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Liquid Communism posted:These threads have actually done a rare thing, and changed my opinion drastically. As much as I'm a fan of the right to keep and bear arms, I no longer think American police officers should be allowed to routinely go armed. They are clearly, as a profession, incapable of responsibly exercising the necessary self-control required to go about bearing a deadly weapon. I think the bigger issue is that they know there just won't be any repercussions no matter how many people they murder. Start punishing the ones that just outright murder people and suddenly you'll see a lot less of it happening. Though you're right, beat cops just walking the streets really don't need to be heavily armed. The police most certainly don't need to be buying literal goddamned tanks for regular use either. Sorry but your average, bog standard police department doesn't need an APC. That's for the special units that get called in in the rare event that poo poo actually does get that bad. Which for your average cop is, you know, not every day.
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Mar 3, 2015 09:53
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The Larch posted:I imagine it's harder to claim that you totally intended to draw your taser, no, seriously, when it's already in your hand and in use. If that's not an option there aren't really any excuses left that you can give. Far as America is concerned "I am a police officer and decided that person should die" is more than enough. The reason could be "I didn't sleep well last night and was having a bad day so I literally murdered somebody" and America would be like "Ok, thanks for your service!"
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Mar 29, 2015 19:53
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SedanChair posted:And then this went down in history, as the very moment when right-wing shamelessness became transparent even to its consumers. You say that like the right wing will change at all. It's like when wrestling realized that everybody knew it was fake. We all knew the truth all along and once they realized nobody cared poo poo got continually more insane. Countdown to righties demanding that police just randomly gun down blacks to "keep them in line" starting....now.
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Apr 8, 2015 09:05
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Radish posted:Wait I thought tazers were "less than lethal." Are they a lethal threat in the hands of civilians but not police? If you point it at a cop a dull plastic spoon is a "lethal weapon."
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Apr 8, 2015 12:51
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ActusRhesus posted:Incorrect. The military as a whole has higher test scores and possesses a higher average education level that the population writ large. Even if you exclude the officers corps where a bachelors degree is a minimum requirement for line, advanced degrees are required for most staff, and graduate coursework is needed for promotion, there is a 20% high school drop out rate in this country which is a disqualifier (unless you have a GED and some college) and of those who graduate high school, many can't pass the ASVAB. I'm not saying everyone in the military is a genius. But our general population is pretty loving stupid. A major component of the problem is that significant chunks of our population are willfully, deliberately stupid. Among conservatives being as uneducated as possible is seen as a good thing because that makes you a salt of the earth good old boy with common sense unlike those ivory tower nerds with their fancy titles, arrogant attitudes, and loving literacy. Just because somebody has studied a subject for ten years doesn't mean they understand it. Me, I know how the world works so let me tell you how global warming is a hoax...
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Apr 14, 2015 18:22
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ActusRhesus posted:I'm not so sure stupidity and ignorance are limited to any one political ideology. Oh they aren't but I've never seen somebody actually be proud about how dumb they are while actively trying to be even dumber that wasn't a staunch Republican.
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Apr 14, 2015 19:48
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Voyager I posted:Isn't most of that just extra defense budget bloat getting dumped off? It's not like the Hicksville PD has the money to pay bluebook for an APC or whatever. The more important question is what the gently caress does a local police department need a literal goddamned tank for? Yeah SWAT teams should have access to some heavy duty equipment but Joe Trafficcop has no reason to have access to a tank. Nor does he have reason to keep five guns in his patrol car. Your bog standard local cop may very well have a pistol, mace, a tazer, a shotgun, an AR-15, and a knife in his car at all times.
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Apr 14, 2015 20:56
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Vahakyla posted:Unless this issue is also about reducing military spending, no, that money can't be redirected to anything since the pickup truck from your backyard going to your cousin's house would not transfer to restaurant coupons. The issue though is that all of this military hardware got paid for at some point and apparently industry lobbyists and ensuring that the government is required to buy X amount of stuff every year whether they need it or not. Given that our military spending is obscene what people are seeing is that we're spending poo poo loads of money arming the police just as heavily as we do soldiers when there are people going hungry. The defense companies are making money hand over fist while the rest of us get to foot the bill. And for what? So Sergeant Fatty McRacistpants can murder black people more efficiently.
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Apr 14, 2015 21:25
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ActusRhesus posted:Is it the root of minority underachievement? No. Socioeconomic status and poo poo schools are more the cause. Does it suck for the kid getting called Oreo? Yup. Anyway, this is a derail. My point was simply that saying "only" staunch republicans undervalue education is inaccurate. There's actually quite a difference between "undervalue and/or do not have access to education" and "openly hostile to the idea of being taught things." I went to high school with some white guys who were functionally illiterate and proud of it. Voyager I posted:They are separate problems. The contracts exist to let military industrial shitlords sell more hardware. The cops getting their leftovers is just a side-effect, and if you stopped that from happening the government would just throw them all in a pit or whatever because the contract still says they have to buy X whatevers per year. Not really. All this leftover military stuff laying around is leading people to go "well what do we do with this? gently caress I don't know, I guess the police can use it?" and it is arming police to the teeth. Sorry but one is ultimately directly causing the other which has been leading to an increasingly well-armed police force. The defense contractors are just lapping up the free money while anybody that says "Well I don't know, maybe we shouldn't be spending so loving much on tanks we don't even need" is labelled a coward. Cutting military spending is effectively impossible so we have the net effect of a police force that gets more heavily armed every year. And hey you give some boys new toys and they're going to want to play with them, right? It also doesn't help that a lot of people are also ex-military...you know, people that are literally trained to kill and told that the proper response to a threat is bullets? Then you consider that police culture often has a severe "us vs. them" attitude and you have this perfect shitstorm that is going to get worse before it gets better.
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Apr 15, 2015 02:52
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Series DD Funding posted:The other story said he shot in the air. There was air between him and the police. Ergo, it was at the police.
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Apr 15, 2015 06:56
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Rent-A-Cop posted:Pointing a gun is enough for aggravated assault in Arizona. Thinking about maybe owning a gun some day while being black is probably enough for aggravated assault in Arizona.
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Apr 15, 2015 08:36
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Military: So this militant that we know is armed and wants to make us die ran into that house over there. We have him outnumbered 30:1 and are just going to wait him out. He can't stay in there forever. Police: I THINK I SMELL WEED AND MIGHT HAVE HEARD A TOILET FLUSH THEY'RE DESTROYING EVIDENCE QUICK SMASH IN THE DOOR, THROW A FLASHBANG IN EVERY ROOM, CALL IN EVERY SWAT TEAM WE CAN, AND IF HE SO MUCH AS LOOKS LIKE HE MIGHT BE THREATENING ONE OF US SHOOT HIM 90 TIMES OR HELL JUST DO IT IF YOU FEEL LIKE IT gently caress IT HE'S OBVIOUSLY A DRUG DEALER BECAUSE I SAID SO OK GO!
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Apr 17, 2015 02:06
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Voyager I posted:I know the second part is sarcastic, but it really cannot be overemphasized that Police and Soldiers aren't doing the same jobs and thus pointing out that they handle superficially similar situations in very different manners is meaningless. Hell, if they were handling it the way the Military does ('going in would be dangerous, just level the building on them' being a perfectly reasonable response in a military context) I would take it as a cause for serious alarm. The second post was also kind of meant to highlight how insane the police in America have gotten in some cases. "I don't know, I thought I smelled weed, I guess" is enough justification for the police to knock down your door. Once that happens "I felt threatened" is enough justification to gun down whoever they feel like. Both statements could be completely and utterly false but the response is to pat the cop on the back and say "good job!"
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Apr 17, 2015 05:50
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WhiskeyJuvenile posted:Yeah, you don't make it to trial intending to throw the case. The phrase "show trial" exists for a reason. It's entirely possible (I have no idea if it's true or not) that the prosecutor, or just that particular system in general, needed a thing to point and and say "well, we want to charge murderous police but dadgummit look what happened!" One of the biggest issues here is that it's a situation where nobody can win no matter what happens. If the police keep getting away with literal murder poo poo just keeps getting worse and the police lose more credibility every time it happens. If this turns out to be a show trial/the result of corruption then we see more police murder because they know they can get away with it. If the cop does go to jail on a second trial you'll hear nothing but DOUBLE JEOPARDY AN INNOCENT MAN IS IN JAIL NOW AAAAAAAA  nonstop. If it turned out to be an issue of corruption or ineptitude and it gets investigated by higher levels of enforcement and enough detail gets public and it turns out that prosecutors do, in fact, loving suck overall it throws a spanner in the justice system as a whole. Suddenly you can't trust any of it.The justice system, as it stands, has massive issues that nobody is bothering to fix and I think this is a key example.
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Apr 21, 2015 18:26
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Fartmancer posted:There are always opportunistic assholes just looking to start some poo poo. There was a giant group of people fighting down in the inner harbor back on April 6th that barely made any news. And, of course, people are always trying to sell their own narrative on things. In some cases it's actually undercover police trying to stir up the crowd to start a riot deliberately. Occupy apparently had issues with that. Here's a couple others. The police have also been accused of trying to incite crowds at more recent lefty things. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/12/1351145/-Undercover-CHP-Officer-pulls-Gun-on-Protestors-after-they-catch-him-inciting-Looting http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/03/undercover-officer-major-riot-john-jordan
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Apr 27, 2015 04:28
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semper wifi posted:Cross burnings and upvoting youtube comments: literally the same thing They're not the same thing but they're related. One of the awful results of the rioting is going to be the nonstop "  URBAN FERALS CAN'T CONTROL THEMSELVES " bullshit that we're going to be hearing for weeks now. Racist shits are sending a pretty clear message to black people; you will sit down, shut up, and accept your lot in life or there will be repercussions.
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Apr 27, 2015 06:28
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Lotka Volterra posted:It's been said before, but it seems to have a lot to do with the incestuous relationship between judges/the county clerk/the DA/and the police force. Almost every level of the justice system is set up to protect police, and having ridiculously strong unions on top of that makes most cops (however bad) nigh untouchable. It's a serious problem when these people wield as much power as they do. The biggest problem is that the same apparatus that is supposed to be investigating, charging, and punishing police misconduct is the apparatus being investigated. The police effectively investigate themselves and won't let anybody else do it. This is how you get things like blatantly obvious police murders going completely unpunished or bullshit non-punishments like paid suspension. That latter part is an even more insane issue "dear police officer that did something wrong: have some free money and a vacation!" Given that policing in America is also very heavily local there also aren't really any major national attempts at oversight or even national guidelines. Until some organization other than the police comes about that isn't beholden to the police at all comes around we're going to keep seeing this poo poo happening. It gets even more problematic when you see incidents of the police destroying evidence gathered against them. There's been poo poo loads of stories of people recording the police doing something, the cell phones being seized, and then mysteriously vanishing. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 22:53 on May 2, 2015 |
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May 2, 2015 22:51
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Samurai Sanders posted:I asked before but no one answered, do the FBI or justice department have some way to proactively root out bad police departments, or is it purely reactive? I don't think there's any real way for the justice department to root out bad departments at all if the current state of affairs is any indication.
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May 2, 2015 23:49
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nm posted:^^^^^^ Hence saying "real way." If an agency exists but never does anything it may as well not exist at all.
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May 3, 2015 00:34
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Samurai Sanders posted:Yeah, which is why I am wondering, if stopping the police from ending people left and right isn't a priority for the justice department, what is? At the moment? I imagine mostly keeping private prisons full with whoever they can round up in poor and/or black neighborhoods.
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May 3, 2015 01:26
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Police response to white people protests - OK guys go home. No really it's curfew time and yo need to go home. First warning...OK you can leave now. We're serious. We're enforcing curfew and you might get hurt. Not by us I mean by other people. Second warning...leave before we start arresting people. You're obviously law-abiding citizens so you need to obey this law. OK, third warning...leave now or you go to the station. :white people leave: Police response to black people protests - :SMACK, BASH: STOP RESISTING!!! :PEPPER SPRAY: Yyyyyup, literally the same.
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May 3, 2015 22:13
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Samurai Sanders posted:Well, except when the police occasionally spray non-resisting white protesters too just for the hell of it, like in that famous picture. In this case I was largely referring to the response in Baltimore. If you're referring to the Occupy one that's kind of a different scenario; there was a massive crackdown nationwide on Occupy. That was more political than racial. Really different story.
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May 3, 2015 22:17
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mlmp08 posted:Even though I often trot stats like this out to troll, they're disingenuous. Doesn't make it acceptable.
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May 3, 2015 22:52
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I can't seem to find it at the moment but I get a feeling that one of the issues is that you have a lot of people "Just doing their job" and the job is often problem. I can't find it but there was a very interesting study a while back to the tune of "justifying the Nazis." The short of it was that people were told they were going to be studying the effects of pain on giving correct answers to quiz questions by having a button that zapped people in a little room. If they were right you didn't press the button. If they were wrong they got progressively worse shocks. What people were not told was that the person in the room was an actor and no shocks were ever delivered. Over half of people would just keep delivering shocks up to and including 100% fatal levels even after the person in the room couldn't apparently even answer questions anymore. Most people would literally kill somebody just because an authority told them to.
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May 4, 2015 21:01
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That's exactly what I was thinking about, thank you.
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May 4, 2015 21:39
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Hey man just because it's a three sigma event doesn't mean it's entirely impossible. Obviously the stars aligned just right and the kid just had some really atrocious luck. Let's just ignore all the evidence that the cop was doing something deliberately and/or just flat out extremely negligent he's a cop his job is stressful. Just ignore that we use the same argument every time a cop fucks up and give them a free pass to do whatever they want, whenever they want, all the time.
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May 5, 2015 20:06
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size1one posted:No, it's not. It's anti-abuse/corruption. The argument isn't to get rid of the police, it's that they should act professionally. This isn't an unreasonable thing to expect from the police, but you clearly seem to think so. Hey man it's a stressful job and they have to make snap decisions based on information in situations where they may or may not die. If we didn't let police just gun down whoever they want without repercussions then a bad guy might get away or a cop might die. I mean, being dangerous is kind of their job; if it wasn't why do they carry guns?
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May 13, 2015 21:49
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FRINGE posted:This is absolutely not an end-all point of view, but it deserves more attention than I have seen it getting: Anecdotal but the worst years of my life were also the ones I drank the most. I was pulling absurd amounts of hours, not sleeping much, was very single, and basically didn't have friends. I was barely getting by financially and the mountain of stress and lack of a support group meant that I was pretty much working, sleeping, or drinking. I only struggle with alcohol abuse when I'm in similar situations. Never did hit hard drugs or anything but I've really had some conversations about that with a lot of people that just don't understand why addictive behavior shows up in the first place. It absolutely isn't something that one chooses. If it were a choice and nothing else than addiction wouldn't exist.
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May 16, 2015 13:09
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gently caress You And Diebold posted:Obama Just Announced a Plan to Restrict Police Use of Military-Style Equipment Sometimes that's a good way to solve a problem in a way that doesn't rock the boat too much. It would be ideal to just say "anybody that isn't a SWAT team doesn't get to have a loving tank, ever" but good luck getting that through Congress. If memory serves other problems have been solved the same way. Laws to the effect of "you can keep your toys but don't get any new ones." Over time the old ones will fall apart and not get replaced. It isn't ideal but if it actually works it's definitely a step in the right direction. Granted it truly baffles me how much we're going to hear police being all "well we JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND why nobody likes police anymore!" after this bullshit. "Serve and protect" should be replaced with "hope we don't notice you or decide your skull needs more holes in it" these days.
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May 18, 2015 14:56
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Powercrazy posted:Why the exception for a "Swat" team? There is literally no need for one. The purpose of "shock and awe" no-knock raids is to secure drug evidence incase the occupants try to destroy it. And to that I say, "so what?" Your precious evidence isn't worth the huge escalation of force against citizens. SWAT teams should be explicitly federally banned and should exist as only an FBI special task force. You do kind of need those special units to exist in the rare case you need them but yes I do agree with you, really. Your average local police force probably doesn't need a SWAT team at all. It just truly baffles me that your average local beat cop is armed like a damned infantryman in a combat zone and has a tank on call if he decides he needs it.
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May 18, 2015 19:27
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Vahakyla posted:Lol plz draw some goddamn lines. In a lot of American areas there are places where the police literally use being sneaky and nabbing people for fines as a way to fund the department. I'm serious. Where I'm originally from there is a stretch of highway where the speed limit is set artificially low. The local department has black uniforms and paints their cars black and sit around that particular stretch of highway at night just waiting for people to speed. If they don't get enough people for traffic violations they'll literally just make poo poo up. I know people that have been given tickets for doing things that were literally physically impossible. Some nearby departments have also been doing similar things. There's a department that is almost entirely funded by fines that came from a particular hill. It's a bit of a big, steep one so people (not being idiots) would try to get a bit of speed going before driving up it. The speed limit of the road leading to the hill was dropped and the police hide there all day, every day to nab people speeding up to handle the hill. It very seriously is often all about revenue.
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May 19, 2015 03:57
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chitoryu12 posted:The entire idea of SWAT was created specifically as a level between police and the military. They're intended to be used against heavily armed and dangerous criminals, who encompass more than simply armored bank robbers. Again, SWAT teams are much like helicopters and AR-15s: used improperly, but not bad in and of themselves. Yeah and the point I've made is that your bog standard beat cop shouldn't be armed like a SWAT cop. Why does a traffic officer need access to an assault rifle and a tank?
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May 19, 2015 06:30
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...what the gently caress does aggravated menacing even mean?
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May 21, 2015 18:21
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oohhboy posted:It effectively says you can kill someone and get away with it if you dilute responsibility(and keep shooting) in a large enough group, especially when they should have been taken to trial collectively for massive excessive use of force. It shouldn't have mattered whether he fired the killing shot or not, it was his intentions and actions leading up to the shooting that was important. Technically the Judge is correct under your law, but that still doesn't make it anymore absurd. This is America, though. Our justice system is a bizarre and cruel mirror universe mockery of some other world's real, functional justice system.
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May 23, 2015 20:07
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Cichlid the Loach posted:Officer Brelo, according to the ruling, swiss-cheesed the driver and passenger because he still reasonably perceived a threat. Given that in reality the car was stopped and the occupants were unarmed—in other words, it was already the case that there was indeed no threat—what WOULD, from the officers' point of view, have constituted an end to the threat, short of the victims' death? If the answer is "nothing," then what? Does it matter? This is the nation where "I don't know, I thought I smelled weed, I guess" is enough justification for a police officer to smash your door in and gun you down.
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May 23, 2015 20:46
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flakeloaf posted:Do traffic court judges in the states not ask their recently-minted convicts if they have time or the means to pay? Our justice system doesn't give a poo poo if you can pay or not. That's part of why it's so bonkers and why the comparison to debtor's prison is there. This is also the nation that has a raging hardon for levying any fee they possibly can on people that are broke while deliberately trapping them in systems they can never escape. It's on the same level of payday loans; the poor absolutely and positively cannot get unpoor. The system is set up that way. Every year the price of literally everything goes up but the poor are told they just have to make do somehow. "Making do" generally involves things that are living on borrowed time. Can't afford car insurance? Well you still need to get to work somehow and lol you expected us to have mass transit that's a good one. Can't afford to get your car inspected and reregistered? Well hope that a cop doesn't see you that's hundreds to thousands in fines you won't ever be able to pay. If you don't pay them you don't get to drive anymore. Oh you need to drive to get to your job? Tough poo poo poor, you should have thought of that when you chose to be poor.
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May 27, 2015 15:16
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Anora posted:Here's the sad part, for the two insurance guys, if you could have afforded a lawyer, he could have gotten you off. $8000 for that fine is excessive, which makes it unconstitutional (8th amendment, in the bill of rights). Also, since he threw you in jail for not paying money, that's a debtor's prison, which is illegal. In this case the judge is a criminal and the system is at fault. Everybody knows that the poor have a really really hard time keeping all their bills paid. It comes with being poor. The right thing to do is say "OK you can pay that a week late it's fine" or exchange things like community service if a poor can't pay fines (well the park needs cleaned...can you get there by walking? OK, your next day off go pick up the garbage in the park and we'll forget about this whole thing) or such. There are plenty of options but instead so much of America is geared toward deliberately punishing the poor. There are jurisdictions that hammer the poor as hard as they can because they know they can get away with it. The poor can't afford lawyers and probably don't even know what their rights are in every case. Hell there have even been reports of police using particular interrogation techniques that led to false positives like half the time. The police were literally pulling people in, getting them to confess to crimes they couldn't possibly have committed, then patting themselves on the back for a job well done. American policing is loving insane and has nothing do with actual justice or crime prevention.
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May 28, 2015 14:22
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So what percentage of situations does a cop face that ends up with him needing certain pieces of equipment? If you took away a police officer's entire arsenal (and yes I do mean literally all of it) what kind of danger would he be in on an average day walking the beat?
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May 29, 2015 20:29
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sugar free jazz posted:Replace rifle with an M249 LMG and literally the exact thing would have happened. Focus on the actual problems, not scary looking things. Replace the rifle with a cod and the outcome would be quite different. One of the issues with policing is that the police are so drat heavily armed in the first place.
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May 30, 2015 20:13
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You know, how long were the squatters squatting? If they were there long enough (usually around a month I think) and nobody told them to vacate the place they earned tenant's rights. Squatters actually have certain rights and if the property is very abandoned and obviously abandoned they had every right to be there. In fact in some areas it's perfectly legal to break into, occupy, and use a building that is abandoned. Use it long enough and it becomes yours. What I'm saying is that if the guy was neglecting the building and not even watching it he is not within his rights to literally murder two people that were legally likely to be his tenants.
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Jun 2, 2015 07:55
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