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-Troika- posted:Isn't Ferguson basically one of those speedbump towns that makes most of it's revenue by hassling people driving through it on their way to other places? I don't think so. It's in the St. Louis metro. At one time it was a small town in the vicinity of St. Louis, but the city expanded and eventually engulfed Ferguson. The real issue is that in the 1990 census the town was 75% white and 25% black, then in the 2000 census it had flipped to majority black, and finally by the 2010 census it was ~65:35% black:white. The population was fairly stable over this time, so whites fled as blacks moved in, and this process completely reversed the racial character of the city in the space of 20 years, but the municipal government and apparatus like the police have remained firmly in white hands. It's a black city that is ruled by a white minority due to quirks of its electoral system, and that minority hires out-of-town whites to police the majority black population. This strikes me as an interesting and uniquely American dystopia.
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Mar 5, 2015 02:06
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Powercrazy posted:I think they could claim ignorance, and might even be bona fide ignorant that he had This isn't really true for the second officer on the scene. He's standing over the victim and watching during the whole process of Slager slowly walking to where the taser fell, grabbing it, slowly walking back to the victim, and planting it. If he backed Slager's story, and there's every reason to assume he did since that version wasn't questioned until the video dropped, he should be in a lot of trouble.
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Apr 9, 2015 04:30
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demonicon posted:This doesn't change at all the fact that the number of guns in the US is a big factor in why the US has the police force it has right now. I know that this doesn't help in any way but in an alternate dimension were the second amendment didn't exist, the US statistics would probably be much closer to those of other developed nations. I would put this point a little more precisely, because I don't think that the guns necessitate the armed police. We have militarized police for the same reason we have so many guns: a culture of endemic fear about threats that are actually negligible, or that would be better and more safely mitigated indirectly, by addressing root causes.
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Apr 9, 2015 17:58
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Zwabu posted:Since the DA's in these cases often have a working relationship with the police involved, there is a systemic conflict of interest in their vigorously pursuing justice for a police victim like Garner in that it might hamper their working relationship with the police there. I would also point out that even if you discount that relationship, there are strategic reasons for a prosecutor not to vigorously pursue cases against police. The state's case in many or most criminal trials relies heavily on the testimony of police, and the tendency of judges and juries to accept them as credible simply on the basis of their being police is a tremendous boon to prosecutors. Contrarily, in many cases where an officer is accused of a crime, his first line of defense is to begin shaping the narrative before there's even any formal investigation or accusation. Immediately after the crime takes place he's in a position to preemptively obstruct investigation by manipulating/concealing/destroying evidence, falsifying reports, intimidating and bringing spurious charges against victims and witnesses, etc. Worse, this is all done with the acquiescence or active assistance of other officers. Getting a conviction in such a situation means breaking down that narrative, and demonstrating that at least one and probably many police officers are telling self-serving lies. There may be criminal cases that hinge on those officers' testimony. Convicting one of them of a crime could well result in burning their credibility as witnesses in those cases. Past convictions could be overturned, future cases could be wrecked. e.g. imagine that you're a prosecutor and you have a lot of drug cases based on a particular officer: his swearing to probable cause, his collection of evidence, his testimony. He's involved in a questionable shooting, where eyewitnesses and video evidence disagree with his version of events--basically, he's lying in his reports and he'll lie on the stand if he has to testify in his defense. What does that do to all those drug cases? It's also a problem collectively, because you don't want judges and juries to start realizing that police lie, that you can't assume they're telling the truth. One of the main objectives of the prosecution in jury selection is eliminating jurors who distrust the police, why make that task harder?
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Apr 14, 2015 22:08
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ActusRhesus posted:Also dafuq is pace university? Like nearly 100% of .edu websites, the link he posted has a big button in the corner that says the name of the institution which, if you click on it, takes you to their homepage.
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Apr 24, 2015 13:14
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hobbesmaster posted:They're a borderline 4th tier law school so it doesn't count! Right, he could also have googled them http://thirdtierreality.blogspot.com/2010/10/third-tier-rathole-pace-university-law.html
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Apr 24, 2015 13:26
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hobbesmaster posted:That redirects to a porn site at the moment so be careful clicking that link. Yay wordpress exploits! Whoa what? I didn't even know that was a thing. It worked completely as expected for me. twodot posted:This is not an unreasonable action for a layperson, but the correct response to "Legal academics is dumb, I'm not going to engage with that" is either an argument that legal academics is not dumb (which I would be interested to see) Right, the main reason I replied to ActusRhesus saying "lol Pace" isn't that I disagreed, it's that elaborating the argument slightly would have saved the trouble of posting four or five more times to explain why Pace sucks and why legal journals are terrible. I'm honestly kind of curious why law schools put their academic imprimatur on publications that are basically bullshit, but I can accept it readily enough. It sounds like something they would do.
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Apr 24, 2015 22:38
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PostNouveau posted:Isn't there some mechanism for removing unhinged people like him from office? Yes, there are a few different mechanisms. They've just failed every time they've been attempted. e.g. he has to stand for election, but Maricopa County voters keep electing him. He was also investigated and recommended for prosecution by the FBI, but the Justice Department declined to indict him in 2012, probably for political reasons: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/03/07/records-fbi-urged-charges-in-ariz-abuse-of-power-case/6152807/
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Apr 25, 2015 04:58
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-Troika- posted:I'm sure that's very comforting to the random shop owners who's windows got broken and the motorists who were attacked by protesters, none of which had anything to do with the guy being protested about's death. Riots like that don't happen because one guy got killed by the police, that's just the catalyst. What you're looking at is an outpouring of anger that has been building in Baltimore for years or decades. The African American citizens of Baltimore have long been victimized by BPD's culture of brutality and corruption, and neither the city nor the state has ever done anything about it. BPD is a garbage fire. Worse, Baltimore has spent decades and enormous sums of money on the Inner Harbor and Camden Yards sports complex--where that riot video was filmed--to create a playground for tourists, conventioneers, and yuppies, while over the same period they've neglected and ignored the sprawling slums that make up most of the city's area and population. Riots are bad, but hey, it's kind of fuckin' insane to spend billions of dollars building a shiny consumerist Potemkin village across the street from crushing Dickensian poverty, and then to police the boundary between the two by sending a wildly dysfunctional and corrupt BPD into those neighborhoods to beat, rob, and murder with impunity. It's no way to run a city, and if anything we should be surprised that it's taken this long.
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Apr 26, 2015 20:36
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The most interesting thing about the police claiming that Gray broke his own neck is the total lack of respect they have for their audience. quote:Uh we just found a jailhouse snitch, who we can't name. He made a statement, which we will paraphrase rather than quoting. He says that Gray caused the injuries himself, even though that's probably not even physiologically possible. Also please ignore the fact that all previous information indicated that Gray's behavior during the ride was quiet and orderly. 
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Apr 30, 2015 23:31
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Samurai Sanders posted:Police discrimination against minorities is all-inclusive I guess. Baltimore City is about 65% black and a little less than 30% white (plus assorted, mostly East Asian, minorities). The police department is 46% white, which is still racially disproportionate but not as totally outrageous as some cities you could name. The racial factor in Baltimore is slightly different from most places in the country because it's had a substantial black majority for such a long time that many positions of power are actually filled by black people. This actually makes it a good demonstration of the principle that American racism is systemic and institutional more than it is a matter of individual prejudices. In Baltimore you have a city where black police, bureaucrats, and elected officials on up to the mayor go about the business of perpetuating racial disparities, not necessarily because they're malicious but because that's how American cities work. It further demonstrates that simply voting in and "winning" elections isn't enough.
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May 4, 2015 19:41
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Accretionist posted:Haha, it sounds as though without the military installations, Colorado Springs would just implode. They're more or less the reason the city exists in the first place. That article is actually from 2010, since then Colorado Springs has made a slight rebound as the US economy picked up. I think by 2013 they had turned the streetlights back on and restored police and fire funding, but they were still short on roads and parks. Lack of funding for roads is also a bigger deal there than people from other parts of the country might realize, because Colorado tends to experience unusual extremes of temperature relative to other states, which puts a lot of stress on the road surface. Colorado Springs wound up with hosed up dangerous roads as a result of defunding them for several years, and then had to scramble to find money for repairs when it became obvious that they couldn't let it slide any longer. But I think by far the best regional Tea Party story is the saga of the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix. AZ was facing a huge short-term budget shortfall in 2009, so they sold off a bunch of buildings in their state capitol complex and then leased them back from the investors. They got an infusion of cash up front to plug the budget hole, while over time taxpayers would lose a tremendous amount of money on the deal due to the continuing lease payments.
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May 11, 2015 13:47
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Kalman posted:So you're against anyone trying to obtain confessions? You're assuming that we have no alternative to the interrogation techniques that are currently standard in the USA, which isn't the case. Here's a New Yorker article about the issue from a couple of years ago, which goes into some of the problems with the standard, also called the Reid Technique. It goes on to explain that British police recognized that the Reid Technique was generating an unacceptable proportion of false positives, and they worked with psychologists and other experts to design a better method, the PEACE model. It's also been widely adopted in Canada.
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Aug 27, 2015 18:37
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Kalman posted:Whether lying is a good thing pretty much depends on how much of each of those three instances you think exists. On net, I'd bet on it being better overall as I think the third group is relatively small, but then again, I'm deeply skeptical of the value of interrogation as a whole. There's some value in interrogation as an evidence-gathering or investigatory tool, rather than a process that must inexorably lead to confession.
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Aug 27, 2015 19:21
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Dapper_Swindler posted:nah, he put 14 rounds into a downed kid when he was clearly incapacitated., dyke is hosed, the others probably not. He's going to say that he feared for his life, got scared, and "fell back on his training" by firing until his weapon was empty or the threat had been neutralized. The fact that the first two shots did that job will probably be accounted for by some kind of state of mind defense, like in that moment he panicked and couldn't be sure it was over so he just had to keep shooting. It will probably be a contest between the jury believing it, or finding the extra 14 shots too excessive to accept. I think Illinois allows the jury to convict on lesser included offenses so maybe he can get involuntary manslaughter or something. I'm interested to find out what the other police are going to say when they're asked why Van Dyke was the only officer to open fire. They're not going to throw him under the bus so it's going to require some strange contortions in their testimony.
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Nov 25, 2015 01:44
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