I'm not normally a fan of litigation, but in this case they should sue the police department into the ground. If this behaviour was way too expensive to sustain because of liabilities, they'd have to curtail it.
Complaints are something they just ignore. Settlements hurt.
If this was some national security incident where the nephew was about to activate a nuclear weapon this sort of force might be justified. That it was for drugs is the most disturbing part. How does that help anyone in any capacity?
I agree, but settlements don't hurt enough - ultimately they come out of the taxpayer's pocket,a nd unless a mayor or police chief is held personally responsible, all that happens is a game of bureaucratic musical chairs. This also needs civil suits against the officers, and jail terms. At least the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is treating it as a criminal incident, so it's possible that one or more of these police may do time.
However, the problem is systemic. I don't see a change without major adjustments to the law which would be highly unpopular, eg mandatory life sentences for crimes committed by police officers or similarly draconian measures.
We don't need draconian measures; we need substantive and reliably enforced measures. People respond much more strongly to certainty of punishment than severity.
I hew to the economic view that they respond to the combination of the two, in contrast to this position paper: http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/deterrence%20briefing%2... which I think begs the question. The problem is that certainty of punishment is difficult to achieve, especially where co-offenders have a strong incentive to back each other up - in this case, groups of police officers :-(
We should (for some value of "should") respond to the expected value plus something like the Kelly criterion. In practice, my understanding is that the research consistently shows that we are systematically less sensitive to severity than certainty. Of course the severity needs to be sufficient that it can't just be written off as a cost of doing business, but that is true long before we hit "draconian". You can insist that, in spite of the research, we're all perfect little economic calculators acting rationally, but know that you run significant chance of being wrong.
But sure, let's run with your assumption.
"The problem is that certainty of punishment is difficult to achieve"
"X is hard, therefore Y," without establishing that Y is worthwhile, is a piece of reasoning responsible for many ills. Yes, it's a cost-benefit thing, but bear the following points in mind:
When you have (X * Y) in general, and X >> Y, you can make a much bigger difference with a small change to Y than a big change to X (unless it's an exceptionally big change to X).
Costs of long term imprisonment scales with the medical needs of the people we're imprisoning, which is much faster than linear.
Draconian sentencing means we're doing harm to the those we falsely convict (which will inevitably be above zero); this means increasing the risk to innocent officers, which lowers the quality of officers we can recruit.
"especially where co-offenders have a strong incentive to back each other up - in this case, groups of police officers :-("
This is a tremendous issue, for sure, but it is one that needs to be resolved for a whole host of reasons, of which this is only one.
Note that a more draconian sentence reinforces this - if I think there's a chance my innocent buddy is getting sent up for life, I'm more concerned (and therefore, presumably, more willing to stretch the truth) than if I think there's a chance my innocent buddy is getting a slap on the wrist - so if I'm mistaken about my buddy's innocence, raising X might actually decrease Y. (Actually, that holds even if I think my buddy is guilty of something that doesn't deserve so stiff a penalty...)
> That it was for drugs is the most disturbing part. How does that help anyone in any capacity?
It helps police departments keep their budgets and continues their access to militarization programs (where the DoD gives them surplus equipment after combat operations).
Sadly this doesn't seem to work. There is little to no correlation between settlements and the divisions within an organization that they are supposed to punish, especially for large jurisdictions.
Atlanta, small for a "big" city and with a terribly low budget relative to its size set its 2014 budget at 550M. A few million dollar wrongful death/abuse settlements each year don't even get noticed.
I'm not so sure. Atlanta made tons of changes after the Kathryn Johnson incident and the Atlanta Eagle raid. They totally disbanded the red dog unit, and have been much more sensitive to public perception after those events. I think more importantly this shows that these small county (Habersham, ~40k total county pop) police forces have no business having "SWAT" teams, much less doing no-knock drug raids.
I can't argue with that, just felt the need to defend APD a bit, as a lot of people are confusing them with the redneck swat team who threw the flashbang into a crib. APD has changed a ton for the better after Turner became chief. Before that, Pennington from New Orleans PD was clearly a mistake for the city, and led to many of the largest APD scandals in recent history.
Yes they hurt the taxpayers, which means the taxpayers should be concerned that their police department is acting so flagrantly and apply more pressure to get that fixed.
Sometimes the only way to get change is to make it painful to not change.
One incident will not be enough, but if this becomes epidemic and they're spending $50M a year on lawsuits...
Absolutely. This is the unfortunate effect of the militarisation of the police force and how ridiculous the War on Drugs has become! They were looking for drugs ...
Unfortunately South Africa's police force has also learned from the USA, as have others I see. Granted a Swat team is necessary sometimes, but overall the Police force is just becoming more indimidatory and inhumane. It's a bad trend, and a real threat to civil society.
