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Comment by k-mcgrady | Hacker News Reader

Personally I think one of the main reasons US police don't hesitate to use deadly force is that they are not held accountable for it. In the UK it s a big deal when an officer uses his weapon, there are investigations etc. In the US, as we've seen in the last couple of years, there can be start to finish video evidence of an officer using deadly force completely unnecessarily and he/she gets away with it. If you start prosecuting officers for using deadly force without proper cause I'm sure use of it would drop pretty dramatically.

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The problem is not the lack of prosecution in the US. There are in fact countless attempts to prosecute officers for deadly force. The problem is that the bar for determining justified vs unjustified is low in the US. This bar makes it extremely, if not almost impossible except in very rare cases, to prosecute an officer for deadly force. There were two Supreme Court rulings that created the bar that we see today. First is Tennessee vs. Garner and the second is Graham vs. Conner.

The US has bigger issues that are at the root of police shootings in my opinion. These issues stem from extreme poverty, lack of jobs, disenfranchisement laws for convicted criminals, a lack of responsibility or taking responsibility for actions, and a growing distrust of the police that is so large community members would rather not report any crime. As an example, there is an article this morning in the DC news[1] calling for the police department to be completely eliminated and allow citizens to enforce the laws. I don't even know where to begin with that idea and I know it will never happen, but to have so much distrust that you call for eliminating the entire department shows a bigger problem.

How do you fix it? That's a good question. I am huge proponent of community policing. Taking officers out of cars and putting them on foot in the communities. But unfortunately community policing creates another set of problems in the US. There are limited police resources and therefore those resources logically are deployed to areas that most need them. Right or wrong, these areas tend to be poor communities or inner city areas where minority populations are larger. In turn community policing is often viewed as targeting.

I am not going to sit here and deny that "profiling" does not occur and that there have not been extreme instances of "targeting". It is easy for me as a white male to be numb to the day-to-day problems that minorities face. But these terms, in my opinion, have become overused and the media has no problem turning "community policing" into acts of "targeting" solely for profit.

Instead of focusing on these isolated shootings (and they are isolated compared to the amount of policing that occurs daily) we, as a society, need to focus on solving the bigger issues. You start addressing the poverty, the education system, disenfranchisement laws, and working to build families instead of tearing them apart, only then will we see reduced incidents of officer involved shootings.

[1] http://wjla.com/news/local/black-lives-matter-dc-speaks-out-...

There are in fact countless attempts to prosecute officers for deadly force. The problem is that the bar for determining justified vs unjustified is low in the US

To be fair, the GP talked about accountability of the officers. If 99% of the officers are prosecuted, acquitted, and they keep their jobs, in effect they are not held to account.

I understand what you are saying, but it doesn't make sense. If the officer is prosecuted and found not guilty then why shouldn't he be able to keep his job? This country would be a bigger mess if we said that every person who is arrested, prosecuted, and found not guilty should still be treated as if they were guilty, should lose their job, and ultimately punished.

What you are really trying to address is the difference between criminal law and department policy. It is completely possible to violate department policy and not break the law. It is also possible to break the law and not department policy. Unfortunately when it comes to use of force, many department policies follow the line of the law.

Is this right or should it be different? That's a tough answer. Where do you draw the line? Do you say that every officer who fires his gun is automatically subject to termination? Do you create public panels that investigate every officer involved use of force? I can see a benefit to that, and actually think that if implemented correctly, could go a long way to resolving some of these issues. However, that too has to be handled delicately as it stands to create a lynch mob effect. You also need to ensure that the people on the panel understand the existing laws as they stand. If someone is found not guilty, you don't blame the system, you blame the law and work to change the law, not the system.

There is also a difference between being criminally liable and civilly liable. Just like there is a difference between something being morally wrong and being criminally wrong.

I'd strip the police departments of the powers to just charge the taxpayers for money in settlements and make them purchase malpractice insurance, just like every other professional. Insurance underwriters would bring department policies nationwide up to a single uniform standard. I'd hope this skin in the game + increased investment in officer training would effect changes.

Not sure what you refer to "charge the taxpayers for money in settlements"?

Also, with the insurance, many departments themselves are insured. I think what you mean is to have the individual officer have to provide their own coverage in the form of a deduction on their paycheck. While it puts a financial stake in the officer to prevent, it also now creates a whole new problem and does not solve the underlying problem.

First, if an officer is insured, it has the potential to create one of two scenarios. Scenario one is they take no action because they are afraid their "insurance rates" will go up. Similar to the way people avoid going to the doctor. Scenario two is you get the other extreme where the officer now says I'm all in if I don't have to worry about paying for my brutality.

More importantly though, everyone keeps focusing on the police brutality issue. I'm not denying there is a problem in isolated incidents. However, the solution isn't attacking the departments or officers themselves. You want to work for change, start focusing on the bigger issues at hand. Fighting crime in the neighborhoods, working to find solutions for poverty, creating jobs, changing disenfranchisement laws, encouraging the building of families instead of the tearing them apart, and finally getting people to take responsibility for their actions.

We could wake up tomorrow with new laws that eliminate police brutality, but the unfortunate truth is that those laws wouldn't change any of the above or work to stop racism in this country.

[edit: fix typos]

> In the UK it s a big deal when an officer uses his weapon, there are investigations etc.

Agreed.

Though even so they still shoot more than other (smaller) countries:

http://yle.fi/uutiset/finnish_police_fired_guns_only_six_tim...

>> If you start prosecuting officers for using deadly force without proper cause I'm sure use of it would drop pretty dramatically.

Or yet more reasonable: police would not care to act. Why act if you can destroy your life and nobody protects you? The proper cause is very subjective and nowadays biased against police officers.

"not caring to act" would also be a very wrong thing and as one would expect from any other job, they should be fired for not working.

And replaced by whom? We have enough trouble recruiting police officers as it is; it's a thankless, dangerous, ill-compensated, and often literally terrible job.

Add to that the increasingly common perception that, in exchange for doing your best to protect and preserve your community and your society, you're liable to be thrown under the bus by everyone from your own chain of command to the national legislature and executive for purely political reasons - and is it any wonder that more and more police officers are losing their willingness to risk themselves for a society which, from their point of view, no longer has their back but rather looks for any excuse to plant a knife in it?

So basically, what you have is a broken system that neither the police nor the general public are happy about: the police because they worry they will be treated unjustly if they need to exercise deadly force, and the general public because they worry the police might kill them for minor traffic violations.

No, it's a lot worse than that. Twelve percent of the general public, and that heavily concentrated in the Old South states plus a few conurbations almost entirely east of the Mississippi. Too, that twelve percent gives rise to a disproportionately large fraction of violent crime in the United States. These facts together have an amazingly wide range of deleterious effects.

In the UK there may well be investigations but the end result is the same.

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