From RawStory: WATCH: Rochester Police Union president defends cop who pepper sprayed handcuffed 9-year-old-girl
The president of the Rochester Police Union this week defended a Rochester Police officer who pepper sprayed a 9-year-old girl in the face last week.
On Sunday, the Rochester Police Department released body camera footage of a young girl getting pepper sprayed even though she had already been handcuffed and placed in the backseat of a police car.
Union president Mike Mazzeo subsequently told reporters that pepper spraying the child was the right call for the officers to make at the time.
Rochester’s police union president says that the officer who pepper sprayed the 9-year-old “made a decision there that he thought was the best action to take. It resulted in no injury to her.”pic.twitter.com/Ace5TOLytS
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) February 1, 2021
(Featured image is “Enzo & Nio’s ‘Let Them Eat Pepper Spray’ on N11th Street” by hragv and is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0)
Everyone make a note: Pepper spraying someone is no longer an injury and now is, presumably, something you can do _to_ the police without charges of assaulting a police officer being filed.Report
BTW, can we just appreciate what a dumb justification this is. ‘The bad thing that the person did was the thing he thought was best to do at the time’.
Like…yeah? People normally do take whatever action they consider the best action at the time?
‘The police officer’s actions here were fully intentional on the part of him, ergo, they cannot be a bad thing.’Report
I wonder what he’d say about all the Capitol rioters last month pepper spraying Capitol Police officers.Report
Oh, good, we can pepper spray his kids for funsies then, I guess.Report
I haven’t watched the video.
My first assumption, knowing nothing other than the headline, is to assume the girl is not white, and not affluent.
Is this the anomalous case where that is the wrong assumption?Report
No, and the reporting on CNN quotes an exchange between her and an officer where the officer yells at her that she’s acting like a child. She is quoted as responding “I am a child.” Apparently her status as a juvenile didn’t provide the protections she thought it would.Report
Here is the wikipedia page detailing the current local government of Rochester.Report
Because cops in Republican controlled cities are so much better behaved.Report
Or we could just cut to the point:
Where in America do cops treat non-affluent, Black women with the same courtesy and respect afforded affluent White men?
Can someone point to this place and show how we could replicate it nationwide?Report
If you’re asking for a city that had a silver bullet applied to it that solved all of the problems forever, I don’t have an example of that.
But if you want a fix that worked after a few years (that involved stuff like “disbanding the current department, building a new one from the ground up”), we discussed that here.Report
Right, and in order to make sweeping changes like disbanding an entire force I suggest we first have to form a cultural consensus that it is unacceptable to treat some lives as mattering less than others.
Equal treatment of all people is the most necessary of the necessary-but-insufficient steps.Report
Or we could just start terminating people for obvious misconduct.Report
What makes you think this was misconduct, obvious or otherwise?
Serious question because if these officers were fired, arrested and put in front of a jury, I think there is even money they get acquitted.
And reinstated.
With backpay and an apology.
And invitations to speak at the next CPAC conference/ Trump rally.Report
I’d be interested in seeing what would happen if they were arrested and put in front of a jury.
I honestly think that that should happen.Report
I didn’t say anything about charges. Just standards. Real ones, not written by the union for self-preservation.Report
What is the history and track record of police officers being tried for brutality?
I mean, Sheriff Joe Arpiao took delight in brutalizing his prisoners, and became a beloved celebrity among 40% of America.
The point I’m making, is that there is a certain percentage of American voters who fully approve of police brutality. And they are found in both parties, and are often a majority.
So the idea that what you see in the video is some shocking anomaly or aberrant behavior is absurd.
This is exactly what a lot of Americans demand from their government.Report
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So…in order to change this, we need a shift in our cultural consensus, across all political parties, of how police should behave?Report
Forget it Chip, it’s Birdtown.Report
Well, for my part, I’d like to push for something like “arresting the cops involved and putting them in front of a jury”.
Instead of saying “we need to change how we think about things”.
Let’s change what we do.
Fake it until we make it.Report
I’m not sure if you are even disagreeing here.
What does “push for” mean in this context, if not activism and changing peoples minds?
For instance, Black Lives Matter held rallies every day…every single day for months on end…in front of the Hall of Justice attacking our District Attorney and encouraging people to vote for the reform candidate.
And the effort paid off, and now we have a DA who actually does want to hold police accountable.
Without coalition politics and activism and lobbying and concerted joint effort of millions of citizens, culminating in voting for actual candidates (who aren’t joke third party cranks), how is anything “pushed for” or changed?Report
Well, perhaps you could start. How does your mind need to be changed? What are you wrong about?
Like, instead of what you currently think, what should you be thinking?Report
I was strongly pro-police union until very recently, when I began to see that their benefits were outweighed by their malign effects.
I really don’t think you and I are disagreeing about anything here.Report
Those 5 GOP votes (out of 139) are needed before Team Blue will do anything?
How about the cities where there are no GOP votes at all, does a GOP vote existing in another city prevent Team Blue from doing what they claim they want?
This video is the most outrageous police event that has happened in the last few months and will dominate the media for the next month.
A video that is selected for being the most outrageous of the month probably doesn’t reflect “average”. For starters if it were a white kid or a black cop then it wouldn’t be in the news.
The good news is the winner of the “most outrageous police video of the month” doesn’t show someone being killed. That should feel like progress but probably doesn’t.Report
It’s not the video, per se, it’s (once again) the fact that the police fall back on violence so readily. You watch these videos, and you can see/hear them just quickly hit their limit of patience and go straight to force.
The rest of us are expected, by law, to exhaust all other reasonable options before we can resort to force, and even then, we may face charges and conviction for it.
But the police can apply force very, very quickly, and we are told that they had no choice.
And the thing is, most of the time, they are right. Things go pear shaped very quickly, force is called for. But the rest of the time*, officers are too quick to use force & violence.
But then, we only train our police with a very limited set of conflict resolution tools…
How would I have dealt with the child?
You have at least two cops there. One is busy pushing her into the car/keeping her from leaving, the other goes over to the other side, opens the drivers side rear door, grabs her shoulders, and pulls her in. Passenger side door closes as soon as her feet clear, and the driver side closes before she can react.
*That we hear about.Report
I’m not following you at all. I don’t think it’s acceptable conduct and I think it’s enabled by a comprehensive relieving of accountability. And yes, some of that is a legacy of law and order politics.Report
Is that was they did in Camden? They formed a cultural consensus first?
Sounds like the people in power need to adopt that cultural consensus a heck of a lot more than this faceless mass of people.Report
Yes, they obviously did. None of the people in power were terrified of being voted out of office, and the citizens didn’t angrily vote in a new city government to overturn the reforms.
So we should conclude that when the citizens want reform and signal such to the people in power, it will be done.
But not one moment before.Report
Did you read about the Minneapolis Charter Commission blocking ballot measures?Report
I did an it infuriated me. Sadly I don’t live in Minnesota, so I can’t really weigh in. But still its a ridiculous response.Report
This is confusing “vast cultural change” with “apathy towards how the police department is run”.
IMHO, The bulk of the population is busy and police reform isn’t on their radar.
Only 2/3rds of the population voted for President this last election, so a third were so apathetic that even Trump didn’t matter that much. Midterms are something like 42%-52%. Local elections are maybe half that.
So only 20% of us or so care enough about local elections to bother voting.
Police reform is going to be a sub-fraction of that 20%.Report
At least some Democratic politicians and most of our voters realize that there is a big issue with police behavior. The official policy of the Republican Party is too cheer them on.Report
Maybe they could form a blue ribbon commission.Report
I like the whole, “We were trying to take her to a medical facility.”
And you couldn’t call an ambulance because…?Report
“Nowhere in the cop job description does it say “purveyor of health services”.”Report
It’s the utter ‘thickness’ of officers and departments that boggles. RPD just got dragged through the coals over how they treated a mentally ill black man, contributing to his death, and yet they still thought, “hey, let’s pepper spray a young girl who’s clearly in crisis”.
That kind of armor against reality takes decades to build. Culture problem, root to branch.Report
Started three different responses to this comment and deleted all of them because I’m so god***n pissed off that this type of sh*t keeps happening while half the country defends it and half of the other half doesn’t give a shit.
These types of cop interactions? They’re who we are as a country.Report
As a society, we still have too much of a “YEA! Bust some heads!” streak. We want to be able to do that to people who anger us, but we can’t, so we satisfy it vicariously through popular media and allowing the police to do it.Report
We are also REALLY GOOD at ignoring who we actually are, and clinging desperately to who we want to be seen as. Its why too many people buy the whole” there’s a few bad apples in some police departments, but cops are good people” schtick. Police unions closing ranks around officers ALL THE TIME prove its culture and not bad apples. Its training not bad apples. Its Structure, not bad apples.Report
We also have a nasty streak of “I abhor violence! Except against those people*, who are bad* and totally deserve to have violence visited upon them.”
*For whatever value of people or bad you have.Report
They did call an ambulance. This happened while they were waiting for it. The claim will probably be that they were afraid she’d hurt herself, possibly via cold exposure since it looks pretty cold in the video and she wasn’t allowing the car door to be shut.Report
She was dressed for the weather, they wanted to close the door so she wouldn’t run away again.Report
If you remembered the Minneapolis politicians having a veto-proof majority who called for “disbanding the police” but don’t remember what happened after that, we discussed that here.Report
This is where ‘defund’ gets exposed not only as a dumb idea but an idea so dumb it actually prevents reform.Report
What isn’t noted in Jaybird’s pull quote is that Rochester has begun to implement a non-police response team to handle this kind of stuff.
Also not mentioned is the powers that be weighed in with the usual blah de blah about outrage, we’re looking into it, etc. “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
And, of course, the cops involved get a paid vacation.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.Report
Raw body cam footage and more info here: https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2021/01/31/rpd-body-cam-video-9-year-old-girl-getting-handcuffed/4330459001/
Upshot:
1) Herd of cops there for some other reason.
2) Mom was there and was telling the cops the kid was having a mental health breakdown.
3) Kid freaks out.
4) Cops cuff her and try to put her in the back of a cop car to wait for an ambulance. Can’t. Spray her.
I didn’t watch with the sound on.Report
On thinking about things differently:
Report
What we’re looking at is the unions showcasing their job, which is to support their officers.Report
If all police unions were responsible for was arguing for more money, more vacation, more sick time, and better pensions, only libertarian cranks could possibly imagine arguing against them.Report
Change things so Unions have skin in the game for bad cops existing and a lot of this goes away.
I’m not sure how we motivate unions to throw bad members under the bus before someone gets hurt.
Jury settlements for police abuses (jsfpa) coming out of police payroll? X% of jsfpa coming out of the union?Report
Liability insurance that the Union has to pay for.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2020/06/26/why-police-department-insurances-are-the-key-to-progress-on-police-reform/Report
I like this idea.
Not because I think it’s morally the best way to do it… but, hey, it’s like going after Capone for taxes. I think it’ll work and it’ll get the outcome we want.Report
The issue with getting Capone for his taxes is that it tells the rest of the rum-runners that they can be as big as Capone…so long as they stay current on their taxes.Report
If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then the law only applies to the poor.
That said, the penalty for not paying a fine can be grievous.Report
Lots of people have gotten hurt. a non-trivial number of people have gotten dead. Police unions STILL don’t throw members under the bus. It has not alerted cop or union behavior one bit.Report
Why should it have altered their behavior? All of their incentives are wrong here. How does the organization lose power/money if they enable this behavior?
They are not humanitarian organizations and don’t pretend to be. For that matter even humanitarian organizations first protect the organization.
This brings me back to the whole “why should public unions even exist” question. They’re supposed to be public servants, protecting the union’s workers from an abusive management seems to be a non-issue here.
A union’s job is to prevent management from having full control over the workers. The moment we move away from “a union is a good thing by definition”, I don’t see what value the police union gives to me a random taxpayer.Report
It’s interesting how, as DavidTC puts it, all other unions are boxed in by the law, except for police unions.Report
Police unions are as boxed in by the law as any other union is. The power police unions wield is political; not legal and is unique in the world of unions or even public sector unions.
Take Minneapolis. This summer after Floyd the city council was virtually unanimous about abolishing the police department. Then the police did a work slowdown, there was a spree of crime, some neighborhoods in South Mpls actually started barricading themselves off and arranging their own security to discourage criminal elements and, lo and behold, polical support for abolishing the police melted like snow in hell with minority communities leading the way in demanding more police presence.
That’s, admissibly, one part attributable to the knee slapping idiocy of “defund the police” as a political mantra* but it’s equally a demonstration of the raw power of police unions.
*which is why, when confronted, defund the police pushers inevitably talk about redirecting those funds to mental health services and housing services etc etc… but that merely highlights how stupid Defund the Police is as a slogan to anyone outside the left twitter idiosphere.Report
Which is an argument for attacking the union directly. Reform would be a lot easier if it were gone because it’s entire reason to exist is to prevent reform.
Argue for “getting rid of the police” and the police can show you what that’s like.
Argue for “getting rid of the police union” and a work slowdown will look a lot more self serving.Report
Oh sure, but it’s hard as fish either way and the further left would rather try and get rid of police altogether than try and get rid of a union because unions are, by definition, good.
It’s the attention problem really. You aim at police or their unions and all they have to do is lay a little low and let crime rampage and that immediately preempts voter attention. The local politicians, regardless of party affiliation, knows perfectly well that most voters will forget about police brutality the moment any criminal activity touches on their neighborhood but the Police Union -never- forgets politicians who cross them.Report
Does anyone think that if we abolished police unions or restricted them to salaries, etc., the cops wouldn’t create an alternative organization, with no capacity to represent the cops in collective bargaining, that would pretty much as effectively exercise the considerable political power of the cop interests? Its talking heads would lay out the same line that union heads do now whenever there’s an incident, it would rally cops to demonstrate against insufficiently cop-friendly legislation, it would organize them to lobby and vote and use their solidly-entrenched political appeal among large segments of the voting public to pressure public officials.
Note that this isn’t the “it’s not a silver bullet” argument. It’s the “it’s not much of anything at all” argument.Report
If the cops would have to fund that alternative organization themselves, that would be different from how Police Unions are handled.
Right?Report
That doesn’t seem hard to manage.Report
And yet it’s fought against, tooth and nail.Report
What’s being “fought against”? You’re predicting that alternative organizations will have funding problems that will render them significantly less effective than unions. I think they won’t. Maybe you think they will. But who is fighting against these, so far, largely hypothetical alternative organizations?Report
I’ve seen two arguments about police unions.
1. We should abolish them.
2. We should change their scope to a smaller scope.
Abolition of the unions gets argued against because of some weird fealty to the idea of collective bargaining, I guess.
It’s the “well, we should change it” that gets pushback too.
(As for the criticisms of unions in the first place, I normally see it as part of a multi-part argument involving the different things that need to be done which gets the “single thing isn’t a magic bullet” counter-argument alternated with “multiple things are impossible to do” counter-argument.)
How would you fix it, CJ?Report
It’s not that we should ‘change their scope’. We shouldn’t say ‘The police union is not allowed to negotiate over qualified immunity’, for example.
We should instead say the government _is not allowed to grant qualified immunity_. (Or anything like it.) Regardless of whether that’s something forced by union negotiation or just given out.
It would be incredibly stupid if we restricted what unions could negotiate over, came up with a contact within those limits, and then just _gave_ the police near infinite powers without negotiation…and I remind people that we basically _did_ do that with qualified immunity, and I was tricking people by mentioning it in regard to union negotiation.
The union is not responsible for qualified immunity in any manner, that’s something we got because a somewhat reasonable-sounding court case happened, and then a much less reasonable one did, and that interacted in a weird way with existing law. And we never fixed this in the law.
Mostly because we were entirely on board with it.
Which sorta blows up any ‘Getting rid of police unions will fix this’, doesn’t it?Report
True, getting rid of the unions does nothing to end QI. However, getting rid of the union would let the Mayor fire someone for assaulting a 9 year old on camera.
Is preventing the Mayor from doing that such an important social goal that we need a union?
Does the union create other social “goods” that we should live with that?
I don’t accept “unions are good” as a definition, so can you tell me what benefits I get from allowing the police union to exist? Or if not me, society in general? Are the police physically threatened with violence and/or otherwise abused by their management?Report
There’s nothing wrong with qualified immunity as such. Police officers performing their duties in good faith shouldn’t be held personally liable in civil suits for damages resulting therefrom. That’s totally reasonable. The only problem is that the immunity isn’t qualified enough, with excessively restrictive requirements to establish forfeit of immunity.
Furthermore, QI only covers civil cases against individual police officers. It doesn’t block lawsuits against the police department or city, it doesn’t block prosecution of officers, and it doesn’t prevent officers from being fired or otherwise disciplined for misconduct. I hear a lot of talk about how terrible QI is, but almost never in connection with the thing QI actually does.Report
There’s nothing wrong with Qualified Immunity in theory. Hell, there’s nothing wrong with Police Unions in theory.
The problem comes with Qualified Immunity *in practice* and Police Unions *in practice*.
That’s why critics are stuck pointing at things that actually happened and saying “look at this thing that actually happened”.
And magically transported to an argument about what QI and unions are supposed to provide in theory.Report
We shouldn’t limit what Police Unions can ask for, we should just have politicians who are capable of telling the Police Unions “no”?
Well, I suppose we point out the politicians in charge of various cities at this point. We can point out how committees blocked initiatives from appearing on ballots.
We do have an option to increase the training budget, though! Maybe add a few slides to the powerpoint!Report
How would I fix what? I’m no big fan of cop unions and would be fine with reining them in some, but, for reasons I’ve already explained, I don’t think abolishing or limiting them would do much even to curb the political power of the cop interests, let alone contribute much to solving the larger problems of criminal justice.Report
“How would I fix what?”
Hrm. Maybe you don’t even see a problem.
I’ll say that there is a sizable number of people out there who believe that the police engage in too much violence against people of color and the police who are involved in this officer-involved violence are protected by the system.
We had riots about this last year.
The problem, as I see it, is the system that protects police from not only consequences but from having to change the system to one that would start giving consequences for particularly egregious acts.
Like, if I wanted to put it in a nutshell, we had a system where Derek Chauvin was the primary officer in the officer-involved death of George Floyd.
While it’s true that Officer Chauvin (and the other 3 officers) were fired a day later (hey, sometimes the system fires people quickly! I guess there just has to be footage), the initial charges were later amended to heavier charges following further protests.
So I’d guess that I’d say that the problem is a systemic one where police are shielded from consequence except in the most egregious cases and the most egregious cases are not particularly close to edge cases that could get people to argue over whether it was appropriate for the police to take the actions they took.
I suppose it’s possible to look at this systemic problem and say “look, no system is perfect but this is, realistically, the best system we could reasonably ask for given the complexities of the system”.
If that is not your position, I guess I’d be asking where you see the system could be improved by changing it and what changes you’d recommend to make the system better.Report
Yes and no.
The “with no capacity to represent the cops in collective bargaining” is REALLY huge. If you want [some reform], you wouldn’t get hung up at the collective bargaining stage and you wouldn’t need to keep fighting them for it.
There’s a lot of reform stuff out there that the union, even right now, can’t really oppose in public so they have to oppose it behind closed doors while the public isn’t watching.
Citizen review panels (or the lack there of) come to mind. Giving management the ability to fire people who should be fired is also a thing.
We’d also be making [not-union] dues a voluntary rather than involuntary thing which would reduce it’s money and thus power by a lot.Report
Cop opposition to civilian review panels is loud and public now, not something smuggled into closed-door collective bargaining negotiations. And any civilized police force, like any other civilized organization, will have some procedural safeguards against arbitrary firings, which will inevitably mean that some “people who [we think] should be fired” won’t be fired. Assuming that cop brass with a somewhat freer hand would do much firing to begin with.Report
If we want an estimate on how much power we’d be handing to middle management, look at the difference between Charter (union free) schools and unionised public schools.
Or we could look at the difference between unionised and not private companies (in the same industry).
The implication is the union makes a huge difference in terms of how hard it is to reform things.Report
I’m sure that if Sheriff Joe Arpaio was unshackled he would set things right.
And if the cops who pepper spray 9 year old girls were forced to answer to the people with Punisher logos on their Thin Blue Line flags, they would straighten up right quick.Report
. And any civilized police force, like any other civilized organization, will have some procedural safeguards against arbitrary firings, which will inevitably mean that some “people who [we think] should be fired” won’t be fired. Assuming that cop brass with a somewhat freer hand would do much firing to begin with.
In this particular case, the people who we think should be fired are the people who pepper sprayed a handcuffed 9-year old girl.
I suppose it’s technically true that there will always be people out there who want the stuff like cops who have sex with women in their custody to be fired or the people who want the cops to use chokeholds that have been officially discouraged in the training slides to be fired… I mean, sure. We can come up with edge cases that could go either way all day.
But the existence of edge cases does not disprove the existence of egregious cases.Report
I probably shouldn’t, but I’m assuming you have a point. Or maybe you just want The Man to be able to fire anyone he damn pleases whenever he damn pleases just because some people do deserve to be fired and fair process is a damn nuisance. If that’s your point, just say so.Report
Cops get fired all the time.
It’s kinda weird.
I just want them fired for torturing 9-year old girls in addition to being fired for blowing the whistle.
If you want to argue that whistleblowing cops shouldn’t be fired either, that’s cool. I agree with that.
But if we’re going to have a system that already capriciously fires police officers, I’d prefer one that fires them for torturing children than one that fires them for speaking out.Report
Reading comprehension problem again? Who says bad cops shouldn’t be fired? What I have said is that an organization, even a police force or an army, ought to have a reasonable process to avoid arbitrary firings. In the real world, this means that, inevitably, someone, sometime who we think ought to be fired won’t be, but due process sometimes gets in the way of our doing what we want. If that doesn’t suit you and you really want The Man to be able to fire anyone, anytime, say so.Report
Read the stories, CJ.
They’re already doing that thing in the real world that involves arbitrarily firing cops. THAT IS ALREADY HAPPENING.
The question is whether they should *ALSO* fire cops caught on camera torturing handcuffed 9-year old girls.Report
No, it isn’t. This is why it’s hard to take you seriously.Report
Well, if you’re defending firing cops against being fired for capricious reasons, I’ll point out the stories where cops were fired for capricious reasons.
Here. I’ll link to them again.
This cop was a whistleblower for illegal stop/frisks. He was fired.
This is an NPR story about Isaac Lambert and Lorenzo Davis. Both were fired for blowing the whistle.
I understand wanting to put a hedge up to protect the cops that shouldn’t be fired, but the cops that shouldn’t be fired are already being fired.
The hedge will not do any good.Report
I’ve read the stories. They don’t say what you seem to think they say. There is not a word in them about whether the fired whistleblowers cops — that’s their description of themselves, which may be right but may not be — could be fired at will, had procedural protections that were ignored, or went through the process and the results came out wrong, which is bound to happen now and then. Serious people think about systems, not just individual results.
Again, if it’s really your position that cops, generally, ought to be subject to summary firing without any process at all, say so and we can agree to disagree and move on.Report
Again, if it’s really your position that cops, generally, ought to be subject to summary firing without any process at all, say so and we can agree to disagree and move on.
How long did it take for Derek Chauvin to get fired after the George Floyd footage surfaced?
Was due process followed with his firing?
I’m suggesting that it is possible for particularly egregious acts can be fast-tracked.
I’m suggesting that these expedited possibilities are not utilized anywhere *NEAR* often enough.
There need to be incentives set up for getting rid of cops that are in the ballpark of the egregiousness of Derek Chauvin’s behavior. And disincentives for *NOT* doing that.
These incentives/disincentives are not there.
They need to be there.
In the case of the cops who tortured the 9-year old girl, the police union defended the cops and it took the Mayor herself to suspend them.
Now, I think it’s good that the Mayor utilized this tool in her toolkit.
I think it’s indicative of a sickness that she had to.Report
“There is not a word in them about whether the fired whistleblowers cops…had procedural protections that were ignored, or went through the process and the results came out wrong, which is bound to happen now and then.”
it’s amusing how whenever you point out a cop being unjustly fired people will start explaining that no doubt he had a long history of troublemaking and his firing was just the end of a lengthy process that we, as civilians, simply were not privy to, and it’s not our place to judge the process from the outside, and anyway we wanted more cops fired so it’s rather hypocritical to speak against it now, right?Report
Take that up with someone who is saying that. My point was that the stories Jaybird pointed to in response to my claim that organizations ought to have fair processes to prevent arbitrary firings said nothing at all about the process in the whistleblower cop cases. Were the firings arbitrary? Were there processes that were ignored? Were there no processes at all? Did the process work as designed and, as sometimes happens, come out wrong? I have no idea, but I take such questions seriously. Jaybird doesn’t.Report
It’s weird how the stories about the cops not getting fired talk about the importance of the process.
And the stories about the cops that did get fired don’t even mention the process.Report
I take such questions seriously.
Good. Since you take these questions seriously, I have serious questions. According to this story, dated May 29th, there were four days between Derek Chauvin’s officer-involved incident with George Floyd and him being arrested.
My question for you is:
Given that there were, at most, four days between Mr. Chavin’s incident and his firing, Was The Process Followed?
It seems to me that there are two possible answers:
1) Yes
2) No
If the answer is, yes, the process was followed, then I’d ask whether it’s indicative of a problem that the process is not followed quickly and efficiently in cases such as the one in Rochester where the police pepper sprayed a handcuffed 9-year old girl?
If the answer is no, I’d ask it is your position that Derek Chauvin was then terminated unfairly?
This question also seems to have but two answers, but I don’t think it necessary to ask follow-up questions for either of those answers if it is your position that, no, they likely followed the process in firing Derek Chauvin following his officer-involved interaction with George Floyd.Report
I don’t know Minneapolis’s processes or Rochester’s, which are probably different, so I can’t tell you whether they were followed or not. Do you know?Report
I know that Derek Chavin’s firing was appropriate, whether or not the procedures were followed.
The procedures are not what defines Mr. Chauvin’s firing’s appropriateness, in my view.
But I am not the one who takes the question seriously enough to ask “what if the answer is yes, what would I think?” as well as “what if the answer is no, what would I think?”
I think that if Minneapolis has procedures in place that could fast-track Mr. Chauvin’s termination, then these procedures are good and police departments that do not have these procedures need to change. They need to change to be more like (if not exactly like) Minneapolis.
I think that if Minneapolis said that Mr. Chauvin’s acts were egregious enough to skip over the procedures entirely, then they made a good call. More police departments need to have an “in case of emergency, break procedure” panel that, in cases as egregious as Mr. Chauvin’s, the regular procedures are ignored.
And so I ask you:
If the answer is that the procedures were followed for Derek Chauvin, is it a problem that other departments do not have similar procedures?
Is it a problem that things only work this quickly in Minneapolis when a man dies while a non-police person films it and shares the footage on social media?
If the procedure was not followed, is it your position that Derek Chauvin was terminated inappropriately?
(I suppose that there might be a third option of “I don’t know and that means that there might be a third option and until we’ve excluded that third option from being possible, I don’t have to answer any hypotheticals. Because I take these questions so very seriously, you see.”)Report
So the answer is, no, you don’t know. Glad we cleared that up.Report
Not only do I not know, I know it doesn’t matter and I explained why it doesn’t matter.
I’m left with a handful of questions, though. I’ll repeat them.
If the answer is that the procedures were followed for Derek Chauvin, is it a problem that other departments do not have similar procedures?
Is it a problem that things only work this quickly in Minneapolis when a man dies while a non-police person films it and shares the footage on social media?
If the procedure was not followed, is it your position that Derek Chauvin was terminated inappropriately?Report
You don’t “know” it doesn’t matter, you think it doesn’t matter, which is a very different thing. As best I can understand your position — and you don’t make it easy — it is that if X ultimately deserves to be fired it doesn’t matter how it is done. That’s a view some people take. The usual citation is to the dialogue between More and Rich in A Man for All Seasons, but that is pretty much a cliche.Report
In this case, I have argued that it doesn’t matter because, in this case, he deserved to be fired.
And, in this case, he either got fired using the proper channels (which were expedited for the purpose) or not using the proper channels (which is irrelevant).
As for the quote from A Man for All Seasons, I will go back to pointing out that whistleblowers get fired already. Good cops get fired. Ex-cops talk about the toxic stuff that happened and they can only talk about it now because they are ex-cops and the current cops know that they have to have solidarity with each other lest they be fired.
So the winds are already blowing.
But the only hedge seems to be around the bad cops and the cops willing to cover for the bad cops and the cops willing to argue for Union Theory when police union excesses are pointed out.
The thing you’re saying we need unions for lest they happen are happening.
The only things not happening are police unions disciplining cops who torture little girls leaving the discipline of said cops to the mayor.
Out of curiosity, was the mayor’s handling of the pepper spray situation inappropriate?
I mean, since you won’t answer my questions about whether you think Chauvin’s firing was inappropriate.Report
Just so we’re clear: if X deserves ultimately to be fired, it doesn’t matter how it was done? We’ll just have to agree to disagree about that. Anything else is just repetition.Report
I’m not talking about X as an abstract principle.
I’m talking about the concrete example of Derek Chauvin.
Is it your opinion that he may have been fired inappropriately?
Or merely that other people who are not inside of the inner circle of the Police Department in question cannot know whether he was fired inappropriately or not and therefore must remain silent on the appropriateness of his firing?Report
He may have been, he may not have been. Neither of us knows, and only one of us cares. I’m guessing that if he was fired in violation of his procedural rights, he probably has a remedy that might result in, for example, a do-over. But since it seems so clear that, ultimately, he will get fired good and proper no matter whether he was initially fired inappropriately, he may not bother pursuing it. And that will be fine.
As for remaining silent, it is for each of us as individuals to decide how much we want to talk when we don’t know what we are talking about. I have my limits;, you, presumably, have some of your own — though I haven’t seen them.Report
Neither of us knows, and only one of us cares.
Apparently it’s you. I already explained why his procedural rights were immaterial to his firing.
(Hey, three other officers got fired too! Do we have no opinions on their firing?)
================
I just want to point out that all of this is fundamentally related to the issue of the little girl who got pepper sprayed in the back of a police car.
I am confident in my saying that the officers who did that should not be officers.
Your argument, as far as I can tell, is not that these officers should be officers, but that I should not have an opinion on whether or not they should be officers because I don’t know all of the information.
Did I get that right?Report
No. You can have any opinion you want on anything you like, no matter how ill-informed. And the rest of us can point and laugh.Report
“Lol your stupid efforts to persuade people about police reform so that 9 years old kids don’t get pepper sprayed in the face are are so embarrassing. For you!”Report
The problem we have here is that we, as a society, have a problem with finding that (IMHO) clear line between what is in essence a workplace issue, and what is a real harm committed against someone who is not part of that workplace, but who has to interact with persons in that workplace.
And a large part of this is, IMHO, this idea that any given person has some manner of right to be employed in given career, simply because some arbitrary amount of time was invested in training or time in service. This idea seems so ingrained that many institutions & organizations spend an inordinate amount of time and effort to rehabilitate workers. Be it police, or teachers, or medical staff, or lawyers, or trade unions, etc.
Some people, regardless of the amount of training, or desire, are not fit for the job. And some people, regardless of how much time was spent in service doing good work, hit a point where they need to be done doing the job. There is no shame in this, but we seem to place some shame in it (oh, you couldn’t cut it as a cop, you must not be a worthy person). Probably some kind of sunk cost thing…
We need to encourage those people to change careers as soon as it’s obvious that the career in question is a bad choice. And hey, you know what, if that means we need to seriously talk about publicly funded higher education, and UBI for students, I’ll make that trade-off.Report
PS I’ll also note that one of the big stumbling blocks of getting bad people out of jobs where they are causing harm is Defined Benefit Pensions. If getting fired means you loose out on a significant chunk of your retirement savings, that is going to remain a problem. People will fight tooth and nail to not be out in the cold that way.Report
Without disagreeing, it’s interesting to me that the “right to work” folks are the ones who think no amount of excessive force against a citizen should justify termination, while the “civil rights” crowd are the ones who think no amount of excessive force against a citizen should justify reforming CB agreements and statutes to be less favorable to bad cops.Report
We are very confused as to what rights are, and what rights actually grant.Report
It’s because we’re no longer capable of looking at anything on its own merits, only as an extension of (at times assumed) ideology. Maybe I’m being overly charitable but I think everyone here probably agrees with the substance of what Jaybird is actually saying. At least I’d like
to think we can all agree that law enforcement ought not be allowed to do something like this. But because it resembles enemy action its treated as a bad faith Trojan horse.Report
Well, you can’t come out and say “I support the cops in this”.
But you can say “your opinions about the cops being wrong are ignorant and you should be embarrassed by them. I am not saying that the cops were right! But if the cops were wrong it has nothing to do with the muck dropping from your lips. I’m going to discuss you, personally, instead of the topic. Here, let me talk about you, personally, some more.”Report
Yeah. Whenever we ask a question about “what is the point of the police?”, we can expect a handful of answers. “Protect and Serve”, “Sheepdogs”, “Law and Order and Stopping Crime”, someone really cynical might say “Revenue Enhancement”.
But these discussion have weird stuff bubble up like the point of the police is to provide middle class employment.Report
I don’t have that right. I could screw up a lot less than that, a lot less publicly, and be fired that day.
I expect most jobs are like that.Report
And yet, some jobs/careers are more equal than others.Report
There are good arguments for weakening cop unions, particularly as part of a larger package of other reforms.
“Here’s a good cop who was fired arbitrarily so we need to make it easier to fire cops arbitrarily” isn’t one of them.Report
How’s this?
“The police unions have maintained a toxic environment that rewards solidarity above and beyond protecting and serving the community. This maintenance of the toxic environment has demonstrably resulted in good cops being fired and bad cops (e.g., the ones torturing 9-year old girls) are defended. This is a sick institution that needs to be reformed and, if it cannot be reformed, dismantled.”
Pithier: There are good arguments for not weakening cop unions, particularly as part of a larger package of ineffective reforms.
“We don’t want to arbitrarily fire good cops so we need to not make it easier to fire cops arbitrarily” isn’t one of them.Report
Chip. can you give an example of the type of situation you’re thinking of here, where a cop would be arbitrarily fired except for the protection of the union?Report
That’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying that the Union is, in effect, picking it’s battles, which it’s not supposed to do. If a whistleblower can be so easily fired, but a cop with a public history of questionable use of force is defended to the bitter end, then either the Union is playing fast and loose with it’s own rules, OR it’s gamed the rules such that it always has a justification for picking it’s battles.
But ultimately, IMHO, the division should be this hard line:
If the misconduct in question is regarding interactions between a union member and the department/management, it is completely within the purview of the union.
If the misconduct is an interaction between an officer and a member of the general public, the Union has not only no say in the matter, but beyond possibly providing/paying for a defense lawyer for the officer, the union should have to keep it’s collective mouth shut (no PR campaigns, no public statements, etc.).
I mean, this is a very clear line that only police unions seem to regularly cross.
If a teacher had pepper sprayed an unruly 9 year old in their classroom, and the teacher union made public statements about how the teacher had take reasonable action, etc., we’d be having a very different discussion.Report
This is an entirely reasonable proposal that I happily endorse.Report
Not only is CJColucci correct that absolutely none of this is via secret close-door agreements but entirely out in the open, but this….
…assumes that the police officers disagree, in any manner, with what the police unions are currently doing, and thus would voluntarily withdraw their funding.
There doesn’t seem to be the slightest bit of evidence of this whatsoever.
Also, uh, I hate to have point this out, but workers have an interesting history of using force against coworkers who refuse to support a union, as you yourself have pointed out. This would be just as true for failing to support a voluntary organization…you don’t donate X% o f your salary to the Police Benevolent Fund or whatever, and bad things happen.Report
Our RL experience with the Teacher’s union is making them voluntary reduces donations by… what… a third? Something like that.
Further your line of argument could equally be used to “prove” that all Catholic priests support their management’s shielding of pedophiles so maybe this kind of collectivist reasoning doesn’t work.
So illegal use of force is expected as part of the nature of unionisation. I’m really shocked to hear you admit that.
But what is the larger reasoning here? Without a union will be just as bad as with one, so there’s no point in getting rid of it?
Unions make no difference? Is that only true when we think about getting rid of unions or is it an argument I can use when we think about creating them?Report
Police unions, being government unions, _already_ are voluntary in the way you are speaking of.
No police officer has to pay for any sort of lobbying.
Of course, police don’t generally lobby by paying lobbyists. They lobby by showing up in full uniform (Which should probably be illegal…we don’t let the military wear their uniform when doing political stuff, why do we let police?) to talk to political leaders and talk very Seriously(TM) with whatever random lies they want….and hint somewhat strongly that if politicans do not give them unfettered power they will pull back protection from them…and they get whatever they want.
And use of force is expected by employers as part of the nature of fighting back against unions. Usually force from the police, arresting people for trespassing, or blocking access, or all sorts of things. There’s actually a _lot_ more use of force against labor than unions themselves use against owners.
It’s just that we’ve defined _that_ sort of force as legal (And in fact pay for it with our tax dollars), and the _other_ sort as illegal. So people don’t understand the police doing things like ‘Arresting people blocking an entrance to a business’ as ‘force’.
There’s two positions about policing and the ability of the government to use force: A mainstream one that sees anything the police do to ‘legitimately enforce the law’ is justified (Not violence that isn’t that ‘legitimate’, but actual enforcement of laws.), and a sorta far libertarian position that asserts all government policing arrives at the threat of violence and thus is unjustified.
Both those positions are wrong. Force is not okay because it is authorized by laws, or even ‘society’. Especially when the vast majority of society has never even been asked about this and this force is mostly to protect arbitrary property rights that the vast majority of society had no part in either.
But it’s not automatically invalid, either. Any use of force exists within a context that may justify it or may not. And that context, in turn, varies depending on the understanding of the situation…for example, the 1/6 insurrectionists use of force was justified within the situation they thought they were in, but…they were not actually within that situation.
Unions get better outcomes for their workers than non-unions. This is true regardless of the union.
Without the police union, their pay would surely go down.
But I see no evidence we wouldn’t just _hand them_ the same rights we’ve always handed them. The pay is basically the only thing governments even bother to negotiate over.Report
One of the union’s big goals is to keep bad cops on the force. This isn’t just done as a “lobbying” thing, it’s big part of bargaining. If good cops want to give money for the purpose of keeping bad cops on the force, then that’s on them but it should be an active choice.
I’m going to guess this is handled at a contract level. At my company it’s handled at a policy level.
So you’re cool with mixing up “legal” and “illegal” uses of force? That’s how far you need to move the goal posts in order to give a counter to the general violence unions bring?
Generally speaking, we don’t consider “protest” to be violence so you have to push pretty far to get yourself arrested. The last time you and I talked about this I put out a link to a list of links which had (among other things) recent unions criminally convicted in a court of law of a pattern of violence. Not all of it was even in the context of “protest”, it was more “it’s useful to the union to beat people up so we will”.
Are you claiming that union violence is mostly justified? That the list of events the century (link here) is justified? That your own example here, i.e. cops threatening to kill other cops for refusing to join a union, is justified?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_violence_in_the_United_States#21st_century
The Mayor, who is pointing to the union contract as a reason why she can’t fire a guy for assaulting a 9-year-old on camera, apparently disagrees with you.Report
As Jaybird has pointed out, stopping workers from getting fired unjustly, and setting up a process where the union has first say if they get fired or not, is literally the main purpose of a union. Of every union. It comes before negotiating for salary or anything: The union asserts the right to judge employee behavior, and who should be fired for misbehavior.
Now, no other union will choose to defend obviously illegal actions, but that’s because they know they would _lose_. And also they have no magical way to stop people from getting charged with crimes.
Police unions not only have that second thing, often given by law, and if not by contract, but know they will be completely unchallenged by management. This is because police unions and police management are not adversarial, unlike basically all other unions.
LOL. You would think that an entire summer of cops behaving like fascist asshats would clue you in on the fact this is not true, but…this is literally an article about how the cops pepper-sprayed a nine-year old. Like…right here. And we’re only talking about it because there was _pepper-spray_ involved. In fact, that’s the only thing we tend to talk about at all with police misconduct…when they cause actual physical harm. We don’t talk about the children who are just _peacefully arrested_ for no reason, much less the adults.
I just gave a rather long explanation of why most people’s understanding of what violence is is rather poor, so I let me rephrase your question:
Are you claiming that the police’s use of force, (That is, the threat of the use of force to get compliance) is justified in, for example, clearing a union picket line from standing on the sidewalk in the front of a business so that the business can continue to operate?
Here, have a random example, there’s literally thousands of them: https://www.eagletribune.com/news/local_news/shaws-strikers-arrested-after-surge-in-picketers/article_f543295d-d4ad-5f4b-ba34-73045a78ce52.html
Here’s the actual thing about your ‘list’…those lists don’t include THE POLICE on the ‘anti-union violence’ list. You don’t recognize the police threatening and harming protestors as anti-union violence, because you mostly assume it’s all their behavior is within the law, and that somehow makes it not violence.
It’s clearly not all within the law, as the police have been demonstrated to be completely lawless at this point and doing whatever they want. But on top of that…it’s not magically justified because someone has written laws saying it is.
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Here’s the truth: Violence by unions makes the news because it is so rare.
Violence by corporations makes also the news because it is so rare…because we’ve now offloaded that violence to the police instead of the Pinkertons. Which is literally what labor laws are intended to do, which is why ‘corporate’ violence stopped about 1940, as it was now under a framework the police could enforce. Instead of corporations having to hire thugs, they could just make a phone call and the police would not only beat people, but arrest them afterward and keep them locked up…for free!
Violence by the police makes no news at all, mostly because 99.999% of people go along with the police’s threat _of_ violence and allow themselves to be kidnapped. In fact, we’ve defined violence to down where _threatening_ violence isn’t violence if it’s the police doing it.
And even then whatever ‘violence’ is left over, like the police acting outside the law and randomly arresting people who comply with the law, doesn’t make the news most of the time.Report
Well then there we go. We have our friendly union head claiming everything was fine even in this situation.
This nicely showcases the union shouldn’t have the ability to “judge employee behavior and who should be fired”.
I think you mean “unlike private unions” because I’m not sure where the public unions have adversarial relations with management. They’re often strong enough to elect city officials so we end up with the whole “the tax payer isn’t represented” argument.
This brings me back to asking why public unions should be allowed to exist.
First of all, to the best of my knowledge the union isn’t allowed to physically shut down a business. That would include blocking entrances and especially include using violence on people who either work there or do business there.
2nd, what you’re suggesting here is that a union, because they’re subject to police violence when they try to violently shut down a business, is justified in using violence on anyone who gets in the way.
Did you read your entire link? For all the claims of “nothing unusual happened and they just arrested me”, typically they have 25 protesters and that day they had 150, and 6 got far enough out of line that it became a problem.
That 99.999% is the advantage of having neutral enforcers of society’s laws (although granted it’s problematic for them to be neutral when their own “rights” are at stake).
Your real issue here is you apparently think it should be fine for a union to violently shut down a business and the law doesn’t agree.Report
Calling this “employee misbehavior” kinda buries the issue, doesn’t it. We aren’t talking about a cop cussing out his boss, or cheating on the time cards, or sexually harassing a co-worker, or sleeping on the job.
We are talking about a cop violating the rights of another in a way that would get any other citizen arrested and charged, or subject to a civil action.
Again, imagine if a teacher had pepper sprayed an unruly child, and the teacher’s union somehow had the power to tell the police to back off and let them handle it internally.Report
This is a very strong argument against police unions in fact.
Police officers aren’t just employees like grocery clerks or accountants because they are tasked with the awesome power of life and death over the citizens.
The citizens should have a much tighter grip over them and if the unions obstruct that then they need to be broken.Report
I’m still hesitant to break police unions, as such. But strongly restrict them, most certainly.
That said, DavidTC is right, in that city governments are the one that grant those powers to the Unions, and eagerly so, so the only way to deal with this in one shot is federal laws or rulings that preclude such grants.Report
The Mayor/Police Chief often (or maybe even always) gets elected with union support. “Sitting on both sides of the table” is trite but true. Effectively the union is writing the contract that they then sign.Report
The idea that ‘tax payers are not respresented’ is absurd. They are represented quite well, even for police. Public employees don’t get paid well at all. The ones at the absolute lowest end get paid slightly better, everyone else is worse. I.e., If you are functionally a receptionist in working for the government, you will be paid better than a normal receptionist. If you are functionally a security guard, same thing. If you are any sort of skilled labor, you will paid much worse.
But money is all the other unions ask for. The police, however, _also_ ask for complete immunity from everything, and get it. Probably because that doesn’t actually cost anything….well, beside giant lawsuits.
As for the reason the police able to control who is elected to some level: The police have the unique ability to force themselves uncritically into the media. And with no oversight, they can always present themselves as heros. At least…until recently. Honestly, that was the biggest and best outcome of the BLM protests…actually tanishing the police’s reputation among normal people. We’ll see if it sticks.
But, if the police were subject to oversight, a lot more facts would get out and they’d get a lot more media criticism, which in turn would make their endorsement worth a lot less.
No other union can do this. Teachers outnumber the police something like five to one. And they have basically no power whatsoever in the government, no ability to influence elections at all. If they did, I promise that Wisconsin’s government would be rather less far-right. The teacher union literally went to war with the state government in 2011, to the point of actually managing to get recall elections…and…lost badly.
Yes, the law is set up that way. On purpose. So the police can use violence against people who do that. Now, what sort of principle is ‘the union isn’t allowed to physically shut down a business’? Because it’s one that is a lot less inherently obvious than you seem to think.
Perhaps I should ask this the other way: Why do unions need the permission of their business to exist? (Oh, wait, it’s not _them_ they’re asking permission from, it’s the government. Because, again, we’ve offloaded all the anti-union activities to the government.)
So, the government will make people jump through hoops to create a union, and often allow the company to block it entirely by things that are actually _illegal_ but never prosecuted (Like threatening to fire workers who join), but the union cannot make the business jump through hops by a series of coordinated _legal_ actions like just constantly walking back and forth in front of an entrance?
I would really appreciate it if we’d stop using the word ‘violence’, because I have a feeling you’re defining it in a way that includes a consideration of things being illegal or not. I’ve also seen people try to define violence as something done against property, which it isn’t.
So instead, I will say: In labor disputes, I do not approve of anyone shooting at anyone, or threatening to shoot anyone. Or any level of physical harm or threat of that.
But, again, in labor disputes, 99.999% of that is done by the police, enforcing laws that exist to benefit employers and capital owners. Pointing at the 0.001% that has been done by labor and asking how I feel about it is inherently silly. I don’t approve of it. But it is something that happens in response to the amount of threat and physical harm from the other side.
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As for other things for things that are not physical threasts or injuries, like blocking a business: Property-wise, that corporations steal billions of dollars from workers each year. Amazon just got convicted of stealing $67 million in driver tips. Remember when the vandalization of an Amazon Go store in Seattle got met with outrage? Did the protestors cause $67 million in damages?
No, can I prove that any specific corporation is causing more economic damage to their workers than the workers are to them? Probably not, but let’s go back up to my example, which I picked randomly by searching for ‘picketers arrested for blocking business’ or something like that. Did that business (Supervalu) steal anything from employees? I don’t know, let’s google it.
Yes. Reading other articles, it appears the ‘subpar contract’ was actually ‘We want to pay workers less than min wage, so we will pretend they are contract employers and that we have paid them to ‘clean the store’, and underestimate the amount of time. This is a common thing box stores do to illegally underpaid cleaners. (When not hiring literal slavers to have slaves clean the store. That wasn’t Supervalu, but feel free to google that.)
And…um…we also get this fact: Other abuses, said CTUL organizer Brian Payne, include sexual harassment, lack of air conditioning or heating, and threats of physical violence.
Threats of physical violence. Against workers who picket. Hmm. Is this the point where I ask you to denounce that?
Anyway, we were talking about economical harm, not that. And…Supervalu has certainly done much more harm to employees than someone blocking a truck could cost the company. But one of those crimes has the police there, ready to arrest people. The other is a long and complicated legal process that takes years and often doesn’t even get started, and that’s when a Democrat is president…nothing happens when a Republican is.
Again, this is a ‘picketing that results in arrests’ story I randomly picked from the search results, not somewhere where I tried to find a bad employer actor…and we got one anyway. Because, frankly, we usually always would get one…few strikes are merely over _legal_ employer behavior.
That’s not what the word violent means.
And you apparently think it should fine for the police to _violently_ (Because everything the police do is violent by definition, because all of it is backed by the threat of violence) to clear a public sidewalk for the benefit for a business.Report
You’re moving the goal posts from “the police union negotiating with their captured politicians” to “all state/federal employees”. You’re also wrong on the details.
You have to get to a PhD before they’re “worse” if we include benefits.
You have to get to a Master’s Degree before they’re worse if we just look at wages.
https://fee.org/articles/a-look-at-pay-for-federal-employees-compared-to-their-private-sector-counterparts
Because without the business’ permission (i.e. forced by the law), the business could just fire and replace everyone. That doesn’t work in every situation but it would work in a lot.
Your own link, which you picked to showcase the police being unjustly violent against the union, described the activity of the people arrested as “forming a human chain to block trucks”. And even that just got them a warning to stop, what really got them arrested was doing that and then standing behind the cop in spite of him telling them to stand where he could see them.
Unions can most certainly do what you’re saying they should be able to do, but you are misrepresenting what the union is doing and what the cops are stopping.
A union burning down a hotel would have been a violent action even if it hadn’t killed 96 people. I don’t see how you can be against “violence and threats of violence” without including property.
I also think we need to take into consideration whether the “violence” is legal. It is not useful to define as “violence” much less “kidnaping” the cops arresting people (without injury) to shut down an expected riot (your link).
The police are supposed to hold society’s monopoly on the use of force, the unions are not.
If the police are mis-behaving then that’s an issue for police reform (and there’s clearly a need for that) but stopping unions from threatening people and otherwise misbehaving is how we want the police to work.
First, if you’re going to claim “billions”, then you really should have a link.
2nd, pointing to illegal behavior by corporations is NOT a way to justify illegal behavior by unions. No one is arguing that Amazon stealing tips should be legal.
Are you trying to argue that unions should be able to physically shut down a business by blocking traffic with human chains and the like? Amazon stole drive tips, so all unions everywhere should be able to shut down any business?
I am fine with unions forming in response to businesses behaving badly towards workers. What I’m not fine with is unions getting a blank check to behave badly (violence, threat of violence, and shutting down parts of society), and that’s somehow justified because their cause is just.Report
“I don’t see how you can be against “violence and threats of violence” without including property.”
What, you weren’t around last year, during the Mostly Peaceful Protests, where it was explained that it was only violence if directed against actual people, and it was totally inappropriate to describe things as “violence” if it was just burning down some silly old buildings and a bunch of junk that advertising and consumerism convinced us we thought was important, and anyway that’s what ~insurance~ is for…Report
It’s Just Property!Report
Oh, the best part is the comment saying “insurance to tie to police reform”. But, you know, only in context of other conversations about police reform.
“Yes, we should reform the police. We should do T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z.”
“Y ISN’T A MAGIC BULLET!”Report
You’re the one who decided we were suddenly talking about Federal workers. I was talking about cops and teachers, who are, respectively, local and state employees. Public employees for _local_ government are, in fact, paid less than the private sector. Here:
https://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/wage-penalty-2010-05.pdf
‘While low-wage workers receive a small wage premium in state-and-local jobs (about 6 percent for a typical low-wage worker), the typical middle-wage worker earns about 4 percent less in state-and-local work, and the typical high-wage worker makes about 11 percent less than a similar private-sector worker. ‘
What are you talking about? That isn’t in my link.
Easy. Watch.
*stands there not including property under the definition of violence*
That was very easy.
You have missed the entire point that the law is structured so that the company is in the right and the union is in the wrong.
Googling ‘how much wage theft is there’ is trivially easy. But here you go: https://www.workingnowandthen.com/blog/wage-theft-the-50-billion-crime-against-workers/
Now, that estimate is actually higher than most places, you’ll see other figures like $17 billion. Just minimum wage violations alone are $8 billion. But even the lowest estimates are, of course, still more than all other thefts put together and multiplied by 100.
No one _needs_ to argue it. It is legal, in the sense Amazon was not, in the slightest amount, punished for it. People are calling the $62 million a fine, but it’s _not_, it’s the money that Amazon stole, and the government is going to give it back to it was stolen from. You’re not being ‘fined’ when you just have to give back stuff you stole.
And that was it. This is one of the largest thefts in history, in the top 100 at least, and there is no punishment whatsoever
And this theft wasn’t something hard to find. Some drivers figured this out immediately, and told the FTC, which launched an investigation which somehow took three years. Amazon is a public company, it has basically no privacy rights, especially when interacting with employees.
So the FTC stood there watching this, for three years, until Amazon realize the FTC was watching and stopped.
And it would be easy to assume ‘Oh, the FTC was just biding their time, watching more and more crimes being committed, before they make their case’. But that’s dumb in the first place, and certainly makes no sense when you remember their only penalty was to just give the money back.
We have an entire police force dedicated to doing stupid shit like monitoring protests, when it is _trivially easy_ to track down wage theft in most case, and yet we fail to do it, or somehow it’s considered a win when it takes _years_ to do it and there is no penalty whatsoever.
Note there are plenty of cases like this where _even this does not happen_.
Sure they should. Why not?
You have so many implicit assumptions that you just take this as a given that it is not true. Because that’s how society has been structured.
How about a compromise: Everyone who removes money from anyone else in any illegal manner, whether the taking is via impacting the business or wage theft, causes 1 day of jail per $1,000 in losses. (Distributed across however many people did it.)
Complete equality before the law. You steal $1000, you go to jail for a day. I mean, this is clearly too low a time in prison, but, let’s start there.
Let’s see, those protestors that delayed a truck or two, maybe costing $100,000? Maybe there were five of them? So…send them to jail for twenty days? I dunno.
And we can do this as soon as Jeff Bezos reports to jail for his 183 year sentence. Or…as there were actually meetings about this at Amazon, where they decided to do this, there are probably like 100 people involved, including him, so it’s actually only about 1.8 years that the entire upper management of Amazon has to spend in jail.
Seems fair to me.
‘parts of society’
Isn’t _employment_ part of society? Isn’t their job part of society? Isn’t paying bills part of society?Report
I thought about it and this requires a 2nd reply for the logic to be spelled out.
If physically assaulting a 9 year old on camera isn’t enough to trigger the Union’s “unjust” radar, then nothing is.
So, No, the union’s job isn’t to prevent “unjust” firings. The union’s job is to prevent any firings.
Since trying to fire good cops is presumably a rare thing, that leaves preventing the firing of bad cops.Report
This is why I bring up the firings of the whistleblowers above.
The union’s job doesn’t include preventing the firings of whistleblowers.Report
I think at some point ‘job’ and ‘role within the system’ are confused here.
The union’s _job_ is to play defense attorney. And, just like a defense attorney, their job is to try to prevent bad things from happening to their clients. And if they can’t fully prevent things, at least figure out the best outcome that is possible.
Their _role_ within the system, like a defense attorney, is to create an adversarial system, where there is two sides, one side making accusations at a person, and the other side defending against those accusations, via some sort of process to determine facts, with the intent of arriving at a just outcome.
And just like defense attorneys, (non-police) unions will often say ‘Well, they have you with their allegations dead-to-rights, all we can do is control the outcomes. We might be able to get “allowed to resign’ instead of ‘being fired’ or something?’
The union has a job. To defense members. This does not mean it should _always win_ at that job, especially not all the way.
And unlike a defense attorney, unions have other considerations. Unions, unlike lawyers, can just give up on clients that are causing too much trouble and the members themselves don’t want the union to defend. Or members that violate safety regulation and endanger other members.
And ultimately, a (non-police) union has to stay within the contract enough that the company will not assert the union has the collective bargaining agreement and sues them.
—
However, a system like this requires a) the people who have built it have not tilted it impossibly towards the defense side by allowing almost any behavior as acceptable, and b) a ‘prosecuting’ side that actually attempts to ‘prosecute’. (To be clear, I’m talking about the police _management_ not ‘prosecuting’ by attempting to seriously discipline workers and pushing back against the union. Not the lack of criminal prosecution that _also_ happens.)
And that’s the reason that I have many ‘(non-police)’ in this post…police unions notably don’t ever do that, because they are at absolutely no risk from their employers.Report
The union has the ability to swing elections (or better yet, promote candidates long before that while they’re still weak). That typically means they’re a very strong voice in electing the Mayor and Chief of Police. That might extend to offices like the DA.
The union, in combo with sitting across from the elected officials they own, writes their work contract to the point where firing bad apples is difficult to impossible.
The union plays the role of the defense attorney.
“police _management_” is either elected, and thus selected by the union, or comes up through the ranks and are thus either members of the union themselves or former members.
Who is supposed to be on the other side in this “adversarial system”?
What is their motivation? Even “police management” isn’t motivated by profit nor by the threat of losing their monopoly, so why should they go against the union, the contract, and their own elected officials?
Protecting workers from their employers is the big reason why unions should exist, if that’s not an issue then we need to take a hard look at whether its costs justify its benefits. I don’t see any benefits but there are a lot of costs and intrinsic conflicts of interest that are created by allowing the union to exist.Report
Here, let’s pretend we are operating in a reality without a police union, and let _me_ ask the questions:
The police benevolent association and other pro-police non-profits have the ability to swing elections (or better yet, promote candidates long before that while they’re still weak). That typically means they’re a very strong voice in electing the Mayor and Chief of Police. That might extend to offices like the DA.
The members of those groups, in combo with sitting across from the elected officials they own, writes their work contract to the point where firing bad apples is difficult to impossible.
—
Who is supposed to be on the other side in this “adversarial system”?
What is their motivation? Even “police management” isn’t motivated by profit nor by the threat of losing their monopoly, so why should they go against the police benevolent association, the contract, and their own elected officials?
EDIT: In fact, whenever anyone writes the term ‘police unions’ in this entire discussion, I want them to mentally replace that with ‘police benevolent association’ and see if that entity could do _exactly_ the behavior they are accusing the police of?
Because…you can’t magically wave a wand and stop police officers from associating with each other or issuing public statements or supporting candidates. or demanding rights for police officers. The government cannot stop that under the 1st amendment.
The only union activity you can stop by disallowing their _union_ is _negotiating wages_, because that is the only _union_ behavior the union is doing in this entire discussion.Report
“[Y]our line of argument could equally be used to “prove” that all Catholic priests support their management’s shielding of pedophiles…”
(he believes that.)Report
I’d argue that they are not as boxed in. They like to pretend that they are, but they have a large number of carveouts in the laws at the federal, state, and local levels that grants their membership rights other do not have.Report
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I’m going to paraphrase Chip here and say that from the cop point of view all non-cops are not bad people.
I have a friend who is a paramedic. Rides in an ambulance to crime scenes. He says he’s never had any issues. Thing is he’s part of the Team if not quite One Of Us.Report
OK, if you’re in their orbit you might be not so bad. That leaves a lot of people subject to their authority who may or may not be bad that are generally judged to be a priori bad.
I believe Oscar in his piece suggesting reforms that could be adopted is tours for policemen. Too much time on the street, witnessing all sorts of stuff going down is going to mess with your head. I kind of liked that idea. No soldier is on the front line for the entire war.Report
The reason I keep harping on culture is that even here on this blog, I am seeing two strains of comments:
One of “We should do THIS massive structural reform!” and ;
Two, comment bitterly noting the number of cities that have liberal majorities and yet are strangely unable to bring the police under control.
The point that keeps coming back to is that reform, even the most mild and tepid, is a tremendously difficult task.
Part of it is the hard power police unions but I think most of it is the soft power of public support for the current policing model.
The other comments about how bigotry like anti-Semitism and tacit choice of school segregation in liberal communities emphasizes this fact.
As easy and comforting it is to mouth platitudes about equality and justice, actually putting this into our political structures is very hard.
I’m thinking about the messages our culture sends in the endless torrent of cop shows and action shows, where the Man With A Gun is the warrior hero and all problems are solvable by the application of superior force.
There is this vast yawning chasm between the depictions of police and justice system in culture, and what we are witnessing in real life. There seems to be a feedback loop between the creators of culture and the consumers of culture, where on social media, people condemn militarized policing, yet enjoy its benefits.
Because the militarized policing model does convey benefits for people like us, the educated white comfortably employed people. They act as social enforces for everything from rousting homeless people to street drummers. In the Wilhoit principle, we are the ones for whom the law protects yet does not bind.Report
Chip, what’s weird is that if people propose changing one thing (let’s limit QI), the comment comes “that’s not a magic bullet!”
So let’s do several somethings that address the system like in the essay that Oscar wrote. You’ll be delighted to know that someone took something in the bottom half of the list and said “I am not sure that abolishing QI is the magic bullet people imagine it to be.”
The point that keeps coming back to is that reform, even the most mild and tepid, is a tremendously difficult task.
Part of the problem is that there is some seriously weird entrenched positions. Like, imagine someone said “police unions are toxic and need to be abolished”.
Could you imagine someone else saying “I haven’t seen any evidence that police unions contribute to toxicity?”
So studies are dug up and presented and suddenly it turns into a discussion of knowledge theory.
Like, this is a serious question:
How would you overcome this particular type of entrenched attitude that has the weird side effect of maintaining the status quo? How would *YOU* overcome this attitude?
If you think “hey, maybe I had part of the attitude that had me immediately defer to some weird idea that I had about the importance of unions even in the face of seeing them defend the indefensible”, how did you abandon that attitude?
Like, if you were going to tell me “here’s what you’d need to do to get me to change my mind about something”, what would be on that list?
Because there are a *TON* of things that need to be overcome and each one would probably not do a whole lot on their own and doing two or three might get us to the point where change is measurable and doing all of them might finally get us to a point where, okay, this is where we want to be… but each little step gets pushback with the exception of “adding additional powerpoint slides to the training portion”.
We need to end the drug war.
We need to end QI. If the action cannot be defended in front of a jury, then it should not be defended without one.
We need to end asset forfeiture.
We need to have the police put some skin in the game (insurance has been mentioned above).
We need to neuter police unions (limit them to vacation, sick time, pension, and pay).
And there are a handful of other things that need to be done as well but *ANY ONE* of the above would be helpful.
But all of these get weird pushback and explanations for why we should keep the status quo. Or, maybe we should do those things *EVENTUALLY* but, first, shouldn’t we instead look at creating additional slides for the powerpoint presentation?Report
I think what Chip is doing is snarkily presenting the neo-Marxian view that nattering on about concrete plans is useless, because if we had the right attitude about things then we wouldn’t need plans because the state of grace would obtain naturally, and if we have the wrong attitude about things then a million perfect plans won’t matter because we’ll just find ways to keep on being horrible.
Which…isn’t wrong? The question is whether faking it is just as good as making it.Report
For my part, I don’t care what they think, so long as they also think “I will be punished if I torture a 9 year old girl”.Report
“Your Honor, when she screamed I felt threatened and reached for my pepper spray. I was uncertain what she’d do next. And when I sprayed her in the eyes, right after she said “I am a child”, I seriously believed that my life was in danger.”Report
Cops in Cleveland were so fearful for their lives from Tamir Rice they shot him dead within 2 seconds of contacting him.Report
There is also the duality of the police shown in the media, of:
1) The police are heroic and always do the right thing/are morally right/etc.
2) The police are incompetent/corrupt and only the lone hero with a gun can save the day.Report
Substituting “Trump” for “the police” in the above makes for some interesting reading.Report
This is a pretty good summation and I think there’s a lot of truth to this.
Having said that, I think viewing the entire situation through the lens of racism obscures more than it reveals. That’s why we still end up with the same problems even if we put Team Blue in charge, or even have a totally black structure.
I think police reform is a good idea… but I also think the results won’t be what the people shouting for reform want. We have several problems, and while they overlap they’re not the same.
1) Cops can get away with serious abuse of authority. We see videos which show that and can reasonably expect they’ll get a pass.
2) We have various bad policies which encourage the misuse of police (the war on drugs, a few others).
3) We have “structural racism”, i.e. “multi-culturalism”, i.e. “vastly different crime rates in some sub-cultures”. The expected result from that is vastly different incarceration and victimization rates.
4) We have a history of racism and a media which spins every current issue into a showcase of racism even when the numbers suggest that’s not a thing. This results in us chasing shadows rather than reform.
Fixing #1 would result in more arrests of bad cops, but the bulk of the damage is in the other issues.Report
Here’s a story that popped up in 2015.
A former DEA agent explained that there were two sets of rules for the drug war:
I suppose that there are two main ways to look at that last part.
The first would be something to the effect of “golly, we really need to address racism and anti-Semitism.”
The second would be something to the effect of “golly, we need to end this war on drugs.”Report
And yet we took the third way – “Golly, when people tell use we need to end racism by ending the war on drugs we will pepper spray them into submission.”Report
Were the BLM protests all about ending the war on drugs? If so, I sure missed it.Report
They weren’t all about it, but I remember Killer Mike mentioning the legalization of marijuana in his wonderful speech that he gave after the death of George Floyd.
It wasn’t most of the speech. It was one line.
But it was in there.Report
I’ll just drop this here:
Report
Nice.Report
The NY AG is also investigating. For what thats worth.Report
Relevant:
Defund or reform UC campus police? Sharp disagreement surfaces
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-02-03/defund-campus-police-or-reform-them-sharp-disagreement-surfaces-at-uc
Drake, the university’s first Black president in its 150-plus-year history, shared his experiences with outside law enforcement starting with how he was first stopped by officers as a teenager “for no reason.” Such racial profiling continued year after year — most recently about six years ago when he was UC Irvine’s chancellor on his way home. He was detained by law enforcement officers for 15 minutes, treated rudely and “verbally threatened … for no reason, with no outcome, with no charges, with no problem” but was sent a form letter months later saying the stop was justified.
UC Board of Regents Chair John A. Pérez also detailed his own abuse at the hands of police, beginning as a junior high school student when he said he was walking home with friends and stopped, handcuffed and thrown to the ground without ever being told why. Years later, a month before he was elected to the State Assembly, he was again stopped, handcuffed and detained.
What’s interesting in this story is that the Power That Be are themselves the victims of police injustice yet also appear to be the voices of caution in trying to find alternatives to the current model of policing.
It’s also notable how difficult it is even for well intentioned reformist to come up with alternatives to our current militarized policing.Report
Here are a couple of flashbacks to 2012.
They’re about the UC-David security officer who sprayed peacefully protesting students in the face with pepper spray.Report
and it is just so interesting to recognize that the union fought like hell for that guy, to the point where it took state government involvement to get him fired AT ALL, and he still walked away with more money from the deal than any of the people he sprayed received as compensation.Report
I don’t think he got fired.
His last day on the job was July 31st.
Given that we’re talking about a University, that date tells me that his contract was not renewed.Report
“It’s also notable how difficult it is even for well intentioned reformist to come up with alternatives to our current militarized policing.”
Personally, I think a big part of the reason for that is that you and CJ are actually *representative* of liberals’ views on this issue, namely, that since no one thing will change cop culture it’s better to do nothing and just keep complaining*.
*where most of the complaining is directed at people who want to take steps to change cop culture.Report
We keep saying this, all of us here, that there is no silver bullet, no One Thing which will solve police abuses.
Yet…how many comments are there on this thread? How many are about firing cops, and how many are about alternative methods of reform like civilian review boards, mental health interventions and the like?
Liberals- standard doctrinaire liberals- have been pounding the drum for these alternatives for decades.
Yet the conversations around here always come down to – “Let’s Fire Someone!”
As if this were indeed the silver bullet.
Here’s a proposal: Lets talk about police reform, without mentioning firing cops.
Lets all agree that bad cops should be fired, and put that aside for the moment.
Can we do that, can we have a conversation about these other reforms, or are we forever fixated on the silver bullet?Report
“Here’s a proposal: Lets talk about police reform, without mentioning firing cops.”
Ahhh, there it is. There it is!Report
You stopped reading at that sentence, I gather.Report
…has anyone spoken against “civilian review boards, mental health interventions and the like”?Report
lots of cops and police unions.Report
Here’s a link to Oscar’s essay on Altering the Police Paradigm. Again.Report
Firing people is never a silver bullet, but you can’t achieve serious reform leaving bad actors and bad faith actors in place. That firing NEEDS to go hand in hand with the other reforms. Heck, firings probably need to precede it. You can’t dump QI and leave bad faith actors in place and expect change. You can’t force unions to pay into settlements and leave bad faith actors in place and expect change. You can’t defund the police, shift resources to crisis intervention and other non-LEO service models, leave bad faith actors in place, and expect change.Report
+1Report
Personally I think firing is more important than criminal prosecution (not that it should be off the table where merited). No one ever thinks they’re going to be prosecuted but everyone has concerns about being fired. When we’re talking about incentives I’d say impunity from professional consequences is a load bearing column of the bad culture and the petty abuses that set the stage for the really horrific incidents.Report
I’m not one of those who is looking for “one big thing.” I expect it will take a lot of big stuff to do the job, and that the devil is in the details. I haven’t laid out my big plan because I don’t have one, and won’t waste people’s time with my half-formed thoughts. So when I’m over here, I don’t initiate that conversation. But I’m not the one who takes what would be, at best, point 18 of a 20-point plan, probably favored for other reasons anyway, obsesses over it despite very little reason to think it will greatly help even the corner of the big problem it might address (the political power of Big Cop), and brands anyone who voices any hesitation about it as a sellout to the status quo. There’s an old saying about how when you’re trying to fill a box, start with the boulders, then add the rocks, then the pebbles, then the sand. There’s too much kicking of sand around here.Report
This is why I mentioned that a lot of the comments such as “let’s break police unions” can only be done after a lot of other, bigger, more difficult hurdles which are political.
If we had a political environment in which a city council could break a police union, or if we had an environment in which a police union refuses to defend brutal cops, we would already be most of the way to where we want to go.
Once again – steps 18-20 are not bad things to do, and they are essential; But I’m more fixated on steps 1-18.
And IMO confronting entrenched racism is step 1.Report
If entrenched racism will never be overcome, does that mean “and we can’t move on to step 2 until we do”?
Because if we’re likely to be racist next year, it seems like prioritizing attacking racism above all else is likely to result in a maintained status quo.
Mayor Warren, for example, suspended the police officers.
She did this without confronting entrenched racism first.
Did she do things in the wrong order?Report
It slowly dawns on me that it’s possible that Mayor Warren confronted entrenched racism *BY* suspending the police officers.
Holy cow. In order to confront entrenched racism, we might actually have to change policies!Report
Its nice to have a Mayor Warren, but for every Warren we have a Daley.
As you yourself pointed out, in liberal Democratic cities, white people tacitly accept brutal cops, so long as the brutality is directed towards other people whose lives don’t matter.
I put racism as first priority because everything flows from that.Report
“Its nice to have a Mayor Warren, but for every Warren we have a Daley.”
This is where I link to the study showing that unionization increased both instances of excessive force as well as the whiteness *of* the force.Report
This is astonishing.
So like, when the Tokyo police form a labor union, their police force becomes more white?
Or does the whitening effect only happen in societies where white people are the dominant race?Report
“I can’t evaluate the merits of the paper until I study the writer’s methodology, oops I mean until I have some trusted and respected analysts on my team evaluate their methodology.”Report
You make that sound like a bad thing.Report
Have you guys found a rebuttal written by a pro-cop union academic yet?Report
The original paper reviews the existing literature. Most papers do that.Report
You make that sound like a bad thing.Report
If it were demonstrated to have been true, it would have been a good thing.
As it is, it came across as “you guys have to prove your assertions with citations, I merely have to say that I already answered your question.”Report
I’m still back on, “what is the assertion?”Report
I’m still back on, “what is the assertion?”
That’s why we can’t have
police reformnice things.Report“I’m not one of those who is looking for “one big thing.” ”
Oddly, though, you’re the person who keeps saying that *other* people view item 18 as the One Big Thing even when they repeatedly say that there is no One Big Thing and that’s why there are 20 other bullet points in the reform proposal.
I think the more noticeable aspect of these debates isn’t (for example) Jaybird’s insistence that city government’s should have the power to fire bad cops, but your insistence that allowing it won’t change anything.Report
No, I don’t keep saying that other people view point 18 as the One Big Thing. What I say is that they constantly harp on point 18, that point 18 is, at best, small potatoes, and that they treat hesitancy to adopt point 18, which is what they choose to talk about, as complicity with an evil status quo. And they do this with people who might be their natural allies, some of whom either explicitly back, or have no problem with, limiting the ability of police unions to bargain for things other than traditional pay, benefits, and the like.
As for firing bad cops, city governments do have that power. It isn’t always easy, whether because of basic legal principles (cops are public employees entitled to due process whether they are unionized or not), bargained-for or legislatively-imposed procedures, lack of will in the cop brass or city officials, or broad political backing of the cops, so it isn’t a question of allowing it; it’s a question of how one goes about achieving the firing of bad cops in a reasonably fair system. That’s too hard to put in a tweet.
And, for reasons I have already laid out and won’t repeat (there’s way too much repetition around here), I have my doubts that adopting Point 18 will do much even for the corner of the problem it is meant to solve, the political influence of cop interests, let alone the larger issues. I’ve given my reasons for thinking that, so we can agree to disagree and move on. Preferably with boulders rather than sand.Report
“I have my doubts that adopting Point 18 will do much even for the corner of the problem it is meant to solve”
If you think it won’t help and still oppose it, you must think it will have negative consequences. What are they?Report
Wasted effort is itself a negative consequence, as is squandering political capital that you might need to get Points 5, 7, 8, and 12.Report
Ahh. Yes. Of course.Report
Denver is having some success with non-police responders.
https://denverite.com/2021/02/02/in-the-first-six-months-of-health-care-professionals-replacing-police-officers-no-one-they-encountered-was-arrested/Report
Sleeping on it, I came up with this argument.
There seems to be different areas that deserve different levels of scrutiny.
Like, the handcuffed 9-year old in the back of the police car. Were her rights violated by being sprayed with pepper spray?
Well, that’s an interesting discussion, isn’t it? What were her rights? We know that she had the right to remain silent. We know that she had the right to an attorney. Did she have a right to not be pepper sprayed? Opinions differ.
When it comes to the police officers, however, we know that they have a handful of rights when it comes to their termination. These rights are clearly delineated. They’re right there in the contract.
So the right of the 9-year old to not be pepper sprayed are in this indeterminate space while the rights of the police officers to not be fired without a great deal of review are set in stone.
And, indeed, if you look at the union rep and what he said, it looks like the review happened and no fault was found on the part of the police.
So discussions of the rights of the 9-year old are taking place in this loosey-goosey nebulous philosophical cloud while the rights of the police officers are written down.
I suppose the suspension of the police at the agency of the mayor brings us to some interesting questions (did she violate the rights of the police?) but I, personally, find those questions to be a hell of a lot less interesting than the one about pepper spray and whether the rights of the 9-year old were violated.
Because:
If the police violated the rights of the 9-year old in the back of that police car, it is obvious to me that They Should Not Be Police Officers.
Discussions of the contract or of the rights of the cops in question strike me as waaaaaaaaaaaaaay less important than the question that can easily be imagined being growled by Harry Callahan: “What about the rights of that little girl?”
I mean, I even went out of my way in the above to avoid using terms like “torturing a child”. I know that we had a huge debate in the tail end of the Bush years over the difference between “torture” and “harsh interrogation techniques” and maybe the cops only utilized a harsh interrogation technique on the 9-year old, absent asking a question, to get her to comply with their demands. We know that harsh interrogation techniques are unpleasant, but not *TORTURE*, according to the Geneva Conventions. We had entire memos written about this and there are still disagreements over whether waterboarding was torture.
On top of that, pepper spray is used to disperse crowds. Using a crowd dispersion device isn’t torture when it’s used against a crowd. Isn’t claiming that it’s torture when directly applied to someone handcuffed in the back of a car from a couple feet away stealing a base?
Much like waterboarding, it doesn’t leave a mark and doesn’t leave any lasting permanent harm. There’s some physical distress but it goes away.
And if it was not torture, then it becomes a lot harder to argue that the cops violated the rights of the 9-year old in the back of that car.
Or, at least, it stops being a slam dunk.
While the rights of the police officers are enumerated in the contract. They had the right to a review and, as far as I can tell from the statement of the union official, their actions were reviewed and found to be okay.
And since I am one of the people who believed that the child’s rights were violated, I see the union as not giving a crap over whether the rights of the child were violated. Which tells me that the union is part of the problem as well. Hell, the contract is part of the problem.Report
That cop’s contract means he has the right to do what he did to that kid.
That’s assuming he doesn’t get fired over this. If he does get fired then his contract just means he has the right to not get fired instantly over this.
If “not getting fired instantly” doesn’t seem like a big deal, then I should point out that most of us don’t have that right and get along just fine.Report
I have a handful of things that I could do at my job and they would result in immediate termination.
They include “deliberately hurting a child while on the clock”.
Ask your HR department about whether there are similarly egregious acts that could result in termination, if only for your own good.Report
In many jurisdictions, the cop would be suspended right away, perhaps without pay, kept out of the way of the public, and, after some procedural rigamarole, as some would have it, fired good and proper. This case would be a slam-dunk in almost any jurisdiction, so it’s a matter of timing, not the rights of the 9-year-old, which are not in any reasonable dispute. Perhaps that isn’t as emotionally satisfying as throwing him out on his ass right away, but it is as practically effective.Report
In many jurisdictions
In this particular jurisdiction, the police union argued that the police officer “made a decision there that he thought was the best action to take. It resulted in no injury to her.”
It took the mayor to take action to suspend these officers and that is the limit of what she can do due to the contract.Report
Is someone here defending the police union head, who was doing what such people usually do? Beuller?…… Beuller…..?
We can revisit this thing if the officer is not ultimately fired. For now, the guy is suspended and no threat to the public while the process grinds on.Report
No one is defending anything, as far as I can tell.
They’re just saying that the people attacking don’t know the whole story and the process is important.Report
They don’t. It is. But none of that is much to get worked up about unless, down the line, the guy skates.Report
It certainly appears that the guy would have skated without the intervention of the mayor, who suspended the cops in question.
And I am uncertain as to why I need “the whole story” having seen the police officers pepper spray the handcuffed 9-year old girl.
I’m trying to think of some additional information that I could get that would change my mind on it, given the particulars that we know.
Given that I am more than happy enough to wave away claims that I don’t have the whole story, I can then jump to “looks like the guy would have skated without the intervention of the mayor”.
And then look at the system that would have allowed the guy to skate without the intervention of the mayor.
And argue that this system is bad and needs to be changed. Yes, even if there are existing contracts.Report
Part of the issue is that cops often skate once the public attention wanders away. Either they are found to have acted appropriately, or they get fired and re-instated, or they get fired but also get a positive recommendation at the department next door.
There is no trust in the system. The game is rigged, and we the people have very limited ability to change the game.Report
Sadly we don’t generally exercise the abilities we have in this arena either.Report
Are you serious? Her right NOT to be violently attacked is indeterminate? Her right to be treated like the child she is is indeterminate? Either that’s next level trolling right there (like George Turner level) or you really don’t get how black kids are treated by cops in this country.
Never mind that I have kids that age and I can get them to cooperate – even in full on melt down – without pepper spray.
The fact you seem serious about “debating” this is offensive.Report
I had some clarifying thoughts in further sentences, Phil. If you want to just read the one that addresses your immediate concern, I’d point you to the last sentence in my post.Report
And yet you think this is still open for discussion? There are moral absolutes in the world dude, and “you just have to understand” doesn’t absolve you from running past them.Report
Phil, I’d ask you to read all the comments above (including ones that are *NOT* by me).
I understand that there are a lot of them but they comments above provide context to what I am saying that might help bring my comments into a different focus.Report
I’ve read the thread form the beginning. While I find your writing style a tad opaque some times, I generally get it. Nothing in the comments up this point suggests that girls rights are indeterminate, nor do they suggest the cop had any reason to violate them other then being a power grabber protected by a weird combination of a dysfunctional union systems with whack-a$$ incentives and a systemic racist approach to law enforcement that sees black kids as dangerous adults needing immediate punishment and not compassion.
Had you left it there we might have had our usual stylistic disagreements where you’d write, and I’d take a couple of runs through your stuff to understand it but get there, all the while shaking my head at your unwillingness to write directly.
Then you slept on it and wrote directly – in more then one place in this response – that the girls rights were not fixed or determined. Sorry dude, my original statement still stands. Her rights are not indeterminate. And you either need to walk that back directly or move on. Because I have no intention of backing this horse down.
The last thing a cop will ever do is pepper spray one of my kids because he thinks their rights are indeterminate.Report
Well, I’ll just point to this sentence again in the middle of my post:
If the police violated the rights of the 9-year old in the back of that police car, it is obvious to me that They Should Not Be Police Officers.
And now the question is whether they violated her rights.
If they did, it is obvious to me that they should not be cops.
If they did not, we can have a discussion about what policies need to be followed when it comes to what the process is.Report
The problem you and i are having, which I suspect I’m about to have with Dark, is you keep saying IF they violated her rights, so as to pretend to be having some grand dialogue about her rights. There’s no IF available here. They violated her rights. That you make the statement conditional is where I believe you are wrong and where my judgement of you both starts and ends.Report
And I will point to the last paragraph again. Here, I’ll copy/paste it:
And since I am one of the people who believed that the child’s rights were violated, I see the union as not giving a crap over whether the rights of the child were violated. Which tells me that the union is part of the problem as well. Hell, the contract is part of the problem.Report
I’d say “situational”. For example if she pulled a gun then we wouldn’t even be talking about this. And yes, she was no where close to even a grey line.
More importantly, I’m not sure rights of this nature exist. Do I have the right to not be mugged? It’s illegal to mug me but society doesn’t have the obligation to hire bodyguards to follow me around.
The question is whether this was cop-using-legal-authority-within-policy or cop-going-well-outside-legal-authority.
If it’s the former, then we have one set of problems and the kid can sue the department and violating rights will be part of that. In theory this is handled by changing policy… however I have a hard time thinking current policy says it’s fine to attack unarmed 9 year olds who are non-violently freaking out.
If it’s the later (and the Mayor clearly thinks it is), then the system shouldn’t be protecting him. He should be fired, the girl should be suing him personally, and arresting him for physically attacking her should be a reasonable possibility.
This takes us instantly to “who is it that is supporting cops engaged in illegal behavior” and I expect that’s just the union.Report
“Rights” have two components – legal and moral. Some of our “rights” are legally protected.
In this case the cop violated both legal and moral rights and protections. She’s a 9 year old kid. Based on reporting she had crossed no legal lines justifying her treatment. Morally society has a duty to protect its offspring as they grow. This cop thought otherwise, as evidenced by the “You’re acting like a kid” comment – as if somehow this kid (likely because of her skin color) was supposed to act likely something OTHER then a kid. Legally, this was a 4th Amendment violation – “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
“IF statements” in this context suggest moral and legal ambiguity. There is neither in how this girl or her rights were handled.Report
The search and seize was fine. The kid’s mom was there and told the cops to do this and that the kid as having a mental health breakdown. They’re waiting for the ambulance to show up.
Where we go off the rails is spraying her after they’d cuffed her because she kept trying to get out of the car.
In any case, it’s hard to call that anything other than a physical attack. It’s not because they feel threatened, it’s just to avoid more effort at putting her in the car or more effort at restraining her.
That’s not even close to justification.
We lack perfect knowledge on how the system is dealing with this. What is on the table is the Mayor trying to fire them, they’ve apparently been suspended, and the Union head is backing what they did as justified.
I’m not sure what are good assumptions on what happens next. If the system thinks about it for a week or so and fires them, then that’s one set of issues, but on the whole we’re pretty good.
If the system doesn’t fire them then that’s another set of problems and we’re not.Report
IF statements, in my case, are part of an argument.
P -> Q
P
Therefore
Q
Is Modus Ponens.Report
One of the solutions is statutes that lay out some firmer lines and I think it’s part of the approach. Currently these incidents are assessed primarily in the vagaries of the 4th Amendment and case law (i.e. was the seizure reasonable).
Something to also keep in mind is that a number of states (including my deep blue home) have statutes including some or all of the ‘Law Enforcement Officer Bill of Rights’ that protect them from prosecution and discipline for on duty actions.
Where this all gets difficult is that the former tends to be debated as a matter of protecting criminals from the natural consequences of their actions while the later, until recently, was looked at as protecting LEOs from unfair Monday morning qiarterbacking. We may be approached a place where the second is up for discussion but I don’t believe we are there on the first, even though it is a critical component to curbing police excesses against innocent people aa well as guilty.Report
As you note, I think there’s a possible play along the lines of Miranda (which is what I think JB is getting at).
You have the right to remain silent.
But
Anything you say can and will be used against you…
You have the right to a peaceable arrest
But
Anything you do to resist a peaceable arrest can and will…
That’s only slightly tongue in cheek as many of the problems start with people disinclined to a peaceable arrest.
That said, I do think there’s still a legitimate play to both codify in law and culture that the constitutional principle is that arrests must fundamentally be peaceable… I think we’ll have to live with a greater number of failed arrests from people disinclined but also not posing a direct threat to public safety… and that might be a good thing too. Until the police are then accused of not using more force to remove *obviously* bad actor who subsequently does X.. but then that’s what QI is for, I suppose.
Basically we have the policing we want and incentify… change the incentives if you can live with the policing we’ll get.Report
My take on QI remains: “If you can’t defend this in front of a jury, then you shouldn’t defend it without one.”Report
Sure, but in the instance above, there’s no possible defense since it would be defending against an event that hadn’t happened and couldn’t be foreseen — except in a ‘frivolous’ hindsight lawsuit — hence why QI would be appropriate because if we require police not to use excessive force subduing arrest candidates… then some greater number will not be arrested.Report
This is true, and keep in mind that while Miranda rights have since been codified in most places it originates as judge-made law (a prophylactic as they say) to protect the 5th amendment rights of detainees. As long as it remains good precedent will exist independently of any statute.
That being said all of these big criminal/bill of rights SCOTUS cases really need to be looked at as the high watermark of judicial intervention that they are. The real work on this subject is at the legislative level and there are real trade-offs and competing interests in play. You’re absolutely right that we get the policing we are willing to lobby for as a polity, and when it comes right down to it l, we are fickle and totally inconsistent in what we want.Report