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How about the time officers of the Lethbridge, Alberta, police department stalked a member of the (minority, NDP) political party while on-duty? [1] [1] https:

How about the time officers of the Lethbridge, Alberta, police department stalked a member of the (minority, NDP) political party while on-duty? [1] [1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-western-canada-lethbridge-police-officers-treatment-of-alberta-mla/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/arti...

eloff 6y ago
You can't generalize from one incident to a large group. There are bad apples in every large group. If you can demonstrate an unusual percentage of bad behavior, compared to other developed nations, that'd be more interesting. Either way we could talk about potential ways to improve the situation.
- jtxx 6y ago
  https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidden-plain-sight-racism-white-supremacy-and-far-right-militancy-law https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidd...
- LeonB 6y ago
  The “bad apples” analogy has been done to death. When bad behaviour is detected within a police force, they don’t eliminate the “bad apple” they protect them. No other “good apple” speaks up against the behaviour. Thus — in line with the metaphor - the rot affects the whole barrel.
  - eloff 6y ago
    That's clearly one area for improvement.
    - qtplatypus 6y ago
      Which is why you shouldn’t assume people are going to act in good faith. If acting in good faith was universal then we wouldn’t need any form os]f security at all. This is why you have to build systems that assume that there will be bad actors.
  - LeonB 6y ago
    Chris Rock's take down of the "bad apples" argument is my all time favorite on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttd4985R0FQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttd4985R0FQ His comparison of how errors in policing are treated compared to how plane crashes are treated is very apt. I've used this lens to look at many situations since. The lack of impartiality displayed in the face of an "officer involved" incident is glaring. Police officers and other people in that branch of government never display the kind of serious investigative interest that a plane crash investigator applies. They never approach it with fresh eyes, hoping to uncover and fix root causes. In IT we talk about "the 5 whys" for trying to get past superficial reasons for an incident. But you can't expect to ever see that kind of approach when everything is quickly hidden behind a "blue wall of silence."
    - throwawaybbbb 6y ago
      Maybe because plane crashes don't happen as often as "officer involved incidents" unjust and just and are actually a lower hanging fruit in comparison? And the two aren't investigated by the same body of government NTSB investigates plane crashes in the US (federally created). In some departments there exists Civilian Review Boards [0] IMO better than an internal investigations department and delegating to a federally created agency. But do they work in reality? 0: Civilian Review Boards https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_affairs_(law_enforcement)#:~:text=The%20internal%20affairs%20refers%20to,a%20police%20force%20policing%20itself%22 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_affairs_(law_enforc....
      - LeonB 6y ago
        Do they? (work in reality)? You sound like you want to share information, go ahead. (And I think you misunderstood something I wrote, but I'm not sure what. I didn't mean that the same body of government investigate both crashes and police misconduct... I meant that very often police misconduct is investigated by groups that are adjacent to the police, not impartial. Even if/when it is a separate group, the 'blue wall of silence' is an effect deterrent to investigation and there doesn't seem to be any interest in counter-acting this.)
- filoeleven 6y ago
  This standard is not equally applied. For police, “a few bad apples” defends the majority as “good people.” For protestors, ANY property damage is seen as invalidating the whole movement as “violent extremists and lawlessness.” This despite police having supposedly extensive training on what is lawful and protesters being regular citizens.
  - eloff 6y ago
    Honestly the whole movement is leaderless, aimless, and senseless. Right off the bat making it a race issue is divisive and misleading - when the statistics show people of color are no more likely than anyone else to be a victim of police violence, when considering the number of police interactions. Blacks and latinos commit more crimes. That's the uncomfortable truth. Then they have no serious or well thought out plan to improve things - so what do they hope to gain from protesting? Abolish the police is pure nonsense. Awareness of the issue is the best they can hope for.
    - filoeleven 6y ago
      You didn’t address anything I said, so I’ll refrain from rebutting your statistics.
    - sjtindell 6y ago
      Per your statement about race; look into that statistic you listed more, there are good explanations. Imagine this chain - the system is rigged in deep ways against a young man of color. He probably grows up in a broken home, a poor neighborhood, with low access to schooling or opportunity. As a result, he is driven to commit crime. So police patrol his neighborhood more, so they learn to associate his kind of people with crime, so he has more police interactions. And then that statistic lands on your news feed. Do you think the system is more fair for all people regardless of skin color? Or that crime has little relation to poverty? Or that people of color are inherently more likely to commit crime whether by genetics or culture? Then you won’t be able to follow that chain. There are a lot of interacting systems. Not questioning as an attack, just pointing out that the logic makes lots of assumptions. Consider the problems with our algorithm for determining recidivism rates. The data shows people of color return to crime more when released. So the algorithm assigns them higher jail time before parole, which means more time out of society and among criminals, which leads to more crime when released! That statistic, “people of color commit more crime” is a self-fulfilling prophecy or recursion of some sort, it’s harmful unless we’re using it to determine a “why” that isn’t just “because of their skin color or culture”.
- cmehdy 6y ago
  If a large group happens to have enough issues that it's a constant social debate, and that large group happens to be PAID to be in the group (as opposed to doing something without a reward, or being born into a condition), it's a very different kind of expectation one should be talking about. Furthermore, if that group is one of the only groups of people supposed to enforce what a society codified as its morals and ethics, there's a strong argument to be made to have a much, much lower threshold for the sample sizes needed to view problematic acts as unacceptable. Trying to compare countries is an interesting remark.. how about this article, which will give a response to your "bad apples" rhethoric?[0] The article is about Canada, so I guess if we set our gold standard to the US then everywhere in the world is a dreamland. How about if we compare it to the Netherlands or Norway though? Since arguably a lot of Canadian policies, the political compass, and the culture are at the very least in-between the US and those other developed nations. Finally, striving for improvements in a system as a proportion of how badly everyone does when the enforcement of moral and social norms is pretty rarely negotiable for the majority of a population, seems to me like we're extending the benefit of the doubt to a privileged subset of a population that hasn't proven a satisfying-enough track record to deserve such gratitude. [0] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/ https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/
- chx 6y ago
  > There are bad apples in every large group. Stop that. One, "Letting a demonstration be judged by its most violent participants but not judging a police force by its most violent cops is the language of the oppressor." two, let's recall a Chris Rock joke you can hear in https://twitter.com/Baldilocks__/status/1266055148788494336 https://twitter.com/Baldilocks__/status/1266055148788494336 for example. "Bad apple? That’s a lovely name for murderer. That almost sounds nice. I’ve had a bad apple. It was tart, but it didn’t choke me out. Here’s the thing. Here’s the thing. I know being a cop is hard. I know that shit’s dangerous. I know it is, okay? But some jobs can’t have bad apples." "Some jobs, everybody gotta be good. Like … pilots. Ya know, American Airlines can’t be like, 'Most of our pilots like to land. We just got a few bad apples that like to crash into mountains. Please bear with us.'" ==== And this is not as much a joke as it sounds -- how many times have we found out the murderers have a long list of past complaints? The problem is the system doesn't exclude the "few bad apples" because it's not a few bad apples, it's a systemic problem.

eloff 6y ago

You can't generalize from one incident to a large group. There are bad apples in every large group. If you can demonstrate an unusual percentage of bad behavior, compared to other developed nations, that'd be more interesting. Either way we could talk about potential ways to improve the situation.

jtxx 6y ago
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidden-plain-sight-racism-white-supremacy-and-far-right-militancy-law https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidd...
LeonB 6y ago
The “bad apples” analogy has been done to death. When bad behaviour is detected within a police force, they don’t eliminate the “bad apple” they protect them. No other “good apple” speaks up against the behaviour. Thus — in line with the metaphor - the rot affects the whole barrel.
- eloff 6y ago
  That's clearly one area for improvement.
  - qtplatypus 6y ago
    Which is why you shouldn’t assume people are going to act in good faith. If acting in good faith was universal then we wouldn’t need any form os]f security at all. This is why you have to build systems that assume that there will be bad actors.
- LeonB 6y ago
  Chris Rock's take down of the "bad apples" argument is my all time favorite on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttd4985R0FQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttd4985R0FQ His comparison of how errors in policing are treated compared to how plane crashes are treated is very apt. I've used this lens to look at many situations since. The lack of impartiality displayed in the face of an "officer involved" incident is glaring. Police officers and other people in that branch of government never display the kind of serious investigative interest that a plane crash investigator applies. They never approach it with fresh eyes, hoping to uncover and fix root causes. In IT we talk about "the 5 whys" for trying to get past superficial reasons for an incident. But you can't expect to ever see that kind of approach when everything is quickly hidden behind a "blue wall of silence."
  - throwawaybbbb 6y ago
    Maybe because plane crashes don't happen as often as "officer involved incidents" unjust and just and are actually a lower hanging fruit in comparison? And the two aren't investigated by the same body of government NTSB investigates plane crashes in the US (federally created). In some departments there exists Civilian Review Boards [0] IMO better than an internal investigations department and delegating to a federally created agency. But do they work in reality? 0: Civilian Review Boards https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_affairs_(law_enforcement)#:~:text=The%20internal%20affairs%20refers%20to,a%20police%20force%20policing%20itself%22 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_affairs_(law_enforc....
    - LeonB 6y ago
      Do they? (work in reality)? You sound like you want to share information, go ahead. (And I think you misunderstood something I wrote, but I'm not sure what. I didn't mean that the same body of government investigate both crashes and police misconduct... I meant that very often police misconduct is investigated by groups that are adjacent to the police, not impartial. Even if/when it is a separate group, the 'blue wall of silence' is an effect deterrent to investigation and there doesn't seem to be any interest in counter-acting this.)
filoeleven 6y ago
This standard is not equally applied. For police, “a few bad apples” defends the majority as “good people.” For protestors, ANY property damage is seen as invalidating the whole movement as “violent extremists and lawlessness.” This despite police having supposedly extensive training on what is lawful and protesters being regular citizens.
- eloff 6y ago
  Honestly the whole movement is leaderless, aimless, and senseless. Right off the bat making it a race issue is divisive and misleading - when the statistics show people of color are no more likely than anyone else to be a victim of police violence, when considering the number of police interactions. Blacks and latinos commit more crimes. That's the uncomfortable truth. Then they have no serious or well thought out plan to improve things - so what do they hope to gain from protesting? Abolish the police is pure nonsense. Awareness of the issue is the best they can hope for.
  - filoeleven 6y ago
    You didn’t address anything I said, so I’ll refrain from rebutting your statistics.
  - sjtindell 6y ago
    Per your statement about race; look into that statistic you listed more, there are good explanations. Imagine this chain - the system is rigged in deep ways against a young man of color. He probably grows up in a broken home, a poor neighborhood, with low access to schooling or opportunity. As a result, he is driven to commit crime. So police patrol his neighborhood more, so they learn to associate his kind of people with crime, so he has more police interactions. And then that statistic lands on your news feed. Do you think the system is more fair for all people regardless of skin color? Or that crime has little relation to poverty? Or that people of color are inherently more likely to commit crime whether by genetics or culture? Then you won’t be able to follow that chain. There are a lot of interacting systems. Not questioning as an attack, just pointing out that the logic makes lots of assumptions. Consider the problems with our algorithm for determining recidivism rates. The data shows people of color return to crime more when released. So the algorithm assigns them higher jail time before parole, which means more time out of society and among criminals, which leads to more crime when released! That statistic, “people of color commit more crime” is a self-fulfilling prophecy or recursion of some sort, it’s harmful unless we’re using it to determine a “why” that isn’t just “because of their skin color or culture”.
cmehdy 6y ago
If a large group happens to have enough issues that it's a constant social debate, and that large group happens to be PAID to be in the group (as opposed to doing something without a reward, or being born into a condition), it's a very different kind of expectation one should be talking about. Furthermore, if that group is one of the only groups of people supposed to enforce what a society codified as its morals and ethics, there's a strong argument to be made to have a much, much lower threshold for the sample sizes needed to view problematic acts as unacceptable. Trying to compare countries is an interesting remark.. how about this article, which will give a response to your "bad apples" rhethoric?[0] The article is about Canada, so I guess if we set our gold standard to the US then everywhere in the world is a dreamland. How about if we compare it to the Netherlands or Norway though? Since arguably a lot of Canadian policies, the political compass, and the culture are at the very least in-between the US and those other developed nations. Finally, striving for improvements in a system as a proportion of how badly everyone does when the enforcement of moral and social norms is pretty rarely negotiable for the majority of a population, seems to me like we're extending the benefit of the doubt to a privileged subset of a population that hasn't proven a satisfying-enough track record to deserve such gratitude. [0] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/ https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/
chx 6y ago
> There are bad apples in every large group. Stop that. One, "Letting a demonstration be judged by its most violent participants but not judging a police force by its most violent cops is the language of the oppressor." two, let's recall a Chris Rock joke you can hear in https://twitter.com/Baldilocks__/status/1266055148788494336 https://twitter.com/Baldilocks__/status/1266055148788494336 for example. "Bad apple? That’s a lovely name for murderer. That almost sounds nice. I’ve had a bad apple. It was tart, but it didn’t choke me out. Here’s the thing. Here’s the thing. I know being a cop is hard. I know that shit’s dangerous. I know it is, okay? But some jobs can’t have bad apples." "Some jobs, everybody gotta be good. Like … pilots. Ya know, American Airlines can’t be like, 'Most of our pilots like to land. We just got a few bad apples that like to crash into mountains. Please bear with us.'" ==== And this is not as much a joke as it sounds -- how many times have we found out the murderers have a long list of past complaints? The problem is the system doesn't exclude the "few bad apples" because it's not a few bad apples, it's a systemic problem.