I fail to see why it should protect the police from engaging in cold, calculated retribution of perceived enemies.
I think what vkou is saying (and I agree) is that while there currently are some police in prison who have been convicted of crimes, the difficulty factor of convicting a police officer is much higher than the difficulty of convicting a normal person. If the same higher standard for obtaining a conviction was applied to everyone else, hardly anyone would be sent to prison.
Further reading: https://aele.org/loscode2000.html
To read the bias read up on the Jason Van Dyke case, first time in 50 years a Chicago cop convicted of murder after being caught on camera and he served 3 and 1/4 years in prison. “The U.S. attorney's office confirmed on April 13, 2015,[57] that they had been conducting a federal criminal investigation of the McDonald case in conjunction with the state attorney's office, after contradictions were found between the initial police report and the dash-cam video”
Look, if you have zero counter evidence than any evidence to the contrary should be persuasive.
edit: looking at this again, I think I misread your point. You're claiming that unless I have evidence that shows that police are usually held accountable, then any evidence that they are not, even anecdotal, should convince me. I would say that's plainly not correct. If I know nothing about whether police are held accountable, a single case demonstrating one not being held accountable does not warrant assuming they usually are not. It only demonstrates that they are not always held accountable and tells me nothing about frequency. Drawing broad inferences from too little data is a pernicious problem in our society. That said, I can find plenty of anecdotes where cops were held accountable. How am I to know which is more typical?
It’s unrealistic to actually carry that out in every case, but in cases where you have zero evidence updating your views based on the first bit of evidence you receive is absolutely the correct choice. The degree to which any single piece of evidence should change your mindset is of course minimal, but holding a view with zero supporting evidence in the face of multiple pieces of counter evidence is a sign of insanity.
In the United States between 2005 and 2020, of the 42 nonfederal police officers convicted following their arrest for murder due to an on-duty shooting, only five ended up being convicted of murder.
By comparison:
In 2018 70% of US murder cases resulted in conviction.
Conviction rates of 12% vs 70% show a very strong bias.
Cops doing their job in a routine way doesn’t make the news. Cops taking steps to de-escalate things and avoid killing someone doesn’t make the news. Cops killing someone (justified or not) typically does.
If every time you see a news report of a police officer killing someone, you come away thinking “police must just be killing people left and right”, you’re forming an inaccurate conclusion. If you get your news from anything that’s driven by attention/clicks (that is to say, approximately everywhere), it’s a doubly inaccurate conclusion.
There aren’t that many documented cases of cops shooting people without justification, but in those cases you often find instances of cops covering up for other cops. That’s evidence not just for these cases but also otehr cases which where successfully suppressed.
there seem to be a large number of complaints against police officers in the U.S.
very few of these actually go to an indictment.
of these ones that go to an indictment it seems fewer get heavy sentences in comparison to the rest of the population for similar infractions.
all of this seems to make the police a statistical anomaly in comparison to other people accused of criminal conduct.
Occam's razor would suggest that the reason that police do better than other people in not being indicted, not being convicted, and receiving lesser sentences is because they are police.
Have there? I haven't seen them. Best I've seen is a study suggesting that killings by police may be undercounted due to mistakes in reporting, but doesn't make any claims that these represent crimes committed by police.
> there seem to be a large number of complaints against police officers in the U.S.
Google tells me there are 900,000 cops in the US. That's a large number too. What's the complaint/cop ratio?
> very few of these actually go to an indictment
How many fewer than we'd expect? What's the normal indictment rate? What should it be?
> of these ones that go to an indictment it seems fewer get heavy sentences in comparison to the rest of the population for similar infractions.
Again, how many fewer? These are all things I would expect could be demonstrated empirically. What are the actual numbers? It seems like people are mostly going by their gut feeling, which I just don't find convincing.
https://www.security.org/resources/police-brutality-statisti...
note however this is violence, not corruption which would be a separate thing https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/249850.pdf
as it happens statistics on corruption in police in U.S are very few, even fewer than those about violence which only recently have started becoming available.
>How many fewer than we'd expect? What's the normal indictment rate? What should it be?
obviously the normal indictment rate would be how many 'civilians' who get the cops called on them then go on to have an actual court case.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
would be where I would start on that. But of course that is very low-level, as you can see from the earlier link in this post https://www.security.org/resources/police-brutality-statisti... they say there are few indictments, I would just accept that as the case as the experts having done the low level work instead of doing the low level work because everyone doing the low level work themselves is unfortunately very inefficient and if we had to do that we would not be able to do anything else, which sometimes it seems to me that people who do not accept the conclusions of the experts but demand that the low level work be done on an individual basis in order to argue fairly are actually hoping that nothing will be done at all.
That's understandable. Looking back on our interaction, it does seem unfair that I should say I don't necessarily need stats, but then immediately ask for stats. It reads like a bait and switch. My apologies, I think I just got caught up in all the back and forth. I really do want to be openminded about this, but I didn't do a great job of showing it.
I also understand where you are coming from about it seeming like I'm asking people to google things for me. However, from my perspective, I see people making a lot of assertions as if they were common knowledge and yet when I look I don't see what they are claiming. As an example, the sources you provide don't directly bear on any of the questions I asked.
We can see for instance that blacks are arrested a lot more frequently than whites. But we also know that blacks are disproportionally poor, and poor people are more likely to be arrested and convicted than middle income or wealthy people. The reasons for that can be debated, but without controlling for income and other confounding factors, you don't really know to what degree blacks are disproportionately represented. That's just basic statistics. Maybe there are studies that do this, but I haven't seen any, nor apparently have the other commenters here.
But that's not even directly relevant to whether police generally are held accountable for breaking the law generally. As you yourself said, there aren't many statistics on this. And yet people are claiming it a well established fact. I think that's wrong. I'm sure it happens to some degree (everything happens to some degree for large populations), but we need to understand the scope of problems so we can address them properly. As I said elsewhere, do we need to tweak the system or replace it? We can't know until we know what we're dealing with. Just assuming it's really really bad may feel helpful, but I don't think it is.
> I would just accept that as the case as the experts having done the low level work instead of doing the low level work because everyone doing the low level work themselves is unfortunately very inefficient
This is a good point. However, it's not clear to me that the experts are saying what is claimed. Take this from the conclusion from your first link:
> While there’s room for debate over policy interventions that might limit the number of police killings, there’s inadequate accountability or scrutiny for these incidents. When police kill a civilian, the initial assumption by some is that the incident was justified, while others automatically assume it wasn’t. While the truth may be somewhere in between, the public can’t possibly make informed decisions without cold, hard facts.
Totally agree! This is exactly what I'm saying. But this report isn't claiming to provide those cold hard facts, they are saying they are needed. Great! But why is everyone acting like they already have them?
People keep pointing at the disproportional numbers of minorities killed, but don't discuss confounding factors. For example, it should not at all surprise us that native americans would be highly represented in this area because they are among the poorest people in the country, many living in areas with no jobs and high drug and alcohol abuse rates where domestic violence and other violent crime is well above the national average. It would be strange if this didn't result in higher rates of conflict with the police, and hence higher rates of death. Is there more than that going on? Maybe. It needs to be studied. For instance, how does it compare to similarly impoverished white communities? That's the sort of thing I'm looking for.
In short, I'm really not trying to be difficult here, but it seems to me that people are not asking basic questions, so I can't really trust their conclusions. I do appreciate your taking the time though and I hope you don't feel like you've been trolled. I do appreciate your patience.
It is possible that police are both "commonly" held accountable, yet not "often enough" for the good of society. Devil is in the details.
If this decision doesn't show there is something deeply, fundamentally, disgustingly wrong with your legal system, I don't think anything else can show that.
It seems to me like in fact governments are working to improve the law in that area.
Your comment has a baked in assumption I want to question, though. Why do you regard police accountability as the most plausible default?
You know that's not true. It's not the Democratic candidates that regularly trot out the Willie Horton ads. As I write this, Mehmet Oz is running ads against Fetterman for being soft on crime.
https://whyy.org/articles/election-2022-pennsylvania-senate-...
The police reform bill was the work of the Democrats:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/08/politics/democrats-police-leg...
The party position:
https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/protecti...
Go ahead, show me the GOP position on policing.
It’s true that Republicans are an order of magnitude more bloodthirsty — which makes the Democrats’ full-throated embrace of carceral policies all the more baffling. If I wanted regressive faux–law and order, why would I vote for them instead of a Republican?
But I also recognize that defunding the police is an incredibly unpopular position even among most Democratic voters. Even in the communities affected most by crime and bad policing[1]. Most people do not want fewer police. They want better police.
So the Democrats "embrace policing" because if they don't, they lose elections. Especially with crime on the rise, whether real or perceived. But that doesn't mean that the two parties are the same with respect to policing and I don't think it helps the progressive cause being cynical about it.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/26/growing-sha...
Yes, that is what makes them cops, the police are authorized to do many things that are illegal for us ordinary citizens. they can restrain people, go through stop lights, speed, threaten, sometimes even kill.
We as society recognize that these things are in general bad to do, however there are special cases where it is needed. so we authorize some people to professionally break the law where needed.
That being said, the quote "Who watches the watchmen?" is as always very relevant and those authorized to break the law need to be held to a very high moral standard.
Let’s take your red light example. Cops are allowed to go through red lights when they’re responding to an emergency and they’ve put on their lights/sirens. That’s a reasonable special power. In practice, what I see happening is either (a) police briefly turn on their lights/sirens as they cross the intersection, then immediately turn them off, or (b) police simply run the red light.
But not whenever they want. When needed. You could do any of those things legally in most states. The first to prevent a suicidal person from killing themselves, the next two when driving a serious case to the ER, the last two when defending yourself from an armed home intruder.
But it has since been interpreted as this: even if it is clear to all parties that the duties were not performed in a reasonable manner, qualified immunity applies unless the case fits the exact pattern of a prior case that held officials accountable.
How exact must the match of circumstances be? https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/qualified-immunity-lega... (note: opinions in this article and by this organization are not mine) has examples:
> A prior Sixth Circuit case had already held that an officer clearly violated the Fourth Amendment when he used a police dog without warning against an unarmed residential burglary suspect who was lying on the ground with his hands at his sides.42 But the court here held that this prior case was insufficient because “Baxter does not point us to any case law suggesting that raising his hands, on its own, is enough to put Harris on notice that a canine apprehension was unlawful in these circumstances.”43 In other words, prior case law holding it unlawful to deploy police dogs against nonthreatening suspects who surrendered by laying on the ground did not make it clear that it was unlawful to deploy police dogs against nonthreatening suspects who surrendered by sitting on the ground with their hands up.
> Nevertheless, in spite of this objectively unreasonable shooting, a majority of the Sixth Circuit panel found that the officer was entitled to qualified immunity. The court itself acknowledged that several prior cases had clearly established that “shooting a driver while positioned to the side of his fleeing car violates the Fourth Amendment, absent some indication suggesting that the driver poses more than a fleeting threat.”46 Even though that statement would seem to govern this case exactly, the majority held that these prior cases were “distinguishable” because they “involved officers confronting a car in a parking lot and shooting the non‐ violent driver as he attempted to initiate flight,” whereas here “Phillips shot Latits after Latits led three police officers on a car chase for several minutes.”47 The lone dissenting judge in this case dryly observed that “the degree of factual similarity that the majority’s approach requires is probably impossible for any plaintiff to meet.”48
To make an analogy to our industry, it's like the famous Reflections on Trusting Trust compiler paper here: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref... - if your compiler is compromised to the extent that even when compiling a compiler, it inserts the same exact compromise in the newly compiled compiler... then there's no turning back.
And here we have a concept of qualified immunity that cannot ever be given nuance, because it's impossible to adjudicate based on a no-longer-existing version of the case law that allows nuance to be added to the concept of qualified immunity. It's, quite literally, a cancer from any logical perspective. We should be ashamed as a society to have allowed such a system to exist. Only new national legislation, to my knowledge, can stop the rot, and that will come far too late for many who have suffered at the hands of law enforcement officials.
(IANAL, this is not legal advice)
But then there's the reality, which is that it's been abused via a "chicken and egg" problem.
It's called "piercing the veil of qualified immunity" and the standard for doing so is "currently established law". IOW, if it's not been pierced in the past for exactly (and I mean exactly) the same thing, then the default is that qualified immunity applies.
What ends up happening is that even if the broad strokes are exactly the same, they'll claim there is no currently established law if some of the minutia of the details is different. The police officer kicked the pregnant woman in the face instead of the stomach.
The effect is that qualified immunity stopped being reasonable.
---
If I may, I suspect most reasonable people understand that qualified immunity is there because police officers are human and mistakes happen. But it's been abused, and as such it needs to be reformed.
---
editing this in as a perfect example of what I mean about courts using specificity to effectively make it impossible to pierce the veil of qualified immunity.
Many thanks to btown for the link, I went looking for something similar and was unable to find it.
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/qualified-immunity-lega...
> In other words, prior case law holding it unlawful to deploy police dogs against nonthreatening suspects who surrendered by laying on the ground did not make it clear that it was unlawful to deploy police dogs against nonthreatening suspects who surrendered by sitting on the ground with their hands up.
If you do, too, contact your US House legislators about HR 1470 and your desire to end qualified immunity: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1470
I've heard this before, but I don't completely get it. Can someone explain it in more detail? Does this mean the only thing that can pierce the veil are rulings from before qualified immunity was put in place? What about new laws or constitutional amendments?
Initially, courts ruled that the police lost qualified immunity if they performed an action that they knew violated peoples rights (Malley v. Briggs)
Lately, courts have basically said "how could the government know it was a violation of this guys rights? Sure, there is a very similar case which said you can't violate this right, but the details are slightly different, so how could they know the persons rights were protected in this specific case? Case dismissed." (Zadeh v. Robinson)
It's absurd, not just because the details are always different, but because the initial case law was set without any similar precedent. It basically takes a particularly egregious violation of your rights to overcome the qualified part of qualified immunity and sue the government (Taylor v. Riojas)
(Not a lawyer, but married to one.)
Last time I checked, all humans are human ... and mistakes happen. Try using that line the next time you're explaining yourself to the police.
I'm not sure I understand why police officers should get any kind of extra leniency? I'd probably want to hold police officers to higher standards than the public, not lower.
[1] https://www.nyulawreview.org/issues/volume-89-number-3/polic...
There's a broad disconnect between the police departments, their hiring and disciplinary practices, and the consequences of the lawsuits their actions generate.
Tying the payouts specifically to the police budget would mean that when the city's residents' policing service expectations failed to be met, one could point to that being a direct consequence of police actions costing them their own policing budget, increasing pressure on the public to do things like elect effective police oversight commissioners who will act to reign in their abuses and provide good value-for-cost policing.
The status quo instead disconnects the oversight from the consequences, leading to the quiet defunding of other services for political reasons (since it would require city counsels to constantly vote to cut police budgets in proportion to each damage award, rather than happening "neutrally" by centering the legal defense and payouts within the police budget to begin with).
This is a very tall order that I predict would not come true. It is already very easy to see how much police misconduct costs a city’s tax base, but push come to shove, most people will think they are isolated cases and will not happen to them.
> The status quo instead disconnects the oversight from the consequences, leading to the quiet defunding of other services for political reasons
This political reason is that voting in local elections is not common. 100% of the police and their allies will be voting, while most others will be spending their evenings on things other than paying attention to local politics.
There are a few exceptions, but overall, I would not expect voters to react to feeling the pain of reduced police budgets with “let’s dig into why police budgets are getting smaller”. By and large, they will simply vote for the politician that provides the simplest message, which is the incumbents are refusing to properly fund the police department, and if you vote for me, I will properly fund it.
The only solution I see is holding individual cops accountable, including for criminal charges like perjury for lying such as the detective in this case clearly did.
Your point is irrelevant as Novak is suing the city, not any individual officer. This has nothing to do with qualified immunity.
https://reason.com/2022/09/28/a-parodist-asks-scotus-to-let-...
>After a jury unanimously acquitted Novak of that felony, he sued seven officers for violating his First Amendment rights.
>But this year the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit concluded that the officers he sued were protected by qualified immunity, which shields police from liability for violating constitutional rights unless their alleged misconduct ran afoul of "clearly established" law.
/s
Often courts rule that a search was invalid or a conviction is tossed out, but almost never are the cops punished for the invalid search or arrest.