we ask our police to do different things than other people ask their police to do. you know what don't do dick for investigations? surplus Army vehicles - ThreadSky

proptermalone.bsky.social • 4 days ago

we ask our police to do different things than other people ask their police to do. you know what don't do dick for investigations? surplus Army vehicles

Reposted from Arun

UK police are also just literally better at their jobs. London Metropolitan Police solve about 90% of homicides, *Police Scotland haven’t failed to solve a homicide since 2013*. In the US the average clearance rate is 58%.

Comments

billthepony.bsky.social•4 days ago

This is an opportunity for Democrats to help the American people understand how far right our courts have been for decades.... The Liberty these state agents have to just blow you away. His entirely judge created law.

(Dems of course cheered it on... But we can change course)

graay.bsky.social•4 days ago

I called the cops about a hit and run on my vehicle when it was unoccupied. Apparently the contractors working across the street saw what happened and reported the incident and gave the plate number but they couldn't remember it now. I was calling to make sure the two reports got connected.

graay.bsky.social•4 days ago

The cop started giving me a whole spiel about how they didn't really investigate crimes that were reported through the portal at all and that it really only existed for insurance purposes. Which was not why I called but was pretty shocking to hear him say completely unprompted.

graay.bsky.social•4 days ago

Worse, apparently what the contractors said was not put down as a police report at all (?) so that information is lost.

graay.bsky.social•4 days ago

They're claiming all this data is just for insurance purposes but they're not even doing that right.

elviereads.bsky.social•4 days ago

it's fascinating how willing cops are to say "oh we won't be doing anything about that." I once had a scary middle of the night encounter outside my apartment complex, called the cops, they interrogated me, told me I should have screamed, and outright said they wouldn't be taking any action

elviereads.bsky.social•4 days ago

guy was like "what are you hoping we'll do?" and I said, idk, have some cops walk around the neighborhood for a while to make sure if the guy's still wandering around he stays on good behavior? and he was like. oh. we won't do that. anyway. scream right away next time

graay.bsky.social•4 days ago

I think becoming a cop should require at least 2 years working in customer service.

jortscity.bsky.social•4 days ago

https://bsky.app/profile/jortscity.bsky.social/post/3lnsb5ni4uk2u

thequeso.bsky.social•4 days ago

Another fun thing - I once started counting the number of police entities that had jurisdiction in Oklahoma County, which is dominated in population and land mass by Oklahoma City. I stopped at 12.

guynamedpaul.bsky.social•4 days ago

Oh man, Cook county has to be crazy:
https://geographic.org/streetview/usa/il/cook/index.html

nikolaidenmark.bsky.social•4 days ago

Let’s see, Tulsa county would have TPD & TCSO
Separate PDs for
Jenks
Broken Arrow
Owasso
Sand Springs
Catoosa
Bixby
At least five more towns that are partially in the county
Plus OHP.

We’re less dominated by one city, but still absurd

nikolaidenmark.bsky.social•4 days ago

Oh, nearly forgot. Muscogee, Osage, and Cherokee nation police

thequeso.bsky.social•4 days ago

ok so I redid this
OKCPD
Edmond
OCSO
OHP
Village
Nichols Hills
Warr Acres
Jones
Harrah
Choctaw
Midwest City
Del City
Luther
Arcadia
Nicoma Park
Spencer
UCO PD

There is probably at least one small municipal that I'm missing, but that's 17 (UCO is questionable but I'm taking it).

nikolaidenmark.bsky.social•4 days ago

Fie!

I forgot TCC PD

michaelalevin.bsky.social•4 days ago

Nichols Hills PD: Sign could say 25 but you should do 19 just in case.

michaelalevin.bsky.social•4 days ago

Yukon has a police department, if I recall correctly. Does Southern Nazarene have a police department? That's a lot of police.

thequeso.bsky.social•4 days ago

Yukon, thank God, is in Canadian County.

Southern Nazarene does have a police department though.

if you ever want to see a difference in policing, Nichols Hills PD pulled me and my busted Ford Probe over for doing 48 in a 25 when I was 16.

When the cop saw that I was white I got a stern warning.

michaelalevin.bsky.social•4 days ago

Oklahoma City University and University of Central Oklahoma probably have police departments, too.

thequeso.bsky.social•4 days ago

OU Health Sciences Center definitely has OU PD

bonescrosby.bsky.social•4 days ago

Jefferson Co, AL departments
BHM
Hoover
My Brook
Vestavia
Homewood
Irondale
Tarrant
Pleasant Grove
Hueytown
Bessemer
Gardendale
Fultondale
Center Point (I think)
Trussville

And a few other places

thequeso.bsky.social•4 days ago

And I don’t know if I have a point, but that level of Balkanization in law enforcement sure isn’t helping solve crimes

bonescrosby.bsky.social•4 days ago

Oh hey Jefferson County, AL. So many little fiefdoms.

Contrast with Virginia. Richmond metro area. One city police department. Four surrounding counties, four police departments. Way too sensible. (Sheriff for each county and the city, handle only jail and courts).

michaelalevin.bsky.social•4 days ago

Franklin County police departments: Columbus, Bexley, Upper Arlington, Westerville, Dublin, Hillard, New Albany, Gahanna, Whitehall, Groveport, Grove City, Worthington, Grandview Heights, Obetz, Capital U, Otterbein U. I do not know if the townships have police departments.

michaelalevin.bsky.social•4 days ago

Most of these departments exist to write speeding tickets, parking tickets, etc., and ensure that minorities do not feel comfortable driving through, let alone stopping in one of these towns. All of them are worthless when it comes to solving actual crimes.

disastergis.org•4 days ago

Oof, try taking a look at LA County. Just city agencies alone, you're looking at 45. That's not including the Sheriff and Contract Cities, nor the CHP and contract cities, nor small groups like Port or Airport Police, School Police, Rangers, Harbor Patrols and others. 4,751 sq mi & 9.7 mil people.

freighttraindisco.bsky.social•4 days ago

Only 12?

sekelley.bsky.social•3 days ago

https://susankelley.substack.com/p/castle-doctrine-cowboys-and-ice-overreach

trashbot.bsky.social•4 days ago

this seems downstream from gun regulations

both the crime rate and crime investigation are affected when you're drowning in a sea of guns

tmoney2007.bsky.social•4 days ago

I don't know what the statistics mean in other countries, but "cleared" doesn't necessarily mean "found the guilty person" or even that someone was convicted in the US.

elsjones.bsky.social•4 days ago

the other day we saw 4 cop cars, 2 cops each, including one K9, to arrest a driver who was in a car accident. he was, of course, black, and they were screaming at him. in the middle of the roadway right between a Frisch's and a Target.

he ran a red light.

emdashel.bzky.team•4 days ago

Basically an occupying army at this point.

3fecta.bsky.social•4 days ago

Also the training levels. Some of the northern European countries, training is basically 3.5 years before you are done. It's like getting an undergrad degree.

oneiriccanid.bsky.social•4 days ago

All cops exist partially for oppression reasons, with American cops it’s like 95% of their job.

snowjob.bsky.social•4 days ago

I once had nine cruisers including two K9 units and an MRAP show up in a small town after doing some urban exploration with a group of friends in an abandoned strip mall.

Good times.

athenae.bsky.social•4 days ago

Found one of my elderly neighbors, who has Alzheimer's, surrounded by like eight cops after she rang the wrong doorbell. She weighed like 90 pounds and had a chihuahua, and my neighborhood isn't exactly Fallujah. They could have just sent one nice Officer Friendly but no.

joedobner.bsky.social•4 days ago

Overpoliced suburbs often send multiple officers to calls like that to pad their "time spent responding to calls"

sheepbop.bsky.social•4 days ago

Ah, you see, there's property involved, which is obviously more important than people.

raclapper.bsky.social•4 days ago

My favorite personal memory of the police being when my local college town's cops deployed riot gear and a sound cannon to break up a block party.

raclapper.bsky.social•4 days ago

Why in the name of bloody fuck does a town of a couple hundred people in the off season, an island in a sea of corn, need a sound cannon?!

caramia5.bsky.social•4 days ago

My little town has one of these vehicles and it’s not useful for anything small town police actually do, so it’s rusting into the ground behind the station

dogsdadbod.bsky.social•4 days ago

Police conducting and completing any investigations at all is purely a secondary function of their existence.

proptermalone.bsky.social•4 days ago

only a little over 10% of DC police solve crimes as their job.

wanderlib.bsky.social•4 days ago

DC also has a truly stupid amount of redundant law enforcement agencies.

Capitol Police, Park Police (the bastards), Metropolitan Police, Metro (WMATA) Police, and that's before you even count the feds who carry guns for ego and pay reasons.

snowjob.bsky.social•4 days ago

POSTAL 👏 SERVICE 👏 POLICE 👏

freighttraindisco.bsky.social•4 days ago

So you're pro mail fraud? Yikes.

sheepbop.bsky.social•4 days ago

LIBRARY POLICE.

(probably)

sheepbop.bsky.social•4 days ago

Have you seen the recent Netflix series The Residence, where someone is murdered in the White House and all the different agencies argue jurisdiction?

freighttraindisco.bsky.social•4 days ago

This tells me that Netflix are a bunch of morons because it's fucking obvious there would only be two and I could guess who would win easily.

sheepbop.bsky.social•4 days ago

Yeah, for plot reasons and to get the Consulting Detective into the storyline they have to make the Metropolitan Police win. But they also have the FBI, Secret Service, National Park Police (who the others keep dunking on but that's the land where the White House is) etc.

freighttraindisco.bsky.social•4 days ago

No. MPD would not win. NPS would not win. Not seeing how NPS even have a claim, the land issue doesn't matter, EOP isn't their turf.

The only parties of note are USSS and FBI and FBI wins handily as USSS is a too close to the case.

sheepbop.bsky.social•4 days ago

London has two, the Metropolitan Police and the City of London Police, which just covers a square mile or so where most of the major financial institutions are. None are armed in the usual run of events.

wanderlib.bsky.social•4 days ago

The gun bit was less a complaint about the actual firearms (though it's not great) and more a complaint about the utterly insane culture and financial incentives that white collar DoJ/DHS drones in DC have.

thewizardofboz.bsky.social•4 days ago

Dc also has a seperate security police dept

golikehellmachine.com•4 days ago

... 652 people in professional development? i am *extremely* curious to know what that actually encompasses, because that's exponentially higher than i have ever seen in *any* private sector organization

proptermalone.bsky.social•4 days ago

28 week training, guessing that's most of why

golikehellmachine.com•4 days ago

still a shocking number, that's way above normal best practice for most organizations. portland's an outlier here because we're way under the number of police you'd normally have for a city this size, but they're loosely comparable-sized cities and that's almost as many actual officers as we have

zachrabiroff.com•4 days ago

That division includes the whole Police Academy, too

snowjob.bsky.social•4 days ago

DC MPD is growing substantially- iirc we have an oversized force because of how often MPD is called on to help with protests and other federal government or international related events

kevinwhitejr.bsky.social•4 days ago

DC MPD also had, until recently, a national thought leader in policing and police recruiting, including training and retention. I think he’s at Rutgers now.

freighttraindisco.bsky.social•4 days ago

Yeah people on here are going to find shit to be mad at but MPD in effect trains the region because a lot of people usually filter out to nearby jurisdictions after a certain point. Everyone who lives here knows this. MPD pays better than fed LEO so there's less move in that direction.

golikehellmachine.com•4 days ago

i am not mad about it, it’s just genuinely a really unusual ratio of instructors/trainers to staff, i have never seen one that high

freighttraindisco.bsky.social•4 days ago

DC is always going to be unique bc DC, but quality wise it's a better force than say NYC.

We also have staffed up Spanish speaking officers via PR or elsewhere and they need to then train. There's a lot more churn because of how the region operates.

proptermalone.bsky.social•4 days ago

it's on the order of a quarter of London's police

petejmoore.bsky.social•4 days ago

Worth keeping in mind though that because of the UK's weird structure where the Met is both London's local police AND in many ways the national police force, the detective count is not quite the story for crime in London.

martymcd.bsky.social•4 days ago

Yeah, what's the population/geographical size of DC because the area the Met covers is enormous and a population of around 6m

proptermalone.bsky.social•4 days ago

we're much smaller (800k) but the comparison is percentages

martymcd.bsky.social•4 days ago

So the Met is 620 sq miles and 8.6m people for comparison

proptermalone.bsky.social•4 days ago

ok. NYPD is a better comp, maybe; it's ~15% detectives out of employed officers, which doesn't count various auxiliaries.

sheepbop.bsky.social•4 days ago

Plus City which is a different police force

lastgamerontheleft.bsky.social•4 days ago

When I was younger I had a vague interest in being a detective. I had about half a decade of experience in financial crimes investigations.

I was shocked to learn that the only way to become a detective in the US was to spend years as a traffic/street cop. They are radically different skill sets!

proptermalone.bsky.social•4 days ago

for what it's worth I think MPD (DC police) are fairly good at their jobs as urban American PDs go; this isn't intended to be cherry picking, I just went with the local one, no idea if they're an outlier

motherflicker.bsky.social•4 days ago

DC got pretty good homicide clearance rates in the Obama years, but then fell off considerably: https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/homicide-closure-rates

meelar.bsky.social•4 days ago

Part of the problem with American cops is the lack of centralization--it makes it really hard to collect even basic stats and do comparisons. Big-city departments get a ton of scrutiny, but rural cops are often even worse!

groverhaustenbosch.bsky.social•4 days ago

my friend from owsley county, kentucky is dead certain that the sheriff murdered the quarterback he played high school football with, as in he was found with a shotgun barrel in his mouth. but nothing came of it because when you're sheriff in a small, conservative rural county, you're basically god

bigdogmomthree.bsky.social•4 days ago

I would bet that most of the unsolved murders are in rural areas. They don't have the staff or expertise to solve them. Thank God that DNA has gotten so much better.

srboisvert.bsky.social•4 days ago

You'd lose that bet. Chicago only solves the cases where the murderers pretty much turn them themselves in either on purpose or via stupidity.

raine1967.bsky.social•4 days ago

MPD knows how to handle protests far better than I have seen in other cities. That said, I live here. I used to live in NY, and the NYPD was out of control during the 2003 RNC convention.

freighttraindisco.bsky.social•4 days ago

Practice makes etc. They're surprisingly tolerant of the often recurring pestilence that is poorly behaved visitors. Chief Wiggum having had to pay (LOLOL DC paid obvs) for Pershing Park helped. And then we yeeted him elsewhere.

davemayhem.bsky.social•4 days ago

No such thing as the get out jail free card that is qualified and immunity either. The IOPC isn’t perfect but I’d argue it has more teeth. Especially now the Met can fire police properly (which was an embarrassment to the force)

nbeaudrot.bsky.social•4 days ago

And the constables probably have better community relations (after all they're unarmed)

matthewraskob.bsky.social•4 days ago

One always has to make the qualification that racism & other forms of prejudice & abuse are absolutely problems in the UK’s police forces, but truly…the US is on a different planet in this regard.

sheepbop.bsky.social•4 days ago

Not all police officers are unarmed. Depends where they are. I've seen them at train stations and airports with guns. But that's unusual, and are officers with special training.

sheepbop.bsky.social•4 days ago

* in London

northeasternblot.bsky.social•4 days ago

We could have a massive quality of life increase if these departments assigned one (1) officer full time to catching bike thieves.

freighttraindisco.bsky.social•4 days ago

PS performs as a support for ISB and does do investigation preliminaries. They're also doing a lot of the liaison, social support piece. ISB could be larger but the defraud clown show, no money seems to get moved there.

katennp.bsky.social•4 days ago

Doesn’t the UK have like 12 murders a year anyway?

horseknuckler.bsky.social•4 days ago

They average around 550 a year

freighttraindisco.bsky.social•4 days ago

It's even higher wherever there's a TV franchise, like Lower Upper Dibbling betwixt Tyne.

sheepbop.bsky.social•4 days ago

Don't ever move to (the fictional county of) Midsomer.

"Throughout the span of 136 episodes, there have been more than 388 murders, 423 deaths in total and an additional 250 attempted murders or suicides."

freighttraindisco.bsky.social•4 days ago

Yes but they all had it coming so is it really a crime?

stoney.monster•4 days ago

It's why their detective shows are superior.

startarally.bsky.social•4 days ago

It was a bad idea to ask them to do those things and we should stop.

goaskalis.bsky.social•4 days ago

It reminds me of what the Monks of New Skete said in their dog-training books. They were discussing whether dogs can get along with other types of animals, and broadly, yes, they can, with the possible exception of chickens. The monks advise that all that flapping and squawking and flying feathers

goaskalis.bsky.social•4 days ago

is just too much temptation for even the most well-socialized dog sometimes

goaskalis.bsky.social•4 days ago

Our police act a lot more like a military force in enemy territory than a civilian peace-keeping force. The reasons and/or justifications for that are another subject, but this is the reality we have accepted.

goaskalis.bsky.social•4 days ago

I would say that it seems that people have a tendency to want to use any toys they possess and we did allow police forces to buy up a lot of Gulf War surplus, and men do love to bang shit around

freighttraindisco.bsky.social•4 days ago

Also a bit much to claim UK police are better because let's just talk about the Met and Sexual Assault oh fuck no let's absolutely not.

vasthypno.bsky.social•4 days ago

US police do even worse with sexual assault, unfortunately. Sone states have decades of untested rape kits. Notorious rapist cops get fired & rehired in other cities. Non notorious ones stay employed

Prison rape on inmates of both genders is common enough we had to pass new laws about it.

librarylass.bsky.social•4 days ago

of course, soon what they'll be asking your police to do is round up all the girls that look like me (or slightly better).

srboisvert.bsky.social•4 days ago

Also not that clearance does not equal solved. In Chicago they will declare a homicide cleared if the police think they know who did it but can't prove it.

nbeaudrot.bsky.social•4 days ago

Private insurers and the government started pushing "cameras everywhere" in the *Blair* years. We can't even get Shotspotter set up consistently.

scottmullin.bsky.social•4 days ago

That's ok. Shotspotters don't work

sheepbop.bsky.social•4 days ago

Yeah, Boris Johnson in London did order second-hand water cannon vehicles, but luckily they never materialised.

hollylilly22.bsky.social•4 days ago

And the UK doesn’t have the volume of homicides that America does not the number of guns.

pesto-on-errything.bsky.social•4 days ago

A few other notable points: does gun violence make homicides harder to solve? Does our law enforcement apparatus’ animus towards the communities they purportedly serve reduce community member assistance necessary to solve violent crimes?

mobutt.bsky.social•4 days ago

Yes and yes, I’d reckon.

pesto-on-errything.bsky.social•4 days ago

Gun violence angle is half Baked - obviously we have stupid rates of gun violence. So - natural comparative difference. Not clear that it actually makes investigation harder? OP makes excellent point re: division of law enforcement (patrolling vs detective-ing), which could be better correlation?

ajaxsinger.bsky.social•4 days ago

Poverty-suppression v crime-stopping. Though the universal CCTV system doesn't hurt.

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