Since everyone is going around complaining about cops or rioters (and rightfully so) I thought I'd take an opportunity to offer actual solutions. These are the solutions I would impose to solve the problem.

Most of the solution centers around just one important problem that is the root of the whole issue. Police are above the law. They tend to get leniency for crimes due to be officer, especially when it is the result of carrying out their "duty" and even when there is an attempt to hold them accountable they cover up each others mistakes in various ways that get them out of it. This is where all the solutions lie.. so here they are:

1) eliminate all police unions, I'd say any government job that makes or enforces policy of any kind should not be allowed to unionize. Unions generally use theie collective bargaining power to wipe police officers with bad records clean and thus allow them to avoid getting in trouble.

2) Ensure the law has just as strict a consequence for an officer as it does a citizen and that them being an officer doesnt give them any greater latitude in that regard. If anything their consequences when on duty should be stricter. If they shoot someone because of a mistake because they thought they had a gun when they didnt, murder, no exceptions, no different than a citizen.

3) any officer on the scene when #2 happens and a officer breaks the law is expected to immediately stop the incident if they can and at a minimum arrest the officer immediately. If any officer fails to arrest another officer they will be consider an accomplice and equally as guilty as if they carried out the offense themselves

4) retroactively apply the #2 and #3 to all officers currently on the force to serve as an example. Give a 2 week grace period so any officers who would fall under the category of #3 have a chance to arrest their fellow officers who have in the past commited a crime under #2. After two weeks any officers guilty of #2 or #3 will be arrested with no forgiveness. Resigning from their position will not grant them immunity.

5) Require body cams, ensure the body cams can not be turned off

6) Any officer intentionally hiding their body cam during an incident will immediately loose their job and be fined one year back pay. If there is evidence of wrong doing they will be tried and this action held against them as evidence.

7) officers are always required to be in pairs or more.

8) Reverse broken-glass policying policies from the top down. Have officers focus on real crime as a priority and deprioritize non-violent crimes.

@freemo
1) i kinda support redemption mechanics but .. hmmh. expunging isn't quite the right answer.

2) people tried but juries tend to consist of people with law enforcement bias.

4) ex post facto laws are banned (and also bad ideas.)

5) they already do

8) is this a reference to broken window theory?
@freemo i remember this discussion from a criminologist's blog. broken window theory kind of works but i don't know what particular instances of enforcing it you are taking offense to.

@icedquinn My stance here is that minor offenses should be deprioritized in comparison with more significant offenses. Especially when those minor offenses do not directly cause harm to persons or property.

So that means deprioritizing the sorts of things most police man hours goes into such as minor traffic stops, drug users, jay walking, whatever (which is often used as an excuse to search vehicles and other attempts to find more serious crimes that they dont directly suspect). You will generally find real crimes that require some degree of investigation is often ignored.

@freemo yeah that's not broken window theory stuff though. or at least not how the criminologists i learned it from talked about it.

that sounds like the typical city ticket quotas to pad their budgets.
@freemo the broken window theory i learned from criminologist blogs talked more about literal cases of if you just leave gang tags everywhere or you have literal broken windows, people were then more likely to also litter or do other degenerative things because it's a vicious cycle of "well it's already a shithole so who cares?"

as in if the area is required to look nice, people who live there will be more invested in protecting it (Pygmalion effect happens i guess) so protecting the clean image becomes part of the defense strategy.

or rather, if the area looks like shit it probably is.

i dunno how well it translates to policing at large. london doesn't look like shit but they have daily stabbings. :blobcatdetective:
@freemo there seem to generally be a lot of bad PR towards evidence-based policing attempts.

trying to exploit psychology to prevent vicious cycles -> making mountains out of molehills
scrutinizing people from outside the community -> xenophobia
modeling suspect stops after past crime instances -> racial profiling
staffing most of the police where the crime tends to happen (pareto principling, 'predictive policing') -> i forget what the complaint about this one was
@freemo a lot of those particularized complaints are stopped by banning the city from profiting on the public. Machiavelli literally tells The Prince not to fuckin steal or seize from your subjects because you'll keep finding reasons to do it. The PD gets to keep the money so they start issuing quotas to fine people over. I think some cities redrafted the laws so fines go to the treasury instead of the PD and it stops them from looking for soft targets to fill quotas with.

City still shouldn't be profiting either but it seems to help.
@freemo drug charges are similar. federal "forfeiture" (read: illegal seizure) laws and financial incentives to claim they found drugs.

@icedquinn To some degree you are correct, the origin of the theory is that if crime, however minor, is seen by the general public then it encourages more significant crime to be carried out.

The target of proponents isnt so much "lets clean up graffiti and broken windows" but rather more along the lines of "lets arrest people who commit minor crimes because the public will witness that, including arresting people who commit graffitti, break windows, jay walk, speed"... in other words it promotes the lazy approach of cops focusing on small crimes that are done in public view or easily inferred by the public and putting less priority on crimes that are carried out in a more secretive (and thus harder to catch) fashion, which goes hand in hand with more serious crime.

Moreover the philosophy has changed a lot in its life, while originally the discussion was around obvious signs of crime like graffitti and such it has evolved to be used in a context that is more encapsulating of minor crime vs major crime, in that focusing on easier to handle minor crime they can prevent major crime with a fraction of the effort.

@freemo tbh it really just sounds like financial corruption (doing the things the prince should not do) as the real reason and using broken window theory as the noble excuse (carnegie.)
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