This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.]
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link