zlacker

>>mnm1+(OP)
Qualified immunity has become a get-out-of-jail-free card for law enforcement.

I believe it's the primary reason for the complete apathy law enforcement shows towards de-escalation and self-restraint in general.

Why bother behaving when the standard for prosecuting you is so high as to be laughable?

>>typeni+Yi
This is my feeling also, but in general I'm very frustrated at how this whole conversation is based on these "feelings" because the data is so poor. I think an important component is an independent oversight apparatus that (among many other things) is responsible for collecting standardized, high quality data that can be aggregated at a national level so we can conclusively answer questions like, "do police target certain races in their killings or is it an artifact of different crime distributions or etc?". It just seems insane to me that we keep going through this cycle over and over and spend so much time debating these questions, but we don't avail ourselves by the relatively inexpensive, straightforward step of collecting more/better data. Of course, not everyone will respect data over their own feelings/experiences, but (1) the data might agree with those feelings/experiences and (2) the rest of us can move toward a consensus at any rate.

>>throwa+Km
These aren't feelings. This is about feedback loops. Effectively what is happening is that a minority number of cops are horrible, but because the garbage collection apparatus of PDs and our legal systems are broken this violence occurs without accountability.

Our police force has had it's immune system stripped away.

Qualified immunity, lack of independent prosecutors and police unions make this a multi angle problem.

Imagine every place you've worked (if you've done that) and the larger the company the more likely you are to have one or two scary psychos that you just try to keep off their radar, now imagine that coworker has qualified immunity, a state issued gun, police union backing and a blue line to back him up... you aren't going to antagonize that guy, at best you'll avoid him, and he'll go out effectively unsupervised or with someone who won't stop them, we need external processes to get rid of bad cops so police have a better work environment.

Police reform is the most pro human thing I can think, whether your a cop or not.

https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/area/workshop/leo/l...