You have to scroll far past the accusations of racism and outrage to reach the story here:
> Here’s how the off-duty work program works: Some businesses — like large nightclubs — are required by the city to have security, which until 2020, sometimes had to be off-duty Minneapolis police officers.
Nightclubs often are required to have security beacuse they are a nuisance to the surrounding area and the taxpayer shouldn't be picking up the tab because you decided to overserve your customers. The off duty cop requirement is the only odd part here in my view and that appears to be gone now.
Why do you summarily dismiss (and recommend that other people dismiss) the multiple viewpoints in the article suggesting that the law you’re mentioning was unfairly targeted at immigrant owned establishments? It’s absolutely part of the story. Is it really that hard to believe that a corrupt way of enforcing a law might intentionally be targeted at people who are less likely to feel empowered to fight it?
> Nightclubs often are required to have security beacuse they are a nuisance to the surrounding area
How many night clubs are located in non-urban residential areas? The commercial properties near them would be closed because, you know, they operate during the day and night clubs don't.
> the taxpayer shouldn't be picking up the tab because you decided to overserve your customers
The solution to overserved customers is to not overserve them, not to have off-duty cops or security there to manage them after the fact. This is quite easily remedied by having the cops come by and fine them until they stop doing it. The fines will pay for the enforcement, so the taxpayers will be fine. By paying off-duty cops to manage overserved customers you are making real law enforcement improbable and making the problem worse.
> The off duty cop requirement is the only odd part here
Strange to qualify with 'only' when it is a major point of the piece.
I've been to community meeting with neighbors complaining about drunk bar customers urinating, sleeping, barfing on their lawns; making noise late into the night; fighting; etc.
About security specifically, bar fights are a cliche and alchohol makes people violent. Are we going to pretend that isn't an issue?
> You understand that any visible intoxication is overserving a customer right?
No, it's not. Continued service of someone who is visibly intoxicated, however, is.
I understand the tenets of responsible service of alcohol, and that as a server, you are meant to stop service immediately at that point.
Realities, however, are more nuanced.
I teach new EMTs and paramedics, and one of the discussion points is around informed consent and implied consent. Every class has a scenario or two where a student inevitably says to or about a mock patient, "Well, you have been drinking alcohol so I have implied consent to treat you" or similar. "So, because he's had a drink, he can't refuse medical advice/treatment?" "Right."
"So I can go to a restaurant, have two glasses of red wine with dinner, and be legally allowed to drive a motor vehicle home, but not legally make decisions about my own health?"
RSA education is generally more black and white, but even with your comment above you show that it is easy to misinterpret. It is not a case of "if your customer is visibly intoxicated, then you overserved them", because they weren't intoxicated until that point (all else being equal, if someone sits on a bar stool and orders 4 shots of tequila to start and downs them all in front of you, then reasonability applies, of course).
I'd be OK if they closed entirely, but barring that I demand they pay the costs of externalities they create. One method of doing so would be hiring private security. They should also have to carry a bond to pay out for any DUIs, violence, vandalism, domestic violence or sexual assault that they are a co-conspirator of.
Let's extend your logic - should a gas station convenience store also carry that bond? I mean, you can buy a box of beer at the gas station and go home and be violent.
Unfortunately corrupt cops aren't limited to just one legal fig leaf for collecting payments, or even to operating inside the bounds of the law at all. Even this specific article discusses four or five different towns with varying flavors of this corruption problem; it focuses on Minneapolis probably just because that's where the newspaper is based out of, not because that's the only place where cops do a protection racket.
> That smells just a little bit like racism to me.
No, it smells like a claim of racism. But claims of various 'isms is so common now it's lost all meaning.
I'm more interested in why the focus is seen to be on corrupt cops, and not on the fact that the damn city required it!
If you've got a corrupt city, is it any wonder that the cops are going to be corrupt too? You can't fix the cops without first fixing their paymasters.
it may well be suspicious, but this is just how news articles are written [these days?]. exciting controversial claim at the front, explanation for why you should feel a certain way about said claim, some dross, maybe a tweet, then—if you're lucky—maybe, languishing at the back of the article will be some facts and a source.
> Here’s how the off-duty work program works: Some businesses — like large nightclubs — are required by the city to have security, which until 2020, sometimes had to be off-duty Minneapolis police officers.
Nightclubs often are required to have security beacuse they are a nuisance to the surrounding area and the taxpayer shouldn't be picking up the tab because you decided to overserve your customers. The off duty cop requirement is the only odd part here in my view and that appears to be gone now.