Investigation of the Chicago Police Department
January 13, 2017 8:29 AM Subscribe
Today, the DOJ released their report on a year-long investigation (PDF) of the Chicago Police Department, finding "reasonable cause to believe that CPD has engaged in a pattern or practice of unreasonable force in violation of the Fourth Amendment and that the deficiencies in CPD’s training, supervision, accountability, and other systems have contributed to that pattern or practice. "
posted by phunniemee at 8:33 AM on January 13, 2017 [16 favorites]
Meant to add to the end of that: IPRA is the Independent Police Review Authority, the group whose sole purpose is supposed to be to make sure complaints about police abuse are investigated fairly.
posted by phunniemee at 8:36 AM on January 13, 2017 [6 favorites]
posted by phunniemee at 8:36 AM on January 13, 2017 [6 favorites]
Policing in America needs to be abolished and rebuilt from the ground up. An impossible task but a worthy goal.
posted by ghharr at 8:40 AM on January 13, 2017 [19 favorites]
posted by ghharr at 8:40 AM on January 13, 2017 [19 favorites]
I'm sure we can expect good follow-through on this report from the DOJ under Attorney General Jeff "Race Traitor" Sessions.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:46 AM on January 13, 2017 [11 favorites]
posted by leotrotsky at 8:46 AM on January 13, 2017 [11 favorites]
The CPD has always been a mob of human garbage. I could tell stories from when I lived there but they make me sad. Fuck em all.
posted by sexyrobot at 8:48 AM on January 13, 2017
posted by sexyrobot at 8:48 AM on January 13, 2017
So what does this mean in seven days?
posted by corb at 8:49 AM on January 13, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by corb at 8:49 AM on January 13, 2017 [3 favorites]
So what does this mean in seven days?
Well, for all intents and purposes, it means something for the people in Chicago to know that they cannot trust their own police force.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:50 AM on January 13, 2017 [9 favorites]
Well, for all intents and purposes, it means something for the people in Chicago to know that they cannot trust their own police force.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:50 AM on January 13, 2017 [9 favorites]
Don't forget our own Guantanamo beyond the reach of law courtesy Chicago PD; Homan Square!
posted by lalochezia at 8:51 AM on January 13, 2017 [5 favorites]
posted by lalochezia at 8:51 AM on January 13, 2017 [5 favorites]
So what does this mean in seven days?
"Speaking on Capitol Hill, Sessions suggested that entire departments filled with good officers could be tarred by the work of individuals and was critical of lawsuits that force reforms.
“These lawsuits undermine the respect for police officers and create an impression that the entire department is not doing their work consistent with fidelity to law and fairness, and we need to be careful before we do that,” Sessions said.
Sessions would not commit to leaving unchanged agreements that are in place when he takes over, though he said he would enforce them until changes are made."
posted by ghharr at 8:51 AM on January 13, 2017 [5 favorites]
"Speaking on Capitol Hill, Sessions suggested that entire departments filled with good officers could be tarred by the work of individuals and was critical of lawsuits that force reforms.
“These lawsuits undermine the respect for police officers and create an impression that the entire department is not doing their work consistent with fidelity to law and fairness, and we need to be careful before we do that,” Sessions said.
Sessions would not commit to leaving unchanged agreements that are in place when he takes over, though he said he would enforce them until changes are made."
posted by ghharr at 8:51 AM on January 13, 2017 [5 favorites]
Supervisors approved this use of force
Barrel of rot from top to bottom.
posted by rtha at 9:06 AM on January 13, 2017 [11 favorites]
Barrel of rot from top to bottom.
posted by rtha at 9:06 AM on January 13, 2017 [11 favorites]
I've had my own horrific encounters with the CPD. As a witness, not a suspect. They need to be dismantled and rebuilt. Illinois PAs, on the other hand, tend to be outstanding.
posted by MarvinTheCat at 9:10 AM on January 13, 2017
posted by MarvinTheCat at 9:10 AM on January 13, 2017
Plus ça change?
posted by symbioid at 9:37 AM on January 13, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by symbioid at 9:37 AM on January 13, 2017 [1 favorite]
I'm going to make myself read the whole thing because it's my city so it's my problem but it's going to take a little while for me to get to that head space.
I know there are problems with police all over but I do think Chicago's situation is uniquely bad, though obviously that's colored by my living with it. I wish I believed anybody at any level of power (other than those organizing within the community) had any interest in actually fixing it rather than trying to cover it up or ignore it.
Despite Sessions being a remarkably vile human being, this is one of those problems that I don't think would be handled any differently no matter the candidate who had won the election; we can tell ourselves otherwise but I think that's the type of liberal self-congratulations that ends up having a straight-up racist evil police force in one of the Bluest cities in the country.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 9:53 AM on January 13, 2017 [5 favorites]
I know there are problems with police all over but I do think Chicago's situation is uniquely bad, though obviously that's colored by my living with it. I wish I believed anybody at any level of power (other than those organizing within the community) had any interest in actually fixing it rather than trying to cover it up or ignore it.
Despite Sessions being a remarkably vile human being, this is one of those problems that I don't think would be handled any differently no matter the candidate who had won the election; we can tell ourselves otherwise but I think that's the type of liberal self-congratulations that ends up having a straight-up racist evil police force in one of the Bluest cities in the country.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 9:53 AM on January 13, 2017 [5 favorites]
"Speaking on Capitol Hill, Sessions suggested that entire departments filled with good officers could be tarred by the work of individuals
Once again, "90% of cops give all the rest a bad name."
And as I've said before, these alleged "good cops" should feel compelled to clear their reputations by actively working against such corruption.
Sh'yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:54 AM on January 13, 2017 [14 favorites]
Once again, "90% of cops give all the rest a bad name."
And as I've said before, these alleged "good cops" should feel compelled to clear their reputations by actively working against such corruption.
Sh'yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:54 AM on January 13, 2017 [14 favorites]
Here's a shorter fact sheet from DOJ, should you prefer.
posted by me3dia at 9:57 AM on January 13, 2017 [5 favorites]
posted by me3dia at 9:57 AM on January 13, 2017 [5 favorites]
Black youths in Chicago told DOJ that officers called them "nigger," "animal," "piece of shit." Chicago officers told DOJ that this is true.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:14 AM on January 13, 2017 [5 favorites]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:14 AM on January 13, 2017 [5 favorites]
The CPD get away with this because both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun Times are completely in the bag with the Fraternal Order of Police.
In October there was a big story about a female police officer getting beaten up and being afraid to fire her weapon because she feared investigation. This was a huge national news story with zero critical local reporting.
The full story was that she was grappling with a suspect, along with two other officers, on a public street in the middle of the day. There is pretty much zero allowance for her to ever fire her weapon in that scenario because she would be recklessly endangering her fellow officers and the general public. Yet this was never mentioned in the press, not mentioned by the police chief and completely ignored by the FOP spokesperson who is the primary news media source.
In August, after another bad cop shooting, there was a big national news story tiggered by a Sun Time story about Chicago gangs having a meeting where they were discussing assassinating police using a high powered sniper rifle. This was just a few days after a cop shooting an unarmed kid in the back. Another national story with no critical reporting and zero follow up. There is simply no way the police wouldn't instantly act on the intelligence of an organized conspiracy to assassinate cops. Last month there were recent huge gang busts and convictions and there was no mention at all of the cop killing conspiracy.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I will NEVER call the Chicago Police Department. And I am white, well off and don't even jaywalk.
posted by srboisvert at 10:48 AM on January 13, 2017 [13 favorites]
In October there was a big story about a female police officer getting beaten up and being afraid to fire her weapon because she feared investigation. This was a huge national news story with zero critical local reporting.
The full story was that she was grappling with a suspect, along with two other officers, on a public street in the middle of the day. There is pretty much zero allowance for her to ever fire her weapon in that scenario because she would be recklessly endangering her fellow officers and the general public. Yet this was never mentioned in the press, not mentioned by the police chief and completely ignored by the FOP spokesperson who is the primary news media source.
In August, after another bad cop shooting, there was a big national news story tiggered by a Sun Time story about Chicago gangs having a meeting where they were discussing assassinating police using a high powered sniper rifle. This was just a few days after a cop shooting an unarmed kid in the back. Another national story with no critical reporting and zero follow up. There is simply no way the police wouldn't instantly act on the intelligence of an organized conspiracy to assassinate cops. Last month there were recent huge gang busts and convictions and there was no mention at all of the cop killing conspiracy.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I will NEVER call the Chicago Police Department. And I am white, well off and don't even jaywalk.
posted by srboisvert at 10:48 AM on January 13, 2017 [13 favorites]
Sincere question, in what ways, if any, would we be worse off if we completely abolished the institution of police
posted by beerperson at 10:52 AM on January 13, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by beerperson at 10:52 AM on January 13, 2017 [3 favorites]
If we didn't have police, we might instead have paramilitary organisations with no oversight patrolling our streets.
Hey, wait a minute.
posted by tobascodagama at 11:11 AM on January 13, 2017 [14 favorites]
Hey, wait a minute.
posted by tobascodagama at 11:11 AM on January 13, 2017 [14 favorites]
Sincere question, in what ways, if any, would we be worse off if we completely abolished the institution of police
There would be many but before considering abolishing police perhaps notice that the rest of the OECD has police and they seem be about 1/1000th as awful and at least 10X as skilled as the Chicago Police Department (and for the most part they get paid less).
posted by srboisvert at 11:29 AM on January 13, 2017 [1 favorite]
There would be many but before considering abolishing police perhaps notice that the rest of the OECD has police and they seem be about 1/1000th as awful and at least 10X as skilled as the Chicago Police Department (and for the most part they get paid less).
posted by srboisvert at 11:29 AM on January 13, 2017 [1 favorite]
Look guys it’s just that cops are bad! It’s got nothing to do with politics. Racism is something that just happens. Because stupid people. And rules. And stuff.
*sigh*
C’mon. Really? We’re going to dance around this topic again? Trot out our confirmation bias? Play authority appeal? Again? Make little points of law as though the brass, back room players and corporations give a toss? How many of them are or have lawyers at their disposal to make the law they need? We’re gonna pretend peer pressure and little Eichmanns don’t exist. Play the “soldiers/cops are wrong because they could stop wars by individual action” blame game but look the other way at people who work at Wal-Mart or keep driving cars, using the petroleum infrastructure, etc.
The same failure to see the forest for the tree parasympathetic “gee if all those evil bastard hunters only stopped killing animals, now excuse me while I go develop hundreds of acres of pristine forestland for more condos” bullshit? I’m not a social psychologist but can we stipulate (IANAL) that such a thing exists?
We noticed it’s racism and we’re going to put that on every individual cop as a participant as though racism is not a learned behavior and its motivation is self-sustaining.
Really?
It’s not “racism” that makes this happen. This is not a boat accident It wasn’t any propeller. It wasn’t any coral reef. And it wasn’t Jack the Ripper…
It’s not a policing problem (or rather, policing is only a symptom)
Racism is and always was an excuse for profit making.
And we’re gonna perpetuate it on and on so we can point to some scapegoat bad guys and say “shame on you” and feel good about ourselves while the underlying causes just roll on.
To wit:
“The CPD has always been a mob of human garbage. I could tell stories from when I lived there but they make me sad. Fuck em all.”
I get the anger here. And it’s righteous, no worries. Not what I’m describing tho.
The pattern of this thinking though completely ignores the big picture reality of WHY.
Any cop – you reading this, if you were a police officer – winds up with the same sort of professional banality. By necessity. Otherwise you can’t be a cop.
(“Officers were ordered to give those statements or face the threat of losing their jobs, but under long-standing legal precedent, the statements cannot be used against them in criminal proceedings.”)
And indeed, plenty of people aren’t. Cops that is. And many people are ex-cops.
But again – why? Why would a police officer be given those kinds of orders? Why would people who would accept that state of affairs be hired and last while others who won’t be weeded out by the higher ups? What’s the motivation? Just racism?
You can’t just hate and kill black people and make money off that alone. Hell, even the holocaust was (apart from the zealots, madmen and other useful idiots) a robbery.
I’ve got this crazy tinfoil hat conspiracy theory that somehow cheap labor is exploited by industry that pays off politicians to maintain a race based wage gap that displaces socio-economic damage off big business and into neighborhoods where it collapses social structures because the tax structure benefits amalgamation and allows for corporate predation through privatization by showing public services as “failing” and that one of the instruments that politicians and businesses use to maintain social disparity is police union officials and police brass.
The easiest method of maintaining that disparity is through obvious, but superficial, differences like skin color or language or social indicators (long hair, say, in the 60’s or shabby clothes or language patterns).
I know what you’re saying, apart from “Smedlyman’s views don’t conform to my world outlook therefore he is wrong even though his point escapes me” – that there would be some kind of pattern here other than only Republicans being racist because racism. If it wasn’t Chicago we were talking about and if Emmanuel wasn’t a Democrat.
Well, and Daley.
And Sawyer.
And Washington
And Byrne, Bilandic, Daley (senior)…uh
Here:
60 minutes circa 2008
60 minutes 2017
Eight or nine-odd years, anything different? At all?
What’s the difference between drug dealers and pharmaceutical companies? Drug dealers don’t have to lobby for legislation.
It’s the same thing here. Same pattern. An existing order is here that oppresses one group but allows another to openly profit based on a legal-political expediency.
Or do we not think drug dealers (and for that matter liquor sellers going back to prohibition) don’t have their hand in city politics?
And if the bad guy side of the fence has people on the payroll, how much more so does the legal side do it’s politicking and lobbying and fundraising to make laws that maximize THEIR profits?
And under what environment do they make the most profit you ask? (If you have the attention span – TL;DR – an individual can only do so much damage or deliver so much relief no matter how good or evil they are. A system, on the other hand…)
Maybe it’s a complex point. Or to be fair, and as is admittedly often the case, I state it poorly.
Chicago is a uniquely racist city. One block is gentrified. Step across a street and it’s the “wrong side of the tracks” Why?
Why would Chicago be so segregated? Racism just happened? The cops are just - evil! Wake up. Spend more than a half second reading something that makes you feel good and confirms what you already know.
Tens, hundreds, thousands of black folk were smuggled into Chicago in the Civil War era.
That didn’t just happen. Yes there was a great deal of principle involved by individuals. Yes some very good people (Republicans at the time) who believed slavery was wrong created the underground railroad. But it wasn’t principled kind hearted individuals one at a time.
Consider the LaQuan McDonald shooting – one cop goes to help him. Solid. Good for that cop. The mathematics of the social reality though dictate that eventually it happens again and no one helps and that’s the new face of the egregious situation we find ourselves in and someone else’s name gets plugged into the headlines and people ask why the cops didn’t help THAT one.
One person can save another. One person can’t fight an entire order. One northerner helping one escaped black person is great. But the South, in this example, had the entire criminal justice system dedicated to maintaining profit and control and in the first decades following the Civil War laws were passed so anything a newly freed slave did was a “crime.”
And you can’t ship 5000 families thousands of miles through fugitive slave patrols – no matter how altruistic you are. Logistics don’t care how nice you are. Economics don’t care how heroic you are, you have to eat. You don’t make money enough to live just being nice and smuggling absolutely destitute people to freedom.
And yet, thousands upon thousands of black people arrived by train. All on the QT.
Strange, innit?
Big businessmen like railroad tycoons were apparently fine with being part of a massive conspiracy to freight thousands and thousands of people for years by Pullman cars - out of the goodness of their hearts?
We know it was illegal for blacks to leave the south because it made it hard for plantation owners to exploit their labor, but gee, why would northern businessmen want a massive influx of cheap labor? Kinda answers itself, no?
Why would business further want to control political access and foster division between white workers and black workers? Why would (northern) business want to further control access to public services, particularly police services, considering laws and policing in the south?
Here’s a good read on the topic
In the past northern prisons forced their inmates to labor for the profit of private companies. And there are still private prisons, so a lot of them still do. But somewhere tycoons figured out you don’t need a prison, you just need to isolate people in neighborhoods (which is why Chicago is such a patchwork quilt, for good and ill).
But it’s even better if you can isolate them mentally. And so – racism. Division.
“Racism is the lynchpin that holds American capitalism together despite all its inequality and misery.”
The politics of exclusion and division dominates the economics of labor exploitation.
This drives police department policies because those policies are driven by political power which is driven by moneyed interests that exploit labor.
It’s in their interests to dichotomize people to do this and the easiest way to do that is to make one element suffer. To do that, you cause them pain. Where people notice that pain and take action you use those that do the act as scapegoats and pretend the motivations for it are arbitrary (and yet self-sustaining somehow).
Or, a more familiar tune we all know: privatize profit, socialize loss.
Banks too big to fail, so the government bails them out and people lose their jobs and get kicked out of their homes
We go to war, costs the government billions, thousands of soldiers lives (who are conveniently blamed for the war), tens or hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, and the contractors reap profits.
Privatize profit, socialize loss.
It’s that simple.
Same with the drug thing. There' are "good" drugs and "bad" drugs. Gangs bad. Pharma companies good. Both make profits and benefit from the drug laws. One gets a war, the other gets subsidies. Laws demonize one and mandate the other. We have the world’s largest prison (and asset seizure) system and the worst healthcare system in the developed world. By accident? Just fell into that pattern?
Next time you see a police shooting or beating of a minority ask yourself who benefits from the "demonization" side of the street. And ask yourself who benefits from police being defended from the results of those actions. What is it they're protecting that is protecting them?
We know who bears the costs. (Chicago has paid out over $521 million in settlements and legal fees due to police violence, misconduct, and abuse over the past 10 years alone)
I know it sounds like I’m all over the map above when you look at the details.
But it’s just this simple principle that encompasses all that. An expansion on “war is a racket” if you like but from the flip side of that perspective - “The time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets” - Baron Rothschild
Who benefits? And if the time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets, why couldn’t you manipulate events so there is blood in the streets while deflecting the risk to yourself?
Again – worst bloodshed in Chicago in 18 years. It’s not because some individuals are racist or the police are all genetically predisposed to being thugs. You get (60 minutes transcript) some scapegoats while Emanuel (et.al) gets reelected and gets paid.
Think that was by accident or random conflux of events?
Keep pissing on ALL the cops for not being “good”
or honest (Spalding and Echeverria) or fighting the system while ignoring the realities of their environment
and then go keep supporting the same system that maintains the economic status quo that drives police policy.
And things will NEVER change.
You have to attack the root. Use an oar instead of a straw. Burn the tall grass. To spout some cliches.
Divide and conquer is an old, old tactic. There’s always money to be made when someone says “let’s you and him fight.” Always a diversion.
It’s constantly a surprise to me that people don’t think of it, recognize it whenever there’s a conflict - who benefits and who pays?
Maybe my labor exploitation through division tinfoil hat theory is all wrong.
Maybe they're all bad apples.
So ask yourself who benefits from incentivizing bad behavior, normalizing misconduct and creating a dysfunctional police culture?
Because we know who pays and who doesn't (or at least the types of people who pay and who don't, and one in particular who doesn't)
And, again, we shouldn’t expect the police to be something they’re not.
Before considering eliminating policing, consider eliminating the circumstances that dictate who controls them and why.
posted by Smedleyman at 11:33 AM on January 13, 2017 [6 favorites]
*sigh*
C’mon. Really? We’re going to dance around this topic again? Trot out our confirmation bias? Play authority appeal? Again? Make little points of law as though the brass, back room players and corporations give a toss? How many of them are or have lawyers at their disposal to make the law they need? We’re gonna pretend peer pressure and little Eichmanns don’t exist. Play the “soldiers/cops are wrong because they could stop wars by individual action” blame game but look the other way at people who work at Wal-Mart or keep driving cars, using the petroleum infrastructure, etc.
The same failure to see the forest for the tree parasympathetic “gee if all those evil bastard hunters only stopped killing animals, now excuse me while I go develop hundreds of acres of pristine forestland for more condos” bullshit? I’m not a social psychologist but can we stipulate (IANAL) that such a thing exists?
We noticed it’s racism and we’re going to put that on every individual cop as a participant as though racism is not a learned behavior and its motivation is self-sustaining.
Really?
It’s not “racism” that makes this happen. This is not a boat accident It wasn’t any propeller. It wasn’t any coral reef. And it wasn’t Jack the Ripper…
It’s not a policing problem (or rather, policing is only a symptom)
Racism is and always was an excuse for profit making.
And we’re gonna perpetuate it on and on so we can point to some scapegoat bad guys and say “shame on you” and feel good about ourselves while the underlying causes just roll on.
To wit:
“The CPD has always been a mob of human garbage. I could tell stories from when I lived there but they make me sad. Fuck em all.”
I get the anger here. And it’s righteous, no worries. Not what I’m describing tho.
The pattern of this thinking though completely ignores the big picture reality of WHY.
Any cop – you reading this, if you were a police officer – winds up with the same sort of professional banality. By necessity. Otherwise you can’t be a cop.
(“Officers were ordered to give those statements or face the threat of losing their jobs, but under long-standing legal precedent, the statements cannot be used against them in criminal proceedings.”)
And indeed, plenty of people aren’t. Cops that is. And many people are ex-cops.
But again – why? Why would a police officer be given those kinds of orders? Why would people who would accept that state of affairs be hired and last while others who won’t be weeded out by the higher ups? What’s the motivation? Just racism?
You can’t just hate and kill black people and make money off that alone. Hell, even the holocaust was (apart from the zealots, madmen and other useful idiots) a robbery.
I’ve got this crazy tinfoil hat conspiracy theory that somehow cheap labor is exploited by industry that pays off politicians to maintain a race based wage gap that displaces socio-economic damage off big business and into neighborhoods where it collapses social structures because the tax structure benefits amalgamation and allows for corporate predation through privatization by showing public services as “failing” and that one of the instruments that politicians and businesses use to maintain social disparity is police union officials and police brass.
The easiest method of maintaining that disparity is through obvious, but superficial, differences like skin color or language or social indicators (long hair, say, in the 60’s or shabby clothes or language patterns).
I know what you’re saying, apart from “Smedlyman’s views don’t conform to my world outlook therefore he is wrong even though his point escapes me” – that there would be some kind of pattern here other than only Republicans being racist because racism. If it wasn’t Chicago we were talking about and if Emmanuel wasn’t a Democrat.
Well, and Daley.
And Sawyer.
And Washington
And Byrne, Bilandic, Daley (senior)…uh
Here:
60 minutes circa 2008
60 minutes 2017
Eight or nine-odd years, anything different? At all?
What’s the difference between drug dealers and pharmaceutical companies? Drug dealers don’t have to lobby for legislation.
It’s the same thing here. Same pattern. An existing order is here that oppresses one group but allows another to openly profit based on a legal-political expediency.
Or do we not think drug dealers (and for that matter liquor sellers going back to prohibition) don’t have their hand in city politics?
And if the bad guy side of the fence has people on the payroll, how much more so does the legal side do it’s politicking and lobbying and fundraising to make laws that maximize THEIR profits?
And under what environment do they make the most profit you ask? (If you have the attention span – TL;DR – an individual can only do so much damage or deliver so much relief no matter how good or evil they are. A system, on the other hand…)
Maybe it’s a complex point. Or to be fair, and as is admittedly often the case, I state it poorly.
Chicago is a uniquely racist city. One block is gentrified. Step across a street and it’s the “wrong side of the tracks” Why?
Why would Chicago be so segregated? Racism just happened? The cops are just - evil! Wake up. Spend more than a half second reading something that makes you feel good and confirms what you already know.
Tens, hundreds, thousands of black folk were smuggled into Chicago in the Civil War era.
That didn’t just happen. Yes there was a great deal of principle involved by individuals. Yes some very good people (Republicans at the time) who believed slavery was wrong created the underground railroad. But it wasn’t principled kind hearted individuals one at a time.
Consider the LaQuan McDonald shooting – one cop goes to help him. Solid. Good for that cop. The mathematics of the social reality though dictate that eventually it happens again and no one helps and that’s the new face of the egregious situation we find ourselves in and someone else’s name gets plugged into the headlines and people ask why the cops didn’t help THAT one.
One person can save another. One person can’t fight an entire order. One northerner helping one escaped black person is great. But the South, in this example, had the entire criminal justice system dedicated to maintaining profit and control and in the first decades following the Civil War laws were passed so anything a newly freed slave did was a “crime.”
And you can’t ship 5000 families thousands of miles through fugitive slave patrols – no matter how altruistic you are. Logistics don’t care how nice you are. Economics don’t care how heroic you are, you have to eat. You don’t make money enough to live just being nice and smuggling absolutely destitute people to freedom.
And yet, thousands upon thousands of black people arrived by train. All on the QT.
Strange, innit?
Big businessmen like railroad tycoons were apparently fine with being part of a massive conspiracy to freight thousands and thousands of people for years by Pullman cars - out of the goodness of their hearts?
We know it was illegal for blacks to leave the south because it made it hard for plantation owners to exploit their labor, but gee, why would northern businessmen want a massive influx of cheap labor? Kinda answers itself, no?
Why would business further want to control political access and foster division between white workers and black workers? Why would (northern) business want to further control access to public services, particularly police services, considering laws and policing in the south?
Here’s a good read on the topic
In the past northern prisons forced their inmates to labor for the profit of private companies. And there are still private prisons, so a lot of them still do. But somewhere tycoons figured out you don’t need a prison, you just need to isolate people in neighborhoods (which is why Chicago is such a patchwork quilt, for good and ill).
But it’s even better if you can isolate them mentally. And so – racism. Division.
“Racism is the lynchpin that holds American capitalism together despite all its inequality and misery.”
The politics of exclusion and division dominates the economics of labor exploitation.
This drives police department policies because those policies are driven by political power which is driven by moneyed interests that exploit labor.
It’s in their interests to dichotomize people to do this and the easiest way to do that is to make one element suffer. To do that, you cause them pain. Where people notice that pain and take action you use those that do the act as scapegoats and pretend the motivations for it are arbitrary (and yet self-sustaining somehow).
Or, a more familiar tune we all know: privatize profit, socialize loss.
Banks too big to fail, so the government bails them out and people lose their jobs and get kicked out of their homes
We go to war, costs the government billions, thousands of soldiers lives (who are conveniently blamed for the war), tens or hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, and the contractors reap profits.
Privatize profit, socialize loss.
It’s that simple.
Same with the drug thing. There' are "good" drugs and "bad" drugs. Gangs bad. Pharma companies good. Both make profits and benefit from the drug laws. One gets a war, the other gets subsidies. Laws demonize one and mandate the other. We have the world’s largest prison (and asset seizure) system and the worst healthcare system in the developed world. By accident? Just fell into that pattern?
Next time you see a police shooting or beating of a minority ask yourself who benefits from the "demonization" side of the street. And ask yourself who benefits from police being defended from the results of those actions. What is it they're protecting that is protecting them?
We know who bears the costs. (Chicago has paid out over $521 million in settlements and legal fees due to police violence, misconduct, and abuse over the past 10 years alone)
I know it sounds like I’m all over the map above when you look at the details.
But it’s just this simple principle that encompasses all that. An expansion on “war is a racket” if you like but from the flip side of that perspective - “The time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets” - Baron Rothschild
Who benefits? And if the time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets, why couldn’t you manipulate events so there is blood in the streets while deflecting the risk to yourself?
Again – worst bloodshed in Chicago in 18 years. It’s not because some individuals are racist or the police are all genetically predisposed to being thugs. You get (60 minutes transcript) some scapegoats while Emanuel (et.al) gets reelected and gets paid.
Think that was by accident or random conflux of events?
Keep pissing on ALL the cops for not being “good”
or honest (Spalding and Echeverria) or fighting the system while ignoring the realities of their environment
and then go keep supporting the same system that maintains the economic status quo that drives police policy.
And things will NEVER change.
You have to attack the root. Use an oar instead of a straw. Burn the tall grass. To spout some cliches.
Divide and conquer is an old, old tactic. There’s always money to be made when someone says “let’s you and him fight.” Always a diversion.
It’s constantly a surprise to me that people don’t think of it, recognize it whenever there’s a conflict - who benefits and who pays?
Maybe my labor exploitation through division tinfoil hat theory is all wrong.
Maybe they're all bad apples.
So ask yourself who benefits from incentivizing bad behavior, normalizing misconduct and creating a dysfunctional police culture?
Because we know who pays and who doesn't (or at least the types of people who pay and who don't, and one in particular who doesn't)
And, again, we shouldn’t expect the police to be something they’re not.
Before considering eliminating policing, consider eliminating the circumstances that dictate who controls them and why.
posted by Smedleyman at 11:33 AM on January 13, 2017 [6 favorites]
Speaking on Capitol Hill, Sessions suggested that entire departments filled with good officers could be tarred by the work of individuals and was critical of lawsuits that force reforms.
Well, maybe, but there's little doubt these good officers know someone, or several, who is as dirty as the day is long, and keeps his or her trap shut about it. (Or, you know, watches a totally incriminating video and declares, "Looks okay to me!")
Looking the other way is still corruption even if they aren't specifically getting paid to do it.
posted by Gelatin at 12:02 PM on January 13, 2017 [2 favorites]
Well, maybe, but there's little doubt these good officers know someone, or several, who is as dirty as the day is long, and keeps his or her trap shut about it. (Or, you know, watches a totally incriminating video and declares, "Looks okay to me!")
Looking the other way is still corruption even if they aren't specifically getting paid to do it.
posted by Gelatin at 12:02 PM on January 13, 2017 [2 favorites]
Entire departments filled with good officers will do well to hold themselves in contrast by condemning these actions and the various attitudes that produce them. Protecting their friends inappropriately will be the thing that tars them. Help the accused officers' families, but be clear about what isn't allowed in the course of doing their admittedly difficult jobs.
Love is the death of duty.
posted by amtho at 12:20 PM on January 13, 2017 [2 favorites]
Love is the death of duty.
posted by amtho at 12:20 PM on January 13, 2017 [2 favorites]
I love the question-begging implicit in the bad-apples trope. If there are only a few bad apples then why are the good cops afraid to speak out? If they're not afraid and they're not speaking out, in what sense can they be good?
posted by klanawa at 12:51 PM on January 13, 2017 [5 favorites]
posted by klanawa at 12:51 PM on January 13, 2017 [5 favorites]
Klanawa, in the interest of trying to understand the whole problem a little more completely, I'll guess this: the larger police community may believe that the lay population at large implicitly "believes" the bad apples trope, even though the larger police community does not (at least, not publicly, and not as it applies to their friends). So, to prevent an erroneous false impression of pervasive badness, they'd prefer to hide the bad apples, because the larger police community does not believe that a few bad apples really signify a larger problem. They are, in this scenario, saving the larger populace from an erroneous impression.
To fight this particular mindset, we'd need to convince the larger police population that either there really was a larger problem, or that there was likely a larger problem, or on the other hand that the population at large has a more nuanced view of the situation than they are given credit for.
Or, what's more likely to happen, people will ignore this kind of social thinking problem entirely and try address this through brute force / appeal to authority / emotional argument approaches.
posted by amtho at 12:56 PM on January 13, 2017
To fight this particular mindset, we'd need to convince the larger police population that either there really was a larger problem, or that there was likely a larger problem, or on the other hand that the population at large has a more nuanced view of the situation than they are given credit for.
Or, what's more likely to happen, people will ignore this kind of social thinking problem entirely and try address this through brute force / appeal to authority / emotional argument approaches.
posted by amtho at 12:56 PM on January 13, 2017
Maybe my labor exploitation through division tinfoil hat theory is all wrong.
Maybe they're all bad apples.
Your problem Smedleyman, is that you present your case as if these two things are mutually exclusive and that this conspiracy evolved and is actively managed by people who are "in" on it.
I think that both things are true. In some cases, you have racist cops who were raised by racist families to believe racist things. Were your theory not true, that guy either wouldn't ever become or wouldn't stay a cop for long. What I suggest is that the state of affairs is what you present but it's not an outcome planned for. Rather, it's the outcome of the uncountable incentives in our system combined with some bad actors. In some cases, you have evil people doing evil things and creating incentives for these evil things. Sometimes it's just people setting up a program that rewards people for doing thing that seem great but have unforeseen consequences that ripple out into the world.
For example, you have a bunch of people of principle who want to smuggle slaves out of the south. If I owned a railroad and some folks tell me that they want to pay me to take a little risk and help smuggle out some slaves, you can bet that I would absolutely help those people out. Do the right thing and make money doing it! Now I've got a bunch of escaped slaves that need jobs and wouldn't you know it, I want to give them jobs and it just so happens that they're happy getting paid less than the people who are already here! Win-win! And I don't mean that sarcastically, I could absolutely believe that some Northern factory owners saw it that way and some of those escaped slaves were thrilled with it too. Or course, some were racist and only begrudgingly gave them jobs, the allure of increased profits overcoming any distaste in hiring black workers.
And that one thing, even with everyone doing things for the right reasons, sets up generations of de-facto segregation.
So really you've got this giant conspiracy that happened by accident. No one coordinated this, no one planned it and no one maintains it. But when you take the aggregate effect of everything involved, this is the outcome. Some people made decisions that had good effects, some bad, some both but never with a goal of supporting or fighting this conspiracy. Most of the incentives that drive this are subtle and their connection to the larger conspiracy isn't clear. And it's not like I think about how my personal choice of where to live will affect race relations and I couldn't figure out what all the effects would be if I wanted to.
So the only piece that I really disagree with is this idea that it's some kind of active conspiracy with active conspirators who understand what they're conspiring to do. Are there individual actors who actively prop that system up? Yes, but they do it for their own benefit and not to support the goals of the conspiracy and certainly not in coordination with others.
posted by VTX at 1:31 PM on January 13, 2017 [4 favorites]
Maybe they're all bad apples.
Your problem Smedleyman, is that you present your case as if these two things are mutually exclusive and that this conspiracy evolved and is actively managed by people who are "in" on it.
I think that both things are true. In some cases, you have racist cops who were raised by racist families to believe racist things. Were your theory not true, that guy either wouldn't ever become or wouldn't stay a cop for long. What I suggest is that the state of affairs is what you present but it's not an outcome planned for. Rather, it's the outcome of the uncountable incentives in our system combined with some bad actors. In some cases, you have evil people doing evil things and creating incentives for these evil things. Sometimes it's just people setting up a program that rewards people for doing thing that seem great but have unforeseen consequences that ripple out into the world.
For example, you have a bunch of people of principle who want to smuggle slaves out of the south. If I owned a railroad and some folks tell me that they want to pay me to take a little risk and help smuggle out some slaves, you can bet that I would absolutely help those people out. Do the right thing and make money doing it! Now I've got a bunch of escaped slaves that need jobs and wouldn't you know it, I want to give them jobs and it just so happens that they're happy getting paid less than the people who are already here! Win-win! And I don't mean that sarcastically, I could absolutely believe that some Northern factory owners saw it that way and some of those escaped slaves were thrilled with it too. Or course, some were racist and only begrudgingly gave them jobs, the allure of increased profits overcoming any distaste in hiring black workers.
And that one thing, even with everyone doing things for the right reasons, sets up generations of de-facto segregation.
So really you've got this giant conspiracy that happened by accident. No one coordinated this, no one planned it and no one maintains it. But when you take the aggregate effect of everything involved, this is the outcome. Some people made decisions that had good effects, some bad, some both but never with a goal of supporting or fighting this conspiracy. Most of the incentives that drive this are subtle and their connection to the larger conspiracy isn't clear. And it's not like I think about how my personal choice of where to live will affect race relations and I couldn't figure out what all the effects would be if I wanted to.
So the only piece that I really disagree with is this idea that it's some kind of active conspiracy with active conspirators who understand what they're conspiring to do. Are there individual actors who actively prop that system up? Yes, but they do it for their own benefit and not to support the goals of the conspiracy and certainly not in coordination with others.
posted by VTX at 1:31 PM on January 13, 2017 [4 favorites]
Policing in America has its origins in slave patrols and strike breakers. And even if it didn't have those origins, it still matured into the professional, bureaucratic system it is today under Jim Crow.
I don't see why it's such a stretch to believe that the whole system is, in fact, sick. It certainly doesn't help that the system is sick in a way that attracts people who actively desire to abuse power, either for personal ends or white supremacist ones.
You can't fix a system as sick as American policing without destroying it and then rebuilding it from the ground up.
posted by tobascodagama at 1:53 PM on January 13, 2017 [3 favorites]
I don't see why it's such a stretch to believe that the whole system is, in fact, sick. It certainly doesn't help that the system is sick in a way that attracts people who actively desire to abuse power, either for personal ends or white supremacist ones.
You can't fix a system as sick as American policing without destroying it and then rebuilding it from the ground up.
posted by tobascodagama at 1:53 PM on January 13, 2017 [3 favorites]
The NotAllCops apologists need to remember exactly how many cops stepped up and earned their pay when Laquan McDonald was executed.
The number? Zero.
How many cops were there at the execution who later falsified their reports with the coordination of the FOP? ALL EIGHT OF THEM.
There are 12,300 CPD officers. Not one of them came forward about this. NOT A SINGLE ONE.
There are REASONS for these things but we must not allow them to be EXCUSES. Particularly not for people in positions of great power such as police.
I'll accept a NotAllCops argument when I see some CPD cops actually stand up for what is right.
I'm feeling pretty grim about this because the FOP, both nationally and in Chicago, was all in for Trump. And I mean all in with something like over 80% support in Chicago. They expect to be able to shrug off this DOJ report like water off a duck's back.
Then what happens?
posted by srboisvert at 1:54 PM on January 13, 2017 [14 favorites]
The number? Zero.
How many cops were there at the execution who later falsified their reports with the coordination of the FOP? ALL EIGHT OF THEM.
There are 12,300 CPD officers. Not one of them came forward about this. NOT A SINGLE ONE.
There are REASONS for these things but we must not allow them to be EXCUSES. Particularly not for people in positions of great power such as police.
I'll accept a NotAllCops argument when I see some CPD cops actually stand up for what is right.
I'm feeling pretty grim about this because the FOP, both nationally and in Chicago, was all in for Trump. And I mean all in with something like over 80% support in Chicago. They expect to be able to shrug off this DOJ report like water off a duck's back.
Then what happens?
posted by srboisvert at 1:54 PM on January 13, 2017 [14 favorites]
What’s the difference between drug dealers and pharmaceutical companies? Drug dealers don’t have to lobby for legislation.
Isn't a brush that broad kind of unwieldy? I get the nut of what you're saying, as well as your larger point with which I generally agree. We are all part of the racist system and our socially taught and enforced racism feeds the system.
But it isn't helpful if your argument doesn't draw useful distinctions between a hawk and a handsaw. They both start with H, but...There are other reasons only the pharmaceutical industry sells antibiotics and chemotherapeutic agents.
Pressing the issue of systemic racism in policing is important because, not in spite of your larger point. It's a large problem, but it still needs to be addressed one part at a time. The police may be a club held by larger players, but if you remove that club from their hands, they can no longer hit you with it.
posted by Mental Wimp at 2:55 PM on January 13, 2017
Isn't a brush that broad kind of unwieldy? I get the nut of what you're saying, as well as your larger point with which I generally agree. We are all part of the racist system and our socially taught and enforced racism feeds the system.
But it isn't helpful if your argument doesn't draw useful distinctions between a hawk and a handsaw. They both start with H, but...There are other reasons only the pharmaceutical industry sells antibiotics and chemotherapeutic agents.
Pressing the issue of systemic racism in policing is important because, not in spite of your larger point. It's a large problem, but it still needs to be addressed one part at a time. The police may be a club held by larger players, but if you remove that club from their hands, they can no longer hit you with it.
posted by Mental Wimp at 2:55 PM on January 13, 2017
Mayor Rahm Emanuel says Justice Department report on Chicago police is "sobering"
Sorry to kill your buzz.
posted by Jode at 4:38 PM on January 13, 2017 [2 favorites]
Sorry to kill your buzz.
posted by Jode at 4:38 PM on January 13, 2017 [2 favorites]
Appendix XIV has just a short paragraph stating that Chicago's overly restrictive food truck laws restricted the DOJ's ability to get the report done in a timely fashion and also may interfere with police operations. [false but plausible]
posted by srboisvert at 9:35 AM on January 14, 2017
posted by srboisvert at 9:35 AM on January 14, 2017
Points taken.
“Your problem Smedleyman, is that you present your case as if these two things are mutually exclusive and that this conspiracy evolved and is actively managed by people who are "in" on it.”
Oh, I’ve got more problems than that. *grin*
Yeah I agree I there are of course useful idiots who, say, happen to be racists or sadists or authoritarian thugs as well as the whole chicken - egg thing.
I think though there’s a direct connection between the drug war, racial oppression, labor exploitation, and an active (as opposed to passive/unthinking) conspiracy. At least by some principals. Somewhere, beyond the ignorant hate there people either noticed and/or actively promoted racism and racist laws because there was money to be made off it.
Sometimes too people do the right thing with the wrong goal in mind. Take the slaves out of the south, put them to work in northern factories so you can pay the white workers less because hey, at least they’re getting more than the ni**er working next to them.
Consider – slave catchers, union busters; vagrancy, Jim Crow laws, were all methods to exploit labor (specifically minority labor) and opium, cocaine and marijuana were also all methods by which minorities were exploited (building railroads f’rinstnce) and then when laws were passed against them an excuse to imprison them ( non-violent/drug related prison population from about 50,000 people in 1980 to 400,000 in 1997) and exploit the 13th amendment loophole
for prison slave labor.
“There are other reasons only the pharmaceutical industry sells antibiotics and chemotherapeutic agents.”
Sure. The sort of distinction there though is that the pharma industry has lobbyists to push its agenda and make their profits. Whereas the drug war is institutionalized, so the way the money is being made is different. Contrast alcohol prohibition which had players on both sides of the street.
You had a force trying to make it legal AND a (racist, mostly against Irish, Jewish and Italians) institution that profited from its illegality.
In this case there are two separate interests, but they both rely on the structure of laws to make money - pharma needs laws that allow them to inflate their profits (e.g. california's prop 61) but they're not part of "the system" as it were.
Whereas drug dealers are, because of not only the ways the laws are written, but because the economic disparities, the social exclusion and racism are inherent in the system.
There might not be a coherent set of collusion going on where there’s some big board and a master plan. But plenty of financial conspiracies (like ADM comes to mind and the global conspiracy to dominate lysine ( and the movie “The Informant”
is up there with “The Big Short” on this) involve non-explicit signals and a sort of tacit cooperation.
One firm notices the other two are keeping their price around "x" and they, without discussion, keep it there too. One raises it. The other two figure "more money for us too" and raise theirs. No one talks to no one.
Sort of the same deal with hiring. Companies don't hire a "Shaniqa Jackson" because no one else hires her. Not because of any individual pro-action. Otherwise you'd have to believe every single HR person is racist. Whereas a blanketed sort of unspoken chilling effect is completely plausible. And the individual HR person can use whatever internal mental defense they like (I'm not a racist, she just didn't seem like a good fit for our corporate culture" or whatever)
So I think there’s this unspoken but knowing thing going on. If it were an honest game then more cops on the street would make black communities safer just by being there. But the objective isn’t safety. Manifestly so.
The big question then is, what IS the objective. I mean, if a bunch of wealthy landowners and politicians can sit down in a room and purposefully look at ways to make a community safer, can they not sit down in a back room and purposefully look at ways to line their pockets at the expense of the community?
I mean, it's like the education thing and school vouchers. I'm pretty sure the people saying they want school vouchers have something other than a proper, egalitarian, universal education system on their mind.
For law enforcement, the dead givaway in Chicago is (and I keep harping on this, sorry) the de-funding of the Ceasefire program.
Why would anyone cut funding on a program that OBVIOUSLY works. I've never heard an argument against it - like "oh, no, more people were being shot when ceasefire was around" - no one has ever said that. Only thing people in Illinois have said is "we don't have the money for it."
So at an individual level, cops may be good or bad apples - but it doesn't really matter at all. No matter how good or evil you are on the small scale, the sea changes will sweep your work away. And I think those sea changes - cutting funding, not properly training police, all the focus on firearms, no verbal judo or understanding of action, having cops live outside the communities they patrol - etc. etc. - are by design.
Now I love firearms. But for police officers, I think they shouldn't have to need them.
And that the way they are used - inevitably lead to egregious shootings.
I'm not a big fan of the Japanese legal system. But one thing I do agree with is their policing.
They think of privacy, community and crime in some very different ways which I'm a bit leery of (no search and seizure laws, fr'instnce) but individual cops - the emphasis is more on verbal interaction and martial arts (judo or if you're a stone cold bad ass aikido http://www.yoshinkan.net/03contentsE/course-sensyuE.html) than their sidearm. And they practice more with batons, tonfa (PR24s), etc.
And, apparently, " huge futons and essentially roll up a person who is being violent or drunk into a little burrito and carry them back to the station to calm them down."
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38365729
I've seen CPD beat down drunks, for example, for no reason other than the drunk was mouthy. OTOH they do get bribed to hang outside watering holes and shut down trouble, so...
But it's all attitude. What I'm saying is, the tools don't determine the attitude, the attitude determines the tools. And the tools and structure are dictated by the political landscape and interests of business in the city.
Someone wants the state of affairs to be the way they are. And it's not low ranking beat cops. - Well, maybe it is sometimes. But whether they love it or hate it, they're not the ones with the juice to resist/push reforms.
I mean, Chuy Garcia was talking reform and hiring new cops years ago. The incumbents (Emanuel, the aldermen) crapped all over that idea (too much money, yadda yadda) and he didn't get elected.
Now Emanuel is on board with it suddenly.
But it's just a smokescreen. We could hire 1,000 more cops or 10,000.
It's poverty and segregation (and the resulting isolation and focused surveillance) that drive the crime rate.
Those are kept from exploding by the police, as an institution. They're kept as the status quo.
What's shocking is not the "murder rate in Chicago" but the murder rate in some few hypersegregated neighborhoods - the rare is 14.9 per 100,000 overall. 53.8 per 100K in Greater Grand Crossing. Less than 1 per 100K in Lincoln Park.
Now look at FFP report - "practice of unreasonable force in violation of the Fourth Amendment and that the deficiencies in CPD’s training, supervision, accountability, and other systems have contributed to that pattern or practice"
- think a lot of unreasonable force going on in Lincoln Park?
The deficiencies in training, supervision, and accountability are BY DESIGN at a level above the cops' paygrade.
I get the "take the club out of the hand" thing. It's logical. But I'm seeing the big picture more as "only a madman fights in a burning house."
We have to put out the fire first.
With the caveat that someone purposely set the fire. And we should get to those sons of bitches after we quell the flames.
posted by Smedleyman at 9:53 AM on January 14, 2017 [4 favorites]
“Your problem Smedleyman, is that you present your case as if these two things are mutually exclusive and that this conspiracy evolved and is actively managed by people who are "in" on it.”
Oh, I’ve got more problems than that. *grin*
Yeah I agree I there are of course useful idiots who, say, happen to be racists or sadists or authoritarian thugs as well as the whole chicken - egg thing.
I think though there’s a direct connection between the drug war, racial oppression, labor exploitation, and an active (as opposed to passive/unthinking) conspiracy. At least by some principals. Somewhere, beyond the ignorant hate there people either noticed and/or actively promoted racism and racist laws because there was money to be made off it.
Sometimes too people do the right thing with the wrong goal in mind. Take the slaves out of the south, put them to work in northern factories so you can pay the white workers less because hey, at least they’re getting more than the ni**er working next to them.
Consider – slave catchers, union busters; vagrancy, Jim Crow laws, were all methods to exploit labor (specifically minority labor) and opium, cocaine and marijuana were also all methods by which minorities were exploited (building railroads f’rinstnce) and then when laws were passed against them an excuse to imprison them ( non-violent/drug related prison population from about 50,000 people in 1980 to 400,000 in 1997) and exploit the 13th amendment loophole
for prison slave labor.
“There are other reasons only the pharmaceutical industry sells antibiotics and chemotherapeutic agents.”
Sure. The sort of distinction there though is that the pharma industry has lobbyists to push its agenda and make their profits. Whereas the drug war is institutionalized, so the way the money is being made is different. Contrast alcohol prohibition which had players on both sides of the street.
You had a force trying to make it legal AND a (racist, mostly against Irish, Jewish and Italians) institution that profited from its illegality.
In this case there are two separate interests, but they both rely on the structure of laws to make money - pharma needs laws that allow them to inflate their profits (e.g. california's prop 61) but they're not part of "the system" as it were.
Whereas drug dealers are, because of not only the ways the laws are written, but because the economic disparities, the social exclusion and racism are inherent in the system.
There might not be a coherent set of collusion going on where there’s some big board and a master plan. But plenty of financial conspiracies (like ADM comes to mind and the global conspiracy to dominate lysine ( and the movie “The Informant”
is up there with “The Big Short” on this) involve non-explicit signals and a sort of tacit cooperation.
One firm notices the other two are keeping their price around "x" and they, without discussion, keep it there too. One raises it. The other two figure "more money for us too" and raise theirs. No one talks to no one.
Sort of the same deal with hiring. Companies don't hire a "Shaniqa Jackson" because no one else hires her. Not because of any individual pro-action. Otherwise you'd have to believe every single HR person is racist. Whereas a blanketed sort of unspoken chilling effect is completely plausible. And the individual HR person can use whatever internal mental defense they like (I'm not a racist, she just didn't seem like a good fit for our corporate culture" or whatever)
So I think there’s this unspoken but knowing thing going on. If it were an honest game then more cops on the street would make black communities safer just by being there. But the objective isn’t safety. Manifestly so.
The big question then is, what IS the objective. I mean, if a bunch of wealthy landowners and politicians can sit down in a room and purposefully look at ways to make a community safer, can they not sit down in a back room and purposefully look at ways to line their pockets at the expense of the community?
I mean, it's like the education thing and school vouchers. I'm pretty sure the people saying they want school vouchers have something other than a proper, egalitarian, universal education system on their mind.
For law enforcement, the dead givaway in Chicago is (and I keep harping on this, sorry) the de-funding of the Ceasefire program.
Why would anyone cut funding on a program that OBVIOUSLY works. I've never heard an argument against it - like "oh, no, more people were being shot when ceasefire was around" - no one has ever said that. Only thing people in Illinois have said is "we don't have the money for it."
So at an individual level, cops may be good or bad apples - but it doesn't really matter at all. No matter how good or evil you are on the small scale, the sea changes will sweep your work away. And I think those sea changes - cutting funding, not properly training police, all the focus on firearms, no verbal judo or understanding of action, having cops live outside the communities they patrol - etc. etc. - are by design.
Now I love firearms. But for police officers, I think they shouldn't have to need them.
And that the way they are used - inevitably lead to egregious shootings.
I'm not a big fan of the Japanese legal system. But one thing I do agree with is their policing.
They think of privacy, community and crime in some very different ways which I'm a bit leery of (no search and seizure laws, fr'instnce) but individual cops - the emphasis is more on verbal interaction and martial arts (judo or if you're a stone cold bad ass aikido http://www.yoshinkan.net/03contentsE/course-sensyuE.html) than their sidearm. And they practice more with batons, tonfa (PR24s), etc.
And, apparently, " huge futons and essentially roll up a person who is being violent or drunk into a little burrito and carry them back to the station to calm them down."
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38365729
I've seen CPD beat down drunks, for example, for no reason other than the drunk was mouthy. OTOH they do get bribed to hang outside watering holes and shut down trouble, so...
But it's all attitude. What I'm saying is, the tools don't determine the attitude, the attitude determines the tools. And the tools and structure are dictated by the political landscape and interests of business in the city.
Someone wants the state of affairs to be the way they are. And it's not low ranking beat cops. - Well, maybe it is sometimes. But whether they love it or hate it, they're not the ones with the juice to resist/push reforms.
I mean, Chuy Garcia was talking reform and hiring new cops years ago. The incumbents (Emanuel, the aldermen) crapped all over that idea (too much money, yadda yadda) and he didn't get elected.
Now Emanuel is on board with it suddenly.
But it's just a smokescreen. We could hire 1,000 more cops or 10,000.
It's poverty and segregation (and the resulting isolation and focused surveillance) that drive the crime rate.
Those are kept from exploding by the police, as an institution. They're kept as the status quo.
What's shocking is not the "murder rate in Chicago" but the murder rate in some few hypersegregated neighborhoods - the rare is 14.9 per 100,000 overall. 53.8 per 100K in Greater Grand Crossing. Less than 1 per 100K in Lincoln Park.
Now look at FFP report - "practice of unreasonable force in violation of the Fourth Amendment and that the deficiencies in CPD’s training, supervision, accountability, and other systems have contributed to that pattern or practice"
- think a lot of unreasonable force going on in Lincoln Park?
The deficiencies in training, supervision, and accountability are BY DESIGN at a level above the cops' paygrade.
I get the "take the club out of the hand" thing. It's logical. But I'm seeing the big picture more as "only a madman fights in a burning house."
We have to put out the fire first.
With the caveat that someone purposely set the fire. And we should get to those sons of bitches after we quell the flames.
posted by Smedleyman at 9:53 AM on January 14, 2017 [4 favorites]
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