That's the thing I don't get and that is the most upsetting thing to me about this situation: why aren't police officers speaking out more against each other? The only voices I hear from the police are coming out in defense of other officers who did something bad. This to me reinforces the impression that it's not a small minority that's the problem, but the entire institution. Is the media just not picking these voices up?
If there had been strong voices within the police calling for reform and officers had kneeled with the protestors instead of attacking even peaceful ones, the situation now would look very different.
Well, as a programmer, I know from experience that there's a lot about programming computers that isn't obvious unless you actually spend time doing it - and that when you have a group of people (i.e. project managers) who seem bound and determined to portray programmers as lazy, time-wasting, obstinate, overpaid, wastes of space who should be offshored anyway, it's very easy for them to play armchair quarterback and insist that every programming problem was trivial in hindsight and confirm their hypothesis.
Now, apply that to police work. Police are routinely put into situations where their lives and the lives of other police officers are in danger, and they have to make split-second decisions or an innocent person can end up dying. I don't know anything about police work, but I'm willing to gamble that getting that right is even harder than getting programming right, and if somebody's bound and determined to make you look bad, they can do so more easily than project managers routinely do to programmers. If even 90% of the police have good intentions (and I believe that number is much, much higher), it stands to reason that they'd usually be willing to give other officers the benefit of the doubt: this or that may look bad if you put effort into making it look bad, but at least give the officer a chance to defend himself rather than jump to conclusions.
Now combine that already low number with the fact that there is strong belief among cops that doing so will negatively affect their career trajectory.
As far as cops coming to defense of other cops, every single officer I know has had false allegations against him, including one with a rape allegation that was only proven false because he had his body camera on the entire time he was with the suspect. So anything that's even slightly grey will get the benefit of the doubt as far as cops are concerned.
I've experienced the same thing as a foster parent. I'm not actually sure how many allegations have been made against my wife and I, so I tend to immediately dismiss any news of such against other foster parents (then occasionally it will be be "oh shit they were keeping kids in dog kennels?" and I'll have to backtrack). I'm almost certainly dismissing some actual misdeeds in there, but I also feel fairly secure that the signal to noise of allegations against foster parents is very low.
Fear of reprisals from other officers? (This has happened in a few cases.)
You gotta go back to the original article, this is exactly what it's about. Everybody agrees that good cops calling out bad cops is a good thing. Therefore, it doesn't spread, and you don't hear about it unless you pay deep attention to specific goings-on in specific police departments. It's also particularly likely not to spread because the details of such cases are usually kept quiet, and the cop just gets quietly let go.
The only thing most people who are only sort of paying attention hear is, cop does something kind of dubious, activists scream at the top of their lungs about how outrageous it is. They double down way past "this particular bad cop should be fired and charged" to "All cops are bastards" and "Defund the Police". Which then kind of forces cops and people who appreciate law and order to push back, find ways to excuse the action and defend the police.
I've seen a bunch of pics of cops kneeling with protestors. They didn't spread far, and they didn't change anyone's mind. They didn't contribute to the outrage, and so they can't spread among a media class that is highly incentivized to spread only the most outrageous things.
There's a word for this: solidarity.
This is what it looks like from the outside.
I can't remember the last time that a doctor or lawyer blatantly murdered someone on tape and had their peers go up to bat for them about how they're actually the victim and did nothing wrong. When it comes to law enforcement and correctional officers, I can find a dozen of such instances from the last 12 months alone.
While professional groups are often mistakenly analogized to labor unions, they aren't and have very different functions. Professionals in organized professions like law or medicine may also be in labor unions (this is unusual in the US outside of the public sector), but the labor union and the professional organizations aren't interchangeable.
When an engineer's structure causes injury or loss of life, it is studied and taken very seriously. Liability falls on both the engineer and their employer, if there is one. Blatant negligence means the removal of licenses or the ability to practice in the field they're licensed in, along with civil lawsuits or even criminal charges.
When a cop causes injury or loss of life, the entire system tries to brush it under the rug completely, and learn nothing from it. Then their peers go up to bat for them explaining how they're being unfairly persecuted and that they did nothing wrong. Cops are often shielded from civil and criminal liability for abuses that other professionals would end up in prison for.
Trying to place the blame on unions is pretty far-fetched, and you're speaking to someone who is against the idea of police unions in particular.
Police unions have played a major role in protecting union members from management. Or as we call it elsewhere in politics, accountability.
I'm not saying solidarity is bad. I'm saying it's a tool that police unions have weaponized against the general public.
I think that reducing the problems of policing in the US down to "solidarity" isn't apt, as solidarity in other unions doesn't produce this level of opaqueness, lack of honesty and responsibility, negligence, ineptitude, or criminality.
The issue is at play is culture, one that comes from the top and is reinforced every step of the way to the bottom.
I agree that police unions have a strong hand in enabling and enacting the policies that shield police from accountability, but police are given powers that are unique to any other government or otherwise union worker. Allowing easily abused power to consolidate to the point that it has is why I'm against police unions in particular, but not others.
I do not think, do not believe, and do not claim that all the problems of policing in the US reduce to weaponized solidarity. I think, believe, and stand by my claim that solidarity has been weaponized by police unions. I also stand by my previous claim that the particular behavior pattern other commenters pointed to is one form of weaponized solidarity in action.
I hope this has been helpful. Thank you for the opportunity to clarify. Again, please accept my apologies for my failures in communication.
The rest of us just happen to call that accountability.
Let's say if in the case of Mr. Floyd another one of the officers had said, "get off him, this submission hold is not in line with department policy" and the officer got off Mr. Floyd and Mr. Floyd had not died. What then? One might realistically imagine that the above negative concepts would be applied to the officer who said something. Maybe by hearing those words Mr. Floyd could pursue a complaint against the officer.
There are probably lots of reasons why an officer and probably most people in that situation would feel pressure to avoid speaking out in that moment.
Then we'd never heard about George Floyd.
Not to say there is no serious police brutality problem, but it's worth remembering the huge selection bias in what videos go viral and we end up seeing.
There is over 1 million cops in the US, and out of however many million interactions they have with the public each day, an overwhelming majority are perfectly fine.
(I suspect the scissor is murder vs every other option).
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-americans-feel-abou...
> On May 25, 2020, an unarmed black man named George Floyd died while in police custody in Minneapolis. An officer knelt on Floyd's neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds before he died. Which of the following comes closer to your view: [the choice to add the facts that Floyd was unarmed and knelt on for that long to the question is quite heavy-handed for a survey and sure to influence the respondent]
and
> Which comes closer to your view on recent protests: > > These sorts of protests will continue unless we solve the root cause of the problem. We need long-term solutions to poverty and violence. > > The first priority is ending the protests and violence, which means we need more police officers and national guard to calm the situation down > > Don't know > [this question pretty assumes the respondent agrees that poverty is the root cause of what's going on]
as compared to the YouGov survey which has a much more neutrally worded set of questions (and a much larger set).
It's therefore not surprising that the YouGov survey records more opposition on some questions that seem similar in spirit to the questions that dataforprogress.org does.
But the two surveys taken together do provide information that does floor me, which is that the overwhelming majority of Americans (indeed around 90%) are convinced that the police officers in this case did something wrong and should've been fired (although they might be not be all convinced of the severity of the offense, but everyone seems to agree it's at least essentially manslaughter).
So you're right! Floyd's death itself is hardly a scissor issue.
The scissor issue instead seems to be the protests themselves. Again I much prefer YouGov's question here to Data for Progress, which asks
> Do you think these protests have been motivated more by a genuine desire to hold police officers accountable for their actions or a long-standing bias against the police?
And the numbers there are
> A genuine desire to hold police officers accountable: 43% > A long-standing bias against the police: 40% > Not sure: 17%
This is still going on and over 20 people connected to the protests have died since then. There was a retired cop shot while protecting his friend's store. There was a young girl killed for no reason outside a Wal-Mart. There was a burned body found long after the fact in one of the buildings burned during the riots.
The question isn't whether things should change or whether this is a problem but what to change and how to change it and whether that change will really make things better.
- I have several cop friends, from a relatively geographically diverse range of the US. All of them say that how Floyd was arrested was at a minimum against procedure, and almost certainly contributory to his death.
- One cop I spoke to pointed out that his training mandated that once a prone subject is handcuffed, their training mandates rolling them onto their side, as being unable to leverage oneself up can restrict breathing, even if nobody's kneeling on you. He also pointed out that kneeling on the neck or back in order to handcuff someone is well within procedure at his department, but continuing after they are restrained is obviously not.