That articles raises all sorts of "selectively including information to push a narrative" red flags.
Eg, one police officer interviewed says:
> “I made two arrests two days in a row one week, and both turned into paperwork clusterfucks,” the former officer said. “When you’ve accumulated two or three use-of-force complaints in a week, you’ll say: ‘I just need to stop. I need to stop doing this.’”
The article later interprets it as "police officers opposed to the consent decree that McGinn negotiated [engaged] in underpolicing".
Which is technically accurate, but also... The article implies this is political retaliation, as in "we'll let people commit crimes, that will teach you", while the interviewed officer's reported experience is "when you get reprimanded and asked to fill time-consuming paperwork every time you do X, at some point you stop doing X". (Or you keep filling the paperwork, and therefore spend less time patrolling and responding to calls.)
Don't get me wrong, police brutality is a thorny problem and police often actively resists solving it. But when there's a tradeoff, if you act like the tradeoff only has one side and the other is that the people whose jobs you're trying to regulate are lazy corrupt assholes, you're not going to make a lot of progress on solving the problem.
They are not being forced to fill out that paperwork on their own time, it is part of their work shift for which they are compensated. I can think of no other occupation where an employee can refuse to fill out paperwork or refuse to do some other tedious task just because they don't like it and not get fired.
I always do my required paperwork but I admit I must have lost some money because I "forgot" some of my expense reports.
I also admit that a large part of why I often just walk during lunch breaks at clients instead of eating sometimes ridiculously good lunches might be because I hate collecting those papers/digital notes and have to force them into the accounting system at work.
Don't underestimate the dread of certain kinds of paperwork for certain kinds of people.
These "use-of-force complaints" didn't file themselves you know. Citizens actually spent their own time filing them (in addition perhaps to being subjected to the use of force), so you can't just dismiss them as an one-sided/asymmetric nuisance.
And while the officer's stance is not an outright "we'll let people commit crimes, that will teach you", it certainly comes close to "policing our style, or none at all".
Eg, one police officer interviewed says:
> “I made two arrests two days in a row one week, and both turned into paperwork clusterfucks,” the former officer said. “When you’ve accumulated two or three use-of-force complaints in a week, you’ll say: ‘I just need to stop. I need to stop doing this.’”
The article later interprets it as "police officers opposed to the consent decree that McGinn negotiated [engaged] in underpolicing".
Which is technically accurate, but also... The article implies this is political retaliation, as in "we'll let people commit crimes, that will teach you", while the interviewed officer's reported experience is "when you get reprimanded and asked to fill time-consuming paperwork every time you do X, at some point you stop doing X". (Or you keep filling the paperwork, and therefore spend less time patrolling and responding to calls.)
Don't get me wrong, police brutality is a thorny problem and police often actively resists solving it. But when there's a tradeoff, if you act like the tradeoff only has one side and the other is that the people whose jobs you're trying to regulate are lazy corrupt assholes, you're not going to make a lot of progress on solving the problem.