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There's "taking pride in your work", and there's "the thin blue line". One of those things is healthy. The other is emphatically not. It's left as an exercise
by rosser 11y ago
There's "taking pride in your work", and there's "the thin blue line". One of those things is healthy. The other is emphatically not.
It's left as an exercise for the reader to determine which is which.
- dragontamer 11y agoAgreed. But then there are plenty of newbie (and even veteran) cops who don't understand the difference either. Keeping that in mind, and educating them of the viewpoint is more important than yelling at them or breaking them down.
- shkkmo 11y agoAny examples on how to do this? I haven't seen many good examples of arguments that don't just swept under the rug.
- dragontamer 11y agoPolice Cameras in general. Most cities seem to "sell" police departments on the idea that they protect the officer, when in fact they are being used for reviewing officer behavior.
- rquantz 11y agoIf "pride" means doing childish things like the slowdown in New York last year, or apparently not investigating drive by shootings in Baltimore because the protesters hurt their feelings, then that pride needs to be ruthlessly rooted out and destroyed. We need cops who work for us – all of us – rather than for the FOP or PBA, and they need to understand that they have unconscious racial bias that needs to be counteracted. If they don't believe those things, fire them and get cops who will do their jobs.
- dragontamer 11y agoSo lemme get this straight. Your solution to an uptick of 48% more murders is to fire all the cops. Break the Police pride down, punish the cops. That's totally how you get people to risk their lives and patrol the West Districts of Baltimore. Absolutely brilliant. I wonder why no one has implemented this outstanding idea before. /sarcasm Let me give you a hint: If you Fire a Cop, they'll just work in another district. There are _plenty_ of safe districts looking for experienced officers, and there's almost no reason why an officer has to keep working in West Baltimore aside from pride. They can very easily jump to another richer district, one with fewer murders and higher-educated populace. And frankly, the smarter cops tend to do that. I think officers prefer to work in safe places and hand out speeding tickets all day... rather than taking on armed drug dealers in the worst parts of Baltimore.
- rosser 11y agoThen what's your solution? Telling everyone else they're wrong only goes so far — particularly in the face of the obvious and systemic problems that policing in America faces today. So offer some alternatives instead of just knocking everyone else down.
- dragontamer 11y agoIronic, when your only solution is firing everybody. As stated before, my solution is to create robust independent police review boards. It'd be something like New York City's model with an independent "Civilian Complaint Review Board", complete with subpoena power against officers. http://www.nyc.gov/html/ccrb/html/home/home.shtml http://www.nyc.gov/html/ccrb/html/home/home.shtml Anyway, Chicago's review board has indications of weakness, and the article above is simply a note of what is going on in that agency. Maybe the review board needs to hire more non-cops and more lawyers from the ACLU. The correct action depends a lot on the politics of the Chicago review board are. If the review board is appointed by the direct election, then the leaders need to be voted out and reformed. If the review board is appointed by the local mayor / city counsel, then we should organize political protests and bring up the Chicago Independent Police Review Authority as an actual issue during Chicago elections. If you don't live in the city of Chicago, then of course the article posted here doesn't apply to you. They don't apply to me either, but if it were happening in my city, that's how I'd start.