The Police Brutality Thread

[Bo Diddley]

Cop with a 'tude. Of course the guy on the bike should have just shut up once he encountered the cop with the 'tude.

Agreed. They probably have similar argumentative personalities, which is why they got into it in the first place.

It would be interesting to see the officer's departmental policy of use of cell phones. He should probably have been using a hands free device while he was driving.

[Northwestcoug]

The video of Alton Sterling's death is published by the Daily Beast. It does not bode well for the officers:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...illed-him.html

The link is to the article, and the video is embedded. Needless to say, it is very graphic.

[Commando]

And their body cameras "fell off" before the incident. Pretty convenient for them... except for that pesky smartphone camera technology!

[Dwight Schr-ute]

The Police Brutality Thread

Another one last night in Minnesota. Apparently gets pulled over for a broken taillight. Announces he has a CCW with a firearm in the glove box. Gets shot reaching for his wallet in his pocket. His girlfriend calmly uses FB to live broadcast his last breaths while still being held by gunpoint.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...t-on-facebook/


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[Art Vandelay]

Every time another...and another...and another killing of a young black man occurs I have 2 thoughts/questions
1) Are these killings happening at a higher or lower rate than they have historically? My assumption is there are likely less shootings/beatings. However, with the advent of cell phone cameras, and social media the deaths are now more well known
2) How disproportionate are the killings of African American's compared to other ethnic groups? In my community there have been multiple police shootings (most seemingly justified) of Latins and/or poor whites over the last few years. Only one received any national attention, and that was short lived. This leads to the follow up quandry: Are (a small minority) of cops truly racist, or are (a larger minority) of cops control freaks who overreact and make poor life or death decisions because of adrenaline and/or fear?

[Sullyute]

Both.

[cougjunkie]

I tend to find myself being fairly non-judgmental of the police in these situations. We never see the entire story, we don't know what happened before or after the camera started rolling. I can't imagine someone goes through all of that training, the police academy, and years and years on the force because they hate black people and want to harass and kill them. I am not buying that. I truly think 99% of these police officers fear for their lives and in almost every case these men are resisting in some way or another. No I don't think they deserve to be shot, but I reserve judgment as you never know what is going through that cops mind or what previous incidents he has been through. With that being said:

Alton Sterling was awful. Not sure how that is justified. The defense will obviously be the cops took a hand gun off his personage. He was carrying a loaded weapon illegally. To have him pinned down on his back like that and shoot him point blank in the chest is crazy. Again he was resisting and he was already tazed. I can see the cop saying that he thought it was his tazer.

The guy in Minnesota, assuming his girlfriends story is correct (video only shows after he was shot), is by far the worst one I have ever seen. He is in his car, still has seat belt on, with his girlfriend and a 4 year old in the back seat. All he had was a broken taillight. Zero criminal history. And to fire 4-5 shots at him with the child so close is disgusting.

[Topper]

I tend to find myself being fairly non-judgmental of the police in these situations. We never see the entire story, we don't know what happened before or after the camera started rolling. I can't imagine someone goes through all of that training, the police academy, and years and years on the force because they hate black people and want to harass and kill them. I am not buying that. I truly think 99% of these police officers fear for their lives and in almost every case these men are resisting in some way or another. No I don't think they deserve to be shot, but I reserve judgment as you never know what is going through that cops mind or what previous incidents he has been through. With that being said:

Alton Sterling was awful. Not sure how that is justified. The defense will obviously be the cops took a hand gun off his personage. He was carrying a loaded weapon illegally. To have him pinned down on his back like that and shoot him point blank in the chest is crazy. Again he was resisting and he was already tazed. I can see the cop saying that he thought it was his tazer.

The guy in Minnesota, assuming his girlfriends story is correct (video only shows after he was shot), is by far the worst one I have ever seen. He is in his car, still has seat belt on, with his girlfriend and a 4 year old in the back seat. All he had was a broken taillight. Zero criminal history. And to fire 4-5 shots at him with the child so close is disgusting.

This one looks heinous. There seems to be a dearth of good training of officers. We seem to see a lot more citizens getting shot and killed by officers jumping the gun than vice versa.

[cougjunkie]

Interesting read:

http://www.outkickthecoverage.com/po...problem-070716

this washington post link is also interesting:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graph...ice-shootings/

[Topper]

Interesting read:

http://www.outkickthecoverage.com/po...problem-070716

this washington post link is also interesting:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graph...ice-shootings/

Interesting links and data sets.

[cougjunkie]

Interesting links and data sets.

So if we filter out the Washington post article.

50 people have been shot by police that were unarmed and not attacking another individual at the time police arrived.

4 of them were killed by stray bullets as innocent bystanders. (1 black and 3 white)

Of the remaining 46

15 were black

10 were white

11 hispanic

All of them were committing crimes at the time.

32 of them were shot as they resisted, or struggled with officers.

The remaining 14 were fleeing or shot in the back. That is a disturbing number.

[Commando]

I am about all out of outrage on this issue. It's getting comical. I just think of that obese guy huffing away from the cop and getting shot in the back. Or the traffic stop that put his car in gear and got shot in the side of the head. And these are just the police murders captured on video. I can't imagine the submerged part of the iceberg- there have to communities where there are cops that regularly kill people and cover it up as a matter of procedure. Let the guy selling loosies, the deadbeat, etc. go without murdering him, guys, k?

[Goatnapper'96]

Interesting read:

http://www.outkickthecoverage.com/po...problem-070716

this washington post link is also interesting:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graph...ice-shootings/

To think identity politics could be driving all of this protesting? When I hear President Obama discuss the issue it seems to me that he wants me to believe that the distrust by black communities of Law Enforcement is proof enough that racism is the cause. I think his real point is that historical racism has created financial circumstances that lead to more crime in underprivileged communities. While I am prone to giving this perspective some legitimacy I then look at the facts around the cases the black protest community leadership chose to make their most visible cases and I cannot help but dismiss most of it as racebaiting and identity politics. Similar to my accepting that Hillary Clinton should not be prosecuted, which is very different as to whether or not she should be President, I think it is important to have trust in the rule of law - it is the most important bedrock of our social contract with our rulers. Whenever a cop kills a citizen there will be an investigation, I will await those results.

[Bo Diddley]

So if we filter out the Washington post article.

50 people have been shot by police that were unarmed and not attacking another individual at the time police arrived.

4 of them were killed by stray bullets as innocent bystanders. (1 black and 3 white)

Of the remaining 46

15 were black

10 were white

11 hispanic

All of them were committing crimes at the time.

32 of them were shot as they resisted, or struggled with officers.

The remaining 14 were fleeing or shot in the back. That is a disturbing number.

This wasn't at all clear to me as I read through those stats. I think many of them were committing crimes, but in many instances, the police were investigating reports of crimes. And then in a few cases, it says the police used a taser first, but really no mention of what led up to the initial use of force.

Still, it seems that being involved in criminal acts results in a confrontation with police, and a real risk of deadly force.

Really the one stat that stood out to me was 10 of the 50 that were killed also dealt with mental illness. I have long felt that being trained to deal with the mentally ill is a general shortcoming across the board.

At the end of the day, I think many of these shootings highlight the fallibility of human judgement. While we need to hold police to a high standard for their use of force, and especially for use of deadly force, we also need to be prepared for those times when police make mistakes. I have worked with many people in both law enforcement and the military. You have a broad spectrum of abilities, including judgement. It would be nice if we could weed out those prone to poor decision making, but it's a function of cost. I've said it before--at the end of the day, you get what you pay for.

[Pelado]

Interesting piece on the crime and police situation in Chicago:

Violence in Chicago is reaching epidemic proportions. In the first five months of 2016, someone was shot every two and a half hours and someone murdered every 14 hours, for a total of nearly 1,400 nonfatal shooting victims and 240 fatalities. Over Memorial Day weekend, 69 people were shot, nearly one per hour, dwarfing the previous year’s tally of 53 shootings over the same period.

The growing mayhem is the result of Chicago police officers’ withdrawal from proactive enforcement, making the city a dramatic example of what I have called the “Ferguson effect.” Since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, the conceit that American policing is lethally racist has dominated the national airwaves and political discourse, from the White House on down. In response, cops in minority neighborhoods in Chicago and other cities around the country are backing off pedestrian stops and public-order policing; criminals are flourishing in the resulting vacuum. (An early and influential Ferguson-effect denier has now changed his mind: in a June 2016 study for the National Institute of Justice, Richard Rosenfeld of the University of Missouri–St. Louis concedes that the 2015 homicide increase in the nation’s large cities was “real and nearly unprecedented.” “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect,” he told the Guardian.)

Felicia Moore, a wiry middle-aged woman with tattoos on her face and the ravaged frame of a former drug addict, is standing inside a Polish sausage joint on Chicago’s South Side at 10 PM. Asked about crime, she responds: “I’ve been in Chicago all my life. It’s never been this bad. Mothers and grandchildren are scared to come out on their porch; if you see more than five or six niggas walking together, you gotta run.” The violence claimed her only son last year, she says, just as he was being drafted by the Atlanta Hawks. Moore is engaging in some revisionist history: her son, Jeremiah Moore, was, in fact, killed with a shot to his head—but in 2013, a little over a year after he was released from prison for shooting a mother at a bus stop; the Atlantic Hawks don’t enter into it.

Felicia Moore’s assessment of the present crime situation in Chicago, however, is more reality-based.

This volatile policing environment now exists in urban areas across the country. But Chicago officers face two additional challenges: a new oversight regime for pedestrian stops; and the fallout from an officer’s killing of Laquan McDonald in October 2014.

The number of armed felons that the city’s cops confront dwarfs the number of officer-involved shootings. No other police department takes more guns off the street. In the first nine months of 2015, the CPD recovered 20 illegal weapons a day. From January 2007 to November 30, 2015, the police made 37,408 arrests of an armed felon, or roughly 4,670 a year. Each of those arrests could have turned into an officer shooting. But in 2015, even as crime was increasing under the Ferguson effect, the Chicago police shot 30 people, eight fatally. Those fatal shootings represent 1.6 percent of the 492 homicides that year. Nationally, police shootings make up 12 percent of all white and Hispanic homicide deaths and 4 percent of all black homicide deaths. Chicago’s ratio of fatal police shootings to criminal homicide deaths is less than the national average.

“I ain’t trying to buck them, I ain’t trying to disrespect them, I ain’t trying to give them a hard time, because I love my job. It’s not them, it’s the younger generation that’s got us messed up.” Civilians provoke confrontations with cops, not vice versa, Fisher says: “I seen a lot of people disrespect them, cussin’ and fussin’. If a cop was to get out of his car here, someone would run. To me, if you’re not doing anything, why would you run?” (Such commonsensical hypotheses have been ruled illegal by many courts—if a cop makes them.) Melissa, a 24-year-old outside D & J’s Hair Club on Pulaski Road, says that she has no problem with the police. “They doing they job. I don’t give them no reason to talk to me.” The problem is crime, she says: “I feel unsafe here. It just gets worse and worse.”

http://www.city-journal.org/html/chi...ink-14605.html