Well, that’s a horrific and evil abuse of power.

People will say, “Oh, he’s just a bad apple.”

No, the majority of police officers are trash people who abuse their power.

What's the point of being a cop if you can't exact personal revenge?

A bad apple spoils the bunch. They never like finishing that saying

The United States has an obsession with incarcerating people.

Gotta keep the engine stoked

Ah, a petty bastard. Great choice, SFPD. Fits right in.

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Must have been a your mamma joke...

So how do we get “good” people to be cops?

How do weed out the “bad” when accepting applications?

How about having literally any standards during the hiring process and actually, truly firing and blacking the ones who offend.

You are really fucking special if you think cops randomly running up your name on the database just because they had a personal spat with you is acceptable LEO behavior in the slightest.

He was insulting my mother by suggesting that my mother and I have an incestial relationship when he called me a Motherfucker.

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I also think Internal Affairs shouldn't be a thing. It puts us in a "who watches the watchmen" situation, but to be honest, I'd prefer just about anyone else scrutinizing the police, than themselves.

I like the idea of a community council that oversees the police department

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Have you read the article ? What is the "horrific and evil abuse of power" here ?

The cop targetting and arresting someone for insulting his family?

Not particularly complex.

What a complete moron.

>targetting and arresting someone for insulting his family

That would be bad indeed, but he didn't do that.

>Sgt. Adam Plantinga said he saw a man peeing in public about a year ago and told him to knock it off, and the man responded with some “choice words” about the officer’s mother and cursed at him, according to the officer’s tweet.
>
>“Saw him today and ran a wanted check. Behold, a felony warrant. So now he’s in the clink …” the tweet added.
>
>"Say what you want about me, but you malign my mother and it's on. Kathleen Fay Plantinga is a light in this world."

A little of column A and a little of column B.

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Cops are petty byatches.

There are definitely problems with policing in the United States. Cops are supposed to “serve and protect” the people but focus too much on serving and protecting the government which serves and protects the status quo. Police only get a few months of training (3 months in South Dakota) and too much of that is focused on control and not enough focused on deescalation. The drug policies cops enforce are based on punishment and not treatment. The Supreme Court doctrine of qualified immunity protects bad cops and Congress doesn’t override the court. Police internal review is a sham because people have a natural tendency to protect their own people. We definitely need to reform police training and goals. We also need to reform government.

It's why they want even more power

Insult a cops mother while having active felony warrants is a pretty dumb move.

Historically? Shutter the police department and open a new one, putting people you can trust to do good things in the face of adversity (like cops who were pushed out of the previous department for whistleblowing or refusing to engage in malfeasance) in charge of setting up the new system.

This was the traditional FBI strategy for dealing with bad departments and it works well, while most other approaches don't. Getting good people to be cops is difficult while bad cops are calling the shots and actively working to keep them out.

Getting good folks in charge from the get go lets them develop appropriate methods of identifying and retaining good officers appropriate to their locality.

OK so that works for people that are already hired but what about the hiring process?

Also, given your response… you seem to think I’m defending somebody/something, I am not

I was literally asking how do we hire “good” people in a position of authority…

The reason I used quotes is to emphasize, the fact I believe good and bad is a spectrum rather than a binary classification…

He wouldn’t have ran the warrant check if the guy hadn’t insulted his mother and to be honest, a cop will be able to find something you are doing that is illegal 100% of the time.

Kathleen Fay Plantinga is a light in this world but her son is a douchebag piece of shit.

Guy said something that wasn't illegal, cop files that away despite it not being illegal, and then uses the fact that the guy was standing somewhere not committing a crime but being near where other guys had previously committed crimes, and decides to run his warrant check because, uh......

No telling how much time and resources this cop has wasted on running checks on factually and legally innocent people he has personally taking a dislike to.

Making it so that bad actors actually get punished for abusing their power would be a good start

He literally just did his job taking in someone with a felony warrant and ofc Reddit acts like it’s a horrific abuse of power. He could have arrested the guy that day for exposing himself in public

Great idea…how do we accomplish that?