New answers tagged police
0
Citizens of the United States pay some of the lowest tax rates in the world, for top-tier (economically) nations. And yet they/we are constantly complaining about being "taxed to death."
So we chose to focus on a simple measure of tax burden: national-level income taxes plus mandatory social-insurance contributions as a percentage of gross income. ...
35
A large part of the reason that training in the US is so short compared to other developed countries appears to be that the training in the US seems to focus more on the practical aspects of the job, rather than the social or ethical aspects. This Axios article contains comments from a Professor of Sociology:
Rashawn Ray of the Brookings Institution and the ...
3
The question must surely be "pros and cons for whom"?
Presumably the question is not asking for an analysis of the pros and cons of worker unions in general, but specifically the pros and cons for the state in permitting police unions.
The main function which police unions perform, is to allow the police to battle the state in an organised and ...
2
I think a lot of the answers are venturing along the political lines of the issue - I'd like to tackle what I'd call the core of your question:
Why did the police arrest for the DUI instead of issuing a citation and locking/impounding the car?
After all, you've got a hypothetical alternative laid out, with a full potential spiel the officer could give the ...
2
One big difference between USA police and UK Police. Normal police in the UK do not carry guns. If an arrest is necessary and it is known that the person(s) are possibly carrying firearms then a special squad goes in with the police.
2
A 2018 report from the Department of Justice outlines "Contacts Between Police and the Public, 2015" (published 2018). The report notes
Overall, a higher percentage of males (22%) than females (20%) experienced police contact (table 1). This was driven by a higher percentage of police-initiated contacts among males (12%) than females (9%)
Table 1:...
12
Your title question and the body of the question are not quite the same.
Addressing the body of your question:
Why was it deemed necessary physically to restrain the man?
He was being placed under arrest. Driving under the influence of alcohol is not considered a "minor traffic violation" in the U.S. It's not a matter of a pay a $200 fine and ...
5
Cuffing him was reasonable. He had, indisputably, committed a DUI. He was asleep in his car, in the middle of a drive-thru lane(so it's not a case of sleeping it off in a parked vehicle, he had to drive drunk to get it there), with a BAC of 1.5X the legal limit an hour and a half after after last driving it(it took about 40 minutes for the cops to respond to ...
4
The easiest answer is that the police in the US are train to treat everyone as a criminal. That’s why the interactions go the way they do. Countries like the UK are trained to understand the situation at hand before doing anything, then based on that making a decision on the proper actions.
The other big factor is guns. Cops in the UK don’t have to worry ...
14
The answers so far seem to have missed a very practical reason*: to humiliate the person being arrested. It's part of the range of bullying tactics police like to use, from the "perp walk" where the arrested & handcuffed person is led (often forceably) through a gauntlet of media cameras, the publication of mug shots, harsh & repetative ...
4
There is one problem that is at the base, before even starting machine learning.
It does not necessarily have a large practical effect, but it is unavoidable.
For illustration, imagine a face image of a low-resolution CCTV camera, or a face image that is small and hard to recognize in general.
Under low light conditions, there is less contrast between ...
25
Guidance on use of handcuffs is given at the police department level. Specifically for Atlanta Police Department:
4.1.6 Arrest Procedures
Employees will use only that force which is reasonable and necessary to affect an arrest or restraint, and to ensure the safety
of the arrestee, the officers, and others.
Only restraining devices issued by the Department ...
121
Why do US police use handcuffs in otherwise calm, non-violent circumstances?
Because they have cause to fear escalation and because their training encourages it.
Since the question mentions UK currency and US policing, we can compare the two countries:
Escalation
The US population is five times that of the UK. However deaths of police officers are 50 times ...
8
The fears of racism associated with facial recognition technology aren't just in relation to the fact that early examples worked better on Caucasian faces. In fact, in An Other-Race Effect for Face Recognition Algorithms, Phillips et al. show that the racial bias extant in humans, in that people are generally better at recognising members of their own race ...
5
tl;dr– Those who think that law-enforcement is racist are liable to be concerned that anything that'd empower law-enforcement would further its perceived racism.
Some are concerned that empowering racists would further racism.
The concern's probably just:
Police do racist things.
Facial-recognition would help the police.
Therefore, facial-...
12
In addition to the other answers, there's also the issue of using facial recognition to predict criminality of an individual. For example: this The Intercept article. For clarity, the research paper was specifically published to highlight these fears, not as a serious attempt to predict criminality, but still serves to highlight the origin of fears around ...
73
People often have the mistaken belief that computers are inherently objective and unbiased – and while they may not hold prejudices themselves, the results that they produce reflect the biases and assumptions of their programmers. This is particularly clear with machine learning systems, where the predictions they give out are dependent on data set used to ...
3
Yes. There are already laws in the United States that prohibit unions for military service personnel. See US Code Ch. 10-976:
(b) It shall be unlawful for a member of the armed forces, knowing of the activities or objectives of a particular military labor organization—
(1) to join or maintain membership in such organization; or
...
23
Every new technology used for policing is thought to lead to racist results, because it is assumed that policing as currently practiced leads to racist results.
Here's a blog post from 4 years ago that discusses a number of technologies that law enforcement was considering using in Northern California: https://www.aclunc.org/blog/together-we-can-put-stop-...
39
Let me set aside, for the moment, the question of whether current facial recognition technology (FRT) accurately distinguishes the facial features of non-whites. There is some evidence that it does not, but that is a technological problem which could (assumedly) be ironed out.
The more pressing problem is that technology does not think at all in the sense ...
0
A question like this is actually better suited for the skeptics then politics, luckily skeptics have already covered the question here: Are African Americans victims of a disproportionate number of police killings?
The short version is that it's complicated, there are definitely a higher proportion of police shootings of black then white individuals once ...
11
The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, the latest year for which statistics are available at time of writing being 2018, gives a breakdown by sex for arrests made during the year.
In particular, for arrests in general, 5,684,385 males were arrested, compared to 2,126,700 females. This represents a ratio of about 2.67 to 1.
With respect to 'crimes ...
1
Back in 1981, Ronald Reagan used his executive power to order striking air-traffic controllers back to to work, after negotiations between their union, PATCO (Professional Air-Traffic Controllers), and the Federal government fell through. Those controllers who refused to return to work after 48 hours were fired and blacklisted. After a few months of ...
17
It is certainly possible to ban police unions in a democratic country, as they are banned in the UK for instance. The Police Act 1996 says:
Subject to the following provisions of this section, a member of a
police force shall not be a member of any trade union, or of any
association having for its objects, or one of its objects, to control
or ...
4
Not without the approval of Congress.
29 USC §158(d) defines collective bargaining as follows (emphasis mine):
For the purposes of this section, to bargain collectively is the performance of the mutual obligation of the employer and the representative of the employees to meet at reasonable times and confer in good faith with respect to wages, hours, and ...
44
Technically speaking, any union can be dissolved if the people on the other side of the table are willing to cope with the consequences. A union is merely a collective bargaining structure that negotiates employment contracts as a group. The private sector in the US has a long history of union busting, which generally involves firing all union-affiliated ...
12
Can the police unions be dissolved permanently?
The best example here is Camden, NJ. They dismantled their police force because the previous union had been quite powerful, and had driven the salaries of the police force up to unsustainable levels
The transformation began after the 2012 homicide spike. The department wanted to put more officers on patrol ...
2
Is it possible to ban police unions in a democratic country?
No. Unions are an expression of the First Amendment to peacefully assemble.
Can the police unions be dissolved permanently?
A particular union might be, but only if it is deemed a criminal organization. That's a high bar, and it's barely ever reached.
Even if this happens, nothing prevents ...
6
Precedent is strongly against treating a sit-in as an insurrection. It was not done when sit-ins were much more frequent during the 1960's. It was not done in 2016 when a federal facility, the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, was occupied for several weeks.
0
This question is loaded with several different unrelated problems. It could be answered much better if it'd be split in separate parts.
To answer this question directly, considering exactly how it is formulated: because nothing in police job description says that their behavior should change in any way because of "international focus" or any "international ...
71
I'm a local, I've been in the zone the last couple days. I'm not qualified to give a legal or historical answer, but I want to make a few points about the nature of the zone, that hopefully can inform more historical answers.
It's not special.
The police of the East Precinct voluntarily left, they were not driven out (like Minneapolis 3rd Precinct was). ...
51
In strictly rational terms, it would be difficult to call this an act of insurrection. There has been no armed conflict, no declarations of independence or sovereignty, no expressed intention of overthrowing even the local government, and police and government officials are not being prevented from entering the area. Instead, Seattle police and officials ...
1
Defining and using an appropriate level of force in a high pressure situation is really challenging and requires good police training and organisational support. This doesn't excuse deliberate abuses of power but it does make abuse harder to distinguish from poor police practice or mistakes in the heat of the moment.
Some complicating factors:
Complexity ...
40
It is the President who gets to decide. 10 U.S. Code §252 "Use of militia and armed forces to enforce Federal authority" says:
Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by ...
5
Of course, it can (because it did before police was a thing) but much less efficiently
A dedicated police force is basically division of labor. Enforcing order and investigating crimes is a skill, and like with any other skill, it requires specific knowledge, experience and equipment to do it well, and some people are naturally better at it than others.
...
11
Because that is the function of unions.
A union does not exist to support the industry, but to support the workers. For example a union of automobile workers does not exist to improve the public perception of the industry, or to make the industry "better". Unions exist to protect the workers.
It's not the role, of a union to judge who is rightly ...
2
There is a lot of research on police unions going back decades and it all just seems to say that there isn't enough research on police unions. I see a lot of authors acknowledging the general perception that police unions are against reform, but they often question whether this is really the case.
Here is the most relevant, recent article I've looked at. ...
2
The killing of George Floyd was a disgusting act caught on video and widely published. The video produced a strong emotional reaction which spurred many people to action (to do something, anything, right now), and the emotion seemed to sustain itself. Soon, the focus of the protest moved almost completely beyond the facts of the case involving Floyd. ...
19
I don't think it is a complicated answer.
Police rarely get charged with using excessive force. This is partly systemic, because in the U.S., District Attorneys need the police to testify in their cases, and they cannot risk angering the police and losing testimony, or making the police look bad, which would also complicate their cases.
If prosecuted, ...
3
For a recent example of disbanding a police force, see the RUC of Northern Ireland. In practice, many former RUC officers continue to serve in the PSNI, but there were leadership, policy and structural changes to go with the renaming.
Prior to the establishment of professional police, the capture of criminals was a community matter. Local governments (in ...
53
Did you ever watch the TV show "Cops?" I watched a lot of it. My take-away was that even in non-high-stress situations, cops have little tolerance for anything from "perps," except "yes, officer," "no, officer," and "just tell me what you want and I'll gladly do it, officer." Anything else, and you'll likely find yourself handcuffed on the ground with a knee ...
5
I think the case of Daniel Shaver highlights a multitude of problems.
In 2016, Shaver (who was drunk at the time) aimed a pellet gun out of a Mesa, AZ hotel window, which prompted an armed police response (this was not long after the Las Vegas shootings). Shaver and an acquaintance were ordered out of the room at gunpoint. Police shouted commands at the ...
12
tl;dr: The death of George Floyd was not an isolated incident, it's the larger system people want to change.
These 4 officers were charged, but convictions in police misconduct cases are exceedingly rare. See for example Five Thirty Eight's statistics, and the riots after the police charged with use of excessive force on Rodney King were acquitted (back ...
0
(Answering the title question only)
It depends on what you mean by "function", but if you mean anything like a lawful, orderly society with low rates of crime, the answer is "no".
The Murray-Hill riot (also known as "Montreal's 'night of terror'") was the culmination of 16 hours of unrest in Montreal, Quebec during a strike by ...
29
There are a few things that keep putting fuel on this fire.
The media likes to sell, and violence is exciting. There have been over 700 protests.[1] But only around 20 have ended up in violence.[2] Of course it can depend a lot on definitions of violence and protest. But many protests are peaceful. (That does not mean we should not do something about the ...
5
The real question is: Can 2020 society function without police?
A good way to look for an answer is to observe situations where the police have been withdrawn from regular appearances. Specifically the south side of Chicago.
This 2016 article covers the aftermath of Chicago PD withdrawing from regular patrols on the south side, in mid 2015, following an ...
42
The answer to this question is more a matter of psychology than policy. There are a few psychological factors to keep in mind:
Police officers (and protesters as well) are enmeshed in a tense situation, and often lack a proper perspective on their own behavior. It's a kind of tunnel-vision in which an officer is focused on himself and those immediately ...
112
One data point seems to be the 75 year old who was seriously injured when he was knocked backwards by police. When the policemen who did this were suspended the entire squad resigned from the Emergency Response Team (but not their day jobs) in protest.
John Evans, president of the local police union, told the newspaper: "Our position is these officers ...
6
For the case of Minneapolis specifically, there is as of yet no specific plan. Especially in the short-term, the police department will remain and the idea is to create alternative solutions with the input of the affected communities:
"(We need) to listen, especially to our black leaders, to our communities of color, for whom policing is not working ...
7
In Minneapolis specifically, the city's Star Tribune looked into this in 2014, comparing published statistics from the City of Minneapolis with the 2010 Census to produce the comparison below. In particular:
The department’s diversity problem falls unevenly across its ranks:
while black and Hispanic officers number too few, American Indians and
Asians ...
Top 50 recent answers are included
