Purgatory : Policing the Police
We have discussed this some on the Minneapolis thread, but I am thinking it might be worth discussing on a separate thread.
Ever since 9/11 American police forces have been gradually militarized. At first it was in response to the fears of terrorist attacks which really have not happened. Instead, that military equipment has been turned against civilians. We have certainly seen it this week throughout the United States.
But it seems some mayors have gotten to the point of saying enough is enough. Experts have said it is time to reduce bloated police budgets and spend the savings on community programs. Sounds like the mayor of San Francisco is wanting to reduce the SFPD budget by 1/3 and use the money on neighborhood services. New York is considering reducing the police budget as is the LA City Council. The Minneapolis City Council was considering defunding the police altogether (declined).
Many police departments are now banning chokeholds. Other cities are reviewing past incidents were chokeholds caused the death of an individual. There was a similar incident in March in Tacoma. The Tacoma mayor is now calling for the prosecution of the police officers involved.
Then there is the incident where a 75-year-old man was shoved to the ground in Boston. After two of the officers were suspended the entire Emergency Response Team resigned from the team (but not from the force).
This will be the 11th night of protests. Let's hope the police can show more restraint tonight.
Ever since 9/11 American police forces have been gradually militarized. At first it was in response to the fears of terrorist attacks which really have not happened. Instead, that military equipment has been turned against civilians. We have certainly seen it this week throughout the United States.
But it seems some mayors have gotten to the point of saying enough is enough. Experts have said it is time to reduce bloated police budgets and spend the savings on community programs. Sounds like the mayor of San Francisco is wanting to reduce the SFPD budget by 1/3 and use the money on neighborhood services. New York is considering reducing the police budget as is the LA City Council. The Minneapolis City Council was considering defunding the police altogether (declined).
Many police departments are now banning chokeholds. Other cities are reviewing past incidents were chokeholds caused the death of an individual. There was a similar incident in March in Tacoma. The Tacoma mayor is now calling for the prosecution of the police officers involved.
Then there is the incident where a 75-year-old man was shoved to the ground in Boston. After two of the officers were suspended the entire Emergency Response Team resigned from the team (but not from the force).
This will be the 11th night of protests. Let's hope the police can show more restraint tonight.
Comments
- Ban chokeholds and strangleholds
- Require de-escalation
- Require warning before shooting
- Exhaust all other means before shooting
- Duty to intervene (bystander officers must intervene and report use of excessive force)
- Ban shooting at moving vehicles
- Require use of force continuum (rules specifying allowable force vs. level of resistance)
- Require comprehensive reporting (of every use of force or threat of use of force)
I think the "duty to intervene" is particularly interesting; police culture might be significantly improved if it was generally accepted that part of being a good cop is not tolerating bad cops.I am surrounded by a lefty bubble, from flat-out anarchists, through anarcho-syndicalists and communists and Marxists, over to people who actually thought Biden was the best candidate before any of the others had dropped out.
Most are calling for disbanding police unions.
(Re police unions, in the U.K. I think they have resisted initiatives to rearm the police - which, whatever else they may have done, I consider a good thing.)
There are no police unions in the UK, which has both positive and negative effects. It seems to me that, at least, the activities of police unions should be restricted, but I think the culture problems in some US police departments go way beyond the union.
When I contemplate this situation, I realise, perhaps for the first time in my life, that I am utterly unable to comment on something, in this case the process of reforming the police in America. It requires detailed knowledge of the no doubt varied ways in which forces are structured. I'm not sure you can even make any but the most generalised statements. It seems like an organisational nightmare.
Dave's eight reforms sound good. A facebook friend posted something similar.
[Tangent]
That was in Buffalo, NY, not Boston, MA. You from fly-over country, Gramps?
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Well, that just shows that the police are doubling down and have absolutely no clue about proportional response. In what world was pushing an old man unprovoked over at all necessary or proportionate? The whole thing is rotten.
OTOH, the problem may be self-correcting if these guys continue to resign.
One of the first issues that concerns many of us is the absence of visual footage. Police go to extreme lengths to ensure they are not videoed or recorded and that means civilian/bystander witness is often lacking.
Police in South Africa are mostly poor, working-class and black. They are badly trained to see those they police as criminal and lawless. Much of their policing in townships or informal settlements has to do with suppressing unrest and gang activities. Techniques of crowd control are brutal: teargas, pepper spray, rubber bullets and live ammunition. This results in head injuries, loss of eyesight and facial injury, the aftereffects of irritant gas on asthmatic protesters. Civilians here, as in Hong Kong, are highly skilled at handling and countering police actions, but they have few weapons or technological resources.
What we need is better education in policing -- a good article here from Africa is a Country on the class nature of South African police violence.
It is never permissible to follow an illegal order.
To the 75 "officers" who resigned from their squad but not from the force: You should be fired. And good riddance. Despicable excuses for human beings.
White Americans* mythologise law enforcement and demonise the poor and the brown. Protest and riot are a rarer thing in the US, comfort brings compliance. I do wonder if the reaction to the George Floyd killing would have been the same if tensions hadn't been high because of the coronavirus.
To begin to bring about reform, there needs to be witness and will. The cameras bring the witness, do the people have the will? In America, they seem to right now, but it is a long road to reform. I wonder of the stamina is there.
My hopes for the UK are mixed. The path to reform is potentially easier, but the general awareness of the population for the need is less.
*In the mainstream
The Nuremberg Defence? FFS. Okay then: if they're going to argue that in a court of law, whose orders were they following?
@Simon Toad, as with so many things in the US, the situation can vary from state to state. Where I live, county sheriffs, who have responsibilities in addition to policing, are elected every four years, while police chiefs are hired by the elected city/town council or other appropriate governing body.
1) It was Buffalo, not Boston.
2) The Emergency Response Force had 57 other officers on the team, and they all resigned from it. Still, they remain in the Buffalo PD. I am not sure if they all need to be fired, but I would agree the officers directly involved should be criminally prosecuted.
3) Checking what I said in the OP, I said nothing about an officer stopping to check on the man. Someone was putting words in my mouth.
Dave's eight points miss a key issue, reallocating bloated police budgets to more community-oriented programs.
The spokesman for the mayor of Buffalo made the initial statement that the elderly man "tripped and fell."
He is also the spokesman for the police. No potential conflict there.
He now apologises and says his initial statement was based on incomplete information. Calls into question his motive for saying it.
Make this statement about pipefitters, electricians, or train drivers, and it gets applauded.
I agree with you that the police unions are a large part of the problem. They are reactionary and stuck in the past, and for the police, that past (and the present) is racist and aggressive. I don't see a realistic way of reforming the police without firing the worst of the uniformed thugs, and you probably have to break the power of the union to be able to do that. The police unions have demonstrated that they have no willingness to be part of the solution.
Yeah, right - police are exactly like CEOs. There's no reason at all why Joe Copper would want to bargain collectively for his terms and conditions. Your statement is such obvious bollocks I'm surprised you managed to keep typing it.
You have generally been a supporter of unionization, and of union power being brought to bear to support the workers. Police officers are workers. So are prison guards. (I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you don't like their union much either.)
I see no fundamental difference between the relationship between the police and their union, and any other group of public sector workers and their unions. Some will support the union leadership, and some won't. Most people who don't agree with what the union is doing just keep their head down and get on with their jobs, rather than causing a dispute. The same collective power that enables unions to bargain with large employers also makes it hard for individual workers to argue with the union.
I think there is a substantial difference in that the police have powers that, even used properly, can lead to people being dead or injured. If a union is able to literally let its members get away with murder then that is a situation beyond anything seen in any other sector. The police also have a unique role in protecting the state so the power they can exercise by the withdrawal of their labour is significantly greater.
In every other sector, management by in large, insists it should be deferred in matters of discipline. Unions at best, to my knowledge, have power only in that they insist on a fair adjudication process. People sometimes complain that unions prevent employers from firing employees, but that isn't really true in clear and obvious cases of incompetence and abuse. No teacher's union I know of, prevents school employers from immediately firing teachers upon evidence of abusing children.
With police unions in the US, they have notable power to protect their own against charges of abuse, and that is a problem.
Firing them is a good start. I'd welcome the dismissal of any thugs and other criminal elements from the police.
Unions are necessary when there are a large number of workers in the same field of work, to facilitate collective bargaining over pay and conditions, and to defend individual members against unjustly being picked upon. When their members have caused the deaths through thuggish behaviour with overwhelming evidence, they should stay the hell out of it and let the law take its course.
That sort of defeats the whole concept behind policing.
Maybe telling police that they're "soldiers" against crime and then outfitting them like they were storming Fallujah was a bad idea?
It should be noted that Minneapolis officially has seven of those eight "reforms" already in place and it doesn't seem to have done any good.
As an example of ineffective oversight, I offer this:
So the Chicago Police Board President (a.k.a. the person tasked with exerting some oversight over the Chicago Police) gets beaten by the officers he's supposed to be watching and his response is somewhere between "thank you sir, may I have another" and "harder again, daddy".
"So my attitude was get it done, but I didn’t say, ‘Go do it.’ ”
What a classic line.
Unions are a general good, not a perfect good and not a universal good.
I'd really like to see some reliable reference for that. It is true that one or two police in a given jurisdiction may haul in a bit above $100,000 in a year (a lot less than many CEOs, you'll notice) -- but that is not salary, it is salary plus a lot of hours on "detail" work (sitting around while telephone workers repair lines, standing in front of a convenience store after work, etc. -- a racket in its own right, but not part of their salary or paid for by the government.) And the vast majority of police make about the same as teachers in any public records I have seen for my area. Police reform is long overdue in many ways, but there is an unfortunate tendency for people to inflate other working people's salaries in a way that puts a wedge between workers. My wife was shocked when she heard a friend say as a matter of fact that the local librarian made a six-figure salary -- she was on the library board and knew what the librarian actually made, which was less than half that. Don't let manufactured envy divide us -- we have enough problems with real issues that set us at odds.
Them and the prison guard unions. Which, okay, not unrelated!
I have long thought that we use police for way too many things in the US that would be better addressed by social workers.
Yes, heaven forfend that people might want to exercise their first amendment rights, or that the press might want to cover them.
I'm also shocked - shocked, I tell you - that the NRA hasn't swarmed on to the streets to prevent an overbearing government from instituting an armed suppression of the constitution.
UK police salary for a PC is £22-£45. An officer making £30K at 30 years old, can expect a £28K pension.
The average salary in the UK is £30K
And whilst it is true that not all police officers reach the heights of the large city salaries, almost all enjoy a level of protection from consequence that is obscene. Again, mostly a union problem.
I see nothing in the first amendment about the right to riot and loot. If a protest is peaceful, the Police have nothing to respond to.
Well the first lot generally look like them, but the second lot are complaining about them, and that's an insult to their egos.
According to your own data, the average salary for a police officer is $67,000. Is that CEO territory in the UK, because it's nowhere near it over here. Police. make roughly the same thing that teachers do over here. Both professions get good pensions for a very long time, which is typically not properly budgeted for by the local government that incurs the liability. It may well be that police departments have been tasked with social service duties for which they are ill-prepared. It would certainly make sense to look at reapportioning both finances and responsibilities to better serve the public. But none of that supports the ludicrous claims you originally made and that I took issue with.
Police salaries in the US found here range from $35k - $90k, average $52k
According to the Police Oracle (link), for UK Police: and those are low ranks for the police, Inspectors earn over £50k and higher ranks more.
I'm really not sure where the first lot of figures came from. Police officers are better paid than teachers here, where the upper pay scale for most teachers is £40k, without additional training or becoming headteachers, (link to Gov.UK site)
But they do. They fire rubber bullets and tear gas at the faces of peaceful protesters. Which is a violation of their first-amendment rights (and many others). You might want to become informed.