What I am about to say is in no way a defense of Officer Wilson nor justification for why this young man or anyone else is killed by a policeman. ItÔÇÖs not a claim that the police are always right or honest. It is simply an attempt on my part to try to understand this issue beyond ÔÇ£racist cop purposefully kills unarmed manÔÇØ. ItÔÇÖs difficult to simplify either side of a story like this. There are scumbag criminal cops who deserve to be and are in jail and there are scumbag criminals who deserve to be and are killed by law enforcement. If you donÔÇÖt agree with that statement you probably shouldnÔÇÖt read any further. And please realize that I have no idea what itÔÇÖs like to be a black man or woman anymore than I understand what itÔÇÖs like to be a cop.
So I have to ask myself if a person like Officer Wilson just woke up one day, after 6 years on the job, and decided he was going to kill someone that day. The obvious and reasonable answer is no. So why did it happen? This is a question I have asked many people over the last week, people of all races and ages and the consensus answer was that he was scared. So that begs the question why the fuck is a police officer who carries a gun scared in this, or any other situation. My conversations brought me to a few different conclusions.
1) Poor training: Police Academy typically takes anywhere from 6-24 weeks. This is not nearly enough time to teach an officer how to act in every possible situation. Nor is it really enough time to figure out the psyche or character of a person. To put this in perspective I look at the medical profession where there is 8-12 years of school and on the job training. This is also a profession where human lives are put in the hands of doctors who take a pledge to protect and serve. Yet every single doctor out there is mandated to have malpractice insurance because they WILL make a mistake at some point and it could very likely cost a human life.
2) Danger: Over the last 10 years a law enforcement agent has been killed on the job in the U.S. every 58 hours. I canÔÇÖt imagine knowing this and not thinking about it every day I go to work. Maybe thatÔÇÖs why I could never be a cop but these folks are human and I canÔÇÖt imagine this would not be the thoughts of any rational human who values their life. Our society holds police to a higher standard which I totally understand but at the end of the day they are humans and flawed like all the rest of us.
3) Adversarial position: In many cities and neighborhoods the police are ÔÇ£the enemyÔÇØ. I am certain that there have been many incidents that warrant this feeling. ItÔÇÖs echoed on this very site often. Sometimes they are the enemy for simply doing their job correctly and sometimes itÔÇÖs because they are scumbags on a power trip. If there are any ÔÇ£goodÔÇØ cops, and I believe that most are, they are included in the cries of ÔÇ£Kill The PigsÔÇØ and ÔÇ£Fuck The PoliceÔÇØ. This type of disrespect will NEVER turn a bad cop good but it certainly can turn a good cop bad as it becomes an ÔÇ£us against themÔÇØ mentality. In my mind this stereotypical treatment would make a good cop scared and when youÔÇÖre scared youÔÇÖre going to do stupid shit.
So how do you fix this problem? The first and easiest thing to do is identify the officers who are unfit for the job and eliminate them. Here in Dallas our police chief has terminated more than 20 officers for various violations which in itself is a sad commentary on the quality of officers. The number one police candidate is ex-military who come into the job having already been trained to kill the enemy. My goal would be to attract a better quality of candidate, but how? Most of us who recognize the problem and understand what it takes to be a good policeman would never take the job. Personally I would never take a job where my life is on the line daily and the community I am to serve hates me for $35K a year.no thanks.
The question I keep asking myself is why would someone want to become a cop. I keep coming up with three reasons. Because they are power hungry bullies, because they want to truly help a community and because they canÔÇÖt get a better job with their particular skill set. I donÔÇÖt see that changing anytime soon. You can try to weed out the first but at the end of the day the real solution is gaining a mutual respect between a community who sometimes looks up to the very criminals who the police are paid to arrest and a police force who have overstepped their bounds at times losing the respect of the law abiding citizens.
ItÔÇÖs easy and somehow empowering to sit behind your computer or be in the streets saying ÔÇ£Fuck The PoliceÔÇØ but what I am more interested in hearing are well thought out realistic ideas on how to solve the problem. And this solution would be one that would not only better protect the lives of us citizens but the lives of the police as well. If your attitude is ÔÇ£fuck the policeÔÇØ IÔÇÖm really not interested in what you have to say.
The loss of any innocent life at the hands of another human is tragic. It happens way too much in our society. ThatÔÇÖs the big picture we should be focused on in my opinion. The death of Michael Brown was a tragedy and I feel like many of you that justice needs to be served. But I also think we need to step back and try to understand both sides of the equation because if we donÔÇÖt the problem will never be solved and will probably get worse.
Those of you who want to take this opportunity to take potshots at me don't waste your time...I will not respond. The above are my honest thoughts on the situation after many discussions, not some article that I read online. . It's your right to disagree but I will not entertain your jackassery.
This is basically indistinguishable from many screeds I've seen posted at hardcore rightwing sites. But I must be mistaken because you voted for Obama.
Cops have a less dangerous job than, say, construction workers in Texas do. Or mineworkers in West Virginia. But they do seem to get a whole lot more sympathy than those workers do.
Never mind that in a place like Ferguson the cops are basically a nearly all-white racket preying on the poor black majority. That can't possibly be relevant. One is rude and in stark violation of the Both Sides Do It rule for even bringing it up.
Want to take the single biggest step towards "solving the problem"? Stop pretending that there are only two sides, and that the sides are equally responsible, and that all sides have a genuine interest in solving the problem. You're asking the wrong questions because your perceptions about this country are way off base. You drastically underestimate the problem of white racism in this country. That's why you thought the election of Obama would "help bring us together." Maybe in the very long run it will, but in the real, current world it gave an electric shock to the Angry White Assholes and they're not done with their spastic shitting yet.
I'm not especially optimistic that I'll live to see the end of this particular national schism. I think it will end well, because the Angry White Dinosaurs can't keep it up much longer, but who knows?
I'm so sick of the: but, but there are still good cops out there argument. No, they aren't good cops nor good people because they stick up for the institutionally criminal cops 99.99% of the time.
I would say it goes even beyond that. Even if we were all to determine and agree that there are good cops out there, how does that fix the problem? It changes nothing for the people who are dead/permanently injured/traumatized at the hands of the others, and their numbers continue to increase daily. Many have suggested that police officers need to be held to a higher standard, which is a huge understatement. When you teach someone that it's OK for them to decide who lives and who dies, without consequence, you've got nothing but bad road ahead, and the existence of good cops doesn't just solve that.
This is one of the most bigoted things I have ever read on this site.
Try replacing "cops" with any other particular type of person, race or gender.
This is straight out of the Jim Crow handbook.
What a bunch of collectivist bullshit.
I'm so sick of the: but, but there are still good cops out there argument. No, they aren't good cops nor good people because they stick up for the institutionally criminal cops 99.99% of the time.
I would say it goes even beyond that. Even if we were all to determine and agree that there are good cops out there, how does that fix the problem? It changes nothing for the people who are dead/permanently injured/traumatized at the hands of the others, and their numbers continue to increase daily. Many have suggested that police officers need to be held to a higher standard, which is a huge understatement. When you teach someone that it's OK for them to decide who lives and who dies, without consequence, you've got nothing but bad road ahead, and the existence of good cops doesn't just solve that.
This is one of the most bigoted things I have ever read on this site.
Try replacing "cops" with any other particular type of person, race or gender.
This is straight out of the Jim Crow handbook.
What a bunch of collectivist bullshit.
Maybe you could explain that with a little more emphasis on detail.
I'm particularly interested in: your implication that police are an oppressed, marginalized people (i.e. the Jim Crow reference); why a profession (law enforcement) is comparable with a demographic (type, race, gender) vis-a-vis the profession-specific issues we're discussing; and what "collectivist bullshit" means in this case, since police depts. themselves are collectivist institutions.
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
JustAlice said:
Fred_Garvin said:
HarveyCanal said:
I'm so sick of the: but, but there are still good cops out there argument. No, they aren't good cops nor good people because they stick up for the institutionally criminal cops 99.99% of the time.
I would say it goes even beyond that. Even if we were all to determine and agree that there are good cops out there, how does that fix the problem? It changes nothing for the people who are dead/permanently injured/traumatized at the hands of the others, and their numbers continue to increase daily. Many have suggested that police officers need to be held to a higher standard, which is a huge understatement. When you teach someone that it's OK for them to decide who lives and who dies, without consequence, you've got nothing but bad road ahead, and the existence of good cops doesn't just solve that.
This is one of the most bigoted things I have ever read on this site.
Try replacing "cops" with any other particular type of person, race or gender.
This is straight out of the Jim Crow handbook.
What a bunch of collectivist bullshit.
If the police are responsible for policing themselves (something that desperately needs to be changed) and they are dismally failing at it, then who is to blame other than the police themselves?
I'm so sick of the: but, but there are still good cops out there argument. No, they aren't good cops nor good people because they stick up for the institutionally criminal cops 99.99% of the time.
I would say it goes even beyond that. Even if we were all to determine and agree that there are good cops out there, how does that fix the problem? It changes nothing for the people who are dead/permanently injured/traumatized at the hands of the others, and their numbers continue to increase daily. Many have suggested that police officers need to be held to a higher standard, which is a huge understatement. When you teach someone that it's OK for them to decide who lives and who dies, without consequence, you've got nothing but bad road ahead, and the existence of good cops doesn't just solve that.
This is one of the most bigoted things I have ever read on this site.
Try replacing "cops" with any other particular type of person, race or gender.
This is straight out of the Jim Crow handbook.
What a bunch of collectivist bullshit.
Maybe you could explain that with a little more emphasis on detail.
I'm particularly interested in: your implication that police are an oppressed, marginalized people (i.e. the Jim Crow reference); why a profession (law enforcement) is comparable with a demographic (type, race, gender) vis-a-vis the profession-specific issues we're discussing; and what "collectivist bullshit" means in this case, since police depts. themselves are collectivist institutions.
I didnÔÇÖt say that police officers are oppressed, marginalized people. You are saying that an entire group of people, based on their chosen profession, are all inherently bad and evil. How is comparing any group of people, in this case police officers, any different then grouping people together and comparing them to others based on their shared race, gender or income?
I certainly donÔÇÖt agree with the statement that all rich people are greedy, nor that all poor people are lazy or that all women are weak, or that all men are misogynists. So why subscribe to this idiotic nonsense that all cops are inherently bad or racist? Humans are not inherently anything. ÔÇÿJoeÔÇÖ the cop is two things - a person and a profession. Arbitrary features such as race and gender or chosen factors like career or location does not mean you are guaranteed a particular outcome. The things we have a choice in, like our careers and how we live our lives is just as much an individual experience. There is no such thing as a shared consciousness within a group.
What sounds like it is straight out of the Jim crow handbook is that when you say, out loud, the words you wrote replacing ÔÇ£copsÔÇØ
with women, asians, blacks, etc. It sounds like you are trying to justify your unwarranted ignorant hatred for an entire group of people based on some imaginary innate qualities that exist only in your head.
During prohibition of weed and alcohol the propaganda that was being issued was that blacks and latinos were drinking and smoking weed, turning them into monsters so they could go out to rape, pillage and murder people. Are you saying that the badge a police officer wears is magical and wearing it turns him into a monster? Or was he already evil/racist before he became a cop?
I would say it goes even beyond that. Even if we were all to determine and agree that there are good (asians, POC, women ) out there, how does that fix the problem? It changes nothing for the people who are dead/permanently injured/traumatized at the hands of the others, and their numbers continue to increase daily. Many have suggested that (asians, POC, women) need to be held to a higher standard, which is a huge understatement. When you teach someone that itÔÇÖs OK for them to decide who lives and who dies, without consequence, youÔÇÖve got nothing but bad road ahead, and the existence of (asians, POC, women ) doesnÔÇÖt just solve that.
Sure sounds bigoted to me.
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
Pimps are all bad people. And no, I don't want them drinking from the same water fountain as me.
You are saying that an entire group of people, based on their chosen profession, are all inherently bad and evil.
I neither said nor implied any such thing at all, nor do I believe that. Please read more carefully next time, and consider your response accordingly. If you don't understand what you're reading, ask.
My post had absolutely nothing to do with any inherent belief in whether police officers are good or bad. My entire point was that the situation at hand goes beyond the number of "good cops" versus "bad cops", and beyond what any of us may believe police to be. When we talk about the actions of police, it doesn't matter if some or even most cops are good people; the presence of good cops, whatever their numbers may be, does not diminish the reality of what is and has long been a distinct, documented, repeated pattern of unacceptable collective behavior by police departments across the country. That's the problem being discussed here.
I'll clarify this concept with a simpler example:
I once rented an apartment from a person whose behavior was a little questionable at times, but mostly she was nice enough and most of our encounters with her were uneventful. When we vacated, we left it in the same condition as when we moved in. She then decided that she was entitled to keep 80% of our security deposit, based on a bunch of claimed "damages"... it turned out there was some barely-visible water damage originating from a leaky pipe outside the apartment... so it was actually her own negligence that caused it, but she somehow felt she was within her rights to charge us for it.
In any case, when we took her to court, she attempted to build a case for herself by bringing in nice thank-you letters and things that other tenants had written to her, and explained that those things showed what a good person she was. Needless to say, the judge completely dismissed all that... because obviously, it doesn't matter whether she's a good person, it only matters whether she was entitled to keep our money (the judge made her pay the full amount + 20% interest).
Likewise, a good cop indiscriminately killing a person who poses no credible threat to the lives of anyone around them, has still committed murder. If this passes without consequence, a good cop has been taught that they can get away with killing when they feel justified in doing so, and them being a good person doesn't change the lesson. Morality is as fluid as any human quality, and the line between good and bad is thinner than we'd like to think. Why would we believe that the mental leap it takes to cross that line is any different for police than for the rest of us? They are human beings, and they are flawed too. The difference is: as officers of the law, they have been given the incredible responsibility of being allowed to carry deadly weapons and utilize physical force, when it becomes necessary, to keep dangerous situations from getting out of hand. With that comes the responsibility of using those powers appropriately and with sound judgment (kind of like what Spider-Man taught us). If their power is abused, it falls to the rest of us to call them out, and it is our civic responsibility to do so.
This is not to say that police in general are all disasters waiting to happen... but we must recognize that it can happen, to anyone, and letting police operate above the law means that when it does happen, it will get ugly. All people (even good people) are susceptible to doing bad things, and if the cost of those things is someone's life, and we let it go because we see them as "good people", we're on our way to a very bad place. The inherent nature of the human beings behind the problem does not alter or excuse the nature of the problem.
I'm not going to directly address most of the points in your argument (as I might normally be inclined to do), because the fact that you so thoroughly misconstrued what I wrote makes that a pointless exercise. However, you may want to look up Jim Crow and collectivism... they don't mean quite what you seem to think they mean.
Perhaps you thought I was agreeing with Harvey's
No, they aren't good cops nor good people because they stick up for the institutionally criminal cops 99.99% of the time
but it didn't appear he was implying that all cops are inherently evil, as you state. It seemed to me he was talking more about police departments as institutions tending to hide wrongdoing by their own... which, as we all know, has happened and does happen. However, he doesn't need me to speak for him or put words in his mouth; and I wasn't echoing his statement, I was using it as a jumping-off point for my own, which I've now explained.
Hope that helps. And if you don't know, now you know.
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
It's a corrupt vocation, just like American sloldiering at this point, to the degree that nobody should grow up trying to be that.
Firefighter, paramedic, lifeguard, merchant marine, commercial pilot...aspire to do those jobs.
Don't try to subjugate another foreign land or brutalize peaceful protestors or enforce the "drug war" or feed the prisons. There's no scourge we can't clean up without an industry dedicated to meathead violence.
It's a corrupt vocation, just like American sloldiering at this point, to the degree that nobody should grow up trying to be that.
Firefighter, paramedic, lifeguard, merchant marine, commercial pilot...aspire to do those jobs.
Don't try to subjugate another foreign land or brutalize peaceful protestors or enforce the "drug war" or feed the prisons. There's no scourge we can't clean up without an industry dedicated to meathead violence.
What I liked about Pulp Fiction is that the criminals weren't doing bad 24/7.
When they weren't working they were nice guys doing the mundane things everyone else does.
I went record shopping here last year in Ferguson, I got jumped by four black guys
yup! my car started right up! they told me I may need a new battery>
IRVINE, Calif. ÔÇö LAST week, a grand jury was convened in St. Louis County, Mo., to examine the evidence against the police officer who killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, and to determine if he should be indicted. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. even showed up to announce a separate federal investigation, and to promise that justice would be done. But if the conclusion is that the officer, Darren Wilson, acted improperly, the ability to hold him or Ferguson, Mo., accountable will be severely restricted by none other than the United States Supreme Court.
In recent years, the court has made it very difficult, and often impossible, to hold police officers and the governments that employ them accountable for civil rights violations. This undermines the ability to deter illegal police behavior and leaves victims without compensation. When the police kill or injure innocent people, the victims rarely have recourse.
The most recent court ruling that favored the police was Plumhoff v. Rickard, decided on May 27, which found that even egregious police conduct is not ÔÇ£excessive forceÔÇØ in violation of the Constitution. Police officers in West Memphis, Ark., pulled over a white Honda Accord because the car had only one operating headlight. Rather than comply with an officerÔÇÖs request to get out of the car, the driver made the unfortunate decision to speed away. The police chased the car for more than five minutes, reaching speeds of over 100 miles per hour. Eventually, officers fired 15 shots into the car, killing both the driver and a passenger.
The Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and ruled unanimously in favor of the police. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that the driverÔÇÖs conduct posed a ÔÇ£grave public safety riskÔÇØ and that the police were justified in shooting at the car to stop it. The court said it ÔÇ£stands to reason that, if police officers are justified in firing at a suspect in order to end a severe threat to public safety, the officers need not stop shooting until the threat has ended.ÔÇØ
This is deeply disturbing. The Supreme Court now has said that whenever there is a high-speed chase that could injure others ÔÇö and that would seem to be true of virtually all high-speed chases ÔÇö the police can shoot at the vehicle and keep shooting until the chase ends. Obvious alternatives could include shooting out the carÔÇÖs tires, or even taking the license plate number and tracking the driver down later.
The court has also weakened accountability by ruling that a local government can be held liable only if it is proved that the cityÔÇÖs or countyÔÇÖs own policy violated the Constitution. In almost every other area of law, an employer can be held liable if its employees, in the scope of their duties, injure others, even negligently. This encourages employers to control the conduct of their employees and ensures that those injured will be compensated.
A 2011 case, Connick v. Thompson, illustrates how difficult the Supreme Court has made it to prove municipal liability. John Thompson was convicted of an armed robbery and a murder and spent 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row, because of prosecutorial misconduct. Two days before Mr. ThompsonÔÇÖs trial began in New Orleans, the assistant district attorney received the crime labÔÇÖs report, which stated that the perpetrator of the armed robbery had a blood type that did not match Mr. ThompsonÔÇÖs. The defense was not told this crucial information.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
Through a series of coincidences, Mr. ThompsonÔÇÖs lawyer discovered the blood evidence soon before the scheduled execution. New testing was done and again the blood of the perpetrator didnÔÇÖt match Mr. ThompsonÔÇÖs DNA or even his blood type. His conviction was overturned, and he was eventually acquitted of all charges.
The district attorneyÔÇÖs office, which had a notorious history of not turning over exculpatory evidence to defendants, conceded that it had violated its constitutional obligation. Mr. Thompson sued the City of New Orleans, which employed the prosecutors, and was awarded $14 million.
Continue reading the main story
But the Supreme Court reversed that decision, in a 5-to-4 vote, and held that the local government was not liable for the prosecutorial misconduct. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, said that New Orleans could not be held liable because it could not be proved that its own policies had violated the Constitution. The fact that its prosecutor blatantly violated the Constitution was not enough to make the city liable...
It's all about the look of confusion as the h'arresting officer in the foreground is surrounded by cheesy quavers. Although the double KO is pretty sweet too.
Seriously. That's some heavy shit to carry for the rest of your life and it was probably all the parent's stupid idea.
You can't lay all of the blame on the parents. Did they come up with the idea that it's cool for people to own, use, carry guns? Did they build a Burgers & Bullets restaurant? It's a fucking psychoville outlier society that thinks this is acceptable, and in centuries to come this period of American history will either be looked back on in the same way that Sparta was regarded in ancient Greece, or America will have forced it's values down everyone else's throats with a heavy dose of Mcfood and we'll all be proudly listing our gun skills on our CVs.
Comments
Sorry, but 'spirit' isn't going to make 300 million+ guns go away.
This is basically indistinguishable from many screeds I've seen posted at hardcore rightwing sites. But I must be mistaken because you voted for Obama.
Cops have a less dangerous job than, say, construction workers in Texas do. Or mineworkers in West Virginia. But they do seem to get a whole lot more sympathy than those workers do.
Never mind that in a place like Ferguson the cops are basically a nearly all-white racket preying on the poor black majority. That can't possibly be relevant. One is rude and in stark violation of the Both Sides Do It rule for even bringing it up.
Want to take the single biggest step towards "solving the problem"? Stop pretending that there are only two sides, and that the sides are equally responsible, and that all sides have a genuine interest in solving the problem. You're asking the wrong questions because your perceptions about this country are way off base. You drastically underestimate the problem of white racism in this country. That's why you thought the election of Obama would "help bring us together." Maybe in the very long run it will, but in the real, current world it gave an electric shock to the Angry White Assholes and they're not done with their spastic shitting yet.
I'm not especially optimistic that I'll live to see the end of this particular national schism. I think it will end well, because the Angry White Dinosaurs can't keep it up much longer, but who knows?
This is one of the most bigoted things I have ever read on this site.
Try replacing "cops" with any other particular type of person, race or gender.
This is straight out of the Jim Crow handbook.
What a bunch of collectivist bullshit.
I'm particularly interested in: your implication that police are an oppressed, marginalized people (i.e. the Jim Crow reference); why a profession (law enforcement) is comparable with a demographic (type, race, gender) vis-a-vis the profession-specific issues we're discussing; and what "collectivist bullshit" means in this case, since police depts. themselves are collectivist institutions.
If the police are responsible for policing themselves (something that desperately needs to be changed) and they are dismally failing at it, then who is to blame other than the police themselves?
I didnÔÇÖt say that police officers are oppressed, marginalized people. You are saying that an entire group of people, based on their chosen profession, are all inherently bad and evil. How is comparing any group of people, in this case police officers, any different then grouping people together and comparing them to others based on their shared race, gender or income?
I certainly donÔÇÖt agree with the statement that all rich people are greedy, nor that all poor people are lazy or that all women are weak, or that all men are misogynists. So why subscribe to this idiotic nonsense that all cops are inherently bad or racist? Humans are not inherently anything. ÔÇÿJoeÔÇÖ the cop is two things - a person and a profession. Arbitrary features such as race and gender or chosen factors like career or location does not mean you are guaranteed a particular outcome. The things we have a choice in, like our careers and how we live our lives is just as much an individual experience. There is no such thing as a shared consciousness within a group.
What sounds like it is straight out of the Jim crow handbook is that when you say, out loud, the words you wrote replacing ÔÇ£copsÔÇØ
with women, asians, blacks, etc. It sounds like you are trying to justify your unwarranted ignorant hatred for an entire group of people based on some imaginary innate qualities that exist only in your head.
During prohibition of weed and alcohol the propaganda that was being issued was that blacks and latinos were drinking and smoking weed, turning them into monsters so they could go out to rape, pillage and murder people. Are you saying that the badge a police officer wears is magical and wearing it turns him into a monster? Or was he already evil/racist before he became a cop?
I would say it goes even beyond that. Even if we were all to determine and agree that there are good (asians, POC, women ) out there, how does that fix the problem? It changes nothing for the people who are dead/permanently injured/traumatized at the hands of the others, and their numbers continue to increase daily. Many have suggested that (asians, POC, women) need to be held to a higher standard, which is a huge understatement. When you teach someone that itÔÇÖs OK for them to decide who lives and who dies, without consequence, youÔÇÖve got nothing but bad road ahead, and the existence of (asians, POC, women ) doesnÔÇÖt just solve that.
Sure sounds bigoted to me.
There you go, dummy.
My post had absolutely nothing to do with any inherent belief in whether police officers are good or bad. My entire point was that the situation at hand goes beyond the number of "good cops" versus "bad cops", and beyond what any of us may believe police to be. When we talk about the actions of police, it doesn't matter if some or even most cops are good people; the presence of good cops, whatever their numbers may be, does not diminish the reality of what is and has long been a distinct, documented, repeated pattern of unacceptable collective behavior by police departments across the country. That's the problem being discussed here.
I'll clarify this concept with a simpler example:
I once rented an apartment from a person whose behavior was a little questionable at times, but mostly she was nice enough and most of our encounters with her were uneventful. When we vacated, we left it in the same condition as when we moved in. She then decided that she was entitled to keep 80% of our security deposit, based on a bunch of claimed "damages"... it turned out there was some barely-visible water damage originating from a leaky pipe outside the apartment... so it was actually her own negligence that caused it, but she somehow felt she was within her rights to charge us for it.
In any case, when we took her to court, she attempted to build a case for herself by bringing in nice thank-you letters and things that other tenants had written to her, and explained that those things showed what a good person she was. Needless to say, the judge completely dismissed all that... because obviously, it doesn't matter whether she's a good person, it only matters whether she was entitled to keep our money (the judge made her pay the full amount + 20% interest).
Likewise, a good cop indiscriminately killing a person who poses no credible threat to the lives of anyone around them, has still committed murder. If this passes without consequence, a good cop has been taught that they can get away with killing when they feel justified in doing so, and them being a good person doesn't change the lesson. Morality is as fluid as any human quality, and the line between good and bad is thinner than we'd like to think. Why would we believe that the mental leap it takes to cross that line is any different for police than for the rest of us? They are human beings, and they are flawed too. The difference is: as officers of the law, they have been given the incredible responsibility of being allowed to carry deadly weapons and utilize physical force, when it becomes necessary, to keep dangerous situations from getting out of hand. With that comes the responsibility of using those powers appropriately and with sound judgment (kind of like what Spider-Man taught us). If their power is abused, it falls to the rest of us to call them out, and it is our civic responsibility to do so.
This is not to say that police in general are all disasters waiting to happen... but we must recognize that it can happen, to anyone, and letting police operate above the law means that when it does happen, it will get ugly. All people (even good people) are susceptible to doing bad things, and if the cost of those things is someone's life, and we let it go because we see them as "good people", we're on our way to a very bad place. The inherent nature of the human beings behind the problem does not alter or excuse the nature of the problem.
I'm not going to directly address most of the points in your argument (as I might normally be inclined to do), because the fact that you so thoroughly misconstrued what I wrote makes that a pointless exercise. However, you may want to look up Jim Crow and collectivism... they don't mean quite what you seem to think they mean.
Perhaps you thought I was agreeing with Harvey's but it didn't appear he was implying that all cops are inherently evil, as you state. It seemed to me he was talking more about police departments as institutions tending to hide wrongdoing by their own... which, as we all know, has happened and does happen. However, he doesn't need me to speak for him or put words in his mouth; and I wasn't echoing his statement, I was using it as a jumping-off point for my own, which I've now explained.
Hope that helps. And if you don't know, now you know.
Firefighter, paramedic, lifeguard, merchant marine, commercial pilot...aspire to do those jobs.
Don't try to subjugate another foreign land or brutalize peaceful protestors or enforce the "drug war" or feed the prisons. There's no scourge we can't clean up without an industry dedicated to meathead violence.
I agree 100% with you on this one Harv.
When they weren't working they were nice guys doing the mundane things everyone else does.
Support our troops?
No, just let the owners kill themselves and those in the immediate vicinity until none are left. Yee-haw!
yup! my car started right up! they told me I may need a new battery>
For teh LULZ? I bet that intructor's dying whisper was "I regret nothing!"
In recent years, the court has made it very difficult, and often impossible, to hold police officers and the governments that employ them accountable for civil rights violations. This undermines the ability to deter illegal police behavior and leaves victims without compensation. When the police kill or injure innocent people, the victims rarely have recourse.
The most recent court ruling that favored the police was Plumhoff v. Rickard, decided on May 27, which found that even egregious police conduct is not ÔÇ£excessive forceÔÇØ in violation of the Constitution. Police officers in West Memphis, Ark., pulled over a white Honda Accord because the car had only one operating headlight. Rather than comply with an officerÔÇÖs request to get out of the car, the driver made the unfortunate decision to speed away. The police chased the car for more than five minutes, reaching speeds of over 100 miles per hour. Eventually, officers fired 15 shots into the car, killing both the driver and a passenger.
The Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and ruled unanimously in favor of the police. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that the driverÔÇÖs conduct posed a ÔÇ£grave public safety riskÔÇØ and that the police were justified in shooting at the car to stop it. The court said it ÔÇ£stands to reason that, if police officers are justified in firing at a suspect in order to end a severe threat to public safety, the officers need not stop shooting until the threat has ended.ÔÇØ
This is deeply disturbing. The Supreme Court now has said that whenever there is a high-speed chase that could injure others ÔÇö and that would seem to be true of virtually all high-speed chases ÔÇö the police can shoot at the vehicle and keep shooting until the chase ends. Obvious alternatives could include shooting out the carÔÇÖs tires, or even taking the license plate number and tracking the driver down later.
The court has also weakened accountability by ruling that a local government can be held liable only if it is proved that the cityÔÇÖs or countyÔÇÖs own policy violated the Constitution. In almost every other area of law, an employer can be held liable if its employees, in the scope of their duties, injure others, even negligently. This encourages employers to control the conduct of their employees and ensures that those injured will be compensated.
A 2011 case, Connick v. Thompson, illustrates how difficult the Supreme Court has made it to prove municipal liability. John Thompson was convicted of an armed robbery and a murder and spent 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row, because of prosecutorial misconduct. Two days before Mr. ThompsonÔÇÖs trial began in New Orleans, the assistant district attorney received the crime labÔÇÖs report, which stated that the perpetrator of the armed robbery had a blood type that did not match Mr. ThompsonÔÇÖs. The defense was not told this crucial information.
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Through a series of coincidences, Mr. ThompsonÔÇÖs lawyer discovered the blood evidence soon before the scheduled execution. New testing was done and again the blood of the perpetrator didnÔÇÖt match Mr. ThompsonÔÇÖs DNA or even his blood type. His conviction was overturned, and he was eventually acquitted of all charges.
The district attorneyÔÇÖs office, which had a notorious history of not turning over exculpatory evidence to defendants, conceded that it had violated its constitutional obligation. Mr. Thompson sued the City of New Orleans, which employed the prosecutors, and was awarded $14 million.
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But the Supreme Court reversed that decision, in a 5-to-4 vote, and held that the local government was not liable for the prosecutorial misconduct. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, said that New Orleans could not be held liable because it could not be proved that its own policies had violated the Constitution. The fact that its prosecutor blatantly violated the Constitution was not enough to make the city liable...
Read the rest here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/opinion/how-the-supreme-court-protects-bad-cops.html?_r=0
Sounds like a fun place for a daughter's next Birthday Party!
It's all about the look of confusion as the h'arresting officer in the foreground is surrounded by cheesy quavers. Although the double KO is pretty sweet too.
Surely, statistically, she's dodged a bullet in that her chances of being involved in another gun related killing have just got much smaller?
...unless of course she goes back for her 14th birthday, figuring that 13 is just an unlucky number.
B/w
What a shit show
Seriously. That's some heavy shit to carry for the rest of your life and it was probably all the parent's stupid idea.
You can't lay all of the blame on the parents. Did they come up with the idea that it's cool for people to own, use, carry guns? Did they build a Burgers & Bullets restaurant? It's a fucking psychoville outlier society that thinks this is acceptable, and in centuries to come this period of American history will either be looked back on in the same way that Sparta was regarded in ancient Greece, or America will have forced it's values down everyone else's throats with a heavy dose of Mcfood and we'll all be proudly listing our gun skills on our CVs.
In the video she's shooting at a silhouette FFS.