Sounds corrupt but they’re the police so…I guess not?
Law in the US ceased to exist on January 20, 2025. The rest of us are just going through the motions until the reality catches up. (So, while in the past, something might have happened, now, they will get medals.)
It seems the whole world is at a fork in the road…rule by law or rule by power.
The problem is not getting paid overtime for time spent working wtf. The problem is being the fucking worst??
3000 hours OT would mean over 5000 hours worked or 14 hours every damn day of the year.
#doubt
Even if true, that’s terrible management from a budgetary view (they could hire a second person for less cost) and an operations view (stretching a “high stress” position very thin).
terrible management from a budgetary view? are you kidding? where are we supposed to spend all this money? feeding the poor? housing people? if we do that, where will the cops find the resources to arrest people for feeding the the poor and also shoot the homeless? they work so hard.
They are almost certainly not actually working that much though. Look up the recent Massachusetts state police overtime scandal.
Okay, fuck it, I’m getting out of this software engineering thing, I’m moving to the US to become a cop. I think I’m white enough for Trump, definitely whiter than he is.
I’ve eaten oranges whiter than he is
Here’s a test for you:
There’s a chunk of cash in an envelope. Do you take it?A non white person could be close by at any moment, are you fearing for your life?
You’re walking outside and you hear a dog bark in the distance. Are you shooting wildly in the basic direction of the sounds?
You’ve just killed an innocent person and been given a
paid holidaywhoops, I mean ‘suspension’, where would you like to go?Hmm… If I find the envelope, yes. If someone is handing it to me as a bribe, no.
No
No
Hawaii maybe? Weather seems nice, same for the nature. Nice place to get your thoughts off murder.
True heroes, these rich cops. Not like schoolteachers, who are suspicious villains and possibly freeloaders, am I right?
*sigh
Not incentivizing our teachers/academics/social workers but highly incentivizing cops is going to devastate our country’s output soon.
We need to cap police OT. They are making off like bandits.
Best part is, they’re either overreporting it, or they’re legitimately dangerous to society from being so overworked in a job that already seems to put them on edge.
I have no quarrel with people being paid for their overtime (in fact, it would be shady for overtime to NOT be paid out), but I don’t think 19 hours of overtime per week over the course of an entire year (or 20 if they take 2 weeks off a year) for police officers is OK. Tbh I don’t think it’s OK for anyone who doesn’t earn dividends or bonuses based on company profits, but it’s even less OK for police.
If I worked 5 hours overtime every week for a year, my entire combined income would be less than what these guys make in 2 months ):
Nah they definitely take it all. Usually just parked out side a gated community taking a nap or “working” the sideline at a sporting event or any number of other bullshit like “helping” at the dui checkpoint in the middle of the night chilling in the big air conditioned trailer maybe also napping. My buddy is a statie in another state overtime is plentiful but not actual hard police work like overtime at your job is just more of your job. For police it’s just paid hang out
Honestly, that wouldn’t even be so bad if the majority of them weren’t dicks.
I totally agree that the current institutions that are US police forces are terrible at best, having a police force in general is needed. Unless you’re talking about anarchy which while interesting, is a completely different conversation.
Think about a surgeon. We put peoples lives in their hands. We expect them to be preposterously educated, able to perform extreme tasks under significant duress, to maintain ongoing technical and specialized training, to prove that the training is effective, and they are compensated accordingly. If they fuck up, they can be held personally liable for their fuck ups. There are consequences to the career and its not a role to be taken on lightly.
Hear me out.
We raise the amount we pay cops to 1.5 million dollars a year… but.
No qualified immunity. It no longer exists (guess what? it already doesn’t exist for military service members). Any crimes they commit, the consequences are 10x’d and they are no longer allowed to engage in public service, ever. They can be publicly executed for any crimes beyond misdemeanor. They have to pay for their own equipment. They have to carry liability insurance for any violations of civil rights which might occur in the line of performing their duties.
The minimum qualification is a PhD in constitutional law. They need to be able to run a 6 minute mile, do 100 push ups in 2 minutes, 200 sit ups in 2 minutes, and 80 burpees in 2 minutes. They need to be able to carry 120 lbs for 10 minutes up an incline. They need to be able to recite the US Constitution, the state constitution, and the local city and county charters where they are stationed. They are expected to have advanced knowledge of any and all laws they are expected to be enforcing. They have to undergo annual psychological, physical, technical, and legal reassessments to prove their suitability for the job; these reassessments are maintained as a part of public record.
We 10x the pay and we hire 1/10th the number of cops. It becomes a career path somewhere between than a doctor or a lawyer or an astronaut. Its not something a HS drop out should be able to consider as a career path.
Look, obviously, hyperbole. Or is it?
What about this, instead we just take that 1.5 mill a year and put it towards things that actual solve problems, rather than making sure we have the best and brights super soldiers doing traffic stops and taking notes on your break in.
Since we’re engaging in fantasy, sure.
But I think you’ll find no matter what you do, some version of a person whose role in society is to enforce the laws, a kind of “law enforcement”, emerges.
The properties of that role can vary widely from society to society, but pretty much every society independently comes to the same conclusion, that the role is necessary, once the society determines a common and well structured code of conduct is necessary.
100% abolish the police. They are a corrupt institution which finds their roots in re-enforcing a slave culture. 100% let every prisoner free. The roots of the prison system in the US are the same as the police state.
But countries with no history of slavery have police forces and prison systems. They are an emergent property of large social systems. Society will re-invent the role. We might as well fill the niche in a manner we want, instead of a manner we dont want.
But countries with no history of slavery have police forces and prison systems. They are an emergent property of large social systems. Society will re-invent the role. We might as well fill the niche in a manner we want, instead of a manner we dont want.
I mean yeah, if you don’t have means of enforcing law, the law becomes pointless, might as well abolish all laws.
And I mean that MIGHT be possible, but do we really want to test what it’d be like in a lawless society where it’s probably going to be money and violence that decides who’s right, kinda like now, but with no possibility of suing the people with money or violence, you could only respond with your own violence.
The idea that things devolve into a lawless society because a lack of police is absurdist reductionism.
Firstly, we already live in a lawless society; see any of the actions Trump has taken since January. Its just a matter of “for whom does the law apply?”
Second, and I posted this to your other response, the idea that we can’t “abolish a police department and rebuild it into something that serves its intended purpose” is also absurdist, in at least that we have the counter-factual of it actually happening: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/12/camden-policing-reforms-313750
So they didn’t abolish the police, they reformed it. That doesn’t disprove my statement, which in itself was not a shot at you, merely commentary on what you said.
You said
They are an emergent property of large social systems. Society will re-invent the role. We might as well fill the niche in a manner we want, instead of a manner we dont want.
And I don’t disagree, I merely stated that police of some sort, regardless of name, is not just an emergent property, but also a necessity. I never said that the way Americans do policing is THE way to do it. I’m not American myself.
Firstly, we already live in a lawless society; see any of the actions Trump has taken since January. Its just a matter of “for whom does the law apply?”
That’s more an America problem than a “police is inherently bad” problem if you ask me.
TL;DR: Yes, I agree, policing in the US needs heavy reforms. But the moment you go around saying “abolish the police”, you’re not talking about reforms, or at least that’s not what most people are going to hear. They’re going to think they’re going to have to live in The Purge. So maybe stop referring to it that way and people will give your ideas, which are actually good, more consideration.
No. The abolished it. They didn’t reform it. They abolished it.
But the moment you go around saying “abolish the police”, you’re not talking about reforms, or at least that’s not what most people are going to hear.
Stop it.
Don’t both misinterpret what I said and then put words I didn’t put down into my mouth. If your balls shrink into your chest when you hear “abolish the police”, thats a you problem. Likewise, if you are basing your decision making on “what most people want to hear”, you probably are both a) not an effective strategist, and even further b) not a very good person.
Abolish the police. If you can’t do that, de-fund them. Tip-toeing around the sensitivities of a deeply immoral people isn’t a strategy that gets results. It only gets you halfway to no-where.
For a couple of teachers?
I don’t understand what you mean.
Like pay for teachers not cops.
Maybe I’m too easy to please but I’d be happier if they took the money that currently goes towards tanks and “how to shoot first” seminars and put it towards ongoing education for officers on law, de-escalation tactics, and critical thinking in stressful situations.
I mean, I agree entirely with the “abolish the police” movement. I don’t think policing in the US is recoverable. Its rotten to the core. Its a remnant of slavery. In that sense I’m an abolitionist.
But I also think its a thing that “law enforcement” is a thing that will be expected to happen. So if you are going to abolish policing as we currently know it, you need to replace it with something different.
Any law enforcement will be called police. Frankly it’s a bit silly to say police are rotten so if we abolish them we should change their name. That’s basically just rebranding. And I mean, sometimes that works, so I guess I shouldn’t discount it entirely.
Replace it with what? Militsiya? Pretty much every country in the world calls their law enforcement “police” these days. I suppose there are some that have gendarmerie or carabinieri or similar, though those exist next to police rather than instead of them usually.
These questions aren’t being asked in a vacuum: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/12/camden-policing-reforms-313750. Maybe ask a Camdenite? I’m sure we’ve got a few laying about.
Its not a hypothetical to dissolve a department of a government which is dysfunctional and rebuild it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camden_County_Police_Department
Wikipedia seems to think they still have a police department. So the police as an institution isn’t being replaced, it’s just being reformed. It’s controlled by a different level of local government and it has different rules now, but it’s still police. If this is what you’re supporting, you’re not for abolishment of police, you’re for police reform. Which the US does heavily need. Abolishment of police means something else entirely.
This is the way. I can’t tell you how much it hurts me when I see an obese cop.
Practicality-wise though, if the police have recruitment issues now though, finding recruits with a PhD will be impossible. People really overestimate how many PhD’s are out here in the wild.
police preferentially dont hire people with that much education on purpose.
1.5 million dollars a year.
We are so bad about this across the board. Why is society so content to expect the worst from people like police and politicians?
Honestly, probably because we’ve been conditioned to get angry at the employees of the super rich rather than the hoarders themselves.
It’s impossible to work 3000 hours of overtime in a year. This is fraud. If that person is actually working those hours, then it’s incompetence by the Sergeant above them allowing them to work that many overtime hours for no reason.
14.47 hour days to the maximum legal amount of days before days off. And working on holidays is time and a half or double time by default as well. Could be done. Not good, but not fraud.
The trick I read before is to arrest someone at the end of your shift, then you have to process them at overtime and possibly wait for a judge or something. They know the tricks to draw it out.
Of course why didn’t I think of arresting someone just to get overtime? Probably because I’m not a fucking psychopath
The system is absolutely fucked. My mother, years ago, had just recently given birth to my youngest sister. She was pulled over with a suspended license. She didn’t know she had unpaid parking tickets. The cop was gonna let her go until backup stopped by (why this cop needed backup for a car that had two small women and baby is suspect). One of the backup cops was vehement on arresting my mom, her newborn be damned. The first cop explained that they get a $250.00 bonus for any arrests made. He tried and tried to convince the second cop not to arrest but said cop did not care in the slightest about separating a newborn from our mom. My mother spent the night in jail because that second cop only saw dollar signs looking at her.
It’s absolutely disgusting that they have financial incentive to put people through hell.
Depending on internals it doesn’t even necessarily need to be an arrest, just something that requires a report. My local PD apparently needs an incident report done within 12 hours of said incident taking place, this could be as simple as checking on a weird noise and finding a cat.
Sorry to inform you but your application to the police academy has been denied
The money is in police detail work And a lot of them are able to do it during their normal shifts. The person probably did legitimately log that many hours or near that many hours, the problem is that they were able to do it in the first place.
3151 hrs of overtime.
78.775 full-time 40 hour weeks there.
So assuming 2 weeks of vacation, he somehow managed to work 128.775 weeks in a year?
128.775/50 - let’s see how many work weeks he had to work each week to get there - 2.5755
So each week he had to be working about 2.6 normal weeks, or about 103 hours a week.
Assuming he worked 7 days each week, he was doing 14.7 hour shifts every day of those 50 weeks of working 7 days with no breaks.
Hmm.
theres that doubletime, trippletime, quadrupletime and time and a half multipliers to factor in too. I think you for overtime past a 40 hour wk, past 8 hours day, on a holiday, with hazard pay you can pump it way way up. We should give the same to teachers.
52 weeks in a year. If he worked all 52 full time it’s 4000hrs, which means we’re talking 40+ weeks which most people do work. So yes it’s within range. Remember you don’t have to be awake and working to be considered on duty. Overnight work is still paid work In a lot of industries
At the end of the day we’re both speculating here. The larger point is that unfortunately a lot of this is legal, which is the entire problem. They can get away with this shit without any recourse.
Your definition of full time is incorrect. Full time is 40h/week, at 52 weeks per year that’s 2080 hours per year. 3000 hours of overtime puts the total at 5080, or 19.5 hours per day.
That’s by working 5 days a week, every week, no vacation nor PTO nor sickness.
It is fraud
Unaccountable fraud is the new American Dream.
I think you are a bit off with your assumptions. In California, overtime is earned either when you work more than 40 hours per week, OR more than 8 hours a day.
So technically he could have for example worked three 24 hour shifts in a week, which would equal three 8 hour shifts (24 regular time hours) and three 16 hour overtime blocks (48h OT). 48 * 52 = 2,496 OT. He could have even been sleeping and on call while working that OT.
Definitely poor management but not guaranteed fraud. The math is more nuanced.
And it’s legal to have 24h shifts? Or 16h of overtime in a day?
Edit to add: I don’t know how it works in california, but where I’m from on-call duty is not the same as overtime, and you can’t mix the two. And there are limits to shift time (including on-call) + overtime. So even if it was legal to have 8h shifts and 16h of on-call duty (it isn’t) it wouldn’t be classified as overtime
No it must be fraud because ACAB
It must be fraud because nobody can work 5000 hours a year
You’re right i used the 78 figure for some odd reason.
anyway again the sad reality is this is all probably legal, maybe grey. And we are both still speculating as to the numbers and how OT works for them.
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Cops at my hospital are all in overtime. They bring in inmates for psych holds/psych eval and then supervise them hands-off for the entire hospital stay. Easy money. Then the really entitled ones try to act pushy and basically want us to give the patient shots for unjustified reasons. Just so they can sit and watch movies without being bothered.
They must already get a hazard pay designation by being there, or else they’d be looking for ways to create hazards. So it could be worse.
He surely did work 11,5hours everyday additionaly to his regular shift 🥴
For some reason my lemmy app glitched as I was scrolling and I was seeing this title above This post
That “No Tax on Overtime” pitch makes perfect sense now.
Yes especially when Project 2025 also wants to reclassify what counts as overtime hours to make it unachievable for most.
No wonder that cop in Parks & Recreation moved to San Diego.
Since you can be ‘too smart’ to be a cop, can we get them to remove the america’s finest from their cars and gear? Clearly that is no longer the case.
remove the america’s finest from their cars
They are finest at getting paid.
Now do California Highway Patrol.
I want the police abolished and the prisons emptied today. I don’t care what happens next.
If you’re making wild suggestions, you should probably care about the effects it will have
Some people just want to watch the world burn.
You’re not familiar with prison abolition? I have some links if you’d like to educate yourself. :)
the reason for my latter sentence is that any impediment stops this goal from materializing. the right will always have a worry, or question, or addition, or delay, and each of these impediments prevents achieving the end goal. that latter sentence is strictly necessary to achieve the result.
You’re either being hyperbolic or you’re willfully ignorant about what would happen if we did that, neither of which help your case
Your failure to imagine a successful alternative doesn’t mean that the person you’re talking to is ignorant.
Your imagination seems to only go as far as ‘the prison doors open and anarchy occurs’. There are many alternatives to changing people’s behavior that isn’t simply locking them into boxes for decades at a time.
Nobody is saying that justice shouldn’t be done, only that the current system is not just and doesn’t improve the people that are put into it.
Why should this person need to use their imagination to legitimize someone else’s argument, especially one so absurd? OP should make their own argument.
Person A: The Police and prisons should be abolished.This is a person making a point. What they’re talking about is pretty obvious from the text.
Person B: "If you’re making wild suggestions, you should probably care about the effects it will have"This is a person making an implication. They never define what ‘the effects’ are, they simply hanging an implication. What they mean is left up to the imagination of the reader.
Person B again: "You’re either being hyperbolic or you’re willfully ignorant about what would happen if we did that, neither of which help your case"Once again, they’re not actually saying anything. They’re not saying “what would happen if we did that” they’re implying the the Person A is hyperbolic or willfully ignorant for believing… something. Something that they won’t actually define.
Again, this isn’t a point, this is the person implying something but never actually saying what it is.
This is a shitty conversational tactic where the person never has to take a position that can be argued against but can appear, to the ignorant, as if they are actually saying something cynical and intelligent.
I’m replying to the most obvious reading of the implication which is “If you abolish the police and prisons then there will just be criminals everywhere”.
But, because of this shitty conversational tactic, of not actually stating their position, Person B can simply come back and say “Oh I didn’t mean that” and move the goalposts elsewhere.
Why should this person need to use their imagination to legitimize someone else’s argument, especially one so absurd? OP should make their own argument.
It is that person who’s arguments are left to the imagination. Since they never actually say what they mean.
The first person in the conversion was pretty explicit about their position.
Person A: The Police and prisons should be abolished.
This isn’t a “point” it’s just an empty statement devoid of any reason or logic.
Person B: “If you’re making wild suggestions, you should probably care about the effects it will have”
This is a person making an implication. They never define what ‘the effects’ are, they simply hanging an implication.
It’s pretty damned obvious what will happen if you abolish all enforcement of the law, people will engage in more crime because there will be little to no consequences for said crime. This is basic reasoning that doesn’t require fantastical leaps of the imagination to figure out like Person A’s statement does. We can use history as our guide for this as this has happened numerous times in places where the government has collapsed. Places like Somolia where roving gangs controlled local territories with lots of blood and violence. What historical reference can you give where all laws were abolished and something good happened?
This is a shitty conversational tactic where the person never has to take a position that can be argued against but can appear, to the ignorant, as if they are actually saying something cynical and intelligent.
This sound like a description of Person A’s statement to me.
I love how you can write a book length comment on all the reasons why it’s wrong to argue against you and the OP but have yet to give a single actual argument for why your position makes any sense or will improve anything for anyone but criminals. You can’t even describe basic concepts like how any of this would work. Even OP stated “I don’t care what happens next” meaning they’ve given their “point” zero thought or consideration. You two are absolutely ridiculous.
Don’t get angry. Abolition is a good thing. It helps you. Instead, try to envision what the goal is. What do you think I’d like to achieve?
