‘Duty to intervene’: How some US cities are telling cops to police each other | Hacker News Reader

‘Duty to intervene’: How some US cities are telling cops to police each other

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In Minneapolis, where Floyd died, a duty to intervene policy has been on the books since 2016, according to the city’s website.

The policy reads: “It shall be the duty of every sworn employee present at any scene where physical force is being applied to either stop or attempt to stop another sworn employee when force is being inappropriately applied or is no longer required,” — word for word the same language used by the Dallas Police Department in defining its new order.

Seeing how well that has worked in Minneapolis, what are the chances that this will work in Dallas?

The officers were all arrested and the entire MPD is potentially getting dismantled, so Dallas might take the policy a bit more seriously.

What does getting dismantled mean? You close and reopen with the same people? Or you close and start from scratch with unexperienced ppl (assuming a large pool of applicants)?

One obvious option is to build a new police department entirely out of officers poached from the police departments of other counties/states—preferably from cities that manage to have both high racial diversity and low rates of questionable police violence. Other public-servant roles (e.g. postal workers) get relocated between cities this way all the time, being moved to where there’s demand.

Another option is to just have no official city police department (i.e. a group with warranted immunity from criminal prosecution for “exercising one’s duties”), only an informal community watch/militia of regular citizens entirely out of the hands of top-down municipal control. There are functional communities that operate this way, e.g. Cheran in Mexico (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37612083)

I doubt that scales beyond small cities. You would get something far worse with private security. If you have Amazon Prime, you will get the right to refuse to testify though. Fun aside, it should also be noted that the people in your example are armed. I don't think that will meet any love with city dwellers.

One worry is, that looking at Franco Spain, he introduced the Guardia Civil to oppress ppl, and one mechanism was that no officer from the local community was allowed (at that community). That prevented police to fraternize with the local people. Also, could it not be perceived as a punishment for the police officers to get transfered, like: you did good work so please change city.

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2020/06/07/Minneapolis-City-...

Reduction of capacity, narrowing of capability and resources diverted to other services intended for situations where (armed) police aren’t required.

The idea is to close it and not replace it. The only tool in the police toolbox is violence; despite this, they have become catchall first responders despite being wholly unequipped for most scenarios.

We should treat drug use and mental illness as public health issues. We should treat homelessness by housing and feeding those who want help. We should treat domestic disputes with social work. These are complex issues that deserve specialized responses.

Let me get this right: so no police in that city? Seriously?

Yes. Why is this crazy? There’s no natural law that says a society needs a police force as it exists today. Police in the US have only existed since the mid–1800s. In the South, they rose from the ashes of runaway slave patrols; in the North, they were created to quell labor organizing [0]. So the issue is that police as we know it today is intrinsically racist and classist, and we need to entirely reimagine it.

[0] https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/

This is just a perspective from a foreign country. My worry would be would I trust armed neighbourhood vigilantes more than the regular police. I dont know enough about the US, but do you think that would be better?

How are you going to treat violent crime? What are you going to do about street gangs? No amount of social work, hand-holding or counselling will get at those.

This is not entirely true. Why do people join gangs in the first place? They feel outcast, need money, feel pressured, etc.

So let’s tackle those problems proactively. Invest in neighborhoods. Make sure there is economic opportunity. Provide ways for people to feel accepted by their community. The point is to try to stop these things before they become problems, rather than only deal with them punitively under threat of violence.

Of course violent crime will still exist. But we’re not even dealing with that particularly well today: half of all homicides in Minneapolis went unsolved last year [0]. The actual solution might not look anything like policing as we know it today.

[0] https://www.startribune.com/as-homicides-rise-minneapolis-po...

Curiously, those efforts sound very like recruiting for a gang. You'd have to beat them at their own game. As they add the threat of violence, it could be a hard sell.

Providing community services and job opportunities sounds like recruiting for a gang?

"Accepted by their community", where the community is the gang. Economic opportunity - gangs can provide that too.

They've tried these things here in Sweden, for decades. It has not worked, the opposite is true. Economic opportunity sounds nice but the 'economic opportunity' of robbing someone who made use of that economic opportunity and in such a way get the spoils without doing the toils keeps on winning out for some, no matter how many programs are created, how many youth centres are built, no matter how many integration programs are started. As to whether it is the lure of easy money, the false glamour of the bling-bling lifestyle as glorified by a significant part of rap and hip-hop artists, the 'rebel against the prevailing culture' attitude which permeates large areas or some other factor, something keeps on pulling increasing numbers of young boys and girls into crime.

Ineffective policing may be part of it, an alarmingly low number of violent crimes is solved here - ~10% of murders and violent crimes (the categories are combined in the report), %19% of sex crime including rape, ~6% of robberies and theft going all the way down to ~0.5% of bicycle theft cases [1,2]. The trend for the percentage of solved crimes has been going down for a very long time now so things are not improving, at all.

[1] https://www.bra.se/download/18.7d27ebd916ea64de5304de44/1585...

[2] https://www.bra.se/download/18.cba82f7130f475a2f1800010674/1...

How does the murder rate in Sweden compare with the United States?

At ~1.1 per 100.000 inhabitants it is lower than the USA which lies around ~4.9 per 100.000 (data from BRÅ (Sweden) and FBI (USA) for 2016). Compared to the rest of north-western Europe Sweden lies on the high side, e.g. Norway has less than half of this number, the Netherlands about half, Germany around ⅔, Denmark has a comparable murder rate. The situation in Sweden varies markedly from place to place with Malmö generally lying somewhere at the top (~3.5 murders/100.000). Where most countries in the region have seen a downward trend in the number of people subject to a crime, Sweden and Germany go against the trend with a steadily rising number [1,2], in Sweden this seems to be largely due to the rise in gang-related violence which has also led to a sharp increase in the number of shootings and gun-related homicides [4], hand-grenade attacks [4] and stabbings (on which I do not have separate data other than noticing the number of knife-related crimes in the news steadily increasing). For more info see Wikipedia:Crime in Sweden [5].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Crime_in...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sweden-crime-1976-2016-ro...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Crime_in...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Crime_in...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden

Would they have been arrested were it not for the national uproar?

Almost certainly not.

That was only after days of national and international protests demanding such actions. The entire system is too far gone and needs to be torn down if anyone inside it legitimately views this as a success story.

> Seeing how well that has worked in Minneapolis, what are the chances that this will work in Dallas?

I think we can all agree that until there's actually some accountability enforced continuously by civilian oversight, this will not help.

>>Seeing how well that has worked in Minneapolis, what are the chances that this will work in Dallas?

We have laws against murder and people still do it. But life in jail crosses their mind or at least should before doing it.

Another thing they should do is make it a bit easier to sue them individually for clearly violating civil rights.

> Another thing they should do is make it a bit easier to sue them individually for clearly violating civil rights.

I don't follow this. If it wasn't clearly established that Officer 1 violated your rights by excessive use of force, how could it be clearly established that Officer 2 violated your rights by not preventing Officer 1 from doing whatever he did? By hypothesis, he couldn't reasonably have known that Officer 1 was committing a violation.

Chokeholds were also banned by the NYPD since 1993, decades before Daniel Pantaleo used one to murder Eric Garner.

Policies to improve the police’s war on us will be wholly ineffective. We need drastic changes, such as what it looks like Minneapolis is poised to do.

It is stunning at how effective the crackdowns have been at radicalizing the population against the police. Thoughts that were the absolute unthinkable left edge of political discourse are now policy in one city within a week. That’s lightning fast.

It’s true. I tend to be on that far left edge of political discourse, but had you asked me three weeks ago I would have bet a lot of money against the Overton window shifting so much and so quickly.

It’s kind of fascinating seeing people create new rules for cops, when the problem is that cops don’t follow rules.

What’s needed is an accountability system for cops. Someone capable of punishing cops when they transgress, someone who is not beholden to cops for their day to day operations like local DAs.

This is unfair due to the selection bias of news. If such a policy works in 99 cases out of 100, that 1 case makes it into news and skews perception of the policy. Sure, there are people who break out of prisons. But that doesn't mean that prisons can't keep people inside.

It must be down to accountability. People will break all the rules in the book if consequences are never meted out.

An idea I like better is defunding police departments then augmenting the staff with social workers. So much of police training is in dealing with people in crisis situations. Why not bring in experts instead?

Also, police departments are insanely expensive for what we get as the public.

Excluding pensions Baltimore will pay $268mil, and has a homicide case closure rate of 30%. It’s hard to say that this is a reasonable usage of Baltimore’s resources.

Or training police to be social workers?

A good friend went through multiple police academies a few years ago. They all had lots of training in “social work” and “community policing” and “root causes of crime”.

Why not just train developers to be designers?

Why do all these software product teams hire separate people for thhe two roles?

There's tons of classes on design available...

It's for the same reason, and based on the basic principles of natural selection and economics.

When you have two skills that are orthogonal to each other (make it work; make it pretty), group fitness is improved by separating those roles into different members of the group.

Letting one member or subgroup own both responsibilities always leads to the same outcome.

They optimize group selection and fitness for the responsibility that is most required for survival - developers for solving problems with code, cops for meeting force with greater force - and the other, like a vestigial tail, exists but is functionally useless.

Because policing and social work are more like development and systems administrators.

I live in a city that requires police officers to have graduate degrees before they are permanently hired.

Most police don’t have their graduate degrees when initially hired, so they have to go back to school and earn them to get a permanent offer.

Because local universities have great social work departments and law schools (and sub par criminal justice departments), most cops get degrees in law or social work.

The local university had a program that offers both, so many cops do that.

So i can tell you from experience that police officer/lawyer/social worker hybrids are a thing. And it works out very well.

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