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I agree 100% with everything you've said, and yet I still think those reforms would fail to effect change under current circumstances. Because current police cu

I agree 100% with everything you've said, and yet I still think those reforms would fail to effect change under current circumstances. Because current police culture basically says "Let me do my job however I want, without consequences, or I just won't do my job". And it has already started to show, with major police departments like Minneapolis, Chicago, Boston, NYC, and Seattle effectively pulling a depolicing strike in response to criticism and legislative action trying to hold them responsible for their failings. What you've prescribed would have prevented this from becoming a problem in the first place, but it can't do much anymore, because the prevalent police culture in the US will punish the public for punishing the police. And we've allowed this to happen to us. At this point, nobody knows what can actually fix the problem, but I'm increasingly inclined to think that firing them all, potentially imprisoning large quantities of them, and starting over from scratch, would be the only thing that works. Which is mind-blowing...it is practically an admission that even though we're a wealthy country, in terms of rule of law, we're not much different from a 3rd world failed state like Venezuela or Myanmar.

croissants 6y ago
> we're not much different from a 3rd world failed state like Venezuela In 2016, Venezuela's murder rate was well over 50 per 100,000, and the USA's murder rate was slightly over 5 per 100,000 [1]. This gap is pretty consistent. [1] https://dataunodc.un.org/crime/intentional-homicide-victims https://dataunodc.un.org/crime/intentional-homicide-victims
ErikVandeWater 6y ago
> ...effectively pulling a depolicing strike in response to criticism and legislative action trying to hold them responsible for their failings. That is a vast overgeneralization. Check out how many extreme repeat offenders are immediately released without punishment: https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=496 https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=496 Seattle Police officers are literally reduced to _bribing criminals with candy_: https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=865 https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=865
- darksaints 6y ago
  Seattle prosecutors may not be the best, but they also get nothing to work with. When the police decide to show up 8 hours after a crime occurs because they were dragging their feet in protest, or they don't have video evidence because their body cams were turned off, is it any surprise that there is not enough evidence to charge a criminal? Collecting evidence is the primary responsibility of the police, and prosecutors declining to prosecute a criminal for lack of evidence is a failing of the police, not the prosecutor. Unfortunately, given the abundance of evidence against criminal cops, they still don't prosecute them, so maybe the culpability is shared to some degree. https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-officers-used-excessive-force-at-protests-citys-opa-finds https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-officers-used-excess...
  - ErikVandeWater 6y ago
    How do you know that police were collecting insufficient evidence before they started reducing policing of some crimes as a response to non-prosecution?
- geofft 6y ago
  That's because the voters, the people who should actually have the right to say how they want their government to run, have either voted for legislators who write laws that do not punish repeat offenders, or have voted for prosecutors who use their discretion, or have voted for judges who use their discretion. That is the right of the voters. The police (and certainly not the police unions!) do not have any power in a republican society to override that. It is certainly true that the way that Seattle police (and SF police, and NYC police, and NJ police, and...) want to maintain public order is different from the way that the voters want to maintain public order. But that is the very problem at hand - as the comment above says: 'current police culture basically says "Let me do my job however I want, without consequences, or I just won't do my job"'. Police overpolicing because they don't want to do their jobs as they're told is not very different from police underpolicing because they don't want to do their jobs as they're told.
  - 6y ago
geofft 6y ago
If they don't want to do their jobs, then hire other people who actually will. Reagan did this with the air traffic controllers in 1981 (which I'm not saying I agree with in terms of policy, but it was both legal and effective). They went on strike, and Reagan said, look, federal workers aren't allowed to strike, and if you don't report to work we'll fire you. ATC took a hit, flights were slowed, but they found other people who were willing to the job and demanded less than PATCO demanded. Which is ultimately how unions should work. They aggregate the bargaining power of the employees into a unified voice, nothing more or less. If that combined bargaining power is low - e.g., because the employer is willing to risk the work not getting done, or because potential workers don't actually want to combine their individual bargaining power with the union - then the union has no additional magical power. Unions just make it logistically easier/possible to negotiate things that the workers could in theory but not in practice negotiate on their own. They don't have any power to negotiate benefits for workers that the market couldn't theoretically support. If a (say) truckers' union says "We want a 20% pay increase and more time off," and other potential truckers agree with those demands and the logistics companies can manage it without going out of business, then they'll get it. If the trucker's union says "We want a 10x pay increase and we want you to take all legal accountability for anyone we hit with our trucks," they would rightly lose that negotiation - any company that said "yes" would not last very long, and the company would do just fine saying "no." If a society has no public safety resources without the cooperation of a single union, such that it's less of a "negotiation" than an acquiescence to whatever that union demands, then that is the thing that's caused us to be a failed state. So I agree. Fire them all, at the very least ban them from being rehired, and start over. And it's mostly amazing to me that Reagan felt comfortable firing 11,345 air traffic controllers, who are clearly operationally needed to put planes in the air and get them down again (unlike police, whose role in public safety is much more indirect), at a time when he had himself acknowledged that ATC was understaffed... and meanwhile, there is basically only one story of a US local government (Camden, NJ) that felt comfortable firing its police department and starting over. Or maybe put another way - I don't really understand why the PATCO decertification prompted the weakening of private sector unions in the decades since then, but police unions, who like PATCO are public sector unions in safety-critical roles, only seem to have gotten stronger.

croissants 6y ago

> we're not much different from a 3rd world failed state like Venezuela In 2016, Venezuela's murder rate was well over 50 per 100,000, and the USA's murder rate was slightly over 5 per 100,000 [1]. This gap is pretty consistent. [1] https://dataunodc.un.org/crime/intentional-homicide-victims https://dataunodc.un.org/crime/intentional-homicide-victims

ErikVandeWater 6y ago

> ...effectively pulling a depolicing strike in response to criticism and legislative action trying to hold them responsible for their failings. That is a vast overgeneralization. Check out how many extreme repeat offenders are immediately released without punishment: https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=496 https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=496 Seattle Police officers are literally reduced to _bribing criminals with candy_: https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=865 https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=865

darksaints 6y ago
Seattle prosecutors may not be the best, but they also get nothing to work with. When the police decide to show up 8 hours after a crime occurs because they were dragging their feet in protest, or they don't have video evidence because their body cams were turned off, is it any surprise that there is not enough evidence to charge a criminal? Collecting evidence is the primary responsibility of the police, and prosecutors declining to prosecute a criminal for lack of evidence is a failing of the police, not the prosecutor. Unfortunately, given the abundance of evidence against criminal cops, they still don't prosecute them, so maybe the culpability is shared to some degree. https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-officers-used-excessive-force-at-protests-citys-opa-finds https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-officers-used-excess...
- ErikVandeWater 6y ago
  How do you know that police were collecting insufficient evidence before they started reducing policing of some crimes as a response to non-prosecution?
geofft 6y ago
That's because the voters, the people who should actually have the right to say how they want their government to run, have either voted for legislators who write laws that do not punish repeat offenders, or have voted for prosecutors who use their discretion, or have voted for judges who use their discretion. That is the right of the voters. The police (and certainly not the police unions!) do not have any power in a republican society to override that. It is certainly true that the way that Seattle police (and SF police, and NYC police, and NJ police, and...) want to maintain public order is different from the way that the voters want to maintain public order. But that is the very problem at hand - as the comment above says: 'current police culture basically says "Let me do my job however I want, without consequences, or I just won't do my job"'. Police overpolicing because they don't want to do their jobs as they're told is not very different from police underpolicing because they don't want to do their jobs as they're told.
- 6y ago

geofft 6y ago

If they don't want to do their jobs, then hire other people who actually will. Reagan did this with the air traffic controllers in 1981 (which I'm not saying I agree with in terms of policy, but it was both legal and effective). They went on strike, and Reagan said, look, federal workers aren't allowed to strike, and if you don't report to work we'll fire you. ATC took a hit, flights were slowed, but they found other people who were willing to the job and demanded less than PATCO demanded. Which is ultimately how unions should work. They aggregate the bargaining power of the employees into a unified voice, nothing more or less. If that combined bargaining power is low - e.g., because the employer is willing to risk the work not getting done, or because potential workers don't actually want to combine their individual bargaining power with the union - then the union has no additional magical power. Unions just make it logistically easier/possible to negotiate things that the workers could in theory but not in practice negotiate on their own. They don't have any power to negotiate benefits for workers that the market couldn't theoretically support. If a (say) truckers' union says "We want a 20% pay increase and more time off," and other potential truckers agree with those demands and the logistics companies can manage it without going out of business, then they'll get it. If the trucker's union says "We want a 10x pay increase and we want you to take all legal accountability for anyone we hit with our trucks," they would rightly lose that negotiation - any company that said "yes" would not last very long, and the company would do just fine saying "no." If a society has no public safety resources without the cooperation of a single union, such that it's less of a "negotiation" than an acquiescence to whatever that union demands, then that is the thing that's caused us to be a failed state. So I agree. Fire them all, at the very least ban them from being rehired, and start over. And it's mostly amazing to me that Reagan felt comfortable firing 11,345 air traffic controllers, who are clearly operationally needed to put planes in the air and get them down again (unlike police, whose role in public safety is much more indirect), at a time when he had himself acknowledged that ATC was understaffed... and meanwhile, there is basically only one story of a US local government (Camden, NJ) that felt comfortable firing its police department and starting over. Or maybe put another way - I don't really understand why the PATCO decertification prompted the weakening of private sector unions in the decades since then, but police unions, who like PATCO are public sector unions in safety-critical roles, only seem to have gotten stronger.