Ongoing U.S Police Brutality and Corruption Discussion Thread

no charges in the WI David Blake case

sorry Jacob blake

Curious to know table's thoughts on the newly elected Washtenaw County county prosecutor that immediately ended cash bail after his swearing in. I mean, he hasn't yet disbanded the police, so I guess fuck that guy, right? Even though he made a tangible step towards an ostensibly better future?

Y'all are simply much less pessimistic than I am. I've given up any hope of reform, and while I think that changes that cause less suffering (such as ending cash bail, ending marijuana arrests) are good, the carceral state remains. If you're helping to put people in prison, then you're not "good." There is no "good DA."

If you're helping to put people in prison, then you're not "good." There is no "good DA."

Yeah, this is a fair point. I wouldn't argue that any of these guys are "good", but they are sometimes, very rarely capable to doing "good" things within the absolutely shitty system they are also propping up. Short of the wholesale tearing down of the carceral state and obliterating of the police we need, I'm trying to keep these little steps in mind. Because there are definitely people who will not have their lives as disastrously ruined as they would under a cash bail system.

there is no "good person"

there is no "good person"

Hard agree. Just as there are criminal activities, but no criminal people.

I'm NAL but that Washtenaw policy looks good. If nothing else I was glad to see no mention of replacing cash bail with an algorithmic assessment like they did in New Jersey to deleterious effect.

To table's point though, that ending $$$-for-liberty is a big win right now (and I'm not denying that it is a win) despite months of nationwide protests this summer is bleak.

Exactly. What's been happening in Columbus or Minneapolis or any number of other places *just in the last month* is absolutely appalling, for example, and so while these incremental reforms are good insofar as they lessen the severity of the blunt force trauma of the carceral state on the populace, it's still blunt force trauma.

Exactly. What's been happening in Columbus or Minneapolis or any number of other places *just in the last month* is absolutely appalling, for example, and so while these incremental reforms are good insofar as they lessen the severity of the blunt force trauma of the carceral state on the populace, it's still blunt force trauma.

― Pere Legume (the table is the table), Tuesday, January 5, 2021 5:00 PM (forty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't think it's an either/or proposition, in that you can work towards defunding the police all the while make sure that some incremental reforms are being made to lessen the blunt force. There's enough bright minds and energy to go around and work on both counts.

Tell that to the people I know who have Covid in prison.

Like we're legit dealing with legalized slavery, and people are like, "it's so great that some people are able to use credit cards to escape slavery!! wow!"

like excuse me wtf, that's bullshit, we all know it's bullshit. That's why I sigh and accept incremental reforms that happen, but am not like jumping up and down for joy when such incremental crumbs are thrown at us.

I think lots of people don't know it's bullshit which is why it's important to have both a large and smaller picture of the necessary activism to build change.

in a way it's even more harrowing that SO MANY PEOPLE don't know. so goddamn many

If you think the US government and the corporations that own it are going to stop using a huge source of essentially free labor, then you've got another thing coming.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/884989263

Heh I give up, what's the point. If we suggest any other type of activism than your preferred way, it's not good enough and we are horrible people, and then in any case, the situation is doomed and we are naive to think otherwise. There's no attempt at understanding or having a discussion.

I never said anything about you or anyone on this thread being horrible people. And I never suggested anything about activism in this particular discussion.

I am being realistic, which one needs to do in order to properly assess the situation.

I understand the incrementalist view, and I find it insufficient in addressing the substance of the issue, which is the way in which legalized slavery is a huge part of the apparatus of the way this country and its economy are run.

I want people out of jail. I donate 10% of all the money from the workshops I facilitate to bail-out funds.

But recognizing these things as what they are— incremental steps that won't change the substance of the main issue— isn't some sort of affront to decency, and I don't understand why people think that it is.

Some confusion probably draws from your first 'look at Philadelphia just look at it' post, as if Krasner actually made things worse in Philly... when he has been objectively less bad than his predecessors or alternatives.

True, and I guess I didn't clarify that bit about Krasner enough.

Of course Krasner is better than anyone who's come before him— Lynn fucking Abraham was a goddamn monster— but that isn't saying much, and I think it's important to be clear-headed about this stuff.

Big steps are better than no steps, and much better than "let's form a committee to evaluate the efficacy of making a plan for potential incremental steps."

In 2020, not a single officer in Newark fired his or her weapon while on duty - a remarkable milestone. De-escalation training is proven and effective.

Alongside our new use-of-force policy, we are building a stronger and fairer New Jersey for all. https://t.co/sI9WWvpqjP

— Governor Phil Murphy (@GovMurphy) January 3, 2021

that's... kind of amazing? even with the pandemic, which surely contributed to fewer confrontations.

otm

if you can do it in newark, there's no reason you can't do it in any us city.

Weirdly proud of NJ government lately. Legal pot (I don't smoke but still), I'm now getting health insurance from the state instead of the feds, police de-escalation training...

Yeah, stop embarrassing us up in NY already!

it's a little weird to see people suddenly cheering on the cops, I'm not saying they are wrong, but definitely feeling some cognitive dissonance and not sure what to think about it

yeah. no side is good in this situation, but I guess you gotta pick which basket of nazis is worse

the fact that the cops are basically rolling over here though fits the narrative

People will be discussing the inadequacy of cops even more than before. I doubt there will be a groundswell of good feelings like after 9/11.

seeing cops taking selfies with the terrorists is disgusting. The police force needs to be held to account after this.

Also re: Georgia reports earlier:

As far as I can tell no militia actually attempted to enter the capital building in Georgia that was misreporting and secondhand from someone else. I've talked to the militia groups that are actually here, and it's all news to them.

Actually reporting from Georgia. pic.twitter.com/CXdLAwgySA

— Zach D Roberts (@zdroberts) January 6, 2021

that's our "car bomb exploded outside the State building" moment

Never applaud cops. Ever.

Sorry! Wrong thread for my Georgia post. A lot going on today.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-police-officers-who-were-in-dc-during-wednesday-riots-placed-on-administrative-leave/

love that this will be taken more seriously (assuming they were just at the “rally” or whatever and not actually storming the Capitol) than you know, murdering an unarmed black teen.

what an absolutely disgusting institution. abolish.

medium-key psychopathic language in this letter

Minneapolis Police union president Lt. Bob Kroll sent this email to members this morning announcing his retirement at the end of the month pic.twitter.com/j1wphZrEJf

— Max Nesterak (@maxnesterak) January 11, 2021

I’d like him to account for his whereabouts on 1/6.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/nyregion/nypd-james-kobel-racist.html

After two months of investigation, police officials have concluded that a high-ranking officer responsible for combating workplace harassment in the New York Police Department wrote dozens of virulently racist posts about Black, Jewish and Hispanic people under a pseudonym on an online chat board favored by police officers.

The officer, Deputy Inspector James F. Kobel, filed his retirement papers late last week as the departmental inquiry was winding down. But the officials said on Monday that they still planned to bring administrative charges against him as soon as this month for falsely denying that he had written the offensive messages.

“The evidence is strong,” said one senior police official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel matter. “We have no doubt that it’s him.”

/.../

Captain Chris Monahan, who heads the Captains Endowment Association, the union that represents the inspector, defended him in a statement, saying he had served the city and the Police Department for 29 years.

“Given the current political climate and anti-police sentiment, D.I. Kobel did not see it as possible to get a fair administrative trial and decided to avail himself of the opportunity to file for retirement,” the statement said.

ironic.youtube

after this fuckin' week, this is what the pigs care about

https://www.yahoo.com/sports/kentucky-backs-players-right-to-kneel-after-local-cops-burn-gear-in-protest-052523461.html

no UK thread but fuck the police

this article from the Marshall Report itemizes the outrageous costs and blatant kickbacks that lard modern execution and suggests that why this administration legalizes state sponsored murder has far more to do with local economics than justice.

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/01/14/a-6-300-bus-a-33-last-meal-what-new-documents-tell-us-about-trump-s-execution-spree

When Scott Mueller drove to Indiana in July to see Daniel Lewis Lee die, he stayed at a Holiday Inn. The hotel was nice enough, and only a 10-minute drive from the federal execution chamber in Terre Haute where the man who killed Mueller’s father would take his last breath.The two-night hotel stay cost around $200, and the tab was picked up by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. It amounted to a small fraction of the more than $107,000 the agency spent on hotels for the witnesses and staff who flocked to western Indiana last summer for the federal government’s first executions in nearly two decades. 

A review of the expenses for five executions in July and August—including at least $9,376 for plane tickets and rental vans, more than $25,000 for kosher food and roughly $6,590 for tents—paints a stark and intimate picture of the practicalities of death, shedding light on a secretive process typically hidden from the public and shielded under law.

Records providing details of the spending, which the American Civil Liberties Union estimates totaled nearly $4.7 million over two months, were released under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

I know I do this a lot, but I have to say...

it's almost like the US justice system might be irrevocably corrupt!

But really, it reminds me of when my partner and I got stopped for going 75 in a 70 (when other cars were speeding past us) in rural Kentucky. We were moving across the country with tons of stuff and a roof rack, and our car had California plates.

We had less than an 1/8th oz of weed in the car, and so after the two pigs ransacked the whole vehicle— breaking one of my turntables in the process– and turned up nothing, they let us go with a summons.

It turned out that the misdemeanor possession fine was $500, but since I had to pay a lawyer to represent me (because I couldn't go back to rural Kentucky), I ended up having to pay $750 to him and about $700 to the court to make the shit go away.

Of course, it turned out that this lawyer was the only lawyer that represented out-of-towners in the county, and used to work as the county attorney. You can easily see the racket— pigs stop every out-of-state plate they feasibly can, charge em with some bullshit, the person pays a lawyer to represent in court, court gets money to give to the pigs so they can stop every out-of-state plate they feasibly can, and so on and so forth.

I mean whole suburbs of St. Louis were set up as basically speed traps for revenue generation. There's dozens of postage stamp municipalities with no property tax base that subsist almost solely on fines and court fees.

That doesn't make it okay.

Like, it's hopelessly corrupt and fucked up, tbh.

I mean whole suburbs of St. Louis were set up as basically speed traps for revenue generation. There's dozens of postage stamp municipalities with no property tax base that subsist almost solely on fines and court fees.

That doesn't make it okay.