We found 85,000 cops who’ve been investigated for misconduct | Hacker News Reader

We found 85,000 cops who’ve been investigated for misconduct

knoxnews.com

34 pointsnotRobot25 comments

I'd like to see officer body/car cam footage being publicly accessible. Beyond this, I'd like to see a hard requirement that if a batton or firearm is unholstered that body cam must be on, a single offence may be fireable, and a second in a ~5yr period is automatic firing.

Any civilian death by the hands of police or in police custody not captured on body cam should have an automatic 2+ week suspension, grounds for firing, and require trial (not just a pass via grand jury) for at least manslaughter. That doesn't mean they will always be convicted, but methods need to be put into place that allow for absolute limits to be in place.

Those would be a good start... civilian access to footage means footage needs to be taken... from there, largely, citizen groups can provide additional pressure.

Beyond this, I'd like to see civilian volunteers to try to pair each officer with a trained volunteer at least 2 shifts per week per officer (armed). Along with ongoing interaction training.

Beyond all of the above, reduction in military weapons, tactics and hand-me-downs. SWAT is/was supposed to mean "SPECIAL Weapons And Tactics" as in, not the norm... and rarely to be used.

Regarding your fourth line about pairing officers with volunteers, this happens in (some/all?) UK constabularies, for example: https://www.lancashire.police.uk/ridealong

On a related note, we also have volunteer Independent Monitoring Boards for prisons: https://www.gov.uk/volunteer-to-check-standards-in-prison

And voluntary magistrates' courts which try all cases first (although they pass serious ones on to the Crown Court): https://www.gov.uk/become-magistrate

And Patient Participation Groups for all GP practices: https://www.napp.org.uk/ppgintro.html

I don't know if any of these are also the case in the US, and the UK definitely has problems of its own, but it does seem to be leaps and bounds ahead in terms of citizen oversight and institutional transparency.

Well that pretty much negates the "A few bad Apples" line. The whole basket is rotten.

It is very obvious that the issue is training and hiring requirements. Add military arms to the equation and you have an even bigger Problem. Why is it that when I get pulled over I am the one that is trying the deescalate the situation?

And this is all before you add the racism issue into the pot.

I would also ask, with regards to things like the black site in Chicago where police kidnapped and tortured people for years as an institution, how many bad apples is that?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-poli...

And how many more good apples would we have to add to correct a situation like this? Three, perhaps? Would we need to find as many as 3 more good apples?

I don't know how it is with apples but with potatoes you need to get rid of the whole lot if you find just one with mold on it.

It really depends.. there are like 17k police agencies..., assuming that the average is 100 officers per agency that/s 1.7 million... further assuming 1/2 the offenses are bogus, meaning 40k/1700k meaning a 0.02% bad cop.. or 2:100. Given it's a high stress job, which lends to certain personality profiles over others, it's still pretty bad.

Now, that's also assuming those infractions are the worst kinds, which most won't be. Repeat offenses within a given timeframe are more serious though. And I'd like to see soft limits on infractions in a ~5yr window leading to automatic dismissal.

For that matter, up to 2% of the worst offenders being able to be dismissed per year as policy (this is where the union becomes a problem) as a possibility.

There are other things that could improve things, mostly around required camera footage being taken, and publicly accessible. There are of course caveats.

30k dismissed from 85k is very high ratio. That clearly shows 85k is very low number to begin with. And these numbers are for last 10 years.

I wasn't aware it was for 10 years... yeah, that's really low in general. I was under the impression it was a single year, I only quickly skimmed TFA.

> Well that pretty much negates the "A few bad Apples" line. The whole basket is rotten.

Well technically it proves the line. The full phrase is "A few bad apples spoil the entire lot". Spoiled apples emit ethylene which causes the surrounding apples to spoil faster.

That is surprisingly apt comparison.

Violent/racist cops protected by their organization will cause others who were hiding their tendencies to be embolden, further spoiling the basket.

For those in the EU:

https://eu.knoxnews.com/story/in-depth/news/investigations/2...

And the title needs (2019)

The article mentions that there are "30,000 people banned from the profession by state regulators".

I wonder how many more have committed similar offenses without getting sanctioned.

Full disclosure: I'm not American, and I don't really follow recent news from US, so I certainly don't know much about the protests, haven't been there, etc, etc.

Having said that, here's my 3 cents from a bystander perspective...

I've seen some videos from this list. Lots of them are taken in an environment when a person violates the law in some way, often in front of the police officer. I'm not saying that every video has a situation like this, just the few I've encountered. So if the job of the police is to enforce the law, maybe the protesters should rather try to change the law instead of trying to oppose only the lowest execution layer of the law enforcement? I mean, trying to do the opposite of what the police officer says the citizen should do, seems to be a unintelligent thing to do, from my perspective.

Downvotes are welcome ;(

People do the opposite of what the police say in other countries, but it does not end in police brutality.

Dealing with people who may be unintelligent, drunk, mentally unstable, or distressed etc is part of the job.

That's... not true...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaEOeyANSVM

in Poland we had an 'a protest of entrepreneurs' recently against government lockdowns caused by covid-19, and there was some pushing with the police (even a candidate for the president has been detained I think)

This doesn't change the fact that the protest did violate the 'no gathering' rule, so the police could be used to enforce this rule. It's all I'm saying.

If people would respect the law, however pointless it is, then police wouldn't be able to do anything at all.

Other counties is not strictly a category that includes all other countries.

The issue here is police breaking the law, and then the law not being enforced.

I'm not sure anyone's really against police enforcing the law. That should not have to result in a misconduct of the police officer though. Is that controversial?

The point of protesting is to voice the need for change. That includes law.

Also, is it reasonable for routine traffic stops or harmless questioning to end in death? Is it worth it? Is it fair?

You do know that enforcing the law is the reason we have police in the first place?

You're saying if people would only not break the law, then the police would not misbehave. Yes, that's true of course, for there would be no police at all.

So is the point then that police are naturally bound to misconduct, and it's the fault of citizens that they misbehave? This argument reminds me of the idea that men are naturally bound to sexually assault women who dress 'provocatively'.

In every civilized country there are rules for what police can and cannot do. This is very important, as they are the primary institution which can legally use violence. If these rules are not held in high integrity, which they are not, then the legitimacy of this violence is eroded and trust in the nation state evaporates.

The only point I was trying to make is that you've written it yourself: the police is allowed to use violence. How can you enforce the law for parties that ale not cooperating? You can do it only by using violence. And in some videos, I see a lot of people that are not cooperating. That's all.

No more input from me, since I've already lost lots of karma for the original post ;p

Also I don't want to get into the how-women-should-behave territory, sorry ;)

The police are allowed the reasonable use of force when there is probable cause to support it. They are not allowed the unlimited use of force whenever they feel like it. That distinction is critical to this entire issue, and a lot of the outcry is over excessive use of force.

Even framing it as you are — as violence — is already the wrong mindset I would want an officer to have. They should be using force, not violence, as a means of last resort to de-escalate a situation and ideally to cease any violence that's occurring.

Sometimes the most effective way to demonstrate the injustice of a law is to publicize its enforcement. Much of the brutality captured on video recently is, strictly speaking, legal. But there's little support for changing the law without the public getting a visceral sense of how bad it is.

> Much of the brutality captured on video recently is, strictly speaking, legal.

We must not be watching the same videos. I've seen a lot of behavior by police, captured on video, of criminal assault. Just because someone is breaking the law does not give an officer carte blanche with regards to force. (And I've seen a lot of videos where the victim of police brutality is not clearly breaking the law, and if anything, seems to be following it.)

This isn't the video list thread...

> maybe the protesters should rather try to change the law instead

That's what most of the protesters are trying to do. In fact they tried for years even without any protest and it didn't work. People lost their job because they kneeled down.

You can't kill someone for 20 bucks and not listening. Meanwhile forgiving officers misconduct that led to someone losing his life.

There is fundamental problem with police recruitment and ways to keep them in check and they need to let experts find and cure it. It's wrong to ignore it as much as it's wrong to blame every police officer for it.

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