Police arrest man who was videotaping them, then shoot his dog

[TheTwinAndreBen]

well i know of at least one WSPD officer who believes such practices are unethical, and is considering writing to the WSJ and signing it as a former traffic cop, but he's hesitant to speak against the establishment he works for and, on the whole, ideologically believes in his job.

Please let us know how this high stakes Winston-Harlem drama plays out.

 

[lbE08]

Speeding traps: Set in places known for speeding, typically also with a correlation to accidents. Intended to get people to slow down once word has spread that cops are in the area.
The performance measures by which our traffic division is rated (straight from the public budget document): The critical effectiveness performance indicator for this program is the number of traffic collision calls for service per 1,000 residents.
No mention of citations.

There is a strong correlation between number of officers on the road/citations given to number of traffic collision calls for service and traffic collision fatalities.

 

[dmcheatw]

Speeding traps: Set in places known for speeding, typically also with a correlation to accidents. Intended to get people to slow down once word has spread that cops are in the area.
The performance measures by which our traffic division is rated (straight from the public budget document): The critical effectiveness performance indicator for this program is the number of traffic collision calls for service per 1,000 residents.
No mention of citations.

There is a strong correlation between number of officers on the road/citations given to number of traffic collision calls for service and traffic collision fatalities.

thanks for the good faith. leaves some things unanswered, but your last sentence, if there is a causal relationship then i didn't know that and i need to think on that.

 

[lbE08]

thanks for the good faith. leaves some things unanswered, but your last sentence, if there is a causal relationship then i didn't know that and i need to think on that.

You know how everyone on the highway drives the speed limit/safer/more deliberately when a cop is out there? Basically that, magnified.

 

[dmcheatw]

sure that makes sense, but i'm fairly sure (not positive but have been under this impression for some time) that # of active police per area/capita is very weakly, if at all, correlated with crime. could be different for traffic infractions though. the thing is police are by their nature reactionary..so, for me at least, what you assert is difficult to believe partially b/c of a)causality hasn't be established and mainly b) i'm pretty sure goes against the weight of the data indicating little to no effect of policing. spearate topic but i know for a fact that harsher sentences are generally not considered to affect crime rates by most criminologists, same argument can and is made about police.

police by and large are there after the crime, not before it. they don't typically get any feathers for stopping crime, and their benchmarks are usually straightforward aside from things like crime statistics which again causality is nearly impossible to prove if it's even there to begin with.

 

[lbE08]

That's why I said it was a correlation, not causation.

Police IS a reactionary service, but the intended outcome of police is increased sense of safety and security within the community, which affects overall happiness/satisfaction with a living situation, greater care to live in a certain place, and blah blah blah it all trickles down to increased property values (in the massive, twisty picture).
Things are measured on effectiveness (which is # of accidents, crime rate change from year to year, cases cleared, etc), efficiency (average call response time, etc) and workload (incidents dispatched, officer-initiated calls for service, telephone reports, etc).

There is all kinds of literature on how to measure the effectiveness of a police force, but those things mentioned above are fairly standard looks. We probably disagree with the strength of the correlation of active police #s to crime; fact of the matter is there are policing standards and to staff at a level below that which gets you the appropriate benchmarks is not good.

 

[dmcheatw]

i recognized you did not say caused, but the previous post seems to betray your actual opinion...one that i think is reasonable and might be pretty well supported, it's just not consistent with my impression.

you have a lot more technical knowledge of specifics of policing and the measures to assess its effect...but i would just point out there are very big non-police related influences on every benchmark you listed off hand...for eg. you couldn't say you're reducing accidents if an intersection was recently redesigned or if a speed limit was recently lowered due to a new school zone or if an auto manufacturer with a significant market share just rolled out a new safety feature on all their models..the data can potentially become misleading.

i do agree with you that we have to have police, have to have some way to measure their performance, and if your LE agencies are understaffed it's bad for society and bad for police. for whatever reason i feel compelled to point out that for all my criticisms i've never said i thought police were inherently bad or superfluous, and we have a better system than most societies have enjoyed most of the time....but, yeah, i have some serious issues with basically the entire criminal justice system and when i was an adolescent my favorite shows were the FBI files and forensic detectives if that tells you anything.

 

[dmcheatw]

this is @all btw: here is my basic position as simple as i can put it:

though well intentioned, police know not what they do, and it's irresponsible at best to wield such power without an appreciation of its ramifications, or even making any effort whatsoever to understand those ramifications. add in some other well established facts (like cops justifying breaking the law themselves to serve a supposed greater good or giving other officers a lifetime pass on all minor crimes) and police, generally speaking, also become huge hypocrites. and they package it all under the extremely deceptive guise of wanting to genuinely help you, which is lying by nearly any definition. they also go out of their way to start shit with people who really would like nothing more than to be left alone, which is also a definition of harassment. and this is all because it's assumed--no, it's unquestioned--that they're the good guys. the problem is everyone, even stalin, thought god was on their side, if u get my meaning.

if someone looks at my above 4-5 sentences, can you really say they're the good guys? or if they're any worse than those they arrest (using weapons and violence themselves no less)? at the very least, i do not think ANY of them qualified to judge others, which is what they implicitly do every single day of their working lives when the issue a citation or lock someone up.

in my world social workers, counselors who accept medicaid, EMTs, teachers, and immigrant farm workers do more for society than even a well intentioned police officer (like my friend's brother) much less an overzealous officer (like my skin head, ex-wrestling friend who has a gun fixation, no degree, and volunteered for iraq).

 

[lbE08]

I think your position is largely influenced by your personal encounters with LEOs and the fact that media outlets only tend to show extremes (usually negative). I'm sorry you've had bad experiences. I don't disagree that what you say is true and a real problem, though I believe it to be to a much, much lesser degree than you believe it to be true.

 

[dmcheatw]

pos-rep

eta: to avoid confusion, i'm not conceding b/c i think my points are important i just wanted to acknowledge there is always more than one version of the truth, and that you have a point in terms of how widespread and serious someone may or may not think these things are.

 

[DeacHawk]

since this thread got bumped, and nobody wanted to play when i transitioned from financial, to social problems caused by cops, i have a remaining questions back to finances.

so, even though historically cop = tax collector (sheriff of nottingham), and, somehow, if we follow the money we find no government office is reliant on this income in any way--nothing would be cut and services across the board would remain the same if police stopped writing tickets is my understanding of deakhawk? and IbE's position, then i have two questions.

1) what are speeding traps for?
2) what's the quota for?

my friend's brother who was a WSPD beat cop for 2-3 years recently told me that all WSPD officers are supervised by a lieutenant and must meet a quota. if they do not meet this quota, they must submit in writing the reason this quota wasn't met to their lieutenant. I said if I had to write such a letter the body would have only read: "i didn't meet the quota, because people weren't breaking the law." to which i was told the Lt. would say to me: "you need to look harder," and that "a good cop can always find crime."

think about that for a second.

so if nobody needs or wants or cares about this traffic money, if it's not a defacto tax, why the quota? how is it good policing to make an arbitrary number of citations that must be met or exceeded, or you risk being passed up for promotion, pay raises, and falling out of favor with the higher ups? Friend's brother is one of the more responsible, thoughtful cops (though still no newton or einstein that's for sure) but got himself promoted...people like him are better suited on the streets precisely because they can think and don't take people in on a knee-jerk, yet they're always promoted off the streets...anyway he wants to write to the WSJ about current WSPD practices, but he's scared to, and, being a company man, doesn't know if it's the right thing to do.

anyway so if nobody is reliant on the money, and nobody will miss it if it dries up, why the quota? and two, how does starting with the premise "there is always crime you just gotta find it" make any fucking sense whatsoever? i really hope people disagree with me because it's me, not because they can't see the lunacy that is the current implementation of LE in the U.S.

also, if bubba deac wants to answer any of this stuff (including my last couple posts in this thread) from his pov, would be interesting.

my position is that revenue from police citations, that go to school systems in NC, are not the primary funding source like property taxes or state income taxes. If tickets stopped being written, I'm sure there are other funding sources to cover the loss in revenue. What each agency or elected body does, however, is not something I would speculate on.

Let's say your fantasyland where police do not issue tickets was reality, what is the deterrent to commit crime that is not severe enough for jailtime?

 

[lbE08]

this is @all btw: here is my basic position as simple as i can put it:


if someone looks at my above 4-5 sentences, can you really say they're the good guys? or if they're any worse than those they arrest (using weapons and violence themselves no less)? at the very least, i do not think ANY of them qualified to judge others, which is what they implicitly do every single day of their working lives when the issue a citation or lock someone up.

I feel compelled to respond to this, because apparently I just can't let this thread die:
Police are not judging, they're enforcing. If someone is breaking the law (however silly you may think the law is is irrelevant), the police will stop them. The lovely judicial system then takes over. However flawed this system may be, the police are not the judges.... unless you mean they see a person and judge whether or not they are going to give them a ticket or stop their illicit behavior, but this isn't really a choice- it's their job. So no, the police are not judging the actions or deciding the punishments - they're just citing infractions.

 

[dmcheatw]

i will give both of these prior posts the attention they deserve, but i'm gonna go out of town and i'd also like some time to think about and maybe try to check some books on my library shelf. deakhawk's question that he posed which is a good one, i also want to give the best possible answer. so give me until sometime next week plz. have a nice weekend.

 

[dmcheatw]

Ok, well my position has been that speeding tickets are simply a supplemental form of taxation; all it requires is a paradigm shift to a historical context. I have definitely made a number of other assertions in this thread--I did think there was a much more direct relationship between ticket revenue and a PD's budget. It's been like that in almost every society since humans started writing things down, so that was a pretty safe assumption which I was mistaken on.

With respect to this question:

Let's say your fantasyland where police do not issue tickets was reality, what is the deterrent to commit crime that is not severe enough for jailtime?

I have not argued that tickets should not be issued and that financial punishments are ineffectual, but I will answer it anyway because there are literally limitless potential solutions, and the very question shows not only a lack of creativity, but an uncritical acceptance of several assumptions which time and again have proven unfounded…and that’s what makes it a good question because the sentiment is hardly unique to people who have not studied this or had first-hand experience. It’s like supposing corporal punishment is the only way to influence your child’s behavior. It’s the most immediate way, but it’s not the best way, and a lot of people would consider overuse poor parenting or abuse.

The shortest answer though is something like using speed governors beyond something like 85 mph, adapting punishments to more productive things such as community service (which for a person whose time is worth a lot would be a more effective deterrent by the board’s logic anyway), and issuing something like a tax credit to people who are not cited because rewards are always better methods of influencing and internalizing behavior than punishments would be some offhand ideas, and I’m not getting paid to do this or have an education in it. Pretty sure all new cars have little black boxes just like planes, so you can check compliance with a high degree of accuracy if you wanted to and such automation would also be more efficient and fair than current policing. Start up costs could be funded by heavily revamping the current criminal “justice” system, starting with the PD. Anyway this is going to have to be my answer in lieu of a better researched strategy because it’s not worth the time unless I’m speaking to an audience that can be influenced.

As far as the idea that police do not judge people, once you realize and accept that an individual’s actions are inherently judgemental, the argument does not make sense. The inverse is actually true, as police have the widest latitude for action of any of the bureaucrats in the process, whereas a judge, for example, is bound by sentencing guidelines. The police officer judged that the individual needed to go to court in the first place. Sometimes a LEOs hands are tied, but in general the defense that they are just doing their job are are thus absolved of responsibility is not only incorrect, but contrary to the principals which underlied the Nuremburg Trials. This is the definition of street level bureaucrat as per Wikipedia:

Street-level bureaucracy is the subset of a public agency or government institution containing the individuals who carry out and enforce the actions required by laws and public policies. Street-level bureaucracy is accompanied by the idea that these individuals vary the extents to which they enforce the rules and laws assigned to them [emphasis mine].

From the article:

A 2003 American study, conducted by Steven Maynard Moody of the University of Kansas, reiterated [emphasis mine] the significance of street-level bureaucrats in the political process, asserting that street-level workers "actually make policy choices rather than simply implement the decisions of elected officials."

So it’s clear the act of policing itself is intrinsically judgmental. What’s upsetting is I have not said even one thing to The Pit posters that isn’t taught in an introductory sociology class. That’s how ignorant people are about something that is this important (and maybe that is the issue right there. It’s apparently NOT important, and that in itself is largely a value judgement). From the notion that tickets = taxation to the idea that punishment is an ineffectual means of behavior correction, I have not written one revolutionary thing in any post I’ve made.

All that said, I have brought up many anecdotes in the course of the thread which I did not start out intending to discuss, but those things are actual facts, not the generalizations you see in books (and much easier to cite as well). None of that was intended to be whining. I was seriously just trying to tell some people some things. Whether those things are representative or not is what we do not agree on. But you all can’t completely reject that there is a problem, or that reward is superior to punishment for modeling animal behavior. TAB's own argument undermines itself--if everyone speeds anyway then how is that not a broken system? It is apparently news that secret courts and police are bending the laws behind your backs in the name of the (supposed) greater good, but it's hardly news to minorities and poor people, because its been done openly since the beginning of time.

If police want to wield this sort of power over people, they at least need to be aware of these dynamics.

Criminal justice as a whole is is fatally flawed in the US, and I should think will be implemented very differently as human society evolves so long as reformists can continue to criticize it.

 

[dmcheatw]

Just to add on, I found these videos interesting:

Looks like I was correct, not only historically as a general rule, but also in present day America, that monies generated by policing activities do directly benefit the law enforcement agency itself in at least some cases. This is right beside us, in Tenn. no less. This video is classic as it shows an officer doing basically every single thing I've criticized them for in a single stop in the span of an hour.



I love how the officer is "trying to help [you]" @ 2:40. Sad thing is those cops say just give the money "and it's done..." (4:29) but probably too ignorant to realize--or worse don't care--what is actually going to happen to those poor (pun intended) Hispanic men and their families for losing a half million dollars.

And what's the DA's solution to all this? Arrest the mules (4:45)! Of course! ...When you're a hammer, everything's a nail.

More of the same below:




-------------------------------

And here is a boring but important video of the opposite; an officer upholding and prioritizing the constitution above all else, thinking independently, not acting for his own personal gain, and not acting as a pawn for the powers that be. So rare for an officer to uphold the constitution than try to get around it, this sheriff deputy became a YouTube sensation, and he deserved it, but it's sad his conduct is considered so unusual it went viral and was the subject of media attention. I like it when police do the right things, and people who do that are the heroes for me.




I would venture to guess that if we had more officers like the above and less like the one below, our society would be better off. Notice the first thing the officer says below is likely a lie. By 6:20 he's managed to alienate about fifteen people and "the day's not over," according to the cop. By 8:40 in the video, a citizen gives an example of what taxpayers would prefer the police be doing instead of the opportunity costs of writing minor, inconsequential tickets:




The irony is the police confiscating that money are doing what's considered good police work by their organizations (how many VCs did we need to kill each month in 'Nam?) and are gonna get promoted (and better toys for their department) a whole lot faster than the sheriff deputy who is actually doing good police work.

Anyway, the reason I bump this is because this is a real and growing problem in our country, and the consequences are nothing less than destroying lives of regular people, and there are many different approaches to handling illegal activities which nobody except me and a few others who participate on this board seem to realize.