Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Small business owners say they're pressured to hire off-duty cops for security

minnesotareformer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 606 posts

Re: Small business owners say they're pressured to hire off-duty cops for security

#101

Post by montagg »

Vultures picking what away at parts of a corpse they can.

You see so many examples of this, just straight parasitical behavior, in at least American society. I don’t think the U.S. is economically where the Soviet Union was when it fell, but it’s rapidly approaching the civic dysfunction and deep corruption. You have to wonder, is this the fall of an empire or something like the corruption of the late 1800s and early 1900s, that created a backlash that corrected it and led to more prosperity? Dunno. We’ll see, if the vultures leave anything behind.

Re: Small business owners say they're pressured to hire off-duty cops for security

#103

Post by lokar »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #62
DonnyV wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here one solution that could fix shortage and quality in police departments. I see a lot of college educated people that can't find jobs. Raise the requirement for being a cop to need 2 to 4 years of college and hire all the college people looking for work. That will also fix most of the corruption problems. I bet a lot of college graduates would kill for a pension right about now.

What makes you think this would solve the corruption problem? Cops aren't corrupt because they're dumb , they're corrupt because the institutions they are part of allow and reward corruption. Without some mechanism to change that culture, simply adding more members to it will only bolster it. College degrees don't have anything to do with it. > I bet a lot of college graduates would kill for a pension right about now…

Impunity is the source of corruption

Re: Small business owners say they're pressured to hire off-duty cops for security

#104

Post by kbos87 »

Doesn’t sound that different from traffic control details in Massachusetts.

While I don't know the details of their agreements first hand, I believe they are required by law to be off-duty cops, they are expensive, and have something like a 6 hour minimum.

What I can validate is that they are usually seen chatting with people or sitting in their car rather than doing a single thing to help streamline traffic or in the interest of safety.

Their union props up laws by saying it needs to be someone experienced and couldn’t be a cheaper certified citizen (as it is in many other states) but the net effect is that you get someone who is entitled and complacent.

Re: Small business owners say they're pressured to hire off-duty cops for security

#105

Post by quacked »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #79
_moof wrote: post #18

Already we've got two top-level comments who think this article is about crime. It isn't. It's about corrupt police shaking down small business owners under threat of losing their business license. ETA: Please give the pedantry a rest. Of course I know police corruption is criminal. That's not what the people talking about "crime" are talking about.

> It's about corrupt police shaking down small business owners I don't believe that there's ever been any other kind of cop. Certainly not outside of fiction. By prefixing the adjective "corrupt" though, you're certainly buying into it. Have you never read the headlines where the entire police union tries to extort the entire city? "If we don't get enough cops on the street, bad things will happen". Hell, even more e…

What kind of society are you envisioning that can address antisocial behavior without detaining or investigating anyone?

Re: Small business owners say they're pressured to hire off-duty cops for security

#106

Post by fzeroracer »

voakbasda wrote: post #91
ryanianian wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> prosecute which bypasses the DA This is precisely why DAs are elected officials. It's supposed to work this way, in theory. The people vote in the officials who enforce the laws in the manner they wish. In practice, DA elections seem totally ignored. The problem is lack of voting and civic engagement.

The only candidates are those steeped in the systematic corruption. I have never seen an outsider even run.

Usually that's because the local PDs exercise their union coffers to ensure that candidates are a minimum level of friendly. If not, there are multiple cases where the police have either directly threatened a candidate or simply did a work stoppage in order to craft a narrative.

Re: Small business owners say they're pressured to hire off-duty cops for security

#107

Post by lokar »

engineer_22 wrote: post #26

It's shocking, but it is probably happening all over the country. In USA there is a shortage of workers, including security workers, and police benefit from that. Some of the allegations amount to corruption, some just business realities. This is a job for FBI to figure out.

This has been going on for a very long time

Re: Small business owners say they're pressured to hire off-duty cops for security

#108

Post by shadowgovt »

montagg wrote: post #101

Vultures picking what away at parts of a corpse they can. You see so many examples of this, just straight parasitical behavior, in at least American society. I don’t think the U.S. is economically where the Soviet Union was when it fell, but it’s rapidly approaching the civic dysfunction and deep corruption. You have to wonder, is this the fall of an empire or something like the corruption of the late 1800s and early…

It's dangerous to extrapolate too much from the early 1900s because the US not being ground zero for two World Wars, therefore able to serve as an industrial core to help rebuild the destruction, created economic opportunity the likes of which one hopes we never see again.

Lacking that destruction creating a huge market for American business, it's hard to predict what happens if America lets its domestic capitalism go off the rails in terms of service to its people again.

Re: Small business owners say they're pressured to hire off-duty cops for security

#109

Post by thedaly »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #54

Fascinating to learn that George Floyd and the cop who murdered him worked at the same nightclub for a while, and that the cop ended up also being charged for not paying taxes on the ~10k he earned under the table at the nightclub.

> Prosecutors said Chauvin failed to pay taxes on $95,920 he earned doing security for El Nuevo Rodeo between 2014 and 2019.

Its actually closer to 20k/year.

Re: Small business owners say they're pressured to hire off-duty cops for security

#110

Post by Ajedi32 »

lr4444lr wrote: post #73

I'm not here to shill for the police, but in my former city, it was not unusual for certain kinds of businesses which had a history of being the source of rowdy behavior to be required by the community board to take certain measures to prevent that. It didn't mean they had to hire former police, but they had to show preventative measures were taken above and beyond state level licenses requirements if the board, whic…

Yeah, and that's where the crime angle to this comes into play. Are the businesses really the "source of rowdy behavior", or is it actually the people who frequent those particular establishments? And if the latter, shouldn't that be the city's responsibility to deal with those people to make sure they aren't able to continue to repeatedly act in a disruptive manner requiring a police response? Why are they making the businesses pay for private security?

Though as others have pointed out, bouncers have been a thing forever, so maybe I'm off base here...

Post reply on HN