> Five months before Monterrosa was killed, the V.P.O.A. had replaced its president, Detective Mat Mustard, who had run the union for ten years. Mustard was notorious in Vallejo for the investigation he led into the kidnapping of a woman named Denise Huskins, in 2015. Someone broke into the house where she and her boyfriend were sleeping, blindfolded and drugged them, and put her in the trunk of a car. When the boyfriend reported the crime, Mustard suspected that he had killed Huskins and invented the kidnapping story. At the police station, the boyfriend said, officers dressed him in jail clothes, then Mustard and others interrogated him for eighteen hours, calling him a murderer. Huskins, who was being held a hundred and sixty miles away, was raped repeatedly. After she was released, the Vallejo police publicly accused her and her boyfriend of faking the kidnapping, comparing the situation to the movie “Gone Girl.” The police threatened to press charges against the couple, and after the rapist e-mailed the San Francisco Chronicle, confessing to the kidnapping, the police accused Huskins and her boyfriend of writing the e-mail. Soon, the rapist was arrested in South Lake Tahoe, after trying to repeat the crime. Even then, the Vallejo police insisted that Huskins and her boyfriend were lying. The couple sued Mustard and the city, eventually winning a $2.5-million settlement. In a show of defiance, the police department named Mustard officer of the year.
Jesus Christ. Besides being absolutely vile, apparently just complete, very expensive incompetence from top to bottom.
Incompetence would end with the initial suspicion. The quote you've provided details an openly malicious and dangerous gang, one that is competent at being malicious and dangerous.
This is what happens when humans are injected with the drug of "righteousness". They believe that anything they do is good and anything their opponents do, and they become insulated in that.
> (opinion) people rarely blame the police for an increase in crime
I see blame in every direction but what's funny is if they're blaming cops for uptick in crime, it's because of a perception of the cops working less, when it seems that when cops work less, crime goes down: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/nyc-cops-did-a-work-...
But… I wouldn’t pretend like that correlation is causation:
- police departments control the official crime metrics
- there were fewer officers to write the paperwork that officially tracks crimes
- when the “blue flu” happens publicly, more crime victims will avoid reporting out of frustration
I highly doubt criminals took a holiday when police decided to coordinate minimum work days.
> During the slowdown, police continued to respond to calls, and the arrest rate for major crimes (murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny, and grand theft auto) remained constant. But the arrest rate for non-major crime and narcotic offenses dropped, as did the number of stop-and-frisk events. It took until mid-January for things to begin to return to normal.
Refutes, it wasn't that people were reporting less crime or that cops weren't responding to violent crimes. It seems "active enforcement," or police departments going out of their way to "do policing," leads to an increase in actual crime committed.
I’m not sure that’s the only possible interpretation.
Crimes aren’t always reported. Stop-and-frisk mostly turns up crimes such as illegal possession of weapon, illegal possession of substance, and parole violation. None of these are likely to be reported by by anyone because the nature of them is mostly that only the participants in the crime know about the crime.
Also, I’m not making any moral or ethical claims above. I dislike stop-and-frisk because it is too subjective, not targeted enough, and corrodes the trust between police and citizens that benefit most from that trust. I’m also not making similar judgements about which actions should be crimes in the law — I’m sure we have too many. But I do highly value talking honestly about the data we use for policy decisions.
And in the context of the Vallejo article, I think corrupt police departments very much increase crime in their jurisdictions. I was in LA when the Rampart District scandal became public and I was nearby when LAPD brass tried to figure out how to handle it.
Someone mentioned this later but "This included fewer tickets and a huge drop in arrests...During the slowdown, police continued to respond to calls, and the arrest rate for major crimes (murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny, and grand theft auto) remained constant. But the arrest rate for non-major crime and narcotic offenses dropped, as did the number of stop-and-frisk events."
When people start to worry in mass about crime rates it's not because of an increase in moving violations. However the article you posted does show a counterintuitive view of what would happen if police have a slow down.
I'll admit I made those points because it seems intuitive, that if someone is a criminal they would be less hesitant to commit crimes if they thought they wouldn't get caught. But that doesn't seem to be the case.
The problem is confounded by what exactly you are measuring. You can't measure crime directly, but you can measure arrests/tickets and reports of crime. Various municipalities even try to adjust their crime statistics by making it harder for some victims to report petty crime.
This is an hour away from the tech capital of the world.
Shameful that the state of California or the FBI don't seem to care about this. Meanwhile we have to organize to fight self inflicted problems like banning algebra in high school.
> This is an hour away from the tech capital of the world.
bit of a non sequitur, eh?
That tech capital is full of the kind of people who've argued (on this very website) the position that ALPR exists and it'd be so damn easy to break any laws governing their use, so they might as well make the best damn ALPR product available and we all better get used to it.
In like 95% cases it is moral panic that turned out nothing burger or a lie. In the 4% it is like one OP Ed somewhere. In remaining miniscule cases, something bad is actually happening.
> Good sampling of ignorant people to try stuff out on
Got it, those twelve states and the fifth largest metropolitan area in America are all crazies.
What about the Rockies and Southwest? Is Wyoming more California or Texas? What about Utah and Nevada? Are you arguing Massachusetts and Maine align their politics with New York’s?
I get the desire for simplifying state politics. But the attractor model is only explanatory ex post facto (or for specific issues); the set of issues being legislated at this level are too varied, volatile and particular to knit into long-standing regional political structures.
Chicago, the third-largest metro area in the US, is a midwestern city. Insinuating that Chicago is somehow part of or defers to one of these 'factions' and is not a 600-pound gorilla of an entity unto itself is frankly hilarious.
I’m cautiously curious which, erm, quadrant(?) the following fall into: Virginia, Montana, Maryland, New Mexico, Minnesota, Tennessee, Kansas, North Carolina, Iowa. Despite having a more than vague sense of the cultural spectra you’re describing, I can’t imagine placing any of these states on that plot without being hilariously wrong.
It is usually just a ratio of urban to rural voting population, which is a proxy for some combination of ratio of young to old voting population, or ratio of white to non white voting population, or ratio of university educated to non university educated voting population.
Minnesota’s urban population is much higher than Iowa’s, so state level politics are more dictated by voters who are some combination of younger/non white/university educated, whereas in Iowa, it is the opposite.
I didn’t mean to suggest any two states I mentioned are necessarily different from each other (or similar to each other, either). That said I did find Iowa felt pretty distinct from Minnesota when I lived in the latter, largely because MSP felt like it had more urban gravity than any place I visited in Iowa, and MSP had a strong cultural affinity with Chicago which I didn’t get a whiff of in Iowa.
They’re probably more alike than any other two states I mentioned, but they felt worlds apart even so.
Every study shows that the overriding cause of homelessness is the lack of affordable housing.
Is there drug use in homeless populations? Of course, there’s also a ton of alcohol use as well. Is it the cause of homelessness? No.
Because we have statistics from other states with much higher drug abuse and OD stats that have lower rates of homelessness, because the driving cause of homelessness is not being able to afford a home.
Hell even HN had a post on this a week or so ago, the dominant factor - more than laws, environment, social support - is housing costs.
The other thing people don’t acknowledge that the denser your population the more compact - and so pronounced - the homeless populations become. A few years back there was an article about how Boise didn’t have the SF homelessness population due to punishing the homeless. Except statistically they had basically the same number, but doesn’t have anything like the population.
Places with bad weather definitely have homeless populations. In the larger view, look at Chicago and New York City.
In the smaller view, look at pretty much any mid-size hub town in the Midwest, or Indiana at least. All of them I've lived in have shelters (the smaller towns usually don't). Food pantries of different sorts are fairly common too, even in small towns. A fair number of these are run by churches who have a mixed track record of how they treat folks staying there (turning away queer folks, forced work or taking possessions, etc).
It isn't like anywhere actually has year-round beautiful weather - not the sort that makes you eschew housing. Some places you just don't have to worry about freezing to death most nights.
One thing about both the studies you reference and studies I reference is that they're both correlative. Not causative. A causative study is virtually impossible here.
One possible causal chain: Drug use leads to less money, leads to no house in high cost areas.
Another possible chain: No money, leads to no house in high cost areas, leads to drug use.
There's actually infinite possibilities because the causal source can come from an unknown variable that we didn't reference here.
From TFA: at least some of CA's cops are well enough funded to waste taxpayer time and money assisting other states, rather than actually enforcing their own state's laws.
It's hard to imagine an "over regulated" police force where that can happen.
We did over attempt to correct, but it had very little impact on actual brutality — just reduced interactions.
This is probably cynical, but I think that good policing will have more instances of brutality than we’d like. I think to fix this you probably would need to spend a lot more money than anyone would want to.
Maybe you're right that the US refuses to spend enough money to handle this, but other countries seem to do fine. I'm really impressed with the German Polizei, for example. Their cops are better trained, friendlier, and actually seem to want to help the community.
In the US you need to spend enough money to hire different people.
That said there are some really good cops too. But our judicial system often puts them in harms way for no great reason. There’s a guy on the street here who has been arrested about 75 times. He doesn’t care about cops at all — and I’m amazed at the patience cops have with him. Especially knowing he will be back on the street in a couple of days.
On average, police in the US are paid very handsomely. They're often among the highest paid general "public servant" positions in the government in each state[1].
From a quick look online, the German police make about 60k EUR a year, or around 64k USD at current (not favorable!) exchange rates. The average American cop makes significantly more, even before you factor in taxes[2] (these numbers are by state, so you should weight them for population.)
As I've mentioned a few times here and elsewhere, IMO police salaries would be justified if they were actually good at their jobs, or at least not openly corrupt and abusive. Policing in America is absolutely a dangerous and difficult job. It's just that the numbers start to look a little more questionable when you look at how police departments actually behave.
That being said: police work is dangerous, but not uniquely or disproportionately dangerous: it doesn't crack the top 20 most dangerous jobs in the US[1], nearly all of which pay less than the police do. Being a delivery driver is nearly twice as dangerous, for half the average pay.
When we talk about the dangers inherent to policing, it's maybe worth considering whether those dangers are our own fault: cops in the US employ lethal and "less-lethal" force far often than cops in other countries do, and public trust in the police (leading to panicked interactions) is correspondingly lower.
The bulk of the danger of policing comes from the road.
You hear about when they get shot back at because in a nation of 300mil there's a lot of cops instigating violent situations with people who are inclined to shoot back so there's more than enough to total volume to fill the news (and it makes a great eyeball grabber for various demographics) but deaths on the clock basically all come from getting hit on the side of the road or getting in car crashes without wearing a seatbelt (lots of cops don't use belts because they wanna be able to get out of the car ASAP).
It's dangerous because police turn EVERY interaction into a warrant check. You have to treat a guy who is possibly holding a warrant for arrest for a crime with a 20+ year sentence different than you treat Bob who you pulled over because his stereo was too loud or his window tint to dark and that is all the stop is going to be about. Making community policing community policing not warrant enforcement and you just changed the ENTIRE dynamic and get back to actual community policing.
> different than you treat Bob who you pulled over because his stereo was too loud or his window tint to dark and that is all the stop is going to be about.
Is it really all the stop is going to be about? You can guarantee that?
Not every criminal is a fugitive with an outstanding warrant. Some of them are unlucky enough to get pulled over during the getaway from their first capital offense for minor violations as stupid as window tint or loud stereos. It's like cheating-- if you're willing to break one rule, you're willing to break others. This is why these nitpicky laws for stupid shit exist.
So it won't end well when a meter maid expecting to write a tint violation ticket notices banging and thumping coming from Bob's trunk on an empty road. Alice is armed with a ticket printer. Bob is armed with god knows what, because given the limousine tint Alice can't see into the car as well as Bob can see out of it.
(Besides, people assault-and-batter meter maids in less-dire situations all the time. Suspects are supposed to fear the enforcement officer, not size them up.)
We literally train kidnapping victims trapped in trunks to sabotage brake lights because it will attract police attention and sufficiently-armed-and-trained intervention. The Department of Motor Vehicles isn't going to be who saves your ass.
Cops have median salaries of six figures where I am, and have higher average and median salaries than software developers. They can make over $250k a year with overtime, and can retire with a full pension after 20 years of working.
Municipalities often spend 50% or more of their entire yearly budgets on police salaries, benefits, liabilities etc.
But I suspect it is a much less desired job in the US. And because of that the people who are drawn to it tend to be drawn to the negative aspects of it.
You’ll have to pay a lot more to get a different class of people.
> You’ll have to pay a lot more to get a different class of people.
Plenty of people do currently join the police in the USA with good intentions, but plenty more would never join at any price. The toxicity of police culture is enough of an offset that basically no salary would cover it for a growing fraction of Americans.
You want more and better cops? Make policing less toxic, then people might actually rebuild some respect for police in general.
What is it they say about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results :-)?
It's not clear to me, from the last 30 years of engorged police funding, that we can pay our way out of this one. Focusing on why it attracts people who are drawn to the negative aspects, for example, as you said.
You want to fix American policing? Stop warrant checks as part of community policing. When the people in the car the police just traffic stopped for a tail light could be facing a 20 year prison sentence the police have to treat that stop and have a wariness towards the vehicle's occupants way different from if it was, say, just a traffic stop for a tail light. Escalating every community interaction by making it warrant enforcement you change the entire risk equation. A guy getting a tail light ticket is different then a guy about to get a warrant enforced for an accused crime with a 20 year sentence. You want to even further reduce the escalation of the interactions? Stop with the 20 year (which is basically life if you are realistic about it, no one getting out after 20 years is getting their life back) sentences.
> "This is probably cynical, but I think that good policing will have more instances of brutality than we’d like."
There's no we here. If your interpretation of what makes policing good involves brutality as a necessary evil, that has a lot more to do with your tolerance of government abuse than policing, and I don't share that.
Look at how Portugal started addressing their drug problem two decades ago and look at their results. It wasn't a silver bullet but they're doing a hell of a lot better than we are in the US with the "war on drugs." If you think taking steps towards Malaysia's solution is the answer to the problem, you've got a very different understanding of what's worth protecting in our country.
There have always been drugs in California. Nothing new there. Do you have an issue with compassion in policing? Or should all policing always come with a baton, a gun, and handcuffs?
"The death rate from fentanyl increased 10-fold from 2015 to 2019. The rate of prescription opioid deaths fell 30% from 2011 to 2019."
"The number of amphetamine-related emergency department visits increased nearly 50% between 2018 and 2020. The number of non-heroin-related opioid ED visits more than doubled in the same period."
If the amount of use is approximately the same, why is there an increase in hospitalization and death?
My original point was more about policing. Lack of Draconian policing of drugs is not the cause of the increase in hospitalizations and deaths from fentanyl, amphetamine, and opioids.
No, it is because the people producing and selling these drugs can give you the high you want at a lower cost to themselves, it is about profit margin.
See Japan and Singapore. Also note those two places have the lowest incidence of drug use and homelessness.
It could be because of the viciousness of the punishment. In the US the punishment matches the degree of the crime in the sense that if you sell drugs you get a punishment that you deserve.
In Singapore if you get caught selling over 500mg of weed you are executed via death penalty. The punishment does not match the crime, but rather the punishment is designed to be as effective as possible in eliminating the crime all together via deterrence and Darwinian artificial selection.
Policing DOES work, it's just most people, you included, are drug users. So you want to end homelessness, you want to stop people from over-abusing drugs, but as a casual user yourself you don't want to be put to death either or anything like that so you have to find some middle ground that works. The problem is there is no middle ground. The US drug war was middle ground and as you and your articles pointed out, it was largely NOT effective.
From a personal standpoint I don't use drugs. Morally I'm more of a middle ground type of a person. I think moderation isn't a big deal. Objectively though, since I have no skin in the game, I would support Singaporean measures to stop drugs and homelessness all together.
Say your grandma falls and breaks her hip. AS part of her recovery she is given opioids to help with pain. Grandma accidentally becomes addicted to opioids but can no longer get a prescription. Grandma, in a fit of addiction, gets her Grandson to help get her some pills. They both get busted.
Would you put your Grandma to death? Grandma needs help not a lethal injection.
Great question. The grandma in Singapore is immediately put under a detoxification program. If she's near end of life she may be placed under legal pain management. Such details are outlined here: NATIONAL GUIDELINES FOR THE SAFE PRESCRIBING OF OPIOIDS 2021 https://www.moh.gov.sg/docs/librariesprovider5/default-docum...
If grandma decides to purchase opioids illegally rather then get treatment that's 10 years in prison in Singapore. The law is effective in this case of making grandma pursue the correct treatment.
This is not all. Executions will occur: namely the parties responsible for the opioid epidemic will be put to death without regard to corporate shielding. Courts will determine on an individual basis who was responsible and hang them.
I believe this last point is something I wish would happen and would largely be an effective deterrent. It is entirely a matter of how much power a DA will have in pursuing such "policing" policies. The former point however is true and is the outlined procedure enforced by the government in Singapore.
Either way even without the last point I think I have shown you that "policing" can be effective. It really depends on how much policing and how severe it is.
There is the obvious side effect of possibly creating a police state by giving the police/government too much power. But while the phrase "police state" has bad connotations it is arguably not always a bad thing as exemplified by Singapore.
I don't know whether such policies will be effective in the states. But it is patently false to say that policing cannot be effective.
It is easy for a person to hold loyalty to an idealized concept that "policing" doesn't work when it comes to drugs. The reality is, like almost everything in life, much more nuanced. Ask questions. What kind of policing? How severe? Being open minded means that you need to ask those questions rather then deliberately constructing logical scaffolding to support your preconceived/popular conclusion about the US drug war.
The War on Drugs did not slow the number of deaths from drug overdoses in 50 years. It is clear that policing alone is not the solution to drug problems.
You've called me a drug user. You've claimed I said that all policing does not work. You are taking very extreme views of me here, I never said any of that. What I'm saying, and I've backed up with lots of info from 3rd parties, is that policing drugs does not slow drug production or drug use. Policing is not the solution to drug problems. Putting drug sellers and users to death does not solve anything.
That’s an interesting point it’s on display like a billboard for any passerby to see at a given time. How this intersects with recording and tracking I guess is the contention, not just the visibility of the unit. But if someone were to sit and manually write and track the plates would they fall in the same ballpark of offense? Is it the efficiency that skews things or the long term storage or both?
License plates are considered by the courts to be publicly available information. There are cars owned by private companies that drive around and periodically photograph/detect/geotag license plates automatically with a custom-built license plate reader system. Then they sell data to e.g. private investigators.
Looks like you don't have privacy online, or in meatspace. I assumed this practice was less prevalent than online tracking but seems like that was just overoptimistic
The LA riots required nearly ten thousand federal troops to end. The alternative to reforming police brutality is ever escalating violence. Eventually law enforcement dissolves entirely as all cops become targets. This happened during the LA riots; cops just didnt come to work. The LA riots weren't only about Rodney king. Food deserts, targeting, and grinding inequality and poverty in Compton, universal, Inglewood, and other historically black cities had become unsustainable. They had no recourse.
No cop can solve poverty.
Cops don't prevent crime, and cops don't prevent drug addiction. These are features of american capitalism that have been made the sole purvey of an ever dwindling national police force. They are the department of last resort for a nation that thinks you can fight drugs like a war.
Focus your argument. It isn't capitalism, policing is almost an issue in all systems. This anti capitalist sentiment is really trying to creep into every single vein of discourse.
It’s capital and state. Hence the anarchist viewpoint being more relevant here than being anti one and pro the other or saying it's capitalism and getting "but it's the state too"
Focusing to the point of tunnel vision is what we're trying to avoid.
Stay too focused and you don't have room to ask why our jails are essentially revolving door state housing for the homeless.
The usa is absolutely in a predictable phase of late stage capitalism. You don't have to be a communist to consider this, rigid critique of system is how you improve systems.
Pay closer attention. this is american capitalism, the implementation undertaken by the US itself as is relevant to the stories locale. it is not the definition itself.
My argument is that drugs and crime aren't a feature of American capitalism. They are a feature of all systems - capitalist, communist, market-communism or socialism. My argument is bringing in the economic system in this case adds little to your comment but continues to try and blame all problems on capitalism or in this case "American-capitalism" the scape goat du jour.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/23/how-a-deadly-p...