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?
Imgaine how hard it is for us to admit a mistake at work which brings the website down but here someone's life is at stake.
What happens if a cop makes a mistake and causes grave injury to someone. What would be his incentive to admit mistake and possibly spend rest of his life in prison.
It’s as if they believe that local PD is some unprofessional good old boys or something, but the FBI, those are the professional ones.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Make sure your skepticism of police statements (including those regurgitated verbatim on the news) extends to feds as well. They have a decades-long history of the exact same damage.
Beware anything put in a sworn statement or affidavit by feds, or provided by federal informants or federal undercovers. You’d be astounded how much of it simply isn’t true.
They "resigned" but are still employed? It's not a resignation if you keep getting a paycheque.
That's a far cry from this situation. There is no "judgment call" here: don't violently shove elderly people to the ground for no reason. If you accidentally do, help them up. If you pass by an elderly person lying on the ground and bleeding, check on them.
There's no "mistake" here.
which is something that the aviation regulators created in response to some of the dynamics you mentioned.
(I don't know how ASRS authenticates that people making reports are really pilots or aircrew.)
I wasn't talking about this specific case though, not sure how you inferred that from my comment that shoving old man was a mistake .
I was talking about a hypothetical case where it was indeed a mistake.
That actually sounds like a pretty good idea, honestly.
But self-regulation hasn't worked and isn't likely to work, precisely because those structural factors are so formidable. So instead, we turn to outside auditing in the form of cell phone video — as advocated by this article.
If you're a passenger on a plane whose pilot is doing something unsafe, you'll probably never know, which is different from if you're a victim of abuse by police (because you'll directly experience the consequences individually directed to you). Nonetheless, the pilot's unsafe behavior also has a real potential to harm you, just in a way that doesn't feel intentional or personal, and in a way that's almost always invisible except in case of an after-the-fact investigation.
There are lots of ways that the analogy breaks down, but I see one where I disagree with you: policing does also have "lots of very complex and nuanced situations [...] that require judgment calls" alongside the situations that are best described as willful abuse and crime.
"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...
I completely agree, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I just meant to point out that this situation was not one of them.
The police union should be ordered to pay all legal fees related to excessive force incidents until they are bankrupt. Police unions have been amongst the biggest enablers of police violence in recent times.
You might like some of the mission and stated thinking behind ASAP and ASRS, and that there's interest in encouraging pilots and crew to speak up about mistakes and other safety-related observations, so that everyone can learn and benefit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Safety_Action_Program...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Safety_Reporting_Syst...
Also related is FOQA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_operations_quality_assu...
I don't know enough about law enforcement to say whether and how any of these practices might be helpful to adapt to different and complicated challenges there.
Regarding admitting a mistake in software development/operations work that brings the site down, it helps to have a culture of trust that everyone can admit making mistakes. In that culture, you'll probably still feel sick and humbled by the mistake, but the first priority is for the team to solve the immediate problem. After that, everyone wants to understand the mistake, to try to learn and avoid problems like that in the future. The professional move is to be upfront with all pertinent information; the unprofessional move would be to attempt to hide information, misdirect efforts understanding the cause, etc. The professional move by everyone else is to expect and respect that professionalism, and to act in the same forthright spirit.
When you tell investigators "A fucking bear was on the track!" the investigators don't believe you. Far more likely you screwed up and have made up this excuse about a bear.
When your train has FFCCTV you know the investigators are going to check it and they are going to see the bear. This country doesn't even have bears - what the actual fuck!
And that pays dividends because now staff have every reason to expect investigators will believe them if they tell the truth, and it means investigators spend less time second guessing human recollection of events which means more time to deal with the actual events of the incident.
Unfortunately he didn't have to courage to stand up for his first feeling.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-poli...
Where are the good men and women, and what is the sum of their good acts in the grand scheme of things?
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?
No, they should get proper training and be held to professional standards.
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.
Qualified immunity means they effectively have zero liability. In the few cases of extreme incompetence, it's taxpayers that foot the bill. Those police have no liability, beyond being responsible for fulfilling their job in a reasonable, professional way.
What the union is talking about is legal bills fighting the city (if the members are penalized in any way). And these are members that "volunteered" for a special pay role, not because they are benevolent.
Speaking of which, the union, as so many of them do, has the doublespeak terminology "benevolent" in its name (Buffalo Police Benevolent Association), yet the primary purpose of police unions is to ensure that bad cops keep their jobs, and to fight any and all measures that obtain even the slightest measure of accountability.
Even if the older guy used language this could have been resolved without the need to escalate the conflict. Using violent force against somebody that does not seem to be posing a threat is a serious problem if your sole job is to keep peace.
i've said it before but here it is again, a workable system for police accountability:
there are tangible ways that laws could be setup and practices adhered to that would make cops more accountable and, while maybe the same level of racist in some parts, help ensure that they get held accountable more often than not.
mandatory body cams rolling at all times unless they are in a bathroom.
turning off or a malfunctioning camera during the act of a police brutality event immediately pierces the qualified immunity defense and they are tried as citizens.
have an outside investigative body that has zero ties to the police department investigate any reports of abuse.
have another outside investigative body that has zero ties to the police department randomly sampling police stop footage to see if there are any instances of impropriety.
I am sure this list is non-exhaustive but it's a start. also, while we are here, fix the issue of civil asset forfeiture. the clear "we get to take your money because it looks suspicious and then keep it for the police department" is a huge conflict of interest.
> There is a tendency for airlines to put the blame on a pilot in case of a crash, this disincentives pilots from speaking the truth.
the other side to this is that the airlines have every single input and the conversation that lead up to the crash along with the meticulous analysis of the wreckage and records of maintenance... the cops investigate themselves and find themselves not guilty of any crimes.
Yes, absolutely! Raise police pay, along spending money on police training. Then hold those officers to high standards. This is absolutely the way forward.
This certainly entails raising taxes, which makes better policing difficult to implement when one of the two major political parties is religiously opposed to taxation.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/23/boeing-737-...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RtnQ2GqBeg
[2]: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/killing-of-george-fl...
[3]: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/06/03/457251670...
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..."
Future allegations may or may not be true. Even officers who follow all procedures want legal defense against false or questionable accusations.
> Many of the employees, who said they refused to work in order to show their support for demonstrators across the country, added an automated message to their digital profiles and email responses saying that they were out of the office in a show of protest.
I'm pretty sure Facebook's "virtual walk-out" was virtual because they were all working from home. They still stopped working, en mass, for the day. They still risked being fired, and they still negatively impacted the company's productivity.
They just didn't actually walk out of the office because they never physically went to the office in the first place.
It's a lucrative gig. In NYC, the NYPD runs commercials advertising full benefits, competitive compensation and only having to work for 20 years before being able to retire with a pension.
[1] https://www.nj.com/news/2017/05/how_much_is_the_median_cop_s...
The policemen attitude in the video is revolting
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.
That combination would probably knock most people off their feet.
