In many cases, the police doesn't care that they are being filmed. There's this new documentary coming out called Do Not Resist, and there was an article on the WSJ about it with the following quote "The most disturbing thing is that it simply doesn’t occur to the sheriff that the footage might be disturbing. He has no problem letting a film crew show this massive contraption built to withstand roadside bombs in a military convoy lumbering through his small town, because the notion that military vehicles aren’t appropriate for domestic policing is foreign to him."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/09/30/...
The striking thing about the footage is, again, the utter mundanity of the raid.
A family was just violently raided over an unmeasurable amount of pot. A man was
arrested over that pot. The money he needed for his business was taken from him.
Yet there’s no shame or embarrassment from the officers. There’s no panic that
the whole thing was captured on video. That’s when it hits you. They don’t think
they’ve made a mistake. This is what they do. The lead officers later tells the
camera, matter-of-factly, that the raid turned up “a personal use amount of
marijuana.” Perhaps realizing that he was also on camera back at the police
station promising a much larger stash of drugs, he adds, “It happens. Drug
warrants are, you know, 50-50.”
If they raid a home on the pretense that he has a large stash and is selling, fine. But when it turns out to not be true, they better pay for damage - no matter what else they find.
I wondered what the ethnicity of the person raided was, and of course he's black.
That's why there's no shame or embarrassment from the officers. That's why the Black Lives Matter campaign exists: the police have, in this case, done a substantial amount of damage to someone's life but not killed them. And there's not even an acknowledgement of that.
I'd hate to burst your bubble, but this shit happens to white people all the time. Just not the white people that HN folks are surrounded by (urban, upper class, educated).
I grew up in a poor, rural area of Appalachia, and this shit is routine.
Your assumption that the race of the victim is the reason the cops are cool with it is based on zero evidence other than your own preconceived notions. I've had my car seats slashed open in a vain search for drugs after I'd already been handcuffed and laid on the pavement with zero fucking apologies, and I'm not black.
Just because you live in a sphere of the world where white people are all rich and privileged doesn't mean that it's like that in the rest of (most of) America.
I doubt you'll find anyone saying this stuff doesn't happen to white folks at all.
The issue is that given the same set of circumstances, a black person is more likely to be searched/shot/whatever than a white person. In the case of police shootings, yes some white dudes have been shot as well as black dudes. But if you look at all the cases of police shootings in the FBI database and compare the cases of white dudes waving knives at cops vs the sample of black dudes waving knives at cops, the police are N times more likely to shoot and kill the the black dudes. (I can't recall exactly what N is but I think it was 5 or 6).
If you're going to "burst bubbles" when talking about privilege, I encourage you to learn about intersectionality first. Otherwise you're bursting a straw man version of the concept, which doesn't achieve anything. Privilege exists on multiple axes, and you still have white privilege even if you're poor and don't have class privilege.
Feel free to post the source for your statistic, because the studies I've seen showed that blacks are much, much more likely to be subject to police encounters a (probably due to a mixture of profiling and densely populated, high crime areas caused by a legacy of red lining and other discriminatory housing policies).
"But if you look at all the cases of police shootings in the FBI database and compare the cases of white dudes waving knives at cops vs the sample of black dudes waving knives at cops, the police are N times more likely to shoot and kill the the black dudes."
Another thing that drives me crazy about these "privilege" discussions is how insanely qualitative and emotion driven they are.
What's the outcome for a white kid born in a trailer park vs. a black kid born in a wealthy suburb? Is class privilege completely nullified by racial privilege, meaning the white kid is likely to earn more than the black kid as an adult? The data doesn't show this, and puts a much heavier weight on class and geography being the bigger barriers.
The result of these emotionally driven discussions is that once again, Americans are focused on race being a primary driver of inequality and distracted away from the much bigger issue of class. It's a very convenient tactic for the corporate elites who own our government and want to prevent real change. Racism is a convenient target, because it allows people to blame a problem whose solution doesn't involve massive overhauls of tax policy to better redistribute the wealth that is accumulating with the .01%.
"The result of these emotionally driven discussions is that once again, Americans are focused on race being a primary driver of inequality and distracted away from the much bigger issue of class. It's a very convenient tactic for the corporate elites who own our government and want to prevent real change. Racism is a convenient target, because it allows people to blame a problem whose solution doesn't involve massive overhauls of tax policy to better redistribute the wealth that is accumulating with the .01%."
I'd upvote this tenfold if I could. I think the race discussion in America pits us against one another and creates Trumps and anti-Trumps, instead of pinpointing the elite (both the leaders of the Trump and anti-Trump camps are elites).
It's horrifying how far away we are from talking about class. Racial privilege exists, but by focusing on it as the number one priority, the number one problem in America, we've turned it into a wedge issue.
The politicians and elite ALWAYS want us to be focused on wedge issues - gay marriage, abortion, race, a candidate's tax return - because otherwise we might unite against the true crimes of our day, such as inflation and currency devaluation. They emphasize divisive issues to keep us fighting with each other instead of fighting against them.
>>Another thing that drives me crazy about these "privilege" discussions is how insanely qualitative and emotion driven they are.
Asserting another person's privilege is a specific tactic for silencing speech. It is literally a method of supression if you believe in freedom of expression.
The positive side of this is that once you realize this, you can treat people who focus on "privilege" with the exact same tools you use on Mormons and Jehovas Witnesses. Race theorists behave in ways that earn them uncomfortable status in the BITE model.
Except it's not an emotionally driven discussion, it's an issue that has been studied for decades. Saying "it's an issue of class not race" is not a hot take on the issue, it's a distraction that had been quantitatively disproven over and over again.
Believe it or not people have done quantitative studies on the interaction of race and class. You can go read pretty much any study on intergenerational income mobility and find what you want to know: At every single income level blacks are less likely than whites to transition from their parents income bracket to a higher one [0]
And by the way it's not just police shootings that are the issue. Minorities are overrepresented at literally every stage of the criminal justice system. They're more likely to be searched following a traffic stop [1]. More likely to be charged with a more serious crime [2]. More likely to receive worse bail terms [3]. And more likely to receive longer sentences [4].
Please try to not let your emotions overwhelm the mountain of evidence pointing to the fact minorities really do have a different experience than white people.
Just because minorities on average have a different experience than white people doesn't mean there are not white individuals who have exactly the same experience as some minorities. Telling those white people that their experiences don't matter because white people on average have a better experience isn't likely to make them feel better, though.
Can you kindly also cite the studies which show that the level of social mobility in America is now one of the lowest in the industrial world?
Luck, particularly how much wealth you were born with, plays a large role in your likely social outcome, in ways which cast serious doubt on the success of the layout and rules of the economic system under which we attempt to flourish.
If you follow that logic, when you look at historical state-sanctioned inequality, from slavery to Jim Crow to de-facto de-segregation to the present, what we're witnessing isn't a continuation of Jim Crow. The lack of social mobility here (a raceless consideration) has condemned those who've started off many meters behind the 'Start' line of the race.
THAT is the interplay between race and class.
The fact that we can only articulate this in terms of race is the genius of how the dialogue continuously shifts away from wealth inequality (in America the top 1% own 40% of the wealth) and into discussions of white versus black. Now, the average white person and the average black person are pitted against one another, instead of BOTH screaming against this very fact.
It's not just a convenient target once you realize that as recently as the 1970s it was typical to redline neighborhoods so darker-skinned people wouldn't be shown certain homes. It was common to have white suburban flight, leaving all-black neighborhoods in the inner cities with little commerce or industry and few jobs. It's so easy to conflate class and race in some cities because a couple of generations out one still has been so informed by the other.
What's the outcome for a white kid born in a trailer park vs. a black kid born in a wealthy suburb?
I don't think this is a productive framing when there is a huge excluded middle in there, but to your point, when have you seen an upper class white person treated like Henry Louis Gates?[1]
See also: Paul Mooney's "Nigger Wake-up Call"[2]
Americans are focused on race being a primary driver of inequality and distracted away from the much bigger issue of class.
Class is a function of race in the US.
"The latter argument—“the issue is class not race”—claims that because we have poor and well-to-do people within all racial groups, what matters is really class difference. As the argument goes, differences in average wealth across racial groups are in fact caused by persistent class differences; race no longer has a measurable effect. Again, this dismissal of the issue of race does not hold up to empirical scrutiny. Class matters to be sure, but so too does race. Moreover, studies find that minority groups are not able to pass middle or upper-class status on to their children with the same frequency as Anglos. And the “class not race” argument simply avoids the most pressing question: Why should there be such drastic class differences between racial groups to begin with?"[3]
> I don't think this is a productive framing when there is a huge excluded middle in there, but to your point, when have you seen an upper class white person treated like Henry Louis Gates?
If it were to happen to an upper class white person, it would probably not become a national news story in which the POTUS involved himself, as was the case with Henry Louis Gates. So the fact that I haven't heard of it happening to an upper class white person does not suggest, at least to me, that it hasn't happened to an upper class white person.
And as I recall from the news reports, Gates became confrontational and argumentative with the officers who were investigating the report of the possible break-in at his home, as was their duty. That might have been a contributing factor in his getting arrested.
> Is class privilege completely nullified by racial privilege, meaning the white kid is likely to earn more than the black kid as an adult? The data doesn't show this, and puts a much heavier weight on class and geography being the bigger barriers.
What data? This is counter to any data I've seen.
> these emotionally driven discussions
To suggest that there is no rational, factual basis to racism in the U.S. is not helpful to a discussion of serious issues.
Rich black man in a dress shirt drunkenly waving a Wusthof in one hand and a glass of wine in the other in his granite-countered kitchen vs. a dirty white trash kid in a torn hoodie brandishing a machete. Who gets shot?
I think alienating two-thirds of the population and focusing on only a subset of the problem is generally counterproductive. I can support the gp with another anecdote of growing up in an overwhelmingly white small town watching cops harass, beat up, (and much worse that I'm not even going to mention) plenty of poor white folks. Race is just a proxy for a power imbalance that cops seek out and abuse, and focusing on race will guarantee the actual problem is never addressed.
I'm not sure where you are getting your numbers, but as far as murders by police, the numbers are generally 50% white, 25% black, 15% hispanic, and 10% other ([1] shows one year). The U.S. population is 60-75% white (depending how it is measured), 12% black, 12-25% hispanic (depending how it is measured).
So, these numbers seem to show that if you are black, you are 2x the average, white you are roughly 0.8x the average, hispanic right about 1x the average as far as likelihood of being killed by a cop. That puts black at about 2.5 as likely as white.
Point is, if you are black, you are absolutely more likely to have these problems than if you are white. This distracts from the actual problem though. The actual problem is the power imbalance that is being exploited by the cops in these situations, and race is just being used as a shortcut by the cop's brain to identify a power imbalance that can be exploited.
Again, focusing on race will guarantee the actual problem never gets addressed (even if it might make you feel like a really great person).
You are ignoring the representation of blacks in violent crimes, where they are disproportionately highly represented [0]. If a population represents between 30% and 50% of the violent crime, you would expect them to represent between 30% and 50% of the police shootings, no?
If true, that would further my point, which is that race is not the underlying problem with police shootings and use of force.
One additional note on this comment, sort of inversely related to my previous comment, focusing on race here also is not going to solve any problems. There are underlying issues leading to these statistics that are independent of race and are being ignored.
Yeah sorry, you're evidence sounded like the thing people usually put out when they say it's a race thing, and it's also not an entirely accurate analysis (in my opinion), which is why I posted that link. I'm in agreement with you. I don't think race is the underlying issue, or certainly not in the ways it's being portrayed as.
> If you're going to "burst bubbles" when talking about privilege, I encourage you to learn about intersectionality first. Otherwise you're bursting a straw man version of the concept, which doesn't achieve anything. Privilege exists on multiple axes, and you still have white privilege even if you're poor and don't have class privilege.
I've read a lot of Social Justice texts the last few years, and it's usually a mix of moralistic preaching, loudly asserting articles of faith as fact, and tearful wonderment at the moral superiority of the author and their ingroup over the common people.
"Intersectionality" writings are often the least coherent, as they try to make quite disparate theories of injustice fit together in some Grand Unified Theory.
I won't rule out that there is intellectually honest writing that quantifies these alleged real world phenomenons in a verifiable and falsifiable way. But if so, it is hiding real well.
If you examine this particular use of the concept though:
>... I encourage you to learn about intersectionality first. Otherwise you're bursting a straw man version of the concept, which doesn't achieve anything. Privilege exists on multiple axes, and you still have white privilege even if you're poor and don't have class privilege.
—you can see that the concept of intersectionality isn't actually used: they are just saying it was the victim's lack of class privilege (that caused them to be discriminated against) in this case, rather than something race related (and that this doesn't negate their white privilege). Intersectionality is related to issues of individuals belonging simultaneously to multiple social groupings and claims that the interactions of these groupings must be taken into account—but at least in the above quote, I'm pretty sure all the term adds is a sort of attempted intimidation factor.
If the premise of the GP is that it's a class/wealth problem, not a race problem, and police disproportionately use excessive force or degrading tactics against the poor, you haven't really provided a counter example. Since black people are more likely to be poor (and racism, institutional and otherwise, likely plays a role in this), you would see more cases of excessive force used against them under this premise.
It's entirely possible, and I think quite likely, that both are occurring. The question then arises as to which is a stronger factor. I suspect that they are close enough in strength that it may change from region to region, city to city.
Your borderline autistic model of privilege is being used as club to justify systemic abuse from the same authoritarian forces you are attempting to describe with your faulty model.
So the state police have went over the heads of the local PD to raid the local mayor's residence. Raid went about as well as they usually do - no-knock, shoot the dogs, handcuff everyone inside, turn the place upside down, leave without any apology.
And here's what the sheriff who ran the raid had to say afterwards: "We've apologized for the incident, but we will never apologize for taking drugs off our streets. Quite frankly, we'd do it again. Tonight."
The one good bit that came out of this story was that the mayor, being in a position to influence other people, rammed through a law that required the state to collect statistics on SWAT raids (like, what laws SWAT is used to enforce, how many raids are no-knock, how many shots are fired etc), and publish it regularly. Police unions have pushed back on that big time, but it passed anyway. The results were entirely unsurprising - SWAT is mostly used to enforce drug laws, many raids are over simple possession charges, and there's a disturbing number of no-knock warrants.
Class based discrimination exists along side of racially based discrimination. Often, "white trash" is used as class and racially based slur. Ironically, it is often seen as a moral failure for a white person to be less educated and poor or very poor. I have not seen the same class based discrimination towards racial minorities, as lower to middle income is expected.
While I agree with your closing statement, I've sat in a few courtrooms where it has been very clear that white people with less education, income or job security are treated with a harsher temperament than some others.
I would replace both of your uses of "regardless of" with "independent of", both because different types of privilege aren't directly comparable, and because it results in a weird "both > and <" situation if you compare a rich black person to a poor white person.
It's well-known enough I'm not going to spend valuable time producing it. While it's reasonable to ask for evidence, we don't have time to find and produce evidence on everything.
Well-known is not the same as correct. It's well known that women will do the same work as men for 23% less. It's also disproven.
Here's at least one study that finds no such bias: researchgate.net/publication/256079484_No_evidence_of_racial_discrimination_in_criminal_justice_processing_Results_from_the_National_Longitudinal_Study_of_Adolescent_Health
Incorrect, I have lived in many poor places, grew up poor and in a very racist part of Colorado. (I'm white)
I now live in a nice area and am no longer poor.
I can tell you from personal experience that cops are much nicer to white people All the time.
The worst white trash human being is still white and when confronted with arresting a white person or a black person, white people go free.
Even after you're arrested and put in jail when you go to court with all the inmates on the docket that day you will see harsher sentences for any non white person, and what essentially is a slap on the wrist for the white people.
Just go to your local court and sit in for a day, you will leave deflated and unimpressed by our judicial system.
Sure they'll put white people in jail but listen to the charges and you will see firsthand that although someone who is not white has 4 priors and gets sent away for a year, a white guy who comes in on his 10th, but has a suit on, and a lawyer might get supervised probation and 10 days.
How often are white people allowed to come back to court on their own recognizance vs. Black people that always have to post bail.
Always wear a suit, always hire a external lawyer and never talk to the police until they tell you the charges (and when they do, only say, not guilty).
For example, early-90s, me growing up in the sticks. Poor people were busted for growing/selling pot. It was reasonably their only choice, there were no jobs. 19 year old gets his car confiscated, and loses his job. Has no way to support his new wife/baby. It just happened to be at the house where the pot was being grown. He did not live there. This kid gets hit with a felony, now he'll never get a job.
Meanwhile, 20 year old son of local construction company owner gets his plants confiscated, and a few hundred in tickets.
Everyone involved here was white. Judge, poor family growing pot, and the family that owned the construction company. The only difference is poor rednecks versus rich rednecks.
This whole clusterfuck is thanks to Reagans (Nancy and Reagan).
Prior to the 80's "War On Drugs", it was only an offence to MAKE drugs. In Prohibition, only those who made alcohol were violating the law. You could still possess and drink it. That's why Speakeasys were a thing.
Fast-forward to the Drug war. And now, even a single pill is enough for a felony. Sure makes sorting out "undesirables" easier. And Harry Anslinger back in the late 30's put a fine point on it.
_______________________
" “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others.”
“…the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races.”
“Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death.”
“Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.”
“Marihuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing”
“You smoke a joint and you’re likely to kill your brother.”
“Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.”"
_______________________
Crazy, I say! These negroes think they're somehow equal to us whites!
All I can do is shake my head, and wonder why such an obvious racial discrimination with regards to culture is still banned today. We got rid of the "colored water fountains"....
> “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under Nixon.
Nixon is definitely to blame for starting the whole thing, but practically every administration since than has contributed - and not just Republicans.
For example, you know that progressive darling, Joe Biden? Well, that guy has been instrumental in expanding civil asset forfeiture in collaboration with the Reagan administration, which put in place the economic underpinning of the whole "war on drugs" thing that makes the law enforcement agencies so heavily invested in continued prosecution of it. He was also behind the "COPS" program, which evolved into the present system of police departments militarizing by acquiring surplus and retired equipment from the military, all funded by the feds.
Just because $policy has a disproportionate effect on one race or another doesn't make $policy racist or mean that we should abolish it. The reasons why marijuana should be legal have nothing to do with racially disproportionate effects of enforcement.
> Just because $policy has a disproportionate effect on one race or another doesn't make $policy racist
Yes it does, even if it is completely accidental and without malice. Racism is not only a way people feel about other people who are racially different from them, it is also a construction of systematic discrimination.
But the fact is that the "war on drugs" happens to be racist with malice.
> or mean that we should abolish it.
It does if you want to live in a more just society; or even if you just want to live in a healthy, functioning society. Policies which disproportionately harm a group of people lead to a permanent underclass. Even if you don't care about the people who are impacted the most, it undermines all of the other institutions of society.
> The reasons why marijuana should be legal have nothing to do with racially disproportionate effects of enforcement.
There are many, many reasons to legalize marijuana (and nearly all of them apply to all other drugs). One of those reasons is absolutely the harm that its prohibition has caused to people of color and poor whites.
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can't say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
By Lee Atwater, an American political consultant and Republican party strategist. He was an advisor of 40th U.S. President Ronald Reagan, the campaign manager for 41st U.S. President George H. W. Bush, and Chairman of the Republican National Committee.
So, the talking point here is: "When does it migrate from blatant full-on racism(Darkies, nigger, etc.) to policies that directly are racist and affect certain races much more negatively (totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse)?"
Or, further, should we be taking data on how our policies affect different demographics, and adjust how policies are done? Should we not strive for equality, even in areas where it's simple economic decisions that do disproportionately affect certain peoples?
There are multiple definitions/types of racism, but one of the most significant ones to enter discourse and study in the 1960s was institutional racism, which more or less defines policies that are disproportionately being used to affect one race as racist.
My point was that there is a difference between a policy used to negatively impact one race and a policy that happens to negatively impact one race. Statistical anomalies and/or demographic trends are not racist.
That people of color are more likely to be arrested, convicted, or sentenced to prison for drug crimes than white people, despite comparable levels of drug use, is most certainly an example of racism in our society.
"Demographic trends"
There's a rich history of redlining and discriminatory housing practices, which is why communities still tend to be racially segregated. By concentrating police activity on these neighborhoods- perhaps a decision often made today by looking at maps that show rates of arrests- you get a feedback loop or cops arresting people of color in predominately minority neighborhoods, because cops were able to do a bunch of that before. In sum it ends up being institutionally racist, even though there may not have been any intentionally racist decision making throughout the way.
There are of course plenty of solutions, but not arresting lots of people for common harmless activity is a good start. Not focusing all policing around areas with the highest arrest rate would be progress. Figuring out how to desegregate neighborhoods would also be useful. The status quo, however, defaults to racism, which is why institutional racism is so insidious.
The only drug that leads to both pacifism and violence.
That said, War on Drugs was Nixon; and it was incredibly popular with people who would show up to vote, which is likely why Reagan let his wife get on the bandwagon and didn't fight it.
>White and black people report using drugs at similar rates, according to the latest data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
>A 2009 report from Human Rights Watch found black people are much more likely to be arrested for drugs. In 2007, black people were 3.6 times more likely to be arrested for drugs than white people.
>Human Rights Watch found more than four in five arrests in the war on drugs are for mere possession, while the rest are for sales. That suggests police are targeting drug users, not traffickers.
>For every 10,000 residents, about 3,400 more black people are stopped than whites, and 360 more Latinos are stopped than whites. Stopped blacks are 127% more likely to be frisked -- and stopped Latinos are 43% more likely to be frisked -- than stopped whites.
>Now consider this: Although stopped blacks were 127% more likely to be frisked than stopped whites, they were 42.3% less likely to be found with a weapon after they were frisked, 25% less likely to be found with drugs and 33% less likely to be found with other contraband.
That statement directly contradicts your evidence:
>black people were 3.6 times more likely to be arrested for drugs than white people.
Please don't exaggerate, particularly when it comes to politically heated topics like this. Otherwise rational people disengage because it's clear you have some kind of axe to grind and the only people that push back are other axe grinders.
Also, as the other poster pointed out, it's not clear if any of this data has been correctly normalized for income level. This same lazy tactic is used by racists to associate crime with black people, so it's very counterproductive to perpetuate stats that don't adjust for income.
There's a lot of deliberate misinformation by people who want black people to be arrested at a higher rate than whites.
And part of the genius of their misinformation campaign is deliberately coming up with policies that target poverty, so that it's difficult to tease out how much of the racism is just a natural outcome of the policy vs. biased policing.
But that's the thing. Even if the policing isn't biased against blacks (you know it is) the policy is deliberately biased against blacks.
Adjusting for income demonstrates that the police aren't totally to blame - and that's correct. They may not even be primarily to blame. But adjusting for income also understates the scope of the problem.
Arguably, the deeper problem is that doing drugs while poor will land you in jail for 15 years while doing the same drugs while rich will get you a slap on the wrist.
STOP DOING THIS. It's not a way to conduct a rational discussion.
>Arguably, the deeper problem is that doing drugs while poor will land you in jail for 15 years while doing the same drugs while rich will get you a slap on the wrist.
Yes, being poor lands you into trouble much more frequently because poor areas are so much more heavily policed. But that's the point, many of these issues are related to biases against poor communities in general, not specifically black people.
You said "exaggerate" which was a tacit acknowledgement that you know and have seen the income-adjusted numbers. Obviously the income-adjusted numbers are less dramatic, but they are just as damning.
What's no way to conduct a rational discussion is when any figure, no matter how well-researched, is immediately called into question apropos of nothing.
If they are damning, use those numbers. Stop lying. Rational people don't call you out for illustrating a problem, they call you out for misrepresenting it.
Why are you so eager to deliberately misrepresent information to make things seem significantly worse than they actually are? When you do that and people find out that you effectively lied, you lose credibility and they stop listening. How do you plan to affect change with that strategy? Get the people stupid enough to believe your lies to riot?
> Otherwise rational people disengage because it's clear you have some kind of axe to grind
There is an axe to grind. I live in a country which has had about three centuries of experience finding every possible way to marginalize black people, and in the last few decades has found every way to dress up the marginalization of black people to preserve plausible deniability and work around laws preventing the direct marginalization of black people (for instance, finding things like income or geography that are correlated with race, and then applying disproportionate policies based on that, so they can convince kind-hearted people like you that they're not discriminating on race when that is totally the intention of the policy). Why should we not have an axe to grind here?
Please stop pretending that this is some sort of dispassionate "politically heated" issue that you can have a friendly watercooler discussion about. Otherwise rational people disengage because it's clear you are making the irrational assumption that both sides are being equally reasonable and participating in equally good faith.
It's not like it's just fine and dandy to discriminate against poor people unless it's being done with the underhanded intent that most of those poor people will also be minorities, is it?
I totally agree that minorities should be upset at these policies, but so should the non-minorities that are being affected by them, too, and hopefully those "kind-hearted people" you talk about, too.
How does that directly contradict my statement? Also, you left out the very important context, which is that while they are 3.6x as likely to be arrested, black people use drugs at the same rate as white people, so what justifies the 3.6x increase?
And, how does income affect stop-and-frisk or drug possession arrests? Do cops have some sort of x-ray vision where they can see a suspect's W-2?
> how does income affect stop-and-frisk or drug possession arrests?
It's typically poor communities that these tactics are done in. I think the tactics are reprehensible, and race probably does have something to do with it, but I've also seen cops roll up into rural trailer parks to start shit, too. What gets lost in a lot of the media narrative is how poor folk in general get taken advantage of by the authorities.
I know a white guy whom just got a felony for two pills in his car, a majorly stupid thing you can't do these days. It was all over Fox national news like he was some sort of gang/drug lord. In reality he was just working a full time 9/5 at amazon box and hustling a little on the side to pay the bills. Now he lost his job and is sitting around on welfare because no one will hire a felon.
I've encountered plenty of "stop everyone and check their license/registration/insurance" points where they just wave me past. Presumably because I'm a late-20's white male wearing business casual in a decent/good car.
It's not perfect - occasionally you'll stop someone who looks like a homeless guy and it'll turn out to be Robert Downey Jr. doing some method actor research for a new movie.
Most of the time, though, if you want to target someone who's low-income, there'll be a part of town and a set of characteristics you can pretty reliably look for.
The point I've been making this entire time, how black people are much more likely to be harassed by police than white and poor people. The "poor white people have it just as bad" angle is wrong.
Then we don't particularly disagree on most items. Poor people are harassed (as I've noted, they're fairly easy to target). Black people are harassed. Poor black people are doubly harassed as a result, and institutional racism has ensured there's a higher proportion of poverty there as well.
Aren't the poor side of cities mainly black ? If that's the case then that's just a consequence but it kinda makes sens.
If police patrols more in those sides of the cities, the probability for someone black to be arrested then goes higher.
The real problem would be that the poor side of the city is mainly black and that it is trapped in a vicious circle where they have less education and are then more likely to turn to crime and not succeed in life.
Still, being less likely to be found with contraband and such heavily suggests blacks/poors are being frisked more often than nescessary --at the very least, there's some unjustified bias.
> If they raid a home on the pretense that he has a large stash and is selling, fine
If you ask the police, anyone who owns a scale (which lots of users do, to verify the weight of what they're buying) is a "drug dealer" with intent to distribute.
So the police raid a house and only find barely a gram of weed in a book bag. If the police arrested the kid for possession with intent to distribute based on some other minor factor (e.g. two empty plastic bags) then what will happen is the prosecutor will offer a standardized deal to the public defender.
The public defender will say to the defendant, here's the deal - 1 year in jail, 3 years probation where you lose your 4th amendment right and also these drug classes that are costly and burdensome.
The public defender will encourage the defendant to take the deal. "Or you will lose at trial and you will be sentenced to 3 years in jail."
The point is, the police can arrest anyone for anything. And the prosecutor can add charges that are unrelated 6 months after the fact. Anything goes in a plea deal and it is a terrifying and troubling reality.
The trailer looks quite spectacular but here's a comment from Roger Ebert that nuances things a bit
"I have to wonder if a calmer, more reflective tone might have benefited the project in the long run. Anyone who already agrees with the movie's arguments likely won't have any problem with its methods, but a larger opportunity to open minds might've been lost somewhere."
Besides the misquote, people of color, and especially black folk, are regularly told to "calm down" to "get the message across better." But what happens when an athlete like Colin Kaepernick calmly and quietly takes a knee in protest? The dialogue explodes around his being disrespectful and not about the issues he is actually protesting.
If you want a calmer, more reflective treatment of the issue, I would recommend Radley Balko's book "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces".
Although it's pretty hard to discuss it calmly, precisely because once you start digging into it, there's so much stuff that's plainly damning and disgusting. For example, Balko also collected a significant number of quotes from law enforcement in his book; let me share some:
"Why serve an arrest warrant to some crack dealer with a .38? With full armor, the right shit, and training, you can kick ass and have fun."
"The officers with SWAT and dynamic-entry experience interviewed for this book say raids are orders of magnitude more intoxicating than anything else in police work. Ironically, many cops describe them with language usually used to describe the drugs the raids are conducted to confiscate. “Oh, it’s a huge rush,” Franklin says. “Those times when you do have to kick down a door, it’s just a big shot of adrenaline.” Downing agrees. “It’s a rush. And you have to be careful, because the raids themselves can be habit-forming.” Jamie Haase, a former special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement who went on multiple narcotics, money laundering, and human trafficking raids, says the thrill of the raid may factor into why narcotics cops just don’t consider less volatile means of serving search warrants. “The thing is, it’s so much safer to wait the suspect out,” he says. “Waiting people out is just so much better. You’ve done your investigation, so you know their routine. So you wait until the guy leaves, and you do a routine"
"One day, with a big smile on my face, I popped in to tell my deputy chief, Ed Davis, that I thought up an acronym for my special new unit. He was still, as we all were, glued to the classic concepts of policing, which discourage the formation of military-type units. But he realized some changes would have to be made. “It’s SWAT,” I said. “Oh, that’s pretty good. What’s it stand for?” “Special Weapons Attack Teams.” Davis blinked at me. “No.” There was no way, he said dismissively, he would ever use the word “attack.” I went out, crestfallen, but a moment later I was back. “Special Weapons and Tactics,” I said. “Okay?” “No problem. That’s fine,” Davis said. And that was how SWAT was born."
It's around 37 minutes long. There's some interesting discussion on the making of Do Not Resist and the problems with the way police departments are operated and officers are trained.
He's saying that cameras may reduce complaints by 90%, probably because people think that if there was a camera involved and the cop did something wrong, then he would be punished for it, or alternatively if he didn't do anything wrong, then he wouldn't be. Either way, that person probably thinks it's not necessary to file a complaint.
The issue is that for one, the person may be wrong. Cops rarely get punished. And second, the complaints may drop by 90%, but the abuses may not drop by nearly as much. Let's say maybe they drop by only 20%.
So in practice, this could lead to an overall drop in police abuse, but not by nearly enough to cover all the abuses. However, now it seems the vast majority of people won't even complain about most of the abuses, so those abuses will remain hidden/unpunished, unless you expect the police chiefs or some other oversight body to watch all the videos and then decide for themselves when to punish the cops (which should probably happen - or at least have a "police behavior alert system" that notifies the oversight bodies by scanning the videos).
Cameras were assigned randomly on a week by week basis and complaints also dropped when cameras weren't worn, so public perception is an unlikely explanation.
I think police-worn video will reduce the amount of abusive policing.
But I'm making a big assumption there. I'm assuming that the police know that they're being abusive, and don't want the public to know how they're policing.
What happens if the police are in fact proud of what they do? Convinced that it's the right thing?
For one example see how some police seem to go to maximum escalation at the earliest opportunity. They do this in the name of "officer safety", but ignore the increased danger it poses to members of the public.
I talked to a police officer in Germany and he told me that police abuse happens even if they wear cameras. He said that those who wear cameras simply don't record their colleagues who are hitting people i.e. looking to another direction deliberately.
And I'm sure that if you start to punish them based on those body cameras, you'll see that the police officers will give you biased footage.
Although I can imagine that police officers start to change their behaviour because they're watched (there are studies showing positive changes in behaviour due to surveillance), there must also be more education for the police officers in regards to baseline probabilities so that they realize that black and white people aren't different in behaviour, this could help them to realize that their intuition is not profound. I think helping them to understand cognitive biases is a good way to start a shift.
All of this requires that they aren't doing abuses deliberately, though.
Humans game every system, it is our nature. Awareness of our behaviors is the first step in taking measures to alter those behaviors. A body camera, while it may be subject to the same human gaming in some regards, provides awareness of police interaction that has previously been unavailable. Additionally, identifying those individuals who are willing to game the system provides value as well.
> there must also be more education for the police officers in regards to baseline probabilities so that they realize that black and white people aren't different in behavior
Black and white people are different in behavior, on average. There are many reasons for this, among them that black and white people (both directly and through their social networks and family histories) have very different experiences of how the police (and public authorities more generally) act toward them going back in an unbroken chain for several centuries.
This is not true. A pair of images recently made the rounds of the internet with that speculation, but that was not a traffic stop.
Some models of police cars overheat if left running and parked on very hot days. The officers leave the cars running to power their electronics and lights. Some officers were trying to ameliorate that situation.
I honestly cannot trust that. With all of the abuses the police have pulled off over the years when it comes to this sort of thing, I cannot trust them. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
The officers leave the cars running to power their electronics and lights.
Those could be powered by the two giant batteries installed in every police vehicle. The engine is left running for the air conditioner. If "experts" are claiming the above, they are not experts.
Snopes is biased. Police cars are engineered to run 24/7 in the blistering heat with all electronics running. That is why there are specially created models from GM, Ford, and Dodge that are beefed up to handle the stress of every day police use.
Thought the same thing when I watched a bit of the Cops tv show, if they had no problem with what was being filmed, what would they do without cameras? (off the top of my head: grabbing by the hair and insulting a drunk who was already in a cell, shoot a guy in the back who was walking with a knife)
That's fine. This will enable a feedback loop where they can be directly be rewarded/punished for right/wrong actions by investigators as need be. Once they see repercussions, they'll care more and use/abuse this accordingly but the result will be a net improvement.
While it is odd that a sheriff might lack some self-awareness on this issue, it's not really an issue WRT police cameras.
That the cops have a 'bullet proof vehicle' is not necessarily a problem in and of itself. It's presence does not violate anyone's rights, moreover - there actually may be circumstances in which such gear might be useful that we are not aware of.
For example : a couple of times a year, a group of officers may be sent to 'take down' some very violent and armed people. Imagine if your 'daily job' required to you to face massively armed and violent bad guys. Wouldn't it make sense that your employer provide you with the basic means to protect yourself.
I'm not entirely justifying it, rather pointing out that 'having an armed vehicle' is largely outside the issue of whether or not cops change their behaviour, or whether civilians change their behaviour - when they know there are cameras present.
>For example : a couple of times a year, a group of officers may be sent to 'take down' some very violent and armed people. Imagine if your 'daily job' required to you to face massively armed and violent bad guys.
Surely there are special forces to deal with that sort of situation? I know there are in the UK.
Yes and no. It depends on the urgency/severity of the situation, and how remote of a location it is. Either way I would much rather have police driving around in obvious armored vehicles, than in unmarked cars.
The problem is that most places don't have the funds to run a completely separate dedicated SWAT. So what they do is place a bunch of regular cops on it, so that they end up sharing their time between SWAT training and door-busting, and regular policing. Needless to say, it doesn't go well, because SWAT training and practice instills the kind of us-vs-them "warzone" mentality that is extremely detrimental to day-to-day policing.
The other problem is that once SWAT is there, cities start using it everywhere on the basis that they have already paid a lot for it, and might as well get their money's worth. This is encouraged from below (i.e. by the officers) too, because raids are more "fun", but also because civil asset forfeiture proceeds from a well-timed raid can be immense, and goes towards the police budget - from which they can buy more SWAT toys like APCs, battering rams or .50 BMG rifles... which then become things begging for an excuse to use, and so the cycle closes.
You work with what you have. But, I would be curious if the state doesn't have different teams to cover different sections of the state to alleviate that problem. If they don't, then they're doing a bad job of it.
I would hope that if the local police force has decided to not budget in a response team of that nature then likely they don't need one. But, if they needed one and don't have the budget, then that's a different problem.
That's why it's easier to just outfit the cops with the equipment necessary to respond to someone with a gun. Do you realize the population density of places like the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana (the area I'm talking about)? Having enough swat teams to respond within even 15 minutes of every small town is completely unsustainable.
I'm a little surprised that in the article, and in the comments here, there's such a presumption of guilt on the part of the police.
I understand that this is a controversial topic in the US, probably moreso than elsewhere, and for very important reasons, but is it really impartial for the study, the article, or the comments here to draw the conclusion that police were "better behaved" because they were being filmed?
Maybe the public were better behaved when they being filmed.
Maybe the police were, in some cases, behaving as they normally do but the public were less inclined to raise complaints that may have been spurious as they knew there was evidence of the actual exchange.
I don't doubt that behaviour of individual officers is a factor and was likely affected in a positive way here, but I'm deeply skeptical that a 93% drop in complaints is solely down to bad police officers playing nice for the cameras.
The presumption of innocence needs to be a two-way street, surely?
> Maybe the public were better behaved when they being filmed.
This is very much the case. I'm a paramedic, and the police agency in the area got body cameras a few years back. It is extremely common (in my first-hand experience) for folks who have been treated completely respectfully to threaten a complaint. Once it's pointed out the whole incident was on camera, it's amazing how often they drop it right there...
I have very serious concerns about policing in this country. I think they are trained to jump to lethal force far too quickly, and the militarization we have seen over the past decades has led to an 'us vs them' mentality for many officers.
But you're absolutely right that a large chunk of the drop in complaints is almost certainly folks who don't bother pressing an issue once they find out there is video evidence of what happened.
Bu then how does the fact that the drop is on officers with cameras and officers who don't have cameras? The spurious complaints would continue on officers who don't wear them.
That is not at all obvious. There is a large difference in relative power between a citizen and police officer compared to citizen and paramedic. Due to this, I would expect much fewer frivolous complaints against policemen.
Now, I do not mean to write this as a proof that there were no frivolous complaints against police, only that you cannot derive any conclusions from number of such complaints against paramedics.
I'm not talking about paramedics wearing cameras (that would be a HIPAA nightmare...). I'm sharing my personal experience from observing a large number of LEO/citizen interactions (cops and paramedics end up on the same scenes quite frequently)
Sure, the presumption of innocence is a two-way street, but it does not always work these days for either party.
But to be fair, the article and the original paper discuss all your points as well. There is no "blame everything on the police" attitude there.
And body cameras help with all of those: They can substantiate claims against misbehaving police officers, but they can also prove their innocence.
Also, it may very well be that citizens, when aware of the cameras, are less confrontational and ill-behaving towards officers, not just officers on best behavior.
And if an officer OR a citizen behaves badly, with body cameras you get instant video proof, which helps the victim no matter if the victim was the citizen OR the police officer.
The article explicitly addresses this question and presents very compelling evidence that the video cameras affect police behavior more so than civilian behavior.
Against all expectations, there was no significant difference in complaints between officers wearing cameras that week and those going without.
Strange, right? It seems logical to expect that when the camera was actually present, it would act, as intended, as an impartial witness, cooling heads on both sides of an encounter. But complaints dropped even when officers weren’t using the cameras.
“It may be that, by repeated exposure to the surveillance of the cameras, officers changed their reactive behaviour on the streets — changes that proved more effective and so stuck,” explained the study’s lead author, Barak Ariel, in a Cambridge news release. “With a complaints reduction of nearly 100 percent across the board, we find it difficult to consider alternatives, to be honest.”
The researchers dub this effect “contagious accountability” — learning to do the right thing even when no one is watching.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it assumes the public even knows how to tell if police officers are wearing body cameras. Even the police themselves don't make the distinction when they are the ones wearing it.
Why would the public make a distinction when even the one person who should know, can't?
You're assuming that the civilians are acting under the assumption that the police are wearing body cameras. But why would you assume this? Most police nationwide do not wear body cameras. For most of recent history, the police in those districts did not wear body cameras. When the study was started, obviously the police themselves knew they were wearing cameras, and hence, would have acted differently because they know they were being watched. But the vast majority of civilians do not follow local-police-news closely enough to assume that the police are wearing body cameras.
> The problem with this line of reasoning is that it assumes the public even knows how to tell if police officers are wearing body cameras.
I don't see how it assumes that at all. I think the gist is that police behave in a way that produces less complaints when they are conscious that their actions are being recorded.
> The presumption of innocence needs to be a two-way street, surely?
The presumption of innocence is a legal standard to partially offset the immense might of the state. The prosecutors should need to do a very good job establishing that you actually did something before they can put you in a cage.
When it's people talking about statistical measures that don't directly disproportionately impact any given person, no, it doesn't.
Did you even read the whole comment you replied to? The op didn't say the statistics were wrong, he/she just pointed out that they could easily be explained by either side of the confrontation behaving better in the presence of a camera. Which one behaves better is not covered by the stats.
> The presumption of innocence needs to be a two-way street, surely?
Historically, the presumption of innocence has two legs: one, the Latin "Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, (the burden of proof is on the one who declares, not on one who denies). This is something like the theory of knowledge rule that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
The other leg, in the western legal tradition, is that the state (and particularly the prosecution) is always the bearer of the burden of truth.
In this sense, it actually makes sense to presume that the police are "guilty," or at least that they must prove that their actions are legal and comport with the boundaries of state power.
So, in the western tradition, it is only those accused by the state of a crime who enjoy the presumption of innocence; people acting on behalf of the state do not.
> The presumption of innocence needs to be a two-way street, surely?
Why? Presumption of innocence is not a feature of any normal human relationships; it's a special restriction we place on the way the government relates to us. What is the benefit of extending the presumption back to the government? The police are allowed to take your money, rough you up, or kill you if they choose. We can't do that to them.
Among decent, rational people the presumption of innocence is a function of their normal human relationships. There is nothing special about assuming someone is innocent until sufficient evidence is presented.
Presuming departments track complaint resolution outcomes, we should see the rate of "legitimate" cases go up.
E.g., if 100 cases were filed, 50 frivolous, and the officer in question was sanctioned in 10 cases, that's a 10% rate. If the number of frivolous cases drops to 0, the "sanction" rate should double to 20%.
I have had numerous encounter with police and never, ever had a problem, nor witnesses bad behaviour on the part of police.
Conversely - cops, as a normal part of doing their jobs have to deal with drunk, crazy, wild and violent people quite often.
I'm not making a comment about the article, but about the 'presumption of innocence'. I think 'bad cops' are probably an issue of culture within specific policing stations and groups.
> I have had numerous encounter with police and never, ever had a problem, nor witnesses bad behavior on the part of police.
Well that is just amazing to be honest. I have LEO in the family and they all did personality 180s after joining. They converted to an "us vs them" mentality. All of there coworkers were identical.
I am not saying that they ran around being assholes to everyone, but they literally started thing less of "others". Every person in the community is a criminal now, they just haven't been caught.
You can even see it in action. If you have ever came across a person in the grocery store wearing a high-and-tight and they looked at you with bafflement as to why you did not immediately get out of their way when they were passing -- that was an off-duty cop.
BTW, the power-trip doesn't just apply to cops, if you know any correctional officers, you will see the same phenomena.
This power-to-bad-behavior conversion isn't just some anecdotal stories, it is well-known in repeated physiology studies.[1]
You can see it in their personal lives as well.[2][3]
Add to us-vs-them mentality and inflated sense of power a below average IQ (PDF page 92), and you have what we have today.
I was under the impression that the Stanford Prison Experiment was not a reliable experiment due to a number of confounding factors. Introduction of bias by the lead researcher, influencing the participant's behavior is one such factor. In this way, the experiment is more of an example of how not to conduct research, more so than a reliable indicator on how power goes to people's heads.
"The high and tight is a military variant of the crew cut. It is a very short hairstyle most commonly worn by men in the armed forces of the U.S. It is also popular with law enforcement officers and other public safety personnel."
The Stanford prison experiment does not apply to cop to citizen relationships. The power imbalance isn't even close to comparable.
Consider your anecdote about getting out of the way in the grocery store. If that happened in a prison the guard would just immediately punish the person. A cop can't do that.
The difference is a random citizen shooting you will go to jail if they get caught. A police officer will get paid leave with a presumption that you did something to cause it while it is "investigated" by their brothers/sisters in blue.
If their brothers/sisters in blue don't like them then they will be arrested for murder if they acted inappropriately.
Otherwise the investigation will likely be half-assed or purposely sabotaged. The "blue line" is a real thing, most cops won't take down other cops unless they have to/dislike the other cop.
Every place is different and while there are obviously bad police officers, there are also some very good ones.
I once had a friend here in Japan who unfortunately was starting to suffer from mental illness. She let her visa lapse and when her employer asked her about it, she decided to do a runner. I caught up with her at the bus station and it seems that her employer had called the police because they showed up too. First thing she did was punch one of the two officers.
In Japan, this is a pretty big deal. I'm sure many people have heard stories about the Japanese police. I tend to be quite careful of them because they have pretty broad powers. Anyway, calm as anything these guys restrained her and just held her until she calmed down. Then they explained how her visa worked and told her where to go to fill in the paper work to get it all sorted. They explained that her employer still wanted to employ her and to help her get things worked out. And then after everything was all straightened out, they left.
Without arresting her.
This was a godsend to my friend who was able to sort things out and as her disease progressed was able to go back home for treatment. I'm still grateful to those police officers. I don't think all Japanese police are like that, but there really are people who are good at their jobs.
They should be able to justify every single action they perform while on duty anyway, and it should be easy with a bodycam. I see no problem in presumption of guilt for officers on duty.
At the very least it'll give them incentive to actually wear the cam.
I am not disagreeing that police officers should be held to a higher standard than others (with great power comes great responsibility), but nobody should ever be presumed guilty and be left having to prove their innocence.
No one is forcing you to become a police officer. If you want special privileges (e.g. allowed to use deadly force) then you also get special responsibilities.
Why would it be dangerous ? As I said, that officer needs to account for all his actions during working hours anyway, so there should never be a problem proving his/her innocence.
Or to put it another way: if an officer has, say an hour, on a working day in which (s)he can't account for his/her whereabouts and actions, wouldn't that be a good reason to suspect and investigate that officer ? What was he/she doing in that time, why did he/she feel the need to drop 'off the grid' for an hour ? If they have nothing to hide, then why would it be a problem ?
Making the police officer career more risky by imposing arbitrary sanctions in case of bad luck isn't going to improve your chances of recruiting good police officers.
Yes, there are special responsibilities, but due process is important. If it's not happening, make that process work. Your approach is similar to "there is too much crime, let's make more laws so that more things are criminal".
> Making the police officer career more risky by imposing arbitrary sanctions in case of bad luck isn't going to improve your chances of recruiting good police officers.
No, it lowers the chances of recruiting bad apples. People don't do anything wrong and who keep the bodycam running all day have nothing to fear.
> Your approach is similar to "there is too much crime, let's make more laws so that more things are criminal".
There is too much crime because the worst criminals work in law enforcement. This would be a way to weed them out.
They should he held to a higher standard when off-duty as well. Many (most?) officers carry even when off-duty and would take on the first responder role if needed.
In my state anyone with a CDL who drives with any amount of alcohol in his system is guilty of DUII. It doesn't matter if you are on vacation, driving your personal vehicle, hundreds of miles from home or driving an 18 wheeler through rush hour traffic. We should hold police to a similar higher standard.
> They should he held to a higher standard when off-duty as well.
Maybe slightly higher, but that is not the point. The point is that a police officer on duty is not a person doing a job, he is the embodiment of the government. If a police officer shoots an innocent man, that man was not killed by a rogue police officer, that man was killed by an agent of the government.
For this reason they should be kept on an extremely short leash. As in: if we could have a computer take over their brain during duty hours and basically turn the officers into remote-controlled robots then we should.
I think a lot of that is that there is a huge power imbalance in the interaction. So the presumption of guilt on the officer's part may have something to do with the fact that they are completely in control of the situation from an authoritative standpoint.
Having said that, all of these police body camera studies I've been exposed to say that ALL parties behave better, and every conversation I've had about this acknowledges the same.
There's a long catalogue of evidence that the police have been insitutionally racist (and other issues). Specifically in the UK, but I suspect the US has a similar catalogue of evidence.
> Maybe the public...
The conclusion drawn seems like the most realistic explanation. Your alternatives don't seem credible considering the change also occurred when police weren't wearing cameras.
[Edit: "have been" rather than "are" insitutionally racist, evidence is in the past and will hopefully stay that way)
Excuse the Daily Mail link sorry and the other link is a police murder with the mayor discussing police racism. The Dutch police are very good by nearly all accounts, but it's not hard to find accounts of racism.
The UK police have a very long and much worse history of racism with the Met being front and centre (less so now than 10+ years ago though). I won't post a link for them as it is extremely easy to find many many cases unfortunately. Pick you examples with them, beatings, killings, harassment, illegal searches etc. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3163974/Boy-13-handcuffed-motorcycle-police-officer-run.html
This is not an incident however, this is happening all over Europe. Police are hesitant to reveal real rates of crime, Dutch police advising victims not to press charges because the Northern-African suspects are known to make your life miserable. Calling statistical profiling racial profiling instead etc.
Ethnic profiling is bunk. It kind of works in areas like Israel, where there is literally a war on and the goal of profiling is not to determine criminality, but which side of the war you are on.
If you're trying to determine criminality, ethnic profiling doesn't work. It's been proven time and again. It's amazing that we're still having this debate 70 years after the West shed eugenics.
> proven time and again ... after the West shed eugenics
Given how you conflate racial profiling and eugenics, I'd be skeptical of what you consider proven.
But you are right, race doesn't correlate directly with criminality - but it does correlate if it correlates with something else that does e.g. religious membership.
"The conclusion drawn seems like the most realistic explanation."
I'm not sure I agree. I imagine either of us could find evidence of police corruption, institutional racism, or myriad other issues. There are a lot of police in the world.
I'm not excusing racist or crooked police, I'm suggesting that there could be multiple explanations for the drop in complaints.
"Your alternatives don't seem credible considering the change also occurred when police weren't wearing cameras."
And that would seem to indicate that on average, the officer's in question were behaving better, and I expect that's the case. It could also mean that the public was aware of the cameras too, and that word gets around, which is likely in smaller communities.
If I had to guess, I would guess it's the former. But I'm not a police officer, an ombudsman, or a victim of police abuse, so I would be speaking from zero experience.
There's also a long catalogue of evidence that white people as a group have been institutionally racist.
Your own race (just as an example) is none of my business, and obviously I sincerely hope you're not racist (which I very much doubt you are), but in any case I'm in no rush to jump to conclusions about either, which is kind of my point.
Presumption of innocence exists for more reasons than just protecting citizens from the state (although that's an important one). It's because our gut instincts are most unscientific judges of character.
I will say that I'm glad they've found a strategy that seems to have such a strong positive impact on police-public relations, though.
> ...there could be multiple explanations for the drop in complaints
Uh huh, so, this particular study covered 1,429,868 officer hours across the six different police forces in the UK and the US, and found a 93% drop in complaints. Some forces found a 100% drop in complaints.
Meanwhile, here's another Cambridge study from 2012 that shows police cameras reduce the incidence of unacceptable use of force.
I had thought it was clear that I was referring to this discussion, i.e. that the drop in complaints was due to the use of body cameras, but it was not proven why.
Provide citations when you state such loaded things (cops are racist). Otherwise things just degrade people into two sides (each group starting and staying on the side they agree with).
> Specifically, the study showed that during the given time period, minority neighborhoods do experience higher levels of FIO activity, approximately 1% of FIO’s completed per month, when controlling for crime.
> It also showed that Black subjects are 8% more likely to be stopped repeatedly and 12% more likely to be frisked and searched when controlling for other factors like Criminal History and Gang Membership in Violent Crime areas.
> The researchers' preliminary statistical analysis found that the racial composition of Boston neighborhoods drove police-civilian encounters even after controlling for crime rates and other factors. [emphasis in original]
The only "loaded" thing here is your assertion that cops being racist is a loaded statement, and the implication that it needs citations to be treated as a reasonable thing to say. That is the consensus position, common enough to be treated as fact in state supreme court decisions, and the one with the weight of evidence behind it. It is no more "loaded" than a claim that the earth revolves around the sun.
State Supreme Court decisions have never been made based on the statement that all police in the US are racist.
You gave links only supporting the behavior in Boston, so the only conclusion that can be made is about Boston. Assuming the demographics of Boston are the same as Los Angeles or Atlanta requires a level of stupidity that would preclude you from operating a computer, so I assume you are being willfully misleading to grind an ax. Take it to another forum or discuss it with a therapist.
I don't intend to spend my day providing citations for statements that aren't reasonably disputed, just in case some random guy on the internet disagrees.
Police organisations (in the UK at least) accept they have a historical problem with institutional racism. This is a well discussed problem.
UK police are currently putting significant effort into fixing the problem.... for example recent work to reduce the disproportionately high drop-out rate amongst applicants from minorities in order to help make the police representative of the community at large.
> I don't intend to spend my day providing citations
If it takes a day, then I assume the evidence isn't at hand, in which case how do you know it exists?
Do you have first-hand experience of this evidence, or are you just assured it exists by sources you consider "reasonable".
you are also a "random guy on the internet" and since you made the claim, the burden is on you. Some hand-waving "reasonable dispute" doesn't cut it - if it's so obvious, accepted and supported, it should be as easy to demonstrate.
I'd also add you comments about historical racism lack context - i.e timelines, impact, magnitude etc all of which would feed into the main question; Are the UK police racist today? Muddying the waters with vague or unsupported claims doesn't help answer this question, especially given that there are lots of efforts to answer it, and reasonable sources of information in existence.
You misunderstand. hueving didn't ask me for a citation for this point, he asked me to provide citations in general. I don't intend to spend MY day (not "a" day) providing citations for every statement I make in general. If people ask for a specific citation fair enough; that's not what happened here.
> Do you have first-hand experience of this evidence, or are you just assured it exists by sources you consider "reasonable".
I worked with the people who ran various RCTs for the police, and listened to them present their findings which were then implemented as policy. So no, not first-hand, no, but good enough for me.
A reasonable standard to maintain IMHO, especially for topics that are "such loaded". Then maybe we disagree on how controversial the claim is? I don't think "the UK police has had problems with racism" is controversial (well, maybe the magnitude is, especially compared to the US), but whether this still applies generally today I think is controversial.
Attempts at improving the police has gone on for quite q while, so I wouldn't assume the question "Have they been successful; Are the police different now?".
> A reasonable standard to maintain IMHO, especially for topics that are "such loaded".
Loaded perhaps. Disputed? Not with significant credibility in my opinion.
> but whether this still applies generally today I think is controversial.
I've used the past tense throughout, and even a footnote in my comment on that exact point. Nor have I referred to racism, only to institutional racism which is a very different thing.
A lot could have happened in the 7 years since the Macpherson report, but it's not "controversial" to expect evidence of change before assuming that all the problems have disappeared and everything is now completely fine.
> Are these findings public?
Yes. The one I mentioned was published last year. I don't want to post links relating to clients on here so will leave the googling to you if you're bothered.
If you believe anyone who disputed the claim would find it hard to find a credible source, fair enough, lay down that challenge. The question here is can you find a credible source for the claim yourself first?
Even if there where absolutely no credible sources of dispute, the burden would still exist; Or at least, you need enough evidence to dispute.
> I've used the past tense throughout
Maybe I misread the thread;
headmelted: "I'm a little surprised that in the article, and in the comments here, there's such a presumption of guilt on the part of the police."
you (responding to this line): "There's a long catalogue of evidence that the police have been insitutionally racist (and other issues)."
I interpreted "There's a long catalogue" as meaning a presumption of guilt was justified because of past issues.
> A lot could have happened
between "assuming that all the problems have disappeared" and "assuming nothing has changed" is "we don't know". You don't have to assume anything, but when you do (and make a claim) it's then you have a burden to justify it.
Then only use so much evidence as to support your claim.
Evidence of you claim is only evidence of your claim after it is verified, at which point the work has been done. before then it's potential evidence. You don't know what evidence you have until you investigate it, so again, suggesting that there's a lot is just speculation.
If the claim requires a great level detail, then it's your fault for making an overly broad claim without evidence; again, if the work has yet to be done, you can't be sure what the picture will look like - you can only assume that you are able to prove a "wonderfully detailed picture" of whatever you claim; This is a faith-based argument; you have faith in you ability to demonstrate, and in the apparent quality of evidence, before actually having done it.
A google search isn't research for many reasons (e.g. the bias in focus of a search engine, which is a tool for finding specific information, not building a representative/comprehensive summary of information on the internet; The 'mememtic survival bias' and/or 'publish bias' of what kind of information is most commonly found on the internet etc etc etc).
One relevant reason is just because a url is returned, doesn't mean it's a relevant source (and multiple urls may all have the same underlying source/s); checking those sources would be the job of whoever made the claim. Until this is done you only have a blob of data, not a verified list of sources.
If this hasn't been done, then you don't know, and are just pushing the burden of investigation on me - I'd assume if I find any invalid source among that google search, you'd just tell me to keep looking until I found a valid one? Why do I have to spend my time to support your claim? I should be send on a wild goose chase to find something that you claim to exist...
It is true that this is well discussed, but usually those discussions center on anecdotes and shoddy statistics rather than meaningful evidence.
The prevalence of all of this biased discussion simply leads more people to believe their biased worldviews to be factual when it hasn't really been demonstrated.
I'm not convinced that a study that relies on IQ (which is itself a biased metric) and self-reported data (self-reported data is low quality) makes the picture "unclear".
Fryer's "Use of Force" paper would be a stronger argument I feel, but even that relies on very patchy data and doesn't take into account the higher likelyhood of minorities being stopped without cause.
Managing a small law enforcement operation is hard. On a national scale it's a monumental task, and human beings are biased and irrational at the best of times.
Not sure why the US doesn't record statistics on things like police shootings. Given the lack of data, if US law enforcement doesn't suffer from insitutional racism then it may well be through pure dumb luck; as there's no way to compare departments, or tell which policies or initiatives have a positive or negative effect.
> I'm not convinced that a study that relies on IQ (which is itself a biased metric) and self-reported data (self-reported data is low quality) makes the picture "unclear".
1. I didn't intend to communicate that this paper alone makes the picture unclear. This paper is just one source that indicates no bias in law enforcement.
2. This paper explains why IQ is a reasonable factor
3. This paper explains why this self-reported data is reasonable
4. The data from convicted criminals, victims, and law-enforcement all tell a similar story (African Americans commit crimes disproportionately)
I agree with you that there are huuuuge gaps in our data collection, and this is a really serious problem. Besides the gaps you mentioned, Eric Holder's justice department stopped releasing information on race of perpetrators in 2009 and many large (liberal) cities don't report this information either. This information is obviously critical if we want to determine whether or not we have a racial bias in law enforcement.
I share your surprise. I'm disappointed in the comments here; usually this is where I come to find level-headed conversations based on data and evidence. Instead the top comments are all unsupported and political.
To this commenter and its parent: please don't complain about downvotes or accuse other community members like you have. On controversial topics, it's even more important that we comment reflectively, civilly, and substantively because it's difficult enough to stay on-topic.
I'm deeply skeptical that a 93% drop in complaints is solely down to bad police officers playing nice for the cameras.
This is easy enough to show. And it is the most obvious and natural conclusion. Your skepticism is fine, but I'm confused why you can't understand my lack of it. In my experience cops are trying to get away with anything they can.
The presumption of innocence needs to be a two-way street, surely
Nonsense! Being a police officer is not a right. I don't have a "presumption of innocence" regarding my job. I have to actively prove I'm doing it well. Same goes for cops.
I wonder how much of the effect comes from the cameras and their perception, and how much comes from the oversight that the study itself provides.
And how long it's going to last.
We are all on our best behavior when somebody's, but it typically doesn't last forever. Eventually the effect wears out.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it, I'm just skeptical of long term numbers outside of studies. Still, if it reduces complaints and incidents, it'll well be worth it.
I've seen similar statistics on several occasions over the last decade or so. I was never given the impression that it was a study, moreso that it was a very basic analysis based on the number of complaints filed for a period after body cameras were implemented.
This is the first time I've read something that actually has an aura of being a study. I'm a little leery of only seven departments being looked at, but that's just a pointer that further study needs to be done. The numbers are promising.
Since this study is from the UK where (at least in London) it feels like there are cameras pretty much everywhere...I wonder if a citizen concerned with police abuse could get a sort of citizens warrant to tap into these feeds to make their case?
Or maybe automatically track police with these cameras with some sort of recognition system and have a review board do sample tests on the material in some way? Are those alternatives that are considered (compared to body cameras)? I like the general psychological notion of "adding extra surveillance of citizens creates extra surveillance of the state forces as well". Might even serve to create some sort of "enough surveillance" balance.
How does access to security cameras generally work? You can get access to the material for court cases to defend yourself, right?
In all of the EU, EU data protection law provides for subject access to recordings. Specifically in the UK, the UK Data Protection Act requires that anyone that operates surveillance cameras have procedures in place to process subject access notices.
In other words: You already can get access to them. No warrant needed. There are exceptions, e.g. recordings can be withheld if subject to an ongoing criminal investigation (but in that case, if you're involved, it will be evidence that your defence have a right to get access to).
This is not limited to government operated cameras, but all operators (and private cameras make up the vast majority of cctv in the UK)
I live in Ireland, a member of the EU. I once tried to get footage from a privately owned camera overlooking a public ATM. By the time I got a reply, they stated the footage on the HDD had already been wiped and overwritten...
CCTV in Britain is not all its cracked up to be, on the negative and the positive side. Even if the operator was competent, and there was coverage of the area, I doubt in a conflict with a police officer that you'd get much out of it, most of the time, you'd need the sound, and higher quality footage, to get much of a sense of the situation.
You can get access to security cameras, but you'll have to go hunting a bit. Some cameras are operated by local government, but the vast majority are run by privately and you'd need to track down each operator and request the relevant material. Depending how long its been they may or may not still have it, and I imagine despite the legal requirement to provide access a lot of people will initially refuse to go trawling through their CCTV archives to find the relevant material.
IIRC, they rotated the cameras between officers, and postulated that wearing the cameras had some sort of lasting affect on the attitude of the officers (even when there were no cameras). That said, all officers knew that they were part of this study and could have just been on their best behaviour.
I'm shooting in the dark, but can this be explained by the fact that people don't know whether the officer has a body camera or not, but won't take the risk? tbh I don't know how big/noticeable they are,.
Don't you think it's more likely that the police involved - who all knew about and experienced wearing the body cams for a portion of their shifts - modified their overall behaviour, than assume that the unrelated public - who very likely don't know that police are trialling the cameras, were told when they were being recorded, and who probably haven't individually had multiple interactions with police before/during the trial (ie. to learn and modify their behaviour, even when they knew they were not being filmed by body cameras) - all managed to modify their behaviour, without conferring or conspiring, in line with the trial time?
Honestly, I have no clue about the proportion of police abuse vs. false claims. I assumed the latter was more important, but I'm probably wrong, now that I think about it.
The TechCrunch article reference a study made in the UK but 'global' (it references several sites), though shows a photograph of a police officer wearing a US flag.
There has been extensive research on recording physicians during patient care. The results almost unanimously conclude that recording physicians improves performance, quality, and compliance [1].
Kind of like traffic cameras? If you know you're being watched, you'll conform to the letter of the law, most of the time.
That link is just about hand washing. I'd hoped 'performance, quality and compliance' meant something more, maybe related to patient outcomes. Got anything else?
Joe, I recommend Unaccountable by Martin Makary. Martin also has extensive list of academic publications relating to the monitoring of physicians as a way to improve patient outcomes.
Maybe another explanation is that many complaints are false and people stop complaining when they know they can be proven lying? Just like proliferation of smartphone cameras virtually eradicated any UFO sightings.
I think it's cultural, UFO sightings may be just if not more common with people regularly flying drones. People just care less. I have seen plenty of flying things I can't identify, I just never assumed Aliens.
The thing is when the novelty aspects wears off, people (policemen and citizen) will tend to forget that they are being recorded. A bit like people are outraged that the NSA is recording them naked on skype. But a year later they would be back at it again and wouldn't even think about it.
That's how many documentaries are made. You follow a guy with a small camcorder, the guy knows he is recorded, behaves, but it is impossible to curb his attitude for too long and after a few weeks you start capturing natural reactions, he sort of forgot the camera.
Smart people will do a better job at keeping in mind that they are watched, but the sort of people involved in confrontations with the police, whichever side is at fault, is more often than not not smart.
So would be curious to see the real long term effect.
The NSA recording your Skype calls has no tangible consequences. An official police camera recording an officer's misconduct can cause that officer to lose their job or freedom. I don't think they'll forget, and even if they do, the bad ones will get ejected from the force.
I agree, with the caveat that this will only be effective as long as there's some kind of penalty for the camera getting turned off or 'breaking'. This seems to be a recurring theme, wherever they get deployed. One example is the police killing of O’Neal in Chicago in July. The officer involved there had his camera turned off. This might have been an issue with training the officer with the equipment, but it's hard to truly know.
A separate issue is that these body cameras need to be deployed universally or they lose credibility and effectiveness. One example of this is Korryn Gaines' death in Baltimore in August, where there is some question of whether the police were wearing bodycams during a raid after a 7 hour standoff at the woman's home (she was armed). The police wouldn't confirm there were any bodycams present until a photograph was found which showed a bodycam on one of the officers at the door to the woman's apartment at some point during the standoff. The police claimed then that none were present for the raid, and only a few support officers outside were wearing them.
The problem here isn't whether they were or weren't wearing the cameras in that particular incident, or whether there was anything suspect about the police' performance there. The problem is that it is completely _possible_ for the police to cover up events that the bodycams are supposed to provide accountability for by simply refusing to admit that there was a camera in use until someone shows up with a photograph. I don't believe that's what happened in that case, but I do think it's plausible that some police department will eventually do this to avoid public scrutiny during some embarrassing or controversial event.
I'm not really certain how we could make police accountable, in a fair fashion, for instances where the equipment legitimately fails. I think some penalty here should be on the department instead of individual officers, but I'm not sure what that punishment should be. Equipment failure in the field isn't unheard of, but if checks are performed before going on duty and there is regular maintenance, then it should hopefully become a rare occurrence, and even more rare for it to occur during an event where such a record could provide substantial testimony to the police's behavior during some situation. I'm sure the tech isn't completely stable, yet, but solid reliability needs to be one of the highest priorities for any such program.
The camera should directly upload footage to a server that is not owned by the police but a different branch of government that does not have any incentives to shield the police.
I wonder how many of those "stopped" complaints would have been frivolous or made in hopes of cash settlement. Even if only a few percent, body cameras seem like a no brainer, good for everyone. Except to corrupt people (on both side of badge).
A drop in false complaints could be a factor, but the study tentatively weighs the officer behavior the bigger change:
> Specifics on how exactly this is happening are unclear. Is the officer less confrontational to begin with, avoiding escalation? Or are suspects and complainants more wary of their conduct? Is it some combination of the two, or are even more factors involved? To determine these things would be a far more complex and subtle piece of research, but the study does suggest that officer behavior is probably the most affected, and that other effects flow from that.
It would be interesting if they could capture how many complaints there are generally, and how many complaints in areas deploying body cameras are dis/proved due to video evidence.
Because it's pretty hard for a regular civilian to judge what the 'appropriate amount of force' is within certain limits.
I mean - obviously if the cop was just beating someone blind, you can 'intervene' - but aside from that - it's probably just best to whip out your iphone, record, let the officer know you are recording.
Here in Massachusetts, a lot of officers would consider recording with your phone intervening, and they would punish you for it. It took several cases of the state supreme court ruling that this was NOT OK before police finally curbed their behavior and stopped (or reduced greatly) their hassling of people recording. I think the court even got snarky about it at one point, saying something like "Despite our previous clarifications on this issue, police continue to violate citizens rights" or something similar.
It's not unreasonable for cops to be concerned by it - a lot of people were 'up in the cops' face about it - not just casual recording.
When you work in very difficult situations, and there are people filming you it can get dicey.
There are a lot of 'antagonists' out there who will do everything they can to prod cops into doing something they shouldn't, basically harassing them.
So it goes both ways.
Clearly - we should be allowed to video cops - but we also should not be allowed to harass or interfere with them unless there is something crazy happening.
But again - 'interfering' with a cop doing his job is a very risky thing because you never have the proper context, you don't know what is really going on. Physically assaulting a cop is grounds for him to fight back pretty aggressively.
Again in normal situations, it's not a problem, but there are tons of videos of cops trying to arrest someone, and then 'a mob' of friends trying to stop the cop.
Of course, they may feel their friend is being 'unjustly arrested' - but that's not up to you or I type thing. It can get pretty sketchy out there.
Check youtube. Cop tries to arrest, guy flees, cops put him down on the ground, 10 people try to harrass cop, pulling at his arms, pushing him back - very scary. Someone's going to get hurt.
It's a new dimension of civility and we all have to figure out the new social norms.
Though that might be true, the study didn't look into the falsehood of the complaints.
>In the year before the study, 1,539 complaints in total were filed against officers; at the end of the body camera experiment, the year had only yielded 113 complaints.
Search for "false" in the published study [0] yields 0 results.
Then the study didn't even consider the possibility of false complaints? From the frequency it is mentioned here it seems like a possible hypothesis that should have been mentioned as not a factor if it was proved out to not be.
That too would be a good result although given that complaints remained lower after the cameras were removed, it would seem false complaints weren't the problem.
Individuals attempting to make a complaint would now be informed that the incident was caught on camera. False complaints are likely dropped outright at that point.
After wearing cameras, police then stopped wearing them but complaints continues to be low even when there were no cameras.
The likely explination is that the police's behavior had changed and continued in the changed state after the camera was removed.
The behavior of newly detained suspects, those detained after body cameras were removed and so without experience of the body cameras in the past, could not have been changed by an experiment they had no part in nor knowledge of. Thus false complaints would continue at the same rate.
>The devices and recordings can be owned and used (and conveniently redacted) only by the authorities.
I see no reason why that has to be the case. There should be a startup whose entire purpose is gathering and posting surveillance on the police - a Wikileaks of law enforcement. Something that can't be altered or redacted by any government.
When Google Glass came out, people were quick to dismiss the fears people had that it represented a paradigm shift in surveillance, because everyone had a smartphone with a camera and microphone already.
We have the ability to turn the surveillance state against itself, So why aren't we? We should already be recording the police at all times and streaming it to the web. Why even give the state a choice in the matter?
> Against all expectations, there was no significant difference in complaints between officers wearing cameras that week and those going without.
Is no one else alarmed by this? Maybe I'm jaded by A/B testing, but if the A doesn't win or lose to the B, then I generally chalk up the effect as exogenous. Could it not be something else - anything else - that changed the number of police complaints from one year to the next?
They mention this in the paper. The chance of all 7 depts changing their reporting simultaneously is pretty vanishing. Much of the paper is dedicated to understanding the cause of the lack of difference between experimental groups, check it out.
Oh gee, you mean to tell me the criminals in uniform out there to "serve and protect" us suddenly stop violating our rights when they MIGHT be held accountable? I say "might" because there is still no guarantee since the blue wall of bullshit is quite dense.
93% is an absolutely staggering statistic. No other change to police policy even comes close. And the beauty of it is that in addition to hopefully clamping down on bad cops, it also has the delightful use of protecting and exonerating the good ones who receive knowingly false complaints from people who are just being spiteful against cops that arrested them.
93% is a number that cannot be ignored. This, alone, is reason enough to justify the cost to get every single cop in this country suited up with a camera. It keeps everyone in check and acts as expert testimony that produces (in most cases) crystal clear memory of events for everyone to examine.
As a white male growing up in a very diverse area with a fairly high percentage of minorities, I never really believed those who claimed seemingly unbelievable stories of police mistreatment and excessive force. I had never personally experienced it, nor even bore witness to it at any time. I thought they were all lying through their teeth to stick to a claim of innocence and how the police steamrolled them. Now, looking back, I am left wondering how many of those stories were true. And I grew up in the 90's! I can't even imagine what really went on in the 60's and 70's.
Far too often we see videos detailing out horrible acts by law enforcement. Acts that if anyone without a badge were commit, EVEN IN SELF-DEFENSE, would in many cases land us in jail for a very, very long time. I wonder how many people I grew up with have criminal records today simply because they weren't the correct skin color.
It's quite strange that the article immediately jumps to the conclusion that is (only) the police that is behaving better.
Why don't they even pose the possibility that the people being policed, knowing there is a camera, either behave better or at least, knowing there is a camera, don't make false claims about police mistreatment, knowing that the police now has proof about what really happened?
The policemen would know when they where using the cameras or not and could react accordingly, the people being arrested or having any interaction with the police wouldn't, so they behaved properly in both occasions and/or didn't make false claims about mistreatment by the police.
Specifics on how exactly this is happening are unclear.
Is the officer less confrontational to begin with,
avoiding escalation? Or are suspects and complainants
more wary of their conduct? Is it some combination of the
two, or are even more factors involved? To determine
these things would be a far more complex and subtle piece
of research, but the study does suggest that officer
behavior is probably the most affected, and that other
effects flow from that.
Clearly the brilliant researchers of Cambridge don't have teenage children. The answer is simple. People in emotional need of attention will act out (and escalate) as necessary so long as there remains feedback (whether positive or negative, healthy or harmful).
I suspect this sort of irrational behavior is most frequently displayed against the police officer, but in some cases can be caused by officers (they are people too). The only distinction between officers and non-officers being frequency of experience dealing with confrontation.
Despite the behavior being completely irrational (often out of control) there remains a fear of accountability. Will video evidence go out to your parents, spouse, coworkers? How embarrassing, right? The magic is that this fear of accountability is immediately present. The irrational behavior has to ramp up, similar to rage, and so is not spontaneous. This indicates the accountability fear is a constant reminder to not embarrass yourself, particularly when there is evidence that will appear on YouTube.
It is very sad that we've (had to?) militarize our police force in America to such a degree that there's really no going back. I don't fear the police, only an interaction with them. Despite the cameras it seems no one is safe from escalation and death. Even with cameras we will only see the aftermath. Someone will still be dead.
Whether or not you agree with police violence, oversight, or power, body cameras are the best way we have right now to document exactly what is going on.
If the courts decide to change how the police interact with the public, it will probably be on the data of thousands or millions of minutes of body camera footage. At that point the court can make a very clear decision: Do we want this to continue? Because with the footage it will be (more) clear exactly what is going on.
It's been on my mind for awhile. It's a similar situation: people in positions of power and responsibility which can be and are abused.
The political situation is even more important. The billions that go missing in economies due to corruption likely have a greater affect on poverty and crime than police brutality.
Along with body cameras better training and specialized units to deal with those suspects who are ostensibly mentally ill would save a lot of time, money and lives.
Do you have any evidence to support the claim that this happens "often". Your use of scare quotes seems to indicate that this is intentional behavior. Can you back up such an accusation?
Police unions will fight cameras. They will do cute, pilot programs in certain neighborhoods to fool us.
I would like to see all police officers be required to have a cam on(at all times)while on shift. It would just be like carrying a gun.
"If you don't want to carry a gun---you just can't be a police officer. No Andy Griffith's on this force. Times have just changed. We carry guns-- we carry cams! If you do well on the test, and pass the psychological; you're hired. Good Luck. We hope to have the best, brightest, and most ethical on board."
It will never happen because police departments are so scattered across the US, and know one is ultimately in charge.
(On at all times. No covers for cams. One the whole time while on shift. Maybe a bathroom break exclusion, but I feel that would abused.)
I know a lot of cops, including many that wear body cameras. They are universally in favor of them, for the very reason you mentioned (they all have stories of times they were accused of misconduct, but had video evidence on their side).
Please have them come to Boston and convince their fellow officers. The union here is fighting them tooth and nail, even after being given financial incentives to pilot them.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" applies here. I would definitely want a camera if I was an officer, and I definitely don't want a (gov't always-on) camera if I'm a civilian.
Infractions follow a power law graph. The general public and especially journalists are fascinated with video coverage of gory shootings. However, 99.9999% of infractions will be of a lesser nature. Given that unions and mgmt are by nature somewhat argumentative, the primary, almost exclusive use of body camera footage will be for selective enforcement against disliked employees who violated the equivalent of changing a TPS report header.
Of course there will be no "bathroom break exclusion" thats about 99.999% of the point of even having it. Officers who are enemies of management will have regulations exhaustively enforced with video evidence to prove they spent 15 seconds longer than the union negotiated bathroom break time period and so on. Video evidence that the custodial broom was leaned up against the wall of the closet in violation of the earthquake protection regulation to hang the broom from the provided wall mounted earthquake proof hanger. Upon trivialities like this, careers will be destroyed. Careers of the "wrong" people, of course, only. For peculiar and probably corrupt or even illegal definition of "wrong".
There are solutions such as requiring a judge to personally review all the footage before releasing it, or adding anti-witch hunt rules as part of union negotiations. Or maybe it just can't be done at the current level of mgmt ability and skill.
My experience of working in secured camera'd facilities is it'll be sold as "protecting us from terrorists" and so forth but mostly it'll be used to discipline people who put their feet on their desk when they lean back and think, or to discipline employees who take too long to have a #2 in the bathroom. But it'll only be used to discipline enemies of mgmt, and handwaved away for the "good workers". Where "good" means anything from they're objectively skilled to merely being white.
