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Comment by Broken_Hippo | Hacker News Reader

The hard part is fixing an organization that has some good people and some bad people

This is just the "not all cops" with more words. Where are the good cops?

They aren't turning people in. They aren't speaking out. If they do such things, they get fired. They aren't getting promoted: Speaking out makes you untrustworthy.

They aren't doing this so much that we know there are police gangs. With tattoos and everything. Surely, folks knew, but nothing happened. Simply not acting like the bad cops isn't enough to be a good cop.

The only real reason we have evidence of police misconduct is because of modern technology: The only reason Rodney King's abuse got nationwide coverage is because it happened to be on video, and now everyone has a camera in their pockets.

And little has changed.

Where, exactly, are these good cops and what are they doing?

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I think with this American police stuff, a lot of people are missing a simple truth.

>This is just the "not all cops" with more words. Where are the good cops?

They're not in the same police departments as the bad cops. This is what people miss.

The good cops you don't hear about, because they don't have a lot of problems. Instead, you hear about the bad cops in departments like the LAPD and NYPD (and many other much smaller departments). The good ones don't make the news, but the bad ones usually make the news multiple times.

>They aren't speaking out. If they do such things, they get fired.

Exactly. So the bad cops tend to congregate together into bad departments. It's exactly like the rotting apple trope people keep misusing and not understanding. The bad apple makes the whole barrel rot quickly. So if you see a department with a few bad cops, most likely they're ALL bad. The good departments get rid of the bad cops before they ruin the place.

This isn't to say that most departments are good, or bad; I really don't know. But I do believe there's good cops out there, but they're not in the same departments as those shitty cops that are in police gangs like you mention.

By that theory you'd still expect some bad cop to occasionally end up at a good department. So if the other cops at the department are really good cops, they would charge the bad cop very quickly for doing something. I would imagine that to make at least local news (I mean we just read that cops saving ducks is making lots of news). Why do we not see any of those reports. One way to identify good departments should be police union membership. Considering the crucial role police unions play in protecting bad cops, good departments should have near zero membership, are there such departments?

I'm guessing that in well-run departments, bad cops tend to get pushed out quickly, before they do something really bad that's worthy of news coverage (plus, they probably have better hiring practices to try to identify who's a good "cultural fit"). Plus, departments probably try to avoid media coverage of anything that makes them look bad, just like any organization.

Police unions nationwide are probably a net negative I'd agree, but claiming that good departments wouldn't have any union at all seems a big extreme. Public service employee unions are pretty normal in the US.

https://thecrimereport.org/2020/06/18/the-plight-of-the-poli...

We do, sometimes. Instead of getting the presidential medal of freedom like they deserve they are forced to suffer.

The system is broken from the top, can only be fixed from the top and those on top are pretty content with the status quo.

Setting up the DHS after 9/11 was dumb but setting up a new department answerable only to the president to police the police would fix the problem.

>Setting up the DHS after 9/11 was dumb but setting up a new department answerable only to the president to police the police would fix the problem.

No, it wouldn't: what happens when someone like Trump gets elected? Now the police nationwide are basically just like the SA.

If the department was tasked solely with policing the police then Trump would likely just have tried to water it down and render it toothless exactly like he did with the EPA.

I dont see an intrinsic problem with its existence.

> Why do we not see any of those reports.

Because the bad cop goes to jail and now he's no longer in the department, so the department falls out of the news cycle. I'm not sure what else you'd expect...

Here's a possible example of a couple bad cops in what could be a good department: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/offi...

The "bad department" is the US when you compare it against the rest of the planet

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/

So the US doesn't only have bad cops, it has bad police departments. The rot starts from the top, then?

While there's definitely cultural problems in the US that could lead to more bad departments, the US is a highly decentralized country with a lot of control at the local levels. I think this tends to lead to a lot more corruption at local levels (in some places much more than others), and accordingly more bad departments.

The US lacks a national police inspectorate, or similar body that could reliably investigate crimes committed by police from the outside. Police are left to police themselves.

> you hear about the bad cops in departments like the LAPD and NYPD

New York (state) police kill about 1/3 of the median, California just a little under the median[0]. I imagine those numbers are higher for the two cities you've mentioned than state-wide.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123317/rate-people-kill...

Again, see my parallel comment about how decentralized America is and how much power is retained at local levels. The NYPD may be in New York, but it doesn't represent New York state.

Also, killings aren't a great way of comparing departments necessarily. There's a lot of corruption in the NYPD, but that doesn't necessarily translate to killings. Just look at their former "stop and frisk" policy; it was a violation of rights and racist, but didn't result in many killings that I remember.

You are illustrating why "The hard part is fixing an organization that has some good people and some bad people."

People within an organization don't all have the same amount of power to affect change. Most have little power. And at the same time, they have bills to pay at home.

Meaningful change has to be systematic.

There may be some good cops, but I think they get crowded out by all the scum around them or by their strange loyalty behavior where no cop would say anything bad against another cop - at worst they die because of it, or they need another job, or they get transferred to another police station in the middle of nowhere.

This is just “yes it is all cops” with more words.

So you're saying every single cop is bad. I have a hard time believing that, but on the other hand I live in a country that does not have a problem with police brutality.

> I live in a country that does not have a problem with police brutality.

Yea I really doubt that. You're likely just not the target.

A lot of western peers have Very Few deaths per year involving police interaction.

Death isn't the only form of police brutality.

If police in every single country is intrinsically corrupted, what are you suggesting instead? If we have no role model anywhere I presume a simple reform is not enough, since it would be futile.

Surprisingly, whenever there's a civil war or government collapse, we don't see any mass migration of these ACAB-types to these cop-free utopias.

> Where, exactly, are these good cops and what are they doing?

I can't believe this comment is not only not flagged dead, but actually is the top reply here. Sometimes HN really is a caricature of liberalism.

I mean, seriously. Where are any good cops? ANY? And what are they doing?? This is so profoundly ignorant I'm not sure where to start.

- youve never seen someone tearing down the interstate going 40mph faster than surrounding traffic? Or swerved all over road? Or ran red lights? Who do you think is taking care of those problems?

- you know literally 0 people who are or were criminals and know 0 people who've been victims? I've known murderers and drug dealers. People get robbed, fights break out, domestic disputes happen.

Im not a fan of the current state of policing in America, but policing is hard and extremely dangerous; there are more guns than people here. Someone has to enforce the rule of law at their own peril. You don't have have to ignore the bad to take the good, but don't act like it's not a useful, necessary, and dangerous profession. Don't be a child.

The commenter is not saying “where, physically are the good cops.” They are not saying “good people don’t exist in the police department.” What they are saying: “when these terrible episodes of brutality happen, often over a number of years within the view of fellow officers, where are the good cops stepping forward and policing this, or at least preventing departments from institutionally providing cover for the wrongdoers.”

We’ve seen a common pattern many times where abusive officers do terrible things over a period of years and get away with it until they are caught due to their own mistakes, while the occasional objection gets squashed. I don’t entirely blame the “good cops” for valuing their survival and careers over fighting these battles: I blame a culture that makes it much too costly and difficult for good cops to push criminals out. But this is a broken and unprofessional culture that needs to be uprooted and changed, because a country needs law enforcement professionals that it can trust.

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