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Comment by beardedwizard | Hacker News Reader

Imagine you are operating with good intent, and are now personally liable for every call you make under duress trying to fight crime. Batman has to crack a few eggs.

Nobody would want to be a cop without some form of protection, but having this protection covers the worst cops. A tough situation, but if we make police work unappealing, what will we achieve? Are there successful examples of this?

It is also interesting that software engineering is one of the only engineering professions that has no industry regulation or personal accountability for negligence.

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What if the first words associated with policing were "serving the community" or "supporting neighbors" rather than "fighting crime"? What if lower crime came as a second order effect from having professionally helpful people around and available?

What if recruitment focused on hiring warm, generous, and communicative people who can relate to troubled people and deescalate complex situations -- competing for candidates from nursing and education programs -- instead of on mimicking military structures and courting highly volatile aggro meatheads?

Would these discussions still immediately turn to how "eggs have to be cracked" to defeat the baddies? Or would the discussions instead be about process failures that might be remedied through analysis and reflection?

I'm as much against Civil Forfeiture as the next guy, and I think there are plenty of wrongs with cops today.

But you have quite a hill to climb with your argument.

There has never been a police force at scale implemented anywhere on earth with the qualities that you state. Not saying that its not possible. But there's a reason people some people become nurses, others become gamblers, other become politicians, teachers, and cops.

I think you could expect better outcomes from simply having more effective means of separating the bad apples, vs taking QI completely off the table for the good guys.

Note - I'm not even against abolishing QI. Yet when I see arguments like this that hinge on changing human nature... and replacing it with a novel concept in recruiting, that has never succeeded anywhere on earth for thousands of years....

Would police forces based on the Peelian Principles count?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles

> What if the first words associated with policing were "serving the community"

Then the job would be "community service"; we have that in the form of, say Red Cross. Policing by definition is anti-crime in purpose.

Maybe there's a place for the sort of agency you envision, but regardless of the goodwill of others, there will always be wolves trying to eat the sheep, and we'll need an agency to deal with them.

I agree. Furthermore, imagine if the police were measured by the number of crimes they actually prevented versus the number they documented. Yes, I realize that these are orders of magnitude of difficulty in difference. The important thing being that one is what they are expected to do, the other what they actually do.

Do you think the officers in this case were actually trying to fight crime, or make a petty arrest to a local citizen for an activity protected by 1A?

There are two groups of officers described by the parent post: ones who try to fight crime, and "the worst cops". They aren't the same group.

The challenge is how to protect the first group and not the second. Would you want to be a cop if every shitbag you arrest is going to sue you for some frivolous crap? You will lose some of those cases even if you are a saint of a police officer.

Have medical doctors already solved this through insurance? Not a fantastic solution, and it increases costs, but it does provide due process for people making claims, and allows a court to decide whether a doctor did something wrong.

Apply the same to police.

> ones who try to fight crime, and "the worst cops". They aren't the same group.

They are the same group, because the ones trying to fight crime will eventually witness a "worst cop" committing a crime, report it, and then get fired.

https://www.aclu.org/video/meet-officer-mader-fired-trying-d...

https://mfranciswrites.medium.com/5-good-cops-that-got-fired...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/what-polic...

Or "the worst cops" will be put in charge of training new recruits, made their supervisor, and then ignore their complaints as he kneels on someone's neck until they die

Other professions have surety bonds and professional liability insurance. Right now if a cop does wrong the community pays. Rescinding qualified immunity and requiring sworn officers to personally bond and insure themselves would incentivise good behavior and appropriately redirect negative consequences to the actual problem sources.

> Imagine you are operating with good intent, and are now personally liable for every call you make under duress trying to fight crime. Batman has to crack a few eggs.

Batman isn't a cop, Batman is a vigilante sociopath with a bat fetish who assaults the poor and the mentally ill because he can't process trauma like a normal person. Batman is only allowed to exist in the context of a corrupt justice system that wants someone like him and his circus of violence to distract the citizens of Gotham from their own systemic corruption. In a just society he'd be in a padded cell where he belongs.

We shouldn't want police to be Batman. We shouldn't just accept the premise that the cops just have to "crack a few eggs" now and then. That's just conceding to authoritarianism.

> sociopath with a bat fetish who assaults the poor and the mentally ill

> padded cell where he belongs

Times change, and the heroes of yesteryear become the villains of tomorrow. Seems to me there's a quote about that.

In a just society, he wouldn't have turned out the way he did to begin with. You know, because Gotham, and his world, wouldn't be fucked up the way it is.

> We shouldn't want police to be Batman. We shouldn't just accept the premise that the cops just have to "crack a few eggs" now and then. That's just conceding to authoritarianism.

We shouldn't want Batman, no. But nobody here is arguing that police should be able to do whatever they want, whenever they want, just because, hell, they felt like it. That's not what's meant by "cracking a few eggs". The argument is that mandatory strict adherence to every possible law at all times, is possibly not the best way to combat crime perpetrated by criminals who by definition are disregarding the law.

>In a just society, he wouldn't have turned out the way he did to begin with. You know, because Gotham, and his world, wouldn't be fucked up the way it is.

Except... Gotham being what it is, Bruce Wayne isn't the only person to have lost loved ones, even parents, to criminal violence. Other people learn to deal with it and move on with their lives. It seems to be just Batman and the Joker who feel society owes them a blood debt for the pain it caused them.

> But nobody here is arguing that police should be able to do whatever they want, whenever they want, just because, hell, they felt like it. That's not what's meant by "cracking a few eggs".

OK, but that is essentially what the idiom it seems to be drawing from means - "if you want to make an omlette, you have to crack a few eggs," implies breaking the law and/or people to get something done. It's just a prosaic way of saying the ends justify the means.

And anyway, for the most part, police do do whatever they want, whenever they want, just because, hell, they feel like it. And QI lets them get away with it.

>The argument is that mandatory strict adherence to every possible law at all times, is possibly not the best way to combat crime perpetrated by criminals who by definition are disregarding the law.

If mandatory strict adherence to every possible law at all times makes it impossible for the police to fight crime, then maybe the problem is there are too many laws, and they're too strict. Because remember, the police don't chase criminals, they chase suspects assumed innocent until proven guilty by a court.

We're not even talking about high speed chases, crimes committed in undercover work, property damage, shooting dogs, no-knock warrants or any of the extralegal things police do that put the public in danger for the ostensible greater public good. We're talking about a Facebook parody. The police could have just, you know, had it flagged or something. But they chose violence because the police always choose violence. Maybe when they're obviously wrong, they for pay for it.

> It seems to be just Batman and the Joker who feel society owes them a blood debt for the pain it caused them.

This seems to be going a bit off the rails, I guess I'll just say the Batman I'm familiar with seems to be different from yours, and leave it at that.

> If mandatory strict adherence to every possible law at all times makes it impossible for the police to fight crime, then maybe the problem is there are too many laws, and they're too strict. Because remember, the police don't chase criminals, they chase suspects assumed innocent until proven guilty by a court.

Possibly. I definitely feel there are too many laws, and many seem arbitrary and/or too strict.

> But they chose violence because the police always choose violence.

I guess I missed the part where they beat him into submission. I had thought they just arrested him.

And, maybe he didn't deserve to be arrested. I don't know. I do think what he did shouldn't really be morally defensible, but that's a different argument that's been debated into the ground elsewhere in this thread.

> for the most part, police do do whatever they want, whenever they want, just because, hell, they feel like it. > police always choose violence.

I'm afraid this is where any meaningful discourse probably ends. I can't say I really get along well with most officers, but this is also not what I've seen out of most officers. You get some definite assholes, and some bigots. But words like most and always seem pretty far out of line.

Literally hundreds of police forces in other countries have to broadly follow the law while exercising their powers.

How do they manage this? They have training manuals which break down the law for them in basic, easy-to-understand terms. These are used in training and are widely available to the police, including when a scenario develops. For example: when is it legal for a police officer to move a member of the public's car without their permission? Rather than discuss detailed case law or legal concepts with funny names, it just gives standard examples and standard exceptions (when moving the car is immediately necessary to prevent damage to the car; when moving the car is necessary to prevent damage to some other property; when a order clearing the road has been obtained AND sufficient notice has elapsed since blah blah BUT NOT when the order was obtained AFTER... etc).

Are police officers in these countries often prosecuted successfully over slight discrepancies between this type of summary and the exact legal position in grey area cases? Of course not. But they are subject to prosecution in scenarios where it can be demonstrably shown that, for instance, none of the conditions for moving a vehicle applied, and it must have been clear to the officer at the time that none of the conditions applied.

> Nobody would want to be a cop without some form of protection...

Every other profession has protection in the form of insurance. A bad cop's insurance policy will eventually become too expensive to do the job and will have to find another line of work.

That's not protection, that's... payment in advance.

No...that's the marketplace.

Yes, and I'm saying it's asinine, as is the mentality that promotes it as normal.

Do you know how many countries have qualified immunity?

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