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The Human Toll of Flashbangs

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Re: The Human Toll of Flashbangs

#181

Post by dalke »

Spooky23 wrote: post #170
dalke wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Cops" is a broad term. For police officers in general, $120K/year base salary is extremely high, and not representative of the average. To get your conclusion you have to compare the highest paying jobs for police officers with the average paying jobs for software developers. Here are more details from the BLS about 'Police and Sheriff's Patrol Officers' for 2013: http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes333051.htm mean an…

You're missing a few key things: - Overtime. In many cases, police overtime exceeds base salary. Example from Schenectady, NY, which is city of 50-75k people in upstate NY. ( http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Schenectady-cop-s-pa... ) - Actuarial value of pension. Even using the BLS base salary data without overtime of $58k, you need to valuate the cost of a $30k annuity for 30-40 years, as most police have 20…

I didn't miss overtime. You wrote "A relative is a lieutenant, make $120k, and overtime brings that up to almost $200k." I only evaluated the base pay.

That was enough to establish that your relative is in an unusual situation to start with. As overtime is a function of the base pay, and most officers are not in a supervisory position, your example doesn't really reflect the typical police officer income.

Pointing to an overtime example from New York (the state with the highest base salary), and a record-setting overtime pay as well, is not useful as an average indication of what a police officer makes. Your position concerned average, non-"hick" officer.

It would be like me pointing to an instant millionaire software developer who won the startup lottery and saying that's typical.

You make good points regarding pension and healthcare. I also didn't include stock options in the software developer income, but none of my options were ever worth the paper they were printed on.

Remember too that your example was for a supervisory position. Most police officers are not in that situation.

I took a different meaning of '"crazy" money". I would have used the term "well-paid" for your definition. "Crazy" implies there's something extreme, no? What term would you use for police officers making $500K/year in base pay?

I think software developers should be unionized, but to start with, I think the programmer exemption for overtime pay should be abolished. Only software developers making less than $27.63/hour or $55,260/year have the possibility of getting overtime, which is about the 10 percentile for software developer income.

Re: The Human Toll of Flashbangs

#182

Post by maxerickson »

woodman wrote: post #79
username223 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to BLS, coders make something like $93k/yr [1], while policemen make about $57k [2], and primary school teachers make $53k [3]. How much of a pay cut would you take to accept one of those jobs? How much more in taxes would you pay to hire/train better people to do those jobs? [1] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Computer-and-Information-Technology/S... [2] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Protective-Service/Police-and-detecti.…

I'm not able to find the BLS methodology used to come up with that $57k figure, does anybody know? Unless they're drawing that from the IRS, I really doubt the accuracy. Cops generally make quite a bit of money from overtime and generous pensions. They also frequently moonlight and get paid well to do very little: any business that employs a large number of temp workers will have an off duty cop hanging out in a back…

They survey employers:

http://www.bls.gov/oes/oes_ques.htm#overview

(The OOH uses OES data: http://www.bls.gov/ooh/about/occupational-information-includ... )

It specifically does not include overtime:

http://www.bls.gov/respondents/oes/payterms.htm#overtime_pay

Re: The Human Toll of Flashbangs

#183

Post by exprL »

antimagic wrote: post #173
ceejayoz wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't appear to be true. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/08/ahmed-merabet-m... > Merabet, who according to officials was 40, was called to the scene while on patrol with a female colleague in the neighbourhood, just in time to see the black Citroën used by the two killers heading towards the boulevard from Charlie Hebdo. > “He was on foot, and came nose to nose with the terrorists. He pulled out his…

Yup, French police carry sidearms... And if that's not enough, during periods of elevated risk of a terrorist attack, you even get soldiers walking around with semi-automatic rifles in squads of three.

This interests me (in a slightly off-topic way): do the soldiers really switch their service weapons to a semi-automatic model in order to patrol, or are all the rifles within the military police (etc.) semi-automatic only?

Re: The Human Toll of Flashbangs

#184

Post by maxlybbert »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #142
Rainymood wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is the problem with guns, imagine if the police didn't have any guns and they would have to approach him by first. Obviously they outnumber him but know (unless he has a lethal weapon on him) there shouldn't be any lethal force. Guns escalate the situation way too quickly to a life threatening one ...

That's how it works in the UK I think. Police don't regularly carry firearms and specially trained firearms officers are called in when necessary. I think the problem with this approach in the US is that guns are way more available and way more likely to used in a crime (I don't actually have figures on this but it seems a reasonable assumption). Edit: Replaced incorrect use of 'weapons' with 'firearms'.

They still make mistakes ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jean_Charles_de_Meneze... ), but since it takes a little more work, I'll assume they make fewer mistakes.

Re: The Human Toll of Flashbangs

#185

Post by Someone1234 »

tomohawk wrote: post #176
ceejayoz wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't appear to be true. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/08/ahmed-merabet-m... > Merabet, who according to officials was 40, was called to the scene while on patrol with a female colleague in the neighbourhood, just in time to see the black Citroën used by the two killers heading towards the boulevard from Charlie Hebdo. > “He was on foot, and came nose to nose with the terrorists. He pulled out his…

I was going off of reports such as this: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/charlie-hebdo-french-satirical-m... "the first two officers to arrive, who were apparently unarmed, fled after seeing gunmen armed with automatic weapons and possibly a grenade launcher."

CBS News isn't a reliable source.

This is also the same "source" which claimed that both suspects had been captured and a third killed according to "US intelligence sources" (still unnamed). Turned out that that wasn't true at that point in time or since then.

They're like the Daily Mail of the US, just peddle utter shit all of the time...

Re: The Human Toll of Flashbangs

#186

Post by king_jester »

briandear wrote: post #166
pjc50 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer that hasn't yet been mentioned in this thread: racism.

Really? Any evidence to back that up?

You must be living under a rock to not have read one of the bazillion of stories about policing and racism that have come up since last fall, but for a great overview of the subject I highly recommend The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness [1]

[1] www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/

Re: The Human Toll of Flashbangs

#187

Post by morganvachon »

happyscrappy wrote: post #180
morganvachon wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A large contributing factor is the military industrial complex spewing out death tech at an absurd rate, and with nobody to blow up with it all it just goes to police forces at auction. Sometimes not even sold, but given. There are government programs where police departments can ask for used military gear and get it at no cost (i.e. no impact to their budget). This makes the departments especially eager to acquire…

While we should be on guard for police abuses let's not pretend it is anywhere near Mao or Stalin.

I said "we are becoming". I didn't say we are there, but it's a disturbing trend. Take it from someone who worked on the inside, it's only getting worse.

Re: The Human Toll of Flashbangs

#188

Post by happyscrappy »

king_jester wrote: post #186
briandear wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Any evidence to back that up?

You must be living under a rock to not have read one of the bazillion of stories about policing and racism that have come up since last fall, but for a great overview of the subject I highly recommend The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness [1] [1] www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/

Police need to try harder to ignore the statistics of who commits crime. Just because one group is statistically committing more crime that should not affect their dealing with an individual who is innocent until proven guilty.

Re: The Human Toll of Flashbangs

#189

Post by Brakenshire »

maxlybbert wrote: post #184
k-mcgrady wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how it works in the UK I think. Police don't regularly carry firearms and specially trained firearms officers are called in when necessary. I think the problem with this approach in the US is that guns are way more available and way more likely to used in a crime (I don't actually have figures on this but it seems a reasonable assumption). Edit: Replaced incorrect use of 'weapons' with 'firearms'.

They still make mistakes ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jean_Charles_de_Meneze... ), but since it takes a little more work, I'll assume they make fewer mistakes.

> since it takes a little more work, I'll assume they make fewer mistakes.

To put this in context, over the four years from 2008-2012, police officers in England and Wales opened fire on 18 separate occasions, killing nine people.

In a country of 55 million people, that's about 5 shooting incidents, and 2 people killed each year.

http://www.channel4.com/news/police-fatal-shooting-trigger-h...

Re: The Human Toll of Flashbangs

#190

Post by wl »

sitkack wrote: post #179
sseveran wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is of course the problem with departmental policy. We routinely see SWAT teams investigating themselves and finding that everything they did was in line with departmental policy.

And policy is not law. We should not allow a shield of false legitimacy protect illegal actions.

The problem is that the law often isn't clear. You have assault, battery, manslaughter, murder, unlawful detainment, and similar laws on the books, all with varying requirements and all with various carveouts for law enforcement, self-defense, etc. They tend to be written in broad language because real life is complicated. In the end, the law in this area is generally in the form of case law created by courts in response to novel situations. The courts have to make judgement calls. In my experience, LE agencies make a lot of effort to ensure their policies conform to existing caselaw and cover the gaps in it. Sometimes they get it wrong. But more often than not, when a policy is particularly egregious, the underlying law is to blame.

In the end, police have broad authority to use reasonable force to effect lawful arrests and searches. And most people don't understand just how broad that authority is under the law.

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