Departures of Police Officers Accelerated During a Year of Protests
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
- Recently featured in ABC's 20/20 show for a "Gone Girl" case were the Vallejo Police Department accused a couple of faking a kidnapping. The woman was sexually assaulted during her kidnapping, and the VPD staged a news conference claiming the whole thing was made up. The city paid the couple millions for the VPD's mistakes. https://abc7news.com/gone-girl-kidnapping-vallejo-police-apo...
- A police officer shot and killed a person riding his bicycle without a helmet, when the person did not stop. The city paid the person's family millions in settlement. https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/5-7-million-settlement-r...
- Officers practice of celebrating kills with ceremony and badge-tip bending was recently uncovered. https://openvallejo.org/2020/07/28/vallejo-police-bend-badge...
- Recently fired the Police Union president for destroying police evidence and threatening a journalist. The officer was hired by his father, who was the Police Chief a few years ago. https://abc7news.com/vallejo-police-association-union-presid...
- I think one thing a lot of people don't know if how much their local police officer make. Here are the stats for the city of Vallejo, the person costing the city $600K/year in wage and benefit was recently fired. https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=vallejo...
But I also don't put it past the guys who treat the public like crap to also turn around and fudge a timecard.
I'd suspect this is part and parcel of that and less driven by politics or protests. It's been a tough year and a half for everyone and fatigue is setting in. People are reassessing their priorities in life.
It could also be that the better ones are resigning...unfortunately.
Unfortunately complicated. Public employees are still what make an enormous amount of this country work and they are consistently abused and used as tools in ways that hurt their ability to do so.
I really don't think this is going to end well.
Police are a necessary part of modern civilization. Full stop. If they have no repercussions for bad actions, then implement them.
It really isn't that complicated.
Sure, but how many? How much is the right amount. I hear the same said about our military, but it's degrees. Should we double the amount of money we spend on police? Triple? What's enough? Do we have too much now? There are lots of indications to me that it's turned into a make-work program.
>Police are a necessary part of modern civilization. Full stop. If they have no repercussions for bad actions, then implement them.
The unions are too powerful, the profession is too corrupt. Police "self regulate," and insiders who try to bring light to corruption typically get punished. It's too hard for the political process. All the while, the citizenry continues to get robbed, beaten and killed. Honestly the best thing to happen to the citizenry is phone cameras.
>It really isn't that complicated.
Maybe you should give it some more thought.
Less per capita than pretty much any wealthy city or suburb has.
More per capita than Detroit.
We all see the kind of trouble people with no real pressing crap to do can cause with an HOA at their disposal. So I figure we should make sure the people with a badge and a gun are substantially more busy than that.
Nobody wants to work in an overworked department but I don't see a way to keep police from harassing people unnecessarily other than making sure the department is small enough there's enough "real crime" to go around.
Right now, this doesn't happen, so you mostly get the corrupt tribalism stuff. But demonizing the police profession will guarantee that thousands of reasonable, well-meaning people will never become police officers.
> Maybe you should give it some more thought.
I have given it plenty of thought. I, along with pretty much anyone that actually has lived in crime-ridden areas, thinks that the idea of abolishing the police and demonizing officers is completely absurd.
The worst part is that the people with the loudest voices won't face any of the repercussions. Instead, it'll be the poor, because they aren't rich and social media savvy. Actual working class people are too busy working to be tweeting all day long about politics.
It depends on the jurisdiction. When I was in college, being a cop required a college degree. A couple of my colleagues became police. I don't know if that's still standard in major cities.
>But demonizing the police profession will guarantee that thousands of reasonable, well-meaning people will never become police officers.
Maybe. I think abusing citizens guarantees that the police will be demonized. We're currently in a downward spiral and it's only fixable by changing the status of the police.
>thinks that the idea of abolishing the police and demonizing officers is completely absurd.
That's a red herring. I never said that and in fact I explicitly said it's a matter of degree. That's not a good faith argument. You're arguing with an imaginary person in your head, not me.
And where is the bottom of the spiral? When police are completely hated by everyone, everywhere? You'll only get the absolute worst people to be police officers, as I said in my initial comment.
> You're arguing with an imaginary person in your head, not me.
I'm arguing against the idea that demonizing the police is an effective tactic.
I don't think it's a tactic, I think it's a reaction. If some gang beats your ass or robs you, you aren't gonna go around saying how deep down they're really good at heart, or they were just having a bad day.
Dude, people are having their lives ruined on a whim. It's not just the big stuff you see on the news, it's constant and in almost every department.
Source? Any statistics? You're telling me that every one of the 800,000 police officers in the United States is a gang member that beats citizens on a regular basis?
Another bad faith argument. I said it happens in almost every department.
Here's some videos captured all over the country of police willfully and knowingly violating people's civil rights.
That's the problem. I don't think demonizing the other 99.9% of officers is the solution.
Various forces have little internal secret rituals in which they all collude in murder. Above we have https://openvallejo.org/2020/07/28/vallejo-police-bend-badge... ; there's another example from NYPD: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23525224
Doctors very rarely turn out politically to defend the malpractice of other doctors.
It's still unclear to me how a small town officer, hundreds of miles away, is guilty for the crimes of people he has nothing to do with.
None of them would have faced charges without months of national protests! That's why there's a problem! And I don't just mean the others that were there, all eight hundred Minneapolis PD officers are to some extent complicit.
Protests are great. Let's protest more and get changes made. But protesting against police injustice doesn't mean demonizing the entire profession.
Meanwhile a reality check for you: https://twitter.com/ProfessorPenis/status/140430555390457036...
"the cops showed up with bear mace and rubber bullets for the protesters. THE PEOPLE administered aid. THE PEOPLE apprehended the driver. the cops did nothing but antagonize the crowd of people that were almost murdered."
Are you sure? Lots of causes for crime (i.e. poverty) can't be solved by arresting or shooting people. I am convinced that part of the reason police reform is so difficult in the United States is that most people have never questioned neither the history of American policing (which started as slave patrols in many states), nor the necessity for heavily-armed police at all.
> If they have no repercussions for bad actions, then implement them.
This is not so easy, when both of the parties with political control in the U.S. receive donations from the prison industry...
EDIT: Lastly, in reference to your original point, the argument that police officers are being simply "demonized" is missing the bigger picture. Police aren't individual actors - they protect each other, even when they have crossed a line. And it's all by choice.
If you actually look at the responses from people who live in high-crime areas, the data is clear. Virtually no one wants less police. Most want more.
I trust that more than activists with explicit political messages written in their manifestos.
> Police aren't individual actors - they protect each other, even when they have crossed a line. And it's all by choice.
This is largely due to systemic problems with unions, etc. Still unclear to me how calling a beat cop obscene words or having an ACAB attitude is going to solve that issue.
Anyways:
The fact that most modern countries have police is not evidence that police departments are necessary.
In addition, the article is about the American police, which are notorious for their history of racial profiling, cover-ups, and numbers of civilian shooting deaths every year. Does most modern countries having police mean this is justified behavior?
If you could, please provide a link to a survey or study indicating that people who live in "high-crime" areas want more police.
And even if they did, that doesn't change the reason for the widespread backlash against police in the United States. It's not simply people "demonizing" a profession (which again, people choose to work in).
https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racia...
The data indicates that people want more accountability and reform. Which is exactly what I am arguing for.
> It's not simply people "demonizing" a profession (which again, people choose to work in).
Who cares if they chose to work in it? It's a necessary part of a functioning state. You act as if someone choosing to be a police officer means they deserve to be demonized. Please, let me know how that attitude is going to lead to any solutions.
As for the second part: someone simply choosing to be a police officer doesn't mean they should be demonized. Complying with the "blue wall of silence" by refusing to take an active stand against police misconduct, however, I believe warrants public backlash. The thing is, far too many officers are content to not say anything. And that is a large part of why they have seen more backlash recently.
Agreed there.
If not, why does a bad cop from some backwater town speak for all college educated cops from an arbitrary suburbia?
The first problem is that the USA has over 10,000 police departments. This means that one cop from Kentucky has absolutely no connection to one from Boston.
And yet, the current culture blames the Boston cop for the actions that the Kentucky cop does.
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> https://www.stevelocke.com/blog/i-fit-the-description
Uhhhhh. That's... not really a problem on my scale. I mean, yeah, that's a hassle but...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOZwRBXfFmU
This here is small town cop harassing an African American. And we only know about it because he's an Army Officer (a low ranking one, but still, the Army sticks up for their members).
Who knows how many African Americans did those small town cops harassed before they messed with the wrong man?
Don't get me wrong here: any kind of stop is a big hassle. But... my bar for "serious police misbehavior" is set at a certain level based on what's going on in my area. The blogpost, while a hassle, is not anywhere close to some of the stories I'm hearing just in the past couple of months.
> https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/report-problems-...
Sounds to me that someone was double-checking the results and caught the problem. We don't have those assurances in other locations.
In a city, you have a citizen's board, good defense lawyers, and other "defenses" who can stand up to injustice from the police departments. That's WHY a city-cop can get their ass busted if they make these kinds of mistakes. I mean yeah, it sucks that they're still finding injustices, but at least people are tasked with finding abuse.
In a small town cop where the Sheriff is elected every 4 years by a population who just doesn't give a care, no one has any recourse or defense system against the Sheriff or their deputies. None at all. Its "Wild West" mode, where Sheriff can do whatever the heck they want, and the citizens are ignorant of the injustices their Sheriff does (so they keep electing them over and over again).
I have more faith in Police Commissioner systems, or straight up adversarial systems like NYPC (which has an adversarial Citizen's Review Board to represent citizens: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/ccrb/index.page).
That's not to say it doesn't happen. It does happen. But for every example of accountability, there seems to be several examples of police officers, out of control, power-tripping, many time in the presence of other police officers, without any of them standing up to them.
When we cannot trust the police to do what's right, when we cannot trust the police to stand up to their own, when we can have no idea whether a police officer is going to do their job, or power-trip to ruin your life, this is exactly what happens.
I have very little interaction with the police personally, and I hope that continues. Every interaction is a roll of the dice, and that shouldn't be the case in a civilized nation.
That's my point. The sheriff of (insert small town) has no accountability aside from an election that's all but guaranteed to go his way again.
Other municipalities have better accountability systems. In particular, you need to have the accountability to come from outside the police department.
Citizen review and oversight it definitely important and necessary. The police themselves are also radically failing their responsibilities in this regard.
Citizen review and oversight it definitely important and necessary. The police themselves are also radically failing their responsibilities in this regard.
Okay. Lets say hypothetically, a fellow police officer Alice breaks the law in a municipality that doesn't have a citizen's review board.
Bob witnesses this lawbreaking behavior. Who does Bob go to?
That's why a citizen review board is necessary. To empower Bob to do the right thing in the hypothetical. You can't expect someone to work within the hierarchy (if Alice's boss is on Alice's side, then "rocking the boat" within the hierarchy would just result in Bob's termination).
Its like expecting a pitcher's teammate to report on ball doctoring (making a baseball stickier to result in a more chaotic, harder to hit baseball). Nah man, you need a 3rd party, someone outside the team if you want to manage to catch that. And anyone inside the team who wishes to report on the behavior needs assurances that their identity is kept safe and anonymous.
This premise is false.
The blue wall is real. If the Boston cops would stand up and say they don't support that Kentucky cop, it would make every other cop in America pause. They absolutely have power over each other with their words and actions. They could wholeheartedly support civil and criminal actions against police officers who do wrong.
But they don't; they protect each other, one and all. And that empowers every cop everywhere to act extrajudicially.
Their silence is the connection.
It was a cop who told me about citizen review boards, my rights as a citizen, and how to legally fight cops.
In particular: it was an African American cop who was very explicit about the abuses of cops in various municipalities. It was my local school department that worked with the police department to host this "community cop" discussion with school-children. Etc. etc.
Its not quite as black-and-white as you're making it sound. If a cop does X-abuse, then you go to Y. You have a right to know their badge number (at least in my municipality. And in practice, a cop has the badge and the force and can probably refuse. Still, if they fail to present their badge and there's a recording of it, you might be able to get them. Don't talk to cops unnecessarily, talk to them with a lawyer, etc. etc.)
These discussion points are commonly pointed out by cops who are trying to do the right thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity
It also doesn't help that in many places, the judges, prosecutors and police all frequent and work in the same buildings.
See if you get better results than the radical left antifa lamestream fake news media and report back:
Clearly there are some issues with particular police departments. Saying "watch this video and do it yourself" is not a viable way of proving this is a universal phenomenon.
This is basic logic.
This is a very safe way to try to change your mind. Actually interact with the police. If you are right, then 99.9% of your interactions with the police should be positive. That means if you go into one thousand police stations and ask about the procedure to file a complaint, you should only get a negative interaction at one of them. You are confident that this is the case.
So it should be really really easy for you to go to a police station, ask about how to file a complaint against the cops, and reassure yourself and everyone else that cops are for the most part good and helpful.
I have actual experience. You have an ideological position with zero basis in reality. Sorry. The stats simply don't add up and emotional appeals aren't evidence.
I’m really not sure what you are trying to get across.
I say if you let go of this rock, it will fall to the ground. Let's test gravity.
You say it won't. Not all rocks. And true, maybe not all rocks. Maybe a great gust of wind will blow at the same time. Maybe there's an unseen glass table between your hand and the ground. Maybe it's only 0.1% of bad apple rocks that fall to the ground.
So I just wanted to make sure, since you're sure that only 0.1% of rocks fall to the ground when you let go of them, well, let's try it. When you let go of a rock, it has a really good chance of not falling, right? We don't want to demonise all falling rocks. If you're sure of your thesis, you should be very confident letting go of the rock and demonstrating how it doesn't fall.
Sorry, but you clearly have a severely blinding ideological bias.
And yet, you refuse to test your near certainty.
My gut feeling tells me that over the last year policing changed a hell of a lot more in bigger and richer cities with larger departments that could justify the cost of doing a lot of proactive policing than it did in smaller or poorer cities that only really had the headcount to respond to whatever gets called in. The former group is being told "don't harass that drug dealer unless he's causing problems, we don't wanna risk having a Floyd on our hands" whereas the latter group is still going wherever dispatch sends them and maybe they're getting a little extra lecture on not resorting to violence but on the day to day it doesn't really change the nature of their jobs.
By drug dealer I assume you mean person of color. If they were harassing the drug dealer for dealing drugs there should be plenty of evidence to back the case. If they are using a hunch to harass a civilian and that hunch is the color of their skin, or dress with no other mitigating factors then they should be bounced right out of the force.
Also, by design, police are a reactionary force in the US. A crime is committed, the police react. Pre-crime doesn't exist except in sci-fi.
Generally true, but somewhat less true when one considers policies like stop/frisk.
You can look at cities like Baltimore where the crime rate jumped after the Freddy Grey protests due to the police cutting back on the amount of pro-active policing they're doing.
Why would a drug dealer be a "person of color" ? I did not see that in the original comment and I don't understand why you would make that assumption.
My experience (based on news reports - I've never purchased drugs illegally) about drug dealers is that they are a cross section of society, meaning people of every skin color and ethnicity. The color of their skin is not the deciding factor based on the reports I've seen.
Why is the color of someone's skin so important to you?
[edit: grammar]
Because NYPD literally had a policy that targeted black and brown people. And when they wanted to less biased harrassment the mayor pushed back and instructed them to stop and frisk brown and black men, specifically.
[0] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/bloomberg-apologiz...
I am not from the US, so my perspective might be wrong.
An alternative explanation is that under closer scrutiny of the actions of police officers, the ones leaving are the ones who can no longer get away with the abuse of power they have become accustomed to.
This is a tempting conclusion, which is why I’m cautious about reaching it. Absent evidence, we cannot dismiss the possibility that the ones who are leaving are the good ones. Those with a strong moral core uncomfortable with their peers or sick of being lumped in by the public with them.
I don't have any good data one way or the other. I have exactly one data point - one police officer I personally know - and he's not retiring ahead of the plan he's set for himself.
They did exactly that. Some of the officers felt they were no longer being shielded by the political class. The principled LEOs left a long time ago, usually after their rookie year once they realized the police department had no principals. The ones leaving now know the jig is up.
The next generation of officers will realize they are taken to task about their decisions and training and will act accordingly.
I can't even imagine how much worse it is for minorities and in places that are notoriously corrupt.
I believe that both good and bad cops are quitting in record numbers right now. Because, as you say, good cops can't abide the situation and also can't do anything about it. But bad cops are finding that their entire livelihood is at stake if they stay, even just counting their past misdeeds. And there's no way they'd stop acting that way. It's who they are and they've gotten away with it for too long to stop themselves.
Can you expand on the negative experiences your immigrant parents had with police and courts? Stop and frisk or things like that?
The minority of people (including Black Americans) don't support less police time in their neighborhoods
Preference for Amount of Time Police Spend in Your Area
Would you rather the police spend more time, the same amount of time or less time as they currently spend in your area?
More time; Same amount of time; Less time;
Black Americans 20 61 19
White Americans 17 71 12
Hispanic Americans 24 59 17
Asian Americans 9 63 28
U.S. adults 19 67 14
https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...
A judge decided that a huge, old tree wasn't worth anything (when someone else cut it down without asking), and sided against my parents.
Those are the 2 things that come to mind immediately. Basically, any interactions that involved my parents and a local were biased towards the locals by cops/judges/etc.
Thus accelerating or concentrating the bad people left on the job.
It runs the spectrum from "we just mean re-allocate budget toward community policing" to "no, we really do mean abolish police". LOL.
If you believe police officers are accountable to pseudo-random elected representatives, you'd like to think again. At best, they're accountable to the Executive power on a nation-wide level, because that's where their guns and money come from.
But in many cases, the police is an autonomous force of repression that barely answers to anyone but itself, creating a culture of omerta. And the more you cover things up, the more you get promoted for having shown your loyalty to the structure. Other institutions such as the judicial system are often subordinated to the police ; you can read Michel Foucault on the matter if you're interested.
In France more specifically, "our" police force has a history of countless murders and atrocities. After WWII nazi occupation, the police establishment was NOT dismantled/denazified, and the same prefects who oversaw the extermination of jews, communists, homosexuals, tsigans, anarchists, handicapped folks (among others) oversaw bloody repression of the people of Algeria. If you want a more detailed account of that history, you should probably read Mathieu Rigouste (sociologist/historian of the police) or Frantz Fanon (anti-colonial psychiatrist). If simply glazing at facts on Wikipedia is enough, just check out "Vel d'hiv" (1940) and "17 octobre 1961". It's the same police force and the same stadium used to disappear, torture and deport people.
> I believe that these men now leaving are among the best and principled law enforcement officers.
That is always the case. Those people who join the police force because they want to "help others" are always the first ones to leave, when they realize the police has NEVER EVER been about helping anyone, and is only there to protect the rich and the privileged elites.
Ultimately though, I find it funny how "intelligent" people are so incredibly stupid when it comes to law enforcement. Cops dont make laws. They abide by laws created by legislator politicians. Cops cant argue if a law should be enforced. Only judges and sheriffs can make that call (both are elected positions by the way). However, again, they cant create laws. They work in the spectrum given. The whole checks and balance thing if you paid attention in school. The same politicians who saw "cops bad, shame on them" are the same shit stains that made the law enforcement policy that's hated. Then... they throw the cops under the bus... huh, I wonder why people dont want to be cops once they see how stupid both politicians and the public are on the matter. My honest opinion, as an American that's lived here his whole life, the people fell asleep at the wheel and we are headed for a cliff. It's not the road's fault that there's a turn, it's the driver's fault for not keeping their eyes open. Politicians making bullshit laws for cops to follow then blaming cops for those laws is Biblical level the devil laughing while striking a deal.
It probably shouldn't be surprising that crime went up in a global pandemic and the resulting economic distress.
Crime went up all over; I rather suspect Black Lives Matter wasn't responsible for the increase in Billings, Montana, for example, with a black population of 0.8%. https://www.krtv.com/news/crime-and-courts/violent-crime-sur...
> Cops cant argue if a law should be enforced.
Cops do this all the time. They let people off with warnings, or just let it pass them by. There's immense discretion at the individual cop level on whether crimes should lead to an arrest.
From the context of reducing police misconduct, as bad as the modern cop perspective is, I feel it was much worse in the past. I would guess removing the old guard is part of a positive transition going forward.