Since the author of the article did not even bother linking to the teenagers' website or even showing some screenshots of the app, here are some links:
Often, I experience it as deliberate. There is so much rehashing; if you link to the source, people may simply go there -- especially if it proves to be better than your hash.
This is the kind of impact that start-ups rarely have, in spite of the 'make something people want' and 'lets go and improve the world' mission statements.
Kudos to these three, it's the kind of development one would be proud to be a part of. Watching the watchers is badly needed, not just in America, elsewhere too.
I'm glad to see that a lens flare photoshop filter is still a rite-of-passage in design just like it was back in late 90s :)
Joking aside, this will have same terrible bias as BBB - bad reviews will be the only ones making it in. I am right up there with thinking cops significantly (and often) overstep their bounds but this is treating a symptom not the root cause.
There still needs to be visibility. Only the recent ubiquity of cell phone cameras has allowed the public at large to see interactions between citizens and police. Before this it was easy to dismiss or just be ignorant of how often police abuse occurred to certain groups of people.
It was the officer's word against these "thugs".
Getting everyone to admit a problem exists and getting our heads around how frequently it occurs is the first step towards resolving it.
I used to believe this but now I'm more careful - there are several biases that rear their ugly heads in problems like these. On the one hand, what GP alluded to is that bad interactions will be overrepresented in any kind of police reporting app that doesn't force you to rate every interaction you were in. On the other hand, you have the usual publication/media bias and availability heuristic working against us.
Say 1 in 500 police interaction is bad (terrorizing innocents at gunpoint) and 1 in 10 000 is, well, criminal (police maiming or killing someone innocent). That's 0.5% and 0.01% of all interactions, respectively. Even assuming that all police interactions, good and bad, are recorded in detail by third parties, in a country as big as the United States that still gives a steady stream of police brutality cases to run on nation-wide news, day after day.
So even though in my example the problem is minor and mostly random in nature, even when most people can go through their lives and never experience police behaving badly, the overall perception will be that police brutality is a big problem that absolutely needs to be dealt with right now. In fact, in this case, the only real problem is media reporting and people believing it instead of doing the math.
Now I don't know the real numbers for the police problem in the US, but it wouldn't surprise me if cases of brutality were even rarer than in my example. And even if this is a totally 100% legit problem, there are many, many others - from terrorism to immigrants to vaccines causing autism - that are simply manufactured by news reporting. This all makes me believe that the biggest danger to our civilization are we ourselves - and our massive overreactions to media-manufactured non-problems.
1 defect in 10,000 is not arbitrarily 'good'. Picture a bridge that randomly drops 1 in every 50,000 cars.
Further, cops are not a single entity if state and local cops have different issues and different training then that might be a way to improve the system. But, we don't collect statistics nationally. So, how do we improve?
No, I'd argue it's pretty awful. The average person probably interacts with the police ~10 times during their life. If 1 in 10 000 cop interactions ended up with you getting killed, police brutality would be in the top 10 causes of death in the US (on par with suicide).
Temporal said 'criminal', not 'fatal', and gave the example of 'maimed or fatal'. There are also non-fatal, non-injurious ways to be criminal in policing.
Technically yes, but they also gave an example of a serious, non-fatal, non-injurious way of being criminal in policing ("terrorizing innocents at gunpoint") and classified that outside of the 1 in 10 000 frequency.
I didn't mean literal "criminal" as in criminal law vs. civil law, I was aiming for differentiating between things that seriously stress you up at worst, and things that leave you (or your family, or your dog) with damaged health or property. Bad choice of words on my part.
Phew, agreed -- my jaw dropped at grandparent's 'minor'.
> we don't collect statistics nationally. So, how do we improve?
I think there's plenty of open-loop approaches that could be considered (training on de-escalation, refresher on citizen's rights, praise/laud the interactions that result in no arrest or arrest without aggression). Waiting for national consensus is unnecessary: cities, counties and towns can recognize the crisis and establish best practices that are effective.
National consensus is likely useful to allocate funds that may be necessary to make these improvements, though.
I think the meta-discussion about how accurate or relevant media portrayal of police brutality is, and how it influences peoples' perceptions is an important one. However I think your comment betrays a lot of privilege (or I should say: the way in which your comment resonates with white upper-middle class americans here betrays privilege). If you're black, regardless of your background, you've likely been sat down by your parent and "given the talk" about how to behave around police; about how not to get killed. There's a real culture of fear (which is grounded in reality, in real deaths and real experiences, in real numbers) which is I think more significant than whether police brutality is more or less prevalent than stroke or getting struck by lightning. It's not something I've ever had to deal with.
My other concern is that you haven't bothered to research statistics on police brutality and harassment, yet you seem to express doubt that the numbers are significant. In your hypothetical "most people can go through their lives and never experience police behaving badly", yet almost no Black American will tell you this.
I'm white upper-middle class, and I got multiple "talks" of how to interact with police, from my family, from cop friends of mine or cop dads of my friends, and from a book I bought on the topic. My kids will get the same from me and my brother (who's LEO).
It's not (and shouldn't be) just a black youth thing.
> So even though in my example the problem is minor and mostly random in nature
I would be more likely to agree with you if the problem was actually random in nature. But instead I feel that bad policing in the US is based on personal biases of the individuals involved (conscious or subconscious) and institutional issues that affects certain demographics more than others.
I assure you that in my example the problem is totally random - it is my example after all :). In the US it's probably less so. Institutional issues one can deal with, but what to do about "personal biases of the individuals involved (conscious or subconscious)"? We can try to minimize it, but one has to accept that it'll hit diminishing returns after some time.
But my point was about 'rrmm wrote - that "Getting everyone to admit a problem exists and getting our heads around how frequently it occurs is the first step towards resolving it.". It's true, but you have to be 100% totally damn sure that there is a problem in a first place and that you're not inventing it - because in both cases there will be a problem after media get involved.
>you have to be 100% totally damn sure that there is a problem in a first place and that you're not inventing it
Sounds a lot like a 'no true Scotsman' fallacy.
Everything from apartments to restaurants to taxi and semi drivers have ratings or a feedback system and it hasn't brought any of those systems to a grinding halt.
It's not about finding a true Scotsman - it's about allocating resources to fighting real problems instead of imaginary ones.
Ratings systems are not a silver bullet either - they're often easy to game (products) or measure wrong things (restaurants); users can be pressured into giving a good rating (employee interaction rating machines at border control, which you have to press while still in front of the officer) or bosses can use them to control employees (a known not-exactly-a-taxi, semi-illegal company I won't name). Particular failure modes depend on small details about the rating system - whether it's immediate or delayed, anonymous or not, relevant to the other side's career or not, etc. - but there are always some.
Ratings and feedback in general are a good concept, but you can't just take a "SELECT AVG(rate) FROM policeman WHERE rate < 3" an run to the nearest CNN office to talk about how things are very bad. You have to stop and consider all issues of a given implementation of a rating system, and there are quite many of those.
If you don't feel that the training and culture of LEO has some real problems then I'm not sure we have enough common ground to discuss a solution, to be honest.
I do agree that ratings can be gamed and are not a silver bullet though, that is true. It's difficult to get right.
Based on what I read, heard and saw I do totally feel that "the training and culture of LEO has some real problems". Especially in the US, but Europe also starts to go this way. I don't deny the need for addressing it. My original point was about something else - that we should be sure we don't overblow the problem.
The current situation is that citizens and police are stuck in a feedback loop of growing fear and resent towards each other. A key step to solving our problem is to contain this loop before it grows too strong. 'rrmm wrote about giving more visibility to the transgressions of policemen, but I argue that going for maximum publicity isn't always a best approach. Taking into the account how blindly people consume the media, I fear it may only exacerbate the vicious circle of fear and resent.
Of course. We most likely aren't. But it's important to notice when you pass it (and expect a good solution to pass it at some point in the first place) - something society as a whole generally hasn't internalized yet.
> that still gives a steady stream of police brutality cases to run on nation-wide news, day after day.
US police brutality is so routine that it mostly goes un-reported, or gets minor attention on very local news media. That's changing now. Part of the problem is that US police don't even count how many people they shoot and kill.
I'd argue that the myth of "Vaccines causing autism" was not just manufactured by media, it was manufactured by a crook doctor who i) had developed his own single dose measles vaccine and needed people to stop using MMR and ii) was paid by lawyers to find a link to autism.
> I'd argue that the myth of "Vaccines causing autism" was not just manufactured by media, it was manufactured by a crook doctor who i) had developed his own single dose measles vaccine and needed people to stop using MMR and ii) was paid by lawyers to find a link to autism.
Of course most of the time media sources don't invent stuff like this - but tell me, without the widespread publicity, would anyone even hear about this guy?
Now one can say that it's only fringe outlets that go anti-vaxx nowadays. But mainstream sources do exactly the same type of reporting - omitting or not doing the math, blowing things out of proportion by literal orders of magnitude, etc. - when it comes to GMOs, or e-cigs, or immigrants, or terrorists, etc. The feedback loop between readers and publishers can turn just about absolutely anything into a nation-wide scandal.
> Of course most of the time media sources don't invent stuff like this - but tell me, without the widespread publicity, would anyone even hear about this guy?
So that's a different claim.
When he first appeared he was credible - he got published in a peer reviewed respectable journal after all, and he was actively trying to con people.
Once his paper had been debunked, well, yes you're right there. There's no excuse to keep pushing his theory once we know he's falsified his data, taken samples illegally from people without their permission, etc.
> There's no excuse to keep pushing his theory once we know he's falsified his data, taken samples illegally from people without their permission, etc.
Those are pretty different objections. Only one of them detracts from the theory.
I've read that we have pretty good data on how long a human can float in water of various temperatures before tiring and drowning, because the Nazis systematically drowned Jews in water of various temperatures to get the data.
I also read that relevant bits of this data are posted near beaches with cold water as a public safety measure. So far so good.
...and then of course, that there was a movement to take those signs down because the source of the data is morally objectionable. Full credit for moral purity to the let's-take-down-the-drowning-warnings people. In their own small way, they are dedicated to making the world just that much slightly worse than it was.
> This all makes me believe that the biggest danger to our civilization are we ourselves - and our massive overreactions to media-manufactured non-problems.
Completely agree with this point, but it's irrelevant to the subject of unaccountable police (although it's quite relevant to the media's derailing the issue into racist tripe)
Any single case where police and prosecutors harm someone who is neither subsequently found guilty nor compensated for the harm suffered is an injustice. It doesn't matter if its 10% of cases, 0.01%, or a single innocent person who was detained for a mere 2 hours of their life. The relative frequency isn't important - these cases simply shouldn't exist, the same way a hypothetical mayor's brother not being investigated for murder shouldn't exist.
Better top-down policies and training won't fix the police or justice system - they need better incentives to change behavior at the lowest levels. The kind of incentives where they can no longer push the damage from their moral hazard onto unlucky victims, and are instead bound by the laws they purport to uphold.
Suppose a bank was robbed by one person described as 5'10", medium build, wearing a dark blue hoodie, running north on Main St. and two people were seen minutes later running north on Main from the bank matching that description.
It's perfectly reasonable and there's a societal interest for both to be stopped and contacted, even though it's CERTAIN that at least one of them is uninvolved.
Crime prevention at what cost? Keep the bank safe but imperil, maim, or jail the innocent medium build hoodie wearer of your argument? I think you're operating on an fundamental assumption rather than really thinking through the problem.
I'll leave it at imperil. You can argue skewed coverage, but from where I sit, being approached by police in the situation described seems extremely dangerous.
We're already into several iterations of the feedback loop. In a world where police works properly, you should not be afraid of being approached by them in the first place. An officer should ask you a few questions in a civilized manner, the whole encounter going like two adults talking about their common interest (catching the bad guy).
So coming and approaching is the right thing, but we need to work on reducing fear both sides have of each other first.
I agree that there's danger there, but what's the workable alternative? Never stop and contact anyone until their identity or involvement can be 100% verified prior to contact?
The scenarios will always exist, but the uncompensated damage to innocents does not need to. The "reasonableness" of the stop is effectively internal to the police, and is not a substitute for actually making the innocent person whole again.
Doing otherwise is making it so the true cost of policing is funded by a reverse lottery.
(You've constructed the scenario to be quite benign, but even so the victim has been assaulted and is likely pumped full of adrenaline with nerves shot for a few hours. And that's basically the simplest thing that can occur)
> Say 1 in 500 police interaction is bad (terrorizing innocents at gunpoint) and 1 in 10 000 is, well, criminal (police maiming or killing someone innocent).
I'm pretty sure that terrorizing innocents at gunpoint is, in fact, a crime in the US. It's not a thing you get for free with your carry license.
I think it's within the realm of possibility to tally or at least estimate the number of interactions (or perhaps just arrests) per jurisdiction. That gives you an easy way to see how widespread the problem is. It'll probably become clear that there are certain problem officers and patterns will emerge.
In the end it will be about trust. Previously the cops were given the benefit of the doubt; now that perception is changing. Police will have to do a better job of customer service to change that.
It is within realm of possibility, but my worry is that it simply won't happen. It doesn't happen with all the other widely discussed issues. People tend not to verify facts for themselves, and level-headed headlines generally don't sell.
> In the end it will be about trust. Previously the cops were given the benefit of the doubt; now that perception is changing. Police will have to do a better job of customer service to change that.
"It's crazy that once personal video recorders became ubiquitous UFOs stopped visiting Earth and cops started brutalizing people all the time"
-@stephenjudkins
The bias is justified. When you commit a crime, it is this single worst action that you are judged for, ignoring any positive contributions you have made. So judging cops based only on their worst behavior is quite valid, especially given the power they wield (which seems to include the power to be judge, jury, and executioner).
What's the root cause, and how do you get people thinking about it? What do people do in the meantime? We're talking about people with the authority and ability to ruin or end your life.. that they should face a little pressure and perhaps be enticed to find ways to fix their own system seems pretty reasonable to me.
Well, there's a simple remedy for that. The police can just not do bad things. They are, after all, employed by citizens and paid by citizens using their tax dollars. They are not independent contractors competing for business in a police free-market.
> I am right up there with thinking cops significantly (and often) overstep their bounds...
Really? Are you sure this isn't just because the bad ones are reported often and hardly any good ones? I mean, there are a LOT of officers in the U.S. Surely they aren't all overstepping.
One thing to remember about officers; they see the worst of US day in and day out, every single day. I'm sure it colors one's view of the world after a while. But even given this, I hardly believe that officers are "significantly (and often) overstepping their bounds".
I'm an American expat living in the UK, so I am interested in judging things on comparative rather than absolute terms.
In the UK, the police are on track to have killed 3 people in 2015[1]. In the US, the police are on track to have killed 1,200 people[2]. Adjusted for population, the US has a police homicide rate that is 79 times higher than in the UK. In some places, police violence is now the no. 1 form of homicide, ahead of gang violence, petty crime, domestic violence, child abuse, and any other category of violence.[3]
Actual homicide is just the tip of the iceberg, of course, but if this doesn't qualify as "significantly and often" then I'm not sure what does.
This is not just a civilian attitude. There are plenty of (ex-) police who feel this way too.[4]
>> Actual homicide is just the tip of the iceberg, of course, but if this doesn't qualify as "significantly and often" then I'm not sure what does.
Mainly because police departments do not keep these kinds of statistics, so the data is horribly incomplete. And as anybody knows, you can massage the data to show anything you want when you don't have the complete picture:
Officials with the Justice Department keep no comprehensive database or record of police shootings, instead allowing the nation’s more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies to self-report officer-involved shootings as part of the FBI’s annual data on “justifiable homicides” by law enforcement.
That number – which only includes self-reported information from about 750 law enforcement agencies – hovers around 400 “justifiable homicides” by police officers each year. The DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics also tracks “arrest-related deaths.” But the department stopped releasing those numbers after 2009, because, like the FBI data, they were widely regarded as unreliable.
The other problem with your data is that there is no firm evidence how each of these scenario's played out. Did the person being shot pull a firearm? What about brandishing a weapon or charging the officer, or attempting to assault the officer? We don't know because this kind of evidence is never taken into account. All people see is a cop who killed a citizen, nobody knows the exact circumstances around every single one of these instances - which makes ALL the data that much more suspect.
So yeah, when you look at the raw numbers, they look bad, but when you add in the circumstances by which these played out, you'd probably find out a lot of these were justified - which is why cops tend to get a lot of leeway in these kinds of scenarios, and are rarely charged.
> Mainly because police departments do not keep these kinds of statistics, so the data is horribly incomplete. And as anybody knows, you can massage the data to show anything you want when you don't have the complete picture:
That is true, but not to the US' credit. In the UK, the records are compiled nationally and are beyond question. There have been three fatal police shootings here in 2015; all of them were front-page national news.
The US keeps no such records, and until http://killedbypolice.net/ began compiling credible news reports, nobody was keeping national records. The numbers on killedbypolice.net are therefore an absolute minimum for how many people are killed by police in America. Killings which are not well-documented in the news aren't included. If the number is inaccurate, then the picture in America is even worse.
Undoubtedly many of them are justified. America is awash in guns, and if somebody is shooting at you, then undoubtedly you have the right to shoot back. However only 48% of those who were killed had a firearm on or near them (it doesn't necessarily mean they were using it).[1] Many of the remainder are classified as being "armed", but that includes cases like this mentally ill man who was killed for holding a screwdriver in an unthreatening manner[2], so those numbers should be considered suspect. Finally, there are hundreds of killings every year of people who cannot be considered "armed" by any definition. Many of these are well-documented on video; if you want to spend the next few hours watching snuff films, they're easy enough to find.
The punishment for the overwhelming majority of these killings is a paid vacation for the murderer.
I may be a bit pedantic here, but I think that's an unfortunate choice of words. If I understand the legal situation in the US correctly, Culling of individuals by power of government can only be justified through a judge, and executed with consent from a state governor.
Some of the cullings may be defensible, given the nature of the police's job. But in my view, none are justified.
police departments do not keep these kinds of statistics
That is a big part of the problem itself.
What about brandishing a weapon or charging the officer, or attempting to assault the officer? We don't know because this kind of evidence is never taken into account
.. and a number of recent high-profile cases involve the police claiming these things happened while the video footage showed they didn't.
The UK system is supposed to regard every death by police firearm as an incident that is fully investigated by the independent police complaints commission. (Does America even have one of those?) The system is not perfect (e.g. Mark Duggan, Jean Charles de Menezes) but it works reasonably well.
The Mark Duggan fiasco concerns me in that I think some of the bad relations between US police and the black public are "leaking" into UK culture.
As I understand it (I don't know much about guns) a weapon is a measure of last resort. The officer should only discharge the weapon if someone is about to die and all other efforts have failed. And when they discharge their weapon they must shot for "centre mass" - shoot to wound is a myth.
So if that's true why isn't information gathered about every single round of ammunition that's fired? Because every time that trigger is pulled is a time when someone (the officer, a member of the public) is at risk of death, and pulling the trigger carries a very real risk of killing the alleged perpetrator. (Or innocent bystanders).
It's baffling to me that statistics like these are not kept.
Maybe this would be too high a burden. But at least they should keep numbers on how many people they kill, and what the precise situation was around that death.
> And when they discharge their weapon they must shot for "centre mass" - shoot to wound is a myth.
This is true, for the US. It is also one of the symptoms of what is wrong with "enforcement" in that country.
Police officers in many other countries (such as Germany for instance) are explicitly instructed to shoot to wound if at all possible - and with good results both in terms of getting their suspects arrested but not killed, and in terms of not getting killed themselves. Indeed, this is not just the case for police worldwide, but even for the US armed forces when working under "nation building" rules of engagements rather than "total war" rules of engagements.
A shoot-to-kill doctrine is an obvious sign that rather than having an attitude of serving and protecting their community, the enforcers are serving/protecting themselves first.
As I understand it, police do have to report every round fired - to their immediate supervisor, who has no particular reason to compile statistics on such reports or to show them to anyone else.
So what, you're postulating that US citizens justly deserve to be killed by police 79 time more than their British counterparts? I mean the police is only supposed to kill to protect their, or a bystander's, life. We know from the few times that police-caused deaths have been caught on video in the US that this is often not at all the case. The guy shot down as he walks down the middle of the road. The guy who's neck gets broken in a police van, the young kid shot down in a park because he's playing with a toy gun. The guy that is choked to death because he's selling loose cigarettes in the street.
Those are all recent cases that I am personally aware of, as a non-US citizen, living in Europe. I'm sure there have been plenty of others.
So yes, not all police killings in the US are undeserved, but there sure are plenty that are, and that is what those statistics are showing.
If the US crime rate were 79 times higher than the British crime rate, then you'd be absolutely correct. However as far as homicides are concerned, it's only 3.8 times higher[1]. A 4-fold discrepancy would be completely understandable, and one could probably make a valid argument for a 10-fold discrepancy, based on a theory of necessary force multipliers or something like that, but a 79-fold discrepancy is utterly indefensible.
Let me repeat: criminals in the US are 3.8 times more prevalent and/or violent than their UK counterparts, but police in the US are are 79 times more violent than their UK counterparts.
(I'm using homicide as a proxy for overall crime, because the definition, record-keeping, and rate of reporting for other crimes varies wildly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, whereas homicide is defined relatively consistently from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and is almost universally reported.)
I think to get a complete picture we'd also need to consider the relative prevalence of firearms in the US versus the UK. There are fewer non-lethal options for dealing with someone armed with a guns as opposed to other weapons.
Don't you think you should also include crime rate in this analysis?
And split it by areas. I don't think anyone would find if suspicious that cops kill more people in crime-infested poor neighborhood with constant gang violence than in a high-middle class London suburb.
No. The prevalence of crime should not in itself be an excuse for the police to use lethal force.
Or maybe you meant to argue that crime rate is an indicator for general lawlessness of the population, in which case crime rate and police violence are two sides of the same coin?
ryana posted a link re crime rates not really making a difference.
"While some have blamed violent crime for being responsible for police violence in some communities, data shows that high levels of violent crime in cities did not appear to make it any more or less likely for police departments to kill people."
Your turn to back up your claim that "Crime rate is correlated with amount of situations where use of lethal force is necessary."
Yeah, I'm still waiting to get free 30 minutes to check the actual data and compare it to data outside of US.
My initial assumption was based on the soviet research from the late 80s on this subject, but I couldn't easily find a link right now. (Yes, I know what you think of soviet police system, and you're right in general, but I know the people who did this research and the political climate itself was pretty vegetarian too at the time).
Yes, What else could it possibly have been about? You don't seem to be a native English speaker, so I thought you didn't understand what "aren't means.
It's a bit curious that you haven't answered my original question, or come back with anything substantive apart from expressing surprise at someone not understanding what you meant by "Aren't?"
>Really? Are you sure this isn't just because the bad ones are reported often and hardly any good ones?
There shouldn't be that many "bad ones" to report, period. It's supposed to be a professional police force, not amateur hour of bigots, wannabe Rambos and trigger-happy Harry Callahans.
And since the casualty statistics across the board are awful, and a true shame compared to any other western country, it's not a matter of "reporting" bias either.
[added]
>One thing to remember about officers; they see the worst of US day in and day out, every single day.
They also represent some of what is worst about the US, day in and day out, every single day. Along with the prison system, the gun laws, and the often joke of a justice system, they help perpetuate and increase the criminals rather than reduce them (even if there are year over year decreases in crime rates, that are touted as big successes, the numbers are still ludicrous compared to any western european country).
I think it shows that the way police treats the population and what people have also accepted as acceptable coming from the police is seriously messed up.
Contrast with a place like the UK, where police are not even allowed to carry guns outside of special units.
> It's supposed to be a professional police force, not amateur hour of bigots, wannabe Rambos and trigger-happy Harry Callahans.
What interactions have you had with police officers in the last few years? Because it sounds like the majority of your "experience" is coming from Mother Jones and MSNBC.
I sit on the Civil Service Commission for my township, which exists only because we have a small local police force. I deal with both police officers (e.g. the folks patrolling the street or doing traffic enforcement), management (lieutenant/chief, elected township officials), and police applicants in a professional context on at least a monthly if not weekly basis throughout the year.
Your comment has not even a passing affiliation with reality.
Well, in a "township" police is there to mostly bring cats down from trees and help with the traffic.
Maybe study the numbers or talk to people from big cities, and especially large urban centers?
Besides the homicides by police in the streets statistics, which are indisputable, confirmed by the police, and the worse by over 70x any western country, here are some other factoids:
Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies, estimates that SWAT teams were deployed about 3,000 times in 1980 but are now used around 50,000 times a year. Some cities use them for routine patrols in high-crime areas. Baltimore and Dallas have used them to break up poker games. In 2010 New Haven, Connecticut sent a SWAT team to a bar suspected of serving under-age drinkers. That same year heavily-armed police raided barber shops around Orlando, Florida; they said they were hunting for guns and drugs but ended up arresting 34 people for “barbering without a licence”. Maricopa County, Arizona sent a SWAT team into the living room of Jesus Llovera, who was suspected of organising cockfights. Police rolled a tank into Mr Llovera’s yard and killed more than 100 of his birds, as well as his dog. According to Mr Kraska, most SWAT deployments are not in response to violent, life-threatening crimes, but to serve drug-related warrants in private homes.
He estimates that 89% of police departments serving American cities with more than 50,000 people had SWAT teams in the late 1990s—almost double the level in the mid-1980s. By 2007 more than 80% of police departments in cities with between 25,000 and 50,000 people had them, up from 20% in the mid-1980s (there are around 18,000 state and local police agencies in America, compared with fewer than 100 in Britain).
We are adjacent to a major city most Americans would have heard of. Calls in the last week or so have included homicides, drug busts, etc. So no, not just getting cats out of a tree, which would actually be the fire department anyway.
Your comment has not even a passing affiliation with reality.
Amusing. It's your job as part of the commission to evaluate the performance of your township's civil servants, a circumstance in which those you interact with are highly motivated to act professionally around you.
And yet you claim it's the ordinary citizen who is out of touch with reality.
Here is my own anecdote: Out of four lifetime interactions with functionaries of the law, four have ranged from negative to very negative.
> One thing to remember about officers; they see the worst of US day in and day out, every single day.
US police kill very many more people than other first world police forces. It's not surprising that gets a lot of press coverage.
The US police forces seem to do a poor job of getting rid of the bad officers. Someone who is sacked from one force for being emotionally unstable should not be able to get a job with a gun on another force without jumping through considerable hoops. There are very many examples of this - officers with more than normal numbers of complaints for aggressive behaviour, with disciplinary action for aggressive behaviour, who then go on to murder the public.
Significant and often are clearly a matter of perspective: what's significant and how often is too often?
Realistically, there will always be some incidents. Ideally, they should be as few as possible such that law enforcement is still effective (for whatever value of effective that society chooses). The severity also factors in: No one will probably care all that much if a cop screws up the exact wording of a miranda warning, but when the consequences are someone dead and police perjuring themselves, it takes a lot fewer of those incidents.
Changing the mission back to peace keeping instead of law enforcement would go a long way to fixing the issue. Enforcing the law causes more problems than it solves. See : drug war
As the poster I was replying to didn't set any constraints, its clear they meant generally. I disagree that generally officers significantly overstep their bounds.
Even if most officers don't overstep their bounds themselves, they cover for and protect their buddies who do. This makes the majority of cops bad cops.
They are made-up example numbers to show that even if something is not the "general case" (e.g. majority), it can still be a huge problem if it's big enough, especially if it's bigger than the norm in other "civilized" countries. Note that you didn't provide any numbers for "most cops don't overstep their bounds" either.
If we consider "killing citizens" as "overstepping their bounds" (and I'd say is the most overstepping a policeman can do), then US police does it by about 1-2 orders of magnitude (70 - 100 times) more than other western countries...
Here are some actual hard numbers:
For instance, an April 2007 study of the Chicago Police Department found that out of more than 10,000 police abuse complaints filed between 2002 and 2003, only 19 (0.19%) resulted in meaningful disciplinary action. The study charges that the police department's oversight body allows officers with "criminal tendencies to operate with impunity," and argues that the Chicago Police Department should not be allowed to police itself.[29] Only 19% of large municipal police forces have a civilian complaint review board (CCRB). Law enforcement jurisdictions that have a CCRB have an excessive force complaint rate against their officers of 11.9% verses 6.6% complaint rate for those without a CCRB. Of those forces without a CCRB only 8% of the complaints were sustained.[30] Thus, for the year 2002, the rate at which police brutality complaints were sustained was 0.53% for the larger police municipalities nationwide.
Here are some more:
According to the 2014 Legatum Prosperity Index released in November, in the measure of personal freedom, the United States has fallen from 9th place in 2010 to 21st worldwide—behind such countries as Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Uruguay and Costa Rica. Other such rankings systems show the US as low as 46.
Let’s look at our immediate neighbors to the north, Canada. The total number of citizens killed by law enforcement officers in the year 2014, was 14; that is 78 times less people than the US. If we look at the United Kingdom, 1 person was killed by police in 2014 and 0 in 2013. English police reportedly fired guns a total of three times in all of 2013, with zero reported fatalities. From 2010 through 2014, there were four fatal police shootings in England, which has a population of about 52 million. By contrast, Albuquerque, N.M., with a population 1 percent the size of England’s, had 26 fatal police shootings in that same time period.
China, whose population is 4 and 1/2 times the size of the United States, recorded 12 killings by law enforcement officers in 2014. Let that sink in. Law enforcement in the US killed 92 times more people than a country with nearly 1.4 billion people. It doesn’t stop there. From 2013-2014, German police killed absolutely no one.
As with many other government enterprises, policing has become an elaborate ritual, intended to bless the participants with rewards of tax dollars.
If it were an ordinary business, policing would be in a deep contraction, due to the steady drop in violent crime rates in the last two decades. Fewer people would have jobs as cops, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, bailiffs, and prison guards.
Instead of either laying off unneeded personnel, stopping new hires to let the numbers drop by attrition, merging municipal police departments or turning them into sheriff subsidiaries, or giving police employees the same benefits and pension plan cuts as all other municipal workers, municipalities just send their superfluous officers out to drum up more revenue.
That started out as selective enforcement. Certain crimes, if prosecuted vigorously, have enough statutory fines attached to make them actually profitable. Say hello to speeding and parking tickets. Certain towns turned themselves into speed traps to tax those passing through too quickly. More.
Then governments started expanding their malum prohibitum crimes. Crimes that didn't have fines attached got minimum sentences, and the courts and prisons became machines to turn tax money into guaranteed jobs in criminal justice. After all, you can't just let those violent criminals go. You would never get reelected if you did that. More!
Now, the cops just take your stuff on a civil forfeiture claim or as "evidence", and never return it (cash, vehicles), or they throw it to the ground and/or stomp on it (recording devices). Now, the courts tack on a bunch of extra fees for anyone issued a civil citation. Now, the prisons are run by for-profit corporations, with minimum occupancy agreements with the government authorities. If they want more, what could happen next?
I would think that cities like Chicago would be itching to reduce their future unsustainable pension obligations by investigating every complaint vigorously, and firing the highest-paid police officers for cause if there is even a whiff of official misconduct. Wouldn't that be better than going bankrupt?
It might, if there were even one uncorrupted public official left in that town able to do the job.
It's long past time for the law-and-order budgets to be brought back under control. The only places in the U.S. that should be hiring more cops are the oil and gas boom towns.
But it isn't about the rational course of action. It's all about the money that can't stop flowing through the system that is now too big to fail.
Think about how this reflects on society when this becomes therapy for teenagers at the formative years in their life to deal with something very bad that happened to them by people who were supposed to protect them.
Teenagers and young adults are ripe for causes. It's part of their psychological makeup; find a cause and be passionate about it. It's why protest groups are mostly young adults, and why armies are full of teenage signups.
I was set-up and arrested in 2008 for simply being in a suspicious part of town where I knew an old family friend who fixed my car on occasion.
I was charged with a felony "destruction of evidence" because a totally crooked cop, whom was eventually kicked off the force for messing with hookers, claimed I ate the non-existent drugs, and actually tampered with the swab he used to wipe my mouth.
I was arrested and fired from my job the next week. Eventually, the case was "null-processed" as the cop had been fired for misconduct and the State had no case.
In a life of bizarre legal experiences, it was perhaps the most bizarre of them all, and since then I put absolutely nothing past police, although I do recognize they do a dangerous job of which I would want no part of.
I got messed with by the cops just for being out after dark as a kid. A cop once made my whole family his personal mission just because he caught one of my brothers biking without a helmet.
Well, people who speak up against cop brutality, corruption, etc have a big possibility of being targeted for harassment and intimidation, especially in they live in a small town, or they know who they are in their neighborhood etc.
Of course people without experience with the police force, and without historical knowledge of other incidents and their frequency, often have no idea that this things even happen.
No, he won't recognize them. As he is running the plates and driver's license through the official public computer system, he will also be whipping out his personal phone to run that name through a few private databases, run by ex-cops, with subscription access granted only to cops and ex-cops.
Those databases will tell him, essentially, "This guy created a popular app that puts your job under a microscope. Also, he probably got a bunch of money for it, and may be carrying a lot of cash."
It won't actually say anything about harassing him. That will be entirely up to the investigating officer, and all the other investigating officers that he may have alerted via the aforementioned databases to watch out for cars with the same model and color.
It must be very cool to be able to create any kind of app with your brothers/sisters, especially if you then get some success together. How else would you get a chance at starting a company at 15, 16 and 18.
The article discusses "why" they created the app, but other than the fact that they're mostly self-taught, there's nothing on the "how". Information on their tech stack or how they're aggregating information would have been interesting to read about.
This is my thought, too. Video, unless thoroughly chopped up (which tends to be obvious), doesn't lie. I've had an idea for a "RateMyCop" app for a bit, but it looks like these kids have basically created it already. The only problem with such an app is the natural human bias to be motivated to report negative interactions over positive, as someone else mentioned in these comments. Straight-up video recordings don't have this issue.
I'm with Temporal that this will be negatively biased against the police. There will be some good ratings of good cops at least while this is a fad. There might be a percentage that do it consistently. Yet, most people are going to make this the goto app for ranting against the police. These rants will vary in accuracy.
Overall, I mainly see it being an app for collecting negative claims about police rather than truly holding them accountable. Body cams and attorney's present are accountability. This isn't.
Bias is easily removed, just select your zero and scale.
Human reaction to police actions is a precious feedback that can make them better, not throw them all to jails. What's good in police that is officially correct, but unaccepted by the entire society?
You make something sound easy that I rarely see done well. The real problem is willingness to convict cops. Not enough exists. Once that exists, clear guidelines are necessary so cops can get stuff done while knowing when they'd be crossing the line.
Your argument would still apply if it was an app for citizens to tell the police who to investigate. "Forget the abuse potential: if they don't like a bad solution, they shouldn't have allowed criminals to exist in the first place."
Oh, gee, the cops will surely avoid shooting you if it ~damages their rating~. Why has nobody thought of that before?
The implication here is that cops would care what you think of them. They don't now, and they won't in the future either. The Chicago PD don't run that torture warehouse for the Yelp ratings, yo.
This will be further enhanced by the fact that nobody likes being arrested/jailed and thus the ratings will be pretty much 100% negative. Why would a cop care about how much the perp is complaining, or a meaningless aggregation thereof? On an individual basis (and ignoring the systemic problems), being tough-skinned is basically a requirement for everyone in the justice system.
Periscope is a good app that will help. This is dumb cargo-cult behavior that does nothing. This app doesn't address the problem seriously and will be forgotten in two weeks' time. Yes, they're kids and it's nice that they're coding, but don't give a bad idea a handie just for the heck of it.
Tying recordings to specific officers to compile a history of bad behavior would actually be fantastic. But the Yelp aspect of it doesn't accomplish anything.
- The Five-O app on Pinetart Inc. (the teenagers' company) website: http://pinetartinc.com/?p=44
- The Five-O app on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.five_o
- The "international contest for justice-related initiatives" mentioned in the article: https://innovatingjustice.com/en/pages/innovating-justice-fo...