We always joked about how they behaved like movie action heroes, always ready to use force. We were trained to avoid confrontation at almost any price. When in doubt, retreat.
I guess it's a different view on law "enforcement".
EDIT: Granted there's a big difference between trying to deescalate when possible and raiding a sleeping guy's apartment on bad info.
EDIT 2: This was an honest question and I felt like I got good answers despite the downvoting. Big thanks to everyone who took it at face value or applied the principle of charity, rather than just assuming I'm some kind of disruptive monster. http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html
Most of the recently published police violence in the US seems to come from really trivial situations, not from criminals. I watched the Sandra Bland video. The cop stops her for a trivial traffic violation (I often forget my turns signals too and I see a lot of people doing that too). She responds in an aggravated way. Instead of trying to defuse the situation he makes it worse by telling her to put out the cigarette. Why would you do that? This sounds like a pure ego-trip where the cop wants to assert his total dominance. He could have given her a ticket and just left.
It's worse than that. The cop tailgates her, waiting for an excuse to pull her over. His excuse is that she fails to signal while switching lanes (to create some distance between them.) He was going to pull her over no matter what.
This may have been a trivial situation for the cop, but for black people travelling out of state, it's a nightmare.
This doesn't explain or justify any of the rest of the incident though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_While_Black
http://www.salon.com/2015/07/24/is_this_your_car_like_sandra...
One example where the U.S. seems to be getting it right is high-speed chases, which seem to be becoming less common because it's not worth the safety risks in an urban environment and modern tech + resources make it unlikely that anyone can actually escape for that long. Sure, that'd make for a crappy movie but it's safer for everyone involved.
If true, that may be because they are usually video recorded by news channels. If a civilian is injured during the chase, there's lots of dramatic footage for the prosecution lawyer to show the jury, before asking the officers in charge to answer under oath why they made the decisions they made.
Sounds like pretty strong evidence in favor of mandatory police body-worn cameras, along with a right of citizens who are on the receiving end of a police encounter to obtain and review the footage. There's always the worry that the camera would be 'accidentally' turned off by the police, or that the footage would be lost if it showed anything embarrassing to the police, so to make them effective, you probably need a change in the law such that any discrepancy between the officer's version of events and the citizens is AUTOMATICALLY decided by judge/ jury in favor of the citizen if the 'mandatory' video footage is for some reason unavailable.
If true, that may be because they are usually video recorded by news channels. If a civilian is injured during the chase, there's lots of dramatic footage for the prosecution lawyer to show the jury, before asking the officers in charge to answer under oath why they made the decisions they made.
Sounds like pretty strong evidence in favor of mandatory police body-worn cameras, along with a right of citizens who are on the receiving end of a police encounter to obtain and review the footage. There's always the worry that the camera would be 'accidentally' turned off by the police, or that the footage would be lost if it showed anything embarrassing to the police, so to make them effective, you probably need a change in the law such that any discrepancy between the officer's version of events and the citizens is AUTOMATICALLY decided by judge/ jury in favor of the citizen if the 'mandatory' video footage is for some reason unavailable.
I don't think automatically ruling in the civilian's favor is a good idea because as we all know, tech breaks sometimes. I'm quite certain the body cameras exceed the standard definition of durable goods but they, like any other complex electronics, are susceptible to shock, moisture, fatigue, etc. and can break. All it takes is a landmark case of cop vs. civilian where the camera legitimately broke but the cop was in the right yet cannot prove it and then their life is ruined if the case is automatically decided in the civilian's favor.
I think there's a middle ground somewhere between "toss the case because the bodycam footage went missing" and "lock up the cop and throw away the key"
Civil cases, on the other hand, merely need to meet the standard of "a preponderance of evidence" to support the claim. A mysteriously malfunctioning camera ought to meet that standard, and thus be grounds for an award of damages due to misconduct. This cost will be borne by the police department (and thus the government it belongs to, and thus the public of that area) rather than by the individual officer. This will help encourage the department to keep their stuff in good working order and make sure their staff aren't deliberately disabling the cameras.
This won't help much if the citizen is dead.
Example: civilian makes grandiose claim that is untrue and that cannot be refuted due to the camera malfunctioning. Officer is punished.
Example: civilian makes legit claim that cannot be proven due to camera malfunctioning. Officer successfully convinced court that camera failed to work and it's nonfunctionality was not preventable due to outside circumstances. Officer is not punished and civilian does not receive justice.
Etc.
The popular phrase "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is wrong. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. How strong that evidence is depends on just how much you'd expect to find evidence if the thing were actually true. For example, if you go looking in my garage for aliens, the absence of evidence is pretty compelling evidence for the absence of aliens in my garage, but it's extremely weak evidence for the absence of aliens in the universe.
When it comes to cameras, the question in how often they fail on their own compared to how likely tampering is, and any relevant context which might modify those basic probabilities. If the demonstrated MTBF is 10 years and your cameras are failing on average once every year then something is going on, for example.
Your mention about punishing the officer makes me wonder if you actually read my comment, though. I explicitly suggested that a camera malfunction should not be considered sufficient to clear the "beyond a reasonable doubt" bar for a criminal case, and that while it should work for a civil case, the cost there would not be borne by the officer.
The popular phrase "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is wrong. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
When it comes to cameras, the question in how often they fail on their own compared to how likely tampering is, and any relevant context which might modify those basic probabilities. If the demonstrated mean time between failures is 10 years and your cameras are failing on average once every year then something is going on, for example.
Your mention about punishing the officer makes me wonder if you actually read my comment, though. I explicitly suggested that a camera malfunction should not be considered sufficient to clear the "beyond a reasonable doubt" bar for a criminal case, and that while it should work for a civil case, the cost there would not be borne by the officer.
The actual popular phrase is "the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence" and that is NOT what I was referring to. The absence of evidence is still not evidence of tampering unless tampering can be proven. A hair fiber belonging to a suspect that is found at a crime scene is evidence that the suspect was there. A lack of a hair fiber of a suspect at a crime scene is not evidence that the suspect cleaned up their hair from the crime scene. Bleach on a floor at a crime scene is evidence of an attempt to clean it up. Does that make sense?
I'd argue that body cameras have not been around in wide circulation long enough to provide any meaningful data on their failure rates. Also I can safely assume they have some sort of warranty on them but that does not prevent a handful of defective ones from making their way into active use amongst law enforcement personnel.
Civil cases, on the other hand, merely need to meet the standard of "a preponderance of evidence" to support the claim. A mysteriously malfunctioning camera ought to meet that standard, and thus be grounds for an award of damages due to misconduct.
This is the passage I was replying to and you paraphrased another user's comment regarding a default judgment in favor of the civilian if the camera malfunctions. A malfunctioning camera does not necessarily prove a deliberate tampering and to hang an entire civil case judgment on that is not giving the losing side a fair shot at winning their case. The officer is employed by the department and a judgment born by the department in reference to the officer when the officer did not do anything wrong can have adverse consequences on their career and by extension, their life, far more than you are giving credit to.
Given that BWCs (body-worn cameras) weren't even significantly tested in the U.S. until 2012 and are still not what most people would agree is considered "widespread" then we can hardly conclude much of anything about their failure rates in active use.
Look at it like this: beforehand, there were three possibilities: the suspect was never there, the suspect was there and left behind hair, or the suspect was there and cleaned up. (You might add more, like the suspect being bald, but the general approach is the same.) If you then do a thorough search for the suspect's hair and find none, that removes the "left behind hair" possibility, leaving you with the other two. The probability of each is increased compared to before. How much each one increases depends on the context.
As for civil cases, I don't really see the problem. All you need to show for a civil case is that your version of events is more than 50% likely to be true. Even if body cameras fail on their own with great frequency, the odds of one failing naturally right at the critical moment when an officer supposedly abused a civilian are extremely low.
I also don't see why we can't make good estimates of body camera reliability right now. They're not magic. They're just electronics, not fundamentally different from a GoPro or similar. How often do those fail? The rates should be much the same.
There should also be weight given to the nature of the failure, of course. If a capacitor exploded, it was probably "natural causes." If it was mysteriously smashed, with a tread pattern that matches the tires on the officer's squad car, that ought to be enough to win a civil suit. Other circumstances will vary, but I'd say the number of cases where you have a "mysterious failure" that really is a legitimate electronics failure will be low.
I'm completely 100% for the body cameras and for transparency but I also understand that they shouldn't be the only evidence used to decide guilt or innocence and should not hold more weight over other pieces of evidence.
Wait, how exactly is the cop's life ruined?
If we need to explain "why now", that's still a question with your hypothesis - high speed chases have been dangerous for a long time, but they have also regularly been filmed for some while now.
I am in no way challenging the validity of your report. I'm offering this anecdote to put USian police training (or the lack thereof) in perspective.
I've heard from my father -an officer in the US Army-, and from many others who have reason to know that a HUGE part of an MP's training is in de-escalation and peaceful crowd control.
MPs are drilled over and over and over that the presence of a club, firearm, or -say- riot gear dramatically increases the tension of a situation and that they have to immediately and continually work very hard to bring that tension back down.
Some folks who have served as MPs have had opportunity to review the training procedures of some police departments who have been receiving military crowd control (and other) equipment. Many of those former MPs have gone on record with their serious dismay at the absence of even vaguely proper crowd control and de-escalation training.
If well trained USian MPs behave like action heroes; ready to use force at the slightest provocation, how are comparatively poorly trained USian police officers likely to behave when given identical equipment?
So, US cops are right to have a different basic stance than German cops.
That is not to defend the actions described in the news article. And there certainly is a big problem with militarization of cops in the US.
They are third world because they are ignorant. And they are ignorant because they are third world.
Sometimes small incentives go a long way toward getting people further ahead. Sometimes they may shine by means of sports. But not everyone can be saved by sports. :-)
Mental illness, trauma, stress, physical disability / injury, side effects of living in a bad neighbourhood / neighbourhood targeted by law enforcement, trends in the local economy, etc. are some of the multifaceted reasons that people and families end up in poverty.
If I knew your philosophical leanings I could construct an example that would be quite common -- but for all I know you think it is not exploitation to offer jobs for minimum wage with no benefits that offer only 19 hrs a week of work (no benefits) but demand 24/7 availability.
So let me use a more extreme example. When individuals are suspected (NOT yet proven) of illegal immigration they are sent to a detention facility. There they are not allowed amenities like fresh socks or telephone calls unless they work for them at the rate of $0.13/hr. This is happening today to many thousands of people (http://www.npr.org/2015/07/23/425511981/at-low-pay-governmen...).
Surely THAT counts as exploitation.
I bet the excuse (if an excuse exists at all) is the obvious "nobody is forced to work"/"we provide (bare minimum) amenities to anybody that wants them" circular reasoning.
The immigration issue is a different thing entirely.
I guess in US, it is:
When in doubt, shoot to kill.