[Police brutality] American injustice, yet again.

[薔薇語]

Speaking of D* cops: a Texas Cop decided to step over the bounds of reasonable action and put a young lady into a choke hold. Why? Because she knew her rights and wasn't "Respectin' his Authoritah!"

 

 

-In case you are curious, the prosecutor in that area even stated that the young woman was within her rights and of course the cops tried to make her delete the video but she didn't.

 

Seriously I am typically pro-cop. I have taken the opposite sides of these discussions when they have come on these boards in the past. But I can't count the number of times I have read / watched a story like this or worse and can only walk away with the classic "F* the police" chant. To be honest, I don't trust a single cop. I am getting to the point where I just assume the cop must be in the wrong because it isn't a "small few" but "a majority" who are either belligerent jerks, thieves, or straight up murderers.

 

Body cam ever single one of the jerks. Never let them work alone. Never let them do "internal investigations" and always demand truly outside investigators and prosecutions for when police cross the line.

 

La Rose.

[Ragitsu]

Even the "good" cops will cover for the "evil" cops unless the latter are Satan incarnate.

 

We need to get rid of the ridiculous "War on Drugs", deincentivize the practice of jailing our own population at an ever-increasing rate, bring back financial equality (or at least true equal financial opportunity), hold the wealthiest/most popular people's feet to the fire when it comes to corruption, bolster plus maintain a rigorous system of sound education, and eradicate institutionalized racism by breaking stereotypes and dissuading dishonest media coverage.

 

In other words? A national enema.

[薔薇語]

Even the "good" cops will cover for the "evil" cops unless the latter are Satan incarnate.

 

If Satan was a cop I think most of his peers would still cover for him. 

 

---

 

Maybe this is the deep down reason I like Gotham so much. They show cops for what most of them seem to be: self-involved dirty jerks but at least give us one man worth rooting for. One man who reminds us that not everyone is that way despite it being a majority. 

 

La Rose. 

[Hermit]

I concur with body camming cops as standard issue. Some of them may not like it, but it keeps the bad cops in check a bit more, and , frankly, it helps protect the good ones from false accusations.

 

And yes, they need third party review of incidents like they finally got in Wisconsin.

 

EDIT: I Got the state wrong at first

[Sociotard]

Does the third party review involve tweaking the grand jury system? Because having the prosecutor, who generally has a good relationship with cops, be the only one who talks to the jury seems like a bad idea.

[薔薇語]

Does the third party review involve tweaking the grand jury system? Because having the prosecutor, who generally has a good relationship with cops, be the only one who talks to the jury seems like a bad idea.

 

Of course it is a bad idea. We are expecting a person in an elected position who relies on the cop unions to keep his job directly going after a cop. We are expecting a person who has to deal with cops as partners on a day to day basis to nail one when they step over the line. It is too much to expect.

 

La Rose. 

[Hermit]

Does the third party review involve tweaking the grand jury system? Because having the prosecutor, who generally has a good relationship with cops, be the only one who talks to the jury seems like a bad idea.

Here's the article I was thinking of: What I did after Police killed my son

 

It just mentions an outside agency doing the review , details are a bit sketchy as it's more about the need for reform and what this guy did with others to try to get it.

[Vondy]

While it was speculation in this case since I haven't gotten to read the news about it yet, it was not speculation in regards to Ferguson. 

 

La Rose. 

 

My read of your remarks on Ferguson remains that they are largely speculation and guess-work. Why? Because, there is no way to prove your assertions. Its what you suspect. Its the opinion you've formed. And, as I said, you are entitled to an opinion. But, opinions aren't facts. Don't expect me to jump up and down clapping and gush "The Rose has stated he's not speculating so their opinion is fact!" I do not share your opinion. I'm not interested in catharsis for the mob. I am not interested in populism. I'm not interested in the media fables. I'm interested in facts -- and to put a fine point on it: no one in this discussion was on that grand jury. No one here had the unique and complete access they did. No one here had to make that decision.

 

Intelligent and sincere people are reaching wildly different interpretations of the prosecutor's handling of this case -- and the case in NYC -- based on numerous factors, only one of which is ethnicity. But, there's another point to consider: I don't live in New York or Missouri, or even in their regions -- and this is, ultimately, their local news. The people of New York and Ferguson need to be dealing with these cases. They live there. They have standing. They have the vote. They have the most understanding. They have the most direct influence. The rest of us are just acting like bunch of busy-body old grannies watching what the neighbors are doing from between the part in their lacy shades while huffing and puffing with indignation and unnecessary outrage. When its my local / regional news I'll huff and I'll puff and invest in strongly held opinions and take action. In these two cases, its simply not my place. Based on your location information...

 

This is probably due to wildly different political values and experiences. I believe Madison was wrong about scaling democracy. America is not "too big to fail," and our grand experiment could be reasonably assessed to be "failing." Perhaps the Monroe Doctrine is to blame. We sacrificed sustainable regional domestic democracy for manifest destiny global hegemony, and classical federalism for a voracious, inefficient, unwieldy, and increasingly authoritarian centralized superstate. I am a classic federalist. I am a regionalist. I am a secular traditionalist. I am interested in local cultures, ancestral folkways, and regional self-sufficiency. I think homogenization at this scale has weakened our nation, and that the coast-to-coast melting pot is proving farcical. It might work on a regional level, but its not working coast-to-coast.  People in New York and Ferguson can't solve problems in Seattle. And, I can't solve problems there.

[Vondy]

Does the third party review involve tweaking the grand jury system? Because having the prosecutor, who generally has a good relationship with cops, be the only one who talks to the jury seems like a bad idea.

 

It would depend on who the third party is, how independent they are, and how much reciprocity is likely. Another method that circumvents the court system entirely would be to have a state-level office responsible for reviewing such cases. Officers are technically licensed at the state level when they graduate the police academy. So, even though their local agency is the one that hires them and puts them to work, the state government has a vested interested in who is enforcing the law. So, even without a grand jury and criminal charges, the state could -- just like with teacher misconduct -- theoretically move to pull the officer's law enforcement powers within the state irrespective of what the local police department and prosecutor decide to do. They would need rules, policies, and standards to operate by -- and would likely come under criticism when they didn't satisfy the mob -- as well. But, its another way of addressing the issue.

[Cancer]

Intelligent and sincere people are reaching wildly different interpretations of the prosecutor's handling of this case -- and the case in NYC -- based on numerous factors, only one of which is ethnicity. But, there's another point to consider: I don't live in New York or Missouri, or even in their regions -- and this is, ultimately, their local news. The people of New York and Ferguson need to be dealing with these cases. They live there. They have standing. They have the vote. They have the most understanding. They have the most direct influence. The rest of us are just acting like bunch of busy-body old grannies watching what the neighbors are doing from between the part in their lacy shades while huffing and puffing with indignation and unnecessary outrage. When its my local / regional news I'll huff and I'll puff and invest in strongly held opinions and take action. In these two cases, its simply not my place.

Here I must disagree with you. There are ample cases that indicate that in some cases local officials and voters act (or decline to act) in clear violation of both the spirit and letter of the Constitution and federal statute. The beating and drowning death of Joe Campos Torres by Houston PD officers, and subsequent prosecutorial inaction followed by trivial punishment on zero-weight local charges, is case I am most familiar with. In short, even had the local prosecutor been interested in pursuing more serious charges, the Texas justice system (at least at the time) made it more or less impossible to get a conviction even in a clear case. Federal civil rights charges were pressed because federal prosecution operates independently of state and local, and a broader interpretation of venue makes it possible to get convictions when a local community complicitly finds murder of certain ethnicities acceptable or perhaps even desirable.

 

And yes, locally, I am all but determined that Seattle PD needs to be torn down and rebuilt as a police force rather than an army of occupation. When a quarter of the non-suicide homicides that occur in the city in a year happen at the hands of the police, which is the case here, there is something rotten going on. Frankly, I also think the training facility -- there is only one -- for police here in WA needs reconstitution as well.

[Ragitsu]

Thankfully, I can no longer read that stuff directly.

 

Anyhow...

 

 

a broader interpretation of venue makes it possible to get convictions when a local community complicitly finds murder of certain ethnicities acceptable or perhaps even desirable.

 

 

Stellar point, Cancer.

 

Now, we'll have to see if and how the collective political will sways such an investigation.

 

It would be most excellent if we as a nation shucked off a certain tier of tribal mentality as it pertains to state issues, but i'm not holding my breath for progress on that front any time soon.

[Cygnia]

 

Feds Find Shocking, Systemic Brutality, Incompetence In Cleveland Police Department

 

[Hermit]

The sad thing about that headline for me is the word 'shocking' ... The Feds may find it so, I find myself depressingly unsurprised.

[Zeropoint]

If it's any consolation, all the corrupt and abusive officers out there will one day make wonderful chew toys for the hounds of Hell...

 

 

It's no consolation at all for me, as someone who doesn't believe in any kind of afterlife. We need to create justice here and now, in the world that we actually live in, not shrug our shoulders and assume that the score will be settled later.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Sometimes the problem isn't the officer, but the training. Why the NYPD allows choke holds from the outset is beyond me. Its too easy to misapply one with tragic results in the field, and law enforcement has known that for decades. The LAPD ultimately banned them after a series of unintended deaths while officers were trying to subdue suspects using them. Numerous departments, esp. in the western US, followed suit. The NYPD should have seen the pitfalls and potential ramifications of allowing choke-holds and followed suit.

 

But therein lies the problem -- indicting the officer isn't the solution. Proving criminal intent, or that the officer was being unreasonable when he was doing what his department trained him to do and cavalierly taught him was "less-than-lethal" isn't going to meaningfully address the problem, and isn't entirely reasonable. From where I sit, criminal charges in a grand jury were doomed to fail. A better solution -- and one that would be more effective in obtaining a change in policy -- would be a multimillion dollar lawsuit (lets call it 20+ million) against the NYPD for willfully maintaining policies proven flawed in other jurisdictions that resulted in wrongful death.

 

Name the officer. Name the commissioner. Name the senior policy makers responsible. But going after an officer who followed policy without being able to prove criminal intent? That sounds more like a lynch mob with torches and pitchforks demanding a scapegoat -- and the prosecutor fishing for a fall guy so they can ignore the real issue at hand -- than justice. In my opinion, justice in this case is the NYPD acknowledging their policy was irresponsible, changing said policy, firing the bosses responsible, and then paying out the shorts. It may not be the catharsis the media frenzy is looking for -- but it would mean no one else would die from a policy choke-hold in NYC.

 

NOTE: I posted a correction to this BELOW. The NYPD did ban choke-holds -- but there definition of "choke-holds" opens the door to a lot of problems....

 

Here's a simple dictum that everyone needs to remember about social interactions: they can escalate, or de-escalate. It is in the hands of all participants which takes place. Police/civilain interactions begin with the raw material of escalation at hand. Everyone feels guilty about something; everyone feels defensive about something. People will react to police on the basis of that instinctive guilt, police will interact with civilians with a defensive intention of justifying their intervention to themselves. Every officer is an oppressor, every civilian is a perp.

 

Given that, it is amazing that most of these interactions get de-escalated. (And a real social problem for the out-group of the day that they tend to get de-escalated less for them.)

 

It's easy to see what factors lead to de-escalation, and which are missing in the recent cases. Vondy notes training. I would point to lack of training and see systemic factors behind it that also helped lead to the unfortunate outcomes in other ways.

(i) Training. Chokehold? Really? 

(ii) Numbers. Darren Wilson was patrolling without a ridealong, and didn't have backup when he dismounted his vehicle.

(iii) Operational efficiency. A number of things come together here, above all the lack of training already noted, but also fatigue from long patrols, or too many patrols back-to-back, as seems to have been the case for Officer Wilson. Above all, I am thinking about the Federal report on the Cleveland police department that came down today, and the BBC's discovery that the officer in the Tamir Wilson shooting had already been dismissed from another force as not suitable for police work.  

 

What these come around to is a lack of investment in the police work force. This may be a funding issue in the sense that force strengths are being cut to the budgetary cloth, or in the sense that funding is insufficient to meet the demographic headwinds. (You need so many officers, and cannot get them at the wages you can pay, and so are forced to hire unsuitable material.)

 

I may be projecting from my own experience as a middle manager, but I am very familiar with the problems of chronic workforce unsuitability and experience, and lack of labour hours. together, these lead to poor job execution, poor management, and, as a consequence, bad customer service in the form of unnecessary confrontations with customers. (Especially 'profiled,' which is to say, scruffy, customers.)

 

The solution is to throw money at the problem until it goes away (which it probably will, but as a second-order effect, as people like Michael Brown get the jobs vacated by the people hired to be MOAR POLICE), and I do not have to spell out why this is deemed to be impossible in our current climate. Well, congratulations to everyone who is minding the public purse, because heckuva job!

[薔薇語]

Vondy: 
 
"My read of your remarks on Ferguson remains that they are largely speculation and guess-work. Why? Because, there is no way to prove your assertions"

No, the Ferguson issue is not speculation. The way the prosecutor handled the situation is public knowledge. Please feel free to look into this a bit more. Among the most dissettling things is the 'info dump' he did on the Grand Jury. He bombarded them with documents without end expecting them to be able to make sense of it all. Why would a prosecutor who's sole job is to present the State's best case do that? Because he doesn't want it to get past the grand jury. He was reportedly soft handed with the officer and harsh on anyone who, you know, would prove his case. Rather than be quick and concise with his proceeding, he dragged it on longer than normal so as to tire out the jurors. He mixed in all competing forensic reports so as to cast doubt on the situation. Basically the man did everything he could to ruin the state's case at the Grand Jury - he purposely failed at his own job! And he has a history of this. 
 
So, Vondy, you will excuse me if I think your out of hand dismissal of me and this position scream of a level of arrogance and close mindedness unbecoming of you. 
 
 
Vondy:

"When its my local / regional news I'll huff and I'll puff and invest in strongly held opinions and take action. In these two cases, its simply not my place. Based on your location information..."

Vondy, I get it, you and I have never met face to face so I can't expect you to remember where I am from. But before you do the laziest of checks to just realize I live in Japan, try and think back a bit more or do the due diligence of asking me. Ferguson is a lazy drive away from my home. Missouri is where I was born and it is the place I love. When there are troubles in Missouri, there are troubles in my back yard. 

Also, might I add that the level of cognitive dissidence you seem to be enjoying while making such statements is a bit disconcerting. An expat who commonly made comments about the US and its internal and external affairs should not be telling others to stick to their own homes. 
 
Moveover, injustice knows no home. It is not something to be left unspoken just because it happens at your neighbor's and not your own home. That is the kind of willful blindness and abhorrent tolerance that leads us to not get involved when people are being slaughtered in other nations. And despite the three monkeys best attempts, choosing to ignore injustice does not make it go away. 
 
 
As to your last point about being a regionalist, it has no connection to what I have said. I believe in regional governership more than most on these boards most likely, but that isn't the point here. I am not staying that the solution to this problem is somehow external intervention. I am saying that there is a problem - a pan-America problem. One that must be talked about. One that must be addressed. And one that must be solved. 

Everyday a cop kills at least one citizen in the US. Cops have taken up this horrid "us vs them" mentality that we even try to train our soldier to not do. Why do we let the people who are sworn to protect the public treat us like the enemy and behave as if they live in a war zone? There are places in the US where death by Cop outnumbers death by gangs for heaven's sake. We have cops who steal our money, molest and rape people, brutalize people, and kill us without repercussion. This is not an acceptable thing. And our only recourse seem to be to rely on a corrupt justice system that favors our occupiers over the citizenry. 

This is an unacceptable situation and it must end. 

La Rose.

[Ragitsu]

[薔薇語]

While I thank you for your support I don't think that gif is as useful as you want it to be.

 

While Vondy and I may be at arms right now, I still think he is a good and reasonable man. He has more of my respect than many posters - even when I disagree with him. And as sharp as I may have been, it was because I know and respect his opnion.

 

La Rose.

[Ragitsu]

While I thank you for your support I don't think that gif is as useful as you want it to be.

 

While Vondy and I may be at arms right now, I still think he is a good and reasonable man. He has more of my respect than many posters - even when I disagree with him. And as sharp as I may have been, it was because I know and respect his opnion.

 

La Rose.

 

Meh. It's the sentiment itself - and all that it encompasses - that i'm interested in.

[Twilight]

I made the mistake of reading the comments on the Daily Show facebook page regarding the incident where the man was strangled.  The number of people trying to blame this incident on him is not only shocking, it also makes me ill.  So what if the guy had medical conditions that contributed to his death, they clearly weren't killing him before the cop attacked him ergo the cop is responsible.

[Sociotard]

True, but if the cop was doing something that doesn't normally kill people, and only did kill because of something the cop couldn't have known about, that is relevant. At the very least it changes the crime he would be charged with. And if he was using banned techniques (I'm told this may be the case), he should be punished for those, and tack on involuntary manslaughter, but again only if the officer was violating his departments policy.

 

What I'm saying is, discussing the man's special medical case is relevant. And I'm not sure if there's a good answer to it. It's not like we want cops to know our medical history when we're walking around. That'd be creepy.

[薔薇語]

When a cop engages in an activity that he is barred from doing because it causes suffocation and death then the victim complains of suffocation, he ought to do everything possible to confirm the guy's safety. But no, he ignored the reasonable pleas of a dying man. Why? Because the jerk and his jerk friends don't care out the safety of the citizenry, only with making sure people respect their authoritah! The police officer should have never done that, and now we have a dead man who may of committed the awful crime of selling some cigs.

 

The office got away with murder.

 

 

La Rose.

[megaplayboy]

A few quick points:

1) The grand jury + prosecutor indictment system is a poor fit for police brutality cases. Prosecutors have an obvious conflict of interest because they are dependent on police investigative work and testimony. The grand jury is compromised by some inherent pro-police, anti-minority bias operating at a conscious and/or unconscious level. Everything they process is filtered through that lens. A special investigative unit and special prosecutor for police misconduct cases is a good start.

2) The War on Drugs is a major factor in the intensification of conflict between police and some of the communities they are supposed to serve and protect. Phasing it out over time would be a very prudent move, imo.

3) It's not just police training in use of force that needs to be changed. It's the state laws on the books which often give cops far too much leeway with regard to the use of force, esp. lethal force.

4) We need a return to community policing, a shift from "broken windows" patrol policies which have the net effect of criminalizing minorities for petty misdemeanors and imposes a kind of regressive tax on citizens through overzealous citation work, and we need a major shift in cop culture. Start kicking the unfit for duty ones out instead of circling the wagons every time one of them kills an unarmed citizen,e.g.

5) From what I have been reading, the Cleveland PD/Tamir Rice shooting is by far the worst case of systemic misconduct. The shooter in the Rice case was actually declared "unfit for duty" by the previous department he worked for, and the Cleveland PD hired him without even doing a thorough background check! The officers lied about half a dozen things in their initial interview/report, and rendered no aid to Rice until 4 minutes later when a nearby FBI agent immediately began doing so upon arrival at the scene.

[Twilight]

When a cop engages in an activity that he is barred from doing because it causes suffocation and death then the victim complains of suffocation, he ought to do everything possible to confirm the guy's safety. But no, he ignored the reasonable pleas of a dying man. Why? Because the jerk and his jerk friends don't care out the safety of the citizenry, only with making sure people respect their authoritah! The police officer should have never done that, and now we have a dead man who may of committed the awful crime of selling some cigs.

 

The office got away with murder.

 

 

La Rose.

I have to agree, though I honestly wish it weren't the case.

 

Yeah Garner's a big guy, but he's obviously not in any sort of shape.  Plus there were five police officers present at the time, there was no way this situation couldn't have been resolved peacefully.  Instead the cop used a chokehold and a man is dead, over a misdemeanor.

 

Of course if you say that on the Daily Show facebook page, you'll be called a moron and a dumbass. 

[Gary Miles]

The sad thing about that headline for me is the word 'shocking' ... The Feds may find it so, I find myself depressingly unsurprised.