Saturday, August 21, 2010

How to get all law-abiding citizens to trust police with two simple rules

1. If you are found to be innocent of whatever police were trying to arrest/detain/search/question you for in the first place, you (and anyone acting on your behalf/in your defence) cannot be charged with assaulting a police officer, obstructing justice, resisting arrest, and all those other laws that exist to enable police to catch bad guys.

As I blogged about before, a main reason for being afraid of the police is that even if their original reasoning or methods are bullshit and you're just trying to protect yourself, they can still rightfully arrest you for assaulting an officer or resisting arrest. If a bunch of plainclothes police try to throw you into a van and you try to fight back because, hey, strange men throwing you into a van, they can still charge you with resisting arrest, obstructing justice, assaulting an officer, mischief - even if it was a case of mistaken identity and you aren't actually the person they wanted to arrest.

So they should change this rule. If law-abiding citizens truly had nothing to fear, we'd be much more trusting of and willing to cooperate with police.

2. If the conditions of your detention do not meet Geneva Convention standards, you get financial compensation. Always. Period. Even if you're guilty.

As I mentioned in #10 of my braindump, what makes me more afraid of the police than of the black bloc is the detention conditions. If the worst a law-abiding citizen had to fear from police is having to sit around for a while, with access to sufficient drinking water and adequate toilet conditions, while the red tape is untangled, we'd have no reason to fear them. But once they start denying us drinking water and threatening us with rape, they become the biggest threat to us - and the reason why I now wouldn't even consider calling the police unless the threat I faced was even greater than several days of insufficient drinking water and rape threats. If they could get back to a place where I can be confident that the inconvenience I'd suffer if wrongfully arrested is no worse than waiting in line at some government office, I could trust them again.

Variations I'm toying with:

a) Financial compensation for inhumane detention conditions is somehow deducted from police salary increases. Not sure if this is logistically possible, not really comfortable with establishing the precedent of cutting workers' pay punitively (what if it was just the police chief's pay?), pretty sure pay negotiations would just take this into account and demand higher increases to adapt.

b) If you're found to be innocent and are detained under inhumane conditions, not only do you get financial compensation, but you get a get out of jail free card (or maybe several, depending on the length and severity of your detention). So next time you're guilty of something, they have to throw out the charges, or next time you find yourself kettled or otherwise detained by police, they have to let you go. Even if you're guilty that time.

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