12k complaints over 35 years and 7-8M population, not sure if low or high
They are also only records where the complaint has been substantiated by the [tilted towards police] Civilian Complaint Review Board, so only the most egregious and well-documented complaints are present. If you got the crap beat out of you, but no one else saw it and the officer says you fell down the stairs 8 or 10 times, that's not a substantiated complaint. If there's video footage of your beating but the NYPD declines to turn the footage over to the CCRB, then that's not a substantiated complaint.
I guess you would also need to go make a complaint and see what the odds of it being taken are.
Except that this approach is NOT useful because police malfeasance is NOT distributed evenly. For example, over my lifetime I have only seen one case I can recall of police misbehavior, and I'm not sure that one even rises to the level of "malfeasance".
Perhaps if I were black and lived in New York City (where "stop and frisk" was an official policy for years) I would have a very different impression.
It is for exactly this reason that it is important to use actual statistics instead of personal anecdotes.
Every single interaction I’ve had with the police personally has been worthy of complaint.
He’ll, I’ll even complain when I see them take their side arms in to the bakery for lunch, here in Launceston Tasmania.
Who is so insecure they need a gun with their croissant.
Additionally, when the police prosecutor charged me with drug trafficking on evidence they knew was collected illegally, and 27 months later they had to drop the charges, there’s no simple way to have the officers involved and the police prosecutor charged, or even reprimanded in any way, for knowingly contravening the law.
Those 27 months weren’t real comfortable for me, but ok I’ll wear that, I did have the drugs in my possession, my guilt is indisputable, but my privacy, in that case, is more important than the intentional malfeasance of these institutionalised bullies, and the courts here, at the time, agreed.
To summaries, anyone who can act with impunity deserves constant derision until we see real change.
The police need to be trained that escalating violence isn’t the only path to working in the community, and that even when they honestly believe they caught someone in the act, they need to be treating that human being with kindness and respect.
What I’m saying is, if the police can’t behave, and they presently aren’t behaving, then another agency needs to be created that sends agentes out with the police to act as a public advocate, to protect the rights of everyone, and guide the police in their responsibilities.
Maybe these guys:
... four police officers of Lakewood, Washington were fatally shot at the Forza Coffee shop ...
Escalation is not a logical policy.
This, in and of itself, tells volumes about what that statistics would show if it were available.
But even anecdotes are telling. The ones that are most telling are the anecdotes of whistleblower cops, and specifically how their colleagues treat them after. You'll quickly notice a pattern - as soon as they interfere with one "bad apple", pretty much the entire PD/SD starts actively obstructing them, and it can get pretty extreme. To see just how extreme, and just how many people can get involved in such a witch hunt, look up Adrian Schoolcraft.
I would be surprised if the average American had a dozen interactions with police in a given year, not to mention dozens of instances of police misbehavior.
Can you share a bit about your life? What context do you have for dozens of instances of police abuse?
Or that most people who are happy will not compplain, i.e. refuting a straw man, since nobody said they would?
I didn't say any of that, why do you make things up on my behalf?
Plus some ominous addendum about voting, without saying what that would mean in practice in this context, i.e. voting for whom over whom. Why do I care more about what you're actually saying than you do? Would you say that's also true for the silent [sic] majority who only votes awesomely, for whom you presumed to speak?
>it's easy for everyone here to estimate the actual amount of malfeasance by taken the number of times they've seen police behave inappropriately (dozens) and divide it by the number of complaints they've made (zero).
Followed by my reply:
>In two decades I’ve had a handful interactions and witnessed quite a few more in Seattle - zero malfeasance observed. Most people who are happy with the police will never be loud about it, but they do vote.
The implication here is that there is a significant group of people who had (seen) virtually zero bad behavior and yet will never speak up thus never contributing to any such computation, thus making the "estimate the actual amount of malfeasance" entirely unsound.
Everything else you read into this is entirely the product of your imagination.