Hacker News Reader

Comment by eiji | Hacker News Reader

The military is a national organization with a hierarchy stretching from the first-day-on-the-job cadet all the way into the White House. In the US, almost every police department is it's own thing. I'm not aware of any national organization. Usually the mayor is the top of the hierarchy. That means a faceless bureaucracy, towns and states removed, will deal with individual concerns in the military. Not a known person three miles from your house.

View on HN

Not just that, but much of the hierarchy above police forces is opaque if it exists at all.

The Austin PD chief has come under intense scrutiny for his department's handling of various arrests and protests over the past few months, and after roughly half of the city council called on him to resign, it was reported that neither the city council or the mayor could legally fire him.[0]

The city manager, which is appointed and not elected, has the power to demote the police chief, but the state does not permit a police chief to be terminated.

Long story short, none of Austin's leaders have the power to fire the police chief.

0: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/06/18/austin-police-chief-...

edit: added reporting

County sheriffs are similarly "protected", in that they have to be voted out in most cases in the next election.

That's fine. They are accountable to the electorate who can recall them.

It’s less fine when the electorate consistently delivers a mandate to brutalize a minority population, or just isn’t paying enough attention to such down-ticket races to care.

Criminals are a minority population (by number and temperament, not by race or anything). There structurally can't be any unbiased mechanism for effectively protecting minority populations or the criminals would use them.

Look at the taxes-are-theft crowd; they think the electorate consistently delivers a mandate to brutalize their finances. They aren't totally wrong. They'd love a mechanism to avoid arrest if they don't pay taxes.

So fine or otherwise, it is probably systemically optimum.

What does this have to do with systematic abuse of specific groups? Criminals are people who break laws, they aren't a cultural group. They aren't some collection of people that are oppressed. I'd be impressed if you could show me some data showing that criminals (not prisoners) are systematically abused. What are you arguing for?

Thread ancestor said that the electorate was consistently handing out mandates to "brutalize a minority population".

The electorate's power to hand out such mandates is also the power that it uses to define who criminals are.

There can't be a check on that power without also opening up a huge can of worms for general law enforcement.

> Criminals are people who break laws, they aren't a cultural group.

If a majority hands out a mandate to oppress a minority group they can probably define the minority group to be criminals. In fact, there is a persuasive argument that that is happening.

> or just isn’t paying enough attention to such down-ticket races to care

The Open Society Foundations has had a ton of success in changing how crimes are prosecuted at the local level by pouring money into district attorney elections across the country. That's a major reason the BLM protests have been successful: most people are not being prosecuted because the local DA is a "friendly." Since many people don't pay attention, money spent at this level has been very effective.

Presumably the OSF could target county Sheriffs races next, which would stop those cases from even reaching the DA's desk. Then the police wouldn't need to be abolished per se, they could simply stop enforcing laws that disproportionally target minorities, while simultaneously ratcheting up enforcement on the people who voted for those laws.

Hence "defund the police": they may not be able to fire the police chief, but they can give him an ultimatum to quit or have the budget from which his salary is paid reduced to zero.

> ... or have the budget from which his salary is paid reduced to zero.

That doesn't sound legal -- at the least, he could sue the city/state for those wages

On what grounds could "he" sue?

That's not even remotely how it works. You can't legally do that.

The city could absolutely cut the police budget to $0.

Can do all sorts of things, but when somebody turns up with a gun there has to be some physical mechanism to stop them from seizing control of the local supermarket.

The city can defund the entire police force, but it will have to set up or allow an alternative which will end up the same as the current one if the incentives don't change. Resetting the entire system every time something goes wrong isn't really a viable strategy. It'll work every so often.

Of course. This isn't controversial.

If someone takes a bunch of hostages then we need people who can de-escalate and rescue them, but that isn't what most cops spend their time doing every day.

In my childhood, I was in an area with so-called community-policing (not in the US). It was a living nightmare. Our family was glad to get out of the area.

Even knowing that US police are harsh and trigger-happy, I find it deeply amusing that first world citizens protected by the world's strongest military will talk about community policing.

Pass laws to reform the police. Abolishing them will just ensure that power hungry and petty tyrants fill the void. And these folks will happily beat and murder any and all who act against them, tax/toll all economic opportunities (roads/bridges/vendors, etc), keep the local politician and bureaucrats in their pocket, assault/abuse any woman on the streets - and no-one will dare to report anything.

You haven't added any reasoning or even anecdotal evidence to the discussion, only that you had a "living nightmare" experience, and then you went on to fantasize about some dystopia and why our only option is to pass reforms.

The police aren't following the laws now. Why would you think that adding laws would make them follow the existing ones? Police reform isn't the only tool we have available, and it feels very silly to hear people continue pounding the reform drum in 2020.

Not really a discussion for HN. I can't offer you any evidence. This was in the 80s in a somewhat backward region in a specific state in India ruled by "Panchayat" when I was a child far before the advent of the cellphone. There is no evidence apart from the memory of a lot of beatings. My sister getting assaulted. Folks going missing. And frightened shopkeepers.

Of-course things are far different today since someone or the other carries a cellphone and in modern India, law and order has far improved - thanks to more effective policing and prosecution. (Still have a long way to go)

You are a protected first world citizen. I suspect you will need to learn for yourself what living without the police means. I assure you there is no fantasy "dystopia" made up here. There are real consequences to not having an armed force enforcing the law.

Not if it means you can't pay officers their salaries, and those salaries are protected by a collective bargaining agreement. Now the city is in violation of a contract and is going to end up paying more in litigation costs plus punitive penalties. That's the difference between "technically can" and "can, but will open up the municipality to so much liability it probably constitutes gross negligence on the part of anyone who votes for it."

Collective bargaining agreements aren't contacts. You can still fire everyone.

Creating a new federal body to specifically deal with use-of-force by law enforcement could correct many issues by conducting investigates in a more impartial manner.

It could also issue nation-wide guidelines such as making it impossible to turn off body cameras.

I see this much like the Civil Rights Act. There was no way segregation was going to be ended without significant legislation and enforcement from the federal government. Bottom line is that the sort of large scale reform needed to end systemic problems of police misconduct is going to be extremely difficult to achieve via local reforms. Congress needs to end qualified immunity, end civil asset forfeiture, increase federal oversight, and potentially write new laws governing the use of body cams.

One idea I've seen from police reformers is a 'Missing Video Presumption' law. The basic idea is that if the body cam (or vehicle cam) footage goes missing and there is a conflicting account of events, the court will presume the video would've corroborated the civilian's version of events. This would give an extremely strong incentive to not turn off cameras or sabotage video as police have done in a number of cases.

A lot of these policing issues seems to come from progressive localities so I'm not sure it's even due to government unwillingness to solve the issues.

Most organizations are really extremely bad at dealing with internal abuses which is why external watchdogs could work very well.

Mandatory body cams make a lot of sense but if you need to deal with the opposition of 1000s local police unions it's not going to happen very quickly.

> A lot of these policing issues seems to come from progressive localities so I'm not sure it's even due to government unwillingness to solve the issues.

Part of the reason for this is that police unions fight vigorously against reform and police unions are powerful in local politics. That's why some police departments ended up getting disbanded by their municipalities to restart from the ground up.

It seems like opposition to body cams in general isn't strong, but the real fight will come when stronger laws are proposed for when body cams need to be on, penalties for not having them on, and when footage must be released.

> police unions fight vigorously against reform and police unions are powerful in local politics

Aren't the Democrats the notionally pro-union party? I think it has fallen out of rhetorical favour in recent years, but I thought there was an association between Democrats being in charge and strong local union presences.

Yes.

Police unions are seen as an exception to the usual party alignment. The Minneapolis police union and its president Bob Kroll supported Trump's campaign:

https://www.lawofficer.com/minneapolis-police-union-touting-... (2019)

External watchdogs are only as good as their leaders. For example, the Seattle PD was recently under a consent decree with the Department of Justice over civil rights abuses. Yet they still beat the shit out of people expressing their 1st Amendment rights.

Most large PDs are in urban areas that are either in blue states, or that are blue islands in red states. They also tend to be the most problematic. So this problem can largely be solved at municipal level - if there's political will for it.

Americans: we don't trust authority, most of our Constitution deals with limitations to authorities and opens with a stern remainder that power comes from the will of people trough armed militias

also Americans: we need more authority to deal with the untrustworthy authorities

I see you're being downvoted, perhaps for the directed satire (something, as a Brit, I enjoy… it is our natural habitat:) but it's a legitimate point.

I read a book by Chomsky (I forget which) in which he went through why the American democratic system was corrupt. It was very compelling. His solution, however, would be to "guard the guards" with more state apparatus and a more involved electorate. This is where he and I digressed because it's obviously pie in the sky and open to the same kinds of corruption. Turtles all the way down.

Less is more when it comes to the state - smaller government as a principle can be extended to the police by defunding and not abolishing. Remove their military vehicles, remove their ability to get no-knock warrants and other vast overreaches of power, and strengthen the power of the citizenry. Has that (less government, more individual rights) ever not worked?

> could correct many issues by conducting investigates in a more impartial manner.

Police already think that Obama's DoJ was incredibly political and it did exactly this[1] when issuing more consent decrees (source: police in family). Putting a new "Space Force" brand on the box doesn't make officers trust either their own brass or the feds more than they did.

There's no solution to a lack of trust here except perhaps a massive airing of grievances and more transparency. People like me don't trust that police officers charged with crimes will ever be impartially prosecuted by the same prosecutors who need their hard work on all other cases (departments and unions have actually tanked careers of DAs and ADAs who have aimed to cross the "think blue line of silence"). In my city, the police union used propaganda and threats to scare an independent civilian oversight (private attorney acting in a public role) into quitting his oversight role.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-the-doj-refor...

Wouldn't a federal body less reliant on a favorable disposition from the police be the answer here?

Few are going to welcome more oversight of themselves, but it seems more and more like what's required. That oversight doesn't seem to work when it's locally based, for all the reasons you've outlined.

I think there should be nationwide training standards and standards for tactics that then get enforced. What I get from a lot of videos is that cops often have to improvise because they aren’t trained to deal with a situation. Most of the time the improvisation goes well but sometimes it doesn’t. I think this uncertainty is causing a lot of stress to cops and the people they have to deal with and then leads to bad behavior. I used to know some cops personally and they all said there was almost no way to discuss a difficult situation and develop better approaches. The general attitude seems to be “suck it up” and be quiet. It seems the whole organization is rotten from the top and highly abusive to people working in it.

and these same city officials, especially mayors, are politically connected to their police departments doubly so if they are unionized; not all police are unionized. politicians learn real fast to not go up against any organization backed by a public employee union. police and educators are the absolute worst in this regard.

I keep looking back at how many bemoan corporate money in politics and how references that Citizen's United was the cause but completely ignore that DNC platform while supporting that completely ignores these unions contributing; in fact one certain Senator's webpage is explicit in only using corporation examples. Hell that same person wants you to pay for the DNC and RNC conventions; its criminal we pay for their convention security as is

Simple reason, when people are paid by tax coffers that means their unions are and in turn it just becomes one giant slush fund for politicians who want to remain in power.

Yeah having a tight value set and tight enforcement of integrity violations among other values is certainly a function of the federal structure.

Police don't have that. It's too localized and going beyond the current state of affairs requires on a police chief with ethical super powers to really enforce things, as it would be starting from Base 0 with an Elliot Ness-like reform.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com