Flagg is (again) massively misconstruing my posts. And he has ignored me saying in at least
three places that police have a duty to refuse illegal orders, so that he can repeat his assertion that I said the opposite.
Given that I can explain myself repeatedly, pointing to textual evidence from my posts that contradicts his interpretation of them, and all that happens is he calls me a liar in a new color of boldface underlining, I don't see much point in justifying myself to him.
As far as I'm concerned, he has now failed the Turing test, and is to be regarded as a sort of biological chatbot...
Jub wrote:I snipped some of this because it all boils down to a few simple questions. How much power do police forces have to influence policy? How complicit are they in their militarization and the expansion of their powers at the expense of alienating civilians? How much of this is politicians and police chiefs/union heads all being in bed together and how much is the government dragging police forces kicking and screaming into more power and better equipment?
There's a fair degree of collusion, and I don't disagree that the reforms you suggest would be wise.
I will note that the US's basic federal structure is what causes this kind of division of jurisdiction and authority... and the main reason for
that is that the US hasn't had a true constitutional crisis since at least the 1860s and arguably since the 1780s. There has been no need to restructure the basic nature of the government, and the American constitution lacks the means to do so easily. Therefore, it is by design about as decentralized as a federal nation-state can be and still (sort of) function.
It is also not the place of civil servants and public employees to publicly condemn elected officials that are their bosses and set policy agendas.
Yes it is. It's everybody's job to speak their mind about bad policies. I have and will continue to look my boss in the eye and tell them when they're making a mistake with regards to what I've been asked to do. It's cost me a few jobs, but ultimately it allows me to stick to my principles. I don't want anybody less righteous than myself in charge of the police.
Did you miss the word 'publicly?'
It may be (preferably is) my place to tell my boss he's making a mistake. It is
not my place to go to the media and denounce my boss's incompetence. The word for that is "insubordinate," and large organizations justly fire people who are persistently insubordinate.
Because a large, organized thing like a government doesn't work if employees are willfully stirring up scandals every time they disagree with organization policy. It's one thing to blow the whistle on illegal conduct; it's another to try to blow it on
legal conduct just because you disagree with your boss for political or personal reasons.
Also, when it's a civil servant doing this to a politician, a whole new spectrum of issues can arise. For example, a civil servant might denounce his elected superiors in an attempt to lay groundwork for his own attempt to seek public office. This violates the basic purpose of having a civil service, which is that it is neutral in political affairs.
You do when the leadership is as pants on head retarded as is the case in the US with the war of Drugs and the tough on crime polices that lead to minorities in New York being stopped and frisked at insane rates. Politicians and public officials need to stop thinking of their positions as long term careers and need to go back to doing the right thing and fighting for change at the expense of their job security.
The problem is that many voters disagree on what "doing the right thing" is and what changes should be fought for. People who lived through the '70s and '80s in New York, for example, are likely to be very strongly anti-
crime because they remember a time when the fear of criminals paralyzed the city. It's not nearly as bad nowadays, but people who experienced that are likely to give far more of a free hand to police who claim to be 'fighting crime,' by whatever means.
Not everyone shares your priorities, and it takes a very extended debate to settle any such political question, even when you're right.
Since we do not and cannot easily have true agreement about what the 'right thing' is in politics, we fall back on the idea of constitutional and systematic checks and balances. One of those balances is that the civil service is supposed to remain politically neutral, and allows itself to be directed by politicians and voters, rather than resisting them.
Which is why, even when you think you're right, you are wise to respect things like parliamentary procedure and the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats. Having these mechanisms continue to work no matter
who is in charge is a necessary part of making sure the system continues to work as a whole.
One feeds the other. If police training and police encouraged less aggression towards criminals and a more stand off and wait and see approach like other police forces around the world use we'd likely see less dead/wounded police officers, less dead/wounded criminals, and less dead/wounded civilians for very little cost in on the street effectiveness. Instead of approaching an uncooperative suspect police officers should give them space and try to talk them down, instead of running single officer patrols all patrols should have two officers one to interact with the suspect/civilian and the other do observe and cover their partner, issuing less raids in general be they of the knock or no-knock kind. It doesn't take a large change in attitudes and tactics to get better results.
My point is not so much that this is wrong, it's that when you come out and say "police should accept higher risk to themselves and be more courageous about that," you come across as totally indifferent to the health and survival of policemen. That sort of thing badly undermines your argument, because it makes you look as though you're not paying attention to the realities on the ground.
In this case, there is rousing debate over what "fixing this" would even mean, which is precisely why there is no unified national will on the subject. You may think you know everything that matters about this debate. But if you want to have meaningful opinions about a democracy, you have to accept that other people get to vote too.
And refusing to acknowledge that they do vote and do reject certain actions is just... blind stupidity.
I'm sorry, if the citizenry of the US refuses to see logic frankly they can get bent. It's easy to prove that social safety nets and less militarized police are a good thing. Any pandering about socialism and seeing Europe as weak is fucking stupid and people that feel this way and vote against their own interests shouldn't have a say in running anything let alone one of the more powerful countries in the world...
And at this point you've basically given up having any real claim to a serious position on the issue, in my opinion.
To give an example, nobody would take me seriously as an authority on the politics of Syria and what Syrians should do if I said "Syrians are so stupid, they can go fuck themselves." Because in that case, my way of understanding other humans is to
emote about how they are clearly too stupid to make obvious choices that I would (supposedly) make in their shoes.
And given that this is so, the odds of my having accurate, logical opinions about these foreign groups I'm so emotional and hostile towards are... not good.
I mean, you're basically saying "screw the electorate, I have convictions!" Which is exactly the opposite of what you do in a democracy you want to function.
My convictions are grounded in logic rather than fear of communism and thus should carry more weight than the mass of mouth breathers the US calls an electorate. Sure it's not practical and going down the path of voter restrictions is madness, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't look for something better than a system that can't make up its mind about anything and is demonstrably ruining the US.
And again, once you've come out and said "I don't respect the voters' right to decide what kind of country they want to live in," you really have cut yourself off from the shared circle of meaningful political discussion.
Last note:
You propose to make the penalty for illegal gun possession so bad that it'd scare a hardened criminal. One who already expects to ultimately end up in prison for years at a time just as a consequence of their choice of career. Exactly how is that going to work?
It's going to work because the guy that did the crime with a gun is going to jail forever where as the guy who used something less deadly will be out in 5 to 10 years. You make it known that guys that don't use guns get off lighter and suddenly it's a smarter move to commit crimes with a knife or a bat rather than a gun. It's not about up the punishment unilaterally, but to up the punishment so as to encourage a crime with less potential for harm.
And you base your conviction that this will work on, what, pure theory? I mean, where's your evidence? Do you have extensive knowledge of criminal psychology?
This strategy would work if criminals were
homo economicus and viewed a ten year jail sentence as twice as bad as a five year one. But in real life, criminals are often prone to irrationality, hyperbolic discounting, and so on. If they weren't,
they would not be criminals in the first place! Because they wouldn't be dumb enough to get into a line of 'work' that pays so little and has such high risks.
But you're now assuming criminals are extremely logical and will refrain from doing something that could get them in more trouble. When by definition, criminals are almost sure to be illogical people who deliberately do things they
know will get them in more trouble.
