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by atoav 1180 days ago
Why the sarcasm? Someone does a bad job, get rid of them. How do you imagine cop culture will change? By letting them get away with everything and sticking your head into the sand?

Ah and before you answer: most of use who are not in the US live in places where police misconduct is much less of an problem, so obviously it can work better. The entire German police force fires less bullets during their patrols and missions in a year than e.g. the NYC police force alone. Sometimes single cops in the US fire more bullets alone than the entire German police force. This is even hard to compare, because the Germans have numbers for every bullet fired at a person during service, bullets fired for warning shots, bullets that hit, bullets that did not etc. That data is wildly mixed and unreliable in the US depending on the state.

If you want to have a police force you can trust they must not be above the law and the law must be even stricter, the standards even higher for them than for the rest of the population. That means longer and better education and training, knowing the law, but also strict measures when police officers break the rules or there is even just the slightest doubt about their version of events.

In many police departments in the US the problem is essentially that there are so many bad apples that every good apple that comes is spoiled or cannot do good. This can only be changed be decisive action from the top.

5 comments

In many police departments in the US the problem is essentially that there are so many bad apples that every good apple that comes is spoiled or cannot do good. This can only be changed be decisive action from the top.

How many bad apples does it take, to spoil the whole barrel?

I'm not disagreeing with the comment I'm replying to, just trying to challenge the perception that there's anything ok with "just" a few bad apples. The acceptable number of bad apples is zero.

> The acceptable number of bad apples is zero.

This is obviously idealistic and impossible in the real world (given the size of a police force). What is needed is a system that gets rid of bad apples with time, instead of letting them thrive and corrupting other apples.

The problem with getting rid of bad apples with time is the amount of damage even one bad police officer can do given half a chance, and even if they are punished for what they did it would not erase the bad things they have done. Policing violations are often violent and the effects long lasting.
Yes, but punishment sets the tone and people do not like being punished; especially if it goes on a record that follows them throughout their career.
This is an industry where you can murder someone, get paid leave for it, eventually let go without losing retirement benefits, and then get hired the next county over.

WHAT PUNISHMENT?

<< and then get hired the next county over.

And that.. can probably be changed. Qualified immunity would be much harder.

Does a negative record have the same impact as other jobs?
How many bad apples does it take, to spoil the whole barrel?

It doesn't just take apples, it takes time. If you remove the bad apple as soon as possible, the rest of the barrel can still be fresh and healthy. If you leave it to rot, you spoil the entire batch.

Yep - they always say it's a "few bad apples" but the original saying is "one bad apple can spoil the barrel".
What I meant by that is that any police department should be able to handle one officer that falls out of line. One person that has an impedance mismatch with the general culture of an organization should never be an issue. We all know that from our work places: one highly motivated guy won't change the lazy majority, one lazy guy won't change the highly motivated majority etc. If you have one such person in your organisation the rest of the organsation will either work around it, or try to contain/get rid of that person. This self-correction works only up to a certain fraction however.

Where that cutoff percentage is, depends on the single organisation and the individuals within it. But I believe that in this case it is a combination of police culture ("we always did it that way, we need to protect our own") and systemic incentives ("if we hide bad behaviour we look better than if we expose it") are the key to understanding this.

They do handle cops that fall out of line, but falling out of line in this case means turning in bad cops. The good cops get pushed out and sometimes even murdered
Nobody even knows the saying.
> The acceptable number of bad apples is zero.

Should we defund and abolish public schools since more than zero teachers are child molesters? Should we defund and abolish fire departments since more than zero firefighters are arsonists?

The child molesting teachers don't band together and murder the other teachers who turn them in
Body cams have been so hard, if it were not for cell phones there would be no accountability at all.
I think we should get into the habit of changing leadership on the basis of results alone. So a serious incident would result in the commander being reassigned or demoted. And leadership would be held directly accountable for events regardless of their own culpability.
Correct, but also many German police are associated with hard right-wing / Nazi adjacent political beliefs.

These are deep rooted issues that are not as easily quantified and discouraged. Reducing gun misuse is one thing, but reducing police discrimination, selective policing, and misconduct is a much larger ball of wax.

And in Norway the police had to be told to quit strip searches, "squat and cough", searching homes, and other invasive practices just for catching someone with a joint. They have never been allowed to use means so disproportional to the crime like this, but have been for years.

And people think that they need those means (which they never had) "back."

Also institutional racism and all the other shit that's true for most police across the world.

ACAB.

The police in Germany burned Oury Jalloh to death (or burned his corpse after he died in police custody) and every officer involved got away with it.

The German government decided there doesn't need to be an external investigation into police violence because the police can be trusted to have correctly investigated itself finding that police violence is not a problem.

The NRW state minister of the interior abolished ID badges for riot police, then insisted that there had been no evidence of misconduct during police riots because no individual officers (wearing full helmets and no individually identifying features) had ever been charged despite video evidence of excessive use of force.

Demonstrators hospitalized due to police violence routinely receive police visits in hospital because their injuries are taken as evidence of resisting arrest as all police violence is presumed to be justified.

The NRW police literally used the energy company's transport vehicles to detain and transport arrested demonstrators during the raid on Lützerath, where the police was explicitly instructed to show full force to deter future protests at similar sites.

Police officers were found to be part of a neo-nazi group called Combat18 (18 = Adolf Hitler) that had maintained kill lists using police records and a stash of assault weapons and body bags.

It's a whole thing, yes.

Many police in the US are associated with far right wing white supremacy, basically the same as those nazis
I seems reasonable to expect the police force of a country where the populace is heavily armed to shoot more people.
I don't know. Maybe?

We can look at statistics from eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g... and compare with statistics on police shootings.