Let's Debate the Police and Criminal Justice

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Let's Debate the Police and Criminal Justice

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Considering Britain has taken the common-sense step of banning the carry of any knife longer than 3" or a knife with a locking blade of any length without a court-approved "good reason", I'd say they have that covered too.

# ¿ Mar 3, 2015 11:59

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 00:58

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Vahakyla posted:

DC police are pretty diverse.

They're also diverse in the sense that there's the DC Metro Police, and then a passel of Federal police forces and agencies with overlapping jurisdictions.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2015 15:25

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Nonsense posted:

Nobody gets a pass because they only had milliseconds to think, Nobody gets that kind of pass in any profession military or otherwise.

Actually, they do. That's how that Air National Guard pilot got off with a fine and a reprimand after he bombed the Canadians at Tarnak Farms.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2015 22:17

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Someone within arm's length holding a screwdriver definitely can be a threat. The reasonableness of perceiving them as a threat depends on the circumstances, but the fact that he didn't put the screwdriver down when they told him to and instead advanced towards them could be considered threatening. It's a sad, messed up situation.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2015 22:25

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Dum Cumpster posted:

http://crimeblog.dallasnews.com/2015/03/family-releases-video-of-dallas-police-fatal-shooting-of-mental-patient.html/

Sounds like as usual they can justify what they did but took no steps to try to have the situation play out another way.

According to that link, the police were called because the son was off his medication, making threats and behaving erratically. I'm certain that had an influence on how they reacted. That said, I'd agree that this is a situation where non-lethal force would have been better.

nm posted:

The problem here, regardless of whether the shoot was "good" is that the police have become the first point of contact for any mental illness situation.�

Agreed.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2015 23:23

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Lemming posted:

It also looks like there's been a trend since the early 70s of being lower numbers of deaths on the job all the time, despite an increase in population (~206 million to ~316 million) and presumably number of cops.

Doing a little more digging, it seems possible that there was a local maximum in the 70s due to the start of the war on drugs. As far as I can tell, even accounting for that, it's been decreasing (and that's also ignoring the huge increase in the US incarcerated populating, indicating that it's getting safer for police despite them putting lots lots more people in jail).

The homicide rate as a whole has been on a downward trend, so it would make sense that killings of police officers would follow.

Pohl posted:

I think FRINGE described it really well. I just used the word dangerous because anything could happen at any time, but stressful is a much better word.

People evaluate the risk of aggression from others differently from the risk of harming themselves or suffering a random accident.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2015 19:55

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Zeitgueist posted:

A substantial part of the danger form policework comes from driving a car and eating poorly. Probably more than from people wanting to kill you.

I'm not sure why any of that argues for more leniency in response to shooting someone to death, rather than more.

Zero percent of the risk in most professions comes from people actively trying to harm you due to your profession, and very few involve an obligation to engage with drunk, unstable, or actively violent criminals. Law enforcement is exceptional in this regard, so I don't know why you keep bringing up lumberjacks.

Zeitgueist posted:

Oh and by the way

The risk of dying as a cop, from any job related injury is about 10 in 100,000(2013)

The risk of dying from actual murder as a black american is 17.5 in 100,000(2011)

I'm assuming you're for giving black folks the benefit of the doubt when a cop makes a threatening movement at them, right?

According to that link, the vast majority of black homicide victims were killled by men they knew, not the police, so...

# ¿ Mar 20, 2015 23:03

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Zeitgueist posted:

You are in substantially more danger of someone trying to kill you as a black person than a cop is. I'm just trying to figure what the parameters are that make it OK to go easy on someone when they kill a person.

Except for the part where you explicitly talked about cops making "threatening movements" in your original post.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2015 23:17

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

FRINGE posted:

Law enforcement is pathetic in this regard. Ask anyone that has worked the floor at a locked psychiatric facility. The scared little piglets woudnt even walk inside past the lobby when they wanted to question someone because we demanded they leave their guns outside of the resident area.

If a small number of "not specially trained, non-cops" can restrain extremely strong and literally psychotic individuals (I was one) then the armored gang should be able to do it without gunning people down to get their dicks hard.

So orderlies can corral known and mostly medicated mental patients in a treatment facility where their physical movement and access to weapons is strictly controlled. This is comparable to the dangers faced by law enforcement because...

Dead Reckoning fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Mar 20, 2015

# ¿ Mar 20, 2015 23:48

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

I'm inclined to believe that any lawyer will advise their client to come up with an explanation other than "I don't know what happened" when being investigated for a shooting.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2015 19:00

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Toasticle posted:

Then take the time and spend the money. We are giving someone a gun and the authority to decide if it's justifiable to kill someone. If they can't be trained to be able to react to situations other than 'poo poo pants, pull trigger' they get a desk job or get to be a traffic cop.

Who is going to pay for it? Regular force-on-force classes aren't cheap, and are going to difficult to justify in the context of limited budgets when most police will never fire their guns outside the range.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2015 21:11

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

So officers would be allowed to keep and bear arms as private citizens, but not while on duty? Do you think that officers having less capacity for force than the people they are supposed to police might be a problem? If faced with a school shooter or armed robber, would officers need to wait for the firearms unit, even though rapid action can often save lives?

Spun Dog posted:

Maybe they could sell some of their Homeland Security toys? Seems like there is always money for that bullshit.

It wouldn't be much money. All the homeland security stuff is provided at little cost, having been already bought, paid for and used by the federal government.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2015 22:01

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

I'm sure if you got everyone to agree to a tax hike in order to hire trainers and pay officers overtime to come in on their off duty days in order to take anti-racism training or force-on-force classes, there would be no problem, but for some reason that proposition is unpopular.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2015 22:58

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Mavric posted:

Ugh if only we could use this massive military budget to send experts to train local police forces not to act like scared white gun owners, but alas, all the money is tied up producing equipment no one needs.

I don't know where you think the military is keeping this highly trained division of conflict de-escalation experts, but I haven't met any of them yet. Putting a whole lot of bullets in someone is among the less destructive ways the military responds to holstile actions or intentions.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2015 00:43

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

ozmunkeh posted:

If you're asking whether it would be better for society as a whole if police had to find solutions to problems other than the standard draw gun and scream orders then the answer is yes.

"I don't want to answer the question you asked, so I'm going to answer the question I wish you had asked instead."

# ¿ Apr 2, 2015 03:16

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Mavric posted:

Do you see no difference between a person with the legal authority to start confrontations and then kill the person if they fight back and a regular citizen who is defending themselves from an unprovoked attacker?

Considering the police exercise authority on behalf of the state, your question doesn't make a lot of sense.

twodot posted:

These are so easy to answer I figured they were rhetorical, but if you really want them:
Yes. No. Yes.

I'm glad you're putting so much thought into the policies you advocate.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2015 07:04

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

chitoryu12 posted:

The extremely low number of officers shot to death in the line of duty that I provided shows exactly what threat cops have from guns: slim to none. The 2nd Amendment allows for legal firearms ownership, but I don't think legally owned firearms are commonly used to shoot the police anyway. The chance of an American officer being shot to death by a civilian is less than a hundredth of a percent...but the chance of them shooting you is literally orders of magnitude greater. You have as much chance of being murdered by a police officer as you do of being murdered by a civilian in Texas.

chitoryu12 posted:

Again, highly doubtful. There's an estimated 270 million firearms in civilian hands in the US but police death by shooting is less than a hundredth of a percent of all officers; at 30 shooting deaths in 2013, that's about 0.00001 police officers killed for every legally owned gun in the country. The number of guns in the US always gets brought up to justify armed officers who whip their guns out at every chance they get, but police murder literally over 3500% more civilians than civilians murder cops.

Looking at pure numbers of officers killed vs people shot by officers doesn't tell us anything useful about the utility or necessity of firearms as a part of an officer's equipment.

For example, in 2013 there were only nine fatal commercial aircraft accidents according to the ICAO. However, most people would not conclude that the relatively low rate of accidents indicates that aviation safety is not a serious concern and that we should reduce our spending on aviation safety mechanisms because they are largely unnecessary. Rather, it indicates that our aviation safety mechanisms are highly effective. If hostile suspects are frequently deterred by the display of a firearm, that would be an argument if favor of arming officers, but much like "accidents prevented," aggressors deterred by an officer's firearm are impossible to capture in data. Similarly, although relatively few officers are being killed by aggressors compared to historical trends, it may only indicate that officer safety training has increased their ability to mitigate risk. It could also be due to improving medical treatment and wide issue of Kevlar vests allowing more officers to survive wounds that previously would have been fatal. The number in a vacuum tells us nothing.

I also take serious issue with your characterization of every single officer shooting as a murder. Comparing unlawful killings of police to every single person killed by police in the line of duty including those killed in unambiguously lawful shootings is going to skew the numbers a bit. Again, we run into a data problem. I'm not going to expect you to assume that every single shooting that ends up being deemed justified by internal affairs to be lawful, but if the vast majority of police shootings are of armed, violent suspects and the examples in this thread are the outliers, it deflates a lot of your argument. Again, a data collection problem, but you can't reasonably assume that every officer involved shooting is by default unlawful and unjustified.

Dead Reckoning fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Apr 9, 2015

# ¿ Apr 9, 2015 18:51

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Lemming posted:

You keep saying "data problem" as if it's just this reality that we need to deal with, when in fact it's a figure that's intentionally hidden by cops.

Not really. Statements like "this suspect was only deterred by the display of a firearm" or "they could have safely taken the suspect into custody without shooting him" are by their nature counterfactuals. Even if there was mandatory nationwide reporting of every officer involved shooting, (something I support, btw) it wouldn't get you the information you want, because the question of whether a shooting was justified (as opposed to lawful) is inherently a value judgement. Posters in this thread have stated that they think any shooting in which there was any possibility for the officers to take the suspect in alive, even at great personal risk, is unjustified. The law doesn't necessarily agree.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2015 19:10

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Zeitgueist posted:

Nobody is able to say how common or uncommon this is, not you, not me.�

Which is what I mean by a data problem. People want to say that the police need better oversight, no argument here. If they want to say that the police should be disarmed because the ratio of police unlawfully killed to people unlawfully killed by police is too high, they should probably acknowledge that they have no idea how many police shootings are unlawful, especially in light of chitoryu's position that literally everyone killed by police was murdered.

demonicon posted:

We are talking about cases where people were shot in the back while running away unarmed or were sleeping children were killed. Or where people with toy guns were killed without ever noticing that police was there.�

These are all situations where the shooting is both Unjustified and unlawful. The thing is that the law is never applied.

OK, let's look at the cases of the cop who choked Eric Garner to death and the SWAT team that flashbanged a toddler. In both cases, a grand jury of ordinary citizens, not police, declined to indict. They legally found that there wasn't enough evidence to charge the officers with a crime, and legally those cops are in the clear. (Sort of like how OJ is legally not guilty of killing his wife.) In both cases, I would agree that the jury's logic was flawed and that the result was unjust, but you're complaining about an unjust result, not an illegal one. What do you think we should do to prevent that sort of unjust result in the future?

# ¿ Apr 9, 2015 19:47

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

demonicon posted:

Here it's a profession too but you receive 2 1/2 (at a university and on the job) years of training before you even start at the lowest rank (basically traffic) and then you need another 2 years of study at a university to become an investigative officer. And in order to beome an executive officer you then need to study at a police University for another 2 years.

I'm having a hard time figuring out what the "nine months" is referring to. For example, basic Federal law enforcement training in the US is about 18 weeks, but eligibility usually requires an undergraduate degree, which takes two to four years to complete. After that, the officer would require various follow on training which can vary significantly in length, followed by a supervised probationary period, followed by periodic refresher training.

Lemming posted:

You could very easily categorize some as being vague.
...
What's the chance that the prosecution intentionally threw the grand jury indictment there, like they did in Ferguson? I'm going to go with eleventy billion percent likely.

Are you sure about that? Are you going to going to label every officer involved shooting without at least two corroborating non-police eyewitnesses or video as being vague? Again, even if you had access to literally every report of an officer involved shooting, how would you easily sort them into "justified," "vague," and "unjustified?"

Eleventh billion percent based on what? Here are two concrete examples, and your argument is "I think the result is unjust, so it must have been due to prosecutorial malfeasance. QED."

demonicon posted:

Police officers should be tried before something akin to a court-martial. Of course with officers that operate on a federal level and don't involve anyone from the officers state.

I'm curious, how much do you know about how court martials work in the United States?

# ¿ Apr 9, 2015 20:11

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

demonicon posted:

Only what I know from Wikipedia. The basis idea was that officers would be tried by actual professionals (including police officers) that are specifically trained for that but after thinking more about that, this would have a really bad witch-hunt character and would also be totally unconstitutional and undemocratic, so disregard that

They also have really strong protections for the accused. Article 31 rights are more extensive than Miranda, the accused often has a choice between a judge or a jury of their peers (who have similar training and worldview), and in many cases your commander can overturn a guilty verdict without appeal or justification.

mastervj posted:

This is overthinking it, because the fact is that number (number of people killed with the police) should be easily available in a developed country.

And, as I stated earlier, "number of people killed by police" is not a useful measure of anything.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2015 20:41

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Lemming posted:

Then why do you want it, if it's not useful?

If categorizing whether or not the shooting was justified is impossible like you claim, the only thing that reporting on every police shooting would get you is the literal number of people killed by police. Now, claiming that you can never categorize these shootings is incredibly loving stupid (for example, shooting Walter Scott to death was not loving justified, but the cops tried to cover it up and claim it was! Whew, that was hard), but I'm just pointing out a contradiction here.

I assumed people would understand that "reporting" implied more extensive information than, "yep, our department shot thirteen people this year". Knowing the times, locations, and basic information (Was the suspect armed? With what? What sort of call were the officers responding to?) is useful for criminology, and trend analysis, and public record keeping even though it doesn't allow for holistic good shoot/bad shoot judgements that are based on the totality of circumstances. This sort of information is an excellent start for questions like, "let's examine why this county has twice the number of officer involved shootings as it's neighbors for the last five years" even though it is insufficient to draw conclusions on it's own. This is some Stats 101 stuff, so I guess it was a little generous of me to assume that people understood it.

quote:

I based it on having a human brain that's able to reason. A man was killed on camera by a police officer using a chokehold that was banned by the department, and he was barely able to squeak out "I can't breathe," the cause of death was listed as a homicide by the coroner, and it's notoriously easy for prosecutors to get indictments if they actually want one. There was no indictment. The preponderance of evidence suggests that the case was thrown. I'm not going to give the system that charges itself the benefit of the doubt.

So, no evidence, only bellyfeel. Just checking.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2015 21:18

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Lemming posted:

You're literally saying that we both can't determine whether or not a shooting was justified, and also that we should trust the results of the cops' internal investigations.

Jesus gently caress, you are stupid. No, I didn't say either of those things. My contentions were that 1) the raw number of officer involved shootings in a given year is not a useful statistic for making policy because the circumstances of those shootings matter, and 2) simply looking at basic event reporting data, which may be useful for statistical analysis when aggregated, does not tell you whether a particular shooting was justified or unjustified, a determination which must be based on the totality of circumstances. You braindead waste of oxygen.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2015 06:04

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

mastervj posted:

This is retarded.

Then perhaps you'd like to explain what information can be extracted from the number alone?

Jarmak posted:

Yeah but this is kind of silly cause the population of Northern Ireland is like a third of just the state of Massachusetts.

D&D doesn't really "do" statistics.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2015 17:03

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Zeitgueist posted:

Neither does the CDC regarding guns because it's legally barred.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion: We tortured some folks > Let's debate about everything related to Police and Criminal Justice, and whatever unconnected random poo poo I have an axe to grind to about.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2015 19:07

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

mastervj posted:

You don't even have that number. I agree that a complete analysis would require more detailed data, but it's irrelevant because that number does not exist for a reason. And that reason is to protect murderous policemen.

So, you're not actually disagreeing with anything I said?

mastervj posted:

This is just uncivilized.
Shame on your contry (to USA people).

I guess you don't understand how American government works either. To keep this short, statistics on gun violence are tracked by the FBI, the federal agency that collects data on crime, not the CDC.

Dead Reckoning fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Apr 10, 2015

# ¿ Apr 10, 2015 19:29

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Zeitgueist posted:

No the FBI covers gun crimes not gun deaths.

Oh, sorry, I assumed that we were talking about crimes in "Police and Criminal Justice" thread.

For the record, the CDC does in fact collect data on causes death (including guns), since literally 30 seconds of googling brings up their stats for homicide and suicide in 2013. However, the FBI Uniform Crime Report is generally the source people go to for firearm assault/homicide due to differences in data collection methods and the fact that the UCR's whole purpose is to provide uniform crime data for analysis purposes.

The 1996 Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Bill for Fiscal Year 1997 stated that �none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.� So they're free to research gun violence, they just aren't allowed to advocate for a partisan position on gun control.

Zwabu posted:

You can argue about how easy it is to interpret whether an individual police shooting is justified, but if you don't compile the data you can never begin to analyze the data to look for common threads, racial demograhpics of the incidents, how many were traffic stops, how many involved drugs or alcohol, how much experience the officers had in each incident, what role the officers' partners (if they had one) played etc.

The data you're asking for is partially compiled in the BJS arrest related deaths report but again, the limitation is that the data only includes incidents where the suspect died (so someone who is shot by the police but survived would not be counted) and some of the information you want ("what role did the officer's partner play?") is impossible to quantify or even summarize succinctly. (I also wasn't able to find a summary of their data gathering method on my phone.)

The report makes no judgement about whether the deaths were justified or not, because, �as I pointed out, that's not something you can do without examining the totality of the circumstances. There is no succinct summary of "good" vs "bad" shootings.

This whole derail started because chitoryu12 made a direct comparison of officers killed by assailants in the line of duty and suspects killed by police in the line of duty, which still doesn't work because some percentage of police shootings are going to be justified.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2015 20:47

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Florida Betty posted:

Here's a story out of VA.

A mentally ill woman was in a jail cell with her hands handcuffed behind her back, leg shackles, and a protective face mask, and was tasered to death because she refused to bend her knees to be put in a wheeled restraint chair.

Such a completely unnecessary death. Police are investigating, no charges filed yet, etc.

quote:

Fairfax County Sheriff Stacey Kincaid declined to comment on the case but defended the use of a stun gun on a restrained prisoner, saying it was �a means that is often useful to ensure the safety of a person� rather than using physical force to gain compliance.

Genuinely curious about the validity of this. It seems like being tazed may be safer for the prisoner than being tackled to the floor of a concrete cell, but I'd like to know what research has been done.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2015 18:20

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Agrajag posted:

Victim was black so clearly armed.

The victim was being arrested for trying to illegally sell a 9mm pistol to undercovers, so yeah, the possibility that he was armed is not exactly a stretch.

Doesn't really have any bearing on the hilariously unjustifiable shooting though.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2015 23:13

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

chitoryu12 posted:

I looked at some of the sample questions on the Florida one. It's literally testing on middle school knowledge. It asked how to spell "phenomenal" and how to add fractions.

Like most civil service exams then.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2015 05:24

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Agrajag posted:

Perhaps a more rigorous selection process is needed for an occupation involving the carrying and operating of lethal firearms. Beyond the basic of are you retarded or not.

That's what the interviews, Academy, background checks, and polygraph are supposed to be for. They don't hand you a Glock and a shield on your way out the door if your civil service score cracked the 85th percentile.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2015 05:48

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Agrajag posted:

Yeah clearly those are all a joke and useless as all gently caress. Oh, and don't forget that some random old fucker with money can buy his way into playing cops and robbers.

What I'm trying to say is that the police in your country are a loving danger to the public. Especially if you are not white.

Not really sure why you're singling out the civil service exam as the one part of the screening process that needs to be beefed up then. I don't think making sure every deputy has a 1600 ( :corsair:

) on the SAT would improve law enforcement in this country, or be at all practical for that matter. It's not like you can judge someone's maturity or cool under pressure with a bubble sheet.

code:

Complete the sentence:
"It's OK to shoot fleeing suspects, as long as they are _______________"
A) Black
B) Hispanic
C) White
D) Posing a significant threat of death or serious bodily harm to others

Dead Reckoning fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Apr 13, 2015

# ¿ Apr 13, 2015 06:22

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

FRINGE posted:

Pretty sure it would at least improve it.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836
http://www.aele.org/apa/jordan-newlondon.html

"Yes, if only more people who are good at ScanTron tests were walking around with guns. Clearly they are the better sort of person we want cleaning up our streets."

:lol:

Do you really think that the problem with policing is that too many smart people are being turned away? The reason the department instituted the upper limit was because they didn't want their patrol officers to have the same turnover rate as McDonalds cashiers. Except for those exposed to it through family connections, local law enforcement isn't most people's first career choice.

Let's also remember that setting a high bar based on standardized testing is likely to further exclude minorities from the police force, not only due to the systemic limitation of their educational opportunities compared to white students, but also because a minority student who can run the board on the SATs is probably deciding which Ivy League admissions letter to accept rather than deciding if he wants to spend his Saturday nights getting spat on by drunk prisoners for less than median wage.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2015 07:00

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

FRINGE posted:

Yes that is exactly what people think.

The SAT/civil service exam doesn't test much else.

FRINGE posted:

I have read the same thing several times over several years. Unlike you I dont believe it.

You don't believe that the most qualified officers are likely to jump ship to better paying, more prestigious gigs with State and Federal agencies if given the opportunity?

# ¿ Apr 13, 2015 07:09

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

FRINGE posted:

Many adults (especially with families) are not extremely willing to relocate unless they are under duress. I am sure the pressure to leave would be greater in the cow tipping areas that are paying 12-15/hr for full time LEOs, but not so much in areas that are paying 50-70k/yr+. That is a problem with the payscales - not a reason to purposefully exclude intelligent people from the loving career.

First off, the departments starting officers at 70k a year aren't the ones screening out overqualified candidates. Second, what decade are you posting from? I don't have a single friend my age who hasn't moved for work at least once. Almost everyone I know would be willing to relocate for a 2x salary bump and better advancement prospects. If it's within the same state, even better. This is super common among academics, tech workers, archeologists, resource extraction careers... Plus, the sort of people applying for entry level law enforcement positions are likely to be recent graduates without family ties to hold them in place. Your entire post flies in the face of the labor market as most people experience it since at least 2008.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2015 07:39

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Pohl posted:

Cops are actually good and we like them. There are some structural problems, though. We need to address those structural problems. This isn't just gently caress the police, this is a conversation about how things need to be improved. Can we at least agree on that issue?

I agree with you, but I think a lot of posters in this thread can't even describe what realistic vision of "good" policing in America would look like, (aside from "fewer dead minorities" and "more like Europe"), what causes the systemic problems we have, or how we should go about fixing them.

Witness the argument I just had about the civil service exam. Aside from the highly questionable assumption that people with higher SAT scores are better, more mature, and smarter than those with lower scores, no one thought about or bothered to address the fact that relying on high standardized test scores is likely to further exclude minority applicants. It's outrage without being able to actually articulate the problem or propose reasonable alternatives.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2015 17:04

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Dead Reckoning posted:

I agree with you, but I think a lot of posters in this thread can't even describe what realistic vision of "good" policing in America would look like, (aside from "fewer dead minorities" and "more like Europe"), what causes the systemic problems we have, or how we should go about fixing them.

Spacman posted:

Mate, I'm not From the U.S. So not from your particular police state hell hole and I can describe a realistic vision of "good" policing in America in seven words.

Police not shooting people in the back.

Agrajag posted:

How about not summarily executing people for minor offences for a start?

Thank you both for illustrating my point.

Agrajag posted:

A person that isn't borderline retarded will generally have better critical thinking skills and will not automatically fall back on shoot the motherfucker up while running his rear end off. I don't even know why you would keep harping about excluding minorities. Do you have some bias where you think minorities are dumber than the average white person?

The gap between white and minority students on standardized tests is a pretty well documented phenomenon. Plus, a heavy emphasis on standardized testing is likely to result in a higher proportion of Asian-American officers, (see above,) and it's not like there's a history of tension between Asian-American communities and people of color.

Hollismason posted:

Yeah that's what i thought was funny. Like they're the simplest questions in the world.

Again, no one has satisfactorily explained why this is a problem.

Hollismason posted:

It's actually accurate to say that most Police Departments don't want to hire someone who is really really intelligent. This is actually true here:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836
Why? Because they don't want intelligent people because intelligent people go " This is loving dumb,corrupt, and I'm leaving for a better job".

the article you posted posted:

But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.

It's almost as if their HR department realizes that police work is difficult, frustrating, and stressful, and that highly qualified officers often decide they can do better and move on.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2015 18:39

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

chitoryu12 posted:

Actually punishing officers who violate policies and procedures instead of covering up for them? Harshly punishing officers who fire on unarmed people, especially fleeing ones? Encouraging non-violent conflict resolution and training for it as a priority?

But part of the impunity for police officers has to do with juries favoring law enforcement over minority defendants. The no-bills in the cases of Eric Garner and the SWAT team that burned a toddler is a problem with society that you can't fix by changing policies and procedures. Walter Scott's killer has already been terminated, which is the limit of what can be done as an administrative penalty. Oscar Grant's killer resigned in lieu of being terminated, and again a jury declined to convict him of anything beyond involuntary manslaughter.

quote:

Hiring officers from within the community and with a racial and gender makeup similar to the community so they feel a connection to the people they serve (and emphasizing that they serve and protect the civilians)?

Doing this without lowering the standards for applicants (to say nothing of raising them) is going to be a big problem. Limiting yourself to only the most qualified minority applicants in a delineated geographic area means competing for an extremely small pool of candidates. Even if they want to be law enforcement officers, why should they apply to the local PD if they're competitive for the FBI, NCIS, and National Park Rangers?

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Requiring stricter training standards for firearms (including actually spending the money on the ammo needed for them to practice instead of forcing the officers to spend hundreds of their own dollars on learning to use their weapon safely) and not issuing them to officers who can't pass the test while forcing them by policy to carry less-lethal weapons at all times so they don't have an excuse to resort to a gun for any mildly risky situation? Eliminating the NYPD's stupid 12-pound trigger pulls that try to make up for barely trained officers' unsafe handling practices while making it nearly impossible for the users to shoot the desired target without spraying bullets all over a crowded urban area?

Better training means more money. Even in the military, the only groups that train to a high level to make disciplined shoot/don't shoot decisions in close contact (versus the more general fire-and-maneuver training the infantry focuses on) are Special Operations units like the Rangers.* That level of training and stress inoculation doesn't come cheap. Most PDs don't have the money to shoot 10,000 rounds per officer per year, or operate their own shoot houses. Putting all that aside, if you want to encourage officers to seek non-violent solutions, spending the majority of the training budget running around with guns is a bit contra-indicated. Also, the heavy triggers on NYPD duty guns were specifically added in order to prevent negligent discharges when officers were handling their weapons under stress, so I guess everything old is new again.

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Eliminating civil asset forfeiture and preventing the spoils of criminal asset forfeiture from being used for the department's benefit to eliminate incentives to falsify arrest and seizure for bonus shiny stuff?

Agreed.

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Making any recorded racist or otherwise bigoted claims grounds for immediate dismissal?

I don't believe in zero tolerance policies. Maybe requiring documentation of HR counseling, but I'd still have serious concerns about making someone's personnel file available to be used against them in civil or criminal actions. At the end of the day, administrative remedies are a band-aid. Unless you want to put officers under constant surveillance and tap their personal cell phones (good luck selling that to these highly qualified applicants you're trying to attract) the only real way to reduce racism is when fellow officers start calling them out on it. As someone who has watched the military's flailing attempts to address sexual assault for the better part of a decade, changing a culture from the top down is really hard.

(*The military has gotten better about this, and tries to incorporate MOUT and civilian interactions into the scenarios at the NTC, but again, expensive, and at the end of the day there's a reason they don't send Mechanized Infantry to resolve hostage situations.)

# ¿ Apr 13, 2015 19:39

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Obdicut posted:

Serious question: do you think more federalization is an answer to this? As in, actual federal police officers policing Bumfuck, Idaho.

I think consolidation at the State level could help, but honestly I don't think a dearth of smart applicants is anywhere close to the biggest obstacle in improving policing practices.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2015 20:47

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 00:58

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Armani posted:

This is an honestly interesting proposition.

Account to whom? Because pretty much every department requires officers to report discharging their weapons ASAP. I can really easily see this "common-sense proposition" turning into another one of those unfunded mandatory reporting systems that no one ever reads.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2015 23:17

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Let's Debate the Police and Criminal Justice

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