Small business owners say they're pressured to hire off-duty cops for security
minnesotareformer.com
minnesotareformer.com
Before you add 'Why don't [you|they] do...' responses, recognize for a moment that the police in the U.S. are largely out of control, have undue control of local government and politics, and have an ideology that enforces self-righteousness and an 'enemy at the gates' siege mentality, and oh yeah, are able to apply violence at a level unmatched in society. These are not polite people, and the way one 'deals' with them has far more in common with radical militias rather than state bureaucrats. If you haven't encountered that, you're just lucky enough to have never threatened their interests.
But if you're a police officer? You get an exemption! Apparently, the state has no regard for your safety as a consumer, and allows you to buy whatever you want...
Although there are other laws that do illustrate what you are saying.
In addition, retired police officers often can keep their uniforms and work privately in an official capacity.
One of the main reasons for this is because mobile phones keep getting more expensive, and high school kids frequently steal other high school kids' phones. The limit keeps getting raised so that 18 year olds don't end up with felonies on their record.
Now, some facts:
In North Carolina at least, the Council-Manager form of government provides that the police chief is hired/fired by the city manager-- who is hired/fired by and reports directly to the city council. Depending on the city's charter, the manager may hire/fire the police chief with or without approval of the council.
Apparently there are a few city councils who have a charter that requires the police chief to be hired/fired directly by the city council.
This council-manager form is by far the most popular form of city government in NC. IIRC, there are only two other forms allowed by state law-- one is a city council without a professional manager (only an administrator with the elected council making all the important decisions), and one other one which I can't remember atm.
So on the local level, local sheriffs are hired/fired by the local government-- either directly, or by a professional manager who reports directly to the council.
County sheriffs are elected in NC. But the day to day goings on in a municipality-- i.e., any politics related to businesses hiring 'rent-a-cops'-- would be handled by local police officers. (Outside of perhaps one or two counties out of a 100, and unincorporated towns.)
Apparently, the council-manager form of government comes from a template for local governments that is used by many other states in the U.S. The only way I can think of that NC is special is that there are no county roads-- only state and town (which, again, puts citizens in contact with local police way more often than county police).
In conclusion, the very popular form of council-manager government is counter to your claim that local police have "undue control over local government and politics."
> These are not polite people, and the way one 'deals' with them has far more in common with radical militias rather than state bureaucrats. If you haven't encountered that, you're just lucky enough to have never threatened their interests.
I don't have the stats on radical militias. But I'd wager at least two orders of magnitude lower chance of being killed for threatening retaliation to a police officer in the U.S. than for threatening retaliation to a member of a radical militia.
Edit: threatening retaliation, as in their job/livelihood, to fit with your general statement "threaten their interests."
https://www.propublica.org/article/homicide-detective-st-lou...
> Eventually, another officer helped schedule off-duty work: Derek Chauvin. He worked security at her club for 17 years.
> ...
> She sold the club in 2019. When Santamaria saw Chauvin pinning George Floyd on the pavement in the video that shocked the world, she recognized both, because Floyd worked as a bouncer inside the club in 2019.
That is an interesting connection. I didn't know that they worked together.
(Racism still plays a big part in the Floyd story even if this is true -- Chauvin presumably thought he could get away with it, and his fellow officers mostly didn't try to stop him.)
That said, it's certainly possible he simply wanted to be a dick to Floyd, possibly just for incredibly petty personal reasons, or something like that.
From what I understand he was convicted for second degree murder, specifically "unintentional second-degree murder while attempting to commit felony assault". So he may not have intended for George Floyd to die, but he did intentionally assault George Floyd who died as a result. So that's not intentional premeditated murder, but it's nevertheless a form of murder.
(He was also simultaneously convicted for third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter, but not first-degree murder.)
What makes you think that?
I see I'm getting downvoted here by the typical good dogs, but this has always bothered me about the incident. The racism was presented to us by the media with no explanation, and most people just took it to be fact. No curiosity, no convincing required. I've asked several people, nobody is able to make a case that's even remotely compelling, similar to how you failed to do it here.
Surprising. It came out fairly shortly after the incident that they were at least known to one another on some level through that security job.
This is more simply explained by the fact that Chauvin was in fact killing him.
Broadly, the US needs to eliminate corruption. There are many broken feedback loops right now from the grand (lobbying and campaign finance) to the minuscule (niche price fixing, bribery, police-ran protection rackets), all compounding unfavorably, all seemingly booming. It's astonishing the degree to which the public tolerates such forms of ineptitude and subversion – it has a direct impact on everyone's bottom line.
"In early August 1975, the SFPD went on strike over a pay dispute, violating a California law prohibiting police from striking. The city quickly obtained a court order declaring the strike illegal and enjoining the SFPD back to work. The court messenger delivering the order was met with violence and the SFPD continued to strike...
The ACLU obtained a court order prohibiting strikers from carrying their service revolvers. Again, the SFPD ignored the court order. On August 20, a bomb detonated at the Mayor's home with a sign reading "Don't Threaten Us" left on his lawn. On August 21, Mayor Alioto advised the San Francisco Board of Supervisors that they should concede to the strikers' demands."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_San_Francisco_P...
> The Patrolmen's Benevolent Association Riot, also known as the City Hall Riot, was a rally organized and sponsored by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association of the City of New York (PBA) held on September 16, 1992, to protest mayor David Dinkins' proposal to create a civilian agency to investigate police misconduct. Approximately 4,000 NYPD officers took part in a protest that included blocking traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge and jumping over police barricades in an attempt to rush City Hall. Rioters were observed to be openly drinking, damaging cars, and physically attacking journalists from the New York Times on the scene. Rioters also chanted racial epithets towards the African-American Mayor Dinkins. The nearly 300 uniformed on-duty officers did little to control the riot.
Inflamed in part by Rudy Guliani.
What do you do if your enforcement apparatus does not follow the laws they’re meant to enforce? You’re kind of required to treat them as rebels…
Did they have the majority in the senate, does the the senate leader decide the rules?
When police arrived much later the perp actually showed back up down the street and I pointed him out. It was a struggle to get them to go see who he was and investigate, even though I had photo and video evidence of the crime.
Later that night, that same guy broke into another neighbor's house and they came in much hotter, with shotguns to clear the house and they were able to arrest him not far down the street.
The George Floyd protests were huge. I don't think it's a simple matter of the public being too complacent.
I'd say that insofar as the protests were unsuccessful, it's because their energy wasn't being directed strategically. There was so much discussion of "defunding the police" without anyone offering a clear, compelling alternative approach to public safety and deterring crime.
From a systems-level perspective, telling everyone that police officers are jerks seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nice people place a high priority on being well-regarded by others; jerks enjoy opportunities to abuse their power. The "ACAB" slogan exacerbates the problem it describes.
One question I wonder about is whether jurisdictions where the chief of police is elected tend to function better than jurisdictions where they're appointed by the mayor. There are so many dimensions along which mayoral performance can be evaluated, and public safety is just one of those. By squeezing all the dimensions into a single vote, we're limiting the amount of signal that voters can send to their government.
I don't think policing inherently needs to be a malicious activity. My impression is that police quality is higher in Europe than the US for instance, and that police quality changes depending on which US municipality you look at. One wild idea I sometimes dream about: Imagine if each city had multiple competing police departments, and every cop wore the logo of the department they worked for prominently on their shoulder. Then for each local election, voters vote for one or more logos, and police work + funding gets distributed to the competing departments accordingly. Every time you call to report a crime, it gets assigned semi-randomly to one of the departments, and you're told which department got the assignment. Basically, make police brutality and police corruption into a customer satisfaction issue. The very best police chiefs could make millions of dollars starting police companies which effectively served and protected cities across America.
Yeah, I know HN dislikes capitalism. But it's interesting that policing as an industry has very little capitalist competition -- it's entirely organized by the government -- and yet no one seems satisfied with it. I'd argue capitalist competition can work great if companies are competing to succeed at the correct metric. Alleged failures of capitalism often strike me as failures of the competition metric rather than failures of capitalism per se.
A minor gripe: asking protesters of a utterly shitty, but long standing, complex and entranched situation, to come up clear, simple and compelling alternatives is generally unfair.
In particular the political process should work in reverse: people voice issues, and their governing bodies come up with viable solutions. That's their job.
> police quality is higher in Europe
It can be utterly shitty too. The difference could be that they're not armed with military grade material and protestors aren't willing to let things slide, even as pretty gruesome confrontations happen (people killed, losing eyes, limbs etc.)
I get what you mean but the governing bodies of the people are the people. In a democracy, we are in charge of our own institutions, at least in theory.
I agree that we can't lay the full burden for solving injustice on the people affected by that injustice, and I think finding solutions for injustice is something that everyone should take part in, and there is a particular responsibility for those with the most amount of power to act. But often the people most affected by injustice are the ones who can see the flaws in the existing system best, and who have the best ideas as to where a solution might come from.
My impression is that that’s because in Europe it’s a skilled job that requires a degree. In the US it’s where everyone that can’t get another job goes.
Probably the reason policing is sub optimal is due to the fact that it is funded by the city, so more prosperous areas can pay more, and recruit the best cops, while the areas with less income often can't pay as well, (or enough to offset the risks).
Compare this to schooling, where it's largely funded through the county, so the county often pays less in the nicer areas, knowing the job is easier.
https://www.marincountyda.org/local-links
https://www.marincounty.org/residents/community/school-distr...
Really appreciate the words of encouragement here!
If you want to encourage me further, you should give details about the flaws and challenge me to address them :-)
Most school funding comes through property taxes - it’s a nice way to avoid saying “we’re funding schools in poorer areas using fewer resources” while saying absolutely that.
When Floyd died paris pd changed policies and the police broke the law in order to protest. Lets not look at Europe through rose colored glasses. This can be quite hard to do on HN, because you are often silenced.
This really just betrays that you were not paying attention beyond the tagline.
Multiple cities have already implemented trial programs to replace police services with mental health and EMT professionals to wild success.
Denver has the STAR program [0] and I'm aware of a similar program in New Orleans and I'm sure other cities.
I simply don't think anyone who gets upset at the "defund the police" over the pithy tagline is arguing in good faith.
> Alleged failures of capitalism often strike me as failures of the competition metric rather than failures of capitalism per se.
Proponents of capitalism seem to have never encountered Goodhart's law. [1]
[0] https://www.denvergov.org/Government/Agencies-Departments-Of...
That's chill, but it doesn't seem nearly as radical as the "abolish the police" slogan? What fraction of police calls have been replaced with mental health/EMT calls in these cities?
Suppose someone is suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill -- does Denver now call a mental health or EMT professional for that person?
>Proponents of capitalism seem to have never encountered Goodhart's law. [1]
The severity of Goodhart's law depends on the mismatch between what you want and how you measure it. If you're able to measure what you want very accurately, Goodhart's law is not as much of an issue.
Goodhart's law doesn't just apply to capitalism, it applies in many social domains -- including the political domain. The grandparent comment states:
>There are many broken feedback loops right now from the grand (lobbying and campaign finance) to the minuscule (niche price fixing, bribery, police-ran protection rackets), all compounding unfavorably, all seemingly booming.
Lobbying, campaign finance, price fixing, bribery, and police-ran protection rackets only relate to free-enterprise competition in the vaguest possible sense ("they all involve money").
I brought up the logo police idea for discussion because I think it's possible that it could align feedback loops better than the status quo. I invite you and everyone else to shoot holes in the idea, and guess how specifically it could fail. It could be that it fails in predictable ways, yet is still an improvement on the status quo.
One of my hot takes is that it's good to rotate your metric on a regular basis, in order to flush out actors who are purely optimizing for the current metric and nothing else.
Unfortunately, any beneficiary of the status quo has a strong incentive to maintain it even if it's flawed, and random members of society only have a weak incentive to fix it. That creates friction that prevents rotating metrics.
From an incentive engineering perspective, this meta problem seems like the highest-leverage thing to solve. If we could fix that public goods problem, we could keep tweaking incentives on a regular basis and hopefully outrun Goodhart's Law faster and better than we are currently able to do.
I wonder if mechanisms for solving public goods problems, like dominant assurance contracts, could be helpful here.
Ultimately standard left/right debates sound pretty tired to my ears. In an ideal world, "incentive engineering" would be just as rich of a discussion as "software engineering" is today. The current situation is like if every HN post about software engineering was either an argument for why static typing sucks, or an argument for why static typing rocks. There's a much bigger world out there people. The heroes vs villains frame that people want to apply to every problem is often an impoverished one, IMO.
Edit: not sure why the downvotes here. If you’re a small business owner you are trying to get through your day and your day gets a lot longer if you piss off casually corrupt city officials who can shut your business down by slow walking needed paperwork. This is a group that happily added 200% to your operating costs via ransoming your business license for a thinly disguised bribe. You think they won’t retaliate if you put them on the spot publicly?
So yes, they can retaliate against your friend. And your friend can retaliate against them and the difference is that their retaliation will cost your friend a few hours and a few hundred bucks, but your friend's retaliation will put them behind bars and destroy their careers and probably imperil their pensions.
So if your story is true, contact the DOJ.
Couple months after that started, the guy's house burned down. I heard the trucks came out twice, the second time there were more people responding and the police got into the guy's barn with a major weed grow. Not sure what the whole story was but the VFD moved and became a different entity after that.
The moral is that neighbors enforce the character of the neighborhood. Not cops.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/fires-set-by-firefigh...
I personally know someone whose lawyer asked him for a large sum in cash in the 7 minutes before a trial, in the antichamber of the court.
https://www.nwcg.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pms412...
(I also know that forensic fire investigation for house fires/criminal investigations is basically a made up art with extremely unreliable results - not sure how much that overlaps with wildfire investigations).
I count a total of 14 traits that they looked at[1]. Why is that one, and only that one, significant in your opinion?
[1] Including the trait of being white. And male.
Note that in this strategy, if someone's house catches fire, that's bad for the fire department, and on top of that it looks like they just committed a crime. The fire department is in the business of threatening people until they pay for a service that the fire department hopes it will never need to provide.
Crassus' strategy is completely different; he operates an actual fire department whose services are not available to other people. If your house catches fire, he'll buy it from you.
Theoretically, Crassus could benefit from arson too, but he really doesn't need it.
Crassus is in the business of buying things that have very little value to the seller (who has no way of extinguishing fires) but have a much higher value to him (because he does have a way of extinguishing fires). Unsurprisingly, this is very profitable for Crassus. But what's the similarity?
I puzzled and annoyed them by confessing poverty, but offering to volunteer skilled labor. Apparently the firehouse didn't need wiring or network or anything :)
If so, I agree that vigilante justice is one underappreciated ways that social norms are enforced.
I'm positive that corruption like GP described is able to coexist with scenarios like yours where everything's above board, but given you are hiring the off-duty police voluntarily, you haven't established that there wouldn't be repercussions for not doing so.
I suppose that’s how they continue to get away with it. We’re all hoping someone else falls on their sword.
extortion is unrelated of the exact words used but the intend
that clever phrasing can make you avoid extortion charges or similar is a common misbelive
if a cop gets away with a clear extortionist behavior it's because the prosecutor lets them and uses formulation as a shallow excuse not because clever formulations protect you from the law
This is a good tactic in many other situations as well.
What is worse, many states seem to allow them to wear both their uniform and retain their police powers, whilst being paid in a private capacity.
Which other countries allow this?
Cities legally requiring people to hire moonlighting cops IS the problem.
For example, in the UK the Police are technically servants of the crown, and are prohibited from industrial action / striking - this means there are different from a regular job.
Do you feel members of the military should be allowed to have weekend jobs, particularly roles that benefit from their main job.. such as being a mercenary?
Comparably, I would be shocked in an SEC official would be allowed to have a 'side-gig' working in finance. Same as there are conventions on the business interests that US presidents are allowed to have.
Workers aren't slaves, but police are closer to slave drivers than they are to workers in this model. They do not labor, but are part of the system that coordinates who labors, to what ends, and to whose benefit.
It is one thing, and I think reasonable, say that police can't wear their uniforms when working off duty. It's another thing entirely to say that they can't work at all
The moonlighting cop is still a cop even if off-duty, still has arrest powers and is authorized to use deadly force even while working the second "security" job.
Similarly, I once got a speeding ticket while driving through Kansas, and was instructed by the ticketing officer on how to send a "donation" to the "Sheriff's Benevolent Society" to make it go away without any points on my license...
This is when you express frustration because you already donated to the Policemen's Ball.
If it works out, the officer will respond with something like "What are you talking about, policemen don't have balls"
I always wonder how this is legally allowed. The idea of using taxpayer vehicles, training, equipment, etc. to control traffic while also leveraging the power of the badge to hold authority seems legally questionable, but IANAL.
I know that's how it worked at some events my Dad organised in the 90s. I can't find anything about this on any Police force website, so it might be that it doesn't work like that any more.
As you've said, the contact is with the police force not with the individual officers, who get paid the same as they would for any other duties.
There was a whole court case [1] about when the police could charge for this sort of coverage, which codified the current arrangement that, at football matches, they can charge for the officers in the stadium but not for the ones outside it.
In the UK, while police are allowed to have outside jobs, any outside employment must be approved by the force, and as a matter of policy security work is banned. Similarly, security guards aren't allowed [2] to be special constables (people who work as part-time unpaid police officers).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37912396 [1] https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2013/115.html [2] https://www.met.police.uk/car/careers/met/police-volunteer-r...
Anyone can try to direct traffic, but cops are paid to do it because they get the car and flashing lights (and I assume the ability to ticket/arrest violations) while still collecting side money.
It'd sort of be like me using my company's laptop/servers for side work, I guess.
e: some random source I found -- of course the answer to the question is avoided, other than "it's for the officer's safety" https://www.al.com/on-the-road/2009/12/post_17.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/Velo/comments/us0ciu/cost_to_put_on...
Generally the private entity pays the city, which then pays the cop. In many states private entities can't stop/redirect the flow of traffic legally so they hire off duty cops to do so.
Seems sketchy to me.
It's advantageous for police to be present at large gatherings, from a traffic control point of view it prevents accidents with other members of the public that would cost the municipality even more money to respond to.
Also from a security standpoint as people physically fighting or potentially someone looking to do harm with a weapon would both reflect badly on the community and their events, and also require even more of a response.
So if the event organizer is paying for that security from off duty / reserve officers, the community is getting that extra protection essentially for free, whereas they would have had to pay other officers likely for overtime if it wasn't paid for by the event.
Oh, and I had a detective tell me once (after they'd found the guy who stole my laptop) not to worry because they had ways of making people talk. Shortly afterward I found out that detectives in that precinct had been sticking unloaded shotgun muzzles into suspects' mouths and pulling the trigger. I declined to press charges after I learned that.
of course, similar things happen pretty much everywhere else, but usually not so egregiously.
You were the district attorney at the time this was happening? Why didn't you do more to stop it?
Its actually closer to 20k/year.
Like, dude, that's a protection racket. At that point, you might as well open it up to private organizations and I'll pay on the market for the best one that I like.
The sheer number of off duty "security" was surprising. As was the fact that cops never waited at stop lights. Instead, they'd roll up, flick on their lights for a second, then just roll through and keep driving.
I've never seen anything like it since.
> Eventually, another officer helped schedule off-duty work: Derek Chauvin. He worked security at her club for 17 years.
> …
> “They were gone half the time,” Santamaria said. “They were on my payroll but they were gone.”
>
> She sold the club in 2019. When Santamaria saw Chauvin pinning George Floyd on the pavement in the video that shocked the world, she recognized both, because Floyd worked as a bouncer inside the club in 2019.
>
> El Nuevo Rodeo burned to the ground during the subsequent riots.
Classic, I guess
While I don't know the details of their agreements first hand, I believe they are required by law to be off-duty cops, they are expensive, and have something like a 6 hour minimum.
What I can validate is that they are usually seen chatting with people or sitting in their car rather than doing a single thing to help streamline traffic or in the interest of safety.
Their union props up laws by saying it needs to be someone experienced and couldn’t be a cheaper certified citizen (as it is in many other states) but the net effect is that you get someone who is entitled and complacent.
They are required to do all these jobs that most states don't require them to do. They are extremely expensive, like 10x what a construction worker costs to wave flags on the side of the road. And the police don't even really pretend to do the job most of the time. They are off on the side of the road drinking coffee and playing with a smartphone.
What I have seen is lots of contractors will try to do things on the sly to avoid having to hire the police detail. E.x. a tree cutting crew that is technically going to block the road even briefly. The police detail will cost more than the work crew costs, so the contractor will try to sneak it in, otherwise the customer avoids having the work done completely or can't afford it. Even if the tree cutting takes 15 minutes the property owner would have to pay an entire shift's pay for the police detail.
In the case of the original article though.. rowdy night clubs having to have police on board is no different than police being present in a school a large sports gathering.. it makes sense as those situations can be a powder keg waiting to go off.
This was a few years ago, and when my friend told me about it, I just kept thinking he was talking about The Sopranos. But he wasn't; he was talking about the real-life police.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-26/apple-sec...
I can't imagine what would happen if cops tried a protection racket here...
1. In general, it doesn't sound like the police were the ones forcing the bars to hire police; that was the city. Maybe there was some backroom deal happening where the police were paying off city officials to create that mandate, but if so the article doesn't allege it. As others have pointed out, there are valid (though debatable) reasons for why a city might want to force bars and public events to hire private security, and even some valid (but more questionable) reasons why they might want that security to be cops or former cops.
2. But then there's the racism angle, with the woman in the article claiming that the only reason her business was required by the city to hire private security was because "they’re racist and we’re Mexican". If it's true that's the reason her business was targeted then yes that's a problem that definitely needs to be dealt with; probably through a civil lawsuit and some serious public shaming. Though I'll note that would be the city's fault; not the police.
3. The article also makes a separate claim "some small business owners — particularly those owned by immigrants — have been led to believe they must hire MPD officers, or risk getting ghosted by police", which if true would be an actual protection racket that the feds should bring the hammer down hard on, though there doesn't seem to be any compelling evidence of that as of yet (as least, not as described in the article); just rumors and allegations so far.
4. And then there's the issue of some of the officers hired being really expensive and not good workers. IMO that's only an issue if the claims about a protection racket are true. Otherwise you could just fire the people who are being lazy and hire someone else, same as any other business. It might also be a good argument for why the city shouldn't be requiring officers in particular to be the ones hired (much more limited hiring pool).
5. Then there's the tax evasion issue, with some officers insisting on being paid in cash. That's the least important part of this in my opinion. Let the IRS deal with it if that's actually what's happening.
(I don't know why I wasted so much time writing this summary, but now that I have I might as well post it... hopefully some find it helpful.)
The bigger call out is that people who are trying to vest more power in the federal government should look at stories like this and realize that it's a bad idea.
I think I can maybe reverse engineer the meaning of two of those, but really you should use acronyms in full on first use.
xPD is often how Americans refer to the police departments, so possibly that with “A” being a city or state or similar. ATX I can now assume is referring to the same “A” in APD, leaving “TX”, so I assume Austin, Texas and Austin Police Department? It shouldn’t take this much effort and international geographic knowledge to read your comment! (And I’m still don’t really grok it, wtf is a PMC?)
I didn’t know what a full plate carrier was either, but I could at least Google that one ;)
You're right that ATX == Austin, Texas and APD == Austin police department.
It's a valid response to say the board should not have had this much power, but the point is that it isn't necessarily a racket.
Though as others have pointed out, bouncers have been a thing forever, so maybe I'm off base here...
They are experimenting with putting police stations INSIDE the store, now.
https://www.grocerydive.com/news/Atlanta-Walmart-reopen-stor...
https://fortune.com/2023/09/08/walmart-cuts-starting-wage-ne...
In my experience both groups are full of pretty similar young men, which makes questions like yours pretty obviously loaded; why are you expecting one to be measurably different?
Isn't that in many countries forbidden due to the high likelihood that this leads corruption and interest conflicts?
I'm not saying they're angels, but I've never had a problem with The Angels as security: everybody knows 'don't mess', and things are good.
I've seen a few mild beatings, but considerably less that the same fone by 'regular' bouncers down town (though they're getting better....must be all the cameras).
Not trivial, considering a substantial percentage of elected officials are dead-set against allowing the DOJ to actually fight this kind of thing. They only approve of law and order when the law and/or order is pointed at very specific types of criminals or protests.
Porbably why the police unions are so staunchly supported by conservatives, because in the city the police's primary job is to protect affluents and their property values from the "ghetto".
So the likelihood of some DOJ reformation is slim. The dems in power won't rock that boat (the local governments are usually democratic) and the reps won't because of the real purpose of city police as described.
Hoover's DOJ?
I wish I could believe that your comment was ironic. If it is, then touche, you got me. It's really good.
Root Cause: Examining the way the world is, rather than how it should be, as per the parent comment's point.
If there is a "how it should be" when it comes to the DOJ, which seems very doubtful, there exist no humans on planet Earth who could implement it. Even more so, it would be impossible to know how to implement it without thoroughly and profoundly understanding the various failure modes. In other words, you're even doing the "examining the way the world should be" wrong.
There's no shortage of cops. There's a severe problem of misallocated resources. Their overtime budget alone could take every homeless new yorker off the streets, harden the city to climate change and create humane conditions for the influx of migrants from increasingly destabilized parts of the globe.
You see so many examples of this, just straight parasitical behavior, in at least American society. I don’t think the U.S. is economically where the Soviet Union was when it fell, but it’s rapidly approaching the civic dysfunction and deep corruption. You have to wonder, is this the fall of an empire or something like the corruption of the late 1800s and early 1900s, that created a backlash that corrected it and led to more prosperity? Dunno. We’ll see, if the vultures leave anything behind.
One one hand the law and order is missing and on the other hand the people that make the laws are so divided. The people who should protect lack credibility on one hand and are demonized on the other hand. On one hand we do want to encourage rehabilitation of people who made mistakes and on the other hand some of those make businesses so hard to run. And when we make mistakes, let's say with liberal policies or the conservative side, there is no course correction since it takes elections and then maybe multiple cycles ... we have completely forgotten thr "apologize, fix the mistake and move on" method of working. We say we don't have monopolies but big business has all but killed individual initiative.
I think our fall, if it ever happens, will be magnificent. If it does not, that will be quite crazy too, at least for the bottom of the pyramid.
The former leads to the latter. Despite media (both fictional and non-fictional) largely carrying water for law enforcement, they just can't help but paint themselves in an incredibly unsympathetic, uncharitable light. [1]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/09/13/1199352063/seattle-officer-re... - a bodycam recording[2] of the SPD union VP speaking to the president shortly after an SPD officer ran down a woman using a crosswalk, by doing 74 in a 25 zone, at night, with no sirens. He didn't brake until after he hit her.
[2] Since she was 26, according to our fine boys in blue, her life had 'limited value'. This is what the guild's leadership think of the people they are supposed to 'protect and serve'... When the cameras are rolling.
When you're actually behaving like a demon, is it any surprise that you're demonized[3] for it?
[3] Demonized isn't even the right word. They'll face no consequences, as the SCC is both incapable, and entirely unwilling to reign in these animals.
Lacking that destruction creating a huge market for American business, it's hard to predict what happens if America lets its domestic capitalism go off the rails in terms of service to its people again.
What?
Federal and State governments are the biggest parasites with their armies of useless Admin workers. Incidentally, big Govt is also the main driver of malaise-causing inflation.
Start to starve them, redirect that labor/capital to useful endeavors and watch productivity and consumer confidence skyrocket.
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
The problem in Minneapolis presently is that there are not enough police. There are statutory requirements for numbers that are nowhere being met. For that and perhaps other reasons they are not doing their jobs very effectively to the extent that I feel considerably less safe than I did ten years ago. With numbers and personal experiences to back it up.
* https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/la-is-investigating...
But I think it's a bit more like a crime family or maybe a corrupt political machine than it is like a gang.
If businesses want to hire security, they should. But it shouldn't be a requirement of having a business. It comes off like the boss of the crime family telling you "I just want to get my beak wet". Like they're shaking down the small businesses.
And it's hard to argue that they aren't.
ETA: Please give the pedantry a rest. Of course I know police corruption is criminal. That's not what the people talking about "crime" are talking about.
You understand that protection rackets will 'work' with government officials, right? That this is part of it? And they'll try to codify their existence as much as possible.
And even if it was completely legal, its very obviously bad, and that's why its illegal in the first place and we try to combat such outcomes, which is part of the point of the article.
I don't believe that there's ever been any other kind of cop. Certainly not outside of fiction. By prefixing the adjective "corrupt" though, you're certainly buying into it.
Have you never read the headlines where the entire police union tries to extort the entire city? "If we don't get enough cops on the street, bad things will happen". Hell, even more explicitly in Minneapolis after Floyd. Sometimes in the comments here there are hints of people extorting themselves with stuff like "if we didn't have cops, it'd be chaos!".
The linked shakedown is relatively mild by comparison. That feeling you feel is the same as when the tapeworm hooks its jaw pincers into the inside of your gut. But sure, let's just hope for a more gentle tapeworm.
I am almost certain that qualifies as "crime".
> about corrupt police shaking down small business owners under threat of losing their business license.
would be a crime...
Even if they're willing to pull the trigger, your average 7-Eleven employee is no Navy Seal and won't react well under gunpoint pressure and might end up shooting some innocent bystander or himself.
Just giving guns to everyone is bad idea on so many levels.
I only discovered the distinction recently, when a couple came knocking on my door, asking about my neighbour who'd missed a payment.
Some of the allegations amount to corruption, some just business realities. This is a job for FBI to figure out.
You forgot the asterisk always required when one hears the phrase "shortage of workers*" --> "shortage of workers for the wage being offered."
> Here’s how the off-duty work program works: Some businesses — like large nightclubs — are required by the city to have security, which until 2020, sometimes had to be off-duty Minneapolis police officers.
Nightclubs often are required to have security beacuse they are a nuisance to the surrounding area and the taxpayer shouldn't be picking up the tab because you decided to overserve your customers. The off duty cop requirement is the only odd part here in my view and that appears to be gone now.
How many night clubs are located in non-urban residential areas? The commercial properties near them would be closed because, you know, they operate during the day and night clubs don't.
> the taxpayer shouldn't be picking up the tab because you decided to overserve your customers
The solution to overserved customers is to not overserve them, not to have off-duty cops or security there to manage them after the fact. This is quite easily remedied by having the cops come by and fine them until they stop doing it. The fines will pay for the enforcement, so the taxpayers will be fine. By paying off-duty cops to manage overserved customers you are making real law enforcement improbable and making the problem worse.
> The off duty cop requirement is the only odd part here
Strange to qualify with 'only' when it is a major point of the piece.
That smells just a little bit like racism to me.