The Buffalo incident offers a vivid example of why police records should be considered unreliable. Where are the "good cops" among the 20 or so in the video who had the opportunity to speak up, but in practice chose to maintain the blue wall of silence?
"The union representing Buffalo police officers told its rank and file members Friday that the union would no longer pay for legal fees to defend police officers related to the protests which began Saturday in downtown Buffalo and have continued on and off, according to one source. The union is upset with the treatment of the two officers who were suspended Thursday."
https://buffalonews.com/2020/06/05/57-members-of-buffalo-pol...
If you volunteered to program the Foo system at your job, and your company announced that you would be individually liable for any losses anyone suffered for your further work on Foo system, would you keep volunteering to program Foo or would you look to work on other projects?
Really the issue is one of process. Was shoving the guy to the ground and leaving him there a normal procedure for dealing with the alleged offense? If so, it's the department's fault and the superiors are negligent. If not, they failed to follow process and caused a death, so they should be individually liable for assault charges.
There are no "close-call mistakes" in the situations which have caused outrage. The problem is that the officers involved have excessive support to defend themselves.
If changing that causes some people to "avoid taking a job", good. The public has an interest in them not being in that job.
I agree with you on that! As I said, "the clear cut ones pull at our heartstrings because they are so egregious."
The problem as I see it is that it's hard to tailor a bright-line policy that creates increased personal liability for police for their clear abuses of power and brutality, that doesn't also create increased personal liability for their close-call, reasonable mistakes. Some of the "5 demands" I have been seeing seem like reasonable starts [0]; none that I have seen focus on increased personal liability.
>If changing that causes some people to "avoid taking a job", good.
I would guess that you and I have drastically different estimations of how large an exodus from policing the wrong kind of policy change could cause. We need police reform, but we also need police.[1]
[0]For example, https://i.redd.it/e5ka53eb5k251.png
[1]See, for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23410144 "Montreal once had a 16 hour police strike, creating a natural experiment in what happens without police..."
The point here is that none of those are allowed to operate: the police are extended extensive immunity for criminal actions by the structure of the system, as well as immunity from individual civil liability for those actions.
All government officials should be free from nuisance liability suits for their job-related activities. But if a majority of police require immunity from the consequences of criminal activity, you are going to end up with much more than three million dollars of damage.
