Having become very interested in police brutality for obvious reasons, I recently finished Danger, Duty, and Disillusion: the Worldview of Los Angeles Police Officers [1] by Joan Barker, an academic book from 1999 that takes an anthropologist's view to understanding the LAPD after the Rodney King riots, and pretty much the only work I could find that tries to understand the police officer mindset holistically.
It is utterly fascinating and I highly recommend it, but one of the most interesting takeaways (consistent with this article) is that police officers quickly become utterly disillusioned with the integrity of the police department as an institution. They complain about unfair recruitment and promotion policies, injured officers who become "disposable", an emphasis on quotas instead of applying the law consistently, on politicization of policing priorities, and above all the city always settling cases against police misconduct so that accused officers never get a chance to clear their name in court, when innocent.
With this mindset, when they don't trust their own institution, the only people they trust are fellow officers -- not captains, not management, not the department, not the mayor. Which aligns with this article -- that Marines view the Marines as a trustworthy institution, while police don't see their own police department in the same light.
Now obviously police misconduct and brutality exist and are a huge problem. But the book very much opened my eyes to the idea that it's not only the behavior of police officers that needs better standards and accountability -- that treating police officers themselves better and more fairly may also be just as necessary to achieve full transparency and accountability. What if the "blue wall of silence" dissolved because police officers trusted their own institution, rather than just each other?
I think it's important to understand the extent to which this is a culture, i.e. self-perpetuating in spite of outside influences.
While your comment explains the origin of this culture... it's generally not as easy to change such a culture as it is to maintain it. Once a group of people believe that the rest of the world does not understand them or is against them, they are somewhat inoculated against efforts by the rest of the world to change them.
New officers spend most of their time with older officers, not department leadership, not the mayor, not journalists, not activists, etc. Older officers teach younger officers how to act, and to some extent, what to believe. And, they act collectively to punish new officers who fail to adhere to this culture.
This is well-enough known to become a storytelling trope: a young idealistic officer finds him- or herself facing not only criminals, but also the cultural inertia of the disillusioned existing police force, as they try to do the right thing.
In many contexts, we accept that organizations have to end, and be replaced, to enact meaningful change. Companies go out business; political administrations lose elections.
This is why the idea of "abolish the police" or "defund the police" might not be as crazy as it sounds on its surface. It's not that we don't need people who are paid to investigate crime and keep people safe... obviously we do. But police forces as they currently exist may have too much cultural inertia to evolve the way they need to.
Here's one real-world example of ending and replacing a police organization:
"As a result of the ‘Rose Revolution’ of 2003, the government began a process of reform by sacking all the existing police and creating a smaller force of new recruits, with the help of the international community. The reformed police force became one of the most well-regarded institutions in the country."
To be fair, the cold reboot was their way of dealing with the traffic police specifically, not all police.
But still, the scale here is massive - they fired 30,000 people overall, and half of them on a single day. And, just as in US today, the opposition claimed that such a disruptive measure would unleash a wave of criminal or reckless behavior (on the roads), and a lot of people would die as a result. That didn't happen.
1. The NYPD isn't trying to replace their police workforce. They've simply stopped policing.
2. The current social ajd political environment would cause a hike in crime-rate regardless of police action, and it's not easy to disentangle the effects.
> Previous “slowdowns” by the NYPD have resulted in a drastic reduction in reported crime in NYC.
I couldn't find where that was mentioned in your linked article, but the Occam's razor takeaway is that the crime is still happening and not being reported because people know nothing will be done.
My bad, I just glanced and conflated two events. The one I had in mind was replacing the police force of Ukraine in 2015. A country of 44 million people fired all the 150 thousand policemen and hired 120 thousand new ones.
Small correction, population of Georgia (the country) is ~4 million, not 40 million. I've been there multiple times, it's a country trying very hard to become more European and less Soviet. I wish them well.
My bad, I just glanced and conflated two events. The one I had in mind was replacing the police force of Ukraine in 2015. A country of 44 million people fired all the 150 thousand policemen and hired 120 thousand new ones.
I don’t think anyone expects that to be done atomically. Most of the advocacy I have seen is directed at individual police departments, with some organization between the efforts and some advocacy for nationwide criminal justice and policing reform.
My bad, I just glanced and conflated two events. The one I had in mind was replacing the police force of Ukraine in 2015. A country of 44 million people fired all the 150 thousand policemen and hired 120 thousand new ones.
I've actually heard the some other devs say they interpret the current calls to action as "refactor the police".
Saying "defund" and "disband" has somewhat derailed the discussion with people asking "does that mean when we call 911 it goes to voicemail?"
"Reform" is already a loaded word, as it's been associated with plenty of do-nothing or make-the-situation-worse initiatives.
Refactor is a great choice, except for limited currency outside the programming sector. It implies wholesale changes, an attempt to improve quality, but also that the existing desired functionality is still being honoured.
Indeed, it does bring up the appropriatre set of folloup questions-- can this be refactored with reasonable cost constraints and chances of success?
You need to make an accurate comparison though. It's like shutting down your servers, rewriting from scratch, and hoping that your customers will still be there for you when you've reached feature parity.
One theory for why Chauvin stepped on Floyd's throat for 8 minutes with his hands in his pocket is that he was training 2 rookies on site and he was afraid that backing down to pressure from the public (people yelling at him to stop) would make him look weak and lose face in front of the rookies. And the rookies were deferential to Chauvin's seniority.
It's easy to imagine that if it was an overeager rookie on Floyd's neck, the rookie wouldn't have had his hands in his pocket and Chauvin would have told him to ease off a few minutes earlier before Floyd died.
In a sense it's not too different from the mindset when a captain crashes a plane over the better judgement of a junior co-pilot.
> In many contexts, we accept that organizations have to end, and be replaced, to enact meaningful change. Companies go out business; political administrations lose elections.
There’s obviously a significant difference between the regular election cycle (which applies to police chiefs and mayors that run these departments) and abolition. I don’t think the people calling to defund or abolish to police just want to see the administration change, or the officers get fired and re-hired.
I think aside from the Marxists and Anarchists there are very few people who are supportive of abolishing or defunding police. Fomenting resentment and fear of policing, advocating violence against police, and diminishing police’s right to self defense seems to be a deliberate strategy to destabilize communities and increase crime while framing attempts to restore law and order as oppression and racism.
Police forces have gone through some major and rapid shifts due to technology, first in terms of statistical tracking of crime and enforcement and more recently with regard to widespread surveillance and body cams.
Police can ultimately expect to have every response recorded, maybe even automatically analyzed and flagged by AI. Perhaps surprisingly most police are supportive of body cams because more often than not they are used to support an officer’s actions.
> I think aside from the Marxists and Anarchists there are very few people who are supportive of abolishing or defunding police.
The simple slogans and close approximations poll poorly, the actual concrete policy objectives wrapped up in the “defund” section of the movement, as distinct from the more radical “dismantle/abolish” section, poll quite well: https://www.vox.com/2020/6/23/21299118/defunding-the-police-...
But even with the more simplified versions, the support is more than Anarchists and Marxists, unless those are vastly more common than any previous research has suggested (so that they are a majority of Democrats and an even larger majority of Blacks): https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/64-americans-oppose-defund-p...
> and diminishing police’s right to self defense
Is not something the defund/demolish/abolish movement is interested in. That movement is interested in moving the police out of problematic situations in the first place (and in the extreme dismantle/abolish case, getting rid of the police and redistributing law enforcement responsibilities more diffusely and out of centralized paramilitary organizations), not in reducing the right of anyone to self-defense. If anything, it's the more “moderate” reformers who refuse to consider changes to the fundamental structure of law enforcement that are forced, because of that refusal, to try to address the problem by doing things that might fairly be described as restricting the rights of police to self-defense, or at least the available means.
And somehow those body cams malfunction at the most opportune time. Also, there are plenty of economical and libertarian reasons to defund the police, but I am guessing you somehow missed them during widespread discussion over the past 4 weeks.
That's interesting, but may not apply to the difference between military and police. My impression, confirmed by a family member who was in the army, is that soldiers are typically cynical about the military as an institution, and their loyalty is to fellow soldiers in their unit. It may in fact be typical of people in any large organization that their loyalty is to their team and not the institution. We're tribal creatures that way. And being subject to danger together strengthens bonding.
Former Marine here, and that's definitely true in this branch.
I'll say though, those who think it will be better out almost always get out when they can. The limitation of those so disenchanted with the Corps they think using the GI Bill or doing some other work will be better is the end of their current contract. It provides a sure out. You have to actively convince yourself it doesn't suck enough to be trapped another 2-6 years, while other jobs you need to take an active role in leaving. Those who stay in think the Corps is worth it.
I've been in a couple industries and never seen the same. People hate their job/occupation field/company, and stay in it for a million reasons. The military is nicely set up to spit out those who won't buy into the institution.
I would be curious to compare percentages within military and police forces of those who agree that "life would be better out, but I don't have a better opportunity out". I'd put money on that subsection of the population being much lower for military than police (and most to all other industries really).
> I've been in a couple industries and never seen the same. People hate their job/occupation field/company, and stay in it for a million reasons. The military is nicely set up to spit out those who won't buy into the institution.
That's an interesting point. Some companies, like Netflix, are famous for doing something like this. Offering new hires a lump sum at the end of their probation if they wish to leave.
I know the CEO of a company I once worked for was kinda enchanted with that idea. The company went so far to offer at one point a severance for anyone who wanted to leave within the next month. Small company but I'd guess based on what I heard 4-5% of company in the end took her up on it. And not necessarily the people she (or maybe just I) would have wanted to see leave.
I still thought it was an interesting experiment and not a bad idea. Your comment here reinforces that inclination.
Thanks for sharing. It makes sense that moving from an opt-out model to an opt-in model changes who stays, who goes, and how they feel about it but I never would have thought of it that way.
Do you think there would be meaningful changes if the police moved to using terms of enlistment? I can imagine a hypothetical society where signing up to serve as a police officer/constable/whatever would be mostly something people did for a single term because they felt it was a civic duty, or maybe because it let them access govt-provided education benefits.
Nobody on the right or left is really at ease with the militarization of police forces in terms of equipment, tactics, and outlook towards the policed. Even those who support harsh policing implicitly support it as something to be used against other people; no sane person would choose to be on the receiving end of a pre-dawn, no-knock warrant themselves.
Given that, it'd be ironic if it was a different sort of militarization which improved the state of policing.
I honestly can't say I know if moving to opt-in would change police forces. I'd guess that military provisions of the GI Bill and training towards some tradecraft also help make the decision to leave easier. I wonder if there is something along those lines that could sweeten the deal to get people both in and out with less friction.
Just riffing now, let's say you add benefits the police officer can use after a term (versus only retirement type benefits that incentivize staying in) and some means of assistance into a new occupational field within the first term. It would seem the force also gets the added benefits of (1) more and a wider range of recruits, (2) workers who hate it have incentive to leave or at least don't feel/aren't trapped, and (3) just guessing, but I imagine the cost of the whole force goes down. Between a drop in average time in service of police officers due to more dropping out and fewer staying to retirement, the cost of the whole police force would drop. The new benefits' costs are an offset, though.
Edit: I wonder how an ROTC-type program would do. Make the rule police officers need a degree. That gets the level of officer up. The department pays for the four year degree and perhaps some living stipend, but you commit to an equal number of years on the force. As an office approaching end of that first term, you're making some new-ish public worker pay despite having a good Bachelor's degree (and no student loan debt). That gives incentive to leave.
Having to graduate first is a definite pro for the department, but it does run into problems if the recruit student fails a class, doesn't graduate, etc. Not sure how you deal with that. Maybe they work a lower level job
for the department while in school to help offset that.
It's not too hard to imagine what a national civil service equivalent of the GI Bill might look like, put in X years of service on multi-year enlistments with the same style of benefits and get sent where your discipline and training was needed.
It would have the side benefit of discouraging the phenomenon of people camping out in the same government job for decades, long after they stopped giving any sort of a shit.
It could even make use of the same training programs as the Army but the individuals would be under a civilian authority where-ever they were sent, and potentially even tied in with the military reserves and state guards.
Cities and counties might not even need to maintain their own expensive departments, union relations, and attendant pension problems if this was effectively handled at a state or national level. But aside from disintegrating ossified and diseased institutions, it also provides much more financial security to young people instead of pensioners.
Do you really think that ordinary civilians will sign up for a term of enlistment as police where ~40-50 officers are shot and killed every year? (This only includes deaths by gunfire alone and not knifes/assaults/beatings). AFAIK more police officers got killed in active combat than American soldiers in the last couple of years.
You also need to work 70-80 hours in high stress situations.
Being cop is not all that dangerous job and most deaths are traffic accidents. This is trying to create a sense of it being something more dangerous then other occupations and it just is not.
There is also nothing fundamental about policing that would require 70-80 hours of work per week.
Not only are most deaths traffic deaths, the next largest reason for deaths on the job are heart attacks, which are preventable with a proper diet and exercise.
Please re-read - those figures are from deaths from hostile gunfire not traffic accidents. 89 officers died in the line of duty in 2019. Offenders used firearms to kill 44 of the 48 victim officers. Only Four officers were killed with vehicles used as weapons - the traffic accidents.
My apologies, your second statement is fundamentally false in a very deep way. There is no metropolitan city in the US where the police are not overworked.
But perhaps we have disconnect in meaning - what do you define by policing ? My definition is the maintenance of law and order. But I have observed that activists refer to it as simply keeping the peace. These are two fundamentally different things. Tyrants and Crime bosses keep the peace far more effectively than the police.
The "cops work 70-80 hours a week" thing is a policy choice. Nothing more nothing less. I agree that this has negative impact on policing, maybe more then it would be with other jobs. It makes it less effective just like any other person working 80 hours a week becomes exhausted and ineffective.
But, it is still a result of policy and culture, not something inherent to the task itself.
Given that overall cop deaths are not unusually high, no I have trouble to see that as some kind of super high risk occupation. Overall, being cop does not make me more likely to die and most of deaths are actual traffic accidents due to cops being in the traffic a lot.
To increase their take-home pay, firemen call in sick on a coordinated, rotating schedule, and the minimum staff requirements force off-duty firemen to be called in to work and get paid overtime.
Back in the years from 2003 to around 2008 Iraq was very dangerous and hostile. You should check out the historical press releases from the DOD. The ones where the DOD announced the casualties. It was depressing. However, there were always people enlisting in the military and in fact the USMC and the Army expanded.
I think going to a term of enlistment would be a good think and would allow the police department to only retain the best. The default could be that the police department could only retain 50% of the first term police officers.
I'm a retired Marine. I wonder how much the retirement system of the military effects the decision. Although it just change a couple of years ago the retirement was an all or nothing deal. You do your 20 years or more and you can retire. You do 19 or less you get nothing.
The military, and I believe the USMC, can be downright hostile to it members. Just being able to retire is more like survival of the fittest. I can't tell you how many good Marines have been kicked out or not allowed to reenlist for poor decisions.
The USMC also has a up or out policy. You either get promoted or you get out and later on in your career you might have to retire or wait for someone else to leave the service so you can get promoted.
Out of curiosity, if you found a member of your unit doing something illegal, would you report them? Does how illegal matter? How about who it is in your unit?
I was only in five years but saw lots of reports and made maybe half a dozen job-related (DOD order/Constitutional related offenses) and one EO-related.
I'd say in general the likelihood of something illegal on the job being reported is high, while doing something illegal on one's off time (like something alcohol related) is much lower, especially among those of similar rank. On the former, my workplace had a huge layered nest of rules from all levels of organizations, and those being broken were taken seriously, though I did have to argue with my chain of command on whether certain ones needed to be reported. Some of that was due to particular bosses.
Personal/Personal time ones, I heard of things that got reported and some that didn't. Those are definitely more mixed.
On in versus out of unit, I can't really think of much mixing with people out of a unit. I think if there is a difference, someone is more likely to report on someone within one's own unit. From boot camp on, you learn the weak link ("shitbag") in your unit is going to get you all in trouble, so you need to make sure they're dealt with. In my first school after boot camp, there was a beach party reported that had underaged Marines among them. For like a month, the whole detachment on base, maybe 300 Marines, we're not allowed to be out of uniform even in our own room, among other punishments. Group/Mass punishments mean you either deal with a person who will lead to trouble or report them.
This is an interesting line of discussion. Maybe the more relevant difference is group punishment/accountability. Could that be ported over the police (ignore the current political realities and unions etc ...)
Can you fine a whole precinct for the abusive acts of one officer? Would that encourage more self-policing or more coverups? What kind of incentives could you build into the institution that would encourage "dealing with the shitbag"?
> Can you fine a whole precinct for the abusive acts of one officer?
Absolutely not, because such measures would likely be considered governmental acts that violate constitutional rights such as due process. More than just being allowed to have their own criminal courts (as mentioned in the article), the military is granted many other exceptions under the law.
If you found your collegue does something illegal or unethical, would you? What about manipulative or lying management? Would you?
Looking at our own companies and institutions, we are not eager to deal with own narcissists or quite cool but slightly asshole people.
And the stakes for us are much lower and extend to which we form emotional ties to collegues is lower (shared ennemy, fear and struggle is bound to create those among cops).
It would also depend on what that member was doing. Since the military also falls under the UCMJ they held to a different standard. Sexual assault is obviously illegal for the person doing it but under the UCMJ if you know about or saw something happen and didn't report it you could also be held accountable.
While a lot of military members don't like the UCMJ I think it is pretty effective. It is more then a set of laws in that it regulates conduct on and off the battlefield.
The loyalty of leadership all the way up and down to the fresh E5 is generally to the process first and to the favor of the soldier second. This ensures the proper steps are followed with the necessary supporting documents with keeping all parties informed and protected. The goal is benefit or improve them opposed to harming a soldier unless the facts dictate the soldier has violated a law or is at risk of harming themselves or others.
People are generally eager to do what they believe is the right thing, which means disclosing all manners of information. As an investigating officer my job is to gather the relevant facts of an incident, write a report, disclose any additionally discovered violations, and provide a recommendation to a commanding officer. The commander, in consultation with a lawyer, will impose a legal action, order a change, or recommend the case to a more appropriate venue.
Never would an investigator falsify a report because they will be prosecuted as a criminal. It’s simply not worth it to protect people who are typically strangers to the investigator. After all the system will generally look out for the soldier but not at the risk of other people. With as much support and aid as the military provides its hard to empathize with breaking the law.
Perhaps the biggest differences between the military and police that I have observed is that the military attempts to resolve problems at the lowest level the law/policy allows. Ignoring misconduct is generally a symptom of toxic leadership that will eventually grow out of control. There is also no risk of civil suits.
For police it appears misconduct is either a slap on the hand that means little or the community is throwing the books at those guys with life destroying prison time and police can also be sued. That imposes a lot of risks that don’t exist in the military. It’s not just the officer that’s at risk but a law suit on top of a criminal prosecution imposes financial harm on their family which adds to the risk pressures.
Also policing entails far greater ambiguity at great quantity of decisions than the military typically handles. It’s one thing to blame a person for something after the fact but it’s different when you are there in the moment and have to make hard decisions under time pressure.
> For police it appears misconduct is either a slap on the hand that means little or the community is throwing the books at those guys with life destroying prison time and police can also be sued.
The bar is _amazingly_ high for a personal suit to even be _allowed_ against a police officer. Most unions have it in their contract that the department/city/county has to assume good faith and defend their officers, including defending their 'qualified immunity'. I'd argue that isn't a real threat to most officers, and if it is, there's a reason behind it.
Similar for me as a paramedic. If I'm operating within my scope of practice, within my departments policies and procedures, medical direction or my own reasonable clinical judgment, I'm not getting sued personally. The County and the Department are hit first, and even in the event that somehow through that, I'm personally sued, my Department's policy is that as long as I was within policy and procedure, they and their insurance will indemnify.
It would take something outrageously egregious. Near here we had a situation where EMS was called out for a death, with no coroner/ME/funeral home available. EMS took the body to the fire station for temporary storage, no more than a couple of hours at most.
All good so far.
Less good: allowing personnel to practice intubation of the body in the hallway, without consent. Allowing _non medical_ personnel (front office reception) to also practice. Worst: be doing this still when the person's family shows up at the fire station.
Even that didn't result in all the lawsuits you'd think it might. (Sadly. That was absolutely atrocious, despicable, unethical).
Like you said, the invstigator of a CDI is someone who is higher rank than everyone involved (so there's no attempt at sway), and someone very far removed from everyone else. This way the CDI can provide a fair and impartial judgement of a situation and if it should lead to further action.
One of the biggest take aways that I had was when the accused was a straight up jerk to me, and made my investigation as difficult as they possibly could. I am still amazed that someone whose livelyhood was in my hands would be so rude to that person. It would have been also incredibly easy for me to record facts to sway the information I had to the point that the accused would have gotten in more trouble (I did not do that).
I say that to put myself into the shoes of a police officer. I can only imagine how that would grate on someone who had to deal with it on a semi-routine basis.
It’s probably almost identical. In the Army the investigating officer does not have to be a higher grade to run the investigation, but a higher grade preferred because UCMJ requires a higher grade to charge an officer with a crime.
Yeah, witnesses and the accused have always been very straight with me because, as you said, their careers are in my hands. I believe if somebody were being hostile or deceptive with me I would dig deeper.
My biggest learnings from these is be careful what you wish for. If somebody is reporting a crime or requesting an IG investigation I will be completely objective and impartial. However, when you start digging into people like that all kinds of incidental unrelated private things can shake out from discovery, and if any of those things are a violation of ethics there is now grounds for a separate additional investigation.
I can't talk about police, but some misc. thoughts on why the military is different:
- Military does NOT have qualified immunity in the same ways a police force does.
- I am an Authorizing Official for DTS (aka, I approve travel for other people in my unit). I know very well if I make a mistake, I can be personally liable for paying back the US government. And I know for a fact that it is checked incredibly rigorously. I have made people redo travel vouchers if they are off by even a cent, because I will get into trouble for it.
- Likewise, I do contracts with civilian companies. Likewise with DTS, I can be held personally liable for "directing" a company to do something that costs the government money. In our required training, they have an example where a government person makes an "offhand" remark to use better paint (ACQ 201A in case you are curious), because it will do better. The entire module is how it ended up costing $20,000, and the government almost went after that person to make up the difference. This is why if you work with the government, and they make a suggestion, they make it absolutely clear that it is not to be considered direction.
- The military (in at least it's officers) ingrain the fact that the US government holds you in a position of trust. This includes faith in your integrity and that you are held to a higher standard. Likewise, the military ingrains the idea of "perception is reality". The concept is do not even do things that could have the perception of compromising your integrity or your position of authority. And yes, you can get in trouble for doing things that even have the perception of wrong doing.
- Investigators (OSI, JAG, IG, etc.) are in very separate chains of command, and they take their job very, very seriously. There is no "blue wall of silence" to block investigations, as that would go very, very badly for the individuals involved with that. Same with reprisal. If you reprise against an individual who made a complaint (EEO, fraud, waste, and abuse, etc), you will be in a much more world of hurt than just the complaint. This is re-enforced from the top all the way to your first line supervisor.
“All commanding officers and others in authority in the Air Force are required:
(1) to show in themselves a good example of virtue, honor, patriotism, and subordination;
(2) to be vigilant in inspecting the conduct of all persons who are placed under their command;
(3) to guard against and suppress all dissolute and immoral practices, and to correct, according to the laws and regulations of the Air force, all persons who are guilty of them; and
(4) to take all necessary and proper measures, under the laws, regulations, and customs of the Air Force, to promote and safeguard the morale, the physical well-being, and the general welfare of the persons under their command or charge.
-Title 10 USC § 8583
Accordingly, commanders must be above reproach, bothmorally and ethically, and exemplify Air Force Core Values and standards in their professional and personal lives.”
These are not just words on paper. If you hear about someone being relieved of command due to a “loss of confidence in that individual”, it is related to the above quotation.
EDIT: A couple of other thoughts:
- If you look at the oath of enlistment and the oath of office (what officer's recite), we obey the lawful orders of those above us. We are also told that it is our duty to disobey unlawful orders, and if you obey them, say you were just obeying orders is NOT an excuse.
- Further down, there was a discussion on My Lai Massacre and Guantanamo Bay. When I went to Squadron Officer School (a requirement for Captains), we discussed ethics for at least 2 weeks out of our 6 week curriculum, and we did an extensive study of why My Lai and Guantanamo Bay happened (We spent a full day on each). This was so we could learn form mistakes of our past.
<<...the military ingrains the idea of "perception is reality">>
I really wish this was the norm. It's so weird that we civilians need to have the smoking gun, signed confessions, and video tape before even hinting at malfeasance.
Like this privacy stuff. Just the fact that Google (or equiv) can abuse the data should be a full stop no go. We shouldn't have to prove abuse before demanding reforms.
I experienced institutional incredulity first hand as an election integrity activist. "What, don't you TRUST us?!" We were repeatedly dismissed unless we could demonstrate someone was harmed by the current system. IANAL, but the courts said we didn't have standing. So even though the gear couldn't work as advertised, we had to prove someone was disenfranchised. Of course, vendors, election admins, editorial boards, and misc electeds were also appropriately factblind.
Thank you for communicating that here. I spent about a decade working in some niches of flight safety. What you say matches up with my very positive impressions of the sense of integrity and duty that seemed implicit in the people and processes.
Nice! I spent four years in flight test, and safety is truly no joke in the flight test world.
For others, if I named one thing I have seen the Air Force care about more than anything else, it would be safety. Flight Test investigations are actually very interesting, because there are two investigations:
- The safety investigation
- The criminal investigation
NOTHING you say in the safety investigation can be used against you in the criminal investigation.You could have violated every rule in the book and admit to it in the safety investigation, and it will not be used against you in the criminal investigation. That is because above all else, the Air Force does NOT want whatever happened to happen again.
Edit: I think this applies to all Air Force safety investigations, but I don't have experience with anything other than flight test.
ASRS provides some protection for crew and others to share any proactive observations related to safety, as well as to acknowledge mistakes without reprisal under certain conditions. (Sounds like the USAF Flight Test related policy you mentioned goes even further.)
All the data and information coming from all these many forthright reports is analyzed and shared in various ways, and used to drive improvements.
I suspect aspects of institutions like this would resonate with a lot of dotcom people, were we aware of it.
Agreed, there's some people in this thread with a rosy view of the military as an institution and what veterans think. Specifically, the marines where brought up, and I know many veterans that ended up very jaded within months to the first 1-2 years. They got out at the first chance.
That's an interesting and I think valuable angle to all of this. Trust in institutions is absolutely key to the proper functioning of government, but it is also key to maintaining ethical behavior in any institution. If you can't trust your institution to do the right thing, it means you're less likely to speak up when there's wrong doing, and it emboldens those who commit wrongdoing. Over time one can see how this system calcifies into a culture of unaccountable behavior.
This is why the solution to police misconduct problems is going to require systemic change. There needs to be independent investigations and oversight of misconduct, and better systems to support whistleblowers. Those that are terminated for misconduct should not be reinstated and shouldn't be able to become officers elsewhere. In the military, you can't re-enlist if you've been dishonorably discharged, why should officers who abused their power be allowed to regain that power?
> Trust in institutions is absolutely key to the proper functioning of government,
There's an entire thesis to be found in "high trust" vs "low trust" societies; higher trust overall provides huge benefits, as there's less need for checking and defensive behaviour, and people can more readily trust others to help.
But a high trust society, built up over decades, represents a resource that can be looted by individuals exploiting that trust for their own benefit. Or simply sowing mistrust for entirely partisan reasons.
The Eddie Gallagher pardon is an egregious part of that: at no point has anyone advanced the argument that it was a misconviction, the purpose of pardoning him is to signal the willingness of the US government to commit war crimes. It's hugely destructive of trust for no good reason.
I know a few old dudes who did a lot of swimming around Coronado. They've been out of the service since before the turn of the century, all with more than 20 years in.
They've said that someone like Gallagher wouldn't have had the career path in the 80s that he had 20 years later. The SEALs were smaller, tasked less often, and tighter knit. Someone would have had a private talk with him, the culture would have helped him direct some tendencies differently.
Now that SOC gets all the funds and glory, the talent pool has slipped. The institution has lowered its standards, and the old hands have retired, to be replaced with young guns.
This isn't unique to the SEALs and other groups, the entire military has been experiencing a degradation in leadership. Whether it's the USN that can't buy a decent ship, nor sail without colliding with other vessels, to an Army that has has wasted so much money on trying to buy new helicopters (Comanche), new artillery (Crusader), or even radios. The ChairForce can't buy a new tanker properly, and has burned through so many airframes flying donuts in the mideast.
When the leadership of institutions fail, the results are ugly. We're seeing that across many police departments in the US, but it's not limited to just law enforcement.
Regarding the navy ships colliding, touchscreens are being blamed - accompanied by complete lack of training. Also, there are lesser hands to do the same jobs - leading to lack of sleep.
Although technology and training are factors in the collisions, the core problem is a navy that has been overtasked for a decade. This is a leadership issue, both military and civilian.
And if you really want to see the rot, look at the material condition of the ships. IIRC one of the navigation systems was off line (Fitzgerald I think). Heck the appearance of the ships is disgusting as well. Rust everywhere.
Yes, I looked this up. It's quite shocking and deeply frightening. The US navy are the primary military counter to PLAN (PLA Navy). I wonder whether this happening solely due to leadership or because China has become the first manufacturing base for the world and the US is losing its expertise. Difficulties in Navy supply chains indicate a more systemic problem.
I think the USA as a whole suffers from a general disinterest among the best and brightest to pursue important careers.
It's a topic that's on my mind a lot. On one hand, I'm disappointed to see important institutions constantly lowering their standards, but on the other, I don't want these important jobs either.
Other than a great marketing job by the US military, we don't do anything to attract the best and brightest to government service. Reagan did a good job of poisoning that well.
For proof, look at the average pay for EMTs (less so paramedics). Oftentimes it's minimum wage, and if you make more than $12/hr on an ambulance, you're in the minority.
While a lot of the transports done are not at all critical, I know in my time as an EMT and paramedic of all the people that would not make it alive to the hospital if not for EMS.
And I started at $9.60/hr 8 years ago as an EMT trying to get patient contacts for paramedic school.
The Gallagher trial was itself egregious, with the lead prosecutor spying on the defense team until he was removed by the judge, and the prosecution's star witness admitting to having committed the most serious of the alleged crimes himself - after being granted immunity in return for his testimony.
But a high trust society, built up over decades, represents a resource that can be looted by individuals exploiting that trust for their own benefit.
This is exactly the business model of Uber, AirBnB and other "disruptive" companies that extract profits from side-stepping regulations that their competitors bear the overhead of complying with. People have seen the powerful and wealthy getting away with it - Uber is still in business no matter how many times courts find that their employees really are employees - and so try it themselves.
> Trust in institutions is absolutely key to the proper functioning of government
There is this fascinating 2011 paper [1][2] showing that this trust is very long lasting: They found more trust in public institutions in those areas that had been part of the (well-run) Habsburg Empire a century earlier.
[1] The Empire Is Dead, Long Live the Empire!
Long-Run Persistence of Trust and Corruption in the Bureaucracy [pdf] http://ftp.iza.org/dp5584.pdf
What I find interesting is how behavioural patterns seem to have travelled through not only generations of the same population, but even when they experienced significant immigration and changes in government - for more than a hundred years.
I wonder what the implications are in the context of the U.S., its military and police force. One thing I've realized in recent times is how history - and dark, violent history - is alive to this day. There are things that have been going on for centuries, old forces and habits that keep repeating the same sins, erupting to the surface. I suppose this is the flip side of the coin, what happens when a population loses trust in public institutions.
I'll quote the conclusion from the latter link.
> Our results show that past formal institutions can leave a long-lasting legacy through cultural norms – even after some are generations of being governed by other authorities. Nearly a century after its demise, the Habsburg Empire lives on in the people living within its former borders – in their attitudes towards and interactions with local state institutions.
> Comparing individuals living on either side of the long-gone Habsburg border within the same modern-day country, we find that respondents in a current household survey who live on former Habsburg territory have higher levels of trust in courts and police. They are also less likely to pay bribes for these local public services, demonstrating that the institutional heritage influences not only preferences and unilateral decisions but also bilateral bargaining situations in citizen-state interactions.
> The specific mechanisms through which the Habsburg effect prevailed remain an open question for future research. The substantial waves of migration and displacement that accompanied the institutional disruptions in the successor states of the Habsburg Empire suggest that the cultural norms of behaviour are unlikely to have survived solely by intergenerational transmission within families. It rather seems that such channels as the persistent nature of continuous reciprocal interactions in local communities, the content of knowledge and behavioural patterns conveyed in schools, and the quality of human capital of bureaucrats and citizens may have also played a role.
Ironically this is "broken windows" theory applied to the police: if they don't see the rules fairly enforced inside their own organisation, how can they enforce them outside?
The people completely absent from this are the 1M+ active US Police Officers. We have no idea what they think about their jobs and these issues. Sure, we hear from the unions, but they have a professional agenda.
There must be amazing stories about what policing life is actually like, how it forms you and why people do what they do. If they're being told, I have not found where.
I expect that one part of it is that cops are asked to do impossible things. There are things we citizens don't want to deal with or know about, but still want handled, and these are the people who take care of it.
This would be a really good explanation as to why the blue wall is as pervasive as it is regardless of thr geographical location in US. I always wondered about and could not find a good reason ( after all, cities have their own PDs - you would think there would be maasive differences between them ).
Seems like that only applies for conduct amongst themselves. For things like war crimes against others we go out of the way to protect them and reinterpret law.
Give me a break. Police with the backing of their unions have some of the cushiest benefits. It really just sounds like a bunch of ungrateful people especially in light of how terribly they do their jobs.
How do we truly fix the problem? We dissolve the police union and make police jobs less secure. They should feel the pressure of the fragility of their employment. It’s not like it’s a skilled position that is hard to fill.
I have to agree. Cops can retire with a full pension after only 20 years of working. They make a median salary of $105,100 a year before overtime[1], and can make more then $250,000 a year with overtime[2].
Really good article, but misses a large part of why military self-enforces well: integrity above all is a, or the value that is stressed-stressed-stressed.
The reasoning goes that while any UCMJ violation short of the big ones (abandoning post, AWOL, murder, etc.) is recoverable from with regards to career impact by a PCS (change bases you're stationed at), a new commander, whatever, the ONLY thing that will really sink you is lying.
You can recover from all sorts of failures. What you will never recover from is lying on a sworn statement about that failure.
Enforcement of UCMJ proves this out. Officers and Enlisted both follow this in various ways from small infractions to things that involve UCMJ. The service academies only have 1 non-crime that will really get you kicked out: honor violations. Etc. etc.
The interesting background aspect is Army values get pounded into you from Day 0, and Integrity is one of them. Legitimate corrective action will go around violating them from Basic Training all the way through the last day of your career. Not a lot of other orgs take organizational value lists that are on the proverbial office wall quite so seriously.
I'm almost positive the police do none of this approach, but also they don't have a federal police force really to enforce it top-down like the Army does.
The military is a national organization with a hierarchy stretching from the first-day-on-the-job cadet all the way into the White House.
In the US, almost every police department is it's own thing. I'm not aware of any national organization. Usually the mayor is the top of the hierarchy.
That means a faceless bureaucracy, towns and states removed, will deal with individual concerns in the military. Not a known person three miles from your house.
Not just that, but much of the hierarchy above police forces is opaque if it exists at all.
The Austin PD chief has come under intense scrutiny for his department's handling of various arrests and protests over the past few months, and after roughly half of the city council called on him to resign, it was reported that neither the city council or the mayor could legally fire him.[0]
The city manager, which is appointed and not elected, has the power to demote the police chief, but the state does not permit a police chief to be terminated.
Long story short, none of Austin's leaders have the power to fire the police chief.
It’s less fine when the electorate consistently delivers a mandate to brutalize a minority population, or just isn’t paying enough attention to such down-ticket races to care.
> or just isn’t paying enough attention to such down-ticket races to care
The Open Society Foundations has had a ton of success in changing how crimes are prosecuted at the local level by pouring money into district attorney elections across the country. That's a major reason the BLM protests have been successful: most people are not being prosecuted because the local DA is a "friendly." Since many people don't pay attention, money spent at this level has been very effective.
Presumably the OSF could target county Sheriffs races next, which would stop those cases from even reaching the DA's desk. Then the police wouldn't need to be abolished per se, they could simply stop enforcing laws that disproportionally target minorities, while simultaneously ratcheting up enforcement on the people who voted for those laws.
Criminals are a minority population (by number and temperament, not by race or anything). There structurally can't be any unbiased mechanism for effectively protecting minority populations or the criminals would use them.
Look at the taxes-are-theft crowd; they think the electorate consistently delivers a mandate to brutalize their finances. They aren't totally wrong. They'd love a mechanism to avoid arrest if they don't pay taxes.
So fine or otherwise, it is probably systemically optimum.
What does this have to do with systematic abuse of specific groups? Criminals are people who break laws, they aren't a cultural group. They aren't some collection of people that are oppressed. I'd be impressed if you could show me some data showing that criminals (not prisoners) are systematically abused. What are you arguing for?
Thread ancestor said that the electorate was consistently handing out mandates to "brutalize a minority population".
The electorate's power to hand out such mandates is also the power that it uses to define who criminals are.
There can't be a check on that power without also opening up a huge can of worms for general law enforcement.
> Criminals are people who break laws, they aren't a cultural group.
If a majority hands out a mandate to oppress a minority group they can probably define the minority group to be criminals. In fact, there is a persuasive argument that that is happening.
Hence "defund the police": they may not be able to fire the police chief, but they can give him an ultimatum to quit or have the budget from which his salary is paid reduced to zero.
In my childhood, I was in an area with so-called community-policing (not in the US). It was a living nightmare. Our family was glad to get out of the area.
Even knowing that US police are harsh and trigger-happy, I find it deeply amusing that first world citizens protected by the world's strongest military will talk about community policing.
Pass laws to reform the police. Abolishing them will just ensure that power hungry and petty tyrants fill the void. And these folks will happily beat and murder any and all who act against them, tax/toll all economic opportunities (roads/bridges/vendors, etc), keep the local politician and bureaucrats in their pocket, assault/abuse any woman on the streets - and no-one will dare to report anything.
You haven't added any reasoning or even anecdotal evidence to the discussion, only that you had a "living nightmare" experience, and then you went on to fantasize about some dystopia and why our only option is to pass reforms.
The police aren't following the laws now. Why would you think that adding laws would make them follow the existing ones? Police reform isn't the only tool we have available, and it feels very silly to hear people continue pounding the reform drum in 2020.
Not really a discussion for HN. I can't offer you any evidence. This was in the 80s in a somewhat backward region in a specific state in India ruled by "Panchayat" when I was a child far before the advent of the cellphone. There is no evidence apart from the memory of a lot of beatings. My sister getting assaulted. Folks going missing. And frightened shopkeepers.
Of-course things are far different today since someone or the other carries a cellphone and in modern India, law and order has far improved - thanks to more effective policing and prosecution. (Still have a long way to go)
You are a protected first world citizen. I suspect you will need to learn for yourself what living without the police means. I assure you there is no fantasy "dystopia" made up here. There are real consequences to not having an armed force enforcing the law.
Can do all sorts of things, but when somebody turns up with a gun there has to be some physical mechanism to stop them from seizing control of the local supermarket.
The city can defund the entire police force, but it will have to set up or allow an alternative which will end up the same as the current one if the incentives don't change. Resetting the entire system every time something goes wrong isn't really a viable strategy. It'll work every so often.
If someone takes a bunch of hostages then we need people who can de-escalate and rescue them, but that isn't what most cops spend their time doing every day.
Not if it means you can't pay officers their salaries, and those salaries are protected by a collective bargaining agreement. Now the city is in violation of a contract and is going to end up paying more in litigation costs plus punitive penalties. That's the difference between "technically can" and "can, but will open up the municipality to so much liability it probably constitutes gross negligence on the part of anyone who votes for it."
Creating a new federal body to specifically deal with use-of-force by law enforcement could correct many issues by conducting investigates in a more impartial manner.
It could also issue nation-wide guidelines such as making it impossible to turn off body cameras.
I see this much like the Civil Rights Act. There was no way segregation was going to be ended without significant legislation and enforcement from the federal government.
Bottom line is that the sort of large scale reform needed to end systemic problems of police misconduct is going to be extremely difficult to achieve via local reforms. Congress needs to end qualified immunity, end civil asset forfeiture, increase federal oversight, and potentially write new laws governing the use of body cams.
One idea I've seen from police reformers is a 'Missing Video Presumption' law. The basic idea is that if the body cam (or vehicle cam) footage goes missing and there is a conflicting account of events, the court will presume the video would've corroborated the civilian's version of events. This would give an extremely strong incentive to not turn off cameras or sabotage video as police have done in a number of cases.
A lot of these policing issues seems to come from progressive localities so I'm not sure it's even due to government unwillingness to solve the issues.
Most organizations are really extremely bad at dealing with internal abuses which is why external watchdogs could work very well.
Mandatory body cams make a lot of sense but if you need to deal with the opposition of 1000s local police unions it's not going to happen very quickly.
> A lot of these policing issues seems to come from progressive localities so I'm not sure it's even due to government unwillingness to solve the issues.
Part of the reason for this is that police unions fight vigorously against reform and police unions are powerful in local politics. That's why some police departments ended up getting disbanded by their municipalities to restart from the ground up.
It seems like opposition to body cams in general isn't strong, but the real fight will come when stronger laws are proposed for when body cams need to be on, penalties for not having them on, and when footage must be released.
> police unions fight vigorously against reform and police unions are powerful in local politics
Aren't the Democrats the notionally pro-union party? I think it has fallen out of rhetorical favour in recent years, but I thought there was an association between Democrats being in charge and strong local union presences.
Police unions are seen as an exception to the usual party alignment. The Minneapolis police union and its president Bob Kroll supported Trump's campaign:
External watchdogs are only as good as their leaders. For example, the Seattle PD was recently under a consent decree with the Department of Justice over civil rights abuses. Yet they still beat the shit out of people expressing their 1st Amendment rights.
Most large PDs are in urban areas that are either in blue states, or that are blue islands in red states. They also tend to be the most problematic. So this problem can largely be solved at municipal level - if there's political will for it.
> could correct many issues by conducting investigates in a more impartial manner.
Police already think that Obama's DoJ was incredibly political and it did exactly this[1] when issuing more consent decrees (source: police in family). Putting a new "Space Force" brand on the box doesn't make officers trust either their own brass or the feds more than they did.
There's no solution to a lack of trust here except perhaps a massive airing of grievances and more transparency. People like me don't trust that police officers charged with crimes will ever be impartially prosecuted by the same prosecutors who need their hard work on all other cases (departments and unions have actually tanked careers of DAs and ADAs who have aimed to cross the "think blue line of silence"). In my city, the police union used propaganda and threats to scare an independent civilian oversight (private attorney acting in a public role) into quitting his oversight role.
Wouldn't a federal body less reliant on a favorable disposition from the police be the answer here?
Few are going to welcome more oversight of themselves, but it seems more and more like what's required. That oversight doesn't seem to work when it's locally based, for all the reasons you've outlined.
I think there should be nationwide training standards and standards for tactics that then get enforced. What I get from a lot of videos is that cops often have to improvise because they aren’t trained to deal with a situation. Most of the time the improvisation goes well but sometimes it doesn’t. I think this uncertainty is causing a lot of stress to cops and the people they have to deal with and then leads to bad behavior. I used to know some cops personally and they all said there was almost no way to discuss a difficult situation and develop better approaches. The general attitude seems to be “suck it up” and be quiet. It seems the whole organization is rotten from the top and highly abusive to people working in it.
Americans: we don't trust authority, most of our Constitution deals with limitations to authorities and opens with a stern remainder that power comes from the will of people trough armed militias
also Americans: we need more authority to deal with the untrustworthy authorities
I see you're being downvoted, perhaps for the directed satire (something, as a Brit, I enjoy… it is our natural habitat:) but it's a legitimate point.
I read a book by Chomsky (I forget which) in which he went through why the American democratic system was corrupt. It was very compelling. His solution, however, would be to "guard the guards" with more state apparatus and a more involved electorate. This is where he and I digressed because it's obviously pie in the sky and open to the same kinds of corruption. Turtles all the way down.
Less is more when it comes to the state - smaller government as a principle can be extended to the police by defunding and not abolishing. Remove their military vehicles, remove their ability to get no-knock warrants and other vast overreaches of power, and strengthen the power of the citizenry. Has that (less government, more individual rights) ever not worked?
and these same city officials, especially mayors, are politically connected to their police departments doubly so if they are unionized; not all police are unionized. politicians learn real fast to not go up against any organization backed by a public employee union. police and educators are the absolute worst in this regard.
I keep looking back at how many bemoan corporate money in politics and how references that Citizen's United was the cause but completely ignore that DNC platform while supporting that completely ignores these unions contributing; in fact one certain Senator's webpage is explicit in only using corporation examples. Hell that same person wants you to pay for the DNC and RNC conventions; its criminal we pay for their convention security as is
Simple reason, when people are paid by tax coffers that means their unions are and in turn it just becomes one giant slush fund for politicians who want to remain in power.
Yeah having a tight value set and tight enforcement of integrity violations among other values is certainly a function of the federal structure.
Police don't have that. It's too localized and going beyond the current state of affairs requires on a police chief with ethical super powers to really enforce things, as it would be starting from Base 0 with an Elliot Ness-like reform.
I used to sell life insurance. Dangerous careers would be more expensive. When I was an agent in 2004-2005 in the USA, being a police person was not considered dangerous enough to warrant a rate increase. As a professional wrestler, you'd be lucky to get life insurance at any price.
I'd love to see what would happen if cops had to carry doctor-style malpractice insurance, instead of the taxpayers picking up the bill for abuse settlements.
"You've beaten enough innocent people your premiums are going from $500/month to $50,000. Your choice."
> I'd love to see what would happen if cops had to carry doctor-style malpractice insurance, instead of the taxpayers picking up the bill for abuse settlements.
Then taxpayers would pick up the bill for the higher salary demands of officers due to the cost of insurance, and then the police unions would lobby for targeted tort reform to limit their liability and insurance costs on the basis that it would save the taxpayers money, and succeed, and the structural problems that foster abuse would manage not to be dealt with at all, and the victims even worse off. That's what.
“Let’s absolve ourselves of liability”—which is what this amounts to unless it's a cop proposing it—is just an excuse to avoid addressing the problem.
(Doctor’s malpractice insurance is not instead of their private or public employer being liable as usual under principles like respondeat superior or just plain direct liability for acts aligned with bad policy or direction, and only covers professional negligence, not criminal acts. Mere police malpractice, is—while also an issue, to be sure—not the focus of concern here, and the acts involved are the kind for which it is generally illegal to insure liability for, for good reasons. Insurance for liability incurred through murder is not a thing, and I don't think anyone who has thought it through wants it to be a thing. Except maybe prospective murderers.)
> Sure, but there’s someone managing a budget and has to decide to either hire 2 good cops or 1 expensive bad cop.
They already have to do this when the agency is liable and the cops aren't because of QI; which is equivalent to the agency self-insuring and managing risk through personnel policies and decisions.
Making the major crimes involved insurable would negate any benefit from making cops individually liable by eliminating or restricting the scope of QI.
>> I'd love to see what would happen if cops had to carry doctor-style malpractice insurance, instead of the taxpayers picking up the bill for abuse settlements.
> Then taxpayers would pick up the bill for the higher salary demands of officers due to the cost of insurance, and then the police unions would lobby for targeted tort reform to limit their liability and insurance costs on the basis that it would save the taxpayers money, and succeed, and the structural problems that foster abuse would manage not to be dealt with at all, and the victims even worse off. That's what.
Maybe that could be addressed by modifying the proposal to require that departments buy malpractice insurance individually for each of their officers, and make sure the cost of that insurance shows up on the budget of whatever department or team the officer is a member of. Basically make it more expensive (on a predicable, ongoing basis) to employ bad cops than good ones, which hopefully would then factor into personnel decisions.
Make the officers buy it personally. Have cities pay officers 110% of the base rate, such that officers with clean records get a bonus based on it. Those whose rates go up will pay the difference or leave the force.
BTW, I hate that America has become so neoliberalized that I end up needing to consider how to build a profit motive into having cops not violate constitutional rights.
Those who don't report incidents within x days of the first report should forfeit their 10% bonus for some pay period y to a pool to be split among those who do report incidents in the time frame, with those who report earlier receiving larger portions than those who report later.
It thus is always in everyone's individual best interest to try to identify incidents and report them as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately not everyone has the same sense of duty and the respect for life. Since "these bad apples" don't get punished anyway, and since the system is evidently useless from removing them from ranks, one alternative is to hurt them where it really hurts them, their wallet. I don't know of this will push the half-dirty in police forces to go all the way to the dark side since they will feel that society owes them and they need to make up for the reduction on their disposable income.
I hate that America has become so neoliberalized that I end up needing to consider how to build a profit motive into having cops not violate constitutional rights.
The sort of person who makes a good cop isn’t motivated by money. You don’t pay him to be a cop, you pay him so he can be a cop. So he can pay his bills while deriving job satisfaction from duty, honour, etc. The same way the really good programmers are in it for the love of the craft.
The instant you bring commercial incentives into it you drive away the people you really want. That’s why the military don’t do it. And why tech goes toxic when the techbros show up.
>> I hate that America has become so neoliberalized that I end up needing to consider how to build a profit motive into having cops not violate constitutional rights.
> The sort of person who makes a good cop isn’t motivated by money. You don’t pay him to be a cop, you pay him so he can be a cop. So he can pay his bills while deriving job satisfaction from...
That's likely also true of many classes of bad cops, as well (e.g. deriving job satisfaction from dominating others/exercising power over them).
I also think your kind of missing the point. I interpreted the comment on neoliberalism to be critiquing the idea that institutional solution to every problem has to be some kind of system involving money and markets. Basically, why dick around with insurance and budgets to dis-incentivize the employment of "cops who violate constitutional rights" when you should have an institution that's capable of just removing bad cops like that simply for the violations themselves.
But you're not paying them more to be a cop. For the good cop they get paid a little more, they buy the insurance with the money, nothing really changes.
For the bad cop they get paid a little more and pay a lot more for the insurance, so that it eats too much of their salary and they have to quit and find another job.
The people who are in it for honor and duty aren't going to be the ones paying the higher premiums, right?
Tech was toxic long before techbros showed up. RMS' problematic behaviour drove a lot of people away from the FSF, and he's never struck me as a man motivated by the fat stacks of cash.
Well said. I too find it disturbing that upholding Constitutional Rights has become a defensive position against people who have sworn to uphold the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.
I can't even get personalized life insurance, so I think there's little chance of this working. At my height and weight, I'm considered "overweight" BMI, and they charge me for it. But I'm at 12-14% bodyfat with a 30" waist. I have diet logs to prove how healthy I eat, and training logs to prove how much I workout.
I can't even find a life-insurance insurer that will measure my waist to add context to my BMI despite the clear predictive information that contains and I get penalized for having more lean body-mass despite the fact that it is also predictive of longevity.
There needs to be some collective or individual cost to being a bad cop or the incentives aren't there to behave well. That could be financial, it could be prosecutors actually charging cops; there are many avenues that would help align incentives. Of course cop unions will fight this every step of the way.
> There needs to be some collective or individual cost to being a bad cop or the incentives aren't there to behave well
Sure, cops should not benefit from QI, at least as currently constructed (a more limited form may be appropriate and arguably even Constitutionally necessary from a due process perspective), and that may make merely negligent acts something they can, and may even be required as a condition of employment, to cover with insurance. That isn't instead of their public employer being liable (the absence of QI for private employees doesn't negate respondeat superior), nor does it mean that the important acts (which are intentional crimes) at issue in the present discussion of police abuse would (without major and undesirable changes in public policy) be insurable. That would actually dilute the goal of effective cost to being a (deliberately) bad cop.
I don't have a problem with direct liability for cops.
I have a problem when what is proposed is that as an excuse for absolving public-agency liability, or when it is suggested that civil liability for the intentional violent crimes at the core of the abuse discussion should be made insurable (which has the same problem as QI with only public agency liability, since then the agency effectively is self-insuring the crimes and dealing with individual costs of employees in it's hiring and firing policies.)
Interesting idea... The resultant increase in salary may in fact attract better police, and that could head off a large range of systemic problems itself.
Or the increased salary might constrain the headcount of police departments and keep them below the staffing level where they have the resources to bother mostly law abiding citizens over minor stuff. Either way it's a win.
What matters for changing behavior is the marginal impact of a police officer's actions on their income, not the average income of a police officer. Even if all police officers would be paid more by the current amount that a city dishes out in damages each individual officer would still face an incentive to reduce their excessive use of force to increase their own take home pay. Which is exactly the incentive we're going for here.
I think we're going to start seeing this. Colorado just enacted a new law yesterday that removes qualified immunity from officers. Officers can now be sued personally for civil rights violations. They're going to need insurance. Let the actuaries decide who's a good and who's a bad cop!
Liability from criminal acts is generally legally uninsurable for very strong public policy reasons, even without a conviction of the crime, and deprivation of rights under color of law is already a federal crime. (And many of the other things at issue with police abuse—murder most obviously—are more specific state and/or federal crimes, as well.)
There's a space of insurable liability without QI, but it's not actually the space of most interest in the police abuse discussion.
Civil liability for ones own criminal acts (at least wilfull ones, and often wilfull rather than merely negligent acts more generally) is often prohibited (the exact boundaries differ by jurisdiction), for very strong public policy reasons, and the vast majority of the acts of concern with police abuse are (very frequently unprosecuted, but that's not material when it comes to whether the civil liability is insurable) both willful and crimes, not mere negligence in either the general or professional malpractice sense (almost always intentional deprivation of rights under color of law and/or conspiracy against rights, and very often wilfull/intentional violent crimes on the assault to voluntary manslaughter to murder spectrum.)
Drawing analogies to medical malpractice misses the fact that medical malpractice covers mistakes that fall short of the professional standard of care, but don't cover when someone who happens to be a doctor just decides to murder someone.
No! The whole point of removing qualified immunity is they no longer need to take criminal actions to be sued. Anything they do can be subject to a civil suit which the cop will now need to defend against.
> The whole point of removing qualified immunity is they no longer need to take criminal actions to be sued
No, it is so accountability no longer, in practice, relies on public prosecutors choosing to file criminal charges. The acts of major concern are criminal acts, that are routinely unprosecuted (in some cases, this might be just because of the civil vs. criminal standard of proof differences, but it's very clear that there are a lot of cases of prosecutorial favoritism to law enforcement, whether because of the working relationship that the two institutions naturally have or for other reasons.)
In fact, there have been many such forces, technology being o a big one, which have driven many such improvements over the years. It just isn’t moving fast enough to save everyone.
As user dragonwriter points out there are a number of reasons this likely won't help very much.
I'd love to see all complaints of brutality and all deaths caused by police be investigated by a different organization (maybe a state level org) and if cops are found to be brutalizing/murdering people they are fired or arrested depending on the severity of their actions.
We have a version of that in Ontario: The SIU, the Special Investigations Unit, which investigates every incident of police action that involves injury or worse in the province. It rarely finds anything wrong and can't really punish people. It's mostly staffed by former cops (because who else does investigative work? lawyers maybe? but would they work at their rates?)
There needs to be consequences for bad behaviour, but I think beyond that the solutions are further down the roots, in terms of the institutional culture that attracts and protects bullies, brutalizers.
- independent investigations not carried by the police (to be honest I did a double take when I read that the US do things this way... my original country also has a systemic police brutality problem but we still have a completely separate branch of the police to investigate this kind of things)
They'd behave more like doctors who order hugely expensive tests, procedures, and medicine they know patients don't need for the purpose of indemnity. They'd never admit to mistakes which could be used against them in the court of law. Frivolous lawsuits would abound, and doubly so when successful suits impugn the integrity of officers' statements in criminal court (even after the fact). The policy holders would settle to save money because court is more expensive on average. In other words, we'd expect them to stop policing in general.
> They'd behave more like doctors who order hugely expensive tests, procedures, and medicine they know patients don't need for the purpose of indemnity.
Good. It's gone far too much in the opposite direction.
> They'd never admit to mistakes which could be used against them in the court of law.
Already the case.
> when successful suits impugn the integrity of officers' statements in criminal court (even after the fact)
As it should.
> The policy holders would settle to save money because court is more expensive on average.
That's such a weird typical US way of looking at it. Find a way of using money to solve it.
Why not treat it as what it is, a criminal matter. If a non police officer would repeatedly beat up people the person would be in jail. And they would likely not get their job back. It's really as simple as treat police officer like everyone else.
You're not wrong, but the US currently has a problem getting legislators to write laws that are effective.
Also doing this nationwide would require up to 18,000 different jurisdictions to write similar laws and change other law to homogenize the laws they already have. Police unions are extremely effective at watching legislators when they propose bills and have strong lobbying efforts (combination or money for election campaigns, money against election campaigns, public relations, and the ability to threaten strikes which scares citizens into pressuring politicians to back off their positions).
In short, there's a reason that we look to money to solve part of this problem and that's because it's far more likely that money will solve it in the US political system than good thoughtful legislation despite the pressure of 1.1 million law enforcement officers (and their families and their "blue line supporters" and their social media campaigns).
I would worry more about PTSD than about death or injury if I was a cop.
Almost getting killed tends to cause PTSD, but the tendency is stronger if someone intentionally tried to kill you.
And doing violence to another person is also potent cause of PTSD.
For those 2 reasons, I would expect rates of PTSD to be higher among cops than among the other 15 occupations you list.
I would also worry that the habit of suspicion needed to be effective as a cop would be bad for my marriage and other relationships. In other words, I would worry that the work might make me pathologically cynical.
Finally, some people really enjoy having power over others and using that power to inflict pain. Even if the other disadvantages of police work did not exist, it might be wise for me to avoid it just to pessimize the probability of my needing to work with someone like that. It is a complicated issue, but certainly I find such people distasteful and suspect that most adults in my country (the US) share my distaste.
I would argue that this applies to the people being policed as well, if not more so. A black man has little recourse if he is assaulted by a police man, or if his wife or child is killed by them. Families are torn apart by drug laws and prison pipelines.
While thats true, I can’t imagine the slow bleed that ptsd from working 50 hour weeks of stress can do to the human brain. It would be a surprise if you retired and weren’t screwed up after decades of that imo.
Oh no, cops are fucked over for sure. They suffer in many ways themselves. They also benefit in other ways, and IMO are not innocent, but they are definitely fucked over by how we do policing.
How about the slow bleed of living your entire life knowing you're always one random police encounter away from being shot. The whole law enforcement system creates a slow bleed of stress and trauma on both officers and citizens.
Because that's the narrative that gets your sentence reduced and what any lawyer would advise: from now on, publicly you'll condemn the drugs that got you here.
It's because they are mourning their lost years, their failing health, their dead friends, their dead parents, their dead cousins and brothers and sisters. Oh, and their dead wives, girlfriends, and children. And probably more often than anything else, their fear that they will just go straight back to doing it all again when they get out, just like the last time they got out.
> It's because they are mourning their lost years, their failing health, their dead friends, their dead parents, their dead cousins and brothers and sisters. Oh, and their dead wives, girlfriends, and children. And probably more often than anything else, their fear that they will just go straight back to doing it all again when they get out, just like the last time they got out.
For a lot of drugs, it's not the drug that killed all those people and tore apart those connections, it's the illegal nature that causes violent black markets and heavy policing.
It's not violence and police that are killing them where I live. It's drugs. I'm not saying the jail system is the solution, but let's not kid ourselves about what's going on.
I can see that perspective and also say that I think what it speaks to is that we don't provide a better systemic solution to drug addiction than imprisonment, which is an embarrassing failure of American culture and society.
>A black man has little recourse if he is assaulted by a police man, or if his wife or child is killed by them
To be clear, those are not statistically significant events. In fact, they are insignificant at the population level, and there is no discrepancy across racial lines (as in, the numbers do not show Black Americans being targeted more than other demographic groups).
One of the challenges is that if a demographic group disproportionately engages in criminal activity (more or less), then it will necessarily have a disproportionate negative (or positive) interaction with the entire judicial system (police and courts) - but you cannot fix that with police reform. You can still make the case for Police reform and there are a lot of places of improvement (e.g. the practice of 'swatting' should NOT be a thing - police and judges that issue these warrants should be MORE discriminatory !!!), but that will not lessen the proportion of negative interactions.
>Families are torn apart by drug laws and prison pipelines.
That has NOTHING to do with police. Police enforce laws on the books - typically municipal and state laws. Most cities have progressive Democratic leadership (from mayor, to council, to police chiefs) and those cities also had the biggest issues with protests against police brutality.
One needs to look at who the police are choosing to interact with to understand the denominator properly. The numbers seem to show that they are biased towards interacting with black people.
I get it and I have no disagreement with qualifying the numbers. It's a very complicated issue, but, if it is in fact true, when controlled for all other factors, if a particularity defined demographic group engages in disproportionate amount of criminal activity (less or more), then wouldn't you expect that that would filter down to the individual interactions?
If an individual police officer is choosing who to frisk (or interact with), and the only things they have to go on are visible superficial characteristics (i.e. age, gender, ethnicity, clothing, etc.), and the global fact that those characteristics are statically correlated with more or less crime, that would be impossible for an individual to control their biases.
We know this is a painful exercise, because people are not just those superficial characteristics, and it's unfair for an individual to be singled out for those characteristics - but that's the ONLY information available to the officer.
The officer cannot control their bias, because if they try, they will either over or under compensate and because they are human. It's why we have double-blind trials and the scientific method - we know even well-meaning humans cannot control their biases. And this isn't an example of racism, because it could clothing or gender that trigger the frisk (I guarantee you that men are stopped more than women - WHY?!?!?), but aspect of human cognition. The only way to control for that is by introducing a non-biased random decision maker. For example, in airport security, there will be a device that will randomly flag passengers for extra screening. Perhaps something like that should be the case in these 'stop-and-frisk' policies? But even that has limited value. If a particular neighborhood with issues of crime, is dominated by an ethnic group, even random sample will involve disproportionate 'harassment'.
A while back Sam Harris had a debate with an airport security expert on profiling in airport security[1]. Sam Harris advocated for profiling and security expert was not. Sam Harris was 100% wrong and didn't admit it. The security expert talked about how proper airport security should work (and the problems with profiling and how to control for that). That debate has analogues to this conversation, because police should adopt some of those strategies because profiling is socially painful and breeds resentment and has limited success ... and individuals will not make the right decision in context.
I could have been a bit more clear in my summary. The article cites statistics that claim a higher rate of police stops of Black and Hispanic people are unfounded than those of white people. If true, this is evidence of police targeting practices that are disproportionate with actual underlying criminal activity rates.
Taking a step back to look at the historical context... The brutal wake of slavery and ingrained systemic racism are primary contributors to heightened criminal activity we see in some predominantly black neighborhoods. Black people didn’t collectively choose to live in worse conditions with high crime rates... After unlocking their literal chains, a savagely racist society pushed them in that direction.
If society were savagely racist why are asians not pushed in that direction?
But lets say this is true: it still means the whole police thing is a symptom, and not the cause. So the big question (and elephant in the room) is, what can be done.
> if a particularity defined demographic group engages in disproportionate amount of criminal activity (less or more), then wouldn't you expect that that would filter down to the individual interactions?
What you're asking is "is it legitimate to discriminate against individuals because of the demographic group to which they belong".
I realize that it's not obvious that that's the question you're asking. But when reframed in that way, my answer is obviously no. You should engage with an individual if you have evidence of a crime or suspicious activity. Existing while black is neither.
> Sam Harris advocated for profiling and security expert was not.
I don't think "profiling" by itself quite captures what Harris was arguing for. He was arguing for profiling based on a characteristic--being a Muslim--that can't be directly observed. This was a key point of Schneier's rebuttal. So Harris's version of profiling isn't workable even if we admit that the characteristic in question does increase the probability of the person causing harm.
The profiling done by police does not have the same problem, because the characteristics involved are visible. However, visible characteristics are not limited to the ones you note: they also include behavior. So your statement that visible characteristics like age, gender, ethnicity are the ONLY ones available to the officer is not correct. The officer also sees what the people are doing and whether it looks suspicious, the people's body language, and so on. It is not unfair to single out people for their behavior.
It demonstrated in a very straightforward way how the given statistic can result from very different underlying realities, and then provided evidence of the less obvious possibility. The fact that police stops of black people are less likely to find contraband than those of white people seems rather significant.
> Almost getting killed tends to cause PTSD, but the tendency is stronger if someone intentionally tried to kill you.
I'd be more concerned about being the first on scene of traffic accidents, fires, etc, especially those involving kids. I have vivid visions of stories I've been told from first responders, so I can only imagine it is worse for them.
No it actually doesn't. This is anecdotal but... my father in law is a police officer in a city with 1.2 million people and the way he talks you'd think officers were dropping like flies. I looked it up and in the last 150 years 20 officers have died while on duty in his police department. Many were traffic accidents. One was a heart attack.
I found it disturbing to discover that my local cemetery has a memorial already up for local officers killed in the line of duty. The only name on it is a police dog. There is a lot of empty space.
I'm sure this came from a salesman at a law enforcement expo who has been selling these to every community in the country. It suggests a national narrative where the police are convinced that people are plotting to kill them at every moment, and even if none actually have, it's only a matter of time.
Every encounter with police begins with hostility. You know they're armed. You know they're assuming you are, too. I can only imagine how that's magnified for people who "fit the profile" solely because of the color of their skin.
The police have been made good by decades of "good cop" "bad guy" TV dramas.
I mean look at Law and Order, or Chicago PD, or Blue Bloods. There's a token episode about police brutality or corruption that is "solved" by the "good apple" standing up to them.
I often (disgustedly) hear "it's a war out there". The only "war" that is equivalent to the current policing in the US is the occupation of the axis post WWII. It's absolutely a war, but it's a war where the natives are being raped and pillaged by the occupying force with no recourse because they already lost.
I'd be willing to wager the source of violence in police|public interactions is the public in less than 5% of interactions, probably less than 1%.
You don’t have to almost die to get ptsd. You can get it from
* responding to a bad domestic violence call
* responding to a bad child abuse call
* getting attacked by someone on PCP where you ended up shooting him five times because he wouldn’t stop coming until you physically blew out his knees
* any situation where death feels possible, but unlikely, in the way that car accidents can cause ptsd because you thought you would die, but car technology makes it unlikely for that type of accident.
In all these cases, watching the amount of damage someone has taken can easily cause ptsd.
This is undoubtedly true. But EMTs, firemen and emergency physicians encounter trauma every day on the job and we don't hear them taking it out on wives, children and the general public. What gives?
Good points. PTSD stressors can come from minor traffic stops too, since while it may be rare, they can turn into a lethal situation in a blink of an eye.
I think on that last point it would be dangerous if everyone that that way. What the police need are honest good and moral cops who are not afraid to stand up to their colleagues.
The original source is the Bureau of Labor Statistics [0], which is a bottomless rabbit hole of detail.
Data quality side note... Others have pointed out before that a primary work related risk for nearly all of these professions is transportation. That's why the only landscapers we see on this list are the supervisors: supervisors are on the clock while they're behind the wheel, the workers aren't. Reading this data in a meaningful way requires consideration of transportation related risks.
That omits overtime, which is a massive component of compensation in many departments. It also ignores after-hours gigs they can get because they're cops and pensions, which not so many get anymore.
"In 2017, a sergeant who apparently never sleeps made $279,612, which included $158,917 in overtime pay. A detective made $285,070, including $144,926 in OT. In all, according to a Sun-Times report on Sunday, rank-and-file police officers in 2017 pulled in about 60 percent of the city’s overall overtime pay."
Please point me to all the six-figure teaching opportunities.
Isn't that a public safety hazard? I'm not sure I'd want to trust the judgement of a sleep-deprived workaholic with a gun. Either that or if indeed his working hours are nigh super-human then maybe that sergeant isn't human at all and that salary in the budget is being embezzled.
There was a scandal around here recently about some police officer billing the government for weeks where they worked for something like 27 hours a day. Which would be very unhealthy, I imagine, if there was a way to do that.
Same with eastern PA, Bucks County comes to mind. A friend of mine teaches middle school, has her masters degree, and makes north of 100k. The property taxes in Chester Country, Delaware County, and Bucks County definitely reflect the salaries. The schools in those areas are generally pretty good, I've heard.
Nope I'm taking issue with this maybe in large cities NYC, Chicago, LA they do, but remember most cops aren't in those cities the majority of them are paid for by small municipal budgets and aren't having hours and hours of OT to bill. Remember the vast majority of cops in the US aren't generally violent aren't working in huge cities with thousands of people and may only have a couple dozen people on their force.
My neighbor is a cop (sergeant) in a midwest town of roughly 300K people. His base salary is $95k, and last year he earned $40k in overtime. He's been with the PD for roughly 22 years. Police start at $56k. There academy training is paid for by the city.
In contrast, teachers start out at $46k, and are required to have a BA, plus teaching credential that they pay for themselves. The maximum a teacher can earn in the city is capped at $88K, and that requires a PhD plus 24 years of experience.
If teachers got paid overtime, they'd be the highest paid employees in the nation.
Hi, my hometown is in the Midwest and has about 70k residents. The police department budget is two-thirds the general fund and increases about six percent year over year, for the last five years.
This year they added some building code enforcement officers to evict poor people; 95k/year plus benefits.
I think these small town cops are doing just fine with their community college associates' degree in "criminal justice".
High school teachers generally require post-baccaleureate education, police officers require a high school diploma, and are the only profession I know of where employers have gone to court (and won!) to defend using IQ tests in hiring with a high score being a negative factor. The latter getting paid slightly more represents a very high premium for danger, given the difference in entry qualifications.
The IQ thing blew my mind, although to be honest "low IQ" is not correct since average policemen IQ is slightly above average. Suddenly I'm reminded of Brave New World.
Does any have a reference for the evidence of high intelligence make the police more likely to leave the job early? I wonder what a police force recruited only from the intelligent would be like?
The great thing about IQ tests if you are smart is it is easy to pretend to be stupid.
In Redwood City, police officers start out at $120,000 a year (plus a pension). I know mechanical engineers in the Bay Area that start out making less than that and do not get a pension.
It never occurred to me to compare policemen to teachers.
But imagine if teachers could levy fines to students and use the proceeds to pay their overtime.
Or could walk to a child and steal their lunch money or whatever they have in their pockets (civil forfeiture).
It would help if 75% of the police force weren't there drawing a salary because they need to make money for the police force by harassing people for minor traffic violations.
I would have no problem with being a police officer in iceland, but certainly in the US. I get why they don't want to give up their guns, especially now, but that has consequences for policing work. If you can assume your "victim" to be unarmed, you approach the situation differently.
So I do think it is a quite dangerous job there to be honest. Moreso than the ones you mentioned. Some time ago deep sea fishing was the deadliest job. Would still prefer it from a risk assessment perspective.
30-40% of police officer deaths aren't gun-related, they're traffic accidents[0] with another 30% being "job related illness"[1]. And in some years traffic accidents is the leading cause of deaths.
About 50~ police officers die via guns per year. The police kill about 1,000 citizens per year via guns though[2].
I do actually believe that in case of deep sea fishing routine may be the source of many accidents as well, pretty similar to driving.
But there are other factors that I consider dangerous. Imagine you actually do have to shoot someone. Even worse if it is an accident where you panicked because your feared for your life.
Are there any statistics on officers who are shot but not fatally? With the widespread use of body armor, you’d expect that would drive fatality numbers down.
I posit that cops have body armor, training, and generally are equipped to take bullets, so to speak. Only 50 officers might have died, but if 1500 were shot, that makes the 1000 civilian fatalities look different; civvies aren't wearing vests.
That's a good point, but the corollary of that is, how many people were shot by the police but didn't die?
And going one step further, we've seen the stat for yearly police gun homicides but as far as I know there are no reliable statistics for how many people are killed by police by other methods. How many people are dying from chokeholds, from beatings, from having medical attention withheld?
It's worth noting that while every unjustified shooting is one too many, the vast vast majority of shootings by police are unambiguously justified. The US has a lot of violent criminals, many of who are bold enough to even try to kill police officers.
Is there some independent research on the subject that you’re referring to? Note that the bar for “legally justified” is extremely low[1], so it would be nice to see some kind of audit that doesn’t rely on legal rulings.
WaPo did a whole series of articles on police shootings a few years back. Part of that was creating a database of all police fatal shootings since, unbelievably, none existed.
One of their articles looked at every fatal police shooting in 2015 and looked at the circumstances. They found 30% occurred when the victim had pointed or brandished a gun, 28% when they had fired a gun and 16% when they had attacked some other way. They identified 5% to have occurred in a manner likely to cause public controversy.
Slightly related: I saw a comment the other day by someone who had somehow managed to blame Obama for the rise in violence against minorities, with the rationalization being that “we didn’t have all of these problems until Obama was in office”.
It’s a classic case of correlation != causation. Smart phones with video cameras in them became ubiquitous during Obama’s time in office. Similarly, bodycams became more commonly used by the police. That’s the difference.
This has been happening all along, we just couldn’t prove it until now.
Also the ubiquity of auto-uploaded videos and livestreaming. Only in the last few years has virtually all video recording become online first. Before all police had to do was take a person's phone away to hide their actions.
That’s a great point. Oddly enough it works the other way too. My neighbor is a detective and told me that a young lady livestreamed herself looting Target. Shared it on Facebook.
Since they kill 1000 people a year (as cited early in the thread, didn't look it up), that would leave 400-700 controversial killings, or 1-2 per day on average...
No, because police are trained to not get into situations where they are at greater risk whenever possible (and it doesn't endanger others). Like it or not, a significant part of officer training in the US is for 'combat-like' scenarios that are active and violent, and risk management, and it's at least partially to keep the number of officer deaths down. That and they're basically allowed to shoot someone who maybe has a gun and looks like they're drawing it, which may also contribute towards the relatively low number of gun-related officer deaths. It also results in more people getting shot than need to.
And as others in the thread have said, it's actually really really hard to accurately shoot a target with a gun, and the number of non-fatal gun-related injuries probably far outweigh the fatal ones.
"The officers with SWAT and dynamic-entry experience interviewed for this book say raids are orders of magnitude more intoxicating than anything else in police work. Ironically, many cops describe them with language usually used to describe the drugs the raids are conducted to confiscate. “Oh, it’s a huge rush,” Franklin says. “Those times when you do have to kick down a door, it’s just a big shot of adrenaline.” Downing agrees. “It’s a rush. And you have to be careful, because the raids themselves can be habit-forming.” Jamie Haase, a former special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement who went on multiple narcotics, money laundering, and human trafficking raids, says the thrill of the raid may factor into why narcotics cops just don’t consider less volatile means of serving search warrants. “The thing is, it’s so much safer to wait the suspect out,” he says. “Waiting people out is just so much better. You’ve done your investigation, so you know their routine. So you wait until the guy leaves, and you do a routine traffic stop and you arrest him. That’s the safest way to do it. But you have to understand that a lot of these cops are meatheads. They think this stuff is cool. And they get hooked on that jolt of energy they get during a raid.”"
"Narcotics investigators had made a controlled drug buy a few hours earlier and were laying plans to raid the suspect’s home. “The drug buy was in town, not at the home,” Taylor says. “But they’d always raid the house anyway. They could never just arrest the guy on the street. They always had to kick down doors.”"
"The thing is, when law enforcement officials face suspects who present a genuine threat to officer safety, they do tend to be more creative. When the FBI finally located Whitey Bulger in 2010 after searching for him for sixteen years, the reputed mobster was suspected in nearly twenty murders and was thought to be armed with a huge arsenal of weapons. Of all the people who might meet the criteria for arrest by a SWAT team, you’d think Bulger would top the list. He was also aging, in poor physical health, and looking at spending the rest of his life in prison. If ever there was a candidate to go out in a blaze of cop-killing glory, it was Whitey Bulger. And yet instead of sending a tactical team in to tear down Bulger’s door, the FBI did some investigating and learned that Bulger rented a public storage locker. They called him up, pretending to be from the company that owned the facility, and told Bulger someone might have broken into his locker. When he went to the facility to investigate, he was arrested without incident. Why can’t investigators handle common drug offenders the same way? A big reason is a lack of resources. If your department is serving several drug warrants a day, you just aren’t going to have the personnel to come up with that sort of plan for each one. A second reason is that drug offenders simply aren’t all that likely to shoot at cops, and it’s easier to use violent tactics against people who aren’t going to fire back. It’s by no means a universal rule, but often when police do face a genuinely violent suspect like an escaped fugitive with a violent history, a suspect in a series of violent crimes, or a barricade or hostage situation, they don’t immediately storm the place. They set up a perimeter or try to figure out other ways to make the arrest safely. This again isn’t possible with drug warrants—there are just too many of them. But because drug dealers aren’t all that dangerous, it works out to raid them instead."
(all from Radley Balko's "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces")
A police officer is murdered every week on average. I imagine the numbers for those shot at is much higher, since most gunshot wounds don't result in death and most shots probably don't result in hits.
In one weekend, over a hundred people were shot in Chicago by criminals. I'm not sure you appreciate how many extremely violent, dangerous criminals there are in the US.
I hope you see the difference between people not being able to trust law enforcement and not being able to trust gangsters.
This crime is in many ways the result of the violence of the police which means other citizens are afraid to call and cooperate with the police. Exactly what you need to reduce this crime.
Similar stuff happened in Iraq. When civilians could not trust the American occupying force then militias and terrorists filled the power vacuum.
> the vast vast majority of shootings by police are unambiguously justified
Is that so? What counts as "unambiguously justified" to your eyes? I don't see how this squares. I mean... let's pick "the dead subject initiated lethal violence first" as a reasonable proxy for what you're talking about.
You're saying that in situations where someone attacks a police officer, the police are 1000/50 == twenty times more likely to win that deadly confrontation than lose? Really? They're well trained, they aren't that good shots.
I think the jury is very much out on that assertion. In this era of pervasive video, we're finally getting a look at a decent fraction of these confrontations, and a shocking number are not justified at all, much less "unambiguously". I don't see how you can reasonably assert that all the unmeasured ones must be...
The Seattle police department releases bodycam footage of lethal encounters. I'd encourage you to watch some of the controversial ones and draw your own conclusions.
What's been interesting to me is that the narrative that develops between the event and the video release almost always survives the video even though the video challenges the narrative.
For example, somewhat recently spd killed a man that was brandishing a knife. Reports indicated he was shot in the back, causing an uproar. The video footage shows that the suspect was twisting and lunging towards them when shot.
To be clear: citing one episode in Seattle against the dozens and dozens of "less justified" killings isn't really making the case the "vast majority of police killings are justified".
FWIW: I'm in the region, follow these things, and don't remember that episode. I'd be curious to follow a link to that video if you have it.
You are deliberately misrepresenting that video! The shots are fired at 1:06, and the guy was, MAYBE in the process of stopping and turning toward the police. He was not facing them, at all. There is absolutely no "lunging" happening. His arms are tight to his sides, the knife isn't even visible, much less extended. And the shots are fired from WELL out of arms range, maybe 8-9 feet away. Hell, if you told me he was trying to surrender I'd half believe it. I'm looking at this and thinking... sorry, that killing was needless. He wasn't a threat. Or wasn't enough of a threat to make it worth killing him over.
After watching the video again I stand by the description. At that position in the video the man faces them and has his knife arm fully extended before the shots are fired. There is a second perspective following the first that shows this more clearly.
Given he yells "you're going to have to fucking kill me" seconds prior to being shot it's hard to interpret any of that as a surrender.
The other controversial killing in recent memory is a non compliant armed man. The body cam footage is inconclusive on this one to me. The man certainly doesn't seem like a threat because he's on the ground. However, he was struggling and armed with a pistol. They gave him many opportunities to surrender.
I just stepped through it again, and you're spinning like crazy. He doesn't extend that knife. He doesn't face the police until after he takes a bullet in his side. He never got within knife range. He never approached the police.
He did not have to be killed. You're really telling me that we can't ask for three more seconds to let him drop the knife or actually approach an officer with it?
And that's the problem with this logic. You want to allow absolute hair trigger aggression by police officers. And when you allow that, you get innocent people killed. Because the cops can't make that decision correctly every time, and if you train them to shoot first, they will.
This guy didn't have to die. I don't know what was in his head, but I know he didn't have to die.
There's a 21-feet distance supposedly required for a trained shooter to draw and fire a gun before a knife attacker can close in. Sure, they had guns drawn, but you still cannot "wait" until they approach.
And, frankly, this "didn't need to die" perspective is alien to me, and I bet most people. If it was my life on the line, I wouldn't even allow a 1% increase in risk - the guy readying to, and obviously willing to, attack someone with a knife deserves to die. Does he "need" to die? No. Maybe event if he's literally in the process of stabbing someone, it would be wonderful if we could freeze time and just take him to a mental ward. But is it acceptable for him to be killed? Without a shred of doubt, yes.
But.... they were pursuing him! They chose the distance! If they weren't able to safely stop him because they were too close and had to kill him if he stopped (because let's be honest here: they killed the guy because he stopped)...
Isn't that STILL a failure of policing? It's it STILL true that he didn't need to die? Why were the cops' "lives on the line" if they were the ones choosing to engage?
They were not the ones initially choosing to engage. I wouldn't expect them to have sound judgment or impartiality after they were attacked in the first place and fired at with a taser. Again, he absolutely didn't need to die, but he totally deserved it and the cops' reaction is understandable. If I ever attack a cop, wrestle his taser off of him, and fire at him as I run away, I'd like to, in advance, absolve the cop of all responsibility of shooting me in the back. I understand he wouldn't quote need unquote to do it, but it is totally acceptable if he does.
You don't have to be within "arms range" of a police officer for them to shoot you if you have a knife. It's generally accepted that someone with a knife is a deadly threat at about 20 feet or so away, as it takes a little over a second for them to cross that distance. In that video, the man who was shot clearly drew a large knife and turned towards the officers before they started firing.
"You're saying that in situations where someone attacks a police officer, the police are 1000/50"
Are you claiming that it would be "more fair" if this ratio was different? Should it be 50/50? I think not, I assume that at least some members of this 1000 were indeed dangerous criminals, not innocent citizens murdered by cruel police officers?
The question wasn't about "fair", it was about "justified". And... yeah? The police aren't assassins or solidiers. They aren't supposed to kill anyone at all. When it happens, it's a tragedy that is supposed to be avoided.
So when must it happen? Well, when they need to defend themselves, I guess. So yeah, I think that kill ratio becomes an important point of evidence as to how dire the need for defense was. If you come to me and tell me that the police are dying as fast as the criminals, then OK, fine, I'll buy that those are just shootouts. If it's 2:1 in favor of the police, then I guess I'd be OK with that and rationalize it as the police being better trained and more worth preserving. Four to one? Maybe.
TWENTY to one? Come on. That's not reasonable on its face.
Again, the set of actions that would drive a reasonable person to use deadly defensive force is much larger than those where the subject is actually (with perfect knowledge) trying to kill the officer. E.g. a suspect might shoot at cops in order to get away, not actually trying to kill the officers.
Shouldn't we hold police to a slightly higher standard than what random-sally-with-a-gun is expected to do? Isn't that the whole point of having police in the first place: that we trust them with powers we don't give to ourselves?
You're avoiding the point. "Reasonable officer" then. My point is that suspects aren't necessarily trying to kill when they give the police officer good reason to think that they are using unlawful force that that threatens someone's life.
And MY point is that you are applying the wrong standard. Law enforcement policy needs to be aimed at optimizing the net good to society and not making individual police officers feel safer. Because the standard you want leads to horrifying rates of false positives where people end up dying needlessly.
No, they are supposed to arrest every criminal that tries to kill them. Sometimes they have no choice but to shoot (and maybe kill) someone to protect themselves or others, but that is not the goal.
The inverse is true though. They are not supposed to kill any person that doesn't try to kill them.
No they aren't. They are not mercenaries. They are supposed to arrest every suspected criminal and prevent those suspects from committing acts of violence. They are allowed to use violence to prevent loss of life, but they are not supposed to kill anyone.
The point is, if every one of those deaths were someone who presented a credible threat and were actually trying to kill an officer, why do so little of them succeed? If anything, they have the element of surprise on their side. Police are often only given little ammunition and training time every year, literally just a couple boxes of ammunition. Anyone just casually going to a gun range every couple of months for fun is going to have more experience than most law enforcement officers.
If they were only killing every criminal that actually attempted to kill them and had the means to, there's no chance the defenders in that situation are coming out successful 20 to 1.
Criminals using deadly force against police probably have intimidation/escape as their goal, not murder. But from the perspective of the police officer, you can't wait to find out. When a police officer starts to shoot, he has essentially made the decision to keep shooting until the threat ends.
What from the perspective of the police officer is reasonable grounds to fear for his life, is going to be a larger number of situations than those where someone is actually, with perfect knowledge, making an attempt on his life. Or put another way, people do things with (e.g.) the intention of injuring/obstructing/etc. and escaping, but that a reasonable person would interpret as being an attack on their life. If you wave a gun in someone's face, they are in their rights to shoot you, even if you had no intention of ever firing it.
> If you wave a gun in someone's face, they are in their rights to shoot you, even if you had no intention of ever firing it.
That is absolutely not the case. If so, there would be a bunch of very justifiably dead 2A protesters and some cheering hippies. You would NEVER say that about a white man holding a 5.56mm and yelling at someone outside your local state house.
Where exactly did you get that logic? Brandishing a weapon is a crime. Bearing one is not. The difference is squishy, and in neither case are you reasonably allowed to kill someone.
The only reason that makes sense to you is because you have a preconceived notion of whether the person "waving" the gun has a life worth preserving or not.
You took one very strange interpretation of the word 'wave' and really ran with it into a very ungenerous interpretation and attack. I'm not going to engage with that.
I interpreted it, and explained so, as "brandishment", which is the legal term of art for exactly that act of displaying a weapon in a threatening way. I submit that if you meant something different, you're the one who needs to clarify.
Both of these statements can be true: 1) the vast majority of shootings by police are justified, and 2) there are way too many cases of excessive use of force by police, including shootings.
You can look at the reports. They don't usually leave local news, if they even make it there, because there is nothing remarkable about them. People have done aggregations of the data. I'm not saying it's going to convince you if you're already convinced otherwise.
"But only a small number of the shootings — roughly 5 percent — occurred under the kind of circumstances that raise doubt and draw public outcry, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. The vast majority of individuals shot and killed by police officers were, like Snyder, armed with guns and killed after attacking police officers or civilians or making other direct threats."
Frankly, that’s incredibly difficult to believe. When the cameras are off, police lie about the circumstances to make their violence seem justified. (Or even when the cameras are on — for example, the NYC police union has opposed the firing of Eric Garner’s murderer.)
Maybe not backed by evidence, but definitely a reasonable extrapolation. Basic logic and social analysis will inform you that the role a police officer has attracts two mentalities: those who very strongly want to uphold law and help people, and those that enjoy abusing power and controlling people. Obviously these lie along a spectrum, and there is some overlap.
Anecdotally, I know many of the bullies from my high school ended up being police. They enjoyed the power and feeling of beating and subjugating their classmates, and they found a job that pays well and gives them fulfillment.
Let me posit this: if you were that type of individual, what better job is there to have than being a cop? Also, if you had that job, would you incriminate yourself after abusing your power, or would you lie, knowing that police protect their own and are often given the benefit of the doubt?
I think it's extremely naive to assume that the situation isn't exactly as I described above. The real question is what is the ratio of abusers and bullies to helpers and law upholders.
> I think it's extremely naive to assume that the situation isn't exactly as I described above. The real question is what is the ratio of abusers and bullies to helpers and law upholders.
And ignoring all the unsubstantiated claims you're making - it's completely compatible and most likely that the ratio is overwhelmingly good cops with a few abusers, and generally if/when present, concentrated in specific localities.
The generalization that cops are inherently predisposed to evil or something is bizarre, unhelpful and polarizing - not to mention inflammatory to all the cops that are in fact lawful and in many ways more honorable than most citizens in terms of sacrifice, risk, and social good.
We simply don't have any data of quality that could substantiate any claims on this subject. So all claims on it are unsubstantiated.
> it's completely compatible and most likely that the ratio is overwhelmingly good cops with a few abusers, and generally if/when present, concentrated in specific localities.
What is your reasoning? Not only is this an unsubstantiated claim, but it also comes with no logical reasoning describing how you reached this conclusion, unlike my original post.
> The generalization that cops are inherently predisposed to evil or something is bizarre, unhelpful and polarizing - not to mention inflammatory to all the cops that are in fact lawful and in many ways more honorable than most citizens in terms of sacrifice, risk, and social good.
You call this idea bizarre, inflammatory, and state that cops are in fact lawful and more honorable than most citizens. You haven't given any evidence to support this, nor have you explained any type of reasoning or logic for how you arrived at this conclusion.
I find this very ironic and hypocritical, as you directly accused me of making unsubstantiated claims; I at the very least provide logical reasoning, while you fail to provide anything other than vacuous conclusions.
> I at the very least provide logical reasoning, while you fail to provide anything other than vacuous conclusions
At least you're admitting to a priori reasoning and using that to conclude generalizations about an entire profession.
A cursory search tells me there's around 1 million law enforcement officers in the US. Like all conspiracy theories - what are the chances there's widespread and indefensible corruption such that all of them are complicit but very little ever leaks?
Clearly we see cases of indefensible abuse (as we'd expect in law enforcement given a population of 300+ million people), but perceived prevalence of abuse seems to be hysterically skewed towards "ubiquitous evil" when social media, etc. broadcasts local incidents directly onto everyone's radar where people are primed to view everything in terms of their preconceived narratives and worldviews.
I preceded my reasoning by stating that there wasn't good data; I'm not sure why you point that out as if it were some new development. In the lack of good data, logical reasoning is the only framework for generating a hypothesis. Am I wrong about that? Other than a priori reasoning, what should I have used; the same style of baseless claims that you make?
And if I was generalizing across an entire profession, I clearly did NOT state that the entire population of police is rampant with abuse. I extrapolated from well known understandings in economics that people who are attracted to the incentives provided by being a police officer indicate that some police officers will be amoral bullies who take pleasure in wielding unmitigated power over people, while others will be those who take pleasure in helping people and upholding the law. Feel free to reread my comments completely.
You still have provided no logical reasoning for your conclusions. I'd really like to hear why you think what you think.
> A cursory search tells me there's around 1 million law enforcement officers in the US. Like all conspiracy theories - what are the chances there's widespread and indefensible corruption such that all of them are complicit but very little ever leaks?
What are the chances that people who have immense power and immense protection from legal action will become corrupt? Quite high really.
Is your argument at this point summed up as "they haven't been caught misbehaving at scale, so let's generalize their entire profession with the benefit of the doubt"?
> Is your argument at this point summed up as "they haven't been caught misbehaving at scale, so let's generalize their entire profession with the benefit of the doubt"?
I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt. I'm saying that it's reasonable to assume that complete information suppression by a conspiracy of bad actors across independent localities is likely impossible. This is why most conspiracy theories are false. Information suppression is hard and even more rare is uniform behavior across many thousands of individual police departments.
It's definitely true that police act in their self-interest and corruptly sometimes. But sometimes is a term that represents vastly different circumstances with tons of different causations, effects, etc. Just saying "cops are unaccountable power-abusers" is simplistic, unproductive, offensive and wrong. There's an opportunity for conversation about reform, but the rampant groupthink, stereotyping and dogmatism is killing it.
> I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt. I'm saying that it's reasonable to assume that complete information suppression by a conspiracy of bad actors across independent localities is likely impossible. This is why most conspiracy theories are false. Information suppression is hard and even more rare is uniform behavior across many thousands of individual police departments.
The only one in this thread that has mentioned either conspiracy theories or complete information suppression is you. You responded to this comment:
"Frankly, that’s incredibly difficult to believe. When the cameras are off, police lie about the circumstances to make their violence seem justified. (Or even when the cameras are on — for example, the NYC police union has opposed the firing of Eric Garner’s murderer.)"
With the following:
"This is technically a conspiracy theory right?"
I don't know how you arrived at "complete information suppression" from the first comment. I think that most cops, like most drivers, would lie to protect themselves. I also think that some portion of cops don't NEED to lie to protect themselves, because they aren't people who abuse their powers. There is some unknown portion, however, that became police because they enjoy the opportunities for power and domination over others, and use their power to abuse others.
> It's definitely true that police act in their self-interest and corruptly sometimes. But sometimes is a term that represents vastly different circumstances with tons of different causations, effects, etc.
This sentence is in line with my conclusions throughout this discussion. It is something we agree on. This is an argument along a spectrum; I've given solid logical reasoning for why I think there is some percentage of police that are amoral and abusive, namely that it is the MOST attractive job for people of that persuasion, and I am a first-hand witness of it with n=~7.
What I am still waiting for is any sort of logic behind claims you've made that are of this ilk:
"most likely that the ratio is overwhelmingly good cops with a few abusers, and generally if/when present, concentrated in specific localities."
Where's your reasoning for why cops are overwhelmingly good? You keep blasting a message without providing your reasoning. You've seen my reasoning, as I've repeated it several times now, but provided none for your claims. Please do so now.
>The real question is what is the ratio of abusers and bullies to helpers and law upholders.
The ratio is tilted heavily in favor of abusers and there has been ample evidence showing this since the dawn of modern policing. Modern policing descended from slave patrols and it shows. The militarization of police is a more recent abomination, but not the root cause.
There is a third category beyond abusers and "law upholders": those who stand by and do nothing, thereby enabling the abusers and silently endorsing their behavior.
This has been my personal experience, but I don't know of any statistics that capture this, so I don't think we can make that conclusion at this moment.
However, from my time in the Marine Corps, which also attracts some people who are amoral dominators, I can say it very much depends on the culture. The Corps pushes personal accountability and camaraderie very strongly in its culture. I witnessed people who were professed racists change in just a few months to accepting all skin colors, people who were completely self-centered narcissists turn into strong team players. It didn't work all the time, and wasn't uniform across the service, but a strong, zero tolerance culture can mold people into it.
> There is a third category beyond abusers and "law upholders": those who stand by and do nothing, thereby enabling the abusers and silently endorsing their behavior.
When I listed categories, I should have made it more clear that it's really a spectrum with opposing values on either end. People who stand by and do nothing would lie more towards the middle, not having a strong enough valuation of justice to step in and stop it, but not a strong enough desire for power abuse to join in. A random person on the street could have a strong sense of justice but still not condone police brutality by standing idly, but I think you are right that a police officer is responsible for violence by not attempting to circumvent it; stopping violence like that is the REASON they have special legal protections.
Regarding this often-cited argument of "people can own guns, so cops need them" - in a situation with a gun, does it actually help if the cop also has a gun? Now you have a gunfight on your hands. By analogy, people are allowed to own rocket launchers as well (it's true!) but that doesn't mean every beat cop should carry one. What's the actual problem with disarming the police completely, and having them call in a SWAT team in the rare event that someone actually threatens a cop with a firearm?
Just to extend on this - this is how it's done in the UK.
Specifically in London the regular police are not armed. Armed police patrol the city in cars - if you're in the city you can identify these cars as they have a big yellow spot on the windows and there is an officer in the back seat. The aim is to be able to respond to a request within 8 minutes.
During the London bridge attack the attackers were shot dead by armed police 9 minutes after the first call to the police.
This is also how it's done traditionally in Ireland, the regular police aren't armed but there is a "Special Branch" of detectives, usually plain clothes in unmarked cars.
Recently they've been sneakily expanding the use of armed police though. In Dublin, I see more and more cars marked "Armed Response Unit" which have regular cops with guns. And just last week a detective was shot and killed with his own gun while doing a traffic stop. There's been a massive PR blitz about how good a guy this cop was, but zero discussion about why the duties of armed police have now been extended to include road traffic policing. I suspect it's planned to arm more and more of them and I wouldn't be surprised if the British followed the same slippery slope.
Not particularly, Irleand is a relatively homogeneous country. There has been an uptick in the last few years in drug gang related murders due to a feud between two pretty brutal drug cartels (the leader of one now controls an international cartel from Dubai and rather outrageously is the promoter behind the Tyson Fury Vs Anthony Joshua heavyweight boxing fight). I think this has probably lead to an increase in gun carrying by Gardai (Irish police service).
In 2018 and 2019, there were over 30,000 assaults on police officers in UK.[1] In 2017 and 2018, there were over 110,000 assults on police officers in US. You can't just adopt this in the US, policing is more dangerous in the US.
I know simple math, thank you. As I pointed out in the other reply, the rate of assult to US police, who are armed and more hostile to you is only about 25% lower than UK police where the majority of them don't carry a firearm. Actually we don't know the proseuction rate so we don't even know it's that lower.
The US population is more than 4x bigger than the UK, and seems to also have more police per capita, so those numbers would imply that policing is safer in the US. (Which I don't quite believe; more likely those assault numbers are incomparable or just wrong).
I wanted to point out that the rate of assult to US police, who are armed and more hostile to you is only about 25% lower than UK police where the majority of them don't carry a firearm.
Has anyone done any deep analysis of this kind of thing.
Of those assaults, what impact did the police officer's gun have on the situation?
You can imagine an example where the gun is an asset - for example if the officer encounters an ongoing potentially deadly assault and then can shoot the perpetrator.
But I feel like more often the gun is a liability, an unarmed person is held at gunpoint and becomes violent - the police officer is left with the option of shooting the person or letting them get away. If they were using a batton/cs spray/taser (options available to regular British police) they then have many more options available to them.
The stats I'm looking at say there are ~65m people in the UK and ~330m in the US. So about 5x the number of people. If that's true (5x people) and the assault stats are true (3.6x assaults), then policing more dangerous in the UK.
(this feels off to me.. am I doing my math wrong?)
> By analogy, people are allowed to own rocket launchers as well (it's true!) but that doesn't mean every beat cop should carry one.
They can own rocket launchers the same way they can own private jets. They're comparatively rare, expensive as hell, and utterly unrealistic for the average person. It's a bad analogy.
Meanwhile, regular long-arm firearms and handguns are insanely common in the US, comparatively cheap, and often very practical to carry or store in vehicles. The US has a crazy level of per capita gun ownership, like 120 guns for every 100 people. Gun ownership isn't rare, and disarmed police are going to get killed haggling after heavily armed civilians.
Another option essentially is to move certain functions away from police, such as traffic enforcement (use more cameras and non-armed officers who need not be police) certain kinds of house calls like for the mentally ill to be done by social workers, and such. The police can be reserved for violent, life-or-death situations.
According to https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rpa11.pdf , approximately 8.2% were "reported crime emergency". So, in effect, 91.8% of all police contact with the public is something other than apprehending criminals at all.
> I suppose it could work if 95% of the police were engaged in something other than apprehending violent criminals...
I would be surprised if apprehending violent criminals was more that 5% of the job, personally. Wouldn't you?
To the downvoters; it is your right to do so, but think about it - Police are on patrol, taking reports of crimes that happened previously, they guard things, they help keep order at sporting events, they're on hand for political events. They're being traffic cops, white collar cops, they appear in court, all sorts of activities. And there's paperwork.
I would be very surprised if at any one time more than 5% of cops, or for a cop on average, more than 5% of their time was directly "apprehending violent criminals". It's important they do so, of course.
It's even lower than that in most of the US where cops are basically waiting around for something to happen most of the time. But the narrative is bullets flying every time they enter the war zone of placid suburbia.
Cop work is exceedingly boring. If you ever do a ride-along, you'll see how boring. And with a ride-along, they try to show you the exciting stuff since it's a recruitment method. Lots of driving around, lots of running tags, lots of looking for something meaningful to do when it's dark and not much is happening. Idle hands are the Devil's workshop etc etc.
There’s absolutely no benefit to shooting an officer as a criminal. You instantly become added to America’s most wanted list and the courts will throw the book at you.
Which is good. It means we can avoid violence, collect evidence for an easy conviction (such as videoing a firearms violation) and apprehend criminals safely using trained SWAT forces.
Nah, cops will just gun you down if they "think" you have any sort of firearm.
Watch this video. The cops don't see a gun, they think he has one because of the call, but they don't see one. The minute his hand goes towards his waste, they blast him...
I'm seriously wondering whether this is a form of sarcasm or a bait. 10.8% of sworn officers faced assult in 2018[1], while armed. Cops threatened by people with or without firearm is not that rare. In 2018, 2,116 sworn officers were not only threatened but actually got shot(!) by a firearm.[1]
2,116 officers were assaulted with a firearm, but only 6.1% of those 2,116 were injured in the assault. That's approximately 129 firearm injuries. That means the rate of non-fatal firearm injuries is approximately 16.1 per 100,000. In 2012 the rate of non-fatal firearm injuries from assault was approximately 15.67 per 100,000 for the general population. When adjusted for the sex demographics of the police (88% male) the rate is 24.93 per 100,000.
Edit: It looks like the non-fatal firearm injury rate for officers is actually 23.6 per 100k. I had the wrong number in the denominator because not all police stations responded to the FBI survey.
You know you're comparing people fully armed and cautious people versus the general population, right? Also it's a biased comparison because the 2,116 could have been shot where the rate of "could have been shot" is much lower in the general public because obvious reasons.
You know that you failed to understand your own source and therefore claimed a number of officer shootings ~16x higher than reality, right? And 'sacred_numbers was kind enough to correct you?
In most states, the legal definition of assault doesn't even require physical contact.
Trying to shove a police officer and miss? Assault. Stepping on their shoe while being arrested? Battery, and also probably assault. Spitting on a police officer? Battery, and probably aggravated assault.
It's very misleading to claim that 10% of police officers were assaulted in 2018. That might be true in a strict legal sense, but most of them probably walked away from their "assault" without so much as a bruise.
So if a guy pulls a gun on the cops they are supposed to hide while he shoots until SWAT gets there? Its reasonable to have cops with no guns when encountering a gun is incredibly rare.
Of course it helps to have a gun if your opponent has a gun, because both of you now have a risk of getting shot.
If I know you don't have a gun because you're one of these unarmed cops, I can completely dominate the situation. I can make you stand on one leg and do a recital.
> By analogy, people are allowed to own rocket launchers as well (it's true!) but that doesn't mean every beat cop should carry one.
Rocket launchers are not anti-personnel weapons and no ordinary criminal carries them or would be expected to carry them. The best weapon to neutralize a threat wielding a rocket launcher is not another rocket launcher, it's a rifle.
Should we arrive at the situation where criminals routinely arrive in armored personnel carriers or tanks, then we can talk about arming the police with rocket launchers.
Are you saying that the stats posted above are wrong? Based just on your imagination? Or do you have some information about shortcomings in how they were collected?
No, I didn't say that they are wrong. My imagination is unlimited of course.
A shortcomming I see here is that the danger is reduced to fatalities as average over the whole profession.
There certainly are areas in the US where policing is extremely safe, everyone knows you by name, sponsors you a donut from time to time and is happy to see you. I would do it without a problem and this is probably true for most officers. But allow me to specify, I wouldn't want to be a police officer in urban areas with focal points in crime.
I really haven't really heard anyone, even protestors, claim that police in the US should give up their guns. The recent high profile cases of deaths haven't been by gun, but with bare hands. Mostly, the discussion is around if/when deadly force should be used, no matter the implement.
That doesn't mean there won't be police. Other cities have disbanded their police departments. All have been replaced with a new police department. The idea is to replace a poorly run department when reform isn't good enough. The idea isn't to have a completely unpoliced city.
Camden City PD was disbanded to reduce the costs of salaries and benefits with new union contracts. The CNN article doesn't even contain the word 'union'.
That's beside the point. My reason for linking the example was to illustrate that departments have been disbanded before and it's a more aggressive strategy for change than attempting to reform an existing department, not a call for lawlessness.
"disband the police" fits on a sign, but it's an incomplete statement.
I agree with that impression, and actually find it really puzzling that disarming police isn't a central message. I think it's very likely that if the police on George Floyd had been unarmed that eventually the bystanders would have intervened (at least I hope).
> I would have no problem with being a police officer in iceland, but certainly in the US. I get why they don't want to give up their guns, especially now, but that has consequences for policing work. If you can assume your "victim" to be unarmed, you approach the situation differently.
Iceland has a fairly high guns-per-capita number, with about one gun for every third person. An odd choice to use as an example of a country safe due to an unarmed populace.
> So I do think it is a quite dangerous job there to be honest. Moreso than the ones you mentioned. Some time ago deep sea fishing was the deadliest job. Would still prefer it from a risk assessment perspective.
"Longarms" or "long-arms" generally refers to rifles and shotguns, as opposed to handguns.
It's an important distinction, as something on the order of 80-85% of gun violence in the US -- rape, murder, robbery, suicide, etc. -- are with handguns.
Almost all deaths deep sea fishing are from mistakes. Many deaths from policing are people intentionally trying to kill you.
Maybe that comes into play. With deep sea fishing , if you're careful enough, you can drastically lower the death rate - it's in your hands. Not so with policing.
My Dad was a lobsterman for 12 years and just being careful is not enough to "drastically lower your death rate" for a profession fisherman unfortunately.
You can't control how long you've been awake. You can't control a rogue wave the sweeps you off the tail of the boat. Professional fisherman have enormous respect for the sea.
You can control your wakefulness with certain drugs that are very common on commercial fishing boats.
You can improve your odds of not being overswept by using your tethers appropriately and wearing proper protective gear which many people forego because it's less comfortable to work in.
Are they really? It seems likely to me that many are simply reacting to being cornered and threatened. Taking the behavior of the police out of the equation makes the answer useless.
A major part of their job is arresting people who usually don't want to be arrested. Yes, I'm sure some police over-escalate a situation and end up dead for it, but that's probably not the norm.
I am me, period. Put me in whatever box you feel like.
I honestly have no idea if policing has gotten more violent or if it's just more visible now. I would guess both. But it doesn't really matter, does it? It's still a major issue that we need to fix somehow.
Would you say there's a difference in kind between the risk of death due to equipment failure or negligence, versus the risk of another human being actively trying to kill you? They seem different to me, but I'm not sure how to reason about the difference.
Death-by-person probably less controllable than death-by-equipment-failure. But, in reality, I'm not sure that it is.
There are processes/procedures to reduce the likelihood of both.
This is exactly what I'm struggling with. Intuitively, the idea of another person trying to injure me sounds scarier than a harness failing or tree falling. People can be a lot more unpredictable than gravity or metal fatigue. But then again, the safety of loggers and roofers depends not only on their own gear & diligence, but also on human co-workers who can be just as unpredictable. Versus violent criminals, at least the co-workers aren't actively and creatively malicious (usually).
Interesting. Do you have a link? Those numbers are hard to Google, all the results I'm getting are for deaths caused by the police vs. of police themselves.
I agree that being a police officer isn't as dangerous as cops would have you believe, but aggregating statistics for the whole profession probably hides some spikes of larger danger.
Lots of cops work essentially desk jobs. Lots of cops work in safe, quiet jurisdictions. They're pulling down the average, while cops who are responders to 911 calls in high violent crime areas pull it up.
There is a statistic somewhere (my googlefu can't find it at the moment), that shows that in less then 1% of the cases where police are called there is actually even the chance to intervene. In otherwords in 99% of the cases they come after the (possible) crime and are really just taking a statement. Still they walk into every situation with their hand on their gun.
Often enough situations escalate because of that. I believe many situations would be much saver if the officers would not carry guns. Call the armed units for cases where it's warrented, like e.g. in New Zealand.
I believe that ranking shows based on statistics but the real X-factor in Police vs everything that ranks above them is "other people" or your sense of control of the situation.
Think about why many people are fine with driving but fear flying, despite flying being significantly statistically safer. The difference is that when you're driving, you feel in control.
The same is true of all the professions listed as more dangerous than police here. If you're following your training and the safety protocols that go with it, safety isn't a huge concern with any of them.
For police, they respond to 911 calls and serve arrest warrants. A huge part of their job is getting called to potentially dangerous scenes with people who may or may not be armed, may be violent, may fire at them, may ambush them, etc.
This is a recent national story from my hometown that illustrates it.
I can't imagine being more fearful about logging than worrying that something like this would be on the other end of one of the dozens of 911 calls I'm asked to respond to each day.
There's a continual mental impact of always dealing with the nasty side of humanity that I think often gets overlooked- everyone is always lying to you or hiding something, and you get to see a large number of dead kids and wasted lives.
And a lot of the corrosiveness that cops have to suffer is from other cops. Racism, bigotry, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia etc. If you're smart, you're excluded by IQ tests since departments prefer to avoid you.
This ends up altering your worldview as an "Us versus Them" where there are cops and there are criminals. Everyone else is a potential criminal. Everyone is given side eye. The system is rigged, so why not put in for extra overtime. Bump up your salary the last three years so that your pension goes from a $90k/year basis to $175K.
And if you think cops are out to protect you? What a joke. Cops are out to protect themselves first. They've been glamorized since the 1980s as "foot soldiers in the war on crime." Their unions have fought to protect the "few" bad apples, when the bunch is rotten.
They go through the motions of "protecting" us, but that's just paperwork. Showing up and taking some notes. If you've ever had anything stolen, you'll know what I mean. The cop will write down some information, maybe give you his biz card, then that's the last you'll hear of it. They never do any leg work/investigation, unless it's something mandated by their bosses.
Defund needs to happen soon. Spend the money on drug rehab, mental health, etc. We need less than half the cops we have, and no damn PD needs an MRAP.
I mostly don't agree with this as I know too many cops. The racism is tricky- if the only X people you saw were criminals, without any balance on the positive side it can very easily get into some sort of loop. And lots of places are like that in the US, for a variety of reasons- the cops see the bad side of X, without a balance of neighbors and other helpful examples to counterbalance. They're part of the problem, but they're also caused by the problem.
The danger also scales with the number of aggressive assholes wearing the same uniform. It is like any job where your coworkers don't do their job. Eventually you will be held responsible for their results. When the boss asks you about it you might be reluctant to point out your coworkers since you still have to work with them.
Big cities, yes. Small towns and rural areas, not so much. National average is around $60k/year - but the variance is high (from $30k to $120k - depending on the area).
>But how dangerous is it?
The numbers don't tell the entire story. There's a difference between danger coming from negligence vs from a chance of murder by another human. Soldiers coming back from Iraq suffered high numbers of PTSD, even though the mortality rate would probably be similar to one of the dangerous jobs you listed. Not only that Police have to deal with the darkest sides of society, including scenes of murder, rape and violence even against the most innocent of our society - like children.
'Police' is a type of job that is closer to the military example I gave, than to a logger or fisherman.
Can't believe people are citing this data. Comparing homicide statistics of people armed with guns being killed vs armed or unarmed regular people and thinking cops are safer than armed or unarmed regular people? Come on.
How about we account assults? In 2018, 10.8% of sworn officers faced assult. Of them, 30.6% sustained injuries. In 13.2% of the incident, the attacker was prosecuted.[1] But the rate of aggravated assult against regular people is 0.2%. Clearance rate is 52.5%. Prosecution rate is much lower.[2] I really don't care about your ideology or anything, but saying police is a safe job is just stupid. 10.8% of sworn officers faced assult while armed. Let's see how things changes when police is forced not to be armed.
10.8% faced “assault” is a very misleading statistic because “assault” as reported here is completely up to the discretion of the reporting officer.
Only ~1/10 of these “assaults” are even prosecuted. If prosecutors aren’t even willing to charge someone with assaulting an officer, it probably wasn’t worth calling an “assault”.
There was one famous case from Ferguson, where a guy was charged with destruction of property, because he bled on the uniform of the four officers who were beating him in the cell they've just thrown him in, after he complained about conditions.
(The reason why the victim was in jail in the first place was because they arrested him after incorrectly identifying him as a target of an outstanding arrest warrant. Filing the property damage charges allowed them to keep him in cell for another week, until he could procure the bond money.)
Even accounting for that rate, police faces 5x "prosecutable assults" more than a "reported assult" on a normal person. We don't know what "prosecutable assult" statistics on a normal person so we can't compare them directly, but the rate is approx. 67%[1]. Clearance rate is 52%, so it shows that while policing in US, you get approx. 15x more chance of facing "prosecutable assult".
1. Police are much more likely to report an assault than average citizen is. Just by the nature of their job, very nearly every single assault against a police officer is likely to be reported.
2. Once reported, an assault against a police officer is much more likely to be prosecuted because courts, prosecutors, and juries place much more weight on the testimony of a police officer than an average citizen.
3. "Assault" is a very broadly defined crime. Generally assault doesn't actually require a physical attack, so using it as a metric for "danger" is dubious.
Assault usually only requires someone to do something that makes the victim think they were in danger of being physically attacked. Police officers are trained to be hyper aware of threats, and they know that the legal definition of assault is different than the colloquial definition, so the police (and prosecutors) have a much broader view of what qualifies an "assault" than the general public does.
Cops are also looking to throw the book at a hookup, with the help of willing prosecutors. We've given cops the benefit of the doubt for decades, and only now with widespread phonecams are we seeing the truth.
Unfortunately, a police assaulting a civilian, wherein the civilian victim performs any act of self defense down to and including bleeding on an officer counts as a prosecutable assault on the officer.
Something about this list is fishy. Where are the soldiers? Also I'm thinking this is just a simplistic comparison with a base death rate on the job (ignoring age & co-morbidity factors). Police often retire after 20 years so you're looking at the majority of the police force being under ~40-50. That's a significant point of comparison because other jobs you kind of just work until your body fails you (either through extra clumsiness, too much labor for the heart, etc). So the manner of fatal death & age are super important factors here that are ignored.
I don't think it's helpful to say police don't actually have a dangerous job. It is perhaps helpful to consider other HNer comments like "You couldn't pay me enough to be a cop". That might explain the pay difference.
More importantly, the entire framing is the problem. As soon as you're looking for reasons to cut officers slack, you're on the wrong side. Being a police officer should have at least the same seriousness, responsibility, training, & consequences (if not more) as being a lawyer, judge, doctor, etc. Probably more since they have greater training and capability to end a life and put themselves in such situations more frequently (& often instigate/escalate such situations whether through their own actions or their association with police).
They don't even make the list, obviously. The majority of the military is non combat for every branch, and only a small minority is deployed at any particular time. This isn't WW2, soldiers rarely die.
Over the 8 years of the Iraq war 4.5k US soldiers died out of 1.4 million troops (300k deployed). That's 40 per 100k, compared to 97 for pilots, 64 for metalworkers, and 46 for taxi drivers.
The list in op is for the current year. The number of troops killed this year was far lower than any point during the Iraq war, and they don't come anywhere near the top of the list.
Without doing any research, I'm guessing it's one of two possibilities:
- They're not in the top 25 because death rate among soldiers is low overall. The vast majority of soldiers are clerks, mechanics, and other support personnel, many of whom will never even deploy. Of those who do, many will spend their time on a large base in minimal danger. Those who are in danger from combat and IEDs are those who venture outside the base frequently (infantry, drivers, combat engineers, etc). These are a small fraction of what would be considered "soldiers" on a list like this, which brings the overall mortality rate down significantly.
- This list doesn't account for soldiers at all because, to put it bluntly, calculating this for the military is a pain in the ass. Doing it properly would likely require an entirely separate and more detailed study and breakdown of the data. One reason is because of the variance in jobs. Another is because the danger varies wildly depending on whether we're actually in a war. Being an infantryman during WWII, Vietnam, or in a place like Fallujah circa 2004 was risky business. Right now, not so much. It's worth noting that the military has its own government-funded life insurance program (SGLI) rather than contracting it out to a civilian agency. I suspect this is because no civilian insurers are willing deal with the unpredictability.
Well, to be fair, they ARE in that list. It's just that most the deaths are more from occupational hazards than actual combat. Electricians get electrocuted, welders fall off of scaffolds, and some guys just get hit in the head by something that falls off of something else:
"{REDACTED}, age 31, was injured during training at Naval Air Station North Island, Calif., when an auxiliary fuel tank fell off the HH-60H Sea Hawk helicopter he was inspecting. Clement and another sailor were struck by the tank. {REDACTED} died from head injuries sustained in the accident."
I think the rate of death and injury where they weren't back to work in a couple of days for US troops in Iraq was a bit less than 2 in 100. *
Note that most soldiers work in supply, administration, artillery, cooking, running the mail system, and things like that, and aren't exposed to any combat at all at any point in the careers.
I can imagine refuse collector being more dangerous than that.
* Death and Injury Rates of U.S. Military Personnel in Iraq , Goldberg, 2010
I would not expect soldiers to be included as the potential and expectation for death is much higher and generally totally different. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread if you're in the military you can legally be ordered to do something that will 100% result in your death with no ability to refuse, which is not true of any of the professions on that list.
I would think logging would be less dangerous now.
When a was growing up in Maine, loggers cut down trees with the chainsaw and pulled the trees into the wood yard with a tractor like skidder (skidah in Maine-speak).
Now, they are more likely (I think) to use a machine that clips the tree off (like scissors) and takes the branches off.
The title is conditional risk. The characters reason that since very few people die of thunderstorms, they don't need to take any precautions.
The point is of course, that the reason that so few people die of lightning is that people are sensible and avoid danger. And that if you are reckless then you will be at much higher risk than the average person.
I'm not saying that this is necessarily the case here. But it's a hypothesis that I think needs refutation.
I knew a really nice guy that ended up working in forestry in the US, and tragically died after backing into a powerline whilst up a tree in a harness cutting branches. Working with trees is so dangerous.
I take issue with this statement/argument based on the fact that there have been several people in jail for releasing material to wikileaks that revealed the grotesque amount of Human Rights violations, not least of which the video showing how some soldiers will kill in cold blood: Collateral Murder.
This ended up seeing Manning get thrown in jail, be tortured for years in isolation, as well as having attempted suicide several times while in jail (again! after getting a communicated sentence by Obama)_the last time for refusing to testify against others involved. And Assange has also had to suffer a confined existence, been dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy and placed in jail and still awaits trial while his health and mental health have deteriorated, I'd say his near 8 year amount of torture as a direct result of the Military trying to cover up misconduct showed the World just how perverse both systems really are.
I'm not even going to get into things like the use of Contractors like Black Water/Xe, or black-sites/rendition camps, and spies.
All I will say is read Jeremy Scahill's work, this pro-Military narrative seems entirely jingoistic and akin to 9/11 ahead of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, I have vets in both wars in my family and have seen the consequences first hand, to me and alarming as the tensions between the CCP and the US are accelerating.
Just so its clear, I despise the CCP but War is not a solution or an option we should accept.
Look how fucking horrible behavior can be when even when the organization has a publicly stated stance of holding members accountable, and occasionally actually does so.
Now imagine the fucking horrible behavior that doesn't even manage to get surfaced in an organization that takes a public stance of not holding members or itself accountable.
The military is far far from perfect. The police still manage to be worse. And that's fucking terrifying.
> The military is far far from perfect. The police still manage to be worse. And that's fucking terrifying.
Having been personally subject to police violence for my life as an activist several times: I only sort of agree, which is why I said look as Jermey's work and draw your own conclusion.
I can tell you right now: my experiences do not even remotely compare to that of the normal civilian in Vietnam or Laos during those wars, I went to school with many of the children of that generation and it would be outright offensive if I tried to compare our experiences; let alone that of the Iraqi or Afghani people who are living in a literal nuclear waste land due to the constant bombing and use of depleted uranium munitions on their land while being 'shocked and awed' into submission.
Many of who I'm sure would tell you were just as oppressed by the Saddam regimes as well as the 'Taliban' but have found themselves in perhaps the worst of all possible situations in a horrible Humanitarian crises as they were 'liberated' by the US. While the world continues to ignore that.
That is completely and deliberately out of context. Manning released greater than 750,000 documents and almost all of them had nothing to do with violence of any kind. So much out of context that whistleblowing was never raised as any form of defense by Manning’s civilian attorney.
You're taking issue with something I said, but proving my point for me. He shouldn't be subject to this torture for releasing cables. Collateral Murder was unclassified, but in the reactionary affairs of the Military Police it was as if he is the one who did it all. He was doomed to damnation for convictions he felt he had, and had to suffer for doing so.
I'm not sure how some of you are attributing this when there is a clear paragraph denoting what they were doing was a duty to anyone who actually believes in what the US is asking you to do when you join its ranks: protect the Constitution, which includes informing the People of what is being done with their taxes as well in their name that ultimately makes the world less safe.
But he did not release the Collateral Murder video, it just ran simultaneously in the news cycle as Wikileaks cable releases were being run and got more attention than how a Secretary of State's role was to make way for US corporations to get stronger footholes into emerging S. American Countries in return for certain 'diplomatic' favors , and how the Intelligence agencies spied on them in the process.
Seriously, read Jermey's work, as well John Perkins' book Confessions of an Economic Hitman, this was regarded as the norm even before the cables were ever released by many sources.
So, to be clear: Manning and Snowden alike released classified information regarding Cables or internal documents of how Intelligence agencies operate in and outside the US and respectively have been crucified for it.
The footage was portrayed as classified,[7] but its confessed leaker, U.S. Army soldier Chelsea Manning, testified in 2013 that the video was not classified.[8]
> Chelsea Manning was not involved in the "collateral murder" leak.
True, he testified and said it was an unclassified video. You're right. However, the ire of the State was such that you'd think it had been, and that's the point.
How can whistle-blowers like Manning or Snowden be treated in this manner when all they're doing is exposing the material that should be afforded to every citizen to scrutinize, and if I'm honest if we did we would stop calling the US anything but yet another Empire with all the Human Right's violations that they all commit. Moreover, he isn't alone: so many from Binney, Drake etc... This is systemic Imperial decree that is masked as Law when in reality we've been here before with the Pentagon papers and Daniel Ellsberg.
In short, I don't think there are 'good guys' in this narrative of Police vs Military and both need to be vastly reformed.
From the very inception of this country, its General who led the Revolution stated that Government is a necessary evil, and should be regarded as such with certain vanguards that protect the People from the eventual Tyranny (even his own) that they all succumb to. Jefferson then went on to enshrine into the Deceleration of Independence and his philosophy leading up to his presidency, which was underwhelming by his standards of radical, and fringe Idealism he had supported up until then.
Manning and Snowden should never be compared as whistleblowers. Snowden has so much moral high ground in the form of responsible disclosure compared to Manning that it does him a disservice to put him in the same sentence as Manning.
> Manning and Snowden should never be compared as whistleblowers
I disagree entirely, and despite my preference with Ed as his involvement encompasses Bitcoin, general cryptonerd stuff and the fact that I really enjoyed the 1/2 of Permanent Record I read, I still think Manning has shown great conviction under horrible circumstances and continues to Freedom Fight under constant horrible duress and personal harm.
I don't have heroes, but if I did the two would hold equally high positions given the efforts to inform the public at personal sacrifice to their careers and Life.
If it's one bad actor, they'll get court marshalled. If it's several (e.g. Abu Graib; possibly misspelled), or if it's systemic (e.g. no care whatsoever for collateral damage, such as shooting civilians or bombing schools and hospitals), then the powers that be will stop at nothing to cover it up or play it down.
Supporting tyrants against their people on some feeble 18th century concept of 'sovereignty' is why we have the crisis of the last decade in the first place. Freedom for everyone or screw it all.
Out of curiosity, what is the “crisis of the last decade?” Honest question here, I’m personally not aware of any “crisis” that hasn’t been ongoing for several decades before the 2010s.
Wait, you actually want “America world police”? And who decides what is or is not democratic? In your world, what would you do against Saudi Arabia (I assume you’d see them as not democratic and thus not a real country)?
"Non democratic countries are not real countries." Lemme up the ante. Countries without free medicine and guaranteed basic income are not real countries". Someone need to come and teach them a nice lesson. "Screwing" will help as well.
IMHO this article is nonsense. Even the Gallagher example contradicts the premise. The SEALs that reported him basically risked their careers in doing so.
The military may have laws/rules to report misconduct, but structurally, units are incentivized to hide misconduct (e.g. “handle internally”) because they don’t want the embarrassment. More importantly, failures by subordinates are often seen as leadership problems (you can make an argument that in many cases this is true) which mean officers and SNCOs are likely to sweep them under the rug if they can.
I saw many, many cases of this in the USMC. DUIs turned into “wet and reckless” because it involved a SNCO (an NCO or lower would have lost rank). NCOs (rightfully) pressing charges against subordinates for misconduct, only to be pressured by company/battalion leadership to accept “alternative punishment” (which often amounted to nothing). A let’s not even talk about all the case where there was sexual or physical abuse that went unreported despite everyone knowing it was happening.
The only time the military is motivated to act on misconduct is when it can’t hide it.
The military may have laws/rules to report misconduct, but structurally, units are incentivized to hide misconduct
The key word seems to be structurally. The US have this much copied feature of decentralization. Every town elects his sheriff, judges, a lot of the administration is local, then statal. Federal bodies are a far away, mistruted entities. Police is local.
It made sense for a huge country developed at the rhythm of railroad. Law and order must exist near the place where the crime is. I'm not so sure that it's still the case with current connected world. Maybe the US still needs a level more decentralization than most other countries. But if you look at other countries where police is less corrupt and citizens trust them, it's usually an entity dependent on central government, not the city council.
Making the investigative entity as far as possible from the investigated is much better for imparciality. Also involving judges, not in the same branch. Local police here has limited competences. Any serious crime goes to national corps. Police needs to go to national academy and get certified for the whole country.
In my country I would trust police much more than the military.
That’s a fascinating idea, but in practice I think we Americans have completely messed it up. Some U.S. states like Georgia centralize investigative responsibilities (often when municipalities are too small to budget these services). This strategy hasn’t lead to great results. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is notorious for falsely indicting and imprisoning minorities. I suspect the same is probably true in other states.
We do still have the FBI and federal Dept of Justice that is supposed to provide some semblance of oversight. However, as we have seen over the last 4 years, they are equally susceptible to political influence as local law enforcement agencies.
There is an interesting fact that's seldom overlooked over here. We have comunidades autónomas, that might be similar to states, only smaller. They're relatively new, less than 50 y.o. and accumulates a disproportionate number of corruption cases. Why is that?
Central government was developed around the statute of the public officer. In the 1800s there was an unending flow of public officers in and out (the "cesantías") caused by political parties putting their people in public jobs and firing the others' people when every elections turnover. At a certain moment a system of merit access was imposed to provide stability. If you were under the line that divides technical from political, you're safe from firing. Still it's possible that you want to cooperate for promotions but, at a certain level, you just don't care.
Comunidades were developed from scratch, with a hight proportion of "external" workers (that don't have the protections of the public officer statute), with "merit points" distorting the exams (being the merit having been working for years without exams because you're friends with someone) and with very little judicial oversight.
TL;DR: to avoid local corruption, make the police come from as far above as possible. To avoid central corruption, make technical lead not political and involve judges not elected by politicians. Everything elected by politicians gets corrupted.
It's trained from early in bootcamp that misconduct must be reported and dealt with.
The Gallagher debacle did not go like you're claiming. Some of the SEALs who reported him went on to choice assignments that I know of personally, and I believe at least one of them has made Chief since (for the non-Navy that's the biggest promotion an enlisted Sailor can get). There's always some measure of risk I suppose, but NSW handled that case by the book. The lawyers fucked it up, and then his lawyer managed to get the case into the public eye and by extension a CINC with no military experience or understanding who interfered in the case over and over.
The military isn't perfect in this area by any means, but in my experience if they're going to err, they're going to err on the side of a full investigation and throwing the military member under the bus whether deserved or not.
I’m sorry but that’s not how the Gallagher case went down. To specifically reinforce the point:
“ It is an unspoken rule among their teams that SEALs should not report other SEALs for misconduct. An internal investigation could close off choice assignments or end careers for the accusers as well as the accused. And anyone who reported concerns outside the tight-knit SEAL community risked being branded a traitor.”
“ The platoon members told investigators that they tried repeatedly to report what they saw, but that the chain of command above them was friendly toward Chief Gallagher and took no action. Finally, in April 2018, they went outside the SEALs to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Chief Gallagher was arrested a few months later.”
NYT hasn't met a story they can't spice up with some made up details.
Gallagher was tried in a Navy court, not federal court. When they claim they "tried repeatedly to report what they saw", they may have talked to somebody, but they sure didn't report it to any of the people in their chain of command they could have. Probably they talked to their buddies and wondered why nobody did anything. NCIS handed the case to a Navy Admiral who signed the charge sheet, not a federal court.
There are a ton of things in that story that simply aren't so.
20+ year career on active duty, multiple deployments with NSW, and lots of experience with NCIS (clowns with badges) as well.
Yes, NSW is generally tight lipped about things. The claim that the SEALs involved in this were punished for it didn't happen.
Strangely, the word "union" doesn't appear in the article.
Considering that it is the police unions that create the system within which police officers are protected, I believe their power and tactics need to be examined.
Unions are boogeymen for these issues. They advocate for members by design so that is easy to do. The problems affecting police in states that prohibit collective bargaining for public employees or where private police are the same.
>They advocate for members by design so that is easy to do
And in their blind advocacy for members they are advocating for things that are at odds with what is good for the people their members are supposed to serve therefore they are a problem that needs to be solved and cannot be left out of this.
Police unions are a good indicator of how deep the problem runs. Police union bosses are elected. Google "police union boss" if you want to see a spittle flecked shouting goon defending the worst police behavior. This is the guy who won the most votes. This is how we know it is not "a few bad apples."
Nevertheless, the union is a symptom of a very deep problem that will not be solved by half measures. If you build a true public safety service to replace the police, you can expect their union to look normal, not like a big city police union.
> police unions that create the system within which police officers are protected
Police unions exacerbate the problem. But they aren't the root cause. Their leadership is supported by the rank and file. And police unions act much more antagonistically in comparison with other public unions.
> “A soldier is reasoning agent,” a military court explained in the 1991 case U.S. v. Kinder, in which a soldier who killed a civilian was convicted of murder on the grounds that his superior’s order to do so was obviously illegal and should have been reported.
This reference appears to be completely wrong. The case it links to is an appeal of drug dealing convictions.
The phrase "A soldier is a reasoning agent" appears in the 1973 case U.S. v. Calley [1] appealing Calley's conviction for murder at My Lai.
Military, especially Navy SEALs, are a lot more trained than police are, so their standards of behavior are higher. In US it takes 2-6 months to become a cop. In Germany, for comparison, it's around 2-3 years.
Not only that, but to join the military is to join a way of life. In the military your conduct is still governed by military regulations after you go home for the day. You can't just quit the military if you want a new job. You can be punished in your career for wrongdoing by one of your dependents. Your career can suffer for doing things in your off time that aren't illegal (adultery for example).
Not to say the military is perfect by any stretch. You still have your portion of GI's committing crimes and scandals at various levels of organization. And you still have problems someone of a higher rank can get away with stuff because of their power over subordinates. But by and large the military has much stronger mechanisms to maintain and enforce accountability than the average police department.
The higher ups created it, the average soldier was sacrificed for it. Doesn't change the fact, that the military has apparently better internal controls, better training and better rules of engagements. Even for some sorts of police work. The US military. Quite telling if you ask me.
> the military has apparently better internal controls
Source?
The video "Collateral Murder" which made Wikileaks famous is one of the many proofs of that the US military doesn't apply much control on their engagements. The army had a video of the helicopter crew that shot unarmed civilians, including reporters and children. The crew obviously had fun killing them. They used offensive words and gamer slang. And the army lied to the press in order to protect the murderers.
You may also read the many NGO reports about misconducts, torture, and civilian killings in Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan… The internal controls almost never do anything unless a high level of media pressure applies.
The US army may have internal controls when the victims are Americans (bullying, etc), but apart from this... some lives are more equals than others.
There were comments on another thread from soldiers being deployed to Bagdad during the surge. Citing rules of engagement, and these were a lot more stringent and de-escalating than police actions against protests in the US.
Also true that US forces are the least restraint forces at the moment. Because all you said is true. And yet, it seems to work at least as good for the armed forces as it does for police. Only that the former is an occupation force on foreign soil, while the latter is nominally there to serve and protect the public.
When I was in the military I was taught about esprit de corps, loyalty, camaraderie etc. but they stressed that any order that goes against humanity must not be followed. Fortunately I never had to test that on my own ass, however I'm sure that the Police protecting their bad apples has nothing to do with that. Loyalty and esprit de corps must never ever go beyond the law, otherwise they become essentially like the mafia's code of silence, that is, a crime that covers other crimes. If I see a cop doing that, I cease to consider him as a cop as he just became a criminal wrapped in uniform.
I have frequently seen police compared unfavorably to the military in recent weeks. I have never served, but everything I've seen about how the military handles use of force and how it handles incidents of violent misconduct suggest a standard that police units, at their worst, do not adhere to.
What I find so strange is that while I am no supporter of the military complex in the US, all of my ire is directed at the civilian oversight and not the military itself.
The military generals wanted to close bases that it didn’t need and that they thought was wasteful - the government wouldn’t close them because of the job loss.
The military leaders have said one of the biggest threats to our democracy is our ballooning national debt - I can’t find a quote from a general but you will find plenty of pro-military sites that agree. But yet the civilian government ignores the threat.
The military has plenty of weapon programs that it would love to mothball. But again, Senators are worried about job loss and they keep making weapons and selling them to foreign governments.
The government can spend billions on weapons that the military doesn’t need and private contractors but won’t equip soldiers with what they need.
This also goes for global warming etc. The military is a really interesting institution when it comes to politics in the US, and undoubtedly anywhere really.
I can’t really say that I disagree with anything on a meta level in recent history that the military has done or that military generals have said that wasn’t a direct result of incompetence, greed, or just wrong headed ideology by the civilian government.
It doesn't seem to actually explain anything. I was in the military and have some cop friends so maybe I can explain the divergent sociology:
Post police academy, AFAIK police never experience collective punishment. In the army its normal if someone loses a weapon to have everyone doing a few pushups. When you saw your squadmate without a rifle, why didn't you ask them wtf they're doing? From large to small scale cops experience punishment alone and military suffers as a group. Small crime breeds large crime and (pardon the pun) military simply self-polices more than cops as a leadership style.
I can't blame cops too much as they have to deal with demographics where saving face is important and one cop dropping another cop for pushups because they lost their summons-writing pen is impractical. Which brings up sociological difference where the enemy for cops is 40% to 100% of their daily interactions and is up close and personal, so screw these guys I'm breaking bad, whereas 100% of human interactions in the military is with buddies and the bad guys don't speak our language and the firefights are at 25 or more yards in a very abstract sense. Essentially cops spend most of their time with people who hate them so "getting even" makes more sense, whereas military spends nearly 100% of their time with friends and why would you want to screw over your buddy?
The military bakes corporate style reorganization into the cake, you can expect a PCS move around the world every two or so years, its very unusual to have TV or Movie style old timers who've been in the unit forever. Even in the Reserves if you are in long enough to get E-5 or E-6 you're almost certainly going to have to move to get that next promotion and higher level leadership always rotates even in the reserves. Noobs don't even know HOW to be corrupt for the first quarter of their time on station. Its a valuable learning experience and filters out people who can't learn quickly on the job, which for military is good. Cops on the other hand will have some old sgt who's been sitting on the same desk for 25 years and the good ole boys network of questionable activities formed decades ago and ...
The military is highly paid; civilians don't understand that when I got out (a quarter century ago) the current pay rate for me would be just under $3K/month, but that's not before tax like civilians, that's after getting housing, food, insurance, essentially all I have to pay for $3K/mo would be bar bill and car expenses. Cops on the other hand get paid approximately as much as public school teachers aka F-all not much in a pyramid scheme where people scream about the top of the pyramid making $100K but realize the top of the pyramid is incredibly small (like pro sports salaries) and the base of the pyramid is an immense number of people making $50K/yr or often far less. Speaking of pyramids, in the military every 5-yr experience E-4 makes the same $3K/mo after all expenses are paid, whereas with both cops and teachers its a pyramid where everyone has to compete to get up to that $100K/yr contract, there's a different attitude when you're competing vs when you all get the same paycheck.
Edited to add another important sociological point: Cops usually work alone or in a very small group like two people. Two people can keep a secret, even three. The smallest "working group" I can think of in the military would be special forces teams with at least 4 people, but the rank and file work in groups who can't keep secrets. You can't expect to catch a cop who works alone or with a buddy, so things get worse and worse until they make the news in a big way; whereas the first time someone screws up in the military they generally get caught and kicked out so things rarely get worse over time.
Note that outsiders think the military to cop pipeline is smooth. It CERTAINLY is NOT, and my buddies complain a lot about the sociological differences mentioned above along with others. Outsiders think they just wear a different uniform, but its really a wild cultural shift to go from military to being a cop. Maybe its the smallest shift to go from MP to civie police compared to other vocations, but its still a big shift in an absolute sense.
Essentially cops spend most of their time with people who hate them
How much of policing is actually responding to violent crime vs traffic infractions or minor spats between neighbors?
That the general populace is afraid of cops is largely of the cops own doing. If they weren't power-hungry thugs, even when executing traffic enforcement, they wouldn't have this problem.
Imagine walking up to a group of people at work as your job.
If you're a cop, 99% certain someone in that group, if not the entire group, is VERY unhappy to meet you. Doesn't matter if you're shooting a bank robber in progress or handing out speeding tickets or infinite domestic violence cases, nobody likes you. Most folks can take being universally hated for an entire career plus or minus alcoholism and such, but a microscopic minority will fight back leading to massive unrest and social problems.
If you're in the military, with microscopic career field exceptions, every group you walk up to is your buddies you work and party with, who wanna hang out and have fun with you.
One job field is going to have occasional fatal anger issues, and the other job field is going to have DUI/party-hard issues.
Well they are certainly working hard to make it 99% certain that a member of every group hates them... It isn’t anywhere near that bad though; people come to the police for help. There are suburban and small town police that probably go days without actually interacting with civilians in an official capacity regularly. Maybe some sort of rotation system at the state or county level would help.
A stark difference is respect. The command of it, the teaching of it, really everything. OCS tends to not fuck around when drilling proper bearing in to potential officers. Enlisted salute officers, period. know them or not? It doesn't matter, they are an officer and you show that respect. Police arm themselves to demand that respect and authority, granted they are sometimes in hostile situations and need that but generally they really don’t.
I’m disgusted that unarmed people end up dead at the rate they do during interactions with the police. I will ask why we as a society didn’t care that much until now, it’s a deep culture that formed. Another gigantic difference between police and military is that there are safety valves and “turning on the military” to solve an issue is a major fuck deal, it’s a war fighting machine. The police are sort of like society’s janitor; they get called when a home owner doesn’t want a homeless camp in the park near their home. The police, generally, don’t have that many tools for dealing with homeless, mentally unstable, drug addicted, and otherwise marginalized people. There is supposed to be a crime to lock people up, we don’t fund mental hospitals, etc. if you watch some of the videos it looks like they’ve become very good at fabricating crimes to justify force and arrest which are effectively the only tools they readily have.
Police arm themselves to demand that respect and authority, granted they are sometimes in hostile situations and need that but generally they really don’t.
I've often thought that police should leave their firearms locked in the trunk (or locked in a safe installed in the center console area). If they're chasing a violent criminal, get it. Making a traffic stop, wellness check, or something else, leave it in the car.
This pretty much on the mark. I'd only add that even though the military is uber hierarchical, in good unit's it can be seem fairly flat. Everyone does PT together every day and when I was in the CO would be doing pushups and running with a section every morning. It's a closer team and less bureaucratic leadership so standards are kept in check by the collective. Even though there were pay and rank differences, everyone was in it together where in the police it seems very much like you're on your own.
I think another reason could be the wide latitude you have in the military to punish someone without any official paperwork. If someone did something wrong, you could punish them with physical exercise, cleaning duties, taking away weekend liberty, etc., all without any paperwork. When you don't have to worry that you're going to ruin someone's career every time you punish them, it's a lot easier to keep them in line.
I was thinking the opposite: the US military has "up or out", where one has to advance to stay in, tending to weed out bad apples in the officer corps. As far as I am aware, police have nothing similar (and furthermore, don't rotate). So my assessment is that it's much easier to get along to go along in US police forces than in their military.
The big problem with up or out is that officers eventually become politicians (literally connected to politicians) with the pseudo-immunitiy that politicians seem to enjoy. Prosecutors just choose not to prosecute, or they just retire in lieu of what should be jail time.
The military is made up from officers and enlisted personnel with the former selected and cultivated for higher personal characteristics. The police otoh while referring to themselves as officers is almost entirely enlisted-class material.
Not since the 60s. On paper its possible in theory during an era of low application numbers to become an officer in an obscure location with various waivers if you're lucky, but in practice the requirements to actually get hired as a P.O. are the same as military OCS.
You pretty much need a clean and successful record with a bachelors degree for both paths.
Degree inflation is a real thing, similar to how receptionists in 2020 need a degree in "something" whereas in the old days high school was enough. Boomer generation cops could get hired with a mere high school diploma but that was 50 years ago.
>On paper its possible in theory during an era of low application numbers to become an officer in an obscure location with various waivers if you're lucky, but in practice the requirements to actually get hired as a P.O. are the same as military OCS.
Today, the published requirement to apply to the NYPD is 60 college credits (i.e. a two-year associate's degree). The LAPD only requires high-school graduation.
On the other hand, Army OCS requires a four-year bachelor's degree.
Enlisted-class does not mean uneducated or unskilled (in fact the skill is usually concentrated in senior enlisted and warrant officer levels) - it means educated for certain norms of conduct. What is the police equivalent of West Point where an honor code violation would see one expelled ?
Given how police as an institution is failing, I wonder if there is a way to "reboot the system" (#RebootThePolice?) in a way that prevent bad culture to reproduce within.
Like building a new corps of police ("NeoPolice") alongside existing police with same responsibilities, but with a more stringent process on recruiting, training, internal culture, values, etc. And have it slowly supplement the old, dysfunctional police.
Some rationale:
- When something is really broken, non amount of repair can fix it, you need a new thing. Shifting some policing responsibilities to other institutions (eg Defund the Police) might reduce the negative impact of a failing institution, but doesn't fix it.
- We need a transition plan if we defund/abolish the police, and so far there is none to replace the police core responsibilities (around the use of force)
- New competition drives innovation, and having a new police force can shine the line on how much better our experience of the product can be, driving further change.
It'll require strong, sustained leadership to build those institutions from scratch which will be difficult, given how police is mostly a local institution and the resulting outcome can vary greatly.
I don't think we can consider "police" as a single institution, or in isolation. The character of the police in a particular locality depends on the local government of that locality. If the police are corrupt, it is because the local government is corrupt. That is going to vary widely from locality to locality, and fixing it cannot be a matter of simply changing the police alone; it has to be a matter of changing the local government.
Yes, it's the money the DoJ has long been giving to local police departments to help them "protect and serve" and in general be pretty.
So, we get to set up a company, say, Local Police Audits, Inc. and a company Audits and Approvals, Inc. The second works to make sure the DOJ thinks they are pretty and, then, works to make sure the first is pretty; and then the first works to make sure the police departments, e.g., in Minneapolis, Atlanta, NYC, Baltimore, etc. are pretty, get a coveted, official pretty prize.
And if a police department does not get a pretty prize? Then the DoJ "will make them an offer they can't refuse" -- get a pretty prize or lose your DoJ money.
The Blue Line, police contracts, and police unions aside, this offer will be meaningful to the local mayor, town council, and maybe the local newspapers, voters, taxpayers, chief of police, the state governor, and even the mainstream media (MSM).
How many government organizations (especially unionized ones) get rid of or otherwise deal with bad performers?
Instead of pointing out the military as the rule and police officers as the exception, maybe we should consider that the military is the exception.
Teachers, federal employees, and government employees at all levels of local government are known for being able to keep their jobs long after they should have been fired or disciplined.
The egregiousness of bad policing is that many times they are breaking laws. But honestly, there are gray areas. The police are allowed to hit some people. They have to shoot some people. So it's not a huge leap to assume that some of them will overstep their bounds. And when they do, the union will back them, and their colleagues will back them. And we'll hear how underpaid they are (just like teachers).
I've come to believe public sector unions in their current form just shouldn't exist, as they exacerbate these kinds of problems. It is the Union's job to protect members, and the only group who is by design trying to make this happen.
I can't see the benefit to having an organization whose role it is to fight the public (citizens) in order to improve the lives of a group granted a monopoly over a function (e.g. use of force/policing). With private company unions, there is at least market pressures that solve some issues.
(I am not against all forms of representatation for workers, and think unions should exist but be more like "hollywood agents", and sell their services to individuals. The power to strike always still exists if you can convince the individuals it is a good idea.)
It's the culture – but that starts with the leadership. These videos are messages to the entire fleet from the head of all US Naval operations, three weeks ago and then yesterday. The first is a call to humbly listen, and the follow-up presents the voices of sailors, to be heard:
Acoording to ethics class during basic training in the Australian army, the key difference between soldiers and civilians is that military personnel are under a legal obligation to follow all lawful orders. The class highlighted that police are (by definition) civilian because police are only obligated to obey reasonable orders.
So a soldier refusing to carry out a lawful order that would result in near-certain death is guilty of a crime. A cop refusing to carry out the same order is entirely within their rights.
And then there was also a lot of discussion of the difference between lawful and unlawful orders, My Lai, Nazi Germany, etc.
Some Australian police recently refused to deal with people who had covid-19, because they argued it was unreasonably dangerous.
At least in theory, military personnel are held to a much higher ethical standard than civilian police.
"Johnson, stand here and guard the road against the approaching enemy" is a lawful order, but it may not be reasonable under many different interpretations.
This is pretty basic military law that a lawful order has a valid military purpose and is a clear and specific (and its generally documented in writing although verbal lawful orders do exist).
Reasonable is in the sense of proportionate such as "reasonable force". Would a reasonable person do X Y or Z to reach a lawful goal?
If you're guarding a nuclear bunker and there are signs everywhere about deadly force authorized and someone tries to break in, its a lawful order to shoot them although if they're a pizza deliveryman it may not be a reasonable order; although lets be realistic pizza deliverymen don't normally break into nuclear bunkers, so its perfectly reasonable to shoot a deliveryman-impersonator commando.
A very off the cuff and unfair comparison is the people who decide acceptability of lawful orders are skilled knowledgeable bureaucrat lawyer types implementing the details of written laws and regs and higher level orders, whereas the people who decide reasonableness of orders are usually on the knowledge level of jury members. Or lawful orders are in the arena of goals, whereas reasonable orders are in the arena of how to do it.
The article links one study baking the "blue wall of silence" claim, but provides only personal anecdotes backing the "US military usually punishes misconduct" claim. In fact, the last part of the article seems to imply the opposite (due to the influence of the current administration).
I think a more appropriate title would have been "When facing misconduct, Police often close ranks. How does the US military handle it?"
Because in the military, the "enemy" are the terrorists/belligerent nation etc. Complaints from terrorists/enemy nations etc as they are in a battle situation are obviously disregarded. The army serve the public, and fight the enemy.
For the police, the "enemy" is the public who are complaining about what the police are doing. It is them Vs us.
To quote George W Bush, you are either with us or against us.
I think they are more similar than not. The military does have mechanisms to investigate and punish misconduct, but so do the police, internal affairs departments. I believe the difference is internal vs. external initiation of claims. I don't see the military being very open to criticism from non-military personnel, in other words, they close ranks too. I think its more to do with tribalism.
Does the quantity and quality of training play a role?
I don't just mean telling recruits to behave well over and over, although maybe that helps, too.
I suspect that training in general makes people behave a little better. If you are proud of your abilities, in your element, and confident that you are in control, I would like to think that results in a better outcome.
My experience of the non-US military is that soldiers have a lot more accountability.
You are told the rules, standards are high and you are held accountable by your peers and superiors. Infractions are punished and squads are self-policing as you can be punished if one of your squad is caught breaking the rules. IE people are always looking over your shoulder and you are looking over theirs.
And the US military seems very similar. Yes mistakes are made and crimes are committed but overall standards are high.
Most cops I see in the US operate on their own (so no squad policing) and standards dont seem to be very high compared to non-US cops I know.
"The latest move comes months after the ICC authorized a probe into alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan by US and Afghan forces as well as alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Taliban. It also follows a push by the court's Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda to investigate potential crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinians -- a prospect about which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said they were "gravely concerned.""
...
"The ICC prosecutor Bensouda sought authorization in November 2017 to open an investigation into crimes connected to the conflict in Afghanistan. According to documents from the time, Bensouda's office determined that there was "a reasonable basis to believe" that members of the Afghan National Security Forces, the US armed forces and the CIA had committed "war crimes," including torture and rape. "
Great article and I think it talks about a lot of fundamental reasons, but not the primary "why". The way most police organizations are setup is already contentious with the population, where as the way that the military is setup is contentious with other countries and their militaries rather than the immediate population. That already means police are provided perverse incentives. How do you measure the success of a police department? It's a common issue in all security circles. Considering that most if not all police departments are usually receiving funding at a regional or local level, where the government can't just print money to keep their existence going, you now have an organization that needs to justify it's existence by making arrests, giving out tickets and essentially maintaining the reason for their existence. The military really doesn't have that problem. The strength of the military is usually directly tied to the existence of the established order. It is military's that over throw governments and bring in new ones.
The military also has little to no interactions with the population. They are almost entirely focused on foreign populations and enemies. When abu ghraib happened, the military acted swiftly. It was a major PR nightmare for the US. The government needed the population's support for the war. So they cleaned up.
And that is really what the major differences are.
TLDR;
Military -> little interaction with populace, existence tied to government, needs populations support to do War which is major measure of success
Police -> funded without unlimited money, needs to justify their existence, direct interaction with populace, naturally in contention with population
Such an organization is called "gendarmerie" and it is seen in many countries like France, Italy, Spain, Argentina,... usually alongside the civilian police force.
This seems like a simple case of local prosecutors and juries not doing their work. The officers were acquitted in the Rodney King trial too. (And that's why currently people are bending backwards trying to argue against Quantified Immunity - in civil suits! These cases should never even reach that level. These should be criminal cases, and the police/city/county/state/country should automatically compensate the wrongly harmed.)
The federal level should step in and charge/indict officers. There might be obvious constitutional issues though. So the next best thing could be an oversight system that is actively against bias (racial, ethnic, and occupational in case of somehow the local system consistently siding with local police). Of course it's unlikely that such a law could survive for long and still be effective, so this probably some other solution is needed - maybe/probably something like tying federal funds to implementing better state-level oversight, etc.
Organizations like the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Guard, and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms collectively fill a similar role to the gendarmeries in other countries. I'm not sure we need another armed federal agency to enforce the law.
One is the interfacing the public. When you are interfacing with the public, you have an incentive to look your best. The easiest way is to not admitting fault, and the police have plenty of power to do that unfortunately. Military to the public is as a whole, so internally they don’t have these powerful forces acting on them.
Culture of silence comes from the top, or more realistically mid-career people who have bought into the system. Your proverbial E4 (junior enlisted with some clout) is the same as a early but motivated patrolman, and those are the parties that do the locker room harassment. But their direction and latitude to behave that way comes from that former party.
With that in mind...
The police leadership that condones the integrity violations required to stay silent are peers to the E6-8's/O4s-O5s who are in the military for 7-14 years and are vectoring towards a career. While bad apples exist in those parties, and those parties have enough influence to create culture of silence, it's never sustainable.
So, life-long careers exist in both for parties with influence enough to do a wall of silence, both have similar danger to the job, but the military has a fraction of these ethical shortcomings police are experiencing.
I'll probably be down voted, but this article seems incredibly out of touch with reality. I was a Marine and a Federal civilian for 11+ years, but this is solely my opinion/based on my own experiences. I am also generally proud of my service and have a great deal of respect for current/former service members. Hopefully I don't offend any of you - my angst is directed towards the cherry-picking and misrepresentation of facts in this article.
That being said, at least in my experience, it is, and always has been, very much culturally ingrained that you handle problems internally and you do not rat on friends. There is an implicit trust that exists for those in combat-oriented roles, that others will watch your back and you'll watch theirs. That doesn't stop at combat situations. Trust me, the forms of reprisal taken against people in the military who rat on others is far worse than simply ending your career.
I find it a bit ridiculous we are now holding up the military justice system as some kind of panacea or institution that has it right. Just a few years ago, we were castigating the military for it's handling of sexual assault. One of the key issues? Sexual assault reporting being handled at the unit-level, unit commanders being disincentivized from escalating reports (e.g., it reflecting poorly on the unit commander when sexual assault takes place in their unit), and as a result, sweeping the issues under the rug. Now we are holding up military culture as being at risk of the "camouflage wall of silence" rising?
The Eddie Gallagher case is another great example. The article conveniently fails to mention that one of the key reasons Gallagher was able to walk away was due to an SF soldier covering his ass. One of the Government's key witnesses, who had already been given immunity, decided to change his story and take the blame for the killing the boy Gallagher was accused of murdering. Kind of throws off a murder charge when someone else says they're the ones who committed it. Less explicit, is the fact that Gallagher bragged about averaging three kills per day, including four women, over 80 days. You're telling me that, through the course of this guy's service, this was the only time he messed up?
The SEALs that finally did report Gallagher will never work in any kind of a special operations, law enforcement, government, or any other field where their skill-sets can be used. That may not seem like much, but it's akin to someone becoming a doctor and losing their license to practice. People outside of these communities don't realize just how small these circles are and how pervasive their former/current members are elsewhere in the industry/government. Word travels and stuff like what they did is not forgotten. Look no further than the Navy Times article from 2019 titled, "What motivated fellow SEALs to dime out Eddie Gallagher?". For the uninitiated, "dime out" is synonymous with "rat out".
There are many reasons law enforcement recruits heavily from prior military service members (e.g., prior training, physical fitness, etc.), but a big one is because they're already at least partially vetted as being a good "culture" fit.
Did anything happen to the soldiers (and their officer) shown killing civilians in Wikileaks' Collateral Murder video [0]? What about whoever ordered that drone strike on a wedding [1]?
On [0]: as far as I know, the U.S. armed forces instigated an internal review immediately after the events in the video. The review determined that the use of force was consistent with the prevailing rules of engagement, and so there wasn't any disciplinary action.
I really don't know. I think it's a bit more nuanced than some of the commentary around it suggests, particularly stuff that was based on the original Wikileaks selective cut.
Another difference: The US Army doesn’t have a fucking union. These are public-sector employees who are authorized to use deadly force, and they have union representation. How is even a single person OK with that?
It is utterly fascinating and I highly recommend it, but one of the most interesting takeaways (consistent with this article) is that police officers quickly become utterly disillusioned with the integrity of the police department as an institution. They complain about unfair recruitment and promotion policies, injured officers who become "disposable", an emphasis on quotas instead of applying the law consistently, on politicization of policing priorities, and above all the city always settling cases against police misconduct so that accused officers never get a chance to clear their name in court, when innocent.
With this mindset, when they don't trust their own institution, the only people they trust are fellow officers -- not captains, not management, not the department, not the mayor. Which aligns with this article -- that Marines view the Marines as a trustworthy institution, while police don't see their own police department in the same light.
Now obviously police misconduct and brutality exist and are a huge problem. But the book very much opened my eyes to the idea that it's not only the behavior of police officers that needs better standards and accountability -- that treating police officers themselves better and more fairly may also be just as necessary to achieve full transparency and accountability. What if the "blue wall of silence" dissolved because police officers trusted their own institution, rather than just each other?
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Danger-Duty-Disillusion-Worldview-Off...