8 ms·

There needs to be a police reform. Before I became a programmer, I wanted to be a cop, studied criminal justice....as I was going to school I had some cops in

• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  Start by not hiring anyone with a history in law enforcement.
  • throwanma 4y ago
    That will only make it worse, what decent person would go into a job that blacklists you from other jobs?
    • teaearlgraycold 4y ago
      Not sure why that matters. If you're a town and you don't want terrible law enforcement then you could fire all of the cops, hire new ones that are actually just social workers, lawyers, etc. and go from there. Other towns would be hiring people that you never would but that doesn't affect your local area.
• e40 4y ago
  > He recently told me all his new recruits cannot write That is shocking and depressing.
  • avgDev 4y ago
    That it is. Every time some new videos comes out, I'm like yep no surprise. However, there is a significant percentage of Americans who refuse to listen, they just want to defend police, saying there are "bad apples" everywhere. However, there is systemic rot in the police. An honest cop will have a bad time, as they did not obey the bullshit "thin blue line".
    • causi 4y ago
      People who use the "bad apple" phrase like that are using it to mean the exact opposite of what it actually means and it drives me crazy. The phrase is "one bad apple spoils the bunch."
      • dotancohen 4y ago
        It's all phrases, like there is some "reclamation" of language to mean the opposite of its original intent. I was recently talking to someone who called himself a "pacifist" so I began the phrase "Si Vis Pacem..." (If you want peace... note that the word pacem is the root of the word pacifist), but even after explaining to him that the ancient phrase ends with "para bellum" (prepare for war) he still defended his draft dodging as "for peace".
        • causi 4y ago
          Was he using the phrase or just calling himself a pacifist?
          • dotancohen 4y ago
            He was calling himself a pacifist. But he had no idea what the word "pacifist" actually means - the people who use it today use it without knowing the actual meaning. I did actually ask him to tell me in our language (not English, but he was using the English word) what "pacifist" means and he could not tell me. It's an excuse, not a belief. But I'm not ranting about pacifists. I'm ranting about how many words are phrases are being redefined. Another one is the word "shame" in my country. Those is favour of judicial reform are using the word as if it has a positive connotation for the past few weeks.
• dcow 4y ago
  Not defending any of that. In addition it also doesn't help that we've had generations of parents telling kids to be lawyers and doctors and PhDs and avoid any type of civil service work. I feel like a large contributor to the apathy surrounding our government institutions is that nobody wants to be a civil servant. I'm not sure how exactly to fix this, it's just an observation.
  • idopmstuff 4y ago
    I feel like that's generally because parents want their kids to be financially secure, and civil service jobs generally pay pretty poorly. That said, policing is often an exception - there are places where they're underpaid, but often their salaries are solid relative to cost of living.
• spacephysics 4y ago
  One direction into resolving this, which may seem counter intuitive, is to put more money into police training, and have higher salaries for desired positions. This in turn (should) attract more people and thus get a better pool to select candidates from. However the nepotism and in-group mentality does make this difficult to another degree. Though to play devils advocate, it’s human nature to pull more into an in-group when you feel anyone outside that group is attacking you, and threatening your livelihood for the actions of others. We should condemn the officers that act wrongly, but calling all of them bastards and such just makes the problem far worse. Now there’s even greater incentive for police officers to stand with their own, and not call out inappropriate behavior. Further, now people don’t want to be police officers, making the talent pool very low. And I don’t blame anyone for that. I had a desire to also be an officer at one point, but if I were a kid today, I’d steer clear of it even if I wanted to do more good.
  • KptMarchewa 4y ago
    The problem with any solution in US is focus on hyperlocal policing. US, even if it has private medicine, has tons of regulations around it - like requirement to have regulated medical degree to practice medicine. For some reason it's impossible to pass law that police needs to have some regulated degree to practice policing.
    • kevviiinn 4y ago
      Police unions are generally the reason it's impossible to pass any sort of reform laws, they easily strongarm politicians and spread copaganda
  • avgDev 4y ago
    Cops at the police department I was talking about make around $100K+ with overtime. This is a pretty popular around many departments. Salaries are $60k but cops get a lot of overtime. It isn't a problem that can be solved with money.
    • nerdponx 4y ago
• rsync 4y ago
  "There needs to be a police reform." Americorps style residency in low income areas for, let's say, five years. After such period, with exemplary behavior, one would become eligible for subsidized home ownership in a high income, single family zoned community - with similar covenants on professionalism and decorum. It's win-win-win: - Low income areas get young eager beavers who actually live and work in their neighborhoods - and are strongly incentivized to do good. - Blue-collar workers (the police, very often BIPOC) have a pathway to home ownership and integration into higher income areas. - Those areas end up with a police force that lives (and polices, and raises their kids) locally in their area.
  • tehwebguy 4y ago
    They already do that. The behavior is already stellar according to the people who actually measure it (other cops, what a coincidence) The house in a HCOL area is paid for with overtime fraud and the only pensions left in America.
  • crooked-v 4y ago
    Who decides "exemplary behavior"? If it's the current institutions, then anything up to and excluding shooting people in their beds at the wrong house will still be "exemplary".
    • monocasa 4y ago
      > If it's the current institutions, then anything up to and excluding shooting people in their beds at the wrong house will still be "exemplary". Hell, some institutions make killing an obviously innocent person part of the rite of passage, like the LA Sheriff gangs.
    • rsync 4y ago
      That's the point - it's an end-run around the existing police institutions and unions, etc. Both destinations - the communities that one polices in during the five year "public service" stint and the eventual destination communities with the subsidized housing - would create their own rules as to what constitutes "exemplary behavior". There is nothing that the existing policing structures can offer that trumps subsidized home ownership in an affluent/upscale community. The officers will listen to the community and follow their rules. Note: this is a very rough first expression of an idea I've been kicking around for a while so I will admit it's a little rough around the edges.
• AdrianB1 4y ago
  Georgia (the country, not the state in US) reformed the police by firing all cops and hiring brand new ones. Not sure how it will work long term, it was relatively recent.
  • nerdponx 4y ago
    A few localities in the US have tried things like this too. Fire all cops, fold city police department into surrounding county police department, re-hire fired city cops who meet certain criteria. Back in 2020 amidst the George Floyd murder and subsequent protests, a lot was written about such a program in Camden, NJ: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2020/06/11/police-reform-camden-new-jersey-rebuilt-its-police-department https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2020/06/11/police-reform-camden.... However I don't know if things are still going well.
  • throwanma 4y ago
    That's just politics and ensuring loyalty to the top of an organization one does not have control of
• throwanma 4y ago
  You could have joined and raised the bar, but shied away from it. The more negative the perception is, the more you guarantee only the worst will join
  • monksy 4y ago
    You can't. They filter out the people who are a threat to them. They even use the union to do this.
  • ssklash 4y ago
    I would suggest doing some research on what happens when you try to raise the bar from the inside. There are countless examples of retaliation, to the point of murder, against people who question the status quo. Often times people who do as you suggest end up quitting in disgust anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Serpico https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Serpico
    • midoridensha 4y ago
      You can't reform a bad institution from within as a low-level worker. Workplace culture comes from the top.
  • avgDev 4y ago
    No you cannot. There are a bunch of politics, and silent rules. I don't think you understand how toxic the environment is and how childishly these cops can act. I suggest reading r/protectandserve for a while. Bonus points if you follow threads after some massive video gets released. You will see a lot of bans of non-verified users and a lot of siding with the cop. Here is a locked thread from Derek Chauvin sentencing, according to users trial was a sham. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtectAndServe/comments/o7vpe7/derek_chauvin_sentenced_to_225_years_for_killing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtectAndServe/comments/o7vpe7/der...
• micromacrofoot 4y ago
  Take away their guns and build community service into their work schedules and they'll reform themselves pretty quickly. At the moment it's an attractive overglamorized profession for young men who played too much cops and robbers as children and who haven't spent enough time in their communities empathizing with people.
• dwallin 4y ago
  I think you need to intelligently create and build a parallel institution, with goals, tools, and organization culture better aligned to the needs of building up communities while keeping order in a modern society. Start with a small scope at the start, fulfilling a small need in a niche part of government. You want to avoid starting a large organization or growing fast, as that would require to lift pieces and personel from existing law enforcement. Then you demonstrate value and a better track record as you build the good-will and cultural cache to slowly expand and push out traditional law enforcement from more and more areas of concern. This should be fairly tractable, as most law enforcement forces these days have a vast array of duties. You will need a deft political hand to avoid getting on the bad side of existing "law and order" political power centers. You need to present yourself as someone who cares about safety and wants to free up cops to focus on "serious crime". This will help you control the narrative and undermine the eventual "not tough on crime" arguments.
  • Beldin 4y ago
    Problem: that's been tried and failed so far. Eg. campus police, security guards, etc. I think one major problem is that rejects from one domain can transition to another domain without penalties or problems.
    • klyrs 4y ago
      Campus police and security guards are just an extension of the state-monopolized violence concept; that isn't what GP was suggesting.
  • ianburrell 4y ago
    Portland has been having success with Street Response program. 911 dispatches teams of EMTs and mental health specialists to deal with mental health crises. I have wondered if could have separate organization or non-armed police that deals with administrative issues. Like taking reports or investigating crimes. I think it would be fine doing noise complaints or traffic violations. These are all things that the police have been ignoring recently. I think it would also reduce the problems with having armed police dealing with everything.
• gwright 4y ago
  On a broad level, I don't disagree. But I think it is helpful to keep in mind that the "police" in the US is not monolithic. There are over 18,000 separate police organizations in the US and they are not organized in a strict command hierarchy. Jurisdictions have much more independence in the US than is common in other countries. Canada has just less than 200 police agencies and Sweden has just one (https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-police-compare-different-democracies https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-police-compare-differen...) Some places need a much more aggressive approach to reform than others. Unfortunately I think the public narrative over the last few years regarding policing in general has very little nuance. As a side effect, the type of people we would like to be involved in policing are being discouraged from considering that career. This is not a healthy trend. The decentralization of police power in the US is intentional. While better recruitment, training, and implementation is desirable, solutions in this area are going to have to acknowledge that decentralization to be successful, IMHO.
  • tfourb 4y ago
    Or just do away with some of that decentralization. Germany also has a federalized system and based on our historical experience, avoiding centralized control over security forces has high priority in our constitutional system. But we still have a quite well-structured system that consists of a couple of federal police forces designed for very specific purposes and state police forces (which are subordinate to state governments only), which are those that interact with citizens on a day-to-day basis. States have their own regulations and laws that govern police work, but they have a loose process of coordinating those among each other and have to work within a federal constitutional framework that sets some explicit boundaries. Having 18,000 police organizations is just asking for bad outcomes, imho, we have plenty of stuff going wrong with 20-30.
    • gwright 4y ago
      If you are concerned about "bad outcomes" in a decentralized system, why do you think consolidating power in a more centralized system would be an improvement? The idea of minimizing and decentralizing power runs pretty deep in the US.
• vkou 4y ago
  > Then, I heard a story from one cop being out with cop buddies and driving wasted, smashing into car and running away. In BC, a cop was driving from the bar, hit and killed a motorcyclist, left the scene, drove home, downed a couple of shots of vodka to 'steady his nerves'. [1] An old trick that he allegedly shared with his RCMP buddies. https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/ex-rcmp-cpl-monty-robinson-gets-12-month-conditional-sentence-1.895563 https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/ex-rcmp-cpl-monty-robinson-get... He got a 12-month suspended sentence for it. Quite a bit less than what he'd face for killing someone while DUI. (He later got a 2-year sentence for perjury in an inquiry regarding him killing a Polish immigrant with a taser.) [1] Which is to say, make it impossible to determine how intoxicated he was at the time that he killed Orion Hutchinson.
• thomastjeffery 4y ago
  26% of arrests in the US are for drug related crimes. 46% of prisoners in federal prison are there for drug related crimes.[1] We need more than police reform: we need to reform the context that police work in. There is a huge incentive for police to focus on the most easily accusable crime types. Because drug related offenses are so easy to prosecute, police are heavily motivated to pursue drug related arrests. The act of pursuing drug related arrests can itself be trivially abused. There is very little distinction between a baseless accusation and a successfully prosecuted crime. This makes it incredibly difficult and subjective to regulate the behavior of officers who are pursuing drug related arrests. On top of that, we have an overwhelmed court system that can keep the accused waiting weeks, months, or even years to see trial. This pressures the courts to rush justice. From within the court system, a conviction is seen as a success; so it's pretty obvious what outcome is most likely to be falsely generated by that rushed justice. It's also trivial to abuse those wait times: a dubious accusation is enough to lock away any person the officer chooses. That person may need to wait in jail (generally considered worse than prison) for as much time as the sentence they would be convinced for! Even if an officer faces consequences to that abuse, the consequence can only happen after a length of time that itself is extended by the increasing wait times of the overwhelmed court system. This creates a feedback loop: the sheer volume of drug convictions creates a conviction in the mind of each officer: pursuing drug related offenses is easy and inherently justified. It's no surprise to me that so many officers approach arrests with oversized egos: incredulous at the idea they could possibly do wrong. This is normal everyday stuff to them, and the entire system expects them to continue. We all know the war on drugs is a failure of epic proportions. It's time to move on. Every moment we wait is an abuse to the justice system itself and the people to whom it is served. [1] https://drugabusestatistics.org/drug-related-crime-statistics/ https://drugabusestatistics.org/drug-related-crime-statistic...