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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

The title confused me because here in Germany the police are civil servants and they generally don't have a right to strike or just choose not to do their job as they're an executive organ of the state but apparently here the police is just.. side hustling?

"conversations with officers “making them very well aware of what they’re agreeing to.” But the decision may come down to what individual officers are comfortable with, Grammas said. Overtime security work is not mandatory for officers, but voluntary."

Maybe it's a cultural thing but blurring the line between an officer in their public capacity and what is basically private security at a sports event should be two separate things. Hiring the police out as a private security force where they then get to negotiate what rules they have to play by has a Judge Dredd vibe to it

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Often at large private events the city will require a certain number of police, that the host must hire. And they can only hire from local departments that have worked out these deals letting officers do this on their own time, but in uniform.

It’s weird, and often sort of extortion

> Hiring the police out as a private security force where they then get to negotiate what rules they have to play by has a Judge Dredd vibe to it

The work is voluntary overtime work.

They're not forced to accept voluntary overtime work. It's an optional thing they can choose to do above and beyond their base job, if the pay and terms are interesting enough.

I don't see why it's a problem. What are the alternatives? Forcing police to do security for private events inside of private venues as part of their job?

It should be impossible to negotiate this with individual policemen - if the state or municipality has the requirement and authority to provide security for something, then the conditions for that should be handled by the government (and then the officials would execute that as part of their ordinary non-negotiable orders of what duties their service requires), and if the government does not do that thing, then police officers should not be involved at all, this should be handled by private security, in which case even if someone from police participates off-duty, they shouldn't be permitted to have uniforms/badges/official authority, as they are not there as representatives of the state but as civilians.

There shouldn't be any middle ground - either the government sends the police to do whatever the government requires, or it does not - the policemen themselves should not get a choice, they exist to execute and enforce the government decisions, not make them.

The way it works in Finland:

Police officers are public officials. As such, they do not have the right to have a second job or a side business by default. They may apply for a permit for a specific job, and it is usually approved if there are no obvious conflicts of interest or other reasons that could compromise their impartiality. Some jobs, such as private security, are automatically out of question.

If your event needs security, you hire private security. Police officers may have been involved in training the security personnel, but they can't work in the field. And if a uniformed police officer shows up at the event, it almost always means something has gone wrong.

Have private security work the private event. Send a token number of police along, at the city's expense (the same number they'd normally assign to an area with 50,000 people out and about, so the sports event isn't sucking disproportionate resources).

If the stadium is such a hotbed of crime and disorder that private security can't handle it and they really need to escalate constantly to involve armed law enforcement, stop allowing it to host games at all.

yeah, this is super common here in the US. Off-duty cops are in demand as security guards and they can work in uniform, which to me is all kinds of weird. You can literally "rent a cop" (an expression used as a joke about mall security guards who are typically not cops at all) this way, complete with full police powers.

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