The epidemics of police brutality and gun violence rage in America.
April 16, 2021 12:51 AM   Subscribe

 
The Knoxville shooting that lead to the death of a child was apparently caused either by one officer shooting another officer, or the officer shooting himself. The AG will not release video footage. The cancer of gun ownership continues to eat away at the US, one dead body at a time.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:09 AM on April 16, 2021 [18 favorites]


Tom Scocca, politics editor at Slate, tweeted "They lie because they know it's indefensible but they keep doing it because they know they'll be defended." linking back to a story he wrote when he was at Gawker, If Police Are Using Reasonable Force, Why Do They Lie About It?

The thing is, his article is from 2015. All you really need to do is swap out Laquan McDonald for Adam Toledo, or Walter Scott for Daunte Wright. The names change, but the story is all the same. As Trevor Noah said, it's not a question of apples being rotten or not, it's the tree, and the tree is rotted all the way through.
posted by Ghidorah at 2:07 AM on April 16, 2021 [32 favorites]


So this happened a couple of days ago, and I could not be happier for the Black woman/ex-cop who was vindicated. Finally. For fuck's sake. As a conversation about excessive force by police sweeps the nation, one former police officer has been vindicated 15 years after she was terminated for forcibly removing a white officer who placed a handcuffed Black man in a chokehold. Thanks for the post, OP.
posted by Bella Donna at 3:46 AM on April 16, 2021 [37 favorites]


From August 2020: Brooklyn Park and Brooklyn Center now stand as police reform model

When what happened to Daunte Wright is the result of 15 years of "successful" police reform, it's easy to see why a lot of people think defunding the police and instituting community safety programs run by the actual communities isn't "radical," but already a compromise.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 4:53 AM on April 16, 2021 [7 favorites]


Oops, forgot to mention this as well (but then, there are not enough pixels in the world to encompass all the wrongs done to Black people, other folks of color, marginalized folks and, also, did I mention Black people?): Maurice Caldwell, a Black man wrongfully imprisoned for 20 years, recently reached a settlement with the City of San Francisco.

It is a heartbreaking story, not made any easier to read when you hit this part about the cop, named Crenshaw, who framed Caldwell for a murder: "In the two years leading up to the interaction in which he threatened Caldwell, Crenshaw had received 25 citizen complaints, none of which were sustained. (When he retired as a commander in 2011, Crenshaw had accumulated 66 citizen complaints.)"

Last year the Bay Area News Groups reviewed the cases of 110 people killed by police. "While Black residents make up only 7% of the combined population of Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, they accounted for a staggering 27% of those killed by police in the region since 2015, the news organization’s analysis found." Latinos were also disproportionately represented among the victims because of course they were.
posted by Bella Donna at 5:02 AM on April 16, 2021 [10 favorites]


How do you work in law enforcement today without radically changing your behavior? If I found out that my work methods were killing people -- even purely by accident, which obviously isn't the case with police killings -- I would drop everything to retool.

They can't all be militarized, racist trash, can they? I only know two police officers very well, and I don't think they are. (Heck, both are in the Twin Cities, and one is black himself.)
posted by wenestvedt at 5:19 AM on April 16, 2021 [8 favorites]


US police and public officials donated to Kyle Rittenhouse, data breach reveals
The beneficiaries of donations from public officials include Kyle Rittenhouse, who stands accused of murdering two leftwing protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last August. Rittenhouse traveled with weapons from neighboring Illinois to, by his own account, offer armed protection to businesses during protests over the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

Rittenhouse, who became a cause célèbre across conservative media throughout late 2020, and was even supported by then president Donald Trump, held a fundraiser on GiveSendGo billed as a contribution to his legal defense. According to data from the site, he raised $586,940 between 27 August last year and 7 January .

Among the donors were several associated with email addresses traceable to police and other public officials.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 5:31 AM on April 16, 2021 [27 favorites]


It's hard to believe there is any amount of gun violence or police killings that will ever change anything. At least until the majority decides there is, and that doesn't seem likely. Yes, there is a very vocal outcry every time one of these incidents occurs, but the sad fact is most people are fine with all of it (as long as it doesn't involve them personally, of course).
posted by tommasz at 5:43 AM on April 16, 2021 [2 favorites]


How do you work in law enforcement today without radically changing your behavior? . . . They can't all be militarized, racist trash, can they?

According to this guy (Officer A. Cab, "Confessions of a Former Bastard") you don't, and they are.

(Written last June but clearly nothing has changed since then.)
posted by dlugoczaj at 6:19 AM on April 16, 2021 [19 favorites]


I had forgotten that piece already. *sigh* Better go back and re-read it...
posted by wenestvedt at 6:35 AM on April 16, 2021


That Officer A.Cab piece is really good.

From it: "Many cops fantasize about getting to kill someone in the line of duty, egged on by others that have." I always figure that this is the real cause of these police murders, because cops rarely murder white people at traffic stops. Some cops are presumably literal Nazis who specifically want to kill people of color for ideological reasons that they can articulate clearly; many cops just semi-consciously want the excitement, renown and good feelings of murdering someone and getting away with it, so as soon as they see the opportunity they act.

~~
As to Minnesota, I moved here after college, years and years ago now, and honestly I'd move back to my family if my job and my partner's family weren't here. I moved to Minneapolis because I really loved it, not that it was a perfect place, but the interlock of gentrification and police violence have totally changed the city to the point where almost everything I love has gone and been replaced by, eg, a bunch of condos and a bunch of cops with more and more military equipment. In retrospect, I can see how the city responded first to the anti-WTO protests and then to RNC 2008 with more and more militarization.

The mayor, Jacob Frey, is the real trash human here - he pushed to be in charge of the build-up around the Chauvin trial. But Walz keeps trying to have it both ways. I think that if it were just down to what was in his heart, Walz wouldn't be such a bad guy (whereas I think Frey's a bad guy through and through), but over and over again he keeps buying into these ideas about security. He's really not capable of moral leadership, which is what we need.

Minnesota is really split between a lot of people who are, for all their flaws, genuinely liberal (ie, receptive to police abolition ideas, receptive to leftish social change), people who are vaguely liberal unless it affects them personally and a lot of outstate Trumpists. We need moral leadership from Walz but all we get is temporizing and the National Guard.

Frey and his ilk want to bring in more gentrification, more out of state tech and banking money, more of the Whole Foods demographic. Now, I hate to speak with enthusiasm about that plan and those people, but the ones I have met don't particularly care for police violence and the National Guard, and if this is how it's going to go - the police kill someone, we call out the Guard and have a week of protests and police violence and the Guard on the streets - no one is going to want to move here. We've been selling ourselves as this non-coastal liberal hip-for-the-midwest kind of place, and while it's not like most other places have great policing, it's not exactly a draw to say "come to the Midwest, none of the advantages of the coasts and all of the police brutality".
posted by Frowner at 6:54 AM on April 16, 2021 [20 favorites]


We've had so many shootings that the Atlanta massage parlors murders didn't even make the list unless I somehow missed it.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 7:04 AM on April 16, 2021 [3 favorites]


For many, you enjoy calling the police officers path “a job.” I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong. You want to talk about privilege, well you have it for making the statement above.

You might find this interesting. It's a blog post from a local cop who quit last year after the protests. When I drove rideshare we got simultaneously called to some DV situations over and over again. She was really good.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 7:23 AM on April 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


Nah, that's just the usual "thin blue line" copaganda lies about how they have it so hard because it's supposedly the most dangerous job in the US, which all available data disproves.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 7:37 AM on April 16, 2021 [11 favorites]


Tom Scocca, politics editor at Slate, tweeted "They lie because they know it's indefensible but they keep doing it because they know they'll be defended." linking back to a story he wrote when he was at Gawker, If Police Are Using Reasonable Force, Why Do They Lie About It?

One of the benefits of so many police interactions being recorded by passersby on their mobile phones is not only revealing police conduct, but also their lies. Recall the case of the officer filmed planting a gun on a victim he just shot, no doubt planning to claim he acted in self-defense.

It's instructive that the video taken at the scene of George Floyd's murder is being used by the prosecution, not the defense. The strong implication is that the evidence shows what he did is in fact murder.

Police objections to being recorded in the course of their duties should never be mistaken for good faith, and occasions of body came "malfunctioning" or being turned off should be presumed evidence of obstruction of justice.
posted by Gelatin at 7:51 AM on April 16, 2021 [18 favorites]




Residents requested the footage, as well as Mayor Kincannon. The DA, Charme Allen, refuses.

Why would anyone withhold exculpatory evidence? The obvious conclusion, then, is that the footage is incriminating.
posted by Gelatin at 8:05 AM on April 16, 2021 [13 favorites]


Most cops are bastards, at least to some degree, but most cops never fire their weapon, much less kill anyone. There is, however, a huge cultural problem that leads to the blue wall of silence and there are systemic issues that make it damn near impossible to remove a cop from their job even in the face of repeated misconduct.

My aunt was a cop until recently. She kinda just fell into it. Her initial goal was to become a detective, but years of abuse and harassment meant that didn't last long. Having bills to pay and a pension on the horizon, she went back out on patrol until she was able to retire.

Like every cop I've known, she had a lot of stories about people being stupid, but unlike the brodozer fuckwits, they were always told in a way that was, if not sympathetic, at least rueful. The asshats I hated sharing a dinner table with, on the other hand, were always of the "look at how stupid people are" variety, either with excitement about "getting to" bust somebody's head or regret at not getting the chance.

She had a story she told me once about the one time she damn near did end up shooting a guy and it was pretty fucking clear she hated being put in that position. Thankfully for both of them, she was trained to deescalate, not escalate, situations.

Anyway, to get to the actual point, the most notable difference between her circumstances and those of the people who clearly took joy in being bastards was the time they became a cop. The training changed at some point, with the emphasis changing from using a light touch whenever possible to one that preaches that they're in constant danger, a sense of authority backed up by the threat of violence must always be maintained, and any opportunity to send someone to jail must be taken. The precise timing of the change varies widely by location, but at this point the siege mentality is being inculcated in new recruits everywhere.

TBH, the only answer that doesn't involve eliminating the police entirely involves getting rid of the trainers who insist that the gun is the first best option, firing pretty much everyone who joined the force in the last 20 years (give or take), hiring an entirely new set of people who haven't been exposed to the wannabe military mindset, and training them in conflict resolution, not escalation. Oh, and maybe remind them that it's perfectly ok to have a conversation about maybe not doing the thing instead of arresting them for the thing when it's penny ante shit so that we avoid making people's life worse when it isn't necessary to protect others from imminent physical harm.

Nobody is served by carting a single mom headed home from work after her night shift off to jail because she forgot to turn on her fucking headlights when it's a few minutes after dawn and already light enough out that it's not going to hurt anybody in the least. Nor does it serve anybody to cart some kid smoking a joint on the corner off to jail. A conversation about being less obvious about it serves everyone better. (Legalization is even better, but there are some states where that's going to be a while yet)
posted by wierdo at 8:09 AM on April 16, 2021 [20 favorites]


Someone's already brought up how a breach of a crowdfunding site allowed people to see who dontaed to Rittenhouse, I'd like to bring attention to this part, where it's revealed the Exec Officer of Internal Affairs of my city was one of them:
"One donation for $25, made on 3 September last year, was made anonymously, but associated with the official email address for Sgt William Kelly, who currently serves as the executive officer of internal affairs in the Norfolk police department in Virginia.
That donation also carried a comment, reading: “God bless. Thank you for your courage. Keep your head up. You’ve done nothing wrong.”
The comment continued: “Every rank and file police officer supports you. Don’t be discouraged by actions of the political class of law enforcement leadership.”"
Yes I'm sure I can count on him to investigate the police for racial misdoings.
posted by FirstMateKate at 8:17 AM on April 16, 2021 [22 favorites]




I'm not going to defend the entirety of the cop experience and message, but it really is a stressful and demanding job. The vast majority of what most cops do is exactly what needs to be done. They are first responders to medical emergencies, they handle a lot of people with untreated mental illness, they deal with domestic violence up close and personally, and it usually goes about how you'd want it to. There are probably better ways to handle most of those things, but part of the stress of the job is having to handle them anyway.

The remainder of the calls, the ones that go wrong and the ones that continue to occur, are the heart, soul, sinew and sweat of what is wrong in this country: race and power and separation and suppression and fear and greed all preserving a specific past in the face of a changing present. That's where the focus has to be, and it's going to have to be a culture thing more than a training or structural effect. Cops take care of one another first and best, which is laudable in some ways but utterly corrupting in others. Those 28 shots were not to stop a criminal, but to stop an investigation behind a wall of "Clearly we all thought the same thing and acted accordingly."

Maybe we do need to replace them all, but at this point who would take the job? There's work to be done on the community side too so that the job isn't so toxic. It's not an easy problem.
posted by Cris E at 8:32 AM on April 16, 2021 [3 favorites]


I'm not going to defend the entirety of the cop experience and message, but it really is a stressful and demanding job.

You know what's a really stressful and demanding job with split second life and death decisions? Being a doctor. We train the hell out of them, we license them, we demand their near perfection, and upon making a mistake they are reamed by an M&M committee, could have their license stripped from them, and are also personally liable so many carry liability insurance.

If we can't abolish police we should at least be able to demand professionalism and standards. Police have long been a cowboy profession where any yokel can be given a gun after a few weeks of proving to be a good old boy and it needs to fucking end. Mandatory licensing, mandatory liability insurance, local civilian review oversight boards with unilateral firing power. Three things we can do today to start weeding out bad cops and defang the cop unions that let them act as gangs.

Corruptio optimi pessima should be a beacon for how the justice system should be acting but instead we get impunity and everyone covering for each other. If they refuse to police each other the community should at least be able to say "get the fuck out".
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 8:53 AM on April 16, 2021 [64 favorites]


They are first responders to medical emergencies

Which is not good. They will take it upon themselves to cancel ambulances. It happened to a friend of mine when her adult daughter was having an extreme diabetic reaction. The cop saw two Native American women and smelled alcohol on the one in distress and sneeringly dismissed them as drunken Indians. This happened in Minnesota, incidentally, where I've been in a vehicle with a man who was pulled over and roughed up for Driving While Indian.
posted by LindsayIrene at 8:56 AM on April 16, 2021 [44 favorites]


"and it usually goes about how you'd want it to"

Most of the interactions I've had with police did not "go about how you'd want it to," even if nobody got shot. That doesn't describe the outright racism, scorn, violence, or disdain for the law that have been involved.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 9:03 AM on April 16, 2021 [16 favorites]


I agree with both of those things. In fact my two largest complaints with modern policing are community policing (increases opportunities for bad stuff to happen during BS arrests) and not getting rid of bad cops.

I live in MN, and Chauvin was the outlier in the four most recent shootings. He was the stereotypical bad cop doing bad things that ended up killing a man. But if you listen to the tapes of the Philando Castile and Daunte Wright shootings, the cops weren't being terrible people so much as really, really terrible at their jobs, frightened and panicked and rushing to action without thought. Castile explained that he was reaching for paperwork, Wright was shot when an officer grabbed the wrong weapon while dealing with a frightened suspect, and Justine Damond was killed when an officer was startled in his car and reached across his partner's face to shoot a woman out the passenger window. These were all acts of people who are expecting the worst, prepared to react with overwhelming force, and did not pause to consider anything beyond their own first instinct. The adrenaline took over and washed away lives.

I'd love to license law enforcement officers. I think it would help with those bad cops that bounce from one job to another, and I think it could make their sense of professionalism a larger and more effective counter-weight to the blue wall.
posted by Cris E at 9:06 AM on April 16, 2021 [3 favorites]


they deal with domestic violence up close and personally

So do 1 in 4 women and 1 in 9 men in the US, with police officers perpetrating domestic violence at rates 2 to 4 times higher than in the general population. Arguably the job of being a spouse or child of a police officer in the US is particularly stressful and demanding, but this is not something one could claim as being especially or uniquely stressful for police officers.
posted by eviemath at 9:07 AM on April 16, 2021 [29 favorites]


The irony of all this "oh, the poor cops! the job is so hard!" is that they are pretty well compensated with salary, benefits, retirement, etc., even before you get into things like overtime. It's still a solidly middle class job, unlike so many. And, of course, the kid that screws up burgers at McDonald's making 8 bux an hour would suffer A Consequence if he murdered a customer, whereas cops never do.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 9:08 AM on April 16, 2021 [16 favorites]


Police in Hutchinson, MN, are called on a man assaulting a hardware store employee over being asked to wear a mask. Man drives away with cop's arm stuck in his window. Cop uses hammer to break window. Suspect beats cop with hammer. Suspect is alive and very much not shot. Take a look at him.
posted by LindsayIrene at 9:15 AM on April 16, 2021 [14 favorites]


In re "what needs to be done": I live in a majority POC, low-income neighborhood on one of the poorer streets. I effectively cannot call the police. The police are useless to me because I'm rolling the dice on someone's life if I bring them here. Even if that didn't bother me morally, if I called the cops and something bad happened, I would be ostracized in my union, in my social circle, on my street, etc because the expectation is that I know better than to bring the cops here.

This means, of course, that when I see violence I walk on by. If I see someone getting beat up and I feel that I can personally intervene (which has happened once and in retrospect I was very, very lucky - someone else in my neighborhood did something similar and was stabbed in the head and permanently disabled) I do so. But otherwise, frankly, there's fuck-all I can do. I feel really angry that I am in this position where I de facto have to be callous because there is no help.

I have called 911 for people with medical emergencies a couple of times, and of course I always stay with them until I'm sure that they're getting medical help and not a bullet, but I would be afraid to call if someone was having a mental health emergency.

At this point, I know three people who have witnessed police killings. Like, they are in my extended social circle; one of them is a pretty good friend. These were all killings that just sort of...happened, as they were going about their business. And of course the police beatings are innumerable, plus the harassment.

Some years ago, I had a friend staying with me for the last part of her pregnancy. She was literally leaving for the hospital when the cops came to my door to attempt to search my house. She did not let them in since they had no warrant. They talked to me on the phone and tried to get me to leave work to come and let them into the house. They finally let my friend go and I flat refused to leave work. My friend and I are white and I have a very *professional* phone manner, so the cops did finally just leave, but still, they literally tried to threaten a pregnant women to get into my house.

Also, frankly, I am a high-anxiety, high adrenaline person and I would never, eg, punch someone at work even if I felt very anxious and angry. If I did punch someone at work, "I have been badly trained and the adrenaline took over" would not be an excuse. Cops rarely shoot white people, especially well-off white people, out of hand. I've met a lot of white people and it's not that we never get drunk or have guns or behave in weird ways. Cops just...don't let the adrenaline take over when they know that they'd face a consequence.
posted by Frowner at 9:16 AM on April 16, 2021 [56 favorites]


Bear in mind that the cops came to search my house after I'd been living there for over five years. I have no police record, there have been no noise or other complaints about me, etc etc. Before I lived there, a family lived there for about twenty years.
posted by Frowner at 9:19 AM on April 16, 2021 [10 favorites]


This is way bigger than a few jumpy police officers, and bad cops aren't rare outliers. It's also bigger than individual incidents, and police shootings aren't the only problem. We need to fundamentally change the culture and practice of policing, justice, and mass incarceration. Anything short of a complete overhaul isn't going to be enough.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 9:27 AM on April 16, 2021 [10 favorites]


Here in Los Angeles, the problem is deeply systemic. The reporter Cerise Castle did a deep public records dive to produce this 15 part series on law enforcement gangs: A Tradition of Violence: The History of Deputy Gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department

It's a heavy read--including interviews with family members who have lost loved once to police violence and are then harassed long afterwards by members of the sheriff's department, often including the deputy who killed their family member. Reading through the stories can feel quite hopeless.
posted by mandymanwasregistered at 9:58 AM on April 16, 2021 [7 favorites]


Why do police routinely carry guns? Really, why? Their job isn't ever to kill people, so why do they carry something that's only purpose is to kill?

If they feel threatened, the goal should always be to disarm/incapacitate the person if deescalation fails. Why should killing ever be an option? Tasers and pepper spray aren't ideal, but at least they only kill unintentionally, not by design.
posted by Eddie Mars at 10:35 AM on April 16, 2021 [9 favorites]


My dad, who retired from law enforcement 20 years ago, agrees with the Defund movement. He thinks the core problem is that these organizations turn a blind eye to racism, which then festers.

And my sister, an LEO who’s planning to retire this year from another agency, thinks that the Defund movement is absolutely correct about rebuilding social services to take over the nonenforcement responsibilities that we started dumping on our police departments in the ‘80s.

Anyway, two perspectives from cops with decades of experience.
posted by Orthodox Humanoid at 10:43 AM on April 16, 2021 [15 favorites]


I'm surprised nobody has started marketing bodycams to private citizens.
posted by gottabefunky at 12:00 PM on April 16, 2021 [3 favorites]


It shouldn't surprise me, but it still does: I waded into my social media and argued with a bunch of racist people over Daunte Wright, the majority of whose arguments were "but he resisted arrest / but he had a warrant" and even if those were true, the cops are still legally accountable if they kill you. I expected the racism, I did not completely expect the concurrent, stubborn, absolute loyalty of "I am nakedly, totally fine with the cops killing people without a trial if I think the person did something bad."
posted by nakedmolerats at 12:01 PM on April 16, 2021 [12 favorites]


Why do police routinely carry guns? Really, why?

I honestly feel this is a much more achievable goal.
Much like we have traffic units that receive more training for vehicle related enforcement and specialized negotiators for barricade situations and detectives to investigate crime, a weapons unit could be educated and, importantly, monitored.

There really is no reason the officer coming to take a report on my stolen bicycle needs to have a sidearm and a backup weapon in the car.

It would be easily doable in a urban/suburban areas where backup is not that far away, but I'm not sure how you'd handle things in the more rural areas where travel times are measured in hours.
posted by madajb at 12:30 PM on April 16, 2021 [4 favorites]


If you took guns away from cops many of them would quit en masse, which is really a selection process that is long overdue anyway.
posted by klanawa at 12:37 PM on April 16, 2021 [26 favorites]


Why do police routinely carry guns? Really, why?

The problem isn't that American cops are armed. Cops carry guns almost everywhere outside England, Scotland, and Wales. Cops carry guns throughout continental Europe. Hell, much of Europe combines regular cops with a gendarmerie that's full-on paramilitary and very heavily armed. They still manage not to murder their citizens at a low-level-war rate.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 1:24 PM on April 16, 2021 [8 favorites]


... it really is a stressful and demanding job.

I wonder if it would be easier -- and less threatening to civilians -- if a lot of those non-core responsibilities went to others who were better trained and more temperamentally inclined toward care & service, and less toward power & authority.

It'd be nice if the 911 operator had more choices, like to send out "an EMT with a social worker," and not just "two armed police officers or nothing."
posted by wenestvedt at 1:24 PM on April 16, 2021 [11 favorites]


Cops carry guns almost everywhere outside England, Scotland, and Wales.

...and Norway, New Zealand, Iceland, Ireland amongst the 19 or so countries/territories that don't regularly arm the Police.

I'm actually surprised to learn Police in Japan even carry guns given the extremely restrictive gun ownership laws there. I love this description of the Japanese police force's approach to violence - I'm sure it's not nearly as tender as it's described...but the imagery is amazing.
"The response to violence is never violence, it's always to de-escalate it. Only six shots were fired by Japanese police nationwide [in 2015]," says journalist Anthony Berteaux. "What most Japanese police will do is get 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."
posted by inflatablekiwi at 3:00 PM on April 16, 2021 [21 favorites]


The pandemic driven decimation of the hospitality industry should be a massive opportunity for changing the nature of policing in the US. Hire the waitstaff to be law enforcement.

Waitstaff are already used to high stress environments, dealing with people at their worst, and getting people to comply without having significant control over them. Throw in the significant gender imbalance of FOH, and you have a group of people that could fundamentally change the composition and culture of law enforcement. It would be a significant step up in pay and benefits for the waitstaff, for likely less work, and odds are it will reduce the problem of police living outside of the communities they work in.
posted by fido~depravo at 3:57 PM on April 16, 2021 [18 favorites]


Hire the waitstaff to be law enforcement.

Would also include anyone who's worked the cash register at any fast food chain on the night shift dealing with the post-bar crowd. You want unflappable people with the best verbal de-escalation chops? These are the people.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 4:09 PM on April 16, 2021 [10 favorites]


Trevor Noah's monologue earlier this week really nailed it.
Where are the good cops?
If the narrative were true about the problem being only a few bad apples, then why aren't their colleagues speaking out and standing up?
It's a rotten tree that produces some good fruit.
posted by cheshyre at 4:13 PM on April 16, 2021 [11 favorites]


I'm sure it's not nearly as tender as it's described...but the imagery is amazing.

The only videos I could find on a cursory search that was non-propaganda or training is that it's mostly used on drunks, and not terribly violent drunks at that. Regardless, the police were professional to a fault.
posted by porpoise at 5:16 PM on April 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


Regarding mass shootings and social contagion:
Researchers have documented a “contagion effect,” in which mass shootings and school shootings increase in probability during the 2-week period following an incident* (Bond and Bushman 2017; Kissner 2016; Kostinsky et al. 2001; Towers et al. 2015). For instance, Kissner (2016) examined the frequencies of active shooter events in Chicago from 2000 to 2009 and observed temporal clustering within 2-week periods.
I also have started wondering whether the attacks on Asian Americans are following this kind of social contagion effect, that is, could the way that it is reported incite further attacks?
posted by wuwei at 5:27 PM on April 16, 2021 [3 favorites]


Portland police shot and killed a man who was having a mental health crisis in a public park today. When people showed up they sent nearly every cop the city has to perform riot duties while the body was still laying on the ground.
posted by gucci mane at 5:38 PM on April 16, 2021 [10 favorites]


Police in Hutchinson, MN, are called on a man assaulting a hardware store employee

My parents had a front-row seat for this one as they got stuck inside the police perimeter while out getting gas. In their email they were surprised by how many unmarked squad cars Hutch has, and how many women the police have.

For my part, what amazes me is that this was actually the third assault on an employee of that store by anti-maskers. And how absolutely vile my Facebook feed of old classmates has been on the subject. It's an important bit of context that that part of Minnesota is extremely white and extremely pro-Trump.

It's a bit disheartening for a town founded by, and named after, a group of radical abolitionists.
posted by traveler_ at 5:40 PM on April 16, 2021 [6 favorites]


I do not doubt that the job is difficult and traumatic, or that it's breaking a lot of the people who work it. But that's an argument in favor of changing how we handle things rather than doubling down on more of the same.

A few bad apples:

Locally, in the past 24 hours, we had a news story about DAs looking to vacate hundreds of drug convictions because of the work of an NYPD detective who's been indicted for perjuring himself. Meanwhile, a former officer plead guilty to obstruction in a murder-for-hire plot.

That's not to mention the officer who was indicted last month for killing a friend, or the officer who was indicted in January for killing his 8-year-old son (not linking because I feel like it's over-the-top upsetting).

By all means, take the guns and $75k Boston Dynamics dog robots and replace them with futon mattresses, but we also need to take a whole lot of officers who will use anything at hand, including their patrol car, as a weapon, and replace those officers with basically anything else.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 5:45 PM on April 16, 2021 [6 favorites]


Portland police fatally shoot man in Lents Park
Portland police responding to a call of a man with a gun Friday morning in Lents Park fatally shot the man after he drew what appeared to be a firearm, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the investigation.

The man died at the scene.

Investigators recovered what appeared to be a replica firearm with an orange tip on it, the sources said. A witness videotaped the shooting and provided the footage to police.
Twitter: @CarissaDez Interviewed this eye witness whose story totally contradicts what PPB stated, they murdered this man in cold blood while his hands were up.
#PortlandProtests #Portland #PDX #PDXprotests


This person’s eyewitness report directly contradict what the police initially reported, which is further evidence we should not be listening to the police when they report on their own homicides.

Sergio Olmos’ twitter thread which goes into the subsequent protest.
posted by gucci mane at 7:10 PM on April 16, 2021 [4 favorites]


Portland is once again (and has continually been) a center of police militarization.

We are going to see protests and riots this year worse than we ever saw last year. Everyone is radicalized, everyone is geared, everyone knows who the enemy is. And it’s all the same city centers once again.
posted by gucci mane at 10:59 PM on April 16, 2021 [5 favorites]


I’m not gonna spam this thread with Portland protest stuff but they set the Apple store on fire much worse than anything that happened last year, and this is just day 1. This summer is about to go down in history books.
posted by gucci mane at 12:23 AM on April 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


To what extent do these policing problems arise from the fact that America has so many guns (and such powerful guns) in the hands of private citizens? I ask because I don't live there and I'd be interested to hear the views of those who do.
posted by Paul Slade at 1:34 AM on April 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


I mean in a lot of these cases the cops are gunning down unarmed children and teenagers. I know it's tempting to blame the guns but white guys with guns tend to get talked down and arrested or commit suicide.

There's a grim argument to be made that you're better off carrying the heaviest gun you can because then the cops might at least try to talk to you. (It won't matter if you're black, they'll shoot you anyway).
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 1:57 AM on April 17, 2021 [7 favorites]


i am as pale as any old ghost
i have been pulled out of my van and held at gunpoint by the pigs because my van resembled another van
i have been pulled out of my car and threatened with beating by the pigs because broken taillight
i have been pulled out of my car and all my things tossed into the street because i consented to a search
i have been forced to kneel with a shotgun in the back of my neck on my own porch while pigs invaded my home and terrorized my family because someone else got shot in another part of town

cry me a fucking river about how hard their job is. i have been a cabdriver and a bodega clerk, both jobs are more dangerous by a large margin.

if my skin was darker i would probably be dead
like several of my friends are
they have warred on us for decades, thanks for noticing
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 6:00 AM on April 17, 2021 [19 favorites]


It's not even a hard job! The vast majority of their time is spent sitting on their asses driving around, and filling out paperwork.

They don't even prevent crime, they respond to it. I absolutely hate the disingenuous hand-wringing about "oh no but without cops what will we do about the murderers and rapists?" I guess they'll have to work in other industries.
posted by graventy at 7:09 AM on April 17, 2021 [6 favorites]


Its kind of a hard job because society uses the police as a blunt instrument for any number of things which don't actually require police (eg traffic patrol, crowd-management, social, or mental-health professional etc - jobs for which they're ill equipped to deal with). Largely made worse by under-funding those aforementioned areas over the course of 40+ years of austerity/neoliberalism (someone decided its better to scoop people up at the bottom of the cliff rather than build a fence or put some netting up at the top or on the way down).

Pondering the latest shootings I can't help but think the Police can't/won't be reformed - where does that leave people if the state or federal government won't intervene?

And, even if they are de-funded, where do all the ex-Cops go? If they aren't de-programmed then you've got more power-tripping, armed people out there in the community - will they turn to crime, become rent-a-cops, bouncers, join militias/terror-orgs, private-military-corps? Kind of remembering how elements of ISIS formed out of Iraqs ex-Military - although even then, Police/Military are arguably already infiltrated by religious extremists & white-supremacists so maybe theres minimal difference anyway.
posted by phigmov at 12:12 PM on April 17, 2021 [6 favorites]


Nebraska mall shooting leaves man dead, woman injured

The gun ownership cancer continues to eat away at the country.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:44 PM on April 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


"And, even if they are de-funded, where do all the ex-Cops go? If they aren't de-programmed then you've got more power-tripping, armed people out there in the community - will they turn to crime, become rent-a-cops, bouncers, join militias/terror-orgs, private-military-corps? "

They are already doing all this. Cops don't magically disappear when they go off-duty and they have the only effective union, so they are allowed to moonlight all they like.

Without a badge to hide behind, it will be no less illegal to fight back against them than against any other criminal.
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 11:33 PM on April 17, 2021 [6 favorites]


History rhymes alert: those de-funded ex-cops are sounding rather like the Freikorps to me.
posted by Rash at 10:00 AM on April 18, 2021 [3 favorites]




Are we in the midst of America’s Years of Lead?
posted by gucci mane at 7:26 PM on April 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


Are we in the midst of America’s Years of Lead?

We’re in a stochastic something. I’m scared.
posted by ichomp at 9:07 PM on April 18, 2021


I live in MN, and Chauvin was the outlier in the four most recent shootings.
The murder of George Floyd was not a shooting. Also, police in Minnesota have killed more than four people in the time period you are referencing.
posted by soelo at 4:08 PM on April 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


There is a revolt of uniformed law enforcement, I'm sure of it. The police could just as easily station one officer in front of every storefront wherever a protest is happening, to prevent looting and other destruction while people are left free to march and protest all they like. Even though some protesters want to battle, I think police could be understood to be (tacitly) helping instead of (violently) hindering.

It's pretty zero-sum in my mind: hurting people vs. protecting businesses.

Instead, they abandon the rest of the city and schedule the whole department to gang up on and beat protesters for having the arrogance to criticize something the police have done, police whose salaries the protesters pay.
posted by rhizome at 4:46 PM on April 19, 2021 [9 favorites]


See also: an entire profession practicing DARVO.
posted by rhizome at 4:49 PM on April 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


There is a revolt of uniformed law enforcement, I'm sure of it.

We're at the point where gun owners are America's brownshirts:
“Our guys are very experienced. We have active-duty law enforcement in our organization that are helping to train us. We can blend in with our law enforcement,” says a member of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia group.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:33 PM on April 19, 2021 [5 favorites]


Chauvin found guilty on all counts!
posted by Windopaene at 2:13 PM on April 20, 2021 [9 favorites]


And bail revoked.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:19 PM on April 20, 2021 [7 favorites]


Cops carry guns throughout continental Europe. Hell, much of Europe combines regular cops with a gendarmerie that's full-on paramilitary and very heavily armed. They still manage not to murder their citizens at a low-level-war rate.

Well, it has been explained to me that many of the Americans shot dead by American cops are killed because they did not obey orders from the police. Some might say that being murdered for not obeying orders is the kind of retaliation you might get from an occupying army and not a branch of the municipal government that you pay handsomely to serve and protect you, so what do I know?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:21 PM on April 20, 2021 [6 favorites]


Biden's speech was as presidential as one could hope. We have an opportunity here to do better. No mincing of words. No both-sides racist bullshit. It felt good to have a decent human being to say what needs saying, clearly, without hedging.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:27 PM on April 20, 2021 [3 favorites]


We're at the point where gun owners are America's brownshirts:

Seriously with this crap? You should read the news, leftist bought guns last year in record numbers. If you'd care to open your mind at all to the idea that some of us might need to defend ourselves from those brownshirts I'd be happy to explain how it works.
posted by butterstick at 5:30 PM on April 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


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