7 ms·

Coming from France, this seems completely unreal to me. Here, we've got three types of "police": "police municipale", which is paid by the city and has got ver

by Faaak 9y ago

Coming from France, this seems completely unreal to me. Here, we've got three types of "police": "police municipale", which is paid by the city and has got very small rights "police nationale" and "gendarmerie", which belong to the country, and have got "full rights". Here, you can't give donations to the force, and I can't event believe the implication of such cards; it seems so "third world". It makes me afraid when municipal police are given more rights (carrying a firearm, …) as they are much more entangled with the mayor, the city, and the local people. The gendarmerie for example all live in barracks and serve a bigger area. I would think that they are less prone to corruption.

currymj 9y ago
it seems unreal to most Americans as well. it's not a practice that's widely known, as the article says. if the cards are given after a "donation", the donation is to the labor union representing the police officers, rather than to the force itself. the unions sometimes engage in charitable activities in the area, so there is at least a pretense for making a donation. the article also talks specifically about NYPD, which while technically a municipal police department, probably shouldn't be seen that way because it's so huge. indeed the mayor of New York describes it as "the seventh largest standing army in the world".
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  I do imagine that it's not significantly different than the professional courtesy one would likely get in a smaller department. But NY being so large, where there's no chance any given officer knows who another officer's family is, they need some sort of card. "I'm Officer Smith's wife" doesn't cut it in NY. But it is amazing how much official bureaucracy has been placed on a system... designed to give people a loophole out of the bureaucracy.
- sandworm101 9y ago
  >> the donation is to the labor union representing the police officers. Not always. Many US department accept donations directly. Often people donate equipment, up to and including cars. The Tulsa shooting in 2015 involved an insurance salesman acting as a "volunteer" police officer. He had donated substantially to the force and was, allegedly, given privileges in recompense. Pay to play imho.
  - currymj 9y ago
    this is a fascinating fact, and I guess I should have assumed everything was even worse than I thought. I guess it’s the flip side of civil forfeiture, departments funding themselves like businesses.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      I guess these thing has lead to the saying that the police force is the biggest gang...
geofft 9y ago
One of the big problems with US police, I think, is that police have to carry a firearm because anyone they run into can carry a firearm. In countries where firearms are regulated to the point where both legal and illegal firearm possession is rare, police can just carry batons and not expect to find themselves facing a gun.
- dbcurtis 9y ago
  In England, when private gun ownership was legal, contables used to carry batons. Now, private gun ownership is largely illegal, and police carry guns.
  - geofft 9y ago
    I thought that gun ownership in England was restricted to special types of police, i.e., the average beat cop patrolling an area or pulling you over for speeding is unlikely to be armed, right? (Is this a language difference in "constable" vs. "police" vs. "cop" etc.?)
    - xhedley 9y ago
      Indeed. Only 5% of police officers in England and Wales are Authorised Firearms Officers, and AFOs are only issued arms for specific operations. I was surprised that there were only 10 incidents where police shot their firearms in year ended March 2017 (although multiple officers might use their guns in a single incident). I guess some of the use of firearms is deterrence - a lot of police wandering round waving submachine guns at airports and stations when the terrorism threat is high. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-use-of-firearms-statistics-england-and-wales-april-2016-to-march-2017/police-use-of-firearms-statistics-england-and-wales-april-2016-to-march-2017 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-use-of-fir...
      - geofft 9y ago
        Wow, that's two orders of magnitude fewer than the number of people shot and killed in the US in 2017.
Y_Y 9y ago
To me it seems that having gendarmes with big guns wandering around is very third world and the civilised thing to do is have unarmed police like in Ireland. Our police are mildly corrupt, but at least they don't shoot people.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jankotek 9y ago
  Instead Ireland has soldiers with assault rifles. They guard banks, shops etc... I prefer civil police.
  - dmurray 9y ago
    The army occasionally escort trucks full of cash. I've never seen a soldier here guarding a shop or a bank.
    - HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
      > I've never seen a soldier here guarding a shop or a bank. As an anecdote - I have. It was somewhere in the southwest about 15 years ago.
  - psergeant 9y ago
    This is not either/or. The UK has routinely unarmed police, and no soldiers on the street, instead having specialist armed police.
- Faaak 9y ago
  In general gendarmes only carry a gun with them (a glock or something like that), and rarely "big guns" as you put it. They also don't go around shooting people.
inferiorhuman 9y ago
We have state (e.g. state troopers, highway patrol) and federal police (FBI) as well. Pretty much all except for those on traffic duty carry guns, however.
- somebehemoth 9y ago
  Many or most are heavily armed in addition to their side arm. Shotguns, tazers, batons, pepper spray, etc. http://www.policehow.com/police-gear-equipment.php http://www.policehow.com/police-gear-equipment.php
HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
> Coming from France, this seems completely unreal to me. Probably because no one talks about it. Corruption is largely a taboo issue in France. Neither government nor independent researchers have conducted any comprehensive and empirically based analyses of the phenomenon in the recent past. In addition, the French government does not report publicly on organised crime, and academic research is very limited. The information available publicly nevertheless provides sufficient evidence that in certain geographic (Corsica, large cities, or South-Eastern France) or economic areas (public utility contracts, energy, real-estate, or defence sectors) corruption is often encountered. At the lower level of organised crime, police (information leaking, or direct involvement in OC activities) and local authorities (regarding public contracts) are most often targeted by criminals. At the higher level, judicial corruption and undue political influence over the criminal justice process occur in relation to financial and corporate crimes. The scale of the corruption problem remains unclear due to lack of data. In Corsica, parliamentary reports indicate that the problem is commensurate with the one in mafia-affected regions of Italy. https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/sites/homeaffairs/files/doc_centre/crime/docs/study_on_links_between_organised_crime_and_corruption_en.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/sites/homeaffairs/files/do...
- poutrathor 9y ago
  I spotted a lot a russian sounding names in the authors of this "report". The "Center for Study of Democracy" looks like a Russian troll factory : http://www.csd.bg/index.php?id=182 http://www.csd.bg/index.php?id=182 One dude from Sodia university, all the others with no instutions other than the so call think tank. Also that gem : > France: the local researcher preferred to remain anonymous
  - HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
    .bg is Bulgaria. Bulgaria is an eastern European country, a member of NATO and the EU. The capital is Sofia, and they speak a slavic language - Bulgarian.
jagermo 9y ago
Chiming in from Germany: I don't know about cards like that, however people put stickers of one of the police unions (GDP) on their windshields in hope of getting a better treatment from the police. However, there are two reasons why this would not work: 1) Police officers can choose to forgive minor infractions, i think everything below a certain fine can be waved. An example would be if you drove a little to risky or something else and don't behave like an idiot to the officer. 2) as soon as you are above these thresholds, it gets very dangerous for cops to let you off the hook. There is a crime called "Strafvereitelung im Amt", basically meaning trying to hide a crime as an officer of the law. it carries a sentence of at least 6 months up to five years and even trying to hide something is punishable. This can also break the career of an officer. So if you, for example, drive drunk and your buddy let's you off the hook, he should damn well be sure that his partner does not talk about it. There is, of course special treatment for special persons. I remember the mayor of my town, being known as an alcoholic, driving his car at night away from the bar where he boozed it up with his buddies. He never got caught, probably because his license plate was known and the cops were "somewhere else".
- tsbertalan 9y ago
  > it carries a sentence of at least 6 months up to five years and even trying to hide something is punishable. This can also break the career of an officer. This is the part that's unimaginable in the US.

by Faaak 9y ago

currymj 9y ago

it seems unreal to most Americans as well. it's not a practice that's widely known, as the article says. if the cards are given after a "donation", the donation is to the labor union representing the police officers, rather than to the force itself. the unions sometimes engage in charitable activities in the area, so there is at least a pretense for making a donation. the article also talks specifically about NYPD, which while technically a municipal police department, probably shouldn't be seen that way because it's so huge. indeed the mayor of New York describes it as "the seventh largest standing army in the world".

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
I do imagine that it's not significantly different than the professional courtesy one would likely get in a smaller department. But NY being so large, where there's no chance any given officer knows who another officer's family is, they need some sort of card. "I'm Officer Smith's wife" doesn't cut it in NY. But it is amazing how much official bureaucracy has been placed on a system... designed to give people a loophole out of the bureaucracy.
sandworm101 9y ago
>> the donation is to the labor union representing the police officers. Not always. Many US department accept donations directly. Often people donate equipment, up to and including cars. The Tulsa shooting in 2015 involved an insurance salesman acting as a "volunteer" police officer. He had donated substantially to the force and was, allegedly, given privileges in recompense. Pay to play imho.
- currymj 9y ago
  this is a fascinating fact, and I guess I should have assumed everything was even worse than I thought. I guess it’s the flip side of civil forfeiture, departments funding themselves like businesses.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    I guess these thing has lead to the saying that the police force is the biggest gang...

geofft 9y ago

One of the big problems with US police, I think, is that police have to carry a firearm because anyone they run into can carry a firearm. In countries where firearms are regulated to the point where both legal and illegal firearm possession is rare, police can just carry batons and not expect to find themselves facing a gun.

dbcurtis 9y ago
In England, when private gun ownership was legal, contables used to carry batons. Now, private gun ownership is largely illegal, and police carry guns.
- geofft 9y ago
  I thought that gun ownership in England was restricted to special types of police, i.e., the average beat cop patrolling an area or pulling you over for speeding is unlikely to be armed, right? (Is this a language difference in "constable" vs. "police" vs. "cop" etc.?)
  - xhedley 9y ago
    Indeed. Only 5% of police officers in England and Wales are Authorised Firearms Officers, and AFOs are only issued arms for specific operations. I was surprised that there were only 10 incidents where police shot their firearms in year ended March 2017 (although multiple officers might use their guns in a single incident). I guess some of the use of firearms is deterrence - a lot of police wandering round waving submachine guns at airports and stations when the terrorism threat is high. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-use-of-firearms-statistics-england-and-wales-april-2016-to-march-2017/police-use-of-firearms-statistics-england-and-wales-april-2016-to-march-2017 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-use-of-fir...
    - geofft 9y ago
      Wow, that's two orders of magnitude fewer than the number of people shot and killed in the US in 2017.

Y_Y 9y ago

To me it seems that having gendarmes with big guns wandering around is very third world and the civilised thing to do is have unarmed police like in Ireland. Our police are mildly corrupt, but at least they don't shoot people.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jankotek 9y ago
Instead Ireland has soldiers with assault rifles. They guard banks, shops etc... I prefer civil police.
- dmurray 9y ago
  The army occasionally escort trucks full of cash. I've never seen a soldier here guarding a shop or a bank.
  - HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
    > I've never seen a soldier here guarding a shop or a bank. As an anecdote - I have. It was somewhere in the southwest about 15 years ago.
- psergeant 9y ago
  This is not either/or. The UK has routinely unarmed police, and no soldiers on the street, instead having specialist armed police.
Faaak 9y ago
In general gendarmes only carry a gun with them (a glock or something like that), and rarely "big guns" as you put it. They also don't go around shooting people.

inferiorhuman 9y ago

We have state (e.g. state troopers, highway patrol) and federal police (FBI) as well. Pretty much all except for those on traffic duty carry guns, however.

somebehemoth 9y ago
Many or most are heavily armed in addition to their side arm. Shotguns, tazers, batons, pepper spray, etc. http://www.policehow.com/police-gear-equipment.php http://www.policehow.com/police-gear-equipment.php

HumanDrivenDev 9y ago

> Coming from France, this seems completely unreal to me. Probably because no one talks about it. Corruption is largely a taboo issue in France. Neither government nor independent researchers have conducted any comprehensive and empirically based analyses of the phenomenon in the recent past. In addition, the French government does not report publicly on organised crime, and academic research is very limited. The information available publicly nevertheless provides sufficient evidence that in certain geographic (Corsica, large cities, or South-Eastern France) or economic areas (public utility contracts, energy, real-estate, or defence sectors) corruption is often encountered. At the lower level of organised crime, police (information leaking, or direct involvement in OC activities) and local authorities (regarding public contracts) are most often targeted by criminals. At the higher level, judicial corruption and undue political influence over the criminal justice process occur in relation to financial and corporate crimes. The scale of the corruption problem remains unclear due to lack of data. In Corsica, parliamentary reports indicate that the problem is commensurate with the one in mafia-affected regions of Italy. https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/sites/homeaffairs/files/doc_centre/crime/docs/study_on_links_between_organised_crime_and_corruption_en.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/sites/homeaffairs/files/do...

poutrathor 9y ago
I spotted a lot a russian sounding names in the authors of this "report". The "Center for Study of Democracy" looks like a Russian troll factory : http://www.csd.bg/index.php?id=182 http://www.csd.bg/index.php?id=182 One dude from Sodia university, all the others with no instutions other than the so call think tank. Also that gem : > France: the local researcher preferred to remain anonymous
- HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
  .bg is Bulgaria. Bulgaria is an eastern European country, a member of NATO and the EU. The capital is Sofia, and they speak a slavic language - Bulgarian.

jagermo 9y ago

Chiming in from Germany: I don't know about cards like that, however people put stickers of one of the police unions (GDP) on their windshields in hope of getting a better treatment from the police. However, there are two reasons why this would not work: 1) Police officers can choose to forgive minor infractions, i think everything below a certain fine can be waved. An example would be if you drove a little to risky or something else and don't behave like an idiot to the officer. 2) as soon as you are above these thresholds, it gets very dangerous for cops to let you off the hook. There is a crime called "Strafvereitelung im Amt", basically meaning trying to hide a crime as an officer of the law. it carries a sentence of at least 6 months up to five years and even trying to hide something is punishable. This can also break the career of an officer. So if you, for example, drive drunk and your buddy let's you off the hook, he should damn well be sure that his partner does not talk about it. There is, of course special treatment for special persons. I remember the mayor of my town, being known as an alcoholic, driving his car at night away from the bar where he boozed it up with his buddies. He never got caught, probably because his license plate was known and the cops were "somewhere else".

tsbertalan 9y ago
> it carries a sentence of at least 6 months up to five years and even trying to hide something is punishable. This can also break the career of an officer. This is the part that's unimaginable in the US.