Minnesota police: Please help us not shoot you

September 17, 2021 10:24 AM

Minnesota’s Department of Public Safety is offering a “Not-Reaching Pouch.” "It’s a clear plastic pouch ... for storing a driver’s license and insurance information. The idea is that the pouches will help reduce the likelihood of officers panicking and shooting drivers who are reaching for their documents during traffic stops. ... 'We are continually looking for ways to reduce deadly force encounters as these instances can be catastrophic for police officers, and community members,' said DPS Assistant Commissioner Booker Hodges."

"DPS is partnering with Valerie Castile, the mother of slain motorist Philando Castile, to distribute the pouches 'during community events and other contacts with citizens.'" But as Christopher Ingraham explains, "It’s one thing for members of a community disproportionately affected by police violence to devise innovative ways to protect themselves during police encounters. But it feels like another thing entirely for police agencies to begin promoting those solutions as well. In effect, police in Minnesota are saying that the likelihood of officers shooting people for complying with their orders is so high that they recommended drivers carry a special device to prevent that from happening."

The response on Twitter has been less than enthusiastic.

posted by Mr.Know-it-some (88 comments total)

OTOH, this pouch seems like a good idea.

OTOH, it sure seems like a solution for a symptom, but not the actual cause.
posted by nushustu at 10:25 AM on September 17, 2021 [52 favorites]

it sure seems like a solution for a symptom, but not the actual cause.

The decades of women who've had to share "tips to protect yourself from a rapist" amongst themselves welcome you to the club.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:28 AM on September 17, 2021 [208 favorites]

So... given how things've gone in the past, how long before someone gets shot while using one of these & the defense becomes "I thought he was carrying drugs/weapons/weaponized-drugs in it, a dusting of fentanyl could be lethal if absorbed by the fingertips!"
posted by CrystalDave at 10:31 AM on September 17, 2021 [15 favorites]

I'll consider buying a not-reaching pouch after cops get not-reaching restraints that prevent them from pulling their guns.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:38 AM on September 17, 2021 [76 favorites]

as a recent transplant away from Minneapolis this is.... stupid.

Stop shooting brown people is the only policy change the police need to adopt.
posted by djseafood at 10:50 AM on September 17, 2021 [58 favorites]

This country never runs out of ever more twisted & diseased new ways to turn everyone into a criminal the moment they're born. It wasn't enough that you can be stopped & made to show your papers at any time & worse, you're automatically considered guilty of attempted murder just for attempting to comply if you weren't also storing your papers in this special papers jail. I hate it here.
posted by bleep at 10:51 AM on September 17, 2021 [30 favorites]

I've never understood why we can't expect police to assume the risk of giving citizens the benefit of the doubt (aka being innocent) in confrontations rather than just immediately blasting. Protecting society can be risky and if someone believes in that mission, the risk should be worth it. If not, then maybe policing is the wrong vocation for that person.
posted by Godspeed.You!Black.Emperor.Penguin at 10:53 AM on September 17, 2021 [93 favorites]

Since the problem is discrimination based on biology (escalation of force correlated to skin color) a step in the right direction is discrimination based on biology (fire all the antivax cops).

The Venn diagram of antivax and racism seems to have a lot of overlap.
posted by otherchaz at 10:54 AM on September 17, 2021 [14 favorites]

Cops should just write "don't shoot people" on the back of their hands like that Strangers with Candy episode
posted by OverlappingElvis at 10:54 AM on September 17, 2021 [10 favorites]

The decades of women who've had to share "tips to protect yourself from a rapist" amongst themselves welcome you to the club.

Bingpot!
posted by WaterAndPixels at 10:57 AM on September 17, 2021 [6 favorites]

Does this pouch hold a police body cam?
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:58 AM on September 17, 2021 [7 favorites]

Perhaps, instead of putting the driver’s license into the pouch, put the traffic cop’s gun into the pouch and then toss the pouch into the sea.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:04 AM on September 17, 2021 [77 favorites]

That's a fairly novel method of victim-blaming that edges close to outright 'fuck it, kill'em all'
posted by Old'n'Busted at 11:04 AM on September 17, 2021 [24 favorites]

And when this happens again: “Well they weren’t using the pouch, your honor, which I determined was immediately suspicious.”
posted by mochapickle at 11:12 AM on September 17, 2021 [81 favorites]

Besides the ridiculousness of this from a not-addressing-the-problem angle...Isn't it just a terrible idea to have people store their license, registration and and insurance in a plainly visible place. Like isn't this going to make it all the easier to steal your car/identity etc. etc. Are people supposed to put their stuff in this pouch and hang it from the vent every time they get in the car and then put it away every time they get out of the car, just in case the police stop them?
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 11:14 AM on September 17, 2021 [42 favorites]

Next year instead of addressing their own problematic behavior they'll be suggesting we drive see-through cars.
posted by Trent Crimm, The Independent at 11:17 AM on September 17, 2021 [14 favorites]

It’s not just an insane dystopian proposal! It also makes no sense on its own terms because these three documents don’t live together as Cyd Harrell explains:

- a registration is a singular item that's supposed to stay with the car
- an insurance card is associated with a person, so needs to go to any car they drive
- a driver's license is a singular item used as ID in many situations so stays with the person

so you're basically putting the burden on a person of moving small essential items into & out of this weird pouch every time they drive, in order to "make it easier" for you to not shoot them

posted by migurski at 11:18 AM on September 17, 2021 [117 favorites]

OFFICER: License and registration, please.
CITIZEN: OK, I've got them here in my not-reaching pouch.
OFFICER: OK.
CITIZEN: I'm going to reach for them slowly.
OFFICER: OK.
CITIZEN: [reaches slowly]
OFFICER: Oh shit GUN GUN GUN! [empties clip, reloads, empties again]
OFFICER: [weeping] Why didn't they just comply?
posted by The Tensor at 11:19 AM on September 17, 2021 [69 favorites]

What if they didn't carry guns around to enforce "broken taillight" laws?
posted by Cookiebastard at 11:19 AM on September 17, 2021 [38 favorites]

...or you could just not harass and shoot Black people? I mean, it's a thought.
posted by Kitteh at 11:21 AM on September 17, 2021 [17 favorites]

Interesting idea. Let me counter with this: how about any time a cop discharges his firearm in the field for any reason, they are immediately fired without any retirement benefits and forbidden from working for any US police precinct for one year.

Bet it would cut down on the number of police shootings, while still leaving them armed in case they actually do need a weapon.
posted by JDHarper at 11:24 AM on September 17, 2021 [28 favorites]

these three documents don’t live together

But they are presented together during a traffic stop, which is the only possible use that a cop can imagine
posted by OverlappingElvis at 11:27 AM on September 17, 2021 [22 favorites]

You would think if traffic stops were so dangerous they'd figure out ways for cops not to have to do them as much but that's not what cops want. They like doing traffic stops, they like being able to shoot people, they like having to answer to no one, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
posted by bleep at 11:32 AM on September 17, 2021 [19 favorites]

I’m reminded of this feminist chestnut: Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed to Work

The problem isn’t that black people are reaching for their documents. The problem is that police are so racist they are on a hair trigger to believe that black people are all armed and dangerous. I can clearly see the problem here, and it’s not with the people reaching for their documents.

Whoever thought this up, and anyone who supported them, should be fired.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 11:33 AM on September 17, 2021 [26 favorites]

I'm surprised they didn't just go ahead and ink a deal with a skin-whitening cream manufacturer.
posted by klanawa at 11:43 AM on September 17, 2021 [10 favorites]

So they are handing out opaque bags that are the size of a gun?
posted by Catblack at 11:44 AM on September 17, 2021 [6 favorites]

My "Use this to try not to get murdered by trigger-happy cops" document folder is raising a lot of questions already answered by my document folder.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 11:45 AM on September 17, 2021 [12 favorites]

I'm no expert in public safety, but I believe police can just check registration and insurance digitally, and they know all the details as soon as they scan your plates. The only thing they really need is to check your driver's license, and that belongs in your wallet. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader why they insist on verifying easily-outdated paper copies.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 11:50 AM on September 17, 2021 [26 favorites]

Isn't it just a terrible idea to have people store their license, registration and and insurance in a plainly visible place.

And yet, this used to be required, at least for the Registration. I think it's in The Big Sleep where Bogart leans into a parked car, reaches down to the steering wheel, and pulls up the attached Registration, in order to find out who's car it was. When screened with modern audiences, everybody goes "Wha-a-at?" at that point. And DMVs used to supply that info to anybody asking, given the license plate number.
posted by Rash at 11:50 AM on September 17, 2021 [4 favorites]

Cops are so scared they routinely kill people in self-defense, but there were more police deaths by COVID in 2020 than all other causes combined; even as they oppose any protection from this fatal disease.

Other people should take extraordinary measures to keep from dying due to police fear of safety even though delivery drivers, sanitation workers, and construction workers are all far far more dangerous of professions.

It's not about safety, it's about control through intimidation and violence with protection from any consequences.

We shouldn't send cowards out into the world with guns to do violence on behalf of the state. Maybe loggers, steelworkers, or landscapers could perform routine traffic stops without routine state-sanctioned murder, but not these racist cowards.
posted by CPAnarchist at 11:51 AM on September 17, 2021 [85 favorites]

Can't the departments just spend some of their funding on a nice* drone that can go over to the vehicle and pick up whatever it needs to pick up? They could make it really cute with giant baby-animal eyes, and maybe drivers could get a choice, like "do you want the Artoo one that just scans your stuff and beams it over, the UFO one with a little hatch that opens up and out come mini aliens to abduct your papers, or the baby T-Rex where you put your docs in when it roars?" It could boost the Made-in-the-USA drone-making economy! You could do product tie-in drones, or drones sponsored by McDonald's! So many opportunities for synergy, and they're going with clear plastic bags.

* non-killer
posted by trig at 11:56 AM on September 17, 2021 [19 favorites]

As a minnesotan and who has been pulled over a few times, WTF is a registration? They always ask for it in TV and movies, but I've only ever been asked for driver's license and proof of insurance.

(Also this whole thing is appalling.)
posted by paper chromatographologist at 12:01 PM on September 17, 2021 [4 favorites]

I cannot even with this country anymore.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:05 PM on September 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

I've never understood why we can't expect police to assume the risk of giving citizens the benefit of the doubt (aka being innocent) in confrontations rather than just immediately blasting. Protecting society can be risky and if someone believes in that mission, the risk should be worth it. If not, then maybe policing is the wrong vocation for that person.

I have spent a while wondering about this as well. According to family lore, my great-grandfather was a police officer in New York City around the turn of the last century. I don't think he carried a firearm, or if he did, apparently he didn't use it very often. Supposedly it was not uncommon for him to come home from a shift looking a bit worse for wear; it was expected at the time that beat cops would get into it with the local ne'er-do-wells. A certain amount of superficial personal injury was just par for the course. (And, of course, it's not like he wasn't likely dishing it out—I imagine that many police-involved incidents at the time might have ended not with a summons, but with an extrajudicial beating with a billy club in an alley. So we perhaps shouldn't romanticize too much.)

Somewhere, at some point, it's like we decided that policing should be a risk-free profession. This seems a bit crazy on its face.

It would be like if firefighters had just collectively decided at some point that they weren't going into burning buildings anymore, and just stood around on the street watching them burn. Thankfully they don't do that, because that's not the job. Sure, we have lots of protective equipment now that didn't exist in the past, and anything that makes the job less dangerous is good, as long as it doesn't fundamentally stop you from doing the job.

But for some reason, we've decided that it's okay for police officers to neglect their duty to protect the public, because... they're scared?

When did we, as a society, start tolerating that sort of cowardice, and refuse to call it out?
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:06 PM on September 17, 2021 [37 favorites]

WTF is a registration? ... I've only ever been asked for driver's license and proof of insurance.

If you're not a white person they have trouble believing you legitimately own the car you're driving.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:08 PM on September 17, 2021 [33 favorites]

Abolition is the only way forward.
posted by ob1quixote at 12:12 PM on September 17, 2021 [14 favorites]

I think it's in The Big Sleep where Bogart leans into a parked car, reaches down to the steering wheel, and pulls up the attached Registration, in order to find out who's car it was.

This happens in every other episode of Perry Mason, too.
posted by JanetLand at 12:17 PM on September 17, 2021 [4 favorites]

From the article: "The pouches were initially developed by Jackie Carter, a Black woman, following Castile’s shooting."

That's interesting. I still don't think it'd work very well—I can imagine all the ways it would have unintended outcomes.
posted by adamrice at 12:23 PM on September 17, 2021 [3 favorites]

it's like we decided that policing should be a risk-free profession

Watch where you point that "we", please.
posted by hanov3r at 12:24 PM on September 17, 2021 [4 favorites]

> As a minnesotan and who has been pulled over a few times, WTF is a registration? They always ask for it in TV and movies, but I've only ever been asked for driver's license and proof of insurance.

Meanwhile, here in Massachusetts, WTF is "proof of insurance"? Insurance is a pre-requisite for getting the car registered. And no piece of paper is ever going to be current, so the cop is gonna have to look me up in the computer anyway.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 12:24 PM on September 17, 2021 [6 favorites]

It is absolutely fucking wild to me the bizarre contortions and workarounds people will develop to avoid acknowledging that something (in this case, the institution of policing) is bad and wrong. Like I seriously can't even think straight I'm so angry about this, and it's also genuinely fascinating to me because it's so fucking weird, it's like they're in the bargaining stage of grief about their conception of the police as a force for good as opposed to acknowledging that they are agents of white supremacy. It must be exhausting to work so hard to keep convincing yourself of something that isn't true in the face of all the evidence.
posted by an octopus IRL at 12:35 PM on September 17, 2021 [31 favorites]

Seems like a sort of half-assed substitute for "fire police who find contrived reasons to stop black people, and then shoot them."
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 12:36 PM on September 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

WTF is a registration? ... I've only ever been asked for driver's license and proof of insurance

I have literally never been not asked for it.
posted by corb at 12:39 PM on September 17, 2021 [10 favorites]

Someday, in a museum exhibit on how the U.S. became a fascist state, this pouch will sit between a bulletproof children's backpack and a "Thin Blue Line" bumper sticker.
posted by liam665 at 12:56 PM on September 17, 2021 [30 favorites]

I'm no expert in public safety, but I believe police can just check registration and insurance digitally, and they know all the details as soon as they scan your plates.

Very true, at least in my state. The only time I've ever gotten pulled over was when a policeman in a speed trap scanned my plates remotely and found out I had an overdue registration fee (mostly due to a DMV fine for an uninsured vehicle--which I was not insuring because I had SOLD it--that I was fighting, but which made me unable to pay my registration fee online). He followed me off the highway at my exit, pulled me over, and had all that info when he came to my car and I rolled down the window. I didn't have to give him a thing. (I'm a white woman so nothing came of it, either. He told me to pay up and sent me on my way.)
posted by dlugoczaj at 12:59 PM on September 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'm pretty sure the deal with needing to provide insurance/registration/etc when they can just look it up is because it's the relevant jurisdiction's law and another way for them to discretionarily decide who to detain and intimidate. Even if it's not the letter of the law it doesn't matter as long as the cop says they think it is.
posted by CPAnarchist at 1:06 PM on September 17, 2021 [3 favorites]

How about we just abolish the police instead.
posted by skye.dancer at 1:11 PM on September 17, 2021 [21 favorites]

A Black woman, looking for a solution to the epidemic of police violence against people of color: Here's an inexpensive idea that might save at least a few lives. It should not be necessary, but it's something we can do.

A Black woman, whose son was murdered by the police: This is a good idea and could potentially have saved the life of my son.

Numerous other Black people and people of color: I support this idea.

MetaFilter: This is stupid, twisted & diseased, ridiculous, insane, and everyone involved should lose their jobs.

It is absolutely fucking wild to me the bizarre contortions and workarounds people will develop to avoid acknowledging that something (in this case, the institution of policing) is bad and wrong

The company's website directly points out that "there’s no question that black drivers are racially profiled". In a 2019 interview with CNN the inventor said that

[S]he worries more about her son getting pulled over than she did during his time as an Army medic in Afghanistan.
...
“We shouldn’t have to do this,” she said. “But if there is something we can do to take this off the table, if this makes the interaction [between drivers and officers] more favorable, then let’s just do it.”

I'm not in a position to judge whether this is an effective or worthwhile idea. I will leave that to the Black people—particularly Black women in this case—who are trying to reduce the likelihood that they will be murdered by our racist, militarized police. But if you feel differently, here are the contact forms for the company and the related non-profit.
posted by jedicus at 1:14 PM on September 17, 2021 [37 favorites]

Somewhere, at some point, it's like we decided that policing should be a risk-free profession. This seems a bit crazy on its face.

It's actually worse than that: it's that cops decided that their job was an absurdly dangerous profession without really looking into the data carefully and started training themselves to act like absolutely any interaction with the general public might result in the death of the cop or the citizen, and that their standard policies should be to prevent the death of the cop first and the random citizen second.

They think they are very very brave and that the general public is very very dangerous, especially anyone they have mentally tagged as particularly frightening or potentially violent... say, like black men. They tell themselves they are bravely marching in to fight a battle against a general public that wishes to kill them at any time. And in doing so, they create enemies where none might otherwise have existed, leaving the blood of their terrified victims trailing in their wake.
posted by sciatrix at 1:14 PM on September 17, 2021 [50 favorites]

Cops have gone to the Supreme Court to affirm their right to do nothing to help anyone and do anything to hurt anyone. They're not trustworthy. If it wasn't them who were pushing this I would have nothing to say about it.
posted by bleep at 1:21 PM on September 17, 2021 [29 favorites]

jedicus, from the text of the FPP right at the top of this page:

But as Christopher Ingraham explains, "It’s one thing for members of a community disproportionately affected by police violence to devise innovative ways to protect themselves during police encounters. But it feels like another thing entirely for police agencies to begin promoting those solutions as well. In effect, police in Minnesota are saying that the likelihood of officers shooting people for complying with their orders is so high that they recommended drivers carry a special device to prevent that from happening."

I hope you'll consider whether you may not be reading commenters here in good faith.
posted by biogeo at 1:24 PM on September 17, 2021 [51 favorites]

I think it is one thing for a Black woman (whose son was killed by the police) to say: "Here's something we, as Black people, can do to maybe make us less likely to get shot by racist, incompetent, scared police."

It's an entirely OTHER thing for the police to say "Yeah, we can't help but kill people because we get scared when people do *the thing we asked them to do* so maybe y'all should coddle us by using this thing."

One is a desperate attempt to stay alive. The other? That's an abdication of responsibility.
posted by mcduff at 1:24 PM on September 17, 2021 [65 favorites]

At a time when cops being shot in America is at an all-time low…
At a time when it has never been safer to be an American cop…

This feels like abject bullshit and yet one more argument for eliminating qualified immunity.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 1:30 PM on September 17, 2021 [15 favorites]

It's the difference between female-presenting persons organizing hand signals to use to each other so they can protect one another from predatory behavior in a loud music club versus a nightclub actively requiring women to enter only in pairs and have an established "rescue me" signal to demonstrate at the door before they come in.
posted by Scattercat at 1:48 PM on September 17, 2021 [21 favorites]

state farm gave me something like that - i thought it was nice and thoughtful

now i wonder if they're planning on shooting me
posted by pyramid termite at 2:25 PM on September 17, 2021 [7 favorites]

But it feels like another thing entirely for police agencies to begin promoting those solutions as well.

and

It's an entirely OTHER thing for the police to say "Yeah, we can't help but kill people because we get scared when people do *the thing we asked them to do* so maybe y'all should coddle us by using this thing."

That would be a fair point except that the Black woman that created the product and the affiliated majority Black non-profit have been working for over a year to get police departments to be aware of, adopt, and promote the use of the pouch.

I don't think the police departments that have adopted this deserve any particular applause or thanks for it. It is after all pretty much the absolute least they could do to address the massive problem that they are the ongoing cause of. But police being aware of and promoting this thing is the express goal of the Black people who developed it, so I'm not going to excoriate the police for it, either.
posted by jedicus at 2:29 PM on September 17, 2021 [14 favorites]

still plenty other stuff to excoriate them for
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:47 PM on September 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

Oh yes, absolutely.

In any case, I hope that soon this becomes a moot point in Minneapolis, which is set to vote on replacing its police department with something potentially much better.
posted by jedicus at 2:53 PM on September 17, 2021 [4 favorites]

Can you fit your toddler's birth certificate in it?
posted by sebastienbailard at 2:58 PM on September 17, 2021 [3 favorites]

As a minnesotan and who has been pulled over a few times, WTF is a registration? They always ask for it in TV and movies, but I've only ever been asked for driver's license and proof of insurance.

I think Minnesota might have "tabs" instead of a piece of paper. When I lived in Minnesota, I did gather Minnesota doesn't have some piece of paper other states do and that the word "tabs" was somehow involved. (Tags? No idea. I'm also unclear on whether people were just talking about the sticker on the license plate or something else.)
posted by hoyland at 3:16 PM on September 17, 2021

I guess if it saves just one life then it's a success right? I'm not sure how you'd measure that effectively though. Even then it feels very dystopian to have like, specifically-designed equipment issued to black people for them to use whilst interacting with the police because the hope is that it will reduce the number of them that are murdered by police. It's kind of surreal. Like a anti-cop-murder talisman or something. "does it work?" "well, I'M still here so..."
posted by some loser at 3:42 PM on September 17, 2021

Jedicus, you're right. I did post angrily and in haste saying the person who had thought up this idea should be fired. And believe it or not, this is even after I RTFA and noted with interest that it was invented by Jackie Carter, a Black woman, and supported and promoted by Valerie Castile, Philando Castile's mother, after her son was shot. I shouldn't have worded it like that, and I apologize.

However, I still am really angry at the police organizations who do not seem to want to take responsibility for the fact that the reason Black folks are getting shot is that policing is a racist institution in America (and other places--I happen to be throwing stones from the glass house next door, where despite making up less than 5% of the Canadian population, Indigenous people make up 40% of deaths from police shootings). The origins of the problem are the same between our two countries: colonization and institutionalized racism against people of colour. I don't believe anything short of abolition or at least a serious revamping of the entire institution would accomplish fewer deaths from racist policing.

I completely understand the impetus behind wanting to invent something that would stop police shootings, and being convinced that if implemented, it could stop so many deaths of Black folks. I just do not think it's going to work, given that the reason cops shoot Black people isn't because the cop doesn't realize the Black person is reaching for documents, not a gun.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 4:16 PM on September 17, 2021 [16 favorites]

As a minnesotan and who has been pulled over a few times, WTF is a registration? They always ask for it in TV and movies, but I've only ever been asked for driver's license and proof of insurance.

Minnesotan here: When you get your license plate stickers in the mail every year, there's a little card attached to them which has your name, car description, VIN number, address, etc -- this is your proof of registration and you're supposed to be putting that in your glovebox in case a cop asks for it.
posted by AzraelBrown at 4:24 PM on September 17, 2021 [7 favorites]

The decades of women who've had to share "tips to protect yourself from a rapist" amongst themselves welcome you to the club.

I don't think this is a good comparison, not least because it moves a discussion about police violence against Black people—women, men, and nonbinary— to a discussion about more general violence against white women. Nor is it really a good parallel to a situation in which we're talking about state violence against a group.

It's the difference between female-presenting persons organizing hand signals to use to each other so they can protect one another from predatory behavior in a loud music club versus a nightclub actively requiring women to enter only in pairs and have an established "rescue me" signal to demonstrate at the door before they come in.

Nor is this right. The comparison, if one needs to be made, which it doesn't, would involve the nightclub's employees committing acts of violence against the customers without reprisal. We can just talk about Black people getting killed by police without comparing it to anything else. There's no need to insert white experience in order to understand it.
posted by sock poppet at 5:05 PM on September 17, 2021 [11 favorites]

Sock poppet - Your criticism of comparing state violence and general violence is valid. I would only note that not all women are white.
posted by anshuman at 5:34 PM on September 17, 2021 [5 favorites]

'We are continually looking for ways to reduce deadly force encounters as these instances can be catastrophic for police officers, and community members,'

Notice who they mention first.
posted by brundlefly at 6:19 PM on September 17, 2021 [26 favorites]

Sock poppet - Your criticism of comparing state violence and general violence is valid. I would only note that not all women are white.

Yes, and the group of people subject to state violence in the cases the post describes already includes women, which I noted—Black women. The point of the comparison to sexual assault (a threat not only faced by women, while we’re on the subject and arguing nuance) is to include white women specifically in the conversation when it isn’t necessary.
posted by sock poppet at 6:37 PM on September 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

But, yes, sure: bringing up the experiences of white women and non-black women of color in a post about an aspect of Black American experience is an unnecessary diversion of attention.
posted by sock poppet at 6:43 PM on September 17, 2021

I just asked God about this and he told me he made pouches for joeys (baby kangaroos, Yanks).
posted by kozad at 6:58 PM on September 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

Mod note: Just as a general "let's remember who we're arguing with and who we're in solidarity with" reminder, let's try to not fall into the trap of flensing one another over the bullshit that the cop-industrial complex gets up to. It's entirely possible and okay to disagree about fine points without losing track of where the gross points of ideological disagreement are; let's try and avoid context collapse here.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:02 PM on September 17, 2021 [12 favorites]

A Black woman, looking for a solution to the epidemic of police violence against people of color: Here's an inexpensive idea that might save at least a few lives. It should not be necessary, but it's something we can do.

A Black woman, whose son was murdered by the police: This is a good idea and could potentially have saved the life of my son.

Numerous other Black people and people of color: I support this idea.

MetaFilter: This is stupid, twisted & diseased, ridiculous, insane, and everyone involved should lose their jobs.

I don't really think the people who came up with this are to blame, or to blame for asking the police to promote it. It's the lack of contrition from the police while promoting it that really shocks me. To me a correct statement from the police would have been more like...

"We sincerely apologize for having let things become so bad that citizens came up with this idea and asked us to promote it, this is truly of failure of our institution. Feel free to use one, while we work hard and spare no effort to make this issue disappear forever quickly".

.. one can dream.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 7:11 PM on September 17, 2021 [27 favorites]

/puts context in clear plastic bag
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 8:16 PM on September 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'm actually quite surprised by the restraint of the comments in this thread. in the annals stupid bureaucracy to hand out a bag to hold documents that doesn't even have a zipper and call it no reach unquote it's f****** racism. as if this would dispel the fact that a paper folder is not really some sort of bag of holding with a machine gun. talk about the law for a second. it's quite legal to hand out the zipperless bag and hoping to save one life likesome sort of rationale of morality like painting your house with lead in hopes that in the nuclear blast, you'll somehow be shielded. in Michigan we have the most draconian no insurance laws concerning vehicles. believe it's a 200 to $500 fine loss of license up to a year in jail. in Michigan most police cars when they come up behind you and run your plate know the registration know if it has insurance and whatever else they have. just recently happened to me driving and of course since I had a good record and considerations of covid they dismissed the case. I only mention this because the cop was just looking for drugs I knew that and promptly asked him when he came back to the vehicle if he could drive me to my doctor's office, he did. the no insurance law in Michigan is the ticket to pull someone over if you're a police officer.even though it's about myself I consider perfect example of white privilege. if the military can send troops to study gunshot trauma in Flint Michigan then perhaps other cities can send a few of their cops our way to at least show them how it's partially f****** done. and you have to start somewhere right so let's not have police hand out little plastic bags to hold your documents for example here in Flint when the bureaucracy poisoned our f****** water cops are out handing water. when demonstrations came to Flint the police decided to go ahead and join along with the protesters. that's really just two drops in bucket isn't it. when Police use a backhoe to slowly open up a house with a barricaded gunman well they're serious in de-escalating and resolving aviolent situation. somewhere between the perception and the reality something has to give and if it's 23 cents worth of plastic so f****** be it.
posted by clavdivs at 8:19 PM on September 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

So, what are they going to implement to prevent big brave police officers from unloading their weapons into unarmed, barefoot women in pyjamas? (I’m referring to the slaying of Justine Damon Ruszczyk by Mohamed Noor in 2017 here.)

In the <2 years he’d been in the Minneapolis Police Dept, Noor had had three formal complaints against him, including for assaulting a woman while on duty. Two months before he shot Justine, Noor had pointed a gun at the head of a driver he had pulled over for a minor traffic violation.

Even the fact that he’d had all of seven MONTHS’ training (in an MPD ‘fast-track’ program) and was driving around with a loaded weapon blows my mind.

Fuck this whole system, seriously. It’s like the lives of minorities and women mean nothing. This guy could have taken Justine with his bare hands. He had NO reason to open fire on her.

I know this is a slight tangent but as a non-American, your policing terrifies me.
posted by Salamander at 9:01 PM on September 17, 2021 [12 favorites]

And no piece of paper is ever going to be current, so the cop is gonna have to look me up in the computer anyway.

This might vary from state to state but in most places the law is that you must carry up to date proof of insurance when you drive and you can be charged with a crime if you don't.
posted by OverlappingElvis at 9:49 PM on September 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

I’m having a hard time with the logistics here. What does it mean that the bag is “attached to an air vent”? Does it clip onto a vent and hang down? How would it not get in the way of like the radio and climate controls? And you’re supposed to take your driver’s license out of your wallet and put it in the bag when you get into the car, then take your driver’s license out of the bag and put it back into your wallet when you get out of the car?
posted by mr_roboto at 12:09 AM on September 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

I don't think this is a good comparison, not least because it moves a discussion about police violence against Black people—women, men, and nonbinary— to a discussion about more general violence against white women. Nor is it really a good parallel to a situation in which we're talking about state violence against a group.

On the other hand - it does make a connection between two situations where the burden is put upon the victims of violence to take on yet another level of responsibility to protect themselves, instead of placing the burden on the perpetrators of that violence to not do that violence.

Moreover, the original comment did not specify "white women". It simply said "women".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:17 AM on September 18, 2021 [17 favorites]

How come the cops don't already know your insurance, license, and registration information? Couldn't they ask you a couple of questions and find you in their database?
posted by pracowity at 3:53 AM on September 18, 2021 [6 favorites]

This might vary from state to state but in most places the law is that you must carry up to date proof of insurance when you drive and you can be charged with a crime if you don't.

Let’s sing it together: Especially if you’re black….

Cops have discretion. As do judges. As do courts. Which is why every single law is used to disproportionately punish and incarcerate black and brown people.
posted by amanda at 6:44 AM on September 18, 2021 [13 favorites]

I appreciate that Valerie Castile did this in response to the death of her son. I do not think that this pouch would have saved him. Body cameras were touted as a big strategy for police accountability and a lot of good people put a lot of stock in them and they don't work either.

Since Castile himself seems to have been a particularly optimistic, kind and socially motivated man, it would not surprise me if his mother were also particularly kind, optimistic and socially motivated and therefore very ready to see whatever hope there is to be seen in police behavior.

If there is one word for my sense of Minneapolis-St Paul right now, it is corruption, with the accompanying aspect of rot. Things are rotting here. I've lived in Minneapolis since 1998 and there have always been problems with racism, problems with cops, problems with neglect, but what we're going through now is the city's (and the state's, to a lesser degree) attempt to suppress popular, clearly stated citizen calls for reform. This in the context of intense gentrification and the absolute moral failure of several politicians who ran on left-liberal principles.

Right now, Minneapolis has covertly hired (at great expense) several "community" groups specifically to cool out locals if there are demonstrations, police shootings, etc. One of these groups had members hanging out by a north side grocery store (that's the mostly Black side that's gentrifying because it's the last place where there are affordable houses) and brutally beating a customer. Another one of these, hired to provide "services" to the many, many homeless encampments that are all over now, had a member walk into a tent full of donated supplies and spray them with wasp spray, destroying them and rendering the tent unsafe.

There's a lot more - the nominally most progressive city council members working to destroy our last remaining public housing, my own city council member who talks a huge anti-racist game is a big buddy with police and business, the mayor is in the pocket of developers.

And the situation with the cops - the cops are putting it about that they've been "defunded" and therefore can't provide services. Of course, they haven't been defunded. Nothing has changed in their budget. All the lunatic white conservatives - including the broke ones in my neighborhood - are baying to the moon for more money and more cops because "the radicals defunded the police and look how bad everything is".

In my neighborhood, there are literally multiple homeless encampments within a mile radius, one very large and others small but more than just one person. I frequently go out to the alley and see a cardboard or foam nest that shows that someone has been sleeping there, usually accompanied by needles from where they were shooting up. I've seen people shooting up in broad daylight on the street in such an obvious way that even a mind-your-own-business type like me notices. Such low income areas of Minneapolis as are not actively being gentrified are where the city and the police have elected to consolidate the problems of homelessness, prostitution and heroin addiction, while aggressively driving them out elsewhere in favor of condos.

An illustration of how things have gone: When things were merely bad, around the time Jacob Frey was elected, the city decided to put up a lot of fencing along the greenway to prevent homeless people from camping there. On my bike route, I would routinely go past multiple tents under every overpass and I will never forget the day that I was biking past one and someone's little toddler ran out of a tent. After the fences went up, I stopped seeing homeless people there.

Now, years later, poverty, rent rises and abandonment by the city are such that the fences still exist but the city no longer prevents people from climbing over them and camping there again. They concentrate their efforts on driving the homeless out of the richer areas - if you bike from my neighborhood to the rich end of town, there's a cutoff point beyond which there are no tents.

Now, none of this is super public. You either need to see it daily or you need to be plugged in to community activist stuff. I was fortunate enough to find some good people to follow after last summer and so I know a lot more about what's going on than I used to.

Why say all this when the issue is the pouches? Because you need to know what you're dealing with. The police aren't merely a corrupt and unaccountable agency that needs to be reformed; they are the violent and rotten arm of a violent and rotten city government and they will never be reformed while the city operates as it does. They serve a purpose - making the city into a money machine for developers and a playground for regional tech and banking money.

Shooting people is what they do, in short. Shooting people, beating up the homeless and taking their stuff, etc. No amount of pouches will ever challenge that because it's not an accident, it's on purpose.

Do not think that there is anything benign or reform-minded in the metro. Things were not always like this, even when they were bad, but the US economy is a lot more brutal than it used to be and it's producing more brutal politicians and more brutal enforcers.

A pouch really, really isn't going to change things.
posted by Frowner at 7:00 AM on September 18, 2021 [52 favorites]

I think it is a heartbreaking product designed by people who are in a lot of pain and are trying to hold onto a shred of hope. I think it is a terrible idea that portends to solve a problem that isn’t the real problem. It is an amazing art piece on the failure of our society and the shameful inclinations of man.
posted by amanda at 7:11 AM on September 18, 2021 [19 favorites]

(Just to clarify - the "problems of prostitution" are not, like, "doing sex work is bad", it's when you hear pimps yelling at girls or see some very young woman dressed for a rather risque nightclub running down the street in the middle of the day in obvious distress or you see creepy white men hassling women on the street, etc. The problems are problems of street-level, very stigmatized sex work by women who are either economically trapped or coerced, and while my neighborhood has been a neighborhood with street level sex work as long as I've lived here, the violence and obvious distress etc have increased hugely in the past couple of years.)
posted by Frowner at 7:38 AM on September 18, 2021 [17 favorites]

Based on the miscommunication s in this thread, we need a new word for 'non reformist reform'.

There are plenty of these in everyday consumerist USA life, and the context of which institution is endorsing the action matters, as to whether the token has the effect of making an observer realize that the problem is mich bigger than the token can ever hope to solve.

Banning plastic straws or bags instead of banning the construction of new ethane cracker petrochemical plants, for example.

Donating to Louisiana Tribal nations in the wake of climate caused hurricanes, instead of working have their sovereignty over the land and air recognized, as they have requested

Organizing fundraisers for prison visitations, an educational opportunity about the horror of US prisons disguised as a charity

Purchasing air quality monitors for people living in the belly of the US petrochemical corridor, when the desire would be to just enforce the laws of the United States on oil companies.

There are many solutions under capitalism that are consumerist patches to the social order, though, one does get weary of how many people think these tokens are the solution.

On the other hand, if the token is presented in the context of the larger social and political struggle, the token will galvanize someone who hasn't thought about it to take that political position.

Without the token, the majority of people won't ever have the opportunity to conceptualize the need for the token, and that is a larger goal.

If this measure pisses you off, that's part of the purpose, you have been emotionally educated.
posted by eustatic at 9:13 AM on September 18, 2021 [11 favorites]

These things can also be a great trap for bureaucracies. What a sublime/awful thing to have someone have to compile statistics about.
posted by eustatic at 9:25 AM on September 18, 2021

eustatic: "we need a new word for 'non reformist reform'."

Perhaps the phrase you're looking for is "putting lipstick on a pig."
posted by adamrice at 11:34 AM on September 18, 2021

in Michigan we have the most draconian no insurance laws concerning vehicles. believe it's a 200 to $500 fine loss of license up to a year in jail.

it's my understanding that up to a third of michigan drivers are uninsured anyway - i met a guy in detroit 40 years ago who sold a friend of mine fake insurance papers for a "buck" (100 dollars) - i'm sure it's still going on

and of course our insurance system is the most costly in the country and detroit gets charged more than anyone because it's detroit

it's corruption all around and those of us who actually pay for our insurance are the ones who get screwed

the politicians aren't going to fix it any more than they're going to fix the roads

the police sure aren't going to fix it, not when their salary partially depends on it
posted by pyramid termite at 4:13 PM on September 18, 2021

Well, see, Your Honor, his papers weren't in order
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:03 PM on September 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

It’s one thing to hide the silver before a possibly disreputable guest comes into the house, and quite another for the guest himself to suggest it so that he isn’t tempted. I can on one hand think well of Mrs. Castile for trying to come up with a sensible way to stop what happened to her son from happening to others, and also think poorly of the police for getting on board without addressing the central point that they’re not a partner in getting them to stop indiscriminately shooting people. They’re the problem.
posted by gelfin at 12:18 PM on September 19, 2021 [9 favorites]