Ongoing U.S Police Brutality and Corruption Discussion Thread

A basic summary of how Minnesota is actually a terrible state:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/24/why-activists-predicted-months-ago-that-minneapolis-could-become-the-next-ferguson/

I want to believe this (no reflection on you at all) but 7 days of posting stuff about Jamar Clark into an echo chamber on ILX

― a strawman stuffed with their collection of 12 cds (jjjusten), Tuesday, November 24, 2015 10:55 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fyi i appreciated all the postings and news, but its not like i had a lot to say outside of "thanks for the links i appreciate them" and i still sorta don't.

i do think the video's release is a good thing in that there will probably be more protests after the release than before the release (for whatever reason) and that is worthwhile. also because it establishes the precedent that the police shouldn't just have the unilateral ability to only release the videos that suit them. even for activists, people that want to organize and protest around this stuff, the ability to know that the evidence is incontrovertible and in hand can strengthen their resolve and make them feel like it is possible to spur more people to action, etc.

i don't know if it needs to be watched, but the fact that it can be is important.

yes, i was reading about the jena six tonight and commentators after the fact remarked about the activist outcry at the time despite their / some misgivings that it was not a 'perfect civil rights case'. incontrovertible (save for like… the facebook comment i just read re someone who thought the tamir rice video cleared the officer?!) video evidence helps even the most resolute stay resolute. it's getting into the 30s here finally. the protesters at the 4th precinct have been lighting fires to stay warm. in the past several years (back to occupy) a lot of our protests here have tended to die out in the winter.

i've been so busy these past few days that i haven't been able to follow the news around the chicago shooting as closely as i'd have liked.

so do the authorities have any explanation for why it took a year to bring charges or even to get the office suspended? is the general assumption that it's only with the judge's decision to compel them to release the video that they have pressed charges?

the whole situation is heartbreaking. the scenario is similar to one that occurred in this city a year or two ago. although in this case the video evidence makes the inhuman gratuitousness of it undeniable. the video made me gasp--you see smoke rising from the young man's prone body, evidence that he's still being shot (by the same cop) ten, fifteen seconds after he hit the ground.

the other thing that i found so shocking--or if not shocking, then just hideously familiar--is that it's pretty clear the other cops knew that the kid didn't pose an immediate danger to them. most of them hadn't even drawn their weapons, it appears. so it's clear that what the one cop did was far beyond the bounds of what was demanded in that situation. and yet i have no doubt that every one of those other cops, even knowing that their coworker had murdered a young man in cold blood, colluded with him to fabricate a story, conceal/taint/destroy evidence, etc. unless we start to prosecute those folks, too, i'm not sure that we'll get anywhere....

so awful and sad.....

'investigations with police involvement are very complex'

'Needed extra time to try to fight every FOIA request'

'video server was loading very slowly'

jesus christ, this poor kid

http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/25/us/laquan-mcdonald-life-chicago/index.html

Is this in any way credible?

http://henrycountyreport.com/blog/2015/12/01/leaked-documents-reveal-dothan-police-department-planted-drugs-on-young-black-men-for-years-district-attorney-doug-valeska-complicit/

Is Rahm in any way credible?

http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/12/corruption-beyond-chicago-top-cop/418215/

that henry county report is insane.

The group of police officers who chose to notify federal authorities and the US Attorney in a series of constructed letters to protect their own safety documented is below as many had their lives threatened by fellow officers.

So is the $500M in settlement money that Chicago PD has paid to its victims over the past ten years.

For years, white supremacists in a Dothan, Alabama, police department planted drugs and guns on black people. According to Internal Affairs documents obtained by the Henry County Report, their superiors, several of whom have since been promoted, knew about the practice and helped cover it up. Indeed, the lieutenant implicated by the documents is now the chief of the department. The sergeant who obstructed the Internal Affairs investigation went on to become sheriff and then director of homeland security for the state, a position he continues to hold today. The district attorney at the time (still in office) sat on exculpatory evidence and proceeded with felony prosecutions against the individuals the officers had framed.

https://newrepublic.com/minutes/124937/years-white-supremacists-dothan-alabama-police-department-planted-drugs-guns-black-people

I'd seen this floating around and it's fucking insane

i have not read it myself yet but i see that there's already some questions about that report

the SPLC has retracted their tweet of it:

https://twitter.com/splcenter/status/672466511886422018

slate's criminal justice reporter gave it a hard look and interviewed the report's author:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/12/dothan_county_alabama_police_corruption_what_do_we_actually_know.html

SPLC ‏@splcenter 3h3 hours ago
Questions have arisen about the reporting and readers should not assume the claims are true until more information is provided.

hmm

SPLC's pretty reliable

Yeah, thought that might happen.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/police-tear-protest-camp-minneapolis-4th-precinct-35551810

Word on the ground is that this is a pretty pleasant and whitewashed version of how things went down

holtzclaw guilty, recommended sentence of 260+ years

he didn't take it well

Fake crying like the psychopath he is. Good luck, USA.

so we have our own case in SF now: http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Family-of-man-shot-by-SF-police-to-file-federal-6691945.php?cmpid=brknow

although tbh I'm a little ambivalent about this one, dude was armed and is suspected of having just stabbed somebody. Could they have captured him without killing him? I suspect so but there lies the rub (I haven't watched the video fwiw, I don't watch snuff films)

Fake crying like the psychopath he is. Good luck, USA.

― Three Word Username, Friday, December 11, 2015 4:04 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

why fake? even psychopathic serial rapists can cry when they learn they will spend the rest of their life in prison

yeah, i'm not exactly sorry for the guy in any way but he's almost certainly going to be in jail through 2045; you're allowed to lose your shit

dude is gonna get it in prison

:(

"it" = "a college degree"

shakey, the video is pretty incredible. the guy was pretty much encircled (against a wall) by cops, one of them tries to cut him off from the side, 'he lunges' or whatever bullshit they say, and then it's like a firing squad

SF Police Chief is using this as an opportunity to argue for arming cops with stun guns. Which I guess is progress of some sort (also sounds practically like an admission of wrongdoing)

jesus. that is absolutely horrifying. shakey i understand about not wanting to watch the video, but if you are not going to watch the video imo you need to not cast aspersions on what he was supposedly armed with or was suspected of having done. i don't think the latter is a good thing to do in any case because it aligns with the way police consistently slander victims, but i think in particular it does not look good to say "and don't show me anything to contradict this, either." like, that's what video evidence does, as absolutely terrifying and heartbreaking as it is to see a person shot fifteen times by five police officers - it cuts through those narratives and exposes them.

i don't care what you're "suspected of," it's profoundly unlikely that anybody needs to be shot to resolve the overwhelming, overwhelming majority of situations. certainly not shot so many times as to ensure death beyond a shadow of a doubt. a firing squad is a very apt analogy. god, that's horrible.

I would think that my average level of trust in police departments is well documented around here but I guess not

I don't "trust" the police version of events beyond the dude being armed and the fact that there was a stabbing nearby. My "little ambivalence" is due to these as mitigating factors distinguishing this from the countless instances of cops just shooting unarmed people when they felt like it - this one is slightly different. That doesn't make it right.

does it even makes it slightly different though? you're innocent until proven guilty, not innocent until proven guilty unless you are suspected of being responsible for a recent stabbing in the vicinity.

(maybe not quite the exact right set of rights to invoke here to make my point, but hopefully it's still clear.)

because even if he was known 100% to be responsible for the recent stabbing, shooting him fifteen times against a wall is not justified. shooting him at all does not seem justified actually. i'm pretty sure most stabbing cases get resolved in some other fashion.

it's slightly different in that it makes it not entirely unreasonable for a cop to have drawn his weapon (as opposed to say, shooting a small child playing in a park, or shooting an unarmed driver during a traffic stop, or strangling a guy selling cigarettes etc.) Cops to have shot him 15 times is excessive and crazy, obviously. And no I won't be shamed into watching people murdered sorry.

xp

is this one of those classic ILX times when two people who agree about something argue over semantics cuz um

DC otm, you can't give them an inch on this. the job of the cops is to arrest - not try, convict, and sentence. the suspect's alleged prior actions are irrelevant and bringing them up as an excuse is a slippery slope.

whether the guy was armed and had just committed a crime is obviously an important bit of context. why 5 different cops have to shoot to kill rather than, shooting him once or twice in the legs, is the question

sorry for extraneous commas

would never say anybody's obliged to watch these videos. just that ''not gonna watch it'' and in the same breath ''but on the basis of other evidence that i take more seriously, this case seems less clear cut than others'' doesn't 100% wash with me. but to be honest, i've moved past that, because i'm more where sleeve's at. like i don't know that there's any surrounding circumstance which makes this kind of killing something about which i'd be ambivalent. put another way, i do think it remains entirely unreasonable for one cop, let alone five, to have guns drawn and ready in this situation. i recognze that knives are dangerous weapons but... really? this seems ''reasonable''? imho it seems crazy and i don't want to be in on the project of naturalizing crazy policing, or accepting it as a long-established norm.

i do think we probably agree on huge swaths of things related to this issue - pushing on the places where we don't because i think they're important, not because they're semantic.

xp yeah then come the 'i wuz trained to shoot to kill' bullshit justifications

aside from watching videos like these just to help things bring home to myself sometimes, mostly i am just interested in being able to calibrate my rejoinders to people who are oblivious to the things they can see in such videos or blinded by idiotic beliefs from even seeing them. i.e. i want to make sure i don't overstep any line of credibility when talking to them, and i want to be able to choose what's most salient to talk about.

been teaching some ethics students around this topic in the past year and while at times it's been good, the buildup of protests all year seems to have stimulated some of them to cling to the crudest pro-police garbage. : /

"Fake crying" = head down, eyes dry, head shaking no. Yes, bad people have real feelings and cry for real; he looked like he was fake crying to me.

this isn't an important matter but imo he was overdoing it for the camera but may also have been very emotional

Don't really care how he feels or acts. Awesome he got all those years behind bars to act however he wants without any power to cause harm.

once it sinks in that he ain't coming back he can start getting some cool swastika neck tattoos

does the aryan nation accept people with Japanese heritage?

i think the Japanese were only given honorary white status in apartheid south africa

Not even an indictment on this? Even if he's holding a knife, it sure looks like he's surrendering.

http://gawker.com/officials-release-second-video-in-fatal-police-shooting-1747834692