I think that police departments open sourcing their policies would go a long way. Or wearing body cams in more situations.
What do you smart (non-cynical) internet people think?
"New Era of Public Safety: An Advocacy Toolkit for Fair, Safe, and Effective Community Policing" (2019) https://policing.civilrights.org/toolkit
https://policing.civilrights.org/
Criminal_justice_reform_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_reform_in_the...
Are there points in these resources that could be summarized here?
Be better at working as an organisation and not rely on the action of a single cop. Change laws procedures so that persons of interest can still have hope and that being arrested does not equal to the end of life as they know it. Strangely enough, fair process and trials and forgiving laws help make it less likely that people being arrested attempt desperate violent actions against the cops. In return, it makes the cops job easier and reduces their likeliness to use excessive force.
Again, the probability of getting caught is the most effective deterrent to criminal activity , not the severity of the punishment.
So, the USA - the bill of rights, search warrants, Miranda rights. It's not exactly policing by consent, it's more like an understanding that the police will go to any lengths they feel necessary, so there need to be hard rules that completely invalidate the case against someone if breached.
I guess the same model can continue to be refined through the democratic process. Technology can play a part. One can imagine future laws that impose strict rules about body cams (e.g. that absence of a recording implies innocence, or that 'lost' footage carries a presumption of guilt in police brutality allegations). Ubiquitous surveillance, not to say it's a good thing, but if it's happening anyway, it should be useful in preventing excessive force by police too. Laws could be passed specifically enabling (and preventing treatment as a crime) various technological forms of monitoring of law enforcement by the public.
> What do you smart (non-cynical) internet people think?
I don't know how one would start to rip up American policing and produce a kindly institution that was accepted universally by the community. No-one can be that non-cynical. But I guess I'm non-cynical in thinking that there's still some mileage in democracy and the rule of law, and progress might still be made via the normal channels. Of which, by the way, protesting is a part.
Racism and abuse are cultural and deeply rooted, don't know how you change that without dismantling it. But abuse is learned and cheered upon, then is covered and rarely punished.
You have cases like a cop shooting with a machine-gun an unarmed teen and then not only going unpunished but retiring to cash in a milionary pension because of "PTSD".
In most any other organization, especially ones where there aren’t enough qualified workers, you don’t have one main role where the entry level people and under performers are all doing the same work as seasoned veterans. You separate out roles, and entry level people do work that requires minimal responsibility and can inflict minimal damage.
You have a swat team, and they get called in when needed, but they don’t get to decide when to jump into action, someone else decides that, and the swat team doesn’t drive around looking for things to get involved in. There’s no reason the shooters and the deciders need to be the same person.
Is there any reason a cop writing a traffic citation:
* Needs a gun?
* Needs to approach another car on foot?
* Needs to exit his own car at all?
What if there was a role for traffic cop, which is entry level, unarmed, where the cop never exits their own vehicle, and where the only job is to write a citation, but _not_ also to run warrants and try to search the citizen’s car for illegal items?
If you had that role, the traffic cop isn’t on edge, worried he might get shot in the face for pulling over a guy with warrants. The guy with warrants doesn’t need to run, he just gets his citation and moves on.
Eventually technology will help enable this, say, once we have remote control drone cars to issue traffic citations.
Sure, there are tons of details to sort out, like a reliable system to identify drivers independent of the physical car (so there’s no person-to-person interaction required to write a ticket), but I suspect this is an area where the motives are so misaligned that technology will have to show up which forces these kinds of forward progress. The same way people fought for women’s rights for a long time, then the pill shows up and advances things forward by an order or magnitude.
Along these lines, it would also be good to dissolve or restrict the police union. The union protects bad cops. The goals of the union are in conflict with the interests of the community in these situations. Even FDR was against public unions.
They aren't going to release many their policies or tactics for opsec and efficacy purposes.
A good book (content-wise, maybe not execution-wise) is "We Get Confessions".