Years ago, David Simon (creator of The Wire and The Deuce), wrote about the difficulty in getting the name of an officer behind a fatal shooting. [0] That officer turned out to have a prior incident of a shooting, and the case against the surviving suspect ended up being dropped. If the prerogative is “prioritize police privacy”, where would thenline be drawn for when transparency is/isn’t allowed?
0: https://davidsimon.com/in-baltimore-no-one-left-to-press-the...
I think this data is valuable for two things:
1. Discovering systemic problems. Why does department A have so many cases of use of force? It might be racism. It might be bad training. It might be underfunding/understaffing. Or any number of other things.
2. A complex analysis of individual police officers within departments. Is this officer outside a standard deviation in use-of-force with officers within the same department or patrolling the same beat or answering the same type of calls? Is the demographics of his use of force against individuals inconsistent with the demographics of the area? Is he largely using force against suspects who are not charged with a crime or are charged with a non-violent crime?
Publishing these names has questionable value and is unlikely to lead to any type of complex analysis. Already most of the arguments for publishing the names are doing so on the basis of a presumption of guilt.
Who is "they"?
I also expect that, even in the worst case you are trying to imply, I would feel the same way about publishing the names for the same reasons. I think you are either trying to get me to admit that–which I do freely–, or you are simply uncomfortable that you and I have a different position on the tradeoffs.
Yes, we obviously have a different position about the trade offs, that’s why I replied to your comment in the first place. However, what I’m arguing is that your current position is untenable. It is not logistically or morally feasible for a news org to provide upon request info that it has used its editorial judgment to redact.
Or perhaps uneven distribution of violent crime among departments. http://blogs.kcrw.com/dna/gang-borders-create-invisible-wall...
The Citizenry should have privacy while the government should be transparent.
Tangent: Somewhere along the lines this has flipped and we've somehow stumbled into a situation where the government believes it deserves privacy and owes the citizenry none. I'm not sure how we ended up flipped, but it is not a good sign. This can probably go without saying considering the user-base here, but if we don't know what our government is doing, we can't hold them accountable and we have no idea for who or what to vote.
Tangent to the tangent: If we're not careful, we might end up with new classes divisions, those who have both privacy and access to our data, and those who have neither privacy nor access to data, even their own. Strange times.
I just wonder: is there a better way than giving names to the public to make mob-rule style decisions? It's impossible for us to know the full context (which is maybe something the government should strive to provide for all instances of police response), and I can't help but feel that the public will make sweeping decisions, without due process, and without proper examination (which again, seems currently implausible).
While it's possible someone with more use of force is a rabid psychopath, it's also possible they've been in a lot of unlucky situations. I doubt the general public consider how true randomness can sometimes result in use-of-force outliers that are in fact behaving just fine, and have had a stroke of bad luck.
Who was debating whether police officers deserve privacy? That's a question for theologians. The debate was about whether the threat to police officers' safety was an important enough factor to the public to merit censoring their names from reports of their conduct.
If policework is currently less dangerous than trash collecting, that's an obvious argument against. I like the economic argument: if you prefer your violence anonymous, quit and find another job.
They get paid to serve and protect and no one is asking for their cancer status. Everything they do is public, so it's well within our rights to know how many times they used force. Now if Officer Tim used force four times more than others in the same area and years, we can wonder...
Why should there be any expectation of privacy about what someone does during the course of their job paid for by tax payers that also involves direct interaction with the public?
This sounds like expecting us to anonymize what politicians do in some sort of weird effort to protect the "privacy" of their public actions.
How is this at all relevant to whether a police officer deserves privacy? Yes, their fatality rate is around half that of a trash collector. Since when was HN anti-privacy?
You can use data like this to analyze and criticize the system, but I see no reason why the officers' identities would be helpful for any legitimate purpose, especially weighed against their privacy and the danger of such exposure in this heated political environment.