Originally published at: Cop who killed Daunte Wright convicted of manslaughter | Boing Boing
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They are also shit at investigating crimes. That is also something that should be done by professionals who actually have an appropriate background in science and law to match modern investigative methods.
/soapbox
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Makes sense to me. #AndYouThoughtYouWereBadAtYourJob
Though I predict sentencing will be lenient.
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I’m reminded of the time I applied for the San Diego PD circa 1985, long story short… I was told to my face that I had too much education, would likely be bored with the work, and I should stick to the career path I was on [what ever the f’ that meant]. Got the same assessment/response from the Cal. Highway Patrol, but was offered the China Lake area after I made a complaint, f’ that noise.
The law enforcement industry wants low I.Q., mouth breathing, uneducated troglodytes. Evidence is overwhelming.
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David Simon (known for his work on The Wire, among other things) has made some compelling arguments that this is, in part, due to the perverse incentives created by the war on drugs.
The gist of it, from what I can remember: If you want to advance your career and rise through the ranks, you need to make a lot of arrests that lead to convictions. Drug related arrests are easy, low-hanging fruit, and it’s often fairly easy to get a low-level offender to flip on a superior to get more arrests up the chain. It becomes pretty routine and investigations don’t take much creativity or brainpower, and it’s treated as a higher priority than something like getting someone’s stolen car back. So the folks who get promoted to detective can’t solve a real crime to save their lives.
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You’re supposed to leave the cap at home, bro.
Vaudeville suits you better, anyway.
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Yes, that’s actually their explicit policy which has been reinforced in court rulings.
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Wow, that must have been before Wheel of Time got picked up by Amazon. Times are tough all over.
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While that’s an interesting perspective, close rates were shit well before the war on drugs.
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Training Day was another cop drama that pretty explicitly laid that out:
Alonzo: Why do you wanna be a narc?
Jake: I want to protect the streets by ridding it of dangerous drugs.
Alonzo: [smirking knowingly] Yeah, but why do you wanna be a narc?
Jake: I wanna make detective.
Alonzo: There you go. You stick around with me, you’ll make it. Unlearn that bullshit they teach you at the Academy.
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True, but in most cases they’ve definitely gotten worse. I just looked at the trend lines for clearance rates of various types of crimes since 1964 on
arresttrends.vera.org/clearance-rates
Clearance rates for things like burglary, rape, and car theft have definitely declined since the start of the war on drugs despite the fact that modern law enforcement now has many more powerful tools at their disposal to solve these crimes.
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Yeah, most serious crimes aren’t reported to the police, police make arrests in perhaps a quarter of those cases (less than half for violent crimes, less than a fifth for everything else), and arrests often don’t result in convictions. So the actual percentage of crimes “solved” by the police is absolutely abysmal.
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WRIGHT is how his last name is spelled.
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Welcome to boingboing!
Sometimes a contributir makes a mistake. Best way to get it fixed is to @ them in your comment (though I’m not sure a new account can do that).
@beschizza the victim’s name is Wright. You accidentally wrote White. Please fix!
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Car theft is basically legal now, the cops won’t do anything until we go back to licking the boot
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Too true. Without going into details, yeah, I know from people who have experienced it directly that if you have your car stolen, you either need to be screwed somewhat by your insurance company or track down the thief yourself like Columbo and hand them over gift-wrapped to the constabulary.
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I think I know where they went
because they have all been abandoned in front of my house and now there is nowhere to park
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While in grad school, a friend of mine tried out for a desk job at Oakland P.D. Tested well. Too well actually. She was told explicitly that she scored too high for the job…
They want people who will obey the groupthink, not someone intelligent enough to analyze things on their own and come up with potentially dissenting opinions.
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