People keep proposing naive solutions without realizing cops only use bodycams because they see them as net benefit for them. The technology was around for a long time but only became popular when it was sold as surveillance tool, not accountability tool. If police loses control of the footage they will simply stop using them. If you force them they will protest. Guess who the politicians will support in this fight?
Settlements need to be paid out of the cops’ pension fund.
Send more cops to prison.
Neither of which the US is going to do, because here, the cops and law enforcement are a civic religion. Therefore the best most Americans can do is keep their heads down and avoid the bastards as best you can manage.
In Spain when cops fuck up you simply take away their ability to work in law enforcement. It’s really that simple. In US they will just get hired by another city. The problem in US is not that this is hard to solve and requires some clever, hard to write legislation. The problem is that law enforcement always worked for the elites, not the masses and no one in power wants to change it.
It’s also that cops have put an amount of investment into pr that is unique among government employees (and that includes pushing you to not think of them as just more government employees) except maybe the military. They’re bleeding your local budget dry, but if the news reports on stuff like that or their misconduct they lose access to crime leads. There’s a massive push to make you think highly of them. Here’s a video I recently watched on the topic that points to true crime as a possible in to get ordinary people to see the cops as as flawed as they are
Very interesting. I assumed that police always held privileged status in US but this could be simply because they are always portrayed like that in movies, even historical ones. The PR is definitely there. In pretty much every movie caps break the laws and ignore rights of everyone and it’s shown as something necessary and even ‘cool’. Bad guys don’t deserve rights…
cops should carry liability insurance just like doctors and a cops rates will be effected by where they work. When one cop watches another break the rules they should be watching their monthly premiums rise.
The easiest way to get this accomplished politically is to create insurance for them. Have the departments cover the base insurance rate and premium increases from settlements increase that officers insurance which (s)he has to pay out of their pay. If the insurance is unaffordable then you can no longer be a police.
I’d love that, but I don’t think (at least here in the US) that there will ever be a meaningful change to how killer cops are managed legally, especially after there was zero accountability for Uvalde.
People keep proposing naive solutions without realizing cops only use bodycams because they see them as net benefit for them. The technology was around for a long time but only became popular when it was sold as surveillance tool, not accountability tool. If police loses control of the footage they will simply stop using them. If you force them they will protest. Guess who the politicians will support in this fight?
There are only two ways to fix this that I see:
Neither of which the US is going to do, because here, the cops and law enforcement are a civic religion. Therefore the best most Americans can do is keep their heads down and avoid the bastards as best you can manage.
In Spain when cops fuck up you simply take away their ability to work in law enforcement. It’s really that simple. In US they will just get hired by another city. The problem in US is not that this is hard to solve and requires some clever, hard to write legislation. The problem is that law enforcement always worked for the elites, not the masses and no one in power wants to change it.
It’s also that cops have put an amount of investment into pr that is unique among government employees (and that includes pushing you to not think of them as just more government employees) except maybe the military. They’re bleeding your local budget dry, but if the news reports on stuff like that or their misconduct they lose access to crime leads. There’s a massive push to make you think highly of them. Here’s a video I recently watched on the topic that points to true crime as a possible in to get ordinary people to see the cops as as flawed as they are
Very interesting. I assumed that police always held privileged status in US but this could be simply because they are always portrayed like that in movies, even historical ones. The PR is definitely there. In pretty much every movie caps break the laws and ignore rights of everyone and it’s shown as something necessary and even ‘cool’. Bad guys don’t deserve rights…
cops should carry liability insurance just like doctors and a cops rates will be effected by where they work. When one cop watches another break the rules they should be watching their monthly premiums rise.
The easiest way to get this accomplished politically is to create insurance for them. Have the departments cover the base insurance rate and premium increases from settlements increase that officers insurance which (s)he has to pay out of their pay. If the insurance is unaffordable then you can no longer be a police.
I’d love that, but I don’t think (at least here in the US) that there will ever be a meaningful change to how killer cops are managed legally, especially after there was zero accountability for Uvalde.