The deal brings an end to a lawsuit brought last year by Officer Mathew Bianchi that claimed he’d been punished by his superiors for failing to honor the cards, though the settlement itself makes no substantive changes to how the cards are used by NYPD officers.
This is something that shouldn't exist. Just because someone is friends with or does a favor for a cop they get a "I don't have to follow the law card". WTF?!?!? Doesn't matter if it's only for...
This is something that shouldn't exist. Just because someone is friends with or does a favor for a cop they get a "I don't have to follow the law card". WTF?!?!? Doesn't matter if it's only for minor infractions. They are also depriving the city I assume of revenue for tickets. The cop that sued seems like one of the good ones. That chief and whoever else that is upholding/running this program needs a severe reprimand or demotion and it should stop, but I get the impression the program is still in operation.
It's pretty much a "get out of jail" card, but instead of being used in a game, they are used to absolve people of getting fined for things like speeding. There is a reason we have laws against...
It's pretty much a "get out of jail" card, but instead of being used in a game, they are used to absolve people of getting fined for things like speeding. There is a reason we have laws against this: speeding, for instance, has killed many. Disgusting stuff, and not the first instance of abuse of power coming from a US police force.
In a job designed to perpetuate state violence, there is no such thing. The only good cop is the one that quits. Edit: I expected to get responses I disagree with, but "state violence is good,...
The cop that sued seems like one of the good ones.
In a job designed to perpetuate state violence, there is no such thing. The only good cop is the one that quits.
Edit: I expected to get responses I disagree with, but "state violence is good, actually" was not among them. I think it's time I filter out the politics tag.
Unless you're a libertarian, I don't see the alternative to state violence. I'm not saying that police departments shouldn't be improved, and of course police unions play a big role in why police...
Exemplary
Unless you're a libertarian, I don't see the alternative to state violence. I'm not saying that police departments shouldn't be improved, and of course police unions play a big role in why police often don't get held accountable, but there's no perfect system. So as long as the system exists at all, violence, justified and unjustified, will occur, and the goal is to reduce it while ensuring that laws are enforced.
Even if you are a libertarian, that's just supporting market violence instead of state violence to some extent. If all protection of property etc. is private, there's even less accountability. It's the hard truth of life, life is sometimes violent. Stopping people from doing things you don't want them to do requires violence, or implicit threats of violence.
Yeah, state violence is of course bad, all violence is, but in a democratic society, the state having a legal monopoly on violence at least provides a potential avenue for accountability. I'd much...
Yeah, state violence is of course bad, all violence is, but in a democratic society, the state having a legal monopoly on violence at least provides a potential avenue for accountability. I'd much rather have someone who I pay to do violence under certain guidelines, and who is subject to my votes than an Elon musk death squad that just does whatever whoever pays them says.
Yes, and… Community control of the police. Democratize it. After all, we already believe the police ought “serve and protect.” But for whom? Often it’s those in power and influence, or property.
Yes, and…
Community control of the police. Democratize it. After all, we already believe the police ought “serve and protect.” But for whom? Often it’s those in power and influence, or property.
Respectfully, if you think state violence is bad, you should see the other kinds. As others have said, state violence provides the opportunity for accountability. There are abuses, but they are...
Exemplary
Respectfully, if you think state violence is bad, you should see the other kinds.
As others have said, state violence provides the opportunity for accountability. There are abuses, but they are not the accepted norm. People have many different avenues by which they can seek justice and correct the problem in the future.
State violence is also an equalizer. I am a slim male of average height with no violent tendencies. A larger, stronger person with a higher capacity for violence is not free to take what he wants from me without consequence. I can call on the state to protect me, or to help me seek justice after the fact.
Look at the violent labor battles in 19th century American company towns to see an example of what happens when brutal police forces are accountable only to a single person or business. This was true in history and it remains true today. Cartels in South and Central America, gangs in Haiti, the list goes on. Good luck getting justice or safety from these groups if you have nothing to offer them. You are perhaps even worse off if you do have something they want.
I'm pretty liberal and I obviously think a healthy democracy needs to stamp out abuse of power every single time. But when I hear my hardcore leftie friends start saying that police shouldn't exist, I struggle to understand how they think their idealism is going to mesh with reality.
Best case scenario would be Musk/Benzos goon squads operating with medium levels of impunity to protect consumers and capital. Worst case is a power vacuum filled by the worst of the worst gang members with unlimited capacity for cruelty and violence.
It does not, in fact, do any of this. State monopolies on violence mean the state gets to dictate what kinds of violence are acceptable, and they have. Police abuses of power are very much the...
As others have said, state violence provides the opportunity for accountability. There are abuses, but they are not the accepted norm.
It does not, in fact, do any of this. State monopolies on violence mean the state gets to dictate what kinds of violence are acceptable, and they have. Police abuses of power are very much the accepted norm; we just pretend otherwise.
State violence is also an equalizer.
This tells me you've lived a privileged life, and/or never had a truly bad run in with the cops before.
Look at the violent labor battles in 19th century American company towns to see an example of what happens when brutal police forces are accountable only to a single person or business.
You mean the labor battles that state violence helped perpetuate? Stuff like the Battle of Blair Mountain, which the U.S. government participated in on the side of the companies?
I'm pretty liberal and I obviously think a healthy democracy needs to stamp out abuse of power every single time. But when I hear my hardcore leftie friends start saying that police shouldn't exist, I struggle to understand how they think their idealism is going to mesh with reality.
This is because you've grown extremely accustomed to the society that exists today, to such a degree that you have difficulty imagining what radical change would even look like. A great many are like you. It's not unusual.
But cops are an antagonistic solution, and are designed as such. For this reason, they will never be justice.
I will not be responding to any further comments, as I have no interest in continuing a debate when this site's consensus appears to be that state violence is perfectly acceptable.
I know you've said you don't want to respond to any further comments, but I was wondering if you could describe what kind of change you're talking about. I'm not being sarcastic or anything...
I know you've said you don't want to respond to any further comments, but I was wondering if you could describe what kind of change you're talking about.
I'm not being sarcastic or anything either. I'm genuinely very interested to hear what you have in mind. I'm open to new ideas! Help me understand.
(Late reply, but this is hardly an impolite ask, so I wanted to oblige. Sorry about the wait.) I have several issues with policing overall, from its U.S. history of strikebreaking and...
(Late reply, but this is hardly an impolite ask, so I wanted to oblige. Sorry about the wait.)
I have several issues with policing overall, from its U.S. history of strikebreaking and slavecatching, to the modern day idea of enforcing the status quo by violent acts such as tear-gassing protesters to evicting the poor to enforcing laws that attack the homeless just for existing. To me, it is not possible to be a good cop, because you either have to be a good person (and be bad at your job) or be good at your job (and do horrible things). You can't do both, so you can only succeed by quitting.
Many people will argue that cops should be changed to do milder or more helpful things, like being trained to better handle domestic issues or mental illness. But to me, either this is doomed to fail because it's still cops with guns doing it who will always be prone to violence, or you do it by extricating all the violence and thus it stops being cops altogether. Paramedics, social services workers, and crisis intervention aren't cops, because they do not inherently wield or further state violence.
Still, the most important factor is and always will be that innumerable better solutions are on offer. So to answer your question, there are two things in particular stand out in my mind as examples.
The first occurred on another site. I'd mentioned I was fine with very literally abolishing the police,1 and someone responded by saying:
Someone has to take care of the person who stole a car and is speeding down the freeway going 100+, crisis councilors aren’t going to be driving trying to perform a PIT maneuver.
...to which I responded:
This could be solved by replacing cars with public transport, such that people don’t really have so many opportunities to go 100+ to begin with, or by using traffic calming techniques to make it feel too unsafe for anyone to want to try, or using alternative road layouts to make it significantly harder to pull off at all (e.g. roundabouts). There are many options, almost all of which are better – and less punitive – than the police.
Thinking like this can be applied to a great many things besides traffic, be it drugs, murder, etc. People are not ontologically evil, so it does no good to treat them as such. By and large, many crimes occur because of various reasons typically borne from societal ills, such as financial hardship or a lack of access to things like therapy. Fix those, and you can prevent a lot of crime from even being considered.
The second example was here on Tildes. A while back, this article on American air safety was posted here, and I found it a very compelling and concrete demonstration of how things could be better. It opens by describing a horrific crash that killed several dozen people, and then delves in to how and why it happened, and how the investigation occurred. I highly recommend reading it in whole, as it's a very good article, but the important parts are this:
In the aftermath of a disaster, our immediate reaction is often to search for some person to blame. Authorities frequently vow to “find those responsible” and “hold them to account,” as though disasters happen only when some grinning mischief-maker slams a big red button labeled “press for catastrophe.” That’s not to say that negligence ought to go unpunished. Sometimes there really is a malefactor to blame, but equally often there isn’t, and the result is that normal people who just made a mistake are caught up in the dragnet of vengeance, like the famous 2009 case of six Italian seismologists who were charged for failing to predict a deadly earthquake. But when that happens, what is actually accomplished? Has anything been made better? Or have we simply kicked the can down the road?
It’s often much more productive to ask why than to ask who. In some industries, this is called a “blameless postmortem,” and in aviation, it’s a long-standing, internationally formalized tradition.
[...]
The [National Transportation Safety Board] does not assign fault or blame for an accident or incident; rather, as specified by NTSB regulation, “accident/incident investigations are fact-finding proceedings with no formal issues and no adverse parties…and are not conducted for the purpose of determining the rights or liabilities of any person.”
When liability is not a concern, an investigation has leeway to draw more meaningful conclusions. In the case of the disaster in Los Angeles, if you listen to the tower tapes, you can easily identify the moment Wascher cleared two planes to use the same runway. But if you remove her from the equation, you haven’t made anything safer. That’s because there was nothing special about Wascher — she was simply an average controller with an average record, who came into work that day thinking she would safely control planes for a few hours and then go home. That’s why in interviews with national media her colleagues hammered home a fundamental truth: that what happened to her could have happened to any of them. And if that was the case, then the true cause of the disaster lay somewhere higher, with the way air traffic control was handled at LAX on a systemic level.
In my mind, this is how it should be. And it is why institutions like police are an abject failure. They seek to blame and punish, and when you do that, you solve nothing. All you do is hurt more people, and empower others to do so themselves.
By contrast, here's what the NTSB investigation got us:
[...] as a result of these findings, genuine safety improvements have been made, including more reliable ground radar at more airports, automated ground collision alerting technologies, and a national ban on clearing planes to hold on the runway in low visibility. None of these improvements would have been made if the inquiry stopped at who instead of asking why.
Real, meaningful change, that has no doubt saved lives. And all that without punishing anyone at all, because this is a design that works with people instead of against them.
Police don't do that, and they never did.
The fact that Wascher made a mistake was self-evident, as was the fact that that mistake led, more or less directly, to the deaths of 35 people. The media and the public began to question the fate of Ms. Wascher. Should she be punished? Should she lose her job? Did she commit an offense?
[...]
Cutting straight to the case, Wascher was not punished in any way. At first, after being escorted, inconsolable, from the tower premises, her colleagues took her to a hotel and stood guard outside her room to keep the media at bay. Months later, Wascher testified before the NTSB hearings, providing a faithful and earnest recounting of the events as she recalled them. She was even given the opportunity to return to the control tower, but she declined. No one was ever charged with a crime.
As the aviation industry has learned through hard-won experience, that’s usually how it should be.
1. To be clear, I also said: "This doesn’t mean we should replace the police with literally nothing — obviously things investing in social services and crisis intervention would be great. It’s just that I find it hard to do worse than what currently exists."
Thank you for the thorough and well-reasoned response. I started a comment with specific points and quotes from your post, but I deleted it because honestly, I agree with you in principle on every...
Thank you for the thorough and well-reasoned response. I started a comment with specific points and quotes from your post, but I deleted it because honestly, I agree with you in principle on every point. I teach middle school kids with learning disabilities, and probably only half of my students are born with legitimate disabilities - the other half fall behind because their home lives suck so much. So yeah, I'm very much a bleeding heart idealist who wants to make the world better through the power of love and robust social services.
However...
Here is where I think you and I are failing to meet on this issue: Your (or dare I say our) ideal system would need to be perfect 100% of the time to remove the need for police. Mental health services, child services, public transport, medicine, and a slew of other services would need to prevent 100% of crime and endangerment. This is literally never going to happen unless science finds a miracle drug that curbs every desire we have as human beings.
In a perfect system, a woman will still become enraged with her husband and grab a kitchen knife in a moment of extreme distress. A young man with an unloving mother will still rape his college girlfriend in an attempt to resolve these feelings. A boy who has experienced sexual trauma will still, even after a ton of therapy, choose to mix together bathroom cleaning chemicals to inflict harm on strangers in a subway car.
Notice, I didn't even bring up guns because I assume in our ideal world guns would not exist. But realistically, they will always exist in some capacity even if outlawed completely.
You'll also notice I attributed all of these harmful actions to some type of trauma previously experienced by the perpetrator. I did this because it demonstrates the need for our ideal world to catch 100% of these issues and handle them perfectly 100% of the time. Even a small slip up can result in unresolved trauma which can (and will, in a large enough sample size) lead to extreme antisocial behavior.
But even these examples are the "ideal" examples. You assert that nobody is born evil, and I only agree with you to the point that I don't believe in evil as a concept. Whatever we call it, some people absolutely are born this way and they will take advantage of people who think they are good every single time. They would see your point of view as hilarious and weak-minded. That isn't me insulting you because I also feel mostly the way you do. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. I like to assume everyone is inherently good, possibly made bad by a cruel world. But I know this isn't true. I think of Donald Trump's comment about how cheating makes him smart. That mentality is common and it's not always an affliction that the "sufferer" wants fixed. Some of them like it. We will always have natural born psychopaths and sociopaths. Many of them feel zero empathy for you or I, and they have zero interest in singing kumbaya with us.
They do exist. I grew up with at least two of them, I have met a couple more as an adult, and I certainly have taught one or two of them in my role as an educator.
Speak softly and carry a big stick. Love thy neighbor but lock thy door at night.
Not everyone is good. Some people like to prey on others. And even if you found a miracle drug to make everyone good, you will never get 8 billion people on board with taking it.
To end my response, I want to again clarify that I would never defend abuses of power. The examples you give are obviously horrible and make a really good case for why police shouldn't exist. But there's that old saying about capitalism that applies here: Police are the worst possible solution... except for all the other ones.
All of that said, I am in favor of massive reforms to reduce that type of abuse. We could democratize our police more, give oversight committees more teeth, give more power to the people, etc. Police should serve peaceful people. They should protect peaceful people. They should defer to social services whenever possible. But once in a while, even in a perfect world, there is a violent motherfucker with a gun who only speaks the language of violence and power. In these cases, the police need to be empowered by the peaceful people to utilize violence in a controlled and regulated way.
What are your thoughts on this? Again, thank you for the thoughtful response.
This is the first time I'm hearing about "courtesy cards", and it seems insane that they're tolerated at all. I'm a public servant myself, and it's drilled into us that there are very clear ethics...
This is the first time I'm hearing about "courtesy cards", and it seems insane that they're tolerated at all.
I'm a public servant myself, and it's drilled into us that there are very clear ethics guidelines. I'm appointed by the citizens of my municipality to do a job, and I'm paid by their taxes and trusted to serve them fairly. As such, I'm very, very careful to not use my position for any sort of personal benefit. The compensation I get is my paycheck and benefits package, and nothing more. I don't accept free gifts from outside vendors, I don't use my position to enhance my life, and I especially don't use my position to give my friends and families special benefits. Why should they get special treatment on the taxpayers dime just because they know me?
I'm guessing this is something that the police unions have strong armed the city into allowing, but it should absolutely be made illegal via legislation. It's not morally right at all.
I had one of those cards from when my sister was briefly with NYPD. I also had a small badge in a wallet type of thing that said "officer's brother," presumably meant to be kept in the glove...
I had one of those cards from when my sister was briefly with NYPD. I also had a small badge in a wallet type of thing that said "officer's brother," presumably meant to be kept in the glove compartment of my car or something. It definitely felt scummy to even have them, but I did keep them for a couple of years in case they ever might have come in handy. For me it wasn't so much about getting out of tickets as it was about defusing any encounter I might have with a cop having a bad night. Anyway, it eventually became a moot point, as I got rid of my car a couple of years later.
Not sure why I expected real change.
This is something that shouldn't exist. Just because someone is friends with or does a favor for a cop they get a "I don't have to follow the law card". WTF?!?!? Doesn't matter if it's only for minor infractions. They are also depriving the city I assume of revenue for tickets. The cop that sued seems like one of the good ones. That chief and whoever else that is upholding/running this program needs a severe reprimand or demotion and it should stop, but I get the impression the program is still in operation.
It's pretty much a "get out of jail" card, but instead of being used in a game, they are used to absolve people of getting fined for things like speeding. There is a reason we have laws against this: speeding, for instance, has killed many. Disgusting stuff, and not the first instance of abuse of power coming from a US police force.
In a job designed to perpetuate state violence, there is no such thing. The only good cop is the one that quits.
Edit: I expected to get responses I disagree with, but "state violence is good, actually" was not among them. I think it's time I filter out the politics tag.
Unless you're a libertarian, I don't see the alternative to state violence. I'm not saying that police departments shouldn't be improved, and of course police unions play a big role in why police often don't get held accountable, but there's no perfect system. So as long as the system exists at all, violence, justified and unjustified, will occur, and the goal is to reduce it while ensuring that laws are enforced.
Even if you are a libertarian, that's just supporting market violence instead of state violence to some extent. If all protection of property etc. is private, there's even less accountability. It's the hard truth of life, life is sometimes violent. Stopping people from doing things you don't want them to do requires violence, or implicit threats of violence.
Yeah, state violence is of course bad, all violence is, but in a democratic society, the state having a legal monopoly on violence at least provides a potential avenue for accountability. I'd much rather have someone who I pay to do violence under certain guidelines, and who is subject to my votes than an Elon musk death squad that just does whatever whoever pays them says.
Yes, and…
Community control of the police. Democratize it. After all, we already believe the police ought “serve and protect.” But for whom? Often it’s those in power and influence, or property.
This is honest to god the best written example of why the concept of police is good, that I've ever seen.
Respectfully, if you think state violence is bad, you should see the other kinds.
As others have said, state violence provides the opportunity for accountability. There are abuses, but they are not the accepted norm. People have many different avenues by which they can seek justice and correct the problem in the future.
State violence is also an equalizer. I am a slim male of average height with no violent tendencies. A larger, stronger person with a higher capacity for violence is not free to take what he wants from me without consequence. I can call on the state to protect me, or to help me seek justice after the fact.
Look at the violent labor battles in 19th century American company towns to see an example of what happens when brutal police forces are accountable only to a single person or business. This was true in history and it remains true today. Cartels in South and Central America, gangs in Haiti, the list goes on. Good luck getting justice or safety from these groups if you have nothing to offer them. You are perhaps even worse off if you do have something they want.
I'm pretty liberal and I obviously think a healthy democracy needs to stamp out abuse of power every single time. But when I hear my hardcore leftie friends start saying that police shouldn't exist, I struggle to understand how they think their idealism is going to mesh with reality.
Best case scenario would be Musk/Benzos goon squads operating with medium levels of impunity to protect consumers and capital. Worst case is a power vacuum filled by the worst of the worst gang members with unlimited capacity for cruelty and violence.
It does not, in fact, do any of this. State monopolies on violence mean the state gets to dictate what kinds of violence are acceptable, and they have. Police abuses of power are very much the accepted norm; we just pretend otherwise.
This tells me you've lived a privileged life, and/or never had a truly bad run in with the cops before.
You mean the labor battles that state violence helped perpetuate? Stuff like the Battle of Blair Mountain, which the U.S. government participated in on the side of the companies?
This is because you've grown extremely accustomed to the society that exists today, to such a degree that you have difficulty imagining what radical change would even look like. A great many are like you. It's not unusual.
But cops are an antagonistic solution, and are designed as such. For this reason, they will never be justice.
I will not be responding to any further comments, as I have no interest in continuing a debate when this site's consensus appears to be that state violence is perfectly acceptable.
I know you've said you don't want to respond to any further comments, but I was wondering if you could describe what kind of change you're talking about.
I'm not being sarcastic or anything either. I'm genuinely very interested to hear what you have in mind. I'm open to new ideas! Help me understand.
(Late reply, but this is hardly an impolite ask, so I wanted to oblige. Sorry about the wait.)
I have several issues with policing overall, from its U.S. history of strikebreaking and slavecatching, to the modern day idea of enforcing the status quo by violent acts such as tear-gassing protesters to evicting the poor to enforcing laws that attack the homeless just for existing. To me, it is not possible to be a good cop, because you either have to be a good person (and be bad at your job) or be good at your job (and do horrible things). You can't do both, so you can only succeed by quitting.
Many people will argue that cops should be changed to do milder or more helpful things, like being trained to better handle domestic issues or mental illness. But to me, either this is doomed to fail because it's still cops with guns doing it who will always be prone to violence, or you do it by extricating all the violence and thus it stops being cops altogether. Paramedics, social services workers, and crisis intervention aren't cops, because they do not inherently wield or further state violence.
Still, the most important factor is and always will be that innumerable better solutions are on offer. So to answer your question, there are two things in particular stand out in my mind as examples.
The first occurred on another site. I'd mentioned I was fine with very literally abolishing the police,1 and someone responded by saying:
...to which I responded:
Thinking like this can be applied to a great many things besides traffic, be it drugs, murder, etc. People are not ontologically evil, so it does no good to treat them as such. By and large, many crimes occur because of various reasons typically borne from societal ills, such as financial hardship or a lack of access to things like therapy. Fix those, and you can prevent a lot of crime from even being considered.
The second example was here on Tildes. A while back, this article on American air safety was posted here, and I found it a very compelling and concrete demonstration of how things could be better. It opens by describing a horrific crash that killed several dozen people, and then delves in to how and why it happened, and how the investigation occurred. I highly recommend reading it in whole, as it's a very good article, but the important parts are this:
[...]
In my mind, this is how it should be. And it is why institutions like police are an abject failure. They seek to blame and punish, and when you do that, you solve nothing. All you do is hurt more people, and empower others to do so themselves.
By contrast, here's what the NTSB investigation got us:
Real, meaningful change, that has no doubt saved lives. And all that without punishing anyone at all, because this is a design that works with people instead of against them.
Police don't do that, and they never did.
[...]
1. To be clear, I also said: "This doesn’t mean we should replace the police with literally nothing — obviously things investing in social services and crisis intervention would be great. It’s just that I find it hard to do worse than what currently exists."
Thank you for the thorough and well-reasoned response. I started a comment with specific points and quotes from your post, but I deleted it because honestly, I agree with you in principle on every point. I teach middle school kids with learning disabilities, and probably only half of my students are born with legitimate disabilities - the other half fall behind because their home lives suck so much. So yeah, I'm very much a bleeding heart idealist who wants to make the world better through the power of love and robust social services.
However...
Here is where I think you and I are failing to meet on this issue: Your (or dare I say our) ideal system would need to be perfect 100% of the time to remove the need for police. Mental health services, child services, public transport, medicine, and a slew of other services would need to prevent 100% of crime and endangerment. This is literally never going to happen unless science finds a miracle drug that curbs every desire we have as human beings.
In a perfect system, a woman will still become enraged with her husband and grab a kitchen knife in a moment of extreme distress. A young man with an unloving mother will still rape his college girlfriend in an attempt to resolve these feelings. A boy who has experienced sexual trauma will still, even after a ton of therapy, choose to mix together bathroom cleaning chemicals to inflict harm on strangers in a subway car.
Notice, I didn't even bring up guns because I assume in our ideal world guns would not exist. But realistically, they will always exist in some capacity even if outlawed completely.
You'll also notice I attributed all of these harmful actions to some type of trauma previously experienced by the perpetrator. I did this because it demonstrates the need for our ideal world to catch 100% of these issues and handle them perfectly 100% of the time. Even a small slip up can result in unresolved trauma which can (and will, in a large enough sample size) lead to extreme antisocial behavior.
But even these examples are the "ideal" examples. You assert that nobody is born evil, and I only agree with you to the point that I don't believe in evil as a concept. Whatever we call it, some people absolutely are born this way and they will take advantage of people who think they are good every single time. They would see your point of view as hilarious and weak-minded. That isn't me insulting you because I also feel mostly the way you do. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. I like to assume everyone is inherently good, possibly made bad by a cruel world. But I know this isn't true. I think of Donald Trump's comment about how cheating makes him smart. That mentality is common and it's not always an affliction that the "sufferer" wants fixed. Some of them like it. We will always have natural born psychopaths and sociopaths. Many of them feel zero empathy for you or I, and they have zero interest in singing kumbaya with us.
They do exist. I grew up with at least two of them, I have met a couple more as an adult, and I certainly have taught one or two of them in my role as an educator.
Speak softly and carry a big stick. Love thy neighbor but lock thy door at night.
Not everyone is good. Some people like to prey on others. And even if you found a miracle drug to make everyone good, you will never get 8 billion people on board with taking it.
To end my response, I want to again clarify that I would never defend abuses of power. The examples you give are obviously horrible and make a really good case for why police shouldn't exist. But there's that old saying about capitalism that applies here: Police are the worst possible solution... except for all the other ones.
All of that said, I am in favor of massive reforms to reduce that type of abuse. We could democratize our police more, give oversight committees more teeth, give more power to the people, etc. Police should serve peaceful people. They should protect peaceful people. They should defer to social services whenever possible. But once in a while, even in a perfect world, there is a violent motherfucker with a gun who only speaks the language of violence and power. In these cases, the police need to be empowered by the peaceful people to utilize violence in a controlled and regulated way.
What are your thoughts on this? Again, thank you for the thoughtful response.
This is the first time I'm hearing about "courtesy cards", and it seems insane that they're tolerated at all.
I'm a public servant myself, and it's drilled into us that there are very clear ethics guidelines. I'm appointed by the citizens of my municipality to do a job, and I'm paid by their taxes and trusted to serve them fairly. As such, I'm very, very careful to not use my position for any sort of personal benefit. The compensation I get is my paycheck and benefits package, and nothing more. I don't accept free gifts from outside vendors, I don't use my position to enhance my life, and I especially don't use my position to give my friends and families special benefits. Why should they get special treatment on the taxpayers dime just because they know me?
I'm guessing this is something that the police unions have strong armed the city into allowing, but it should absolutely be made illegal via legislation. It's not morally right at all.
After clicking on the card link in the article, I saw this:
This is just bribery with extra steps...
I had one of those cards from when my sister was briefly with NYPD. I also had a small badge in a wallet type of thing that said "officer's brother," presumably meant to be kept in the glove compartment of my car or something. It definitely felt scummy to even have them, but I did keep them for a couple of years in case they ever might have come in handy. For me it wasn't so much about getting out of tickets as it was about defusing any encounter I might have with a cop having a bad night. Anyway, it eventually became a moot point, as I got rid of my car a couple of years later.