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Comment by blindriver | Hacker News Reader

Police who brutally beat an innocent person like this aren't just not doing their job, they are doing the exact opposite of their job. Even if they brutally beat a criminal, they are going far beyond incompetence. What these cops did wasn't just incompetence or a mistake, it was corruption and pure evil. Why the FUCK are we protecting these criminals? Why do we want this as a society?

Giving the police qualified immunity in situations like this is unlicensed freedom for them to not only be incompetent, but be corrupt and destroy the foundations of what our society is supposed to be about. Are we really okay with allowing fucking cops to ruthlessly beat people for no reason and think that's just part of their job?

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They should not only not have immunity, they should face increase penalties for any crimes committed in or off the clock.

being a devils advocate, but who is going to enforce that?

Prosecutors, if they'd do their jobs.

The issue is prosecutors rely on police a lot for their normal criminal cases so whenever one does get the courage to seriously pursue things like this they can get sabotaged or slow walked by the rest of the department in retaliation.

Classic "Who watches the watchmen?"

DA's office. Its separate from the police for a reason

It still works for a government controlled by the ruling class. The problem is not some malfunction with "police departments" as though a department with a new name could reform it.

"Checks and balances" is and always was a laughably naive and probably intentionally unserious response to overtly structural problems.

What is your serious response to these structural problems then? How do we improve?

Structural problems require structural solutions. A best first step would be reforming the brainwashed American conception of Marxist studies so we can someday conduct a serious discourse concerning the contradictions and consequences of capitalism, which belie the origins and effective purpose of our police departments as we know them.

If anything is for sure, defunding the police was never a remotely serious proposal and it's not lost on Marxists why working people found it such a laughable phrase. Calling it a "proposal" or "strategy" would be giving far too much credit.

In what ways are the existing police services "capitalist"?

All of the police services that I'm familiar with in places like the US, Canada, and Europe lack the fundamental traits of capitalism.

For example, they're the creations of centralized, monopolistic (and often quite socialist) governments, and funded with taxpayer money, rather than arising from the private sector.

As such, there's no competition. Residents and visitors don't get to individually choose which, if any, police service(s) they'll voluntarily receive services from, and what compensation they'll provide, if any. They can't just switch to some other police service if they're dissatisfied with one they've already been choosing to use. They can't unilaterally opt out of dealing with a particular police service.

Entry to the market is also extremely limited. An individual can't just declare himself to be a police officer, and then start offering policing services. An organization of such people can't declare themselves to be a police force.

Unionization of police officers is quite common, as well.

While private security may be available in some areas, it's typically very limited, with no real ability to intervene. They merely monitor an area for trouble, and alert the government's police service(s) if anything arises.

The problems with policing today seem to me to be due to its highly-socialist nature.

Many prisons have been bought up by private companies.

Judges have been convicted of taking bribes in exchange for convictions: https://www.npr.org/2022/08/18/1118108084/michael-conahan-ma...

The first business of the first modern police forces in the US were catching runaway slaves in the south and crushing strikes in the north.

Calling something a "union" doesn't make it socialist, not even close. Did you really need me to hold your hand with that?

On what planet are police so-called "socialist"? I suspect this is the brainwashing I was referring to. This kind of nonsense is extremely unique to the United States.

The issue with placing that in the DA's office is they work closely with police on basically all their other cases so they have an incentive to not antagonize the police by actually holding them accountable. The ideal situation is a separate body just charged with dealing with police misconduct so they don't have to worry about police torpedoing their day to day case load in retaliation.

That’s a feature not a bug. Just because they work with the DA doesn’t mean they should be all buddy-buddy.

With qualified immunity the only people allowed to enforce that are prosecutors, but they often can't afford to jeopardize their relationship with police. Federal prosecutors are further removed from local cops and have better incentives on that front, but they often run into issues around jurisdiction.

The point of repealing qualified immunity is to let the victims sue as a means of enforcing checks on police.

That lets criminals use the legal system as a DDOS attack on the police. I'm not sure that's a desirable outcome.

Not really. The courts should toss any frivolous claims fairly quickly. If it is still an issue, then perhaps we need wider ranging changes to the legal system as any abuse that could happen with these cases surely happen in other areas of the law too.

Why couldn't the judge?'

Just do things the normal way...and the sentence is announced... oh, you're a cop, and were on duty. Multiply any sentence/fine/community service by 1.5.

The key, as I see it, is less about what the number is, or the details, but that's something very black and white. I'm normally really not a fan of "zero tolerance" type rules but I think this is a case where it makes sense.

Since we ( hopefully ) do not have an army of cops to arrest set up independent specialized task force just for that.

In today's political climate (including the current Supreme Court which is pretty strongly political), the most likely answer is local jurisdictions who have been paying out millions in civil penalties for this behavior. They won't be able to enforce criminal liability, but they could start making changes to training, use of force policies, hiring, etc. If the jurisdictions start taking out insurance to pay these claims, then the insurance companies will probably start mandating changes as well.

I have no issue with your post, but what a ridiculous situation we find ourselves in. We can't get rid of bad apples because of police unions and the relationship between prosecutors and police. It's not politically viable for politicians to enforce standards for police. So, instead, we have to hire a for-profit intermediary to come up with profit-centered reasons to enforce these standards. Yikes.

> who is going to enforce that?

That's exactly why the penalties should be greater. The deterrence factor is a function of both the size of the penalty and the chance of being caught & prosecuted. If the chance of being caught and prosecuted is lower, then the penalty has to be higher for it to have a similar deterrence effect.

A few ideas I like:

- Make police get individual insurance, similarly to doctors. Malpractice should have a monetary impact that doesn't hurt the taxpayer.

- A mirror to the DA, exclusively for prosecuting crimes committed by police. Remove the conflict of interest with the current DA system.

- Make police have some form of practitioners license, and have a board that can revoke it, similarly to the BAR association.

- Mandatory N years of desk duty after being involved in a fatal shooting (regardless of justification)

Isn't this what Internal Affairs are for?

Why would anyone become a Police if they were going to face increased penalties? How does that incentivize people to be Police?

To avoid increased penalties, they just need to not commit crimes. That shouldn't present a problem at all. They have a great deal of expertise in the practical applications of the law and thus should be really well-equipped to follow it.

What is the argument to hold them to a higher standard when they are off duty?

As a class, police officers are expected to be highly knowledgeable of the law and have been trained in both hand-to-hand combat and conflict de-escalation. Off duty police officers should know when they're doing something illegal, they should be ready to stop a volatile situation from coming to blows, and they are at an unfair advantage in a fight vis-a-vis the average civilian and should thus be slower to resort to violence.

> How does that incentivize people to be Police?

Why should we incentivize people to be "Police" where "police" implies a free license to abuse civilians? In fact, people who are deterred by an abuse license repeal are probably the right people to deter from service jobs like policing.

Your analogy is flawed. If someone is a board/director in a company they have additional scrutiny. Why would they ever take that job?

The question should be, would otherwise great people NOT join the force if such a control isn't in place?

Also, without controls - you attract exactly the wrong people (power-hungry bullies).

The question as phrased assumes that the primary incentive for joining the police is impunity for casual lawlessness. That's dystopian.

You could also ask the same question of skilled martial artists and armed forces veterans. Both classes can face higher penalties, but that doesn't deter people from becoming Army Rangers or karate black belts.

It should incentivize them to act with a high degree of professionalism and regard for the law. What’s the point of granting them extraordinary powers over life and liberty if they’re not held to a higher, not lower, standard?

People who work for a broker or market making bank are heavily scrutinized and they, their family, and to some degree associates (room mates, etc) are restricted in their basic conduct - political activity, investing, etc, and face increased penalties for financial crimes vs the average person. It’s telling we hold our money handlers to a higher standard than the armed representatives of the government with extraordinary rights to deprive people of their liberty and life. Money is more important than our freedom and safety?

On recruiting officers by making the job come with the perks of immunity for criminal behavior, seems like we should find another strategy. If you can’t identify yourself as the police before you beat someone half to death, maybe you’re not qualified to be a law enforcement officer? Maybe we should be glad they wouldn’t take the job if it came with reasonable protections for the people they’re supposed to be protecting?

Seriously, most professional careers come with obligation of avoiding even the appearance of impropriety.

Qualified immunity is a civil doctrine. It has nothing to do with criminal law.

More importantly it’s not a law at all. It’s as you say a doctrine established by the courts. If congress wanted to improve civil protections from the police, they would clarify the law and end qualified immunity as a doctrine. It’s absurd this stems from the courts.

As a friendly reminder, the legislature crafts the laws while the courts judge if they are followed or not.

There is a definite place for the legislature to step in and be clear here.

"while the courts judge if they are followed or not."

Or in the case of qualified immunity, create it out of thin air.

It's not created out of thin air. There is a lot of reasoning and background on it. Whether I agree with it or like it is entirely different.

Is there a law granting this power? No. It was created by the court.

I can reason about something all I want, but it doesn't make it the law.

To be clear, qualified immunity is entirely a judicial branch legal principle, and not a law that was passed by the legislative branch.

If laws are created in this space than the judicial legal principle MUST to be reworked/updated/changed to accommodate it. The law is a higher priority.

There IS a law (Section 1983), which stood whole for almost a century, before the Supreme Court largely gutted by inventing this legal principal out of thin air.

In most states, CDL holders receive harsher punishments for traffic violations because they are licensed, trained, and should know better. In some states, they are even treated more strictly in their personal vehicles for the same reason. Truck drivers can lose their job because they were speeding in their free time. LEOs really don't like it when you point out the discrepancy between this logic and how they are treated.

I called the police on the police for reckless driving in Canada and they were pulled over promptly. RCMP really doesn't like it when their reputation is soiled by 'the locals'. Best police force I've interacted with across all countries where I've visited and lived combined. It only happened once but it really made me feel that 'the system works' when those that uphold the law are not above the law.

I'm reminded of a situation some years ago when a Florida Highway Patrol officer pulled over a Miami police officer for speeding in Florida. The Miami officer was fired, but FHP officer was harassed by other police officers.

https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/miami-police-fire-cop-pul...

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/fl-sb-jane-watts-...

A good way to implement this would be to have payouts from lawsuits come out of their pensions instead of from taxpayers.

I’m not sure that works. I’m tact, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.

The situation you have to avoid is when higher ups ALSO want to sweep something under the rug to make their own numbers look better.

There has to be some sort of teeth for those who hire, train, and manage bad cops.

> Why the FUCK are we protecting these criminals? Why do we want this as a society?

The police are the foot soldiers of the ruling class. Insofar as the police may serve certain interests of working people, the aggregate sum of the police's influence on our society serves to protect the interests of the rich, which are usually at odds with the interests of working people.

They are not.

The criminals who do this like doing this and get protection from them.

>The police are the foot soldiers of the ruling class.

While they will certainly side with the "rulers" over anyone else when there is a conflict on the day to day the are also the foot soldiers of you the hypothetical average HNer reading this comment.

The people with real power DGAF about the sort of petty "annoyance or minor risk to the public" behavior that the police spend the bulk of their time enforcing.

You think Musk is worried about fentanyl in his weed?

You think Gates cares if you are drunk and disorderly alcohol in public?

You think the Kochs give a crap about some kid doing a burnout at a stop light?

You think Murdoch cares whether some restaurant is staying open in defiance of a health department?

Of course not. They're above that kind of stuff. Ditto for any list of powerful politicians you feel like coming up with.

When the police initiate an interaction they are almost always doing it to enforcing the laws that you the average "well enough paid to give a crap about issues not related to your economic survival in the short/medium term" American want them to enforce (revenue policing notwithstanding).

I’d rather not arrest people for marijuana possession, but owners of private prisons and the alcohol lobbies sure as hell would like that

Incorrect. As we are seeing all over the country, the "ruling class" has been voting to reduce policing--because what the f--k do they care? They have private security, or live in exclusive enclaves. The bulwark of support for the police is middle class parents and property owners. They're the people who, unlike the wealthy, can't rely on private security and geographic barriers to protect themselves from criminals.

Look at who voted for Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa in New York City, who both ran on a pro-police platform.

This is cable news poisoning. In reality, reduction in policing (or "defunding") has no support in either party --- for a poignant example, look at Brandon Johnson's runoff race against Paul Vallas for Chicago mayor, where he's frantically distancing himself from 2020 rhetoric. There are activists pursuing defunding, and even abolition, and to a first approximation none of them live in enclaves or gated communities with private security; defund activists universally live in dense urban areas.

100% wrong. Those votes were to reduce public policing, in favor of private policing. In other words, it was members of the ruling class voting to drop the facade altogether and abandon any remaining semblance of a police that serves the public.

You're wrong and you aren't supporting your argument.

Those votes were to reduce public policing, in favor of private policing. That is nothing new, and it is in no way a reduction of police. This was simply members of the ruling class voting to drop the facade altogether and abandon any remaining semblance of a police that serves the public. Again, nothing new. The ruling class does have to maintain its own legitimacy. That's all you're describing.

If you want to rein in behavior of police officers, then (a) don't allow offenses to be time-barred against retirement, and (b) pay victims out of their pension funds.

I think you'll find that this entire "protect the blue" bullshit that cops have to cover for each other will go out the window when their material interests are in jeopardy.

You don't need to make complicated special rules for going after police. You just need to remove some of the existing special rules that protect them.

If you can sue a doctor for malpractice you should be able to sue a police officer too.

I don’t think (b) will work. The Dallas police pension fund is currently $3b in the red, how will they pay anything?

Presumably "in the red" here means it's underfunded with respect to meeting existing pension obligations, not that the fund has a literal negative balance. If I'm wrong then please disregard the second part of this comment.

The idea is collective punishment. Settlements would make the pension fund deeper in the red, meaning cops wouldn't get their promised pensions due to the actions of the abusive cops who caused the settlement payouts.

The hope is that the threat of losing your retirement security because your coworker fucks up is enough to break the thin blue line and cause cops to police themselves.

Because the people who support them think:

1) It will never happen to them.

2) The victim "must" have done some thing wrong.

> Even if they brutally beat a criminal, they are going far beyond incompetence.

It is actually worse than that. The police cannot be the judge, jury and executor. The Judge Dredd is an anti-hero for a reason.

It's double-worse-than-that, because all these dudes loooove The Punisher and like to post his logo on everything, which is a solid, full step worse than them thinking they're Judge Dredd. It's as if they don't understand the core point of their job. See that great season 3 scene from The Wire with the older officer telling the younger one what police work used to be like before the drug war—far less adversarial, a lot more about building ties with the community. "You call something a war, you're gonna get soldiers", I think one line goes.

We shouldn't be, but the majority of this Supreme Court does in fact want this, yes. They have been systematically expanding qualified immunity over the last few years

Maybe it's the tone of this comment that is rubbing people the wrong way but its basic content is correct. Since the major court rulings of the mid-century which created our modern concept of protection for the accused, there has been a slow and consistent chipping away at those rulings. Various forms of immunity being expanded little by little in case after case is a big part of that.

You are correct, and this Supreme Court in particular has made large changes to the concept, furthering the degree to which qualified immunity can be applied, and have done so in a time when there is a large, popular pushback to the concept. :)

Because qualified imunity and seizure of property worked so well for other areas of the planet like africa and the old robber empires of europe.

> Why the FUCK are we protecting these criminals? Why do we want this as a society?

The system (or a corrupt one) will encourage these kind of policeman and provide them with coverage (whether immunity or else). These guys will come in handy when you need them for a dirty job.

Giving anyone qualified immunity is a bad idea, giving it to cops is just a part of it.

They are doing their job, this is their job. The mistake here was who they did it to not what they did.

> Why do we want this as a society?

This is a very very good question to spend some time with. Understand just how routine this sort of activity is for police, understand that it is not a mistake or anomaly. Why do we want this? It's an interesting question.

It’s their job to beat people senseless?

Kind of. It was pretty much the job of the proto-police forces which naturally became our modern police forces. The development of policing in America is much more crude and ad-hoc than people would like to admit. I don't think modern police generally join the force with this spirit but there's a root of violent lackiness that has maybe never been fully exercised from the system.

Police should enforce the law, they are not in the retribution business.

Tasers and chemical agents aren't as effective as they'd like, and guns are a bit too permanent (though that doesn't always stop them). The truncheon is a long-standing symbol of police for a reason.

> The case started in 2014. James, then a college student, was walking between two summer jobs in Grand Rapids, Michigan, when two men stopped him, demanded his name, and took his wallet. Thinking he was being mugged, James ran. But the men caught him, beat him to the point that his face was unrecognizable, and choked him unconscious. James only later discovered that the men were members of a police task force—one an FBI agent and the other a local detective. The officers never identified themselves as law enforcement to James, and bystanders who witnessed the beating were equally in the dark, calling 911 to report what they believed to be an attempted murder in broad daylight. Uniformed officers arrived, and, even though it was clear James was not the wanted suspect, arrested James, transported him to the hospital, and handcuffed him to his bed.

> They are doing their job, this is their job.

Maybe elaborate on that a little I'm not sure I understand. How exactly is what they did their job?

I think you misunderstand giraffe_lady's point. She's saying that beating up on random people is actually the job of the police - not the job we think they have, not the job they have morally or legally, but given the system and society we have, that's their actual job. And the question is, why do we as a society want our police to do that?

I'm not sure that I agree with her point. But that's what I think she's saying.

> She's saying that beating up on random people is actually the job of the police

I mean it's obviously not literally that. Is it the outcome of something that is the police's job? Maybe but then what would that be?

Maybe they were just trying to score some internet points by being a troll, I don't get it.

The point I was making is similar to "the purpose of a system is what it does."

Regardless of or alongside what we say the police do, or what they claim to do, they also beat the shit out of people a lot. We don't prevent them from doing this, or usually impose consequences for them doing it, we don't even seem to generally mind that they do it. We continue to pay them.

So, the job of the police is what they do, and a significant portion of what they do is beating the shit out of people. That makes it their job in a limited but still useful and very real way.

>"this is their job."

To beat the living shit out of people? I doubt it.

Well we pay them to do it, don't stop them from doing it, and almost never impose consequences for doing it. In a real practical way I think that makes it their job.

"we" do not pay them for doing it. Government does and is not asking us. We are just a cowards that do not have enough guts to protect our rights or hoping that as long as it is not me it is fine.

The mistake you are making is to think that beating people up is part of their job description at all. They're supposed to either arrest people or stop them from fleeing, beyond that any violence is utterly off limits.

Any LE officer that 'beats people up' deserves to have the book thrown at them. With some extra penalty because of the abuse of their badge.

No the mistake you've made is thinking that their job is defined or limited by the job description. What police do is violence, and it's not off limits at all because they almost never face consequences for the violence they do.

So regardless of what we say the police should be, or the standard we say they should be held to, in practice they beat up who they want and we let them. We keep paying them to do it and don't stop them from doing it, that makes it their job in a very real way.

>Are we really okay with allowing fucking cops to ruthlessly beat people for no reason and think that's just part of their job?

I mean, the truth is a lot of us are. If James King had been black, this wouldn't even be news.

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