The US police misconduct thread

[Nocturnal Submission]

I must admit that I was unaware of the transfer of military equipment to the police in the US. I've no idea if that happens in the UK or, if it does, to what extent.

[Hot Pepsi]

Aren't they the same issue?

Not necessarily. Many small towns and cities have been gradually shedding population and/or jobs for a long time but the opioid situation is relatively new.

In general, the political response to the opioid crisis is to see it as a health problem whereas the crack crisis was treated as a law enforcement problem. Now part of that is because a lot of people who really care about these things learned from the mistakes of the Reagan era, but a huge part of that difference is that opioid addiction appears to be spread more evenly across racial and class strata whereas crack was heavily concentrated in urban poor and mostly black areas.

[Bruno]

I know a bare handful of serving police officers, and a couple that are no longer working, but apart from two that were friends from school the remainder are all ex-miiitary so please don't take this as a representative sample. Is that kind of progression a thing in America?

From what I can gather it's a thing, but it doesn't seem that precise statistics are kept on it.

[DCI Harry Batt]

I don't think those 10 action steps being collected together like that is intended to persuade people who believe in having police that they should stop believing in it. I don't think persuading is much of a thing really, on that kind of issue. They are things that those of us who want a police-free future should put our efforts into, both on a personal action level and on a persuasion level. Let's do these things, let's encourage others to do them as well. Others don't need to agree with us that a police-free future is a great idea and is achievable, in order for us to work together on these action ideas.

[S. aureus]

From the New York Review of Books article I learned that the police have to make use of the surplus combat equipment within a year of acquiring it. Which is just putting a cherry on top of a pretty dumb idea in the first place.

[Bruno]

I can get behind that, but if we grant that "persuading isn't much of a thing here," you should be doubly interested in not tethering the steps to the desire for a police-free future. "Reforming our perspective and reliance on the police" is more marketable than "Steps Preliminary to Abolishing the Police."

[Bruno]

From the New York Review of Books article I learned that the police have to make use of the surplus combat equipment within a year of acquiring it. Which is just putting a cherry on top of a pretty dumb idea in the first place.

I guess a lot depends on what "make use" means?

(My previous post was in reply to TonTon's)

[Nocturnal Submission]

From the New York Review of Books article I learned that the police have to make use of the surplus combat equipment within a year of acquiring it. Which is just putting a cherry on top of a pretty dumb idea in the first place.

Dear God.

[ursus arctos]

My understanding is that "utilization" in that context means that the equipment is deployed by the police force. This requirement has been cited by advocates challenging grotesquely over-militarised responses by largely rural and suburban police forces, who reportedly fear that they will lose their armored vehicles if they don't roll them out.

For weapons, it seems to be training and firing, not necessarily in an adversarial situation. I would be surprised if those requirements apply to ammunition.

On Greenlander's point, anecdotal evidence (which, as Bruno notes, is all that we have) certainly seems to indicate that a larger proportion of new recruits to civilian forces have served in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere. The most troubling such evidence is of former military who were discharged or found their path to promotion blocked because of their Ramboesque tendencies who were then eagerly hired by local police forces.

[Nefertiti2]

https://twitter.com/naomi_dann/status/1268922183629312003?s=20

[Incandenza]

I've seen Deray and others sharing some 8 point plan as a first step to reforming the police, but it's things like "make use of deadly force a last resort," things that are just wishes and not something that can be meaningfully implemented and tracked. It's like Biden's suggestion to have police shoot people in the leg, and not the chest or the head.

It just feels like the only meaningful change would come from completely disbanding police departments, starting with new departments and radically rethinking what the role of police is in a community, and that's not going to happen.

[Hot Pepsi]

Yes, the article does rather fall short in the "visualizing a police-free future" department. If this is the vital first step then it is an extremely hard one for most people.

There was an article like that in Sojourners by a Yale Divinity student. Lots of nice goals and references to restorative justice, but no detail on how we can possibly get there.

Especially in America where even if we could ban guns tomorrow, there’s be billions of them still out there and plenty of ammo to last a long time.

In every future I can imagine, there will be people who want power over other people and will use violence to get it. Checking that greed and violence doesn’t always require violence, but it does require the rule of law.

I think this is one area where I’m a bad progressive Christian. I don’t think people are “inherently good.”

[Hot Pepsi]

I've seen Deray and others sharing some 8 point plan as a first step to reforming the police, but it's things like "make use of deadly force a last resort," things that are just wishes and not something that can be meaningfully implemented and tracked. It's like Biden's suggestion to have police shoot people in the leg, and not the chest or the head.

It just feels like the only meaningful change would come from completely disbanding police departments, starting with new departments and radically rethinking what the role of police is in a community, and that's not going to happen.

It happened in Camden.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ice-department

But not for the reasons you mentioned. They couldn’t afford the contract they had with the city police, so they got rid of all of it and formed a new unit with the county.

All of the articles I saw about it seem to assume that they need cops to stop the drug problem. Drugs can cause a lot of problems - I saw a list of horrific, insane crimes of people on PCP in Camden - but decriminalizing weed and shifting more resources to treatment would help.

Of course, everyone says that like it’s easy. It’s not easy. But there is no other option. We are not going to arrest and jail our way out of these problems. Keep going the way we’re going isn’t going to restore “law and order,” let alone justice or safety.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Good article in today's Politico on the plethora of law-enforcement choices in the US

[S. aureus]

Especially in America where even if we could ban guns tomorrow, there’s be billions of them still out there and plenty of ammo to last a long time.

Every time I see this kind of thing it gives me a "the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" feeling, and also it seems like a reason to either justify having a paramilitary police or to fail to envision that there may be other effective ways of policing.
I think relatedly, one thing that always shocked/irritated me about Americans, though I've been here long enough that I'm probably used to it and maybe embody it now myself, is the complete acceptance of the homicide and gun violence levels present in the USA as some sort of inescapable natural law.

[Bruno]

I think this is one area where I’m a bad progressive Christian. I don’t think people are “inherently good.”

It's weird to me how that view percolated from Christianity at all.

[Hot Pepsi]

Every time I see this kind of thing it gives me a "the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" feeling, and also it seems like a reason to either justify having a paramilitary police or to fail to envision that there may be other effective ways of policing.
I think relatedly, one thing that always shocked/irritated me about Americans, though I've been here long enough that I'm probably used to it and maybe embody it now myself, is the complete acceptance of the homicide and gun violence levels present in the USA as some sort of inescapable natural law.

I think there’s a lot more that can be done about “bad guys with a gun” than shoot them after they start shooting.

But I suppose in some cases, there isn’t. Or at least, the only thing stopping some people from being violent is the threat of greater violence against them.

For example, I believe that the only thing stopping white supremacists from massacring all the Black protestors is that they know that most of the cops (and or the military), or at least enough of them, would turn on them if they did that. They keep talking about this coming race war, but thankfully most of them are afraid to try to start it. At least so far. It’s hanging by a thread.

I don’t know if stopping that requires a paramilitary force like we have. It doesn’t seem to in the parts of the world that have much lower levels of violent crime.

But it sure as hell doesn’t require a paramilitary force of poorly trained psychotic fuckheads who are accountable to nobody but each other. Nor do we need, at the NRA would have it, lots of untrained, unvetted, unhinged, unaccountable amateurs reading Soldier of Fortune shooting whatever and wherever they feel like.

It’s not a “natural law” that we have this much violence, but I don’t see it shifting much soon.

I have little doubt that if suddenly Britain or Germany or Canada were flooded with cheap weapons, there’d be a lot more murder there too.

But not as much as here. We appear to just be more violent at some deeper level. There’s a hypothesis that Scots-Irish clannish culture and it’s valorization of revenge leapt from Appalachian whites into all parts of America, black and white. There may be something to that.

Or some other hypothesis. The ability of gun manufacturers to buy legislatures and spread their lies unchecked is a big contributor too, no doubt.

Inequality has a lot to do with it too, I’m reliably told. Countries with a lot more abject poverty are not as violent as, for example, St Louis, where the very poor and marginalized live in the shadow of the very rich and powerful. That’s not good for morale, so to speak.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Yes, the article does rather fall short in the "visualizing a police-free future" department. If this is the vital first step then it is an extremely hard one for most people.

I think the article is not quite right in calling it a "vital first step" - it's a vital step, for sure, but actually the actions are part of getting towards that vital step, it's not a pre-requisite for them.

Also worth pointing out that that kind of piece is more about "what we can do together with people" rather than being aimed at "what we can hope elected representatives might do on our behalf".

[Hot Pepsi]

It's weird to me how that view percolated from Christianity at all.

It’s not really Christian at all, but sometimes, even in progressive US scenes, there can be a pressure to not be a Downer Debbie.

A lot less of that sort of thing in the last four years, though. I’m hearing more people talking about how to have faith without hope and so forth.

[Nefertiti2]

You're not "more violent at a deeper level" - Violent crime has steadily decreased. As you point out, you're more unequal. You value human life less, especially Black life, and there has been a dedicated attempt since Reagan at least to take away everything you can from the poor and ensure that the rich get ever richer.

But theories of innateness or "the Scots-Irish clannish culture" are irrelevant. You can read James Baldwin

This was written in 1962

read the whole essay- it's mindlblowing

Crime became real, for example—for the first time—not as a possibility but as the possibility. One would never defeat one’s circumstances by working and saving one’s pennies; one would never, by working, acquire that many pennies, and, besides, the social treatment accorded even the most successful Negroes proved that one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear. It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else—housewives, taxi-drivers, elevator boys, dishwashers, bartenders, lawyers, judges, doctors, and grocers—would never, by the operation of any generous human feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and hostilities. Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or to seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough. There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet.

[Bruno]

Unless someone can come up with a workable way to take millions of guns out of American circulation, we have no choice but to address the underlying reasons for people wanting to use their guns.

[Nefertiti2]

I don’t really understand why the second half of that sentence is dependent on the first.

What percentage of those millions of guns I wonder not are in the hands of people who want to hunt or protect them self people who actively want to kill other people.

And what percentage of those people connect to white nationalists?

https://twitter.com/pramsey342/status/1268964697480425472?s=21

[Hot Pepsi]

You're not "more violent at a deeper level" - Violent crime has steadily decreased. As you point out, you're more unequal. You value human life less, especially Black life, and there has been a dedicated attempt since Reagan at least to take away everything you can from the poor and ensure that the rich get ever richer.

But theories of innateness or "the Scots-Irish clannish culture" are irrelevant. You can read James Baldwin

This was written in 1962

read the whole essay- it's mindlblowing

I have been listening to him lately. Underrated writer.

I think he’s right, but that’s not inconsistent with the the Scots-Irish thing.

Crime as a way to make money and get by is not the same as murdering somebody because they disrespected you.* And a lot of murder in the US is about that kind of shit. Not to mention, all domestic and family violence that leads to murder.


For example:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/n...-rate-nyc.html

“In past decades, feuds arose between gangs over control of drug-selling territory or other illicit businesses. But now beefs often blossom on social media over relatively minor matters — perceived insults or slights, investigators said. That makes the shootings more unpredictable and random and can happen in fast, concentrated bursts, the police said.”

I have read similar stories about Philadelphia, Baltimore and St Louis, but can’t find them.

*But a lot of violence is just about money and power. It’s not personal. It’s strictly business.

There’s also this chilling line in The Counselor, a film about the cartels based on a Cormac McCarthy book. Brad Pitt’s character, sort of a wise cowboy type, tells Michael Fassbender, the eponymous, in-over-his-head lawyer: “Here’s something else for you to think about. The beheadings and the mutilations? That’s just business. You have to keep up appearances. It’s not like there’s some smoldering rage at the bottom of it. Not that their love of bloodshed is insincere.”

[Tactical Genius]

You tell people to hate and fear the disenfranchised, then you send them out strapped in body armour and tooled up with the latest military hardware in streets filled with those same disenfranchised. The shit that happens is as inevitable in Houston as it is in Hebron, in Jacksonville as Jenin, in New York as Nablus.

This is a good point AdHoc, but I seem to be seeing something different here that I have not seen in Israel or during the US riots of the late 60's.
I am seeing the police brutalising white people with no provocation, especially white women and old white people in large numbers, i don't remember this happening before.

As a disclaimer, I wasn't around in the 1960's and what I see of Israel and the west bank etc is through the prism of western media.

[WOM]

I am seeing the police brutalising white people with no provocation, especially white women and old white people in large numbers, i don't remember this happening before.

This. And the press have never been targets like they are now.