Police use of force policies can help to end police violence | Hacker News Reader

Police use of force policies can help to end police violence

useofforceproject.org

73 pointsjs277 comments

Almost all of this is completely non-starters if we don't end the blue wall of silence and qualified immunity.

The first autopsy in this case came back blaming existing health conditions and other causes (someone standing on his neck). If there had not been a video the cop would never have faced any action. That report, while possibly factually true, was written in a way to make it possible for the police officer to get off.

There’s no excuse for policing that doesn’t accommodate existing (when being stood upon by the neck) or pre-existing health conditions. If the insurance companies don’t get to discriminate on these grounds, why do the police? The police and those defending their actions are basically saying the bar for acceptable police use of force for the general public is as much as deemed necessary by the individual officer in the field, up to and including killing a person. All for a nonviolent offense. To say that he died because of his health conditions is to say that “healthy” people wouldn’t, and so the officer’s use of force was therefore within acceptable limits.

I guess the public doesn’t find that acceptable any longer. Good for them.

>There’s no excuse for policing that doesn’t accommodate existing (when being stood upon by the neck) or pre-existing health conditions.

Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull. Literally double standards for police vs everyone else.

I don't see it as a double standard if the incident occurs when police have done everything they can to de-escalate a violent situation, resort to the minimum force possible, and the suspect still gets hurt. But this is why things like body cams that are always on and robustly tamper proof are needed, along with strict discipline or automatic firing if the officer does manage to disable or obstruct the camera.

> when police have done everything they can to de-escalate a violent situation, resort to the minimum force possible, ...

My understanding is that it is very common for this not to happen.

Yes, very unfortunate. Given the wave of the last years of incidents like this, some departments have begun having additional emphasis on de-escalation, but that's not enough. It needs to be ingrained in training from day 1, and for current police it needs to be an intensive retraining requirement.

That said, there will always be incidents that cannot be safely (for the officer & surrounding public) brought to closure with force, even with perfect training. That has to be understood and baked into the expectations we have of police conduct. But always-on body cameras that are robustly tamper resistant with stiff penalties, like getting fired for disabling or obscuring them, are necessary to make this happen. We have to be able to audit police actions to know if they made a best-effort to de-escalate, to avoid force. Failures caught on tape need to be replayed and dissected in after-action reports by the rank & file to know how they can avoid similar mistakes. I mean, this is standard stuff in plenty of jobs: something screws up, you fix the immediate issue ASAP, then you figure out why it went wrong and gather the stakeholders to review and figure out how not to screw up in the future.

I'm not sure pre-existing conditions are so cute & dry. Given violent subjects unwilling to deescalate means some level of force (which should be the absolute minimum possible) may be needed, and any use of force risks bumping into pre-existing conditions. How do you know the person with a gun that you're chasing has a heart condition? Minimal force might mean tasering, and when you taser them there's a risk of cardiac issues, but what is the lesser-forcen alternative when de-escalation fails? (Though tasering is used all too frequently for very little reason)

Simply because police declare a constitutionally-protected protest activity unlawful doesn’t make it so. The police are an authority to make the call, but they aren’t the last call on unlawfulness, and they don’t have unlimited lawful uses of power to disperse peaceful assembly. The Geneva Conventions still apply to individual and collective police conduct, as treaties we have signed and ratified are equal to the law of the land under the Constitution. And ultimately, citizens have a right to protest. The police aren’t a part of the Constitution. Police in early America didn’t exist as such. The closest we had were colonial slave catchers.

Ultimately, we have direct democracy and direct rule all the time already, right now. It’s just unevenly distributed. Private citizens self-organizing to shield, shelter, protect, and share free speech with protesters, inside their homes, to escape police brutalities outside, all proves that the state needs the people’s authority, not the other way around. The police, private property representatives, politicians, and laws exist as an escape valve, short circuit, methodology, and framework for such a democracy to exist as it was able to be conceived of administered upon its founding. These are not bad ideas or implementations. But we should have more of a say in how our country is run at every level. With current technology, we have the means to enact instant direct democracy with no politicians, only bills, amendments, and voters; with instant implementation, and with instant lawsuit argument and just-in-time adjudication. The question is, do we have the will?

I don't disagree with really much of anything you said, but my comments was in regards to the inability to perfectly take pre-existing conditions into account and still perform their job of protecting the public from violent suspects that don't respond to even the best, most perfect de-escalation techniques. A person attacking a bystander, or a cop for that matter, especially with potentially maiming or lethal force, may have to be dealt with using police force. That force, even when it's the minimum necessary to protect the public, may nonetheless trigger a pre-existing condition, and I don't think there is any realistic way of avoiding such edge cases.

Not to mention there's probably enough surveillance these days to allow us to identify the perpetrator, allow them to leave the scene of the crime, and then track them down later and a detain them away from the inciting incident. I would imagine that arresting someone away from the inciting incident of the crime would likely lead to a less-adversarial interaction because they're in a less stressful situation.

The answer to that is body cams and a strong body cam policy.

I live in a city with one of the 100 largest police forces in the country. All officers are required to wear and activate body cams when performing a police action. Once the video starts the officer cannot interfere with it, though they can pause audio, since it is transmitted to a precinct building and not stored on the officer or their vehicle. Access to stored videos is limited to oversight authorities.

In that case there is little to nothing a thin blue wall can do to protect police officers from misconduct, because it would require destruction of logged evidence on the part of a supervisor or oversight authority.

Body cams allow police to be held accountable after the fact, but haven't conclusively led to a reduction in violence. They are part of the solution, along with use of force policies. https://www.joincampaignzero.org/

It seems the results have been mixed and inconclusive, rather than conclusive that they don't lead to a reduction in violence.

Thanks, I’ve edited my comment slightly.

Body cams are only part of the solution; if the rest of the system is broken, police misconduct won't be punished regardless of how hi-res and accurate the images of the misconduct are. We've been this before: brutality all the way up to homicide caught on tape, then let go with a slap on the wrist.

> We've been this before

If you are speaking to videos from bystanders they are often problematic as evidence because usually they do not capture the entirety of the police encounter. In that case they could capture excess behavior but not the preliminary conditions that resulted in escalation of force.

That was the valid legal defense for the officers involved In the Rodney King incident even though the conduct in the video looked grossly excessive. Police body cams exist to solve for gaps like that. Perhaps if additional video evidence had been present from the start of the Rodney King incident the officers would not have been found innocent.

The goal, after all, is accountability.

How you’re kidding yourself, the police force+friends would do anything to hold onto that psychological power, they would not let a fellow cop who may even be a cold blooded murderer face justice, that would dent their projected power and would make being a cop a lot less glamorous and more like a regular job. It would be ideal but you’re forgetting this is America, a police state, more and pronounced lately

Is there data to suggest the frequency with which police supervisors regularly destroy restricted evidence and what their motives are?

If there were do you think we'd be having these discussions? I mean the point of destroying evidence is to leave no trace, and you can't really do a study of things lost and forgotten... like you can't do a study or trace all the destroyed works of art and writings of the ancient world that have been destroyed and don't have copies of which nobody has ever seen except the original eye witness, who if they're alive - couldn't recite the book or re-paint the work of art...

> If there were do you think we'd be having these discussions

Yes, even more so.

(oops; typo on my part, I noticed - thanks for correctly interpreting my gibberish)

I was indeed referring to that sort of video. But "context" is always going to be a get out of jail free card even with a bodycam if grand juries and prosecutors are willing to just plain make stuff up. So while there's some support for your point about the Rodney King stuff, the cops also made claims like "we thought he was on PCP" (which turned out not to be the case). Clearer video of Rodney King standing back up could still be interpreted as an intent to charge at the officers by a jury that's predisposed to believe everything that cops say.

I'm currently seeing this play out in Sydney, Australia, where a cop just kicked an unresisting teen suspects' feet out from under him (while holding his arms behind his back). All the relevant material is on video, and yet we see officials more or less freely inventing exculpatory "context" that supposedly justifies what happens.

If you have a network of people around the cops who will just accept "we were afraid for our lives" as an excuse to do anything, no amount of bodycams will solve that problem.

Bodycams are not necessary, they’re like an awkward patch that can be conveniently removed when puss is coming out.

Why are they able to stop body cams in the first place? What is the penalty for not turning it on? Thats sketchy and unclear and a convenient doorway to abuse. Bodycams should record every moment and store everything encrypted in a blackbox and not be viewed by anyone unless theres a problem and a judge allows it. And periodically erase themselves after a number of days/months.

Or simply not use body cams at all but remove their immunity. That immunity is a carte blanche aka a licence to kill for the many who can’t temper their anger.

In my city police cannot stop the recording. I believe that is done by dispatch, but the police themselves are not provided that capability.

But they have the option to when they start it. And many times they don’t start it right away. Little door to do devilish things, don’t you think? And most of these incidents when they don’t turn on their cameras have unclear consequences, it’s a brotherhood thing

That sounds highly speculative. I imagine officers that fail to start their cameras appropriately are at the mercy of retaining their own legal counsel when questions of misconduct arise. The police department has shielded itself from liability by providing video recording equipment and when the officer chooses to perform their job without that equipment in violation of department policy that liability falls entirely on that officer.

That liability falls entirely on the offending officer only when the story make wings and it’s too big to suppress, otherwise, they’re flexible with their ‘brothers’

I think you need find better sources of information than television cop dramas.

that's what electrical tape is for... I mean 'oops I got some oil on the lense....my bad' could be a valid excuse... Maybe they're a messy eater and just drizzled some jelly donut all over the lense... sure it might still catch audio but is that good enough for courts?

The blue wall extends beyond obstructive police: prosecutors have to work hand-in-glove with the police and risk compromising that relationship by bringing charges, leaving only incidents prominently in the public eye or extremely egregious. The rest they let IA and discipline boards handle.

What you are describing is a legal process problem opposed to a police enforcement problem. The courts are a whole different set of problems that also need refinement, but is a completely different beast.

There's a bridge between the two though, they do not exist in a vacuum separated from each other. Perhaps I lack imagination, but I don't see court reforms that could fully address this issue of the working relationship between police and prosecutors

qualified immunity almost doesn't matter because of the need for prosecutors to work hand-in-glove with police. Even without such immunity, prosecutors would be reluctant to bring charges except in truly egregious cases because of how much harder it would make their jobs working with the police. So anything mostly out of the public eye that isn't truly horrid they largely leave to the discipline process of the force & Internal Affairs. I'm not sure how to fix that. Automatic outside investigators/prosecutors from a different jurisdiction might help, though the blue wall would still pose a problem.

It seems to me there are cities in that list with lots of red boxes that nevertheless haven't had significant problems with use of force by their police. I guess you can probably find room for improvement everywhere, but it seems potentially counterproductive to just treat them all the same way and assume the requirements listed are necessary or sufficient for reducing police violence?

Strongly disagree.

"Use of force" policies are how we got into this mess. Essentially it is the honor code, where police can change it on a whim without oversight or public accountability, and when they're violated there's no clear framework.

We should completely scrap "use of force" policies and create use of force LAWS, with special prosecutors and civilian oversight. Police shouldn't be policing each other. In fact police should be members of the public with limited additional powers, or "police are the public and that the public are the police" as Peel said.

Doubling down on a toxic idea is wrongheaded.

I think reviews should be done by grand jury and maybe a three member judicial panel.

Laws tend to lag technological capabilities. There have been rapid developments in lethal and non-lethal methods of force. Policy is needed for when it may be difficult to update laws and more agility is needed. There's a balance.

I’m pretty sure killing someone by asphyxiation has been around for a while.

Good? Allowing additional modes of force should be slow and conservative, not rushed out into the field as quickly as possible in the name of "progress." We're talking about policing, not a Silicon Value startup.

"Move fast and break things" shouldn't apply to members of the public, as the police test their new gadgets.

This is pie-in-the-sky for most cities right now. Municipalities must vote for enacting community-led policing boards that set law-enforcement policies, benchmarks, goals, and hiring standards. It will take time to change their individual departments, but it will work.

See also: Michael A. Wood, Jr.

https://youtu.be/Ndg-JGmYryA

https://youtu.be/BopwzJ-9G0Y

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33293421

This seems like a great idea on paper, but I fear that adding more bureaucracy to the situation only introduces a new way to strangle our society.

The statistics show a rapid decline in police violence and do not support a racial bias in violence

So it’s getting better, but still sucks for everyone?

Well...let’s just quit right now.

It should be easy to dismiss his claim.

As it should be to prove it.

FBI and others should have plenty of data about it.

Citation please?

Also, even if there was no racial disparity, the current situation is not ok.

Just google it, the data is public

The statistics I see from Google all indicate that police violence is going up, not down. So where are your sources?

If you won’t defend specific claims, why generalize? You’re not convincing anyone.

I googled it and apparently there is evidence the world is flat and the moon landing was faked. I think I'm going to google a little bit more to see if 9/11 was an inside job. I'm getting pretty convinced.

There are no statics because the police refuses to track it. The best we have show clear racial bias: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02601-9

About 1000 people were killed by cops last year. 41 of those were unarmed. Of those 41, 9 were black

Murder is a subset of violence....

Those 9 deaths are over 60% higher than they would be if the murder rate matched the demographics of the US population. The numbers you cite show the exact opposite of what you claim they show.

Sources please

Why are you only counting unarmed victims? Does the 2nd Amendment not exist? Carrying a weapon should not be grounds for summary execution.

Police kill about 1,000 people each year and that has not declined. Source:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

As well:

- According to the most recent census data, there are nearly 160 million more white people in America than there are black people. White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers.

- U.S. police officers have shot and killed the exact same number of unarmed white people as they have unarmed black people: 50 each. But because the white population is approximately five times larger than the black population, that means unarmed black Americans were five times as likely as unarmed white Americans to be shot and killed by a police officer.

- When considering shootings confined within a single race, a black person shot and killed by police is more likely to have been unarmed than a white person. About 13 percent of all black people who have been fatally shot by police since January 2015 were unarmed, compared with 7 percent of all white people.

- Police reform advocates and researchers as well at The Post’s own analysis has consistently concluded that there is no correlation between violent crime and who is killed by police officers.

- A 2015 study by a University of California at Davis researcher concluded there was “no relationship” between crime rates by race and racial bias in police killings. A report released last week by the Center for Policing Equity, which reviewed arrest and use-of-force data from 12 police departments, concluded that black residents were more often targeted for use of police force than white residents, even when adjusting for whether the person was a violent criminal. - An independent analysis of The Post’s data conducted by a team of criminal-justice researchers concluded that, when factoring in threat level, black Americans who are fatally shot by police are no more likely to be posing an imminent lethal threat to the officers at the moment they are killed than white Americans fatally shot by police.

- “The only thing that was significant in predicting whether someone shot and killed by police was unarmed was whether or not they were black,” said Justin Nix, a criminal-justice researcher at the University of Louisville and one of the report’s authors, said in April. “Crime variables did not matter in terms of predicting whether the person killed was unarmed. This just bolsters our confidence that there is some sort of implicit bias going on. Officers are perceiving a greater threat when encountered by unarmed black citizens.” Blacks are shot and killed by police at 2.5 times the rate of whites.

Source:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/1...

This isn't true. Each year about 25% of people killed by cops in the US are Black, while Black people only make up 13% of the US population. The amount of people cops have killed has not decreased, at has stayed steady at about 1,100 for six years[1][2][3].

In addition to that, 20% of the people cops shoot at are unarmed[4][5].

[1] http://useofforceproject.org/

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/...

[4] https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/xwvv3a/shot-by-cops

[5] https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/a3jjpa/nonfatal-police-s...

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