mindslight a year ago

Second page:

> Training more cops on “Find My” app

And there it is - the fallback to this disempowering narrative revolving around cops need more "training" to behave better. Rather, the incentives need to be drastically reformed so that cops are bound by the same laws as everyone else.

To see the inequitable treatment and framing here, the only question you need to ask yourself is "what would happen to a gang of non-cops who committed a similar home invasion?" In our society the government is supposed to be subservient to the People, so the only difference between a cop and a non-cop should be that a cop gets paid to professionally perform the job of enforcing the law. This should result in a higher standard of behavior than an average group of yahoos carrying out vigilante justice. But instead, cops have been foolishly given immunity from the laws they claim to uphold, creating the perverse incentive where they simply don't care how much damage they cause. This is the key dynamic that needs to be reformed, and the rest will fall into place.

Are there written department policies saying that police officers can use an ambiguous tip to guess at a location, should SWAT the place before politely talking to the occupants, are allowed to deny arrestees access to medication, and can needlessly wreck up their house and possessions for the cops' own personal convenience? If the answer to all of these is "yes", then responsibility rests on the the police department, which should be paying the victim for damages and emotional distress. If the answer to any of these is "no", then the individual cops also need to be held jointly liable for exceeding their authority (both civilly and criminally). Compensating the victim needs to happen procedurally after an attack on an innocent civilian, and if the police department stonewalls on the compensation, then the damages need to be tripled.

mikestew a year ago

The Ars article does leave out one detail that will probably come as a shock to no one: Ruby Johnson is black.

https://www.aclu-co.org/en/press-releases/aclu-sues-denver-p...

  • mindslight a year ago

    What would be the point of including that detail, besides creating division where half the readers go "of course, the police are so bad to Black people" while the other half go "doesn't affect me, who cares" ? We need less stoking of racial divisions, not more.

    Rather than pointing out every way that the victim may differ from the reader, we need White / suburban / upper middle class voters to realize that these same injustices can just as easily happen to them and their loved ones, and that they will be in the exact same powerless position regardless of their skin color. The class division isn't Black vs White - it's police vs non-police. Then we might get some reform.

    • giraffe_lady a year ago

      > these same injustices can just as easily happen to them and their loved ones

      That's the whole point though, they can't just as easily. It's possible yes, but it's vastly more likely for some people than others and the distribution isn't random. What do you get out of pretending that it is?

      The story here isn't "police do anomalously shitty thing" it is actually "police do what they have always done, to who they always do it to." Black people do have different experiences in the world, with police, than others. Race may be arbitrary, but racism isn't. When you pretend that it's not a factor you're making causes and patterns invisible to your understanding, imposing a limitation on what you can see and make sense of.

      • mindslight a year ago

        > you're making causes and patterns invisible to your understanding, imposing a limitation on what you can see and make sense of.

        Conversely, assigning a pattern as part of your understanding is also imposing a limitation. So it boils down to what the pattern gets you as a lemma. In this case, I'd say that focusing on the fact that a peaceful person otherwise quietly enjoying their life was attacked is the important part, because we want every other peaceful person just wanting to enjoy their life to see this as something that can happen to them. Add in the elderly woman bit if you need to make an emotional appeal to the ridiculousness of the situation, although it would be the same injustice if a young man was the victim of this home invasion. Always be cognizant of what you're giving up by tossing in labels.

        I'm not denying that if the woman was White, there would have been more likelihood of the cops pausing to think "hey this could be my mother", and maybe give some benefit of the doubt and end up treating her as a person. But by the time we're at the absurdity of the cops committing a violent home invasion and home destruction on a 77 year old woman, we need a much stronger correction than simply some increased benefit of the doubt! Rather, we're dealing with a violent gang which needs to be treated as such, and made to pay for the damages they cause regardless of their motivations (as I elaborated on in my other comment).

        For an example of where I would say focusing on race makes sense, let's switch topics and say we're talking about speeding tickets. Let's posit a situation (which is likely congruent with reality in many places) where warnings are given out more frequently to Whites, and actual tickets to Blacks. For a single instance of a cop giving a ticket to a Black motorist, the cop isn't doing anything wrong - the Black motorist was speeding, and thus qualifies for a ticket. But still looking at the overall pattern, we see that the law is being applied much more strictly to Blacks, while Whites get leniency. Addressing that probably does require training and quotas and other statistical outcome-based methods to rectify the constructive injustice.

        (Assuming we don't just raise the speed limit up to where it should be based on how everyone drives, getting rid of the fundamental injustice of a setup that makes most everyone into a criminal.)

tinus_hn a year ago

In other news, people are angry because the police doesn’t go after a phone thief, even though they can clearly tell from the Find My app that it is in that specific house