There's a severe financial side to it all as well...

The city budget funds the police, which funds the union, and they donate their money to the attorney general, mayor, and city council members. Often when they don't get the budget they demand, police will openly retaliate against local businesses and residents who did not support their budget.

Which is also exactly what the mob does.

I hope this closure impacts the union's finances severely, to the point of putting it on life support.

Police unions are the modern day mob, and they are the reason why reform hasn't budged in this country for decades.

> Unfortunately, the greater group of protesters is incapable of understanding nuanced policy or democratic change.

This is a totally uncalled for generalization. That aside, most of the items you've listed work against the policies that police abolitionists are fighting for. Here's a good explanation: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59ead8f9692ebee25b72f...

The doc is really weird. It picks and evaluates dimensions that obviously will improve after disbanding the police, but doesn’t try to address the question if the actual safety will improve. Instead it looks at whether disbanding the police will “ challenge the notion that police increase safety?” wtf. Also hard to believe that more training and bodycams have negative effect on actual quality of policing and safety. Any data to support this?

> Also hard to believe that more training and bodycams have negative effect [...]

The police use body cameras for real-time facial recognition of the policed [1]. It 100% has, and explicitly is, a negative effect. It was a right of center “reform” on the police that did nothing but further expand the power (and future of abuse of power) of our policing institutions.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2017/03/22/real-time-face-recogniti...

Now you would have to argue that real time face recognition is truly and solely a bad thing. If used correctly it can help reduce the violence in communities, catch child molesters, rescue kidnapped kids etc. Finally it would help defund the police as it can increase its efficiency.

only thing I can see facial recognition doing is causing police forces to constantly single out individuals for previous crimes by removing their anonymity from the police force.

this doesn't improve safety it causes a feedback loop where the person targeted will struggle to move to a normal life.

Just to be clear, I’ not in favor of facial recognition. However as a society we need to make informed decision and not to pick some random cons just to dismiss ideas that we dont like. I would be very disappointed if engineer, even junior, showed your attitude towards problem solving.

> I would be very disappointed if engineer, even junior, showed your attitude towards problem solving.

What attitude is that exactly? Some semblance of a code of ethics? I think you are drastically underplaying the "random con" of a realtime facial recognition surveillance network of body and CCTV cameras.

People have to be confronted with the use cases of the technology they build prior to building it. Ignorance, naivety, and a post-hoc "I didn't know it would be use as such" is just ethical negligence.

It sounds to me like you have no idea what's going on in Minneapolis. The city has passed laws to require those things. The police department has sued, stonewalled, and flat out ignored those laws. This is the next logical step - when they won't obey the law, remove them entirely.

A huge part of the problem in Minneapolis is the police union resisting any kind of reform. Unfortunately the most expedient way to get rid of the union is to fire _everyone._ Hopefully other police forces recognize this as a reminder to choose their battles more wisely.

Disbanding the force is more important than everything on your list.

As others have said, once you lose institutional control, and the mayor and the police chief have both effective said that they have lost this, than small reform don't matter.

Plus Minneapolis PD has a strong reputation as one of the most corruption in the nation.

https://www.startribune.com/minnesota-police-officers-convic...

https://www.patrickburnslaw.com/Articles/Business-Law-Articl...

It seems like the mayor and police chief should be voted out as well. If they cannot maintain control they should go as well.

I think you're missing some significant details. The NYT did a really good episode on it last week: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/podcasts/the-daily/george...

TL;DR When a cop is fired there are several safety nets that can reinstate them. If I remember right, the union reinstates ~45% of fired officers. Neither the Chief nor the mayor have the LEGAL power to even fire bad actors in the police department. They literally cannot do anything about the problem within the law.

I think you are missing what I am saying. The person I was responding to said the police cheif and mayor has lost control. If they have then they failed at their job and should be replaced.

This does not mean that other things should not also be done.

I beleive getting rid of / modifing the police unions would be beneficial. Fixing the whole qualified immunity issue would also be good. But I also think police need representatives to protect them from false accusations or from being railroaded. Maybe that is from a union or maybe its from something else.

All those things have been tried and reform is more limited. The biggest problem is that unions protect all the bad applies in "solidarity" so even with body cams and abundant evidence of brutality nothing happens.

If you actually think body cams help, ask yourself why Derek Chauvin felt comfortable murdering George Floyd in broad daylight while being filmed.

> Unfortunately, the greater group of protesters is incapable of understanding nuanced policy or democratic change.

Please elaborate.

That's so much of what a metropolitan police force does that that's functionally equivalent to a disbanding, assuming they don't all resign in protest of being held accountable.

Did you just advocate for tearing apart the current policing paradigm and then wind up with "Unfortunately, the greater group of protesters is incapable of understanding nuanced policy or democratic change"? That's a wild ride of a post right there.

How do you think what's happening will differ from what you're suggesting?

Reforming the police doesn’t work. It was tried in the 60’s and it only strengthened the policy and lead to the creation of SWAT teams, DEA, and a militarized police force. More info: https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/06/police-abo...

Good luck with that.

Many PDs have bodycams as-standard already.

Good cops love bodycams because the video footage exonerates them when something happens. Bad cops hate them.

- What happens when the bodycams are off? Is the officer fired and jailed?

- What happens when an officer fails the pysch eval? Are they fired?

- Who oversees the corruption reporting? How do you know they are not corrupt too? They surely can't be part of the police dept.

- Reduce/eliminate drug penalties: The problem is racism where drugs are often used as the excuse. Why is there no racism training in your list? Or de-escalation training?

> Unfortunately, the greater group of protesters is incapable of understanding nuanced policy or democratic change.

This is extremely rude and invalidating of large efforts put forward by the protesters to look at all options, think outside the box, and make real change. Some protesters have even been re-writing the police and city budgets themselves to see how things might turn out.

> What happens when the bodycams are off? Is the officer fired and jailed?

If an officer's bodycam is turned off and there is a confrontation, the officer should be assumed guilty in any dispute. It should be the officer's responsibility to ensure their bodycam works, just as it is the officer's responsibility to ensure their gun works.

They aren't even assumed guilty when they're filmed killing someone.

Yes, that's why I said should.

I think bodycams themselves are fantastic tools—but like most technology, they cannot by themselves fix a human problem.

Our system doesn't assume criminal guilt under any circumstances, by design, and that's a good thing. Everybody accused of a crime has the right to a trial, even cops.

Let me expand on what I wrote: From a professional perspective, you should be assumed guilty, and probably loose your job, if you are accused of something and your body cam was not on. Because even if the accuser is lying, why was your camera off?

From a legal perspective, I think a cop without a body cam should be given the exact same rights as a private citizen, including around the use of force. The right to use force comes with responsibilities, like having a body camera.

And when standing in court as a private citizen, a body cam which just happened to get turned off at the exact time of the incident should be viewed with extreme suspicion. Not proof in itself, but a very serious black mark.

That's not entirely true. There are a category of legal defenses called "affirmative defenses" [1] where you are presumed guilty and have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt something that makes your typically unlawful conduct lawful. Self-defense, insanity and fair use are common affirmative defenses.

I would expect affirmative defenses to be fairly common in trials involving police; there's typically not a lot of argument around whether an officer assaulted/killed someone, just over whether the use of force was authorized.

That being said, I would be more in favor of changing jury instructions to indicate that the lack of body cam footage can be seen as an incriminating factor. Not that it 100% means that they are guilty, but that it can be considered suspicious circumstantial evidence. Much in the same way that you cannot be compelled to self-incriminate, but that juries are allowed to interpret invoking the 5th amendment as incriminating.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_defense

What about adding mandatory personal liability insurance for all cops, just like what doctors have to pay into? Then when they mess up, they are personally on the line instead of the taxpayer.

It's not rude, it's a reasonable list of suggestions.

The statement "the greater group of protesters is incapable of understanding nuanced policy or democratic change" is extremely rude. It's also wrong. It definitely violates HN guidelines in at least 3 different ways.

They made a low-effort post of ill-advised, out-of-touch suggestions and ended with lobbing direct insults at huge swaths of people.