edit - people are responding with anecdotes of the police being unhelpful. The comment I responded to suggested that the police are never helpful.
If police presence is diminished, who is going to lose? Not HN posters. Likely working class people.
1) had a cop yell at me and bystanders because someone not even with me said “excuse me sir” the cop yelled that he should say “excuse me officer” and the two cops next to him laughed
2) I was hit as a pedestrian and police said they were too busy to come take an accident report that I had to come to that station. I and the driver gave conflicting reports, there was no cop at the scene. Witnesses offered to testify but police wouldn’t contact them. When I went to the station there were lots of police sitting around.
3) I lived across from the police station and my car was broken into. It took four hours for the police to come over, investigate and prepare a report. Cop said next time I should call the private neighborhood security company that is all off duty copy’s getting overtime.
4) neighbor conflict with neighbor violating a judge’s order. City police said they wouldn’t do anything because they don’t enforce violations from those kids of judges per city policy. I asked what kind of police do, he said none. I’d have to call state police.
These aren’t huge issues and I’m still alive, etc. But I think it’s indicative of systemic problems where there’s not a good feedback loop to make sure cops are effective.
I’m grateful for police and they do do good work, but everyone I know has a litany of stories like this. And since police seem to do stuff like protest collection of data, routinely lose/not record body cam, and other indicators of a corrupt org; I think there’s need for serious police reform.
3) Four hours to investigate and prepare a report is ridiculously fast. So, there was a lot of latency, but it sounds like they were actually quite efficient once they arrived. Note: I'm not sure I believe the bit about calling a private security company, as that wouldn't make any sense; they couldn't have filed a police report for you.
4) Sounds right. Cops are bound by jurisdiction as a matter of law. If something isn't in their jurisdiction, they aren't allowed to do anything. This usually happens at county/city borders (where it's a case of figuring out which set of cops has jurisdiction to act), but it also applies to court orders. You haven't provided sufficient facts to say why state police would be enforcing a judicial order in this case.
3) it was 4 hours to arrive across the street. The report was ready the next day. The private security company is off duty cops so they can do everything police can since they are police.
4) it is in their jurisdiction as it’s in their city and the crime occurred in their city, they just don’t enforce it unless requested by some outside party (like the state court). The state police don’t respond to minor issues like contempt. So again, who should handle this issue.
My point is that police don’t do what is needed. And the bit about being busy and underfunded is hard to believe given the massive funds that go to police.
Police unwilling to meet the basic needs of doing law enforcement. In each case you asked for obvious and basic effort at investigating crimes and they just opted out.
It begs the question what are they doing instead?
But boy oh boy are police there when I don’t need them: Shutting down streets in Fell’s Point at 1AM so it’s harder for people to get cabs and get home safe, calling in a helicopter and dogs to “investigate” me and a few friends filming a project in college, threatening to book me over a +14mph speeding ticket then apologizing and saying “ya gotta understand, there was a murder in this town two years ago”.
The stuff I read about cops totally gels with my personal experience.
There were 3 or 4 eyewitnesses who they never talked to and of course I never heard back.
Someone else I know had surveillance video of an unmarked tow truck with no plates picking her car up out of a garage. She had a hell of a time even getting a cop to watch the video, multiple phone calls to multiple layers of police over the course of a week or so. Never heard back.
> edit - people are responding with anecdotes of the police being unhelpful.
Which is it? You want to get pedantic about what is "suggested", make a comment about how "/Only/ people who never have to deal with the police say things like this", then people come out to show how they have had bad dealings with the police, and now words don't matter?
The point I'm trying to make, which is not hyperbole, is that there are lots of people who basically rely on the police to keep the peace. If someone comes into the store where they work and starts pissing on the ground, or acting aggressively, or breaking things, or threatening people, they call the police.
These kind of interactions are common. They aren't visible to people (like me) whose only interactions with the police is occasionally reporting property crimes.
> Only people who never have to deal with the police say things like this. Their only experience with policing is reading articles about how evil cops are.
but also people who have to deal with the police but never have any positive experiences with them.
Or to put it another way - people who have positive experiences with the police wouldn't ask if they ever do anything beneficial for society.
But somehow phrasing it that way makes it sound like these people are perhaps not so plentiful.
The ride was in the back of a police SUV. I’m 6ft and it was in humane - extremely uncomfortable, extremely unsafe, I felt like an animal. If I had been 6ft5 it would have been genuinely hard to breath. I had to ask twice for them to wear a mask.
After dropping me off at my stolen and partially destroyed car, they talked briefly about lunch and then left, never to be heard from again. There was a large knife left in my car from the thief. No fingerprints taken or asked for.
And this is my experience as a home-owner with a powerful family friend on the inside. I have plenty of other stories from when I was single and poor.
Only wealthy white folks who haven’t dealt with the police would question the legitimacy of the OPs question.
I have had exactly one positive experience with one police officer, which I would characterize as that officer doing an acceptable job.
I have never seen compelling evidence of your last claim. But I have seen extensive evidence that shows the negative impact of we police, evidence which aligns closely with my experiences.
Recreationally, I’ve played a lot of baseball and softball with cops; I end up hearing some of the good and bad socially there as well.
Are there dickheads who become cops? Hell yes! The profession probably specifically attracts some of them. Are all cops bastards? Not in my experience.
Edit to add: our college campus police had a phenomenal relationship with the campus community. If I had any kind of issue, I’d have had no qualms about asking them for help. That’s a bit of a “gimme” perhaps, perhaps they have an easier job in some ways, but they had earned the trust of the majority of the community in ways that the neighboring college police forces had clearly not.
The problem is even the "good" cops protect the bad cops. If they aren't willing to prosecute cops for things like beating their wives, why do you think they're good?
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-...
I find it hard to believe there are many police forces that don't have several officers that are known to break protocol, laws, and do shitty things like beat their wives - but they all hide behind the blue shield.
I have never had a positive experience with a police officer in my life, and I grew up in the richest whitest suburb you can imagine. I don't think it's possible to be a good person and stay in the force, and I have heard horrible stories from former officers that quit due to disgust at what their coworkers bragged about.
I really, really want to be wrong about this. But the older I get the more data comes out that police officers are just horrible human beings.
While I have had some unpleasant experiences with some jackass cops (mostly when I was still a public defender), the majority of my experiences with the police have been them doing their jobs.
In fact, the number one complaint from the cops I interact with is all the jackasses that give the rest of them a bad image. (And before you ask why they don't do something about it, they can't, in the same way that most of the programmers on this board don't have the power to stop programmers at other companies from doing what they do.)
The officer explained to the man that, as somebody trained in collision assessment, the damage to their vehicle indicated a less than 5 mph collision and that does not substantiate any physical damage to their person. I received a note from the officer with badge number and name should I need to contact her in the future.
After explaining this to the insurance company I never heard from them again.
The way that the police are organized in the US, and the way they operate, is causing lots of needless harm and injustice. To my mind, the big question is, how do we substantially reform those failings while maintaining (or, god forbid, improving?) community security? There are lots of ideas out there, but the US sadly doesn't seem to be in a place where broad and substantive reforms are likely any time soon. Perhaps some local governments will provide effective models of a way forward, I'm still holding out hope.
I know of two incidents where children I knew got lost, and the cops found them and brought them home.
They've done wellness checks for me on aged relatives.
They've given me speeding tickets, too, but I deserved them :-)
I have interacted with a number of the police with regards to homeless individuals that were high or off their meds and endangering others, and the people responded promptly every time to coordinate with EMT/fire on getting them taken to a hospital.
I was almost hit by a truck while walking, and the officers took my report within minutes (though as nobody got the license plate, and I wasn't actually hit, the case went nowhere).
A friend once got a flat on the side of a narrow stretch of freeway and officers set up cones on the freeway until a mechanic replaced her flat so her car wouldn't get hit.
Important: I'm not white.
They are very effective at reinforcing social hierarchies through force
In my time in Norway I've been helped by the police a number of times:
- As a guard, to take out some large bloke looking for a fight in a place where I worked
- In the same place after a teenager jumped at me in the middle of the night, this time I didn't even call them as they spotted it from a patrol car or something
- A few years ago I reported someone probably walking from door to door in the middle of the night looking for unlocked doors. Police arrived within 15 minutes, maybe a lot faster I cannot remember exactly.
At one point I was mildly hassled by 3 or four officers as I was photographing a very early sunrise in the city. Once they realized my camera was full not only of what looked like burglary research to them but also sunrises in the nature and landscapes and so one they let me go with a smile.
(The sun rises before 0400 in the summer around here so to most ordinary citizens I was probably weird.)
1. There are bad laws and structurally perverse incentives. Individual police peons can't change the laws but are blamed for their effects.
2. People have bad interactions with the police. Public respect for the police falls. Good police quit. The proportion of bad cops increases.
3. Voters want politicians to do something. Fixing the perverse incentives is politically expensive. Grandstanding and Other Side blaming is politically expedient. This fixes nothing but makes tensions even higher. Goto 2.
Why is the murder rate in Baltimore more than 20 times higher than it is in San Diego? Is it really solely attributable to the quality of the San Diego police department, or is this maybe a problem with solutions that exist external to the police department?
There have been instances of police deciding not to enforce mask mandates, but of course in other situations they say shit like "the law is the law my hands are tied" its 100% BS
The peons exist within the system. The system allows them to ignore mask mandates. It doesn't allow them to issue fewer than the implicit quota number of citations that generate government revenue. The system punishes them for enforcing the law against politically connected people, which keeps bullshit laws on the books because they only get used against poors and dissidents. The system cares more that cases are closed than that suspects are guilty, because "percent prisoners who are actually guilty" is hard to measure and isn't one of the system's target metrics.
The peons can't change these things. The ones who try get punished and lose promotions.
We have to fix the laws. And the social factors that cause the incentive for violent behavior to exceed the deterrent effect of law enforcement.
Suppose whichever police force(s) you're talking about shall be disbanded. In this experiment, you can choose some amount of delay between that announcement and the actual disbanding; whatever seems most reasonable to you.
How would that play out in the following days / weeks / years?
How do you think individuals, companies, insurers, etc. would adapt? What aspects of life would be better, or worse?
(Personally, I think society would be for worse off. But of course I'm only guessing, and could be wrong.)
For example, if a town's police system disbanded, but the state police still enforced laws against members of the town preventing them from engaging in their own policing, that creates a different scenario than if the state police didn't enforce any laws against the members of the town acting like the previous police force did. If even the military refuses to touch the area, given a threat that would normally allow the military to act like a foreign invasion, then it is a different situation compared to when you have a lawless area that's still protected from external threats.
And then you have lynchings like with Ahmaud Arbery. Not a thief, still shot and killed. Vigilante "justice" is often not just.
Though you may be right, an increase in lynchings may overall reduce crime (as presently defined, and excepting lynchings). It will also probably have a lot more false positives than the existing system, increasing paranoia with respect to outsiders and "others". So crime in a community may go down, safety for outsiders will likely go down, and for insiders may go up.
There is nothing fun about dealing with dysfunction constantly. And there is this illusion created that all kinds of dysfunction has some nice neat solution, and its just not true.
It's just that as the allocation of capital becomes increasingly unequal, more people are starting to question why we spend so much money protecting capital.
I think the USA has a problem with the way police and guns are viewed. There's a sense of distrust in authority which is sometimes justified. But also breeds overly defensive and pretty bad officers.
The standards are low. The pay is low and everybody hates them. Who would want to be a police officer?
So the problem feeds itself, bad people become police officers. Good people look around and quit.
So even if "good" smart people with fair judgement go, they are turned away.
Lots of people want to be the 'change from within'. I'm one of them - I spent years as a defense contractor despite the fact that I hate the US military industrial complex.
But in the case of the police, it's prevented.
Also, yes, the police sometimes do very good and important things. But Chris Rock has a joke about this - there can't be good airline pilots and bad airline pilots, all pilots have to be good pilots or there won't be pilots at all. Trust (in anyone but especially authority) takes 10 years to make and 10 seconds to break. So coming in at 50:50 just isn't good enough
You don't need brilliant officers, need ones that are just not dumb, + don't have some power trip complex. This is true for many jobs.
https://nypost.com/2021/09/30/french-cops-suicide-note-confe...
Or this:
Bundy was arrested in 1975 but released due to lack of evidence. Does that mean the police didn't want to arrest him, or does that mean the police officers were following the law, and couldn't just lock him up on their hunch?
Look up the Aspen summit, where dozens of officers and prosecutors came together to share information, discuss his case, and they agreed that Bundy was the man they were looking for, but needed more hard evidence to arrest and convict him. That certainly looks like the behavior of officers who want to arrest him, and not stalling behavior.
https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/crime/chp-officer-murder-s...
I think this is a good compromise because it allows officers to still make split second decisions, which seems to be a recurring concern amongst them, just an incentive to make more collaborative decisions. an incentive which is lacking right now.