"There are around a million cops in the U.S. So a good way to think about this is - imagine if 99% of them were awesome, upstanding people doing their absolute best to support our communities and keep everyone safe, and 1% were bullies in it for the chance to carry a gun. That’d be 10,000 Terrible Cops, which is probably enough to fill up a weekly podcast with stories of things the Terrible Cops did.
So I don’t think this podcast is truth-requiring in that I think it would be possible to run exactly as is in the world where 99% of cops are great. The ideal podcast of this sort is one which would have to be substantially different if we didn’t have a horrible police abuse and police brutality problem.
One way to do that is to cover the response, not just the initial act. If 99% of cops were great and 1% were terrible, but the institution of policing were functional and healthy, the terrible ones would lie and get fired. One of the problems with modern policing is that, not only do cops abuse power, lie, and brutalize civilians, but they don’t get in trouble for this. That article strikes me as one you couldn’t write in a world where the police were a just institution. It looks at 81 cases where cops were found lying on the job about the circumstances of a search or an arrest, or testifying falsely to a court. In two cases, the cops got in trouble. In the other 79, they didn’t. It picks those 81 cases because those were the only ones where information was available about whether the police had followed up on a finding of dishonesty.
Another way to do that is to look for signs of repeated dysfunction of a type that wouldn’t continue to be tolerated if we had a just police system. In a good system, there’ll be some bad apples - but they’ll get fired after the first or at least the third excessive-use-of-force complaint. “Cop who shot teenager had twenty previous misconduct complaints, mostly for excessive force and racial slurs” wouldn’t be a news story in that world."
https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/172142516446/so-i-listen-to-a-podcast-where-every-week-the-host#notes
So I don’t think this podcast is truth-requiring in that I think it would be possible to run exactly as is in the world where 99% of cops are great. The ideal podcast of this sort is one which would have to be substantially different if we didn’t have a horrible police abuse and police brutality problem.
One way to do that is to cover the response, not just the initial act. If 99% of cops were great and 1% were terrible, but the institution of policing were functional and healthy, the terrible ones would lie and get fired. One of the problems with modern policing is that, not only do cops abuse power, lie, and brutalize civilians, but they don’t get in trouble for this. That article strikes me as one you couldn’t write in a world where the police were a just institution. It looks at 81 cases where cops were found lying on the job about the circumstances of a search or an arrest, or testifying falsely to a court. In two cases, the cops got in trouble. In the other 79, they didn’t. It picks those 81 cases because those were the only ones where information was available about whether the police had followed up on a finding of dishonesty.
Another way to do that is to look for signs of repeated dysfunction of a type that wouldn’t continue to be tolerated if we had a just police system. In a good system, there’ll be some bad apples - but they’ll get fired after the first or at least the third excessive-use-of-force complaint. “Cop who shot teenager had twenty previous misconduct complaints, mostly for excessive force and racial slurs” wouldn’t be a news story in that world."
https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/172142516446/so-i-listen-to-a-podcast-where-every-week-the-host#notes