I was thinking at the very least to get a citizen right where you can request to have any encounter with the police recorded.
‘Officer I request my right to have this encounter recorded’.
2. Limit the use of force
3. Independently investigate and prosecute
4. Community representation
5. Body cams / film the police
6. Training in de-escalation
7. End for profit policing
8. Demilitarization of the police force
9. Fair police union contracts that remove provisions within police bill of rights that impose barriers to accountability
Look here:
Https://bit.ly/3cosVXM
I don’t think a cop can psychologically hold up being on the street for years on end without losing some perspective. The job fundamentally blasts you with the worst of people, and it’s easy to develop a rotten world view if measures are not taken to handle that input.
A maximum limit of X months per year on the street or something, the other half in some other duty.
My take on the Floyd murder was there was definitely an element of a power complex that the cop devolved into over years.
The problem right now is that excessive use of force by an LEO rarely results in actual, hard time or fines for that officer. Consider the death of Eric Garner [1]. The city of New York paid 5.9 million to his family and the arresting officer was fired from the NYPD. Additionally, the Department of Justice declined to bring criminal charges against [the arresting officer] under federal civil rights laws.
If we reorganized our justice system to actually pursue officers who use excessive use of force, perhaps officers would be more careful about using it. But the current state of affairs has no penalties for the officers if they do use excessive use of force when it is not justified.
1. Body cams mandatory for all police inside & outside of the station, and they stay on 100% of the time and batteries should last the whole shift. No ifs/buts/maybes. If the need arises, bathroom breaks can be edited out after the fact.
2. National ID card, in all states and mandatory for everyone over 13/16. Put all biometric, facial and possibly DNA data on file, encrypted and only available for searches. Be creative.
3. Remove the need to arrest people for any non-violent crimes. People are positively ID'd via some tech (insert something wild here if you want). Cop files a report, includes evidence of positive ID, person needs to appear in court as they will be notified by SMS/Email/letter/lawyer-visit because that stuff should all be on-file and up to date. Send them warnings if they don't appear in court, meanwhile block their access to everything like cell-phones, bank accounts, etc. Start pro-actively messaging their family, or them, and let them know about the additional time/fines they are racking up by missing court dates. 3.a) Assume they're guilty if they don't show up for court and don't have a valid reason.
4. Disallow police from forcibly cuffing people for arrest. Procedure should be to throw two pairs of cuffs at the person while they're being pointed at with gun/taser, and they have to put it on themselves. Procedure allows for x minutes of that, then by default they have to taze this individual into submission and just arrest them. Once they're cuffed, just carry them in a car/van, or wait for support.
5. Punishment for disobeying orders by a policeman to do the above.
6. Very strict guidelines and sets of laws being broken that justify physical arrest. The default should be to just tag the person and tell them to appear in court. If it's a grey-area, just block their cellphone, bank-accounts, cards, etc.
7. Track all cell-phone locations, strongly-linked and verified to individual identities, and store permanently. Store it securely and allow court-orders to open for case investigations. Allow anonymized access to information-based researches that are told to investigate crimes. This one alone could solve so many crimes in my view that I am saddened to no end that people prevent it from happening safely at the recurring expense of innocent lives.
One could go on and on. But guaranteed the above sets of actions/laws are very unpalatable for the majority of people, and it would cause "human rights lawyers" to salivate at the potential for litigation and for "human rights activists" to salivate in protestual anger.
The goal of policing should be to make the community safe. If the goal of policing is to rack up violations, and you basically streamline it where a cop can go around and rack up tons of alleged infractions, then that’s what will happen. In fact, that’s exactly what happened when some police departments enforced quality of life infractions. Suddenly every cop had the mandate to write you up to meet their quotas, and they are able to internalize their value system organically since the word from above is zero-tolerance for even the smallest infractions.
I don’t want to live in that kind of society honestly. Take a look at this reddit thread if you want to see examples of this, and get anecdotes of how people get harassed by cops (regardless of race) for the smallest things (and this type of policing is a vector for physical escalation):
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/gu8xlv/cops...
This one here is particular infuriating:
Your point #1 is a must, tech has to really step up and make this one happen.
What do these cops do when these situations happen and there is no video recording of the encounter? They all back each other up and write up some bogus police report justifying the need for force. That’s exactly what would have happened if we didn’t get the recording this time around. These four cops would have straight lied.
Let’s say we effectively deter them from doing so with liberal use of cameras. I think if they are really rotten, they will find ways to drum up other charges.
There are two paths of discussion here, one path assumes the cops are mostly good and do bad things in very intense, escalated situations. The other is they are rotten, and do something bad in any situation such as wrongfully detain, concoct charges, forge evidence, or justify a violent escalation.
If we’re dealing with a rotten police community, where they operate with a clear power complex and mafia—esque collusion amongst each other, then we must confront that word, systemic.
Violence is just one by-product of a systemic problem. Lying, manipulation, imposition of unrestricted authority in any/all contexts, and so on.
If systemically there is a 20% prevalence of rotten behavior, numbers straight out of my ass of course, we’re talking 1 in 5 interactions are tainted with the public. We have to find out what the real number is, because I do believe that number exists and it ain’t below 10%.
Asking the police to provide us this data is about the same as asking the CCP for police data. We need serious transparency into this organization.
People stop it from happening (to some degree and at great cost) because this would hurt far more than it would help. Imagine if the police could do this now. They would use it to drag everyone who had been in the vicinity of the protests out of their homes and lock them up (at best). "Secure" and "court orders" would never hold up in practice, but "permanent" certainly would. Plus, all criminals would need to do to avoid it is not bring cell phones to crimes, or bring someone else's. Unless you want to mandate carrying government tracking beacons at all times? I'm no libertarian, but this is one of the worst proposals for fixing police brutality I've ever seen.
I've worked in a consulting position with a German police union a long time ago (different than the US unions, they are regular trade unions here, generally left-of-center). The new guy running the local office told me that he was fortunate to discover exactly what you describe happening to himself and asked to be placed elsewhere so he won't start arresting every black person wearing baggy pants that he sees.
Additionally, this thread lists actual legislation that has been proposed and, in some cases, passed in cities and states to address police violence: https://twitter.com/samswey/status/1266855519425384450
This basically just gives people a license to steal whatever they want and stalk and harass anyone they want, so long as they don't lay a finger on a person. The only consequences are fines, and non-payment of a fine is not a violent crime and thus not cause for arrest.
Police (no fault of their own) are woefully under trained given what is expected from them.
Of course, it will never happen because of the cost.