Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

One of the problems with US police in general seems to be that levels and quality of training vary so wildly. You have some "world class" police training programs, while others seem to be almost akin to slapping a badge and a gun on the first person who walks in the door.

I have no idea if what I am about to suggest is even legal, but I'd like to see congress pass a reform bill which contains:

- A minimum level of training and minimum continuing education requirement for all levels of police (state, county, federal, etc). Similar to No Child Left Behind (but for cops).

- Civilian oversight of police complaints (akin to what other countries have). Or failing that federal oversight.

- Federal funding to develop better officer education programs (with goals including officer safety, de-escalation, alternatives to use of force, and ethics).

- Reform asset forfeiture. All funds now also have to go to local education, homeless shelters, or similar. Nothing officer benefiting can be funded. Also someone has to have actually committed and been prosecuted for a crime(!).

This is well known amongst law enforcement officers.

I have two brothers in the California Highway Patrol, including one that's an instructor at the academy.

CHP officers go through a rigorous 1 to 2 year application process that includes background checks and psych evaluations. After they are accepted, they live on premises at the academy for 7 months where they are instructed in the law (academically) as well as high speed driving, weapon handling, how to properly make a traffic stop (like coming up on the passenger side, not the driver side), how to investigate a crime, etc.

My brother that's an instructor says that CHP officers are well aware that sheriff deputies and city police officers do not have a rigorous selection process and only receive 1-2 months training and that their interactions with them make that difference in training obvious.

It's too bad there isn't a standard certification process to become a police officer like there is for many professions. Your manicurist likely had more training a tougher certification process than some police officers.

I'm a resident of southern California, and I have realized that the CHP is a better group to encounter than the local police or sheriff.

In my encounters they've always been right, always been fair, and have never escalated a situation. They're genuine professionals.

Our police, in my experience, are the opposite.

Call me a cynic, but on the asset forfeiture part, how these things usually seem to go is that a few years after somebody decides that it all goes to education or something, the jurisdiction's budget going to that gets cut correspondingly and reallocated, possibly to the law enforcement department. Then when you want to reform asset forfeiture, you hear "But what about the children in the schools it's funding!".

That's why I'd rather see them just get rid of it entirely while also cutting back on the War on Drugs.

Money is fungible, so this is in fact what basic economics would predict. The root problem is that assets can be seized sans conviction.

I know this happens with most state lotteries. I can specifically confirm that the one in Florida was supposed to be for education, but like you said, the budget was cut by an equal amount a couple of years later. The sad part is the "money for education" thing was what got the public to vote to allow it.

Total separation of those who investigate complaints against the police from the police themselves, with separate organisations, recruiting, promotion and the chief of said investigations reporting directly to whoever the relevant chief of police reports to. Otherwise the incentives just lead to Internal Affairs acting as a cover up job to protect the good name of the police force in general.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/04/why-rules-bend.html > An obvious enabler of police corruption is the fact that internal affairs units, tasked with exposing corruption, usually report to the same police chief that would be embarrassed by such exposure, and who may also be corrupt. An obvious solution is to make internal affairs more independent, e.g., reporting directly to a city council or even a governor. In the US the FBI sometimes serves in this role, though rarely at the request of local governments, and within the FBI its internal affairs still reports to FBI’s chief. Why don’t more governments create independent agencies to investigate corruption, to assure citizens that corruption is not tolerated?

> Total separation of those who investigate complaints against the police from the police themselves, with separate organisations, recruiting, promotion and the chief of said investigations reporting directly to whoever the relevant chief of police reports to.

I'd argue that it would be even better if they reported to a separate authority in most cases (obviously, for some agencies this is impractical at some level, but I think the norm for, e.g., local agencies should be for a state oversight body to oversee police misconduct rather than a local agency parallel and subject to the same local government.)

Where this isn't practical (state and federal law enforcement agencies of general jurisdiction), a parallel and organizationally co-equal agency doing misconduct investigation makes sense.

> In the US the FBI sometimes serves in this role, though rarely at the request of local governments

The FBI doesn't actually serve this role except insofar as the primary authority for investigating most federal laws, when alleged police misconduct happens to involve violating federal laws (often, civil rights laws), the FBI ends up investigating, not as part of a "oversee the police" role, but as part of its general "enforce federal law" role.

The other unaddressed issue in this whole debate is candidate quality:

most u.s. police forces recruit from a similar pool of people as enlisted armed forces (and less selectively), they are: 1. HS/GED + potentially a couple years of college (its my understanding that most police officers don;t hold four year degrees) 2. Pass a drug test 3. Pass a criminal background check 4. Pass a rudimentary psych/aptitude test 5. Meet a minimum level of physical fitness

A friend who was a marine and did recruiting estimated that about 20% of a graduating U.S. high school class could meet those requirements - you then had to compete with other jobs and trades that were potentially more lucrative/appealing - and in the case with the marines (and i suspect it is similar with police forces) had a couple of motivations for joining (despite what they might say) 1. kill people/beat ass 2. Serve their country community 3. family tradition 4. need a job/job security 5. Challenge 6. uniform and toys

when viewed in this context one may not be too surprised at the actions of some portion of police officers

Veteran here, can confirm. Perhaps this is why I dislike cops so much, I know why they really joined.

Regarding your second bullet point, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement now investigates Miami-Dade County police shooting, instead of the agency investigating itself.[0] There's a step in the right direction.

[0] http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/a...

There's an attitude problem. I think it was best shown here: http://www.theagitator.com/2012/07/05/two-videos-two-cities-... .

No amount of training is going to overcome the recruit pool you get by advertising "want to feel like a big man? Work for us!"

There's definitely a legal way to do it. You just tie federal dollars that flow down to local police to requirements for police training. It's the same way federal highway dollars are tied to standards for state driver's licenses.

Of course states and cities will be free to turn down the dollars if they want, but the incentives will be strong for them to comply.

Possibly even simpler than these recommendations is creating, publishing, and adopting nationally a National Decision Model, as was done in Britain. When publicly available and enforceable, it makes it really easy for everyone to see the standards by which police officers have to make decisions, and easier to discern good decisions from bad decisions.

I would much rather have many competing local standards than one centrally imposed standard written by lobbyists and bureaucrats.

The changes that the article talks about would take decades to push through such a system

I think the main problem with your suggestion is that different jurisdictions have different police needs. Should a single officer department in a rural county enact the same programs that NYC has?

Which of the above suggestions wouldn't apply to both?

I understand what you're saying in general, but there are a lot of universals that would apply across all kinds of jurisdictions.

I think mainly the training regimen could vary wildly based on local needs.

I imagine someone in a tiny town in Alaska would need more training on dealing with wildlife than somebody in NYC would. Their training on handling humans should be pretty much the same.

With the exception that rural people probably have more and bigger guns than NYC people.

> Should a single officer department in a rural county enact the same programs that NYC has?

That single officer should receive the same level of training or better. I don't see lack of backup being a good argument for those officers receiving LESS training, which is your implication.

Now if you give them MORE training, then I'm all for it. I just said a minimum level of training and continued education.

You can counteract that somewhat by delegating rural policing to a larger force, so that the overhead of some programs are shared.

Maybe it wouldn't be too popular in the States, where everyone from the Mayor down to the city hall janitor (and including the sheriff) is elected. But it seems to work fairly well in Canada. Jurisdictions too small to warrant their own regional force contract the RCMP or provincial force (e.g. OPP) to serve as the regional force.

The flip side is that it can lead to a certain detachment (no pun intended) from the community because the officers consider it a "tour of duty" to serve at a tiny outpost before graduating to a "real" position.

That already happens to some degree, but the point of aggregation is from local police to county sheriff and is primarily driven by economic concerns.

In my area towns with less than 10k residents have been outsourcing policing to the county sheriff instead of continuing to staff their 1-2 officer police departments.

And how does that play considering study after study and program after program showing that a successful approach in fostering harmonious police-citizen relations and reducing crime is to have the cops "walking the beat" and becoming known and recognized in the areas they're policing?

I don't think you have to delegate to a larger police force, I think those small town's should be able to/have to send their officers the state police academy (or something similar) to ensure proper training, recurring education, standards etc.

> Should a single officer department in a rural county enact the same programs that NYC has?

A very small department probably needs higher minimum standards, but there's also a minimum viable size, greater than 1, for a separate department.

While more training is definitely necessary, it begs the question of what's being taught, because my guess is the "first rule of policing" (see link) is still a core part of the curriculum

http://blog.simplejustice.us/2011/06/19/the-first-rule-of-po...

Who's getting the "world-class" training? The NYPD?

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