I believe we have ample evidence that the systemic answer is “as little as possible”?
(Edit to clarify: in the greatest country in the history of the planet Earth, 'Murica.)
We actually did quite a bit post-Breonna here. For details read this: Kentucky Senate passes bill to restrict no-knock warrants | PBS NewsHour
It addressed a lot of the previous oversight that led to the shooting. Still a bunch more to do, don’t get me wrong, Qualified Immunity should be on the chopping block first or second and quickly. That law got passed IIRC, and also civilian review boards, which is a start. Plus we indicted the shitty work that led up to the shitty warrant.
If only that were so! I’ve experienced indifferent policing, neglectful policing, policing that basically doesn’t do anything at all, and it is so far preferable to the American variety that there is no contest.
This seems to me like a game of whack-a-mole, which of course you eventually lose. There was no no-knock warrant involved here at all — just a culture which says you obey the cops or they rightly kill you. It’s the culture that is the problem, and this sort of oversight applied to the same actors in the same culture can’t possibly solve the problem. Culture eats process for lunch.
Can’t argue, other than to say cultural pressures in one area will bleed into others, hopefully.
The fact that “every day you hear a story like this” doesn’t really mean much though, in our current media environment.
These stories draw huge amounts of attention. They get clicks. But in a country of 350 million people, how prevalent are they really?
Certainly much more than they should be, but do you think that all cops are like this? I feel like they aren’t. I honestly don’t know what percentage of police interactions involve some kind of misbehavior by police, but I think that even with minority groups, most cop interactions don’t end with the police murdering people.
I guess I’m seeing your attitude here that all cops are a cancer, because there are tons of stories of this kind of thing, similar to the people who say that all immigrants are a cancer because right wing outlets are easily able to find constant stories of illegal immigrants committing horrific crimes.
In reality, the statistics show that immigrants are less violent and crime prone than native born Americans, but when you are talking about millions and millions of people, it’s not hard to find bad examples.
How many cops are there in the US? I dunno, a few hundred thousand at least? How many interactions do they have with people every year?
There definitely seen to be some departments which are institutionally corrupt or racist, but the line of thinking that goes from “I see lots of bad examples in a very large population, so that population must be bad” is a line of thinking that leads to some bad things that I know you don’t agree with, if applied to other populations.
LA implemented a civilian oversight board, and the police just used their power against them – raiding their homes and banning them from police facilities. Oversight doesn’t work if the police still have this much power, we have to take it away from them.
Then Do More. I’m not saying oversight boards are the panacea, they’re a start. Saying that they didn’t work somewhere isn’t a reason to throw them out with the bathwater. Incremental change works, sudden shocks create blowback. And obviously, it comes down to voting and having a strong enough bloc to be able to resist the initial thrashes of a dying but dangerous animal.
I think this message would resonate more if you could point to the community where incrementalism made the police a force for substantially more good. I don’t think there really is such a place — a place with awful American policing that was made meaningfully better by reform — but I’m willing to look at the example if you have one.
Would love to see the “good cops” actively reigning in the bad cops in their midst - advocating for them to get fired, advancing the cause to get rid of qualified immunity, more whistleblowers to expose other bad shit, publicly committing to de-escalation, not allowing disgraced cops to get rehired elsewhere, etc.
But, they’re not.
So fuck them.
Which is the police force in America that teaches that it is better that a cop die than that a citizen die? That truly believes and teaches that policing is sacrifice and service, not exercise of authority? Is there one?
Indeed, there are no good cops. There are bad cops, and there are more bad cops.
This.
Good cops are ex-cops because they get run out of the profession by other cops.
Or killed by them.
This is a legitimate point. Reform efforts have failed. However, the problem is, what’s the alternative? Are there any examples of communities that disbanded their police and maintained peace and order with some kind of alternative department? B/C to my knowledge there are no examples of that either.
The problem for my position is that although I do think there is a roadmap to serious reform, nobody appears willing to take on the massive political challenge of actually implementing it in a serious. My version of reform is MUCH more impactful than the kind of incremental reform that is being attempted and nobody is willing to do that.
So my ideas are unfortunately a pipe dream at this time. Sadly, so are the alternative “defund and replace” type ideas.
In the big picture, the reality may simply be that we have to live with seriously problematic police practices until much more fundamental political and cultural change comes to our country, or, sadly, maybe never.
It’s pretty F’ed up.
Additionally, the existence of bad cops - and the inaction of “good cops” - means that the average citizen has no way to know which they’re about to encounter.
So when you see a cop suddenly approach your car unannounced, force open your door, you think you’re getting carjacked or something, what the fuck else should you do other than defend yourself and try to escape?
Cops don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. They need to earn it.
How many cops publicly defended Darren Wilson?
There are examples where reform efforts have been tried but failed, but there are no examples where defund and disband and replace have been tried but failed. So ‘more reform’ isn’t really in the solution set, as it has been tried but failed, while ‘start over’ is still an option that has not yet been tried, so is not known to be a failed approach.
This is a great road map. I apologize for my intemperance in earlier posts. There is no issue that fills me with more despair than this one. When I say police are a cancer I mean literally that police authoritarianism and immunity from consequences are rotting our society. We have to be able to trust our security forces. It’s the foundation of any civil culture.
One could argue basically all of history prior to police departments.
Lots of non-big cities don’t have police departments. They have a sheriff and a couple deputies that serve the area. Said sheriff and deputies don’t pull this sort of shit because they’d probably be dead if they tried.
This might be true, I don’t really know, but some of the larger and more famous sheriff’s departments are spectacularly abusive.
But people literally say the same thing about Muslims. *Why aren’t the good Muslims doing anything to condemn those terrorists?"
I think maybe the case is that there are in fact cops that do those things? Or departments that actually serve their communities without problems? But “cop does job and doesn’t commit crimes” isn’t really a news story.