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tyre nichols, a 29 year old black man in memphis, was beaten up by several cops on jan 7th and died three days later. all five of the cops, who are black, were fired, arrested, and charged; the police chief denounced their actions as 'inhumane'. the bodycam video will be released about 3 hours after this post at 7pm EST. hopefully we won't see a recurrence of the floyd riots, although several cities, including atlanta which is dealing with its own controversial cop shooting incident, are preparing for an eventful evening. the police reform movement, which has stalled, may also be pushed back into the forefront of public consciousness.
4 videos have been released on the city of memphis vimeo account: https://vimeo.com/cityofmemphis
I doubt it. In theory, I'm okay with brutality for the sake of effectiveness. If a criminal is pointing a gun at police officers, by all means shoot him in the head to protect the police. If a criminal is violently resisting arrest, by all means have 5 policemen tackle him to the ground to restrain him. And if his head gets smacked and he gets a concussion while being tackled, so be it, and the police shouldn't be charged.
That is almost never how these brutality cases go. Usually it's a bunch of tyrants beating the crap out of someone they see as lesser than themselves for fun. It's not only excessive, it's unnecessary. They're not going too far in the line of duty: making a distasteful but utilitarian tradeoff between effectiveness and kindness, there's literally no point. If someone is already on the ground, already restrained, and no longer a threat then beating them further does not help capture them or keep the police safe. Police are humans just like everyone else, and they have the same tendencies towards bullying and abuse of power as everyone else. These people have often grown up in poor violent communities and they are the same poor violent people as the people they're policing, they just have more authority. In theory, the police would screen for this during the hiring process, and most of them do with some effectiveness. That is, I bet the proportion of violent thug-like people in most police forces is less than in the average population. But it's not zero, and it's not close enough to zero to ignore. The 90%+ of virtuous brave moral police officers do their jobs effectively and then don't get arrested for brutality so they don't make the news. Most of the time. There are exceptions, there are false accusations. But most of the time the police who actually get in trouble deserve it, and the issue is with people falsely generalizing that to say that all police are bad when they're usually not.
Assuming the video footage corroborates that this was pointlessly excessive, then these officers being imprisoned will make Memphis better off, because having violent thugs in the police force accomplishes nothing but justify the hatred that criminals and noncriminals alike have for the police and make them less likely to feel guilty about committing crimes. Police who follow the law and have respect for civilians are more effective at establishing a rapport with their communities and disincentivizing crime beyond just the threat of violence. Get the thugs out, hire better and more competent people who actually respect the law to replace them. This is not a tyrannical dictatorship, everyone has to follow the law, including the police and politicians.
... yeah, because the videos that get blown up on social media, both by casual 'virality' and explicit promotion by activists (not that explicit promotion or activism are bad!), are the worst ones, selected for both the worst cops, bad days of the worst cops, and any other random factor that could increase brutality. the distribution of cases of 'cop beats someone up' and 'cop beats someone up, 50k upvotes on reddit' are not at all similar.
This is a good point, which I was sort of assuming implicitly but did not state carefully in my post. I'm not making the claim that all accusations of police brutality are legitimate and that all police accused of brutality are scum. However, conditional on this being a scandal that we are hearing about, and involving a beating rather than a gunshot, and the guy actually dying from a beating, this is very likely to be an excessive abuse of power by the police involved.
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Is it separable? Ideally, obviously, but in practical terms?
If the Mayor of Random City, Guatemala needs to crack down on violent crime, I'd bet his first options are "hire some scary-looking cops" and "tell the existing cops to be more aggressive". From a bureaucratic perspective I'm not sure if there's a silver bullet that lets you beef up your police force, without also accidentally empowering some thugs.
Sure, "hire better and more competent people", if it were that easy everyone would be doing it already. I don't mean to say that violent extralegal police gangs are acceptable, just that it will take some inventiveness to remove them.
This is a hard problem. I can think of a bunch of attempts at solutions, but all of them have costs, tradeoffs, or exploits that can occur if bad faith actors abuse them.
A. Increase salaries which incentivizes more competent people to want to become police officers.
B. Increase training so people know what to do, and make it possible for new recruits to fail their training if they aren't good enough.
C. Make it easier to fire police officers who are misbehaving. It shouldn't take an event that involves national headlines and legal prosecution to fire a police officer. People being sketchy and aggressive is usually discernible by their coworkers and boss, pretty much none of these big scandals involve the people who knew the bad cops say "oh my, I'm so surprised, I never would have seen this coming, he's always been so professional before this instance." It's almost always a pattern of behavior and escalation. Fire them sooner along the path.
All of these have the issue that they cost money, which is politically hard, and wasteful if they end up not being effective enough per cost. They also potentially have issues if the higher up police themselves are bad and corrupt. More money to line their pockets and hire people they like, and more opportunities for them to fire honest cops with less justification while letting their corrupt underlings go free. But from the perspective of a non-corrupt higher up person, these would likely be effective if costly.
D. Weaken qualified immunity. It serves a legitimate purpose that allows cops to do their jobs without worrying about getting sued for normal policework, but my understanding is that it is too strong and has too many loopholes where stuff that was obviously wrong gets dropped anyway and bad cops go free. Making it marginally weaker would likely have a negligible impact on good policemen, while making it harder for bad cops to get away with crimes, and thus disincentivizing them from committing them in the first place, which is the whole point of having laws at all.
E. Make it easier to prosecute/punish higher ranking officers for the crimes of their underlings. Specifically if the underling was ordered or pressured to do the wrong thing, or if the higher ups knew about it and didn't stop it. Although this might create some incentive for higher ups to cover up misdeeds rather than report them, if you combine this with massive penalties for covering up misdeeds and leniency for reporting them (maybe the higher ranking officer gets in trouble if and only if they knew about and failed to punish an underling's crime) you can combat this incentive.
The downside here is that these create incentives for cops to be less aggressive and less effective, just sitting around all day instead of stopping crimes and interacting with the public, which creates risk. If done carefully, it would be set up to only punish actual crimes which are not done accidentally, such that good police officers could do their jobs with no increased risk, and only bad police get in trouble, but that's easier said than done. However, as in Scott's post on tradeoffs and failures: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-653 there's a dimension where you tradeoff aggressiveness versus mercy, and there's a dimension where you just get more competent at both, and I think there are enough flaws that there's plenty of room to move up on the latter without messing with the balance on the former.
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Which brutality cases are you referring to? I can only think of Rodney King as fitting your narrative. Floyd wasn’t that.
Yeah. I'd consider this worse than Floyd if only since there's a legitimate argument that it was more negligent manslaughter from positional asphyxiation compared to continuing to wale on a restrained suspect indiscriminately.
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