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If bad behavior is common in the police force, but the majority of officers aren't badly behaved, wouldn't a sign of success be if police officers quit en masse? The only real reason turning over the entire police force is a scary prospect is that de-ba'athification resulted in ISIS.

I absolutely deny that resignation of the vast majority of police officers would result in a significant loss of useful institutional knowledge or talent. These are rotten institutions from the top down which is what really enforces the no-snitching culture. People above you will destroy you for snitching, and pull strings for you when you don't.

The people above are also the ones whose "blessings" are listened to. Low-level cops don't get to speak for themselves, we only listen to people who achieve in a culture that rewards bad behavior. It's how we handle everything, not just police.

>> Clearly police officers are above the law in America.

I think many law enforcement officers view themselves as 'the law' and therefore believe that the ends justify the means. The popular, although dated, culture backs them up on that and there are many laws that favor law enforcement over suspects.

Police in the US think they are above the law because in many ways they are. The good ones know how to find the balance and keep the peace.

I guess it stems from a time when all you really had to work with was physical evidence and the only records being what officers had written down. So it really wouldn't have worked any other way. A suspect is always going to say whatever makes them seem innocent. "I wasn't holding that knife when you arrested me" would be impossible to disprove if the suspect was wearing gloves at the time or forensic evidence wasn't yet available. So in some ways the officers word had to hold more weight.

It seems like the only solution is for every single interaction to be digitally recorded.

>I can't shake the feeling that there is some truth or barrier to this problem that the average person doesn't know about/the government doesn't think we can handle being told.

I think the truth is simple. Police officers are regular people, not supermen. They work an awful and dangerous job where they interact primarily with the worst individuals in our society. There will always be bad apples.

Being a cop is dangerous, but the danger is drastically overstated. Being a cop is significantly less dangerous than a bunch of other jobs that typically get ignored, such as construction, landscaping, being a crossing guard(!), pilot/flight engineer, roofer, gargbage collector, mechanic (several types), mechanic supervisor, or even a delivery driver. None of those other groups seem to have developed the same siege mentality that police officers have, despite having a better statistical argument for it.

Even on the violence front, it's overstated. In 2020, 45 cops were shot to death on purpose, 5 shot on accident, 13 were purposefully struck by a car, and 1 died from an unspecified assault. That's 59[0] purposeful killings out of an estimated 665,280[1] police officers in America, or 8.8 per 100,000. Meanwhile COVID19 killed 221 cops, and various vehicular accidents killed 39 cops. Obviously 8.8 per 100,000 is not great, but it's far from how being a cop is portrayed in popular media.

For a grim comparison, consider the risk of being murdered as a cop to the risk of being murdered as a pregnant woman. A 2005 study connecting female homicide deaths with pregnancy information came to the conclusion that the homicide rate among pregnant women might be as high as 10.5 per 100,000, or about 25% higher than the murder rate for cops.

Given that the estimated domestic violence rate for police officers is 40%[3] and the known link between domestic abuse and homicide[4], a pregnant woman married to or living with a cop might have a higher chance of being murdered by her cop partner than her cop partner has of being murdered on the job.

It does strike me as an awful job though. No disagreement there.

0 - https://www.odmp.org/search/year/2020

1 - https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes333051.htm

2 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449445

3 - https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-...

4 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/investigations/...

Thanks for engaging. I agree that there are other jobs that are more dangerous in terms of on the job deaths.

I think that an interesting distinction is that when it comes to police, the danger comes from other humans. That is to say, their threat model is people intentionally trying to kill them, opposed to workplace accidents. In this way, the police are more similar to military forces, who also have a siege mentality.

While you point out that there were 59 police killings, this number may not capture the full picture. It is worth considering that there were 1000 fatal shootings by police and an estimated 2000 non-fatal shootings.[1] That is 450 per 100,000 per year. This is just the tip of the iceberg as it doesn't include shootings where nobody was injured, or violent interactions without guns. Violent nonfatal injuries and illnesses resulting in days away from work among police officers occurred at a rate of 121.7 per 100,000 FTE workers in 2018; the rate for all occupations was 7.3. [2] In one study 10% of police surveyed reported that they had killed or seriously injured someone during the first three years of their career. The average officer experiences 188 traumatic events in their career and have PTSD and depression rates 5X the general population, and the highest suicide rate of any profession.[3]

For me, this paints a picture of a job where violence and hostility is the norm. I point this out not to excuse the bad behavior of some police, but increase our understanding of it.

>Given that the estimated domestic violence rate for police officers is 40%[3] and the known link between domestic abuse and homicide[4], a pregnant woman married to or living with a cop might have a higher chance of being murdered than her cop spouse.

This would not surprise me at all, given what I stated above. The really interesting question is WHY and what conclusions can we draw from this?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02601-9

https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/police-2018.htm#:~:text=P.... https://www.addictioncenter.com/news/2019/09/police-at-highe...

https://rudermanfoundation.org/white_papers/police-officers-...

> While you point out that there were 59 police killings, this number may not capture the full picture. It is worth considering that there were 1000 fatal shootings by police and an estimated 2000 non-fatal shootings.[1] That is 450 per 100,000 per year.

You raise a good point; being involved in a shooting even as the shooter is a traumatic event. It's not terribly uncommon for people to have PTSD after shooting someone, even if they didn't catch any return fire. There are also the cases where cops were seriously injured (as compared to "injured" in order to increase criminal penalties) but did not die or retire due to the injuries. Getting shot in body armor is still a pretty injuring event, especially soft body armor.

The important, and difficult question to answer is how many of these violent interactions were triggered by police, and how many were likely to happen no matter what the cops did? American police kill a lot more people than our OECD peers do; we're between Angola and Iran on the international stats, about 3.5x more than our nearest OECD peer (Canada). It's not unreasonable to assume that non-lethal violent encounters scale similarly[0]. Certainly some part of that is American culture in general, but it would be unreasonably deferential to cops to presume that they have no part in the problem, especially with so many high-profile anecdotes of cops escalating or using force unnecessarily. If using violence is traumatic, then doesn't a lot of the blame for that trauma fall onto the same people who decide to use it unnecessarily, and onto the same people that have willingly adopted a warrior mentality[1]?

0 - Perhaps higher still. American emergency rooms are very good at treating gunshot wounds; part of the reason why gun fatalities are down since the 1980s despite still high shooting rates. It's not unreasonable to assume that the ratio of shooting to fatality by American cops is higher than say, Canada, implying that it's even worse than the death statistics imply.

1 - https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/warrior-police-train...

American police kill a lot more people than our OECD peers do, but again, it is worth noting that overall gun violence is higher is the US. US police killings are 3.5X that of Canada, and the US gun homicides are 6.5X that of Canada.

>it would be unreasonably deferential to cops to presume that they have no part in the problem, especially with so many high-profile anecdotes of cops escalating or using force unnecessarily.

I think that the cops are one cog in a poorly designed machine, and in my opinion, not the most impactful one. Changing police policy is necessary, but not sufficient change to reduce police violence. We live in a relative police state, and it is convenient to place the bulk of the blame the replaceable enforcers opposed the system of laws and policies which perpetuate violent crime and violent police. Only changes to the latter will result in lasting change. To tie in the Canada comparison, The US also has 6.5X the incarceration rate.

>it would be unreasonably deferential to cops to presume that they have no part in the problem, especially with so many high-profile anecdotes of cops escalating or using force unnecessarily. If using violence is traumatic, then doesn't a lot of the blame for that trauma fall onto the same people who decide to use it unnecessarily, and onto the same people that have willingly adopted a warrior mentality

There are some cases where there is obvious misbehavior by officers and they should be held accountable for their actions, although I think this effect is overstated by focusing on the most outrageous examples. Most often, my understanding is that police shooters are acting in accordance with police training and policy to use lethal force when they perceive lethal threat from others. In these cases, think much of the "blame" falls on the policing institutions. The question becomes if a different policy exists would result in fewer unnecessary civilian deaths, with minimal increase in officer deaths. Perhaps there are win-win solutions where both death rates are reduced by avoiding dangerous scenarios entirely (e.g. avoiding unnecessary no-knock raids).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...

To a pizza driver, a more dangerous job than being a cop, the biggest threat is another human as well. That doesn’t mean they can go around shooting undeserving people. You’re rationalizing criminal behavior.

I’m not rationalizing or endorsing anything. I’m describing the nature of the problem. We will never see any change unless people understand the problem.

People understand the problem, all the recommended fixes are being stymied, lobbied away or plain ignored.

What solutions have >50% public support and are being ignored?

Always on body cams, ending civil forfeiture, replacement of police unions with individual liability insurance, third party review boards are just a few.

First off, I think most of that is a fine start.

I think the strongest are review boards and body cams, and the weakest are busting the unions and individual insurance. For the latter, I haven't seen any data showing public support over 50%.

I think the most productive changes would be legalization and demilitarization of the the war on drugs. A centralized database of police violence and complaints would be the next step, and this could go hand in hand with third party review boards.

Even if your proposals and mine were adopted entirely, I don't think they would resolve the fundamental problems with police violence and bring behavior in line with expectations.

The police unions have too strong of an influence on government and are rife with corruption, nepotism, favoritism and worse. Breaking up the union and individual insurance are the number one priorities to break the back of the excessive authority the cops currently wield. Everything else is a nice to have.

The US problems with this are like Apples laced with VX.

The issue isn't that police work is hard but that from the start US police officers take an us vs. them approach to everything they do and in many cases can get away with just about anything by default.

Great! Lets talk about that then. Why do you think they take an us vs them approach and how can society address it?

It’s not even in the top 20 most dangerous jobs in the nation. It’s simple, they are an armed gang with authority and are using their teamism to keep their power. It needs to be wrenched away and cops should be what they are everywhere else — servants for the public good.

> If nothing else any reform must have the blessing of police officers.

This statement right here is a pretty roundabout way to speak the truth that "reform" is unlikely to ever change anything. Even these moderate proposals that are just pointless theatre are opposed tooth and nail by police officers and unions everywhere.

Hell, in the midst of everything going on last year, many police unions insisted their budgets needed to be increased at the expense of all other city departments facing cuts.

"end qualified immunity, fix incentives, destroy police unions" - end tenure, fix incentives and destroy teachers unions teachers' union in America have destroyed many more lives by failing to fire bad teachers & doing misjustice to students.

The interesting thing is that they only stopped him for a few minutes and, once they realized he wasn't suspicious, declined to do anything and let him go, then neglected to return his phone until it was demanded back. Despite the headline, they didn't go back and invent charges for the guy, they determined he was innocent and dropped it, though they neglected his phone.

One problem with making a federal case out of this is that it tends to incentivize the cops to make their own federal case out of this in defense, i.e. to make stuff up so they have a defense if they made a mistake.

You are making light of some serious constitutional violations.

The ruling says quite clearly that they illegally arrested him. They also illegally searched him if you watch the video, but for some reason neither court addresses it. Perhaps that wasn't brought up in the original complaint. Also, they didn't neglect to give him his phone back like it was an innocent mistake. They illegally seized it to search for evidence of a crime.

Making a federal case out of this is the only avenue for justice for him.

The "arrest" was that they said he was arrested when they detained him for 12 minutes or so. That might count as one technically for legal purposes, but it's hardly what most people would consider an "arrest."

The article makes much of the idea that they "make a suspicious activity case" but the fact is that they didn't fabricate anything, they dropped the matter when they saw it was unrelated to any criminal activity.

This may not be constitutional, but a norm of not cooperating with law enforcement is a terrible one that leads only to further bad outcomes. If this guy had simply given his real name and said what he was doing--despite not being required to--he likely would've kept his phone and not wasted so much time.

Maybe things have changed since I was last in Des Monies, but I don't see this case going anywhere with a jury.

It is unfortunate that you don't appreciate how his actions further establish and protect our rights. I suggest you read the case of Turner v Driver to see how standing up for your rights can establish important legal precedent that benefits everyone.

This case is, in my opinion, highly unlikely to go in front of a jury. I have seen many cases similar to this end in five to six figure settlements.

For example, this interaction with similar circumstances resulted in a $41k settlement and a departmental policy change: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV6nsq6IIHg. This interaction was only a short detainment, yet it resulted in a $75k settlement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02J2EVyxfbU.

I could easily provide another dozen or so examples.

The important constitutional violation here was that the cop misspoke and said he was arrested when the actual encounter was effectively detainment, which may result in a few tens of thousands to be paid on lawyers. Yes, I'm sure you can find many examples like that.

I don't see the "benefit" here. I've been pretext stopped in the middle of the night while driving a beaten-up car in an out of the way area. The cop asked me to get out and walk around to see something and I did so, etc. We both went our separate ways a few minutes later, because nothing was wrong.

If this guy had simply said "my name is X, I'm videoing these illegally parked cars for my blog at Y" this would've ended without incident. Instead, it will become an incentive to cops to either "find something" (which, despite the headline and a quote in the article that makes it seems otherwise, I would point out that the article says the cops did not do here) or make sure they never bother to investigate anything happening in plain sight, even if that leads to bad outcomes for people.

But those are invisible, because you can't see that but-for event and someone acting like a Karen with the cops will get tens of thousands of dollars for it.

Being a police officer is an unskilled position. Something that can be filled in an afternoon. Break up the union, force them to quit en masse. The good ones can be rehired on individual liability insurance like nurses or doctors.