Yeah I'm sure new replacement cops will be awesome at respecting civil rights
Ah and before you answer: most of use who are not in the US live in places where police misconduct is much less of an problem, so obviously it can work better. The entire German police force fires less bullets during their patrols and missions in a year than e.g. the NYC police force alone. Sometimes single cops in the US fire more bullets alone than the entire German police force. This is even hard to compare, because the Germans have numbers for every bullet fired at a person during service, bullets fired for warning shots, bullets that hit, bullets that did not etc. That data is wildly mixed and unreliable in the US depending on the state.
If you want to have a police force you can trust they must not be above the law and the law must be even stricter, the standards even higher for them than for the rest of the population. That means longer and better education and training, knowing the law, but also strict measures when police officers break the rules or there is even just the slightest doubt about their version of events.
In many police departments in the US the problem is essentially that there are so many bad apples that every good apple that comes is spoiled or cannot do good. This can only be changed be decisive action from the top.
How many bad apples does it take, to spoil the whole barrel?
I'm not disagreeing with the comment I'm replying to, just trying to challenge the perception that there's anything ok with "just" a few bad apples. The acceptable number of bad apples is zero.
This is obviously idealistic and impossible in the real world (given the size of a police force). What is needed is a system that gets rid of bad apples with time, instead of letting them thrive and corrupting other apples.
WHAT PUNISHMENT?
And that.. can probably be changed. Qualified immunity would be much harder.
It doesn't just take apples, it takes time. If you remove the bad apple as soon as possible, the rest of the barrel can still be fresh and healthy. If you leave it to rot, you spoil the entire batch.
Where that cutoff percentage is, depends on the single organisation and the individuals within it. But I believe that in this case it is a combination of police culture ("we always did it that way, we need to protect our own") and systemic incentives ("if we hide bad behaviour we look better than if we expose it") are the key to understanding this.
Should we defund and abolish public schools since more than zero teachers are child molesters? Should we defund and abolish fire departments since more than zero firefighters are arsonists?
These are deep rooted issues that are not as easily quantified and discouraged. Reducing gun misuse is one thing, but reducing police discrimination, selective policing, and misconduct is a much larger ball of wax.
And people think that they need those means (which they never had) "back."
Also institutional racism and all the other shit that's true for most police across the world.
ACAB.
The German government decided there doesn't need to be an external investigation into police violence because the police can be trusted to have correctly investigated itself finding that police violence is not a problem.
The NRW state minister of the interior abolished ID badges for riot police, then insisted that there had been no evidence of misconduct during police riots because no individual officers (wearing full helmets and no individually identifying features) had ever been charged despite video evidence of excessive use of force.
Demonstrators hospitalized due to police violence routinely receive police visits in hospital because their injuries are taken as evidence of resisting arrest as all police violence is presumed to be justified.
The NRW police literally used the energy company's transport vehicles to detain and transport arrested demonstrators during the raid on Lützerath, where the police was explicitly instructed to show full force to deter future protests at similar sites.
Police officers were found to be part of a neo-nazi group called Combat18 (18 = Adolf Hitler) that had maintained kill lists using police records and a stash of assault weapons and body bags.
It's a whole thing, yes.
https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/gun-ownership.html
https://www.norc.org/PDFs/GSS%20Reports/GSS_Trends%20in%20Gu...
We can look at statistics from eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g... and compare with statistics on police shootings.
All we can do is try.
The fired cops will just get jobs in other departments. Cops won't be better trained, procedures that lead to this won't be changed. No real change is going to happen.
Firing cops at this point is just theater. It isn't trying, it is honestly just more of the same. It isn't likely that they fire the entire department either, and it will do nothing to take care of the folks that were elected in (sherriff and prosecutor, for example).
>it will do nothing to take care of the folks that were elected in (sherriff and prosecutor, for example).
I won't deny that rot starts at the top, but part of that rot is never firing misbehaving employees. You emphasise training, I emphasise learning, and the only way to learn is not fiddling around with the curriculum, it's not giving cops an extra year of training. What helps people learn is bad cops fucking around and finding out.
You can give people as much training as you want, but if they see other cops getting away with this gang nonsense, they will learn that you can do that and nothing bad will come of it.
- A large percentage of the people are already bad
- Anyone who pushes back against bad behavior is shunned, fired, or left "without backup" in bad situations
- There are no repercussions for bad behavior
- There are positive reinforcements for bad behavior
Eventually, you're either going to be driven out, or you're going to turn. So wiping the place clean and starting from scratch, while drastic (and _certainly not appropriate everywhere) can be a valid approach when the problem is rampant across the entire department.
“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
I will use myself as an example. I absolutely do not want to be a cop despite having a relatively strong moral compass, because I know for a fact that I will agonize over small things and believe most excuses thrown at me. More than that, I do not think taxpayers would want me to be a cop, because I am lenient ( which also why I did not really enjoy having a position of authority in my previous job ). I mostly assume everyone will do what has to be done.
And sadly, that is not nor has ever been the case. Uniform is just a symbol of that power.
Last time I had to call cops was when two drunk people started brawling in a bus. One fell asleep and the second, driven to desperate acts by prolonged homelessness tried to steal his phone. In the end, the victim decided that the best course of action after reclaiming his phone was to kick now lying down thief until satisfied.
I and another passenger have stepped in, restrained the aggressive phone owner. We have gotten 4 of us out of the bus. We told the phone owner repeatedly to verify that his phone is OK, in order for him to realize that no harm has been done. We have talked him down. He was still inclined to (way less fervently) take revenge. I had to choose between getting confrontational and sending him home to sleep it off "or else" and calling the cops. Since the first option would put me at risk of being caught breaking the law, I had to call cops.
Cops came in sirens blazing, 3 cars, acting all high and mighty. "Your IDs" and shit. In the end, the phone owner has not even been told not to kick other people. The homeless person has not been checked by a medical professional. He was drunk, might have had some ribs broken, but none of those 7 "public servants" bothered to check. I asked if they were at least giving him a lift to wherever he was residing. "We are not taxi."
Fucking useless.