Ongoing U.S Police Brutality and Corruption Discussion Thread

are you?

☐ FOR ALL POLICES or
☑ AGIANST ALL POLICES

Rock. The. Vote.™

memorial for a guy for whom we're still trying to determine whether or not it's ok to be mad at the cops who killed him

correct me if that's grammatically incorrect

https://i.imgur.com/EvC7XjP.jpg

do you think this human interest story is?

☐ TRAGICALLY INTERESTING or
☑ TRAGICALLY NOT REALLY THAT INTERESTING BUT THAT PICTURE SURE IS INTERESTING

"There are good cops"

https://www.kentucky.com/news/state/kentucky/article246849952.html

Gov. Andy Beshear and others reacted with outrage Friday after learning Kentucky State Police training materials used quotes from Adolph Hitler and advised trainees to become “the ruthless killer.”

The story was initially reported by two student journalists at duPont Manual High School in Louisville and published online by the school’s newspaper, the Manual RedEye.

The presentation used in the past was immediately denounced by some for emphasizing violence from police rather than minimizing force and reducing conflict.

The slideshow titled “The Warrior Mindset” includes a quote from Hitler’s Mein Kampf: “The very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence.”

“It is always more difficult to fight against faith than against knowledge,” states another quote attributed to Hitler in the PowerPoint presentation, which the student newspaper posted online.

if there were some Good Cops I feel like there have been ample opportunities to flex recently

"if we're such bad cops, then why won't you admit we're not?"

do ACAB people think it is Good or Bad for cops to wear bodycams?

So they can turn them off, find them faulty, or manipulate them to fit a narrative?

is manipulating things to fit a narrative Bad or Good?

burrito what is going on

basically I see them as a distraction, though they could turn out to be worse than that

Research on the impacts that body-worn cameras have on policing is mixed. Some studies have found that cops who wear them are less likely to use force or be the subject of civilian complaints. But a 2017 randomized control trial that included over 2,000 police officers in Washington, DC, found that the effect of body cams was too small to be statistically significant: Officers who wore the cameras used force and received complaints at about the same rate as their colleagues who didn’t. A 2016 analysis of 10 previous studies of body cameras also found that they had “no discernible effect” on the use of force, and actually increased the likelihood of an officer being assaulted.

That’s reflected in the experience of some law enforcement officials themselves. “You forget about the body camera pretty quickly,” says Betsy Smith, a retired police sergeant with almost 30 years of experience. “It doesn’t change our behavior, because most cops are just going out there and doing their job. If people think, Let’s get these cops body cameras to change their behavior, I think that’s really naive, and frankly it’s kind of insulting to law enforcement.” But Smith isn’t opposed to body cameras. She says she’s in favor of equipping every police officer in the country with one, but not necessarily because filming cops keeps them accountable.

By design, body-worn cameras point outwards into the world, often aiding police officers in monitoring communities, rather than helping communities watch police. And surveillance technology is only growing more sophisticated: At least one body cam manufacturer has pitched adding live facial recognition as a feature to police departments, OneZero reported earlier this year.

https://www.wired.com/story/body-cameras-stopped-police-brutality-george-floyd/

there are good reasons they fell out of favor as a demand quite a while ago

burrito what is going on

nothing much, just chattin about police, trying to figure out whether or not they're all bad or all good

with maaaybe a little performative virtual signaling thrown in to keep things spicy

that's virtual signaling, not virtue signaling btw - I mean literally demonstrating an awareness of the message board environment

cops teargas marchers, kids in garner, north carolina

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article246861942.html

In 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice laid out nine ways in which Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson and his deputies violated people’s constitutional rights in the county, through “a pattern or practice of discriminatory policing.”

The DOJ, under the Obama administration, filed a lawsuit over the accusations, but a Republican-appointed federal judge threw out the suit. The DOJ appealed, then agreed to drop its legal threats in exchange for Johnson agreeing to actions including “bias-free policing” training for his deputies.

Johnson since been re-elected sheriff twice, in 2014 and 2018. Both times, no one ran against him.

that's virtual signaling, not virtue signaling btw - I mean literally demonstrating an awareness of the message board environment

like anyone who would safety pin an ACAB patch onto the punk jacket of dialogue, table is smart enough to know that all cops aren't actually worthless pieces of shit, just like anyone with a gun in their hand doesn't automatically turn into a killer. it's just a kewl thing to say to provoke a reaction and trick the blue lives matter crowd into engaging with it. I get that! and I'm a dope for letting it irritate me.

but I also shared some details on a police shooting in my neighborhood from a few months ago because I was kinda interested in getting an ACAB person's take on it. like, what exactly did the cops do wrong here in this particular instance? what could/should they have done differently? I guess I'm just hoping for some sort of an acknowledgement that no, not all cops are Derek Chauvin and yes, every fatal shooting unfolds under unique circumstances and it all needs to be taken into consideration if you want to actually understand the ways policing can be improved. I don't actually think that acknowledgement will substantially change anything, but if you honestly think all cops are inherently irredeemable, do you also think systematic improvement is an impossibility?

burrito lives matter

shit, I just realized I used the phrase "not all cops." I'm gonna get an earful now

I am the son
And the heir
Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar
I am the son and heir
Of nothing in particular
You shut your mouth
How can you say
I go about things the wrong way?
I am A BURRITO and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does

Are we done pretending this dude is worth talking to yet

God, please forgive Dan his rudeness.

Good news, Dan! God said he'd forgive you :)

dude, what

huh?

For years I have auto-SB'd anyone who uses the phrase "virtue signaling" & encourage others to do the same

what about "virtual signaling"

btw it's FP not SB, Dan S

oh, shit, sorry, you're Dan I. my bad

I and I try to understand the difference between Dan S and Dan I & I encourage others to do the same, Jah bless

Hey, Burrito, as someone who has needed to hear this in the past on various fora, can I say you’re posting like someone who needs a break from posting for a bit.

It’s a stressful time and I hope you’re ok, but maybe you oughtta just cool it.

I appreciate that but I've checked myself and am in no danger of wrecking myself. If you need to vent about your PTSD from unpleasant message board experiences past, go ahead and send me a webmail - mine works.

just one. maybe one? will step up and say “yeah shit that’s kinda fucked up”?

literally one. a single cop. then I’ll shut up. seriously. I’ll log off the internet for life.

Actually, burrito, I do believe that all cops are irredeemable.

If a person chooses to become an enforcer of state violence, of laws that are created and made manifest in a field of pain and death, then I don't understand how anyone can trust that person.

p@trick sk1nn3r tho

Lol a former CIA spook, member of the coast guard, and current cop? Please.

https://www.kenoshanews.com/news/local/kenosha-man-facing-felony-charges-for-giving-kyle-rittenhouse-gun-used-in-shootings/article_38bc2084-5763-5985-9a12-573ea87de66c.html

The gun that Kyle Rittenhouse had was straw-purchased for him by a 19-year-old friend.

Black told police that when they went to his stepfather’s to get the guns he was concerned about Rittenhouse having the rifle because he was not 18. “Black thought in his head he could have stopped it, but he knew if he would have told Kyle ‘no’ (meaning taking the rifle), he (Kyle) would have thrown a fit,” the Antioch report states.

oh noes, a fit

doesn't sound that bad, but it's important to clarify that when Kyl3 R1ttenhouse throws a fit, he murders people with a gun

So this seems the best thread to post this in, but I've been kind of struggling with watching some protests happen in our town that are anti-police, but seem to be having the effect of only actually helping the police.

Background:
We live in a town with a major university, a big name that pretty much everyone has heard of and the university dominates the town in terms of employment, taxes, prime real estate, yadda yadda. The university has their own, rather sizable police force. A group of students has been carrying on their passion from the summer and have been pushing for them to abolish their police force. (Let me pause here to emphasize that I am completely on their side here, this police force for the school is ridiculously well funded and has had a lot of issues in terms of bias and focusing only on minority students - so the students are incredibly on point here and targeting the right thing). So they started protesting on campus and calling for the abolishment. The president of the university has been an absolute dick and completely dismissive of their protests, threatening to have them arrested and expelled, yadda yadda. Of course this bullshit has only pushed the students harder and caused their number to grow.

So, now they protest pretty much every night and they have moved their protests to the areas with most visibility - downtown, but well off the campus grounds. The protests have been 99% peaceful, other than Halloween night when things got a little tense and some instigators in the crowd started firing fireworks at (from all accounts) both the cops and the protesters. Things calmed down again the night after and they've been peaceful since. Anyway, the university police have had nearly nothing to do with these protests since it's not on campus, so it's been our city's police that have been manned around these protests (which, again, given our town, consists of them mainly doing traffic control and watching things). What has ended up happening is that our city cops keep getting paid a bunch of overtime money every night there's a protest, which I believe have been going on for about four and a half weeks now?

Our mayor has repeatedly pushed back on the university president, telling him to listen to the students and take them seriously (and also threatening to make them pay all the overtime for the cops, but I'll believe that when I see it). The president remains really obstinate and, understandably, keeps enflaming things.

Anyway, I'm torn here because I support the students and I 100% understand them protesting where they get the most visibility and press, which protesting on the interior of campus likely wouldn't do. That said, at the same time, I feel like right now they are just filling up the pockets of cops while protesting somewhere that has no control over the decision making for their goals. I don't know what the answer is, but it annoys me that the only net result so far seems to be more money for cops.

I don't know, paying cops more to just stand there instead of actually hurting people is okay with me (particularly if the mayor makes the university pay for it)

Huh, I guess I didn't think about that end result.

jvc - i wonder if there are other net results that could be included here? that is, if you're looking for ways to feel more optimistic about this situation, maybe there's other ways of measuring it than whether the board of trustees has (yet) caved and told the pres it's time to pack it in.

like idk -- do you think the mayor's current stance has been influenced by the endurance and evident organizing strength of the student protests? have the views of townies at large shifted at all? i'm kinda projecting my now-dated college-town experience from Athens GA which had a lot of well-intentioned NPR/recycle-bin white liberals of 2004, who i don't picture being immediately on board with police reduction, but who also might be persuadable, capable of gradually adjusting their mental sense of what things are good and progressive to support. that kind of thing can count as a net result. or on the other side, getting reactionaries to show their ass and make shitty public statements that will come back to haunt them in years to come.

plus also, as always, the benefits of protests aren't always measured in terms of changing the thing they're protesting --- protests also form social/emotional/political bonds, build phatic infrastructure, get people in the habit of showing up for the next thing etc. for each individual person, showing up and seeing all the other people showing up is a high, it fills you up with energy and fire, anger and also joy.... these are powerful and important things imo.

All fair points DC, all good to keep in mind. I don't have any insight in the BOT and how they may be reacting, at least nothing that has been reported on or widely shared. It's hard to tell how the townies around here feel, with the pandemic I'm not really interacting with people anywhere near as much as I might otherwise. I mean, the friends and folks I do regularly talk to are all supportive of the protests but annoyed that the university isn't being responsive at all. That said, there are a few local, small business owners that have been pretty vocally pissed about it, saying that it's keeping customers out of downtown at a time when they most need customers after having been closed for many months.

The mayor is weird, he's been vocal about pushing back on the president but he also recently announced he isn't running for election after his one term, so he's kind of become a non-presence in other ways.

But yeah, good things to keep in mind and glad the visibility remains out there for the larger movement.

Just a note that while DJP is correct, there's also the notion that the town police don't have to be there at all, or get paid overtime. Those circumstances have nothing to do with the protestors and more to do with the fact that we live in a police state. The protestors aren't filling up the pig pockets, you and your fellow town taxpayers are. So it's up to them to figure it out, not the protestors!

It’s actually totally possible to not have the police stand around during protests!

table and silby otm

in my experience being in protests that took the streets without police presence, we just directed traffic ourselves

absolutely, same