{"id":490,"date":"2020-06-08T22:12:40","date_gmt":"2020-06-08T22:12:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/morganredfield.com\/blog\/?p=490"},"modified":"2022-03-22T01:09:54","modified_gmt":"2022-03-22T01:09:54","slug":"police-violence-through-schneiers-lens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morganredfield.com\/blog\/2020\/06\/police-violence-through-schneiers-lens\/","title":{"rendered":"Police Violence Through Schneier’s Lens"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Bruce Schneier\u2019s book Liars\nand Outliers<\/a> has a security framework that\u2019s been helping me understand police\nbrutality lately . Schneier, one of the top computer security researchers in\nthe world, wrote that book to describe a holistic view of how societies prevent\npeople from harming each other. He breaks harm-prevention into four different\ncategories: moral, social, institutional, and security.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let’s go through what\nthose different methods are, and how they are (not) used to keep the police\nfrom hurting the public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moral Pressure<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moral pressure is the\ninternal feeling that individuals have about right and wrong. It’s when someone\nthinks “it’s wrong to steal,” or “killing people is bad.”\nWhen people act on these principles, that is the effect of a moral framework\nthat stops people from wanting to hurt others in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When officers are\nrequired to get implicit\nbias training<\/a>, that training is seeking to provide an additional moral\nsense for the officers. The sense that certain actions that might look\ninnocuous are actually racist and harmful to society. I think implicit bias is\nreal (though less powerful than most of it’s proponents believe).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most police become\nofficers out of a desire to help people. There are exceptions, and white\nsupremacist groups have a history of infiltrating the police<\/a>. When you\nactually ask\nofficers why they became police, 68% cite a desire to help people.<\/a> The same\nsurvey also shows that 41% of police officers \u201csee injustice in the world and\nwant to correct it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am worried that only<\/em>\n68% of the officers in that survey said they became police officers in order to\nhelp people. As I understand it, the survey allowed you to agree with many\noptions, so the idea of 32% of police didn\u2019t care enough about their community to\neven check a box does worry me. Given the role that police play in our society,\nI\u2019d prefer more emphasis on that particular trait when recruiting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, I worry that\nthe current police situation is making recruiting moral officers more\ndifficult. If someone right now cares about helping their community or righting\ninjustice, I doubt that they\u2019d think going into the police is the best way to\ndo it. Systemic issues in policing could be actively pushing away the people\nthat we most want to do the work, slowly making police departments worse for\ntheir communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Societal Pressure<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Moral Pressure\ndoesn’t stop someone from considering a harmful act, Societal Pressure often\nwill. We live in a society, and people want their peers to think well of them.\nThey don’t want to be shunned, whether literally or figuratively. They want to\nbe respected. Unfortunately, this harm prevention method has been totally\ntwisted by our modern policing systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who are a police\nofficer’s main peers? Other police.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many officers in large\ncities can’t\nafford to live in those cities<\/a>, and so they actually live in the suburbs.\nThis further separates the officers’ peer groups from the people that they\ndirectly impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not only that, police\n(seemingly driven largely by union leadership) have a strong culture of\nprotecting their own. That means that Social Pressure is pushing police to\nignore violations from within the police, instead of pushing police to avoid\nthose violations. Watch\nthe video of the police pushing a 75 year old<\/a> to the ground, seriously injuring\nhim. Several police in the team around the man look worried, and like they want\nto help him. The official report (before the video came out) was that the man\nhad tripped. That means that everyone on this team chose not to correct the\nofficial report. That includes the ones who looked worried about him during the\nevent. That\u2019s the force of societal pressure, causing these officers to try to\nprotect their own instead of doing what\u2019s right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This severe perversion\nof social pressure within police departments means that many externally imposed\nmethods of fixing police violence will be swept aside. The desire of humans to\nbe an accepted member of their group is the strongest force in the known\nuniverse, and that force is currently working to protect corrupt police\nofficers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Institutional Pressure<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If someone’s morals\nwon’t keep them from violence, and their social peers won’t ostracize them for\nit, then it’s up to the institutions they’re a part of to impose official\nsanctions. These institutional sanctions are most of what we talk about when we\ntalk about law and order. The official laws that people are supposed to follow,\nalong with real consequences when the laws aren’t followed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People (including\npolice), respond to their incentives. Without real consequences to their\nactions, the police will continue to hurt others.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lot has been shared\nrecently about all of the failures of institutional pressure against the\npolice. I’ll just mention what I see as the biggest two right here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first is qualified\nimmunity<\/a>. Police who harm others in the course of their job (whether\nmaliciously or not) are protected from the consequences that a member of the\ngeneral public would face. This protects police from consequences for more than\njust the egregious murders committed by police officers. There are examples of\npolice stealing hundred of thousands of dollars, of them shooting children,\nkilling pets, and not being punished for any of it. The effect of qualified\nimmunity means that police don’t have real consequences for many major\nincidences of violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Secondly, even when an\nofficer is sanctioned for poor behavior, many police\nunions<\/a> have negotiated\nloopholes<\/a> with local municipal governments. An officer may be sanctioned\nand lose their job, but then be hired back after their records are shortly\nsealed. Records may be kept secret from independent watchdog groups, preventing\npatterns of behavior from being seen (and thus preventing sanctions from\nproperly escalating).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this means that\nbad behavior among the police is tolerated at an institutional level. It\u2019s\nprohibitively difficult to use law and sanction to punish police officers that\nabuse the public. Officers who notice that they can get away with little\nviolations will be more willing to commit larger violations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Security<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Security is what is\nsupposed to save you after morality, social pressure, and institutional\nsanctions have failed. If someone is trying to hurt you, you use cameras to\nobserve them, you use locks to keep them out, you use guards to physically stop\nthem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s what’s\nhappening right now. Morality, social pressure, and the law have all failed to\nkeep Americans safe from their police. Now we have people filming police\nbehavior and sharing it online. We have people physically putting themselves\nbetween people of color and the police trying to hurt them. We have protesters\nexplicitly calling police out on their behavior, demanding change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Security is the last\nline of defense because it’s very expensive. I’m really glad the protests are\nhappening now because things need to change. Unfortunately, one reason the\nprotests are so strong right now is that so many people are out of work. Their\nopportunity cost for protesting is low, so they can put in the effort that’s\nneeded now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We need to fix the\nother aspects of our police system so that people don’t keep dying after\nAmerica fully returns to work. We need to make that change now, and we need to\nmake it last.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bruce Schneier\u2019s book Liars and Outliers has a security framework that\u2019s been helping me understand police brutality lately . Schneier, one of the top computer security researchers in the world, wrote that book to describe a holistic view of how societies prevent people from harming each other. He breaks harm-prevention into four different categories: moral, … Continue reading “Police Violence Through Schneier’s Lens”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nPolice Violence Through Schneier's Lens - Theory and Practice<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/morganredfield.com\/blog\/2020\/06\/police-violence-through-schneiers-lens\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Police Violence Through Schneier's Lens - Theory and Practice\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Bruce Schneier\u2019s book Liars and Outliers has a security framework that\u2019s been helping me understand police brutality lately . 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