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I really think people like your former self who have a bit of a cop problem could really stand to do a few ride-alongs and watch a few dozen hours of police footage. As you say, it's really illuminating. American police are overwhelmingly incredibly well-trained, professional, and cordial, even when dealing with jaw-droppingly disrespectful citizens.
Indeed, it's always astonished me just how ill-informed and prejudiced so many otherwise intelligent people seem to be about police. I suspect it's for a few reasons:
Anyway, it truly did make my day to hear that how you (and @Amadan) changed your minds about policing. There are few topics that makes me despair quite like the topic of policing when I see it come up in spaces like this.
Civili asset forfeitures are hard enough to contest, and have few enough checks and balances, that they provide huge incentives for the police to become bandits, even though there can be legitimate civil forfeitures. Don't mistake "isn't written to be X" for "isn't in practice X", especially when incentives rear their heads.
Prosecuting the police depends on prosecuting them by a system that is sympathetic to the police, leaving civil suits as the only way to get justice. If you can find prominent examples of qualified immunity abuse where the police actually received serious criminal punishment, I'd like to see them.
* Qualified immunity abuse: examples where most people would say "it's blatantly obvious that police aren't supposed to do that".
A lot of what you describe might reduce the danger to the police from guilty suspects, while increasing the danger to innocent suspects. It's not as if innocent people are trained in the proper ways to make themselves look non-dangerous to police.
The cops and their apologists give out such advice all the time. Most of it is humiliating, because what makes you look non-dangerous to police is an abject display of submission. Some of it is actively dangerous legally because it involves answering their questions.
Can you elaborate on this? Generally, police just want you to:
Is standing/sitting there with your hands casually at your sides (or on your steering wheel) until the conclusion of the interaction so humiliating?
For the very small proportion of encounters with police that involve the officers' guns drawn, they may ask you to walk backwards and get down on your knees or get flat on the ground with your hands out to the sides. Do you consider that humiliating? This is done to minimize the subjects' ability to put up effective resistance. It's to decrease the likelihood that they have to fucking shoot you! I'm terribly sorry if you feel like you're playing the hokey-pokey for that brief moment that the vast majority of the population will never even encounter in their entire lifetime.
I never have been in such a situation, but I imagine that I would in fact find it quite humiliating to be forced to kneel or prostrate myself in front of my assailants. The fact that they are (presumably) insisting on it to assuage their own fears wouldn't really factor into my emotional reaction.
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I described in my comment one facet of American police training which is specifically designed to reduce the danger to innocent bystanders at the cost of increasing the danger to the person the police officer is targeting.
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This one in particular infuriates me. I've spoken to so many otherwise intelligent people who seem to think "why didn't they just shoot him in the arm/leg?" is actually an effective or useful suggestion. I've tried to explain to them, very patiently, why this is nonsense, but it never seems to sink in.
I'm sure most of the people reading this already agree with me, but I'm going to reiterate it anyway:
For all of the above reasons, American police officers are trained to aim for the torso rather than the limbs in the unfortunate event that they determine gunfire is necessary. You might disagree with the priorities of the training, but you can hardly blame the officer himself for reverting to his training in the heat of the moment.
It’s TV and movies. Which I think is the truest statement you can make about the way most Americans understand worlds they have not personally entered. The TV or movies show things being a certain way, and unless the given American has significant experience or knowledge that teaches them otherwise, they assume it’s true.
And movies love to do leg shots because it’s dramatic. They’re not worried about the realistic problems with doing that. They care that it looks cool and therefore sells more tickets. Most movie and TV fights are generally fantasy based on looking good and not based on the method being realistic to the type of fights depicted.
The same could be said of almost anything. Ask any computer programmer about the ridiculous hacking scenes, doctors about medical shows, or scientists about any depiction of working scientists in their field, or what can and cannot be done. But because of the way most people live without interaction with those things outside of personal friends or high school, most people just assume the movies are accurate.
This is another reason why Terminator 2 is such a great movie. The T-800 abides by his directive not to kill any humans by shooting them in the legs instead, but then again you'd expect an advanced robot assassin to have that level of firearm precision.
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I agree with most of your points and would particularly prioritize the availability heuristic. Police encounters are heavily lopsided where the vast majority of people can go through their lives and never have one (aside from maybe the occasional speeding ticket) while a small minority are frequent flyers. There's about 10 million arrests every year in the US, and even news savvy folks would probably be aware of a couple dozen.
I disagree with a lot in point #4. Cops still have quotas, though they get more creative about hiding it. Here's a recent example from this year from Maryland State Police who were expected to conduct at least 100 traffic stops a month. There's also an ongoing scandal in Connecticut State troopers creating thousands of fake traffic stops, although it's not clear if they were motivated by a quota or if they did it to pad out the race statistics of the people they stopped. I don't know what you meant by cops acting like bandits, but the Institute of Justice stays very busy litigating civil forfeiture cases, like this one from Detroit where the cops had a pattern of seizing people's personal cars and keeping it in legal limbo for months. It's true that QI only applies in the civil setting but there remains significant institutional biases against criminally prosecuting any police. You speak of police "investigating themselves" as if it's a myth but barring this trial exception in Washington state, that's how it works everywhere else as far as I'm aware.
Maybe I am misunderstanding what you wrote, but the examples you highlighted don't seem like the best way to make the case that the public has a skewed perspective on how policing is actually conducted (I point I actually agree with).
Part of me is tempted to respond to the individual complaints you cite (e.g., regarding quotas, apparently MSP expected 100 stops per month per trooper. That's 5 per shift. Let me ask you something: how do you think police supervisors should deal with a trooper who, upon review of his shift, has been sitting under an overpass all day making zero stops and playing Angry Birds on his phone?) But I hope you won't begrudge me for instead getting at what I think is the core of the disagreement. Let me explain.
In general, I've never been impressed by examples like what you're citing. Here we have an institution - police departments - who, unlike corporations, churches, NGOs, etc., are public-facing, held accountable by the public, and have a significant degree of open records. Along come actors (people working at leftist/libertarian publications) who are extremely ideologically and professionally motivated to find fault in this institution and its members, whether or not fault exists in general or in any given instance. And they have 18,000 police departments to sift through for ammunition, with all the evil and human failings that go along with the approximately million fallible people in those departments, and little to no motivation to identify innocent explanations or exculpatory context.
Given that background, don't you therefore agree that our baseline expectation should be that there will be virtually endless examples scattered throughout the year, for every year in perpetuity, of something that officers or departments are doing that's shady, abusive, corrupt, or (perhaps more often than not) merely cast in that light when framed a certain way, with certain information omitted, and with the author guiding the reader (who lacks domain-specific knowledge and context) to squint a certain way to see the optical illusion pop out? And, most importantly, would you not agree that the fact that there are perpetually frequent examples should mean virtually nothing for the layman who just wants a general impression of police as an institution or wants to know what to think of his home city's department and its officers?
To put it another way: Wouldn't it be astonishing if there weren't such frequent articles of alleged police misdeeds in these publications, given the trove available to reporters to sift through, the evil and imperfections inherent in any group of a million people, and given the reporters' ideological biases and the eagerness to click on those articles by their readers who share those biases?
Now, it would be very fair for you to point out in response to the above that my reasoning would seem to preclude ever finding widespread fault in any institution. I wouldn't take my reasoning that far, though. Let me use an analogy to help explain how I think about this.
Consider academia. As someone who's been in The Motte for years, I hope my memory is not mistaken when I identify you as someone who, like myself and many people on The Motte, believe that academia is ridden with systemic progressive bias. How do we know that academia is actually systemically biased towards progressives, and that it's not just a bunch of conservatives scouring the thousands of universities in the Western world for isolated examples of bias like I claim that Reason et al are doing with police departments? While there's no slam-dunk proof, I think one major difference comes down to just how blatant, widespread, all-encompassing, top-down, and officially sanctioned the examples are from the firehose we have to draw from. We can see the universities' curriculum, hiring/tenure process (e.g., DEI loyalty oaths), official policies, statements by leadership, actions by strongly adjacent institutions like major academic journals, political donation records, etc., and it all points in the same direction and has a very strong magnitude. If you were parachuted into a few random social science classes for a few hours, you could expect to be positively nauseated by the intensity of the leftist bias.
By contrast, if you watched a random few hours of body cam footage, it seems you agree that you would not be similarly steeped in a display of corruption, abuse, and other malfeasance. And if police misdeeds were higher up the chain than mere body cam footage could reveal, we should expect a putatively widespread problem to be in evidence in vast quantities of large departments, with extensive networks of mutual corruption at the top levels, not these frankly pennyante, chickenshit, and/or extremely isolated examples that Reason et al restock the shelves with every so often. But you know where we can find that? In Latin America and other corrupt countries in the present, and in American departments generations ago when organized crime was a much bigger deal. So we know what to look for. We know how rancid is smells when it's a problem. It's just not there anymore, thank goodness. (Of course, that's not to say that isolated examples of misdeeds shouldn't be remedied, and they usually absolutely are. It's just that those examples should be be given approximately zero weight to someone trying to form an understanding of what a given police officer or department is like.)
By disciplining him for not working during his shift, which has nothing to do with the number of stops and everything to do with him ditching work to play games on his phone.
You might object that measuring this is unreasonably hard and that measuring stops is a reasonable proxy to check for that. I disagree.
You can check electronic surveillance, which many police departments are already moving to for other reasons. Body cameras, car cameras, and car GPS systems are a lot more common and any one of these should make it trivial to check if a police officer is doing nothing all day.
If for whatever reason you don't think these tools are sufficient to identify police abandoning their jobs, there's another option that works for any job where workers have overlapping skill sets. You can switch up who does what work. Put the officer who think isn't working on a route where you know other officers regularly make many stops. Rotate a few officers who you know do good work to cover his route. If the pattern of few stops follows the officer who you're suspicious of, that's good evidence that he's not doing his job well enough.
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Going back to your original #4, if you had written something like:
...I wouldn't have a problem with it. My interpretation of what you originally wrote (correct me if I was wrong) was to argue that people have a skewed perspective of how policing is actually conducted, and you did that by presenting various statements of fact as a way to demonstrate how ill-informed folks are (e.g. "police don't have quotas but the public thinks otherwise" presumably).
But as I pointed out, much of what you presented as evidence of the public's ignorance turns out to be actually grounded in reality. So it seems to me that what you're actually disputing is how much weight those examples should get, but that's a very different argument to make.
[Also, whether I think police quotas are an appropriate way of dealing with lazy cops is a completely separate discussion from whether or not police quotas even exist.]
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Much of the problem in academia has to do with things that people say, things that people are told not to say, and firings and hirings. These are inherently hard to hide from the public, so there's a lot of evidence that academia is doing them.
Other kinds of institutional problems are much easier to hide, so you should expect correspondingly less evidence.
And the anti-police sentiment you see here on themotte is a lot more nuanced than the political slogans on the news. It's more "the police have serious problems". Pretty much nobody here really thinks that all cops are bastards, regardless of how many do in the activist left.
The police literally have body cameras! Much of their activity is also observed out in public, and their records are often public or released on request. It's hard to imagine an institution/occupation whose activities are harder to conceal than policing in the 21st Century.
I'm not claiming that the sentiment here on The Motte and in similar places is anything like the hysterical, lowest common denominator, activism-soaked ACAB stuff. My problem is that I think the more nuanced takes are egregiously false, too.
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