Quote:
Originally Posted by illinifan999
I've made roughly 100 domestic assault arrests in 5+ years. I had a grand total of 1 of them go to trial (victim didn't show, but apparently made an "excited utterance" to me which got around hearsay). It still ended up getting dismissed since they couldn't prove the domestic relationship without the victim.
I used to get at least annoyed when my cases got plead down or dismissed until I learned that plead down means I get to go home and dismissed means I don't have to show up. I know that unless the person's guilt is blatant or I get a confession, the prosecutor isn't risking their "batting average" for it.
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I think it's best in government to really understand appreciate the importance of your role in the system, perform that part ethically and competently and not to have stress about other peoples' roles (except if you know someone to be breaking the law or engaging in unethical practices). Those arrests may not have led to very many convictions for domestic battery, but they all mattered, many of them shut down a violent confrontation, kept a victim safe, created a paper trail that prosecutors and sentencing judges will use forever, etc. After that, your job is done (unless you're testifying).
Taking a lot of those to trial (or manslaughter-type cases when the law is muddy) definitely decreases your "batting average", and I guess some prosecutors care about that, but it's something I've never seen in the offices I worked in. Of course, I've never seen pressure from police to prosecute a certain way, or any conspiracies to rig cases either. I'm sure it happens, and that there's some offices that are really tainted by that, and other unethical practices, but the vast majority of police and prosecutors are just not involved in anything like that, or shooting people. So it's an odd place to be, when you're criticized when you've done something wrong, but you're also deemed a racist if you do something right because, like it's said about those New Jersey officers, the only reason you did the right thing was because the suspect/defendant was white.
Edit: Black Americans are statistically disadvantaged in almost every facet in American life. Educating, housing, health, economic, everything. White America mostly gets a pass on all that, except for those involved in law enforcement. Which is good in a way, it's the only place where those things are really being challenged (though it's not always a productive challenge). I think that makes some white people really happy and comfortable, to be able to point at "worse" white people who are the real problem. If you're a middle-class professional white guy your internal biases that you might not even be aware of don't really matter at all - even though statistical evidence for those biases exist in all kinds of fields in the U.S. People in law enforcement are some of the few people that really have to confront whatever biases they have if they want to be good at what they do. But it's not like everyone else's hands are clean.