21 ms·

In Secretly Recorded Phone Calls, Officers Say Innocent People Were Framed

598 points by danso 6y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> Caught on tape by a whistleblower cop, the officers said they witnessed or took part in alarming acts of police misconduct, from framing and beating residents to collaborating with drug dealers, all as part of a culture of impunity within the department’s narcotics unit. Probably the single most effective thing to reduce police abuse in America would be to end the war on drugs and decriminalize drugs. No-knock warrants were originally used to try to catch drug dealers before they could flush the drugs down the toilet. Civil forfeiture was originally created to try to take money from drug dealers. The war on drugs has taken a wrecking ball to the Fourth Amendment restrictions on search and seizure.
- kyleee 6y ago
  Yep, and the legal market prices must not be pushed too high due to excessive regulation and taxation, lest the black markets (and crime associated with them) continue to flourish
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > lest the black markets (and crime associated with them) continue to flourish Black markets of tax evaders are vastly superior to those avoiding criminal penalties up to life in jail.
    - kyleee 6y ago
      Agreed but tax evasion is not the only crime associated with black markets (especially the drug trade)
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        Most of the other crimes are associated with prohibition. When the penalty for drug distribution is a decade in prison which the government then uses as leverage to flip your distributors and then do the same to everyone in your whole organization, it makes it economically viable to use extreme measures to avoid prosecution. Snitches get stitches etc. Whereas when the consequences of tax evasion are paying what you owe plus penalties and interest, you just pay the money (or go bankrupt). There is no incentive to spend five million dollars to avoid a million dollar penalty as a gesture of loyalty to your people or to keep them from flipping; you just pay the million dollars. There is much less incentive to murder witnesses and risk prison when the alternative was only bankruptcy and not prison to begin with. The violence is primarily attributable to the harshness of the penalties in the War on Drugs and what that justifies in order to avoid them. Meanwhile prosecuting tax evasion is self-financing whenever tax evasion is prevalent, so it has a natural equilibrium at a low level of tax evasion. Prohibition is the opposite -- the harder you prosecute the higher the street prices get and the more lucrative it is to commit violence to bring in those high prices.
        freedomben 6y ago
        Agreed. I highly recommend Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel[1] for a great look at the economics behind the drug trade. It's remarkable logical when you just consider the facts. [1]: https://smile.amazon.com/Narconomics-How-Run-Drug-Cartel/dp/1610397703 https://smile.amazon.com/Narconomics-How-Run-Drug-Cartel/dp/...
    - klyrs 6y ago
      From a harm reduction standpoint, this is wrong. I want heroin users to get pure, uncut heroin -- just as I never worry that a bottle of whiskey is going to be cut with fentanyl. Legalize it and regulate it, and price out the black market or it will have all the incentive to undermine the possible good.
      - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
        I used to be for complete legalization for the reasons discussed here, but now i struggle with that because of how much destruction there is to people from meth and opioids. If those were legally available in smaller "safe" doses maybe it would be better. But this is just tough to contemplate.
        ken 6y ago
        How do meth/opioids change the equation? They're not (for the most part) legal. Alcohol causes tremendous destruction, too, but I thought there was general agreement that national prohibition was worse.
        colejohnson66 6y ago
        They change the equation when someone is advocating for “full legalization” with (sometimes) “no government regulation”. The argument is (rightly or wrongly) that certain drugs are actually so harmful that they should be kept out of the public.
        NotSammyHagar 6y ago
        Yes, that's what I was thinking. They are so destructive and addictive that people can't stop taking them. I worry that if they were legal and cheap people would get hooked on them and cause a lot of devastation ton themselves and their families. Of course there are people today who can't get methadone to treat their heroin addictions, because of legality concerns where it's not available.
        6y ago
  - AuryGlenz 6y ago
    I’m curious - which drugs do you think should be available for sale commercially? All of them? The libertarian side in me says yes, but the pragmatic side says easily available meth wouldn’t exactly be a great thing for society.
    - freedomben 6y ago
      If Meth were legalized, somebody would figure out a way to make a safer Meth. Very few people would choose to use dangerous product that is often cut and has unknown levels of the drug in it, when there is a packaged/tested version available. A lot of the really terrible drugs only exist today because of prohibition. Some of them were invented as a way around the laws, and some were invented as an economical way to produce/traffic in the face of extreme danger (from law enforcement). Most people would opt for safer drugs if they had options. As it stands now you are basically at the mercy of the local illegal drug dealer that you know, and most of them don't have high quality standards.
      - AuryGlenz 6y ago
        You can already get a prescription for meth, but it's still neurotoxic. Better than something you can get on the street? Sure, but it's still straight up bad for you. The safer version of meth are the other amphetamines like Adderall.
        freedomben 6y ago
        Agreed, but you can't legally get some without convincing another human to give it to you, and that human is on high alert for watching for someone who might abuse it - which is exactly the person who would benefit most from legality/availability of safer alternatives, but to that person it is illegal. That's why they turn to the black market.
  - aidos 6y ago
    Your parent said decriminalise rather than legalise. It’s a strategy that Portugal has had a lot of success with.
  - noarchy 6y ago
    This remains an issue in Canada with regard to cannabis, now that it is legalized. And we still have a thriving black market in cigarettes, due to high taxes.
- swiley 6y ago
  I’m honestly pretty pissed off with the Democrats picking a candidate that’s not pro legalization. The one alternative we have to the republicans is just doing the same crap.
  - brenden2 6y ago
    Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same coin. They both represent the elite class, and do not care about these issues. They've had decades to do something about it, and instead gave themselves raises and made it harder for anyone to change anything. Edit: It's funny because I actually applied to YC to build a company that would try and fix this. Naturally they didn't even offer to interview me. YC doesn't care about fixing a system that helped get them where they are, either.
    - orf 6y ago
      The "both sides are the same" argument is a complete nonsensical distraction and wears really thin when faced with reality.
      - save_ferris 6y ago
        Sure, there are pretty significant differences in the day-to-day conduct between the two parties, but it is true that both parties are beholden to major corporate interests and are decreasingly supporting positions held by the public at large. The centrist wing of the Democratic Party refuses to seriously consider universal healthcare as a platform while we all watch the current healthcare system fall further and further into dysfunction via private bureaucracy. Numerous progressive policies have wide support across the political spectrum, but aren’t being seriously considered by either major party. And that is something that both parties are very guilty of.
        Ididntdothis 6y ago
        The Democrats are the spineless party. They have no courage to take a position. It’s all wishy-washy trying not to offend anybody (especially not their donors).
- brenden2 6y ago
  And now the DEA has been mobilized against citizens to quell protests and criminalize dissent. The DEA is now the Gestapo.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- op03 6y ago
  With the blame games, polarization and mistrust simple problems aren't getting solved. Forget about big ones. As Herbert Simon in his Nobel speech pointed out, if you can't solve 2nd grade problems don't run into the 10th grade classroom and cry about what's on the blackboard.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > The war on drugs has taken a wrecking ball to the Fourth Amendment restrictions on search and seizure. The "war on terror" is probably even worse, given how many citizen rights were all but wiped after 9/11 across the world.
  - wahern 6y ago
    How many Signal-using techies have been asphyxiated by cops kneeling on their necks or gunned down simply for daring to walking around in public? Let's not equivocate abuses. It's unnecessary. And moreover changing the way our most vulnerable citizens are treated will likely go a long way toward changing the way everybody else is treated.
    - mschuster91 6y ago
      People in Afghanistan got killed by drone strikes or "exfiltrated" to Guantanamo or a load of "black sites". The "war on terror" is absolutely as murderous.
      - wahern 6y ago
        The War on Terror is an actual war waged using actual militaries. And non-American citizens don't have constitutional rights outside United States territory. Those facts in no way diminish the wrongness of what has happened, but we could just as well compare it to Global Warming and our complicity in the death of millions; the connection would be just as tenuous and unconstructive. That said, interestingly in 2016 ~1100 people were killed by police officers in the United States[1], while ~1600 people were killed by drone strikes in Afghanistan[2]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/... [2] https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/drone-war/data/get-the-data-a-list-of-us-air-and-drone-strikes-afghanistan-2016 https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/drone-war/data/get-the...
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- pdonis 6y ago
  > Probably the single most effective thing to reduce police abuse in America would be to end the war on drugs and decriminalize drugs. I agree 1000%. I wish more people would realize this.
  - akvadrako 6y ago
    That the protestors aren’t using this as one of their main demands gives a clue as to their motivations. They clearly aren’t above advocating extreme solutions and the far left generally seems to recognize the importance of legalization.
- agustif 6y ago
  In my opinion, politicians love wars on drugs because that way they can keep the monopoly of whatever they want to sell. If you make the laws, you make something illegal, and then don't follow your own laws because you're also the enforcer
  - lowdose 6y ago
    Alcohol beverages was a $1,439 billion market in 2017. There is no movie recorded since the prohibition era without reinforcing this drugs as social acceptable every 30 minutes at least once. https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/alcoholic-beverages-market/ https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/alcoholic-beverages-mar...
    - jandrese 6y ago
      > There is no movie recorded since the prohibition era without reinforcing this drugs as social acceptable every 30 minutes at least once. Citation seriously needed. Your link certainly doesn't provide it. Off of the top of my head I can think of countless counterexamples.
      - agustif 6y ago
        1. Thank you for smoking (Go watch that movie) Weed industry in the US (Miraculously legalized in most key states in record times)
      - lowdose 6y ago
        > Overall, 86% of the total 655 movies included at least 1 alcohol scene, with a range of 0 to 617 and a mean of 68 (SD = 87) occurrences per movie. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4035596/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4035596/ If we take this mean and use a movie average length of 1.5 hour it was actually 10x worst than my estimation. Yes you are right it is probably better to take the median. I think it would be pretty easy for a ML pose algorithm to scan the whole Amazon Prime + Netflix archive for a real answer. Especially series like Mad Men are over the top in conditioning for alcohol and cigarette use. I started noticing when I quit smoking how much this was.
- rch 6y ago
  It's possible the 'war on drugs' was an excuse used to establish those capabilities. I think it's telling that the DEA has been given the authority to take part in other enforcement actions on a temporary basis in response to the current protests. The agency could easily shift focus to e.g. human trafficking and continue unabated post-legalization.
  - toyg 6y ago
    There is only so much human trafficking one can do. I don’t see anything with the potential production volume of what is, essentially, a foodstuff (cheap to produce and consumed multiple times a day, every day). Scaling down would be inevitable at the first sign of economic crisis, in the same way the defense sector was hit significantly post-89.
    - bdamm 6y ago
      The point is that there's plenty of illegal behavior and only so many enforcement resources (which is by design right?) so we don't need to be worried for the officer's jobs, they can just switch to new legal focus area de jour.
      - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
        It's awfully hard to retrain a cop to be a forensic accountant. The judicialbranch has been failing to undertake anything but token measures against white collar crimes. Actual police work against white collar criminals is not as easy as coercing a junkie into selling felonious amounts of a plant by product or made in a bath tub chemical.
- jrs235 6y ago
  And get rid of two party recording consent laws?
- splitrocket 6y ago
  That, making civil forfeiture funds go to the general coffer, and forcing police departments to pay settlements out of their own budget. They socialize the costs and privatize the profits of their misbehavior. FYI, 1/3 of all people killed by strangers in the US are killed by the police. [0] Police take more money from people through asset forfeiture than criminals do with theft. [1] [0]https://granta.com/violence-in-blue/ https://granta.com/violence-in-blue/ [1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-took-more-stuff-from-people-than-burglars-did-last-year/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  From a legalistic point of view you are correct. But if it wasn't that it would be something else. Already the DEA is being repurposed to investigate networks of 'professional anarchists' who are supposedly the architects of the current unrest. While support for the drug war is waning, reactionaries are just switching back to tropes about 'communist agitators' that were used prior to the drug war to delegitimize civil rights activism in the 1960s.
- benmw333 6y ago
  100% agree.
- kingbirdy 6y ago
  > Civil forfeiture was originally created to try to take money from drug dealers. I agree with your premise, but this statement is incorrect. Civil forfeiture originated from the British Navigation Acts of the mid 1600s. It continued to be accepted practice in the US after the revolution, and was relied on during Prohibition as a tool against bootleggers much as it's used against drug dealers now. Usage has certainly escalated due to the war on drugs, but it's not where it originated from.
  - daseiner1 6y ago
    prohibition was just an earlier battle in the larger war on drugs as far as i’m concerned
    - solotronics 6y ago
      Before the Harrison narcotic act in 1914 there was never such a thing as an "illegal drug" there were laws about adultering products with poison but the concept of illegal drugs or a "war on drugs" didn't exist before 1914 in the US. I am not sure how addicts were treated by law enforcement historically but would be curious to hear about that. Just my own intuition says they probably were treated under existing vagrancy laws "Vagrancy laws took myriad forms, generally making it a crime to be poor, idle, dissolute, immoral, drunk, lewd, or suspicious."
      - kyuudou 6y ago
        Think about all the industries that profit from drug enforcement, incarcerating otherwise harmless citizens committing victimless "crimes". And where would hand-me-downs from the federal armed forces go!? Lots of cash cows...
        greyhair 6y ago
        Commercial for profit prisons are a huge problem. Huge. There is a whole lot of sentencing and prison reform that needs to be taking place, particularly for non-violent crimes.
- utkarsh_apoorva 6y ago
  Police brutality videos on twitter have left most of us, even in the developing world, in utter shock. I am in Bangalore, India For most of us in developing world, US has been a model state - with problems yes. But a great example nevertheless. For God's sake, WE were supposed to be a third world country, always looked at with sympathy in popular media (usually grossly incorrect depiction though) In India, civil unrest is common, and has increased over the past decade. Cops know one thing very very clearly - they are outnumbered. If civilians start to become violent, it will be impossible to control them. So they stand down. I have read umpteen number of articles talking about how policing could be improved in the US, from removing powerful weapons to changing the training programs. I feel that the solution is probably simple - sensitisation to the fact that they are outnumbered. If war mentality is what they get into the field with, better factor everything in. No army in the world engages with a superior force unprovoked. People, the citizens, ARE the most superior force - not just morally, but Truly . F*ing . Practically.
  - rcpt 6y ago
    Police may be outnumbered but the US already called in the military in many cities.
    - ChristianBundy 6y ago
      - US Police: 1.2 million full-time or part-time [1] - US Military: 1.29 million active [2] - US Population: 329.74 million [3] I believe they're outnumbered by about 131 to 1. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_the_United_States#Number_of_police https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_the_United_... [2]: https://www.cfr.org/article/demographics-us-military https://www.cfr.org/article/demographics-us-military [3]: https://www.census.gov/popclock/ https://www.census.gov/popclock/
      - nickpeterson 6y ago
        Most of that military/police population are adult physically able males. The regular population is everyone, if you constrained that population to males/females 18-60 then subtracted the military/police numbers, you’d be closer. It’s probably more like 150:1. Also consider all those officers know how to use weapons, have certain training, it starts to get closer than you think. We have too many police and active military and too many things are illegal that shouldn’t be. The problem is that the military is basically welfare for small towns and southern states.
- mythrwy 6y ago
  If they ended the failed and ridiculous drug war not only would police departments have less friction with the community they would also free up massive resources to deal with real problems. Maybe even start preventing property crimes! One can dream. The old adage about go catch some murderers instead of chasing kids around with a joint.
- syshum 6y ago
  Thank you for being one of the few people that recognize the real reason many people want to legalize drugs So many times it is countered with "You just want to get high that is why you want to legalize drugs"... No I dont want to have my home invaded at 3pm and be shot dead by a trigger happy gang member because the "informant" the police bullied in to snitching gave them a random address for their "dealer" //true story that has happened more than once in the USA
- vkou 6y ago
  > Probably the single most effective thing to reduce police abuse in America would be to end the war on drugs and decriminalize drugs. No. No, no, no. A thousand times no. The war on drugs is just an objective of the police. The objective isn't why brutality happens. Brutality happens because of a systemic problem - the complete lack of accountability. Drugs are just the impetus for some fraction of police-public interactions. They are not the reason for how those police-public interactions are carried out. The police are completely out of control in my neighbourhood. There are walls of tear gas rolling down the streets, rolling into people's apartments, their living rooms and bedrooms. Nobody, not the city mayor, not the state government is willing to reign them in - which is why this is happening. The war on drugs is a bad thing, but if you end it tomorrow, it won't solve a single one of these systemic issues.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    >but if you end it tomorrow, it won't solve a single one of these systemic issues. Why not? The war on drugs is absolutely unenforceable - that leads to police picking and choosing what to enforce which amplifies systemic biases they have. You cannot enforce drug laws accountably, not least because it is largely racist in origin and as such targeted at specific minority groups - let alone practicalities There's a fantastic Vice interview of an British ex-undercover drugs officer: He summarizes most of his career as having been spent ruining the lives of poor people around him and his crowning achievement being a bust that (in the words of one of his colleagues apparently) "interrupted the illegal drug trade in stoke for upwards of 20 minutes"
    - vkou 6y ago
      The police can always pick and choose what they enforce. Have you ever called them? I am close friends with people who have, multiple times. Getting them to show up is an exercise in pulling teeth. They respond to calls - all calls - in an utterly discretionary nature. As they currently operate, they can't even do any part of their job accountably. Drug legalization is just a pet issue for techies, that is a smoke-screen that distracts from the real issues.
- tonystubblebine 6y ago
  This and cash bail are the two most obvious ones. 1/3 of incarcerated people on any given night are unconvicted people who just couldn't afford the bail. This gives police an enormous amount of power to coerce people. It's also deeply un-American because people are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. And then on top of that, it's serves no practical purpose as the vast majority of released people show up for their court dates.
- jandrese 6y ago
  The War on Drugs was really just a casus belli on black males. The civil rights movement had eroded the Jim Crow system the authorities had set up to keep themselves in power, and were seriously worried about more educated well spoken minorities starting movements in the country. They needed a way to suppress their minority populations without drawing the ire of the rest of America, so they manufacture a drug crisis by taking a small problem and blowing it way out of proportion as an excuse to crack down on their potential political opponents. It has worked amazingly well.
  - zdragnar 6y ago
    To say that drugs were a small problem is rewriting history. We would have all been better off treating it like a medical issue rather than a legal / criminal matter, and the long tail effects of enforcement have definitely cemented a lot of structural issues in society- and admittedly, some drugs are far less harmful than others. Pot and crack use have two wildly different outcomes, obviously. You can look at examples in history when oppressors used the opposite tactic: wars were fought to force China to keep opium legal, lining pockets of mercantile companies while keeping China hooked (and earning it the old 'sick man of asia' moniker).
  - camgunz 6y ago
    90% yes, 10% pharmaceutical/alcohol/tobacco companies lobbying.
- georgeecollins 6y ago
  This reminds me of the Ramparts Scandal in Los Angeles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_scandal It's amazing how bad that was. I believe policing in Los Angeles has improved since then. It still has tons of problems, and the justice system in general in Califronia, has tons of problems. But it is amazing how bad it got in this incident.
- jeegsy 6y ago
  > Probably the single most effective thing to reduce police abuse in America would be to end the war on drugs and decriminalize drugs. I have very much thought the same thing. We might be overly optimistic but it would solve so many problems.
leereeves 6y ago
> Prosecutors have a constitutional obligation to disclose information to defendants that could help establish their innocence. But there’s a big debate in criminal justice circles about when police misconduct allegations in unrelated cases fall under that requirement. Why is this debated? If there is convincing evidence that an officer committed perjury or fabricated evidence, isn't there reasonable doubt about anything else they've done?
- downerending 6y ago
  Playing devil's advocate for a moment, information from unrelated cases is often excluded from trials. For example, you generally cannot discuss a victim's prior sexual history in a rape trial, etc. The debate, then, would be about which cases such exclusions should be appropriate in and which not. There's general agreement that neither "all" nor "none" is an appropriate answer.
  - merpnderp 6y ago
    But the cop isn't on trial, so why does the prosecutor get to hide facts about them from the jury?
    - downerending 6y ago
      IANAL, but as above, rape victims aren't on trial either. So perhaps for similar reasons.
      - anigbrowl 6y ago
        I realize you were trying to explore a legal technicality but the inadvertent equivalence of law enforcement with sexual vulnerability doesn't read well at all.
        downerending 6y ago
        Not sure I follow your point, but for what it's worth rape and murder seem about equally bad in my book, and I think all violent crimes should draw life in prison without parole.
ordinaryradical 6y ago
My theory on how to fix this is to maintain the adversarial nature of the courts. Don't force the DA to prosecute cops. Have them maintain the relationship as it currently works and let the DA become the the cops' lawyer by default while the Public Defenders' office take over the role of prosecuting police. Since the PD and DA are already set-up this way in relationship to policing, this makes more sense than trying to wring impartiality out of the DA; they have to work hand in hand with police to convict criminals and need to maintain a cozy relationship. The simplest solution would be to keep the dividing lines the way they are.
- thelittlenag 6y ago
  That it doesn't already work this way, or something similar to this, I find bizarre.
- philjohn 6y ago
  Or have dedicated prosecutors who aren't already overloaded and underpaid as public defenders are.
- macintux 6y ago
  My suspicion is the Public Defenders’ offices are nearly universally underfunded and overworked, so the only way to make this work is to make sure they’re resourced appropriately, which would be a tough battle politically.
  - akvadrako 6y ago
    It sounds like a good idea. It might be easier to get public support for being "tough on police" then defending accused criminals.
  - ciarannolan 6y ago
    >My suspicion is the Public Defenders’ offices are nearly universally underfunded and overworked [...] By design.
  - ardy42 6y ago
annoyingnoob 6y ago
It should be obvious by now that our 'law and order' approach over the last several decades has gone too far. We did this in Los Angeles less than 30 years ago and here we are again. When will we learn?
eruditegamer420 6y ago
I wonder what race the officers assisting and aligned with drug dealers are? Does anyone know? The article seems not to mention this. I know they're probably white because white cops are evil, but I can't seem to find the citation?
splitrocket 6y ago
Here's the police lying to the NY Post: https://twitter.com/keithcalder/status/1268204578421407750 https://twitter.com/keithcalder/status/1268204578421407750 Police: $2.4 million in Rolexes stolen. Rolex: No watches were stolen. Only broken windows.
- bufferoverflow 6y ago
  I believe the police in this case. Why would people break into a Rolex store and not steal expensive watches that are close to impossible to track.
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    Well run jewelry stores don’t leave 2 million worth of untraceable merchandise in unguarded display cases during times of unrest. I 100% believe that there were no watches on display. Why would the store spokesperson lie?
  - throwgeorge 6y ago
    what possible incentive could Rolex have to lie? if it actually happened they couldn't possibly claim insurance having controverted the police.
  - hammock 6y ago
    How are they impossible to track? They have serial numbers
  - filleduchaos 6y ago
    No offence, but even basic perfumeries will clear out their window displays and put them in safes or other secure storage for the night, to talk of a store that sells watches with price tags in the thousands of dollars - unless your argument is that the alleged looters were kitted out for a full-on burglary heist and not, as is usually the case, simply lashing out opportunistically. Beyond that, there are other holes in the story like how exactly the police managed to come up with the $2.4M figure apparently without any collaboration from the store itself, or what motive Rolex SA would have to lie about losing $2.4M in merchandise. But as always, people are primed to believe that the police _must_ be telling the truth somehow, even in a post about a whistleblower laying out years of lies and deception on their part.
fchu 6y ago
This unfortunately isn't surprising anymore: 1. State and local governments wanted order above all 2. They created laws and regulations that gave too much leeway to police with little oversight 3. Cops think they can act with impunity. In this moment of reckoning, I wonder if the US will be able to undo some of these terrible policies Relevant References: https://www.joincampaignzero.org https://www.joincampaignzero.org https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km4uCOAzrbM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km4uCOAzrbM
boomboomsubban 6y ago
I can never find the survey, but I remember reading that something like 80% of officers think they've never arrested the wrong person for a crime. Which would imply that these officers thought they were just closing loopholes that would let these criminals go free. That is what makes these stories truly terrifying. The cops still probably think they're righteously pursuing justice.
- metalliqaz 6y ago
  this is human nature, and it's why criminal protections exist in the first place it applies elsewhere too. I'd be willing to be a lot of HN readers have broken the rules governing code quality because they felt it was justified by the outcome, ignoring the reasons those rules were put into place
  - dec0dedab0de 6y ago
    I'd be willing to be a lot of HN readers have broken the rules governing code quality because they felt it was justified by the outcome, ignoring the reasons those rules were put into place Which rules are they again?
    - metalliqaz 6y ago
      They are different wherever you happen to work. Most teams have development standards in place, and in places where software is certified (aerospace, automotive, medical devices, etc.) those standards are formalized. But you what I mean. Skipping reviews, bending rules around complexity, data concurrency, style, and so on.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    Though I understand what you're saying, I don't see the false infallibility in other careers. I doubt any programmer has ever thought they shipped a bug free product.
Drip33 6y ago
> Prosecutors have a constitutional obligation to disclose information to defendants that could help establish their innocence. But there’s a big debate in criminal justice circles about when police misconduct allegations in unrelated cases fall under that requirement. Contrast that with Prosecutorial immunity >Prosecutors cannot be sued for injuries caused by their own misconduct. For example, even if a prosecutor deliberately withholds exculpatory evidence in violation of professional ethics and a defendant’s constitutional rights, and this willful misconduct results in an innocent person spending decades behind bars for a crime of which they are subsequently exonerated—the prosecutor remains immune from civil liability.[0] What incentive do they have to provide the evidence? If prosecutor happens to be caught hiding evidence the remedy is dropped charges nothing more. They'll move onto the next case and do the exact same thing. [0] https://fedsoc.org/events/prosecutorial-immunity https://fedsoc.org/events/prosecutorial-immunity [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutorial_immunity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutorial_immunity
- Pxtl 6y ago
  I assume they can still be disbarred for professional misconduct. In general the justice system seems to have extensive functionality built to prevent its inner workings from facing the kind of personal liability that everyone else faces.
  - raincom 6y ago
    There are two extremes: (a) hiding evidence that helps defendants; (b) prosecutorial discretion to help their allies by not pressing charges. One may get disbarred for(a); however, no one gets disbarred for (b).
  - afthonos 6y ago
    They can. As in, it is a possibility contemplated, and almost never implemented.
Buttons840 6y ago
Whistleblower cops should receive $500,000 for every fellow cop or administrator their testimony helps convict. As a tax payer, I will happily pay my portion of that award to help keep my local police clean.
- mythrwy 6y ago
  Wow it's looking like you'd be broke pretty quick. At least at first.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
blacksqr 6y ago
"Let us abolish policemen who carry clubs and revolvers, and put in a squad of poets armed to the teeth with poems on Spring and Love." --Mark Twain, 1900
- stronglikedan 6y ago
  So, instead of bludgeoning or shooting them, bore them to death!
  - jandrese 6y ago
    In violent cases they will send out the S.W.A.T. team. Song Writers Against Terrorism.
foxfired 6y ago
I want to remind people of Chris Dorner[1]. Chris Dorner was a black police officer that based on his manifesto, had witnessed many use of excessive force by his colleagues. When he reported them, he was fired in retaliation. When the manhunt begun, the police started shooting at people that vaguely fit his description. The police shot 102 bullets at a mother and daughter delivering newspaper. People had to paint messages on the back of their truck so the police don't shoot at them. Watching it at the time was unreal. The police and media portrayed him as a psycho, while the people whose car he stole had a different story. In the last stand off, he was in a cabin and the police burned it to the ground. The police denies burning it down, but they did use tear gas and in the police recording, you can hear a man say "use the burners". One year later, LAPD chief Charlie Beck, admitted that 8 LAPD officers had violated the use of force policy. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Dorner_shootings_and_manhunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Dorner_shootings_a... Edit: as the comment pointed out, Dorner killed 4 people, including 2 officers and the daughter of a police captain. I did not omit this information, it is included in the very first paragraph of the wiki.
- MauranKilom 6y ago
  It would be great if you could add the information that he killed people (police officers and their families) in retaliation for his firing to your post. Otherwise it makes very little sense without reading the wiki article.
- skrebbel 6y ago
  You accidentally forgot to mention that the manhunt wasn't because of his manifesto but because of the people he killed. Doesn't excuse the behavior of the police, but it's a weird thing to skip over.
mythrwy 6y ago
Part of the problem may be the budgets of cities. Real policing, with councilors, with recording, with community involvement may be prohibitively expensive. Especially with those kick the can down the road pension plans. I suspect this has resulted in the strategy of hire goons, don't pay them that much (yes I know cops in CA are well paid), let them bust the occasional head to keep the rabble somewhat down and the goons happily employed and stick your fingers in your ears and go la la la until the whole scheme blows up. As another poster mentions, ending the drug war may go a long way towards freeing up resources for better policing.
pnw_hazor 6y ago
Bad policing or bad police is a consequence of bad governance. Bad local policing is the consequence of bad local governance. It seems that the urban cores with the most problems are under complete control by a combination of democratic politicians or democratic socialists. In many cases, they control the county and state of the cities with the most problems. Why won't democratic constituencies hold their own politicians accountable? edit-to-add: I expected the insta-downvotes, but why is no one addressing the issue? It would take one local election cycle in most urban cores to start fixing the police. Or, at least one police contract negotiation, assuming progressives already control the local government (e.g., Seattle, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and many more). Why is the blame directed toward those who have little if any influence in the governance of local police in urban cores?
- IvyMike 6y ago
  > It seems that the urban cores with the most problems are under complete control by a combination of democratic politicians or democratic socialists. In many cases, they control the county and state of the cities with the most problems. There are not a ton of big cities that lean conservative, so of course any problem occur in cities, they will occur in liberal cities--that is just the distribution of city politics. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/08/08/chart-of-the-week-the-most-liberal-and-conservative-big-cities/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/08/08/chart-of-th... With that in mind, I don't see any evidence that the conservative big cities are immune to problems with police brutality. I mean, type "Mesa AZ police brutality", or "Oklahoma City police brutality", etc, and it seems like the problem is endemic in all cities.
- Floegipoky 6y ago
  > Why won't democratic constituencies hold their own politicians accountable? > Why is the blame directed toward those who have little if any influence in the governance of local police in urban cores? This is an election year, and instead of voting out crooked politicians people are rioting. Either these people are too stupid or incompetent to figure out how to vote, or this theoretical model of government accountability to The People through voting does not hold in practice.
- 6y ago
jes5199 6y ago
defund, demilitarize, disband
netsharc 6y ago
It's bad news for the protesters where police departments are corrupt; if the cops are dirty, they will fight hard against reform and accountability (because if someone actually audits them they might go to prison). I suppose it's the same with the Trump-enabling GOP politicians... The book "Thieves of State" (a long review/synopsis of it: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/19/corruption-revolt https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/19/corruption-rev... ; an AMA by the author: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2t244h/iama_anticorruption_expert_w10_years_working_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2t244h/iama_anticorru... ) is eye-opening; as an example, in Egypt police officers had to pay their higher-ups monthly a cut of their racketeering money, and this continues all the way up to the minister level. So when the revolution happened, the police fought hard to keep the regime standing, because they would've been personally held accountable too.
rlewkov 6y ago
I'm shocked, shocked I say
justinclift 6y ago
> ... the officer said he was unwilling to go further with [the FBI] because he did not want to wear a wire or take a polygraph test. Why is the FBI still using widely discredited tech (polgraphs)?
magwa101 6y ago
Defund Police.

598 points by danso 6y ago

> Caught on tape by a whistleblower cop, the officers said they witnessed or took part in alarming acts of police misconduct, from framing and beating residents to collaborating with drug dealers, all as part of a culture of impunity within the department’s narcotics unit. Probably the single most effective thing to reduce police abuse in America would be to end the war on drugs and decriminalize drugs. No-knock warrants were originally used to try to catch drug dealers before they could flush the drugs down the toilet. Civil forfeiture was originally created to try to take money from drug dealers. The war on drugs has taken a wrecking ball to the Fourth Amendment restrictions on search and seizure.

kyleee 6y ago
Yep, and the legal market prices must not be pushed too high due to excessive regulation and taxation, lest the black markets (and crime associated with them) continue to flourish
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > lest the black markets (and crime associated with them) continue to flourish Black markets of tax evaders are vastly superior to those avoiding criminal penalties up to life in jail.
  - kyleee 6y ago
    Agreed but tax evasion is not the only crime associated with black markets (especially the drug trade)
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      Most of the other crimes are associated with prohibition. When the penalty for drug distribution is a decade in prison which the government then uses as leverage to flip your distributors and then do the same to everyone in your whole organization, it makes it economically viable to use extreme measures to avoid prosecution. Snitches get stitches etc. Whereas when the consequences of tax evasion are paying what you owe plus penalties and interest, you just pay the money (or go bankrupt). There is no incentive to spend five million dollars to avoid a million dollar penalty as a gesture of loyalty to your people or to keep them from flipping; you just pay the million dollars. There is much less incentive to murder witnesses and risk prison when the alternative was only bankruptcy and not prison to begin with. The violence is primarily attributable to the harshness of the penalties in the War on Drugs and what that justifies in order to avoid them. Meanwhile prosecuting tax evasion is self-financing whenever tax evasion is prevalent, so it has a natural equilibrium at a low level of tax evasion. Prohibition is the opposite -- the harder you prosecute the higher the street prices get and the more lucrative it is to commit violence to bring in those high prices.
      - freedomben 6y ago
        Agreed. I highly recommend Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel[1] for a great look at the economics behind the drug trade. It's remarkable logical when you just consider the facts. [1]: https://smile.amazon.com/Narconomics-How-Run-Drug-Cartel/dp/1610397703 https://smile.amazon.com/Narconomics-How-Run-Drug-Cartel/dp/...
  - klyrs 6y ago
    From a harm reduction standpoint, this is wrong. I want heroin users to get pure, uncut heroin -- just as I never worry that a bottle of whiskey is going to be cut with fentanyl. Legalize it and regulate it, and price out the black market or it will have all the incentive to undermine the possible good.
    - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
      I used to be for complete legalization for the reasons discussed here, but now i struggle with that because of how much destruction there is to people from meth and opioids. If those were legally available in smaller "safe" doses maybe it would be better. But this is just tough to contemplate.
      - ken 6y ago
        How do meth/opioids change the equation? They're not (for the most part) legal. Alcohol causes tremendous destruction, too, but I thought there was general agreement that national prohibition was worse.
        colejohnson66 6y ago
        They change the equation when someone is advocating for “full legalization” with (sometimes) “no government regulation”. The argument is (rightly or wrongly) that certain drugs are actually so harmful that they should be kept out of the public.
        NotSammyHagar 6y ago
        Yes, that's what I was thinking. They are so destructive and addictive that people can't stop taking them. I worry that if they were legal and cheap people would get hooked on them and cause a lot of devastation ton themselves and their families. Of course there are people today who can't get methadone to treat their heroin addictions, because of legality concerns where it's not available.
      - 6y ago
- AuryGlenz 6y ago
  I’m curious - which drugs do you think should be available for sale commercially? All of them? The libertarian side in me says yes, but the pragmatic side says easily available meth wouldn’t exactly be a great thing for society.
  - freedomben 6y ago
    If Meth were legalized, somebody would figure out a way to make a safer Meth. Very few people would choose to use dangerous product that is often cut and has unknown levels of the drug in it, when there is a packaged/tested version available. A lot of the really terrible drugs only exist today because of prohibition. Some of them were invented as a way around the laws, and some were invented as an economical way to produce/traffic in the face of extreme danger (from law enforcement). Most people would opt for safer drugs if they had options. As it stands now you are basically at the mercy of the local illegal drug dealer that you know, and most of them don't have high quality standards.
    - AuryGlenz 6y ago
      You can already get a prescription for meth, but it's still neurotoxic. Better than something you can get on the street? Sure, but it's still straight up bad for you. The safer version of meth are the other amphetamines like Adderall.
      - freedomben 6y ago
        Agreed, but you can't legally get some without convincing another human to give it to you, and that human is on high alert for watching for someone who might abuse it - which is exactly the person who would benefit most from legality/availability of safer alternatives, but to that person it is illegal. That's why they turn to the black market.
- aidos 6y ago
  Your parent said decriminalise rather than legalise. It’s a strategy that Portugal has had a lot of success with.
- noarchy 6y ago
  This remains an issue in Canada with regard to cannabis, now that it is legalized. And we still have a thriving black market in cigarettes, due to high taxes.
swiley 6y ago
I’m honestly pretty pissed off with the Democrats picking a candidate that’s not pro legalization. The one alternative we have to the republicans is just doing the same crap.
- brenden2 6y ago
  Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same coin. They both represent the elite class, and do not care about these issues. They've had decades to do something about it, and instead gave themselves raises and made it harder for anyone to change anything. Edit: It's funny because I actually applied to YC to build a company that would try and fix this. Naturally they didn't even offer to interview me. YC doesn't care about fixing a system that helped get them where they are, either.
  - orf 6y ago
    The "both sides are the same" argument is a complete nonsensical distraction and wears really thin when faced with reality.
    - save_ferris 6y ago
      Sure, there are pretty significant differences in the day-to-day conduct between the two parties, but it is true that both parties are beholden to major corporate interests and are decreasingly supporting positions held by the public at large. The centrist wing of the Democratic Party refuses to seriously consider universal healthcare as a platform while we all watch the current healthcare system fall further and further into dysfunction via private bureaucracy. Numerous progressive policies have wide support across the political spectrum, but aren’t being seriously considered by either major party. And that is something that both parties are very guilty of.
      - Ididntdothis 6y ago
        The Democrats are the spineless party. They have no courage to take a position. It’s all wishy-washy trying not to offend anybody (especially not their donors).
brenden2 6y ago
And now the DEA has been mobilized against citizens to quell protests and criminalize dissent. The DEA is now the Gestapo.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
op03 6y ago
With the blame games, polarization and mistrust simple problems aren't getting solved. Forget about big ones. As Herbert Simon in his Nobel speech pointed out, if you can't solve 2nd grade problems don't run into the 10th grade classroom and cry about what's on the blackboard.
mschuster91 6y ago
> The war on drugs has taken a wrecking ball to the Fourth Amendment restrictions on search and seizure. The "war on terror" is probably even worse, given how many citizen rights were all but wiped after 9/11 across the world.
- wahern 6y ago
  How many Signal-using techies have been asphyxiated by cops kneeling on their necks or gunned down simply for daring to walking around in public? Let's not equivocate abuses. It's unnecessary. And moreover changing the way our most vulnerable citizens are treated will likely go a long way toward changing the way everybody else is treated.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    People in Afghanistan got killed by drone strikes or "exfiltrated" to Guantanamo or a load of "black sites". The "war on terror" is absolutely as murderous.
    - wahern 6y ago
      The War on Terror is an actual war waged using actual militaries. And non-American citizens don't have constitutional rights outside United States territory. Those facts in no way diminish the wrongness of what has happened, but we could just as well compare it to Global Warming and our complicity in the death of millions; the connection would be just as tenuous and unconstructive. That said, interestingly in 2016 ~1100 people were killed by police officers in the United States[1], while ~1600 people were killed by drone strikes in Afghanistan[2]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/... [2] https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/drone-war/data/get-the-data-a-list-of-us-air-and-drone-strikes-afghanistan-2016 https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/drone-war/data/get-the...
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
pdonis 6y ago
> Probably the single most effective thing to reduce police abuse in America would be to end the war on drugs and decriminalize drugs. I agree 1000%. I wish more people would realize this.
- akvadrako 6y ago
  That the protestors aren’t using this as one of their main demands gives a clue as to their motivations. They clearly aren’t above advocating extreme solutions and the far left generally seems to recognize the importance of legalization.
agustif 6y ago
In my opinion, politicians love wars on drugs because that way they can keep the monopoly of whatever they want to sell. If you make the laws, you make something illegal, and then don't follow your own laws because you're also the enforcer
- lowdose 6y ago
  Alcohol beverages was a $1,439 billion market in 2017. There is no movie recorded since the prohibition era without reinforcing this drugs as social acceptable every 30 minutes at least once. https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/alcoholic-beverages-market/ https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/alcoholic-beverages-mar...
  - jandrese 6y ago
    > There is no movie recorded since the prohibition era without reinforcing this drugs as social acceptable every 30 minutes at least once. Citation seriously needed. Your link certainly doesn't provide it. Off of the top of my head I can think of countless counterexamples.
    - agustif 6y ago
      1. Thank you for smoking (Go watch that movie) Weed industry in the US (Miraculously legalized in most key states in record times)
    - lowdose 6y ago
      > Overall, 86% of the total 655 movies included at least 1 alcohol scene, with a range of 0 to 617 and a mean of 68 (SD = 87) occurrences per movie. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4035596/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4035596/ If we take this mean and use a movie average length of 1.5 hour it was actually 10x worst than my estimation. Yes you are right it is probably better to take the median. I think it would be pretty easy for a ML pose algorithm to scan the whole Amazon Prime + Netflix archive for a real answer. Especially series like Mad Men are over the top in conditioning for alcohol and cigarette use. I started noticing when I quit smoking how much this was.
rch 6y ago
It's possible the 'war on drugs' was an excuse used to establish those capabilities. I think it's telling that the DEA has been given the authority to take part in other enforcement actions on a temporary basis in response to the current protests. The agency could easily shift focus to e.g. human trafficking and continue unabated post-legalization.
- toyg 6y ago
  There is only so much human trafficking one can do. I don’t see anything with the potential production volume of what is, essentially, a foodstuff (cheap to produce and consumed multiple times a day, every day). Scaling down would be inevitable at the first sign of economic crisis, in the same way the defense sector was hit significantly post-89.
  - bdamm 6y ago
    The point is that there's plenty of illegal behavior and only so many enforcement resources (which is by design right?) so we don't need to be worried for the officer's jobs, they can just switch to new legal focus area de jour.
    - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
      It's awfully hard to retrain a cop to be a forensic accountant. The judicialbranch has been failing to undertake anything but token measures against white collar crimes. Actual police work against white collar criminals is not as easy as coercing a junkie into selling felonious amounts of a plant by product or made in a bath tub chemical.
jrs235 6y ago
And get rid of two party recording consent laws?
splitrocket 6y ago
That, making civil forfeiture funds go to the general coffer, and forcing police departments to pay settlements out of their own budget. They socialize the costs and privatize the profits of their misbehavior. FYI, 1/3 of all people killed by strangers in the US are killed by the police. [0] Police take more money from people through asset forfeiture than criminals do with theft. [1] [0]https://granta.com/violence-in-blue/ https://granta.com/violence-in-blue/ [1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-took-more-stuff-from-people-than-burglars-did-last-year/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
anigbrowl 6y ago
From a legalistic point of view you are correct. But if it wasn't that it would be something else. Already the DEA is being repurposed to investigate networks of 'professional anarchists' who are supposedly the architects of the current unrest. While support for the drug war is waning, reactionaries are just switching back to tropes about 'communist agitators' that were used prior to the drug war to delegitimize civil rights activism in the 1960s.
benmw333 6y ago
100% agree.
kingbirdy 6y ago
> Civil forfeiture was originally created to try to take money from drug dealers. I agree with your premise, but this statement is incorrect. Civil forfeiture originated from the British Navigation Acts of the mid 1600s. It continued to be accepted practice in the US after the revolution, and was relied on during Prohibition as a tool against bootleggers much as it's used against drug dealers now. Usage has certainly escalated due to the war on drugs, but it's not where it originated from.
- daseiner1 6y ago
  prohibition was just an earlier battle in the larger war on drugs as far as i’m concerned
  - solotronics 6y ago
    Before the Harrison narcotic act in 1914 there was never such a thing as an "illegal drug" there were laws about adultering products with poison but the concept of illegal drugs or a "war on drugs" didn't exist before 1914 in the US. I am not sure how addicts were treated by law enforcement historically but would be curious to hear about that. Just my own intuition says they probably were treated under existing vagrancy laws "Vagrancy laws took myriad forms, generally making it a crime to be poor, idle, dissolute, immoral, drunk, lewd, or suspicious."
    - kyuudou 6y ago
      Think about all the industries that profit from drug enforcement, incarcerating otherwise harmless citizens committing victimless "crimes". And where would hand-me-downs from the federal armed forces go!? Lots of cash cows...
      - greyhair 6y ago
        Commercial for profit prisons are a huge problem. Huge. There is a whole lot of sentencing and prison reform that needs to be taking place, particularly for non-violent crimes.
utkarsh_apoorva 6y ago
Police brutality videos on twitter have left most of us, even in the developing world, in utter shock. I am in Bangalore, India For most of us in developing world, US has been a model state - with problems yes. But a great example nevertheless. For God's sake, WE were supposed to be a third world country, always looked at with sympathy in popular media (usually grossly incorrect depiction though) In India, civil unrest is common, and has increased over the past decade. Cops know one thing very very clearly - they are outnumbered. If civilians start to become violent, it will be impossible to control them. So they stand down. I have read umpteen number of articles talking about how policing could be improved in the US, from removing powerful weapons to changing the training programs. I feel that the solution is probably simple - sensitisation to the fact that they are outnumbered. If war mentality is what they get into the field with, better factor everything in. No army in the world engages with a superior force unprovoked. People, the citizens, ARE the most superior force - not just morally, but Truly . F*ing . Practically.
- rcpt 6y ago
  Police may be outnumbered but the US already called in the military in many cities.
  - ChristianBundy 6y ago
    - US Police: 1.2 million full-time or part-time [1] - US Military: 1.29 million active [2] - US Population: 329.74 million [3] I believe they're outnumbered by about 131 to 1. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_the_United_States#Number_of_police https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_the_United_... [2]: https://www.cfr.org/article/demographics-us-military https://www.cfr.org/article/demographics-us-military [3]: https://www.census.gov/popclock/ https://www.census.gov/popclock/
    - nickpeterson 6y ago
      Most of that military/police population are adult physically able males. The regular population is everyone, if you constrained that population to males/females 18-60 then subtracted the military/police numbers, you’d be closer. It’s probably more like 150:1. Also consider all those officers know how to use weapons, have certain training, it starts to get closer than you think. We have too many police and active military and too many things are illegal that shouldn’t be. The problem is that the military is basically welfare for small towns and southern states.
mythrwy 6y ago
If they ended the failed and ridiculous drug war not only would police departments have less friction with the community they would also free up massive resources to deal with real problems. Maybe even start preventing property crimes! One can dream. The old adage about go catch some murderers instead of chasing kids around with a joint.
syshum 6y ago
Thank you for being one of the few people that recognize the real reason many people want to legalize drugs So many times it is countered with "You just want to get high that is why you want to legalize drugs"... No I dont want to have my home invaded at 3pm and be shot dead by a trigger happy gang member because the "informant" the police bullied in to snitching gave them a random address for their "dealer" //true story that has happened more than once in the USA
vkou 6y ago
> Probably the single most effective thing to reduce police abuse in America would be to end the war on drugs and decriminalize drugs. No. No, no, no. A thousand times no. The war on drugs is just an objective of the police. The objective isn't why brutality happens. Brutality happens because of a systemic problem - the complete lack of accountability. Drugs are just the impetus for some fraction of police-public interactions. They are not the reason for how those police-public interactions are carried out. The police are completely out of control in my neighbourhood. There are walls of tear gas rolling down the streets, rolling into people's apartments, their living rooms and bedrooms. Nobody, not the city mayor, not the state government is willing to reign them in - which is why this is happening. The war on drugs is a bad thing, but if you end it tomorrow, it won't solve a single one of these systemic issues.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  >but if you end it tomorrow, it won't solve a single one of these systemic issues. Why not? The war on drugs is absolutely unenforceable - that leads to police picking and choosing what to enforce which amplifies systemic biases they have. You cannot enforce drug laws accountably, not least because it is largely racist in origin and as such targeted at specific minority groups - let alone practicalities There's a fantastic Vice interview of an British ex-undercover drugs officer: He summarizes most of his career as having been spent ruining the lives of poor people around him and his crowning achievement being a bust that (in the words of one of his colleagues apparently) "interrupted the illegal drug trade in stoke for upwards of 20 minutes"
  - vkou 6y ago
    The police can always pick and choose what they enforce. Have you ever called them? I am close friends with people who have, multiple times. Getting them to show up is an exercise in pulling teeth. They respond to calls - all calls - in an utterly discretionary nature. As they currently operate, they can't even do any part of their job accountably. Drug legalization is just a pet issue for techies, that is a smoke-screen that distracts from the real issues.
tonystubblebine 6y ago
This and cash bail are the two most obvious ones. 1/3 of incarcerated people on any given night are unconvicted people who just couldn't afford the bail. This gives police an enormous amount of power to coerce people. It's also deeply un-American because people are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. And then on top of that, it's serves no practical purpose as the vast majority of released people show up for their court dates.
jandrese 6y ago
The War on Drugs was really just a casus belli on black males. The civil rights movement had eroded the Jim Crow system the authorities had set up to keep themselves in power, and were seriously worried about more educated well spoken minorities starting movements in the country. They needed a way to suppress their minority populations without drawing the ire of the rest of America, so they manufacture a drug crisis by taking a small problem and blowing it way out of proportion as an excuse to crack down on their potential political opponents. It has worked amazingly well.
- zdragnar 6y ago
  To say that drugs were a small problem is rewriting history. We would have all been better off treating it like a medical issue rather than a legal / criminal matter, and the long tail effects of enforcement have definitely cemented a lot of structural issues in society- and admittedly, some drugs are far less harmful than others. Pot and crack use have two wildly different outcomes, obviously. You can look at examples in history when oppressors used the opposite tactic: wars were fought to force China to keep opium legal, lining pockets of mercantile companies while keeping China hooked (and earning it the old 'sick man of asia' moniker).
- camgunz 6y ago
  90% yes, 10% pharmaceutical/alcohol/tobacco companies lobbying.
georgeecollins 6y ago
This reminds me of the Ramparts Scandal in Los Angeles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_scandal It's amazing how bad that was. I believe policing in Los Angeles has improved since then. It still has tons of problems, and the justice system in general in Califronia, has tons of problems. But it is amazing how bad it got in this incident.
jeegsy 6y ago
> Probably the single most effective thing to reduce police abuse in America would be to end the war on drugs and decriminalize drugs. I have very much thought the same thing. We might be overly optimistic but it would solve so many problems.

leereeves 6y ago

downerending 6y ago
Playing devil's advocate for a moment, information from unrelated cases is often excluded from trials. For example, you generally cannot discuss a victim's prior sexual history in a rape trial, etc. The debate, then, would be about which cases such exclusions should be appropriate in and which not. There's general agreement that neither "all" nor "none" is an appropriate answer.
- merpnderp 6y ago
  But the cop isn't on trial, so why does the prosecutor get to hide facts about them from the jury?
  - downerending 6y ago
    IANAL, but as above, rape victims aren't on trial either. So perhaps for similar reasons.
    - anigbrowl 6y ago
      I realize you were trying to explore a legal technicality but the inadvertent equivalence of law enforcement with sexual vulnerability doesn't read well at all.
      - downerending 6y ago
        Not sure I follow your point, but for what it's worth rape and murder seem about equally bad in my book, and I think all violent crimes should draw life in prison without parole.

ordinaryradical 6y ago

My theory on how to fix this is to maintain the adversarial nature of the courts. Don't force the DA to prosecute cops. Have them maintain the relationship as it currently works and let the DA become the the cops' lawyer by default while the Public Defenders' office take over the role of prosecuting police. Since the PD and DA are already set-up this way in relationship to policing, this makes more sense than trying to wring impartiality out of the DA; they have to work hand in hand with police to convict criminals and need to maintain a cozy relationship. The simplest solution would be to keep the dividing lines the way they are.

thelittlenag 6y ago
That it doesn't already work this way, or something similar to this, I find bizarre.
philjohn 6y ago
Or have dedicated prosecutors who aren't already overloaded and underpaid as public defenders are.
macintux 6y ago
My suspicion is the Public Defenders’ offices are nearly universally underfunded and overworked, so the only way to make this work is to make sure they’re resourced appropriately, which would be a tough battle politically.
- akvadrako 6y ago
  It sounds like a good idea. It might be easier to get public support for being "tough on police" then defending accused criminals.
- ciarannolan 6y ago
  >My suspicion is the Public Defenders’ offices are nearly universally underfunded and overworked [...] By design.
- ardy42 6y ago

annoyingnoob 6y ago

It should be obvious by now that our 'law and order' approach over the last several decades has gone too far. We did this in Los Angeles less than 30 years ago and here we are again. When will we learn?

eruditegamer420 6y ago

I wonder what race the officers assisting and aligned with drug dealers are? Does anyone know? The article seems not to mention this. I know they're probably white because white cops are evil, but I can't seem to find the citation?

splitrocket 6y ago

Here's the police lying to the NY Post: https://twitter.com/keithcalder/status/1268204578421407750 https://twitter.com/keithcalder/status/1268204578421407750 Police: $2.4 million in Rolexes stolen. Rolex: No watches were stolen. Only broken windows.

bufferoverflow 6y ago
I believe the police in this case. Why would people break into a Rolex store and not steal expensive watches that are close to impossible to track.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  Well run jewelry stores don’t leave 2 million worth of untraceable merchandise in unguarded display cases during times of unrest. I 100% believe that there were no watches on display. Why would the store spokesperson lie?
- throwgeorge 6y ago
  what possible incentive could Rolex have to lie? if it actually happened they couldn't possibly claim insurance having controverted the police.
- hammock 6y ago
  How are they impossible to track? They have serial numbers
- filleduchaos 6y ago
  No offence, but even basic perfumeries will clear out their window displays and put them in safes or other secure storage for the night, to talk of a store that sells watches with price tags in the thousands of dollars - unless your argument is that the alleged looters were kitted out for a full-on burglary heist and not, as is usually the case, simply lashing out opportunistically. Beyond that, there are other holes in the story like how exactly the police managed to come up with the $2.4M figure apparently without any collaboration from the store itself, or what motive Rolex SA would have to lie about losing $2.4M in merchandise. But as always, people are primed to believe that the police _must_ be telling the truth somehow, even in a post about a whistleblower laying out years of lies and deception on their part.

fchu 6y ago

This unfortunately isn't surprising anymore: 1. State and local governments wanted order above all 2. They created laws and regulations that gave too much leeway to police with little oversight 3. Cops think they can act with impunity. In this moment of reckoning, I wonder if the US will be able to undo some of these terrible policies Relevant References: https://www.joincampaignzero.org https://www.joincampaignzero.org https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km4uCOAzrbM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km4uCOAzrbM

boomboomsubban 6y ago

I can never find the survey, but I remember reading that something like 80% of officers think they've never arrested the wrong person for a crime. Which would imply that these officers thought they were just closing loopholes that would let these criminals go free. That is what makes these stories truly terrifying. The cops still probably think they're righteously pursuing justice.

metalliqaz 6y ago
this is human nature, and it's why criminal protections exist in the first place it applies elsewhere too. I'd be willing to be a lot of HN readers have broken the rules governing code quality because they felt it was justified by the outcome, ignoring the reasons those rules were put into place
- dec0dedab0de 6y ago
  I'd be willing to be a lot of HN readers have broken the rules governing code quality because they felt it was justified by the outcome, ignoring the reasons those rules were put into place Which rules are they again?
  - metalliqaz 6y ago
    They are different wherever you happen to work. Most teams have development standards in place, and in places where software is certified (aerospace, automotive, medical devices, etc.) those standards are formalized. But you what I mean. Skipping reviews, bending rules around complexity, data concurrency, style, and so on.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  Though I understand what you're saying, I don't see the false infallibility in other careers. I doubt any programmer has ever thought they shipped a bug free product.

Drip33 6y ago

> Prosecutors have a constitutional obligation to disclose information to defendants that could help establish their innocence. But there’s a big debate in criminal justice circles about when police misconduct allegations in unrelated cases fall under that requirement. Contrast that with Prosecutorial immunity >Prosecutors cannot be sued for injuries caused by their own misconduct. For example, even if a prosecutor deliberately withholds exculpatory evidence in violation of professional ethics and a defendant’s constitutional rights, and this willful misconduct results in an innocent person spending decades behind bars for a crime of which they are subsequently exonerated—the prosecutor remains immune from civil liability.[0] What incentive do they have to provide the evidence? If prosecutor happens to be caught hiding evidence the remedy is dropped charges nothing more. They'll move onto the next case and do the exact same thing. [0] https://fedsoc.org/events/prosecutorial-immunity https://fedsoc.org/events/prosecutorial-immunity [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutorial_immunity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutorial_immunity

Pxtl 6y ago
I assume they can still be disbarred for professional misconduct. In general the justice system seems to have extensive functionality built to prevent its inner workings from facing the kind of personal liability that everyone else faces.
- raincom 6y ago
  There are two extremes: (a) hiding evidence that helps defendants; (b) prosecutorial discretion to help their allies by not pressing charges. One may get disbarred for(a); however, no one gets disbarred for (b).
- afthonos 6y ago
  They can. As in, it is a possibility contemplated, and almost never implemented.

Buttons840 6y ago

Whistleblower cops should receive $500,000 for every fellow cop or administrator their testimony helps convict. As a tax payer, I will happily pay my portion of that award to help keep my local police clean.

mythrwy 6y ago
Wow it's looking like you'd be broke pretty quick. At least at first.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

blacksqr 6y ago

"Let us abolish policemen who carry clubs and revolvers, and put in a squad of poets armed to the teeth with poems on Spring and Love." --Mark Twain, 1900

stronglikedan 6y ago
So, instead of bludgeoning or shooting them, bore them to death!
- jandrese 6y ago
  In violent cases they will send out the S.W.A.T. team. Song Writers Against Terrorism.

foxfired 6y ago

I want to remind people of Chris Dorner[1]. Chris Dorner was a black police officer that based on his manifesto, had witnessed many use of excessive force by his colleagues. When he reported them, he was fired in retaliation. When the manhunt begun, the police started shooting at people that vaguely fit his description. The police shot 102 bullets at a mother and daughter delivering newspaper. People had to paint messages on the back of their truck so the police don't shoot at them. Watching it at the time was unreal. The police and media portrayed him as a psycho, while the people whose car he stole had a different story. In the last stand off, he was in a cabin and the police burned it to the ground. The police denies burning it down, but they did use tear gas and in the police recording, you can hear a man say "use the burners". One year later, LAPD chief Charlie Beck, admitted that 8 LAPD officers had violated the use of force policy. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Dorner_shootings_and_manhunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Dorner_shootings_a... Edit: as the comment pointed out, Dorner killed 4 people, including 2 officers and the daughter of a police captain. I did not omit this information, it is included in the very first paragraph of the wiki.

MauranKilom 6y ago
It would be great if you could add the information that he killed people (police officers and their families) in retaliation for his firing to your post. Otherwise it makes very little sense without reading the wiki article.
skrebbel 6y ago
You accidentally forgot to mention that the manhunt wasn't because of his manifesto but because of the people he killed. Doesn't excuse the behavior of the police, but it's a weird thing to skip over.

mythrwy 6y ago

Part of the problem may be the budgets of cities. Real policing, with councilors, with recording, with community involvement may be prohibitively expensive. Especially with those kick the can down the road pension plans. I suspect this has resulted in the strategy of hire goons, don't pay them that much (yes I know cops in CA are well paid), let them bust the occasional head to keep the rabble somewhat down and the goons happily employed and stick your fingers in your ears and go la la la until the whole scheme blows up. As another poster mentions, ending the drug war may go a long way towards freeing up resources for better policing.

pnw_hazor 6y ago

Bad policing or bad police is a consequence of bad governance. Bad local policing is the consequence of bad local governance. It seems that the urban cores with the most problems are under complete control by a combination of democratic politicians or democratic socialists. In many cases, they control the county and state of the cities with the most problems. Why won't democratic constituencies hold their own politicians accountable? edit-to-add: I expected the insta-downvotes, but why is no one addressing the issue? It would take one local election cycle in most urban cores to start fixing the police. Or, at least one police contract negotiation, assuming progressives already control the local government (e.g., Seattle, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and many more). Why is the blame directed toward those who have little if any influence in the governance of local police in urban cores?

IvyMike 6y ago
> It seems that the urban cores with the most problems are under complete control by a combination of democratic politicians or democratic socialists. In many cases, they control the county and state of the cities with the most problems. There are not a ton of big cities that lean conservative, so of course any problem occur in cities, they will occur in liberal cities--that is just the distribution of city politics. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/08/08/chart-of-the-week-the-most-liberal-and-conservative-big-cities/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/08/08/chart-of-th... With that in mind, I don't see any evidence that the conservative big cities are immune to problems with police brutality. I mean, type "Mesa AZ police brutality", or "Oklahoma City police brutality", etc, and it seems like the problem is endemic in all cities.
Floegipoky 6y ago
> Why won't democratic constituencies hold their own politicians accountable? > Why is the blame directed toward those who have little if any influence in the governance of local police in urban cores? This is an election year, and instead of voting out crooked politicians people are rioting. Either these people are too stupid or incompetent to figure out how to vote, or this theoretical model of government accountability to The People through voting does not hold in practice.
6y ago

jes5199 6y ago

defund, demilitarize, disband

netsharc 6y ago

It's bad news for the protesters where police departments are corrupt; if the cops are dirty, they will fight hard against reform and accountability (because if someone actually audits them they might go to prison). I suppose it's the same with the Trump-enabling GOP politicians... The book "Thieves of State" (a long review/synopsis of it: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/19/corruption-revolt https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/19/corruption-rev... ; an AMA by the author: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2t244h/iama_anticorruption_expert_w10_years_working_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2t244h/iama_anticorru... ) is eye-opening; as an example, in Egypt police officers had to pay their higher-ups monthly a cut of their racketeering money, and this continues all the way up to the minister level. So when the revolution happened, the police fought hard to keep the regime standing, because they would've been personally held accountable too.

rlewkov 6y ago

I'm shocked, shocked I say

justinclift 6y ago

> ... the officer said he was unwilling to go further with [the FBI] because he did not want to wear a wire or take a polygraph test. Why is the FBI still using widely discredited tech (polgraphs)?

magwa101 6y ago

Defund Police.