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Comment by pope_meat | Hacker News Reader

Even with body cams and cell phone videos, these boys are still lying. You can't reform this, clean slate.

To be honest, I don’t think a clean slate would solve the problem. Around the world, police lie. Salesmen lie. Politicians lie. Developers lie. Watchdogs lie. Generals lie. Priests lie. And innocent people get hurt.

You are right that you can’t eliminate it from the system with reform. But I don’t think a “clean slate” will do any better either. The goal is marginal improvements, better checks and balances, etc. If you can’t stop a man from lying, the next best thing is to be sure you can catch him.

Build robust systems for accountability and oversight. Trust but verify thoroughly.

This discourages the casual deceiver, but also identifies the motivated.

...and qualified immunity really needs to be gotten rid of, at least in its current form. there's no reason why a cop having a bad day should be able to ruin your life. also consider that as an citizen that's probably untrained in firearm use, you're liable for stray bullets that hit your neighbor when you shoot at a home intruder, while a cop is trained and on the clock, but has no such liability at all.

Why not a clean slate and improvements/checks and balances together, because the current crop of cops have lost the faith of a lot of people.

Google LAPD gangs.

>And innocent people get hurt.

You're saying that everyone lies except for "innocent people"? Where are these innocent people you speaketh of? There's no such thing as "innocent people." Everyone lies their asses off, everyone. There is no such thing as innocent.

They could raise the requirements to become a cop, and change the structure of organization.

1. Require at least a bachelor's degree in anything.

2. Nix all paramilitary training.

3. Make each cop civilly/criminally legally liable for for their third screw up.

4. Hire only people over 25.

5. Dissuade military personal, including veterans, from thinking they have a job waiting for themselfs after their stint is up. (We do not need miitiary trained soldiers. We need Sociologists, and Psychologists.)

6. Cameras should be on every cop, without a way to turn the devise off. (Any complaints could then be verified by a third party.)

7. Get rid of all out little police squads. A cops would be federally licensed, and trained. Preferably stationed where they are needed. In my county of Marin, most are not needed.

8. And let's be honest. Most Cops are just Revenue Collectors. They are not going to be there to save our lives. To anyone saying, there won't be enough people applying for the job. Come on? There are a lot of people whom would like to become Police Officers. It usually those people, people who just want an honest job, whom are not hired. Get rid of all the cowboys, and hire level headed people. Ban all high speed chases, unless it involves a kidnapping. Require all police to obey every road law we are expected to abide. Make all uniforms Orange, or Pink. At least we could see them comming, and the bright colors might make the right people apply?

9. I'm not going to debate. I'm sick and tired of looking in my rear view mirror, or trying to figure out what hedge they are hiding behind. I'm as white as they come. I can't imagine what minorities have to put up with.

I find this response really intriguing.

We as citizens are perfectly capable of handling people lying to us...we do it with children, coworkers, salespeople, advertising, etc. Why is the standard response to fix the police. Obviously, they shouldn't lie, there should be consequences but the solutions don't start there.

This works because people believe cops. Reporters take police reports as truth until proven otherwise. Juries (and judges) take the word of cops over the accused. The public generally treats things said by police as correct even despite evidence to the contrary.

I would posit that we are the problem because the actions of the cops don't work unless we presume they are telling the truth.

Fix the cops, sure, of course (especially 2, disarm them). But fix our society's interaction with them as well.

> I would posit that we are the problem because the actions of the cops don't work unless we presume they are telling the truth.

The problem is that we've built the entire system on the assumption that we can believe them. Admit that assumption could be wrong and it all falls apart.

Suppose the cops say they found drugs on you. You say they planted them. If we believe the cops, you go to jail. If we admit that there have been documented cases of cops planting drugs on people and call that reasonable doubt, nobody goes to jail. You can't have laws against drug possession, or anything else where you don't at least have a victim to corroborate what the police are alleging.

Which is presumably what we need to do, but now we have to fight all the people who want to make it illegal to possess anything that crooked cops could plant on you.

We shouldn't have laws prohibiting drugs in the first place, that's part of the problem.

Prohibition didn't work for alcohol and it doesn't work for any of the other drugs. It only leads to corruption and organized crime.

IMO you have the wrong idea

You do not want police to be "Sociologists, and Psychologists". That is what social workers are for.

A lot of police work is drudgery. So do not ask them to all be qualified with college degrees. It should be a job any honest person can do.

I get your fed up ness with the current set up, but rethink what policing is, what it is for, and why is a better approach than to make police do even more (social work)

Here in Aotearoa the top police officer (we have a national system, generally) is big on "policing with consent". It means that the community must support the police for them to be effective.

It is a big change for us, and it may not stick. The last commissioner put paramilitary police with automatic rifles into Māori communities (poor and coloured). Not long ago teh police and "Māori gangs" would have what amounted to set piece brawls on a semi regular basis.

I still hate the fucking pigs, but I am old and grey. Perhaps the next generation will do better, here

> Dissuade military personal, including veterans, from thinking they have a job waiting for themselfs after their stint is up. (We do not need miitiary trained soldiers. We need Sociologists, and Psychologists.)

I seem to remember a high-profile case where a veteran was calm under pressure and didn't shoot a suspect (even when he would be legally justified to do so). That's obviously only one data point, but it's enough to make me question this assertion at face value.

You're talking about this incident here:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/west-virginia-cop-fired...

In many western european states the training to become a cop requires a 3-year academic stint at police school. The bar seems much lower in the united states.

I don't understand why lying by police, prosecutors or misbehavior by judges is not made into a serious crime that gets punished very harshly. These people are entrusted by society with a lot of power, often over death and life, so the standards should be very high.

You are wondering why police and prosecutors don't do more to arrest and convict police and prosecutors?

No. The complaint is about different rules being applied to cops or prosecutors. Not just enforcement.

There is no qualified immunity for civilians. The cops and prosecutors can lie, civilians can't. A cop can shoot merely when he feels afraid, that excuse don't apply to civilians. Stuff like that.

Then you have judges who should be impartial, but do in fact treat accused cops and prosecutors differently.

America's eccentric localism: there's no Federal Inspectorate Of Police to come in from out of town and do the prosecution. Within the local power structure the abuse of power is propped up because it supports power.

There are a whole slew of federal laws that federal officials could use to charge local corrupt police officers. They just choose not to, because the FBI are cops too.

If you were correct, police departments around the world would be equally corrupt. But living in different cities and countries will quickly persuade you that's not the case.

Marginal improvements can work if the people making the improvements agree on what "improvement" is. But expecting corrupt cops to get serious about stopping corrupt cops is different. A clean slate (plus structural improvements) may be your best bet.

Checks and balances don't work when the entire system is for the injustice. This isn't an issue with the system, but it's an issue with the people and how they feel police should be used against marginalized groups. Even when caught, every step of the system works to shield police from any form of accountability.

Georgia did abolish the police once. It worked, to a point.

"I Abolished and Rebuilt the Police. The United States Can Do the Same."

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/11/abolish-police-georgia-...

Also the police service of Northern Ireland was rebuilt from the irrevocably prejudiced RUC.

What exactly do you have in mind when you say clean slate?

I’d start by looking at overseas policing and taking lessons from them. Look at basing around something like Peelian principals. Find and adopt practices that discourage corruption, just one easy example here is to do away with overtime, cops become salaried and receive TOIL if they work extra hours but are not incentivized to make work. Actually ask questions and study things like, does carrying a gun all the time make an officer safer, in every circumstance? Is it situational? Does it make the public safer? Etc. Build a new curricula around these principals and findings from your studies, with state level police colleges for training. Then start building out a new state wide police service that over time absorbs the functions of various municipal and county departments. Existing officers who want can go through training and continue their careers in the new service, assuming they qualify. Set up an independence conduct commission to be overseen by the public, selecting a jury at random to review cases. (Not an elected position.)

And of course, never stop actually asking the questions how can we improve what we are doing with the principals we have set out.

That's basically like a complete software rewrite. If you don't change the environment this works in you end up with the same set of problems eventually. There are a ton of things that could be done to improve american policing. But it's just for ideological grandstanding. This is pretty much the same with healthcare. It's clearly f..ed up but just used as a partisan tool for to win voters.

Clearly they wish to wipe them out /s

Any line of work dealing with power are liars, clean slate.

There, I've solved human nature. That easy folks.

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