6 ms·

I think the cops should now be billed for that 1.6mill. Garnish there salary to the end of their worthless life. Why should the taxpayers be stuck with these bi

by x0054 13y ago

I think the cops should now be billed for that 1.6mill. Garnish there salary to the end of their worthless life. Why should the taxpayers be stuck with these bills. The taxpayers didn't abuse and humiliated that poor man on a fucking whim, the individual police officers did. No pension, immediate dismissal, and garnishment of wages is the least that they deserve! This case should not end because they settled, make an example of these fucks. Also, even a first year law student would be able to easily throw out any and all evidence they have obtained this way. So the entire procedure was worthless, even if they had succeeded. Makes their conduct even worse. Evil and stupid!

lisper 13y ago
You don't think the people who hired the officers and supervised them should bear any of the responsibility?
- HarryHirsch 13y ago
  I don't think there's a law against criminal stupidity and keeping lax discipline. Now the cleanup, there's a problem. The usual and proven way to deal with corrupt police is to fire everyone and bring in new people from the other side of the country with no local obligations. But how do you do this in an impoverished county in New Mexico where no one wants to go?
  - lisper 13y ago
    > I don't think there's a law against criminal stupidity and keeping lax discipline. There may not be a law against criminal stupidity, but there is certainly (by definition) a law against criminal negligence (if there weren't a law against it, it wouldn't be criminal). If, for example, the officers' supervisors established a work culture that condoned framing people that could easily rise to the legal standard of criminal negligence.
- bayesianhorse 13y ago
  Which would be the general public. Which is both bearing some of the responsibility and most of the bill.
pstuart 13y ago
Make them insure themselves out of their own pension fund.
- erichocean 13y ago
  This is an incredibly good, innovative idea. Thanks for sharing it.
rhizome 13y ago
Why should the taxpayers be stuck with these bills Simply because the police unions put it into the city contract and the politicians signed it.
suresk 13y ago
Until taxpayers start demanding more accountability and professionalism from their police force, they should be stuck with those bills. Police do stuff like this (and get away with it) because the public, generally speaking, assumes that anyone who is abused or treated unfairly by police must have done something to deserve it. The individuals involved should certainly be punished (though they rarely ever are), but the taxpayers have some culpability as well.
- brianpgordon 13y ago
  I pay taxes. I'm blown away by your assertion that I'm to any extent at blame for this crime. Some people abuse a man and I'm at fault because I don't write to my senator?
  - shiven 13y ago
    As a tax-paying citizen, it is your duty to yourself, your family and the society you live in (and leave for the next generation), that you exercise your right to write to your congress-critter/mayor/block-rep, as and when you feel an injustice is happening, especially something that is a gross abuse of authority.
    - ahallock 13y ago
      Writing your congressman is the least you could do. Maybe get out there and start filming the police, raise awareness about jury nullification, encourage peaceful parenting so we don't have bullies on the police payroll--etc. These are more effective than writing some narcissist who cares more about getting re-elected than what's just.
    - DougWebb 13y ago
      Writing your congressman is useless, unless you're signing a check.
  - MichaelGG 13y ago
    I don't think anyone is accusing you personally. Just that collectively, the taxpayers as a class, elect such people. That's why there's still a war on drugs. If most of the voting population was remotely rational, things would be fixed. So yes, the taxpayers should pay. They, as a group, are responsible. (The individual LEOs involved in this case should be harshly penalized, too.)
smsm42 13y ago
That's not individual cop's problem. They were taught this way. They were taught if you get a permission from a dog that alone justifies subjecting a person to torture. They were taught if a criminal addicted to every known drug in existence says something in order to lower his sentence, it's ok to use this as sole basis to break into homes and shoot whoever is in there. And the others, like doctors were taught to willingly participate in these abuses, because drugs! think of the children! Making an example of these fucks would do nothing, because every citizen of the US that supports war on drugs is creating these fucks. Until US citizens wake up and demand the government to stop the war on US citizens, that and worse is going to happen. In war, that's what happens. This war - longest and most harmful war in American history - has to be ended. And US citizens have the power to end it, if only they has the will and reason to stop believing in lies that WOD proponents feed them.
- mistercow 13y ago
  I don't think that blame is a conserved quantity. Yes, the whole war on drugs complex is a problem, but that doesn't absolve the individual cops of responsibility. More pragmatically, a lack of serious consequences is part of why cops have learned to behave this way. Get rid of the war on drugs, and you haven't fully solved the problem. Nothing about this situation would be any more acceptable if instead of drugs, they had been searching for child pornography, a bomb, or an abused animal.
  - AnthonyMouse 13y ago
    > Nothing about this situation would be any more acceptable if instead of drugs, they had been searching for child pornography, a bomb, or an abused animal. The difference is that the other things you've listed are far less common and far less lucrative than illegal drugs. If you took away the war on drugs then you could give law enforcement significantly less than their current budget and still have them allocate more officers to each case, have them each spend more time on it, train them each better, etc. etc. The war on drugs is the primary impetus for the militarization of the police force. Police should be investigators, not soldiers. The war on drugs encourages them to behave like soldiers which is the root cause of their unacceptable behavior.
ArcticCelt 13y ago
Police officers should be required have insurances to cover those lawsuits and any damage should be payed by the insurance company. This way police officers who keep screwing up and abusing their power would get higher and higher premiums until they reach a point where they can't be a cop anymore because it would be to expensive for them. It would weed out the assholes and taxpayer would not have to pay directly.
- mattzito 13y ago
  Great idea, except certain types of police work have a much higher likelihood of being accused of brutality or handling cases incorrectly. Work property crimes? No one will ever accuse you of abuse. Work narcotics or traffic stops in a rough part of town? A lot more likely.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - adventured 13y ago
    A lot of this is solved with a requirement that police officers must always be on cam (cameras that they carry on their person must be on at all times). Everybody benefits except the scumbag cops and the criminals.
    - FireBeyond 13y ago
      Isn't it curious, then, that one of the most staunch arguments against police cameras are the police unions?
      - mattzito 13y ago
        I have family members who are (good) police officers and I've discussed this with them in great detail. Their concerns boil down to the following: - Some of the pro-camera advocates are in favor of gun cameras, which turn on when a gun is drawn. The fairly reasonable argument against those is that they fail to capture what happened immediately prior to the gun being drawn, lacking context - The always-on cameras are unpleasant to consider, simply because who wants to be recorded all the time? There's a concern that a casual conversation before a police incident might be taken out of context or used to embarass the officer - There are also cameras that are designed to activate either manually or automatically when you leave your squad car. These are better, but apparently there are reliability issues, or what happens when a camera accidentally does not turn on? Is the officer automatically going to be judged as negligent? - Beyond these things, police departments have generally terrible IT. Who's going to maintain the cameras? Who's going to manage the retention of the video? What about the privacy of the officers? And so on. Note, I'm not saying these are universally valid complaints, or that the reality would be as bad as officers fear. But I think that in the same way people in general chafe against oversight that they worry could be used against them, police officers worry about being monitored and tracked moreso than they already are. When I asked them what they thought should be done to curb police abuses, one of them who is a senior police official pointed out that study after study shows that the vast majority of police abuses are committed by a very small number of officers. That the better way to handle police officers who abuse their power is to make it easier to get rid of police officers who are bad instead of spending lots of money and effort to try to watch all officers. They did all agree though that in a perfect world cameras would be awesome, because it would remove a lot of the worry they have around someone lying about their behavior. Their concerns were around real-world implementation. I'm personally in favor of cameras for police, but I wanted to present the other side of the argument I've heard.
amurmann 13y ago
In fact institutions should never carry the blame alone. In every case may it be police officers or company employees, the actual people who did something should always be prosecuted as well. Institutions eating up all the punishment and individuals getting away is ruining the legal system and our society. But companies are people...
smsm42 13y ago
And if anybody is interested how cops are usually "punished" for things like these, check this out: http://reason.com/archives/2014/01/26/pepper-sprayer-hits-the-jackpo http://reason.com/archives/2014/01/26/pepper-sprayer-hits-th...

by x0054 13y ago

lisper 13y ago

You don't think the people who hired the officers and supervised them should bear any of the responsibility?

HarryHirsch 13y ago
I don't think there's a law against criminal stupidity and keeping lax discipline. Now the cleanup, there's a problem. The usual and proven way to deal with corrupt police is to fire everyone and bring in new people from the other side of the country with no local obligations. But how do you do this in an impoverished county in New Mexico where no one wants to go?
- lisper 13y ago
  > I don't think there's a law against criminal stupidity and keeping lax discipline. There may not be a law against criminal stupidity, but there is certainly (by definition) a law against criminal negligence (if there weren't a law against it, it wouldn't be criminal). If, for example, the officers' supervisors established a work culture that condoned framing people that could easily rise to the legal standard of criminal negligence.
bayesianhorse 13y ago
Which would be the general public. Which is both bearing some of the responsibility and most of the bill.

pstuart 13y ago

Make them insure themselves out of their own pension fund.

erichocean 13y ago
This is an incredibly good, innovative idea. Thanks for sharing it.

rhizome 13y ago

Why should the taxpayers be stuck with these bills Simply because the police unions put it into the city contract and the politicians signed it.

suresk 13y ago

Until taxpayers start demanding more accountability and professionalism from their police force, they should be stuck with those bills. Police do stuff like this (and get away with it) because the public, generally speaking, assumes that anyone who is abused or treated unfairly by police must have done something to deserve it. The individuals involved should certainly be punished (though they rarely ever are), but the taxpayers have some culpability as well.

brianpgordon 13y ago
I pay taxes. I'm blown away by your assertion that I'm to any extent at blame for this crime. Some people abuse a man and I'm at fault because I don't write to my senator?
- shiven 13y ago
  As a tax-paying citizen, it is your duty to yourself, your family and the society you live in (and leave for the next generation), that you exercise your right to write to your congress-critter/mayor/block-rep, as and when you feel an injustice is happening, especially something that is a gross abuse of authority.
  - ahallock 13y ago
    Writing your congressman is the least you could do. Maybe get out there and start filming the police, raise awareness about jury nullification, encourage peaceful parenting so we don't have bullies on the police payroll--etc. These are more effective than writing some narcissist who cares more about getting re-elected than what's just.
  - DougWebb 13y ago
    Writing your congressman is useless, unless you're signing a check.
- MichaelGG 13y ago
  I don't think anyone is accusing you personally. Just that collectively, the taxpayers as a class, elect such people. That's why there's still a war on drugs. If most of the voting population was remotely rational, things would be fixed. So yes, the taxpayers should pay. They, as a group, are responsible. (The individual LEOs involved in this case should be harshly penalized, too.)

smsm42 13y ago

That's not individual cop's problem. They were taught this way. They were taught if you get a permission from a dog that alone justifies subjecting a person to torture. They were taught if a criminal addicted to every known drug in existence says something in order to lower his sentence, it's ok to use this as sole basis to break into homes and shoot whoever is in there. And the others, like doctors were taught to willingly participate in these abuses, because drugs! think of the children! Making an example of these fucks would do nothing, because every citizen of the US that supports war on drugs is creating these fucks. Until US citizens wake up and demand the government to stop the war on US citizens, that and worse is going to happen. In war, that's what happens. This war - longest and most harmful war in American history - has to be ended. And US citizens have the power to end it, if only they has the will and reason to stop believing in lies that WOD proponents feed them.

mistercow 13y ago
I don't think that blame is a conserved quantity. Yes, the whole war on drugs complex is a problem, but that doesn't absolve the individual cops of responsibility. More pragmatically, a lack of serious consequences is part of why cops have learned to behave this way. Get rid of the war on drugs, and you haven't fully solved the problem. Nothing about this situation would be any more acceptable if instead of drugs, they had been searching for child pornography, a bomb, or an abused animal.
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  > Nothing about this situation would be any more acceptable if instead of drugs, they had been searching for child pornography, a bomb, or an abused animal. The difference is that the other things you've listed are far less common and far less lucrative than illegal drugs. If you took away the war on drugs then you could give law enforcement significantly less than their current budget and still have them allocate more officers to each case, have them each spend more time on it, train them each better, etc. etc. The war on drugs is the primary impetus for the militarization of the police force. Police should be investigators, not soldiers. The war on drugs encourages them to behave like soldiers which is the root cause of their unacceptable behavior.

ArcticCelt 13y ago

Police officers should be required have insurances to cover those lawsuits and any damage should be payed by the insurance company. This way police officers who keep screwing up and abusing their power would get higher and higher premiums until they reach a point where they can't be a cop anymore because it would be to expensive for them. It would weed out the assholes and taxpayer would not have to pay directly.

mattzito 13y ago
Great idea, except certain types of police work have a much higher likelihood of being accused of brutality or handling cases incorrectly. Work property crimes? No one will ever accuse you of abuse. Work narcotics or traffic stops in a rough part of town? A lot more likely.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- adventured 13y ago
  A lot of this is solved with a requirement that police officers must always be on cam (cameras that they carry on their person must be on at all times). Everybody benefits except the scumbag cops and the criminals.
  - FireBeyond 13y ago
    Isn't it curious, then, that one of the most staunch arguments against police cameras are the police unions?
    - mattzito 13y ago
      I have family members who are (good) police officers and I've discussed this with them in great detail. Their concerns boil down to the following: - Some of the pro-camera advocates are in favor of gun cameras, which turn on when a gun is drawn. The fairly reasonable argument against those is that they fail to capture what happened immediately prior to the gun being drawn, lacking context - The always-on cameras are unpleasant to consider, simply because who wants to be recorded all the time? There's a concern that a casual conversation before a police incident might be taken out of context or used to embarass the officer - There are also cameras that are designed to activate either manually or automatically when you leave your squad car. These are better, but apparently there are reliability issues, or what happens when a camera accidentally does not turn on? Is the officer automatically going to be judged as negligent? - Beyond these things, police departments have generally terrible IT. Who's going to maintain the cameras? Who's going to manage the retention of the video? What about the privacy of the officers? And so on. Note, I'm not saying these are universally valid complaints, or that the reality would be as bad as officers fear. But I think that in the same way people in general chafe against oversight that they worry could be used against them, police officers worry about being monitored and tracked moreso than they already are. When I asked them what they thought should be done to curb police abuses, one of them who is a senior police official pointed out that study after study shows that the vast majority of police abuses are committed by a very small number of officers. That the better way to handle police officers who abuse their power is to make it easier to get rid of police officers who are bad instead of spending lots of money and effort to try to watch all officers. They did all agree though that in a perfect world cameras would be awesome, because it would remove a lot of the worry they have around someone lying about their behavior. Their concerns were around real-world implementation. I'm personally in favor of cameras for police, but I wanted to present the other side of the argument I've heard.

amurmann 13y ago

In fact institutions should never carry the blame alone. In every case may it be police officers or company employees, the actual people who did something should always be prosecuted as well. Institutions eating up all the punishment and individuals getting away is ruining the legal system and our society. But companies are people...

smsm42 13y ago

And if anybody is interested how cops are usually "punished" for things like these, check this out: http://reason.com/archives/2014/01/26/pepper-sprayer-hits-the-jackpo http://reason.com/archives/2014/01/26/pepper-sprayer-hits-th...