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An Anonymous Coward writes:
Camden, New Jersey is a very low income neighborhood. According to this NY Times article, until recently it had typical low income policing--heavy on corruption and violence and low on compassion.
But now they have a new chief and things have changed --
"Handing a $250 ticket to someone who is making $13,000 a year" — around the per capita income in the city — "can be life altering," Chief Thomson said in an interview last year, noting that it can make car insurance unaffordable or result in the loss of a driver's license. "Taxing a poor community is not going to make it stronger."
Handling more vehicle stops with a warning, rather than a ticket, is one element of Chief Thomson's new approach, which, for lack of another name, might be called the Hippocratic ethos of policing: Minimize harm, and try to save lives.
Officers are trained to hold their fire when possible, especially when confronting people wielding knives and showing signs of mental illness, and to engage them in conversation when commands of "drop the knife" don't work. This sometimes requires backing up to a safer distance. Or relying on patience rather than anything on an officer's gun belt.
While not out of the woods yet, it sounds like there is hope for Camden and maybe it won't just continue to be written off as a war zone.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Wednesday April 05 2017, @05:45PM
Well, ultimately the point seems to be that the laws against discrimination don't mean the cops have to hire someone who is totally unfit for the occupation. Which isn't at all unreasonable. Where it gets absurd is that the judge accepted, without ANY evidence, the idea that high intelligence makes one unfit for that particular job. That was based on information -- which the plaintiff demonstrated to be inaccurate -- provided to the police force by a private consultant.
It's security through outsourcing -- the outsourcing firm can't be blamed because they only provide "opinions", while the police force can't be blamed because they're assumed to be acting in good faith when they blindly accepted those opinions as statements of fact.
The full ruling can be found at:
http://www.aele.org/apa/jordan-newlondon.html [aele.org]
Interesting side note, the ruling seems to be partially based on a case from the 80s, Harris v. McRae, which found that the government had a legitimate interest in promoting childbirth and for that reason they had a right to limit abortion access for low income women. Seems to me that they went further than they should have in order to punish the "immorality" of having sex while poor, and in doing so set the bar for proving discrimination extremely high. Providing medical treatment for anything except one specific class of illnesses seems a pretty clear case of discrimination IMO, and I REALLY don't like the idea that "the army needs more cannon fodder" can override a constitutional amendment against discrimination. But that's the existing case law and now the courts have to follow it:
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/448/297/case.html [justia.com]