InfantryAg said:
ABATTBQ11 said:
I'm not saying all police are bad, but they aggregately advocate for and perpetuate a system of unaccountability. Cops can't demand Byzantine rules for investigation, discipline, and termination and then complain when people lose faith in them because those Byzantine rules they wanted continually keep ****ty cops on the street. They need to take some level of responsibility for the systems they helped institute and the environments they have created, but I don't think we'll be seeing cops or unions advocating for fewer protections or less favorable investigative or disciplinary procedures anytime soon.
This ^ is applicable for any industry.
The cops I have worked with have many positive contacts on a daily basis. In the hundreds of officers I have worked with I have seen no coverups and a few disciplinary actions. Our union has turned down fighting for a few because the officer was in the wrong. I know of one case that was questionable and is still being hashed out in the courts. There are probably guys who would cover for their close friends to a degree, but there are many more who would turn in another officer for wrongdoing. The culture is that no one is going to risk going to prison or losing their career to cover for a violation of the law. Police violation maybe, if you're real tight.
Outside of my agency I have trained with many state and local cops and it seems about the same. Back in the day, it was a different story, and probably still so in places, but it's the exception, not the rule.
Doctors have way more malpractice than police. I would guess engineering malpractice is much higher also.
That's great, but doctors and engineers do not generally have civil servant protections, LEOBR equivalents, and union contracts that stack the deck in their favor at every turn from investigating complaints, to disciplining for substantiated complaints, to appealing disciplinary actions and firings. They also don't investigate themselves, and they're generally held to account by third party review boards made of other professionals and can have their medical license/stamp revoked. They're also personally liable for their malpractice and mistakes, unlike cops who enjoy a virtually insurmountable hurdle in qualified immunity. They also don't have guns and the authority to arrest and detain.
You don't get to say, "But we don't protect each other (anymore)!" and claim you're accountable as a profession when the members of your profession defanged every possible layer of accountability they could. Honesty and integrity amongst individuals is great, but it's meaningless when those individuals turn around and create disciplinary structures with no teeth through union contracts and political pressure. Sure cops might turn each other in for wrongdoing, but they turn each other in to disciplinary systems of their own creation that either aren't willing or aren't capable of actually doing anything to them.
There's no one thing wrong that can be fixed with a silver bullet. It's the many small protections that cops have fought for that add up. It's like leaf litter under a live oak tree. A single leaf isn't going to keep anything from growing, but when the tree sheds its leaves and they stack up and cover the ground, everything beneath is choked out. Each little protection, like what can be included in an investigation, what evidence is provided to officers under investigation, delayed interrogations, limiting what questions can be asked, exclusion of previous complaints or disciplinary actions in investigations and arbitration, how arbiters are picked, what can be reviewed by arbiters, how appeals are handled, etc. is like a leaf, and individually they're all fine, but when you take them together, they spread out, stack up, and choke out accountability in the entire profession. Not every department has every one of these or even has them to the same degree, but enough departments have enough of them to stifle accountability across the board to the point it is non-existent. Each one of those things is something officers fought for, and now they don't want to accept responsibility for the totality of what they have created.
