The point of abolishing police isn't so that nobody shows up when you call 911. It's so that the right person for the right situation shows up when you call 911.
Given the current state of American policing, there is only one situation where I would call the police, and expect the right person to show up.
That situation is an active shooter. For nearly everything else, I don't need an armed-to-the-teeth, compliance-at-gunpoint, qualified-immunity-protected man with a gun to show up. He is not the right person for 99% of the work the police currently engage in.
Investigation:
> civilian investigators don’t have direct access to the [body cam] footage. They email requests to the NYPD, which decides which footage is relevant. The department takes its time.
Adjudication:
> [E]ven if the CCRB substantiates a case, the commissioner still has complete authority over what to do next. He can decide to simply ignore the recommended punishment. The commissioner can also let the case go before an internal NYPD judge (whose boss is the commissioner). If the judge decides punishment is merited, the commissioner can overturn or downgrade that, too.
Punishment:
>In 2018, the CCRB looked into about 3,000 allegations of misuse of force. It was able to substantiate 73 of those allegations. The biggest punishment? Nine officers who lost vacation days, according to CCRB records.
It might still be systemically racist, but at least the consequences thereof will be lower.
We've already tried reforming departments. It doesn't work. The entire management structure of your neighbourhood police department resists reform. The line officers resist reform. The police chief resists reform. No amount of winger-wagging at them will result in reform. No amount of sensitivity training or unconscious bias training, or body cams have managed to reign them in.
Wiping the slate clean, and starting over might.
I am typically a pro-union person. I even think that police unions, as a concept, should exist.
But police unions, as implemented, are the reason that civilian oversight of police is impossible.
Typical unions consist of line workers - with maybe line managers. They are then overseen by professional managers, directors, etc, who are not part of the union. The union advocates for the line workers, in opposition to managers.
Police department unions are completely different. Every level of management, except for the very top (The mayor and city council) are part of the union. And, unsurprisingly, this leads to a huge conflict of interest, where the line workers aren't opposed by the managers - but are working together, against the civilian authorities.
To draw a parallel, it would be like the entirety of GM, including the CEO, being part of the UAW union. Do you think that would represent shareholder & board interests well? Or would it lead to a completely out of control company, that would operate without any care for board oversight?
hell employers (especially state employers) require degrees and ridiculous experience levels just to wield JS on a crud app.
I think taking away officer's weapons will drastically change who they decide to engage and how they do so.
If that’s the final output I suspect most people will want to retain the status quo because the primary problem is ignored at great expense.
IMO these sorts of questions are kneejerk reactions without any significant fore- or after-thought. They only serve to disrupt the conversation.
In so many of these police related threads on HN lately people make absurd claims and then are upset when asked about data or objectivity, which suggests people are looking to complain about something and don’t want their complaint validated with data, which is strange.
In an ideal world where we have an oracle telling us which cops are good and which are bad your comment makes sense. But the nature of corruption is to obfuscate its dealings. You can't just say "well we need independent oversight" then because there are so many institutional pivot points where cops can hide their abhorrent behavior before it gets to see the light of day.
In practical application ethics violations are knowable breaking of rules or demonstrable malicious intentions.
Police do everything they can to keep ethics violations from being measured. That is what the story is about. In light of that, your objection to psychometry's comment calling for oversight is quite absurd.
2. Reforms don't work. The SPD has been under federal sanction, and has been the target of numerous reform plans for the past two decades. Nothing sticks. The department is institutionally incapable of reform or accountability.
3. Given #2, it is currently being ignored at great expense. Police are the highest-paid public servants. Police departments consume the overwhelming majority of municipal tax revenue.
Why would you hire a cop for a six figure salary, to have them spend most of their time deal with social worker problems, when social workers are already capable of doing that job, for a third the pay? Why do you have that same cop cruise around, issuing parking tickets, when you could have a bylaw officer do the same thing, for a third the pay?
This is evidenced in how you think "ethics" can be defined by a wikipedia page.
The concept of ethics is very much different from its numerous instantiations.
Your comments in this thread are recursively ridiculous and I'm not sure how far I want to unwind them, but people are "inventing their own narratives" (this is an astonishingly bad way of characterizing the problem here) in preference to siting hard numbers because the police are not holding themselves accountable, a phenomenon that includes the suppression of the hard data on how many abuses there are.
I assume you will agree that this is close to objectivity and therefore police are indeed corrupt?
The OP's comment may be poorly worded, but in the context of current events your contributions to this discussion show virtually no sign of attempting to make good faith arguments.
* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Arizona
As two quick examples check out the open carry laws in Texas and Arizona where registered personally owned firearms per capita is among the highest in the country.
A more correct restatement of your claim might be that "many" Southerners openly carry, but that's still a minority of a minority given that, per capita, most Southerners don't even own a gun. "Almost everyone" is reaching into some kind of weird libertarian wild-west fantasy stereotype.
> In so many of these police related threads on HN lately people make absurd claims and then are upset when asked about data or objectivity
And I provided you exactly what you wanted. Yet you seem to be dismissing said evidence out of...? Your feelings?
This is particularly tone deaf in light of the subject matter of the article. I can point to specific things that happened and say "that should not be permitted" or "this is evidence of a corrupt system that is not holding itself to account." I can do this before I know precisely how often it's happening, and it would be wrong not to do that.
If the ability to cover up criminal acts is a consequence of police unions, there’s no doubt in my mind that they should be abolished.
Unions make a lot of sense, unless they can negotiate impunity on behalf of their members.
EDIT: Interesting article on this subject: https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-trou...
Quote from the article:
When it comes to advancing their interests, public-sector unions have significant advantages over traditional unions. For one thing, using the political process, they can exert far greater influence over their members' employers — that is, government — than private-sector unions can. Through their extensive political activity, these government-workers' unions help elect the very politicians who will act as "management" in their contract negotiations — in effect handpicking those who will sit across the bargaining table from them, in a way that workers in a private corporation (like, say, American Airlines or the Washington Post Company) cannot. Such power led Victor Gotbaum, the leader of District Council 37 of the AFSCME in New York City, to brag in 1975: "We have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss."
2. There is no guarantee that the candidate you helped elect in your district will be the person responsible for negotiations. Other politicians are supposed to be a counterbalance to this, if they are doing their jobs, and actually give two figs about conflicts of interest.
This is largely a theoretical concern.
The concern I cited - that management is part of the union is not theoretical. It is one we've seen played out again and again.