I can’t believe you are writing this not in jest. Just a week or two ago we saw a video of an officer planting evidence in broad daylight. He was caught because of the video, how many officers have not been caught? What about yesterday when the police office ran up and kicked a handcuffed man in the head? Was that the rule of law or the rule of force?
This is partly confirmation bias. Millions of officers, we’re gonna have bad ones. Obviously we need to improve, but to think that officers who have at least some amount of vetting are going to do worse than a security force is utter denial of the human condition.
Look at South Africa, they have security forces. Or look at India, they too have a police force. But in South Africa, their security force is only available for the wealthy, while in India, they’re actually corrupt police are paid off daily. You don’t want to leave your house without cash to bribe a cop. And if you don’t, you get beat.
I’d rather be in the US with their policing than have a citizens army of security, or almost any police force.
Yes, we're gonna have bad officers. What happens next? Are they shunned? Forced out of the profession?
This isn't some abstract hypothetical. We have generations of police who "washed out" of training because they weren't bad enough. It's important to have an accurate diagnosis when proposing a course of treatment.
It is.. But at the same time, its a completely decentralized system and there are MANY that do a very good job at washing out the bad ones. There are plenty that deserve criticism, and even federal investigation/intervention. But by and large the system works.
There are millions of police, and hundreds of millions of encounters daily across a huge range of investigations and issues. boiling it down to twitter levels of context is bad and applying such broad strokes is also equally bad. Its certainly not going to encourage good ones to sign up.
I know with the way this type of stuff is being portrayed, its a no win for most police, they could quadruple the salaries overnight and some would still balk, because no matter what it a loss.
Shunning is crap. Instead of resorting to such dark-age extralegal tactics, how about we get some prosecutors who do their damn jobs and prosecute criminal police? Unfortunately prosecutors are generally elected and many people don't want to admit the root of the problem is with the electorate who choose to elect and re-elect prosecutors who don't want to do their jobs.
Depends on the severity of the act. Shunning is excellent punishment for low-level misbehavior. If you allow misbehavior to accrue and expand, eventually you'll get to a case where you need a prosecutor.
That prosecutor's job would be easier if the criminal officer's colleagues would testify against them, which goes back (again) to social mores.
Prosecutors rely on cops to get their prosecutions, and if the prosecutor is the only one who faces repercussions for charging a cop, then obviously they're going to be loathe to charge any cops.
Honestly, though, the system isn't recoverable in most regions. American police, the ideological successors to slave catchers, suffer a rot that is too deep. Many are literally white supremacist gangs. It isn't a system that can be reformed.
Just a few bad apples? The fact that they feel comfortable doing stuff like the head kicking shows there is a organisational cultural issue in the police. If the citizens didn’t film it they’d be on their merry way and not a word would be said.
Inndian here, just like someone was saying upthread, there are millions of police offices in India. Lets not get carried away and say all are corrupt annd people are not getting beat left and right as you seem to inisinuate.
There are around 700,000 police officers in the US. If one of them is caught doing something bad every day, that's 0.00014%.
US police in general have a lot of issues and need to improve dramatically, but the stories about cases of bad behavior are not representative samples, even if you factor in the amount of bad behavior that goes undiscovered.
But every one of those officers doing something bad every day has an entire department and union behind them that are very aware that that officer is bad. What do they do? They protect him. Every time. They are just as culpable. This is why the saying a few bad apples spoils the bunch exists.
On-duty cops shoot a thousand people a year. In the last several decades, three have been convicted of murder. How can we trust the system that produced such ridiculous numbers?
> There are around 700,000 police officers in the US. If one of them is caught doing something bad every day, that's 0.00014%.
I take your point, but not exactly. First, an officer that's planting evidence or attacking unarmed handcuffed civilians has been known to be a bad officer by say the other 50 officers in their department. Second, they're not caught on their first day. Third, the high profile ones are high profile because they're left on the force and continue being bad even after being caught.
So the 0.00014% of people being caught every day is _additive_ over time, this isn't a random sampling. It doesn't mean that 0.00014% of officers are bad, it means that we increase the pool of bad officers by that much every day.
The number was just intended to indicate what a small fraction any individual instance is. Even being additive, and even with undiscovered bad cases, these cases are still not representative samples of US police in general. In other words, as an earlier commenter said, this is partly confirmation bias.
That's not to say these incidents aren't indicative of systemic problems, but that's not the same as saying saying all or most police are like this. What "confirmation bias" means here is that people are looking at the exceptional cases to confirm their opinion of police as a whole, which is objectively a mistake.
That's sort of a biased source you link. It lists deaths, but often times these deaths come as a result of someone threatening a cop with a deadly weapon. There's been like two dozen shootings from the LAPD so far this year, and most were due to someone charging an armed cop with a knife or a similar suicidal incident. I think just looking at use of force without context will give you a pretty biased view. Certainly it's been overused, but a lot of times, especially with the mental health crisis going on where people who are insane and a danger to others are allowed to refuse treatment, it is justified when another life is at stake.
> It lists deaths, but often times these deaths come as a result of someone threatening a cop with a deadly weapon.
Other countries also have people who threaten cops with deadly weapons, and their numbers are far far lower. Hell, suicide-by-cop is a very real and common thing here in the USA.
Once again, you mention nothing about the rate or all the latent variables at play here. For example, other first world countries generally have stronger social safety nets, which means mentally ill people and aged out foster youth in those places are less likely to end up on the street in the first place compared to the U.S. We also have an issue at least in CA where jails are at capacity, and people are being turned out when they would have been held for bail, and often go on to commit more crimes while waiting to be charged for the first one.
> someone charging an armed cop with a knife or a similar suicidal incident
It's weird reading that when I was a kid I was constantly told cops are heroes because they put their lives on the line where most wouldn't or couldn't. Like I'm an untrained bumpkin, unfortunately if someone had a knife and I had a gun, I can't really think of much more than shooting them.
But somewhere along the line the standard for police dropped down to the standard for me? The untrained bumpkin?
Since pretty much every time I hear cop by suicide it's apparent, and people still say "well what would *you* do" like that's the smoking gun...
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It even extends to more casual cases, the other day there was a video of a lady mooning an officer. The thing is the lady was clearly let go before that fairly stupid act, and last I checked mooning someone doesn't imply you've suddenly become a lethal threat.. but the cop was just so out of shape that shortly after realizing they couldn't keep up with this not very fast person they ended up tasering this person on asphalt.
A fully grown adult out cold at running pace straight into asphalt because a cop is so out of shape they can't chase a person who mooned them
That's not the picture I grew up with...
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I honestly don't have a problem with that though! I don't think we have to force people to gamble their lives for others. There's a certain sense of, "if I can't do it, I can't make someone else do it".
But if that's the case then we need to drop a lot of the pretence to traditional policing cops have right now.
Like the pay and pensions are all based around the hazard, but it's safer than being a cab driver. Maybe because now fearing for your life is an out to kill people reaching for wallets.
And a lot of interactions they have with people, like speed enforcement should probably be dropped, if we're just admitting lethal force has moved up a few notches.
And maybe they need to have attachments with them for certain calls. If someone is showing signs of mental instability, someone experienced with dealing with that vs applying lethal force should be directly involved.
The fact that cops are trained is precisely why they shoot people who try and charge them or others with knives. The correct first-line strategy for dealing with a knife attack is not allowing the attacker to close enough distance with you to use the knife, because once they do, regardless of how well trained you are how untrained they are there's still a high chance you'll end up seriously injured or dead. It's that imminent danger that justifies the use of deadly force. As I understand it, every self defence course worth its salt teaches this - even the ones focused on bare-handed fighting. Any tactics for dealing with attackers who do close that gap are just a high-risk last resort for situations where that fails.
Humans are entitled to use deadly force in response to credible threats to life. Someone waving a knife around, or even running while waving a knife around, is not that. The fact that knives exist is the reason that police carry billy clubs. A normal who citizen shot and killed someone of his own race because they were waving around a knife, would be charged with murder. Police officers should be better trained and better able to deal with knives than the average person. Those few departments who have mandated effective training have seen significant results from that training. [0] Well-trained ninjas with swords are actually quite rare in the modern policing environment.
This is missing the forest for the trees so badly it hurts.
Why do you think I said I'd be forced to shoot? Because even without training common sense tells you "not allowing the attacker to close enough distance with you to use the knife" is a pretty good course of action
By your logic the moment a person calls 911, the people who are supposed to help, the person has been sentenced to death. Think about that for a second.
1. The cops will arrive
2. "avoid knife getting close to me"
3. Less than lethal is not reliable, hell even lethal force isn't instant, I feared for my life, they're shot very dead.
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It's not an easy problem, but how is that ok? There's not many ways to fix it other than trying something other than lethal force.
Like the stuff in those videos is not easy, I'm not trying to pretend I could do it, or most people could. It requires cops being able to put the most efficient response for self-preservation behind trying to save someone, which again, I'm not saying we require of anyone...
But let's call a spade a spade at that point. That's not the concept of policing I see paraded. That's not the "thin blue line", it sounds more like a cell of civilians that are deployed to bad situations where they then "apply self-defense"...
Thanks for making my point that the standard for officers is now people who are too scared to put the public before themselves... which is pretty much all of us. The opposite of a thin blue line.
> Like the stuff in those videos is not easy, I'm not trying to pretend I could do it, or most people could.
I'm not a police officer because I'm not brave enough. I'd fear for my life, and I shoot. So instead of putting myself in a profession that should ideally require more of me, I don't.
If everyone felt that way, and did it your way, the only ones left would betge criminally insane/psychopathic unfazed by the utilization of violence. Without those who are willing to counter that wanton tendency to violence with a principled, controlled application of protocol driven escalation of force, civilization devolves even further into barbarism and might makes right than the arguable state in which it is already in.
If the people who were police were better able to keep cool instead of jumping to shoot people in the face in fear... all that would be left would be the criminally insane?
And somehow we'd have less controlled application of protocol?
There really would be a line that separates them from the "rest of us", and anti-police sentiment would be a hell of a lot weaker. I mean, how often do we have national anti-firefighter sentiment? Maybe when police use them to mow down humans?
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If being a police officer is just about carrying a gun and looking out for number one, all we're looking for is people who don't hesitate to pull a trigger.
Just realize, lowering the bar to "willing to shoot to protect self the moment anything threatens me" is a hell of a lot lower than "willing to put other's lives at similar value to mine, even if it risks my own".
Ironically the lower bar sounds like how attract to the "criminally insane/psychopathic unfazed by the utilization of violence"... to become police.
Considering some states have already removed this immunity and others are considering it, I don't think it is required. That is to say that the state can and does bring charges for violations done while performing work for the state.
> it was decided they’re necessary to keep the state from being stuck
It wasn't necessarily decided by elected representatives, most of these protections have be put in place by courts and are based purely on legal precedent rather than legislation.
> It’s legal to sue government agents as private citizens for violation of rights.
It is legal to sue anyone for anything. The standards of proof required to win such a lawsuit make it generally ineffective at rectifing most cases where rights are violated.
The people who pay got vigilante private security don't do it to avoid police planting evidence in them.
They do it to have someome to attack the others, someone under their control. They have zero incentive to prevent private security from planting evidence on others.
Gangs in fact did not ended up to be fair non corrupt equivalent of police either.
I'm much less concerned with them planting evidence on me than I am with them shooting a friend or family member who is experiencing a mental health crisis.
That is the same category. People who will call private security in your friend or family don't mind violence that much.
And in case you are the one calling, you don't need private security as much as private mental health professional. Because that knowledge and exlerience of mental health crisis comes with being mental health professional - not with security.
> People who will call private security in your friend or family don't mind violence that much.
If private security shoots someone having a mental health crisis, they have far fewer legal protections to help them avoid consequences. This is precisely the point I have been making.
Yes, and just imagine how bad the situation will be when the police is privatized and accountable only to their shareholders.
The current situation is not good, but I have hope that in the past year we've hit a turning point where we'll actually start seeing some improvements (they will be slow and incomplete improvements, but they will be progress in the right direction).
Privatized police, on the other hand, is about as dystopian as it gets.
I see this news as a loss of faith in the police. If the police are not trusted or not helping or making things worse then of course people will form their own gangs for protection. Citizen is trying to profit off that. Businesses and rich people do this all the time, this sounds like a service for less wealthy people of the same nature. It could help tame the police if independent observers with the power to intervene and wearing body cameras streaming to a remote server show up at incidents. In fact some people may specifically want protection from the police in situations where they think the police may react badly (e.g., trying to get help for someone with mental health problems). Goons for rent would be a bad way to implement this service. Observers and defenders and negotiators and de-escalators for hire would make more sense and have less liability for the company offering the service. This is the basic idea behind lawyers, you can not trust government to watch out for your interests so you hire an advocate to represent you and protect you. In fact, temporary legal representation during a sudden crisis is another service Citizen could offer. Calling a lawyer to be present during a crisis is something anyone can already do if they can afford it. Privatized police already exist (campus police, corporate police, security guards, even military mercenaries who do policing work). Hiring an observer/witness for cheap seems like a great new business model!
Private security forces are accountable to their customers before their shareholders. If I don't like how my private security company is behaving, I can cancel my contract and switch to another company. When enough contracts are cancelled, then these hypothetical shareholders get involved.
If I could cancel the "contract" with my local law enforcement agencies, I would have done that a long, long time ago.
When private citizens are allowed to do it (see e.g. Stand Your Ground states, Trayvon Martin, &c) it's also bad. Only without body cams, without even the possibility of institutional reform.
Not for the purposes of the law, nor their employment. The state has much more power in how to bring them into line than it does for private citizens (it just chooses not to use that power in the US).
Not when they're off the clock either, interestingly. An off duty officer still obeys the reasonable officer standard for use of force rather than the reasonable person standard.
What matters is that people are voting with their wallets.
People need a solution to rampant crime. Take for example SA, where private security forces are widespread.
The degree of deleriction of duty by public servants has been tremendous in the last 2 years. The NYC Major recently was on the record stating that "there is no security problem in NYC" meanwhile official City hall communication channels have implemented a buddy system where city hall employees can home in groups [1]
If public servants can't provide security for people, there should not be a surprise that the private servicers would emerge.
Law enforcement does not solve the sort of low-level citizen-brigade crime that this app would address, it only treats the symptoms. The cause is people driven to desperation; put money into social programs to address the root of their desperation.
This is a false dichotomy, but what's worse is that social programs are already heavily funded in all the major West coast cities. For example, LA spends over half a billion dollars (yes, billion with a B) on services for the homeless every year, to very little effect. It's not irrational for someone (even someone who advocates for those very programs and services) to look at the full situation and conclude that the best available option is to just throw in the towel and hire private security.
> look at the full situation and conclude that the best available option is to just throw in the towel and hire private security
Someone who is looking at the full situation would realize that hiring private security does not cause the homeless population to suddenly evaporate. An outsider might start to get the impression that the fundamental right of the upper-middle class is the right not to be reminded that people in poverty exist.
No one cares what outsiders think when they are being assaulted on their walk home from work. If you want justice you must first create order.
In addition, it's not like these people don't have sympathy for the plight of the poor: they voted to spend vast sums on tax money trying to fix the root cause of the problem. It's not their fault that these efforts are failing.
Why is ~$500,000,000 a lot of money for the homeless? The CA budget is hundreds of billions of dollars, and there’s a lot of people who live in that state.
LA city budget, not California state. The amount spent is so high that you could just give every homeless person in LA $2000 every month and it would be less expensive.
A large portion of that spending is spent on prevention - getting rental assistance and other things to people who are in danger of losing their housing. There are over 400,000 "severely cost burdened" households that are "extremely low income" which is to say making less than 30% of median income which in LA means less than $20k/year, and spending more than half their income on rent.
You're looking at the most obvious symptom - people with no home - and saying "well if we just treated that symptom with all this money there would be no problem." But the root cause is an order of magnitude larger than that.
Prevention is cheaper and results in a friendlier environment for everyone. The proliferation of expensive, reactive solutions that tend to aggravate the very problem they're ostensibly working on is great for shareholders though. Public health is boring by comparison, and no one gets rich when it works.
That's not what happening here. The money is for the "true crime" entertainment and the fun of being part of a mob, not crime reduction. That's obvious from the substance and tone of the content published in the app.
I don’t follow these things at all, but it seems we may be in a bit of a bad romance with authority figures. These total strangers act in perfectly predictable ways given the positions we’ve handed them, and we call it betrayal.
But for all of the highly visible things wrong with certain police forces, they do at least theoretically have carefully considered constraints and a duty to the public rather than just their subscribers.
You seem to be presuming that you will be the one these mercenaries are working for. When mercenaries I hired beat the crap out of you, how will you fire them?
If you hire mercenaries to beat the crap out of someone, both you and the mercenaries will go to jail.
There are already more private security officers than government police officers in the US today. This isn't new. They have co-existed for many decades.
I don't think the author ever claimed there's no value in real police. It actually, ironically, matches the recent left-wing demands to defund. Let the police with their armored cars and helicopters handle real crime, like when your mercenaries beat up my mercenaries. Let the mercenaries handle the small stuff :)
the problem is that it is not in jest. It is accurate and reviews both how weak societal oversight of police is and how important it is.
Officers are under scrutiny. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes (not often enough for me) when that scrutiny fails changes happen.
What is the oversight process, and the public input on that oversight, for Citizen?
Your example is an argument specifically for not letting go of that scrutiny, and significantly increasing that scrutiny. It, to some, is an argument of why existing state sponsored efforts at law enforcement simply need to be rebooted entirely - because they operate with scrutiny more akin to a private corporation already.
Everyone is a victim of crimes, not just upper-middle-class white folks. In fact, the UMC folks are the ones who can afford to just write off the losses caused by property crimes, and are less susceptible to fall victim to the worst crimes, like murder.
Is there some background information you're referring to? Assault makes up the vast majority of violent crimes, so it's hard to see what it could mean for them to be done "out of sheer desperation". I can see how a desperate person might feel shoplifting or burglary are their only choice to survive, but how could they expect to benefit from punching random people?
