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Comment by x0054 | Hacker News Reader

I think the cops should now be billed for that 1.6mill. Garnish there salary to the end of their worthless life. Why should the taxpayers be stuck with these bills. The taxpayers didn't abuse and humiliated that poor man on a fucking whim, the individual police officers did. No pension, immediate dismissal, and garnishment of wages is the least that they deserve! This case should not end because they settled, make an example of these fucks.

Also, even a first year law student would be able to easily throw out any and all evidence they have obtained this way. So the entire procedure was worthless, even if they had succeeded. Makes their conduct even worse. Evil and stupid!

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Until taxpayers start demanding more accountability and professionalism from their police force, they should be stuck with those bills.

Police do stuff like this (and get away with it) because the public, generally speaking, assumes that anyone who is abused or treated unfairly by police must have done something to deserve it.

The individuals involved should certainly be punished (though they rarely ever are), but the taxpayers have some culpability as well.

I pay taxes. I'm blown away by your assertion that I'm to any extent at blame for this crime. Some people abuse a man and I'm at fault because I don't write to my senator?

As a tax-paying citizen, it is your duty to yourself, your family and the society you live in (and leave for the next generation), that you exercise your right to write to your congress-critter/mayor/block-rep, as and when you feel an injustice is happening, especially something that is a gross abuse of authority.

Writing your congressman is the least you could do. Maybe get out there and start filming the police, raise awareness about jury nullification, encourage peaceful parenting so we don't have bullies on the police payroll--etc. These are more effective than writing some narcissist who cares more about getting re-elected than what's just.

Writing your congressman is useless, unless you're signing a check.

I don't think anyone is accusing you personally. Just that collectively, the taxpayers as a class, elect such people. That's why there's still a war on drugs. If most of the voting population was remotely rational, things would be fixed.

So yes, the taxpayers should pay. They, as a group, are responsible. (The individual LEOs involved in this case should be harshly penalized, too.)

> If most of the voting population was remotely rational, things would be fixed

What if the Democrats and Republicans are both too beholden to the status quo to make changes, and a rational voter figures that their vote means something if they vote for one of the two main parties as the lesser of two evils, whereas voting for a third party is basically throwing their vote away?

It's easy to sell me on the idea that most people aren't rational voters, but saying that the situation will automatically be fixed if everyone votes rationally is a much more difficult sell. It would be a good start, but you'd need some other things to happen.

If more people were "rational" then they wouldn't being insane about drug usage, like most of America is. Politicians would respond in kind. Even within the silly two party system, things would improve.

But to get there, there'd need to be less than what, 30%? of voters being extremely anti-drug?

No, they should not. Taxes are not voluntary. You act as if we all merrily signed up for this system, when in fact it was forced upon us since birth. This idea that if we somehow elect the right person that horrors like the drug war will go away, or that something else won't replace it, is a an abdication of true responsibility. The tax payer, like the individual in this story, is a victim of a predatory institution.

It's not "somehow electing the right person", it's a full change in society. If most people didn't care about drug usage, then this wouldn't be happening.

The buck stops with the voter.

But both parties in every election have the same opinion on this issues - which is that the current system is noble and great. How can it be the voter's fault if there's no other option?

Never heard of a primary election?

The politicians pretty accurately represent their constituents. The voters demand more tough on crime pols and that's exactly what they get.

A primary election is an excellent place to screw the party leaders. They are looking ahead and sometimes find out that a decently coordinated attack can take away their golden candidate.

> Some people abuse a man and I'm at fault because I don't write to my senator?

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." -Edmund Burke

The problem with the system is that we've made voters the ultimate arbiters of what happens but then diluted their individual responsibility for the outcomes to such a degree by federalizing and centralizing everything that you don't want to own the consequences of the power you hold.

If you had voted for a sheriff who perpetrated this injustice, would you be so quick to absolve yourself of your responsibility? Would you vote for him again? How is it any different when it comes time to vote for his bosses?

Police officers should be required have insurances to cover those lawsuits and any damage should be payed by the insurance company.

This way police officers who keep screwing up and abusing their power would get higher and higher premiums until they reach a point where they can't be a cop anymore because it would be to expensive for them. It would weed out the assholes and taxpayer would not have to pay directly.

Great idea, except certain types of police work have a much higher likelihood of being accused of brutality or handling cases incorrectly. Work property crimes? No one will ever accuse you of abuse. Work narcotics or traffic stops in a rough part of town? A lot more likely.

A lot of this is solved with a requirement that police officers must always be on cam (cameras that they carry on their person must be on at all times). Everybody benefits except the scumbag cops and the criminals.

Isn't it curious, then, that one of the most staunch arguments against police cameras are the police unions?

I have family members who are (good) police officers and I've discussed this with them in great detail. Their concerns boil down to the following:

- Some of the pro-camera advocates are in favor of gun cameras, which turn on when a gun is drawn. The fairly reasonable argument against those is that they fail to capture what happened immediately prior to the gun being drawn, lacking context

- The always-on cameras are unpleasant to consider, simply because who wants to be recorded all the time? There's a concern that a casual conversation before a police incident might be taken out of context or used to embarass the officer

- There are also cameras that are designed to activate either manually or automatically when you leave your squad car. These are better, but apparently there are reliability issues, or what happens when a camera accidentally does not turn on? Is the officer automatically going to be judged as negligent?

- Beyond these things, police departments have generally terrible IT. Who's going to maintain the cameras? Who's going to manage the retention of the video? What about the privacy of the officers? And so on.

Note, I'm not saying these are universally valid complaints, or that the reality would be as bad as officers fear. But I think that in the same way people in general chafe against oversight that they worry could be used against them, police officers worry about being monitored and tracked moreso than they already are.

When I asked them what they thought should be done to curb police abuses, one of them who is a senior police official pointed out that study after study shows that the vast majority of police abuses are committed by a very small number of officers. That the better way to handle police officers who abuse their power is to make it easier to get rid of police officers who are bad instead of spending lots of money and effort to try to watch all officers.

They did all agree though that in a perfect world cameras would be awesome, because it would remove a lot of the worry they have around someone lying about their behavior. Their concerns were around real-world implementation.

I'm personally in favor of cameras for police, but I wanted to present the other side of the argument I've heard.

I don't see any problem with giving the officer complete control over the camera.

If the cameras are easy to use and reliable and such, the officers should be demanding that they be available, it will only make their testimony more credible.

(to the extent they are going to abuse their power, they can just go set the stage for the camera when they are off duty or whatever, so I don't think that is the right case to optimize for)

That's not individual cop's problem. They were taught this way. They were taught if you get a permission from a dog that alone justifies subjecting a person to torture. They were taught if a criminal addicted to every known drug in existence says something in order to lower his sentence, it's ok to use this as sole basis to break into homes and shoot whoever is in there. And the others, like doctors were taught to willingly participate in these abuses, because drugs! think of the children!

Making an example of these fucks would do nothing, because every citizen of the US that supports war on drugs is creating these fucks. Until US citizens wake up and demand the government to stop the war on US citizens, that and worse is going to happen. In war, that's what happens. This war - longest and most harmful war in American history - has to be ended. And US citizens have the power to end it, if only they has the will and reason to stop believing in lies that WOD proponents feed them.

I don't think that blame is a conserved quantity. Yes, the whole war on drugs complex is a problem, but that doesn't absolve the individual cops of responsibility.

More pragmatically, a lack of serious consequences is part of why cops have learned to behave this way. Get rid of the war on drugs, and you haven't fully solved the problem. Nothing about this situation would be any more acceptable if instead of drugs, they had been searching for child pornography, a bomb, or an abused animal.

> Nothing about this situation would be any more acceptable if instead of drugs, they had been searching for child pornography, a bomb, or an abused animal.

The difference is that the other things you've listed are far less common and far less lucrative than illegal drugs. If you took away the war on drugs then you could give law enforcement significantly less than their current budget and still have them allocate more officers to each case, have them each spend more time on it, train them each better, etc. etc.

The war on drugs is the primary impetus for the militarization of the police force. Police should be investigators, not soldiers. The war on drugs encourages them to behave like soldiers which is the root cause of their unacceptable behavior.

The police are already militarized. Yes, that happened primarily due to the war on drugs, but that doesn't mean that ending the war on drugs will fix it.

The bleeding doesn't stop just because you pull the knife out of the wound.

Well sure, removing the war on drugs doesn't solve 100% of the problem instantaneously. But it solves 80% of it over a relatively short period of time. You still have to stop the bleeding, but you at least move the problem to "stop the bleeding" from "prevent additional stab wounds." And properly ending the war on drugs should imply "bringing the troops home" so to speak: Dissolving the paramilitary police units and separating their members from one another, and putting them on desk jobs or into community outreach programs that don't involve making arrests or serving warrants. (Or making it attractive for them to take early retirement.)

>Making an example of these fucks would do nothing

It might. Making an example of these fucks might make the next group of fucks think twice.

I absolutely agree that these cops are the product of American public insatiable need to feel as "safe" as possible, because, as you mention, think of the damn children! But the kind of search that they preformed, if successful, would be still useless, because any evidence derived as a result of it would be suppressed. So, I don't think any one trained these idiots to do this.

Many police unions have clause that make the cops be personally liable of criminal acts. They should be criminally tried, convicted, dismissed, jailed, and then have this 1.6 million collected against their future earning till its paid back, with interest. Unless the doctors who preformed the procedures were somehow threatened by the cops, they should pay as well. This is just inexcusable.

I do agree, the war on drugs is at the core of this problem. It's no longer the war on drugs, it's the war on drug users, the people.

No one trained them to do exactly this, but they were trained to be aggressive and ruthless, behave like soldiers on a tactical mission in war, not like guardians protecting the population. Guardians wouldn't do this to a person, soldiers have to do what has to be done for the mission - if the enemy hides weapons in body cavities, then cavity search it is, what else would you do with the enemy?

The cops, of course, could be punished, and in this case even the blue wall probably won't save them. But punishing single individuals would not prevent next time from happening, it would keep happening like clockwork.

And Himler was taught that killing millions of minorities was a good and honest action, yet the judge still found him guilty at Nuremberg. It's generally accepted that "I was just following orders" is not an acceptable reason for perpetuating atrocities.

The actions of police officers is a symptom. The disease is the war on drugs (and similar "tough on crime, soft on evidence" policies). That doesn't excuse what the police do, but it defines what you need to change if you don't want it to continue.

I don't think we can hope for the Nuremberg for the War on Drugs. But at least we could hope for a peace treaty?

Nitpick - Himmler wasn't tried at Nuremberg. He committed suicide while in British custody:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Himmler

Make them insure themselves out of their own pension fund.

This is an incredibly good, innovative idea. Thanks for sharing it.

Why should the taxpayers be stuck with these bills

Simply because the police unions put it into the city contract and the politicians signed it.

You don't think the people who hired the officers and supervised them should bear any of the responsibility?

I don't think there's a law against criminal stupidity and keeping lax discipline.

Now the cleanup, there's a problem. The usual and proven way to deal with corrupt police is to fire everyone and bring in new people from the other side of the country with no local obligations. But how do you do this in an impoverished county in New Mexico where no one wants to go?

> I don't think there's a law against criminal stupidity and keeping lax discipline.

There may not be a law against criminal stupidity, but there is certainly (by definition) a law against criminal negligence (if there weren't a law against it, it wouldn't be criminal). If, for example, the officers' supervisors established a work culture that condoned framing people that could easily rise to the legal standard of criminal negligence.

Which would be the general public. Which is both bearing some of the responsibility and most of the bill.

In fact institutions should never carry the blame alone. In every case may it be police officers or company employees, the actual people who did something should always be prosecuted as well. Institutions eating up all the punishment and individuals getting away is ruining the legal system and our society. But companies are people...

And if anybody is interested how cops are usually "punished" for things like these, check this out: http://reason.com/archives/2014/01/26/pepper-sprayer-hits-th...

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