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Already, police do this exact shakedown on cities. There are numerous incidents (anecdotal) of US police threatening city officials to reduce enforcement during

Already, police do this exact shakedown on cities. There are numerous incidents (anecdotal) of US police threatening city officials to reduce enforcement during election cycles, demanding increases in police force budget. Broadly, the US needs to eliminate corruption. There are many broken feedback loops right now from the grand (lobbying and campaign finance) to the minuscule (niche price fixing, bribery, police-ran protection rackets), all compounding unfavorably, all seemingly booming. It's astonishing the degree to which the public tolerates such forms of ineptitude and subversion – it has a direct impact on everyone's bottom line.

NoGravitas 3y ago
The US has extremely low rates of corruption, because everything that would normally be considered corruption is legalized.
rednerrus 3y ago
[flagged]
- rpmisms 3y ago
  No. SAG-AFTRA members, with the notable exception of Alec Baldwin, can't shoot people and get away with it. Police have special privileges, and should be snapped back into last century before we allow them to abuse them.
- mulmen 3y ago
  In civil society running a protection racket isn’t a valid form of protest.
stevenwoo 3y ago
The Supreme Court is responsible for a lot of this, it has institutionalized immunity for law enforcement and prosecution and unlimited corporate money in politics so that it would require overriding that lever of power which doesn’t seem likely since democrats just rolled over when the gop wouldn’t allow Obama to appoint a Supreme Court justice.
- diogenes4 3y ago
  I'm not one to ever defend the institution of policing or the court system that feeds and protects it, but cops do not have general immunity. They have qualified immunity from civil cases in some places. The primary friction from prosecuting police for criminal behavior has been and will continue to be DAs unwilling to prosecute (for various reasons, some reasonable, and some nefarious).
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    Right, so they’ve culturally made it impossible for the government to go after them and legally impossible for citizens. Pretty sweet deal.
    - diogenes4 3y ago
      There are many reasons why police serve the role they do in society. Neglecting other reasons other than blatant racketeering—the role they play in preserving the institution of private property, the role they play in filling prisons, the role they play in preserving the illusion of justice—serves nobody.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
- sumedh 3y ago
  > since democrats just rolled over Did they have the majority in the senate, does the the senate leader decide the rules?
  - stevenwoo 3y ago
    They could have changed the rules when they got the majority and they could have pushed for alternatives with some random ideas off the top of my head a.) just putting their appointed justice on the court while Obama was still President since the constitution does not specifically say approval just consent so with the anything goes interpretation of original intent that the current supreme court uses why not, b.) packing the court after they got the majority, c.) deciding to make term limits for supreme court justices - the forever a justice is not in the constitution. It like the current situation where one senator Tuberville can block the mass appointment of military leadership, they could change the rules or do it one by one but the leadership is too afraid of changing the way things have always worked around here.
et-al 3y ago
The SF Police Department bombed the mayor's house in 1975: "In early August 1975, the SFPD went on strike over a pay dispute, violating a California law prohibiting police from striking. The city quickly obtained a court order declaring the strike illegal and enjoining the SFPD back to work. The court messenger delivering the order was met with violence and the SFPD continued to strike... The ACLU obtained a court order prohibiting strikers from carrying their service revolvers. Again, the SFPD ignored the court order. On August 20, a bomb detonated at the Mayor's home with a sign reading "Don't Threaten Us" left on his lawn. On August 21, Mayor Alioto advised the San Francisco Board of Supervisors that they should concede to the strikers' demands." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_San_Francisco_Police_Department https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_San_Francisco_P...
- thmsths 3y ago
  Very naive question: why did Federal law enforcement not get involved?
  - greyface- 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_wall_of_silence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_wall_of_silence
  - School-Cotton 3y ago
    Federal law enforcement (FBI etc) has a tiny amount of manpower compared to local police. In theory the national guard could have been called in but that would be a huge escalation and I doubt the elected officials wanted to go there.
    - lacoolj 3y ago
      I feel like blowing up the mayor's house is a pretty big escalation
      - School-Cotton 3y ago
0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago
>It's astonishing the degree to which the public tolerates such forms of ineptitude and subversion – it has a direct impact on everyone's bottom line. The George Floyd protests were huge. I don't think it's a simple matter of the public being too complacent. I'd say that insofar as the protests were unsuccessful, it's because their energy wasn't being directed strategically. There was so much discussion of "defunding the police" without anyone offering a clear, compelling alternative approach to public safety and deterring crime. From a systems-level perspective, telling everyone that police officers are jerks seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nice people place a high priority on being well-regarded by others; jerks enjoy opportunities to abuse their power. The "ACAB" slogan exacerbates the problem it describes. One question I wonder about is whether jurisdictions where the chief of police is elected tend to function better than jurisdictions where they're appointed by the mayor. There are so many dimensions along which mayoral performance can be evaluated, and public safety is just one of those. By squeezing all the dimensions into a single vote, we're limiting the amount of signal that voters can send to their government. I don't think policing inherently needs to be a malicious activity. My impression is that police quality is higher in Europe than the US for instance, and that police quality changes depending on which US municipality you look at. One wild idea I sometimes dream about: Imagine if each city had multiple competing police departments, and every cop wore the logo of the department they worked for prominently on their shoulder. Then for each local election, voters vote for one or more logos, and police work + funding gets distributed to the competing departments accordingly. Every time you call to report a crime, it gets assigned semi-randomly to one of the departments, and you're told which department got the assignment. Basically, make police brutality and police corruption into a customer satisfaction issue. The very best police chiefs could make millions of dollars starting police companies which effectively served and protected cities across America. Yeah, I know HN dislikes capitalism. But it's interesting that policing as an industry has very little capitalist competition -- it's entirely organized by the government -- and yet no one seems satisfied with it. I'd argue capitalist competition can work great if companies are competing to succeed at the correct metric. Alleged failures of capitalism often strike me as failures of the competition metric rather than failures of capitalism per se.
- VirusNewbie 3y ago
downrightmike 3y ago
We don't have cities, we have police departments with a few ancillary services. Example: https://kypolicy.org/kentuckys-largest-cities-spend-a-quarter-of-their-budgets-on-police/ https://kypolicy.org/kentuckys-largest-cities-spend-a-quarte...
anigbrowl 3y ago
The genius of American political life is in defining problems out of existence with ever more complex legal and rhetorical terminology, while working overtime on training people to affirm that they are the freest country in the world.
School-Cotton 3y ago
It’s widely believed in New York (I’m not knowledgeable enough to know whether it’s true, but it’s at least widely believed) that the police have been on a “soft strike” since 2020 and have been refusing to deal with anything but the most egregious situations, for political reasons.
- exclusiv 3y ago
  Anecdotally, my camera system alerted me and I witnessed someone enter my neighbors vehicle. I got my neighbor and we got the dude out of the car and I asked him unkindly what the hell he was doing and if he had stolen anything. When police arrived much later the perp actually showed back up down the street and I pointed him out. It was a struggle to get them to go see who he was and investigate, even though I had photo and video evidence of the crime. Later that night, that same guy broke into another neighbor's house and they came in much hotter, with shotguns to clear the house and they were able to arrest him not far down the street.

NoGravitas 3y ago

The US has extremely low rates of corruption, because everything that would normally be considered corruption is legalized.

rednerrus 3y ago

[flagged]

rpmisms 3y ago
No. SAG-AFTRA members, with the notable exception of Alec Baldwin, can't shoot people and get away with it. Police have special privileges, and should be snapped back into last century before we allow them to abuse them.
mulmen 3y ago
In civil society running a protection racket isn’t a valid form of protest.

stevenwoo 3y ago

The Supreme Court is responsible for a lot of this, it has institutionalized immunity for law enforcement and prosecution and unlimited corporate money in politics so that it would require overriding that lever of power which doesn’t seem likely since democrats just rolled over when the gop wouldn’t allow Obama to appoint a Supreme Court justice.

diogenes4 3y ago
I'm not one to ever defend the institution of policing or the court system that feeds and protects it, but cops do not have general immunity. They have qualified immunity from civil cases in some places. The primary friction from prosecuting police for criminal behavior has been and will continue to be DAs unwilling to prosecute (for various reasons, some reasonable, and some nefarious).
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Right, so they’ve culturally made it impossible for the government to go after them and legally impossible for citizens. Pretty sweet deal.
  - diogenes4 3y ago
    There are many reasons why police serve the role they do in society. Neglecting other reasons other than blatant racketeering—the role they play in preserving the institution of private property, the role they play in filling prisons, the role they play in preserving the illusion of justice—serves nobody.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
sumedh 3y ago
> since democrats just rolled over Did they have the majority in the senate, does the the senate leader decide the rules?
- stevenwoo 3y ago
  They could have changed the rules when they got the majority and they could have pushed for alternatives with some random ideas off the top of my head a.) just putting their appointed justice on the court while Obama was still President since the constitution does not specifically say approval just consent so with the anything goes interpretation of original intent that the current supreme court uses why not, b.) packing the court after they got the majority, c.) deciding to make term limits for supreme court justices - the forever a justice is not in the constitution. It like the current situation where one senator Tuberville can block the mass appointment of military leadership, they could change the rules or do it one by one but the leadership is too afraid of changing the way things have always worked around here.

et-al 3y ago

The SF Police Department bombed the mayor's house in 1975: "In early August 1975, the SFPD went on strike over a pay dispute, violating a California law prohibiting police from striking. The city quickly obtained a court order declaring the strike illegal and enjoining the SFPD back to work. The court messenger delivering the order was met with violence and the SFPD continued to strike... The ACLU obtained a court order prohibiting strikers from carrying their service revolvers. Again, the SFPD ignored the court order. On August 20, a bomb detonated at the Mayor's home with a sign reading "Don't Threaten Us" left on his lawn. On August 21, Mayor Alioto advised the San Francisco Board of Supervisors that they should concede to the strikers' demands." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_San_Francisco_Police_Department https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_San_Francisco_P...

thmsths 3y ago
Very naive question: why did Federal law enforcement not get involved?
- greyface- 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_wall_of_silence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_wall_of_silence
- School-Cotton 3y ago
  Federal law enforcement (FBI etc) has a tiny amount of manpower compared to local police. In theory the national guard could have been called in but that would be a huge escalation and I doubt the elected officials wanted to go there.
  - lacoolj 3y ago
    I feel like blowing up the mayor's house is a pretty big escalation
    - School-Cotton 3y ago

0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago

>It's astonishing the degree to which the public tolerates such forms of ineptitude and subversion – it has a direct impact on everyone's bottom line. The George Floyd protests were huge. I don't think it's a simple matter of the public being too complacent. I'd say that insofar as the protests were unsuccessful, it's because their energy wasn't being directed strategically. There was so much discussion of "defunding the police" without anyone offering a clear, compelling alternative approach to public safety and deterring crime. From a systems-level perspective, telling everyone that police officers are jerks seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nice people place a high priority on being well-regarded by others; jerks enjoy opportunities to abuse their power. The "ACAB" slogan exacerbates the problem it describes. One question I wonder about is whether jurisdictions where the chief of police is elected tend to function better than jurisdictions where they're appointed by the mayor. There are so many dimensions along which mayoral performance can be evaluated, and public safety is just one of those. By squeezing all the dimensions into a single vote, we're limiting the amount of signal that voters can send to their government. I don't think policing inherently needs to be a malicious activity. My impression is that police quality is higher in Europe than the US for instance, and that police quality changes depending on which US municipality you look at. One wild idea I sometimes dream about: Imagine if each city had multiple competing police departments, and every cop wore the logo of the department they worked for prominently on their shoulder. Then for each local election, voters vote for one or more logos, and police work + funding gets distributed to the competing departments accordingly. Every time you call to report a crime, it gets assigned semi-randomly to one of the departments, and you're told which department got the assignment. Basically, make police brutality and police corruption into a customer satisfaction issue. The very best police chiefs could make millions of dollars starting police companies which effectively served and protected cities across America. Yeah, I know HN dislikes capitalism. But it's interesting that policing as an industry has very little capitalist competition -- it's entirely organized by the government -- and yet no one seems satisfied with it. I'd argue capitalist competition can work great if companies are competing to succeed at the correct metric. Alleged failures of capitalism often strike me as failures of the competition metric rather than failures of capitalism per se.

VirusNewbie 3y ago

downrightmike 3y ago

We don't have cities, we have police departments with a few ancillary services. Example: https://kypolicy.org/kentuckys-largest-cities-spend-a-quarter-of-their-budgets-on-police/ https://kypolicy.org/kentuckys-largest-cities-spend-a-quarte...

anigbrowl 3y ago

The genius of American political life is in defining problems out of existence with ever more complex legal and rhetorical terminology, while working overtime on training people to affirm that they are the freest country in the world.

School-Cotton 3y ago

It’s widely believed in New York (I’m not knowledgeable enough to know whether it’s true, but it’s at least widely believed) that the police have been on a “soft strike” since 2020 and have been refusing to deal with anything but the most egregious situations, for political reasons.

exclusiv 3y ago
Anecdotally, my camera system alerted me and I witnessed someone enter my neighbors vehicle. I got my neighbor and we got the dude out of the car and I asked him unkindly what the hell he was doing and if he had stolen anything. When police arrived much later the perp actually showed back up down the street and I pointed him out. It was a struggle to get them to go see who he was and investigate, even though I had photo and video evidence of the crime. Later that night, that same guy broke into another neighbor's house and they came in much hotter, with shotguns to clear the house and they were able to arrest him not far down the street.