• MTK@lemmy.world
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    1 hour ago

    Cops be living in the 60s:

    • Has a low skill job
    • Earns enough to buy a house and feed the famiky on a single income
    • Easily get away with murder
    • Twice as easy if it was a black person
    • Easy access to drugs
    • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
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      17 hours ago

      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.)

  • lazyViking@lemmy.world
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    24 hours ago

    The problem is not getting paid overtime for time spent working wtf. The problem is being the fucking worst??

    • potpotato@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      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).

      • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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        48 minutes ago

        Gotta be something where their contract lets them game the system. Picking up extra time if someone calls out sick on a holiday night or something. Probably got a “cartel” going where officers group up to trade and manipulate schedules in order to maximize pay.

      • pyre@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        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.

        • lud@lemm.ee
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          3 hours ago

          You are joking but just hiring more cops would be cheaper

          • pyre@lemmy.world
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            3 hours ago

            it’s not though. cops keep getting more budget than they can use, so instead they militarize and use their toys on innocent people during crackdowns

            • lud@lemm.ee
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              59 minutes ago

              Sure whatever. That’s not what’s being discussed here though.

              It would be cheaper for them to hire additional staff instead of paying for overtime. What they would do with the saved money is another matter. They could have bought tanks to oppress the orphans or they could’ve bought magical Linux unicorns for the children of Gaza.

              It doesn’t matter, the point is that paying that much for overtime is more expensive than hiring an additional cop or two.

    • MirthfulAlembic@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      They are almost certainly not actually working that much though. Look up the recent Massachusetts state police overtime scandal.

  • kreskin@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.

  • boonhet@lemm.ee
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    23 hours ago

    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.

    • D_C@lemm.ee
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      17 hours ago

      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 holiday whoops, I mean ‘suspension’, where would you like to go?

      • boonhet@lemm.ee
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        13 hours ago

        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.

  • d_cent@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.

    • LandedGentry@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      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.

      • DarthKaren@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        This is what I was looking for. My last duty assignment in the USAF was working physical security at a NATO facility in Va. Part of the agreement with NATO was that no one was allowed to carry weapons. When we had off base functions with the higher ups, we had to hire local PD since they were armed. I got to talking with one and he said they make a shit ton of money on this type of stuff.

      • andyburke@fedia.io
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        1 day ago

        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.

        • LandedGentry@lemmy.zip
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          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.

          • ugo@feddit.it
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            1 day ago

            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

            • oaklandnative@lemmy.world
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              1 day ago

              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.

              • ugo@feddit.it
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                15 hours ago

                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

            • LandedGentry@lemmy.zip
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              1 day ago

              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.

        • kreskin@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          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.

    • someguy3@lemmy.world
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      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.

      • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Of course why didn’t I think of arresting someone just to get overtime? Probably because I’m not a fucking psychopath

        • FilthyHookerSpit@lemmy.world
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          20 hours ago

          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.

          • faythofdragons@slrpnk.net
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            3 hours ago

            And saying that they get a $250 bonus in front of your mom is lowkey asking if she could make a better offer. My family is mixed race, and cops are absolutely corrupt as hell.

            • FilthyHookerSpit@lemmy.world
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              6 minutes ago

              You know, I didn’t even think about that. They could’ve gotten less for an arrest, or maybe nothing. Just another arrest to their “totally-not-a-quota”. Definitely could see them saying that as a way of fishing for a bribe. Man I hate this system that’s been corrupt since it’s inception.

        • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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          23 hours ago

          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.

  • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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?

    • bishbosh@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      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.

      • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        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.

        • boonhet@lemm.ee
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          23 hours ago

          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.

          • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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            23 hours ago

            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

            • boonhet@lemm.ee
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              22 hours ago

              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.

              • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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                22 hours ago

                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.

    • psivchaz@reddthat.com
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      1 day ago

      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.

      • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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        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.

        • Fredthefishlord@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          19 hours ago

          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.

        • boonhet@lemm.ee
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          23 hours ago

          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.

    • Horsey@lemmy.world
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      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.

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      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.

  • MelonYellow@lemmy.ca
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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.

    • kreskin@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      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.

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      23 hours ago

      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.

      • Jimmycakes@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        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

        • person420@lemmynsfw.com
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          20 hours ago

          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.

    • CmdrShepard42@lemm.ee
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      Yes especially when Project 2025 also wants to reclassify what counts as overtime hours to make it unachievable for most.