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Can American policing be fixed?
- hasty_pudding 3y ago[flagged]
- wenebego 3y agoIs this the hn equivalent of the 4chan copy pasta
- hasty_pudding 3y ago[flagged]
- wenebego 3y agoThats what they say there too
- hasty_pudding 3y ago[flagged]
- wenebego 3y ago[flagged]
- hasty_pudding 3y ago[flagged]
- snakeyjake 3y ago[flagged]
- tyingq 3y ago> Since Americans tend to be heavily-armed paranoiacs While the percentage of gun owners, or people living in a household with a gun owner are high...they aren't the majority.
- whythre 3y agoPolice don’t interact with the majority of the populace, they typically interact with criminals, who are often armed, despite numerous and often overlapping gun laws. Felons will carry guns, or thumb their nose at concealment laws, or ignore gun-free zones. Those who habitually break the law do not care about such rules.
- eddd-ddde 3y agoBut the police should interact with the majority of the populace. Anyone should be able to approach and ask for help, without feeling like they will get shot at.
- snakeyjake 3y agoJust about half of all American adults live in a house with a gun. I would say that's tending towards being armed. As far as paranoia goes, you only have to look as far as HN, where (according to the commenters) every company is evil, every regulation is oppressive, every new technology is dangerous, every assertion by a professional is a lie, every government is tyrannical, every intention is malicious, and every Apple software release is worse than the last :-) So for cops to think every person they come in contact with is armed is not outside of the realm of reasonable. If you yourself are a paranoiac it is hard to see why this is wrong but I'm not so it's jarring but I understand it.
- JohnFen 3y agoI think you're exaggerating here. HN doesn't have a universal opinion about anything. Sure, there are people who have the attitude you describe (although it's rare that a single person has all of those stances), but there are also people who don't. HN commenters overall have pretty diverse opinions about those things, and for each one of them you can find commenters who are of the opposite opinion.
- NortySpock 3y agoBest solution I heard was to require police to carry individual "malpractice" insurance. Good cops will tend to get better insurance rates than cops who rough up their fellow citizens on video.
- wyldfire 3y agoMaybe? But this implies an elimination of/constraints on qualified immunity [1]. They don't need insurance if they have no liability. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jfengel 3y agoThe police departments and cities already provide a kind of self-insurance. They're the ones who have to pay the lawsuits. They're already in a position to want to keep good officers and reject bad ones -- and to lower the salaries of ones that they think will cost them. Too often, they don't exercise that power. There are many reasons for that, usually complicated and political. I suppose shifting the responsibility to an insurance company could potentially change the political stakes. But I'm not sure if any insurance company wants responsibility for firing/pricing-out officers they think are bad. They'd need access to close supervision, and I don't know if the police departments would want to grant that kind of supervision from somebody who isn't even an elected body.
- inglor_cz 3y ago1. Qualified immunity needs to go, it isn't even law; it was concocted by SCOTUS out of nothing in 1967. 2. A special force that only investigates law enforcement officers and their wrongdoing (like GIBS in Czechia [0]) could help. Not even police can police themselves. 3. A lot more professional education for officers would be good, US officers have less training than their counterparts in other developed countries. [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Inspection_of_Security_Forces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Inspection_of_Security... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56834733 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56834733
- Smoosh 3y agoResponding to point 1, it is interesting that this is diametrically opposed to recent rulings by SCOTUS which have ruled that government agencies (EPA for example) cannot act without specific supporting legislation.
- mc32 3y agoThe kinds of policing that happens depends a lot on the population being policed. Policing in a violent section of Mex City, Paris, Lagos, Jburg, etc., will be similar to sections of cities in the US where violence is prevalent. More peaceful sections of the city get policed differently because the crimes committed and incidence of crimes are different. The interesting about the Minn events is that the chokehold used was in their instruction booklet --of course that doesn't excuse the disregard for suspect's distress. The police need to be heavily trained on the difficulties and dangers of restraining an uncooperative subject (often under the influence of drugs). According to one study over 120 people are known to have died in prone positions, as it's referred to: https://www.9news.com/article/news/investigations/prone-restraint-police-deaths/73-a4ae192c-ceb6-4815-9e72-2f8a8072765c https://www.9news.com/article/news/investigations/prone-rest...
- haltIncomplete 3y ago[flagged]