I think much of the fault lie with the DA's and Police Unions. They're elected to do some job, which is to prosecute criminals, yet fail to do so when it is a police officer. The Unions are out of control in some instances making it so the police force cannot fire a crooked cop until he has been found guilty, in a criminal case. If the DA will not prosecute an officer he remains on the force, a liability to the citizens and their money, when ultimately he or she is sued in civil court.
On the issue of suing police, I find it interesting that most of thee civil cases are settled before a verdict. The police admit no wrong-doing yet fork over 2 million dollars.
I'm not entirely sure what should be done about the situation.
I am fine with police not being able to be fired until found guilty. I personally think it should be that way everywhere for everyone. For instance, the cases of a student being ejected from a university due to unsubstantiated rape claims that never hit court because there's nothing to prosecute with.
Now, whether they are active officers is a completely different matter, and they should not be permitted to active duty until pending cases are resolved.
Finally, settlements are not a legal judgement of guilt nor acquittal. The only thing that can decide that is a court case. Often, they are a pure risk vs reward decision. If the downside of losing a case is $50+ million and they estimate their chances of losing at equal to or more than 5% -- in other words, still very confident of winning -- then it makes financial sense to settle for $2 million instead.
> I am fine with police not being able to be fired until found guilty.
I don't understand this at all. There are all sorts of terrible things that are not quite illegal. You killed that drunk guy that took a swing at you? Not guilty, but still not good behavior. You were a real jerk to a bunch of citizens, but you didn't actually assault them? Not guilty, but still not good behavior.
On the other hand, "innocent until proven guilty" is one of the cornerstones of modern society.
If an accusation can lose you your job, I can probably dodge my next speeding ticket by threatening to make a false accusation against them. Obviously, this isn't what we're looking for.
But at the other end of the scale, if you're put behind a desk for something that'd have you or I sat in cells awaiting trial, this isn't what we're looking for either.
If the officer did not do anything illegal, then what right do we (as a society) have to fire them? Are they somehow supposed to be more "moral" (for some definition thereof) than the rest of the populace? Because there won't be anything but disappointment with that attitude. There's no reason to romanticize cops as somehow being better than every other person in their society.
Also, these statements are purely as applies to pending court cases, because cops sometimes do have to do things that would otherwise be illegal for anyone else. And it can take a court case to decide if one particular occasion met those necessary criteria. However, if it's deemed that a cop is not meeting some other performance criteria of their job, then that's a different matter altogether.
There are 2 different issues here, whether or not an action constitutes a crime and burden of proof.
We might agree on the first issue.
>However, if it's deemed that a cop is not meeting some other performance criteria of their job, then that's a different matter altogether.
Would you consider a police officer unnecessarily killing a violent drunk to be "not meeting some other performance criteria"?
On the issue of burned of proof we disagree. Employment is a voluntary agreement. If I am your employer and I no longer want to employ you because I am convinced you are a criminal, then that is my call. If I want to lock you in a cage because I am convinced you are a criminal, that is not my call.
I don't know anyone who got fired who actually committed a crime leading to their firing. Well, one guy. He got a starring role in the SEC's annual report that year.
Needless hands-on with a person who poses no danger should be a swift firing.
A lot of people think that when a local politician has the support of the police, it's a good endorsement.
All that means is that the police union has the politician in their pocket.
Same thing when a politician has the support of the teachers union.
It puzzles me when people vote against their own interest by voting for these endorsed politicians. It's much better to have someone there who will have a better chance of representing the voters rather than the unions.
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/ "The Authoritarians" (full ebook in link) provides some insight into this. That said, beware being in an anti-authoritarian bubble in your daily interactions; it will make it a lot harder to understand the authoritarian-follower mind.
What I find fascinating is that there is less natural conflict of interest in being a police officer than there is in being a politician.... and yet people are willing to believe police are corrupt (and some are, no doubt) but so unwilling to believe it about politicians.
This, even after a decade of revelations ranging from Bush's illegal collection of phone metadata, the creation of the TSA (in violation of the 4th amendment) to the NSA spying Snowden exposed and the installation of porno scanners (which I think under most state laws, when used on children constitute child pornography, and if a child gets patted down, it's pretty close to molestation-- as the statutes are written and applied to civilians.)
It's like, to a lot of people, somehow when the government does it, with a plausible sounding rationalization, the laws of morality don't apply.
In fact, even the laws of the law don't apply. The fourth amendment trumps anything congress can pass. State laws still are in force, even if congress authorizes something (e.g.: it can be legal at the federal level but a crime at the local level.)
The government violates its own laws with impunity-- without even an investigation in most cases. Where's the special prosecutor to root out the criminal activity at the NSA? Instead it's just a manhunt for snowden. Yet people are very upset about "net neutrality" (which is a legitimate issue, but far less damaging than the panopticon)
> and yet people are willing to believe police are corrupt but so unwilling to believe it about politicians
My impression of most citizens is the exact opposite: that police are seen as mostly good people stuck with a hard job (and a few bad apples here and there), and that politicians are seen as two-faced snake-oil peddlers (with a few good apples here and there).
My take is a little more nuanced, in that I'm more interested in good and bad systems and institutions, rather than good or bad people (as if there's such a thing).
There's a lot of disagreement about a lot of the examples you mentioned. Serpico was talking about the police receiving envelopes of cash, which is universally considered to be bad. The TSA, phone metadata and the rest don't seem to be as clear cut.
People tend to give the government the benefit of the doubt, moreso than they do the police. But unlike with the police, you can take direct action to remove bad actors in government. Vote, and convince others to vote. There's an election coming up soon. I don't agree with you on policy, but I want you to exercise your franchise all the same.
Voting is the very definition of indirect action. Actions within representative democracy are not direct ever, but either agreeing, or begging. To vote with a politician is to say you agree; to "email your congressperson" is to beg.
Personally, I never vote, because to play a rigged game is to be complicit in its outcome. If you vote, you can't complain about anything the government does -- you agreed with the existence of the system as a whole. Sometimes your team wins and sometimes your team loses, but to play the game, lose, and complain is merely to be a sore loser.
It is perfectly possible to take direct action to stop police injustice. The Black Panthers are a good example. It's also possible to take direct action to stop surveillance. The Tor Project is a good example.
Don't vote. Don't play a rigged game. Take real action and make real change. Stop begging and take control of your life.
It's unfortunate that people capable of being well-informed decide to inform themselves in anti-government ideas up to abstaining themselves from the most effective, durable contribution society is able to to give as a whole. Sure, direct individual action and activism is very helpful, but doesn't replace electing good representatives and politics isn't going anywhere, it's only human nature and has been with us since the onset of society.
Sore loser, are you kidding? Politics is a game, yes, but played by politicians. I'm not playing any game when I make an informed decision to vote for what I think is, well, less bad. I can complain all I want and do, regardless of my vote. It's my right to vote and then it's my right to complain when things are wrong, they're separate responsibilities and one doesn't infringe on the other. I think you need to view politics with a bit more nuance, because you're a big part of the problem, that is: we need less citizenship dropouts.
> I'm not playing any game when I make an informed decision to vote for what I think is, well, less bad
Sure you are. You're playing the voting game. Your team tries to mass agreement for some candidates, the other team tries to mass agreement for other candidates. This agreement comes with the knowledge that you are handing your autonomy, and your right to complain, off to the winner of the game.
If you lose you have no right to complain. You knew the risks.
>Sure, direct individual action and activism is very helpful, but doesn't replace electing good representatives
Direct action is exactly a replacement for representative action. Action can only ever be one of those two things. Similarly, representation is a replacement for direct action -- if you delegate your power to someone else, you cannot exercise it.
>I think you need to view politics with a bit more nuance, because you're a big part of the problem
I think you need to stop confusing yourself with nuance and realize that you're the problem -- you're handing over your autonomy to these people that are using you to build careers on corruption and subjugation.
Stop confusing yourself with the trees and look at the forest.
A government agency that routinely searches and seizes the property of every citizen who passes through its doors, presuming guilt on each of their behalves, and subjecting you to advanced body scanning technology -- that jibes with the fourth amendment to you?
Edit: I think I read too much into it. I agree that the GP should clarify that the routine execution of the TSA's mandate is (in my opinion) clearly unconstitutional, but if the federal government had simply created an agency that did nothing, that would not necessarily violate the fourth.
I am moderately sympathetic to the notion that airport security checkpoints cross lines.
However, airport security checkpoints existed before the creation of the TSA - it wasn't "the creation of the TSA" that started it.
Further, the mandate of the TSA is much broader than running airport security checkpoints. Removing the unconstitutional pieces would not leave us with "an agency that did nothing".
It is perfectly within the rights of an airport to disallow guns on their airplanes, just as it is my right to disallow guns in my home.
With the advent of the TSA and the enforcement of its policies, now the government is searching my belongings before every flight, and the room in which the airlines could compete on features like privacy, is gone.
Even if buckeroo bob wanted to start his own airline that was full-size-shampoo friendly, they no longer can, because the government disallows it completely. If Virgin airlines wanted to eliminate the invasive body scanners and compete on convenience, they could not, because the government has decided that it wishes to scan the contents of every bag and person.
"[1972:] The FAA in December issues an emergency rule requiring all passengers and carry-on baggage to be either screened by metal detectors or searched by hand and requiring airports to station armed guards at boarding checkpoints."
"[1974:] The 1974 Air Transportation Security Act sanctions the FAA's universal screening rule, which spurs U.S. airports to adopt metal-detection screening portals for passengers and X-ray inspection systems for carry-on bags."
The 4th amendment does not ban searches and seizures without a warrant. It bans "unreasonable" searches and seizures without a warrant. If the founders hadn't meant for the courts to try and distinguish between "reasonable" and "unreasonable" searches, they wouldn't have used the word. But they did--they embedded this balancing between privacy rights and the needs of law enforcement in the very text of the 4th amendment.
All of the programs you mentioned, phone metadata collection, the TSA, fall within the recognized contours of what the Supreme Court has recognized as "reasonable" searches.
Now, that's not to say that the Supreme Court's interpretations are the best ones, or that people can't advocate for a different interpretation. What it does mean is that the people supporting these programs can do so with the entirely good faith belief that they are not violating clearly established Constitutional law.
'It bans "unreasonable" searches and seizures without a warrant.'
It bans unreasonable searches and seizures, period.
Hopefully, a warrant will only be issued when the search is reasonable, and a search with more oversight and checks will be more reasonable than the same search without.
The Fourth Amendment does not demand a warrant for every search. Only on Internet message boards has this not been a settled issue since before our grandparents were all born.
To understand why the Fourth Amendment governs both searches and warrants, it's helpful to read up on what a "General Warrant" was at the time of the founders. Hint: they often didn't really have much to do with generating evidence.
The Amendment has two goals: first, to give the courts, rather than Congress or the President, authority in determining what a valid search is, and second to ensure that no branch of government could arbitrarily generate a piece of paper authorizing police to turn someone's house inside out.
I think you misinterpreted me. I didn't say every search must have a warrant. I said every search must be reasonable, and that a warrant makes some otherwise-unreasonable searches reasonable.
At what point in history did searches without a warrant expand from border searches and searches by consent, and when did a standard of "reasonableness" come to mean "it doesn't need a warrant?"
If you want to get into the heads of founders you should read further up where it says that the document delegates powers to the state, rather than granting rights to the citizens.
So what you should be looking for is a delegation of the right to search with out a warrant, it's not there.
There is also no explicit delegation of the power to search with a warrant. By your reasoning, the federal government never has he power to conduct any search. Which renders the 4th amendment gibberish, because why prohibit "unreasonable" searches and set out the requirements for a warrant in that case?
The Constitution gives the federal government sole authority over national security, from both domestic and external threats. That was in fact one of the purposes of creating the federal government (the states' trouble in putting down Shays' rebellion). It also gives the federal government authority over interstate commerce. Ensuring the security of planes from terrorism is right at the core of what the federal government was created to do.
A problem is - who would vote to fund a police-oversight agency, and how would you prevent regulatory capture? You risk ending up with another rubber-stamp FISA style oversight court that does little but pay some salaries out of the general fund.
The first, which you'll see in small children, is to act merely to avoid punishment. This is a small wrapper around classical conditioning. Acts associated with things like pain are bad.
The second, which you'll see in slightly older children, is to act to be rewarded. By this stage, morality is now a wrapper around operant conditioning, and children are able to seek out things they want.
The third is social convention; things are moral if people are okay with your doing them. By the time a kid is 12 or 13 they're probably in this stage if their development is normal.
The fourth is authority. Things are moral if an authority says they're moral. This comes with the realization that the people in your life aren't important just because they're the people in your life, they're important because they were appointed by some authority. A teacher is a representative of a school system, and a principal is a higher representative of that system. Police are representatives of governments. Politicians are higher representatives of the abstract idea of governments.
There are two other stages, but the classification breaks down at this point and they represent more what the psychologist writing the paper thinks more than what actually exists, because almost nobody gets past the fourth stage.
Most humans are entirely content to backend all of their reasoning on authorities.
For most people, it's impossible for the government to violate laws. The government is the law. And further, it's not wrong for the government to violate laws. They're the government. They create morality.
Finally, outside of the entire argument I've made up to this point in my comment, people pick politicians -- not in a meaningful sense, but they join the team surrounding the politician. A politician is either on their team or not. Politicians on the other team are corrupt all the time -- but not politicians on our team.
My only hope is that eventually people wake up and realize no politician, no police officer is on their team.
...that's Kohlber's moral development, which is in every introductory psychology textbook and has been central to developmental psychology since its publication in 1958.
Do all the things you think of as "pop" come from the 50's? Have you heard this great new pop singer Elvis lately?
> What I find fascinating is that there is less natural conflict of interest in being a police officer than there is in being a politician.... and yet people are willing to believe police are corrupt (and some are, no doubt) but so unwilling to believe it about politicians
Politicians make more money and work in a safer, friendlier environment. Perhaps that makes some people see them as having less reason to be corrupt?
I'm not sure that politicians are viewed as less corrupt than police. Here in the UK anyway, during the whole stupid plebgate thing, there was a real puzzle as it was very hard to judge who was more likely to be telling porkies.
Maybe it's just because people believe the police are ever-so-slightly easier to change than the federal government, which seems far away and immovable.
Okay, okay, already: What the heck are the
rules, the real rules? Obviously, everyone
needs to know the rules. I need to know the
rules, that is, the real rules. E.g., what
am I supposed to do in routine interactions
with the police?
I'm just a Ph.D. applied mathematician and software
guy writing code and gathering data
for my start-up I hope people will like;
the project is
for nothing
illegal, immoral, objectionable, offensive,
politically incorrect, etc.
But if the project works, then I'll have to
get out from where I am now, get out from
behind my desktop computer writing code
and gathering data, get out into the
community, have a light truck for my
business, rent office space, contract
for routine services, say, water,
electric power, Internet access, telephones,
trash pickup, hire people, get business
insurance, a bookkeeper, an accountant,
a lawyer, make some use of consultants,
do billing, handle revenue, pay taxes,
etc.
I will need routine police protection
against vandalism and theft, etc.
And maybe there will be police walking a
beat near my offices.
So, then, I may have some interactions with
the police. Then, I need to know what
are the rules. What are the real rules?
Hire a private protection business, including physical site security devices that send alarm notices directly to that business, and NOT to the local police. You have to pay for the local cops, but there's little they hate more than handling multiple false intrusion alarms from small businesses, and they have no legally enforceable obligation to protect you or your business. That won't stop them from sending you a bill for responding to a false alarm, even if they arrive 6 hours after receiving it.
Aside from making your first line of defense private security, make offsite backups for all your business records, and refresh them regularly. Insure your business against damages from typical property crimes, and against potential liabilities for visitors to your premises, and follow your agent's advice on things to do that will decrease your premiums. Hire a registered agent so that legal documents do not arrive via deputy at your regular office.
The best interaction you can have with the cops is to never need one or see one. Second best is to be assisted by a cop that acts with honesty, respect, and professionalism. Beyond that, results will vary drastically according to your locale.
Rule number one is to not have routine interactions with the police. (Unless you're running a doughnut shop, I guess.)
MANY thanks. That's a keeper. I'll index it
so that I can find it when I need it.
Some of what you said I'd guessed but didn't know
the details or the level of importance you made clear.
E.g., I suspected that I needed business insurance,
but I've been unclear on all the reasons why.
The rest, I didn't know. Yup, I'm learning now.
Partly I was wondering if it was expected and
required and in practice permitted to make
gifts, say, cash to the local police. I very
much hoped not, and would have checked with
a street-wise, SMB lawyer. Your advice of
just do not have routine interactions with the
police sounds about right.
On the issue of suing police, I find it interesting that most of thee civil cases are settled before a verdict. The police admit no wrong-doing yet fork over 2 million dollars.
I'm not entirely sure what should be done about the situation.