Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API • Hacker News Board

Re: Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API

#151

Post by selecsosi » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 9:52 PM UTC

fpgaminer wrote: post #135

nostromo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's confusing for me that so many people will complain about how the police unions prevent reform and allow for bad behavior -- but then support unions for all other public sector workers.

It's a balancing act. With no unions, employers can stomp all over their employees, and everyone is worse for it (e.g. Amazon). When the unions are too powerful, they can stomp all over their employer and everyone is worse for it (e.g. police unions). Like all things in life, nothing is cut and dry. It's not wrong to both support unions, and call for the reduction in power of police unions.

As a point, original comments are only referring to "public sector" unions. The mal-alignment contrasts from private unions being organized by private individuals who's interests conflict against that of the private industry.

Public sector unions "bosses" are the people and politicians, so even though these are "private" unions, their alignment is to protect the political class first, cops (members) second, people third. By focusing on politic over people (bad looking cops = lost mayor, DA political race) their primary interested is not public transparency (where the money comes from, leading to lack of consumer alignment on service rendered b/c cops are serving political interests more than they should).

In a private union, the first people they are protecting are their membership (lot could be said here about how that works in practice), but their transparency problem isn't regarding factory deaths or issues at the work place because that is precisely what they are created to bring awareness to. If Ford's cars are killing people, the union actually wants to bring that up since it can hurt employment opportunities for future members.

Re: Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API

#152

Post by lazyasciiart » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 9:52 PM UTC

silo2020 wrote: post #124

pjc50 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the police federation and ACPO perform similar political functions. At least we have the IPCC which sometimes works. (We also used to have a paramilitary organization with close ties to a police force that went around murdering dissidents, but we disbanded the Royal Ulster Constabulary. And, surprisingly, the full tanks and snipers in the streets civil war wasn't quite as deadly as 80s Detroit)

Police in the UK are prohibited from taking any form of industrial action - so the Federation does not have the ability to create disruption (to forcibly get their way) in the way Police Unions in North America can (and frequently do). The Federation represents officers up to Chief Inspector, the Association of Police Superintendents represents more senior officers, but below Chief Officer rank. ACPO is for Chief Pol…

Police in the US are also legally prohibited from industrial action. The fact that they do it anyway is just more evidence that they are out of control. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/01/what-is-bl...

Re: Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API

#153

Post by selecsosi » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 9:52 PM UTC

fpgaminer wrote: post #135

nostromo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's confusing for me that so many people will complain about how the police unions prevent reform and allow for bad behavior -- but then support unions for all other public sector workers.

It's a balancing act. With no unions, employers can stomp all over their employees, and everyone is worse for it (e.g. Amazon). When the unions are too powerful, they can stomp all over their employer and everyone is worse for it (e.g. police unions). Like all things in life, nothing is cut and dry. It's not wrong to both support unions, and call for the reduction in power of police unions.

Another comment in the thread

> Collective bargaining evens out the power imbalances between workers and their employers. It doesn't really matter if the employer is the government or a private company. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about collective bargaining and democracy since the two are unrelated. There are other ways to handle public sector unions. For example, in Canada the military is not part of a union but their pay is tied to other public sector employees who are unionized. This makes sense since you don't want the military going on strike. When the union employees go on strike to get better pay and benefits the military also gets the same increases. You could do something similar in the US by tying police salaries and benefits to another public sector group like teachers or nurses. I have the feeling that this would be extremely unpopular with the police

Re: Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API

#154

Post by heavyset_go » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 9:56 PM UTC

nostromo wrote: post #84

heavyset_go wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's crazy to me that in 2020, there isn't comprehensive, mandatory Federal tracking of police-involved shootings. There is a billion dollar lobby that goes up to bat whenever law enforcement gets bad press, or legislation they don't like gets proposed. While I'm in favor of unionization, I do not support organizations that represent the strong arm of the state's desire to operate opaquely and without oversight fro…

It's confusing for me that so many people will complain about how the police unions prevent reform and allow for bad behavior -- but then support unions for all other public sector workers.

> It's confusing for me that so many people will complain about how the police unions prevent reform and allow for bad behavior -- but then support unions for all other public sector workers.

Policing is a unique role with incredibly perverse incentives, and it has special powers and protections granted to officers by the state that no other workers are granted. When an officer abuses their power, not only do their coworkers protect them, but the system that is supposed to provide checks and balances turns a blind eye to the abuse, and fights against justice every step of the way.

It is clear that this role, and the special status it incurs, is vastly different than other roles for government workers.

I'm not sure what is confusing about having a slightly nuanced view on unionization, especially when I gave my reasoning in both the post you're replying to and this post itself.

Re: Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API

#155

Post by dnissley » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 9:59 PM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #26

save_ferris wrote: post #6

It's crazy to me that in 2020, there isn't comprehensive, mandatory Federal tracking of police-involved shootings. There's no reason that this data shouldn't be mandated to be aggregated and researched, other than to continue propagating a culture of secrecy. From the FBI's Use-of-Force data collection site[0]: > Is it mandatory for law enforcement agencies to contribute to this data collection? > The FBI has no lega…

> It's crazy to me that in 2020, there isn't comprehensive, mandatory Federal tracking of police-involved shootings. There is a billion dollar lobby that goes up to bat whenever law enforcement gets bad press, or legislation they don't like gets proposed. While I'm in favor of unionization, I do not support organizations that represent the strong arm of the state's desire to operate opaquely and without oversight fro…

A billion dollars? That's a lot larger than what I've seen before -- $15 million according to http://nomorecopmoney.com/

Re: Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API

#156

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 10:00 PM UTC

dlp211 wrote: post #133

dragonwriter wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When the SEC and teachers are capable of using the authority of the State to take my life with qualified immunity Teachers are covered by QI just as much as cops, and there is much less past precedent on use of force by teachers. Since QI works on the principle of “the absence of precedent covering similar actors in similar circumstances and ruling it unlawful means you can't be held liable”, they probably are more…

Yes, in theory, teachers are covered by QI, however, in practice 2 things are different: 1 is that there are extremely few cases of QI for teachers, QI is used primarily by police officers 2 is that the unions don't back teachers that come up on QI charges. They don't run clinics on how to use QI to jutify harming someone or other clinics like Killology.

> 1 is that there are extremely few cases of QI for teachers, QI is used primarily by police officers

To the extent that's true, it's because people don't sue teachers personally as a way of getting some largely symbolic measure of justice for things that are actually crimes but where public prosecutors won't prosecute, because teachers don't benefit from the same working relationship with prosecutors that police have.

> 2 is that the unions don't back teachers that come up on QI charges

There are no such things as QI charges, and unions do, in fact, back teachers sued for discretionary acts, the space where QI applies. Which is why education groups have raised concerns about the pressure to end QI.

Re: Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API

#157

Post by darawk » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 10:01 PM UTC

fredophile wrote: post #149

darawk wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point though is that unions, wherever they are present in the public sector, tend to create uniformly sub-pair service. This is true for teachers, it's true for cops, and it's true basically wherever public sector unions are to be found.

Do you have any sources to back this up? My understanding is that non-unionized groups like charter schools do not outperform public schools. Many charter schools appear to outperform but once you account for the fact that they can choose their students, removing all of the low performers and putting them in the public system, they no longer show a benefit.

This is a super politicized issue, but my understanding is that the evidence that they're better is actually pretty good. Here's a fairly comprehensive set of studies by Stanford:

https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies

You do want to read carefully, because Charter schools are often mixed by 'online' and 'brick and mortar'. When you aggregate these two, Charter schools as a group tend to match or underperform traditional public schools. But this is primarily because online charter schools do substantially worse. When you disaggregate the brick-and-mortar charters, they usually overperform traditional public schools, though not totally uniformly. And these studies do try to do matched control of students, to account for that selection effect.

Re: Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API

#158

Post by darawk » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 10:02 PM UTC

dlp211 wrote: post #137

darawk wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point though is that unions, wherever they are present in the public sector, tend to create uniformly sub-pair service. This is true for teachers, it's true for cops, and it's true basically wherever public sector unions are to be found.

The best k-12 schools in the US are in states that have teachers unions, so maybe go rethink your hypothesis.

That's a strange way of framing things. Anyways, here's some actual evidence:

https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies

Be sure to read it carefully, and disaggregate the online charter schools from the brick and mortar.

Re: Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API

#159

Post by linuxftw » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 10:02 PM UTC

save_ferris wrote: post #6

It's crazy to me that in 2020, there isn't comprehensive, mandatory Federal tracking of police-involved shootings. There's no reason that this data shouldn't be mandated to be aggregated and researched, other than to continue propagating a culture of secrecy. From the FBI's Use-of-Force data collection site[0]: > Is it mandatory for law enforcement agencies to contribute to this data collection? > The FBI has no lega…

> It's crazy to me that in 2020, there isn't comprehensive, mandatory Federal tracking of police-involved shootings.

This may come as a surprise to you, but that would be unconstitutional. The constitution limits what the federal government can do, and thus, there is no provision for what you're proposing. Unless of course, you mean an amendment, and that ipso facto requires approval of 3/4 of the states.

Re: Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API

#160

Post by root_axis » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 10:03 PM UTC

some-are-better wrote: post #118

bathtub365 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public sector unions exist because you have two groups of people with opposing needs/desires. The state wants to minimize budget while still providing services, and public workers want to make an appropriate wage for the work they do. The government is organized, so (IMO) there should be an organization on the other side of the table bargaining for the workers.

"The state wants to minimize budget" This is a joke statement right? There is no state in the history of the world that attempts to do this.

What are you talking about? Education budgets are almost comically prone to budget cuts, it's one of the most contentious facets of government spending (at least in the U.S.)