[rcvassallo83]

The thing about the legal system is there's no incentive to investigate to find the truth.

The incentive is to prosecte and prove the charges.

Speaking from the experience of being falsely accused after calling 911 to stop a drunk woman from driving.

The narrative they "investigated" was so obviously false, bodycam evidence directly contradicted multiple key facts. Officials are interested only seeking to prove the case. Thankfully the jury came to the right verdict.

[FireBeyond]

There’s a judge down in Texas, Dallas area I believe, who is in social media a lot because he will excoriate prosecutors who bring bs in to his court room. He’s not soft on crime but hard on rights and process. If a defendant did the wrong thing, he will have the appropriate amount of sympathy, down to zero. At times he will tell them, we all know you got lucky here, do better. But he won’t let prosecutors slate by on garbage charges or statements or investigations by police. Which leads to my primary point at least for this discussion in particular:

To me the scariest part of this as a process is how many times (I’d casually estimate at least 75%) it is blindingly obvious that the prosecutor has not read the statement of charges or officer statements until everyone is in front of the judge. I get on one hand this judge seems to often be handling probable cause hearings but so many of these should never have resulted in any paperwork being turned in to the prosecution, let alone anyone having to show up in court.

[rcvassallo83]

Scary process is an understatement, especially because I was facing a domestic violence charge.

Long story short, emotional abusive partner got drunk and verbally combative, despite my attempts to de-escalate. When nothing worked I went into my bedroom and locked the door. She started pounding on the door and demanded her things. I gave them to her and told her she needs a ride home she no longer welcome. She verbally abused and provoked me for 10 minutes before getting in her car. Took the keys, called 911. She grabbed me causing us both to fall a few minutes before the cops arrived and told them I threw her to the ground. We both had a couple scapes so they arrested us both.

Interfered with the 911 call, filed a false police report, assaulted me, caused property damage. She got charged with class c assault only and a dismissal. I felt like I was seen as guilty until proven innocent.

Fortunately I recorded all her verbal abuse (prosecution tried to use it against me and brought in DV expert to explain both her conduct and my 911 call as typical in IPV cases)

Fortunately the jury didn't buy it. I was literally being threatened with violence in my own home for telling her to leave. Between that and the bodycam statements contradicting her testimony I was shocked that they didn't drop the charges or offer a favorable plea deal.

The judge was absolutely fair, prosecutor bent on punishment, alleged victim was attempting to ruin my life (as captured in my audio)

Whew!

In the end the claims were so obviously fabricated that my attorney made no defense. It was clear that the accuser was not credible.

Perjury was provable. No consequences for her. This happened in Brazoria county

[phonon]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Fleischer_(judge)

[komali2]

It's fascinating to me that judges are elected in Texas, and what's more, run as members of a political party.

[retrochameleon]

There needs to be consequences for shitty, procedure-ignoring police work. Period.

Minimum 1 year of jail time for grossly wrongful arrests that could be avoided with standard procedure or investigation tactics that were not applied.

[helterskelter]

I agree with this sentiment but when you start punishing this sort of thing you create more incentive to cover it up. It's a tricky problem and I'm not sure there's a perfect solution.

What we really need is a change in police culture.

[retrochameleon]

Then the system should be redesigned such that transparency is a priority and cover ups are not feasible. And when cover ups eventually get found out, the punishments even more severe.

[true_religion]

We already have administrative punishments for the police when they incorrectly assign blame and cause a public relations mess.

Is the termination of your career and/or potential retraining and social embarrassment not already an incentive to cover up?

[tremon]

If the punishment fails to correct the behaviour, it is insufficient punishment or the wrong punishment. In this case, I'd say that individual punishments are the wrong tool to correct systemic behaviour. It should be career-ending for brass and prosecutors to be effective.

[jcgrillo]

> change in police culture

until then, there's a simple rule which works well: never talk to a cop. Or at least say the minimum number of words possible, give them nothing to use against you. Present ID if they ask for it, but never admit anything. If they persist, "lawyer". That has worked for me.

[account42]

Add even more disincentives for coverups (i.e. hard prison time) and rewards for whistleblowers.

[vablings]

Medicine has a culture that adapts to this quite well. If you make an honest mistake and communicate it, you are often persecuted by your peers but not hung out to dry legally by your hospital and generally your actions are always defensible.

Similar practices are used in law enforcement, but the legal implications are seemingly more severe

[pstuart]

These dialogs always prompt me to chime in with my solution: make the police be self-insured, backed by their pension fund.

The police today have zero incentive to serve the public, they have zero skin in the game and can literally get away with murder.

Any time you hear the call for "law and order", that is the audience that supports the current system, because they like it like this.

[balderdash]

Great idea, Except that this will never happen because public sector unions are important voting blocks. Public sector unions should be abolished (don’t have a problem with unions) but the conflict of interest is just too great.

[retrochameleon]

Great point. Obviously can't expect them to vote against their own interests, because higher standards, higher accountability, and higher transparency will always be against those interests.

[xtajv]

> These dialogs always prompt me to chime in with my solution: make the police be self-insured, backed by their pension fund.

I'm curious, what exactly do you mean by "self-insured"?

(Is the idea to combine literal insurance underwriting for retirement planning with a monetary incentive system for ongoing work performance)?

[tremon]

They mean that penalties and restitutions for wrongful prosecutions and wrongful convictions should not come from taxpayer money but private insurance. Right now, police departments feel zero pain from judgements against them so they have no reason to structurally correct their behaviour.

[bdangubic]

how is police going to pay for private insurance though? from police officer salaries (which come from taxpayers)?

[forshaper]

Police in some states are actually self-insured, though not backed by a pension fund.

[fc417fc802]

> The thing about the legal system is there's no incentive to investigate to find the truth.

The truth is much more complicated and involves politics. For example Seattle (and possibly other cities?) enacted a law that involves paying damages for being wrong in the event of bringing certain types of charges. But that has resulted in some widely publicized examples where the prosecutor erred by being overly cautious.

[FireBeyond]

And then you have Florida who will bill you about $100 a day for finding yourself in a Florida jail, regardless of whether charges were dismissed, you were found not guilty or any such thing.

And to nobody’s surprise, failure to pay this bill is in itself a Class B felony…

[fc417fc802]

That sounds like a recipe for domestic terrorism - the systemic disenfranchisement of people who have done nothing wrong for no apparent reason other than sheer greed. How long has this been in effect there?

[cucumber3732842]

The system doesn't push the issue on people who can't afford it. Blood from a stone and all that.

[fc417fc802]

I'm confused. Are you suggesting such a ridiculous system is letting class B felonies slide here? That would certainly be the pragmatic approach to being evil but in that case simply treating it as regular debt and going through civil channels would be more than sufficient.

[cucumber3732842]

Are you letting stuff in your backlog that you'll never get to before the product is gone or irrelevant "slide"?

Sure they could round those people up pretty easily just by following up on any contact with the system that they have, but why, for what, to cost the state more money that will likely never be repaid? Especially when sticking a body on DUI detail is hugely in the black. They'll just let that debt, it's accruing interests and the threat of further incarceration linger on the books indefinitely. If the person ever gets their life together they'll have to pay it or face incarceration.

I'm sure someone somewhere has written a DB query to select from outstanding balance where <exists in some other DB that is a proxy for people who have money to pay> and prioritize those cases.

[FireBeyond]

Are you suggesting that Florida it’s to go ‘soft on “crime”’? That would fly in the face of almost all available evidence.

I have extended family in Florida. The system absolutely can and does and will push the issue. There’s a reason that it’s a crime not to pay for your incarceration even if you have a finding of factual innocence against you.

[cucumber3732842]

Your family isn't sleeping under a bridge or whatever. Of course the system wants your money or the money of people on comparable economic footing you associate with. If you can work as a debt slave to the system it wants you to do that even if it means a never ending cycle of robbing peter to pay paul, sleeping on other people's couches, etc. The man sleeping under a bridge cannot, so the cops and the DA and everyone else just go fry bigger fish. Maybe they push the issue 1/100th of the time and incarcerate someone every now and they but they absolutely do not prioritize it the way they do someone who could pay even if only by moving heaven and earth. The system doesn't want to manufacture yet another felony and then incarcerate someone for it out of thin air, that just costs the system more money.

Source: my tiny keyhole view into the system. The parties involve always have have discretion to downgrade stuff to something else, or not pursue it at all and are incentivizes.

[autotune]

That sounds absolutely terrifying.

[bko]

> The narrative they "investigated" was so obviously false, bodycam evidence directly contradicted multiple key facts. Officials are interested only seeking to prove the case. Thankfully the jury came to the right verdict.

I don't get it, if they only care about prosecuting and proving the case, wouldn't they go by the bodycam evidence? They didn't prove the case. Maybe if their incentive was to prosecute and prove the charges, they'd go by the obvious evidence. Or am I missing something here?

[rcvassallo83]

In my experience, the narrative the prosecutor argued on behalf of the accuser was obviously false because specific key facts were contradicted by bodycam statements, for example

"He took my phone and it was dead" -> bodycam showed her using the phone when police arrived

I provided a recording of my accuser clearly being drunk, aggressive, threatening me while I was de-escalating. I was the one who called 911 to stop her from drunk driving. Her speech clearly slurred.

Instead of realizing her story doesn't add up, the prosecutor brought in a DV expert to explain how it's typical for abusers to call 911 and that her behavior was a normal reaction to being assaulted.

Thankfully, the jury knew better.

[pylua]

There is an incentive . It’s called fraud by negligence. I’m hoping she sues everyone here.

That’s seems to be in the realm of poissibility here if I am understanding things correctly (imo)

[hnuser123456]

I would absolutely never call the police on a woman. Simply walk far away and let her be someone else's problem.

[loloquwowndueo]

Unless it’s a Karen chasing you and yelling and threatening to call the police on you for some asinine reason?

[komali2]

Imo they're right, if you're faced with the option of running away from some crazy person or interacting with the police in the USA, the safer option is to run.

A police interaction can escalate to ruinous heights within seconds due to no fault of your own. Remember that cop that got scared by an acorn falling and started shooting at random? I don't care how many "good cops" there are, I'm not rolling the dice on encountering an acorn cop.