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[Police brutality] American injustice, yet again.


Ragitsu

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OK, I fat thumbed the back button on my mouse and lost a long post. So, forgive me for not going into as much detail. Just a couple notes:

 

1. Whoever wrote the headline should be fired. Very likely an editorial staff person, and not the author.

2. Author doesn't understand the reasonable person standard.

3. The Supreme Court rulings are absolutely fine.

4. We've had well-established use of force standards for a very long time, and they work. But to work, they must be applied.

5. We need to get police to actually apply them, including harsh punishments when they aren't properly applied.

6. The author of the article is 100% correct in disagreeing with the findings of the two shills independent experts that the prosecutor dug up for reports, and in his apprehension that the prosecutor shows a lack of will to proceed in the case against Loehmann.

7. Use of the term "rookie" is misleading, although it may be accurate. Loehmann had prior employment in law enforcement, and should not have passed even the most rudimentary background investigation. The city should be held accountable for putting an unstable idiot in a uniform and arming him.

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Here's another article on the subject, and this quote I agree with.

 

 


She added that, under her proposal, courts would be permitted to consider “whether the force was unnecessary” before “unreasonable conduct by the officer made it so”—meaning that the larger context, such as the decision by Loehmann and his partner to drive right up to Tamir Rice, could and should be scrutinized.

 

However, I'm not sure that there's anything precluding this from happening now, other than judges, prosecutors and police departments closing ranks to protect their officers. The reasonable person standard does seem allow for this line of questioning. It also places a higher standard on professionals who have training in whatever area is in question.

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I guess they figure a bad cop is better than no cop.  If only more progressive, enlightened young people went into law enforcement instead of just complaining about law enforcement...

 

But yeah...no cop would be better than this guy, so your bad, Cleveland PD.

 

A shortage of labour, combined with an  unwillingness to compete for it on the market (that is, pay more) will lead to these things. 

 

Oh, my Lord, will it ever. Loehman, from the sounds of things, has a raging personality disorder, but one that may be cyclic in nature. If he has manic, 'up' phases, he may even have impressed his interviewers in Cleveland so much that they didn't even think to look at his papers, assuming that he was an up-and-comer, spiralling up through more and more desireable police departments, perhaps gunning for one of the (I assume) understaffed command positions, which would take some pressure off the interviewers.

 

If so, it didn't last. . . projecting from my own experience of some of these misguided hiring choices (You want fun? Being in the radius of destruction as the DM tries to correct the initial mistake by harassing your immediate supervisor out of a job), Loehman's driver/trainer's main priority the day that Tamir Rice was killed might have been as simple as getting the freak the heck out of his car as quickly as possible. Arrest a perp, take him to the station, leave Loehman in charge of  him, and you've got hours of freedom, away from the ranting, the paranoia, the weird, inappropriate comments and crying jagst happens in every work place. The problem is that we're not given guns in grocery stores, and in particular aren't allowed to shoot customers. (No comment needed here, I think.)

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Loehman's driver/trainer's main priority the day that Tamir Rice was killed might have been as simple as getting the freak the heck out of his car as quickly as possible.

 

Just quoting b/c it's what brought the following thought to mind, not because the quote is directly relevant to what I'm about to say or that I'm trying to rebut it.

 

While the focus has largely been on Loehman as the shooter, the driver shares a large part of the responsibility in the death.

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Was the girl injured? I haven't seen any reports on that one mentioning injuries.

 

From the video, the flipping her out of the desk and onto the floor looks brutal, but the mount to cuff her doesn't look dangerous. He's straddling her, not putting a knee in her neck or spine, which is a good thing. As far as getting her out of the desk -- and away from it so she can't cling to it -- I don't know if there's a better method. If you try to go slow, you're going to increase the risk of injury to both parties.

 

So, what do you do with a student who's disrupting the class and refuses to leave or to comply with the school resource officer? We only see the physical removal, but we don't see if the officer made any effort to verbally persuade her to comply. We do know that she already refused to comply with the teacher's attempt to enforce the school's rules.

 

This incident was entirely avoidable by the student. She gets no sympathy from me. I'm unwilling to condemn the officer based on the video or the news reports. If she comes up with any injuries from the arm lock (hyper-extended shoulder, torn muscles, etc.), then I'd call it excessive. If she comes up with a bump to the head because he tossed her desk, well, my dad has a saying for that one: If you're gonna be dumb, you've gotta be tough. She was using the desk to avoid complying with the officer, and she's responsible for the consequences of that choice.

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This was posted in the "In Other News" thread.  Unfortunately, it fits here as well...

 

http://news.yahoo.com/south-carolina-officer-s-history-comes-to-light-after-shocking-video-goes-viral-160400548.html

 

How disheartening. If it wasn't bad enough that schools already tend to feel like prisons (or even look the part in some instances!), and the school-to-prison pipeline (offenses that would have been handled in-school are now being handed off to police departments which make officially logged arrests) is a real thing, flagrantly inappropriate incidents happen via our "civil servants".

 

Boo to the cop apologists crawling out of the woodwork...and the POS racists too.

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How disheartening. If it wasn't bad enough that schools already tend to feel like prisons (or even look the part in some instances!), and the school-to-prison pipeline (offenses that would have been handled in-school are now being handed off to police departments which make officially logged arrests) is a real thing, flagrantly inappropriate incidents happen via our "civil servants".

Agreed, disrupting class should not result in a police presence except in very extreme cases.

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The behavior that got the cop called (I'm assuming since the article said he was a school resource officer that he was already on campus; we had some of those at the HS I graduated from) was refusing to comply with the teacher when asked to turn the phone over.

 

It seems like the teacher could have been a bit more understanding of the girl's circumstances (assuming she was aware of them, and if she wasn't, she should have been). A wiser course of action may have been to let the girl stay through the class as long as she didn't pull the phone out again and wasn't otherwise disruptive, and discuss the issue with her guardians. Unfortunately, wisdom is something teachers today aren't contractually obligated to possess. In loco parentis isn't a concept that's fully applied these days, as teachers and school administrators don't seem to feel any level of obligation to the students, other than making sure enough seats are filled to get their annual budget allotments.

 

It looks like a case of the school having a hammer (cop) and seeing all of their problems as nails. I still don't blame the hammer. He may be a tool, but he was doing things the way he was trained to. If she disobeys orders, she gets arrested. He didn't seem to be particularly abusive in his method. I can think of three or four other perfectly legal, but much more painful methods to get someone out of a chair than the one he chose. Some of them would have probably had less risk of injury, but I don't see any major issues with the force used.* The fact that the school called him in to apply the force is the problem IMO.

 

 

*Based on what we can see in the video. If he failed to give her an opportunity to comply, or if he caused her any undue injuries, then I'd see fault. The fact that he has a reputation as a d-bag shouldn't enter into evaluating this case.

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