The United Police States of America

[wesw]

tracking stats and wearing GO PROs are great ideas, but enough with the shame. girls are so emotional (said the man who cries when a forest is cut down)

[BoSoxGal]

I can't imagine anything more worthwhile of shame than police abuse of power, especially when it results in death.

[Joe Guy]

Here's a local miscarriage of justice from our BART police. It happened in March but the videos have just been released....



the story

[Crackpot]

Is there a (maximum) IQ requirement for working for BART? I can't think of a single "good" or even "neutral" story involving the organization.

[Lord Jim]

My understanding is that the FBI has better data on car thefts then it does on police shootings...

There's no excuse for that...

With no good data, partisans on both sides can argue their points, in a "fact free zone"...

Let's assemble some reliable data, and then have a discussion...

[BoSoxGal]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morn ... onal_pop_b


Fully ambulatory young healthy male arrested (for having as switchblade in his pocket) after running from police, enters police transport van and somehow ends up with an 80% severed spine which ultimately causes his death.

Don't worry; police are looking into it.

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/marilyn-mosb ... eddie-gray

Finally, a prosecutor willing to take a stand against LEO abuse of power!

[Lord Jim]

arrested (for having as switchblade in his pocket)

And now it turns out it wasn't even a switch blade, just a perfectly legal normal pocket knife, and they already had him in cuffs before they found it...

[MajGenl.Meade]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morn ... onal_pop_b


Fully ambulatory young healthy male arrested (for having as switchblade in his pocket) after running from police, enters police transport van and somehow ends up with an 80% severed spine which ultimately causes his death.

Don't worry; police are looking into it.

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/marilyn-mosb ... eddie-gray

Finally, a prosecutor willing to take a stand against LEO abuse of power!

...And as the lady said, clearly, twice, the police investigatory report handed to her matched what her own investigators found out - well done police, prosecutor and sheriffs dept. in Baltimore. A good job of law enforcement. Now we'll see what a jury decides. Probably the manslaughter (intentional) charges will not hold up.

[BoSoxGal]

Depraved heart murder is the most serious charge filed; looks like most of them were charged with unlawful imprisonment because there was no probable cause to arrest him in the first place. Making eye contact with the police and then running away? NOT ILLEGAL!

Yes, it's good to know that the police investigation was sound as well. I've never said ALL cops are bad - but I think it's becoming abundantly clear that we have a nationwide policing crisis and this hurts everyone, including the police. I used to love the police, as I was raised in an authority-deferential household with law enforcement and military as immediate family members. This presented a big challenge for me when I first became a defense attorney in law school, but over the past almost 20 years, I've come to feel about police the same that Scooter articulated.

I read recently that among millenials, trust in police is below 50% - that's bad for our country and bad for police. Let's fix this!!

[MajGenl.Meade]

My trust in millenials is a lot less than 50%. Arseholes who cover their flesh with childish scribblings and pierce their parts are less than mentally deficient - or soccer players which is about the same thing

[Econoline]

An interesting and informative take on what went wrong with policing in Baltimore, in the form of an interview with David Simon (who,as the introduction points out, was a reporter for The Baltimore Sun long before he wrote and produced “The Wire”:

David Simon is Baltimore’s best-known chronicler of life on the hard streets. He worked for The Baltimore Sun city desk for a dozen years, wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) and with former homicide detective Ed Burns co-wrote “The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood” (1997), which Simon adapted into an HBO miniseries. He is the creator, executive producer and head writer of the HBO television series “The Wire” (2002–2008). Simon is a member of The Marshall Project’s advisory board. He spoke with Bill Keller on Tuesday.

BK: What do people outside the city need to understand about what’s going on there — the death of Freddie Gray and the response to it?

DS: I guess there's an awful lot to understand and I’m not sure I understand all of it. The part that seems systemic and connected is that the drug war — which Baltimore waged as aggressively as any American city — was transforming in terms of police/community relations, in terms of trust, particularly between the black community and the police department. Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war. It happened in stages, but even in the time that I was a police reporter, which would have been the early 80s to the early 90s, the need for police officers to address the basic rights of the people they were policing in Baltimore was minimized. It was done almost as a plan by the local government, by police commissioners and mayors, and it not only made everybody in these poor communities vulnerable to the most arbitrary behavior on the part of the police officers, it taught police officers how not to distinguish in ways that they once did.

Probable cause from a Baltimore police officer has always been a tenuous thing. It’s a tenuous thing anywhere, but in Baltimore, in these high crime, heavily policed areas, it was even worse. When I came on, there were jokes about, “You know what probable cause is on Edmondson Avenue? You roll by in your radio car and the guy looks at you for two seconds too long.” Probable cause was whatever you thought you could safely lie about when you got into district court.

Then at some point when cocaine hit and the city lost control of a lot of corners and the violence was ratcheted up, there was a real panic on the part of the government. And they basically decided that even that loose idea of what the Fourth Amendment was supposed to mean on a street level, even that was too much. Now all bets were off. Now you didn't even need probable cause. The city council actually passed an ordinance that declared a certain amount of real estate to be drug-free zones. They literally declared maybe a quarter to a third of inner city Baltimore off-limits to its residents, and said that if you were loitering in those areas you were subject to arrest and search. Think about that for a moment: It was a permission for the police to become truly random and arbitrary and to clear streets any way they damn well wanted.

BK: How does race figure into this? It’s a city with a black majority and now a black mayor and black police chief, a substantially black police force.

DS:

(Read the rest of the interview here.)

Also of interest on that same web site (The Marshall Project):

Blue Shield: Did you know police have their own Bill of Rights?

[BoSoxGal]

My trust in millenials is a lot less than 50%. Arseholes who cover their flesh with childish scribblings and pierce their parts are less than mentally deficient - or soccer players which is about the same thing

I'm finding it harder and harder to like you recently, Meade. Many of your posts in recent weeks/months have seemed very prejudiced against people of color and youth.

I know plenty of really wonderful human beings who happen to have tattoos and piercings - including lawyers, doctors, judges, professionals of all ilk. This is 2015 and tattoos and piercings are becoming somewhat mainstream.

Beyond that, there are millions of millenials who have neither.

I think you are becoming a very grumpy, out-of-touch old man.

[MajGenl.Meade]

Becoming? Becoming? Don't sell me short!

Well, my granddaughter has two tattoos - one below an ankle (small sigil JG, our son who died - our daughter and grandson also have that one) and the other on the back of one shoulder. Not my cup of tea but I don't mind. It's the 'sleeves' - arms totally covered with scribble that I find absolutely hilarious - I point and laugh. It does hurt sometimes - must make sure to point when they're not looking.

Please do show me where I've said something prejudiced against "people of color" (oh, come now, Ms. Cumberbatch!). Your criticism of my remarks about hugely fat blimps of pastry is a lot more justified than that.

BTW anyone want to buy a nice house in Kent OH? It's up for sale and we hope to be back in South Africa no later than September 1. Need to take our place once again as members of a tiny minority in a country torn by xenophobic attacks, unemployment, corruption and other fun activities (such as trying to find electricity). It's a great place to go be prejudiced against "people of color" - you don't live long playing that game.

ETC a Freudian slip

[Lord Jim]

have seemed very prejudiced against people of color

I have never once seen Meade post anything that could be remotely interpreted as racist. Do you have a link to what you're talking about?

[BoSoxGal]

I would be thinking of his recent posts concerning Ferguson and Baltimore and if I've misrepresented them I apologize - perhaps it's only that he was criticizing millenials who happened to be people of color.

Please recall that I've defended Meade before against other accusations of same, so I'm not a total jerk. Let's say that his generational perspective just rings very conservative to me and it pushes my bleeding heart liberal buttons.

[rubato]

My trust in millenials is a lot less than 50%. Arseholes who cover their flesh with childish scribblings and pierce their parts are less than mentally deficient - or soccer players which is about the same thing

I feel the same about full-sleeve tattoos as I do about gross obesity; I just feel sad for them. They have made choices which will impair their futures. Neither can be completely remediated.


yrs,
rubato

[rubato]

Becoming? Becoming? Don't sell me short!

Well, my granddaughter has two tattoos - one below an ankle (small sigil JG, our son who died - our daughter and grandson also have that one) and the other on the back of one shoulder. Not my cup of tea but I don't mind. It's the 'sleeves' - arms totally covered with scribble that I find absolutely hilarious - I point and laugh. It does hurt sometimes - must make sure to point when they're not looking.

Please do show me where I've said something prejudiced against "people of color" (oh, come now, Ms. Cumberbatch!). Your criticism of my remarks about hugely fat blimps of pastry is a lot more justified than that.

BTW anyone want to buy a nice house in Kent OH? It's up for sale and we hope to be back in South Africa no later than September 1. Need to take our place once again as members of a tiny majority in a country torn by xenophobic attacks, unemployment, corruption and other fun activities (such as trying to find electricity). It's a great place to go be prejudiced against "people of color" - you don't live long playing that game.

Why are you doing this? You don't actually like people.

I can understand my grandfather's decades of work as a missionary in Africa and Jamaica because he actually liked people, loved them really. But you don't. You don't see the best in people you always see their worst. So what is it? Why?



yrs,
rubato

[Lord Jim]

Good Lord, what a load of pure bat guano from the nastiest misanthrope around here...

[MajGenl.Meade]

I apologize for the word "majority" in a post that intended to say "minority" - I corrected the original but rubato's quote contains the Freudian(?) slip.

BSG - I'm sorry I didn't recognize the code word "millenials" as meaning "people of color". I thought it referred to people born around and shortly after 2001. (Not 2000 which all people of brains know was not the first year of a new millennium). In South Africa the racist code word for black people is "non-swimmers" - they'll be thrilled to have a new one. Of course, those kinds of people will think "Millenial" is a new Afrikaans word for a maid with a sickness.

Your OK BSG and you do have a point in a way - I must confess that when I typed "millenials" I was actually (unconsciously perhaps) assuming white people - it's why I thought of soccer players and not basketball chaps. People of color don't seem to have as many piercings around these parts (or around any of their parts AFAICS). As to tattoos, people of colour with sleeves don't tend to look as if they've had a particularly nasty car accident involving fire as people of pastry do. (Dennis Rodman was a noble exception).

rubnuttos, you've not a clue as to whether or not I like people. (That sentence included 8 redundant words). But taking your question at face value, I miss the people, the kids and the struggle of doing something worthwhile; a struggle that is often against my own tendency to do nothing that involves any real effort. Meanwhile, I will try harder to see some of your posts in a less bad light than they deserve - though that will indeed be a tough job.

[wesw]

rube and meade, just grudgingly, and left handedly acknowledged the humanity and worth, each of the other, I think.

it was beautiful.....