We didn't take into consideration the justice system's complete lack of appetite at holding officers responsible for egregious violations of life, civil liberties, and property rights.
Perhaps it is that many people assigned unions and government at-large the role of 'good guys', with corporations and criminals being the 'bad guys'?
In any case, most libertarians (such as myself) have been skeptical of the police and unions (especially public-sector) for a very long time. We've been talking about these issues for decades, and wondering why nobody else noticed what was going on with the militarization and lack of accountability of police. I suppose we finally have our answer.
I think that a similar technological innovation was key during the civil rights movement in the US in the 60s. Capturing the cruelty of racists against blacks in America and showing it on television was crucial for turning public opinion in favor of civil rights.
Of course juries also require a unanimous agreement, and there is always the bootlicking contingent. Jury nullification is great anti-state concept in general, but often ends up used to remove accountability for sub-state power structures.
Source: https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/fall-rodney-king-juror-...
> "But I assumed that the videotape showed everything that had happened. I was amazed to discover how much more of it existed than had been shown on television. The whole tape was only eighty-one seconds, but even so, only a small portion of that eighty-one seconds had been shown on television. The whole tape, seen in context, presented a far different scenario than what the public had seen."
Source: https://laist.com/2017/04/25/rodney_king_jury.php
It's a shame they were acquitted, but our culture of violence runs deep, and our [low] expectations reflect that. It's not surprising that the jurors considered the brutality justified.
filming will do nothing till the the protections afforded the police by their union and local politicians; don't let these mayors fool anyone as most had budget increases planned for their cops; are made illegal. every violent act committed by any police officer must have the possibility of assault charges for the officer unless video clears them. any time the police must make a payout for an act committed by an officer that officer must be released and have their permanent record flagged so they just don't walk across state lines.
the only real national database we need is of government employees, be they cops, firemen, teachers, or clerk. get busted and you are done for nationwide with regards to public service.
Short answer: Yes, both today and historically, especially when we meted out more brutal punishments. Literature on the history of jury nullification invariably points this out.
However, juror leniency has waned as jury pools have become increasingly composed of people who don't live in the same neighborhoods or socio-economic conditions as the defendants and therefore lack a more realistic perspective of the risks and benefits of leniency rather than being driven by fear. See, generally, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice by William Stuntz.
That's proved to be a pathetically overoptimistic vision.
The reasons are several, and other HN readers touch on most of these:
1. It is impunity and immunity rather than credible accusations which enable most oppressive behaviour. Those who know that they can act without consequence ... will. Whether this is cover of numbers (e.g., mob mentality), specific legal protection, or simply acting extrajurisdictionally, the upshot is the same: you don't need to be an evil supergenius if you cannot or will not be caught or held to account. Or, even, if you simply believe you won't or just don't care.
2. As Yonatan Zunger, chief architect of Google+ has observed, information is not power, information is a power multiplier. This was a specific response by him to David Brin's Transparent Society argument that persistent sousveillance would hold power to account. Without the power to act on information, very little is done.
(This isn't to say that, to use Neal Stephenson's terms, either the mobility and nobility are entirely immune. Each has both strengths and vulnerabilities. The nobility (establishment) has the power of institution, centralisation, and capacity to motivate resources, but relies strongly on its own acknowledged power. The nobility (populace), has strength in numbers and some resistance to decapitation, but is also tremendously disorganised and often weakly effective, at least until it isn't.)
3. Attention is limited. At any social scope --- locally, regionally, nationally, internationally --- there is only so much attention to go 'round, and the effective focus tends to be on a vanishingly small number of items, I'd argue for roughly 1 to 100, with 10 items being a very frequent limit. That is, no matter how much is going on, and how rapidly issues on the list itself rotate, focus is effectively on about 10 or fewer top stories in a day. Evidence for this is somewhat anecdotal, but pretty persistant: a top-of-the-hour five-minute news bulletin typically lists 4-6 items, giving less than a minute to each (introductions, sponsorship spots, etc., chew into time). A full-hour news programme similarly covers about the same number of items, though giving 3-4
For some examples:
The two-hour afternoon NPR flagship today lists 14 stories, 7 per hour, running largely 3-4 minutes, with an in-depth item "New Police Force From Scratch: N.J. City Proves It's Possible To Reform The Police" today, running 8 minutes:
https://www.npr.org/programs/all-things-considered/
The President's Daily Briefing, an intelligence summary of gobal developments of significance, runs 10 pages, typically lists ten items, and runs about an hour. There are archives of selected versions of this dating to the 1960s.
The Vanderbilt Television Archive comprises US national news broadcasts dating to August 5, 1968. Though the actual video isn't freely available, rundowns of news stories are listed at the site. Before switching to a 25 minute format, an hour-long news programme typically ran 6-10 items, plus another 4-6 in the top-of-the-hour summary. Shorter formats include fewer and shorter stories.
Major newspapers typically run about 100--500 stories daily (more on weekends), with ~250 being a rough median. Only a fraction of this is actual hard news (news, politics, some of business coverage), with a substantial amount of copy being largely advertorial: sport, much of business, entertainment, style, real estate, automobiles, travel, etc.
The high-popularity lists ("most popular", "most read", "most emailed") of online sites typically list 5-10 items.
The news wires -- UPI, AP, Reuters, AFP -- typically see 1,000 - 5,000 items filed per day (various annual reports and other sources).
Hacker News tends toward a higher bound at 30 items on the front page. As those of us who submit regularly are aware, that is a precious resource and hard to land on. The Hivemind is fickle and operates curiously. (Mods do, lightly, put a finger on the scales, and yes, I've benefited from that on occasion.)
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That's not to say that recording has no merits. I've justified a fair amount of my own reading, writing, and sharing as simply bearing witness. Acknowledging (and attempting to understand) what it is that's going on, hoping to preserve some record for a future in which the limitations listed above have shifted their favour.
But don't for a second believe that information and record are panaceas of themselves, and work yourself to shift the balances noted above.
Qualified immunity being a major element of that, at least in civil law.
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/08/872470083/qualified-immunity-...
See also asset forfeiture.
The difference today is there is no context of what led up to it. Only the act itself which can be spun and edited however anyone likes.
Do police go to far, sometimes yes. Is every encounter where violence occurs to far, probably not. I do agree that when it is too far they need to be held accountable.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2020/06/09/c...
Instead the video is suppressesd A LOT. You've seen a handful of body cam footage, a handful of proofs of the thousands of calls in every city every day.
Think about that.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/09/us/disband-police-camden-new-...
The City's department was replaced with a County department ... rehiring -some- of the officers. Outcome?
"Now, seven years after the old department was booted (though around 100 officers were rehired), the city's crime has dropped by close to half. Officers host outdoor parties for residents and knock on doors to introduce themselves. It's a radically different Camden than it was even a decade ago."
Societies attitudes are very persistent. Takes decades for things to materially change. The root of that is the Max Plank quote: A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
That said I think juries are becoming much more aware of the implications of letting bad cops off the hook. Muni's are becoming tired of paying out settlements for cops that should have been long since fired. And this is in the contexts of increasing militarization of the police while the crime rate has been falling persistently for 30 years.
Things always look like they'll never change and then they do.
After sitting through jury selection last year, I think that's definitely part of it.
But you also have to consider that:
(1) the standard for a crime is actually much higher for a police officer than a civvie. It's something like "would a reasonable officer act this way in a similar circumstance" and the attorney spends the rest of the defense case adding to the onus of the prosecutor
(2) the officer's coworkers are the ones gathering/storing the evidence and pressuring the chief + prosecutor to neither bring a case nor follow through with it
(3) just like a criminal is the best person to be able to get away with a crime, so is the person that spends all day investigating and interviewing criminals. Since a lot of felonies require intent, it's especially difficult to investigate intent if the suspect is very knowledgeable about the tools you would use to build that case. And even if the individual officer isn't, they have union reps and lawyers to assist. The investigators might even depend on the same union reps/lawyers and their own dues pay out the longer those services are needed.
(4) police unions are extremely good at disseminating legal information to their members/constituents (for lobbying, voting, and rallying purposes). They have been caught creating "copaganda" (pro-police propaganda) in social media recently.
(5) union leaders poison the well of investigations in the local media as soon as an officer is investigated
(6) the police union pays for the defense attorney most of the time and they specialize in defending officers all of the time
(7) the police unions have crafted very difficult barriers to firing officers (see POBoR, LEOBoR, lots of employment contract clauses) so the bad ones end up staying on the force, even if they collect a large number of complaints
(8) there is inevitably the discussion of how "hard" the job is (it's honestly really physically tiring, occasionally dangerous, requires lots of concentration + short term memory, is emotionally taxing to see the physical and mental toll of crime, ) and the defense attorney will always bring this up
(8) there are specialist police trainers that act as expert witnesses in what the police are trained to do and what the police mentality is when then encounter a suspect (eg. they are taught to always expect at every second that a suspect could be an armed murderer and a suicide terrorist, so they act accordingly)
(9) prosecutors sometimes tank / sandbag the prosecution because they still have to work with all of the coworkers of the defendant who frequently think it's a violation of trust to bring charges against a cop (no matter how bad the officer acted). A DA / ADA who can't get police to supply evidence or work a case isn't a DA much longer. I don't think 99% of police are acquitted / never see trial unless this is a significant component.
(10) the average person that doesn't want off jury duty has hero worship of authority (judges, prosecutors, police, military) and they aren't challenged on that mentality unless they say a couple of key phrases