Comment by asah 20 hours ago
The real issue is accountability - officers need to be held accountable for reports the way pilots are accountable for use of auto-pilot[1].
[1] yes they are: https://www.google.com/search?q=are+pilots+accountable+for+u...
> But when a police officer raids the wrong home, injures or kills innocent people, or throws tear gas into a room with a baby, there’s rarely accountability—legal, financial, or professional. That’s unacceptable in any system that claims to serve and protect the public.
The American public, or at least the set of them whose vote counts among the gerrymandering, have explicitly chosen this. Their representatives are now building an even less accountable system to be used against "immigrants", i.e. anyone non-white, who can be abducted and denied legal representation.
That’s a dangerous slippery slope. Most public officers (employees) are subject to a wide range of ethics and other regulations that impact post-service employment. In exchange, you’re indemnified for official acts and the government has a duty to defend you.
I’ve served in policy making roles at different levels of government. There’s a variety of businesses post employment that I’m not permitted to enter in post employment, some for 2-5 years, some indefinitely. Those restrictions are taken seriously, and I know that I’ll be held accountable.
Putting the onus on the employee is really enabling bad behavior - the issue is the poor governance of the police, and using the courts as some sort of cudgel won’t fix it, it will just create more corruption as the powers that be will hang out patsies to take the fall.
If the police are allowed to operate paramilitary forces, they need paramilitary discipline and rules of engagement. Army soldiers breaking rules of engagement get punished and officers sidelined and pushed out of the service. Police in many cases have been allowed to create cultures where everyone scratches each others back. Many police are veterans, and many privately will comment on the differences between those experiences.
IMO, the way to address the issues you describe is standard separation of duties. Invest in state and regional police forces, disempower local police, and move enforcement and investigation of police to a chain of command removed from the police. (Perhaps a State AG) When you need to blunt the variance associated with people’s poor application of discretion, the answer is usually a bureaucratic process.
Attorneys General are usually not states or district attorneys. That may vary by state — I’m not an expert in this… iv lived in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York, where the role doesn’t include that so my perspective.
Point being, as much separation as possible from the police (or any) chain of command is essential. The Federal government successfully used independent agencies until the circus that came to town with Trump part 2 appeared.
> I’ve long believed that police officers should be required to carry private liability insurance, just like professionals in many other high risk fields. If an officer is uninsurable, they should be unhireable, plain and simple. Repeated misconduct would drive up their premiums or disqualify them entirely, creating a real consequence for bad behavior.
And it'd be administered by some faceless bureaucracy full of accountants, rather than a couple local politicians that the union can just bully (or bribe or whatever) into ignoring things.
But of course the current mess derives from sovereign immunity, which might be a bit tricky to get the politicians to tinker with more than they already have. :(
>Law enforcement needs greater accountability altogether.
Which is directly contrary to what's good for the state. So unless the lack of accountability is more threatening to the state than less useful to the state law enforcement is the lack of accountability will remain. At best it might get slightly better over decades.
> But when a police officer raids the wrong home, injures or kills innocent people, or throws tear gas into a room with a baby, there’s rarely accountability—legal, financial, or professional.
It's not just that there's rarely accountability - there's explicitly no accountability.
People have sued officers, police departments, cities for the cost of damages from such mistaken raids (including ones that were completely negligent, like wrong street entirely) and the courts have explicitly ruled that they have zero reponsibility to pay for any of the damage caused.
IMO Chesterton'ing the state of policing in the US results in deep fundamental awkwardness.
Why are police heavily armed and adopting military tactics?
Because of famous encounters with heavily-armed criminals by lightly-equipped cops.
Why are criminals able to be so heavily armed?
Because of treating a "right to bear arms" as semi-sacred. Supposedly in the name of distrust of government.
A heavily-armed citizenry doesn't have to lead to fascism but it can certainly give people great excuses to enable it... (See also how it allows the existence of armed private militias who will talk about "standing by" to assist with certain government actions.)
Qualified immunity is a relatively modern invention by the Supreme Court. The origins were fairly reasonable in the civil rights era, saying in Pierson v. Ray that some Mississippi police officers were not liable for enforcing a state law against assembly which was later ruled to be unconstitutional, which is probably the strongest case for a positive effect.
The negatives started mounting as it was rapidly expanded from the question of whether the action was legal at the time as in the Mississippi case to whether the officer violated clearly-established precedent for the specific actions they made. There really isn’t a positive argument for that better than “the courts invented a doctrine because Congress didn’t set a clean policy”. Because it ties into some hot-button political issues now, we’re unlikely to see improvements for a while but it is interesting to contemplate the alternate timeline where the Markey/Booker/Harris resolution in 2020 actually turned into a law.
Is your question what’s the positive effect of an unaccountable and violent police force? In general the effect is continued terrorization of poor and black and brown communities and the entrenchment of the police’s municipal power. This is a “positive” effect only to the worst people who want a hierarchical society where they get to be on top by force.
Chesterton's fence, as properly applied, should have been considered when granting the immunity we see now.
e.g. I wonder what unintended (or perhaps intended) negative effects the current policy has compared to the previous one.
Politically, you could probably sell the insurance idea as actually protecting officers. But then you'd get the wrong people opposing it...
I really wish policing would take more inspiration from aviation on a different avenue for police accountability.
The NTSB exists not to blame pilots (though they sometimes do), but to make air travel safer and prevent future plane crashes. In the business of preventing disaster in safety-critical industry, if you chalk something up to human error or call it a tragic accident, you guarantee that it will happen again. Finding that everyone did everything by the book means the book needs to be rewritten because the book that exists today contains a recipe for plane crashes.
I wish police would treat use of force incidents the same way. The investigations after police use of force ask whether the officer violated the law or department policy. Like most law enforcement and judicial work, the exercise focuses on identifying, trying, and punishing guilty parties. If there is no guilty party, the process can produce no change. I would like to see more investigations into police use of force that focus on improving safety outcomes instead.
That’s really just one issue among many, and it actually makes me worry more about this technology, not less: it provides a clear incentive for the officer to stand by the contents of a report that he or she did not write, even if they realize at some point it is wrong, because they hastily or lazily signed it.
The way this technology is designed is a clear example of dystopian outcomes driven by market forces: capitalism inserted into processes (like justice) which society ought to protect against perversion by profit motives. I can imagine a version of this technology that is designed with societal benefits in mind, but instead we get one designed to make the sale.
Here's the thing. I've read thousands of police reports. Most police reports are super short and super vague. Most police reports are never read even once, even though a large percentage result in convictions. Most criminal charges result in plea deals. Most defendants will never see any evidence against them before pleading guilty†.
If, in the exceptionally rare case that a defendant goes to trial, an officer has to testify, it is probably on average a year after he wrote the report. He will be sat down just before trial by the prosecutor and shown his report and asked to read it. On the stand he generally will not have his report available to reference and is supposed to use his memory, but this will be corrupted by his reading of whatever is in the report he read a couple of hours before. If his report is full of inaccuracies he will almost certainly testify under oath to those.
†This situation has changed very slightly in the last few years with lawyers now supposed to verify the probable guilt of their client before recommending a guilty plea.
Yes. It doesn’t matter exactly how each word in the police report was entered. All that matters is the officer signed off on it. They should be personally & totally responsible for the contents of the report. I don’t care if they use generative AI, speech to text, Dvorak touch typing, QWERTY hunt-and-peck or anything else. An officer must read the final report and sign to assert its accuracy.
If police reports are low quality, it’s an officer performance problem. Obviously performance management in public safety is exceptionally challenging, but that’s the problem domain that matters. You cannot solve law enforcement accountability by tweaking your AI User Interface.
That said, this seems like a missed opportunity to use technology to increase accountability. If you’re running speech to text on body cam footage, great! Everyone involved in the conversation should get a copy of the transcript. There should be a straightforward way to challenge STT errors.
Again though, it’s the same deal as the body cam footage itself. Always-on body cams with default public access are one thing, officer-managed, sue-to-review is quite another. The crucial issues are political, not technical.
The solution to police state is more policing?
What about less? Take away guns and reach of the cops and politicians?
Accountability by making 900k cops across all levels of government stripped of power and made normal people? Same for the 600k politicians coast to coast. Screw their story mode mental illness.
Make everyone busy generalizing logistics process to serve biology and stop with story mode hustling memes about fiat (vacuous proclamations) valuations using jargon from the 1800s?
Roughly 1.5 million pols and cops have 10s of millions wrapped around their finger. With urbanization the best part is a bunch of them live just a few miles from any given large urban area full of people being screwed by them.
The time for demanding meager reforms from 60+ year olds who have no skin in our future is long gone.
Skip the guns and go the route of making everyone a normie civil servant and no one has leverage https://aeon.co/essays/game-theory-s-cure-for-corruption-mak...
Except the low level gossipy kind like “so n so cheated”. Statistical analysis of death trends suggest we kill each other on Main Street over such gossip at the same rate humans did centuries ago. It’s those moments of nation state fueled atrocity and imperialism when human death spikes. Seem clear in the streets most adults just don’t go on murderous rampage.
That's incredibly naive. Spend some time watching police body camera footage. By and large, the police are doing exceptionally well in hostile and difficult circumstances. We're all safer because there is a real counterforce to tough guys, mafias, and paramilitary strong men. They don't exist or are heavily controlled, because the police are a powerful force for good. Taking away the police would create a power vacuum that would be filled faster than you can imagine; and by people who will treat us all much worse than the police ever have.
And yet, many wealthy countries have no worse problems with crime than the US, despite having a fraction of our police forces (per capita) and prison populations.
The real naivete is thinking the US police force is the best policing model on the planet, when that's demonstrably false.
If you make that conclusion after watching police camera footage, aren’t you making a classic survivorship bias fallacy? Those films are not a randomly-selected representative sample. Those films that you watched were those films that
1. Were allowed by the police officer themselves to be recorded in the first place (i.e. the cameras were either deliberately switched on, or at least suffered no timely “camera malfunctions”)
2. And also only films which made it through the filter of being considered suitable for publication, after the fact.
What you have actually been watching are carefully-selected propaganda pieces that, even assuming they are indiviually true and unaltered, are undoubtedly presenting a false view, supporting the powers that select them.
Such videos are not the only basis on which to make the argument I put forth. But you'll also find many sources of police videos that are not "released" by the police, but secured by FOIA requests. There are of course examples of videos with police planting evidence, or using excessive force, or other unfortunate things. But by and large, you'll see over and over, the police behaving admirably and in the public interest.
Law enforcement needs greater accountability altogether.
I’ve long believed that police officers should be required to carry private liability insurance, just like professionals in many other high risk fields. If an officer is uninsurable, they should be unhireable, plain and simple. Repeated misconduct would drive up their premiums or disqualify them entirely, creating a real consequence for bad behavior.
It’s astonishing that police officers aren’t held to the same standards as the rest of us. As a carpenter and building contractor, if I showed up at the wrong address and built or tore down something by mistake, I’d be financially and legally responsible. I’d be expected to make it right, and my insurance would likely step in.
But when a police officer raids the wrong home, injures or kills innocent people, or throws tear gas into a room with a baby, there’s rarely accountability—legal, financial, or professional. That’s unacceptable in any system that claims to serve and protect the public.