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[Campaign Zero] - A Ten Point Plan Against Police Brutality
AngelHedgie
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Black Lives Matter has unveiled their comprehensive anti-police brutality platform - Campaign Zero. In it, they lay out 10 core points that they feel need to be addressed to combat police brutality:
Each section contains both specific policy proposals as well as examples of existing policies they want expanded. It's a very comprehensive plan, and touches all the bases on this issue.
- End Broken Windows Policing
A decades-long focus on policing minor crimes and activities - a practice called Broken Windows policing - has led to the criminalization and over-policing of communities of color and excessive force in otherwise harmless situations. Police killed at least 287 people last year who were involved in minor offenses and harmless activities like sleeping in parks, possessing drugs, looking "suspicious" or having a mental health crisis.
- Community Oversight
Police usually investigate and decide what, if any, consequences their fellow officers should face in cases of police misconduct. Under this system, less than 1 in every 12 complaints of police misconduct nationwide results in some kind of disciplinary action against the officer(s) responsible. Communities need an urgent way to ensure police officers are held accountable for police violence.
- Limit Use Of Force
Police should have the skills and cultural competence to protect and serve our communities without killing people - just as police do in England, Germany, Japan and other developed countries. Last year alone, police killed at least 268 unarmed people and 91 people who were stopped for mere traffic violations. The following policy solutions can restrict the police from using excessive force in everyday interactions with civilians.
- Independent Investigations & Prosecutions
Local prosecutors rely on local police departments to gather the evidence and testimony they need to successfully prosecute criminals. This makes it hard for them to investigate and prosecute the same police officers in cases of police violence. These cases should not rely on the police to investigate themselves and should not be prosecuted by someone who has an incentive to protect the police officers involved.
- Community Representation
While white men represent less than one third of the U.S. population, they comprise about two thirds of U.S. police officers. The police should reflect and be responsive to the cultural, racial and gender diversity of the communities they are supposed to serve.
- Body Cams/Film The Police
While they are not a cure-all, body cameras and cell phone video have illuminated cases of police violence and have shown to be important tools for holding officers accountable. Every case where a police officer has been charged with a crime for killing a civilian this year has relied on video evidence showing the officer's actions.
- Training
The current training regime for police officers fails to effectively teach them how to interact with our communities in a way that protects and preserves life. For example, police recruits spend 58 hours learning how to shoot firearms and only 8 hours learning how to de-escalate situations. An intensive training regime is needed to help police officers learn the behaviors and skills to interact appropriately with communities.
- End For-Profit Policing
Police should be working to keep people safe, not contributing to a system that profits from stopping, searching, ticketing, arresting and incarcerating people.
- Demilitarization
The events in Ferguson have introduced the nation to the ways that local police departments can misuse military weaponry to intimidate and repress communities. Last year alone, militarized SWAT teams killed at least 38 people. The following policies limit police departments from obtaining or using these weapons on our streets.
- Fair Police Union Contracts
Police unions have used their influence to establish unfair protections for police officers in their contracts with local, state and federal government and in statewide Law Enforcement Officers' Bills of Rights. These provisions create one set of rules for police and another for civilians, and make it difficult for Police Chiefs or civilian oversight structures to punish police officers who are unfit to serve.
Each section contains both specific policy proposals as well as examples of existing policies they want expanded. It's a very comprehensive plan, and touches all the bases on this issue.
XBL: Nox Aeternum / PSN: NoxAeternum / NN:NoxAeternum / Steam: noxaeternum
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I think ending for-profit policing is especially important, as it helps remove a lot of bad incentives, and it also kinda goes along with #1 when removing quotas.
That said, I do think there are a few areas for improvement:
Broken windows: Some of those things should be crimes, including trespassing, where the state laws are reasonable. In my home state, it is only trespassing if someone is specifically informed they are not allowed to be there, or it should be obvious (homes, locked buildings, etc). It is not trespassing to be on someone's property without permission or a good reason alone. That's a very reasonable standard.
Body cameras are great. This:
is bad. One of the good things about body cameras is it helps the innocent while helping punish the guilty, and that should apply on both sides of the camera.
Implicit racial bias testing is one part intriguing, three parts pre-crime. Pre-employment personality testing and the like is a bad thing and should be broadly prohibited. If serving police or potential candidates reveal bias through actions and/or statements, that is one thing, but no one should be comfortable with people being denied employment for thought crime, even if for an ostensibly good purpose.
Still, it is a good selection of reforms that would both save lives and improve the general tenor of American policing.
The site says to decriminalize or deprioritize those activities. So that's pretty much in line with what they want.
Fake edit: oh, squarespace. Errrgh.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I think there needs to be laws in place that criminalize this equipment being faulty, being turned off, etc, so that someone has a big incentive not to 'lose' footage or 'forget' to turn on their lapel camera when handling suspects.
It's great that this gear has led to more accountability, and I grin at the notion of reverse Big Brother (No, Big Brother, we are watching you!), but there's also been plenty of cases this year where the police have claimed that [X] went wrong and, whoops, turns out we don't have video that shows what happened. Gosh darnit.
Also, related, I think there should be really stiff penalties for police officers shown to be attempting to censor video footage shot by bystanders.
No surprises here.
A camera being faulty can happen. But when a citizen complains of overreach, abuse, or anything else, and the camera "malfunctions," I'm a-ok with an automatic ruling in favor of the citizen.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
We should be particularly suspicious when police departments argue that they need to stop littering and graffiti because doing so prevents robberies and murders. Even so, stopping littering and graffiti are good ends unto themselves. In larger cities, maybe those are good crimes for community outreach & volunteer police to focus on.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Cameras do sometimes get faulty despite even the best efforts; criminalizing negligence (intentional or otherwise) of surveillance equipment would at least lead to an investigation as to why exactly the camera wasn't working.
The theory may be implemented incorrectly, but the crimes they target are a hassle and deserve attention. However the attention need not be police attention. Littering, graffiti is connected to infrastructure more often then not. More garbage cans that get emptied weekly, abandoned housing that gets rehabilitated and streets that get cleaned regularly are all effective deterrence to QL crimes.
And much of the slums are shitty housing projects from the 50s and 60s that would be better torn down and replaced with mixed income housing.
It's not necessarily taking police "out" of loitering/trespassing, either. There are probably other, non-racist solutions to the problem that do not involve an all-or-nothing approach. The innovative solution to the problem probably won't be "We need to keep punishing people for loitering and trespassing! Because they are up to no good!"
EDIT: The concept of "loitering" often highlights the prejudice of the area. Even in places like Berkeley, CA. tl;dr A black comedian was told to leave the Elmwood Cafe because an employee thought he was "selling something" to his wife outside during lunch. He ate there earlier that morning for his birthday, too! Note: I live in the Bay Area, so this was big news to me. Even if it "wasn't a race thing", as claimed by the employee, it highlights how we treat people that we perceive as "loitering".
This doesn't really encompass the Broken Window vision that is often implemented. It's not about a store owner calling the cops; it's about the cops patrolling the beat, making judgement calls about loiterers and then acting based on said judgement.
I think that to most reasonable people, items 3, 4, and 6-10 are things we'd almost all immediately agree with. 2 and 5 are proposals that really could go either way, depending on implementation and the people doing the implementing. Item 1 is contentious - some will want it to end entirely, some have no problem with the underlying notion but deplore the current typical implementations.
In big cities loitering an almost exclusively a "black crime", used to justify stop and frisk. Its one of those "crimes" where its enforcement has become code for "Harass black folks just to show them who is boss".
The shopkeeper calling the police about teenagers hanging around his shop type situation isn't even a whole percentage point compared to all the cases where the police got a quota to fill and need somebody to fine.
That's why Broken Windows policing is broken, it criminalizes behavior that wasn't criminal before(people just hanging out on the street/park). Its so vague that the police can nail anyone for the crime. And its measured in the number of fines so that there is incentive to make criminals of honest people.
E
"Public nuisance" is a decent phrase for them.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Being responsive to the community is clearly a positive goal, but I have yet to meet a cop who doesn't have a long list of times they've had to go investigate someone for being suspiciously black or Muslim. That's not too say there's no racist cops, but every cop I've known personally has been quite aware of how bullshit it is. A black police dispatcher was telling me about her dispatching a car to go investigate black guys driving through a neighborhood and "pointing suspiciously" just on Thursday.
That is a problem, but clearly there's more to it than just oh those darn cops.
I'm reminded of when, after someone spraypainted "BLACK LIVES MATTER" on one of Richmond's traitor statues, NBC12 reporters went out to the scene to report on it.
Folks in the neighborhood called the cops, and I'll give you one guess why:
http://www.nbc12.com/story/29412455/nbc12-crew-mistaken-for-monument-avenue-vandals
Because ticketing is a huge business, and where else are municipalities going to get money? Tax people with money? Hah!
Highway Patrol are basically highwayman now. Stand and deliver, your money or your life.
Do you have any sort of numbers to actually back up that wild claim?
Because from just some quick browsing, not only can I not really find any nationwide trend in the highway patrol shaking people down for money, it's actually going in the opposite direction.
There are certainly some individual departments with fucked up budgets and/or priorities, example #A1 being Ferguson. But you seem to be arguing that tickets are bad prima facie, which is quite the reach.
Reading that article, two things jump out at me.
1. The Department is underfunded because not enough tickets are being written, which to me implies too much of their budget is planned around citations being issued, which creates a perverse incentive for the police to issue tickets.
2. Tickets are going down not because of a choice on the police's part, but in part because speed limits are being changed to reflect the actual speed at which people typically drive.
Municipalities plan for a significant % of the budget to come from tickets and citations:
Starts around the 6 minute mark
Police are literally pulling people over and stealing vast sums of money from them to keep for their departments or themselves:
Though in the case of that last one, national awareness seems to be turning the tide against that practice.
Jon Oliver (again) has a bit on this in his show about the lottery, where we decide to fund schools with it, then cut school funding, and it's all just awful.
Umm.. the problem about (2) is it still gives cops an excuse to approach, harass, search, arrest for 'resisting arrest' or some other bs and possibly shoot minorities, basically for being minorities.
One key thing is that a lot of the items are state and local level changes, hopefully BLM is working on those levels, since a lot of what makes the news from them is the national level actions. President Whoever isn't going to do bupkis on police labor contracts.
Do this or we cut funding is a pretty big stick used against schools, why not police departments?
Maybe increase federal subsides in exchange for not stealing from people?
Definitely. Financial incentives for any sort of criminal justice related activity can only do bad things.
I too, want to grind my gun control axe in a thread where most of the problems aren't related (e.g. quotas), and can reasonable be boiled down to racism or having bad goals in general (anything not community policing oriented, basically)...
it's specifically related to limiting the use of force and to a lesser degree demilitarization, and I think the pile of dead bodies that Ametica's police has relative to Japan, Germany, England, etc is possibly the biggest problem, and I think it's intimately related to the presence of guns in the different countries
guns are everywhere in America and until you get rid of the related reasonable fear of rapid escalation, training only goes so far relative to those relatively gun-free countries
If it's not your property gtfo
That's not what loitering usually covers.
It's (ideally) for people causing disturbances or whatever on public property, like the sidewalk.
In the burbs it's less important since everyone's store has a parking lot (that you can trespass people from) out front instead of a sidewalk.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
It is an arrestable offense, but the person has to first be told they're trespassing or be in a place that a reasonable person would know they're not supposed to be
A reasonable person knows if a piece of property is theirs or not.