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"- I have several cop friends, from a relatively geographically diverse range of the US. All of them say that how Floyd was arrested was at a minimum against pr

"- I have several cop friends, from a relatively geographically diverse range of the US. All of them say that how Floyd was arrested was at a minimum against procedure, and almost certainly contributory to his death. - One cop I spoke to pointed out that his training mandated that once a prone subject is handcuffed, their training mandates rolling them onto their side, as being unable to leverage oneself up can restrict breathing, even if nobody's kneeling on you. He also pointed out that kneeling on the neck or back in order to handcuff someone is well within procedure at his department, but continuing after they are restrained is obviously not." That's the thing I don't get and that is the most upsetting thing to me about this situation: why aren't police officers speaking out more against each other? The only voices I hear from the police are coming out in defense of other officers who did something bad. This to me reinforces the impression that it's not a small minority that's the problem, but the entire institution. Is the media just not picking these voices up? If there had been strong voices within the police calling for reform and officers had kneeled with the protestors instead of attacking even peaceful ones, the situation now would look very different.

pjc50 6y ago
> why aren't police officers speaking out more against each other? Fear of reprisals from other officers? (This has happened in a few cases.)
adolph 6y ago
The prevailing ethic promoted by culture seems to be against acting as a "Karen." In childhood there are admonitions against being a "tattle-tale." There are popular alliterations like "Snitches get stitches." Let's say if in the case of Mr. Floyd another one of the officers had said, "get off him, this submission hold is not in line with department policy" and the officer got off Mr. Floyd and Mr. Floyd had not died. What then? One might realistically imagine that the above negative concepts would be applied to the officer who said something. Maybe by hearing those words Mr. Floyd could pursue a complaint against the officer. There are probably lots of reasons why an officer and probably most people in that situation would feel pressure to avoid speaking out in that moment.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  > Let's say if in the case of Mr. Floyd another one of the officers had said, "get off him, this submission hold is not in line with department policy" and the officer got off Mr. Floyd and Mr. Floyd had not died. What then? Then we'd never heard about George Floyd. Not to say there is no serious police brutality problem, but it's worth remembering the huge selection bias in what videos go viral and we end up seeing. There is over 1 million cops in the US, and out of however many million interactions they have with the public each day, an overwhelming majority are perfectly fine.
  - Kye 6y ago
    There isn't any room for error when you have the power to ruin or end someone's life. A bad cop can ruin or end more lives over a career than die in a plane crash. Where is the NTSB for police?
Kalium 6y ago
> That's the thing I don't get and that is the most upsetting thing to me about this situation: why aren't police officers speaking out more against each other? There's a word for this: solidarity. This is what it looks like from the outside.
- jahaja 6y ago
  Loyalty rather.
  - Kalium 6y ago
    I'm sorry to say, I chose that word quite specifically. I don't mean loyalty. I mean solidarity.
    - jahaja 6y ago
      If so, it seems to me to be a perversion of solidarity to be loyal to blatant injustice.
      - Kalium 6y ago
        They don't see it as injustice. They see it as protecting workers against management, as solidarity between one another. The rest of us just happen to call that accountability.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Other professional groups that practice solidarity often have review and ethics boards that are, in general, quick to denounce bad actors and strip them of their ability to continue harming others. I can't remember the last time that a doctor or lawyer blatantly murdered someone on tape and had their peers go up to bat for them about how they're actually the victim and did nothing wrong. When it comes to law enforcement and correctional officers, I can find a dozen of such instances from the last 12 months alone.
  - 6y ago
commandlinefan 6y ago
> why aren't police officers speaking out more against each other? Well, as a programmer, I know from experience that there's a lot about programming computers that isn't obvious unless you actually spend time doing it - and that when you have a group of people (i.e. project managers) who seem bound and determined to portray programmers as lazy, time-wasting, obstinate, overpaid, wastes of space who should be offshored anyway, it's very easy for them to play armchair quarterback and insist that every programming problem was trivial in hindsight and confirm their hypothesis. Now, apply that to police work. Police are routinely put into situations where their lives and the lives of other police officers are in danger, and they have to make split-second decisions or an innocent person can end up dying. I don't know anything about police work, but I'm willing to gamble that getting that right is even harder than getting programming right, and if somebody's bound and determined to make you look bad, they can do so more easily than project managers routinely do to programmers. If even 90% of the police have good intentions (and I believe that number is much, much higher), it stands to reason that they'd usually be willing to give other officers the benefit of the doubt: this or that may look bad if you put effort into making it look bad, but at least give the officer a chance to defend himself rather than jump to conclusions.
aidenn0 6y ago
How many people on HN have reported unethical behavior of their coworkers to their bosses? Now combine that already low number with the fact that there is strong belief among cops that doing so will negatively affect their career trajectory. As far as cops coming to defense of other cops, every single officer I know has had false allegations against him, including one with a rape allegation that was only proven false because he had his body camera on the entire time he was with the suspect. So anything that's even slightly grey will get the benefit of the doubt as far as cops are concerned. I've experienced the same thing as a foster parent. I'm not actually sure how many allegations have been made against my wife and I, so I tend to immediately dismiss any news of such against other foster parents (then occasionally it will be be "oh shit they were keeping kids in dog kennels?" and I'll have to backtrack). I'm almost certainly dismissing some actual misdeeds in there, but I also feel fairly secure that the signal to noise of allegations against foster parents is very low.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
"The media's just not picking those voices up" is definitely a part of the story. Portland for example is looking pretty bad right now, but the Portland officers did kneel with the protesters.
ufmace 6y ago
> The only voices I hear from the police are coming out in defense of other officers who did something bad You gotta go back to the original article, this is exactly what it's about. Everybody agrees that good cops calling out bad cops is a good thing. Therefore, it doesn't spread, and you don't hear about it unless you pay deep attention to specific goings-on in specific police departments. It's also particularly likely not to spread because the details of such cases are usually kept quiet, and the cop just gets quietly let go. The only thing most people who are only sort of paying attention hear is, cop does something kind of dubious, activists scream at the top of their lungs about how outrageous it is. They double down way past "this particular bad cop should be fired and charged" to "All cops are bastards" and "Defund the Police". Which then kind of forces cops and people who appreciate law and order to push back, find ways to excuse the action and defend the police. I've seen a bunch of pics of cops kneeling with protestors. They didn't spread far, and they didn't change anyone's mind. They didn't contribute to the outrage, and so they can't spread among a media class that is highly incentivized to spread only the most outrageous things.
- Kye 6y ago
  Some of those were followed up by the same cops teargassing the people they kneeled with. They didn't change minds because it's not just the protesting side doing PR. Those photo ops were only convincing to people who wanted to be convinced.

pjc50 6y ago

> why aren't police officers speaking out more against each other? Fear of reprisals from other officers? (This has happened in a few cases.)

adolph 6y ago

The prevailing ethic promoted by culture seems to be against acting as a "Karen." In childhood there are admonitions against being a "tattle-tale." There are popular alliterations like "Snitches get stitches." Let's say if in the case of Mr. Floyd another one of the officers had said, "get off him, this submission hold is not in line with department policy" and the officer got off Mr. Floyd and Mr. Floyd had not died. What then? One might realistically imagine that the above negative concepts would be applied to the officer who said something. Maybe by hearing those words Mr. Floyd could pursue a complaint against the officer. There are probably lots of reasons why an officer and probably most people in that situation would feel pressure to avoid speaking out in that moment.

BurningFrog 6y ago
> Let's say if in the case of Mr. Floyd another one of the officers had said, "get off him, this submission hold is not in line with department policy" and the officer got off Mr. Floyd and Mr. Floyd had not died. What then? Then we'd never heard about George Floyd. Not to say there is no serious police brutality problem, but it's worth remembering the huge selection bias in what videos go viral and we end up seeing. There is over 1 million cops in the US, and out of however many million interactions they have with the public each day, an overwhelming majority are perfectly fine.
- Kye 6y ago
  There isn't any room for error when you have the power to ruin or end someone's life. A bad cop can ruin or end more lives over a career than die in a plane crash. Where is the NTSB for police?

Kalium 6y ago

> That's the thing I don't get and that is the most upsetting thing to me about this situation: why aren't police officers speaking out more against each other? There's a word for this: solidarity. This is what it looks like from the outside.

jahaja 6y ago
Loyalty rather.
- Kalium 6y ago
  I'm sorry to say, I chose that word quite specifically. I don't mean loyalty. I mean solidarity.
  - jahaja 6y ago
    If so, it seems to me to be a perversion of solidarity to be loyal to blatant injustice.
    - Kalium 6y ago
      They don't see it as injustice. They see it as protecting workers against management, as solidarity between one another. The rest of us just happen to call that accountability.
heavyset_go 6y ago
Other professional groups that practice solidarity often have review and ethics boards that are, in general, quick to denounce bad actors and strip them of their ability to continue harming others. I can't remember the last time that a doctor or lawyer blatantly murdered someone on tape and had their peers go up to bat for them about how they're actually the victim and did nothing wrong. When it comes to law enforcement and correctional officers, I can find a dozen of such instances from the last 12 months alone.
- 6y ago

commandlinefan 6y ago

> why aren't police officers speaking out more against each other? Well, as a programmer, I know from experience that there's a lot about programming computers that isn't obvious unless you actually spend time doing it - and that when you have a group of people (i.e. project managers) who seem bound and determined to portray programmers as lazy, time-wasting, obstinate, overpaid, wastes of space who should be offshored anyway, it's very easy for them to play armchair quarterback and insist that every programming problem was trivial in hindsight and confirm their hypothesis. Now, apply that to police work. Police are routinely put into situations where their lives and the lives of other police officers are in danger, and they have to make split-second decisions or an innocent person can end up dying. I don't know anything about police work, but I'm willing to gamble that getting that right is even harder than getting programming right, and if somebody's bound and determined to make you look bad, they can do so more easily than project managers routinely do to programmers. If even 90% of the police have good intentions (and I believe that number is much, much higher), it stands to reason that they'd usually be willing to give other officers the benefit of the doubt: this or that may look bad if you put effort into making it look bad, but at least give the officer a chance to defend himself rather than jump to conclusions.

aidenn0 6y ago

How many people on HN have reported unethical behavior of their coworkers to their bosses? Now combine that already low number with the fact that there is strong belief among cops that doing so will negatively affect their career trajectory. As far as cops coming to defense of other cops, every single officer I know has had false allegations against him, including one with a rape allegation that was only proven false because he had his body camera on the entire time he was with the suspect. So anything that's even slightly grey will get the benefit of the doubt as far as cops are concerned. I've experienced the same thing as a foster parent. I'm not actually sure how many allegations have been made against my wife and I, so I tend to immediately dismiss any news of such against other foster parents (then occasionally it will be be "oh shit they were keeping kids in dog kennels?" and I'll have to backtrack). I'm almost certainly dismissing some actual misdeeds in there, but I also feel fairly secure that the signal to noise of allegations against foster parents is very low.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

"The media's just not picking those voices up" is definitely a part of the story. Portland for example is looking pretty bad right now, but the Portland officers did kneel with the protesters.

ufmace 6y ago

> The only voices I hear from the police are coming out in defense of other officers who did something bad You gotta go back to the original article, this is exactly what it's about. Everybody agrees that good cops calling out bad cops is a good thing. Therefore, it doesn't spread, and you don't hear about it unless you pay deep attention to specific goings-on in specific police departments. It's also particularly likely not to spread because the details of such cases are usually kept quiet, and the cop just gets quietly let go. The only thing most people who are only sort of paying attention hear is, cop does something kind of dubious, activists scream at the top of their lungs about how outrageous it is. They double down way past "this particular bad cop should be fired and charged" to "All cops are bastards" and "Defund the Police". Which then kind of forces cops and people who appreciate law and order to push back, find ways to excuse the action and defend the police. I've seen a bunch of pics of cops kneeling with protestors. They didn't spread far, and they didn't change anyone's mind. They didn't contribute to the outrage, and so they can't spread among a media class that is highly incentivized to spread only the most outrageous things.

Kye 6y ago
Some of those were followed up by the same cops teargassing the people they kneeled with. They didn't change minds because it's not just the protesting side doing PR. Those photo ops were only convincing to people who wanted to be convinced.