Get Out of Jail Cards, 2 | Hacker News Reader

Get Out of Jail Cards, 2

marginalrevolution.com

98 pointsimpish920884 comments

For the most part, police officers need to be replaced with case workers. People who can take records of crimes, provide counseling, and give actual legal advice to people affected. Occasionally we need dudes with guns to bust something up, but very rarely.

Absolutely. Police officers themselves don't want to do this work, but the police as a system would lose power/ resources and thus they fight against any reform.

I have a fun side-gig in entertainment and thus witness constantly the massive amounts of LE officers who are required to be hired at each of these events just sitting around doing nothing.

Ill have you know they arent just "doing nothing". They're browsing tiktok, okay? Very productive.

The reason those requirements exist is because things do happen occasionally and it can get out of hand at large gatherings when it does. And local taxpayers don't like footing the bill for rowdy people from out of town. Something like an NFL stadium can hold the population of a small city, and when you get that many people together, the law of large numbers applies to the probability of something happening. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/redskins/a-quietly-esc...

Most of the ways that things can get out of hand can be handled by a normal security team. For huge events like NFL, it makes sense to have cops at the ready for the extremely unlikely event of a terrorist attack. But there are orders of magnitude more events with far fewer people that do not need unaccountable armed security.

With averages of >10 arrests per ~3 hr event at some of these venues, I'd think it is obvious that someone with arrest powers would need to be there.

Either way, what you are suggesting has been done, and was the standard before many of these requirements were in place. The problems in police staffing that resulted were the reason these requirements originated.

Yeah venues like that should have cops there, but there are a lot of places that are required to have cops but really don't need them.

https://minnesotareformer.com/2023/10/17/small-business-owne...

I'll give you that at large events, but I'm talking 1-10k sized events with 25+ sheriffs deputies and city cops sitting in their cars. It was was negotiated with the city to have so many LE officers there as a condition of the permits. Seems more like a form of tax and compliance. They literally do nothing though. Every event I witness obviously drunk people driving out of there right by the cops with their heads in their phones.

It's my anecdote that I'm trying to make the point with; these - supposedly - highly trained folks with very expensive equipment are being called in to do all kinds of work for which that training and equipment are unnecessary. There is an opportunity for other folks with more directed training and equipment to fill these roles in society.

> I'm talking 1-10k sized events with 25+ sheriffs deputies and city cops sitting in their cars.

That seems pretty out of the ordinary for an event in the US.

Even just letting most police carry under same responsibility as citizens would be big step up. We have constitutional carry here and even with every swinging dick carrying a 9mm under their shirt you can go years without seeing anyone pull one, why the police can't be like that is baffling .

This is largely a problem of creation of qualified immunity caste system IMO.

Police officers should be case workers first and thugs with guns second. If they aren't willing to be that then the whole force should be replaced.

I'm just curious, do you live in a high crime area?

I do. I know a number of people who have been mugged (and I have been accosted myself though escaped without injury or theft). I have never heard a story where a police officer intervened to stop the event. Now of course I'm sure that police presence has stopped many muggings, but it's nearly impossible to blanket any city with enough police to actually stop violent crime from occurring.

> I have never heard a story where a police officer intervened to stop the event.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the police have no duty to protect the public[0]. Worse, in that same decision, they ruled that states cannot impose a duty to protect the public on the police through legislation.

Since this case is about NYPD, it's worth mentioning the case of Lozito vs. NYC. There was a serial killer who went on 28-hour killing spree (four people died in total). The police were dispatched to a subway station in order to catch the suspect. When they arrived, the killer began stabbing Joseph Lozito. Instead of intervening to catch the serial killer that they had been specifically dispatched to apprehend, the police hid in a booth and let him stab Lozito. Lozito managed to disarm and incapacitate the killer, at which point the police decided to emerge from the booth and arrest the killer.

Lozito sued the NYPD. He lost because the SCOTUS ruling created binding precedent that police have no duty to protect the public.

> Now of course I'm sure that police presence has stopped many muggings

This is a common refrain, but research has consistently shown an extremely weak-to-nonexistent correlation between police presence and violent crime.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...

Crimes that happen in my area are, as far as I can tell, exclusively handled after-the-fact. The cops appear and take a report.

I'm sure they occasionally use force to intervene in a crime, but it must be extremely rare versus just showing up with clipboards and a concerned look.

Isn't that what a detective is supposed to be?

Citation needed.

Oh yeah when I call the police because I got assaulted I would love a case worker to come and talk down to me about the sociology of crime. Just what we need!

This is funny to me because someone I'm close to called the cops after an assault and they literally just talked down to her and left. What's been your experience with this?

> This is funny to me because someone I'm close to called the cops after an assault and they literally just talked down to her and left. What's been your experience with this?

Police behavior is highly regional and subjective, with a sprinkling of just plain randomness (bad day? good day? roll the dice, armed and privileged either way!)

Somehow McDonalds is able to make the same burger everywhere in the country but getting cops to act in a way that makes bad situations better with any level of consistency is apparently impossible.

Maybe, just maybe, police work is a little bit more complicated than making the same shitty mushed frozen burger in a kitchen somewhere to be microwaved for 30 seconds and given to me.

They certainly don't have uniform customer service across the country, and that's a much more appropriate comparison IMO.

What exactly do you want them to do when they show up after you’ve been assaulted and they left?

When I was getting my teaching credential, one of the instructors was a VP of some school and a former police officer who changed careers as he realized he was getting jaded and "everyone was a suspect."

He would have friends and acquaintances hand him a ticket and ask if he could "take care of it." He would take the ticket, pay it, and send them the paid receipt. People stopped asking him after that.

Wow, what a sweet person, who also gently expresses boundaries. Seems like an increasingly rare quality these days :)

These certainly aren't new, I remember wanting one as a teenage heavyfoot in the 90s. Here's another not very new take: not everything unions do is positive and aboveboard, they often become corrupt, like every other group with power, and should not be trusted any more than other groups with power.

> ...they often become corrupt...

Unions are what protect significant chunks of the middle class and it's because they're so important that these flagrant abuses must be corrected.

11.3% of US workers were in a union in 2022. Either the middle class is a hell of a lot smaller than I thought, or it's not a terribly significant chunk.

(I am a union member, formerly IBEW local 46, now IAM district 751)

They’ve been shrinking, although recent growth suggests that trend might be reversing, but unions also help non-members. If you work at a non-union job, your compensation will still reflect the need to be competitive with other places which similar unionized positions. Where I live, there are a ton of charter schools but they tend to track the public school district’s union pay scale pretty closely. When they negotiated a pay raise, there were probably an equal number of non-union teachers who benefited within a couple of years.

I don't get how people on both political sides are often split on supporting teachers unions vs police unions. Be consistent! Whatever problems you think the union you don't like has, the other union has similar issues. I say get rid of both of them, bosses don't like unions for a reason and we're supposed to be their bosses.

> Bosses don't like unions for a reason and we're supposed to be their bosses.

Because the "Bosses" in your example want to extract the maximum out of a worker, in exchange for giving them the absolute minimum.

But I don't want to treat our teachers that way. I don't think of them as just another resource I can minmax my way through.

Furthermore, I'm not my teacher's boss. They're not a public servant; they're hired by a school board, or a principal. Those folks are either elected, or hired by someone else.

I can see, I guess, the reasoning that I'm the boss of anyone I can vote for - but that chain doesn't just keep going forever.

Bosses is obviously not a perfect analogy. But the reason we pay for their services is not to create good jobs, it is to get good schools and police departments. We should be focused on getting the best outcomes for our tax dollars. The best outcomes would generally be produced by a happy workforce, so I'm not saying worker needs should be ignored. But taxpayer and employee interests are not perfectly aligned, employees will always be trying to maximize pay and reduce hours. Giving workers too much power moves us away from what should be our goals of providing a great education in a safe community.

Some people are capable of thinking with a level of nuance deeper than "unions bad."

Teacher's unions aren't there to improve student outcomes. They exist for he benefit of teachers. Police unions aren't there to improve public safety. They exist for the benefit of the police.

Here’s the thing: both of those are good. Anywhere you have a large group of people doing a job, you will inevitably have issues where their bosses want to make decisions which will negatively impact life for a lot of working people, and collective bargaining helps counterbalance that.

There are problems with certain unions, but that has to do with the framework around them. When a police union protests because one of their members is found guilty, that looks like a union problem but it’s really a symptom of a deeper leadership problem: you’re hiring a ton of cops who think they’re above the law!

Most organizations are there to benefit the organization or leader not the members or public.

Maybe some, but nearly every person I've ever heard even mention unions has held one of two (mutually exclusive) views: "unions good" or "unions bad".

It's never "<specific union> is bad/good, because <specific reason>".

That’s not a contradiction. I’m in the “union bad” camp, though I’m also certain there are examples of good unions. I wouldn’t deny that there are.

But I wouldn’t consider a good union as a counter example to my “unions bad” conclusion, and I do t believe this to be motivated reasoning.

For you see, by “unions bad” I mean that incentive misalignment makes all unions become self-serving and focus on protectionist policies that are ultimately in the long term a disservice to the workers they represent and the economy as a whole. TL;DR: unions come with bad incentives, and bad incentives eventually result in worse outcomes. Ergo, “unions bad.”

Other people are able to fully consider all the relevant factors, history and circumstances, and still come away with the belief that unions are near-universally bad.

It's because teachers unions and police unions are different. Not rocket science.

> bosses don't like unions for a reason

Bosses don't like unions because they want to exploit their workers and treat them unfairly. This is why police will always need unions. Police shouldn't be expected to work overtime without compensation, they should be allowed to have breaks, they should make a living wage, they should get sick time, they should have safe working conditions and they should get family leave. These are the same reasons teachers should always have unions.

The problems people have with police unions is their political influence which is nothing remotely like the situation we have with teachers. Elected officials agree to provisions that should never be allowed on the table. In the end, it's not the union that is the problem, but the people who agree to anything and everything that the police unions ask for.

If a union is demanding things like the department limit or not allow officers to be interrogated, or the destruction of their disciplinary records, or the banning of body cameras/civilian oversight then it's up to our elected officials to draw the line and say "those terms are unacceptable" just like we'd expect if teacher's unions demanded limo rides to school every day, billion dollar paychecks and the right to abuse students. Some things are simply not acceptable.

Our elected officials have zero problems with denying teacher's requests for a living wage, or for smaller classroom sizes, or for not being forced to pay for school supplies out of their own pockets, but they instantly give police whatever insane things they ask for. That's a problem that goes far beyond negotiations with the police unions.

There's no police union that can prevent bad cops from being charged with a crime. Unions don't have that power. Police unions can't stop a judge from finding a police officer guilty of a crime either. Unions don't have that power. Unions can't stop that judge from sentencing a criminal police officer to decades behind bars. Police unions don't have that power either. So why is it that those things almost never happen when they should?

A police union can ask for internal department policies that make it harder for everyone else to hold police accountable, but they can't stop it from happening. DAs and judges aren't soft on corrupt cops because they're forced to be by police unions. They choose to be. Usually for political reasons or out of fear of retaliation. When police are allowed to "resign" over something that would get any one else thrown in prison that's not the union's fault. There are many people in many positions of power who are regularly complicit in allowing bad cops to get away with their crimes.

Police still need unions, same as teachers, our elected officials just need to say that enough is enough and show some backbone instead of giving in to every ridiculous demand that enables the corruption within police departments to continue. It's up to us to be willing to vote people out of office if they refuse to.

They should not be trusted more than other power groups (well, maybe a little more, arguably, but let's say they're all equal). However, they are the only significant power group regularly absent from a person's life. Religion, legislators, police, and businesses are almost always there, but unions are just as important a balancing entity as those others, and yet are frequently absent.

None of the other major labor unions consider police unions to be peers. When workers go on strike, police are across from them not with them. When strikers are harmed and killed, it is police doing the violence.

Because of these things, I think it's wise to not generalize across the two types of union.

> When strikers are harmed and killed, it is police doing the violence.

Are there any examples of that in the United States post-WWII?

I don't believe so - the parent is probably thinking of non-union protests.

Poiice unions are not the same as professional unions in almost any meaningful sense. They are not organizations independent from the leadership of the departments themselves. They are not similar in organization, function, or origin. The use of the word "union" to describe them is extremely misleading

Police "unions" are rather unique in that they represent the enforcers of capital, rather than workers.

The best way to get rid of these would be for someone to counterfeit them and distribute the copies widely - they could change them, but they'd have to hand out new ones. Then repeat, etc.

For real, that was my first thought.

Tangentially, what's up with everyone having "student driver" bumper sticker now?

Insurance discount I think

This sounds super insane, I thought stuff like this only happened in 3rd world countries.

Is this applicable elsewhere in “developed” countries as far as anyone else knows?

To paraphrase a commenter on the article: “you thought this was common only in tinpot dictatorships and failing states, and you were right.”

To answer my question for The Netherlands, it is my impression that cops are held to a higher standard and are punished equally—if not more harshly—than normal citizens when caught.

I have recently heard about a case in Poland where a police officer was punished for not being professional. Something like a Ukrainian made a negative comment about "Polish police" when stopped for speeding or leaving his car or something and the officer responded with something like, "if you don't like it here, then get the fuck out to your country" and that got him some kind of punishment. I guess this would be unthinkable in the US.

Corruption is everywhere, not just in big cities. The more rural the county in US, the greater the chance that "stuff like this only happened in 3rd world countries" is necessary to get anything done [permits especially]. Anecdotal personal experience - living ~30 years in rural Virginia versus ~15 years in a city in upstate NY.

I know another common pattern is for Fraternal Order of Police to solicit "donations" for mugs or stickers that people will display on their vehicles in the hope of currying favor with enforcement officers. This seems to be much less strictly enforced than this case in NYC, but some states even allow for optional license plates, with a portion of the fee going to local FOP lodges.

They're a huge thing in Philly, I saw people go so far as to place the stickers over letters on their license plates. They looked quite worn so it didn't appear they were getting in trouble for it.

There have been a bunch of HN threads about this over the years, if anyone wants to try finding them. (I'd do it but am not free right now)

Edit: here's a list so far - others?

Traffic cop sues city for get-out-of-jail-free cards for NYPD friends and family - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36188406 - June 2023 (47 comments)

The Little Cards That Tell Police 'Let's Forget This Ever Happened' (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33638962 - Nov 2022 (43 comments)

NYC Police Union Reducing Number of “Get Out of Jail Free” Courtesy Cards (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30742209 - March 2022 (32 comments)

Police-issued "courtesy cards" help friends and family out of minor infractions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24353003 - Sept 2020 (435 comments)

Patrolmen's Benevolent Association “Get Out of Jail Free” Cards - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21913173 - Dec 2019 (1 comment)

“Get Out of Jail Free” Cards in New York - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16207890 - Jan 2018 (207 comments)

Police union slashes number of ‘get out of jail free’ cards issued - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16206177 - Jan 2018 (1 comment)

“Get Out of Jail Free” Cards - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16203902 - Jan 2018 (1 comment)

NYC Police union slashes number of ‘get out of jail free’ cards issued - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16201487 - Jan 2018 (2 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39027518

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30742209

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16203902

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21913173

Thanks! Looks like the other large one was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24353003. I'll compile these into a list in the GP.

> tinpot dictatorships and flailing states

> NYC

Seems about right.

What’s the difference?

Dictatorships often have cleaner streets.

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

A great book about corruption is "Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security", reviewed in this article, that also discusses the concept of corruption: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/19/corruption-rev...

Any officer that honors these cards is a complete scumbag not fit to wear the uniform.

Yes, I know what I'm implying.

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