I think it's reasonable, from the video of the police officer slapping the phone away, to conclude that the police officer slapped the phone away.
> All criminals deserve proper investigation.
The point of "innocent until proven guilty" is that the burden of proof is on the state. It's reasonable to ask that conduct undertaken by state actors, on the other hand, be accompanied by proof that it was within the law.
I surmise that GP's comment is partly read to mean that overtime (ie, working 60+ hours a week sometimes!) is part of the way we don't treat police officers very well.
It seems pretty clear to me that a police officer working a 24 hour shift is a liability.
If you go to publicpay.ca.gov, you'll find the state wide databases of city and state employees. Police officers make up nearly all of the top non-executive positions. Second, police officers want overtime. If you've watched The Wire, there are more than a few scenes/threads in which eliminating overtime is seen as punishment to officers. This is also chronicled in David Simon's non-fiction book, "Homicide", which The Wire is heavily based off of.
This is not to say that we shouldn't staff departments in a way that overtime isn't excessive. But I doubt you'll find much political support from the officers or their leaders on that.
In fact, the use of overtimes is one of the best way for police officers to ensure a huge pension...Pensions are often calculated on based on the last year of a retiring officer's salary. So an officer who makes $64K base salary in his career can retire with $82K in annual retirement, by working $120,000 worth of overtime in his final year:
http://www.nola.com/crime/baton-rouge/index.ssf/2015/05/how_...
I think think of three departments off the top of my head, all in upstate NY, that have 24-hour shifts.
> Second, police officers want overtime.
Well, but that's only because of the financial incentive structure. It doesn't need to be this way.
Just curious, but who?
> Well, but that's only because of the financial incentive structure. It doesn't need to be this way.
Yes, but it's unlikely that you will be able to change the incentive mindset and system for the entire government (this affects teachers and firefighters, too), at least in a meaningful time frame compared to all the other things you could change about police practices.
I'm all for outfitting officers with more monitoring/surveillance gear, but what problem would an increased salary solve?
[1] http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Police_Officer/Salar...
[2] http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...
[3] https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/-aei-economic...
Ultimately we just need to give them all body cameras and dismiss anything they say or do that isn't recorded.
Police (and others) are given special privileges but expected to act to a higher standard than the rest of us. Quite a lot of them do. It's like accountants and lawyers and doctors. Taking a random sample of doctors and a random sample of, say, HN readers, the doctors would be ... Better.
I know you are being facetious here, but in the internet age, I think this is an increasingly compelling question.