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As a police officer, you swear an oath to uphold the US Constitution. If you believe a law is unconstitutional, you have an obligation to not enforce it. I know

As a police officer, you swear an oath to uphold the US Constitution. If you believe a law is unconstitutional, you have an obligation to not enforce it. I know, that kind of autonomy and trust is foreign to non-USAers, but that's why this country is great.

chimeracoder 4y ago
> As a police officer, you swear an oath to uphold the US Constitution. We'll, they routinely violate the Constitution too, so at least they're consistent.
crop_rotation 4y ago
Yeah right. Where does the US constitution gives police officers the right to decide whether a court order is "unconstitutional"?
- salawat 4y ago
  Actually, it stems from the Nuremberg Trials, and actually having a goddamn moral compass. If you're looking for something a bit more internal to the U.S., look no further than the original Declaration of Independence. While it may scare the bajeezus out of many, the responsibility for calling out governmental bullshit is vested solely with the People, and law enforcers are still People to. Welcome to why the United States is "Home of the Brave". It takes courage to stick around in a melting pot of crazy, and you never really know who is coming to dinner, or how long the civility is going to hold out.
  - cmh89 4y ago
    >Actually, it stems from the Nuremberg Trials, and actually having a goddamn moral compass It doesn't 'stem' from anywhere. It's just a right-wing thing to pretend that police have some unwritten ability to decide the legality of laws. > While it may scare the bajeezus out of many, the responsibility for calling out governmental bullshit is vested solely with the People, and law enforcers are still People to. Calling out 'governmental bullshit' is something they can do on their own time by practicing their 1st amendment rights. Choosing to not enforce a law because you don't like it is not free speech. It's job abandonment and should be treated as such. If you think part of your job is morally wrong, you should quit.
    - salawat 4y ago
      >Calling out 'governmental bullshit' is something they can do on their own time by practicing their 1st amendment rights. Choosing to not enforce a law because you don't like it is not free speech. It's job abandonment and should be treated as such. >If you think part of your job is morally wrong, you should quit. Sometimes, quitting is just setting the stage for the next unscrupulous individual to come in and really muck things up where at least if you are still there, there's a brake, and a voice in the room. See the head of the Boston Office of the FBI. Those dead set on abusing power would prefer that all those principled people would just get out of the way to let them steamroll the populace or enact their designs. >It doesn't 'stem' from anywhere. It's just a right-wing thing to pretend that police have some unwritten ability to decide the legality of laws. It isn't a right wing thing. It's a fact of life. Lets say every cop isn't fine with law X. You say you'll dismiss every cop who won't enforce it. You start doing it. You fire cops in droves. You'll very quickly start running out of candidates for the job, or you'll find yourself having to make concessions elsewhere. In fact, if it's a lot of cops you get rid of, you may find yourself short of any degree of law enforcement. Anyone who has ever found themselves running a Department of a large organization will be familiar with the phenomena by which work to be done requires people to do it; and whereby if you don't have enough bodies to do it, it doesn't get done or is otherwise "pocket veto'd". In reality, everyone has limited bandwidth to effect things in proximity to themselves every day. No one person can be everywhere at once. So you have to delegate. Ergo everyone you delegate to is a potential filter on what things actually get done. If they don't do it, and you can't, it ain't getting done. As much as anyone wants to believe police are cogs... Really take the time to think on the fact that if they fon't do it, it doesn't get done. They are as much a part of setting what the law really is as the judges, juries, DA's that close the loop. I don't care what the law is on paper. I care about what the cop in closest proximity to me thinks about it. And as far as policing the police? Internal Affairs, much like Quality Assurance in software, is a bitch. No one likes it when you're really doing your job, friends are few, and the politics and potential for undermining is ungodly. You alone are tasked with handling the banality of your own group objectively every damn day, and it wears on you.
      - cmh89 4y ago
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    The issue here is that these departments are not complying with elected officials and laws. The individual has an obligation to not-comply a with an illegal order and blow the whistle so the public can weigh in. The department should faithfully implement the instructions of the public. For example if the whole department really thinks that the requirement for the police to report their surveillance equipment is unconstitutional, they they should all quit and tell the public about this apparent grand violation of their right as police officers to secretly spy on the public.
  - ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
    the flaw in this logic is that, while cops are people, they are not The People, and they don't usually reflect The Will Of The People
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
eastWestMath 4y ago
As a police officer you also typically have a high school education, and your idea of whether or not something is constitutional carries little to no weight.
- DANmode 4y ago
  It didn't used to be that way, and doesn't need to be now.
- yucky 4y ago
  Not to poopoo your train of thought but I wouldn't put any faith in someone that's college educated having a better understanding of constitutionality either. Most college degrees are useless now, with the majority of college grads being roughly as educated as the average high school grad a couple of decades ago. And the majority of the ones that do actually hold any value don't give you much expertise on Constitutional law.
fakedang 4y ago
I thought deciding what laws are constitutional or not falls upon the Supreme Court? Wait, police get to choose which parts of the Constitution they want to enforce and which they don't? Right, police state it is.
bee_rider 4y ago
This sort of thinking is, I think, pretty important. It is good if people feel responsible for following their oaths and professional obligations. This obviously depends on a personal interpretation of those obligations, so it will have to be performed by all us laymen. I don’t think, as some of the other comments here have pointed out, that the lack of legal training is a huge problem. But that’s a personal obligation. And the obligation is not to simply not comply, it is to blow the whistle. You very well may be wrong about your interpretation of that oath, so the only answer is to, basically, bounce it to the populace and see what the people’s interpretation of that document is (might have to go through the news, courts, and politics to ultimately get the public’s opinion). This will likely be a career killer—it wouldn’t be an obligation, if following it was easy and cost-free! This is not really what has happened here. In the NYC example: The police department is not an individual with an oath, it is a bureaucratic and legal entity that exists within a defined chain of command, it is supposed to comply with the laws that the government passes. In fact, if the department is asking individual officers to do something unethical by not following the law, the officers have an individual obligation to blow the whistle and not comply with the department. In the SF strike: The police union is a labor entity, it exists to represent the interests of the members. The officers were not saying they were asked as police officers to do something unconstitutional, they were saying that the order to not strike or protest was unconstitutional. That has nothing to do with their oath.
iudqnolq 4y ago
I've got no problem with that so long as there's also a standing policy that if you refuse to follow the law you're fired.
s5300 4y ago
>> If you believe a law is unconstitutional, you have an obligation to not enforce it. This is so funny because police overwhelmingly do not seek any form of higher education & are given guns to kill people in weeks-months of training they’re essentially babied & coddled through. Not a singular new police officer on the force in my small Ohio hometown took a singular advanced class in high school, and most of them legitimately got D’s and shit in basic US history class. These were my peers, some my friends. I know the level of their education and intellectual pursuits fairly well. If we live in a nation where people have a developed world 6th-8th grade level education at best enforcing what they think is unconstitutional, we’re utterly unbelievably fucked.
int_19h 4y ago
That would have been relevant if they were at least consistent about it. But, somehow, stuff like asset forfeiture or stop and frisk is never "unconstitutional" as far as cops are concerned, while stuff like publishing reports on their activities or removing qualified immunity suddenly is.

chimeracoder 4y ago

> As a police officer, you swear an oath to uphold the US Constitution. We'll, they routinely violate the Constitution too, so at least they're consistent.

crop_rotation 4y ago

Yeah right. Where does the US constitution gives police officers the right to decide whether a court order is "unconstitutional"?

salawat 4y ago
Actually, it stems from the Nuremberg Trials, and actually having a goddamn moral compass. If you're looking for something a bit more internal to the U.S., look no further than the original Declaration of Independence. While it may scare the bajeezus out of many, the responsibility for calling out governmental bullshit is vested solely with the People, and law enforcers are still People to. Welcome to why the United States is "Home of the Brave". It takes courage to stick around in a melting pot of crazy, and you never really know who is coming to dinner, or how long the civility is going to hold out.
- cmh89 4y ago
  >Actually, it stems from the Nuremberg Trials, and actually having a goddamn moral compass It doesn't 'stem' from anywhere. It's just a right-wing thing to pretend that police have some unwritten ability to decide the legality of laws. > While it may scare the bajeezus out of many, the responsibility for calling out governmental bullshit is vested solely with the People, and law enforcers are still People to. Calling out 'governmental bullshit' is something they can do on their own time by practicing their 1st amendment rights. Choosing to not enforce a law because you don't like it is not free speech. It's job abandonment and should be treated as such. If you think part of your job is morally wrong, you should quit.
  - salawat 4y ago
    >Calling out 'governmental bullshit' is something they can do on their own time by practicing their 1st amendment rights. Choosing to not enforce a law because you don't like it is not free speech. It's job abandonment and should be treated as such. >If you think part of your job is morally wrong, you should quit. Sometimes, quitting is just setting the stage for the next unscrupulous individual to come in and really muck things up where at least if you are still there, there's a brake, and a voice in the room. See the head of the Boston Office of the FBI. Those dead set on abusing power would prefer that all those principled people would just get out of the way to let them steamroll the populace or enact their designs. >It doesn't 'stem' from anywhere. It's just a right-wing thing to pretend that police have some unwritten ability to decide the legality of laws. It isn't a right wing thing. It's a fact of life. Lets say every cop isn't fine with law X. You say you'll dismiss every cop who won't enforce it. You start doing it. You fire cops in droves. You'll very quickly start running out of candidates for the job, or you'll find yourself having to make concessions elsewhere. In fact, if it's a lot of cops you get rid of, you may find yourself short of any degree of law enforcement. Anyone who has ever found themselves running a Department of a large organization will be familiar with the phenomena by which work to be done requires people to do it; and whereby if you don't have enough bodies to do it, it doesn't get done or is otherwise "pocket veto'd". In reality, everyone has limited bandwidth to effect things in proximity to themselves every day. No one person can be everywhere at once. So you have to delegate. Ergo everyone you delegate to is a potential filter on what things actually get done. If they don't do it, and you can't, it ain't getting done. As much as anyone wants to believe police are cogs... Really take the time to think on the fact that if they fon't do it, it doesn't get done. They are as much a part of setting what the law really is as the judges, juries, DA's that close the loop. I don't care what the law is on paper. I care about what the cop in closest proximity to me thinks about it. And as far as policing the police? Internal Affairs, much like Quality Assurance in software, is a bitch. No one likes it when you're really doing your job, friends are few, and the politics and potential for undermining is ungodly. You alone are tasked with handling the banality of your own group objectively every damn day, and it wears on you.
    - cmh89 4y ago
- bee_rider 4y ago
  The issue here is that these departments are not complying with elected officials and laws. The individual has an obligation to not-comply a with an illegal order and blow the whistle so the public can weigh in. The department should faithfully implement the instructions of the public. For example if the whole department really thinks that the requirement for the police to report their surveillance equipment is unconstitutional, they they should all quit and tell the public about this apparent grand violation of their right as police officers to secretly spy on the public.
- ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
  the flaw in this logic is that, while cops are people, they are not The People, and they don't usually reflect The Will Of The People
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

eastWestMath 4y ago

As a police officer you also typically have a high school education, and your idea of whether or not something is constitutional carries little to no weight.

DANmode 4y ago
It didn't used to be that way, and doesn't need to be now.
yucky 4y ago
Not to poopoo your train of thought but I wouldn't put any faith in someone that's college educated having a better understanding of constitutionality either. Most college degrees are useless now, with the majority of college grads being roughly as educated as the average high school grad a couple of decades ago. And the majority of the ones that do actually hold any value don't give you much expertise on Constitutional law.

fakedang 4y ago

I thought deciding what laws are constitutional or not falls upon the Supreme Court? Wait, police get to choose which parts of the Constitution they want to enforce and which they don't? Right, police state it is.

bee_rider 4y ago

This sort of thinking is, I think, pretty important. It is good if people feel responsible for following their oaths and professional obligations. This obviously depends on a personal interpretation of those obligations, so it will have to be performed by all us laymen. I don’t think, as some of the other comments here have pointed out, that the lack of legal training is a huge problem. But that’s a personal obligation. And the obligation is not to simply not comply, it is to blow the whistle. You very well may be wrong about your interpretation of that oath, so the only answer is to, basically, bounce it to the populace and see what the people’s interpretation of that document is (might have to go through the news, courts, and politics to ultimately get the public’s opinion). This will likely be a career killer—it wouldn’t be an obligation, if following it was easy and cost-free! This is not really what has happened here. In the NYC example: The police department is not an individual with an oath, it is a bureaucratic and legal entity that exists within a defined chain of command, it is supposed to comply with the laws that the government passes. In fact, if the department is asking individual officers to do something unethical by not following the law, the officers have an individual obligation to blow the whistle and not comply with the department. In the SF strike: The police union is a labor entity, it exists to represent the interests of the members. The officers were not saying they were asked as police officers to do something unconstitutional, they were saying that the order to not strike or protest was unconstitutional. That has nothing to do with their oath.

iudqnolq 4y ago

I've got no problem with that so long as there's also a standing policy that if you refuse to follow the law you're fired.

s5300 4y ago

>> If you believe a law is unconstitutional, you have an obligation to not enforce it. This is so funny because police overwhelmingly do not seek any form of higher education & are given guns to kill people in weeks-months of training they’re essentially babied & coddled through. Not a singular new police officer on the force in my small Ohio hometown took a singular advanced class in high school, and most of them legitimately got D’s and shit in basic US history class. These were my peers, some my friends. I know the level of their education and intellectual pursuits fairly well. If we live in a nation where people have a developed world 6th-8th grade level education at best enforcing what they think is unconstitutional, we’re utterly unbelievably fucked.

int_19h 4y ago

That would have been relevant if they were at least consistent about it. But, somehow, stuff like asset forfeiture or stop and frisk is never "unconstitutional" as far as cops are concerned, while stuff like publishing reports on their activities or removing qualified immunity suddenly is.