FBI may shut down police use-of-force database due to lack of police involvement

There are indeed Nations that are a "Rechtsstaat" or a "state of law".

Also you don't need to compare something to the worst of the same category. This is easy and lazy. Compare things to something better, or there is no progress.

This is like saying other people are suffering more than you so your suffering is moot. Let's not tolerate injustices just because others have it worse.

There was definitely a self-policing movement in the 70s and 80s; the state-run police didn’t like it very much. Mumia Abu-Jamal is still in prison for trying to protect a community member from an abusive police officer.

I think you're stretching the use of the term many people.

How would you enforce "mandatory gun ownership"?

First of all, why do so many feel the need to polarize everything and turn it into a a partisan battle? We need less of this not more!

Second, police are local. Generally conservative opposition is to large federal government. This is a purely subjective take, I'm not taking sides.

If police can't do their job, which is restrain criminals and protect the general public, because they're hamstrung by ticky-tacky legalisms at every turn then they... won't do their job.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/12-major-us-cities-top-annual-homi...

> This is what has always amazed me about the political party which are very much supposed to be for smaller government yet it whole heartedly supports the police in almost every instance.

There's a world of difference between what someone says and what someone does.

AKA: Never listen to what a politician says, only pay attention to what they do.

> I would think the party of less government control would be all for more police oversight and a reduction of police power. Instead they fly 'thin blue line' flags and campaign on 'back the blue'. I really don't get it.

You only won't get it if you listen to what they say. If you just look at the voting record and ignore anything non-binding you'll see pretty quickly that this is a party of Big Government and Thought Control (via Doublespeak).

What they say is finely tailored to their voting base, which is largely ignorant of what they actually do.

> I really don't get it. I don't state this to attack that political group, I just very much don't understand.

"Are you the party that believes in the right to bear arms because you're distrustful of all authority and what if we need to overthrow the government someday? Or do you believe that cops are civil servants and we should trust their version of events whenever they shoot a black man for looking like he might have a gun?"[0]

[0]The Card Says Moops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMabpBvtXr4&list=PLJA_jUddXv...

The Right is really about maintaining existing power structures, meaning property, businesses, and religion. The police oppose all of the things that would challenge those, including both petty crime, and non violent protests alike. Therefore, the police and the Right agree on most issues and on the response. Naturally if the police overreach in their authority, it is very likely to be ignored or given the benefit of all doubt.

The right has plenty of people who see police as evil agents of the state the same way there's a sub group on the left who see the police as evil protectors of capital.

It's an interesting lesson in HN demographics that pretty much all the replies to your comment are examples of out-group homogeneity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity

> This is what has always amazed me about the political party which are very much supposed to be for smaller government yet it whole heartedly supports the police in almost every instance.

That's because the Republican ideology is actually not about small government. If you trace their ideology's history, you'll find it's about limiting the government's ability to protect the most vulnerable so as to create an environment that's ripe for exploitation by existing wealth holders. Every Republican political stance is either in service to this greater goal or propaganda stating that the US is exceptional (and you should feel good about the status quo as a result!).

They're not actually for that, it's just rhetoric for their followers. What the Republicans are actually for is authoritarian state power, a society entirely for the wealthy and ethno-christian values.

"small govt" is just a talking point used to justify cutting social spending and bailouts for wealthy donors.

The right (and the left to an only _slightly_ less degree) represent the elite in this country. The elite use the right and the left for several purposes.

The right exist to cut their taxes, extract subsidies, maintain global military dominance, and control the population. They use jingoism, religious zeal, and race/gender wedge issues to form their voting bloc. Elites have an ironclad hold over the hierarchical Republican party. <-- this is where the support of the police comes in.

The left exist to maintain the illusion of a functioning free democracy, to enact necessary reforms as tolerated by the right, to extract subsidies, to impose market entry barrier regulation, and to keep the economy upright. Elites have a strong control over the Democratic party, and tolerate their lack of control over the rest of it for the "illusion of a functioning free democracy" reasons, etc.

This is the reason that the elections are so close. Elites control the elections with campaign finance, and will only pay the exhorbitant costs of elections to the degree that they can maintain control: ideally with a president + 1 of the congressional halls (they own the supreme court already), but if they don't have the president they want, they have enough flunkies on the democratic "center" to maintain status quo until they have full control, and get what they need passed.

The elites only pay for 51% victories. So all the elections are 50% +/- one point.

I abhor calling these people "elites", it is a term of political science and economics, from two areas of study completely beholden to sucking the teats of the rich for status and approval.

I think this quote identifies it all and summarizes quite well.

Frank Wilhoit: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

[1] https://twitter.com/heerjeet/status/1002266261529690112?lang...

My fav. Milton Friedman often use to say that "Democracy is not about winning 51% of votes, it is about finding 5% of people who say they will vote for you if you take up their pet issue and they do not care how you vote on other issues. Then you selected another 5% of people with some other pet issue and so on. Together it should come to 51%".

What you are describing however is the opposite of this. People do not care how horrible a policy being proposed is, if it does not impact them or their loved ones. The conservatives who are flying "thin blue line" are the same people who are claiming that Jan 6 capitol riots were actually orchestrated by FBI and other branches of law enforcements. Conservative love for cops is not based on principles but it is more of a trick to "own the libs". Sooner or later the cops are going to come for the conservatives, for example Biden sending FBI after parents of schoolchildren will eventually be a template for states and cities to target conservatives of different stripes and you will quickly see those "thin blue line" flags going down.

Note how people who smoke marijuana are "addicts" and "junkies" who should be thrown in a pit as per many conservatives even though most of these "junkies" are productive members of society. But when it comes to opioid crisis they claim it is a "health crisis" for which "big pharma" must be held accountable. No one calls the addicts "junkies" or insists they should be sent to jail even though some of them are addicted to a point where they simply can not function normally.

People may like the idea of small government, but that's probably the top issue of only a handful of Connor Roy types and college libertarians, and tangible issues like "property values" or "safety" probably matter a lot more to real people, and that cuts across party lines. For example, look at the racial segregation of every city in the US [0]. Nearly every city solidly votes for Democratic candidates (I personally am solidly liberal), but our cities are still brutally segregated. There are systemic reasons for this (namely in the Jim Crow era, the govt's FHA started a program that underwrote home loans and its criteria explicitly penalized areas where Black people lived, attended schools, or could easily access [1], and by backing home loans only to white people, the consistent, dramatic increase in home values created a massive racial wealth gap [2] that preserves segregation and trapped millions of Black Americans into clusters that could then be denied equal resources) and the side effects of asymmetrically depriving millions of people of many good choices is that a disproportionately large of that subpopulation (yet still extremely small percent of the entire subpopulation) will make bad choices (eg to rob or engage in violent crime). Hence the divergence between a cities political values on a national level and on a local level (ie quiet acceptance of segregation and the corresponding enforcement mechanisms).

This isn't to say Dems are worse than Republicans; a far larger percent of Republicans are explicitly opposed to even hearing about these grotesque racial injustices, let alone attempting to correct these injustices.

TL,DR: people don't form their beliefs from grand principles; we've evolved to pick positions that help us satisfy needs (ie from Maslow's hierarchy of needs). If we want less police brutality, we should endure the cost needed to repair the injustices of the past, rather than what we are doing (ie perpetuating that injustice).

[0] https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/us/census-race-ethnicit...

[1] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Feder...

[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/weal...

It’s because republicans want the police to uphold their values (subjugate minorities, maintain their power etc.) which the crooked cops currently do. If the cops as a general monolith actually upheld the law and treated everyone equally, republicans would turn on them in an instant.

The Republican party stands for one thing and one thing only: power. Nothing else matters.

What is a “weasel” word? I suspect from the usage of that term that no amount of evidence I present will persuade you. Evidence of the problems I alluded too are easy to find. I get no income from the following link.

https://www.amazon.com/Police-Wife-Epidemic-Domestic-Violenc...

> Do you have a citation for your claim

I know this is a popular trope in certain political circles, it's weasel words used to shirk accountability or scrutiny.

The article is literally about the Police's failure to comply and submit documentation of all uses-of-force. In the vacuum of any official documentation, the only thing we have to go by are citizen reports.

If you watch pretty much any video upload to social media about officers harassing citizens you'll see intimidation by the threat of violence and from actual violence. You'll see whenever someone is taken into custody they're handcuffed and that officers use that opportunity to inflict some physical pain on the individual.

Hell, don't just cut off funding & cooperation for not participating, tax them also - as in if they don't want to participate, the need to pay fees to the FBI, perhaps the amounts related to the costs of FBI staff gathering the same data about them - i.e., either provide the data, or pay to have it provided for you.

That should get the attention of a few mayors, town/city councilpersons, if not just the police chiefs noticing the holes in their budget.

I routinely tell anyone that will listen that the US police forces are our most active domestic terrorist organization. People do not want to listen to the truth.

I read:

> The GAO report also says the Justice Department has largely ignored a requirement included in the 1994 crime bill to “acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers” and “shall publish an annual summary of the data acquired.”

Maybe I'm reading this wrong but I read this as "the collection is required by the crime bill passed in 1994". Even if it's not, the FBI surely has carrots and sticks they can use to force participation.

While police power generally belongs to the states, state and local police get tons of money from the federal government. It should be at least possible to withhold that money from non-compliant agencies.

>The FBI can't just arbitrarily order state and local police to participate in their programs.

In practice the federal government has a huge amount of influence over what states do because they are one of the most important sources of funding of many state programs, and they can and do set conditions for getting that money.

Police departments get billions of dollars of resources from the feds. There are already conditions to getting it, requiring that police report when someone is shot as a condition of federal funding is absolutely something that could be done without any new law or regulation.

There is a huge amount of documented history of FOIA games a google search away.

I have zero patience for public employees treating the public with contempt. I know it is a hassle, but dealing with the nutters is part of the job. Public employees that treat the public with contempt need to find a different way to feed themselves.

The only way to really solve this is to make all potentially responsive data available to the public by default, via API.

An 'us vs them' narrative between citizens and government is really really unhealthy. We are all on the same team after all. It is completely reasonable to do the vast majority of, if not all, police work without being untrustworthy and unaccountable. The US Government is based on checks and balances - accountability.