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Hollismason posted:Jefferson Parish Police just released rap videos of a man they shot. Didn't you know that rap is only practiced by the thuggish?
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Apr 8, 2015 21:18
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From my attempt at reading posts from our forum's own officers (a practice I do not recommend if you like not being angry), it appears that a major aspect of police training is maintaining control. Officers are taught that they need to be the man in charge when they're on the scene, solving the problems and keeping civilians under control. It seems like officer training has continued to encourage subduing anyone you can't talk down, with the officer's discretion being the only limiting factor and less-lethal violence like Tasers, pepper spray, and martial arts being relegated from "alternative to a firearm" to "method to make an unruly citizen easier to control." This is what leads to instances where non-violent resistance or even just walking away from an officer is punished through a tasing and arrest. There was one incident in particular in Ask a Copgoon that got brought up a few years back, where a Tennessee police officer strangled a non-resisting party-goer to unconsciousness. The question posed was "What would you have done if you were one of the two cops behind him?" In the real incident, the two of them had barely any reaction to their partner wrapping his hand around a compliant person's neck and choking him out. The answer from one of the officers was somewhat disturbing to read: he would have done nothing at all. While he admitted that the choking never should have happened and he had "already failed if that was allowed to occur", he also said that trying to subdue a violent officer would have removed the sense of the control the officers had over the drunk partiers and risked them no longer being the big men on campus. If the situation escalated to the point where his partner was strangling someone, he would have allowed it to occur so he could maintain order over the crowd and then he would quietly file a complaint about it back at the station and expect Internal Affairs to handle it. That kind of thinking is what scares me. He has such a disconnect from the crowd that he would rather allow violence to occur against them (and hope that internal punishment is sufficient) than prevent a fellow officer from committing bodily harm if it means that the cops keep control over them. Another thing that I'm thinking of is a rather bullshit attempt to "prove" how hard it is to be a police officer by taking an untrained minister, giving him a gun with Simmunition, and putting him in several scenarios to see how quick he reacts. The test is loaded from the start, but there are some immediate problems you can see: 1. They tried to use a completely untrained person, presumably with little to no weapons handling experience, as an example of how things go for real officers who are expected to be properly trained and taught how to make judgement calls that don't harm innocent people. 2. They gave both him and the officer performing the same tests later no gear whatsoever except for a firearm, forcing them to escalate immediately to lethal force as the only solution greater than unarmed grappling.
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Apr 9, 2015 16:02
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quote:To add a little more, when you sign up to be a police officer you are recognizing that you are in fact putting your life at risk. I don't buy the idea that the only way for a police officer to be safe is to have a gun. I heard estimated numbers yesterday on the radio about number of police per citizens killed and there are way way less police officers killed than police officers killing and that's with really incomplete numbers because there isn't really any system in place to keep track of the numbers nationally. I don't want people to kill police officers, but I'd rather numbers be that the people signing up to put themselves in a dangerous situation have more dead people than folks just walking down the street. I've actually gone to town when it comes to statistics. I'll repost something I put up on another forum. In 2013, only 105 police officers died in the line of duty out of an estimated 461,000+ sworn officers (likely more, as that count is from 2008, but we'll use that number for lack of anything better). This means that 0.022% of all police officers in the United States (again, at worst) were killed in the line of duty through any means. This includes accidents, their own negligence, heart attacks, and even one who died of illness related to 9/11. For gunfire, 30 officers were shot to death by suspects (another 2 whom I won't count were killed accidentally, one from friendly fire and one from being a moron and shooting himself in the leg taking his guns out of his car). That gives us 0.00650% of all officers shot. They're already at less than a tenth of a percent chance of dying during their service each year, but the chance of a police officer in the United States being killed by another man's gun is so infinitesimally small that they are literally more likely to die driving to the scene of a crime than being shot at the crime scene. To give a comparison, people have attempted to figure out how many deaths by police occur in the US. It's very difficult, as only about 750 of the 17,000+ agencies in the US actually contribute data. But a current count of just what we know is at least 1100 per year. Even with incomplete data, that's a 3566.6666% increase over how many civilians kill cops. Another entry made by the FBI in 2012 found approximately 400 "justifiable homicides" were committed each year by the less than 1000 agencies that provided data. For more recent data, American police killings have been studiously kept up to date this year and so far we've seen 316. American cops have literally killed more people this year than the UK police have killed in a century. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 16:10 on Apr 9, 2015 |
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Apr 9, 2015 16:07
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Reason posted:I think its pretty telling that in most of the UK police officers do not normally carry guns and their wiki page for police killings is one page, where on the US page it has to be broken down by year, though it appears to be pretty incomplete, probably because there isn't really any sort of national data collection for police killings. This is sadly correct. There's over 17,000 police agencies in the United States, but less than a thousand provide data on their shootings. The site I linked providing a sourced list of officer killings has to provide news links for every one. That list is reliable enough to estimate up to 1100 killings in 2014. That's about as many civilian homicides were committed in Texas in 2013. Edit Fuckup: An article I read last year talked about the increase in deaths in SWAT raids and the general increase in SWAT and other violent armed raids into homes being committed. The criminologist interviewed mentioned how the agencies were perfectly happy providing data on their raids and success rate...until they realized that they looked bad. As soon as they saw that they were being criticized for it, they stopped cooperating.
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Apr 9, 2015 16:20
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Zwabu posted:The pat response I'm starting to get to the idea that maybe only special cop units should have guns is "well we have the 2nd Amendment in the U.S., anyone might have a gun, therefore all police must have guns, period, stop, end of story". The extremely low number of officers shot to death in the line of duty that I provided shows exactly what threat cops have from guns: slim to none. The 2nd Amendment allows for legal firearms ownership, but I don't think legally owned firearms are commonly used to shoot the police anyway. The chance of an American officer being shot to death by a civilian is less than a hundredth of a percent...but the chance of them shooting you is literally orders of magnitude greater. You have as much chance of being murdered by a police officer as you do of being murdered by a civilian in Texas.
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Apr 9, 2015 16:34
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mastervj posted:The fact that civlians in many developed countries very rarely, if ever, have firearms of their own MUST be a factor into all of this. Again, highly doubtful. There's an estimated 270 million firearms in civilian hands in the US but police death by shooting is less than a hundredth of a percent of all officers; at 30 shooting deaths in 2013, that's about 0.00001 police officers killed for every legally owned gun in the country. The number of guns in the US always gets brought up to justify armed officers who whip their guns out at every chance they get, but police murder literally over 3500% more civilians than civilians murder cops. The 2nd Amendment is little more than an excuse to keep poorly trained cops armed and jumpy. Considering that more cops were killed that year through their own negligence or accidents than shootings, I don't think it's very likely that armed civilians are a major threat. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Apr 9, 2015 |
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Apr 9, 2015 16:53
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If 2013's officer death tally says anything, you'd save more police lives by stopping them from driving themselves to work than disarming the American populace. There was the same number of deaths by car/motorcycle crash (outside of vehicular pursuit) as there was for criminal shootings. Edit: I pulled up the list of officers dead in 2013 and the number actually increased from the last time I used it as a source. Noticeably, it went to 6 deaths from 9/11-related illness from 1. quote:Edit to the poster above: And that's what I said at the end: it's not a real risk. It's an excuse for officers to remain armed regardless of their actual ability to shoot or deliver proper judgement. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Apr 9, 2015 |
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Apr 9, 2015 16:56
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Mavric posted:This here. Its very obvious from the amount of people approving of deadly force in situations that could have easily ended without a gun being involved, not just in cop shootings but also civilian on civilian shootings. Even with this shooting with a video showing how completely in the wrong cop is you will find comments everywhere approving of his actions simply because the guy resisted. Americans are scared armed children, and the 2nd amendment supporters have done nothing to mitigate this fear which only leads to approval of deadly force. The difference is that except for a few outlying cases (like Zimmerman), civilians who gently caress up in self-defense and shoot someone they shouldn't shoot tend to get convicted for their mistakes and even outliers like Zimmerman get put on trial. Police who gently caress up get to use nothing but their word regularly to justify shooting unarmed people and dropping weapons next to them, and it's considered a miracle to even get them into court.
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Apr 9, 2015 23:15
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Mavric posted:I agree, I was just commenting on the state of fear Americans apparently live in constantly, be they cop or civilian. Well, some preliminary research suggests anywhere from 55,000 to 2.5 million defensive firearms usages by civilians per year in the US; this includes instances where the weapon is simply brandished, rather than a list of all shootings. Even the lowball estimates have not only more civilian self-defense with firearms than the number of officers shot to death, but they vastly outnumber killings by police. This suggests that the average threat to a civilian from another civilian (or cop, since that list may also include self-defense against officers overstepping their boundaries) is way, way higher than the threat officers face from civilians and it's difficult to simply call it "paranoia".
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Apr 10, 2015 00:03
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Vahakyla posted:I'm actually not opposed to giving quarter and the benefit of doubt to Slager. I don't think he is an evil person. I'm never opposed to giving a fair trial, but I can't exactly give him the benefit of the doubt. I mean, we have really crystal clear video that he shot an unarmed man in the back as he ran and dropped a weapon by his body to frame him. There's no doubt to give. Even the people who are on his side fully admit that he did exactly what he did. They just think the justice system should go easy on him because THIN BLUE LINE and BLACK THUGS.
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Apr 10, 2015 04:34
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Slager probably didn't wake up and figure "I'm gonna kill me some darkies today." That doesn't mean that he definitely didn't let racism subconsciously encourage him to mistrust a black man and consider him unarmed to be enough of a threat to kill, or make him think that Walter Scott was worth less than him because of his race. He probably didn't intend to coldly murder Walter Scott as some kind of punishment for not letting himself be oppressed. That doesn't mean that he didn't respond to a fleeing, unarmed suspect with the conscious decision to use a lethal weapon (he even paused long enough to aim twice, the second time slowing his fire to adjust his aim and shoot at Scott was slowing down). He probably didn't plant the Taser on Scott as part of a conscious decision to go out that day to murder innocent people and get away with it out of bloodlust. But he still made the conscious decision to plant a Taser on the corpse to cover himself. Regardless of whether Slager was panicking or had something else that would be brought up as an excuse, he still made a conscious decision of his own free will to kill a fleeing, unarmed man with aimed gunfire and frame him for stealing his weapon to let himself get away with it. Calling for him to be thrown in prison is not "screaming for revenge" or "being bloodthirsty." Slager was granted power over his fellow man and he abused it until he killed someone and tried to cover it up. Assuming anecdotes about his past are accurate, he has a history of abusing black civilians. Slager isn't a victim of anything except his own racism and lack of care. quote:But turn your eyes to the number of dead in the Irish war of independence. Wikipedia lists the dead as roughly 550 Republican combatants, 700 police and army combatants, and 750 civilians. Even if we attribute a vast majority of civilian deaths to official British forces, that leaves us with a number roughly equal to the estimate of those killed by American police in a year. If you want to be pedantic, sure. But the United States police force is not currently fighting a guerrilla war against black people trying to rebel against the government and form an independent state. Not exactly the same kind of conflict.
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Apr 10, 2015 17:05
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JFairfax posted:I wonder if these numbers are representative of the country as a whole: They likely are. This website uses the news to track every individual case of police killing someone in the US (not only gunshots, but also Taser accidents, running over, beatings, etc.). You can use CTRL+F to quickly find numbers in 2013, 2014, and 2015 for particular states. I don't have the time to do it now, though.
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Apr 10, 2015 21:16
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botany posted:Militarization is a recent phenomenon but US cops used to be way more blatantly racist. You have to remember that the reason you didn't hear anything about racial profiling, for instance, is that racial profiling was official policy and legal until the DOJ made it haraam in 2003. Anecdotes from 60s-70s NYPD officers indicate that it was downright common to hear milder slurs like "guinea" thrown at suspects or even just uncooperative civilians.
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Apr 10, 2015 22:10
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Voyager I posted:Do they at least get benefits? A license to kill?
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Apr 11, 2015 14:47
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Hollismason posted:You guy's say that but would you pass these tests to be a police man? I looked at some of the sample questions on the Florida one. It's literally testing on middle school knowledge. It asked how to spell "phenomenal" and how to add fractions.
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Apr 13, 2015 03:29
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Actually punishing officers who violate policies and procedures instead of covering up for them? Harshly punishing officers who fire on unarmed people, especially fleeing ones? Encouraging non-violent conflict resolution and training for it as a priority? Hiring officers from within the community and with a racial and gender makeup similar to the community so they feel a connection to the people they serve (and emphasizing that they serve and protect the civilians)? Requiring stricter training standards for firearms (including actually spending the money on the ammo needed for them to practice instead of forcing the officers to spend hundreds of their own dollars on learning to use their weapon safely) and not issuing them to officers who can't pass the test while forcing them by policy to carry less-lethal weapons at all times so they don't have an excuse to resort to a gun for any mildly risky situation? Eliminating the NYPD's stupid 12-pound trigger pulls that try to make up for barely trained officers' unsafe handling practices while making it nearly impossible for the users to shoot the desired target without spraying bullets all over a crowded urban area? Disallowing the use of less-lethal weapons like Tasers and pepper spray on suspects or civilians who aren't violently struggling so they don't keep hurting people whose only crime is being lippy and not moving? Eliminating civil asset forfeiture and preventing the spoils of criminal asset forfeiture from being used for the department's benefit to eliminate incentives to falsify arrest and seizure for bonus shiny stuff? Making any recorded racist or otherwise bigoted claims grounds for immediate dismissal? Enforcing stricter standards on shoot/don't shoot judgement calls to minimize body count? Like, the actual methods for good policing and things that need to be solved are really loving easy to figure out; if they weren't, most other first world countries would look like the racist bloodbath in the United States. The difficulties in fixing the American policing system have less to do with figuring out "what good police work looks like" and more to do with actually getting the people in charge willing to put forth changes, especially when they have political, monetary, or power-related incentives to keep things the way they are.
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Apr 13, 2015 17:28
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quote:But part of the impunity for police officers has to do with juries favoring law enforcement over minority defendants. The no-bills in the cases of Eric Garner and the SWAT team that burned a toddler is a problem with society that you can't fix by changing policies and procedures. Walter Scott's killer has already been terminated, which is the limit of what can be done as an administrative penalty. Oscar Grant's killer resigned in lieu of being terminated, and again a jury declined to convict him of anything beyond involuntary manslaughter. Many of these cases never even make it into a courtroom. Even just bringing these cases up for a judge and/or jury to make a decision on regularly would be far better than the current situation, where police have almost total freedom to cover up or explain away deaths and use the officer's word as evidence. quote:Doing this without lowering the standards for applicants (to say nothing of raising them) is going to be a big problem. Limiting yourself to only the most qualified minority applicants in a delineated geographic area means competing for an extremely small pool of candidates. Even if they want to be law enforcement officers, why should they apply to the local PD if they're competitive for the FBI, NCIS, and National Park Rangers? What are your required standards? I thought you didn't like the idea of using standardized test scores as a way to find suitable candidates. quote:Better training means more money. Even in the military, the only groups that train to a high level to make disciplined shoot/don't shoot decisions in close contact (versus the more general fire-and-maneuver training the infantry focuses on) are Special Operations units like the Rangers.* That level of training and stress inoculation doesn't come cheap. Most PDs don't have the money to shoot 10,000 rounds per officer per year, or operate their own shoot houses. Putting all that aside, if you want to encourage officers to seek non-violent solutions, spending the majority of the training budget running around with guns is a bit contra-indicated. Also, the heavy triggers on NYPD duty guns were specifically added in order to prevent negligent discharges when officers were handling their weapons under stress, so I guess everything old is new again. A problem of budget priority more than the existence of money; there's a very large economy with the capability of funding officers, but a significant amount of it goes toward military spending beyond what's necessary to maintain the defense of our nation and NATO requirements. quote:I don't believe in zero tolerance policies. Maybe requiring documentation of HR counseling, but I'd still have serious concerns about making someone's personnel file available to be used against them in civil or criminal actions. At the end of the day, administrative remedies are a band-aid. Unless you want to put officers under constant surveillance and tap their personal cell phones (good luck selling that to these highly qualified applicants you're trying to attract) the only real way to reduce racism is when fellow officers start calling them out on it. As someone who has watched the military's flailing attempts to address sexual assault for the better part of a decade, changing a culture from the top down is really hard. Bigotry -- racism against black and Latino suspects in particular -- is a gigantic problem and the source of many further problems in police departments (such as the poor treatment of minority suspects and the greater tendency to use violence against them or interpret black males as larger and more threatening than they actually are). If an officer is proven to have used a racial slur or otherwise referred to a suspect in a way that insults their race, that officer needs to have the power that was granted to them removed. It's not like we're doing high school discipline where a cop who accidentally spills black paint on his hand is fired for starting a blackface costume. But you are right about something: the problems start from the top down. All of the methods for solving the problems are known and kind of obvious, but you need to actually get the guys in charge to enact them. Many of the guys in charge either don't think anything is being done wrong or know it but actively benefit (such as through civil forfeiture and increased income through spurious fines and fees, or the cheap labor provided by the prison system). The changes are staring us right in the face, but they have to be applied to a system that's basically toxic and rotted on all levels while large numbers of civilians think it's a shining paragon and would resist any accusations that make them uncomfortable. quote:You're shifting the blame from the system to citizens. The prosecutors are friends with the cops. Not to say jurors are necessarily blameless, but there's more to the system than just cops on the street. Judges, prosecutors, legislators, etc. Firing the guy might be the only thing the cops can do, but as we've seen, actually indicting the guy is something that is happening in this case, but needs to happen more generally. Darren Wilson's failed indictment is a prime example of this. McCullough had obvious, proven connections to the police and a history of preventing them from seeing consequences for bad behavior and racism against black suspects/victims. He acted less like a prosecutor and more like Wilson's defense attorney, even admitting after the fact to letting a known false witness testify in Wilson's favor without informing the jury that she was lying through her teeth. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Apr 13, 2015 |
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Apr 13, 2015 20:04
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Intelligence isn't a problem except in less intelligent officers being more malleable. What officers need is empathy, the ability to make judgement calls that minimize harm even to criminals, and training that brings more focus onto non-violent conflict resolution and negotiation instead of emphasizing maintaining total control and treating patrols as wartime and civilians as the enemy. I'm sure Slager isn't a stupid man. But he's certainly not one who can make good judgement calls and is pretty authoritarian and brutal if accounts of his past behavior indicate anything.
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Apr 13, 2015 21:04
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tezcat posted:Well police trying to murder a potential suicide victim isn't new. Someone who wants to indirectly pull the trigger.
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Apr 15, 2015 06:01
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Terebus posted:http://tucson.com/news/blogs/police-beat/marana-suspect-hit-by-police-car-id-d/article_d25f2a7e-bb97-11e4-ba50-df63e61754d4.html?id=201408 Probably from him firing a random shot during his negotiations with the police.
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Apr 15, 2015 06:54
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hobbesmaster posted:Well, his training was falsified... Impressively, the only major difference between his actions and the actions of a fully trained American police officer is that he killed an unarmed and subdued suspect accidentally instead of intentionally.
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Apr 17, 2015 01:22
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Zwabu posted:I suppose the main point, aside from the discipline and training of this policeman, is his willingness to increase the risk to his own life in order to decrease the chance that he'll have to take the other man's life. If you watch what happens and how he made his decision, you can see that he made the exact opposite choice that many officers would make. The man simply had his hand in his pocket, which a great many officers have been documented as taking to mean "Drawing a weapon" and immediately opened fire. He took the chance to wait until he could see a gun or knife come out before potentially shooting an unarmed man making a bluff. I think he could also tell by the behavior that the guy was committing a typical suicide by cop, and thus was trying to get himself killed more than he was trying to kill someone.
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Apr 19, 2015 21:40
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Vahakyla posted:He didn't really increase his risk. Walking backwards is a viable tactic. Technically he "increased his risk" by failing to immediately kill the guy. Technically, the only way to truly avoid being murdered by everyone you meet is to kill them first. He was just brave enough to wait for confirmation of a threat instead of opening fire as soon as he had an excuse.
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Apr 20, 2015 00:49
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It's the classic "off on a technicality". The prosecution set it up for a lower level of murder that was totally different, and they legally can't pin him during that trial for a more grievous charge than what they've decided to charge him with. Because the differing levels of murder have pretty strict definitions, they were effectively trying him for a crime he didn't commit and letting him get off. I wouldn't hesitate to pin the decision to charge him with involuntary manslaughter as corruption. While it's already pretty common with things like plea deals to try people for a lower level of crime as a measure of leniency, the prosecution took a guy who they had a really solid case to prosecute for murder and gave him a lower level that has a strict definition he didn't fit. And thus they were able to take a man who literally aimed and fired at a group of unarmed people for no apparent reason beyond a bullshit "I thought I was shot" excuse and have him declared not guilty.
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Apr 21, 2015 02:47
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JohnClark posted:Again, not a lawyer, but I don't think this is correct. Even though he wasn't tried for murder, he was tried for the potential criminal acts surrounding the death of Rekia Boyd, and jeopardy attaches to the act rather than the specific charge a prosecutor chooses to levy. Otherwise prosecutors could keep you in court theoretically indefinitely while they charge you with each possible crime related to some sequence of events, one at a time. I believe this is correct. However, there's some legal gray areas and overlap regarding it. If a crime applies to multiple jurisdictions, it's possible for those jurisdictions to hold separate trials (the most common being federal vs. state courts). The US Supreme Court made a ruling after Blockburger v. United States, 284 U.S. 299 (1932): following acquittal, the government may bring a second prosecution on additional charges arising out of the same underlying events as the first prosecution so long as both the new crime charged and the prior crime each contain an element of proof that the other does not. Unfortunately, this wouldn't work here. A lower category of murder has the same elements of proof as a higher one, so if he was acquitted for manslaughter the federal government couldn't just plop him down and put a first or second-degree murder charge on his shoulders. Likewise they couldn't pin a lesser violence charge like assault and/or battery, as both of those are obviously elements of a murder. What they could do is charge him on a totally separate violation, like a weapons violation or violation of civil rights. And of course, none of this prevents a civil suit from being brought against him.
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Apr 21, 2015 03:03
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thefncrow posted:Are you sure about this? The ruling wasn't that he was not guilty because the prosecution failed to prove any element that would be common to a murder charge, but because they failed the unique element that differentiates it from murder. It seems to me that should leave the possibility of a murder charge open. This page has an actual lawyer giving his opinion regarding the question "Does double jeopardy apply if you admit guilt after?" and talking about how another court could bring different charges for the same case. Assuming he's correct, the federal government would be unable to charge someone deemed not guilty of manslaughter with a higher degree of murder because there are no elements of manslaughter not present in second or first-degree murder. It would be different if they were downgrading to involuntary manslaughter from murder, as they would potentially have the "reckless endangerment" element. But you can't really punch up from there.
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Apr 21, 2015 07:40
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Killed by Police uses news reports to create a list of police deaths for 2013, 2014, and 2015. This includes all deaths in custody or during police action, including people who suddenly became unresponsive and died of as-yet unknown medical reasons after being cuffed and tossed in the car. So far we're at 356 deaths today, or about 3.2 deaths per day.
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Apr 22, 2015 21:11
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GlyphGryph posted:An argument about traffic laws really isn't appropriate for this thread. Like it or not, the cop got about what most people get for driving recklessly (and no, that's not because he was going 15 over, it's because he crashed into another vehicle and killed the driver) and killing folks with their vehicles. It's not a police issue. Isn't this thread about criminal justice in general, not just Cop Watch? I think an argument about traffic laws is perfectly suitable for this thread.
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Apr 23, 2015 19:43
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nm posted:Even if the officers are completely innocent this guy is a moron. This is why you have PR people so you don't say lynch when people are protesting whote dudes killing a black guy Didn't the guy in charge of PR for the Ferguson police still end up saying stupid racist stuff?
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Apr 23, 2015 21:29
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Dum Cumpster posted:Are there any reasonable suggestions for how to keep police officers from wanting to help each other cover up mistakes so frequently? I know there's no real comparison, but when someone fucks up in the corporate world their coworkers aren't jumping at the chance to help them cover it up. I don't remember reading anything in these threads addressing it, but I could have just missed it. The first problem is that you need to actually be willing to punish the officer who made the mistake. If the prosecution, judge, juries, and DA are all so pro-cop that they're throwing cases or inherently trusting a cop's word or being unwilling to throw the book at an officer simply because he's a cop, you're not going to do anything to stop cover-ups from happening. Technically officers already should be getting in trouble for contributing to cover-ups of police misconduct, but they have even less chance of getting in trouble for it than the officer who just shot an unarmed black guy in the back for not responding in less than half a second to a slurred scream of command after he committed no crime except panicking and running at the sight of a gun being drawn on him for no apparent reason.
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Apr 24, 2015 19:56
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Rhesus Pieces posted:We're getting two or three of these videos leaked every week now. How many more are going to come out, dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? As usual, I recommend looking at Killed by Police. We're at 368 deaths that can be attributed to police action (along with shootings, this also includes things like negative reactions to a taser or pepper spray or a "death by excited delirium" or "sudden medical condition causes death" during a struggle for arrest) as of yesterday, a rate of about 3.2 per day. Reading the news articles indicates that along with shootings, there's a surprisingly large number of deaths that are attributed by news articles to the person suddenly suffering a vague medical crisis and dying. While obviously that's not out of the question, cases like Eric Garner and Freddie Gray make you wonder how many of the stories of a suspect mysteriously dying of an unnamed medical reason or "excited delirium" were actually directly caused by police abuse and have simply been quietly covered up or just never investigated. Hell, we get so many cases of police abuse and spurious murder that almost any case of them using force that doesn't have solid evidence of it being justified can easily be questioned. How many Michael Browns, Eric Garners, and Freddie Grays are out there? How many identical cases have occurred and simply never gotten the news coverage and protests?
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Apr 24, 2015 20:13
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Radish posted:The idea that 3.2 deaths from government employees a day is just something we have to accept since any realistic alternative is impossible (or just too hard legally) to implement as soon as possible is maddening. If 3.2 white, suburban moms were being killed by police a day there would be a public outcry and heads would be rolling but because these people are different combinations of minorities, poor, and mentally instable it's just the price we have to pay as a society to keep things clean. 3.2 deaths a day from the police should be a news headline everyday until the situation is rectified but you only hear about it in the most blatant and egregious cases. That rate is obscene and a black mark on our justice system that we let it continue. We're also the nation that in 2012 incarcerated 716 people out of every 100,000 and has a justice system predominately based around punishment rather than rehabilitation, using prisoners as cheap labor and using gradually increasing fines and fees as a way of gathering income. We also regularly deny rights to ex-cons and vilify them until they're ostracized from society and are thus very likely to return to a life of crime. We're generally kinda really lovely when it comes to criminal justice. Dead Reckoning posted:Their tally also includes people who drew a fake gun on two police officers in front of their station, shot at police pulling them over for having fake tags, or opened fire on deputies responding to a domestic violence call. You're only hearing about the most blatant and egregious cases because no one really gets upset when the police kill someone who started a running gun battle in afternoon traffic. When I get home I'm seriously going to go over every individual March 2015 incident and count how many involved a confirmed weapon usage or fake weapon brandishing (someone holding a cell phone or wallet doesn't count). But as has been said, there seems to be a disturbing trend where any situation that could potentially allow a justified killing results in immediate use of lethal force with little to no consideration of other options. It's a fact that the United States police manage to kill more people in a month than many first world nations have killed in the past century. Either the United States is a war zone, or there's something wrong with our cops. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Apr 24, 2015 |
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Apr 24, 2015 21:04
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GlyphGryph posted:I think the question is "Does Finland have a designated criminal/oppressed underclass?" Probably not. It's almost like having one is a recipe for civil unrest. (Note: The designation probably doesn't come from within the class) Finland has its own issues with racism, predominately against immigrants, but I don't think there's any analogue to black people in terms of a single racial group that gets constantly abused (to say nothing of being slaves until less than 200 years ago). The Sami suffer discrimination, but it's more similar to what's suffered by Native Americans over here; they lost all indigenous land claims and are intended to be integrated into Finnish culture, and have almost no representation in the government.
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Apr 27, 2015 03:50
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Popular Thug Drink posted:i think when reddit macro reposters say peaceful they'd look at the police cracking heads and say "well, those people shouldn't have provoked a response from the cops, it's their own fault really" as if MLK advanced racial equality though like i dunno sheer charisma and Great Man magic powers or something. MLK got beat up and arrested, not exactly respecting the integrity of the public peace there They think that social change is something you create just by asking really nicely and making logical arguments to racists as to why they're wrong.
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Apr 27, 2015 23:07
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Nobody ever cares about the downtrodden until they force you to pay attention to them.
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Apr 27, 2015 23:52
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WhiskeyJuvenile posted:the rioters are a bunch of high school kids Accounts from locals indicate that the police claimed a "credible threat of gang violence" and descended on a local high school before it let students out, shutting down the public transit around it. This resulted in some rather miffed students finding out that their school was surrounded by riot cops and they had no way to get home reliably. It's very similar to what occurred in Ferguson, where peaceful protests were met with rifle-armed officers and snipers and antagonism until a few thrown water bottles gave the excuse to deploy tear gas and shoot reporters.
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Apr 28, 2015 04:42
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on the left posted:The current mayor and previous mayor of Baltimore are both black women, so obviously it's not an impossible strategy. "Our president is black, therefore--"
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Apr 28, 2015 08:06
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GlyphGryph posted:Then why didn't a video of exactly the same kind of situation in North Charleston trigger a riot? I mean, that one was not only a fantastical story of a situation that was beyond the pale, it was on video! Because Slager was immediately arrested and charged with murder. The protests aren't simply about officers doing bad things, but that they have the ability to do bad things and get away with it. Slager was immediately set up for punishment, which is what potential protesters want in the first place (though you bet there will be protests if he gets off). Darren Wilson, on the other hand, was put on paid leave and quietly disappeared from the town and not even indicted. Same with Pantaleo, the officer who strangled Eric Garner. The officers who murdered Freddie Grey for the crime of being black and running away were suspended, but not given any charges despite loading a man into their van and unloading him with fatal blunt force trauma injuries that they didn't have to tell anyone where they came from. Had the officers involved been treated like they criminals they are, there would have been little to no protesting. Instead, the BPD has continued a very long history of brutality and racism by doing the absolute minimum to pacify people. quote:If it was just 'media reports about cops shooting unarmed black guy=riot' then why weren't there massive riots after Tamir Rice? John Crawford? Darrien Hunt? All three of these people had the police report that the victim was armed to justify it, which presented an "It was his own fault" narrative for people to latch on to. Freddie Grey and Walter Scott were both unarmed and Slager was caught on film planting a weapon on Scott. That gives even pro-police people pause. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Apr 28, 2015 |
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Apr 28, 2015 21:30
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SquadronROE posted:To me it's really interesting there haven't been more deaths or injuries in the riots. With how common guns are... and how angry everyone is. There's always this thought that because of the prevalence of guns in the United States, that every dispute from a bar fight to a full fledged riot is destined to see people whipping out handguns and murdering one another. The problem with this thinking is that it assumes that everyone has way, way more desire to murder than they actually do and that all it takes is giving random people weapons to see them start executing police. Unfortunately for the film industry, the United States doesn't quite resemble the church scene from Kingsman.
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Apr 29, 2015 01:44
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Rah! posted:I'm about as critical of the police as a person can be, but I think It's a stretch to say that guy was "disappeared", unless he never comes back, or unless he comes back severely injured or dead (though that wouldn't exactly be "disappeared", but it would be the same kind of hosed up). I've seen the cops swarm and arrest individual people like that at other protests....didn't look out of the ordinary, really. Yes, but none of them waited until a Humvee was passing by so they could immediately throw him in the back and then reform the line like it never happened. Also, the very existence of a police line and reporters filming live indicates that there was probably more than just him on the street.
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Apr 29, 2015 05:47
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