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Comment by gootdude | Hacker News Reader

They only resigned from the task force, because their union would no longer pay the legal fees related to the protests.

"The union representing Buffalo police officers told its rank and file members Friday that the union would no longer pay for legal fees to defend police officers related to the protests which began Saturday in downtown Buffalo and have continued on and off, according to one source. The union is upset with the treatment of the two officers who were suspended Thursday."

https://buffalonews.com/2020/06/05/57-members-of-buffalo-pol...

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They can do that? Defense of people having legal trouble while doing their job is the central purpose of a union!

The police union should be ordered to pay all legal fees related to excessive force incidents until they are bankrupt. Police unions have been amongst the biggest enablers of police violence in recent times.

Would anyone do differently in their shoes? It sounds like they volunteered for a task force, and would be facing individual liability with no assistance from their union if sued for any work resulting from staying on the task force.

If you volunteered to program the Foo system at your job, and your company announced that you would be individually liable for any losses anyone suffered for your further work on Foo system, would you keep volunteering to program Foo or would you look to work on other projects?

On the other hand, if I assaulted or murdered someone at work I wouldn't expect them to cover for me.

Really the issue is one of process. Was shoving the guy to the ground and leaving him there a normal procedure for dealing with the alleged offense? If so, it's the department's fault and the superiors are negligent. If not, they failed to follow process and caused a death, so they should be individually liable for assault charges.

Any person of conscience wants 0 (or at least less, moving towards 0) police brutality. I also think most people would avoid taking a job where they could be judged and imprisoned for a close-call mistake (that the jury believes was) made months or years earlier in a tense, dangerous situation, with no support to defend themselves. Many incidents aren't clear cut - the clear cut ones pull at our heartstrings because they are so egregious.

Let's be honest here.

There are no "close-call mistakes" in the situations which have caused outrage. The problem is that the officers involved have excessive support to defend themselves.

If changing that causes some people to "avoid taking a job", good. The public has an interest in them not being in that job.

>There are no "close-call mistakes" in the situations which have caused outrage

I agree with you on that! As I said, "the clear cut ones pull at our heartstrings because they are so egregious."

The problem as I see it is that it's hard to tailor a bright-line policy that creates increased personal liability for police for their clear abuses of power and brutality, that doesn't also create increased personal liability for their close-call, reasonable mistakes. Some of the "5 demands" I have been seeing seem like reasonable starts [0]; none that I have seen focus on increased personal liability.

>If changing that causes some people to "avoid taking a job", good.

I would guess that you and I have drastically different estimations of how large an exodus from policing the wrong kind of policy change could cause. We need police reform, but we also need police.[1]

[0]For example, https://i.redd.it/e5ka53eb5k251.png

[1]See, for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23410144 "Montreal once had a 16 hour police strike, creating a natural experiment in what happens without police..."

It is impossible to draw a "bright-line" for anything, anytime, anywhere. This is, in fact, why the legal system employs things like juries, standards of evidence, standards of care, and the "reasonable man". And they do pretty well in most cases in handling "reasonable mistakes".

The point here is that none of those are allowed to operate: the police are extended extensive immunity for criminal actions by the structure of the system, as well as immunity from individual civil liability for those actions.

All government officials should be free from nuisance liability suits for their job-related activities. But if a majority of police require immunity from the consequences of criminal activity, you are going to end up with much more than three million dollars of damage.

>On the other hand, if I assaulted or murdered someone at work I wouldn't expect them to cover for me.

Future allegations may or may not be true. Even officers who follow all procedures want legal defense against false or questionable accusations.

"It sounds like they volunteered for a task force, and would be facing individual liability with no assistance from their union if sued for any work resulting from staying on the task force."

Qualified immunity means they effectively have zero liability. In the few cases of extreme incompetence, it's taxpayers that foot the bill. Those police have no liability, beyond being responsible for fulfilling their job in a reasonable, professional way.

What the union is talking about is legal bills fighting the city (if the members are penalized in any way). And these are members that "volunteered" for a special pay role, not because they are benevolent.

Speaking of which, the union, as so many of them do, has the doublespeak terminology "benevolent" in its name (Buffalo Police Benevolent Association), yet the primary purpose of police unions is to ensure that bad cops keep their jobs, and to fight any and all measures that obtain even the slightest measure of accountability.

No one "volunteered", it's overtime pay

Police unions are the #1 problem with the implementation of policing. They aren't even a union in any traditional sense, and have virtually no affinity with other unions. It's more like a protection racket.

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