What does a BIDEN Presidency look like?

[Barrister]

Sure. But the stakes of imperfection are different. "Shit, I cut this length of pipe too short for the sink. This is the third time!" vs "Shit, this intervention I lead escalated to violence for the third time"...

True.  And?

[Jacob]

A lot of the other things you mentioned I'm fully onboard, but this?  WTF?  We're going to fire people from civil service jobs, and confiscate their pensions, based on a quickly-evolving standard set by amoral entities that make decisions to make the problems for their shareholders go away rather than to treat their employee under fire fairly?  That's thought NKVD level shit right there.  I don't think modern corporate American standards should even be applied to modern American corporations, let alone a government job.

I mean modern America corporate standards as they're applied, not as they're spoken about. Whatever shit you think you can get away with at your job should be about the baseline for police as well, along with the consequences. I don't know, is that NKVD level shit?

At my job if I call someone at work a [racial epitaph] [sexual slur] at the very least I get a talking to by HR and will probably have to explain that I know I shouldn't do that and make some sort of excuse. If I do it in a way that results in a PR disaster for the company or if it's part of a repeated pattern, I'll probably have to adhere to an improvement plan or lose my job.

If someone in a position of power (other than the police - so say a social worker, a doctor, a caregiver, a professor, a manager) makes jokes about sexually assaulting or physically assaulting the people they have power over typically there are questions raised about their suitability. I don't see why the police should be exempt from that level of professional expectations.

[Jacob]

It seems the places that have issues are the places that have been run by people with very progressive politics and would probably agree with you in spirit (if not on every point). If you take Atlanta, which I think is probably representative of a lot of big cities, the reality is that the police department has been understaffed for many years (it can't get recruits for all of its positions) and morale is notoriously low. The cost of living in Atlanta is super high compared to the rest of the state and the top priority for elected officials in the rest of the state is to "back the blue".

I'm not giving a solution--I don't have one--just that the problems are pretty intractable.

I'm fine with paying more money - yes, out of my taxes - to the police if they live up to those standards.

Low morale, hard to recruit for organizations that regularly act in a socially harmful ways are rife for serious reform IMO. As I understand it, there are police forces - including in North America - that do better than the current reputation of the US police. If they have a better approach, I'm more than happy to take a cue from them.

[Oexmelin]

Sure. But the stakes of imperfection are different. "Shit, I cut this length of pipe too short for the sink. This is the third time!" vs "Shit, this intervention I lead escalated to violence for the third time"...

True.  And?

And so, beyond the generic recognition that to err is human, that mistakes can and will be made, the tolerance for said mistakes should be much lower for police agents, and I have no problem if the consequences for certain mistakes are quite harsh, "livelihood" be damned. I do not agree with Jacob about pensions.

[DGuller]

A lot of the other things you mentioned I'm fully onboard, but this?  WTF?  We're going to fire people from civil service jobs, and confiscate their pensions, based on a quickly-evolving standard set by amoral entities that make decisions to make the problems for their shareholders go away rather than to treat their employee under fire fairly?  That's thought NKVD level shit right there.  I don't think modern corporate American standards should even be applied to modern American corporations, let alone a government job.

I mean modern America corporate standards as they're applied, not as they're spoken about. Whatever shit you think you can get away with at your job should be about the baseline for police as well, along with the consequences. I don't know, is that NKVD level shit?

At my job if I call someone at work a [racial epitaph] [sexual slur] at the very least I get a talking to by HR and will probably have to explain that I know I shouldn't do that and make some sort of excuse. If I do it in a way that results in a PR disaster for the company or if it's part of a repeated pattern, I'll probably have to adhere to an improvement plan or lose my job.

If someone in a position of power (other than the police - so say a social worker, a doctor, a caregiver, a professor, a manager) makes jokes about sexually assaulting or physically assaulting the people they have power over typically there are questions raised about their suitability. I don't see why the police should be exempt from that level of professional expectations.

I'm not saying that some acts of racism shouldn't be sanctioned, but US corporate standards sometimes mean that a weather guy on a local TV station is fired for saying Martin Luther King a little too quickly, or a former racecar driver is fired for something he said 34 years ago while being new to the country.  I don't think too many people know what they can truly get away with at work;  I suspect the answer is they they can get away with too much in some circumstances, and be disposed of completely unfairly in others.

[Jacob]

-'callous disregard'  Look police deal with severely disadvantaged people every single day.  Compassion fatigue is a very real problem in their line of work (and to a much lesser degree my own).  Part of being a professional means acting like a professional, but really "three strikes and your out" for not having a professional demeanour?  What other profession has anything like that.

I think three (and probably two, maybe one) strike like this is sufficient that someone should be out: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/04/26/new-video-shows-colorado-police-laughing-at-violent-arrest-of-73-year-old-with-dementia/?sh=75a3f1ec578e

'tons of paperwork for firing a bullet'.  You have no much paperwork has to be filed for just pulling a gun out of your holster - it's a lot.  I can't even imagine what would happen for an officer shooting.  I think that automatically triggers an ASIRT investigation (an independent police oversight body).

There's a fair number of bullet storm police incidents in the US. I don't think the paperwork is sufficiently ornerous, to be honest. I expect it's fine in Canada, though.

fail to follow best practices' - your answer is suspension without pay.  Name me one profession where if you don't follow best practices you automatically get suspended without pay.  We're not talking about a major mistake, just not following best practices.  'I'm sorry you forgot to file your TPS reports last week - I guess that's 3 days without pay for you.  Try to do better next time'.  There's a wide range of effective penalties far short of that.

Sure, I'm open to a reasonable and proportionate scale. Main thing is the scale as it exists in a number of US police forces seems to be laughable. I think erring a bit on the side of draconic is appropriate right now.

'conduct yourself as non-inclusive = you're fired'  So I take it you're a big fan of "cancel culture then"?  Problem here is I'm only guessing at what you're meaning because your language is very vague.  I could immediately leap to "make a slightly off-colour joke in public while off duty and you're fired".  Is that what you intended?  We had a situation in Edmonton where two cops were caught by a door cam.  They were on duty but no one else was around and they didn't know they were being recorded.  They were talking about how whites would no longer be in the majority soon (which is true).  One oddly said something about yeah, he would urge his son to get an asian wife to fit in.  They then go out of camera range.  Should those officers be fired?

Imagine yourself saying something racist at work, racist enough that you'd get reassigned or otherwise suffer HR related consequences. Now imagine yourself doing it enough times - or perhaps stepping the intensity up a bit - sufficiently that you'd get fired for it. That's the bar I'd like to see applied to the police not this overly sensitive stuff you're worried about.

'lie under oath / hide evidence' - I mean we do this already.  I have never run into a situation where I think officers have faked evidence.  In fact I once tried to prosecute a case where I thought the officer was being so truthful I was using his own notes against him.  Bigger problem is one of "blue silence" where the officers just don't say anything, which is a harder problem to solve.

Yet, the amount of times individual officers and police departments have made statements (with very convincing levels of certainty) that have proven to be flat out the opposite of the truth when actual evidence showed up is way too high. The stories of officers carrying spare guns or bags of weed to plant on people after arrests are entirely too high as well. The consequences for being party to that should be servere enough to undermine blue silence, IMO.

'create an environment'... even vaguer.

Yes, I'm not writing policy here, I'm throwing out a bunch of ideas off the cuff. But yeah, if you encourage people around you to plant evidence and to lie to cover your fellow officers then you should face sanctions even if you don't do it yourself. And if you witness it and don't report it, that should have some consequences too, especially if they're people you supervise.

I agree there should be clear consequences for misdeeds.  We need to have a system to encourage greater accountability.  I do think body and dash cams can be a big part of that.

Yeah, and I think the potenential consequences for fucking up should be high enough that the body and dash cams are seen as reassurances from the cops that the cams are what protects them from unfair consequences from doing their job, rather than an impediment. I know a UK cop who views them as such (and I'm sure he's not the only one) - he very much prefers having cameras on because they protect him against spurious accusations of misbehavour.

But when your immediate reaction is to attack an officers livelihood through a system of suspensions without pay and summary dismissal (and I didn't even get into 'and lose your pension' with is just vindictive) you're going to immediately create overwhelming police hostility.  Any successful police reform initiative has to have a certain level of buy-in both from the wider community, but from police themselves.

There's room for fine tuning and figuring out what works best and so on, sure. But since they're not civilians, I think a dishonourable discharge equivalent should very much be on the table. And obviously it'd be best if we can get buy-in from the police themselves, but only if that buy-in is not contingent on protecting rotten apples, corruption, and abuse of power. Chuck the rotten apples with extreme prejudice, then work on getting buy-in from the non-rotten apples that remain.

[alfred russel]

It seems the places that have issues are the places that have been run by people with very progressive politics and would probably agree with you in spirit (if not on every point). If you take Atlanta, which I think is probably representative of a lot of big cities, the reality is that the police department has been understaffed for many years (it can't get recruits for all of its positions) and morale is notoriously low. The cost of living in Atlanta is super high compared to the rest of the state and the top priority for elected officials in the rest of the state is to "back the blue".

I'm not giving a solution--I don't have one--just that the problems are pretty intractable.

I'm fine with paying more money - yes, out of my taxes - to the police if they live up to those standards.

Low morale, hard to recruit for organizations that regularly act in a socially harmful ways are rife for serious reform IMO. As I understand it, there are police forces - including in North America - that do better than the current reputation of the US police. If they have a better approach, I'm more than happy to take a cue from them.

I hear ya--urban areas paying more to police to compensate them for the generally tougher job they have and higher cost of living etc is a good idea for both recruitment and morale. But that is the opposite of the current zeitgeist: urban voters wanting to reduce funding to police forces and rural areas wanting to "back the blue".

[Jacob]

And so, beyond the generic recognition that to err is human, that mistakes can and will be made, the tolerance for said mistakes should be much lower for police agents, and I have no problem if the consequences for certain mistakes are quite harsh, "livelihood" be damned. I do not agree with Jacob about pensions.

I guess I'm being too cavalier about pensions. Probably because I'm in a line of work where I don't get one beyond what I put away myself.

If it's that big a deal, sure only put it on the table for the most egregious of situations. Or don't put it on the table, that's fine too. As long as the consequences for being a police rotten apple are severe enough that they give some pause.

[garbon]

A lot of the other things you mentioned I'm fully onboard, but this?  WTF?  We're going to fire people from civil service jobs, and confiscate their pensions, based on a quickly-evolving standard set by amoral entities that make decisions to make the problems for their shareholders go away rather than to treat their employee under fire fairly?  That's thought NKVD level shit right there.  I don't think modern corporate American standards should even be applied to modern American corporations, let alone a government job.

I mean modern America corporate standards as they're applied, not as they're spoken about. Whatever shit you think you can get away with at your job should be about the baseline for police as well, along with the consequences. I don't know, is that NKVD level shit?

At my job if I call someone at work a [racial epitaph] [sexual slur] at the very least I get a talking to by HR and will probably have to explain that I know I shouldn't do that and make some sort of excuse. If I do it in a way that results in a PR disaster for the company or if it's part of a repeated pattern, I'll probably have to adhere to an improvement plan or lose my job.

If someone in a position of power (other than the police - so say a social worker, a doctor, a caregiver, a professor, a manager) makes jokes about sexually assaulting or physically assaulting the people they have power over typically there are questions raised about their suitability. I don't see why the police should be exempt from that level of professional expectations.

I'm not saying that some acts of racism shouldn't be sanctioned, but US corporate standards sometimes mean that a weather guy on a local TV station is fired for saying Martin Luther King a little too quickly, or a former racecar driver is fired for something he said 34 years ago while being new to the country.  I don't think too many people know what they can truly get away with at work;  I suspect the answer is they they can get away with too much in some circumstances, and be disposed of completely unfairly in others.

Can you at least get an update example?

[Barrister]

And so, beyond the generic recognition that to err is human, that mistakes can and will be made, the tolerance for said mistakes should be much lower for police agents, and I have no problem if the consequences for certain mistakes are quite harsh, "livelihood" be damned. I do not agree with Jacob about pensions.

I guess I'm being too cavalier about pensions. Probably because I'm in a line of work where I don't get one beyond what I put away myself.

If it's that big a deal, sure only put it on the table for the most egregious of situations. Or don't put it on the table, that's fine too. As long as the consequences for being a police rotten apple are severe enough that they give some pause.

The thing you have to remember about pensions is that the beneficiary contributes to them as well.

So look - it would be pretty hard to lose a job you've had for 20 years, but hopefully you can get a new one.

But to lose a job you've had for 20 years - but to also lose the 20 years of savings you were counting on to retire with?  You can get a new job, but you can't ever make up for those 20 years.

[Savonarola]

Biden expected to ban menthol cigarettes

Just out of curiosity; are menthol cigarettes still legal in Canada?

[Barrister]

Biden expected to ban menthol cigarettes

Just out of curiosity; are menthol cigarettes still legal in Canada?

Nope.  Banned 4-5 years ago.

[Grey Fox]

No, since 2017.

[Savonarola]

Biden expected to ban menthol cigarettes

Just out of curiosity; are menthol cigarettes still legal in Canada?

Nope.  Banned 4-5 years ago.

Ah well, my dreams of being a bootlegger are crushed. 

[Tonitrus]

Legalizing pot, but banning menthol seem to be moving in somewhat contradictory directions of substance abuse tolerance.