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Ask HN: How can we prevent excessive force by police?

• chewz 6y ago
  Disolve Police Departments and let citizens organize new police force that they will trust.
  • giantg2 6y ago
    This could be a disaster. Knowledge of the law and training in policing would be necessary to avoid chaos and deviation (further than we are already) from rule of law. In theory the community already does this, but in a safer way - by electing mayors and sheriffs that share their beliefs. These leaders should be able to institute changes or appointment people within the rule of law.
    • respect4othrs 6y ago
      Is due process by the justice system sufficient for responding to violations of rights? How can bias in administering due process be addressed by criminal and civil prosecution? Due process #UnitedStates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_process#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_process#United_States Use of force: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_force
      • giantg2 6y ago
        If due process and rule of law is not followed, then you will be violating the rights of the accused.
• respect4othrs 6y ago
  "The 50 Years of Crowd Control Research Police Are Ignoring" https://slashdot.org/story/371676 https://slashdot.org/story/371676 "New Era of Public Safety: An Advocacy Toolkit for Fair, Safe, and Effective Community Policing" (2019) https://policing.civilrights.org/toolkit https://policing.civilrights.org/toolkit https://policing.civilrights.org/ https://policing.civilrights.org/ https://civilrights.org/ https://civilrights.org/ Criminal_justice_reform_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_reform_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_reform_in_the... Are there points in these resources that could be summarized here?
• Finnucane 6y ago
  I wouldn't look to an industry that produced Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel, Dorsey, Kalanick, etc., for answers.
  • respect4othrs 6y ago
    Who would you look to?
• sudoaza 6y ago
  Accountability!! Racism and abuse are cultural and deeply rooted, don't know how you change that without dismantling it. But abuse is learned and cheered upon, then is covered and rarely punished. You have cases like a cop shooting with a machine-gun an unarmed teen and then not only going unpunished but retiring to cash in a milionary pension because of "PTSD".
  • giantg2 6y ago
    I'd be careful about that PTSD statement. If the officer really has it from a duty related incident, then it would be best to retire. They could be a danger in that profession if they are "jumpy". On a side note, the retirement requirements for non-medical retirement should be more stringent.
    • sudoaza 6y ago
      I'm talking about this case, the officer wasn't punished instead now has a huge pension for his traumatic experience https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ooa7wOKHhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ooa7wOKHhg
• giantg2 6y ago
  Body cameras would be good. This would also need to be joined with some policy and law changes, such as amending or abolishing qualified immunity and requiring personal liability insurance. Along these lines, it would also be good to dissolve or restrict the police union. The union protects bad cops. The goals of the union are in conflict with the interests of the community in these situations. Even FDR was against public unions. They aren't going to release many their policies or tactics for opsec and efficacy purposes. A good book (content-wise, maybe not execution-wise) is "We Get Confessions".
  • respect4othrs 6y ago
    > amending or abolishing qualified immunity and requiring personal liability insurance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity (1967, 2005,) What other professions (other than legislative civil servants) offer exemptions to personal and business liability?
    • giantg2 6y ago
      The SCOTUS ruling that created qualified immunity only applies to government workers such as police and politicians, so the answer to your question would be "none".
  • respect4othrs 6y ago
    > "We Get Confessions" The ultimate goal is (temporary incapacitation if necessary and then) rehabilitation: satisfying one's own needs in the real world and respecting the rights of others. How can we model those behaviors? How can we minimize total costs? Clean Language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_language_interviewing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_language_interviewing A) The suspect may be an asset to this and or other investigations intended to prevent further harm. B) This person may be an asset to our team (which is working to help ensure that we can all continue to pursue happiness).
    • 6y ago
• igrekel 6y ago
  Training and drilling to stay calm and de-escalate situations. Training on how to handle confused individuals or individual with mental illnesses. Be better at working as an organisation and not rely on the action of a single cop. Change laws procedures so that persons of interest can still have hope and that being arrested does not equal to the end of life as they know it. Strangely enough, fair process and trials and forgiving laws help make it less likely that people being arrested attempt desperate violent actions against the cops. In return, it makes the cops job easier and reduces their likeliness to use excessive force. Again, the probability of getting caught is the most effective deterrent to criminal activity , not the severity of the punishment.
• rm445 6y ago
  The US seems to have a fairly adversarial, legislative rules-based relationship between policing and people's rights to justice, if that makes any sense. This is just speaking as a layman observing from outside. (Contrast with other countries. There are many places which achieve even less control of their police, or the police serve corrupt interests, but there are also countries which seem to have more public consent and less excessive force). So, the USA - the bill of rights, search warrants, Miranda rights. It's not exactly policing by consent, it's more like an understanding that the police will go to any lengths they feel necessary, so there need to be hard rules that completely invalidate the case against someone if breached. I guess the same model can continue to be refined through the democratic process. Technology can play a part. One can imagine future laws that impose strict rules about body cams (e.g. that absence of a recording implies innocence, or that 'lost' footage carries a presumption of guilt in police brutality allegations). Ubiquitous surveillance, not to say it's a good thing, but if it's happening anyway, it should be useful in preventing excessive force by police too. Laws could be passed specifically enabling (and preventing treatment as a crime) various technological forms of monitoring of law enforcement by the public. > What do you smart (non-cynical) internet people think? I don't know how one would start to rip up American policing and produce a kindly institution that was accepted universally by the community. No-one can be that non-cynical. But I guess I'm non-cynical in thinking that there's still some mileage in democracy and the rule of law, and progress might still be made via the normal channels. Of which, by the way, protesting is a part.
• halfcat 6y ago
  Redesign police departments with separation of roles and responsibilities. In most any other organization, especially ones where there aren’t enough qualified workers, you don’t have one main role where the entry level people and under performers are all doing the same work as seasoned veterans. You separate out roles, and entry level people do work that requires minimal responsibility and can inflict minimal damage. You have a swat team, and they get called in when needed, but they don’t get to decide when to jump into action, someone else decides that, and the swat team doesn’t drive around looking for things to get involved in. There’s no reason the shooters and the deciders need to be the same person. Is there any reason a cop writing a traffic citation: * Needs a gun? * Needs to approach another car on foot? * Needs to exit his own car at all? What if there was a role for traffic cop, which is entry level, unarmed, where the cop never exits their own vehicle, and where the only job is to write a citation, but _not_ also to run warrants and try to search the citizen’s car for illegal items? If you had that role, the traffic cop isn’t on edge, worried he might get shot in the face for pulling over a guy with warrants. The guy with warrants doesn’t need to run, he just gets his citation and moves on. Eventually technology will help enable this, say, once we have remote control drone cars to issue traffic citations. Sure, there are tons of details to sort out, like a reliable system to identify drivers independent of the physical car (so there’s no person-to-person interaction required to write a ticket), but I suspect this is an area where the motives are so misaligned that technology will have to show up which forces these kinds of forward progress. The same way people fought for women’s rights for a long time, then the pill shows up and advances things forward by an order or magnitude.
  • i_like_news 6y ago
    This makes a lot of sense. Why does a cop have to prepare for the absolute worst case scenario when interacting with the everyday public? The research (and the recent 538 article) show that, by the cop preparing for the absolute worst, it makes the other party feel disrespected ("He thinks I'm going to attack him?? Well..") and ironically, is much more likely to lead to a worst case scenario. I'm not saying that cops as a whole shouldn't have guns, riot gear, or bulletproof vests. But those should only come out after being shown necessary in an interaction. Yes, this is likely to shift deaths initially to the side of police from the side of the general public. But overall, deaths should go down dramatically over time. Plus we'd live in a healthier society.
• deleted 6y ago
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