Police are people, too

[Netzach]

I'm well aware of that, but what I'm trying to say is that "I don't think X is realistic" does not a dialogue make. It only takes a soundbite to result in an opinion; it takes learning to result in understanding, even if the outcome is still disagreement.

There's nothing earth shatteringly new to me in what you posted, and the ways in which I find the concept deeply problematic all remain. I'm not ignorant of the arguments, I simply reject them. It's not because I lack imagination, it's because "relationships of trust" between neighbors as a visionary solution scare the ever loving fuck out of me, and no one has ever adequately explained to me why I don't have a point. Relationships of trust between neighbors are why there are still "restricted neighborhoods" to this DAY.

A government overstepping its authority AND a populace that is happy to throw one another under the bus is the perfect storm. People are always willing to throw one another under the bus.

These are always the problems I have further out along the libertarian continuum than I sit, which is no small mile or so.

Now, if you want to keep twisting the arm of someone who fundamentally agrees with more or less everything you've said and every bit of dismay and disgust, whatever, I'm outside the black or white pale you've set up.

 

[Bramblethorn]

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/04/0...ck-mans-death.html?smid=tw-bna&_r=3&referrer=

A white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., was charged with murder on Tuesday after a video surfaced showing him shooting in the back and killing an apparently unarmed black man while the man ran away.

The officer, Michael T. Slager, 33, said he had feared for his life because the man had taken his stun gun in a scuffle after a traffic stop on Saturday. A video, however, shows the officer firing eight times as the man, Walter L. Scott, 50, fled.

...

Moments after the struggle, Officer Slager reported on his radio: “Shots fired and the subject is down. He took my Taser,” according to police reports.

But the video, which was taken by a bystander and provided to The New York Times by the Scott family’s lawyer, presents a different account. The video begins in the vacant lot, apparently moments after Officer Slager fired his Taser. Wires, which carry the electrical current from the stun gun, appear to be extending from Mr. Scott’s body as the two men tussle and Mr. Scott turns to run.

Something — it is not clear whether it is the stun gun — is either tossed or knocked to the ground behind the two men, and Officer Slager draws his gun, the video shows. When the officer fires, Mr. Scott appears to be 15 to 20 feet away and fleeing. He falls after the last of eight shots.

The officer then runs back toward where the initial scuffle occurred and picks something up off the ground. Moments later, he drops an object near Mr. Scott’s body, the video shows.

...

Police reports say that officers performed CPR and delivered first aid to Mr. Scott. The video shows that for several minutes after the shooting, Mr. Scott remained face down with his hands cuffed behind his back. A second officer arrives, puts on blue medical gloves and attends to Mr. Scott, but is not shown performing CPR. As sirens wail in the background, a third officer later arrives, apparently with a medical kit, but is also not seen performing CPR.

 

[KoPilot]

There's nothing earth shatteringly new to me in what you posted, and the ways in which I find the concept deeply problematic all remain. I'm not ignorant of the arguments, I simply reject them. It's not because I lack imagination, it's because "relationships of trust" between neighbors as a visionary solution scare the ever loving fuck out of me, and no one has ever adequately explained to me why I don't have a point. Relationships of trust between neighbors are why there are still "restricted neighborhoods" to this DAY.

A government overstepping its authority AND a populace that is happy to throw one another under the bus is the perfect storm. People are always willing to throw one another under the bus.

These are always the problems I have further out along the libertarian continuum than I sit, which is no small mile or so.

Now, if you want to keep twisting the arm of someone who fundamentally agrees with more or less everything you've said and every bit of dismay and disgust, whatever, I'm outside the black or white pale you've set up.

Like I said, I really don't care what you believe; especially since you have 0 solutions for problems that you do readily recognize. I really don't. I'm interested in really talking with two kinds of people: people who are out there, accomplishing real things, whether I agree with their endgame or not, and people who are receptive to the project that I consider myself part of. Politically engaging with anyone else, you and Keroin included, is a huge waste of time and energy.

There's nothing earth shatteringly new to me in what you posted

Well I hope not, because that's less than a sparknotes version with all the big words edited out.

At any rate, I'm not going to have this discussion here, like I've been trying to say for several posts now. You wanna talk about all your beefs with libertarianism? Start a new thread or continue doing so here without me. It's not going to be nearly as fun when I stop replying, though.

 

[KoPilot]

North Charleston officer faces murder charge after video shows him shooting man in back

Former Eugene police officer sentenced in Bend - The 41-year-old admitted to invasion of privacy and child porn charges

North Carolina State Police: A trooper has been charged with assault with a deadly weapon, kidnapping, and burglary. According to the news report, he allegedly broke into the home of his estranged wife and assaulted her.

Minneapolis cop: 'If you f--- with me, I'm going to break your leg'

 

[KoPilot]

Oops, wait, this one's gold:

Worst of the Month — March

For March, it has to be the conspiracy to frame an innocent man, Douglas Dendinger, in Bogalusa, Louisiana.

Mr. Dendinger agreed to take on the task of a “process server.” That is, he would hand-deliver legal papers to a person who has been sued–putting that person on notice about the legal action. In this instance, Mr. Dendinger was to serve papers upon a former police officer, Chad Cassard, who was being sued for police brutality. Mr. Dendinger found Mr. Cassard as he was leaving the local courthouse and made the delivery. At that moment, Mr. Cassard was in the company of several police officers and prosecutors. These people became hostile and furious with Mr. Dendinger over what this lawsuit would mean for their friend/colleague.

Then the story takes a bizarre and disturbing turn. Later that day, the police arrive at Mr. Dendinger’s home and place him under arrest on several charges, including two felonies (1) obstruction of justice and (2) witness intimidation. Mr. Cassard and a few of his cohorts claimed that Mr. Dendinger had served the papers in a violent fashion. Mr. Dendinger was in very serious legal trouble. He was looking at many years in prison.

Fortunately, a cell phone video of the “incident” emerged. Turns out, Mr. Dendinger did nothing wrong. All he did was peacefully hand-deliver an envelope to Mr. Cassard. The charges were then dropped.

But we now know that local police and prosecutors leveled false accusations about what happened that day. Had the case proceeded to trial, it would have been Mr. Dendinger’s word against several witnesses with law enforcement backgrounds. A jury would have been hard pressed to disbelieve several witnesses who claimed to see the same thing. A miscarriage of justice was narrowly averted.

The cell phone video exposes an outrageous criminal conspiracy by officials in Bogalusa.

More here.

 

[KoPilot]

Baltimore County, Maryland: A now-former officer pled guilty to burglary and drug charges for breaking into dealer’s home to rob him.

Tampa, Florida: A now-former officer pled guilty to stealing evidence. She took tax refund checks seized from fraud cases and cashed them herself.

Franklin County, Kentucky: A now-former deputy was sentenced to 16 months in prison for stealing property during the search of a home.

Honolulu, Hawaii: An officer was arrested for shooting a woman at a bar when off-duty.

Hunt County, Texas: A deputy is being investigated after video appears to show him repeatedly striking woman who was months pregnant at the time.

And I take it you all are familiar with the Walter Scott case by now.

 

[KoPilot]

Because the piece I linked to a few pages back about the creation of "law enforcement" as we know it, aka. police, aka. why LE =/= police, was focused on Britain, here's a brief history of the police in the US:

In most of the liberal discussions of the recent police killings of unarmed black men, there is an underlying assumption that the police are supposed to protect and serve the population. That is, after all, what they were created to do. If only the normal, decent relations between the police and the community could be re-established, this problem could be resolved. Poor people in general are more likely to be the victims of crime than anyone else, this reasoning goes, and in that way, they are in more need than anyone else of police protection. Maybe there are a few bad apples, but if only the police weren’t so racist, or didn’t carry out policies like stop-and-frisk, or weren’t so afraid of black people, or shot fewer unarmed men, they could function as a useful service that we all need.

This liberal way of viewing the problem rests on a misunderstanding of the origins of the police and what they were created to do. The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at least not as most people understand it. And they were certainly not created to promote justice. They were created to protect the new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid to late nineteenth century from the threat posed by that system’s offspring, the working class.

This is a blunt way of stating a nuanced truth, but sometimes nuance just serves to obfuscate.

Before the nineteenth century, there were no police forces that we would recognize as such anywhere in the world. In the Northern United States, there was a system of elected constables and sheriffs, much more responsible to the population in a very direct way than the police are today. In the South, the closest thing to a police force was the slave patrols. Then, as Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant wage workers who were physically and socially separated from the ruling class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired hundreds and then thousands of armed men to impose order on the new working class neighborhoods.

Class conflict roiled late nineteenth century American cities like Chicago, which experienced major strikes and riots in 1867, 1877, 1886, and 1894. In each of these upheavals, the police attacked strikers with extreme violence, even if in 1877 and 1894 the U.S. Army played a bigger role in ultimately repressing the working class. In the aftermath of these movements, the police increasingly presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization, by which they meant bourgeois civilization, from the disorder of the working class. This ideology of order that developed in the late nineteenth century echoes down to today – except that today, poor black and Latino people are the main threat, rather than immigrant workers.

Of course, the ruling class did not get everything it wanted, and had to yield on many points to the immigrant workers it sought to control. This is why, for instance, municipal governments backed away from trying to stop Sunday drinking, and why they hired so many immigrant police officers, especially the Irish. But despite these concessions, businessmen organized themselves to make sure the police were increasingly isolated from democratic control, and established their own hierarchies, systems of governance, and rules of behavior. The police increasingly set themselves off from the population by donning uniforms, establishing their own rules for hiring, promotion, and firing, working to build a unique esprit des corps, and identifying themselves with order. And despite complaints about corruption and inefficiency, they gained more and more support from the ruling class, to the extent that in Chicago, for instance, businessmen donated money to buy the police rifles, artillery, Gatling guns, buildings, and money to establish a police pension out of their own pockets.

There was a never a time when the big city police neutrally enforced “the law,” or came anywhere close to that ideal (for that matter, the law itself has never been neutral). In the North, they mostly arrested people for the vaguely defined “crimes” of disorderly conduct and vagrancy throughout the nineteenth century. This meant that the police could arrest anyone they saw as a threat to “order.” In the post-bellum South, they enforced white supremacy and largely arrested black people on trumped-up charges in order to feed them into convict labor systems.

The violence the police carried out and their moral separation from those they patrolled were not the consequences of the brutality of individual officers, but were the consequences of careful policies designed to mold the police into a force that could use violence to deal with the social problems that accompanied the development of a wage-labor economy. For instance, in the short, sharp depression of the mid 1880s, Chicago was filled with prostitutes who worked the streets. Many policemen recognized that these prostitutes were generally impoverished women seeking a way to survive, and initially tolerated their behavior. But the police hierarchy insisted that the patrolmen do their duty whatever their feelings, and arrest these women, impose fines, and drive them off the streets and into brothels, where they could be ignored by some members of the elite and controlled by others. Similarly, in 1885, when Chicago began to experience a wave of strikes, some policemen sympathized with strikers. But once the police hierarchy and the mayor decided to break the strikes, policemen who refused to comply were fired. In these and a thousand similar ways, the police were molded into a force that would impose order on working class and poor people, whatever the individual feelings of the officers involved.

Though some patrolmen tried to be kind and others were openly brutal, police violence in the 1880s was not a case of a few bad apples – and neither is it today.

Much has changed since the creation of the police – most importantly the influx of black people into the Northern cities, the mid-twentieth century black movement, and the creation of the current system of mass incarceration in part as a response to that movement. But these changes did not lead to a fundamental shift in policing. They led to new policies designed to preserve fundamental continuities. The police were created to use violence to reconcile electoral democracy with industrial capitalism. Today, they are just one part of the “criminal justice” system which continues to play the same role. Their basic job is to enforce order among those with the most reason to resent the system – who in our society today are disproportionately poor black people.

A democratic police system is imaginable – one in which police are elected by and accountable to the people they patrol. But that is not what we have. And it’s not what the current system of policing was created to be.

If there is one positive lesson from the history of policing’s origins, it is that when workers organized, refused to submit or cooperate, and caused problems for the city governments, they could back the police off from the most galling of their activities. Murdering individual police officers, as happened in in Chicago on May 3rd 1886 and more recently in New York on December 20th, 2014, only reinforced those calling for harsh repression – a reaction we are beginning to see already. But resistance on a mass scale could force the police to hesitate. This happened in Chicago during the early 1880s, when the police pulled back from breaking strikes, hired immigrant officers, and tried to re-establish some credibility among the working class after their role in brutally crushing the 1877 upheaval.

The police might be backed off again if the reaction against the killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and countless others continues. If they are, it will be a victory for those mobilizing today, and will save lives – though as long as this system that requires police violence to control a big share of its population survives, any change in police policy will be aimed at keeping the poor in line more effectively.

We shouldn’t expect the police to be something they’re not. As historians, we ought to know that origins matter, and the police were created by the ruling class to control working class and poor people, not help them. They’ve continued to play that role ever since.

From http://lawcha.org/wordpress/2014/12...ce-created-control-working-class-poor-people/
Sam Mitrani, The Rise of the Chicago Police Department, will be released in spring 2015 from University of Illinois Press

 

[subwannabe]

Maybe the first step is for these people to quit being criminals and resisting arrest. While I'm not for excessive use of police force it's kind of stupid to have the mentality of running away or resisting arrest and not understanding that something bad could happen in using this strategy. It's a non-winner. If their only goal is to be a martyr then they have done their job but that usually means you're dead.

 

[midwestyankee]

Maybe the first step is for these people to quit being criminals and resisting arrest. While I'm not for excessive use of police force it's kind of stupid to have the mentality of running away or resisting arrest and not understanding that something bad could happen in using this strategy. It's a non-winner. If their only goal is to be a martyr then they have done their job but that usually means you're dead.

I'm not aware of any state in which resisting arrest is a capital crime. Could you please correct my ignorance, if, in fact there is one? Also, in which states is it the case that criminals do not have the right to trial, even in capital cases? Because it seems as if you're quite comfortable with the notion that people who do bad things in the presence of police officers should be denied due process and executed at the scene.

 

[subwannabe]

That's not what I said at all. In fact, I specifically said that I am not for excessive use of police force. This is kind of like a woman dressing all slutty and then walking alone through the highest crime area of a city. If something bad happens to her, what did she expect? If you resist arrest or run away from a police officer, aren't you aware that it might not go down well, especially considering all the publicity over the last few months? I'm not saying they deserve capital punishment but the perpetrators have to take some responsibility for making a stupid decision. What I am saying has nothing to do with the laws but that these people should know that trying to run away or resist arrest isn't going to get them a batch of cookies from Grandma. I'm white and I wouldn't resist arrest or run away from a white officer because that would be really stupid and I might get shot and killed. Then again, I'm not a criminal so I would probably never be in that situation in the first place but I did recently get pulled over by a black cop for speeding and didn't give him any crapola because you are almost never going to win against a cop.

 

[midwestyankee]

That's not what I said at all. In fact, I specifically said that I am not for excessive use of police force. This is kind of like a woman dressing all slutty and then walking alone through the highest crime area of a city. If something bad happens to her, what did she expect? If you resist arrest or run away from a police officer, aren't you aware that it might not go down well, especially considering all the publicity over the last few months? I'm not saying they deserve capital punishment but the perpetrators have to take some responsibility for making a stupid decision. What I am saying has nothing to do with the laws but that these people should know that trying to run away or resist arrest isn't going to get them a batch of cookies from Grandma.

It seems you won't give up on the notion that the victim of a crime is as guilty as the perpetrator. You really want to rely on that old trope of "she asked for it by dressing slutty" here? Wow.

 

[subwannabe]

You must be a die hard liberal because you only hear what you want to hear. I talked about a woman dressing slutty and then walking through the worst part of town alone, not the every woman who dresses slutty deserves what they get scenario and I never said every "victim" is automatically guilty.

 

[midwestyankee]

You must be a die hard liberal because you only hear what you want to hear. I talked about a woman dressing slutty and then walking through the worst part of town alone, not the every woman who dresses slutty deserves what they get scenario.

You bet I'm a liberal. My kind of people freed the slaves, created Social Security and Medicare and outlawed child labor laws. And we expect professional behavior from the police while you seem to be willing to cut them much too much slack at the least possible excuse when the victim has done something wrong. Police are not supposed to murder unarmed people, no matter how badly those people behave when they're accosted. End. Of. Story.

 

[KoPilot]

There's a term for your behavior, subwannabe. You might do well to read something once in a while: Just World Fallacy.

Now let's see you actually respond to that instead of just regurgitating your same line you've been for this entire thread. And supposedly maintaining a thick head in the face of contrary facts is a quality unique to liberals.

 

[KoPilot]

Bombshell Interview: Cop Reveals That “Planting Evidence And Lying” Are Just “Part Of The Game”

 

[subwannabe]

You guys remind me of the 60's when hippies were anti-any establishment, down to calling the police "pigs" for no other reason than to just be antiestablishment. Sure you can drudge up any of this shit on a regular basis but that is very insulting to the 99% of police forces and police persons who are good and decent, fighting for truth, justice, and the American way.

 

[midwestyankee]

You guys remind me of the 60's when hippies were anti-any establishment, down to calling the police "pigs" for no other reason than to just be antiestablishment. Sure you can drudge up any of this shit on a regular basis but that is very insulting to the 99% of police forces and police persons who are good and decent, fighting for truth, justice, and the American way.

Who said anything about hating all police? Just you, as far as I can tell, in a classic example of fighting a staw man argument.

 

[KoPilot]

Who said anything about hating all police? Just you, as far as I can tell, in a classic example of fighting a staw man argument.

I hate the police, but it's not like subwannabe is actually intellectually engaging with any of my other posts that make absolutely no appeals to anything even remotely emotional and are simply stating the facts.

 

[KoPilot]

You guys remind me of the 60's when hippies were anti-any establishment, down to calling the police "pigs" for no other reason than to just be antiestablishment. Sure you can drudge up any of this shit on a regular basis but that is very insulting to the 99% of police forces and police persons who are good and decent, fighting for truth, justice, and the American way.

And you remind me of someone who, when confronted about the existence of god, just keeps quoting the bible.

 

[subwannabe]

People who hate all police are called criminals because they want to keep on breaking the law without any consequences. If nothing else, I'm sure you are a pothead who doesn't want the police anywhere near you but please remember that police don't make the laws, they just enforce them.

 

[KoPilot]

People who hate all police are called criminals because they want to keep on breaking the law without any consequences. If nothing else, I'm sure you are a pothead who doesn't want the police anywhere near you but please remember that police don't make the laws, they just enforce them.

Very sound argument. It'll take me a while to compile a rebuttal.

 

[IrisAlthea]

You guys remind me of the 60's when hippies were anti-any establishment, down to calling the police "pigs" for no other reason than to just be antiestablishment. Sure you can drudge up any of this shit on a regular basis but that is very insulting to the 99% of police forces and police persons who are good and decent, fighting for truth, justice, and the American way.

I think it would be really insulting to those good and decent people (and I don't agree with your 99% by far)in law enforcement, if we didn't have an active discussion about those who are responsible for things going so hopelessly wrong on what seems to be a pretty regular basis.
The bad eggs are not only a danger to civilians but just as much of a danger to their collegues, making their job harder and putting them att greater risk than necessary.

 

[subwannabe]

Iris: That certainly sounds reasonable. I don't disagree with that at all. And, that 99% figure might be a tad high. I mean there is absolutely no profession anywhere where there aren't some bad apples, including the police. There are so many police and police forces around the country that these stories will continue to pop up but you don't hear much about all the cases where something went right or the police went above and beyond their duty. It's unfair and unreasonable to brand all police bad based on the stories that make the news. It is a very one sided perspective and the media is doubling down on their coverage now.

Locally we just had an incident where the police chased a suspect into the woods and fired, hitting the person in the foot. The police spokesman made a point of telling the media that it was a white suspect and a white cop. A few months ago they wouldn't have made a point of saying that right up front. While bad cops should be weeded out we can't make the police as a whole afraid to do their jobs, especially when their own lives might be in jeopardy.

 

[KoPilot]

if we didn't have an active discussion

The problem is that people like subwannabe don't actually know how to have a discussion about this. They ignore facts, or at least stay silent when presented with them, or they respond from a place of emotion, completely devoid of reason, and would rather fling personal insults and attack strawmen because blah blah American Way, whatever that even means.

 

[subwannabe]

This from a person who openly admits that they hate ALL police. How can anyone have a productive discussion with someone who is so prejudiced (opinionwise) and emotional in their beliefs? The facts you want to present are YOUR facts that YOU want to present to represent YOUR side of YOUR argument. I challenge you to come up with facts backing the other side, as in there are many good police forces and many good cops. But, according to you, there are none. I'll start by admitting that there are bad cops that do bad things and they should be held accountable so that police as a whole don't get an undeserved bad wrap due to a few bad apples that admittedly do exist in probably every police department. There are some really bad doctors at probably every hospital in the country but you can't trash every hospital just because of a bad doctor here and a bad doctor there.