What's the point of a citizen review board if the sheriff or chief appoints everyone on it? Talk about fox guarding the henhous!
If regular people are hearing what an officer is doing and need to be explained by a former cop, "yeah, <horrific behavior> is just part of the job" then what is even the point of having a citizen review? Isn't that the very class of behavior the board exists to stop?
I don’t know, but I know what the point of the law was.
Having a retired cop in the room who understands police work sounds pretty sensible to me.
Police already have power to ruin lives or at least make them seriously inconvenient. A retired cop generally still has friends and/or family that are active cops, and therefore has some influence.
Which means folks aren't nearly as free to speak or do their jobs freely. This is true even if you personally don't feel this way around any sort of law enforcement - you know others do.
It seems obvious to me that that's important knowledge for a team tasked with regulating police work.
There are plenty of standards. and all cops go through a ~6 month Police Academy before they get the badge.
And if you think you know as much about police work as someone who has done it for decades, I don't think we can get much further in this discussion.
People generally have no idea what it like to be a cop and what is and isn't legal. For instance, just about every single person who resists arrest now also yells that they cannot breath. Then the cops ask if they need medical, which of course they say yes, simply to make things more difficult for the police (and waste taxpayer money to have an ambulance come out).
In a vacuum it looks bad. But in the context of every single criminal doing the same extreme heel dragging, you start to see what is going on.
I don’t have any trouble believing that your social media feeds have rage bait videos that follow this pattern, but I’d remind you that the videos recommended to you are unlikely to be representative of reality.
Some feeds support narratives like “criminals lie and waste resources” whereas others show “cops lie and hurt people”, and what you see is strongly correlated with what will catch (and maintain) your attention.
I wouldn't compare it to agenda channels that upload heavily edited and cherry picked content with "telling you how to feel" narration. The unedited average police doing average police work content is enough to stand on its own.
The fact of the matter is though that for every bad cop interaction, there are about 10,000 normal ones.
Neither do the cops, in their defense. And at least the not-cops in this situation aren't paid a salary and empowered by the state to do violence to people in the course of enforcing that law.
> Then the cops ask if they need medical, which of course they say yes, simply to make things more difficult for the police
Those bastards, asking... public servants to... serve... the public. Gosh we beat the shit out of this guy and he has the audacity to ask for a doctor afterwards, so entitled.
> In a vacuum it looks bad. But in the context of every single criminal doing the same extreme heel dragging, you start to see what is going on.
The word "criminal" is incredibly load-bearing in this sentence.
The overwhelming majority of people doing blatantly dumb illegal shit don't just put their hands behind their back and say "you got me!" when the cops show up.
They really genuinely believe they can convince the cops that the hammer they threw in the bushes wasn't being used to smash car windows, and all the shit in their pocket wasn't stolen from the cars with smashed windows all around them. And then they physically fight the cops, lose, and say they are suffocating and need to go to the hospital.
I totally get that there are videos of cops being evil. I wager I have seen more of them than you, since they get tons of views and attention on body cam channels. But I will also wager that you have no idea how dumb and childish the average criminal is. There are 100,000 normal police encounter videos of police dealing with total idiots for every 1 evil cop needlessly killing someone video. You just have 0 exposure to them.
30.61 Establishment of civilian oversight boards. (1) A county sheriff may establish a civilian oversight board to review the policies and procedures of his or her office and its subdivisions. (2) The board must be composed of at least three and up to seven members appointed by the sheriff, one of which shall be a retired law enforcement officer.
They can appoint everyone on it. This is something setup by the sheriff, and the sheriff controls the appointments. They don't have ot appoint all the people, but they can. Which means the original comment still stands.
> Having a retired cop in the room who understands police work sounds pretty sensible to me.
That doesn't mean they have to be on the board. You can easily bring cops in when needed.
> That doesn't mean they have to be on the board. You can easily bring cops in when needed.
The experience from Oakland/SF is that the review boards gets controlled by anti police activist who make policing near impossible.
Would you rather someone unelected by the citizens decide who sits on the citizen review board?
Not sure what the point of this argument is. The mayor could appoint someone. The public can directly elect someone. Why is Florida making the boards charged with oversight of the police can only be appointed by the sheriff? It does not sound like a 'citizen review board' but it does sounds very prone to corruption.
I would think it would be good to say that not more than 50% can be ex-law enforcement though, to ensure a reasonable mixture.
Citizen review boards become necessary because the public is losing confidence in an entire institution. If the public trusted the police department, then an outside review board would have been entirely unnecessary, the IA department would have been enough.
Hospital review boards are not necessary for this reason: overall local hospitals are trusted enough to ensure that they can handle bad actors on their own (in general - it's not like there are 0 cases of bad doctors being covered by their colleagues, but they are the exception).
I don't think this statement aligns with reality:
> The mission of our various state medical boards is to “protect health care consumers through the proper licensing and regulation of physicians and surgeons” [15]—to protect, in other words, specifically from doctors who would intentionally harm their patients. But medical boards typically are more lenient with problem physicians than other patient safety processes.
> For example, over a 10-year period, researchers found that “seventy percent of the physicians with a clinical-privileges or malpractice-payment report due to sexual misconduct were not disciplined by medical boards for this problem” [1]. Additionally, 67% of insurance fraud convictions were associated only with what I would describe as light discipline—no suspensions or license revocation from medical boards. It seems that medical board members have confused their statutory duty toward patient safety with a well-meaning but terribly misjudged desire to rehabilitate problem doctors.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8445548/
> Board member Eserick "TJ" Watkins, who was appointed in 2019, charged that the board doesn't serve patients. Watkins started tracking discipline cases and says the California Medical Board handed out more lenient punishments than its guidelines suggested in nine out of every 10 cases. [...]
> "The way they speak is always with doctor care in mind. You never hear patient care, ever — and I mean, ever," said Watkins.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doctor-complaints-discipline-ca...
I don't think they said this at all.
You know there are countries that have less of these problems per capita.
Where does that belief come from? Do you just default to thinking that the US is the best, or is this opinion based on some sort of life experience?
Like can you not conceive of another country where the kinds of things that go on in America with police are not routine?
Have you been to another country? Have you ever just walked down the street somewhere else? I've been to many countries, one of which is America and holy shit I can tell you that the police there are weird.