7 ms·

Police serve themselves and the state, putting their lives well above those they are supposed to serve and protect. I don't think the public's opinion is likely

Police serve themselves and the state, putting their lives well above those they are supposed to serve and protect. I don't think the public's opinion is likely to change until there's some radical reform. https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2016/07/07/graphic-video-minnesota-police-shooting-philando-castile-ryan-young-pkg-nd.cnn/video/playlists/philando-castile-shot-in-minnesota/ https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2016/07/07/graphic-video-minne... This officer shot into a car seven times with a little girl on board, murdering a man who was cooperating. And then he gets off without charge, despite there being video evidence. Where is the justice in that? People aren't that dumb, they aren't being treated fairly and they know it. According to this study, less than 30% of people believe that police behave lawfully.

x220 8y ago
>less than 30% of people believe that police behave lawfully If you ask someone if they think a large collection of individuals behaves lawfully, the answer should always be "no" because with a large enough group there will always be criminals in that group. If you're instead thinking about whether police break the law in an organized and collectively deliberate fashion, that's an entirely different question.
- teumesios 8y ago
  Uhm, what? Even if someone commits a crime, that does not make them any less able to recognize that the police break laws.
  - x220 8y ago
    Yes, the police break laws. Republicans break laws. Democrats, Muslims, Trump supporters, and Python programmers break laws. Any large group of people contains law-breakers. It's not a useful statement.
    - crooked-v 8y ago
      The difference between police officers and the rest of those groups is that all of them but police officers are self-selected and unenforced. It is entirely feasible to have a police force that break laws only negligibly by enforcing the removal of individual police who break laws.
      - x220 8y ago
        I think I agree with you entirely. I'm pointing out that that statement is very different than "the police break the law".
    - anigbrowl 8y ago
      The fact that the police exist specifically to enforce the law and that they are invested with enormous powers to do so makes them fundamentally different from the other groups you mention. Please do not insult our intelligence with such specious arguments.
- romed 8y ago
  Perhaps, but the impression is reinforced when the police organize themselves to break the law in an organized fashion. For example, consider the police of Oakland, California. Every one of their patrol motorcycles is modified with a loud, unlawful exhaust muffler, through actions that body deliberately undertook. Clearly there are numerous criminals among the ranks of that police department, but it's also true that the department itself is corrupt and makes corrupt decisions as an organized body. Edit: which is to overlook the most glaring examples of NYPD corruption: parking placards and get-out-of-jail-free cards for friends and family (recently reduced from 30 to 20 per officer!). It is not a great exaggeration to claim that the NYPD is America's largest criminal gang.
  - rrauenza 8y ago
    More background on Oakland: https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Oakland-PD-s-Harleys-have-a-new-roar-3281220.php https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Oakland-PD-s-Harleys...
  - x220 8y ago
    See, now we're talking about something more specific and useful. Those are pretty interesting.
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    Not sure why you're being downvoted. OPD is positively plagued with organizational problems and has been under a consent decree for over a decade.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
snackbugs 8y ago
>Police serve themselves and the state Just a minor nitpick about this, forgive me. Overall this post is perfectly agreeable. Police primarily serve private property owners, with private property being different from personal property. Private property refers to property which earns their owners accumulated wealth: think landlords, business owners and such. Personal property, such as your smartphone or house are intuitively different from this even though things like this are called private property in vernacular. I think it's a distinction worth posting about since policing as an institution got its start in union busting and slave catching.
- ticviking 8y ago
  > I think it's a distinction worth posting about since policing as an institution got its start in union busting and slave catching. Do you happen to have a good citation for this, I've heard it several times but am not familiar with any scholarship documenting that connection.
  - jchrisa 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_patrol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_patrol https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-and-origins-american-policing https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-a...
    - ticviking 8y ago
      That Wikipedia article doesn't draw any connection between modern policing and the slave patrols, though it points out the well documented connections between militia efforts and enforcing slavery. Similar institutions date to the Romans[1], which would suggest that slave catchers and the like may not be directly linked to our idea of a municipal police department. The second source seem to support the connection, but doesn't document any actual institutional connections. It relies on similarity, and bald assertion. The existence of overlap between the KKK and local law enforcement is evidence that policing in the US is racist. It isn't actually evidence that the institutions of policing were descended from slave patrols. I'm not a huge expert on criminal justice, but my degree is history, and these kinds of assertions seem to ignore the parallel developments in NYC, Boston, and other Yankee cities in policing and crime solving that established our idea of a municipal police department. That such departments may have been racist isn't a surprise, virtually every institution in 1880 was, but they were in states that did not practice slavery(abolished in 1799 in NY) and as a result had no institutional history of enforcing it. Consider that Federal Marshals were so reluctant to enforce laws on the return of escaped slaves that it took an act of congress, with severe financial penalties, to get them to actually enforce the "property claims" of southerners. 1 - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/slavery_01.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/slavery_01.shtml
corey_moncure 8y ago
Looks like you're interested in this topic! There's always room to think deeper. Here's some prompts. Why do police act this way? Have they always acted this way or did something change? Are police different from other people, that is do they have an innate propensity to act the way they do, or are they conditioned to act this way by their experiences? What sort of job experiences do police have? Have the experiences of policing changed in recent times, and why? What systemic factors contribute to the problem? What social factors contribute to the problem? Thanks to the miracle of the internet, there are many great resources to see the kind of situations real police must routinely navigate. This youtube channel is one of my favorites: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXMYxKMh3prxnM_4kYZuB3g https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXMYxKMh3prxnM_4kYZuB3g (NSFW, violent content)
- nateabele 8y ago
  All excellent questions. Though it has a bit of an anti-capitalist bent, this is the best article I've ever read on the origins of modern law enforcement: https://worxintheory.wordpress.com/2014/12/07/origins-of-the-police/ https://worxintheory.wordpress.com/2014/12/07/origins-of-the... Granted there's room for alternate interpretations, I think history speaks pretty clearly to the fact that the primary function is maintaining control of populations at scale, and that necessarily implies certain things about the outcome of any law enforcement system.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >Are police different from other people, that is do they have an innate propensity to act the way they do, or are they conditioned to act this way by their experiences? In discussion on the subject I've had multiple people who do not know each other say things like "everyone I knew who was a bully growing up became a cop" (and that's a near direct quote). The current state of policing where they can use force to get people to do anything they want and get off scot free even if they're in the wrong definitely attracts a certain personality type.
tzs 8y ago
> And then he gets off without charge, despite there being video evidence I think you meant that he got off without conviction, not without charge. He was charged with manslaughter and a couple of felony gun charges, and was tried by a jury on those charges [1]. [1] http://live.mprnews.org/Event/The_trial_of_officer_Jeronimo_Yanez/970456316 http://live.mprnews.org/Event/The_trial_of_officer_Jeronimo_...
- cristoperb 8y ago
  This a good correction in this case. But in the US it is only the most egregious cases (with the most video evidence) where grand juries/prosecutors even succeed in bringing criminal charges against police officers.

x220 8y ago

>less than 30% of people believe that police behave lawfully If you ask someone if they think a large collection of individuals behaves lawfully, the answer should always be "no" because with a large enough group there will always be criminals in that group. If you're instead thinking about whether police break the law in an organized and collectively deliberate fashion, that's an entirely different question.

teumesios 8y ago
Uhm, what? Even if someone commits a crime, that does not make them any less able to recognize that the police break laws.
- x220 8y ago
  Yes, the police break laws. Republicans break laws. Democrats, Muslims, Trump supporters, and Python programmers break laws. Any large group of people contains law-breakers. It's not a useful statement.
  - crooked-v 8y ago
    The difference between police officers and the rest of those groups is that all of them but police officers are self-selected and unenforced. It is entirely feasible to have a police force that break laws only negligibly by enforcing the removal of individual police who break laws.
    - x220 8y ago
      I think I agree with you entirely. I'm pointing out that that statement is very different than "the police break the law".
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    The fact that the police exist specifically to enforce the law and that they are invested with enormous powers to do so makes them fundamentally different from the other groups you mention. Please do not insult our intelligence with such specious arguments.
romed 8y ago
Perhaps, but the impression is reinforced when the police organize themselves to break the law in an organized fashion. For example, consider the police of Oakland, California. Every one of their patrol motorcycles is modified with a loud, unlawful exhaust muffler, through actions that body deliberately undertook. Clearly there are numerous criminals among the ranks of that police department, but it's also true that the department itself is corrupt and makes corrupt decisions as an organized body. Edit: which is to overlook the most glaring examples of NYPD corruption: parking placards and get-out-of-jail-free cards for friends and family (recently reduced from 30 to 20 per officer!). It is not a great exaggeration to claim that the NYPD is America's largest criminal gang.
- rrauenza 8y ago
  More background on Oakland: https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Oakland-PD-s-Harleys-have-a-new-roar-3281220.php https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Oakland-PD-s-Harleys...
- x220 8y ago
  See, now we're talking about something more specific and useful. Those are pretty interesting.
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted. OPD is positively plagued with organizational problems and has been under a consent decree for over a decade.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

snackbugs 8y ago

>Police serve themselves and the state Just a minor nitpick about this, forgive me. Overall this post is perfectly agreeable. Police primarily serve private property owners, with private property being different from personal property. Private property refers to property which earns their owners accumulated wealth: think landlords, business owners and such. Personal property, such as your smartphone or house are intuitively different from this even though things like this are called private property in vernacular. I think it's a distinction worth posting about since policing as an institution got its start in union busting and slave catching.

ticviking 8y ago
> I think it's a distinction worth posting about since policing as an institution got its start in union busting and slave catching. Do you happen to have a good citation for this, I've heard it several times but am not familiar with any scholarship documenting that connection.
- jchrisa 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_patrol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_patrol https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-and-origins-american-policing https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-a...
  - ticviking 8y ago
    That Wikipedia article doesn't draw any connection between modern policing and the slave patrols, though it points out the well documented connections between militia efforts and enforcing slavery. Similar institutions date to the Romans[1], which would suggest that slave catchers and the like may not be directly linked to our idea of a municipal police department. The second source seem to support the connection, but doesn't document any actual institutional connections. It relies on similarity, and bald assertion. The existence of overlap between the KKK and local law enforcement is evidence that policing in the US is racist. It isn't actually evidence that the institutions of policing were descended from slave patrols. I'm not a huge expert on criminal justice, but my degree is history, and these kinds of assertions seem to ignore the parallel developments in NYC, Boston, and other Yankee cities in policing and crime solving that established our idea of a municipal police department. That such departments may have been racist isn't a surprise, virtually every institution in 1880 was, but they were in states that did not practice slavery(abolished in 1799 in NY) and as a result had no institutional history of enforcing it. Consider that Federal Marshals were so reluctant to enforce laws on the return of escaped slaves that it took an act of congress, with severe financial penalties, to get them to actually enforce the "property claims" of southerners. 1 - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/slavery_01.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/slavery_01.shtml

corey_moncure 8y ago

Looks like you're interested in this topic! There's always room to think deeper. Here's some prompts. Why do police act this way? Have they always acted this way or did something change? Are police different from other people, that is do they have an innate propensity to act the way they do, or are they conditioned to act this way by their experiences? What sort of job experiences do police have? Have the experiences of policing changed in recent times, and why? What systemic factors contribute to the problem? What social factors contribute to the problem? Thanks to the miracle of the internet, there are many great resources to see the kind of situations real police must routinely navigate. This youtube channel is one of my favorites: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXMYxKMh3prxnM_4kYZuB3g https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXMYxKMh3prxnM_4kYZuB3g (NSFW, violent content)

nateabele 8y ago
All excellent questions. Though it has a bit of an anti-capitalist bent, this is the best article I've ever read on the origins of modern law enforcement: https://worxintheory.wordpress.com/2014/12/07/origins-of-the-police/ https://worxintheory.wordpress.com/2014/12/07/origins-of-the... Granted there's room for alternate interpretations, I think history speaks pretty clearly to the fact that the primary function is maintaining control of populations at scale, and that necessarily implies certain things about the outcome of any law enforcement system.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
>Are police different from other people, that is do they have an innate propensity to act the way they do, or are they conditioned to act this way by their experiences? In discussion on the subject I've had multiple people who do not know each other say things like "everyone I knew who was a bully growing up became a cop" (and that's a near direct quote). The current state of policing where they can use force to get people to do anything they want and get off scot free even if they're in the wrong definitely attracts a certain personality type.

tzs 8y ago

> And then he gets off without charge, despite there being video evidence I think you meant that he got off without conviction, not without charge. He was charged with manslaughter and a couple of felony gun charges, and was tried by a jury on those charges [1]. [1] http://live.mprnews.org/Event/The_trial_of_officer_Jeronimo_Yanez/970456316 http://live.mprnews.org/Event/The_trial_of_officer_Jeronimo_...

cristoperb 8y ago
This a good correction in this case. But in the US it is only the most egregious cases (with the most video evidence) where grand juries/prosecutors even succeed in bringing criminal charges against police officers.