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It seems like there is a smoking gun in this case (though I didn't review the evidence thoroughly). Widespread availability of video recording and distribution

It seems like there is a smoking gun in this case (though I didn't review the evidence thoroughly). Widespread availability of video recording and distribution has provided many more smoking guns. Certainly, there are many more incidents where no smoking gun evidence is available. For a long time, black Americans have been claiming that such things happen and were widely ignored or disbelieved. It was and is a grave error - I can't imagine how many victims there are. This raises critical questions: 1) Why did our society make this error? 2) How do we prevent making the same mistake in the future, regarding other issues? 3) About what issues are we making the same mistake right now? Also: What do we do about the legions of victims? Ignoring them yet again would be a crime.

purpled_haze 11y ago
> What do we do about the legions of victims? Financial compensation and putting those that caused the injustice in prison equaling the total of all of the terms served by all of those affected. That is as close to justice as could be had. As for preventing corruption- there's no way to do this as long as there are people that can be corrupted. You can add oversight. You could replace the entire force with minorities. But if there are people that are corruptible, these efforts will fail. The best that you can do is to (1) promote ethics education in schools and flag students that reject it/scoff at it as they may need much more help and (2) don't divorce government and schools from religion which is an additional force for peer-pressure and community support against corruption.
- salgernon 11y ago
  Which religion? Which denomination of that religion? What if that religion has reprehensible beliefs?
  - purpled_haze 11y ago
    Do you disagree that religion in any form can be used as a force against corruption? If you work to exclude religion as a whole because some religions or those practicing them have certain beliefs you may find reprehensible, you also exclude other moral and ethical beliefs, peer pressure, and community support that would combat corruption.
    - salgernon 11y ago
      I have to invert your first statement to make sense: do you (I) agree that religion in any form can be used as a force to encourage corruption? To which I would reply yes, religion in any form can be (and is) used to support and encourage corruption. All (communal, as opposed to internal) religions look good on the surface, promising wealth (prosperity gospel Christianity), eternal life (various abrahamic religions), removal of body thetans (scientology), etc. They all share the attribute of not being provable, and all will fight (often quite literally) for their own survival based on no evidence at all. And they all require the existence of THE OTHER, a threat, sometimes existential, sometimes racial but in some way unacceptably different. Actions against THE OTHER are seen as noble, even when they otherwise seem to go against the letter and spirit of the communal creed. Religion cannot be used as a tool of inclusion because for someone to be considered "good", there has to also be an identifiable "evil". Strangely, nobody ever claims this latter title for themselves. Finally, I'm sure we (you and I) will never know for sure, but I'm willing to bet the majority of the authorities involved here were all part of their community churches.
  - jonlucc 11y ago
    Which religion is devoid of reprehensible beliefs?
- prawn 11y ago
  Agree with the idea of ethics education in school but strongly disagree with it having anything to do with religion!
  - purpled_haze 11y ago
    Do you dismiss that much of the moral and ethics we have today in our society evolved in parallel with religious teachings? I feel strongly that it is foolish to remove the freedom to practice religion if it promotes moral and ethical behavior. Freedom to believe and have faith in something that helps society shouldn't be dissolved. That said, I'm all for having additional secular classes in ethics and morality for those that don't want to practice a religion. Freedom goes both ways as long as it doesn't promote values that hurt others. We need to work together to solve corruption and other problems. Religion is not the enemy of morality, and neither is secular education of morality.
    - prawn 11y ago
      No, I think it goes without saying that ethics classes would find common ground with major religions. But I think we have everything we need to have learnt from a history with religion and can do without the ridiculous bits in 2015+. Not saying that people can't practice freely, but that it has no place in state education and government. No need for it in ethics classes either. FWIW, I come from a country where religion doesn't play a big part in life and can think of two friends out of 50-100 that would be considered at all religious. Religion might seem more relevant to people in other countries obviously.
    - ionised 11y ago
      > Do you dismiss that much of the moral and ethics we have today in our society evolved in parallel with religious teachings? Yes. Much of our morality and ethics are innate and stem from our nature and evolution as a social species. Religion just took credit for it. Even social groups of monkeys and rodents tend to avoid killing eachother and do what is in the best interests of the group.
      - 11y ago
ionforce 11y ago
1) People don't value critical thinking and instead value things like political careers and crafting narratives. 2) Throw out corrupt leadership and anyone who evades auditing.
- Natsu 11y ago
  When we try things like #2, we run into politics. There's no shortage of such scandals from any sufficiently large political party.
taurath 11y ago
Any policy changes will be opposed by an army of well-paid lobbyists and advocacy groups that are incredibly good at spreading fear uncertainty and doubt, and in the end justice will not likely come for those already effected or in jail, unless there is hard smoking gun evidence. Its not in any cops's interest to have all their actions even in the heat of the moment put under a microscope. The good is that this could precipitate more body-cams and have it eventually have it put reasonable doubt back in the hands of the defendant rather than the officer - if you have a body-cam, why was it off during this altercation where questionable things occurred?
- hackuser 11y ago
  > Its not in any cops's interest to have all their actions even in the heat of the moment put under a microscope. Honest police may feel it's in their interest. It protects them from false accusations, and from leal and reputational consequences of being associated with dishonest associates. Being honest, they might also want to see dishonest, criminal actions stopped and punished.
  - taurath 11y ago
    To play devil's advocate: if I were the most decent nicest cop in the world I could see why I wouldn't want my every word and action on camera. It'd severely limit things I could say in confidence to anyone, and if I were say speaking to a victim of a crime its difficult to comfort people with a camera in their face. I'd be worried to being reduced to essentially the role of a call-center employee with every interaction graded not only for not screwing up, but also adherence to rigid policy. Its dehumanizing and eats away at the core of any intelligent person wanting to ever be a cop.
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      These concerns are spurious. You describe situations in which most cops, "nice" or not, would simply turn the camera off. Other situations include using the restroom or making personal phone calls. No one ever said the camera had to be on all the time; how would that even be enforced? The camera should be on in any situation that might later be a subject of dispute. If it's off in such a situation, the courts should consider that a reason to disbelieve the cop who turned it off. A cop who doesn't possess the judgement to operate a camera, probably doesn't possess the judgement to carry a firearm either.
striking 11y ago
If there isn't enough evidence to prove someone is guilty, they go scot-free. This is true to protect people who are innocent. But these people were not innocent. This is the evidence. And justice will be served. As long as discoveries like this are made and we have freedom of the press, justice will continue to be served. edit: I do not make a claim to the sufficiency of the system, but am happy to see democratic ideals in action; there appears to have been a misunderstanding
- hackuser 11y ago
  It's not nearly sufficient. People in this one town have been suffering for decades. It's probably happening in many more towns where nobody leaked the Internal Affairs investigation. We are failing as a society if we don't see our obvious, critical error and do better.
  - striking 11y ago
    I never said it was sufficient. (If this is what you understood, I'd like to better understand how I could better write my statement so as not to be misunderstood in the future.) I am only remarking that people in power are not safe from the press or from guilt. Besides, what would you have them do? You speak of the failures we encounter in society, but not a way to solve them. I am just happy to see democratic ideals in action. I do not make a claim to the sufficiency of the system in place, but to the ideals that the system stands for. I advocate for replacing the system. (and not the ideals.)
    - policestate101 11y ago
      People in power are very safe, people in power torture and commit war crimes, how foolish to say otherwise.
TheSpiceIsLife 11y ago
Opinion: 1) Police are corrupt. Maybe not all of them, but enough of them that "police are corrupt" is true. This will always be the case. Police don't fight crime, nor prevent it. They create it. If you think this isn't so you haven't had enough exposure to them. Maybe my opinion is coloured by my experience: illegal search of person, car, and house. They ransacked my house, stole money and property from me. It took 27 months to have the case dismissed nolle prosequi and my money returned to me. If you see the police, cross the street.
- Frondo 11y ago
  A lot of police are corrupt, and there is an absolute ton of racism in this country so we believe it when the cop tells a lie that implicates a black guy. Not racist like we're out in klan hoods on the weekend, and it's definitely not like we're consciously choosing to be racist--this is just lifetimes of unexamined biases, media information, etc. We have these little biases that tell us not to trust the black guy's word and that adds up over time. Overcoming that shit is hard.
  - steveklabnik 11y ago
    > Not racist like we're out in klan hoods on the weekend, Don't worry, police have that covered too https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/09/01/police-chief-demands-resignation-kkk-cop https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/09/01/police-chief-...
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - zaroth 11y ago
    Personally, I don't believe a single damn word out of a police officer's mouth. Particularly so if they are under oath. It has nothing to do with race, I don't care who the defendant is. They say the least reliable form of testimony is eyewitness accounts. Actually, I think the police have the eyewitness beat on this account. Too bad I've never had jury duty, and even if I did I'd probably be dismissed, so unfortunately I'll never get my chance as one of the 12 angry jurists to apply this in practice. It seems like there are more and more like-minded people who will outright dismiss the grand-standing Detective and insist on just the facts please. Show me actual proof because your word is truly worthless.
jrs235 11y ago
I propose that if an officer is caught planting evidence or government official is caught covering up such acts and found guilty that the officer or official will serve twice and amount of time and twice any monetary amount the wronged served. And follow the drug war policy of mandatory sentences so no judge can reduce the sentence. For examole if these guys planted evidence that resulted in 10 guys behind bars, each for 5 years try then these offices and officials should be mandatorilly sentenced to 100 years behind bars (10 victims * 5 years * 2). These scumbags were not scared of the consequences of what they were doing.
- sukulaku 11y ago
  > These scumbags were not scared of the consequences of what they were doing. That's because they knew there would be no consequences to be scared of.
- drauh 11y ago
  Good luck with that: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/30/opinion/cover-up-in-chicago.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/30/opinion/cover-up-in-chicag...
- gnaritas 11y ago
  > I propose that... We're not in short supply of proposals, so what's the point? Everyone has ideas like this, they're meaningless because they don't address the problem, cops don't police themselves and never will.
  - will_brown 11y ago
    Really? I thought the leaked documents revealed: >As early as 1998, other police officers lodged complaints regarding their beliefs that police officers were planting evidence. In other words officers were policing themselves to the point of triggering Internal Investigations. Nevertheless, if the parents proposal has no point, and you have identified the problem, what is your proposed solution?
    - 11y ago
beeboop 11y ago
1) Most of society doesn't care, isn't aware, or approves of what the police are doing (similar story to mass surveillance) 2) Nothing since no one cares etc. You can vote to express your opinion but have fun losing every time to the majority who make their voting decisions based mostly on TV ads. 3) A lot of things, but again nothing can really be done since most people don't hold those in power accountable I don't think stuff like this is going to change any time soon. Society is too busy looking at their phone.
Alex3917 11y ago
> About what issues are we making the same mistake right now? Wasn't there an article on HN about the government trying to rebrand Islamic State as Da'esh just a couple weeks ago?
NamTaf 11y ago
1) Societies (all around the world) tend to be more racially driven than we like to admit. It's really easy to ignore the suffering of a group of people if you are readily able to distance yourself from them. Race plays a significant role in this in many places. 2) Develop systems that are structurally uncorruptable and uninfluencable as best as they can be, by having significant separations of power by design. There must be no incentive for those with the power to audit to be influenced by those they're auditing. 3) Probably many, scarily enough. Corruption runs deep in many societies that tend not to be considered corrupt. In this case, I like the idea that the officers should be sentenced to prison at some level proportionate to the amount of corruption they were responsible for. The wrongly imprisoned should be released, and the State responsible for implementing the auditing controls against these officers should be forced to provide the wrongly imprisoned the average (for a given value of average) wage, or a multiple thereof to account for additional damages, for the entirety of the time they were wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for. That way, there's a personal incentive not to be corrupt in that if you get caught you are heavily personally punished for said corruption, and there's a strucutral incentive to implement effective anti-corruption controls as the state is then responsible for those that represent it.
- sukulaku 11y ago
  > Develop systems that are structurally uncorruptable and uninfluencable as best as they can be, by having significant separations of power by design Oh kind of like The Constitution, for example? Obviously that hasn't worked out too well in the long term, what with the US being a burgeoning police state and all. But if "we" write a new and more sternly worded piece of paper that says "rulers can't mistreat their subjects", that should work, right?
  - NamTaf 11y ago
    Try again without the facetiousness. I don't mean like a piece of paper saying 'thou shalt'. I mean by implementing systems where, by design, the decisionmakers over roles that police each other have no way to influence one another. For example, those who are in charge of policing the police shouldn't also be in charge of working with the police on policing other people. I don't mean auditors, I mean those who then receive the information from internal audits and are responsible for making judgements based on it.
athenot 11y ago
Regarding #2, "trust, but verify". I think we need a (i) strong and (ii) independent audit system. We have the technology to make it strong, just borrow it from other federal agencies who specialize in intelligence. And with enforcement relying more and more on data gathering and extraction, audits would help ensure these are not misused, and help validate how well due process is followed. The independent part would have to mean it is run by an agency that it not part of enforcement and in a way that is hard to influence. Who exactly it would report to, I'm not sure. Maybe a peer agency of the FBI & CIA? That audit system would data-mine all enforcement activities and keep the data locked up in a vault. That data could then be requested via subpoena (for investigations like these) or FOIA requests (after a "reasonable" time to prevent interference with actual investigations).
AlexCoventry 11y ago
> About what issues are we making the same mistake right now? Military and Intelligence affairs.
thaumasiotes 11y ago
> Why did our society make this error? > How do we prevent making the same mistake in the future, regarding other issues? > About what issues are we making the same mistake right now? - Drugs are a classic victimless crime; prosecutions tend not to be motivated by someone filing a complaint. Rather, it is the responsibility of the police to detect the crime and mete out punishment as they see fit. - Society has reward processes in place for police who identify and punish drug offenders. Those two are sufficient for a lot of abuse. There are some aggravating circumstances: - It's easy for the cops to prey on low social classes, because they don't report to them. The higher social classes aren't really interested in what's going on elsewhere. A doctor's kid is unlikely to be the victim of planted drugs, and so is the doctor. That's not because doctors' kids aren't using so many drugs, it's because the police aren't really supposed to deal with the higher classes at all. I see some other commenters saying that, e.g., society is always driven (at least in significant part) by racial tensions. While I don't actually disagree, I think this is at root an issue of social class rather than race directly. Police preying on a community of white-collar professionals will be reformed. Since these communities don't have the political power to get rid of predatory police, the police are acting without supervision. It shouldn't be surprising that they do what they feel like.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  ...at root an issue of social class rather than race directly. I agree with much of the rest of your comment, and in the past I would have agreed with this as well. However, police are not inherent to the human condition. (We haven't always had police, and with luck we'll be rid of them soonish.) When police were created, it was largely for basically racist purposes, even if the "races" under consideration in many locales were "Irish" and "Italian". (Further south, however...) People would have objected to a police force imposed on everyone, so the trick was to impose it mostly on those who didn't control the public purse or the courts. A society that relies on relentless, capricious violence to compel large swathes of the population to accept their assigned roles is not pareto-optimal. We will improve when we change our laws with the goal of reducing the necessity of policing.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
ashwinaj 11y ago
Well put, but I suspect large swaths of people will still be in denial since any criticism about the police (or military) is off limits. In any case, if this keeps on going the police force would be the first to be "roboticized". I even have a simple algorithm: 1. Investigate reported crime (race/gender/economic parameters are ignored) OR catch criminal red handed. 2. Create a police report and submit evidence. 3. Testify if required, go to step 1.
- bashinator 11y ago
  Step 1 there probably breaks down to several billion subtasks.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    A lot of which we can automate. These are the hard problems we should be solving, not $social_network_flavor_of_the_week.
    - bashinator 11y ago
      I don't disagree in the slightest, but phrasing it as a three-step problem is a bit disingenuous.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  I suspect physical security will be robotized before policing is. Robots could get very good at recognizing firearms held in human hands (i.e. rather than stored in a holster) and then incapacitating the owner of those hands. Once enough such robots are installed in crowded public areas, the current mass-murder-mania (and one hopes, the hysteria that has arisen in reaction) would be eliminated.
  - jrowley 11y ago
    Woah, comments like these are why I read hackernews. Sounds potentially dangerous from a hacking perspective but almost certainly this will be the future.
such_a_casual 11y ago
The solution is dead simple. Put cameras and mics on every cop in the country. Release the recordings to the public after a certain amount of time (leave this up to the states and local govt). Put a cap on how long these recordings can be withheld from the public regardless of special circumstances (maybe 10 years?). Problem solved.
coldtea 11y ago
>For a long time, black Americans have been claiming that such things happen and were widely ignored or disbelieved. I can't understand this "surely this doesn't happen" mentality of a lot of Americans in general in such cases. I mean, I can understand wanting to see hard proof for a particular case (and to name names), but to think that these things do not happen or are not widespread seems delusional to me, like believing we live in Sesame Street kind of society. Maybe because in other parts of the world the general culture doesn't include "trusting authority" as some default -- which used to be the case in the US too, for blacks, 60s students etc, but somehow got lost for the middle class. For a place with the biggest incarceration rate in the world, that seems bizarre. This goes beyond police abuse too. While they would still condemn it, nobody would bat an eye in disbelief for something like "watergate" for example in other parts of the world. Of course those things happen -- in a place like Italy or France for example, they've seen the same things going on tons of times. But even when remember people like Hoover, they tend to think it was some isolated incident, due to a bad person, etc (the "few bad apples" theory as opposed to systemic issues).
- mfisher87 11y ago
  >I can't understand this "surely this doesn't happen" mentality of a lot of Americans in general in such cases. "It can't happen here." It's very disruptive to some people's worldview to suggest that there's still any sort of racial inequality problem.
aagha 11y ago
There's another question that should be asked: How do we find and punish those that were complicit?
marcusgarvey 11y ago
>1) Why did our society make this error? Because America was, and is, racist.
- gkop 11y ago
  I wish it wasn't necessary to need to point out the simplest explanation to a crowd as smart and analytical as HN. And even as it is necessary, I wish HN didn't downvote you for it. But reality.
_quasar 11y ago
The theory that African Americans are being shot by police because they are black is not supported by data. About 50% of deaths at the hand of police are white and 30% black. Of course that means blacks are overrepresented compared to their percentage in the population. However, adjusting to blacks' higher crime rate shows that in fact whites are 1.7 times more likely to be shot by police. Policemen are well aware of potential political fallout when dealing with potentially dangerous African American subjects and think twice before shooting. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/21/police-kill-more-whites-than-blacks-but-minority-d/?page=all http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/21/police-kill-...
- snowwrestler 11y ago
  This Times article makes a mistake by acknowledging that the data are not trustworthy, but then relying on the data to make its point. For example it concludes: > “Yes, more whites than blacks die as a result of an encounter with police, but whites also represent a much bigger chunk of the total population,” PolitiFact said in its Aug. 21 post. > But PolitiFact did not take into account the percentage of those by race involved in violent crime or shootings of police, as Mr. Moskos did. The data of who is involved in violent crime or shootings of police are themselves in question, because they are self-reported by the very officers and departments who are under consideration. Saying that police can't be biased, because their self-reported data does not show bias, is begging the question. Until very recently, with only a few exceptions, the only data on police activity was provided by police themselves. The ubiquity of camera phones is now providing a growing body of independently gathered--and contradictory--evidence. I think this represents a fundamental shift that is taking place in policing today.
- dweinus 11y ago
  1) The analysis here is conducted by a pretty biased source: a former cop 2) his data is fed by news reports which may not evenly cover actual incidents 3) 25% of the data lacks racial info at all 4) The likelihood of biased policing being a factor in higher reported African American crime rates completely undercuts the conclusion he reaches Put another way: there are at least 2 layers of biases that occured before Mr. Moskos even touched the data.
clarkmoody 11y ago
> 1) Why did our society make this error? Society doesn't act, individuals act. The error lies entirely with the corrupt police who did this.
wyclif 11y ago
I'm Anglo-Saxon, and about as WASPy as it gets. When I was a teenager and got my driver's license, my Dad warned me that there were "bad cops" and that I should be careful to avoid getting stopped by police. If I did get stopped, he warned me to be on my guard and gave me tips on how to handle the situation (most of it was about saying as little as possible and not talking to police). But the main thing I wanted to share was that he told me that bad cops sometimes plant evidence (usually drugs) in order to incriminate innocent people, and that I should be on my guard during these encounters and aware of everything that happens. And guess what? I didn't believe him! I honestly and naively could not believe that an officer of the law would do something like that. I had bought into the "protect and serve" nonsense. Later, when I got a little older and more experienced, I figured out on my own that he was right and I told him that I had been wrong all along. Not because I got drugs planted in my car during a stop, but because I had seen it happen over and over again to other people, usually black or hispanic men. When cops are found to be engaging in criminal activity and racism like this, they ought to be run out of law enforcement and never allowed to get another cop or security job. They should also be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
mlloyd 11y ago
1) Why did our society make this error? Racism. Victims are most available in the disenfranchised of our society and black people have always been disenfranchised in our society. 2) How do we prevent making the same mistake in the future, regarding other issues? Stop being racist. Stop disenfranchising entire segments of the population. Start investigating those in positions of power and stop the cover-ups.

purpled_haze 11y ago

> What do we do about the legions of victims? Financial compensation and putting those that caused the injustice in prison equaling the total of all of the terms served by all of those affected. That is as close to justice as could be had. As for preventing corruption- there's no way to do this as long as there are people that can be corrupted. You can add oversight. You could replace the entire force with minorities. But if there are people that are corruptible, these efforts will fail. The best that you can do is to (1) promote ethics education in schools and flag students that reject it/scoff at it as they may need much more help and (2) don't divorce government and schools from religion which is an additional force for peer-pressure and community support against corruption.

salgernon 11y ago
Which religion? Which denomination of that religion? What if that religion has reprehensible beliefs?
- purpled_haze 11y ago
  Do you disagree that religion in any form can be used as a force against corruption? If you work to exclude religion as a whole because some religions or those practicing them have certain beliefs you may find reprehensible, you also exclude other moral and ethical beliefs, peer pressure, and community support that would combat corruption.
  - salgernon 11y ago
    I have to invert your first statement to make sense: do you (I) agree that religion in any form can be used as a force to encourage corruption? To which I would reply yes, religion in any form can be (and is) used to support and encourage corruption. All (communal, as opposed to internal) religions look good on the surface, promising wealth (prosperity gospel Christianity), eternal life (various abrahamic religions), removal of body thetans (scientology), etc. They all share the attribute of not being provable, and all will fight (often quite literally) for their own survival based on no evidence at all. And they all require the existence of THE OTHER, a threat, sometimes existential, sometimes racial but in some way unacceptably different. Actions against THE OTHER are seen as noble, even when they otherwise seem to go against the letter and spirit of the communal creed. Religion cannot be used as a tool of inclusion because for someone to be considered "good", there has to also be an identifiable "evil". Strangely, nobody ever claims this latter title for themselves. Finally, I'm sure we (you and I) will never know for sure, but I'm willing to bet the majority of the authorities involved here were all part of their community churches.
- jonlucc 11y ago
  Which religion is devoid of reprehensible beliefs?
prawn 11y ago
Agree with the idea of ethics education in school but strongly disagree with it having anything to do with religion!
- purpled_haze 11y ago
  Do you dismiss that much of the moral and ethics we have today in our society evolved in parallel with religious teachings? I feel strongly that it is foolish to remove the freedom to practice religion if it promotes moral and ethical behavior. Freedom to believe and have faith in something that helps society shouldn't be dissolved. That said, I'm all for having additional secular classes in ethics and morality for those that don't want to practice a religion. Freedom goes both ways as long as it doesn't promote values that hurt others. We need to work together to solve corruption and other problems. Religion is not the enemy of morality, and neither is secular education of morality.
  - prawn 11y ago
    No, I think it goes without saying that ethics classes would find common ground with major religions. But I think we have everything we need to have learnt from a history with religion and can do without the ridiculous bits in 2015+. Not saying that people can't practice freely, but that it has no place in state education and government. No need for it in ethics classes either. FWIW, I come from a country where religion doesn't play a big part in life and can think of two friends out of 50-100 that would be considered at all religious. Religion might seem more relevant to people in other countries obviously.
  - ionised 11y ago
    > Do you dismiss that much of the moral and ethics we have today in our society evolved in parallel with religious teachings? Yes. Much of our morality and ethics are innate and stem from our nature and evolution as a social species. Religion just took credit for it. Even social groups of monkeys and rodents tend to avoid killing eachother and do what is in the best interests of the group.
    - 11y ago

ionforce 11y ago

1) People don't value critical thinking and instead value things like political careers and crafting narratives. 2) Throw out corrupt leadership and anyone who evades auditing.

Natsu 11y ago
When we try things like #2, we run into politics. There's no shortage of such scandals from any sufficiently large political party.

taurath 11y ago

Any policy changes will be opposed by an army of well-paid lobbyists and advocacy groups that are incredibly good at spreading fear uncertainty and doubt, and in the end justice will not likely come for those already effected or in jail, unless there is hard smoking gun evidence. Its not in any cops's interest to have all their actions even in the heat of the moment put under a microscope. The good is that this could precipitate more body-cams and have it eventually have it put reasonable doubt back in the hands of the defendant rather than the officer - if you have a body-cam, why was it off during this altercation where questionable things occurred?

hackuser 11y ago
> Its not in any cops's interest to have all their actions even in the heat of the moment put under a microscope. Honest police may feel it's in their interest. It protects them from false accusations, and from leal and reputational consequences of being associated with dishonest associates. Being honest, they might also want to see dishonest, criminal actions stopped and punished.
- taurath 11y ago
  To play devil's advocate: if I were the most decent nicest cop in the world I could see why I wouldn't want my every word and action on camera. It'd severely limit things I could say in confidence to anyone, and if I were say speaking to a victim of a crime its difficult to comfort people with a camera in their face. I'd be worried to being reduced to essentially the role of a call-center employee with every interaction graded not only for not screwing up, but also adherence to rigid policy. Its dehumanizing and eats away at the core of any intelligent person wanting to ever be a cop.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    These concerns are spurious. You describe situations in which most cops, "nice" or not, would simply turn the camera off. Other situations include using the restroom or making personal phone calls. No one ever said the camera had to be on all the time; how would that even be enforced? The camera should be on in any situation that might later be a subject of dispute. If it's off in such a situation, the courts should consider that a reason to disbelieve the cop who turned it off. A cop who doesn't possess the judgement to operate a camera, probably doesn't possess the judgement to carry a firearm either.

striking 11y ago

If there isn't enough evidence to prove someone is guilty, they go scot-free. This is true to protect people who are innocent. But these people were not innocent. This is the evidence. And justice will be served. As long as discoveries like this are made and we have freedom of the press, justice will continue to be served. edit: I do not make a claim to the sufficiency of the system, but am happy to see democratic ideals in action; there appears to have been a misunderstanding

hackuser 11y ago
It's not nearly sufficient. People in this one town have been suffering for decades. It's probably happening in many more towns where nobody leaked the Internal Affairs investigation. We are failing as a society if we don't see our obvious, critical error and do better.
- striking 11y ago
  I never said it was sufficient. (If this is what you understood, I'd like to better understand how I could better write my statement so as not to be misunderstood in the future.) I am only remarking that people in power are not safe from the press or from guilt. Besides, what would you have them do? You speak of the failures we encounter in society, but not a way to solve them. I am just happy to see democratic ideals in action. I do not make a claim to the sufficiency of the system in place, but to the ideals that the system stands for. I advocate for replacing the system. (and not the ideals.)
  - policestate101 11y ago
    People in power are very safe, people in power torture and commit war crimes, how foolish to say otherwise.

TheSpiceIsLife 11y ago

Opinion: 1) Police are corrupt. Maybe not all of them, but enough of them that "police are corrupt" is true. This will always be the case. Police don't fight crime, nor prevent it. They create it. If you think this isn't so you haven't had enough exposure to them. Maybe my opinion is coloured by my experience: illegal search of person, car, and house. They ransacked my house, stole money and property from me. It took 27 months to have the case dismissed nolle prosequi and my money returned to me. If you see the police, cross the street.

Frondo 11y ago
A lot of police are corrupt, and there is an absolute ton of racism in this country so we believe it when the cop tells a lie that implicates a black guy. Not racist like we're out in klan hoods on the weekend, and it's definitely not like we're consciously choosing to be racist--this is just lifetimes of unexamined biases, media information, etc. We have these little biases that tell us not to trust the black guy's word and that adds up over time. Overcoming that shit is hard.
- steveklabnik 11y ago
  > Not racist like we're out in klan hoods on the weekend, Don't worry, police have that covered too https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/09/01/police-chief-demands-resignation-kkk-cop https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/09/01/police-chief-...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- zaroth 11y ago
  Personally, I don't believe a single damn word out of a police officer's mouth. Particularly so if they are under oath. It has nothing to do with race, I don't care who the defendant is. They say the least reliable form of testimony is eyewitness accounts. Actually, I think the police have the eyewitness beat on this account. Too bad I've never had jury duty, and even if I did I'd probably be dismissed, so unfortunately I'll never get my chance as one of the 12 angry jurists to apply this in practice. It seems like there are more and more like-minded people who will outright dismiss the grand-standing Detective and insist on just the facts please. Show me actual proof because your word is truly worthless.

jrs235 11y ago

I propose that if an officer is caught planting evidence or government official is caught covering up such acts and found guilty that the officer or official will serve twice and amount of time and twice any monetary amount the wronged served. And follow the drug war policy of mandatory sentences so no judge can reduce the sentence. For examole if these guys planted evidence that resulted in 10 guys behind bars, each for 5 years try then these offices and officials should be mandatorilly sentenced to 100 years behind bars (10 victims * 5 years * 2). These scumbags were not scared of the consequences of what they were doing.

sukulaku 11y ago
> These scumbags were not scared of the consequences of what they were doing. That's because they knew there would be no consequences to be scared of.
drauh 11y ago
Good luck with that: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/30/opinion/cover-up-in-chicago.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/30/opinion/cover-up-in-chicag...
gnaritas 11y ago
> I propose that... We're not in short supply of proposals, so what's the point? Everyone has ideas like this, they're meaningless because they don't address the problem, cops don't police themselves and never will.
- will_brown 11y ago
  Really? I thought the leaked documents revealed: >As early as 1998, other police officers lodged complaints regarding their beliefs that police officers were planting evidence. In other words officers were policing themselves to the point of triggering Internal Investigations. Nevertheless, if the parents proposal has no point, and you have identified the problem, what is your proposed solution?
  - 11y ago

beeboop 11y ago

1) Most of society doesn't care, isn't aware, or approves of what the police are doing (similar story to mass surveillance) 2) Nothing since no one cares etc. You can vote to express your opinion but have fun losing every time to the majority who make their voting decisions based mostly on TV ads. 3) A lot of things, but again nothing can really be done since most people don't hold those in power accountable I don't think stuff like this is going to change any time soon. Society is too busy looking at their phone.

Alex3917 11y ago

> About what issues are we making the same mistake right now? Wasn't there an article on HN about the government trying to rebrand Islamic State as Da'esh just a couple weeks ago?

NamTaf 11y ago

1) Societies (all around the world) tend to be more racially driven than we like to admit. It's really easy to ignore the suffering of a group of people if you are readily able to distance yourself from them. Race plays a significant role in this in many places. 2) Develop systems that are structurally uncorruptable and uninfluencable as best as they can be, by having significant separations of power by design. There must be no incentive for those with the power to audit to be influenced by those they're auditing. 3) Probably many, scarily enough. Corruption runs deep in many societies that tend not to be considered corrupt. In this case, I like the idea that the officers should be sentenced to prison at some level proportionate to the amount of corruption they were responsible for. The wrongly imprisoned should be released, and the State responsible for implementing the auditing controls against these officers should be forced to provide the wrongly imprisoned the average (for a given value of average) wage, or a multiple thereof to account for additional damages, for the entirety of the time they were wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for. That way, there's a personal incentive not to be corrupt in that if you get caught you are heavily personally punished for said corruption, and there's a strucutral incentive to implement effective anti-corruption controls as the state is then responsible for those that represent it.

sukulaku 11y ago
> Develop systems that are structurally uncorruptable and uninfluencable as best as they can be, by having significant separations of power by design Oh kind of like The Constitution, for example? Obviously that hasn't worked out too well in the long term, what with the US being a burgeoning police state and all. But if "we" write a new and more sternly worded piece of paper that says "rulers can't mistreat their subjects", that should work, right?
- NamTaf 11y ago
  Try again without the facetiousness. I don't mean like a piece of paper saying 'thou shalt'. I mean by implementing systems where, by design, the decisionmakers over roles that police each other have no way to influence one another. For example, those who are in charge of policing the police shouldn't also be in charge of working with the police on policing other people. I don't mean auditors, I mean those who then receive the information from internal audits and are responsible for making judgements based on it.

athenot 11y ago

Regarding #2, "trust, but verify". I think we need a (i) strong and (ii) independent audit system. We have the technology to make it strong, just borrow it from other federal agencies who specialize in intelligence. And with enforcement relying more and more on data gathering and extraction, audits would help ensure these are not misused, and help validate how well due process is followed. The independent part would have to mean it is run by an agency that it not part of enforcement and in a way that is hard to influence. Who exactly it would report to, I'm not sure. Maybe a peer agency of the FBI & CIA? That audit system would data-mine all enforcement activities and keep the data locked up in a vault. That data could then be requested via subpoena (for investigations like these) or FOIA requests (after a "reasonable" time to prevent interference with actual investigations).

AlexCoventry 11y ago

> About what issues are we making the same mistake right now? Military and Intelligence affairs.

thaumasiotes 11y ago

> Why did our society make this error? > How do we prevent making the same mistake in the future, regarding other issues? > About what issues are we making the same mistake right now? - Drugs are a classic victimless crime; prosecutions tend not to be motivated by someone filing a complaint. Rather, it is the responsibility of the police to detect the crime and mete out punishment as they see fit. - Society has reward processes in place for police who identify and punish drug offenders. Those two are sufficient for a lot of abuse. There are some aggravating circumstances: - It's easy for the cops to prey on low social classes, because they don't report to them. The higher social classes aren't really interested in what's going on elsewhere. A doctor's kid is unlikely to be the victim of planted drugs, and so is the doctor. That's not because doctors' kids aren't using so many drugs, it's because the police aren't really supposed to deal with the higher classes at all. I see some other commenters saying that, e.g., society is always driven (at least in significant part) by racial tensions. While I don't actually disagree, I think this is at root an issue of social class rather than race directly. Police preying on a community of white-collar professionals will be reformed. Since these communities don't have the political power to get rid of predatory police, the police are acting without supervision. It shouldn't be surprising that they do what they feel like.

jessaustin 11y ago
...at root an issue of social class rather than race directly. I agree with much of the rest of your comment, and in the past I would have agreed with this as well. However, police are not inherent to the human condition. (We haven't always had police, and with luck we'll be rid of them soonish.) When police were created, it was largely for basically racist purposes, even if the "races" under consideration in many locales were "Irish" and "Italian". (Further south, however...) People would have objected to a police force imposed on everyone, so the trick was to impose it mostly on those who didn't control the public purse or the courts. A society that relies on relentless, capricious violence to compel large swathes of the population to accept their assigned roles is not pareto-optimal. We will improve when we change our laws with the goal of reducing the necessity of policing.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago

ashwinaj 11y ago

Well put, but I suspect large swaths of people will still be in denial since any criticism about the police (or military) is off limits. In any case, if this keeps on going the police force would be the first to be "roboticized". I even have a simple algorithm: 1. Investigate reported crime (race/gender/economic parameters are ignored) OR catch criminal red handed. 2. Create a police report and submit evidence. 3. Testify if required, go to step 1.

bashinator 11y ago
Step 1 there probably breaks down to several billion subtasks.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  A lot of which we can automate. These are the hard problems we should be solving, not $social_network_flavor_of_the_week.
  - bashinator 11y ago
    I don't disagree in the slightest, but phrasing it as a three-step problem is a bit disingenuous.
jessaustin 11y ago
I suspect physical security will be robotized before policing is. Robots could get very good at recognizing firearms held in human hands (i.e. rather than stored in a holster) and then incapacitating the owner of those hands. Once enough such robots are installed in crowded public areas, the current mass-murder-mania (and one hopes, the hysteria that has arisen in reaction) would be eliminated.
- jrowley 11y ago
  Woah, comments like these are why I read hackernews. Sounds potentially dangerous from a hacking perspective but almost certainly this will be the future.

such_a_casual 11y ago

The solution is dead simple. Put cameras and mics on every cop in the country. Release the recordings to the public after a certain amount of time (leave this up to the states and local govt). Put a cap on how long these recordings can be withheld from the public regardless of special circumstances (maybe 10 years?). Problem solved.

coldtea 11y ago

>For a long time, black Americans have been claiming that such things happen and were widely ignored or disbelieved. I can't understand this "surely this doesn't happen" mentality of a lot of Americans in general in such cases. I mean, I can understand wanting to see hard proof for a particular case (and to name names), but to think that these things do not happen or are not widespread seems delusional to me, like believing we live in Sesame Street kind of society. Maybe because in other parts of the world the general culture doesn't include "trusting authority" as some default -- which used to be the case in the US too, for blacks, 60s students etc, but somehow got lost for the middle class. For a place with the biggest incarceration rate in the world, that seems bizarre. This goes beyond police abuse too. While they would still condemn it, nobody would bat an eye in disbelief for something like "watergate" for example in other parts of the world. Of course those things happen -- in a place like Italy or France for example, they've seen the same things going on tons of times. But even when remember people like Hoover, they tend to think it was some isolated incident, due to a bad person, etc (the "few bad apples" theory as opposed to systemic issues).

mfisher87 11y ago
>I can't understand this "surely this doesn't happen" mentality of a lot of Americans in general in such cases. "It can't happen here." It's very disruptive to some people's worldview to suggest that there's still any sort of racial inequality problem.

aagha 11y ago

There's another question that should be asked: How do we find and punish those that were complicit?

marcusgarvey 11y ago

>1) Why did our society make this error? Because America was, and is, racist.

gkop 11y ago
I wish it wasn't necessary to need to point out the simplest explanation to a crowd as smart and analytical as HN. And even as it is necessary, I wish HN didn't downvote you for it. But reality.

_quasar 11y ago

The theory that African Americans are being shot by police because they are black is not supported by data. About 50% of deaths at the hand of police are white and 30% black. Of course that means blacks are overrepresented compared to their percentage in the population. However, adjusting to blacks' higher crime rate shows that in fact whites are 1.7 times more likely to be shot by police. Policemen are well aware of potential political fallout when dealing with potentially dangerous African American subjects and think twice before shooting. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/21/police-kill-more-whites-than-blacks-but-minority-d/?page=all http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/21/police-kill-...

snowwrestler 11y ago
This Times article makes a mistake by acknowledging that the data are not trustworthy, but then relying on the data to make its point. For example it concludes: > “Yes, more whites than blacks die as a result of an encounter with police, but whites also represent a much bigger chunk of the total population,” PolitiFact said in its Aug. 21 post. > But PolitiFact did not take into account the percentage of those by race involved in violent crime or shootings of police, as Mr. Moskos did. The data of who is involved in violent crime or shootings of police are themselves in question, because they are self-reported by the very officers and departments who are under consideration. Saying that police can't be biased, because their self-reported data does not show bias, is begging the question. Until very recently, with only a few exceptions, the only data on police activity was provided by police themselves. The ubiquity of camera phones is now providing a growing body of independently gathered--and contradictory--evidence. I think this represents a fundamental shift that is taking place in policing today.
dweinus 11y ago
1) The analysis here is conducted by a pretty biased source: a former cop 2) his data is fed by news reports which may not evenly cover actual incidents 3) 25% of the data lacks racial info at all 4) The likelihood of biased policing being a factor in higher reported African American crime rates completely undercuts the conclusion he reaches Put another way: there are at least 2 layers of biases that occured before Mr. Moskos even touched the data.

clarkmoody 11y ago

> 1) Why did our society make this error? Society doesn't act, individuals act. The error lies entirely with the corrupt police who did this.

wyclif 11y ago

I'm Anglo-Saxon, and about as WASPy as it gets. When I was a teenager and got my driver's license, my Dad warned me that there were "bad cops" and that I should be careful to avoid getting stopped by police. If I did get stopped, he warned me to be on my guard and gave me tips on how to handle the situation (most of it was about saying as little as possible and not talking to police). But the main thing I wanted to share was that he told me that bad cops sometimes plant evidence (usually drugs) in order to incriminate innocent people, and that I should be on my guard during these encounters and aware of everything that happens. And guess what? I didn't believe him! I honestly and naively could not believe that an officer of the law would do something like that. I had bought into the "protect and serve" nonsense. Later, when I got a little older and more experienced, I figured out on my own that he was right and I told him that I had been wrong all along. Not because I got drugs planted in my car during a stop, but because I had seen it happen over and over again to other people, usually black or hispanic men. When cops are found to be engaging in criminal activity and racism like this, they ought to be run out of law enforcement and never allowed to get another cop or security job. They should also be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

mlloyd 11y ago

1) Why did our society make this error? Racism. Victims are most available in the disenfranchised of our society and black people have always been disenfranchised in our society. 2) How do we prevent making the same mistake in the future, regarding other issues? Stop being racist. Stop disenfranchising entire segments of the population. Start investigating those in positions of power and stop the cover-ups.