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Let's talk shitty policing!
The story starts back in August, when police (specifically, Adams County Sherriff's Department of Ohio) raided the home of Joseph "Afroman" Foreman on a warrant for narcotics and kidnapping. Perhaps they thought that the author of "Because I got high" would be a slam dunk, but they walked out with a couple roaches and a few grand in cash.
https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/adams-county/rapper-afromans-ohio-home-raided-by-adams-county-sheriffs-office
When they discovered a grand total of jack and shit, they were forced to return most of the money, except the stuff they stole.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/adams-county-sheriff-comes-up-400-short-returning-cash-to-afroman-after-home-raid/ar-AA14IJPa
Reason covered the case here:
https://reason.com/2022/12/05/cops-return-cash-seized-from-afroman-in-bogus-drug-raid-with-400-missing/
And the man himself has weighed in with a music video that is all security footage of the raid titled "Will you help me repair my door?"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oponIfu5L3Y
Down with qualified immunity, the legalized piracy known as civil asset forfeiture, and the self-funding militarized security state.
I despair for the cause of police reform. There was a window where it might have been possible, but anywhere past the 2000s I just don't see it happening.
Put frankly, nobody really cares about this man. Nobody really cares about the median CAF victims: poor people, strippers, general lower-class coded individuals. Nobody really cares about people jailed on bogus charges, put through the justice wringer for ill-conceived reason, or shot to death by trigger-happy psychopaths. It's the just world fallacy in full effect: they probably had it coming anyway.
The median voter has never in his life gotten in trouble with the police. You'd need a hundred Uvaldes to meaningfully dent this - the sorts of tragedy I wouldn't wish on any nation. The median voter is a middle-aged comfortable person with a steady job and living who thinks everything in society basically works as it should. Oh, sure, some politicians are greedy, the kids these days are bad, but the police? Protect and serve. They keep us safe and things steady and that's all we want. If they beat up or imprison or kill someone, well, I guess that's just what their job is.
I don't know what any one nation can hope to do about this, for as long as the median age in wealthy countries keeps rising. The people who vote don't care, the people who get elected have no reason to care, and the police have made more than clear they have negative interest in policing their own.
What's a downtrodden person to do? What is anyone to do? For as long as the median voter really loves the police, I don't know that I see a way out.
I totally believe you're right about this, but it still frustrates me. Even from a purely selfish perspective, this should matter to people. Holding people in prison or putting them through the justice system for stupid reasons is a waste of my tax money. Ruining people's lives by sending them to prison for no good reason means they're likely not going to be contributing to the economy (or, worse, become criminals and contribute negatively). We do this at a really large scale in the US, so this isn't exactly a small effect.
The blackpilling thing, to me, is that I don't think people are that selfish. They aren't without empathy. They don't have zero care for justice. I think it's the aforementioned just world fallacy: they really think they have it coming. If they didn't have it coming, why, the police might be wrong. The law might be wrong. Society may be doing wrong by them. Everything may be wrong. The lower classes may in fact not deserve their fate.
It's a lot to take in and figure out and, genuinely, I don't think normal people are really in a mood to consider if maybe the whole criminal justice system is that big of a dumpster fire. Better to insist everything is fine, everyone falling afoul of it is a Bad Person, and to try your hardest to ignore all the signs it ain't so.
To put it bluntly, very few of the people suffering from police misconduct are model citizens.
I know. I still don't want them to be at the justice system's cruel mercies.
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Sounds to me like you are falling for the unjust world fallacy. The mistaken belief that every misfortune is the result of undeserved oppression and victimization.
I don’t see why only one side should get to unilaterally create a “fallacy” to diagnose their opposition with.
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Plenty of people think that ruining life for strippers, drug addicts, petty criminals, and the homeless so that they’ll go do their thing somewhere else is a good use of their tax dollars.
Honestly pretty hard to think of a better one
If you want someone's life ruined, surely you'd prefer them dead? I get consistently down-voted for my 'kill all the drug dealers' policy proposal. But surely that's preferable to just ruining the lives of drug addicts, petty criminals and homeless. What if they don't do their thing somewhere else? What if their lives are already ruined? What if they strike back against you?
If we're trying to make things hard for people, why not just bite the bullet and kill?
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The problem is that these kinds of policies A) don’t work very well and B) wind up pushing terrible people into the same neighborhoods which turn from ‘poor’ to ‘festering shitholes of crime depending economically on drug and human trafficking, which then export maladaptive mores to broader society’.
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The "downtrodden" themselves often tread on others. Even Mr. Floyd, saw it fit to rob and forge. Personally, the greatest victims are those that are harmed, but do not harm others.
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The median voter is on the fence between "minor changes needed to make policing better" and "major changes are needed to make policing better". "No changes are needed to make policing better" is only 11% of the country.
What to do? Figure out something realistic that would qualify as "changes"..."to make policing better". The motte of "defund the police"=="pay social workers instead" isn't going to apply to cases like this; nobody's sending a social worker to investigate an alleged kidnapping. The bailey of "defund the police"=="abolish the police" was, if not DoA, at least shot along with those teens in CHAZ. I personally thought that mandatory bodycams were a nice improvement, but there's even been pushback on that from people whose pleasure at the "evidence when police misbehave" outcomes has been outweighed by their displeasure at the "evidence when non-police misbehave" outcomes.
My only wild idea would be to break up all larger police departments into smaller (but overlapping) jurisdictions. I have no solid plan details for how to best implement it. But if everybody knows that the East Metro cops are on the take, and the South Metro cops are brutal, but the West Metro cops are competent and the North Metro cops even helpful, there ought to be a way for the results there to end up expanding the latter jurisdictions and budgets at the expense of the former. This should extend even to enlarging good departments to the point where they could be broken in two (with corresponding promotions and budget increases to compensate for losing economies of scale), and/or disbanding bad departments entirely. "Abolish the (crooked) police" would be a legitimate threat and incentive source, not just a left-wing joke, if there was always a nearby non-crooked (or even just less-crooked! gradient descent works!) police force nearby ready to pick up the slack.
I don't see how that would have helped in this case, though, unless a better police culture in general had spillover effects. You're not going to have much jurisdictional overlap in "literally Amish country. Many miles from anything."
This is similar to what we have in Allegheny County, PA, and it's not a model to emulate. In the county there are 130 municipalities, of which 109 have their own police departments. Allegheny County Police and PA State Troopers have blanket jurisdiction over the entire county, but that jurisdiction is somewhat limited. Then add in all the various special-use police departments—university police, transit police, housing police, etc. Then add in the various state agencies with sworn enforcement arms that regularly conduct law enforcement activities in the county like the PA Fish and Boat Commission, which is responsible for patrolling the rivers, and PA Liquor Control Board, and there are over 150 entities within the county that could conceivably be called police departments, each with its own jurisdiction that may or may not overlap with another jurisdiction or jurisdiction, whether in geography, subject matter, or both. The end result is that there are a ton of tiny police departments that only field a few officers and are woefully underfunded and provide their employees low pay and inadequate training. The guy who shot Antwon Rose had been dismissed from the University of Pittsburgh Police, essentially for being an asshole, and took a job with the East Pittsburgh Police (East Pittsburgh is a separate borough from the City of Pittsburgh), a community of less than 2000 and a median household income of around $30,000. Though he was ultimately acquitted, there was general agreement that he wasn't cut out to be a policeman and that he wouldn't have been one if these small boroughs weren't so desperate for warm bodies that anyone with prior experience was automatically given a job.
This is where the
bit, which I haven't figured out at all, would have to come in. Market competition works because consumers have both incentive and ability to switch to a better competitor. If it's not easy to switch then you don't get competition, just fragmentation.
I jokingly suggested Shadowrun's private police forces before as a solution to police unions, maybe I'll do it again here--if each of those PDs has to compete on service quality, it will definitely cut down on the number of departments Allegheny has, making it sound like less of a tollbooth kingdom after some point.
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The median voter in the US voted for Biden, who played an important role in getting civil asset forfeiture passed in the first place. His opponent is the guy behind 'when the looting starts, the shooting starts'. I don't even care to defend literal looters - it's kinda whatever - but Trump is no criminal justice reform candidate either. I can think of lots of changes that might improve policing! It's getting them in the public consciousness and dealing with the nationwide tantrum police departments seem to throw that's the real issue.
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I don't. It just got conflated with anti-white racism for a few decades, but if we can ever end that shit, I think police reform is a real possibility.
Do you have specific policy reforms in mind? I think there is certainly room to drop the hammer on major rights violations like the case you mentioned, but I find a lot of cases people complain about seem like the products of expecting perfection from a numerous, moderately-paying and unpredictable job: sometimes people mess up, and not all unfortunate results are the result of malice (although that should be rooted out).
I've wondered if policing needs neutral after-action review of bad outcomes without inherently assigning blame with the aim of improving training and public awareness. Similar models have improved aircraft and industrial safety over the last few decades.
Eliminating or greatly reducing qualified immunity (for prosecutors more than cops, actually) is a big plank.
Independent investigative bodies to handle police misconduct rather than subsections of existing police forces.
Civil Asset Forfeiture has to go, and so does the excessive militarization (though my definition and most people's definition might differ here). The two impact each other, because CAF funds a lot of military gear.
I'm actually of teh opinion that use-of-force is one of the least pressing issues for American policing. There's certainly bad behavior, and even pockets of systemic problems, but nothing like there is with the casual civil rights violations, the scummy plea dealing, the near-constant lying on warrant applications etc. Some of this, the reform needs to be in the direction of allowing police more, rather than less autonomy. I am also of the view that we need vastly more police, rather than fewer, and a narrowing of the criminal scope (i.e. ending the drug war, streamlining and rationalizing the criminal statutes etc.).
I want more police focusing on fewer crimes with more training and more oversight. I want every unsolved murder to have a mini task force. I want better witness protections.
I know that there is a virtuous spiral to be joined here. We've seen that we can massively decrease the most serious crime rates in a decade or two, and are now in the process of trying to reverse. We can stop anytime, but it's going to take decades to get back on the path.
Won't that just mean every cop getting constantly sued by everyone they ever put in jail?
Getting jailed tends to mean going to trial anyway. That's kind've the point. I'd be disappointed if the majority of people in jail didn't see a courtroom to get their dose of justice, be it in their favor or not.
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I live in a nation where the anti-white racism thing functionally doesn't exist. If anything, it's made the pro-reform block smaller. I just don't think you're right.
Do you also live in a nation where the primary victims of police malfeasance (by raw numbers) have been so thoroughly erased from the discussion by the "pro-reform" block that most of that block think they are actually the most privileged demographic when it comes to police/justice system encounters?
Does being "erased from the discussion" matter more than the actual injustice being committed in the first place? Also the discussion isn't erased, you are having the discussion right now and we both seemed to be able to find out about white people getting fucked over by the police just fine. Should we let the police slide because MSN talked about the wrong cases too much?
The ways progressives talk about police reform to combat injustice make me believe that they think it is fine to "let police slide" when it is people like me who are impacted by it, that it is not actually injustice in that case. If you want me to support your solution to "actual injustice", you damn well better prove to me that the injustices committed against my demographic are also going to be solved by it. Progressives seem to go out of their way to avoid doing so and expect to gain my support solely through emotional blackmail. Fuck that.
It doesn't matter what the progressives talk about. The police aren't progressives, the voters by and large aren't either, and nobody is capable of criminalizing being white. Using twitter progs as an excuse to do nothing about real police overreach seems like looking for an excuse to me.
As a whole, true, but I think you need to look specifically at the areas that have the biggest crime problems. Someone who happily lives in the suburbs has almost no say over what policing looks like in the urban core.
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I wouldn't care what progressives talk about if they also didn't come in and disrupt local government planning meetings, sabotaging years of bipartisan efforts that had been steadily making progress (eg, on topics like @what_a_maroon brought up) by being an intransigent minority insisting that any solution involve directly confronting racism and sexism.
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I get that it's real satisfying to talk shit about your outgroup, but I really don't care about that. I want for policing to be just, and the American custom of anti-white racism just isn't a factor.
What country are you in?
I'm from the Netherlands.
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Everyone just wants policing to be "just". The problem is that not everyone agrees on how to make policing more "just" or even what "just" policing is. The "pro-reform" block in the US currently claims that the primary reason that policing is unjust is racism and sexism, and thus focus on policies that they believe would reduce racism and sexism. They also claim that white men, the largest demographic victimized by police malfeasance, categorically cannot be victims of racism or sexism. They regularly erase them from narratives about justice reform (eg see my comment on the old site discussing declining white support for BLM) and strongly overestimate victimization of other groups. Do you really think that alienating the largest group of victims by implying their victimization is "just", unlike the "unjust" victimization of other demographics, and downplaying their victimization while exaggerating others' "just isn't a factor"?
While there's certainly a lot of that, I think a lot of the policies that are proposed actually are orthogonal to the -ism angle. Yes, hiring more black or female cops is unlikely to do anything. But things like removing qualified immunity and civil asset forfeiture, body camera policies with actual teeth, a separate body and prosecutor for investigating allegations, etc. would help all victims of police abuse.
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Yeah. Cool. And if the pro-reform block didn't do these things - such as they don't here, because white people are (even more of) a majority of people around, they'd still get nowhere. It's a red herring. Take away BLM, take away the Bezos-sponsored Huffington post-tier editorials, take away the identity politics, and you still don't get reform. It just isn't the kind of cause normal people are going to identify with, because the chief victims of this injustice aren't average people so much as those down on their luck.
Well, no, the chief victims of police injustice are the perpetually badly behaved who are not serious criminals. Saying that they are ‘down on their luck’ implies they have ever had good luck.
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We WERE getting some reform. Body cameras were the main thing driving it; either cops were behaving better with the cameras or the cameras exposed that there was a less of a problem than expected; either way, they were having an effect. BLM opposes body cameras.
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