[unpolloloco]

If police unions defend officers from all accountability...surprise! They're not accountable to anyone. This means they don't engage when they don't want to and engage with unreasonable force whenever they feel like. We've got the worst of both worlds: cops who both shoot civilians with impunity and don't engage with criminals

[Nicksil]

>If police unions defend officers from all accountability...surprise! They're not accountable to anyone. This means they don't engage when they don't want to and engage with unreasonable force whenever they feel like. We've got the worst of both worlds: cops who both shoot civilians with impunity and don't engage with criminals

This is hyperbole.

[sudosysgen]

It's really not. Sure it doesn't happen every single time but cops very often turn a blind eye to crime, even violent crime, and they often shoot innocents or worse and get away with it.

[koheripbal]

Defending employees, even when they do shitty things, is literally the entire point of unions.

[sudosysgen]

What other union defends the right of their employees to commit crimes?

You know what happened to the longshoremen unions that organized to facilitate crimes by their members? That's right, they were declared as a criminal enterprise under RICO and every single member of the union was guilty of a crime.

[akomtu]

The situation in question doesn't involve violence: three dudes grabbed some merchendise from a cannabis shop. From the cop's perspective it's a lose-lose situation: some of the burglars may turn out career criminals and attempt to avoid arrest by any means possible, because getting arrested would reveal some other crimes, and the cop would have to use force or a gun, possibly killing a burglar. The media would predictably paint the cop as a merciless thug and the actual thug as a saint, riots would follow, legislators would further handicap police. The cop wisely decided that it's better to stay aside and engage only if things turn really violent.

SF has a cognitive dissonance right now: it doesn't want crime, but it doesn't want to punish criminals, so when criminals come uninvited, SF can't decide what to do.

[sudosysgen]

Alright. So for this to be dangerous to the cop, the criminal has to react violently to any risk of arrest. In that case, how would the criminal react to the inhabitants coming out? In any case, it seems reckless not to arrest them as it would risk someone's life.

Also, career criminals very rarely use violence to resist arrest. That is something that inexperienced or impulse criminals do. Any career criminal knows that using violence against the police will end up in a worse outcome than getting caught.

I would be interested to see a story where a criminal, in the comission of a crime, initiated deadly force against a policeman and was painted as a saint after their death or injury, leading to riots. This happens almost every day and no one cares about it.

[HWR_14]

The point of unions is to ensure that the workers, as a whole, are treated fairly. You know, wages, benefits, working conditions, etc. Many unions have negotiated consequences with employers for shitty things. Now, it's true unions usually enforce some rules and procedures to prove the employee did the shitty thing, but that just seems good in general.

[LocalH]

Courts have consistently found that police do not have an obligation to prevent crime. It's not hyperbole, it's standard operating procedure

[dTal]

What do they have an obligation to do? Paychecks generally come with some sort of hard requirement.

[LocalH]

Certainly they should have an obligation to not let a crime happen in front of them, yet do nothing about it.

[dragonwriter]

> If police unions defend officers from all accountability...surprise!

Lots of unions try the same and are far less effective; police unions are not inherently powerful, they are granted power by the fact that the citizenry in the US worships military and paramilitary forces and grants undue deference to them, particularly, in regard to this issue, in selecting the civilian political leaders to whom police are nominally accountable.

[akomtu]

In other words: "damned if you do, damned in you don't".