Police Reform in the United States

[San Lumen]

White supremacy isn’t something to be proud of. Any police chief who called for genocide would be ousted as would any officer who attempted it.

not to be proud of. Well, I am sure as hell proud of it and I am proud of my race. This is why we need to reform the police to get out the others and retake the country. So yes, let's all work as one. Let's reform this police force rather than defund. You get a changed police force and I get the genocide I want. Everyone wins, except for the people who are being genocided.

How about you take your bigotry and shove it? America isn’t a white nation.go move to Belarus. You get your white ethnostate.

Attitudes like yours is why stonewall happened and the reason I can kiss a guy on the street.

[Australiem]

not to be proud of. Well, I am sure as hell proud of it and I am proud of my race. This is why we need to reform the police to get out the others and retake the country. So yes, let's all work as one. Let's reform this police force rather than defund. You get a changed police force and I get the genocide I want. Everyone wins, except for the people who are being genocided.

How about you take your bigotry and shove it? America isn’t a white nation.go move to Belarus. You get your white ethnostate.

Attitudes like yours is why stonewall happened and the reason I can kiss a guy on the street.

Hahahah, Well, not for long. Society is slowly regressing back. Western countries are becoming more authoritarian, so it's most likely not going to happen in the next few years, but it is coming though and I am all for joining the state in relocating the enemies of the state into the ocean even though I might be an old man by the time it happens. So I am going to happily have my bigotry and be all happy about it. 

[San Lumen]

How about you take your bigotry and shove it? America isn’t a white nation.go move to Belarus. You get your white ethnostate.

Attitudes like yours is why stonewall happened and the reason I can kiss a guy on the street.

Hahahah, Well, not for long. Society is slowly regressing back. Western countries are becoming more authoritarian, so it's most likely not going to happen in the next few years, but it is coming though and I am all for joining the state in relocating the enemies of the state into the ocean even though I might be an old man by the time it happens. So I am going to happily have my bigotry and be all happy about it. 

Not how you envision.

I guess I’m an enemy of the state because I’m Jewish and gay.

[Australiem]

Hahahah, Well, not for long. Society is slowly regressing back. Western countries are becoming more authoritarian, so it's most likely not going to happen in the next few years, but it is coming though and I am all for joining the state in relocating the enemies of the state into the ocean even though I might be an old man by the time it happens. So I am going to happily have my bigotry and be all happy about it. 

Not how you envision.

I guess I’m an enemy of the state because I’m Jewish and gay.

Well if the state so chooses it, I am simple going to be a follower. Authority above all, degeneracy above non.

[Heloin]

No, that's more of a lack of imagination by your part. If you think that a local community taking care of itself is similar to a riot squad then you're in for a rough time matey.

Who is doing the policing then?

No one.

[San Lumen]

Who is doing the policing then?

No one.

So mob rule and crime is utterly rampant?

[Ifreann]

It has already been pointed out in this thread that crime rates don't tend to rise much - or at all - when the police go on strike.

The efficacy of law enforcement is measured in the absence of crime, not in the capture or punishment of criminals. And when one actually looks at the statistics it's hard not to question whether the existence of the police in the United States has any significant effect on American criminality.

Sorry about the double post, but I'm talking about a specific town in a specific state...and crime is definitely going through the roof since the dummies decided to defund and now are backpedaling at 100mph because... well...

Very weird to not mention what town you're talking about and showing the crime numbers and changes to the police budget.

[Thethen]

Sorry about the double post, but I'm talking about a specific town in a specific state...and crime is definitely going through the roof since the dummies decided to defund and now are backpedaling at 100mph because... well...

Very weird to not mention what town you're talking about and showing the crime numbers and changes to the police budget.

Not sure, but it may be Los Angeles.

[Indomitable Friendship]

White supremacy isn’t something to be proud of. Any police chief who called for genocide would be ousted as would any officer who attempted it.

not to be proud of. Well, I am sure as hell proud of it and I am proud of my race. This is why we need to reform the police to get out the others and retake the country. So yes, let's all work as one. Let's reform this police force rather than defund. You get a changed police force and I get the genocide I want. Everyone wins, except for the people who are being genocided.

Well, I'm not proud of you. Your excessively common attitude is a cancer to the Euro identity movement and you have nothing to offer but some preconceived notions about superiority while having nothing to offer as an individual. We don't need more domesticated bootlickers; we need less, much less. Go co-opt some other movement to fill in the cracks of your insecurities.

[New Visayan Islands]

Australiem's posts as reported here have seen cause for them to take *** one day off for trolling. *** Please take the time off to read and review the Rules; appeals must be made through GHR.

New Visayan Islands
Game Moderator

[Kannap]

Except in the aforementioned situation, they're useless even if they do their jobs.

Like if I find out I've been robbed and call the police and they show up to hear my report, file it, and go on their way - what has that done for me?

I've still been robbed and the police are never going to find the robber (and if they do, I likely won't be getting my property back).

Whats your solution then?

In the current system? There isn't one. Police statistically don't prevent crimes because that would require police officers to be everywhere all the time and that's not practical nor would I want that to be the case. In cases where you've been robbed or attacked, it's still highly unlikely police will be able to help you unless the robber or assailant is still there and gets caught in the act when the police arrive.

The solution to robbery? A societal addressing of the systemic problems that lead to robbery. If somebody robs a store for food or medicine because they can't afford it and need it for themselves or somebody they love, should they be punished for the crime of robbery? Is that the best solution to the problem? Why not address the systemic inequalities that led to that person needing to steal food or medicine to ensure their survival or the survival of a loved one? If somebody is addicted to drugs and robs you to make some money to buy drugs? Why not address the systemic inequalities that those with drug addiction face and invest money into actual rehabilitation programs (prison is not a good setting for rehabilitation in any way) and offer them genuine opportunities to help them?

Most people don't rob or attack other people for the hell of it, there's often an underlying issue that led them to that behavior.

[Kannap]

No one.

So mob rule and crime is utterly rampant?

Do you ever get tired of parroting rightwing talking points?

[San Lumen]

So mob rule and crime is utterly rampant?

Do you ever get tired of parroting rightwing talking points?

Police abolition isn't the solution.

[Kannap]

Do you ever get tired of parroting rightwing talking points?

Police abolition isn't the solution.

Then what is?

[San Lumen]

Police abolition isn't the solution.

Then what is?

reforms like body cams, banning encryption, civilian review boards, bias training, meetings with the community, beat cops (this is cops walking the street) getting rid of military gear in police departments.

[Indomitable Friendship]

Then what is?

reforms like body cams, banning encryption, civilian review boards, bias training, meetings with the community, beat cops (this is cops walking the street) getting rid of military gear in police departments.

reforms like body cams

There are bodycams. Feel free to watch the bodycam of Daniel Shaver getting shot to death while lying on his stomach on the floor.

banning encryption

And what effect does this have? You'll have a little forewarning before getting molested by the state, if you happen to be sitting around listening for it?

civilian review boards

If you want social regulation, why not just cut out the middleman (police)? And what're those going to do, anyway? They have no say if they're not in LE.

meetings with the community

I'm not interested in having a cup of tea with my rapist.

bias training

The job selects for simplistic drones, control freaks and psychos with hero complexes. The entire job is based on bias: imprison and murder everyone that doesn't conform to the government's bullshit.

beat cops (this is cops walking the street) getting rid of military gear in police departments.

Not happening, law enforcement is inherently militaristic and the entirety of its history is an example of snowballing. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

[Ifreann]

Then what is?

reforms like body cams, banning encryption, civilian review boards, bias training, meetings with the community, beat cops (this is cops walking the street) getting rid of military gear in police departments.

How will any of those things lower the crime rate?

[Kannap]

Then what is?

reforms like body cams

Are body cams a good investment? That is, do they solve the problems we face? I'd say no, they don't.

We need to capture footage of police brutality, of course, but is a video from the perspective of a police officer and completely left in the hands of the police department the best way to hold officers accountable for their actions? Of course not. If I take a video of police brutality and live stream it to Facebook or post it on Twitter, then people can see it and get angry about it. If an officer's body cam is the only video of the brutality, then the police department can sit on that and nobody will ever know. If police are pressured to release the body cam footage (say there were witnesses who didn't get their own videos) then they have the only copy of the video and can release an incomplete segment of the video or an edited version of the video that shape the narrative of the video in favor of the officer. When officers are wearing the cameras, they can turn them off, cover up the camera with their hand, or turn away from the situation they don't want on video.

For example, in 2014, Florida deputies chased and beat a suspected drug dealer named Derrick Price. While body camera footage seemed to confirm what the officers wrote in their incident reports — that Mr. Price was resisting arrest — a surveillance camera from a nearby building completely contradicted these reports and showed that Mr. Price had clearly attempted to surrender voluntarily but was still brutally beaten.

Police body cameras, while failing to hold officers accountable, may actually be a good tool for monitoring civilians and violating their rights. These body cams could also be considered a form of unreasonable search if they're so used that way (and I have no faith that police departments aren't using them this way): If a police officer is at the door to your home or the window of your car, you can turn them away from searching your home or car because that is your right, but if they're wearing a body cam then that camera has already collected a lot of data from the vantage point of the front door or the car window and the footage can be paused and visually searched later. Police departments aren't held to any transparency in how this collected data is used or shared, thus posing risk to the lives of individuals and communities. Body cams are just another form of surveillance, which we already know the police use extensively to identify protesters. Some of these police body cams have facial recognition technology, which is often inaccurate and racially biased. By these two instances alone, police body cams could infringe on people's 1st Amendment right to protest and 4th Amendment right protecting them from unreasonable search and seizure.

Besides, the United States has a lengthy history of surveillance that only exacerbates racial bias in how its used. Surveillance disproportionately harms the most marginalized communities in our country: Japanese-Americans during WW2, Muslim Americans after 9/11, and - of course - Black Americans, especially during the large increase in protesting against police brutality in the last decade.

Anyway, the ACLU is more eloquent than I could ever be about the point I'm trying to make:

If our goal is to end police violence, we should question whether body cams are a good investment since research shows they do not stop or even curb police brutality while posing known privacy and civil liberties concerns. Moreover, policing’s deep roots in white supremacy should give us pause at the notion that body cams can limit or prevent police violence, particularly against people of color. If policing's history in America makes policing inherently biased towards violence against communities of color, then we need less police and less policing to curb police violence—not more policing resources, including body cams.

Before spending millions of dollars on more body camera technology that will significantly increase already excessive police budgets, we should first examine whether that money is better spent on other services with a more meaningful impact on public safety. When so many people — disproportionately people of color — are unhoused, lack health care, and struggle to receive adequate schooling, it is worth asking whether investing limited municipal resources in body cameras will address the root problems fueling police violence and white supremacy, or whether that money could be invested in more promising strategies to make our communities safer. (Source)

banning encryption

I don't know enough on this topic to speak on it, but I believe Therm has explained to you in the past why encryption started being used and that banning it would only endanger the lives of police officers. Seems to me that's something politicians and police departments wouldn't go for, but again, I'll defer this argument to Therm because I don't know enough about it.

civilian review boards

Could be a good idea, if implemented properly. But even then, it doesn't solve the problem of police brutality.

But let's look at the history of civilian review boards in the United States. The idea was first proposed in Connecticut in the 1920s and the first one was established in 1948. In the late 1950s and 1960s, cities like Philadelphia and NYC created their own. When it launched, NYC's board received over twice the complaints that the internal police review board did in a single year. Of course, the police union in NYC was opposed to having civilians involved with police oversight and the board was disbanded after just four months. Philadelphia's lasted longer, but probably just because they didn't do much: Between 1958 and 1967, the board only recommended punitive sanctions in 6% of cases it reviewed. The board here also faced opposition from the police union and a 1966 lawsuit resulted in the board being stripped of its duties.

What then, do civilian review boards need to work? They need the power to be meaningful, which civilian review boards typically lack due to opposition from police and lack of funding. The civilian review boards that we have are quite weak. In Louisville, the civilian review board was not able to investigate Brianna Taylor's death because they were restricted to reviewing closed police shooting cases. Ineffective civilian review boards, of course, are just part of the system's design. They're supposed to be ineffective and supposed to be non-committal measures that look good and sound pleasing to get some people convinced that change has been implemented. Civilian review boards often face restrictions from politicians and police departments. For example, Los Angeles created a civilian review board in 2017 but also allowed police officers accused of misconduct to self-determine whether or not their case could be reviewed by the civilian board or the internal police board. Thus, the civilian review board is powerless/meaningless.

For civilian review boards to be effective, the ACLU suggests that they must have their own investigative powers, including the ability to subpoena and offer transparency to their community. As it stands, police union contracts often block what information can be shared with the public about officer conduct. These civilian review boards also must have the power to discipline police officers. As of 2016, only 6% of review boards have this power. Civilian review boards are meaningless if they can't investigate or take action against police officers.

But, as aforementioned, police departments and police unions have historically been opposed to civilian review boards and always will be. I mean, why would police be supportive of something that, ideally, should have the ability to hold them accountable for their actions?

On a podcast released just two months before Floyd’s murder, former Minneapolis Police Federation President Bob Kroll, who allegedly wore a white power patch on a jacket in the past, advised police to get friendly with local politicians because it’s “an effective way to shut these things down before they start,” in reference to civilian police oversight. (url=https://www.mic.com/impact/what-are-civilian-review-boards-and-can-they-actually-fix-policing]Source[/url])

Making civilian review boards effective requires some extent of police abolition: the civilian review boards need executive power to investigate and discipline police officers, police departments and police unions currently hold such power and would need to be stripped of it, or weakened. When local police try to undermine the authority of civilian review boards, cities need to step in and stop the police from doing so - this would mean weakening or removing the police's ability to intimidate citizens, which means removing funding or resources that can be used to intimidate civilians. Defund the police? Necessary, since civilian review boards suffer from a lack of funding. It would make sense to take police funding and put it towards an effective civilian review board (assuming you take the other steps at limiting police power to make the review board powerful enough to do anything).

But all of this aside, even if you properly funded and empowered civilian review boards, they would not solve the problems of white supremacy or police brutality that are systemically inherent in our police departments and our system. The idea of a civilian review board is reactive, and responds to something after its happened: they should be able to hold an officer accountable for killing or beating somebody. But we need to address the root of the problem: Why are police killing and beating people and how do we stop it BEFORE it happens?

bias training

Ineffective and a waste of money. Short answer: have you tried arguing with a transphobic/racist/homophobic person either here on NS or elsewhere online/IRL? Maybe you've witnessed how deeply set in their ways they are and it's impossible to reason with them that the implicit biases they hold are wrong and they're a bad person for believing them.

Bias training, from the perspective of a politician is a perfect reform because it's a do-nothing reform. It's easy-to-implement and weak but may placate voters who may be convinced by the illusion that reform is being done. What is implicit bias training supposed to do? It's supposed to alert officers to their own subconscious prejudices and, ideally, hope the officer will work towards making amends once they realize the error of their ways.

Of course, there's little to no evidence that suggests such bias training impacts police behavior in the field. Frank Dobbin, professor of sociology at Harvard, and Alexandra Kalev, associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University, looked at 426 studies on bias training’s effectiveness. “Diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effective, diversity program around,” the pair wrote for Anthropology Now. Dobbin and Kalev have also found that anti-bias training can make some people even more racist than before the training. Usually, they report, the participants in these trainings either refuse to see their own bias or are convinced its a good bias and end up more biased. Implicit biases are deeply rooted. “Research shows that it’s easy to change attitudes for a short period of time, maybe a few hours, but it’s hard to change for more than a day,” says Jeffrey Sherman, a psychologist who ran the lab where I worked at the University of California, Davis.

But, let's say implicit bias training works. That is, it makes officers more aware of what implicit biases are. A 2020 NYPD study found that the training had elevated officers' comprehension of what implicit bias is, but when examining data about the actions of NYPD officers pre-training and post-training, there was no meaningful change. Regardless of whether officers were made aware of implicit biases or not, they were still arresting and interacting with people in ways that maintained pre-training ethnic disparities. "It's fair to say that we could not detect effects of the training on officers' enforcement behaviors," says Worden.

"[Changing behavior] wasn't the objective," says First Deputy Commissioner Benjamin B. Tucker. "The training was designed just to have them do some self-reflection and just to understand that any biases that they may have may creep into their job," he says. "That awareness, we think, adds value in and of itself."

That's just it then, it's a nice idea to show officers how their implicit biases may be wrong and may be resulting in negative outcomes in their line of work, but if it doesn't change their behavior (based on implicit biases) on the job and there is still no accountability for their misconduct then the training is meaningless, is a waste of money, and is just a distraction from meaningful reforms.

meetings with the community

How do you envision this playing out or working? Often times, police don't live in the community that they're policing. Often times, when we see police interact with community members it's in a negative way: issuing citations/tickets, making arrests, murdering civilians, or police brutality. I mean, you see people exercising their 1st Amendment right to protest/peaceably assemble against police brutality and the police's first response is more police brutality: show up decked out in riot gear and beat the shit out of the peaceful protesters. Oh, and then the icing on top is to declare it a riot and convince people the police were acting properly and that their brutality was not actually misconduct.

Personally, I don't feel safe anytime I see a police officer or a police car. And while that's far from a majority where I live (North Carolina), I do believe there are a great number of people in my community who feel the same. Are these meetings with police officers supposed to make people feel safer? Would you feel safer if you were invited to a meeting with somebody you felt threatened by?

beat cops (this is cops walking the street)

I presume beat cops exist in cities that are walkable. I know when I lived in Asheville, there were officers who walked downtown Asheville. I don't see how this is a reform if it already exists in places where it can exist. In communities that don't have walkable areas, I don't see how you propose this to be implemented (as funny as it would be to see cops walking on foot down the side of miles-long rural roads in the farmlands around my town).

getting rid of military gear in police departments.

A good idea. Police don't need to be militarized or have military equipment or gear. I sincerely hope that includes a belief that police should not be able to use tear gas or rubber bullets against protestors. I also sincerely hope that this is paired with a decrease in police funding. If they don't need military equipment or gear then they don't need to be the third highest-funded military in the world.

[Adamede]

Not how you envision.

I guess I’m an enemy of the state because I’m Jewish and gay.

Well if the state so chooses it, I am simple going to be a follower. Authority above all, degeneracy above non.

So you admit you're a willing sheep.

[San Lumen]

reforms like body cams

Are body cams a good investment? That is, do they solve the problems we face? I'd say no, they don't.

We need to capture footage of police brutality, of course, but is a video from the perspective of a police officer and completely left in the hands of the police department the best way to hold officers accountable for their actions? Of course not. If I take a video of police brutality and live stream it to Facebook or post it on Twitter, then people can see it and get angry about it. If an officer's body cam is the only video of the brutality, then the police department can sit on that and nobody will ever know. If police are pressured to release the body cam footage (say there were witnesses who didn't get their own videos) then they have the only copy of the video and can release an incomplete segment of the video or an edited version of the video that shape the narrative of the video in favor of the officer. When officers are wearing the cameras, they can turn them off, cover up the camera with their hand, or turn away from the situation they don't want on video.

For example, in 2014, Florida deputies chased and beat a suspected drug dealer named Derrick Price. While body camera footage seemed to confirm what the officers wrote in their incident reports — that Mr. Price was resisting arrest — a surveillance camera from a nearby building completely contradicted these reports and showed that Mr. Price had clearly attempted to surrender voluntarily but was still brutally beaten.

Police body cameras, while failing to hold officers accountable, may actually be a good tool for monitoring civilians and violating their rights. These body cams could also be considered a form of unreasonable search if they're so used that way (and I have no faith that police departments aren't using them this way): If a police officer is at the door to your home or the window of your car, you can turn them away from searching your home or car because that is your right, but if they're wearing a body cam then that camera has already collected a lot of data from the vantage point of the front door or the car window and the footage can be paused and visually searched later. Police departments aren't held to any transparency in how this collected data is used or shared, thus posing risk to the lives of individuals and communities. Body cams are just another form of surveillance, which we already know the police use extensively to identify protesters. Some of these police body cams have facial recognition technology, which is often inaccurate and racially biased. By these two instances alone, police body cams could infringe on people's 1st Amendment right to protest and 4th Amendment right protecting them from unreasonable search and seizure.

Besides, the United States has a lengthy history of surveillance that only exacerbates racial bias in how its used. Surveillance disproportionately harms the most marginalized communities in our country: Japanese-Americans during WW2, Muslim Americans after 9/11, and - of course - Black Americans, especially during the large increase in protesting against police brutality in the last decade.

Anyway, the ACLU is more eloquent than I could ever be about the point I'm trying to make:

If our goal is to end police violence, we should question whether body cams are a good investment since research shows they do not stop or even curb police brutality while posing known privacy and civil liberties concerns. Moreover, policing’s deep roots in white supremacy should give us pause at the notion that body cams can limit or prevent police violence, particularly against people of color. If policing's history in America makes policing inherently biased towards violence against communities of color, then we need less police and less policing to curb police violence—not more policing resources, including body cams.

Before spending millions of dollars on more body camera technology that will significantly increase already excessive police budgets, we should first examine whether that money is better spent on other services with a more meaningful impact on public safety. When so many people — disproportionately people of color — are unhoused, lack health care, and struggle to receive adequate schooling, it is worth asking whether investing limited municipal resources in body cameras will address the root problems fueling police violence and white supremacy, or whether that money could be invested in more promising strategies to make our communities safer. (Source)

banning encryption

I don't know enough on this topic to speak on it, but I believe Therm has explained to you in the past why encryption started being used and that banning it would only endanger the lives of police officers. Seems to me that's something politicians and police departments wouldn't go for, but again, I'll defer this argument to Therm because I don't know enough about it.

civilian review boards

Could be a good idea, if implemented properly. But even then, it doesn't solve the problem of police brutality.

But let's look at the history of civilian review boards in the United States. The idea was first proposed in Connecticut in the 1920s and the first one was established in 1948. In the late 1950s and 1960s, cities like Philadelphia and NYC created their own. When it launched, NYC's board received over twice the complaints that the internal police review board did in a single year. Of course, the police union in NYC was opposed to having civilians involved with police oversight and the board was disbanded after just four months. Philadelphia's lasted longer, but probably just because they didn't do much: Between 1958 and 1967, the board only recommended punitive sanctions in 6% of cases it reviewed. The board here also faced opposition from the police union and a 1966 lawsuit resulted in the board being stripped of its duties.

What then, do civilian review boards need to work? They need the power to be meaningful, which civilian review boards typically lack due to opposition from police and lack of funding. The civilian review boards that we have are quite weak. In Louisville, the civilian review board was not able to investigate Brianna Taylor's death because they were restricted to reviewing closed police shooting cases. Ineffective civilian review boards, of course, are just part of the system's design. They're supposed to be ineffective and supposed to be non-committal measures that look good and sound pleasing to get some people convinced that change has been implemented. Civilian review boards often face restrictions from politicians and police departments. For example, Los Angeles created a civilian review board in 2017 but also allowed police officers accused of misconduct to self-determine whether or not their case could be reviewed by the civilian board or the internal police board. Thus, the civilian review board is powerless/meaningless.

For civilian review boards to be effective, the ACLU suggests that they must have their own investigative powers, including the ability to subpoena and offer transparency to their community. As it stands, police union contracts often block what information can be shared with the public about officer conduct. These civilian review boards also must have the power to discipline police officers. As of 2016, only 6% of review boards have this power. Civilian review boards are meaningless if they can't investigate or take action against police officers.

But, as aforementioned, police departments and police unions have historically been opposed to civilian review boards and always will be. I mean, why would police be supportive of something that, ideally, should have the ability to hold them accountable for their actions?

On a podcast released just two months before Floyd’s murder, former Minneapolis Police Federation President Bob Kroll, who allegedly wore a white power patch on a jacket in the past, advised police to get friendly with local politicians because it’s “an effective way to shut these things down before they start,” in reference to civilian police oversight. (url=https://www.mic.com/impact/what-are-civilian-review-boards-and-can-they-actually-fix-policing]Source[/url])

Making civilian review boards effective requires some extent of police abolition: the civilian review boards need executive power to investigate and discipline police officers, police departments and police unions currently hold such power and would need to be stripped of it, or weakened. When local police try to undermine the authority of civilian review boards, cities need to step in and stop the police from doing so - this would mean weakening or removing the police's ability to intimidate citizens, which means removing funding or resources that can be used to intimidate civilians. Defund the police? Necessary, since civilian review boards suffer from a lack of funding. It would make sense to take police funding and put it towards an effective civilian review board (assuming you take the other steps at limiting police power to make the review board powerful enough to do anything).

But all of this aside, even if you properly funded and empowered civilian review boards, they would not solve the problems of white supremacy or police brutality that are systemically inherent in our police departments and our system. The idea of a civilian review board is reactive, and responds to something after its happened: they should be able to hold an officer accountable for killing or beating somebody. But we need to address the root of the problem: Why are police killing and beating people and how do we stop it BEFORE it happens?

bias training

Ineffective and a waste of money. Short answer: have you tried arguing with a transphobic/racist/homophobic person either here on NS or elsewhere online/IRL? Maybe you've witnessed how deeply set in their ways they are and it's impossible to reason with them that the implicit biases they hold are wrong and they're a bad person for believing them.

Bias training, from the perspective of a politician is a perfect reform because it's a do-nothing reform. It's easy-to-implement and weak but may placate voters who may be convinced by the illusion that reform is being done. What is implicit bias training supposed to do? It's supposed to alert officers to their own subconscious prejudices and, ideally, hope the officer will work towards making amends once they realize the error of their ways.

Of course, there's little to no evidence that suggests such bias training impacts police behavior in the field. Frank Dobbin, professor of sociology at Harvard, and Alexandra Kalev, associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University, looked at 426 studies on bias training’s effectiveness. “Diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effective, diversity program around,” the pair wrote for Anthropology Now. Dobbin and Kalev have also found that anti-bias training can make some people even more racist than before the training. Usually, they report, the participants in these trainings either refuse to see their own bias or are convinced its a good bias and end up more biased. Implicit biases are deeply rooted. “Research shows that it’s easy to change attitudes for a short period of time, maybe a few hours, but it’s hard to change for more than a day,” says Jeffrey Sherman, a psychologist who ran the lab where I worked at the University of California, Davis.

But, let's say implicit bias training works. That is, it makes officers more aware of what implicit biases are. A 2020 NYPD study found that the training had elevated officers' comprehension of what implicit bias is, but when examining data about the actions of NYPD officers pre-training and post-training, there was no meaningful change. Regardless of whether officers were made aware of implicit biases or not, they were still arresting and interacting with people in ways that maintained pre-training ethnic disparities. "It's fair to say that we could not detect effects of the training on officers' enforcement behaviors," says Worden.

"[Changing behavior] wasn't the objective," says First Deputy Commissioner Benjamin B. Tucker. "The training was designed just to have them do some self-reflection and just to understand that any biases that they may have may creep into their job," he says. "That awareness, we think, adds value in and of itself."

That's just it then, it's a nice idea to show officers how their implicit biases may be wrong and may be resulting in negative outcomes in their line of work, but if it doesn't change their behavior (based on implicit biases) on the job and there is still no accountability for their misconduct then the training is meaningless, is a waste of money, and is just a distraction from meaningful reforms.

meetings with the community

How do you envision this playing out or working? Often times, police don't live in the community that they're policing. Often times, when we see police interact with community members it's in a negative way: issuing citations/tickets, making arrests, murdering civilians, or police brutality. I mean, you see people exercising their 1st Amendment right to protest/peaceably assemble against police brutality and the police's first response is more police brutality: show up decked out in riot gear and beat the shit out of the peaceful protesters. Oh, and then the icing on top is to declare it a riot and convince people the police were acting properly and that their brutality was not actually misconduct.

Personally, I don't feel safe anytime I see a police officer or a police car. And while that's far from a majority where I live (North Carolina), I do believe there are a great number of people in my community who feel the same. Are these meetings with police officers supposed to make people feel safer? Would you feel safer if you were invited to a meeting with somebody you felt threatened by?

beat cops (this is cops walking the street)

I presume beat cops exist in cities that are walkable. I know when I lived in Asheville, there were officers who walked downtown Asheville. I don't see how this is a reform if it already exists in places where it can exist. In communities that don't have walkable areas, I don't see how you propose this to be implemented (as funny as it would be to see cops walking on foot down the side of miles-long rural roads in the farmlands around my town).

getting rid of military gear in police departments.

A good idea. Police don't need to be militarized or have military equipment or gear. I sincerely hope that includes a belief that police should not be able to use tear gas or rubber bullets against protestors. I also sincerely hope that this is paired with a decrease in police funding. If they don't need military equipment or gear then they don't need to be the third highest-funded military in the world.

officers should face consequences for turning of cameras, editing footage or any other tampering.

Perhaps officers should be required to live where they work?

I see nothing wrong with banning encryption. There is a often a few minutes delay with sites like Broadcastify. Some municipalities have an added charge if a police scanner is found in your position whilst committing a crime.

Beat cops are only practical in urban areas.

[Kannap]

Are body cams a good investment? That is, do they solve the problems we face? I'd say no, they don't.

We need to capture footage of police brutality, of course, but is a video from the perspective of a police officer and completely left in the hands of the police department the best way to hold officers accountable for their actions? Of course not. If I take a video of police brutality and live stream it to Facebook or post it on Twitter, then people can see it and get angry about it. If an officer's body cam is the only video of the brutality, then the police department can sit on that and nobody will ever know. If police are pressured to release the body cam footage (say there were witnesses who didn't get their own videos) then they have the only copy of the video and can release an incomplete segment of the video or an edited version of the video that shape the narrative of the video in favor of the officer. When officers are wearing the cameras, they can turn them off, cover up the camera with their hand, or turn away from the situation they don't want on video.

For example, in 2014, Florida deputies chased and beat a suspected drug dealer named Derrick Price. While body camera footage seemed to confirm what the officers wrote in their incident reports — that Mr. Price was resisting arrest — a surveillance camera from a nearby building completely contradicted these reports and showed that Mr. Price had clearly attempted to surrender voluntarily but was still brutally beaten.

Police body cameras, while failing to hold officers accountable, may actually be a good tool for monitoring civilians and violating their rights. These body cams could also be considered a form of unreasonable search if they're so used that way (and I have no faith that police departments aren't using them this way): If a police officer is at the door to your home or the window of your car, you can turn them away from searching your home or car because that is your right, but if they're wearing a body cam then that camera has already collected a lot of data from the vantage point of the front door or the car window and the footage can be paused and visually searched later. Police departments aren't held to any transparency in how this collected data is used or shared, thus posing risk to the lives of individuals and communities. Body cams are just another form of surveillance, which we already know the police use extensively to identify protesters. Some of these police body cams have facial recognition technology, which is often inaccurate and racially biased. By these two instances alone, police body cams could infringe on people's 1st Amendment right to protest and 4th Amendment right protecting them from unreasonable search and seizure.

Besides, the United States has a lengthy history of surveillance that only exacerbates racial bias in how its used. Surveillance disproportionately harms the most marginalized communities in our country: Japanese-Americans during WW2, Muslim Americans after 9/11, and - of course - Black Americans, especially during the large increase in protesting against police brutality in the last decade.

Anyway, the ACLU is more eloquent than I could ever be about the point I'm trying to make:

If our goal is to end police violence, we should question whether body cams are a good investment since research shows they do not stop or even curb police brutality while posing known privacy and civil liberties concerns. Moreover, policing’s deep roots in white supremacy should give us pause at the notion that body cams can limit or prevent police violence, particularly against people of color. If policing's history in America makes policing inherently biased towards violence against communities of color, then we need less police and less policing to curb police violence—not more policing resources, including body cams.

Before spending millions of dollars on more body camera technology that will significantly increase already excessive police budgets, we should first examine whether that money is better spent on other services with a more meaningful impact on public safety. When so many people — disproportionately people of color — are unhoused, lack health care, and struggle to receive adequate schooling, it is worth asking whether investing limited municipal resources in body cameras will address the root problems fueling police violence and white supremacy, or whether that money could be invested in more promising strategies to make our communities safer. (Source)

I don't know enough on this topic to speak on it, but I believe Therm has explained to you in the past why encryption started being used and that banning it would only endanger the lives of police officers. Seems to me that's something politicians and police departments wouldn't go for, but again, I'll defer this argument to Therm because I don't know enough about it.



Could be a good idea, if implemented properly. But even then, it doesn't solve the problem of police brutality.

But let's look at the history of civilian review boards in the United States. The idea was first proposed in Connecticut in the 1920s and the first one was established in 1948. In the late 1950s and 1960s, cities like Philadelphia and NYC created their own. When it launched, NYC's board received over twice the complaints that the internal police review board did in a single year. Of course, the police union in NYC was opposed to having civilians involved with police oversight and the board was disbanded after just four months. Philadelphia's lasted longer, but probably just because they didn't do much: Between 1958 and 1967, the board only recommended punitive sanctions in 6% of cases it reviewed. The board here also faced opposition from the police union and a 1966 lawsuit resulted in the board being stripped of its duties.

What then, do civilian review boards need to work? They need the power to be meaningful, which civilian review boards typically lack due to opposition from police and lack of funding. The civilian review boards that we have are quite weak. In Louisville, the civilian review board was not able to investigate Brianna Taylor's death because they were restricted to reviewing closed police shooting cases. Ineffective civilian review boards, of course, are just part of the system's design. They're supposed to be ineffective and supposed to be non-committal measures that look good and sound pleasing to get some people convinced that change has been implemented. Civilian review boards often face restrictions from politicians and police departments. For example, Los Angeles created a civilian review board in 2017 but also allowed police officers accused of misconduct to self-determine whether or not their case could be reviewed by the civilian board or the internal police board. Thus, the civilian review board is powerless/meaningless.

For civilian review boards to be effective, the ACLU suggests that they must have their own investigative powers, including the ability to subpoena and offer transparency to their community. As it stands, police union contracts often block what information can be shared with the public about officer conduct. These civilian review boards also must have the power to discipline police officers. As of 2016, only 6% of review boards have this power. Civilian review boards are meaningless if they can't investigate or take action against police officers.

But, as aforementioned, police departments and police unions have historically been opposed to civilian review boards and always will be. I mean, why would police be supportive of something that, ideally, should have the ability to hold them accountable for their actions?

On a podcast released just two months before Floyd’s murder, former Minneapolis Police Federation President Bob Kroll, who allegedly wore a white power patch on a jacket in the past, advised police to get friendly with local politicians because it’s “an effective way to shut these things down before they start,” in reference to civilian police oversight. (url=https://www.mic.com/impact/what-are-civilian-review-boards-and-can-they-actually-fix-policing]Source[/url])

Making civilian review boards effective requires some extent of police abolition: the civilian review boards need executive power to investigate and discipline police officers, police departments and police unions currently hold such power and would need to be stripped of it, or weakened. When local police try to undermine the authority of civilian review boards, cities need to step in and stop the police from doing so - this would mean weakening or removing the police's ability to intimidate citizens, which means removing funding or resources that can be used to intimidate civilians. Defund the police? Necessary, since civilian review boards suffer from a lack of funding. It would make sense to take police funding and put it towards an effective civilian review board (assuming you take the other steps at limiting police power to make the review board powerful enough to do anything).

But all of this aside, even if you properly funded and empowered civilian review boards, they would not solve the problems of white supremacy or police brutality that are systemically inherent in our police departments and our system. The idea of a civilian review board is reactive, and responds to something after its happened: they should be able to hold an officer accountable for killing or beating somebody. But we need to address the root of the problem: Why are police killing and beating people and how do we stop it BEFORE it happens?



Ineffective and a waste of money. Short answer: have you tried arguing with a transphobic/racist/homophobic person either here on NS or elsewhere online/IRL? Maybe you've witnessed how deeply set in their ways they are and it's impossible to reason with them that the implicit biases they hold are wrong and they're a bad person for believing them.

Bias training, from the perspective of a politician is a perfect reform because it's a do-nothing reform. It's easy-to-implement and weak but may placate voters who may be convinced by the illusion that reform is being done. What is implicit bias training supposed to do? It's supposed to alert officers to their own subconscious prejudices and, ideally, hope the officer will work towards making amends once they realize the error of their ways.

Of course, there's little to no evidence that suggests such bias training impacts police behavior in the field. Frank Dobbin, professor of sociology at Harvard, and Alexandra Kalev, associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University, looked at 426 studies on bias training’s effectiveness. “Diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effective, diversity program around,” the pair wrote for Anthropology Now. Dobbin and Kalev have also found that anti-bias training can make some people even more racist than before the training. Usually, they report, the participants in these trainings either refuse to see their own bias or are convinced its a good bias and end up more biased. Implicit biases are deeply rooted. “Research shows that it’s easy to change attitudes for a short period of time, maybe a few hours, but it’s hard to change for more than a day,” says Jeffrey Sherman, a psychologist who ran the lab where I worked at the University of California, Davis.

But, let's say implicit bias training works. That is, it makes officers more aware of what implicit biases are. A 2020 NYPD study found that the training had elevated officers' comprehension of what implicit bias is, but when examining data about the actions of NYPD officers pre-training and post-training, there was no meaningful change. Regardless of whether officers were made aware of implicit biases or not, they were still arresting and interacting with people in ways that maintained pre-training ethnic disparities. "It's fair to say that we could not detect effects of the training on officers' enforcement behaviors," says Worden.

"[Changing behavior] wasn't the objective," says First Deputy Commissioner Benjamin B. Tucker. "The training was designed just to have them do some self-reflection and just to understand that any biases that they may have may creep into their job," he says. "That awareness, we think, adds value in and of itself."

That's just it then, it's a nice idea to show officers how their implicit biases may be wrong and may be resulting in negative outcomes in their line of work, but if it doesn't change their behavior (based on implicit biases) on the job and there is still no accountability for their misconduct then the training is meaningless, is a waste of money, and is just a distraction from meaningful reforms.



How do you envision this playing out or working? Often times, police don't live in the community that they're policing. Often times, when we see police interact with community members it's in a negative way: issuing citations/tickets, making arrests, murdering civilians, or police brutality. I mean, you see people exercising their 1st Amendment right to protest/peaceably assemble against police brutality and the police's first response is more police brutality: show up decked out in riot gear and beat the shit out of the peaceful protesters. Oh, and then the icing on top is to declare it a riot and convince people the police were acting properly and that their brutality was not actually misconduct.

Personally, I don't feel safe anytime I see a police officer or a police car. And while that's far from a majority where I live (North Carolina), I do believe there are a great number of people in my community who feel the same. Are these meetings with police officers supposed to make people feel safer? Would you feel safer if you were invited to a meeting with somebody you felt threatened by?



I presume beat cops exist in cities that are walkable. I know when I lived in Asheville, there were officers who walked downtown Asheville. I don't see how this is a reform if it already exists in places where it can exist. In communities that don't have walkable areas, I don't see how you propose this to be implemented (as funny as it would be to see cops walking on foot down the side of miles-long rural roads in the farmlands around my town).



A good idea. Police don't need to be militarized or have military equipment or gear. I sincerely hope that includes a belief that police should not be able to use tear gas or rubber bullets against protestors. I also sincerely hope that this is paired with a decrease in police funding. If they don't need military equipment or gear then they don't need to be the third highest-funded military in the world.

officers should face consequences for turning of cameras, editing footage or any other tampering.

Nobody is holding them accountable.

Perhaps officers should be required to live where they work?

I suppose that's better than cops living outside of the community they police. But I have a neighbor who is training to become a police officer and I don't trust him nor would I feel safe seeing his police car in his driveway.

[Salus Maior]

So mob rule and crime is utterly rampant?

Do you ever get tired of parroting rightwing talking points?

Anything that isn't an uncritical embrace of socialist/communist/anarchist ideas is a "rightwing talking point".

[San Lumen]

officers should face consequences for turning of cameras, editing footage or any other tampering.

Nobody is holding them accountable.

Perhaps officers should be required to live where they work?

I suppose that's better than cops living outside of the community they police. But I have a neighbor who is training to become a police officer and I don't trust him nor would I feel safe seeing his police car in his driveway.

Get rid of police unions and the rule of thou shalt not criticize a fellow officer.

It is better. If you don’t live in the community I don’t see what vested interest you have in it.

What is your reasoning regarding your neighbor?

[Kannap]

Nobody is holding them accountable.



I suppose that's better than cops living outside of the community they police. But I have a neighbor who is training to become a police officer and I don't trust him nor would I feel safe seeing his police car in his driveway.

Get rid of police unions and the rule of thou shalt not criticize a fellow officer.

Oh no. Starting to sound like an abolitionist a bit there!

What is your reasoning regarding your neighbor?

It's bad enough when I see a person in public who I know can kill me at any moment they like without any consequences, but now I'll have one living across the street?

[San Lumen]

Get rid of police unions and the rule of thou shalt not criticize a fellow officer.

Oh no. Starting to sound like an abolitionist a bit there!

What is your reasoning regarding your neighbor?

It's bad enough when I see a person in public who I know can kill me at any moment they like without any consequences, but now I'll have one living across the street?

Police unions are part of the problem. Several years ago when two officers in nyc were shot in their patrol car the union president had the audacity to blame the mayor.

Sounds like you have a mistrust and hatred of cops.