- Mandatory psych evals half-yearly
- Anonymous corruption reporting
- Reduce/eliminate drug penalties
- Eliminate civil forfeiture
- Ticketing revenues no longer fund the department
- Expanded auditing of violent calls
Unfortunately, the greater group of protesters is incapable of understanding nuanced policy or democratic change. I fully expect MN to swing red this election as a result of this.
This is a totally uncalled for generalization. That aside, most of the items you've listed work against the policies that police abolitionists are fighting for. Here's a good explanation: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59ead8f9692ebee25b72f...
The police use body cameras for real-time facial recognition of the policed [1]. It 100% has, and explicitly is, a negative effect. It was a right of center “reform” on the police that did nothing but further expand the power (and future of abuse of power) of our policing institutions.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2017/03/22/real-time-face-recogniti...
this doesn't improve safety it causes a feedback loop where the person targeted will struggle to move to a normal life.
What attitude is that exactly? Some semblance of a code of ethics? I think you are drastically underplaying the "random con" of a realtime facial recognition surveillance network of body and CCTV cameras.
People have to be confronted with the use cases of the technology they build prior to building it. Ignorance, naivety, and a post-hoc "I didn't know it would be use as such" is just ethical negligence.
As others have said, once you lose institutional control, and the mayor and the police chief have both effective said that they have lost this, than small reform don't matter.
Plus Minneapolis PD has a strong reputation as one of the most corruption in the nation.
https://www.startribune.com/minnesota-police-officers-convic...
https://www.patrickburnslaw.com/Articles/Business-Law-Articl...
TL;DR When a cop is fired there are several safety nets that can reinstate them. If I remember right, the union reinstates ~45% of fired officers. Neither the Chief nor the mayor have the LEGAL power to even fire bad actors in the police department. They literally cannot do anything about the problem within the law.
This does not mean that other things should not also be done.
I beleive getting rid of / modifing the police unions would be beneficial. Fixing the whole qualified immunity issue would also be good. But I also think police need representatives to protect them from false accusations or from being railroaded. Maybe that is from a union or maybe its from something else.
If you actually think body cams help, ask yourself why Derek Chauvin felt comfortable murdering George Floyd in broad daylight while being filmed.
Please elaborate.
How do you think what's happening will differ from what you're suggesting?
- What happens when an officer fails the pysch eval? Are they fired?
- Who oversees the corruption reporting? How do you know they are not corrupt too? They surely can't be part of the police dept.
- Reduce/eliminate drug penalties: The problem is racism where drugs are often used as the excuse. Why is there no racism training in your list? Or de-escalation training?
> Unfortunately, the greater group of protesters is incapable of understanding nuanced policy or democratic change.
This is extremely rude and invalidating of large efforts put forward by the protesters to look at all options, think outside the box, and make real change. Some protesters have even been re-writing the police and city budgets themselves to see how things might turn out.
If an officer's bodycam is turned off and there is a confrontation, the officer should be assumed guilty in any dispute. It should be the officer's responsibility to ensure their bodycam works, just as it is the officer's responsibility to ensure their gun works.
I think bodycams themselves are fantastic tools—but like most technology, they cannot by themselves fix a human problem.
From a legal perspective, I think a cop without a body cam should be given the exact same rights as a private citizen, including around the use of force. The right to use force comes with responsibilities, like having a body camera.
And when standing in court as a private citizen, a body cam which just happened to get turned off at the exact time of the incident should be viewed with extreme suspicion. Not proof in itself, but a very serious black mark.
I would expect affirmative defenses to be fairly common in trials involving police; there's typically not a lot of argument around whether an officer assaulted/killed someone, just over whether the use of force was authorized.
That being said, I would be more in favor of changing jury instructions to indicate that the lack of body cam footage can be seen as an incriminating factor. Not that it 100% means that they are guilty, but that it can be considered suspicious circumstantial evidence. Much in the same way that you cannot be compelled to self-incriminate, but that juries are allowed to interpret invoking the 5th amendment as incriminating.
They made a low-effort post of ill-advised, out-of-touch suggestions and ended with lobbing direct insults at huge swaths of people.