When you demonize an entire profession due to the unjust actions of 0.1% of its members, don't be surprised when the only police officers left are those that revel in the Us vs. Them mentality.
I really don't think this is going to end well.
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.