FBI Chief Links Video Scrutiny of Police To Rise In Violent Crime (nytimes.com)

HughPickens.com writes: This year, murders have spiked in major cities across America. According to FBI director James B. Comey the additional scrutiny and criticism of police officers that has come in the wake of highly publicized incidents of police brutality may be the main reason for the recent increase in violent crime. "I don't know whether that explains it entirely, but I do have a strong sense that some part of the explanation is a chill wind that has blown through American law enforcement over the last year," says Comey. He says he's been told by many police leaders that officers who normally would stop to question suspicious people are opting to stay in their patrol cars for fear of having their encounters recorded and become video sensations.

That hesitancy has led to missed opportunities to apprehend suspects and has decreased the police presence on the streets of the country's most violent cities. Officers tell Comey that youths surround police when they get out of their vehicles, taunting them and making videos of the spectacle with their cell phones. "In today's YouTube world, there are officers reluctant to get out of their cars and do the work that controls violent crime," says Comey. "Our officers are answering 911 calls, but avoiding the informal contact that keeps bad guys from standing around, especially with guns."

Comments

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

If the police acted respectfully during encounters with private citizens, I doubt there would be much need to record these encounters. I know I don't record my neighbor getting his mail or washing his car, because I don't consider either behavior threatening. Police have abused their positions of trust and the recording is one of many symptoms of this fact.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

that's their job. sorry if it's difficult. it doesn't help when the director of the FBI essentially calls them all bitches who are afraid of a camera.

Re:Good

[0123456]

How do you gain and keep the respect of a group of people, whose sole goal in an encounter is to show they world how little they respect you?

I'm guessing that beating them up and shooting them isn't likely to work.

In too many countries, modern police act like an occupying army, and are then surprised when they're treated like one.

Radical proposal

[whoever57]

Here is a radical proposal:

don't choke to death petty criminals, don't shoot fleeing suspects in the back. Don't kill people in the vans on their way to the police station, etc... And more importantly: don't support the police officers who do this!

And finally, actually discipline officers for their misdeeds.

Murders have not "spiked"

[riskkeyesq]

538 recently ran a piece on this misguided and largely misleading storyline police are touting. It's worth a read if you like facts. But this is /. http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...

Papers or else

[fyngyrz]

Their "jobs" were never to break the law. All this whining about pressure on cops is utter BS. If they had been doing their actual jobs, instead of being criminals, they'd be fine. This is simply their own malfeasance coming back to bite everyone -- us and them -- in the ass.

Every cop that breaks the law is a criminal. Every cop that knows about such things and does not turn the criminal in is a criminal accessory. That's cop culture. They think they are above the law, instead of its servants. I have no sympathy for their current situation at all. I do regret that they have been allowed, both by their internal culture and by the courts, to screw the public over so badly. And that the courts, in particular the supreme court, has failed to obey their oaths to uphold the constitution, instead wreaking sophist havoc on its meaning and intent.

I honestly do not think there is any chance at all of fixing this. The downhill slide is too profound; the public almost completely unaware of the issues at hand until they too are caught in the toxic, broken gears of the system. When that happens, they often disappear into the depths of the world's largest imprisonment undertaking. When (if) they come out of that, they're treated as unemployable and sometimes worse.

The "retribution, not rehabilitation" mindset the media has inculcated into the American public and to which their legislators pander, creates a permanent lower class whose only hope for advance is more lawbreaking, and this constrains almost all of those who actually pursue an upwards economic path. The rest are hopeless, and rightfully so. There is little hope to be had.

The root cause is bad legislators, bad law, bad police, and bad courts. There's actually no reason to expect this to work well. Nor does it.

Now the cops are paying for it, a little bit, as the Internet makes public what used to be a quiet secret known only to the cops themselves and their victims. It won't be enough, though. Because it isn't just the cops. The entire system reinforces these results, from top to bottom.