Whenever these people ask for more power in order to "stop/prevent crime", there should be a bot that replies a list of times when the police didn't act to stop crime, despite having full knowledge of the crime occuring and potential to stop it from happening.
EU member and supporter of Chat Control, Romania, had a massive scandal where a kidnapped 15 year old girl called emergency services multiple times to report she was being kidnapped, every single time, the operators and the police officers spoke to her in an ironic and condescending tone. It took 19 hours to locate her, by which time, she was already dead. [1]
Two years ago a woman in Greece phoned the police, begging for a patrol car because her ex was about to “kill her.” The officer mockingly replied, “Police cars aren’t taxis”. Seconds later she screamed, “He’s here! He’s going to kill me” (screams). She was murdered outside the police department moments later.
Being bad at your job isn't the same as being an accessory.
But then again, doctors can be arrested for being bad at their job. As well as lawyers losing their license to practice. Maybe that's a standard we should hold to our supposed "public servants".
>Being bad at your job isn't the same as being an accessory.
Deliberately refusing to intervene when you have a duty to do so kind of is though, at least in a moral sense.
Although, reading the transcript in that article through a translator, it does not seem all that bad. The taxi comment is very early in the conversation, and the operator does immediately offer to send a patrol car to her home.
The operator also stays on the line, keeps collecting more information and does really not seem to do anything obviously wrong.
Even if they'd immediately acquiesced to her request to send a patrol car to drive her home, the car probably wouldn't have been there on time anyway.
Even better, in the US, the police have zero obligation to actually protect anybody from crime (unless that person is in government custody). The courts have upheld this time and again.
>An officer who purposefully allows a fellow officer to violate a victim's Constitutional rights may be prosecuted for failure to intervene to stop the Constitutional violation.
>To prosecute such an officer, the government must show that the defendant officer was aware of the Constitutional violation, had an opportunity to intervene, and chose not to do so.
Unfortunately the courts have repeated ruled that "aware of the Constitutional violation" means knowing that the exact action being observed had previously been ruled a violation of Constitutional rights. It's essentially impossible to prove, which is one of the reasons we don't see that offense prosecuted.
In the Chauvin case all three of the bystanders were sent to prison by federal courts specifically for civil rights violations stemming from their failure to intervene as Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in front of them.
QI applies to civil cases. IIRC, Chauvin didn’t face a civil case and was not made to pay damages for violations of anybody’s rights. Nor did the other officers.
If a cop violates your rights, you just have to pray the DA will prosecute criminal charges. But you still won’t get an monetary
damages from the cop. You might talk the state into settling.
The government prosecutes the government and is judged by the government and a jury screened under voir dire by two government lawyers?
Kind of like when a robber comes to your house, you have him arrested, and when you go to court you look up and he is the one swinging the gavel.
Of course, interesting the cop has to know there is a constitution violation. Somehow ignorance of the law is always an excuse for the cops but the citizenry must know all 190,000 pages of federal regulations and 300,000+ laws and by god if they forgot one they are fucked.
Generally speaking, the way it's supposed to work is the local prosecutors will start the process. That, unfortunately, isn't something they like to do because they have to work with police departments. If they fail to do their job, theoretically the next step is that the FBI gets involved. But, doesn't seem like today's FBI is doing much beyond prosecuting Trump's political enemies.
This is the reason why I've long believed we need a check both federal and local to police that is completely divorced from regular prosecution. We need lawyers/investigators whose sole purpose is investigating and prosecuting police at pretty much all levels of the government. The federal government theoretically has that with the office of inspectors general.
> the police have zero obligation to actually protect anybody from crime
This gets misrepresented on the Internet all the time. What this really means is that you can't sue the city for incompetent policemen, which is the case in basically every country. That only punishes the taxpayers after all. What is different about other countries is that they are much better at firing incompetent police.
In some (EU) countries, as a public officer/agent you can actually get prosecuted (civil or criminal proceedings per case), in cases of blatant or willful incompetence. (Think of the levels of gross wanton disregard/negligence.)
(There is also the legal vehicle of insubordination.)
The bar is high, of course, and yet people have historically managed to get prosecuted, lose their jobs, and go to prison.
I think the problem in the U.S. is, ironically, the power of police unions in a fragmented police force (city, territory, county, etc.) ecosystem, coupled with the lack of unified, express state and federal statutes to enforce a standard of care and competence.
Add to that that peace officer-specific state statutes (e.g., describing manslaughter while on duty) are written in such a way that, as a matter of law, it becomes a herculean task to tick all the boxes to successfully preserve a conviction on appeal. It is truly troubling. (I am hopeful, as this can be solved by the U.S. legislature, which I think we have a lot of reasons to demand to be done.)
The case in NY was police setup a sting on the subway to catch a serial stabber. Instead of stopping him they stood by and watched him attack several innocent bystanders.
They were sued for incompetence. For the failed sting.
The two police officers who stood and watched him get attacked were ruled to be immune because they had no duty to protect him.
Point being, if police see you getting attacked, they have no duty to /stop/ that from happening. Their only duty is to take a report once they feel safe enough to approach.
If you see two police on the corner and think "this is a safe area" you'd completely be operating on faith in their character.
And then chain that with the ridiculous "clearly established" bar for qualified immunity and it's nigh on impossible to hold police in the US accountable for what most citizens would recognize as clear malfeasance.
Not to speak highly of the NYPD - but it is the character of most violent criminals to refrain from attacking you when police officers are standing close at hand.
This is false and a gross oversimplification based on one specific thing, which is that petty theft in particular has taken a backseat in many areas as it's not a felony and is usually a waste of time and money to persue, especially when the thief just gets turned loose with no big consequences.
Depends on the violent crime. I've been nearly run over in crosswalks dozens of times in view of police, sometimes when they're in traffic as well and could easily pull over the perpetrator. It's never happened.
I am sick to the back teeth of this narrative that all grievances can be resolved into currency and that paying this hurts taxpayers. We can jail negligent or reckless public officials, the financial costs of investigating and compensating people are an economic incentive to promulgate better standards in the first place.
> I am sick to the back teeth of this narrative that all grievances can be resolved into currency and that paying this hurts taxpayers.
I don't understand. This seems contradictory. If the problem is that we're trying to resolve too many grievances with currency, then doing so does nothing but hurt the taxpayer. Americans are already significantly more litigious against police, yet you get significantly more misconduct. The same goes for doctors, drivers, etc.
Which wouldn't be so bad, if it wasn't for the fact they do have an obligation to stop anyone from protecting other people from crime (see Uvalde, where orders from above were to block parents from saving their children).
That's tangential... they can be held liable if they fail to protect somebody that is in custody. They generally cannot be held liable for failure to protect a member of the public.
Generally speaking, yes. I have worked with the corrections side of law enforcement in the US and don't internationally for quite a few years at this point. The correction side is a different beast than the police side in many ways, so I definitely want to meet clear that my personal experience is limited in scope to that. However, generally speaking I have seen that the majority of corrections staff take protection very seriously. There are individual officers that can be scum, and ideally they should be bounced out of there. But realistically, it's a human problem. I've known plenty of software engineers that were cavalier with people's personal information in ways I think can be just as damaging. On the whole though, the majority of software engineers I know take protecting that information quite seriously.
Or a bot that lists out all the times police have been given these powers only for them to be abused.
Flock is a great example. Story after story in the local news (only there for some reason) about police officers being disciplined or fired because they stalked people using the flock system.
Meanwhile not a single story where a major case was cracked by, and could only have been cracked by, the flock camera system.
In some parts of the world it's well known if you actually want the police to show up, just claim there are lots of drugs or cash at the location. That will actually get the police excited since they stand to gain from it. It's not clear why the police would care someone is being raped/murdered since they cannot profit from that. Although at 15 I would not expect someone to be wise enough to the world to figure that out.
From my memory this case can actually be used to support spyware, I remember all the media complaining "how is it possible that the police or the secret service can't instantly locate a phone very precisely" , same when that airplane crashed and the people were calling for help but the authorities could not get the coordinates and searched for hours , the media was demanding that the police or other services have the technical ability to locate any person in distress.
It is rather jarring to be stuck in the woods with Google Maps offering turn-by-turn navigation back home while the emergency room only gets a vague triangulated position (which might be wrong entirely if the signal gets reflected off of something).
Of course these days such a system has been added. Bonus feature of the (at least American) feature: the system can be activated remotely, even if you're not actually calling in an emergency. The European ETSI spec is pretty funny, it basically comes down to sending an SMS to a Secret Number with a Secret Format containing your coordinates to prevent abuse (both can be found very easily); at least that supposedly only activates when you dial the emergency services.
> To not "demonize" a particular community where a sizeable percentage (in at least one city the number of 30% of all pakistani muslim men involved in the rapes has been mentioned) of its members happens to think that raping infidels ain't rape.
These accusations keep happening, but the whole "why didn't this get investigated" thing was investigated, and the answer is no, investigations weren't throttled because of woke, in fact the machinery of justice operated just about the same as it always does for sexual assault cases: poorly. Also there's been quite a few investigation and convictions.
EU member and supporter of Chat Control, Romania, had a massive scandal where a kidnapped 15 year old girl called emergency services multiple times to report she was being kidnapped, every single time, the operators and the police officers spoke to her in an ironic and condescending tone. It took 19 hours to locate her, by which time, she was already dead. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Alexandra_M%C4%8...