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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 wh

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.
      - maxerickson 13y ago
        I don't see any problem with giving the officer complete control over the camera. If the cameras are easy to use and reliable and such, the officers should be demanding that they be available, it will only make their testimony more credible. (to the extent they are going to abuse their power, they can just go set the stage for the camera when they are off duty or whatever, so I don't think that is the right case to optimize for)

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.
    - maxerickson 13y ago
      I don't see any problem with giving the officer complete control over the camera. If the cameras are easy to use and reliable and such, the officers should be demanding that they be available, it will only make their testimony more credible. (to the extent they are going to abuse their power, they can just go set the stage for the camera when they are off duty or whatever, so I don't think that is the right case to optimize for)