One of my law school profs who was most into civil liberties thought we should have something equivalent to Britain’s Mi5. Also, The Wire was pro-surveillance tech, which is partly why some peeps deride that show as conservative now
There's a lot to like in here and a lot that's theoretically sound, but I'm not sure what the proposal is for facial recognition. Is it, if there's a crime and the police have footage they can use facial recognition on the footage? Is it, President DeSantis can track every American's movements from cradle to grave? The concerns and costs will differ based on the technology and its uses. There's also a conflation of DNA use with video monitoring, but everything I've seen on widespread CCTV use in the UK indicates that it's been basically worthless for reducing crime. Maybe facial recognition would change that, but current video (as opposed to photo) recognition technology is so inaccurate that I doubt it. Not to mention the racial biases we currently see with it. We can't just say that DNA seems to work really well at deterring crime so let's assume that a technology with far bigger downsides and less reliability will also work really well.
As a criminal defense attorney who has been highlighting this as an argument against punitive sentencing, I applaud you.
We need to add more police DETECTIVES and more detection systems, add more resources and training. But we live in a society that still wants to solve crimes at the cheapest possible level. Overworked labs occasionally churn out fake results, beat cops engage in ‘proactive policing’ (read, harassing people of color for minor infractions) because training up detectives costs more money than handing out police cruisers to people with less than an associates degree worth of education and telling them to find the guns and the drugs.
Federally you’re going to need statutory changes. The entire federal sentencing system requires that federal courts sentence based on the discredited notion of general deterrence. So you’re going to need congress to act - both raising money for more and better trained police investigators (the whole system should be inverted in terms of staffing in my opinion) and reducing the draconian sentences handed out for largely nonviolent offenses.
The feds incarcerate people too Ken. And the draconian punishments handed out for nonviolent offenses are largely worse in the federal system. The statute I was referring to is 18 USC 3553. But thanks for explaining my job to me.
I didn’t say they were. But a lot of states and cities receive funding from the federal government for policing. That’s what I was referencing. Congress would do better to provide funding to local agencies contingent on the hiring of detectives rather than funding things like tanks and SRT / SWAT teams.
Based on what information do you base this on other than some ideology? Federal funding is a small but meaningful part of local police funding, normally in the form of grants. My suggestion is that it is misallocated and the money already being spent would be better used by encouraging more investment in solving crimes as opposed to what it is currently being spent on. I’m really unclear on what your deal is, Ken.
Regarding facial recognition technology, has anyone brought up the issue of it being less accurate in recognizing black faces, not because of racial bias but because dark skin absorbs more light and thus photographs of dark skinned people contain less information for the AI to process? Technology isn’t magic, it only works when it has sufficient inputs.
“…dark skin absorbs more light and thus photographs of dark skinned people contain less information for the AI to process?”
That’s nonsense.
Machine learning isn’t magic, it’s just a category of algorithms and programming technique. Early facial recognition systems suffered from poor technique.
I never heard that before. Is that generally understood to be true, or just speculation? Somewhat relatedly, the covid era of masking probably lessened the power of facial rec tech.
If we're going to make it a goal to catch more criminals, then we need to first have an intensive conversation over what should be a crime, and how extensive the punishment to that crime should be. I think everyone has a list of things that are crimes that should not be, and an even longer list of punishments that they'd think are too harsh if they were made aware of just how severe the punishment could be.
I think we also need to be aware of the limits of technology to surveil crime. Cameras can only be unconditionally built on publicly owned property. Private businesses may have some good reasons to place camera on their property, and to share that with the police as appropriate, but in order to achieve good relations with customers and employees they may also not want to show everything that's going on there. And plenty of crimes take place inside the privacy of homes, where universal cameras aren't going to fly. As for monitoring, that ties into the severity of punishment: which crimes should subject people to monitoring, and to what extent?
I just think there's a lot of questions we have to concurrently answer before we go fully down this path.
I agree. All of society would agree murder and theft (I think) should be crimes, but there are a lot of crimes on the books we don't all agree should be crimes (remember when gay sex and smoking pot would get you locked up?) One problem of society not agreeing on what should be a crime and how severely it should be punished is we start to look the other way at laws we don't want enforced, and then we're surprised law enforcement also looks the other way at laws we do want enforced, the end result being a legal system where who's the cop and who's the judge decides what the law is. Fun times ahead with abortion laws. We don't even agree what murder is.
yup, like I'm in a shrinking minority of Americans but I feel casinos should be banned and operating a gambling operation a crime. They make communities poorer, hurt already struggling people more, and lead to higher property crime rates.
But I'm in the minority on this one. If I somehow got my way and got them banned it is pretty clear the cops would look the other way.
And I'm sure everyone in this group can come up with something.
I'd love to also see a lot more resources poured into investigations that don't require a DNA record of the criminal: one that makes the match through the freely given DNA of relatives. The Golden State killer was caught with just a couple matches sharing only 1% of DNA and some genealogy. If we scaled this up, we could greatly increase the clearance rate of murders and rapes.
Meanwhile, the average federal prison sentence is 147 months. Five grams of meth will catch you five years in federal prison. 21 USC 841.
The Danish DNA bank works because sentences are short; that's a prerequisite. Without minimal sentencing, you're just institutionalizing people so that when they get out, they're less capable of reintegration and living crime-free. Using a DNA bank like that with our current punishment structure would increase crime (assuming that it caught more people in the first place).
The federal system is only about 10% of our incarcerated, so state prisons are the better comparison.
From the Denmark paper:
"WHILE DENMARK HAS A COMPARABLE AMOUNT OF CRIME WHEN COMPARED WITH THE U.S., ONLY A VERY SMALL PORTION OF THIS CRIME IS VIOLENT"
We have 141,000 (7% of prisoners) serving time for the crime of rape alone, and an equal number for murder. How short do you want their sentences to be? And the typical prisoner has 4-5 prior convictions and is rearrested within 3 years after doing further harm to society or a victim.
If we have more rapists and murders than Denmark, why can't we use better tools to incarcerate them?
You have a chicken-and-egg problem here. Denmark can have light sentences because it has tools that makes it so that crimes are more likely to be solved.
There's an idea that deterrence = chance of being caught X severity of the punishment. We jack up the severity of punishment to make up for the fact that a lot of people aren't caught. If you catch everyone, you can dial down the severity while keeping deterrence the same.
However, I believe that there is some decent science out there that this formula is somewhat flawed, in that if you aren't catching enough people, potential criminals tend to round the risk of getting caught down to zero and assume that they just will not be caught. There is also a problem where, once you hit a certain point, the deterrence effect of more severe punishments maxes out. As a result, while the formula is a rough approximation of how things work, it becomes increasingly difficult to make up for a low chance of getting caught with more severe punishment.
Sure- so long as it applies to LEOs too. My philosophy is that if you want to be licensed by the state to do violence on its behalf, you're also subject to a much higher bar for conduct. Felons have to give their DNA samples? No problem- also, every single law enforcement officer should as well. (It would have caught the Golden State Killer much earlier!) Parolees are surveilled more heavily? Sounds good- and also let's make sure every single cop in America wears a body camera (Mass state troopers still don't, last time I checked), that they have to be on *at all times*, and that the footage is immediately owned & stored by a completely different government body. No warrant required to start an investigation for bad conduct, by becoming a cop you agree that your conduct is filmed 24/7/365 on duty. Every cop's face should be photographed and added to a facial recognition DB, so that they can be instantly IDed when they commit crimes in public.
LEOs should be required to testify against each other as a condition of employment or having a pension. Do you know of a fellow officer committing a crime on the job? You should be *required* to testify against them, on pain of possible arrest and losing your pension. Perjury on official paperwork should be publicly prosecuted. All LEO internal docs (emails, etc.) should be immediately FOIA-subject.
I'm pro law & order! Let's apply law and order to an organized gang well known for carrying out brutal crimes and then concealing them, the government
Not just checkups - every estimate of medical malpractice I've seen comes up with hundreds of thousands of deaths per year. It's crazy to be so worried about police malpractice but blaise about medical malpractice.
I think it comes down to a central fact. People are much more comfortable with surveillance of those they consider "others." Rightists are fine with their tough on crime platform because it isn't their neighborhood that gets the oversight.
Left of center police critics are fine with this surveillance of cops because they would never be one nor do they think much of the people who are cops.
In both of your examples, I think more surveillance might be a good solution. But there's not a fair consideration given to the downsides to the people who would have to be surveyed. It's just like "F em", want to be a cop, deal with it".
You see this in attitudes toward teachers/police unions.
In both cases you have a coalition wanting to take away unionizing rights from a class of government workers.
In both cases they make good arguments that the services they provide are so important to society that unionizing is harmful. Police really can kill you. Teachers really can shape your life outcomes and your values.
But they only want to take unionizing rights away from the profession that belongs to the enemy tribe.
Think about all the money saved in the courts if we had video of surgeons screwing up, and reacted immediately rather than spend hundreds of thousands trying to obfuscate around it.
I'm sympathetic to the argument, but I don't know that it actually works that way. There's a lot of context around a surgery or medical treatment, and many judgements that often have to be made by experts. And oftentimes the judgements of experts will disagree with each other.
More transparency might not hurt in terms of exposing real malpractice and nefarious behavior. But it also exposes every move to Monday-morning quarterbacking from people who may not know what they are talking about.
I think that we should just collect DNA from newborns -- I get that it has authoritarian overtones, but if you believe in liberal democracy and the rule of law, why not have a complete database going forward. It prevents all of the concerns about the bias in the criminal justice system meaning that some folks are more likely to have their DNA collected. There was a controversy in SF where a woman was prosecuted for some kind of property crime based on DNA from a rape kit she had provided in a previous investigation. Adding DNA collected in that way has obvious disincentives to reporting crime, but if we all knew that our DNA was in a database then we would all be on notice that it could be used against us in a criminal prosecution.
There are one or two quibbles I might pick here (while agreeing with the basic thrust overwhelmingly) but I'm 100% on board with "I'm a law and order person, and that's why those charged with upholding law and order by the state need to maintain exemplary conduct!"
I really like the idea as a whole. I'd think a typical subpoena would handle requiring testimony against fellow cops. As for their own wrongdoing, are people allowed to give up their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination as a condition of employment? Even if not, forfeiture of a pension should do the trick.
I was in particular thinking of the shooting of Justine Damond in Milwaukee, where the shooting officer's fellow police refused to testify or say anything, and had to be subpoenaed by the prosecutor. They were- shocker- advised by the union not to cooperate with the investigation! That should be completely illegal- if you want to be authorized to do violence on behalf of the state, you should be required to 100% cooperate with every internal investigation.
'He said that his office started issuing subpoenas only after officers, acting on the union’s advice, turned down repeated requests to come in and provide statements.
“We tried again and again, and what they said was, ‘No, we’re not coming in.’ The Police Federation or its lawyers said, ‘No we shouldn’t,’ ” Freeman said'
Sounds good. Seeing as, as you note, the chief of the MPD was not willing to assist into an investigation of an officer shooting a completely innocent person, this just bolsters the common sense principal that a government agency should not be tasked with investigating itself. After all, if you heard about misconduct at the IRS or the NEA, would you trust them to investigate themselves?
So we can simply add this 'authority to order those officers to cooperate on pain of termination' to a civilian review board. And make sure that it's exempt from any union arbitration clause nonsense- if the officer declines to cooperate, they're fired immediately and no arbitrator can reinstate them, and they cannot be rehired for any LEO or government job anywhere in America. Plus, they lose 100% of pension accumulated to date
I am pretty confident that there's not one jurisdiction in the entire United States where a civilian run review board has the authority to compel to an LEO's testimony on pain of firing. (Not to mention that I explicitly included 'and this is exempt from arbitration', because I think we all know the government union arbitration game. Like 'America's worst cop', Florida LEO German Bosque- arrested 3 times, fired 7 times, he just keeps getting rehired thanks to arbitration!)
But I could certainly be wrong. I'm open to learning the name of even one municipality in America where a civilian review board can unilaterally fire LEOs. If you want to name even one....
Facial recognition should be used to identify potential suspects, who the police then investigate using other means, like subpoenaing their cell phone location data, getting a warrant to search their home for stolen goods, etc. However police, judges and juries have historically struggled to understand complicated scientific evidence. I am worried that in practice, the output of facial recognition software will be interpreted as guilty or innocent, which is very bad!
It seems like this would be solvable by simply not allowing the results of facial recognition to be admitted in court the same way polygraph test results are not admissible.
A criminologist friend of mine told me years ago that it is the odds of getting caught that had a demonstrated deterrent effect, not the consequences of getting caught. He was right.
It seems like before giving police expanded surveillance powers, we should make sure they’re making full and faithful use of the surveillance powers they do have, for example the reports that citizens make via 911 and the activity that’s visible to any pedestrian in the city’s worst areas. When police show no interest in either of those things, it’s tough to justify even more intrusive access to everyone’s lives. For example, I think it’s fair to categorically oppose any and all electronic surveillance in a city that has open air bicycle chop shops.
Not really. If police are bad at their jobs, we should consider making their jobs easier. If police are biased in their enforcement of the law, the answer may be to make enforcent more objective.
Police aren’t doing investigative work that comes up short. People make 911 calls, they don’t show up. People offer videos, they don’t want to see them. People have live GPS locations on their stolen cars and electronics, police won’t go. There’s no reason to believe that expanded electronic surveillance would suddenly interest the police in pursuing crimes. With such a PD you don’t get any of the positive leg of the tradeoff, but you do still get all the abuse potential.
I love this take, along with your other pro-surveillence takes (more traffic cameras, more government agency use of personal data). Everyone else in the parts of the internet I read is still strongly and reflexively pro-privacy, so you're delivering great value over replacement pundit.
I'm not totally convinced yet but I do find the pro-surveillence arguments surprisingly persuasive. At the very least, I have to admit that the results of being constantly tracked by my phone have so far been positive overall.
I am surprised how often I find it useful to go back through Google's record of my physical location, trying to remember what I did / where I was on a certain date. I do it at least once every three months if not more.
**PUBLIC** surveillance cameras, i.e. covering public spaces, are a good thing. The more of them the better. Nobody has a reasonable expectation of privacy in public.
Another way to think about it: if it would be OK for a cop to stand and look in the same direction as the camera, there's no privacy objection.
One of my law school profs who was most into civil liberties thought we should have something equivalent to Britain’s Mi5. Also, The Wire was pro-surveillance tech, which is partly why some peeps deride that show as conservative now
Anti-Dostoevskyans of the word, unite!
There's a lot to like in here and a lot that's theoretically sound, but I'm not sure what the proposal is for facial recognition. Is it, if there's a crime and the police have footage they can use facial recognition on the footage? Is it, President DeSantis can track every American's movements from cradle to grave? The concerns and costs will differ based on the technology and its uses. There's also a conflation of DNA use with video monitoring, but everything I've seen on widespread CCTV use in the UK indicates that it's been basically worthless for reducing crime. Maybe facial recognition would change that, but current video (as opposed to photo) recognition technology is so inaccurate that I doubt it. Not to mention the racial biases we currently see with it. We can't just say that DNA seems to work really well at deterring crime so let's assume that a technology with far bigger downsides and less reliability will also work really well.
As a criminal defense attorney who has been highlighting this as an argument against punitive sentencing, I applaud you.
We need to add more police DETECTIVES and more detection systems, add more resources and training. But we live in a society that still wants to solve crimes at the cheapest possible level. Overworked labs occasionally churn out fake results, beat cops engage in ‘proactive policing’ (read, harassing people of color for minor infractions) because training up detectives costs more money than handing out police cruisers to people with less than an associates degree worth of education and telling them to find the guns and the drugs.
Federally you’re going to need statutory changes. The entire federal sentencing system requires that federal courts sentence based on the discredited notion of general deterrence. So you’re going to need congress to act - both raising money for more and better trained police investigators (the whole system should be inverted in terms of staffing in my opinion) and reducing the draconian sentences handed out for largely nonviolent offenses.
“…you’re going to need congress to act - both raising money for more and better trained police investigators…”
Naw, that’s for the states and local governments.
The feds incarcerate people too Ken. And the draconian punishments handed out for nonviolent offenses are largely worse in the federal system. The statute I was referring to is 18 USC 3553. But thanks for explaining my job to me.
Which of the federal law enforcement agencies are underfunded?
I didn’t say they were. But a lot of states and cities receive funding from the federal government for policing. That’s what I was referencing. Congress would do better to provide funding to local agencies contingent on the hiring of detectives rather than funding things like tanks and SRT / SWAT teams.
Alternately, Congress could realize that the federal government cannot afford to fund the hiring of a bunch of local detectives.
Based on what information do you base this on other than some ideology? Federal funding is a small but meaningful part of local police funding, normally in the form of grants. My suggestion is that it is misallocated and the money already being spent would be better used by encouraging more investment in solving crimes as opposed to what it is currently being spent on. I’m really unclear on what your deal is, Ken.
Regarding facial recognition technology, has anyone brought up the issue of it being less accurate in recognizing black faces, not because of racial bias but because dark skin absorbs more light and thus photographs of dark skinned people contain less information for the AI to process? Technology isn’t magic, it only works when it has sufficient inputs.
“…dark skin absorbs more light and thus photographs of dark skinned people contain less information for the AI to process?”
That’s nonsense.
Machine learning isn’t magic, it’s just a category of algorithms and programming technique. Early facial recognition systems suffered from poor technique.
I never heard that before. Is that generally understood to be true, or just speculation? Somewhat relatedly, the covid era of masking probably lessened the power of facial rec tech.
It's also important to point out that one of the main progressive complaints with facial recognition is that many facial recognition AIs are racist, in that they are less accurate at matching non-white faces. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/12/20/79/ai-face-recognition-racist-us-government-nist-study/
Well said. Any tool that's constructed by humans will also be built with the biases of the humans that construct it.
If we're going to make it a goal to catch more criminals, then we need to first have an intensive conversation over what should be a crime, and how extensive the punishment to that crime should be. I think everyone has a list of things that are crimes that should not be, and an even longer list of punishments that they'd think are too harsh if they were made aware of just how severe the punishment could be.
I think we also need to be aware of the limits of technology to surveil crime. Cameras can only be unconditionally built on publicly owned property. Private businesses may have some good reasons to place camera on their property, and to share that with the police as appropriate, but in order to achieve good relations with customers and employees they may also not want to show everything that's going on there. And plenty of crimes take place inside the privacy of homes, where universal cameras aren't going to fly. As for monitoring, that ties into the severity of punishment: which crimes should subject people to monitoring, and to what extent?
I just think there's a lot of questions we have to concurrently answer before we go fully down this path.
I agree. All of society would agree murder and theft (I think) should be crimes, but there are a lot of crimes on the books we don't all agree should be crimes (remember when gay sex and smoking pot would get you locked up?) One problem of society not agreeing on what should be a crime and how severely it should be punished is we start to look the other way at laws we don't want enforced, and then we're surprised law enforcement also looks the other way at laws we do want enforced, the end result being a legal system where who's the cop and who's the judge decides what the law is. Fun times ahead with abortion laws. We don't even agree what murder is.
yup, like I'm in a shrinking minority of Americans but I feel casinos should be banned and operating a gambling operation a crime. They make communities poorer, hurt already struggling people more, and lead to higher property crime rates.
But I'm in the minority on this one. If I somehow got my way and got them banned it is pretty clear the cops would look the other way.
And I'm sure everyone in this group can come up with something.
I'd love to also see a lot more resources poured into investigations that don't require a DNA record of the criminal: one that makes the match through the freely given DNA of relatives. The Golden State killer was caught with just a couple matches sharing only 1% of DNA and some genealogy. If we scaled this up, we could greatly increase the clearance rate of murders and rapes.
Over 80% of Danish jail sentences are for less than a year in jail. Most aren't incarcerated at all. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/crime-and-punishment-denmark
The mean US state prison sentence is 2.7 years. Median is 1.3 years. Linked internally in this article: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/12/06/u-s-public-divided-over-whether-people-convicted-of-crimes-spend-too-much-or-too-little-time-in-prison/
Meanwhile, the average federal prison sentence is 147 months. Five grams of meth will catch you five years in federal prison. 21 USC 841.
The Danish DNA bank works because sentences are short; that's a prerequisite. Without minimal sentencing, you're just institutionalizing people so that when they get out, they're less capable of reintegration and living crime-free. Using a DNA bank like that with our current punishment structure would increase crime (assuming that it caught more people in the first place).
The federal system is only about 10% of our incarcerated, so state prisons are the better comparison.
From the Denmark paper:
"WHILE DENMARK HAS A COMPARABLE AMOUNT OF CRIME WHEN COMPARED WITH THE U.S., ONLY A VERY SMALL PORTION OF THIS CRIME IS VIOLENT"
We have 141,000 (7% of prisoners) serving time for the crime of rape alone, and an equal number for murder. How short do you want their sentences to be? And the typical prisoner has 4-5 prior convictions and is rearrested within 3 years after doing further harm to society or a victim.
If we have more rapists and murders than Denmark, why can't we use better tools to incarcerate them?
Sources:
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html
https://www.rainn.org/statistics/perpetrators-sexual-violence
You have a chicken-and-egg problem here. Denmark can have light sentences because it has tools that makes it so that crimes are more likely to be solved.
There's an idea that deterrence = chance of being caught X severity of the punishment. We jack up the severity of punishment to make up for the fact that a lot of people aren't caught. If you catch everyone, you can dial down the severity while keeping deterrence the same.
However, I believe that there is some decent science out there that this formula is somewhat flawed, in that if you aren't catching enough people, potential criminals tend to round the risk of getting caught down to zero and assume that they just will not be caught. There is also a problem where, once you hit a certain point, the deterrence effect of more severe punishments maxes out. As a result, while the formula is a rough approximation of how things work, it becomes increasingly difficult to make up for a low chance of getting caught with more severe punishment.
I want to start off by saying that I miss Graham. I’d be quite curious to learn what he agrees and disagrees with in this article,
Where’d he go?
He said he was taking an indefinite hiatus, both on here and on his Graham Factor blog.
Sure- so long as it applies to LEOs too. My philosophy is that if you want to be licensed by the state to do violence on its behalf, you're also subject to a much higher bar for conduct. Felons have to give their DNA samples? No problem- also, every single law enforcement officer should as well. (It would have caught the Golden State Killer much earlier!) Parolees are surveilled more heavily? Sounds good- and also let's make sure every single cop in America wears a body camera (Mass state troopers still don't, last time I checked), that they have to be on *at all times*, and that the footage is immediately owned & stored by a completely different government body. No warrant required to start an investigation for bad conduct, by becoming a cop you agree that your conduct is filmed 24/7/365 on duty. Every cop's face should be photographed and added to a facial recognition DB, so that they can be instantly IDed when they commit crimes in public.
LEOs should be required to testify against each other as a condition of employment or having a pension. Do you know of a fellow officer committing a crime on the job? You should be *required* to testify against them, on pain of possible arrest and losing your pension. Perjury on official paperwork should be publicly prosecuted. All LEO internal docs (emails, etc.) should be immediately FOIA-subject.
I'm pro law & order! Let's apply law and order to an organized gang well known for carrying out brutal crimes and then concealing them, the government
Would you apply that same philosophy to other professions with the power of life and death? Should nurses and doctors be required to wear body cams?
If you accept his logic as sound, I don't see any limiting principal on why this shouldn't apply to many major occupations:
1. Teachers: these individuals play a major role in shaping your values and life outcomes
2. Firefighters
3. Doctors/nurses: checkups are the difference between life and death
Not just checkups - every estimate of medical malpractice I've seen comes up with hundreds of thousands of deaths per year. It's crazy to be so worried about police malpractice but blaise about medical malpractice.
I think it comes down to a central fact. People are much more comfortable with surveillance of those they consider "others." Rightists are fine with their tough on crime platform because it isn't their neighborhood that gets the oversight.
Left of center police critics are fine with this surveillance of cops because they would never be one nor do they think much of the people who are cops.
That's actually 100% what I was thinking, too.
In both of your examples, I think more surveillance might be a good solution. But there's not a fair consideration given to the downsides to the people who would have to be surveyed. It's just like "F em", want to be a cop, deal with it".
You see this in attitudes toward teachers/police unions.
In both cases you have a coalition wanting to take away unionizing rights from a class of government workers.
In both cases they make good arguments that the services they provide are so important to society that unionizing is harmful. Police really can kill you. Teachers really can shape your life outcomes and your values.
But they only want to take unionizing rights away from the profession that belongs to the enemy tribe.
Think about all the money saved in the courts if we had video of surgeons screwing up, and reacted immediately rather than spend hundreds of thousands trying to obfuscate around it.
I'm sympathetic to the argument, but I don't know that it actually works that way. There's a lot of context around a surgery or medical treatment, and many judgements that often have to be made by experts. And oftentimes the judgements of experts will disagree with each other.
More transparency might not hurt in terms of exposing real malpractice and nefarious behavior. But it also exposes every move to Monday-morning quarterbacking from people who may not know what they are talking about.
I think that we should just collect DNA from newborns -- I get that it has authoritarian overtones, but if you believe in liberal democracy and the rule of law, why not have a complete database going forward. It prevents all of the concerns about the bias in the criminal justice system meaning that some folks are more likely to have their DNA collected. There was a controversy in SF where a woman was prosecuted for some kind of property crime based on DNA from a rape kit she had provided in a previous investigation. Adding DNA collected in that way has obvious disincentives to reporting crime, but if we all knew that our DNA was in a database then we would all be on notice that it could be used against us in a criminal prosecution.
There are one or two quibbles I might pick here (while agreeing with the basic thrust overwhelmingly) but I'm 100% on board with "I'm a law and order person, and that's why those charged with upholding law and order by the state need to maintain exemplary conduct!"
I really like the idea as a whole. I'd think a typical subpoena would handle requiring testimony against fellow cops. As for their own wrongdoing, are people allowed to give up their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination as a condition of employment? Even if not, forfeiture of a pension should do the trick.
I was in particular thinking of the shooting of Justine Damond in Milwaukee, where the shooting officer's fellow police refused to testify or say anything, and had to be subpoenaed by the prosecutor. They were- shocker- advised by the union not to cooperate with the investigation! That should be completely illegal- if you want to be authorized to do violence on behalf of the state, you should be required to 100% cooperate with every internal investigation.
'He said that his office started issuing subpoenas only after officers, acting on the union’s advice, turned down repeated requests to come in and provide statements.
“We tried again and again, and what they said was, ‘No, we’re not coming in.’ The Police Federation or its lawyers said, ‘No we shouldn’t,’ ” Freeman said'
https://www.startribune.com/tension-rises-between-county-attorney-police-union-in-noor-grand-jury-investigation/475458363/
Sounds good. Seeing as, as you note, the chief of the MPD was not willing to assist into an investigation of an officer shooting a completely innocent person, this just bolsters the common sense principal that a government agency should not be tasked with investigating itself. After all, if you heard about misconduct at the IRS or the NEA, would you trust them to investigate themselves?
So we can simply add this 'authority to order those officers to cooperate on pain of termination' to a civilian review board. And make sure that it's exempt from any union arbitration clause nonsense- if the officer declines to cooperate, they're fired immediately and no arbitrator can reinstate them, and they cannot be rehired for any LEO or government job anywhere in America. Plus, they lose 100% of pension accumulated to date
I am pretty confident that there's not one jurisdiction in the entire United States where a civilian run review board has the authority to compel to an LEO's testimony on pain of firing. (Not to mention that I explicitly included 'and this is exempt from arbitration', because I think we all know the government union arbitration game. Like 'America's worst cop', Florida LEO German Bosque- arrested 3 times, fired 7 times, he just keeps getting rehired thanks to arbitration!)
But I could certainly be wrong. I'm open to learning the name of even one municipality in America where a civilian review board can unilaterally fire LEOs. If you want to name even one....
Facial recognition should be used to identify potential suspects, who the police then investigate using other means, like subpoenaing their cell phone location data, getting a warrant to search their home for stolen goods, etc. However police, judges and juries have historically struggled to understand complicated scientific evidence. I am worried that in practice, the output of facial recognition software will be interpreted as guilty or innocent, which is very bad!
It seems like this would be solvable by simply not allowing the results of facial recognition to be admitted in court the same way polygraph test results are not admissible.
A criminologist friend of mine told me years ago that it is the odds of getting caught that had a demonstrated deterrent effect, not the consequences of getting caught. He was right.
It seems like before giving police expanded surveillance powers, we should make sure they’re making full and faithful use of the surveillance powers they do have, for example the reports that citizens make via 911 and the activity that’s visible to any pedestrian in the city’s worst areas. When police show no interest in either of those things, it’s tough to justify even more intrusive access to everyone’s lives. For example, I think it’s fair to categorically oppose any and all electronic surveillance in a city that has open air bicycle chop shops.
Not really. If police are bad at their jobs, we should consider making their jobs easier. If police are biased in their enforcement of the law, the answer may be to make enforcent more objective.
Police aren’t doing investigative work that comes up short. People make 911 calls, they don’t show up. People offer videos, they don’t want to see them. People have live GPS locations on their stolen cars and electronics, police won’t go. There’s no reason to believe that expanded electronic surveillance would suddenly interest the police in pursuing crimes. With such a PD you don’t get any of the positive leg of the tradeoff, but you do still get all the abuse potential.
This just shows that we need more surveillance *of* the police to accompany surveillance *by* the police.
I love this take, along with your other pro-surveillence takes (more traffic cameras, more government agency use of personal data). Everyone else in the parts of the internet I read is still strongly and reflexively pro-privacy, so you're delivering great value over replacement pundit.
I'm not totally convinced yet but I do find the pro-surveillence arguments surprisingly persuasive. At the very least, I have to admit that the results of being constantly tracked by my phone have so far been positive overall.
I am surprised how often I find it useful to go back through Google's record of my physical location, trying to remember what I did / where I was on a certain date. I do it at least once every three months if not more.
**PUBLIC** surveillance cameras, i.e. covering public spaces, are a good thing. The more of them the better. Nobody has a reasonable expectation of privacy in public.
Another way to think about it: if it would be OK for a cop to stand and look in the same direction as the camera, there's no privacy objection.