Pixiq

Normally your posts are well reasoned, but this one is a bit off.

You state: “Now it is evident that one of the reasons for this increase is the lowering of police hiring standards in the recruitment frenzy following the September 11 terrorist attacks.”

That would make sense if you had some evidence for it. Say a study that shows a disproptortionate number of cops involved in abusing rights would not have made the old standards. Unfortunately, you don’t have anything. The post boils down to: Complaints have risen 25%, ergo lowered standards are causing the rise. Funding is also increasing, ergo more abuses will occur.

Maybe hiring standards aren’t the issue, but the sense of entitlement, official (and unofficial) policy changes, and TSA insanity are causing the abuses to go up among ALL officers. Maybe the training has become substandard. Maybe the extra funding will actually improve police departments.

I don’t disagree that rights are being trampled and will continue to be trampled, but your supposed reason is an unsupported hypothesis.

If you could find some hard data, I’d love to see it. Keep up the (generally) good work!

@tgt: Granted there’s no hard data, but given how many extra cops have been hired since 9/11, something had to change, and the most likely culprit is hiring standards. Carlos’ pointing out the Miami River Cops case helps bolster this by showing that in the past at least one police department has resorted to lowered standards to add to their ranks of officers.

Personally I suspect it’s a combination of things. Many police departments probably have lowered their standards, but I wouldn’t be surprised if training has suffered as well. Also I think we definitely have evidence (from this blog alone) of a sense of entitlement/power by officers accompanied almost exclusively by vague justifications of “_____’s not allowed due to anti-terrorism laws”. Now certainly not all cops act this way, but there’s definitely a decent chunk of them who do. This also may show problems in training but could also be due to lowered hiring standards (the cops that do this wouldn’t have been hired with higher standards because those standards would have weeded out ones likely to act in this manner).

I don’t think the increased funding will help matters though, most police departments desperately need equipment and/or more officers, so it’ll go for more of the same I’m afraid. In some ways less funding might help, by forcing them to do more with less, which would require them to make sure the officers they do have know the law and how to behave properly. (Because they couldn’t easily replace an officer.)

I think there is also a general acquiescence on the part of the public in thinking that violations of peoples’ rights is expected and necessary given the war on terror. More people speak up and assert their rights with video documentation, given the affordability of the technology, but too many people on the sidelines will dismiss them as being troublemakers. I don’t think the lowering of police hiring standards is the foremost reason for these violations of rights, but just one factor among many.

I find it interesting that MSN said.. “Today, MSN.com complied a list of ten cases from 2010 in which ALLEGED police brutality was caught on tape.”

It quite obvious of their pro cop bias when they used the word “ALLEGED”.. yet looking at the Collins, Ashford, Wells and McKenna incidents (to name a few.. and seeing the ones posted on this web site), just the opposite is true.

If things were so “ALLEGED”, then why is it “charges were dropped” and “cops were fired, suspended or resigned!!”?

So much for incidents being “ALLEGED”! And cops wonder why they’re not thought very highly of by the general public. Need I say more?

Rail Car Fan

Rail Car,

They use “alleged” because…. wait for it….

THE POLICE CAN DO NO WRONG!!

they use alleged for the same reason the cops use the term suspect. it has to do with defamation laws i belive.

@Rail Car Fan: There’s nothing sinister with that, it’s standard practice to refer to crimes as alleged until, and unless, there’s a conviction. So unless the cops have actually be convicted of police brutality, it’ll be reported as alleged.