Police departments offer massive settlements because it never comes out of police budgets and if the case is settled then they never have to address the harm they continue to cause.

Dude, Vincent D'Onofrio in The Cell. 100%.

Know this fucker's face.

The only-government-can-have-guns crowd pushes inaccurate perceptions to advance the agenda.

I'm curious about what inaccurate perceptions you think they're pushing and what their agenda is. The inaccurate perception that we're the only country in the world with this amount of resource who are facing this problem? Is their agenda... preventing needless death?

ACAB no matter where you hail from. Our "justice" system is just more adept at shielding them from consequence. If this were a US cop who fired his service weapon above a crowd he'd get two days paid vacation and a promotion six months down the line.

Who the fuck looks at the state of policing in the US and thinks "what we need is less transparency"? Or that we're holding officers TOO accountable?

... Oh yeah, cops.

That article was a wild ride.

Police chief in the mid-90's in my town was the subject of an FBI investigation for taking cash bribes to look the other way with similar gambling machines. He spent 14 months in prison and then went on to collect a police pension for two decades. 💀

The POST commission is interesting. As of 10/31 they've suspended 39 LEOs, 38 of which list the reason as MGL c. 6E § 9(a)(1), which is "The commission shall immediately suspend the certification of any officer who is arrested, charged or indicted for a felony. " So the vast majority of suspensions stem from the officers copping felony charges.

The outlier is Blake Poore with M.G.L. c. 6E, § 9(a)(4), "The commission may, pending preliminary inquiry pursuant to paragraph (1) of subsection (c) of section 8, suspend the certification of any officer if the commission determines by a preponderance of the evidence that the suspension is in the best interest of the health, safety or welfare of the public." Apparently he was suspended for taking LSD. Frankly, as long as he wasn't on the job while he was taking it, the experience would have probably made him a more empathetic and self-aware cop.

POST also maintains a csv of historical police disciplinary data that they update monthly. Right now it's available as a series of PDFs or a CSV on their website, but I've put the whole thing in a PostgreSQL database and I'm working on an API etc. Hoping to have a version you can search by officer, agency, date, etc. through a web app within a week or two.

I haven't read a lot about this, and the article linked here is pretty light on details, but it may be related to him being a school resource officer, or possibly the search they did at his home. But that's also all speculation, so don't really know.

I'm sorry if I seemed like I was trying to pick a fight, I wasn't being disingenuous when I asked.

This gives me hope. The state I live in (MA) finally has a POST database, but it's a work in progress at best.

The current version of the police watchdog agency’s database, which contains about 3,400 sustained complaints against still-active officers going back to the 1980s, features only 13 complaints of racial or ethnic bias, involving 11 officers.

So yeah, 13 complaints about racial bias since the 80's sounds... generous.

Just the other day there was a post here about a California prison guard sexually assaulting female inmates, confessing to the crime, and we still had comments ... supporting the guard? At the very least, victim-blaming:

On the other hand, the ones claiming to be sexually assaulted are hardly the best people themselves, so you have to take their stories with a fair amount of salt.

And that's a huge part of the problem. Some people, especially in the US, just don't give a shit about anyone in the system. These same idiots also fail to realize that at any moment of their small, boring lives they could also be carted off to prison for a crime they didn't commit. It happens all the time, every day.

We need real investigations, and we need the general public to put pressure on state attorneys to actually investigate and file charges.

May I ask why you think that sentence is excessively long? It's ten counts. I don't know anything about VA law, but in some states the maximum sentence for one count of child solicitation is five years, so it could have been a lot longer.

Edit: changed PA to VA whoops

Man, I just spent this morning looking up the officer who (illegally) denied one of my FOIA requests. Turns out he was terminated for falsifying detail slips and lying about it (he was paid for an eight hour shift monitoring traffic at a construction project but spent 6 of those hours at town hall doing something for the police union and then tried to cover it up). Well, somehow he got reinstated with back pay to the tune of $500k. EVEN THAT came out of the town's general budget and not the police department budget-- backpay for police wages. Absurd.

Edit: Since his reinstatement in 2018 he's been promoted multiple times and is now the Deputy Police Chief rofl