Look at it this way - which cops do you think are most likely to be affected by a rule that would allow them to lose their certification for particularly egregious or repeated errors? It isn’t the good ones that you might want to keep around.
Lying on a police report. Intentionally disobeying organization policy by disabling body cameras. Tackling a suspect to the ground that isn’t resisting. Beating a suspect in handcuffs. Shooting someone who is facing away from them with their hands up. Do you believe that a reasonable person would understand that these things are wrong without even a single day of training?
Personally, I’m okay with scaring people away from the profession who might think “jeez, I can get fired and lose my certification just for intentionally assaulting a civilian and then lying to a judge about it on an official report” or “man, execute one person who wasn’t an immediate threat, and that’s it my careers over”. Maybe it’s okay if those people decide not to become cops on the first place
You’re thinking about the positive impact it will have on the small, egde-case outlier cops who intentionally hurt people for the fun of it, and not the majority of cops who never do something that would attract views on social media now having to alter their decision making process because if they ever happen to make the wrong split-second decision their whole career is over.
It will deter normal good people from being cops. It will deter the logical, respectful, moral person that you’d want to be a cop from becoming a cop.
They aren’t as much of outliers as you might think, and yes, eliminating those outliers is absolutely the goal.
But you seem to be thinking that no good person will want to be subject to accountability and consequences. Nobody is suggesting that a cop be immediately terminated forever for any minor mistake they might make. Not even necessarily for a big mistake. There are different degrees of punishment for different levels of mistakes and violations.
Everyone understands that in the course of their profession, police may need to shoot and kill a suspect. If a cop makes a potentially understandable mistake, even if it leads to the death of another person, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re permanently banned. Track record and reasonableness given the situation are important to consider.
Courts still lean heavily towards giving police the benefit of the doubt and that’s not going to change any time soon. So this fear mongering of “scrutiny means good people won’t be cops” just doesn’t stand up. If they’re as good as you say, they should be okay with following professional standards, upholding the law, and exercising good judgement on a regular basis. And those are not the cops that this type of legislation would be targeting.
But at this moment, we all know there are still too many problem cops, and the mechanisms in place aren’t strong enough to prevent a problem cop with a history from continuing to be a cop. At a certain point, enough is enough.
Look at it this way - which cops do you think are most likely to be affected by a rule that would allow them to lose their certification for particularly egregious or repeated errors? It isn’t the good ones that you might want to keep around.
Lying on a police report. Intentionally disobeying organization policy by disabling body cameras. Tackling a suspect to the ground that isn’t resisting. Beating a suspect in handcuffs. Shooting someone who is facing away from them with their hands up. Do you believe that a reasonable person would understand that these things are wrong without even a single day of training?
Personally, I’m okay with scaring people away from the profession who might think “jeez, I can get fired and lose my certification just for intentionally assaulting a civilian and then lying to a judge about it on an official report” or “man, execute one person who wasn’t an immediate threat, and that’s it my careers over”. Maybe it’s okay if those people decide not to become cops on the first place
You’re thinking about the positive impact it will have on the small, egde-case outlier cops who intentionally hurt people for the fun of it, and not the majority of cops who never do something that would attract views on social media now having to alter their decision making process because if they ever happen to make the wrong split-second decision their whole career is over.
It will deter normal good people from being cops. It will deter the logical, respectful, moral person that you’d want to be a cop from becoming a cop.
They aren’t as much of outliers as you might think, and yes, eliminating those outliers is absolutely the goal.
But you seem to be thinking that no good person will want to be subject to accountability and consequences. Nobody is suggesting that a cop be immediately terminated forever for any minor mistake they might make. Not even necessarily for a big mistake. There are different degrees of punishment for different levels of mistakes and violations.
Everyone understands that in the course of their profession, police may need to shoot and kill a suspect. If a cop makes a potentially understandable mistake, even if it leads to the death of another person, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re permanently banned. Track record and reasonableness given the situation are important to consider.
Courts still lean heavily towards giving police the benefit of the doubt and that’s not going to change any time soon. So this fear mongering of “scrutiny means good people won’t be cops” just doesn’t stand up. If they’re as good as you say, they should be okay with following professional standards, upholding the law, and exercising good judgement on a regular basis. And those are not the cops that this type of legislation would be targeting.
But at this moment, we all know there are still too many problem cops, and the mechanisms in place aren’t strong enough to prevent a problem cop with a history from continuing to be a cop. At a certain point, enough is enough.