
‘Duty to intervene’: How some US cities are telling cops to police each other - onetimemanytime
https://www.star-telegram.com/news/nation-world/national/article243312356.html
======
wereHamster
_In Minneapolis, where Floyd died, a duty to intervene policy has been on the
books since 2016, according to the city’s website._

 _The policy reads: “It shall be the duty of every sworn employee present at
any scene where physical force is being applied to either stop or attempt to
stop another sworn employee when force is being inappropriately applied or is
no longer required,” — word for word the same language used by the Dallas
Police Department in defining its new order._

Seeing how well that has worked in Minneapolis, what are the chances that this
will work in Dallas?

~~~
grensley
The officers were all arrested and the entire MPD is potentially getting
dismantled, so Dallas might take the policy a bit more seriously.

~~~
andi999
What does getting dismantled mean? You close and reopen with the same people?
Or you close and start from scratch with unexperienced ppl (assuming a large
pool of applicants)?

~~~
jakelazaroff
The idea is to close it and not replace it. The only tool in the police
toolbox is violence; despite this, they have become catchall first responders
despite being wholly unequipped for most scenarios.

We should treat drug use and mental illness as public health issues. We should
treat homelessness by housing and feeding those who want help. We should treat
domestic disputes with social work. These are complex issues that deserve
specialized responses.

~~~
Yetanfou
How are you going to treat violent crime? What are you going to do about
street gangs? No amount of social work, hand-holding or counselling will get
at those.

~~~
jakelazaroff
This is not entirely true. Why do people join gangs in the first place? They
feel outcast, need money, feel pressured, etc.

So let’s tackle those problems proactively. Invest in neighborhoods. Make sure
there is economic opportunity. Provide ways for people to feel accepted by
their community. The point is to try to stop these things before they become
problems, rather than only deal with them punitively under threat of violence.

Of course violent crime will still exist. But we’re not even dealing with that
particularly well today: half of all homicides in Minneapolis went unsolved
last year [0]. The actual solution might not look anything like policing as we
know it today.

[0] [https://www.startribune.com/as-homicides-rise-minneapolis-
po...](https://www.startribune.com/as-homicides-rise-minneapolis-police-solve-
half-of-all-killings/565618672/)

~~~
Yetanfou
They've tried these things here in Sweden, for decades. It has not worked, the
opposite is true. Economic opportunity sounds nice but the 'economic
opportunity' of robbing someone who made use of that economic opportunity and
in such a way get the spoils without doing the toils keeps on winning out for
some, no matter how many programs are created, how many youth centres are
built, no matter how many integration programs are started. As to whether it
is the lure of easy money, the false glamour of the bling-bling lifestyle as
glorified by a significant part of rap and hip-hop artists, the 'rebel against
the prevailing culture' attitude which permeates large areas or some other
factor, something keeps on pulling increasing numbers of young boys and girls
into crime.

Ineffective policing may be part of it, an alarmingly low number of violent
crimes is solved here - ~10% of murders and violent crimes (the categories are
combined in the report), %19% of sex crime including rape, ~6% of robberies
and theft going all the way down to ~0.5% of bicycle theft cases [1,2]. The
trend for the percentage of solved crimes has been going down for a very long
time now so things are not improving, at all.

[1]
[https://www.bra.se/download/18.7d27ebd916ea64de5304de44/1585...](https://www.bra.se/download/18.7d27ebd916ea64de5304de44/1585639780979/Sammanfattning_handlagda_2019.pdf)

[2]
[https://www.bra.se/download/18.cba82f7130f475a2f1800010674/1...](https://www.bra.se/download/18.cba82f7130f475a2f1800010674/1371914726382/2006_4_kriminalstatistik_2005.pdf)

~~~
panarky
How does the murder rate in Sweden compare with the United States?

~~~
Yetanfou
At ~1.1 per 100.000 inhabitants it is lower than the USA which lies around
~4.9 per 100.000 (data from BRÅ (Sweden) and FBI (USA) for 2016). Compared to
the rest of north-western Europe Sweden lies on the high side, e.g. Norway has
less than half of this number, the Netherlands about half, Germany around ⅔,
Denmark has a comparable murder rate. The situation in Sweden varies markedly
from place to place with Malmö generally lying somewhere at the top (~3.5
murders/100.000). Where most countries in the region have seen a downward
trend in the number of people subject to a crime, Sweden and Germany go
against the trend with a steadily rising number [1,2], in Sweden this seems to
be largely due to the rise in gang-related violence which has also led to a
sharp increase in the number of shootings and gun-related homicides [4], hand-
grenade attacks [4] and stabbings (on which I do not have separate data other
than noticing the number of knife-related crimes in the news steadily
increasing). For more info see Wikipedia:Crime in Sweden [5].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Crime_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Crime_in_Sweden/0/d0dfcfedc5df97f89038ec1d6f907f238078f326.png)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sweden-
crime-1976-2016-ro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sweden-
crime-1976-2016-robbery-sex-murder.svg)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Crime_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Crime_in_Sweden/0/d18beb79a323413058447f353903f0859c9e96a4.png)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Crime_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Crime_in_Sweden/0/c7f34ec045ca46991ad8cb68e7e7c98fc4b0eccf.png)

[5]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden)

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diablerouge
It must be down to accountability. People will break all the rules in the book
if consequences are never meted out.

------
hymnsfm
An idea I like better is defunding police departments then augmenting the
staff with social workers. So much of police training is in dealing with
people in crisis situations. Why not bring in experts instead?

~~~
pyuser583
Or training police to be social workers?

A good friend went through multiple police academies a few years ago. They all
had lots of training in “social work” and “community policing” and “root
causes of crime”.

~~~
kthejoker2
Why not just train developers to be designers?

Why do all these software product teams hire separate people for thhe two
roles?

There's tons of classes on design available...

It's for the same reason, and based on the basic principles of natural
selection and economics.

When you have two skills that are orthogonal to each other (make it work; make
it pretty), group fitness is improved by separating those roles into different
members of the group.

Letting one member or subgroup own both responsibilities always leads to the
same outcome.

They optimize group selection and fitness for the responsibility that is most
required for survival - developers for solving problems with code, cops for
meeting force with greater force - and the other, like a vestigial tail,
exists but is functionally useless.

~~~
pyuser583
Because policing and social work are more like development and systems
administrators.

I live in a city that requires police officers to have graduate degrees before
they are permanently hired.

Most police don’t have their graduate degrees when initially hired, so they
have to go back to school and earn them to get a permanent offer.

Because local universities have great social work departments and law schools
(and sub par criminal justice departments), most cops get degrees in law or
social work.

The local university had a program that offers both, so many cops do that.

So i can tell you from experience that police officer/lawyer/social worker
hybrids are a thing. And it works out very well.

