zlacker

The problem is that the "good" police are incentivised to protect the "bad" police, and do so. You're not going to find the "good" police investigating and charging their colleagues - when it does happen, they're inevitably harassed and removed from the force - and nobody else is in a position to do so, so what you get is the "bad" police operating with impunity.

And there's effects on the wider system - courts will believe a police officer's account of what happened pretty much no matter the opposing evidence. There's no accountability when a police officer goes against the reasons they were hired, and destroys people's lives.

There's the possibility of alternative systems of protection and justice, which don't create organisations which are incentivised to protect murderers, abusers, and rapists.

>>vertex+(OP)
What do some of those systems look like? Have any been tried on a large scale? Are they effective? (Honestly asking, I am trying to imagine something other than a police force - or that looks like a police force - that can effectively deal with crime)

>>eric_b+U
On a large scale, not really. It's very, very hard to change a society away from being under the control of the police. On a smaller scale - yeah. There's a lot of books on the subject of transformative justice, and various methods are practiced in many many leftist spaces. I've been involved in some of it, and it's worked from my perspective.

And simply meeting people's needs deters a lot of crime - nobody's going to wind up in a position where they're robbing a gas station if they know, from an early age, that they're going to be sheltered, well fed, and have a good life, and this isn't dependent on massive amounts of luck, and if they fuck up there's another chance.

>>vertex+(OP)
As far as I understand it[1], the state and the federal government have the ability to prosecute police misconduct, and their incentives are aligned to crack down on the bad police officers.

The problem is that they are dramatically limited in the types of charges they can press against officers of the law (charges that carry big penalties, and have a very high burden of proof). This is anachronistically because we as a society have decided that officers deserve benefit of the doubt in the lack of compelling evidence. These days, many instances of misconduct are recorded, and the rules should change.

In Eric Garner's case, for example, the govt attorneys declined to press charges, because they lacked sufficient evidence that the officer was knowingly violating the rights of Eric Garner. The burden of proof for any kind of misconduct charge is currently so high, that even an egregious misconduct case like this passes by untouched.

If the attorneys general had a wider range of misconduct charges in their arsenal, they could raise the average cost of police misconduct, and it might improve the situation.

[1] recently informed by https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/pushkin-industries/deep-bac...

>>gen220+q3
The NYPD kidnapped and involuntarily committed a whistleblowing officer who they learned had evidence of their stop-and-frisk quotas.

>>vertex+(OP)
If "good" police are standing by and allowing "bad" police to get away with these things, I'd argue that they are complicit in the bad behavior and not so "good" after all.

>>wander+Wc
Indeed, there's a reason I put them in quotes.

>>eric_b+U
I don't think they're advocating for disbanding the department completely (from the article):

> I don’t know yet, though several of us on the council are working on finding out, what it would take to disband the MPD and start fresh with a community-oriented, non-violent public safety and outreach capacity.

It takes a lot of investment in the community, but it works: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/01/what-happened-to-crim...

>>gen220+q3
Actually states do not have the ability to prosecute police to the extent we would think they do. Police chiefs cannot even fire police. Investigating a police officer for wrongDoing or firing a police officer for wrongdoing must follow specific protocols in Union contracts that are put in place specifically to make holding the police accountable a bureaucratic nightmare.

>>sonota+k9
Yeah, I mean it's a known thing that the NYPD is beyond help at this point. They need external help to change.

This is where the department of justice, and state-level attorneys general should be able to check and balance the system, but current laws render them unable to do so effectively.

Even during the Obama years (Eric Garner happened while Obama was POTUS), when a DoJ that wanted to do the right the thing was empowered to, these laws were a huge impediment to progress.

>>TeaDru+sE
I think there's a good argument to be made that the one of the most important steps to solve the US police brutality and unaccountability problem should be to declare Police Unions to be illegal.