participants. I hope you find it interesting.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/column/rabbit-hole

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