Why not clean house? At this point I can't imagine the local community, particularly minorities, have any trust in the authorities. Isn't that failure, why not train a new police force with new uniforms and then phase out the old?
Unions
Baltimore Cops Kept Toy Guns to Plant Just in Case They Shot an Unarmed Person
51–60 of 177 posts
Re: Baltimore Cops Kept Toy Guns to Plant Just in Case They Shot an Unarmed Person
#52Body cams on police and actual consequences for misconduct. Some of the videos of people (of all colors) being unlawfully murdered have led to absolutely zero consequence for those responsible. Those with authority granted by the public should have HIGHER accountability and more severe consequences, not be able to subvert them altogether. It's not difficult to imagine the level of misconduct that is likely occurring…
Absolutely agree on both counts.
Holding public office is a privilege that rightly should come with a different threshold of privacy/transparency.
And yes, no nation is taking the issue of police conduct seriously if it's not even recording wrongful death consistently and reliably.
Some colleagues ran a trial on body cameras and found improved metrics, particularly around stop-and-search. The success rate of stop and search increased, officers reported feeling safer. They also noted an increase in allegations but I don't think dug into that as much as they wanted to (it may be an area where the behaviour feedback loop was slow enough to need a longer study duration).
http://www.behaviouralinsights.co.uk/trial-results/measuring...
Re: Baltimore Cops Kept Toy Guns to Plant Just in Case They Shot an Unarmed Person
#53Body cams on police and actual consequences for misconduct. Some of the videos of people (of all colors) being unlawfully murdered have led to absolutely zero consequence for those responsible. Those with authority granted by the public should have HIGHER accountability and more severe consequences, not be able to subvert them altogether. It's not difficult to imagine the level of misconduct that is likely occurring…
The price for this should be massive. Doing this once or twice corrupts the justice system and destroys public trust in police. This invites gangs to become the law and order. Look how that’s worked out in Chicago.
Re: Baltimore Cops Kept Toy Guns to Plant Just in Case They Shot an Unarmed Person
#54Ignoring the content of the article, why are so many articles on sites like these written so "weird"? There is lots of text and it seems there is very little actual content. It is like only a few lines actually have something to say, but the rest is just filler content. It is like someone wrote an article of a few lines, and someone else just extended it with random sentences to fill a page. To make matters worse, us…
Are you talking about this specific article? I thought it was unusually factually dense for a blog site, since it is in effect a tl;dr of another, very meaty story.
Re: Baltimore Cops Kept Toy Guns to Plant Just in Case They Shot an Unarmed Person
#55Our US society is sick beyond belief.
Don't put Baltimore on the rest of us.
Re: Baltimore Cops Kept Toy Guns to Plant Just in Case They Shot an Unarmed Person
#56I'm glad the cops in Toronto are paid extremely well. A Constable can earn $90k. There's less likelihood of a cop going to such extents if they don't need to. Of course that's not the only reason, but is likely part of the solution.
Re: Baltimore Cops Kept Toy Guns to Plant Just in Case They Shot an Unarmed Person
#57I am so happy I don't live in the "land of the free", seems like one dark and dangerous country.
Well you're free to buy as many guns as possible. Don't know if there is much freedom left besides that.
Re: Baltimore Cops Kept Toy Guns to Plant Just in Case They Shot an Unarmed Person
#58I am so happy I don't live in the "land of the free", seems like one dark and dangerous country.
Sure, if you only ever consume terrible news then it would seem that way.
I can cast sweden in a similar light. Or even Disneys magic kingdom.
Re: Baltimore Cops Kept Toy Guns to Plant Just in Case They Shot an Unarmed Person
#59So basically the system is built so that officers can steal from suspects if the money they have is acquired through illegal means. Is there a racial subtext here? Obviously this could not continue unless a significant portion of the police community was fine with it. What's the common police officers pay in Baltimore? How long are they trained? Are they trained professionals (lots of training) or just thugs with guns (very little training)?
I have no experience in this field but I would guess they have a low pay (financial incentive) and very little training (leading to lack of professionalism). Is it so?
Re: Baltimore Cops Kept Toy Guns to Plant Just in Case They Shot an Unarmed Person
#60Why not clean house? At this point I can't imagine the local community, particularly minorities, have any trust in the authorities. Isn't that failure, why not train a new police force with new uniforms and then phase out the old?
I think the Cosmological Principle can be applied to these situations. The CP roughly states that when we observe the Universe we are seeing a representative part. We are not living in some "special place." Applied here (and in other situations where groups of people act for good or for bad), it would mean that the bad behavior is not because the police are inherently any worse than anybody else, but rather the evolution of the situation led them to this behavior, and, importantly, would lead most sets of people to this behavior.
So replacing the actors would either need to be done periodically, or would have to be done with an entirely new set of rules.
This is also my bias for things like the banking crisis. When something like that happens, it's too easy to blame something like greed. But that's missing the point. If you don't change the rules or some other aspect of the game, you are going to get the same situation again.