There is an important distinction between someone who doesn't misbehave for fear of being watched, and someone who wishes to be watched in fear of the perception of misbehavior.
There is no substitute for someone who's intent is to try and get away with things, and someone who's intent is to serve a cause, be of service, and not get away with anything.
So really, we should build a system where the intent of transparency is paramount, not just transparency itself.
Two things immediately come to mind.
1. Super-incentivize snitching. Reward whistle-blowers to the point where it becomes an easy decision. Not only monetary, but with honor and with medals. Make it the new "right thing to do" in public service. Fight corruption. Easy sell.
2. Super-disincentivize ulterior motives and their actions. Treat crimes by officers as far more severe and malicious than of non-officers. And they are. So if a police officer murders a civilian, punishment should be 10x or 100x. Same with stealing a slice of pizza or ignoring a stop sign.
The point isn't that we should punish officers more. The point is we should all raise them to higher standards, and the officers themselves should willingly accept that higher burden of responsibility.
It should be their responsibility to not profile or discriminate based on appearances of anyone or their car. It should be their responsibility to preserve life at all costs, even at a higher risk to themselves.
And this will deter crookedness and incompetence. If an officer cannot do their job, they shouldn't. And if an officer thinks they can get away with anything, they shouldn't. Being a cop or even buying a cop like in the movies should not pose any criminal opportunities.
On books, everything you say makes sense in the ideal world. But in practicable reality, things are a bit more complicated.
Re: item 1, Baltimore is the birthplace of the "Stop Snitchin'" movement, a heavily distributed and well marketed street campaign defining a dynamic that a wiki entry can't possibly describe accurately. The bigger point is that it had a counter-campaign on the police side which retaliated against it, and that thinking got ingrained in the troops. In other words, officers stick together and no policy change will realistically affect that.
After the Baltimore riots, there was a change on the police side - cultural change, not policy or regulation based one. As a result, homicide rate shot up through the roof and appears to be rising year after year. This behavior is a defensive mechanism and so incredibly tribal - not something you can set through policy, short of replacing 3,000 cops.
To that point, most of Baltimore PD cops DO NOT live in Baltimore. They travel to work from outside. In other words, despite having 3,000 job positions in the city, they couldn't fill them locally so they expanded outward, allowing officers to take cruisers home as a commuting incentive. Think about evaluating that factor - would you want to employ cops who live in your neighborhood, or ones from a neighboring town? Would there be a difference? Then think what would happen if you didn't have a choice.
Re: item 2, you're describing lex talionis, which we as a society abandoned centuries ago. You can't practice treating crimes differently based on who the person is, even if they're cops.
In Baltimore, there are 3,000 cops for 600,000 citizens. Median cop salary is $50k and it's a dangerous and difficult job. Tons of them turn to overtime work to make ends meet and are drained of energy (look up Baltimore Sun overtime database if curious). Meanwhile, the vast poor citizens there have a median income of $30k. That's an indicator of why people turn to crime and its volume. Living in the city is prohibitively expensive (sweet mercy, the property taxes are terrifying - it's no incentive to buy a house there.)
> You can't practice treating crimes differently based on who the person is, even if they're cops.
As much as I want to agree with this statement, I can't help but feel that it's highly problematic in some sense.
When it comes to court cases (IANAL, but this is my understanding), law enforcement officials' testimony is treated with a certain measure of elevated credibility (there's SCOTUS precedent for this, but I can't seem to find the cases). Violation of that trust - as in this case - should be penalized, but I don't know what kind of remedy would be appropriate.
Preface: i am not a lawyer either and i welcome criticism as this is just an idea.
I think the solution wouldn't be to charge robbery twice as hard for cops, but to have an additional charge. Something like 'abuse of federal trusted power' or something like that which would carry its own penalties. This, i think, wouldn't cause the strict separation of penalties that could be problematic, but it would address the problem of people entrusted with federal power abusing it.
Yes this. Hate crime is a crime that adds penalties to what otherwise would be the same act. The problem with hate crime is it assumes we can know someone's thoughts, but with a "violation of trust" crime, being in a superior position of elevated responsibility would be enough.
> Re: item 2, you're describing lex talionis, which we as a society abandoned centuries ago. You can't practice treating crimes differently based on who the person is, even if they're cops.
We did not give up "lex talionis". In fact, shooting a police officer is currently punished more harshly than regular people, at least in Texas. It's called "capital murder" in texas
Funny, the machinations we devise to skirt the core problem, which is an increasing dearth of fundamental moraltity.
Look around.. Something's gone completely wrong. Everyone is angry and there is decreasing value placed on kindness and decency. In fact, selfishness is increasingly a virtue. Observe how POTUS behaves. I don't care what side you're on, there is nothing normal or healthy about that level of chaos, narcissim, and mean-spiritedness. Yet, this is the leader of the free world? It's a sad reflection of where we are.
We can set up all the incentives and disincentives we can imagine but, as the saying goes, "you can't legislate morality". Until we deal with that issue, we'll continue to see all manner of its manifestations.
Its normal for human society- once the hardship sets in, the mammoth has been eaten, mean spiritness sets in. The truth is, we never managed to create a stable society in economical unstable conditions, so everytime people start to starve - the world falls apart.
Ironically even the counter-measures we come up with (Law & Order in a thousand variants/ various dreams of a big Swage elsewhere/Migration & New Beginnings elsewhere) only enhance and propel the problem of a tribe switching to a war-economy.
We are obviously in the process of finding various solutions. David Brins Panopticum of everyone. Permanent social records, that will not forget and will not be silent on your crimes, making you a social outcast for genocidre.
Cheap entertainment, that reduces the effect of social self-devaluation of unemployed citizens.
But who is starving? Even poor people in the US are well off by historical and world standards. In fact poor in the US have a very different problem: obesity.
Participation in society - you can starve on chances. You will not be dad of a family, if you play video games all day long. You will have constant stress, keeping from falling into the social abyss, so you starve on security. There is more to a existance then a filled belly.
Thank you. I feel like one of the few people in my friend group that isn't becoming radicalized, anti-democracy, anti-free-speech all sacrificed in favor of Justice. But what kind of justice can an authoritarian mono-Party state bring about?
Yes. It feels like everyone is under some sort of collective hypnotism or part of some strange reality show.
Literally, if you told me that something was being added to our food or water supplies to produce the odd effect that normalizes the madness that's happening, it would be completely plausible.
America, since its founding, has been an experiment in extreme individualism over collectivism. We worship capitalism over all else. Even a whisper of government programs that help the poor are vilified as communist. Selfishness and immorality is a natural consequence of that. Things won't change until our culture completely changes.
> 1. Super-incentivize snitching. Reward whistle-blowers to the point where it becomes an easy decision. Not only monetary, but with honor and with medals. Make it the new "right thing to do" in public service. Fight corruption. Easy sell.
They did this behind the Iron Curtain. At one point in Romania, 30% of the population were regularly reporting to the Secret Police. Wonder what the percent of false positives were?
Intentional false positives need to be super-disincentivized.
If all is well, the system would be open enough that the whistle blower can blow their whistle in the open. And everyone would support the investigation, and the parties on both sides. Eventually truth does need to exist regarding the why and what was reported.
Although, this wouldn't work where:
1. There are still enough bad guys who would punish this person in the locker room.
2. Situations where everyone is breaking the law, but enforcement is always with discretion. Like ebay where most listings violate something but aren't given a look until "someone" reports them. Or like overlooking jaywalking until someone of "interest" starts walking.
There must be other scenarios, but we can be on top of them.
What you describe is a DDoS scenario for a system you support.
I, with all my good will, can "blow a whistle" on a person I don't like, subconsciously or not. Just because I don't like him. And the defence of whistle blowers is exactly that - a good will.
Why not add the patcher reward? He who rants out the gamble-ability of a system, reaps all the rewards of his fellow follow up loophole sneakers for patching?
He/She who steps to late up and trys to milk a loophole/perverse incentive pays.
plus don't forget retirement is quite nice too, opportunities to double dip exist because of how many of these are structured, and all sorts of tricks are permitted with cashing out accrued time so that it bumps retirement pay.
some cases in california were called into question as there were cops with 100k pensions,but california suffers from lots of government employee pension tricks. these are not limited to just California and are busting the budgets of many cities and now even some states.
but with regards to this Baltimore issue, he damn well best serve time for this and everyone on that call should be off the force.
it might just be time for, if you camera malfunctions your arrests are not valid if it one vs one in testimony.
Okay.. if you really do want them to have access to the data, then you can amend that to 'Strong cryptographic message signing applied on storage.'
There really is a case to be made in keeping the video private; however, police often have to process your private information and the officers have privacy considerations themselves. I really wrote that with this in mind, as I think it's a strong hedge against the "officer privacy" argument. You _will_ constantly record on duty, and that information _will_ be kept private hopefully giving us the best of both worlds.
There's also an evidentiary and performance monitoring considerations. I don't want police to have access to their own video when making sworn statements, research has shown that this can bias and alter these statements which are incredibly important when establishing frame of mind in a courtroom. I also don't want police captains to have the ability to spy on their staff and use the cameras as a backdoor way to monitor the performance or judgement of officers on the street.
To that final point, you _want_ officers to be able to look the other way in certain circumstances.. they aren't a group that should be blindly applying the letter of the law, in my opinion, by keeping the video private you serve to protect this important discretionary relationship between officers and the public.
I'm not suggesting the videos should be available to just anyone for public view. On the contrary they need to be kept very securely, not only to stop unauthorised access but to stop unauthorised tampering or deletion.
However, I don't think access to the video should be controlled by the district attorney or by the state, instead it needs to be more transperant.
For example, lets assume someone in the public has a run in with the law and that results in charges being laid.
At that point, the accused should be able to appoint an attorney who then arranges for immediate access to video from the arresting officer(s) camera.
That process should be quick and fast, not slow and obstructed as it currently appears to be.
I completely disagree with #5, mostly because I think transparency is lost if you restrict video access to district attorney's offices. Videos that are restricted too much aren't any better than no video at all.
First things first, one should always be able to view video of their own police interactions, as should their attorney. They should feel free to show it to family and friends. The district attorney is often viewed as part of the police and working with them closely... and they are political because they are an elected position. If we can't have more public access, it is easy to abuse such power. If the public can show family and friends their interactions, it can lead to change in the way folks are treated. And so on, in the same sorts of thinking.
That said, I don't think they should be made absolutely public without some sort of control and balance. I think it would be wrong for domestic violence calls to be made to the public. I fully support keeping folks' identities private unless they are found guilty in court. I'm going to guess there are prudent exceptions to this, mostly with public figures and safety.
Along with these implementations, I would like to see just an AA in psychology, and require at least 12 units of law, including a course in constitutional law.
Most definitely more education. I'd not require the AA in psychology, though I would require at least an associates' if not a 4 year program. It would include things like interpersonal relations, conflict dissolution and resolution, how to interact with the mentally ill, law, physical fitness - including classes that deal with non-lethal ways of de-arming folks.
Frankly I think that anyone who applies to be a cop should be automatically blacklisted, and that police should be essentially conscripted for, say, $total_training_time + 2 years after education, the way some countries do with their military.
To me, the mere act of wanting the authority to arrest and shoot your peers means you are the last person I want to have that power.
during my four-year hitch in the Corps, a quick poll of the first-term enlisted jarheads in a USMC infantry battalion, asking "what are you going to do when you're hitch is up?" the most frequent answer would have been "become a cop"
and these were guys who, when off-duty, wore t-shirts with aphorisms like
"kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out"
and
"join the Marines, travel to exotic places, meet interesting people, and kill them"
----
i have a (completely untested) hypothesis, that police forces which require officers to be trained as EMTs and police officers (San Jose?) have far lower incidence of claims and proven instances of incidence of excessive force, abuse of authority, etc.
Very anecdotal but after 5 years of living in San Jose, I was very scared of police. I've never had a problem with police, but the times I did there were terrible. I was pretty appalled at their behavior and I wasn't doing anything serious at all. I also heard of people throwing parties, getting in trouble, and being beaten. That was a second hand story though. One of the big reasons I left was fear of the police there.
It would be interesting if not only EMT training was required, but also some number of years as an active EMT. Having to respond to various scenes involving law enforcement, but not being blessed as law enforcement would provide an interesting perspective on police response.
This is silly and short-sighted. There are many people who genuinely want to 'serve and protect', multiple generations in some families. Some people take duty very seriously and in good faith. Applying to be a cop in no way implies that a person holds arrests and the use of deadly force as anything other than a necessary component of the real-world, end-to-end justice system.
>There are many people who genuinely want to 'serve and protect',
Honestly, I doubt this is true for most values of "many".
I'm a straight white male in a first world country with no criminal record. I have a good job and am a well-behaved citizen. I've lived all over this country and my experiences with the police have been uniformly negative.
Thugs interested in proving to everyone that they're in charge, that's all they are.
The idea that police should be conscripted is crazy when you consider that the vast majority of the population just doesn't have the nerves to stop that person in the sketchy car or dark side of the sidewalk, knowing there's a probability they will try to murder you, whether because they hate cops or to avoid arrest, while yourself carrying a lethal weapon. (A lot of police don't even have the nerves for it.) More innocent people would get shot, without question.
This doesn't really explain why folks want to be cops in other countries - Heck, I live in a country where they haven't traditionally carried guns, though they are starting to nationwide from time to time. They do have them available to them. Not only that, but not all of them will be automatically horrible folks. Some actually do want to simply help folks. Not all of them that apply are the asshole. And some of the problem is our own laws and expectations.
At this point, I should mention that I personally dislike cops, and have had really bad interactions with them, including one blaming another's suicide attempt on me. But I also know it isn't universal.
If you do want to arrest and harm folks, no, you shouldn't be on the force. There are other way to sort out these folks or make the behavior different. Pass actual laws protecting folks from such things. Give cops more education. Have laws that make sense. Hire enough police so that they have more time away from folks that are doing harm. Have cops do more work on things that are socially uplifting - where they have contact with good people - and pay the cops for this. Require they are respectful. Require they take the abuse we expect call center and retail employees to take (like being told to fudge off, yelled at, and generally called names). Require police to live in the areas they are policing. Make sure the laws are fair and that we fairly police different sorts of areas. And so on.
Some people become police officers because it's a stable job with a pension. I have a buddy who might become a corrections officer but I don't think it's because he's excited to baton an inmate as much as the salary and benefits that is the driving motivation.
Yeah, giving guns and arrest powers to a bunch of bitter, angry people who'd rather be doing anything else sounds like a great idea.
Besides which, you really think that people only become cops for the power? No one ever honestly wants to protect and serve their community? There's a lot of problems with American police right now, but it can be so much worse.
What's the incentive for cops to plant drugs on people? I assume they get some kind of bonus or have a performance review rating on how many "criminals" they apprehend?
There are many police departments that receive a large chunk of their budgets from anti-drug grants from their states and federal departments like the Department of Justice [0]. Generally, the cops can keep anything they seize in a drug bust such as fancy cars and trucks, cash, weapons, through "civil asset forfeiture"... This is true even if the defendants are found not guilty. Sometimes the seized drugs even wind back up on the market because the cops resell them [1]. Then there's folks who just enjoy being able to wield their power over others (they were probably the kids found bullying others in school).
Cops being able to keep what they find in a drug bust sounds like it creates some horrible incentives and that a policy like that would almost always be negative for the person apprehended.
Combined with a large subset of people that have a bootlicker mentality, you end up with those that want power and worship those in power planting drugs and instigating crimes that would otherwise not have occurred.
I would guess a fair amount is just the whole alpha power dynamics thing. The job attracts a fair amount of people that enjoy the authoritarian role and sticking it to people at will. It's not all of them, but there's certainly a draw for that crowd.
> I would guess a fair amount is just the whole alpha power dynamics thing.
I think that's part of it. But there's also the effect that the Baltimore system/culture, the police, the politicians, the DA/prosecution, the prisons, all evolved on top of a forced labor system. Yes, slavery. The system is inherently designed to preserve that dynamic between the enslaved population and the non-slave population. It captures kids in their youth, puts them in juvi for-profit prisons, which limits their options for work in their adulthood which then puts them at risk to re-enter the jail system (forced labor) in their adulthood. Michael Wood, a former marine and former Baltimore police officer provides an interesting collection of data. His interview here shows how the system works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5nPyf-0UMc Listen to him talking about the "Knockers", a special class of police officers.
Plus closure of shipyards, factories etc.. The local economy is pretty depressed as compared to 50-100 years back but people have families and history and don't want to or can't move so are struggling to survive or can sqeeze by enough to not move..
Taking the amtrak from DC-NY at least a few years ago there were literally miles and miles of entire blocks of abandoned townhouses.. I imagine a google street view would be a good way to see this..
Also relateed - just finished binge watching HBO's 'The Wire' - though fiction and maybe jazzed up a little, it seems fairly accurate to get a picture of how messed up things are/can be based on what I absorbed 3rd hand from living in nearby DC for a good while..
The cops believe the people they are framing are bad people^, and need to be put away. They can't find evidence on the bad person, so they plant some.
^ Unfortunately, many of them see everyone who isn't a cop as a bad person - either a threat, or a criminal.
Another reason to plant evidence is if you just brutalized someone. Beating an innocent person for the crime of mouthing off to you/being black looks bad. Beating a junkie carrying a tenth of an ounce of weed... Well, they were a criminal, so it's all good.
And why wouldn't they plant evidence? Your co-workers won't rat you out, nobody will believe the the guy you arrested, and in the unlikely event that you are stupid enough to be planting drugs in front of your own body camera, you will get a paid vacation.
Because once they have "proof" that you're a criminal, then they get greater leeway in what they want to do in terms of searches and detaining you, and even if they turn up nothing, they still have something to charge you with and hang over your head.
Although these days, they don't even need to prove you're a criminal to steal your money with civil asset forfeiture, they just need to be able to find your money.
Peter Moskos, a criminologist who spent a year on the Baltimore police force while doing his PhD, has a good post up about what happened -- http://www.copinthehood.com/2017/07/thats-quite-days-work.ht... It seems like the officer forgot to turn on his body camera while originally finding the drugs, and so rather than get reprimanded for forgetting to turn on the camera, he decided to recreate the crime scene and pretend he had that he had the camera on the whole time.
But these cameras have a 30 second buffer, and are always recording to that buffer. The buffer is stored when the start button is pressed. That is how he got caught.
So if your camera is off, and you found a stash of drugs. Just press the start button. It'll record you finding the stash 30 seconds earlier.
That's actually why that button exists. So officers have a recording when it's needed unexpectedly.
Agreed it's a theory, though someone mentions some other site with more on the story in the comments..
However, not to excuse falsifying evidence, the 30s buffer example you mention wouldn't cover the case where you found the stash more than 30s earlier and have already disturbed with the otherwise valid crime scene..
I'd imagine in some sort of hot pursuit situation it would be pretty easy to do this and forget the button, especially if you've been working for years without them..
>It seems like the officer forgot to turn on his body camera while originally finding the drugs
FTA: "So maybe this was a reenactment based on a true story. This scenario, which is where I would place my money ..."
It's just a guess. And I'm not entirely convinced by the argument that (also FTA) "people in Baltimore City don't get prosecuted for a stash of drugs"; because right in the first paragraph, he says "A man was arrested related to this ... he had been in jail for the past 7 months." In other words, even if the police knew they weren't going to get a prosecution, they could have just wanted to punish this guy, or try and get him to "confess", or who knows what.
And this is why we'll never have meaningful police accountability and reform. Even being caught in the act, on video, of planting evidence someone will create an excuse for why what they did wasn't wrong. Sickening.
He has a post about what he thinks happened. His take on the issue is extremely (and unreasonably) charitable, but it still involves manufacturing evidence.
What's the argument against having body cameras on at all times that they're interacting with the public, other than when the person they're talking to specifically requests that the camera be turned off?
There are some, but also having it on at all times wouldn't solve the underlying issue. Specifically, drugs could be easily planned a few hours before while the cop was not on duty. Or by paying someone else to do it at specific time.
Always-on cameras definitely help in case of bad interactions with people stopped on the street, since those can't be scripted. But anything you can do ahead of time - not so much. It's trying to have a technical solution to a social issue.
There is no substitute for someone who's intent is to try and get away with things, and someone who's intent is to serve a cause, be of service, and not get away with anything.
So really, we should build a system where the intent of transparency is paramount, not just transparency itself.
Two things immediately come to mind.
1. Super-incentivize snitching. Reward whistle-blowers to the point where it becomes an easy decision. Not only monetary, but with honor and with medals. Make it the new "right thing to do" in public service. Fight corruption. Easy sell.
2. Super-disincentivize ulterior motives and their actions. Treat crimes by officers as far more severe and malicious than of non-officers. And they are. So if a police officer murders a civilian, punishment should be 10x or 100x. Same with stealing a slice of pizza or ignoring a stop sign.
The point isn't that we should punish officers more. The point is we should all raise them to higher standards, and the officers themselves should willingly accept that higher burden of responsibility.
It should be their responsibility to not profile or discriminate based on appearances of anyone or their car. It should be their responsibility to preserve life at all costs, even at a higher risk to themselves.
And this will deter crookedness and incompetence. If an officer cannot do their job, they shouldn't. And if an officer thinks they can get away with anything, they shouldn't. Being a cop or even buying a cop like in the movies should not pose any criminal opportunities.