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> But before action was taken by city leaders, Buffalo police lied about the incident. In an initial statement, the department said that a person was arrested "

> But before action was taken by city leaders, Buffalo police lied about the incident. In an initial statement, the department said that a person was arrested "during a skirmish with other protesters," and that "during that skirmish involving protesters, one person was injured when he tripped and fell." The video clearly refutes the statement, showing that there was no skirmish around the elderly man, and that the officers pushed him to the ground for no justifiable reason. The Buffalo incident offers a vivid example of why police records should be considered unreliable. Where are the "good cops" among the 20 or so in the video who had the opportunity to speak up, but in practice chose to maintain the blue wall of silence?

dominotw 6y ago
There is parallel with pilots and airplane crashes. There is a tendency for airlines to put the blame on a pilot in case of a crash, this disincentives pilots from speaking the truth. Unfortunately the 'anti cop' sentiment would have the same effect. Imgaine how hard it is for us to admit a mistake at work which brings the website down but here someone's life is at stake. What happens if a cop makes a mistake and causes grave injury to someone. What would be his incentive to admit mistake and possibly spend rest of his life in prison.
- lmilcin 6y ago
  What kind of mistake? Shoving a person that did not show any signs of violence towards the officer? Did you ever shove a person by accident? Even if the older guy used language this could have been resolved without the need to escalate the conflict. Using violent force against somebody that does not seem to be posing a threat is a serious problem if your sole job is to keep peace. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/police https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/police
- weaksauce 6y ago
  > What happens if a cop makes a mistake and causes grave injury to someone. What would be his incentive to admit mistake and possibly spend rest of his life in prison. i've said it before but here it is again, a workable system for police accountability: there are tangible ways that laws could be setup and practices adhered to that would make cops more accountable and, while maybe the same level of racist in some parts, help ensure that they get held accountable more often than not. mandatory body cams rolling at all times unless they are in a bathroom. turning off or a malfunctioning camera during the act of a police brutality event immediately pierces the qualified immunity defense and they are tried as citizens. have an outside investigative body that has zero ties to the police department investigate any reports of abuse. have another outside investigative body that has zero ties to the police department randomly sampling police stop footage to see if there are any instances of impropriety. I am sure this list is non-exhaustive but it's a start. also, while we are here, fix the issue of civil asset forfeiture. the clear "we get to take your money because it looks suspicious and then keep it for the police department" is a huge conflict of interest. > There is a tendency for airlines to put the blame on a pilot in case of a crash, this disincentives pilots from speaking the truth. the other side to this is that the airlines have every single input and the conversation that lead up to the crash along with the meticulous analysis of the wreckage and records of maintenance... the cops investigate themselves and find themselves not guilty of any crimes.
- teachrdan 6y ago
  There's an old saying in investigating plane crashes: "When the pilot dies, it's pilot error; when the pilot survives, it's equipment malfunction."
- ryanwaggoner 6y ago
  I'm a pilot. This isn't remotely a fair comparison. There are lots of very complex and nuanced situations in aviation that require judgment calls. People are going to get it wrong sometimes. We're human. That's a far cry from this situation. There is no "judgment call" here: don't violently shove elderly people to the ground for no reason. If you accidentally do, help them up. If you pass by an elderly person lying on the ground and bleeding, check on them. There's no "mistake" here.
  - dominotw 6y ago
    > There's no "mistake" here. I wasn't talking about this specific case though, not sure how you inferred that from my comment that shoving old man was a mistake . I was talking about a hypothetical case where it was indeed a mistake.
    - ryanwaggoner 6y ago
      I guess I was confused since you commented on this story without mentioning this hypothetical future mistake, bemoaning the fact that "anti-cop sentiment" might prevent officers from admitting their "mistakes" in the future.
    - throwaway2048 6y ago
      How about we talk about real, actual documented cases of abuses, and then coverups by police instead of veering off into hypotheticals?
    - craftinator 6y ago
      Great, well in this case, this cop acted violently and aggressively towards a senior citizen, who was killed through that cop's action. Not murder, but definitely manslaughter. If you did that to someone, that's what you would be going to jail for, and rightly so.
      - colejohnson66 6y ago
        Not at all excusing what happened, but was he actually killed? I thought he was taken to a hospital and recovered?
- schoen 6y ago
  Maybe there should be a law enforcement equivalent of https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/ https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/ which is something that the aviation regulators created in response to some of the dynamics you mentioned. (I don't know how ASRS authenticates that people making reports are really pilots or aircrew.)
  - rectang 6y ago
    That seems like a reasonable, constructive suggestion. There certainly are structural factors and incentives which make it difficult for a police officer to actually be a "good cop" when it matters. But self-regulation hasn't worked and isn't likely to work, precisely because those structural factors are so formidable. So instead, we turn to outside auditing in the form of cell phone video — as advocated by this article.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Somehow professionals under the constant threat of malpractice lawsuits and criminal/civil liability are able to operate and flourish in their industries just fine.
  - Natsu 6y ago
    So, we should have the cops take out liability insurance and pay damages? That actually sounds like a pretty good idea, honestly.
    - Ididntdothis 6y ago
      "So, we should have the cops take out liability insurance and pay damages?" No, they should get proper training and be held to professional standards.
      - ryanwaggoner 6y ago
        We can do both, just like we do for doctors, for example.
      - jonfw 6y ago
        Are you ready to double the pay of police? If you wanted to go through a lot of training and be held to high standards, you'd probably look for a more lucrative gig than being a cop
        Ididntdothis 6y ago
        If that’s what’s needed to attract reasonable people into the police then so be it. If we aren’t willing to pay for proper training and supervision then we have the police force we deserve.
        craftinator 6y ago
        Being a police officer is a very high paying job for someone without an education. With overtime, the average pay in many departments is over $100k. For people without an education, who get a massive amount of job perks. The problem is that the job has too much power, which attracts violent, power hungry individuals. Take away their power, and you'll have a police force that desires to make their community a better place.
- rgbrenner 6y ago
  IANAL, but the law takes this into account by requiring mens rea to be convicted of many crimes [0]... for example, 1st degree murder. If it's an accident, it's not 1st degree murder because intent must be proven. At best, an accident might result in some lesser charge that carries less time in prison. So I doubt your scenario (a mistake results in life in prison) would ever occur. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea
- fenwick67 6y ago
  The solution is guilty pleas.
- neilv 6y ago
  The area of flight safety provides some interesting practices to think about. You might like some of the mission and stated thinking behind ASAP and ASRS, and that there's interest in encouraging pilots and crew to speak up about mistakes and other safety-related observations, so that everyone can learn and benefit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Safety_Action_Program_(ASAP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Safety_Action_Program... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Safety_Reporting_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Safety_Reporting_Syst... Also related is FOQA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_operations_quality_assurance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_operations_quality_assu... I don't know enough about law enforcement to say whether and how any of these practices might be helpful to adapt to different and complicated challenges there. Regarding admitting a mistake in software development/operations work that brings the site down, it helps to have a culture of trust that everyone can admit making mistakes. In that culture, you'll probably still feel sick and humbled by the mistake, but the first priority is for the team to solve the immediate problem. After that, everyone wants to understand the mistake, to try to learn and avoid problems like that in the future. The professional move is to be upfront with all pertinent information; the unprofessional move would be to attempt to hide information, misdirect efforts understanding the cause, etc. The professional move by everyone else is to expect and respect that professionalism, and to act in the same forthright spirit.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  One of the key things the airline industry did to fix this was record everything. Same on the railways. Cockpit voice recorders on planes, Forward Facing CCTV on trains (there's only one driver usually so recording what they say is unlikely to present useful evidence). When you tell investigators "A fucking bear was on the track!" the investigators don't believe you. Far more likely you screwed up and have made up this excuse about a bear. When your train has FFCCTV you know the investigators are going to check it and they are going to see the bear. This country doesn't even have bears - what the actual fuck! And that pays dividends because now staff have every reason to expect investigators will believe them if they tell the truth, and it means investigators spend less time second guessing human recollection of events which means more time to deal with the actual events of the incident.
  - dominotw 6y ago
    recording helps but its not always enough though. most recent example https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/23/boeing-737-max-crashes-american-airlines-pilots-union-mcas https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/23/boeing-737-...
- ashildr 6y ago
  I’d like to read examples of pilots being disincentived from speaking up. On the contrary I always had the impression that, while not perfect, aviation had a very successful approach on recording, learning from and subsequently avoiding human and technical errors.
sneak 6y ago
One issue I have found is that people, even educated people who are otherwise paying attention (including the news media and such) seem to drop this skepticism entirely when it comes to statements made by feds. It’s as if they believe that local PD is some unprofessional good old boys or something, but the FBI, those are the professional ones. Nothing could be further from the truth. Make sure your skepticism of police statements (including those regurgitated verbatim on the news) extends to feds as well. They have a decades-long history of the exact same damage. Beware anything put in a sworn statement or affidavit by feds, or provided by federal informants or federal undercovers. You’d be astounded how much of it simply isn’t true.
pjc50 6y ago
They resigned in protest at being held accountable: https://twitter.com/DaveGreber4/status/1268977512320819203?s=19 https://twitter.com/DaveGreber4/status/1268977512320819203?s...
- cpeterso 6y ago
  That tweet says they only resigned from the Emergency Response Team. They're still employed.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- martythemaniak 6y ago
  > I’m told the entire @BPDAlerts Emergency Response Team has resigned from the team, a total of 57 officers, as a show of support for the officers who are suspended without pay after shoving Martin Gugino, 75. They are still employed, but no longer on ERT They "resigned" but are still employed? It's not a resignation if you keep getting a paycheque.
  - Jonnax 6y ago
    It's like announcing you're quitting your job but all you've done is leave a project's agile squad.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
    It’s kind of like the “virtual walkouts” that tech employees due.
    - bilbo0s 6y ago
      A little off topic, but I wonder if we've reached the point where only some trivially tiny proportion of people who aren't poor can reasonably walk away from their employment. Yes, in an ideal world, people would stand up for an issue no matter what it cost them. But right now in America 2020, unless you're already poor, maybe it's just really difficult to take that type of a stand? Probably why, across the political spectrum, we see so much "pseudo-resigning" and "virtual walk outs" at the moment.
eloisant 6y ago
There is one "almost good cop" who tried to check the man when he was lying on the ground, but quickly one of his colleague pulled him by the vest to tell him they don't do this kind of thing. Unfortunately he didn't have to courage to stand up for his first feeling.
- ryanwaggoner 6y ago
  Do we know that's what he was going to do? It looked to me like the officer could have been going to check on the elderly man who he just knocked down, or he could have been about to follow that up with more violence. Neither would surprise me.
- pontifier 6y ago
  If you watch more closely you'll see that this "almost good cop" shoved Gugino very hard, and is probably the reason he fell. This officer was holding his baton in both hands, and pushed both arms forward quickly just as the officer that "pulled him by the vest" braced him from behind for a very forceful shove. This happened at the exact same time the foreground officer straight-armed Gugino. That combination would probably knock most people off their feet.
threatofrain 6y ago
Also, does anyone remember Chicago's black site? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-police-detain-americans-black-site https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-poli... Where are the good men and women, and what is the sum of their good acts in the grand scheme of things?

dominotw 6y ago

There is parallel with pilots and airplane crashes. There is a tendency for airlines to put the blame on a pilot in case of a crash, this disincentives pilots from speaking the truth. Unfortunately the 'anti cop' sentiment would have the same effect. Imgaine how hard it is for us to admit a mistake at work which brings the website down but here someone's life is at stake. What happens if a cop makes a mistake and causes grave injury to someone. What would be his incentive to admit mistake and possibly spend rest of his life in prison.

lmilcin 6y ago
What kind of mistake? Shoving a person that did not show any signs of violence towards the officer? Did you ever shove a person by accident? Even if the older guy used language this could have been resolved without the need to escalate the conflict. Using violent force against somebody that does not seem to be posing a threat is a serious problem if your sole job is to keep peace. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/police https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/police
weaksauce 6y ago
> What happens if a cop makes a mistake and causes grave injury to someone. What would be his incentive to admit mistake and possibly spend rest of his life in prison. i've said it before but here it is again, a workable system for police accountability: there are tangible ways that laws could be setup and practices adhered to that would make cops more accountable and, while maybe the same level of racist in some parts, help ensure that they get held accountable more often than not. mandatory body cams rolling at all times unless they are in a bathroom. turning off or a malfunctioning camera during the act of a police brutality event immediately pierces the qualified immunity defense and they are tried as citizens. have an outside investigative body that has zero ties to the police department investigate any reports of abuse. have another outside investigative body that has zero ties to the police department randomly sampling police stop footage to see if there are any instances of impropriety. I am sure this list is non-exhaustive but it's a start. also, while we are here, fix the issue of civil asset forfeiture. the clear "we get to take your money because it looks suspicious and then keep it for the police department" is a huge conflict of interest. > There is a tendency for airlines to put the blame on a pilot in case of a crash, this disincentives pilots from speaking the truth. the other side to this is that the airlines have every single input and the conversation that lead up to the crash along with the meticulous analysis of the wreckage and records of maintenance... the cops investigate themselves and find themselves not guilty of any crimes.
teachrdan 6y ago
There's an old saying in investigating plane crashes: "When the pilot dies, it's pilot error; when the pilot survives, it's equipment malfunction."
ryanwaggoner 6y ago
I'm a pilot. This isn't remotely a fair comparison. There are lots of very complex and nuanced situations in aviation that require judgment calls. People are going to get it wrong sometimes. We're human. That's a far cry from this situation. There is no "judgment call" here: don't violently shove elderly people to the ground for no reason. If you accidentally do, help them up. If you pass by an elderly person lying on the ground and bleeding, check on them. There's no "mistake" here.
- dominotw 6y ago
  > There's no "mistake" here. I wasn't talking about this specific case though, not sure how you inferred that from my comment that shoving old man was a mistake . I was talking about a hypothetical case where it was indeed a mistake.
  - ryanwaggoner 6y ago
    I guess I was confused since you commented on this story without mentioning this hypothetical future mistake, bemoaning the fact that "anti-cop sentiment" might prevent officers from admitting their "mistakes" in the future.
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    How about we talk about real, actual documented cases of abuses, and then coverups by police instead of veering off into hypotheticals?
  - craftinator 6y ago
    Great, well in this case, this cop acted violently and aggressively towards a senior citizen, who was killed through that cop's action. Not murder, but definitely manslaughter. If you did that to someone, that's what you would be going to jail for, and rightly so.
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      Not at all excusing what happened, but was he actually killed? I thought he was taken to a hospital and recovered?
schoen 6y ago
Maybe there should be a law enforcement equivalent of https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/ https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/ which is something that the aviation regulators created in response to some of the dynamics you mentioned. (I don't know how ASRS authenticates that people making reports are really pilots or aircrew.)
- rectang 6y ago
  That seems like a reasonable, constructive suggestion. There certainly are structural factors and incentives which make it difficult for a police officer to actually be a "good cop" when it matters. But self-regulation hasn't worked and isn't likely to work, precisely because those structural factors are so formidable. So instead, we turn to outside auditing in the form of cell phone video — as advocated by this article.
heavyset_go 6y ago
Somehow professionals under the constant threat of malpractice lawsuits and criminal/civil liability are able to operate and flourish in their industries just fine.
- Natsu 6y ago
  So, we should have the cops take out liability insurance and pay damages? That actually sounds like a pretty good idea, honestly.
  - Ididntdothis 6y ago
    "So, we should have the cops take out liability insurance and pay damages?" No, they should get proper training and be held to professional standards.
    - ryanwaggoner 6y ago
      We can do both, just like we do for doctors, for example.
    - jonfw 6y ago
      Are you ready to double the pay of police? If you wanted to go through a lot of training and be held to high standards, you'd probably look for a more lucrative gig than being a cop
      - Ididntdothis 6y ago
        If that’s what’s needed to attract reasonable people into the police then so be it. If we aren’t willing to pay for proper training and supervision then we have the police force we deserve.
        craftinator 6y ago
        Being a police officer is a very high paying job for someone without an education. With overtime, the average pay in many departments is over $100k. For people without an education, who get a massive amount of job perks. The problem is that the job has too much power, which attracts violent, power hungry individuals. Take away their power, and you'll have a police force that desires to make their community a better place.
rgbrenner 6y ago
IANAL, but the law takes this into account by requiring mens rea to be convicted of many crimes [0]... for example, 1st degree murder. If it's an accident, it's not 1st degree murder because intent must be proven. At best, an accident might result in some lesser charge that carries less time in prison. So I doubt your scenario (a mistake results in life in prison) would ever occur. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea
fenwick67 6y ago
The solution is guilty pleas.
neilv 6y ago
The area of flight safety provides some interesting practices to think about. You might like some of the mission and stated thinking behind ASAP and ASRS, and that there's interest in encouraging pilots and crew to speak up about mistakes and other safety-related observations, so that everyone can learn and benefit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Safety_Action_Program_(ASAP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Safety_Action_Program... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Safety_Reporting_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Safety_Reporting_Syst... Also related is FOQA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_operations_quality_assurance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_operations_quality_assu... I don't know enough about law enforcement to say whether and how any of these practices might be helpful to adapt to different and complicated challenges there. Regarding admitting a mistake in software development/operations work that brings the site down, it helps to have a culture of trust that everyone can admit making mistakes. In that culture, you'll probably still feel sick and humbled by the mistake, but the first priority is for the team to solve the immediate problem. After that, everyone wants to understand the mistake, to try to learn and avoid problems like that in the future. The professional move is to be upfront with all pertinent information; the unprofessional move would be to attempt to hide information, misdirect efforts understanding the cause, etc. The professional move by everyone else is to expect and respect that professionalism, and to act in the same forthright spirit.
tialaramex 6y ago
One of the key things the airline industry did to fix this was record everything. Same on the railways. Cockpit voice recorders on planes, Forward Facing CCTV on trains (there's only one driver usually so recording what they say is unlikely to present useful evidence). When you tell investigators "A fucking bear was on the track!" the investigators don't believe you. Far more likely you screwed up and have made up this excuse about a bear. When your train has FFCCTV you know the investigators are going to check it and they are going to see the bear. This country doesn't even have bears - what the actual fuck! And that pays dividends because now staff have every reason to expect investigators will believe them if they tell the truth, and it means investigators spend less time second guessing human recollection of events which means more time to deal with the actual events of the incident.
- dominotw 6y ago
  recording helps but its not always enough though. most recent example https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/23/boeing-737-max-crashes-american-airlines-pilots-union-mcas https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/23/boeing-737-...
ashildr 6y ago
I’d like to read examples of pilots being disincentived from speaking up. On the contrary I always had the impression that, while not perfect, aviation had a very successful approach on recording, learning from and subsequently avoiding human and technical errors.

sneak 6y ago

One issue I have found is that people, even educated people who are otherwise paying attention (including the news media and such) seem to drop this skepticism entirely when it comes to statements made by feds. It’s as if they believe that local PD is some unprofessional good old boys or something, but the FBI, those are the professional ones. Nothing could be further from the truth. Make sure your skepticism of police statements (including those regurgitated verbatim on the news) extends to feds as well. They have a decades-long history of the exact same damage. Beware anything put in a sworn statement or affidavit by feds, or provided by federal informants or federal undercovers. You’d be astounded how much of it simply isn’t true.

pjc50 6y ago

They resigned in protest at being held accountable: https://twitter.com/DaveGreber4/status/1268977512320819203?s=19 https://twitter.com/DaveGreber4/status/1268977512320819203?s...

cpeterso 6y ago
That tweet says they only resigned from the Emergency Response Team. They're still employed.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
martythemaniak 6y ago
> I’m told the entire @BPDAlerts Emergency Response Team has resigned from the team, a total of 57 officers, as a show of support for the officers who are suspended without pay after shoving Martin Gugino, 75. They are still employed, but no longer on ERT They "resigned" but are still employed? It's not a resignation if you keep getting a paycheque.
- Jonnax 6y ago
  It's like announcing you're quitting your job but all you've done is leave a project's agile squad.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  It’s kind of like the “virtual walkouts” that tech employees due.
  - bilbo0s 6y ago
    A little off topic, but I wonder if we've reached the point where only some trivially tiny proportion of people who aren't poor can reasonably walk away from their employment. Yes, in an ideal world, people would stand up for an issue no matter what it cost them. But right now in America 2020, unless you're already poor, maybe it's just really difficult to take that type of a stand? Probably why, across the political spectrum, we see so much "pseudo-resigning" and "virtual walk outs" at the moment.

eloisant 6y ago

There is one "almost good cop" who tried to check the man when he was lying on the ground, but quickly one of his colleague pulled him by the vest to tell him they don't do this kind of thing. Unfortunately he didn't have to courage to stand up for his first feeling.

ryanwaggoner 6y ago
Do we know that's what he was going to do? It looked to me like the officer could have been going to check on the elderly man who he just knocked down, or he could have been about to follow that up with more violence. Neither would surprise me.
pontifier 6y ago
If you watch more closely you'll see that this "almost good cop" shoved Gugino very hard, and is probably the reason he fell. This officer was holding his baton in both hands, and pushed both arms forward quickly just as the officer that "pulled him by the vest" braced him from behind for a very forceful shove. This happened at the exact same time the foreground officer straight-armed Gugino. That combination would probably knock most people off their feet.

threatofrain 6y ago

Also, does anyone remember Chicago's black site? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-police-detain-americans-black-site https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-poli... Where are the good men and women, and what is the sum of their good acts in the grand scheme of things?