Why It's Almost Impossible to Reform America's Police

[UglyGreed]

From Freddie Gray in Baltimore to Walter Scott in South Carolina to the more than 100 people tortured and framed over two decades in Chicago, the issue of police abuse has finally started to permeate the national discourse. But even as regular headlines reveal fresh abuses, many officers continue to take shelter behind the use-of-force framework for police interactions, suffering few or no negative consequences for excessive use of force.

There are roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States. Most of them operate relatively autonomously, yet officers are shielded in the same way in most states and jurisdictions. Spurred by the growing national movement against police brutality, lawmakers and activists have started looking for solutions that would hold police officers more accountable for the use of force. On Friday, President Obama's new Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced that the Justice Department would investigate the Baltimore Police Department to determine whether there had been systemic civil rights violations by officers.

But given the sheer number of law enforcement agencies in the country, the DOJ doesn't have nearly enough resources to investigate all of them. Between close relationships with prosecutors, secretive police culture, and laws that protect officers from taking personal responsibility for their actions, the obstacles to police reform are stifling.

http://www.vice.com/read/why-its-almost-impossible-to-reform-americas-police-508

[Scuba]

1. Just start locking up those who commit crimes and those who cover us same crimes ...

... and reform will happen.

[UglyGreed]

2. Yes

If I harbor a fugitive or know of illegal activity I'm pretty sure that I could be charged with a crime. IMO those who we trust to enforce the law must be held to an even higher standard.

[seabeyond]

3. put cameras on all, and cars. if they turn it off, they are fired. automatically. federal law,

across the nation. i think that is one thing we can easily do that will put a pause in the abuse.

[DetlefK]

4. Simple strategy: Fire them. All of them.

"History is written by the victors."
"Dead men tell no tales."
It has worn many metaphors.

Who is the carrier of culture? Is it the book that explains culture or is it the pople who live the culture?

This bad police-culture you complain about will never go away unless you get rid of those that spread this culture. Summarily fire anybody who exhibits even the slightest hint (EVEN THE SLIGHTEST HINT) of malpractice and put them in a database that prevents them from becoming police-members again.

Isn't this unfair? Isn't this extreme? What about the guys that aren't that bad? What about all the people that are suddenly unemployed?
The fuck would I care. This isn't about the 100,000 or 1,000,000 people that will have to find a job outside of policing. This is about the 300,000,000 people who deserve the best protection tax-payer money can buy.



Example:
You are head of a corporation.
Your corporation is making negative headlines all the time because some of your employees keep accidently killing co-workers by violating workplace rules.
Would you be willing to fire anybody who so much as looks at you funny, if it would stop the deaths and bad press?

[rock]

5. Well certainly as long as we do not prosecute

(and I mean trial, imprison, and fire) those when we have the best of evidence (videos) no reform will happen.

[gollygee]

6. The whole criminal justice system is racist, not just police officers

If you look at it through the lens of "there are some racist police officers" then there is no solution, as those racist police officers, if fired, will be replaced by the same racist criminal justice system with similar police officers.

It has to be approached from a bigger angle. Laws, prisons, police training and practices, etc. Even beyond criminal justice - like the education system, with overreactions to school discipline problems and the school-to-prison pipeline. And then we as a society need to take some responsiblity to unlearn stereotypes that lead to African Americans appearing inherently suspcious and threatening.

Police officers who do something wrong should be held accountable because they are doing something wrong and misusing their power, not because that will solve the problem.