This is blatantly absurd:
These are not parallel facts; they are intersecting facts.
American police are overfunded to almost as extreme a degree as the American military. In both cases, this expenditure is not unrelated to the starvation and decay of general welfare in the USA.
fta:
The CCRB receives thousands of complaints every year, but it is only able to substantiate a tiny fraction of them. In 2018, [ for example ] the agency examined about 3,000 allegations of misuse of force. It substantiated 73.
Investigators are often not able to reach conclusions on cases, in significant part because they must rely on the NYPD to hand over evidence, such as footage from body-worn cameras. Often, the department doesn’t do so despite a legal duty to cooperate
so yeah, 4k is just a small piece of the actual complaints, and that’s a small piece of people brave enough to complain
That ratio is far higher than the percentage of Nazi officers who were charged with war crimes. And the Nazis didn’t have the benefit of their own guys running the Nuremberg trials.
If you think those 4,000 represent a majority of the cops who engaged in wrongdoing you’re deluding yourself.
The lawsuit alleges that the data release would violate the unions’ Collective Bargaining Agreements with the city, due process under the Constitution, and “unfairly stigmatize” the city’s 60,000 law enforcement officers and firefighters.
The police unions seem to have the same definition for “unfair” as my 8 year old kid.
Anything that they don’t like.
I think our police departments could use a little healthy stigma to keep their megalomania in check.
I will give you a perfect example. In Miami the cops make about 80k - $150k. I have a friend that makes about 50k a year and owns a 100k home and lives fine. She does not drive a car so does not have that expense but otherwise lives rather comfortably. They are paid too much relative to other budget priorities in my oppinion. This is a problem because of the union’s. I do not believe public employees should have unions, specially those we have granted arrest powers to. Get rid of the unions, let us fire and blackball bad cops and if under these circumstances, the good, professional cops warrant 100k salaries then I would be OK with it.
The worst part about those #s is that there is also a ton of waste. In Miami, you will often walk by a parked cop car with it’s engine running and a pool of condensate under it. I thought this was crazy because not only is it burning fuel, it is also consuming the engine life and the other systems like the AC. I finally asked a cop moonlighting at a grocery store that always had their car on outside and his responce was “ the computer inside the car can’t get hot “. This of course is completely nonsensical and they are obviously doing it so that they come back to a nice cool car. I started asking other cops with empty parked running cars and received the same answer. This means, that this practice is so prevalent, they even have an agreed uppon BS excuse to give out when questined by the public.
Imagine an ad, before this year anyway, where a political candidate was accused of cutting police funding. American conservatives live in constant fear, I think. Fear of communists, fear that the only thing keeping people of color from overrunning their neighborhoods is militant police, fear of a god bringing down hellfire on the country if it gets too “godless”.
Given any cut in police funding was basically giving political opponents free attack ads, it’s no wonder it’s just a big corrupt hole to throw money in.
Sure I have auto and personal liability which covers assaults.
The real reason insurance should be involved is simply that they know how to do risk management. They require changes to high risk situations or they won’t insure. They would make the cost of holding on to that loose cannon black and white, and he would get let go.
Nobody running a city gets training in risk management, and even if they did, they have little incentive to solve problems that are unsexy like unfunded risks.
It doesn’t protect you from being punished for the crime.
As things stand now, the unions would still be in place, the insurance company, not the offender, would pay out, and IF the insurance company felt there was a big enough chance the person would do it again, they’d lose their job for lack of insurance. They wouldn’t be prosecuted. They wouldn’t lose their job because they were sociopathic bullies, they’d lose it for not being insured. They probably wouldn’t even have to carry the stigma of what they did to the next job.
Seriously? This is just an added layer of padding for the professional criminals. Why not stop gilding the excrement and let their “complaints” be investigated as “crimes” as they would for anyone else, and let them pay their own penalties for the crimes they commit, both criminal and civil.
Let them be held to the same standard as normal people, since they can’t seem to hold themselves to a higher standard.
I think I don’t have much to spare right now, but damnit, I’m donating something to ProPublica today.
To protect and serve my ass. Defund the police, as much as possible- make these jackbooted shitheels get the message.
I never truly understood the “protect” part, anyway. The role of the police in our society is to investigate crimes, or at most stop the commission of a crime in progress. How do you “protect” people from crimes that haven’t happened yet, unless you go about your work profiling, fishing and entrapping.
Maybe if they devoted their resources to investigating crimes instead of hamfistedly “preventing” them, maybe there wouldn’t be so many innocent people locked up.
Those are mayors buying the ‘cop/pro-cop votes’.
Cops make about the same here, and there are no houses for $100k. More like $300-500k. The King county labor council, which my firefighter’s union belongs to, voted to kick out the Seattle Police guild because of what is going on. Their union president is a big Trump supporter. Police forces have traditionally been used to fight against labor, so I don’t think they should be protected the way they are. That said, fuck off with all of your “get rid of all unions” bullshit. my job IS dangerous and every safety advancement has been fought for by the unions. Management (and more so the politicians they have to please) would cut the budget every cent they could, “America’s heroes” lip service not withstanding, regardless of safety. My union fights for better equipment to also help do our jobs better, improving the quality of service we give our citizens. With the risks I take, and the significantly higher rates of cancers, stress related illness, and shorter life expectancy, I deserve what I make.
Every worker deserves the right to organize. In the end even police. It’s the fact that policing in America grew from such corrupt roots that causes so many problems. And for every person who is about to say “unions protect workers who should have been fired”, yes police unions make that their mission. Our fire department has fired MANY union employees over the years because we don’t want “bad apples” of any kind in our ranks. If you do something wrong, and are honest about it, you will be disciplined, which if it is a minor infraction won’t get you fired as long as you show you have changed your behavior. But if you lie about it, no matter how small it was, you get fired. When I was in recruit school they gave a class on “how to get fired” and they filled an average size white board with names of people, new and not so new, who were fired. They then went over why those people were fired. Outside of guilds like the Police, when union workers don’t get fired it is almost always management’s fault. They can’t seem to follow the simplest of rules to save their lives. Or they are spineless and won’t do the work to show why someone should be fired. Then they just say “oh the union kept them from being fired”. Nope. If you follow the rules, no union can keep you from firing someone for cause. That person can sue and when it goes to arbitration or court, if management has followed the rules, they will prevail. Management in both public and private workplaces routinely ignore workers’ rights, and they get caught if there is a union to protect the workers. In places that don’t have unions, then most likely that person will get fired and not have much recourse because they can’t afford to sue their employer, unless that employer has done something so bad they can get a big settlement. Do some simple research on the history of unions in America over the last 150 years and you’ll sing a different tune.
First of a 6 part podcast on the history of policing in America. A bit more sarcastic and casual than a lot of podcasts, but it puts a lot in context of how we ended up here.
When the unions leverage separate criminal rules for cops then they have gone too far. When a person is accused of a crime, they have no idea what police know when they sit down to be interrogated. Cops, thanks to their union, by contract, must be shown every single piece of evidence against them before their first interview which is held days after the arrest. This is a level of corruption that most don’t know about. The other union leaders have disstanced themselves from the police benevolence associations as a result of this kind of BS. Hell, they raise money from the public selling placebo (maybe), get out of a ticket badges and stickers…
And I said the police guilds need to be dismantled or reined in. Don’t act like I didn’t say that and only quote one line. YOU advocated getting rid of all public employee unions. And I told you to fuck off with THAT noise. And I gave the reasons why. Are you saying the Firefighters union is doing that? Go misquote someone else.
I’m loading laundry into machines at a laundromat. I did not have time to cover your entire trilogy. Sorry.
i live in central texas, population ca. 35,000, about an hour away from a major population center. our police chief makes $93,000, our sheriff makes $115,000. the longest serving officers make $60-63,000.
25 years ago 3 men of color died in police custody. at the time there were zero black officers and only two latinx. this in a town which is roughly 45% latinx, 40% white, and 15% black. within five years the city hired a younger, and surprisingly progressive, new police chief; used a planned increase in the police force; and replacements of officer turnover to recruit officers of color. the sheriff’s department, over the same period, has not changed a bit and has one latinx deputy to demonstrate their face of diversity.
I would estimate that 90+% of Americans don’t make enough to buy a house with just their single income. I am confused why anyone would have that expectation. The average income in NYC is like $77k. What percentage people do you think can afford to buy a home on $77k or less.
Every worker deserves the right to organize
Not when their unions have abetted and covered up criminal behavior, and do so as POLICY. You keep mentioning getting “fired”. The vast majority of the police in that report committed CRIMES. Assault, witness tampering, and on and on and on right to the worst crimes we have.
I don’t want them fired, I want them in jail. I want them paying the civil awards. I want the police that stood around watching and the ones that covered it up in jail, too. When police have to keep themselves to at least normal human standards of behavior and accountability, maybe then we can revisit the fantasy that everyone should be able to buy a house on a single income…
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The people who would replace them make less than that now. NYC teachers are making substantially less. teachnyc.net a mental health counselor in NYC makes substantially less. https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/How-Much-Does-a-Mental-Health-Counselor-Make-a-Year-in-New-York-City,NY We’re talking about more than 1.5 times the city’s median household (not individual) income, $60,762. Every dollar going to one of these cops is a dollar not spent on everything else.
