There’s a simple way to effect change at the legislative level: force cities to pay for police misconduct settlements out of existing police budgets and pension funds, rather than apportioning taxpayer money to do so.
Currently they avoid criminal liability in a number of ways:
- They are never arrested - other police simply fail to arrest them
- They are never indicted - DAs across the country are extremely reluctant to press charges
- Charges are dropped by grand juries - in some states, like NY, all felonies must be confirmed or dropped by a grand jury unless the defendant waived their right. A DA has full power to effectively force a drop by portraying a weak case to a completely secret grand jury, publicly washing their hands of the decision while still getting the result they want.
Then, when a DA is elected who actually says they will hold police accountable they often simply will not (as in Jackie Lacey, Los Angeles’ previous DA) or if they make basically any strides toward actually investigating police they will be stonewalled and face a recall with support from the local PD and/or SD (as in LA’s current DA, George Gascon).
Police are given unbelievable rights: we will see over and over again that officers with complaints will never actually see them investigated and even sustained complaints have barely any consequences. Additionally if they are implicated in a serious crime on the job they often have union rules barring them from being interviewed / interrogated until after a cooling period (this blew my mind).
Compare this to basically any other profession, even so much as yelling at a client or failing to help customer who asked would be a final strike almost anywhere else.
The biggest problem may be that the US justice system is so unbelievably cruel that police refuse to ever put one of their own through that type of hell.
Under qualified immunity that most police officers have this is not going to happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity#Police_brut...
In my opinion it’s vital that when an agent of the state (police officer) deprives someone of civil rights that the maximum possible restitution is not limited by their net worth or professional insurance carrier’s cap (which to my knowledge is not a thing for cops, but it is often suggested here).
What you've prescribed would have prevented this from becoming a problem in the first place, but it can't do much anymore, because the prevalent police culture in the US will punish the public for punishing the police. And we've allowed this to happen to us.
At this point, nobody knows what can actually fix the problem, but I'm increasingly inclined to think that firing them all, potentially imprisoning large quantities of them, and starting over from scratch, would be the only thing that works. Which is mind-blowing...it is practically an admission that even though we're a wealthy country, in terms of rule of law, we're not much different from a 3rd world failed state like Venezuela or Myanmar.
In 2016, Venezuela's murder rate was well over 50 per 100,000, and the USA's murder rate was slightly over 5 per 100,000 [1]. This gap is pretty consistent.
[1] https://dataunodc.un.org/crime/intentional-homicide-victims
That is a vast overgeneralization. Check out how many extreme repeat offenders are immediately released without punishment:
https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=496
Seattle Police officers are literally reduced to _bribing criminals with candy_: https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=865
Collecting evidence is the primary responsibility of the police, and prosecutors declining to prosecute a criminal for lack of evidence is a failing of the police, not the prosecutor. Unfortunately, given the abundance of evidence against criminal cops, they still don't prosecute them, so maybe the culpability is shared to some degree.
https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-officers-used-excess...
That is the right of the voters. The police (and certainly not the police unions!) do not have any power in a republican society to override that.
It is certainly true that the way that Seattle police (and SF police, and NYC police, and NJ police, and...) want to maintain public order is different from the way that the voters want to maintain public order. But that is the very problem at hand - as the comment above says: 'current police culture basically says "Let me do my job however I want, without consequences, or I just won't do my job"'.
Police overpolicing because they don't want to do their jobs as they're told is not very different from police underpolicing because they don't want to do their jobs as they're told.
If the people want to vote for such politicians who want to vote for such judges who make such rulings, that's the people's right, is it not?
Reagan did this with the air traffic controllers in 1981 (which I'm not saying I agree with in terms of policy, but it was both legal and effective). They went on strike, and Reagan said, look, federal workers aren't allowed to strike, and if you don't report to work we'll fire you. ATC took a hit, flights were slowed, but they found other people who were willing to the job and demanded less than PATCO demanded.
Which is ultimately how unions should work. They aggregate the bargaining power of the employees into a unified voice, nothing more or less. If that combined bargaining power is low - e.g., because the employer is willing to risk the work not getting done, or because potential workers don't actually want to combine their individual bargaining power with the union - then the union has no additional magical power. Unions just make it logistically easier/possible to negotiate things that the workers could in theory but not in practice negotiate on their own. They don't have any power to negotiate benefits for workers that the market couldn't theoretically support.
If a (say) truckers' union says "We want a 20% pay increase and more time off," and other potential truckers agree with those demands and the logistics companies can manage it without going out of business, then they'll get it. If the trucker's union says "We want a 10x pay increase and we want you to take all legal accountability for anyone we hit with our trucks," they would rightly lose that negotiation - any company that said "yes" would not last very long, and the company would do just fine saying "no."
If a society has no public safety resources without the cooperation of a single union, such that it's less of a "negotiation" than an acquiescence to whatever that union demands, then that is the thing that's caused us to be a failed state. So I agree. Fire them all, at the very least ban them from being rehired, and start over.
And it's mostly amazing to me that Reagan felt comfortable firing 11,345 air traffic controllers, who are clearly operationally needed to put planes in the air and get them down again (unlike police, whose role in public safety is much more indirect), at a time when he had himself acknowledged that ATC was understaffed... and meanwhile, there is basically only one story of a US local government (Camden, NJ) that felt comfortable firing its police department and starting over.
Or maybe put another way - I don't really understand why the PATCO decertification prompted the weakening of private sector unions in the decades since then, but police unions, who like PATCO are public sector unions in safety-critical roles, only seem to have gotten stronger.
- Eliminate pay to union members by the government while performing union duties; they actually require the state pay members salaries and bonus money will performing many union duties, go look it up.
- Eliminate law enforcement officer bill of rights" (LEOBOR) style legislation
- Require all misconduct records any public employee to be published and easily and freely queried
- All investigations must not reveal who is filing the complaint nor witnesses to the officer or anyone not in the investigation, releasing this information should be a Federal offense
- Cities, State, and localities, must be liable even if the officer is off duty and the misconduct includes use of their issued firearm or other accouterments
- Qualified Immunity language must be modified to remove clearly established clause (QI started as a carve out from Civil Rights law but clearly has expanded)
- With regards to QI and civil suits. At no time if a government agency or member pays out can they include the qualifier boilerplate language that explicitly denies that the municipality or the officer accept any blame for the incident."
- three strikes and your out requirement with no future employment by any similar agency in the country. three strikes rule not to be used with any loss of life misconduct. That is one and out if not resulting in criminal prosecution
You are not going to get anywhere while public sector unions exist for public employees. Even if you somehow managed to rid yourself of the police union the others would simply be used to pressure politicians.
I am all for banning public sector unions from expending any money on political activity under the idea that they are spending public money to do so.
Police are trained to see citizens as enemies and to see themselves as "warriors". The specific tactics they utilize are tactics they have been trained to use and/or are widely used in practice so new recruits are immersed in a culture where these things are the norm.
Additionally the reason cops get away with things in all the ways you list above are because of unions and lack of independent accountability.
Persecuting individual officers for doing the job they were trained to do actual inflames the problem because they already see themselves as the victims (that is crazy, but it is 100% true they feel this way).
Of course individuals play a large role but focusing on charging officers isn't likely to be an effective strategy for changing things.
A much better strategy would be to take officers themselves out of the blame/change equation. They get the most political sympathy so going at them increases divisions and decreases likelihood of any compromise. What's needed to to change police training, yes add independent accountability, and change the charter of police forces by breaking away social services to take over most calls that don't involve felony crimes or immediate life dangers.
Which obviously doesn't have an easy solution.
Maybe mandating more diverse forces, that officers actually live in their city, and training/culture accountability from the top down (that unions can't block).
You may be surprised to find out there exist countries other than USA that have far worse corruption and abuse at all levels of society that have nothing to do with race.
Any encounter with the police is not only hostile, but it carries the ultimate consequence for both sides. There is no way to ratchet down that hostility when the police are justifiably in fear of their lives. They really could be victims and it's no surprise that they act accordingly.
Police budgets are taxpayer money. Even if cutting a budget meant laying off officers, there's reason to think that would create problems - the needs of the community wouldn't be reduced, so you'd be having fewer officers doing more, which is both costly (in overtime) and increases fatigue and the likelihood of problematic behavior. And taking it out of the pension fund or otherwise spreading the harm to other officers is both easily gamed and incentivizes cover-ups.
It matters who we elect. A significant faction of the U.S. has been convinced that government is simply bad or ineffective, and they vote for people who deliberately prove that. But if we want to see change we need to elect people who are willing to go to the mat for the things we support.
No, we don't. We need a system at rewards good behaviour and punishes bad. The market solution is really the best. A solution bound on a single leader vanishes as soon as the leader goes.
> It matters who we elect.
Things were bad during Obama's reign, as they were under Trump. Biden won't bring change, unless systemic change will be implemented.
I think your knee-jerk focus on who the president is (and denying the possibility of change) demonstrates what I was saying: the rhetoric has convinced people that it doesn't matter and it's all some national team sport. That's just not true.
Your (knee-jerk?) characterization is the opposite of what that comment is saying.
Your response: I think your knee-jerk focus on who the president is (and denying the possibility of change) demonstrates what I was saying: the rhetoric has convinced people that it doesn't matter and it's all some national team sport.
It is entirely useless for you to quote each of us without clarifying what you've misinterpreted.
"denying the possibility of change" is the opposite of what they did.
If the punishment is monetary, that's for poor people to worry about.
I disagree with this but I always find it ironic when I hear the advice to use market forces from a group of people that are highly critical of the capitalist principles of market forces.
At least you're consistent, I appreciate that.
So the incentive here is:
I better keep tabs on my partner or else I'll lose some of my pension
Or
I better cover for my partner or else I'll lose some of my pension.
I don't think this is the solution you think it is.
When police officers commit blatant misconduct the officers involved should at least be fired and criminal charges should be applied to them if applicable. This is how it works for every other job, not sure why police should be different.
Increase police training requirements. They're woefully undertrained in the US (at least relative to Germany and several other Western European nations).
National LEO registration or something similar to stop the movement of bad officers from one department to another.
6. Body cams/Film the police
8. End for profit policing
10. Fair police union contracts
Any way of spreading the liability to the department or city bypasses individual accountability and will insulate bad actors.
What you are describing is another complex layer which would be liable to be perverted to serve establish interests because that is inevitably what happens with complex systems with powerful entrenched interests.
5 years after implementation we would be talking about why it had fixed none of our problems and how we needed to fix it which would be politically as hard as implementing it in the first place with the primary difference between now and then being paying a big bundle of money to the insurance industry. Instead of political pressure to just pay off the people the officers shot there would be political pressure to just subsidize the problem officers insurance payments and then STILL pay out for most of the egregious stuff that isn't covered. Most of the time a "market solution" makes as much sense as the people who faced with a technical problem yell "BLOCKCHAIN!"
Personal liability is still a complex system subject to the same forces but the less it is polluted with cop specific process the more likely that it will actually work because its harder to pervert the entire process of civil litigation than it is to pervert an incestuous insurance market that services the law enforcement industry.
Err that is taxpayer money?
Police budgets aren't the police's personal money. They don't care if you take it away it's no problem for them as long as they're still being paid.
Excessive benefits aside, the culture of the police is rotten and policing in the US needs to be rethought from the ground up.
You make it sound like you're paid more if you get a pension!
If the company pays into a pension for or gives you the money which you then pay into a pension... guess what it's the same money just a slightly different setup.
I've got a pension I pay into myself, so it doesn't need to be your employer which does it.
No, it wouldn't. It's not even, right now, the worst it's been in the US. (It may be the most controversial it's ever been, but that's because standards have evolved faster than it has, not because it has gotten worse.)
It may be (but probably
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
We have known issues with police violence and racism. We have insane police budgets and a militarized police force. We have a highly ineffective "war on drugs" that has destroyed wide swaths of our country.
I don't think it's controversial to say that the US has the worst police force and prison industry on earth.
Perhaps; we certainly have the largest reported imprisoned population by those standards, but we also know that there are several countries whose numbers really, really can't be trusted. But, I didn't take issue with “the US police and prison industrial complex is the worst in the world” [0], I took issue with “it would be impossible to make it worse”, since it manifestly has been worse in terms of both abuses within the system and unjust motivations for getting people into the system.
[0] which is not to say I agree, even setting aside potential issues with reporting of incarceration rates, because I'm not sure you've weighted situations where the “police” (and often the prison system, military, and other institutions) are heavily in league with organized crime, such as drug cartels, and directly involved in carrying out and covering up large scale murder on their behalf properly against incarceration rates.
> Another person's misconduct resulted in you getting your pension drained?
This happens quite frequently in companies with public stock and/or profit based bonus contributions. If someone fucks up and the product kills someone, it impacts everyone’s retirement that’s based on company performance.
Wait there are companies with their pension funds entirely invested in... their own stock?
That would create an department incentive to force out risky officers, as they know their jobs are on the line.
If the voters are happy with 16 less police officers then why not fire them right now?
If the job is getting done and you have 500 employees and the budget for 500 employees, there is literally no incentive to even determine if it could be done with 400. Leaders don’t get a portion of money saved or anything like that. They just lose the budget that was for the extra employees and get a bunch of pissed off employees that now have to work harder for the same pay.
They get given money by government, representing the voters.
If the voters think they're happy with less police of course they can drop 100 employees worth of budget. The police can't stop that.
You live in a fantasy if you think voters make rational decisions about policing based on police-load.
I think the best first step would be to increase transparency and accountability. For example, large number of cities did not even respond to the FIOA request. Also, I read that many Police misconducts are not even tracked at federal level and civil forfeiture has little oversight.
Lol
Or reallocate money previously allocated to libraries, social workers, community colleges, public transportation, etc. etc.