There’s a simple way to effect change at the legislative level: force cities to pay for police misconduct settlements out of existing police budgets and pension funds, rather than apportioning taxpayer money to do so.
This sounds good but the only way to actually fix the problem is to hold individual police officers criminally liable.
Currently they avoid criminal liability in a number of ways:
- They are never arrested - other police simply fail to arrest them
- They are never indicted - DAs across the country are extremely reluctant to press charges
- Charges are dropped by grand juries - in some states, like NY, all felonies must be confirmed or dropped by a grand jury unless the defendant waived their right. A DA has full power to effectively force a drop by portraying a weak case to a completely secret grand jury, publicly washing their hands of the decision while still getting the result they want.
Then, when a DA is elected who actually says they will hold police accountable they often simply will not (as in Jackie Lacey, Los Angeles’ previous DA) or if they make basically any strides toward actually investigating police they will be stonewalled and face a recall with support from the local PD and/or SD (as in LA’s current DA, George Gascon).
Police are given unbelievable rights: we will see over and over again that officers with complaints will never actually see them investigated and even sustained complaints have barely any consequences. Additionally if they are implicated in a serious crime on the job they often have union rules barring them from being interviewed / interrogated until after a cooling period (this blew my mind).
Compare this to basically any other profession, even so much as yelling at a client or failing to help customer who asked would be a final strike almost anywhere else.
The biggest problem may be that the US justice system is so unbelievably cruel that police refuse to ever put one of their own through that type of hell.
I agree 100% with everything you've said, and yet I still think those reforms would fail to effect change under current circumstances. Because current police culture basically says "Let me do my job however I want, without consequences, or I just won't do my job". And it has already started to show, with major police departments like Minneapolis, Chicago, Boston, NYC, and Seattle effectively pulling a depolicing strike in response to criticism and legislative action trying to hold them responsible for their failings.
What you've prescribed would have prevented this from becoming a problem in the first place, but it can't do much anymore, because the prevalent police culture in the US will punish the public for punishing the police. And we've allowed this to happen to us.
At this point, nobody knows what can actually fix the problem, but I'm increasingly inclined to think that firing them all, potentially imprisoning large quantities of them, and starting over from scratch, would be the only thing that works. Which is mind-blowing...it is practically an admission that even though we're a wealthy country, in terms of rule of law, we're not much different from a 3rd world failed state like Venezuela or Myanmar.
> we're not much different from a 3rd world failed state like Venezuela
In 2016, Venezuela's murder rate was well over 50 per 100,000, and the USA's murder rate was slightly over 5 per 100,000 [1]. This gap is pretty consistent.
That's because the voters, the people who should actually have the right to say how they want their government to run, have either voted for legislators who write laws that do not punish repeat offenders, or have voted for prosecutors who use their discretion, or have voted for judges who use their discretion.
That is the right of the voters. The police (and certainly not the police unions!) do not have any power in a republican society to override that.
It is certainly true that the way that Seattle police (and SF police, and NYC police, and NJ police, and...) want to maintain public order is different from the way that the voters want to maintain public order. But that is the very problem at hand - as the comment above says: 'current police culture basically says "Let me do my job however I want, without consequences, or I just won't do my job"'.
Police overpolicing because they don't want to do their jobs as they're told is not very different from police underpolicing because they don't want to do their jobs as they're told.
Seattle prosecutors may not be the best, but they also get nothing to work with. When the police decide to show up 8 hours after a crime occurs because they were dragging their feet in protest, or they don't have video evidence because their body cams were turned off, is it any surprise that there is not enough evidence to charge a criminal?
Collecting evidence is the primary responsibility of the police, and prosecutors declining to prosecute a criminal for lack of evidence is a failing of the police, not the prosecutor. Unfortunately, given the abundance of evidence against criminal cops, they still don't prosecute them, so maybe the culpability is shared to some degree.
How do you know that police were collecting insufficient evidence before they started reducing policing of some crimes as a response to non-prosecution?
If they don't want to do their jobs, then hire other people who actually will.
Reagan did this with the air traffic controllers in 1981 (which I'm not saying I agree with in terms of policy, but it was both legal and effective). They went on strike, and Reagan said, look, federal workers aren't allowed to strike, and if you don't report to work we'll fire you. ATC took a hit, flights were slowed, but they found other people who were willing to the job and demanded less than PATCO demanded.
Which is ultimately how unions should work. They aggregate the bargaining power of the employees into a unified voice, nothing more or less. If that combined bargaining power is low - e.g., because the employer is willing to risk the work not getting done, or because potential workers don't actually want to combine their individual bargaining power with the union - then the union has no additional magical power. Unions just make it logistically easier/possible to negotiate things that the workers could in theory but not in practice negotiate on their own. They don't have any power to negotiate benefits for workers that the market couldn't theoretically support.
If a (say) truckers' union says "We want a 20% pay increase and more time off," and other potential truckers agree with those demands and the logistics companies can manage it without going out of business, then they'll get it. If the trucker's union says "We want a 10x pay increase and we want you to take all legal accountability for anyone we hit with our trucks," they would rightly lose that negotiation - any company that said "yes" would not last very long, and the company would do just fine saying "no."
If a society has no public safety resources without the cooperation of a single union, such that it's less of a "negotiation" than an acquiescence to whatever that union demands, then that is the thing that's caused us to be a failed state. So I agree. Fire them all, at the very least ban them from being rehired, and start over.
And it's mostly amazing to me that Reagan felt comfortable firing 11,345 air traffic controllers, who are clearly operationally needed to put planes in the air and get them down again (unlike police, whose role in public safety is much more indirect), at a time when he had himself acknowledged that ATC was understaffed... and meanwhile, there is basically only one story of a US local government (Camden, NJ) that felt comfortable firing its police department and starting over.
Or maybe put another way - I don't really understand why the PATCO decertification prompted the weakening of private sector unions in the decades since then, but police unions, who like PATCO are public sector unions in safety-critical roles, only seem to have gotten stronger.
This is really not getting at the root of the problem (not saying we shouldn't also do this).
Police are trained to see citizens as enemies and to see themselves as "warriors". The specific tactics they utilize are tactics they have been trained to use and/or are widely used in practice so new recruits are immersed in a culture where these things are the norm.
Additionally the reason cops get away with things in all the ways you list above are because of unions and lack of independent accountability.
Persecuting individual officers for doing the job they were trained to do actual inflames the problem because they already see themselves as the victims (that is crazy, but it is 100% true they feel this way).
Of course individuals play a large role but focusing on charging officers isn't likely to be an effective strategy for changing things.
A much better strategy would be to take officers themselves out of the blame/change equation. They get the most political sympathy so going at them increases divisions and decreases likelihood of any compromise. What's needed to to change police training, yes add independent accountability, and change the charter of police forces by breaking away social services to take over most calls that don't involve felony crimes or immediate life dangers.
I agree with most of this but I also think it leaves out a huge piece of the puzzle: systemic racism.
Which obviously doesn't have an easy solution.
Maybe mandating more diverse forces, that officers actually live in their city, and training/culture accountability from the top down (that unions can't block).
I don't know why you think racism is a 'huge' piece of the puzzle.
You may be surprised to find out there exist countries other than USA that have far worse corruption and abuse at all levels of society that have nothing to do with race.
Unfortunately, the police are right. The laws in the U.S. mean that every single encounter has the chance to be fatal. American citizens hold it as the highest right to be able to deal death at a moment's notice. Once they decide to, it's practically impossible to stop or avoid, because it takes only an instant. Few citizens will choose to do that, but every single one could, and you can't tell which until it's too late.
Any encounter with the police is not only hostile, but it carries the ultimate consequence for both sides. There is no way to ratchet down that hostility when the police are justifiably in fear of their lives. They really could be victims and it's no surprise that they act accordingly.
The danger I describe does exist and needs to be mitigated against. The fact that it's practically never actually applicable exacerbates the problem, and makes de-escalation difficult.
- Eliminate police unions (get teachers unions too as they also cover up some serious crimes against children and have even more means to prevent it ever being published)
- Eliminate pay to union members by the government while performing union duties; they actually require the state pay members salaries and bonus money will performing many union duties, go look it up.
- Eliminate law enforcement officer bill of rights" (LEOBOR) style legislation
- Require all misconduct records any public employee to be published and easily and freely queried
- All investigations must not reveal who is filing the complaint nor witnesses to the officer or anyone not in the investigation, releasing this information should be a Federal offense
- Cities, State, and localities, must be liable even if the officer is off duty and the misconduct includes use of their issued firearm or other accouterments
- Qualified Immunity language must be modified to remove clearly established clause (QI started as a carve out from Civil Rights law but clearly has expanded)
- With regards to QI and civil suits. At no time if a government agency or member pays out can they include the qualifier boilerplate language that explicitly denies that the municipality or the officer accept any blame for the incident."
- three strikes and your out requirement with no future employment by any similar agency in the country. three strikes rule not to be used with any loss of life misconduct. That is one and out if not resulting in criminal prosecution
You are not going to get anywhere while public sector unions exist for public employees. Even if you somehow managed to rid yourself of the police union the others would simply be used to pressure politicians.
I am all for banning public sector unions from expending any money on political activity under the idea that they are spending public money to do so.
As another reply mentioned QI is not connected to criminal liability (only civil), and it’s also a bit of a red herring.
In my opinion it’s vital that when an agent of the state (police officer) deprives someone of civil rights that the maximum possible restitution is not limited by their net worth or professional insurance carrier’s cap (which to my knowledge is not a thing for cops, but it is often suggested here).
Market-focused rhetoric over the past decades has made it tempting to think we can just allocate payments the right way to accomplish what we want. This is one case where that fails. Instead, we need leadership.
Police budgets are taxpayer money. Even if cutting a budget meant laying off officers, there's reason to think that would create problems - the needs of the community wouldn't be reduced, so you'd be having fewer officers doing more, which is both costly (in overtime) and increases fatigue and the likelihood of problematic behavior. And taking it out of the pension fund or otherwise spreading the harm to other officers is both easily gamed and incentivizes cover-ups.
It matters who we elect. A significant faction of the U.S. has been convinced that government is simply bad or ineffective, and they vote for people who deliberately prove that. But if we want to see change we need to elect people who are willing to go to the mat for the things we support.
> Market-focused rhetoric over the past decades has made it tempting to think we can just allocate payments the right way to accomplish what we want.
I disagree with this but I always find it ironic when I hear the advice to use market forces from a group of people that are highly critical of the capitalist principles of market forces.
> Market-focused rhetoric over the past decades has made it tempting to think we can just allocate payments the right way to accomplish what we want. This is one case where that fails. Instead, we need leadership.
No, we don't. We need a system at rewards good behaviour and punishes bad. The market solution is really the best. A solution bound on a single leader vanishes as soon as the leader goes.
> It matters who we elect.
Things were bad during Obama's reign, as they were under Trump. Biden won't bring change, unless systemic change will be implemented.
Why focus on presidential elections when we're talking about policing? It matters who we elect at the local level.
I think your knee-jerk focus on who the president is (and denying the possibility of change) demonstrates what I was saying: the rhetoric has convinced people that it doesn't matter and it's all some national team sport. That's just not true.
What are you talking about? The comment dismissed what I had said about it mattering who we elect, in a shallow and narrowly-focused way. My characterization is indeed the opposite, because I disagree with the comment's premise. That's why I replied.
Their comment: Things were bad during Obama's reign, as they were under Trump. Biden won't bring change, unless systemic change will be implemented.
Your response: I think your knee-jerk focus on who the president is (and denying the possibility of change) demonstrates what I was saying: the rhetoric has convinced people that it doesn't matter and it's all some national team sport.
Naming the three most recent presidents and denying that any of them did or could change things was meant as a direct counter to my claim that it matters who we elect. I replied by pointing out that "who we elect" isn't limited to the presidency.
It is entirely useless for you to quote each of us without clarifying what you've misinterpreted.
Professional insurance of the variety that doctors get doesn't cover reckless or malicious behavior. Insurance that covered the things that cops presently ought to be sued for would not be affordable.
What you are describing is another complex layer which would be liable to be perverted to serve establish interests because that is inevitably what happens with complex systems with powerful entrenched interests.
5 years after implementation we would be talking about why it had fixed none of our problems and how we needed to fix it which would be politically as hard as implementing it in the first place with the primary difference between now and then being paying a big bundle of money to the insurance industry. Instead of political pressure to just pay off the people the officers shot there would be political pressure to just subsidize the problem officers insurance payments and then STILL pay out for most of the egregious stuff that isn't covered. Most of the time a "market solution" makes as much sense as the people who faced with a technical problem yell "BLOCKCHAIN!"
Personal liability is still a complex system subject to the same forces but the less it is polluted with cop specific process the more likely that it will actually work because its harder to pervert the entire process of civil litigation than it is to pervert an incestuous insurance market that services the law enforcement industry.
This has always seemed like the proper solution to me. Force individual officers to have malpractice-like insurance that pays for these fees (individual liability).
Any way of spreading the liability to the department or city bypasses individual accountability and will insulate bad actors.
I like the idea but you still have the challenge of transparent reporting. At least it should be easy for civilians to accurately report alleged misconduct (I think Raheem.ai is trying to figure this out.
Force individual officers to carry liability insurance similar to malpractice insurance for lawyers and doctors. If the insurance is forced to pay out a couple times the officer would be uninsurable and thus unemployable.
This is suggested quite often, but no one is going to sell you a liability policy to protect you from committing crimes.
When police officers commit blatant misconduct the officers involved should at least be fired and criminal charges should be applied to them if applicable. This is how it works for every other job, not sure why police should be different.
But is that accompanied with officers being exposed to individual liability? And removing qualified immunity? Because that would be the bigger argument.
Limit qualified immunity and require officers to carry personal liability insurance on the job.
Increase police training requirements. They're woefully undertrained in the US (at least relative to Germany and several other Western European nations).
National LEO registration or something similar to stop the movement of bad officers from one department to another.
You are right but its not merely the degree of training but how they are trained as well. As it stands many are trained that every interaction with the populace might get you murdered and you ought to be ready to murder them first.
> force cities to pay for police misconduct settlements out of existing police budgets and pension funds, rather than apportioning taxpayer money to do so
Err that is taxpayer money?
Police budgets aren't the police's personal money. They don't care if you take it away it's no problem for them as long as they're still being paid.
If a police department has a 10m/year budget, resulting in 80 police officers employed, a 2m settlement coming out of the budget means they have to lay off 16 police officers to pay it.
That would create an department incentive to force out risky officers, as they know their jobs are on the line.
Government agencies don’t willingly cut headcount because it looks like they’re overstaffed. What a quaint notion.
If the job is getting done and you have 500 employees and the budget for 500 employees, there is literally no incentive to even determine if it could be done with 400. Leaders don’t get a portion of money saved or anything like that. They just lose the budget that was for the extra employees and get a bunch of pissed off employees that now have to work harder for the same pay.
The voters don’t know when police are overstaffed, that’s the problem. Only police management understand how over-subscribed officers are and they have no incentives to fix it when there are too many officers for what’s really needed.
You live in a fantasy if you think voters make rational decisions about policing based on police-load.
Take it from their pension (and cut their budgets). Yes, that's wasted taxpayer money but I'm sure the police also view it as their own personal money.
Maybe they will pay more attention to hot heads and prevent them from getting hired in the first place.
> Another person's misconduct resulted in you getting your pension drained?
This happens quite frequently in companies with public stock and/or profit based bonus contributions. If someone fucks up and the product kills someone, it impacts everyone’s retirement that’s based on company performance.
This literally can happen. If the company causes enough harm lawsuits can drain their coffers and cause the company to go under or nearly so and restructuring to stay afloat temporarily can harm pensions.
There is fairly strong evidence of broad complicity among police officers in each other's misconduct, to the point that there are dozens of stories out there of new police officers joining some of the most prominent police forces in the country, seeing bad things happening, and trying to get them to stop—only to be told, persuaded, coerced, and threatened into shutting up or quitting.
> There's a big difference. Pensions are paid by the employer and retirement accounts are paid by the employee.
You make it sound like you're paid more if you get a pension!
If the company pays into a pension for or gives you the money which you then pay into a pension... guess what it's the same money just a slightly different setup.
I've got a pension I pay into myself, so it doesn't need to be your employer which does it.
Rethought from the ground up scares me a little. Yes I think some places need some fundamental changes but you don't want to try a rebuild on a system like that.
The police/prison industrial complex in the US is the worst in the world. It would be impossible to make it worse especially since its foundation is firmly rooted in racism (policy and history). We only gain from starting from scratch.
> The police/prison industrial complex in the US is the worst in the world. It would be impossible to make it worse
No, it wouldn't. It's not even, right now, the worst it's been in the US. (It may be the most controversial it's ever been, but that's because standards have evolved faster than it has, not because it has gotten worse.)
We have known issues with police violence and racism. We have insane police budgets and a militarized police force. We have a highly ineffective "war on drugs" that has destroyed wide swaths of our country.
I don't think it's controversial to say that the US has the worst police force and prison industry on earth.
> We have the world's largest imprisoned population, both by total number and per capita
Perhaps; we certainly have the largest reported imprisoned population by those standards, but we also know that there are several countries whose numbers really, really can't be trusted. But, I didn't take issue with “the US police and prison industrial complex is the worst in the world” [0], I took issue with “it would be impossible to make it worse”, since it manifestly has been worse in terms of both abuses within the system and unjust motivations for getting people into the system.
[0] which is not to say I agree, even setting aside potential issues with reporting of incarceration rates, because I'm not sure you've weighted situations where the “police” (and often the prison system, military, and other institutions) are heavily in league with organized crime, such as drug cartels, and directly involved in carrying out and covering up large scale murder on their behalf properly against incarceration rates.
I'm interested in some concrete examples of how we could make it worse. Do you mean we'll spend even more money? It seems that rebuilding the police force with demilitarization as one of the driving principles would make that outcome unlikely.
They’ll just increase their base pensions and budgets to calculate in the expected costs from the settlements. All this will do is destroy the budgets and pensions in one-off cases where the act is egregious enough for the cost to be 10x any expected costs.
That would also increase an incentive to cover-up the misconduct.
I think the best first step would be to increase transparency and accountability. For example, large number of cities did not even respond to the FIOA request. Also, I read that many Police misconducts are not even tracked at federal level and civil forfeiture has little oversight.
You’re right for cities and counties (and the state itself) in California. None are allowed to operate at a deficit, hence the creation of the state “rainy day fund” by Gov. Brown after the 2008 recession which has worked very well in tempering the current fiscal issues in the Covid pandemic, at least at the state level.
