No Qualified Immunity for Cops Who Made Stuff Up to Justify Phone Seizure
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I think this is underscores the biggest issue. Mistakes are made by these power-hungry ignorant police officers, usually due to their fragile ego, and then they face little consequences. Someone sues and gets a nice settlement. Nothing changes. Taxpayers are taking the brunt instead of the police officer. The offending officer will likely get a slap on the wrist, or if it's a really bad mistake that went viral they might choose an early, comfortable retirement. In order for change to happen, police officers need to be held accountable for their actions. Not sure how to implement that but I think that would result in police officers being much more careful about their conduct.
What decade(s) would you place that time frame in?
I think it was always broken, but it’s only since police body cams and everyone carrying a video camera (10 years, give or take a few years) that problem has been given a voice.
Sometimes it feels like the prevailing sentiment is just “police hurts us so we need to create outrage until they remove police and/or give us a better one”, which is understandable but remembering that how police works today is in fact a result of democratic process (and that indeed it works for the taxpayer) might be useful—less “us vs. them” and more “taxpayer today vs. taxpayer of the past”.
The reality is that the police in the US are here to enforce the social order, not to protect the public.[0] It has always been that way; as the sibling poster said, it’s just more visible now. I think we have the chance to improve policing now because of that visibility.
Edit: I’m adding this paragraph in response to your other comment, which says in part “Police must have satisfied the primary requirements posed by the people at some point in the past, if we are to believe that democracy works at all.” I understand what you’re saying, but we are still struggling to get equal representation up and running here. Democracy may or may not work, but lots of people were excluded from the process until very recently, and there are continuing efforts to keep it that way. So in a very narrow sense, sure, police did what they were designed to, which is to enforce the social order. The social order is messed up, therefore police are too and always have been.
[0] See this Supreme Court case from 2005; a lower court ruling from 1981 says the same thing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonza...
They ultimately supervise and choose the people that hire the police, the people that set the policies for the police, and the people (both in and out of police departments) directly responsible for holding police accountable.
I'm pretty sure there is no jurisdiction in which you can't fire a police officer convicted of unlawful homicide. It's true prosecutors aren't likely to prosecute police officers, but that's because they are elected officials that are held accountable for being sufficiently successful in prosecuting non-cops, but not for prosecuting cops.
Second, while both Constitutional law regarding due process rights attached to public civil service employment and employment contract terms may make it difficult, time consuming, and procedurally involved to fire police officers, which also makes agencies reluctant to even initiate the process, you are significantly overstating the case even absent criminal prosecution.
And third, the only reason it is possible to have contract terms that make it so hard to fire police officers for misconduct is that the the law doesn't set out accountability standards or qualifications for continuation in such roles that would make such a contract void as contrary to public policy. Which is, even if a negative choice, a legislative policy choice by elective representatives. And the decision to enter into such contracts, given that they are allowed, is also a decision made by publicly accountable officials.
So, a whole lot of different, directly publicly accountable decision makers are necessarily involved, either actively or tacitly, in permitting bad cops to continue to do bad things. If the public cared to stop it, they could through the democratic process.
https://ij.org/press-release/u-s-supreme-court-rules-unanimo...
Cities should start suing on behalf of their citizens.
On a side note, do you know of any case law that shows that leaving a charge stand when you know it is false (no detention/custody) is a violation of Constitutional rights? I have a situation that this would be useful for.
A fool's errand, we know that won't happen on the basis of "doing the right thing".
It would have to be structured so that covering up only makes it worse, it is a perfect subject for applying game theory to steer the outcomes.
I mean the poor guy who caused the AWS S3 outage doesn’t need to be personally personally responsible for the millions people lost due to it nor does their teammates via their 401ks. These are structural issues and trying to find someone to scapegoat makes it so people ignore them.
Accidents and mistakes happen, but a great deal of these incidents are not individual mistakes, they're often an escalating pattern of behaviour which has been ignored or excused until something terrible happens.
I'm ok with that.
People can arm themselves and settle their own problems
Cost the state a million dollars because you abused or killed somebody congrats you will now be poor for the rest of your life.
1/3 of 1% of the US works in law enforcement its absurd for the other 99.66% of us to vote in bad terms for everyone unless 70% of us believe those bad terms apply to someone else like a minority.
Look, I have no sympathy for police officers who intentionally do harm but this isn’t the way to weed them out.
To continue the malpractice analogy a doctor who failed to order a test that ought to have been ordered given the patients symptoms and fails to diagnose a condition leading to the patients preventable death would be a victim of malpractice.
The current and suggested practice is for the government to provide what amounts to errors and omissions coverage similar to professional liability insurance to all police officers.
What isn't normally covered by malpractice insurance is reckless, illegal, or intentional acts.
https://equotemd.com/blog/common-exclusions-for-medical-malp...
I'm saying that cops ought to be legally liable for the classes of acts that wouldn't normally be covered by professional insurance. Planting drugs, recklessly shooting someone without ensuring that they actually have a gun not a cell phone in their hand, assaulting someone because you can.
Hey how about using a flimsy pretext to search someone's anus for drugs!
All things that haven happened in recent years!
Reckless or illegal acts are almost certainly uninsurable at any reasonable price because protection for such acts would ultimately be very expensive because in a world where your union keeps you from being held accountable and the law keeps you from being sued personally people would do them.
Malpractice insurance for cops would probably be overkill for actually reasonable mistakes and amount to enriching insurers while it would be useless to solve more serious issues.
It is an interesting solution searching for a viable problem.
Maybe even pull some of their own possession BS grab some restitution on the way in.
I doubt we’d be able to achieve that without the willingness to disband the police. Police unions are extremely powerful and they would never accept this without an existential threat to all of their members’ jobs.
At that point, why not go all the way and disband the police, creating a new law enforcement agency to replace them, with an entirely different culture and mandate?
unlike private sector unions there is no accountability, the contracts are actually written to forbid any real means to hold members or the union as a whole accountable for actions.
So unless they are reigned in nothing is ever going to change. More likely you will be told and you will buy into the idea that more money and more staffing is needed.
and nothing will change except the public will be on the hook for even larger and more outlandish suits and worse pensions
"All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters."
Tribalism rules the day, even in the face of more or less objective facts.
Collectively bargaining to ensure you are being treated fairly is not holding anyone hostage. Your melodramatic language doesn't do your argument any favors. Folks like our mail carriers deserve to be treated well, to have decent pay and functional equipment. Yet legislators time and time again do what they can to cut funding and decrease worker compensation.
Tribalism rules the day, even in the face of more or less objective facts."
It's charming that you think unions try to achieve a fair outcome. Aren't they a tribe fighting for a they can get? I've seen businesses go under due to never ending demands.
"Collectively bargaining to ensure you are being treated fairly is not holding anyone hostage. Your melodramatic language doesn't do your argument any favors."
And your condescending language doesn't do your argument any favors. The ability of the workers to hold the services hostage from the people until thier demands are met, is very much true. This can be extremely inconvenient, in cases such as teacher strikes, even forcing some people to miss work to stay home with the kids.
"Yet legislators time and time again do what they can to cut funding and decrease worker compensation."
This isn't always bad. Do you really think the government should be giving everyone a pension? It would make sense to move people from defined benefits plans to defined contribution plans. This brings them in line with the vast majority of industry.
* The jobs are largely undesirable, so threatening to quit is viable
* The jobs are public facing (for the major unions like police and teachers) so they can rally the public on their behalf
* These professions have extreme leeway for "work to rule" (doing the minimum requiremed) that applies pressure on employer without violating employment agreements.
* note: When most people debate unions, they mean collective bargaining obligations, not free association "minority" unions. A minority union can still speak up for its membership and provide financial support for victims of management.
Most likely if you hold officers financially responsible as a rule, they'll take out errors and omissions policies. Salaries may be raised to pay for premiums, but either way it's tax payer money. The insured pool would probably be police officers from a wider area, but still tax payer money. So if you ended up getting a claim paid by insurance, it's just coming from a wider pool of tax payers.
If you only allowed people to be a police officer if they were wealthy enough to pay a judgement, that would be pretty gross.
It is far from an ideal solution but it should help start getting the ball rolling towards a more professional and transparent police force.
What's wrong with simply _enforcing the law_ on police officers?
With actual financial incentives on the line (their insurance premiums and their jobs) we may see natural behavior change without having to build out a new enforcement apparatus that could be subject to the same abuse as the current one.
We need to stop punting the cost of this to faceless entities like the state and allow the officers themselves to be sued and the free market will do the rest.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
If there is no case to be made in defending a cop, nobody wants to make it. But then it isn't a story, because it's only a story if it's a controversy.
That creates the impression that many people are defending all of these bad cops in the clear cases, when they're really only defending them in the controversial cases.
Seems like the unions will defend an officer regardless of what they did.
And a system where the cops in those cases end up with unaffordable "malpractice" premiums and have to quit would be a benefit.
It's too bad the system is corrupt and they won't hold people within the system accountable.
If someone is wrongly imprisoned, injured or killed the financial remedy must not stop at the individual officer’s net worth / insurance coverage maximum or be subject to potential coverage gaps.
Additionally, everyone will still pay the cost through taxes, but now an insurance company will try to turn a profit on it and those living in regions with “good cops” will be subject to the tax as well.
Compare to credit reporting where everyone starts with a decent provisional score and then the cost of borrowing goes down if you demonstrate the correct risk/reward behavior.
I think the only real catching point is that the courts don't care about rights nor are police willing to really investigate claims against another officer. I have some very recent/on-going experience with this. There was a trooper who knowingly held a false charge against us, leading to restrictions in our freedoms and small costs. I contacted a civil rights attorney who told me the courts don't care unless we sustained significant costs/damages. Recovering costs would be great, but we would mostly like to see protections put into place so this doesn't happen to others (and maybe get this bad trooper removed). I filed one successful complaint against him. Then he took further actions and I filed another complaint. That complaint was closed without any investigation or justification - they didn't even tell me they were closing it.
With all respect, this sounds like an awful idea. Doctors have malpractice insurance because their field is an outlier in many ways. In almost every other profession, people who mess up get fired, not fined, and it works pretty well.
Given that that is largely not the case with police officers, it seems like we should try what works everywhere else before we try the one-off exception we've carved out for medicine.
Most workers in the US are not protected by unions, the police are a stark exception to this. Their union contracts not only protect them as workers, they ensure protections that people absolutely would not believe, such as mandatory cooling off periods before police can be interviewed when charged with misconduct.
Even if the rules were nearly even for police and non-police the issue remains that most enforcement would have to come from their peers (other police or DAs, even other enforcement officers at state and federal agencies will see themselves on the same team). They don’t want to subject one of their own to the criminal justice system because they know how cruel and damaging it is.
[0] It actually won’t work though:
- Taxpayers with police forces that actually avoid incidents that would pay out will still have to pay the insurance tax
- Incidents of gross civil rights violations (such as intentionally arresting or killing someone when it was not warranted) are so injurious that nobody will insure the police forces that actually need it
- In the interim we may see one of the worst possible outcomes: a police understanding that violations are simply a dollars and cents issue
Dumb question—what about introducing a competing agency or agencies?
How bad of an idea is a “for profit police force?”
Could there not be something similar for other professionals that can end a person’s life while ‘on the clock’?
Make a lien on the pension which forces the old guard to feel uncomfortable and request department changes.
Make this occur for the slightest infractions of any individual officer.
Make the municipality have to disclose very significant policing stats when they want to issue a bond, and then quarterly. They currently have a complete disclosure exemption from the SEC.
Turn on these consequences every time a police report doesn't match the video. Or whenever one just lies whether there is video or not.
Make the partners accomplices when they don't report, and that alone being a trigger for the wide range of sanctions against the entire municipality.
There are a lot of ways to make them turn on themselves, while keeping their primarily stated concern of being able to make split second decisions and get home safely at the end of the day.
This would be much better than requiring all this fanfare for a small subset of egregious transgressions.
Why not just deduct all lawsuits and other costs from the collective pension fund for police departments? This seems like a trivial problem to solve (I mean assuming the goal were to solve it, and not increase police power while minimizing accountability). Once the police have to start paying for their own fuckups, I think they will quickly turn on each other. And in the event they decide to double down and hide it collectively, they risk losing the pension fund for the entire police department (obviously depends on the court settlement). At least they'll have skin in the game for their corruption.
Communal punishment is considered a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. While those clearly do not apply in the situation you propose, it may be an interesting datapoint for considering its fairness.
100%, not even a second thought. We need reform, not excuses. Why do cops even get a pension in the first place? It should be a reward, not an entitlement. And it should only be rewarded if the entire department does its job, not an individual officer. They serve the community, and if the community is not served they should not be set for life.
To be clear here, the bar is "don't break the law." This isn't some extraordinary standard we're expecting them to adhere to. In fact, we're only trying to hold them to the same standards they hold everybody else to.
Then convict them. You can't? Fix that. Why this convoluted scheme that punishes unrelated people? You say you want the same standards to apply to the police but on the other hand you accept that they can never be punished directly and their colleages must be fined instead. That's crazy inconsistent, those are not at all the standards that normal people are held to.
How? How do you convict cops when their co-workers cover for them?
Please take some effort to understand what the problem is, because it's painfully obvious to me you do not. If I had to guess, you're not even from the United States. I say that solely based on how completely disconnected from this problem you appear to be.
Absolutely, and that's a great change. Currently, 'good' cops are incentivised to cover up for their bad brethren due to institutional pressures (see: 'good' cops getting bullied out of the force). If instead the culture incentivised speaking out against bad actors because suddenly it affected the majority, maybe we'd see the necessary change.
My work bonus depends 50% on the company's performance and 50% on my own personal performance, and the company performance is measured partially by our safety figures. When other people in the company injure themselves, my bonus drops because the company safety performance drops. I'm incentivised to improve the safety culture in general and enable others to be safe, rather than just my own personal performance.
It's an entirely acceptable approach, because you're supposed to be part of a team. I don't see a difference with the pension example.
Replace individual officer with individual common citizen. Knowingly doing something wrong results in <insert anything> for egg Knowingly driving a car into a building won’t be slap on the wrist and the tax payer will pay for it. It probably means you’ll be in jail, bankrupt etc. why shouldn’t same standard be applied?
No one is going to sell you a liability policy to protect you from committing crimes.
When police officers commit blatant misconduct the officers involved should at least be fired and criminal charges should be applied to them if applicable. This is how it works for every other job, not sure why police should be different.
Where I disagree with the more recent discussion of police brutality is this idea that they should be financially responsible instead of tax payers.
Taxpayers should be responsible. These are people hired by the state for purposes defined by elected officials. We, the voters/taxpayers should bear financial responsibility for their actions...we should bear the financial responsibility for any actions done by government responsibility because they are done in our name. However, financial penalties are not justice. These cops should not be financially penalized, they should be criminally charged because they are committing crimes. If it isn't a crime, that is something that should be fixed. That should be the norm not a rarity. The criminal justice system is our method of accountability for citizens, it should especially be the system of accountability for them. If that fails, the answer isn't the financial accountability.
It isn't completely irrational to say 'you acted outside of the norms of the justice system as an officer entrusted with its authority, therefore you are not entitled to its protections'. As a strawman, if vigilantes handled violence committed by police officers do you think excessive violence by police would stop? It would be an ugly but interesting experiment.
The video makes it clear - it wasn't a mistake.
The cop deliberately broke the law because he wanted to.
> police officers need to be held accountable for their actions. Not sure how to implement that
Why is the idea of simply enforcing the existing laws out of the question? The video shows two people in a uniform assaulting another. The two people in uniform should be charged with criminal assault in exactly the same way it would be the other way around.
The point is that the United States is a lawless country, where "lawmakers" and "law enforcement" commit crimes at will, in public, and laugh about it.
Clearly police officers are above the law in America. Clearly blue lives matter/thin blue line is a very deep cultural problem within the force. Clearly police unions protect people who shouldn't be protected. Clearly police officers protect their peers when their peers commit crime. Clearly there is some level of infiltration by white supremacists into police forces. Clearly police in major cities do not do a very good job of de-escalation at all.
The average citizen has almost certainly seen a video of a police officer acting outrageously and not ending up in prison. Everyone here has theories that will solve it: end qualified immunity, fix incentives, destroy police unions. Most likely none of us are experts. I can't shake the feeling that there is some truth or barrier to this problem that the average person doesn't know about/the government doesn't think we can handle being told.
If nothing else any reform must have the blessing of police officers. If police officers quit en masse that is something society at large isn't willing to tolerate. Just like the old slashdot e-mail reform meme of ol' (https://yro.slashdot.org/story/04/04/06/1629219/analysis-of-...), I suspect we need a similar meme for police reform.
I think many law enforcement officers view themselves as 'the law' and therefore believe that the ends justify the means. The popular, although dated, culture backs them up on that and there are many laws that favor law enforcement over suspects.
Police in the US think they are above the law because in many ways they are. The good ones know how to find the balance and keep the peace.
It seems like the only solution is for every single interaction to be digitally recorded.
One problem with making a federal case out of this is that it tends to incentivize the cops to make their own federal case out of this in defense, i.e. to make stuff up so they have a defense if they made a mistake.
The ruling says quite clearly that they illegally arrested him. They also illegally searched him if you watch the video, but for some reason neither court addresses it. Perhaps that wasn't brought up in the original complaint. Also, they didn't neglect to give him his phone back like it was an innocent mistake. They illegally seized it to search for evidence of a crime.
Making a federal case out of this is the only avenue for justice for him.
The article makes much of the idea that they "make a suspicious activity case" but the fact is that they didn't fabricate anything, they dropped the matter when they saw it was unrelated to any criminal activity.
This may not be constitutional, but a norm of not cooperating with law enforcement is a terrible one that leads only to further bad outcomes. If this guy had simply given his real name and said what he was doing--despite not being required to--he likely would've kept his phone and not wasted so much time.
Maybe things have changed since I was last in Des Monies, but I don't see this case going anywhere with a jury.
This case is, in my opinion, highly unlikely to go in front of a jury. I have seen many cases similar to this end in five to six figure settlements.
For example, this interaction with similar circumstances resulted in a $41k settlement and a departmental policy change: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV6nsq6IIHg. This interaction was only a short detainment, yet it resulted in a $75k settlement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02J2EVyxfbU.
I could easily provide another dozen or so examples.
I don't see the "benefit" here. I've been pretext stopped in the middle of the night while driving a beaten-up car in an out of the way area. The cop asked me to get out and walk around to see something and I did so, etc. We both went our separate ways a few minutes later, because nothing was wrong.
If this guy had simply said "my name is X, I'm videoing these illegally parked cars for my blog at Y" this would've ended without incident. Instead, it will become an incentive to cops to either "find something" (which, despite the headline and a quote in the article that makes it seems otherwise, I would point out that the article says the cops did not do here) or make sure they never bother to investigate anything happening in plain sight, even if that leads to bad outcomes for people.
But those are invisible, because you can't see that but-for event and someone acting like a Karen with the cops will get tens of thousands of dollars for it.
This statement right here is a pretty roundabout way to speak the truth that "reform" is unlikely to ever change anything. Even these moderate proposals that are just pointless theatre are opposed tooth and nail by police officers and unions everywhere.
Hell, in the midst of everything going on last year, many police unions insisted their budgets needed to be increased at the expense of all other city departments facing cuts.
I think the truth is simple. Police officers are regular people, not supermen. They work an awful and dangerous job where they interact primarily with the worst individuals in our society. There will always be bad apples.
Even on the violence front, it's overstated. In 2020, 45 cops were shot to death on purpose, 5 shot on accident, 13 were purposefully struck by a car, and 1 died from an unspecified assault. That's 59[0] purposeful killings out of an estimated 665,280[1] police officers in America, or 8.8 per 100,000. Meanwhile COVID19 killed 221 cops, and various vehicular accidents killed 39 cops. Obviously 8.8 per 100,000 is not great, but it's far from how being a cop is portrayed in popular media.
For a grim comparison, consider the risk of being murdered as a cop to the risk of being murdered as a pregnant woman. A 2005 study connecting female homicide deaths with pregnancy information came to the conclusion that the homicide rate among pregnant women might be as high as 10.5 per 100,000, or about 25% higher than the murder rate for cops.
Given that the estimated domestic violence rate for police officers is 40%[3] and the known link between domestic abuse and homicide[4], a pregnant woman married to or living with a cop might have a higher chance of being murdered by her cop partner than her cop partner has of being murdered on the job.
It does strike me as an awful job though. No disagreement there.
0 - https://www.odmp.org/search/year/2020
1 - https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes333051.htm
2 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449445
3 - https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-...
4 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/investigations/...
I think that an interesting distinction is that when it comes to police, the danger comes from other humans. That is to say, their threat model is people intentionally trying to kill them, opposed to workplace accidents. In this way, the police are more similar to military forces, who also have a siege mentality.
While you point out that there were 59 police killings, this number may not capture the full picture. It is worth considering that there were 1000 fatal shootings by police and an estimated 2000 non-fatal shootings.[1] That is 450 per 100,000 per year. This is just the tip of the iceberg as it doesn't include shootings where nobody was injured, or violent interactions without guns. Violent nonfatal injuries and illnesses resulting in days away from work among police officers occurred at a rate of 121.7 per 100,000 FTE workers in 2018; the rate for all occupations was 7.3. [2] In one study 10% of police surveyed reported that they had killed or seriously injured someone during the first three years of their career. The average officer experiences 188 traumatic events in their career and have PTSD and depression rates 5X the general population, and the highest suicide rate of any profession.[3]
For me, this paints a picture of a job where violence and hostility is the norm. I point this out not to excuse the bad behavior of some police, but increase our understanding of it.
>Given that the estimated domestic violence rate for police officers is 40%[3] and the known link between domestic abuse and homicide[4], a pregnant woman married to or living with a cop might have a higher chance of being murdered than her cop spouse.
This would not surprise me at all, given what I stated above. The really interesting question is WHY and what conclusions can we draw from this?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02601-9
https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/police-2018.htm#:~:text=P.... https://www.addictioncenter.com/news/2019/09/police-at-highe...
https://rudermanfoundation.org/white_papers/police-officers-...
I think the strongest are review boards and body cams, and the weakest are busting the unions and individual insurance. For the latter, I haven't seen any data showing public support over 50%.
I think the most productive changes would be legalization and demilitarization of the the war on drugs. A centralized database of police violence and complaints would be the next step, and this could go hand in hand with third party review boards.
Even if your proposals and mine were adopted entirely, I don't think they would resolve the fundamental problems with police violence and bring behavior in line with expectations.
You raise a good point; being involved in a shooting even as the shooter is a traumatic event. It's not terribly uncommon for people to have PTSD after shooting someone, even if they didn't catch any return fire. There are also the cases where cops were seriously injured (as compared to "injured" in order to increase criminal penalties) but did not die or retire due to the injuries. Getting shot in body armor is still a pretty injuring event, especially soft body armor.
The important, and difficult question to answer is how many of these violent interactions were triggered by police, and how many were likely to happen no matter what the cops did? American police kill a lot more people than our OECD peers do; we're between Angola and Iran on the international stats, about 3.5x more than our nearest OECD peer (Canada). It's not unreasonable to assume that non-lethal violent encounters scale similarly[0]. Certainly some part of that is American culture in general, but it would be unreasonably deferential to cops to presume that they have no part in the problem, especially with so many high-profile anecdotes of cops escalating or using force unnecessarily. If using violence is traumatic, then doesn't a lot of the blame for that trauma fall onto the same people who decide to use it unnecessarily, and onto the same people that have willingly adopted a warrior mentality[1]?
0 - Perhaps higher still. American emergency rooms are very good at treating gunshot wounds; part of the reason why gun fatalities are down since the 1980s despite still high shooting rates. It's not unreasonable to assume that the ratio of shooting to fatality by American cops is higher than say, Canada, implying that it's even worse than the death statistics imply.
1 - https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/warrior-police-train...
>it would be unreasonably deferential to cops to presume that they have no part in the problem, especially with so many high-profile anecdotes of cops escalating or using force unnecessarily.
I think that the cops are one cog in a poorly designed machine, and in my opinion, not the most impactful one. Changing police policy is necessary, but not sufficient change to reduce police violence. We live in a relative police state, and it is convenient to place the bulk of the blame the replaceable enforcers opposed the system of laws and policies which perpetuate violent crime and violent police. Only changes to the latter will result in lasting change. To tie in the Canada comparison, The US also has 6.5X the incarceration rate.
>it would be unreasonably deferential to cops to presume that they have no part in the problem, especially with so many high-profile anecdotes of cops escalating or using force unnecessarily. If using violence is traumatic, then doesn't a lot of the blame for that trauma fall onto the same people who decide to use it unnecessarily, and onto the same people that have willingly adopted a warrior mentality
There are some cases where there is obvious misbehavior by officers and they should be held accountable for their actions, although I think this effect is overstated by focusing on the most outrageous examples. Most often, my understanding is that police shooters are acting in accordance with police training and policy to use lethal force when they perceive lethal threat from others. In these cases, think much of the "blame" falls on the policing institutions. The question becomes if a different policy exists would result in fewer unnecessary civilian deaths, with minimal increase in officer deaths. Perhaps there are win-win solutions where both death rates are reduced by avoiding dangerous scenarios entirely (e.g. avoiding unnecessary no-knock raids).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
The issue isn't that police work is hard but that from the start US police officers take an us vs. them approach to everything they do and in many cases can get away with just about anything by default.
I absolutely deny that resignation of the vast majority of police officers would result in a significant loss of useful institutional knowledge or talent. These are rotten institutions from the top down which is what really enforces the no-snitching culture. People above you will destroy you for snitching, and pull strings for you when you don't.
The people above are also the ones whose "blessings" are listened to. Low-level cops don't get to speak for themselves, we only listen to people who achieve in a culture that rewards bad behavior. It's how we handle everything, not just police.
The qualified immunity is discussed here: https://soundcloud.com/stevelehto/supreme-court-strikes-down...
The lawyer's web site is: https://lehtoslaw.com/
Edit: Your downvotes only make it more obvious that you don't really have a counterpoint to the police's homicidal tendencies nor their unions' participation in crafting legal protections for their actions.
The typical pro-union argument for companies is that they protect workers against abuses by the company.
In the public sector, the union is supposed to protect workers from the citizens? I haven't ever heard of a good theoretical argument for them. Would be interested if someone knew of one.
Public sector unions are fine.
Instead they have three different professional organisations, because the UK is ridiculously class-stratified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Federation_of_England_a...
> Superintendents and Chief superintendents are represented by a separate staff association, the Police Superintendents' Association of England and Wales (PSA),[3] while the most senior officers are members of the Chief Police Officers Staff Association (CPOSA).