Let's see.. in the 20 odd years here in Chicago, the sum of my police interactions are:
Hit by a white shirt (supervisor) who came out of an alley on clark st while in a bike lane - somehow my fault, detained.
Hit on foot, by a car with no lights on in a residential neighborhood while crossing at a crosswalk - somehow my fault for being outside while there was "a suspect being hunted"
Watching officers on foot in 7-11's, local shops, etc, just walk in, take what the want, and leave.
Helping a friend move to another city because he ended a relationship with a cop who made his life a living hell after they broke up.
Being accused of trying to "make the neighborhood look bad" when I called the fire department because my neighbor had smoke coming out of the door in his apartment (turns out he was just passed out drunk and left a pizza in the oven, but what else do you do when you bang on a door pouring smoke and no one answers?)
So yeah, once my S/O finishes what she needs to to change jobs, we're out of here I think. The police force here is really the icing on the cake of so much else that's overpriced, corrupt, or just plain sucks about Chicago. All the good things it's supposed to have just seem completely irrelevant to me anymore.
The worst years of my life were living next door to an Orleans Parish Sheriff. He would follow my friends home, he would spit out his gum onto my sidewalk, he let my dogs out of the yard every day for a week, he would blow his leaves onto my yard, he would let his dog bark all day and all night, he would hang his running leaf blower on the fence at 8:00 in the morning on a weekend. I really could go on and on.
There was no use getting help from the city. One night at maybe 1:00 AM I called the police because of the barking. He told me maybe I should just move.
I look at the police in a totally different way now. He was so clearly in the wrong and such a menace to all of the neighbors. Yet somehow he had an entire department on his side - a department he didn't even belong to. I told his wife my next step was the FBI. They moved shortly after that.
I'm sure wherever he is that he is harassing everyone around him. I can only imagine how his lack of ethics translates into his professional life.
Funny, I lived next to a police officer once. He was the only one with illegal fireworks every New Year's Eve (in Hawaii, where aerial fireworks are illegal).
Now that's true, but I will say that HPD on Oahu are the most professional and legit police officers I've ever had to deal with. I lived in town for six years and had run-ins with the law and no complaints about their behavior, including a couple of times when I thought that surely I would end up being taken advantage of.
Fair point, I think they're mostly professional too and have friends who went into HPD, but I've seen enough that are not (grew up there 20 years, Ewa and downtown).
I have heard a lot of similar stories from credible people. Is there no department that people can complain to? It seems there is no interest in making sure that cops and prosecutors do a good job. You would think that somewhere up the chain people would be horrified by this lack of ethics.
The problem is it usually turns into a Think Of The Children argument. Among my friends on social media, everyone is either 100% anti-cop or pro-cop. No one is willing to discuss possible solutions to occasional injustice.
Helping a friend move to another city because he ended a relationship with a cop who made his life a living hell after they broke up.
I was dating this girl a couple of years ago and we were pretty early on, but she wanted to spend the night. And we were cool so it wasn't an awkward thing, but what I figured out as that she didn't necessarily want to stay the night as much as she was afraid to go home at night. Her reasoning, "My mom just broke up with a police officer and they harass us now." Shes from a super small town with a police force with a reputation for having nothing to do, but staying busy. But even when she said it I thought she might be being dramatic. Now I get it. This type of behavior is ridiculously childish and it might not be the norm, but it seems like something someone could stop.
Police officers abuse their romantic partners at about twice the average rate. Domestic violence occurs in about 40% of households with police officers.
Yes. But it doesn't mean that, given a random sampling of 100 cops in relationships, you could expect ~40 of those to be currently abusive of their partners.
This is also what I initially understood. But still, it means that if I get 100 cops in a room, about 40 have been or will be in an abusive relationship. That is still very telling/surprising.
Does this also mean that of 100 randomly selected people (of whom an ordinary proportion are cops), that about 20 of them have been or will be in an abusive relationship?
I don't mean to downplay the 40 number in the police case (which is very high and kind of terrifying), but, 20% is still a lot! (and so, 40% is even more).
That's, for every 5, 1, on average! That is shockingly high.
I mean at any point in time it's not likely any given person, even an abusive person, is actively doing something. It doesn't mean it's less of a problem.
Keep in mind that is the same police department that "operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site."
They locked a humble worker without proofs, tortured him, killed him during the interrogatory, erased the cameras recording, turned off the GPS of the police cars that got rid of the body, and bribed a woman to commit perjury.
I'm moving to Chicago in a few months. Are there certain neighborhoods that should be avoided on the basis of corrupt police activity? I wonder because I could see neighborhoods that are relatively safe in terms of civilian crime, but cops posted in that area might have nothing better to do than mess with its inhabitants.
I'll be honest with you... Chicago is very much a place where you take your chances.
You can live in Streeterville for example, as rayiner alluded to in another post... but what happens when you go out with friends??? What if they want to go someplace in say... Wrigleyville... some night??? You're walking back to your car, or trying to get a taxi back to the loop, and you cross too close in front of a police officer, or his vehicle. (Basically, the same thing that bbarn was talking about in his post.) Even though it's completely inadvertent, and done with no ill intent, I've seen this very thing go decidedly bad for people in the past. It seems that it didn't go too well for bbarn either.
So if you're asking for guarantees... I think that reasonable people will concede that there are none.
The best advice is to be aware of your surroundings, and be aware that police are extremely dangerous and best avoided. Just do the common sense kind of things... allow police the path if you see them walking on the sidewalk. Don't look directly at an officer. When approached by a police officer, be extremely deferential. And for goodness sake, if you see police abusing power don't try to intercede. Don't let them see you recording or videoing the incident. When you have an opportunity later... just write an anonymous letter to a newspaper with the video or something. Etc etc etc.
Also... not trying to be even more of a dark cloud here, but I think a word of warning is appropriate on this particular point... if you are black and male, and assuming you are professional as you are a hacker news reader... I'm not entirely certain any of this will work for you in any case.
I grew up in Chicago, my family is still there, and most of my colleagues are based there. There is weird pseudo-Stockholm syndrome phenomenon where people just accept that the corruption is widespread and unavoidable.
Any chance this contributed to the Dark Knight being filmed there? Choosing Chicago for the cityscape makes sense by itself but the film focused heavily on corruption.
when i visited Chicago, it was felt like it is a matter of local pride when journalist on radio was telling something about corruption in the school district. Like "look how big! how brazen it is! we can do corruption like the best out there!"... pretty much like Jon Stewart in that bit about New Jersey corruption.
I left after only 2.5 years. I didn't even have any watershed experiences. I just eventually heeded the voice in my head that whispered "get out of here" on a regular basis.
So I left, and I didn't exactly stop hearing that voice, but at least it said "this is pathetic" instead.
It didn't shut up entirely until I moved again.
I can barely even stand to drive around Chicago on the tristate tollway now.
What if you are flat broke? What if you have an elderly dependent in a nearby nursing home? A relative in a nearby prison? A child in the local schools?
"bullies, criminals and injustice" are the police. this whole rather depressing discussion is dedicated to the consequences of standing up to police. again, your choice is simple - bend or be shot.
first 3 bullets in the chest, then 6 in already dead body, then taser the corpse. policemen successfully argued self-defense and was charged with attempted (???) murder. the only reason why this made to trial, was because video was released to public. otherwise he would have walked.
I thought they were supposed to use a taser first and live fire as a last resort? What in the world were they thinking? The guy is clearly not conscious/possibly already dead and then they taser him?
This is going to look bad. I'd better tase the corpse so I can claim I tried non-lethal means first, but the guy was unstoppable and I had to kill him.
It may be different in the more rural regions of Russia, but I'm from Saint-Petersburg, and I've never seen anything similar to a police officer go "in 7-11's, local shops, etc, just walk in, take what the want, and leave". They're usually civil, and sometimes helpful (you can ask directions, etc).
There is corruption here, but it seems to be more prevalent among the civil cervants and the higher ranking police officials.
Chicago neighborhoods are a useful designation for access to services, housing prices, likelihood of being shot on the way to the subway, being able to walk your dog at night, distance to the nearest ANYTHING besides a liquor store and check cashing store... but Chicago police are everywhere and nowhere. You don't call them, they call you.
They'll show up 5 times a day to question the family of the drug dealer who lives in your basement apartment and can somehow not figure out which unit it is... so you live in constant fear they're gonna come break down your door. They'll ticket and boot every car on a street despite a clearly visible permit on half of them...
But you'll hear gunshots down the block and ... nothing. You'll have an emergency and you won't get a response for an hour.
The quieter the neighborhood, the less likely it is you'll ever interact with a police officer.
If you're in your mid-20s, the typical places to end up would be Uky Village, Logan Square, Roscoe Village, Lincoln Square, and Uptown.
You wouldn't want to live in Streeterville or Edgewater for reasons beyond the number of police there. If you're seeing lots of police in Wrigleyville, it's because the neighborhood is overrun with drunk overgrown fraternity members. If you actually live in Wrigleyville, there's a good chance you like the police, because Wrigleyville drunks are pretty fucking annoying.
The kinds of police interactions characterized by things like the Laquan McDonald shooting are more or less confined to the south and west sides of the city, where you're not going to move anyways, because nobody is moving there.
There aren't neighborhoods in Chicago that are low-crime and high-police-violence.
I agree with the other commenter on this thread who points out that Chicago is just like every other big city. One of the things that makes Chicago distinctive is (unfortunately) the legacy of segregation and redlining from the 60s and 70s, which gutted whole large areas of the city. There aren't large sections of Manhattan or Brooklyn with virtually no white residents (at least, no area as large as the Austin/Lawndale neighborhoods). It's an extremely unfortunate situation for people that don't have the means to get out of those neighborhoods, and at the same time pretty much entirely shields white people from problems with CPD.
If you are white and in the wrong place, the police may approach you and tell you where you ought to be and how to get there. If you're white in white Chicago, police pretty much don't exist. They're who you call before your insurance company whenever a property crime occurs, and that's only because your insurer makes you.
If you're black or Hispanic and in the wrong place, the police will approach you and try to find any reason. Any reason to what? Any reason to anything, that's what.
The racial segregation in Chicago is no longer enforced by real estate agents, redlining, and covenants. You can rent wherever you like in the city. But how often do you want to be forced to talk to a cop when you step outside?
It's hard to think of a neighborhood within the limits of the city of Chicago where you could be "out of place" for being black or hispanic, since we have huge black and hispanic populations. Beverly, maybe? But that seems like an exception that proves the rule, since Beverly is effectively a south suburb.
I do not at all doubt that if you are an "urban" looking black person wandering around a suburb like Kenilworth you are likely to be harassed by the police. There are Chicago suburbs that are somewhat defined by whiteness.
But even the whitest neighborhoods in Chicago have pretty significant African-American or Hispanic populations as well (there aren't that many black families living in Lakeview, for instance, but there's a large number of Hispanic families there).
Also, no cop has ever warned me to get out of a dangerous neighborhood in Chicago. Has that happened to you? Where were you?
It supposedly happened to a friend of the spouse who doesn't have a lot of common sense. I have no reason to question its veracity, because if anyone was ever in need of a professionally delivered assessment of "WTF are you doing here this late?", it was her. The cops were apparently able to make the assessment of "drunk and stupid" over "trying to buy drugs".
Though now that I think of it, maybe it was both.
And thinking about the other thing, I don't think I have ever seen a potential "just for being black" stop anywhere south of Belmont, either. So I guess that can't be pinned on CPD. Maybe the commercial centers in Rosemont, near O'Hare? Not sure if that's in the official city limits or not.
It is worthwhile to note that you might be black and "out of place" in your own neighborhood if you are outside in your own yard with a camera recording while the police are doing something.
> If you're seeing lots of police in Wrigleyville, it's because the neighborhood is overrun with drunk overgrown fraternity members. If you actually live in Wrigleyville, there's a good chance you like the police, because Wrigleyville drunks are pretty fucking annoying.
Wrigley isn't a good place to drink at. The cops know about how shitty it gets and they're sitting there waiting to break up fights, call the ambulance for people drinknig too much, and ticket out of control people.
Also, something that hasn't been said yet: Don't move to Englewood. That's where most of the crimes occur.
Because the question is where can you move where you won't come into contact with police all that often. Edgewater isn't bad, and I'd live there, but it's higher crime than Uptown and has a higher police presence.
Some of these posts here are a joke. Chicago is like any other major US city, probably better than the mid-tier cities I've spent time living in in terms of police and crime. It's simply very much two cities and you only hear news stories about one.
Just like anywhere else, don't act like an idiot or seek out trouble in rough areas and 99% of your interactions with police will be fine.
You're on HackerNews so presumably you make money and won't be living on the South Side or somewhere like it. If you're living in Lincoln Park, Wicker Park, Streeterville, etc. you will likely never witness a bad police interaction the entire time you live there - unless you go looking for it. Live in some of the more marginal neighborhoods and those you fear will almost assuredly not be the police.
It's like anywhere else - dressed like a young professional, out with other similar friends, not being confrontational and get caught doing a minor infraction? You'll be warned and maybe yelled at. Do the same acting like fools and giving attitude back? Yeah, you might be taught a lesson and spend the night in jail.
I've had plenty of interactions with CPD between myself and my drunk friends in my earlier days. The cops acted just like you would expect and desire them to in all but one situation. That situation was a friend jumping a security gate on the El to photograph some train stuff. He went to jail for the night.
As with everything like this the hyperbole is just nuts. If you're a poor minority living on the South Side my answer may be different, but for the typical Hackernews frequenter Chicago is no different than NYC or LA, and honestly in terms of "living in the city" you are likely to find far safer and wealthy neighborhoods than you will in the "inner city" of any other mid-tier NFL town in the US.
That said it's a big city. If you're used to living in a big city, Chicago is just another one with better than normal public transit. Same problems and concerns as anywhere else. You can find neighborhoods that have similar crime rates to the most wealthy suburbs there are, and neighborhoods with a higher homicide rate than Iraq. The latter gets you the police department in those areas you would expect.
>Do the same acting like fools and giving attitude back? Yeah, you might be taught a lesson and spend the night in jail.
It's hilarious that you find this acceptable.
Unless I break the law and am arrested, there is no way in hell I should spend the night in jail to be "taught a lesson". My attitude or dress are completely irrelevant.
I mean, did you even read the article? No one cares about your positive, one-time personal experience with the police. Joke, indeed.
I would second this. I grew up in a suburb, but visited the city regularly in my teens and 20's. I have a lot of friends who live in chicago now and pretty much none of them (including hard core stoners to well paid financial investors) have had any trouble with police.
I feel like half of these comments are made up on here, or they were going to a place everyone knows is a bad place.
Hell, Joliet (the suburb I grew up in) had a higher crime rate.
The safest neighborhood in Chicago wrt police if you ask me is Hyde Park. This is of course if you are affiliated with the university. You get a free pass there because the police are paid extra to pamper.
I wouldn't say so. I have lived mostly north, and sometimes west, and found it to be generally the same.
Pick your neighborhood based on other factors.. closeness to the CTA trains, quality of food options, and general cleanliness. I've found these to be pretty good indicators of overall safety/quality of life in a neighborhood. (I won't get into the cause/effect argument, just saying that as a newcomer they are good measuring points)
> Are there certain neighborhoods that should be avoided on the basis of corrupt police activity?
No. It's largely a very safe city and a great place to live in. I've lived here for 16 years (2 in Lakeview, 1 in Uptown, 3 in the West Loop and 10 in Lincoln Square). If I can help answer any questions about the various neighborhoods, you can reach me via jeff@judge.io.
Lifelong Chicagoan here. I've never, ever had these issues and all my run-ins with cops have been fairly uneventful, if not pleasant. Chicago cops have better things to do than give traffic tickets usually and the last time I got pulled over (blew through red from a fast yellow) and I was just let go with a warning.
Recently, there is a mentally unstable person in my neighborhood and he decided to sit on my porch and light pieces of paper on fire one day. I called and they were there in 15 minutes and said they could do what they can to help this guy. The cops seemed geniunly concerned about his and my safety. I was floored by how well this call went.
I live in one of the decent, but not wealthy neighborhoods. Chicago is about 1/3rd horrible ghetto and 1/3rd marginal and 1/3rd decent. Life in those other 2/3rd's is very, very different. If you're outside of the typical "northside" neighborhoods the cops are much tougher and much more paranoid about being hurt or killed. I lived in one of those neighborhoods and there's a completely different vibe there. Cops pull up with 3+ squads at every call, take up defensive positions, hands close to weapons, etc. A dog attacked mine when I lived in Humboldt Park and the cops came out and were cool about it, but clearly on edge as I lived in gang territory. In other neighborhoods, I don't see this edge, or the defensive tactices. So yeah, there's something here about cop safety in marginal neighborhoods. I imagine provoking these guys in these neighborhoods leads to bad outcomes.
Also, not to attack the GP, but there is a Chicago cyclist personality I see frequently. They do dick moves with their bikes, cause accidents, never obey any traffic law, scream at pedestrians, have unbelievable senses of entitlements, kick/punch cars, and constantly pretend to be innocent and are often incredibly confrontational when criticized. I can't imagine cops being nice to these people and the GP sounds like one of these people, which may explain many of his experiences. Chicago cyclists have a bad rep for a reason.
That said, I have next to zero fear of the police and lots of fear in regards to the high criminality and massive gang population here. I've been intimidated and threatened on the train multiple times, car/house robbed, had to walk lady friends to their homes/cars many times not out of courtesy but because there was a known rapist loose or the gang kids were clearly looking to start trouble that night, have been uncomfortably close to a gang shooting at least once, hit 3x by DUI drivers, etc. I suspect Chicago cops are tough because Chicago has so much serious crime. This isn't the suburbs.
Wikipedia: Chicago has more gang members than any other city in the United States: 150,000. The city had 532 murders in 2012.
Chicago tribune: Chicago police officers shot 22 people in 2015, eight of them fatally.
532 vs 8, guys. Oh, 150,000 gang members is 5% of the population. That's right, this is a major city where 1 in 20 are gang members.
That said, the powerful Chicago police union is pretty horrible. It exists to protect the worst of the worst, out of some misplaced sense of pride. I would love to see public sector unions eliminated in the city, if not nationwide. They just make things worse for everyone. Society needs an alternative to the union system in the public sector. I find it bothersome that all the recent ant-police sentiment still has not percolated to the police unions. I suspect this is a political thing where liberals can't attack their own institutions. So expect zero real reform.
FWIW, I am darker skinned and do not pass as "white." I'm typically clocked as a Latino. I've always owned older cars , dress very casually outside of work, and live way below my means. I doubt I was treated in any special way because of status/race. I don't fall into the preferred categories.
"Also, not to attack the GP, but there is a Chicago cyclist personality I see frequently. They do dick moves with their bikes, cause accidents, never obey any traffic law, scream at pedestrians, and constantly pretend to be innocent and are often incredibly confrontational when criticized. I can't imagine cops being nice to these people and the GP sounds like one of these people, which may explain many of his experiences."
No, I'm the mild mannered, just let me get home without dying type. Stopping at lights, yielding at stop signs, pedestrian in crosswalks. Not in a particular hurry to get anywhere usually, overweight, calm demeanor. What makes me "sound like" one of these people to you? You'll note I mention this is the total sum of my interactions over 20 years in this city. I have yet to have a positive one, but still, there aren't many to speak of. Also, only the one experience there had anything to do with being on a bicycle.
As a pedestrian and a driver... screw the bikers. 95% of them are really shitty. The other 5% are well experienced in biking, and they hate the 95% of the other ones as well.
couldn't figure out why you were downvoted, your comment seemed to add to the conversation... until I got to
the GP sounds like one of these people, which may explain many of his experiences.
I'm not sure where you get that from what was written in the post, or why you think it would add value to the conversation, but in the future, I'd recommend keeping in mind that unjustified accusations directed at individuals render pretty much anything and everything else you write moot; they become what people take away from what you've expressed.
Agreed that last sentence wasn't helpful, but neither are the downvotes for him explaining exactly what the situation likely was.
Maybe the OP is a great cyclist. Maybe he's not. It's immaterial.
What is material is trying to provide some context into why that happened, if it did. Lets just say as a fellow Chicago resident I also immediately had the same suspicions that you were responding to.
I used to commute daily as a cyclist, until I moved here. I sold my bike, as I don't want to be associated with these people whatsoever. They are the most entitled, aggressive, and actively dangerous group of commuters I've witnessed. I've lived in Amsterdam. This is not how bikers should behave.
So to me, it was simply providing context to those who don't live here for stories that don't make any logical sense. Cyclists here get absolutely zero benefit of the doubt from me, and I imagine that attitude can get into a cop on a bad day as well. Certainly doesn't justify it, but it explains it.
Cycling's a big part of my life. I've been involved in advocacy groups, racing organizations, commuted most of my life, etc. I'm also a fairly smart guy. I recognize the difference between being out training fast/racing, and riding my bike to work. The two things have different applications, and I do them in appropriate settings.
I think I'm a pretty great cyclist, and by great I mean that I know when to do what, and consider my impact on those around me as much as myself.
The problem here is this is just one example of the problem with police abuse in general. Police should be capable of not defaulting to biases against groups of people because they need to be by their job description. Whether that's "all bikers are entitled and actively dangerous" or "all blacks are suspicious unless otherwise proven", the sentiment is the same. They must be held to a higher standard of judgment because of the authority they are given.
PS - If everyone gave up cycling because they didn't want to be associated with those who do it poorly, not only would that be a shame, it'd leave nothing but the belligerents you speak of.
You are literally comparing cops to gangbangers (oh, but at least they aren't as bad). If you are doing that, you might as well do it per capita. Are there 150,000 cops in Chicago as well?
Probably for "Also, not to attack the GP", followed by "the GP sounds like one of these people" who "do dick moves with their bikes, cause accidents, never obey any traffic law, scream at pedestrians, have unbelievable senses of entitlements, kick/punch cars, and constantly pretend to be innocent and are often incredibly confrontational when criticized."
Unfortunately, where to move? The situation is like that all over the USA. The increasing militarization of the police in the past 20 years (one thing about being "old" is you can see these things happen before your eyes) have produced a very bad scene.
I spent a couple years in Chile. They cops there walk around with machine guns (they're called "carabineros") but are professional, uncorrupt and trustworthy. The difference is palpable.
Also felt much safer around the Polezi in Germany.
But leaving the country has its own costs.
I'm thinking maybe remote work will become more of a thing and a small town somewhere relatively rural might be better... but then small town cops in Louisiana were pretty bad in my youth.
I lived in Chile for a couple years too, and while I knew cool carabineros and didn't have much trouble with them myself I've seen points of view that are way different. I think every system has good and bad eggs, but sometimes the organization and system established can either discourage or encourage poor behavior to some degree.
Funny anecdote I heard in a poor part of Santiago. A guy stabbed another guy during a futbol match. When the carabineros arrived they got the victim to a hospital and everything, but then they pinned the guy to the fence and let every other player in the game give him a good punch.
I think just about anywhere in the US would do. I've lived all over California in the last decade, and while the police out here aren't perfect, they are saints compared to the description of the Chicago PD in this thread.
LAPD and SFPD are under constant scandal, OaklandPD have been under federal control for years. You don't know what you're talking about wrt California police probably because you're white and wealthy.
In my limited experience, the larger suburban areas are better (though far from perfect) with respect to police interaction than either cities or small towns (including rural areas).
Big cities tend to have similar problems as Chicago.
Small towns and rural areas seem to ripe for petty abuses and also generating revenue via excessive traffic stops.
Honestly, if I have to deal with corruption, and all the other stuff, I'll at least have nice weather with it at this point. Central coast California, Boulder, CO, etc.
The thing to keep in mind is that America isn't as homogeneous as a European country, it's as diverse as the entire European continent. Would you say that Denmark is a dreadful mess because of the crime rate in Serbia? Probably not.
this is inspite of it having extremely low rape incidences as a %.
People have no clue how large and diverse the place is and are always generalizing.
and I have very rarely come across police misbehaving the way I read here or even come across violent street crimes. I am sure it occurs though as the films love portraying the extreme scenarios but the ordinary person isn't scared for his/her life or safety.
Even including the "safe" parts of the US in the equation the murders per capita rate is three times higher than Serbia. If you count police shootings the numbers get so crazy compared to any other first world country it is pretty safe to say there is a problem.
For example New Hampshire has a murder rate much lower than Serbia, England, or France. It is more on lines with Germany.
Also, everyone collects murder states differently. The US usually publishes states from the FBI, whose logic is basically "there is a dead body and it looks like someone else did it". The UK, on the other hand, has the Home Office publish murder rates in terms of convictions, which necessarily will be less than the number of bodies.
To be fair to branchless... Chicago's crime rate is not all that high. It certainly would not make a list of the top 50 crime cities in the US. Or even the top 100.
So, I'm thinking, branchless' thought process probably goes something like this... "If Chicago is this bad with crime and corruption... what must the rest of the US be like???"
Having mentioned that, other people are correct as well to point out that not ALL places will have the same level of corruption. Many, many places have far more corruption and crime than Chicago. And many, many places have far less corruption and crime than Chicago. But if you are from Western Europe, the mean level of corruption here in the US may be discomfiting to you.
You have to be careful when you read these lists. For instance, there are a lot of Pine Bluffs in the United States, so you want to be sure that you talk about the right one when discussing murder rates.
But even if you only count the murder rate...
Chicago... the Chicago that we're discussing on this thread... would not make the list of the top 30 as is plainly evident.
there are far, far worse places than Chicago in the US. Lots of them. And there are far, far better places than Chicago in the US. Lots of them.
Murder rate is probably the only statistic that can be trusted. Police are under lots of pressure to make sure crime stats go down, and it's really easy to misclassify or ignore reports for things like armed robbery or rape. A body is harder to hide.
> they find evidence that while Chicago reported 414 murders in 2013 they really had at least 432 through what, if you read the article (and you should) looks like pretty deliberate malfeasance.
> For example, Patrick Walker was found injured and unresponsive in a crashed automobile, taken to a hospital where he died, then during an autopsy they found a gunshot wound in his head and a bullet casing in the back seat of the car. Owing to the fact that he was clearly shot and killed, this was filed on his death certificate as a murder. But the Chicago Police Department has classified the case as a death investigation, making it disappear from their stats.
If all you go by is media reports, then sure, it sounds awful. But let me tell you something about the media: in general they look for the stories that inspire outrage and that are extraordinary. They do not reflect the normal life.
Americas biggest problem in the inner cities. They are literally ghettos were gangs and violence run rampant. The schools are pure shit. The kids have no future. The cops crack down hard (half because they have to in order to maintain any semblance of peace, half because they become jaded).
But that part of America is shockingly isolated from the rest of us. Chicago is a great example. There are blocks where on side of an intersection it's gang territory and the other is totally safe.
There are huge swaths of Chicago that are rich, peaceful, and probably the best city living in America. There are also huge swaths of pure poverty and gang warfare.
If you are born on the right side of the tracks, it's a great place. If you aren't, well, good luck.
This is absolutely not true. Have you ever lived in an inner city? Yes some people are fighting with each other but if you act respectfully, you'll be left alone.
The police aren't cracking down because they "have to". They're cracking down (e.g. stop and frisk) because they're power hungry and ignorant.
As someone who's lived in all manner of socioeconomic areas of the US, I would say without hesitation that the biggest problem here is the cost of healthcare, education and housing. NOT any segment of the population.
>This is absolutely not true. Have you ever lived in an inner city? Yes some people are fighting with each other but if you act respectfully, you'll be left alone.
I've lived in downtown areas of Chicago and DC, but never what people mean when they say "inner city" (i.e. ghetto).
They won't leave you alone. They'll rob you or break into your car. Criminals murder and steal from the people who live there at alarming rates.
They don't really leave the ghetto (other than one summer when kids did flash mobs in Chicago). So I could live in Chicago and feel entirely safe.
But last time I spent time in Englewood--a woman I was meeting with had her car broken into within 15minutes of parking on a major intersection.
>As someone who's lived in all manner of socioeconomic areas of the US, I would say without hesitation that the biggest problem here is the cost of healthcare, education and housing.
These are extremely middle class problems. Most people don't need or want a post-secondary education. 85% people have healthcare coverage. Housing is only bad in a few upper middle class areas.
Your whole series of comments in this topic seem to be along the lines of, "Don't be a dick and nothing bad will happen to you." Maybe that's been your experience, and I'm not going to call you a liar. But that's simply not the case for everyone.
I moved to Brooklyn from Texas last June. Moved to a part of Crown Heights that my coworkers said was probably fine. Kind of on the edge of where things get genuinely sketchy.
Yes, I'm from Texas, and I'm white. My GF says I'm the whitest person she's ever dated by far. Not sure what that means, but apparently I stick out like a sore thumb of white-ness. Maybe that's some of it. I don't know.
But the guys at the corner grocery/deli/convenience stores wouldn't sell anything to me. Not even water. There were a lot of gunshots on the block in the evenings. I really hated walking home after working late--and it being a startup I was working for, that was almost every night.
At the end of my second week there, I was up on the roof of the building having a smoke (because I was tired of being harassed by everyone in the neighborhood when I would go smoke out on the stoop, and I just wanted to smoke a damn smoke without having to talk or listen to anyone) a couple of cops walked up to a guy (guess what color his skin was), chatted with him for a minute or so and then shot him. Twice in the torso, and then after he was on the ground, once in the face. Right in front of my place. When the crime report got to the news, it was literally my address they used when they said, "A man was shot last night just outside #xxx Troy Ave. in Crown Heights"
That, at least somewhat understandably, pissed the neighborhood off. For a week after that, thugs were stabbing people coming off the 4 train at Franklin during rush hour. Just stabbing white people. Not even mugging them. I was getting off two stops from there and ubering home for the remaining week I lived there before I moved to a different place.
A place that has about the same racial makeup. I'm still in the minority by a long shot. But the culture is entirely different, and a much happier place. A mere 2.8 miles from where I was living. NYC is such a weird place.
I am not a jerk to anyone, and I'm not the racist you might think I am because I'm from Texas. I had a remarkably multi-cultural upbringing, considering where I grew up. But the reality is that there are places where simply being white can get you in trouble.
Please understand I'm not complaining about this. The fact of the matter is that there are far fewer places in this country where being white can get you in trouble than there are places where being black can get you in trouble. I get that, and I'm not all that upset about it. Except for the cops shooting the guy for apparently no reason. That part does upset me.
My point is that you are simply wrong with your assertions that all you have to do is "respect the neighborhood" or whatever. That's bad advice for very many people.
First of all, I hope everyone reads your whole comment so they can learn about the police murdering someone when they thought they could get away with it. That's important to hear.
That being said, I have experienced something like the racial tension you say happened after that incident. It was scary but in the end I was safe partially because I made the time to get to know the people who lived around me. Not even hanging out get to know, just nod when you walk by.
If you're a good member of the community, the community will work to protect you if it can. You absolutely do need to keep your wits about you and be street safe though. I admit that's definitely not for everyone.
I don't understand what you mean when you say that you are "a good member of the community" and I also am skeptical that it was ever possible to be that in that neighborhood.
I was a good member of the community in the sense that I paid rent on time, I helped my elderly neighbors get their groceries up the steps and into the house.
But I don't want to hang out with anyone. I am not a particularly sociable person. I'm an extreme introvert. I play the violin and write code.
I'm not going to hang out with the local people in the neighborhood and smoke weed with them because I'm on probation for a DUI, and any interaction with drugs or alcohol could land me in state prison in Texas for 18 months.
What exactly is it that you mean when you say be a "good member of the community"?
What does "have health care coverage" mean? Have health insurance? People with health insurance can and do still rake up significant out of pocket medical bills. And copays don't stop, even after you've met your deductible.
It is true (as true as it can be anywhere). By all means keep making blanket generalizations though because it keeps neighborhoods like that cheap for people like me to live in. I've spent > decade living in "ghettos" and not once have had an incident with the locals. I have however been harassed by cops many times regardless of the neighborhood I'm in.
My experience definitely does not match yours, poor people are just like everyone else and I actually find the communities in areas like that to be MUCH stronger if you take the time to get to know people.
I agree with you; I think there are some amazing strong communities all across the poorer areas of Chicago. But there are also people who will fuck with you there. The communities don't support them; in fact, on the west side (where I live), they put up signs on every block saying they want to chase those people away.
Ask people who bike from the loop to Oak Park if they've ever been fucked with in Lawndale. I have a friend who was ambushed and knocked off his bike right by Garfield Park.
I have never been mugged in Lakeview. I have been mugged in Austin.
Dangerous neighborhoods aren't a classist myth. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that part of "respecting" the poorer neighborhoods is not pretending like you can walk in front of a crowd of young men hanging out on a corner as if you have just as much a right to be there as they do.
I think the truth is somewhere between your guys' position. There is a very real statistical difference between the crime rates between neighborhoods. But its also true that the actual incident rate is much exaggerated by the media and perceptions of neighborhood differences are greater than reality.
One thing that is for sure, young black teens/men have a much, much more dangerous time of it, regardless of neighborhood than anyone else, and that is tragic.
And while we are adding anecdotes to the thread, I've lived in a "bad" neighborhood on Chicago's South Side for over a decade and I've never had a single violent incident (property crime has occurred). In that same span I was attacked in Lincoln Park and Streeterville, and had an attempted bicycle incident near McCormick Place.
I routinely walk in front of crowds of young men hanging on corners (its daily for me as I pass by a couple of schools) and have never had an incident (and I in fact know many of those young men). But there are also neighborhoods less than a mile away where I would not be comfortable doing that.
> have never had an incident (and I in fact know many of those young men)
You don't think those two things might be related?
> But its also true that the actual incident rate is much exaggerated by the media and perceptions of neighborhood differences are greater than reality.
"Reality" is a tricky concept here. Public (out-of-neighborhood) perception of risk will depress the incident rate by keeping victims out of the area. If you magically caused people to believe that the risk was at some level that you felt reflected the current incident rate, and the incident rate rose because people started going where they shouldn't have, whose beliefs were more accurate?
People don't really care about "how often do muggings take place in this neighborhood?". They care about "if I go in there, am I going to get mugged?".
a thousand times this. I've lived in Wrigleyville, Lincoln Park, Jeff Park, Wicker Park (almost humboldt, probably technically humboldt). Worked all across the south side. Worked downtown at a coffee kiosk. The places I've felt most unsafe were Wrigley during/after cubs game and downtown after the blackhawks won. I've been assaulted both ways.
> I've come to the conclusion that part of "respecting" the poorer neighborhoods is not pretending like you can walk in front of a crowd of young men hanging out on a corner as if you have just as much a right to be there as they do.
Well this is part of what I mean by treating people respectfully. As an outsider I always respected that the locals "owned" the neighborhood. You have to be cognizant of the local culture and try not to clash with it.
Any neighborhood can be "dangerous". I'm pretty sure you're more likely to get in a car wreck in the suburbs than mugged in the inner city. Just as you have to practice safe driving in the suburbs, you have to be careful of different things in the inner city.
>"respecting" the poorer neighborhoods is not pretending like you can walk in front of a crowd of young men hanging out on a corner as if you have just as much a right to be there as they do
interesting that this is the same social dynamic that police create in less poor neighborhoods, almost as if the poorer areas were filling some sort of tribal, no-outsiders-aloud enforcement role that the police generally fill, but have neglected these areas.
> If you are born on the right side of the tracks, it's a great place. If you aren't, well, good luck.
And I'd regard that as a total failure. It's sad. It was the new land and here we are thanks to the lack of land value tax with the very rich and a large underclass with little social mobility.
It seems that way, but... it's not. I don't have any real data or concrete thoughts on why, but in general I much prefer some chaos and the potential for change to a whole bunch of stability bordering on stagnation even if it seems like a big hot mess. Don't believe the messy hype :P
Between 15.5 and 40, pulled over for no apparent reason at
least 20 times. I'm giving them the benefit of memory with the number. I was guilty of driving an older car, hair slightly below my ears, and the ultimate sin; driving after 10 p.m. Friday-Saturday.
Told to empty out my pockets because I was talking to a homlessness person.
At least three tickets, where I honestly didn't know what law I broke. I once kindly asked the officer to diagram what I did wrong. He did and even initialed it. Street wrong, wrong color car. He didn't show up n court. (Highway Patrol harldy ever shows up, and they are well coached. Local cops will always show up--there's not much to do in the burbs.)
Watch my dad get out of a DUI, because he as giving a get out of jail card. His buddy gave him his detective's business card, with some scribbling on back.
Done Coke at two different parties, and the supplier were both in law enforcement. Great Coke--I guess? (I was much younger, and honestly, really didn't even like the Coke effects. I think I was drinking too much at the party? I'm no angel.)
In college, I worked as a life guard. The lonely Sherriff would hang with us. He would leave a party if mariguana was in the air, but would get stinky drunk, and drive us around. When we got pulled over, he would Just pull out the Bagde. Yes--I went along. Never like the hypocracy of the dude.
Watched a Francisco cop drive my high school sister, and her model friend to the north side of the bridge, actually they escorted her. They allowed her to drive drunk. One then asked for her phone number. Yes--it's great they didn't ticket/arrest her, but only because she was young, and attractive.
Listen to my dad complain about his cop best friend who just played chess in the basement of the corner building. My dad thought they should be out cruising for the bad guys. I asked my father, "Wouldn't you rather them playing chess, over looking for cheezy tickets?" Father, "Well yes." (I see nothing wrong with doing nothing while on shift, especially in low crime areas. And I don't expect cops to risk their lives. Honestly.)
What has this thought me; buy two cheap dash cams from China. $15 a piece. Just don't drive certain nights. If you are going to go to the evil bar/hootenanny, buy a $19 breath analyzer at Costco.
I can't imagine what minorites have been through, as I am a white dude. Am I an angel--hell no. I guess I'm just unlucky? When I was younger, I honestly didn't think slightly longer hair, and a VW would equate with being harassed, but it did. Do I get harrrased as much now--no. I don't go out like I did, and I drive a car that's inconspicuous, with no bumper stickers. I once put a Police Officers Association sticker on my rear window; trying to invoke reverse psychology. Well it just bought in a red brick.
Do I see people being treated like they had no rights--hell yes, more than ever. The image of a women being forced to empty her purse because she was sitting on the sidewalk is my latest imprint. She was bum rushed by five cops, and a particularly eager female cop whom frisked her too agressively. They left her alone after finding nothing suspicious in her purse, but took her picture. Love to take those pictures?
Again I know they have a tough job, but don't make up tickets. Get to know the law--other than on the job. Oh yea, we all don't get roaring drunk when we go out? You might, but most of us don't. We are not, "Just like you on our days off?". As to the danger of the job; I do morn the death of an honest cop, but actually deaths are higher in construction/taxi cab drivers.
I guess what I'm trying to say is don't stereotype, and make up drama. I'm wondering if I'll live to see the day where I don't cringe when a cruiser is behind me? Done!
Yes, this, as simple as this. This isn't a rogue "bad cop" - it's systemic, criminal abuse of power, and the very reason we have separation of powers - so this kind of activity can be checked all the way back to its origins.
Which is pretty much the origin of my disillusionment, since it isn't happening at all, in the face of red-handed evidence.
What's the bar for 'at all'? People seem to speak (at least relatively) favorably of the new policing situation in Camden, the old department was disbanded:
I see no mention of systemic checks and balances or corruption investigation further than a couple of bad actors. So yeah cover it up replace it with something hopefully less corrupt, but not what needs to happen to prevent it from happening again.
I see the "federal investigation" as a systemic action, and I don't really see how disbanding the old department is a cover up, it's a pretty real consequence.
But if we today have a situation where only egregious problems get attention, we should probably not mistake that for a situation where no problems get attention, because it's likely that the latter would be far worse.
There's also the opportunity to look for good outcomes and try to replicate them, rather than coming up with brand new solutions.
This can't be upvoted enough. You're right. The police are protected by their dependent partners, the prosecutors. Anyone who does this should at the very least be prosecuted for one of the following:
1. Interfering with a police officer
2. Obstruction of justice
3. Destruction of property
Ask yourself why they aren't? Is it the police union? Is it a true explicit conspiracy?
What world we we live in that people get 3 days suspension for breaking a recording device their management put in?
Can you do this to the cameras at your work location?
The prosecutors and the officers they're charging may be drinking buddies, or at least have collaborated professionally before. Prosecutors may also fear other officers being unhelpful in the future to the person who charged the latters' buddy.
The prosecutor may also fear having to open every case that officer was involved in to retrial. The prosecutor, themselves, may have logged those cases as wins.
In the end, the system will never work unless an independent prosecutor, with the power to investigate and bring charges, exists for police crimes.
This right here is it -- the DA's and state's attorney's career advancement is tied to winning cases, and there is no better way to win a case than having the PD on your side.
PDs that curry favor from their judicial counterparts get freedom from oversight.
Both feed off of each-other, especially when confessions and plea bargains are the norm -- PDs coerce confessions and prosecutors coerce plea bargains, and justice remains un-served.
Another poster already alluded to the point, but I'd like to make it explicit: if you believe Chicago is exceptional in this, you are wrong. The NYPD is almost as bad (as far as we know, the NYPD doesn't have an off-the-books torture chamber[1], rather preferring to sodomize arrestees with brooms in the regular jails on a more ad hoc basis).
But just as life-destroying are the things that go on in smaller communities, where talking about conspiracy is just as valid, but the stakes, departments and communities are smaller, so it doesn't get as much attention. I know from personal experience that small town cops can be just as awful, and power structures in small towns don't get the same push back as they do in larger places.
I'm pretty sure we are seeing the beginnings of a sea change here.
Citizen surveillance tech has reached the point that the behavior of police can't be ignored any more, and the disconnect between law, policy preferences and "rough justice" as actually practiced is shocking to people who lived comfortable enough lives to not notice before[2].
Prosecutors and especially judges, always slow to change when change makes their jobs harder, will take longer to get used to the notion that wink-and-nod isn't going to work any more. Police unions are going to lose this fight, especially as activists are starting to become savvy to the tactical advantage of splitting Republicans between law and order fears and union busters.
The result, at least hopefully, will be police that, if not actually part of the community again, are not able to function as the biggest gang around with legal cover.[3]
[2] Not casting any aspirations there; we all pick and choose where our outrage lands to some extent, I'm just as oblivious to some injustices as other people are to this. It is simply human nature to worry about things closer to one's self.
[3] Not all police, some of them are very good at what they do, etc. At least we can retire the "few bad apples" deflection.
The worst part of the "few bad apples" deflection is that when used, everyone is dropping the second part of that idiom. It's "a few bad apples spoil the bunch|barrel"
I don't see a lot of people on the left supporting police unions just because they're unions. Some will support their right to unionize but none of the subsequent behaviour from police unions. You can't really split the left in a significant way on this.
> rosecutors and especially judges, always slow to change when change makes their jobs harder, will take longer to get used to the notion that wink-and-nod isn't going to work any more. Police unions are going to lose this fight, especially as activists are starting to become savvy to the tactical advantage of splitting Republicans between law and order fears and union busters.
I'm optimistic. State budgets are such a mess that the police unions are going to get hit hard from both sides. Young families on one hand, when police pensions start cutting into education, and fiscal conservatives on the other, who will relish the opportunity to take out public unions. The Illinois that rises out of the ashes of bankruptcy might look a lot better.
Most state laws don't allow police departments to keep the proceeds of forfeitures under state law, and the policies around local agencies doing federal-law forfeitures which do allow the agencies to keep proceeds have been narrowed recently because of concerns of inappropriate use.
Chicago might be notorious for high murder rates, crime, and corrupt government, but I would be shocked if this weren't happening in other areas across the country.
Absolutely, but also look at the higher level- The snowden revelations showed a treasonous level of criminal activity at the highest levels of government.
So, of course, Snowden is the bad guy and no charges have been filed against the perpetrators of the crimes.
The police forces in most of America have become a magnet for sociopaths and bullies. There is such a deeply held belief and culture of covering up wrongdoing by fellow officers that it provides a safe space for the absolute worst behavior humanity has to offer. And, because there is still a strongly held belief among most of the nation that, "most cops are good" or even that most cops are downright heroic, that to question or criticize police is to put a target on your back.
A number of my friends are anti-police brutality activists (a few relatively well-known nationwide for it, but all are known by name by many in the local and state PD), and they have quite long arrest records; all bullshit charges, none of which stuck, but all part of a campaign by the police to make their lives miserable. One "accidentally" had his head smacked into a marble floor, hard enough to cause a concussion and a pool a blood on the floor and a night at the hospital, while he was passively filming police at an unrelated protest.
This is not restricted to Chicago, though Chicago seems to be quite far advanced on the path to being the worst.
In short: I don't know what should replace police in the US, but drastic change is needed. Not merely reform; the whole damned system needs to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch. The prison industrial complex, of which police are the front line foot soldiers, is a national disgrace.
We need badge-equivalent cameras. What I mean is that we need to make cameras work the same way as badges and uniforms, in the sense that you just can't do police work if you don't have a working camera. A working camera has a red light on it which means that it is currently streaming (possibly buffering if temporarily out of wireless range).
The police don't have to record anything, they just need to stream somewhere with associated meta data. NGOs will come forward to read the streams and save them.
I understand it will be hard to get unions to agree to this and I don't have a solution, but I'm minded of the reforms made to policing in Northern Ireland as a success story.
you just can't do police work if you don't have a working camera
This is already becoming the policy in many forward thinking agencies.
they just need to stream somewhere with associated meta data
There are real challenges, both technical and practical. Technically, you've got to worry about connectivity and battery life. Practically, somebody has to pay for it all! There's also many genuine use cases for turning off cameras during a shift, not the least of which is that officers have to use the bathroom just like the rest of us, but others like when talking to confidential informants or at the request of domestic abuse victims. None of these problems are insurmountable, but it's going to take time, energy, and money.
I understand it will be hard to get unions to agree to this
That was true a few years ago, but now it's becoming very clear that the majority of decent officers want body cameras. They protect them individually and taxpayers against an endless stream of lawsuits. Google around: studies show that they work, very well, for reducing complaints and use-of-force incidents.
Disclaimer: I work on Axon body cameras in Seattle. If you (or anybody else!) are interested in writing code that will help put a camera and less-leathal weapon on every police officer, please email me: brandon@evidence.com
Thanks, that actually made me feel more optimistic about it, although I hadn't thought of the issues you raise. Keeping a camera charged and working shouldn't be harder than other maintenance already needed such as keeping a firearm clean or keeping a car on the road. If we refine the condition to "you can't appear in public or interact with the public without your camera" then the bathroom problem goes away. Connectivity and confidentiality are harder problems. Confidentiality in particular if it's the case that that's also where a lot of the corruption is.
There will be no singular panacea for corruption. However, I'd rather put a camera on every officer on their own terms now, rather than pray for them to magically cooperate with some all-or-nothing plan in the future. If nothing else, it will make a strict plan easier to move to later.
This is interesting. Normally police departments claim they have few ways to catch corrupt police. And I think there is more than a little truth to that. However, in this case the article shows that corrupt police are revealing themselves through the practice of destroying equipment. This could be an indicator that acts as a "canary" for police corruption! If police departments appropriately monitored such indicators, they may be on verge of discovering an easy method to spot criminal police officers before they do the damage to society.
Of course, if the police do stuff like this: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/07/leaked-police... it is unlikely they are willing to take responsibility for enforcement. Rarely does enforcement happen without oversight. By hiding police records they protect themselves, the police department leaders. We should, however, be able to do better. Public records, paid for by the public, are easily considered public property. I think courts could handle this.
There is no national body that oversees police, but Chicago has the Independent Police Review Authority. However IPRA rarely upholds complaints against police (it's staffed by ex-cops and other people connected to the police), and recently an investigator was fired after finding a shooting unjustified[1].
If you're interested in other things IPRA 'investigates', some people have FOIA'ed Chicago police misconduct complaints and created visualizations based on the data[1].
Devils advocate but wouldn't they investigate every shooting incident, so you'd expect the vast majority to be clean.
I know every discharged weapon in the UK is followed by immediate officer suspension and investigation, and I suspect very few are actually ruled as bad and rightly so.
We have a national body. It's called the citizenry. But, sadly, few people are rising up because it isn't happening in their back yard, or to their children.
Sure there will be comment threads on HN or some Facebook liking, but these are weak responses, and without more, change will come very slowly, and in the meantime thousands more will be trampled on, abused, violated or murdered.
The majority of people who are rising up are only the marginalized people who are the primary victims of police abuse and injustice. All you have to do is look on Twitter and look at the color of people who do the most tweeting about police injustice.
There is no way this would or could continue if a significant amount of the privileged population rose up.
Has this been proposed at all?
Is there anything weird about american policing/law that would mean a national, federal agency wouldn't be able to take on this role?
It would be unconstitutional for the Congress to pass laws taking full oversight of state and local police (it's not one of the Congress's enumerated powers, and per the Tenth Amendment 'The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.').
Sometimes police are found to have violated federal civil-rights law, but that is a bit of a sketchy backdoor.
The Right Thing would be for each state to create such a commission, and for the Congress to create one for federal law-enforcement agencies.
Actually, ensuring that states provide equal protection of the laws to all persons, that states do not deprive persons of life, liberty, or property without due process, and that states do not abridge the privileges and immunities of US citizens is an enumerated power of Congress; see the Fourteenth Amendment, particularly sections 1 and 5.
You make a good point. I suppose one might be able to justify such a commission on that basis (although that itself indicates the problem with the post-Civil War order).
It can be done. The DOJ does this on a case-by-case basis. And FBI has jurisdiction to investigate some of these things. Bernie Sanders has suggested requiring all police killings to be investigated.
Most Constitutional rights extend to people against the states. So if your civil rights (due process, etc) have been violated, it's against federal law.
It's problematic to expect relief for any but the worst abuses from FBI or indeed from any part of DoJ. They're all cops, and they're not going to be eager to police other cops. A more effective organization would be completely separate, and probably staffed by attorneys who had never served as prosecutors.
It would be difficult (maybe impossible?) to do given the US's Federal system of dividing powers between State governments and the National government. The Federal Department of Justice investigates, but the only power they have is to sue local police departments in court and make them agree to stop their unlawful behaviour.
The US Department of Justice does some of this. They sue for civil rights violations, often resulting in a "consent decree" where they either take over the police department or place them under a variety of restrictions.
This would be much easier to implement at the state level. Aside from a few specific instances with the DOJ such as the consent decree mentioned elsewhere, the federal government does not have any authority over local police departments such that it can do much of anything.
Part of what stops police from routinely infringing civil rights in the pursuit of justice is the legal doctrine that evidence obtained illegally is inadmissible, as is all evidence gained from further (lawful) investigation based on that evidence [1]. what is needed is a law that operates in a similar way, that states that in any lawsuit or complaint against the police, there is a presumption of guilt on the part of the police officer in the event of 'malfunction' of monitoring devices. The only way to make the police comply is to make it in their self-interest (or at least in the interests of the city that would regularly have to pay out presumptive damages) to make sure they are working.
> ...or at least in the interests of the city that would regularly have to pay out presumptive damages...
Key challenge with this strategy is the big latency between paying out damages and consequences for the police officer or even department. The bigger the metro, the bigger the latency. Large metro budgets can temporarily cover for the few million dollar payouts that happen to make the daunting gauntlet all the way through to a final, no-appeal judicial judgement, even a few every 3-5 years over a long, long period of time. There is a natural impedance in metro political circles to "protect" the police unless an incident is sufficiently egregious.
I'm believe this adverse behavior pattern won't stop until a legal concept similar to the corporate veil is established for police officers (all the way up to and including police chiefs). Some kind of legal doctrine that spells out when certain conditions are met, individual officers must be deprived of city and departmental support; their "blue veil" so to speak is "pierced". They can still obtain support from private sources like the union, but they are on as much the same footing as a civilian as can be legally established. As a society we can hash out what those conditions are. Some might argue just destroyed dashcam data is sufficient. Others might argue for a much, much higher bar.
> Although the Constitution of the United States does not cite it explicitly, presumption of innocence is widely held to follow from the 5th, 6th, and 14th amendments. See also Coffin v. United States and In re Winship. [0]
One does not sign away Constitutional rights because they become a police officer.
What if consequences based on the presumption of guilt where limited to immediate termination and being placed on a list barring the accused from working as a police officer in the future? Is presumption of guilt allowed if there are no criminal penalties?
Then just make it an 'administrative ruling' so that the Constitution no longer applies. That is all the fad with prosecutors these days (same reason being put on the SO registry can be retroactively applied/extended without it violating ex post facto laws).
"Presumption of guilt" - that's not going to fly is it?
I think the selective absence of evidence where it would normally exist is something that a jury (or investigating organization) should consider within the totality of the evidence presented. That way we can go start from a point of innocence and work our way through.
Why are there options to turn the audio off anyway? In the grand scheme of things what you are trying to protect by turning off audio is likely much less important than the criminal behavior that is coming under scrutiny.
"turning off" might be accomplished by something like breaking or unplugging the mic, or hiding it in the glove box (as was listed in the article). You are giving the officers unrestricted access to these vehicles for large segments of time; there's basically no way to physically prevent them from messing with the equipment, especially if there are no consequences for doing so.
> The only way to make the police comply is to make it in their self-interest (or at least in the interests of the city that would regularly have to pay out presumptive damages) to make sure they are working.
Part of the problem is that it becomes the cost of doing business for a city. What should happen is that the individual should have to pay those multi million dollar fines out of pocket. Of course, the people who are suing for money know that they'll get more money if they sue the city.
The city should budget an amount for each year in payouts. Start with the average amounts over the past 5-10 years plus 10%. When all of the complaints for that year have been settled, anything left goes out to the department as bonuses.
We've got sticks that don't seem to be working. Let's throw some carrots in as well.
As I argued elsewhere here, I believe a stronger incentive would be to come after pay and pensions for police units whose officers have cost the municipality millions in lawsuits. Instead of friends and coworkers trying to protect each other for abuses of power, they will instead take on the role of protecting their families' livelihood. You would be less likely to abuse your authority if your entire department and their retired friends are more incentivized to distance themselves from you than to cover you up.
While your idea sounds great in theory, what I believe would happen would be a stronger blue wall of science. They wouldn't report anything and would side with their own as not doing so could risk their family livelihood. IMO, a better solution would be to require officers to pay their own liability insurance, similar to medical malpractice. Let an indep 3rd party set rates, then you can price out the worst officers and the payouts come from the 3rd party and not the tax payers. Then the officers would want the bodycams as they would protect them. Imagine if a doctor did something wrong and said, oh whops, i guess the patients chart disappeared. They would be uninsurable after that point, same with a cop.
Wow, great idea. Probably even better than mine. The only problem I can point out is that over time budget increases (for they always increase) could be partially set aside to bury the insurance cost and effectively shield the department from the damage of higher premiums.
awesome idea, kind of similar to the idea that financial market firms were much more prudent when they were partnerships, whose top members had most of their self-worth tied up in that company. Once outside shareholders owned the stock, it made it much more sensible to make big bets, if you win you get a huge bonus, if not, they cant take away all the money you made in previous years.
Glad you agree. I think there are plenty of good suggestions for police reform, but I can see how things like body cameras can descend into messy micromanagement (what's a minimum uptime? What are the penalties? What about mistakes?).
Make bad behavior a huge disincentive and police departments will largely sort themselves out. If they are empowered to make their own decisions as to how to do so, they will be more willing to adapt. At the moment there is huge pushback from the public about police abuse, and cops are understandably frustrated by a public - that doesn't go into harm's way on a daily basis - trying to tell them how to do their jobs.
They already do. Bystander cameras, CCTVs, even witness reports have done a great deal to secure absurd amounts of taxpayer money for police brutality lawsuits.
I still think we should have body cameras, but the primary focus should be better policing, not camera compliance alone.
They do on extremely rare occasions, but it is clear that the level of misconduct is far higher than is ever prosecuted.
On the subject of camera compliance - if an officer deliberately evades camera compliance, as a huge proportion do, we have clear evidence that that officer believes they do not have to follow policies and procedures in general. That is corruption.
While this might provide incentive to comply, making individual occurrences more rare, I think it would also provide greater incentive to cover up abuse once it has already occurred.
It depends on who gets punished. If nobody but crooked cops can be proven to have covered up a crime, then only they are punished. But like murder and possession of child pornography, knowledge of someone's criminal act legally complies the observer to turn that person in or they will be charged with conspiracy.
You can cover up one or two crimes but not all of them. Eventually things get found out. You could help someone get away with something once, but if it's ever found out, you could potentially be charged with everything your buddy is up for, go to prison, and come out broke and jobless.
But the only public protests I hear about these things are from #BlackLivesMatter people. And when pursuing it from their perspective, it gets treated as a racism problem rather than a problem of institutional power being out of balance. We can't look at how the police routinely abuse power when we've got the lens focusing on how the police abuse black people.
(Lest I be accused of racism and/or insensitivity: yes, racism adds another dimension to the problem. But I think that a proper solution to the broader problem would also serve to curtail race-related abuses. Yet it seems impossible to suggest this in public discourse without being attacked by SJWs.)
Thank you. People think they're doing double advocacy by tying the issue to race. What they're really doing is framing the issue in a way that makes it seem completely irrelevant to the median self-absorbed voter.
The US Department of Justice can investigate local police departments.
They have investigated several of the local departments that have been in the US national news in recent years, with some actual improvements coming out of the investigations.
The curious thing is that police-forces are paid for by state and local taxes. Why is no one advocating cutting their funding until come into compliance with certain higher standards?
So what you are telling me is that the people are being represented by who they elect. If the people want hard on crime to the point of violating civil rights and they get what they want, what is the issue? That a minority has to suffer because of the will of the majority... that is an inherent issue with democracy.
Isn't there a quote that goes something like: People are ruled by the government they deserve.
That might be true if you ignore the distorting effects of propaganda. What the people want, and what they can be made to believe they want through targeted media campaigns selling lies are not the same thing. Small groups with money can have out sized influence that distorts democracy in the short and medium term.
Go after pensions and overtime pay (for bs like court appearances) to compensate for lawsuits and the costs to society (hospital treatment to abused citizens) instead of regular day-to-day funds and you can hardly be called soft on crime. I think the more accurate term is "fiscally conservative."
The opposition can easily spin the union as being soft-er on crime. Cop-on-civilian crime is still crime.
If perception is all that counts in politics (and it is), use the opportunity to smear everyone connected to crooked cops, especially politicians. Use language like "state-sponsored murder" to rile up state-skeptical conservatives, who provide most of the police union support. If you have connections to the press, run stories like "Could Your Mayor Kill You (And Get Away With It)?" or if you're buzzfeed, "6 Ways Your Mayor Could Kill You (And Get Away With It)" or even "Your City's Death Squad (And The Lawyers Who Help With Murder)"
Make people afraid for their lives and angry of the administration and it will put the administration on the defensive, which weakens the "soft on crime" tactic considerably. Once you've tapped into emotional reaction, it's hard to steer the brain back to logic.
Because if we do that the police become more susceptible to bribery. We can't simply punish whole departments for individual conduct. What we have to do is catch individual cops breaking their cameras and then fire them.
A big part of the problem is our system is set up to favor the governent-- when there's a trial, the judge, the prosecutor, the cops (who handle and control all the evidence) the lab (many scandals in the past 40 years about fraudulent lab work) all work for the government. Even your lawyer is compromised by not being allowed to make certain arguments and the risk of offending the judge (Who there will be future cases before.) The jury are given blatantly tampering instructions from the judge, eliminating much of the value of an independent jury system.
So, who is going to try cops when they are corrupt?
By what mechanism can we the people enforce the law on our own government?
It seems silly to go before our own government and beg for them to obey their own laws.
Sometimes we get lucky- like gay marriage- but how many decades did that take? It was 1980s when the supreme court ruled that sodomy could be criminalized on the basis of "a thousand years of christian tradition" (namely NOT on the basis of the constitution.)
So of course, we will continue to see more and more corruption until like AIDS is now, and the wars overseas -- the news simply stops reporting about it, because it has become the background noise of the society we live in.
That's going the wrong direction.
I'm far more afraid of being killed by a random cop than I am by Walmart or anything in walmart. They all have an incentive to keep me safe so I'll keep buying. They would face consequences (not even criminal, just market consequences) if they were killing people.
Cops on the other hand, they get away with it. And blatantly do day in and day out.
I do not understand how these cannot be made idiot proof and cop proof. You can buy the simplest dash cams from China that record HD video and sound that take mere minutes to set up for under a hundred bucks. The first step needs to mandate a tamper proof system and disabling of any police car from leaving they yard unless the device passes on all tests. Then it should be required to report periodically to a central location if it is working and if not the officer can be directed to obtain a new car. Any device found damaged or tampered with should be a federal offense and investigated by the FBI.
As in, those given the ultimate responsibility should be held the most strict standard. Don't like it, get out.
I'm sorry but this is hoplessly naive. It's Chicago. One of the most historically corrupt machine governments in the USA. Nothing gets done without dozens of people getting paid off if not in cash than in favors or quid pro quo. It's not even something that people on the inside find unusual. It's just how it is, and always has been.
It's a much bigger problem than just mandating tamper-proof cameras.
This is why I state, these items must be tamper proof and back by regulations and laws. Likely all this must be at the federal level and it become a crime on the federal level to tamper with them.
So you make it nearly impossible to break/tamper without trying and its a federal offense to do so. Simple.
Who is buying the cameras? Who is installing the cameras? Who is determining if they are tampered with? Who is making the laws concerning the cameras? Chicago city politicians or employees. All of whom are being paid and influenced to do do their jobs in a way that favors the right people.
You seem to be suggesting a federal takeover of the Chicago police department -- a city whose mayor is the former chief of staff of the president, who himself is a Chicagoan. Good luck with that.
Think of how easy it is to spin that politically. "Why did crime rates go up? Because 20% of our patrol officers were stuck in a garage waiting for camera techs at any given time."
Also remember that many American cities finances are in a shambles (and Chicago is a prime example). Hiring enough techs or more officers to make up the difference your rules will require is simply not an option.
I don't disagree with the sentiment, and I hope federal law starts to treat police camera tampering as a major offense, but there is not an easy technical fix to the problem.
The spin on the other side would be just as intuitive: "Our police officers are more concerned with getting away with abuse of power than following the law they're supposed to enforce, and as a result, tens (to hundreds) of millions in taxpayer money is being spent on lawsuit payouts, essentially a bailout for bad behavior."
While I agree that cameras should be required and intentional tampering a crime, I think behaviors would change much more quickly if laws were put in place to dock pensions and pay across the board to compensate for lawsuits of wrongful death and the like. Suddenly the "blue wall of silence" would become a very vocal supporter of police reform to identify and get rid of bad apples that threaten everybody's pension. Incentives are very powerful tools for changing behavior, much more powerful than blanket force by bodycam laws.
> "blue wall of silence" would become a very vocal supporter of police reform to identify and get rid of bad apples that threaten everybody's pension
This sounds like collective punishment - don't know about America, but over here, it would be not possible due to human rights treaties and legislation. The trade union or police would challenge this in a court and government would back down from such threats immediately.
(Hey, even cops are human. Especially they are human. So even they have human rights.)
It depends on how you define the law. It could simply be a state or federal resolution that cuts funding to a municipality, regardless of where the money goes. So if money for roads and hospitals goes to pay for the misdeeds of bad cops and the administration takes no action, how will voters respond in the next election cycle?
I've been on a ride-along with my suburban, middle-America department. The guy had to put clip the wireless mic to his shirt, make sure the antenna was oriented and power it on at go time to save battery. I don't know if there's newer tech that had more of a promise of being able to be made fool-proof from human error much less willful defeat.
Yeah, just install smartphone technology behind the windscreen; always on, always connected, and can be monitored remotely. Software on there can deal with spotty connection, too - keep recording if connectivity is lost.
And of course make any intentional damage to the things come out of the police officer's own pockets.
These steps may be necessary, but how much of their behavior will change? And at what cost? Maybe it is time to evaluate training methods, hire people who have more empathy for powerful positions like police?
"
“How they determine that it’s purposely caused damages, I’d like to know,” Angelo said last month. “How they can figure out what is mechanical or what is human error, I’d like to know.”"
Yeah, i mean how could you possibly tell whether it was human error for things like "wires cut with diagonal cutters".
If the officers are so worried, they could do something fairly simple. They could take a cell phone video of what's going on when they try to turn on the audio!
To be fair, Angelo's job (head of the local union) is to protect and advocate for the officers. Yes, he sounds completely ridiculous, but he can't come out and say "yup, they broke the dashcams."
(In no way do I mean to imply he is correct, or that the system isn't completely broken.)
This is what some of us feared with the push for police bodycams, that they will eventually use the evidence only when it suits the police, but not anyone else, which could generally be even worse than not having the video at all. The footage should be required to be uploaded to a federal agency's cloud every 24h.
And now some states are even giving the police permission to do that:
This is why Larry Lessig has been so right about the need to fix democracy first. As long as that isn't fixed first, the corrupt systems will always infect even the best ideas and policies that manage to pass at the federal or state level. You need proper democracy so people can easily throw out leaders who side with those with power and protect them.
Doing a ctrl-F for "emanuel" or "daley" in this comment section produced zero results, which is unfortunately rather telling.
Chicago has been run by the same political party since 1931. If the police are this bad and you keep re-electing the people running the city anyway, you are part of the problem. Throw the bastards out, don't just grump on message boards and then keep obediently pulling the same lever in the voting booth where it counts.
There are no good choices. The challengers are generally people who have heard that Chicago/Illinois are great places to feed. In Chicago, there's The Machine: a system for raising large numbers of votes for Duh Mare's candidates from people who don't care who wins, they just want their Alderman to respond to their phone calls. Outsiders like Blagojevich and Rauner at the state level are just as awful.
The amount of Republican pond scum that Illinois has had to deal with easily compares to the amount of Democratic pond scum that it has had to deal with, it's just a matter of upstate/downstate/collar counties preference which scumbag you vote for. They're all ultimately friends anyway; I think Emanuel once worked for Rauner.
Daley in particular was quite a piece of work - particularly in closing out his time in office with the parking meter giveaway. I can't help but wonder what kind of kickback evidence to he and his family we'd find if anyone were actually to do a real investigation of it.
The real kicker is that if the city removes parking spaces temporarily or permanently, it must compensate the private vendor for the lost revenue. That makes sense, but when you throw in that it's a 75-year deal it starts to get a little murkier - want a bike lane? Better budget for the next 70 years of paying the vendor for the parking revenue for any removed spaces (and how is that calculated? Does it get recalculated every year? Is it based on nearby comparable areas or on fixed utilization percentages that don't account for changes in driving patterns and neighborhoods over time?)
I strongly suspect that given changes in how people drive, etc. that by the end of the 75-year agreement Chicago will have ended up paying more in penalties to the vendor than they got in the first place, even indexed for inflation.
Though I agree that this behavior is reprehensible and probably criminal, the comments here seem to miss at least some of the human dynamic here.
I can't hardly imagine that most people posting here would ever consider a job where literally every word or sound that came out of their mouth during their entire working life was recorded, and likely subject to public disclosure. Saying that this is what cops signed up for is not a compelling counter argument either, as this is new and most of the cops in question didn't sign up to work in an environment like that at all.
It seems odd to be even somewhat defending Chicago cops but someone should point out that there are two sides to this.
I also don't work at a job where I am legally empowered by the state to kill people. Extraordinary power requires extraordinary checks and balances. Our country has erred in giving these people extraordinary power with virtually zero checks and balances, and the result has been a steady stream of murders committed by these state agents against marginalized populations. These monitoring devices, and laws that should be implemented making it criminal to damage or disable them, are a tiny, tiny move in the right direction of limiting the insane excesses of police power.
Also, I don't really give a shit what the murderers in the CPD and their blue wall of silence accomplices want or signed up for at this point.
>I can't hardly imagine that most people posting here would ever consider a job where literally every word or sound that came out of their mouth during their entire working life was recorded, and likely subject to public disclosure.
Well, if by "entire working life" you mean "every time they go in patrol or are on a call" then yes. Nobody is interested in their water cooler talks.
>Saying that this is what cops signed up for is not a compelling counter argument either, as this is new and most of the cops in question didn't sign up to work in an environment like that at all.
Then maybe they should not let the door hit them on their way out?
>Well, if by "entire working life" you mean "every time they go in patrol or are on a call" then yes. Nobody is interested in their water cooler talks.
I may be off base here, but cops seem to be on patrol for almost their entire shift.
We trust cops to protect the weak, to wield and use firearms, and to enforce our laws. This puts them in a tremendous position to abuse their power.
The recording devices were installed precisely because abuses of power and criminal activity were already a big problem. The thugs destroyed the recording devices because they want to continue abusing their power, period.
For an honest cop, the recordings offer proof of proper conduct. In the setting of lethal force, the truth is very important. If I follow protocol and shoot someone, I hope there is a video showing that I followed the playbook perfectly.
I've been bullied by cops a few times. Their job is tough, but it strikes me as odd that they bully someone like me, an obviously harmless, non-criminal.
The difference between citizen and cop surveillance is that a citizen should be protected from bullying, blackmail, etc. by the government or other citizens over private actions. A cop should do his or her job exactly as prescribed.
As the other person who replied points out, it's very different for a trusted government official and a private citizen. The official gives up his/her right to privacy when acting in the role of public enforcer of laws...
Cops are trained to establish control of a situation by being unfriendly, authoritative, and uncompromising. It could come across as bullying if you don't know what's going on.
Maybe we should be training them to be friendly, authoritative and reasonable instead. You don't need to be an asshole to exert control; in fact it's much easier to do so if you aren't.
I don't think you know anything about controlling a situation when you're in the presence of thugs and criminals. All of these people who have no idea of what it's like to be a police officer sitting here being critics and armchair psychologists is just really tiring.
Fair point. What I do know is that I'm a lot less scary to harass than actual thugs and criminals. They should do their job and fight crime, not flex their muscles around non-criminals.
> I can't hardly imagine that most people posting here would ever consider a job where literally every word or sound that came out of their mouth during their entire working life was recorded.
The working life for most hackers is rather privileged, so perhaps most people reading this would not care for such working conditions.
However, more and more "blue-collar" jobs are conducted under similar conditions. 100% surveillance on video. Audio recording. Recording all the calls you take or make in a call centre. Recording when you take bathroom breaks and when you are at your station.
Nanny-cams for cleaners, health-care providers and (well of course) child care providers in private homes. It goes on and on, but if you step outside of our cozy little tech community, you find that people are treated just like any other cog in a machine, which means they are instrumented and monitored at all times.
If I log into client infrastructure at my job (large corp), my activities are monitored. Audits are always kept of mission-critical data, and access to it closely watched. I wouldn't be surprised if my work machine contained software to monitor various aspects of my work. Frankly, I wouldn't want it any other way - as developers, we can do a lot of very expensive damage, and those logs are a way of proving you conducted yourself like a professional at all times.
Maybe this isn't common in SV, but if you work for a large organization who needs to be able to answer a client when they ask 'what happened at x on y', you better believe things are in place to make it happen.
I don't believe it's unreasonable to expect the same from police.
Being a police officer isn't exactly like other jobs. You are granted powers (killing, detainment, seizure, trespass) which are forbidden to any other citizen. You want to be special, you can deal with a nannycam.
Most cops don't sign up to do what they end up doing. Having been on a few ride-alongs, and knowing a few cops personally, my impression is that the job is much more paperwork than it is actively saving the community from the bad guys. I'm not belittling the importance of paperwork, mind you, it's just that cop work, just like every other kind of work, is not like TV.
These reforms don't happen overnight. The city council, the police chief, the mayor, the police union, the prosecutor's office, the governor -- they've debated and discussed dashcams for a long period of time, because it's not just about policy, but also effectively implementing it, with all the speed that most government contractor work happens at. These reforms didn't happen at a speed at which even the old cops were blindsided at. They had plenty of time to consider a new career without resorting to criminal obstruction of justice out of petulance.
Recordings aren't on all the time. Think about the rest of the picture. These guys do highly questionable (shooting people under dubious circumstances) and get paid leave. They sure as heck don't have their entire patrol recorded. If the union can negotiate the former the latter is a cakewalk.
They're typically set up so when lights or sirens come on then the audio/video recording gets turned on and stays on for an amount of time after lights/sirens turn off which is usually a minute or more. This is to discourage behavior like using lights/sirens to run red lights or bypass traffic jams. Years ago cops used to warn people who were going too fast but not fast enough to be worth a ticket by flashing their lights. They don't do this anymore because the chief doesn't like to see them giving out warnings based om something like "If you can stop the guy then stop him, who knows, you might get lucky and he's got a bong in the passenger seat, you don't catch any fish without a line in the water"
I can't hardly imagine that most people posting here would ever consider a job where literally every word or sound that came out of their mouth during their entire working life was recorded
I started out doing phone tech support. I doubt I am the only one.
Phone tech support: every word recorded, probably video in a lot of cases. Retail: video of the whole store is common, unsure about audio. Office work: every worker signs a document saying everything they do on the network can/will be recorded and reviewed, which for many may be the bulk of their communication during work hours. The list goes on -- and none of these people are legally empowered to kill anyone.
The dash cams are for their benefit. There was a county in another state that implemented dash cams for their police force and found an 80% drop in complaints against officers.
Why do officers feel like they are being watched? The dash cams are to protect them. If they fear being watched, perhaps they know they aren't doing their job?
>The dash cams are for their benefit. There was a county in another state that implemented dash cams for their police force and found an 80% drop in complaints against officers.
Baloney. The cameras are for the public's benefit.
Imagine your employer (or whatever) came to you and said, "From now on, you're wearing a camera whenever you're working. It's for your benefit; if anyone ever accuses you of slacking off, you'll have the video evidence to prove that you're not."
Would your productivity increase? Almost definitely. Is the camera really for your benefit? Nope.
Police are far more likely to have complaints levied against them than most other professions. There's minimal downside as a pissed-off arrestee to filing a spurious complaint.
> Police officers in the small city of Rialto in San Bernardino County have been wearing cameras since 2012. Rialto Police Chief William A. Farrar, working with a Cambridge University researcher, found two big results: Complaints against his officers declined by 88 percent and officer use of force declined by 60 percent.
A police department with body cameras probably won't see many false "he called me a nasty word!" complaints, and cops will be a lot less likely to actually use a nasty word or unnecessary force. Good cops benefit from being able to defend themselves, and bad cops either shape up or get caught.
That is, of course, as long as the department cares when they break their cameras.
My manager looks through all of the code I commit as part of a review process. How is that any different? I know that if I commit sloppy code, he will come and talk to me. And if I commit good code, he will give me a hearty handshake and a pat on the back. So I try not to commit sloppy code because I know he is watching.
"I can't hardly imagine that most people posting here would ever consider a job where literally every word or sound that came out of their mouth during their entire working life was recorded, and likely subject to public disclosure."
It's becoming more common - professional atheletes and politicans fit into this category, even many day care workers who are paid even less than cops. I'm sure others can think of additional professions.
> I can't hardly imagine that most people posting here would ever consider a job where literally every word or sound that came out of their mouth during their entire working life was recorded, and likely subject to public disclosure.
Taxi cab driver? Truck driver? Pilot? Train engineer? And none of them even get guns.
I'm not certain cops signed up for indoctrination into a culture where it is acceptable to routinely prevaricate in official reports and testimony for the purposes of self-preservation, or even just personal convenience.
If the things you do and say could have drastic, life-changing repercussions for other people, you should have someone monitoring them. If you don't want to be watched all the time, the only acceptable alternative is to be unimpeachably trustworthy. On the strength of just a handful of reports where the objectively verifiable facts--such as bystander smartphone video footage--contradict the official police story, that option is sadly no longer available.
If your child made a habit of lying to you on a regular basis, would you or would you not supervise their behavior more closely? If the CPD were your child, it would have emptied your bottle of vodka, crashed your car into your spouse's car, killed the family dog in the process, and when questioned about what happened, it would have said, "Bad dog. You probably should have trained him not to drink and drive.... -hic-"
> the cops in question didn't sign up to work in an environment like that at all.
But you're wrong -- cops have always had to face public scrutiny of their actions. The words they speak and the asses they beat have always been capable of being used as evidence in court.
...on the other hand, the cockpit voice recorders a) only record a loop of a few hours, so after an intercontinental flight they will have overwritten everything on the first half of the flight and b) there's a button to erase them.
A lot of IT workers have an expectation of privacy when working on a company owned computer. I wonder what they would say to being monitored. Probably be appalled.
If we factor out the "lives are on the line" aspect of it and only look at the "making sure one is doing their job properly" aspect, then what's the difference?
This is a great point. And there is a very easy compromise here. Make the tapes legally sealed from the public unless a judge issues an order to unseal it.
If you're not intelligent enough to know that law enforcement interactions with the public are recorded on dashcams, maybe you shouldn't go into police work...
We're talking about dash cams here, not body cams. They had TV shows in the 90s based on police chase videos from dash cams. World's Wildest Police Videos first aired in 97, though I suspect there were shows prior to that, the names I cannot recall. So police dash cams have been in the popular culture for almost 20 years. I think cops in Chicago (or any city) knew what they were signing up for at this point.
Most police officers are not just older workers forced to adapt. According to the NYPD, the median age of their academy graduates is 26.
Younger beat officers are overwhelmingly utilized for patrol duties. They knew or should have known dashcams could be in use during during those patrols.
When did most cops become cops? Shortly after discharging from the military. Amped up on PTSD and adrenaline addiction. Yeah, I want a camera on them every second of the day, whether they are on duty or off duty. The mentally ill should not have guns. We've had a steady drum beat that "common sense gun control" should include a psychological test. I don't think most cops coming into the job straight out of the military would be able to pass the same test proposed for civilians.
Most big city cops are not ex-military. In smaller and rural departments it's more common, but the demographic for Chicago area cops is almost certainly working class families from the greater Chicago area, and most probably already started thinking about starting the process soon after graduating high school.
The majority of police forces have psychological testing for applicants and routinely dismiss otherwise fit, healthy and intelligent individuals because the psych came back inconclusive.
Chicago PD needs to be disbanded and rebuilt from scratch under federal supervision. I had a lot of police in my family growing up and revered them as public servants, now I cross the street when I see a cop and won't give them the time of day. Yeah, a lot of cops are decent people doing a hard job, but no more respect until they clean up their own act.
There is a near-total failure of the press to dig in to police corruption. When a case like this happens, the victim's name is splashed in the papers, and the press camps out on the victim's family's lawn. That's backward, and it does nothing but create some sensation.
The cop involved in the shooting, his personal life, his family, his buddies in the PD, the cops who witnessed the event, their supervisors, etc. should be the ones under the TV lights. That's where you will find the perjurers and the corrupt.
A reminder that the primary election for Anita Alvarez, one of the country's worst states attorneys and the person with the most discretion in pursuing cases like this, is this March.
This has been the rebuttal every time the argument "we just need bodycams on police" comes up in the latest thread about police indiscriminately raping or abusing women/shooting black men in the street like hunters shooting deer/pepper spraying protesters at point blank range for having the audacity to stage a sit-in.
Body cams won't magically make police accountable or less corrupt. Power corrupts. The only solution is to take power away from police.
We do need bodycams on police, but the program needs to be properly administered. Documentation when things break, enough spares so malfunctions are quickly and easily replaced. The Chicago PD is clearly rife with corruption, so you can't just point to this program and say it won't work. There are lessons to be learned here, and they can be avoided with actual (and immediate) accountability.
I think it's naive to assume that prosecutors will ever prosecute cops without massive public outcry, that police departments are at all capable of policing themselves (including documenting broken bodycams), or even that politicians are going to have enough teeth to stand up to the police unions.
It's so naive it borders on stupidity. Do you really think "documentation" would change anything? It'd just lead to "Oops, didn't know that was broken sarge, I'll get a spare." "Oops, looks like all the spares are gone. Sarge, can you order some more?" "Oops, forgot to order some spares. Maybe I'll get to it tomorrow."
Chicago is especially corrupt (as far as I know it's the only metropolitan police force with its own CIA-esque black site), but it's absolutely naive to think this can work anywhere. This is just the tip of the spear.
This is a problem at the top and the bottom of the department, and it won't get fixed until both sides are held appropriately accountable.
The beat officers don't care because their management stack doesn't care. This should be pursued criminally, and would be were it anyone else messing with municipal equipment.
This is a departmental corruption issue first and foremost - and it's the senior management that should be held to account. Unfortunately, the problem won't be fixed until some of them go to jail and/or are made to make compensation for the damages and time spent repairing the system. Only then will the policies change to where the guys on the street quit damaging equipment.
It extends out of the department as well -- look no further than the DA and the stable of state prosecutors for another cesspool of laziness and neglect.
When it comes to Ferguson-type departmental corruption, it shows just how institutionalized the racism is - and how far it extends outside of the departments.
We should likely spend more time on this, as in this light, it doesn't matter what changes are made at a departmental level - there's no path to success on their own.
Change is going to have to be at the elected official level - but those systems are so gerrymandered, and so corrupt that it presents a really difficult problem.
When they can always get away with slap on the wrist, why not destroy camera or turn it off before shooting someone. Some other cop is going to back any and all claims in court. There is no evidence anyway. They make sure of that. I'm still waiting to see what happened with Ian's case. At least some are indicted because of cams now a days. Turning of cam should have some mark on service records and effect their pay/promotions etc. Whats the need of cop is not to obey and enforce law?
In this case, charge the police officer with murder and obstruction of justice; the camera footage would exonerate them if they killed legitimately, after all. Disabling a camera means they've got something to hide.
In case of [1], that man(and many others) will still be alive if cops behaved professionally rather than behaving like a bunch of _____
In case of [2], why weren't the cops charged with obstruction of justice
There is no one overseeing police behavior, they can get away unless someone with enough time and money takes them to the courts and even then they get too little punishment.
The CPD and City of Chicago have long operated under their own terms, and they need to be very careful now that there is a national focus on them. The common perception from outsiders of the city has always been "well....that's just Chicago" - think when characters like Rod Blagojevich make it to the national spotlight. With high profile cases of police corruption at the very highest level, I think the "charm" of corrupt politics and government start to go away.
I lived there for 7 years before relocating elsewhere, and at no point did it ever feel like the city was operating on behalf of its residence. There is segregation unlike anything I've seen in any other major city that is entirely ignored, the "startup" culture that they've been trying to cultivate for years is complete BS and at odds with how anti-business the city is, and now people are starting to see what happens when large government organizations go unchecked for decades.
I guess the one silver lining about incidents like this is that it should put some national pressure (and hopefully, accountability) on the CPD. I am aware that things like this happen elsewhere, but having lived in about a half dozen cities in the US, I never felt like the problem was as large and systemic as I observed in Chicago.
Good luck proving deliberate destruction -- "accidents happen" and noisy hand-waving will result in nothing beyond three-day suspensions and desk jockeying.
It seems that this is a cultural problem and not a technological one. If the entire police force is against the idea of recording, how will tamper-proofing make a difference (if the people reviewing the videos are also complicit?)
I'd love to know where Obama is in all of this given his South Side heritage.
Also, corrupt cops are a very real thing in Chicago. Dated a girl briefly in Lakeview who warned me that I didn't want to meet her dad as he was a cop and it eventually came out that he was pretty fucking corrupt.
The relationship ended for other reasons, but holy crap was I determined to end it amicably. Last thing I wanted was to be on the shitlist of a corrupt Chicago cop/dad.
Police dashcams and bodycams are there to protect officers as much as the public. This being said, I can totally understand why many officers aren't too thrilled about being recorded every second of their shift, and clearly in Chicago several of them have taken action. Police officers are thrown into highly stressful situations every single day, and even "good" cops will make poor decisions from time to time. I think Police dash cams are in the public's best interest, and strongly believe that citizen journalism is helping communities hold authorities accountable, but there needs to be a balance between accountability and unfair scrutiny. Once this balance is found, hopefully incidents such as those described in the article will drop significantly.
This seems like a good use case for https://petitions.whitehouse.gov, no? I have to imagine such a blatent abuse of the system would have to warrant more than a cookie-cutter answer from the administration.
I grew up in an Asian country where I have seen police corruption first hand more than once and I always wished my country had better educated and morally strong individuals who would protect the weaker sections of the society instead of siding with rich/powerful people even if they are criminals.
I always wished like in the west police would enforce the law regardless of the status of that individual and that police and other govt officials are better paid and hence there was no need for them to get corrupted for the sake few extra bucks.
I am currently working in one of those "developed" countries in the west and observing things around me, reading articles/comments like here. It appears that, it is not really very different here either. I guess human greed is universal.
Police in the US are very much not like police in other Anglo countries; they are much more adversarial.
Not to say the other police are perfect, but it seems much worse in the US. Example: I'm from Australia, and was recounting a story here on HN about how I don't like that subtle power play when police pull you over and talk down to you in the car. So I get out (I'm very tall) and wait for them in a friendly manner. It changes the tone of the traffic stop. Doesn't change the outcome, but it's hard for them to talk down to someone they have to physically look up to.
On relaying this story, multiple HN'ers from the US thought I was genuinely putting my life at risk of being shot by the police, and told me I should never ever do that. This is a genuinely foreign concept to me - that I should be fearful that police might be predisposed to shooting me for getting out of the car. That these folks even have that general fear speaks volumes as to the excessive force the US police use.
But see, in the US, the occupants of cars are much more likely to try to use force on police officers, too. (And remember how many Americans are armed.) The police officers are literally in a position where they have to evaluate each move you make in (I'd guess) about half a second. If they shoot when they shouldn't, it may destroy their career. If they don't shoot when they should, they may die.
I don't know, but I suspect that Australians are much less likely to shoot at or otherwise attack police officers...
I agree with you in that part of the issue is the armed populace in the US (Australia is very much an unarmed populace, and always has been; ignore most of what you hear about the 1996 gun bans from anyone). Another part of the issue is the 'us vs them' attitude that appears to be more prevalent in US policing (and in US politics in general). In contrast, the UK's police tries to follow the Peelian Principles, which are designed to avoid the 'us vs them' mentality.
For my money, I'd rather have a population without guns, if it means we don't have to be scared of the people we hire to keep our cities orderly. The armed population in the US doesn't seem to be rising up against government transgressions there any more than the unarmed population does here, so it doesn't seem like the rationale for amendment #2 holds water.
Many police forces in Europe operate in a totally different manner than what you've described of Asia + America. This is not a "universal" problem.
Ultimately, this comes down to the management strategies the police utilize. The British/American paradigm is the tragic, horrible police management strategy that leads to the types of stories we're discussing now. Many Asian countries follow the same such policies. Go look at Norway's police force, and you'll see that things can be very, very different.
How long before people start defending them, "It's just a few bad apples"? And I won't hold my breath waiting for them to remember the full phase is "a few bad apples spoils the barrel."
The "it's just a few bad apples" excuse is especially egregious, as bad apples need to be disposed with rapidly before they rot the rest of the batch.
Farmers who encounter a bad apple don't shrug and say "eh, there'll always be bad apples, nothing we can do". It's really weird how what should be a saying supporting police reform got twisted into something promoting indifference to abuse.
> “How they determine that it’s purposely caused damages, I’d like to know,” Angelo said last month. “How they can figure out what is mechanical or what is human error, I’d like to know.”
How video uploads significantly increase after the change in policy, with the same equipment and people, I'd like to know.
Citizens, get some police suppression/accountability laws on the fucking ballot. The only people who will vote against police suppression laws are police. It's time to stop this bullshit.
Chicago has a long history of wide spread willingness within its government to act criminally in return for personal gain. Until Chicago itself is feed up with it, nothing will change.
So in even the most extreme, overly generous estimation of plausible "errors" a person could make, we're talking about a police force that is around 40% corrupt?
You're getting downvoted, but I think this is a legitimate question to ask, at least about police unions. There are many serious problems with public sector unions. I'd like to point to the financial situations (unfunded pension liability related) of California and Illinois as prime examples of such problems.
maybe all police officers should have to record audio and video and do a live broadcast while on duty (someone has to make sure their equipment is working properly)...
I'm just speculating but I'd say that with the recent death of Ian Murdock and how that situation played out, tensions are high between the HN community and the police in America.
Yeah, great. A bunch of tech nerds and programmers commenting on a job where your safety is constantly on the line and you have to make split second decisions and you're under enormous stress and there is no black and white. This board is so anti-police it's just disgusting.
I work in an industry that supports public safety.
Yes, being a police officer is dangerous, but their safety is not /constantly/ on the line - yeah, maybe once a day, maybe a couple times a day, an officer is going to have to make a choice that could endanger them - its not every second of every day.
The cameras in the end are supposed to protect the officer as much as the citizens, it makes the officers accountable, as well as provides backup for their version of events. Now I get the desire to not be recorded all the time, no one wants a surveillance state - but when the methods of redress for a corrupt officer are so few, body cameras are a reasonable precaution in the eyes of the public.
HN is generally anti-authority, and right now, I can of very little visible authority wise than the police, so right now the police are there as a focus point.
That police have the emotional and intellectual maturity of children wouldn't be so bad if they didn't also wantonly kill innocent people largely without consequence.
Just another fine example of the American police state, but I'm sure some fascist can explain away.
I think you're on the wrong foot here. The premise of the cameras was not that they were there for decorative effect as some sort of symbol to be vandalized.
I see it as a majority of the Chicago police force destroying evidence and equipment necessary to investigate their actions. This is open rebellion with the intent to escape justice - though for what crime specifically we may never know.
Any proveably "deliberate" tampering should end in a firing, revocation of pension, and then court case brought against them. Any deliberate tampering during which the officer sustains a complaint against them? Enter this into presumptive evidence against the officer and recommend prosecution. We started monitoring the officer because it turns out they can't be trusted as much as we thought - slipping our monitoring and destroying our property is an overtly hostile act, the same as openly slitting the tires of an Internal Affairs agent in the process of investigating the officer.
To deter it in the future: ramp up the random checks (you did have random checks... right? I should be able to pick a random time and download footage) and enter in punitive fines for poorly maintained or operated cameras; Raise salary slightly to make it budget-neutral, but pay for prompt repair first.
Hit by a white shirt (supervisor) who came out of an alley on clark st while in a bike lane - somehow my fault, detained.
Hit on foot, by a car with no lights on in a residential neighborhood while crossing at a crosswalk - somehow my fault for being outside while there was "a suspect being hunted"
Watching officers on foot in 7-11's, local shops, etc, just walk in, take what the want, and leave.
Helping a friend move to another city because he ended a relationship with a cop who made his life a living hell after they broke up.
Being accused of trying to "make the neighborhood look bad" when I called the fire department because my neighbor had smoke coming out of the door in his apartment (turns out he was just passed out drunk and left a pizza in the oven, but what else do you do when you bang on a door pouring smoke and no one answers?)
So yeah, once my S/O finishes what she needs to to change jobs, we're out of here I think. The police force here is really the icing on the cake of so much else that's overpriced, corrupt, or just plain sucks about Chicago. All the good things it's supposed to have just seem completely irrelevant to me anymore.