Agent X

Hey there, long time no see. I can say there is a great deal of consensus that police training isn't all that great and that there are many instances when police choose to escalate when it is not demonstrably needed. There seems to be a divide with how to "feel" about this and how to view the nature of the average police officer's "soul". On the subject of the Greater St. Louis Area, I had read a long article about a fairly unique problem in the area. Evidently, Missouri law is fast and loose about the incorporation of municipalities. Over the decades, tiny little municipalities have been created as another option to "white flight". These little municipalities can't support themselves so they have moved to predatory policing a la the speed trap town - only it's a bunch of them right by each other - a recipe for disaster.
 
As far as the Grand Jury in Ferguson. I am convinced the Prosecutor only called a Grand Jury for political reasons. He had the discretion to not prosecute without one but chose to call a Grand Jury to be more transparent. I'm going to throw something out there that some won't like. I am happy he let the Grand Jury hear so much of the evidence. I have never liked the notion that "A grand jury will indict a ham sandwich." I've always felt the Grand Jury system was rigged too much against the defendant.

That's the sad thing. The witnesses didn't sound particularly credible to me. We've got the running buddy who was with him when he's shoving a small man around. We've got a couple of women who may have seen some or all of it and who changed their story immediately after the preliminary autopsy. This stuff wasn't hard to find but people's CONFIRMATION BIAS set in and they started tuning anything out that didn't fit with the bias. Michael Brown is a sweet, lovable kid (who is huge and commits violent crimes against a storekeeper). Michael Brown's hands were up (but other witnesses said they weren't). The cop tried to pull Michael Brown into the cop car through the window (which one really ought to visualize before they don't get a little skeptical). So you get knuckleheads making stuff up about what they thought they saw. Then you've got the Law and Order crew who ignore the fact that Wilson's explanation of why he got so close to Brown is... stupid. One of them decides to take it further and put out a pic of some other victim and pass it off as the cop.
 
Meanwhile, everyone forms an opinion without doing any digging. If they want to push police brutality they go listen to MSNBC and read DailyKos and get the spin they desperately want. If they want to push a hero cop puts down a black thug they go to Fox News and read DrudgeReport and the Blaze to get the spin they desperately want. Eventually, when it all comes out, the wrong side (in this case the more wrong side) has invested too much and now they have to pretend they didn't screw up. So they chant, "Hands up, don't shoot!" when it's pretty obvious from forensics that scenario didn't happen. It's pathetic. Every few years somebody gets shot down by multiple cops without having done anything and without a weapon and it doesn't catch fire like this did, a case which should have had everybody be careful about jumping to conclusions as the first factoids dripped in.

That's a pretty good analysis of where quite a few police are. Our system bends over backwards to provide any plausible justification. I remember watching a video on Youtube. A cop car is following a car with two African American males to a fast food restaurant very closely. The brothers (they are brothers) are very aware the cops were tailing them and look annoyed and puzzled by it. They go in to order food. The cops come in behind them and ask them what the problem was. They said they don't know what they are talking about. Eventually, the brothers ask the cops why they are there. The cops say to eat so the brothers turn around to order. Next thing, the cops are demanding ID. The brothers want to know why and the cops don't bother to tell them. Eventually, one cop puts his hands on the chest of one of the brothers and the brother brushes his hands away and steps back. With his hands now spread to a few inches wider than his shoulders but close to his shoulders, palms out, and making no move toward the officer - the cop punches him and then punches his brother. And then it's on. When it was reviewed by Detroit PD they said the officer was justified because when the young man reacted to being pushed by brushing the cop's hands away he assaulted the officer. So, if cops hassle you, get in your face, and start pushing on you WITH NO REASON - and you brush the hand away from your chest - they get to hit you. It's messed up. Here is a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMaB2OkU1TY

I just glossed over what you wrote. You and I fundamentally have a different idea of what trials are for. Apparently, you are fixated on their use for Public Relations and think that a trial will meaningfully change public opinion. I think you are wrong on both counts. I don't believe in show trials and I believe confirmation bias says a trial wouldn't have changed anyone's mind.
 
As to the particulars of the case, you are doing a very good job at ignoring WHY Brown was shot. Brown was shot because he wrestled and punched with a cop while the cop was in his car. He didn't get shot because he was big or black or because of cigarillos. Even witnesses who thought the cop was wrong agreed there was a fight at the cop car.
 
If you start winning a fight with a cop he will use his gun to keep you from using it.

I think part of the problem with the police who themselves break the law or abuse their authority merely 'resigning' is there is little to keep them from heading to another area of the country and getting a new job with a new police department. Sure, their background might raise a red flag, but the new department might also just note that they 'quit their job' instead of 'were fired'. So you have Bad Cop #3 get caught using excessive force on year, and quitting. But in three years, he could be wearing another badge doing the same thing all over again.

@ The Rose:
The guy lost (or let loose of) his job and as far as I remember the article the young lady is considering to press charges. That is what should happen if you choke somebody with no reason and you are a police officer. Looks okay to me, especially since we do not know what else is coming towards him. Nothing good, I presume.
 
@ Agent X:
Regarding the "Taunt and harass them till they react in a mildly physical way - THEN HIT' EM HARD and get away with it"-cops: What country and century is this this again? Alabama - the 1920s? Dodge City in th 1880s?
No wonder people are increasingly irritated and react irate if behaviour like this is not, say, an everyday occurence but happens more than twice in any given community. per year.
 
By the way: A lot of people have the understanding that Germany is quite extensively policed. In comparison to the USA: Far from it! If I am in Bochum, a neighboring city of about 350,000 (about the size of Pittsburgh) I usually NEVER see a police car. In Pittsburgh I run into police (city, University, Sheriff's Department, sometimes Highway Patrol) almost every third or second block.
As much in a DAY as I see in a YEAR in Germany!
Friends from the US noticed the absence of the omnipresent police force, too.
 
And I still feel pretty save here. Actually, I only became the victim of a crime (a mugging) in Pittsburgh.
And someone broke into my appartment to rob my landlady who lived upstairs.
Oh, and I got into a drug raid once.
On three different stays.
And Pittsburgh is considered one of the safest cities in America.
In Germany: ZILCH in 44 years. If you don't count car accidents (only vehicle damage - and always my fault).

Does that mean you pick the wrong incident and portray it as something it isn't to make your point? Which destroys your credibility with people who aren't so invested in your cause that they think there are other things that matter too and makes you sound delusional when you circle around inconvenient facts. I want to rein in police brutality as much as anyone. I'm just not interest in making scapegoats to do it.

That's the sad thing. The witnesses didn't sound particularly credible to me. We've got the running buddy who was with him when he's shoving a small man around. We've got a couple of women who may have seen some or all of it and who changed their story immediately after the preliminary autopsy. This stuff wasn't hard to find but people's CONFIRMATION BIAS set in and they started tuning anything out that didn't fit with the bias. Michael Brown is a sweet, lovable kid (who is huge and commits violent crimes against a storekeeper). Michael Brown's hands were up (but other witnesses said they weren't). The cop tried to pull Michael Brown into the cop car through the window (which one really ought to visualize before they don't get a little skeptical). So you get knuckleheads making stuff up about what they thought they saw. Then you've got the Law and Order crew who ignore the fact that Wilson's explanation of why he got so close to Brown is... stupid. One of them decides to take it further and put out a pic of some other victim and pass it off as the cop.
 
Meanwhile, everyone forms an opinion without doing any digging. If they want to push police brutality they go listen to MSNBC and read DailyKos and get the spin they desperately want. If they want to push a hero cop puts down a black thug they go to Fox News and read DrudgeReport and the Blaze to get the spin they desperately want. Eventually, when it all comes out, the wrong side (in this case the more wrong side) has invested too much and now they have to pretend they didn't screw up. So they chant, "Hands up, don't shoot!" when it's pretty obvious from forensics that scenario didn't happen. It's pathetic. Every few years somebody gets shot down by multiple cops without having done anything and without a weapon and it doesn't catch fire like this did, a case which should have had everybody be careful about jumping to conclusions as the first factoids dripped in.

Eh, nevermind. Enjoy the view from your high horse.

I think the problem is that we're looking at incidents of policing going wrong, and seeing that they lead to a far higher number of fatal shootings than in other jurisdictions, involving a disproportionately large number of white policemen shooting black teenagers, and we see a need for social change. The shootings arise in cases of policing gone wrong.The kid is doing something wrong and suspicious. The officer perceived a need to fire, and the death is a tragic outcome of the behaviour that triggered the encounter in the first place, and the misperception of risk that led the police oficer to fire. 
 
It is not always like this. There have been some blatant cases. But take what is perhaps the most extreme one, the shooting of Oscar Grant in 2013.  It seems clear that in a stressful and chaotic situation, Officer Mehserle drew and fired the wrong weapon. Just absolutely clear malpractice. But what the heck are you going to do with that? It's systemic in the sense that it's another black man shot by a white officer. That's what needs to be fixed in a vaguely societal way, but the problem of young,out-group males being disproportionately subject to police violence is scarcely confined to America.
 
It seems clear that solutions going forward need to focus on minimising risk:
 
First, above all, fewer firearms, to break the culture that expects gunplay. Second, less stress on police through other means than de-escalating risk. Patrols in arger numbers (and less frequently); but I would like to take a moment to focus on finances. The Oscar Grant episode involved a BART Policeman rather than a San Francisco Police Department patrol officer. The City of San Francisco advertises a BART police salary of $5,548/month to $7,422, though the low end of the scale is at the end of several years of training. The SFPD, on the other hand, pays $80,574.00 - $112,164.00/year . 
 
Would anyone care to speculate as to why the city of San Francisco chooses to operate a separate police department for the BART system? Why, yes, you are completely right! It is a jurisdictional issue over which the city has, unfortunately, no control or influence! It has nothing to do with money!
 
Snark aside, 64 grand may seem like a lot of money, but I suspect there's a reason that I found a job opening advertisement for BART, and a job description for the SFPD. The reported average rent for a 1 bedroom in San Francisco as of 09/2014 is $2873/month, up from just over 1400 five years ago. Now, an SFPD officer in his mid-50s, who entered Police Academy right out of high school in 1979, probably owns his own house. As late as 1990, the price of a three-bedroom house in San Francisco was under $300,000. Mortgage and property tax payments on it have, er, diverged from rental by a considerable margin. 
 
An SFPD officer in his 20s, by way of contrast, will probably think that he has won the lottery on income --but that does not mean that he can afford rent and student loan payments (because of course a college degree is required now). As for a BART officer --hey, welcome to the lumpen proletariat! The one good thing about your job? You're the one handing out the lumps.
 
I've got to say, the temptation to confiscate evidence of illicit drug dealing --oh, what am I saying? That stuff doesn't happen! 
 
In case you're interested, a County of St. Louis Police Department commissioned patrol officer with nine years seniority earns $21.40/hour, or $21.94 with a bachelor's degree. The City of Ferguson's listed salary is $21.15, although this is from a non-official source. It's not nearly as big a gradiant as that between the SFPD and the BART police, but it is still significant, especiallly when it is not clear that oranges are being compared with oranges. 
 
And here is the key takeaway point. We have extensive experience in how to turn a police force into a band of demoralised corporate thugs-for-hire. Extensive. A key part of this formula is low pay, and this trend is far from confined to America. Everyone is trying to save money on this pesky "civil service" thing with wage caps, discipline, austerity, holding costs down, all that good stuff.
 
So, congratulations, world! We have a clear policy direction,and we seem to be getting there jig-time. After all, brutal and corrupt policing have given us some of the greatest moments in human history.  
 

I tried to edit that post. I thought it was "short". For some reason, I couldn't.
 
There is a massive incongruity with claiming you have a bias for justice.
 
Your outrage toward the prosecutor just screams "grudge" to me. There was no meaningful difference in the autopsies. There were a host of witnesses who saw all sorts of things. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/newly-released-witness-testimony-tell-us-michael-brown-shooting/ Of course, some witnesses changed their story after the preliminary autopsy report, witnesses who had to tone down their description of what happened. We've got a young man who just threw around a store owner and is wandering down the middle of the road and a police officer who tells him to go to the curb to walk and it goes downhill from there.
 
I know that a lot of people "voted" to make this incident the rallying point against police brutality, especially against minorities, and that gives everyone who desperately wants to change the system a motivation for endless special pleading against Wilson and for Brown. I looked into it and I can say I do not for a minute believe Wilson should have gone to trial. Oh, and I DO understand why people are so angry (and it's not about Brown and Wilson). That's why I can pick up on a lot of smart people willfully ignoring information they don't want to hear. I am not impressed with a militarized police force. I have witnessed shoddy police work. I was hassled by a cop for no reason other than being a teen. Once, I was an adult I thought that was probably over with. However, I discovered having a beard and walking on the sidewalk at 10 at night gives a cop a reason to hassle you as well. I've read up on cops who are too free using force. I've seen the footage of a man getting shot for following a cop's directions to produce his ID. I've read up on no-knock warrants on the wrong house leading to accidental death. I read up on the predatory policing in St. Louis and even talked to a friend of mine who lives in the area.
 
I just wish people would have picked their incident more carefully.

I tried to edit that post. I thought it was "short". For some reason, I couldn't.
 
There is a massive incongruity with claiming you have a bias for justice.
 
Your outrage toward the prosecutor just screams "grudge" to me. There was no meaningful difference in the autopsies. There were a host of witnesses who saw all sorts of things. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/newly-released-witness-testimony-tell-us-michael-brown-shooting/ Of course, some witnesses changed their story after the preliminary autopsy report, witnesses who had to tone down their description of what happened. We've got a young man who just threw around a store owner and is wandering down the middle of the road and a police officer who tells him to go to the curb to walk and it goes downhill from there.
 
I know that a lot of people "voted" to make this incident the rallying point against police brutality, especially against minorities, and that gives everyone who desperately wants to change the system a motivation for endless special pleading against Wilson and for Brown. I looked into it and I can say I do not for a minute believe Wilson should have gone to trial. Oh, and I DO understand why people are so angry (and it's not about Brown and Wilson). That's why I can pick up on a lot of smart people willfully ignoring information they don't want to hear. I am not impressed with a militarized police force. I have witnessed shoddy police work. I was hassled by a cop for no reason other than being a teen. Once, I was an adult I thought that was probably over with. However, I discovered having a beard and walking on the sidewalk at 10 at night gives a cop a reason to hassle you as well. I've read up on cops who are too free using force. I've seen the footage of a man getting shot for following a cop's directions to produce his ID. I've read up on no-knock warrants on the wrong house leading to accidental death. I read up on the predatory policing in St. Louis and even talked to a friend of mine who lives in the area.
 
I just wish people would have picked their incident more carefully.

@ Sinanju: Thanks for the first-hand report about the garnd jury system: I had no idea (or quite a blurry one) of how that works.
Seems quite 19th century to me, quite well for a close-living community where most people know each other and are fully aware of the circumstances and know the person about to being tried (at least like "Yes, it's the nephew of Old Widow Miller who used to work in Mr McPherson's store. Married Susan Maurer last year."). 21st century conditions are not really well addressed by this jury system, it seems.

It's not hard to google up details about grand juries. If you like them so be it. I don't. While I am very unhappy with the state of police work in this country (and the legal system overall) I am not going to assume every time a police officer shoots someone they "planted" the gun on them.

Please don't lower yourself to putting words in my mouth. My post didn't go anywhere near there. We're done here.

I really find it hard to believe that the general attitude of police in the US is either "let's go kill us a brown!". Or "let's see how many crimes we can commit without punching a hole in the Blue Wall?"
 
The opinion of some, both here and elsewhere seems to be that the vast majority of police officers are criminals if not murderous monsters.
 
I really think some diaphragmatic breathing is in order.
 
It is not like all of us live in New Orleans, or, well, maybe Cleveland. Or as an even better example, Mexico or Rio.
 
If there were active police death squads throughout the country, there would be a hell of a lot more dead people.

Re: Multiple-Power Attacks--Untenable Rule
 
On this notion that the designers are falsely claiming that multiple power attacks were always intended - I suggest those who feel this way check out the write-up of Bruiser from the group the Corruptors of All - I believe that was in Enemies III (?). Bruiser is a brick who has a PD drain as well. It is NOT linked to his strength or anything else. In his description it is flatly explained that one of his tactics is to use a punishing blow that not only delivers stun and body but also weakens the defenses of his opponent through the use the PD drain. So, IOW, there is at least one character that demonstrates the use of MPAs.
 
Oh yeah, I've built a character with multiple power attacks as a central point of the character. He was not overpowering. Of course, he was working at fewer damage classes than the majority of the characters in the game.
 
P.S. I hate hard and fast damage caps and active point limits. There are so many balanced, original characters that suddenly don't get made.

Re: Multiple-Power Attacks--Untenable Rule
 
On this notion that the designers are falsely claiming that multiple power attacks were always intended - I suggest those who feel this way check out the write-up of Bruiser from the group the Corruptors of All - I believe that was in Enemies III (?). Bruiser is a brick who has a PD drain as well. It is NOT linked to his strength or anything else. In his description it is flatly explained that one of his tactics is to use a punishing blow that not only delivers stun and body but also weakens the defenses of his opponent through the use the PD drain. So, IOW, there is at least one character that demonstrates the use of MPAs.
 
Oh yeah, I've built a character with multiple power attacks as a central point of the character. He was not overpowering. Of course, he was working at fewer damage classes than the majority of the characters in the game.
 
P.S. I hate hard and fast damage caps and active point limits. There are so many balanced, original characters that suddenly don't get made.

Listing of all mystic / New Circle characters updated in THIS POST

Re: The New Circle