Police Misconduct: Tracked

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Dr. Medulla
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Re: Police Misconduct: Tracked

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/1 ... &ir=Canada

Stupid black people. If you just become rich and white, you won't have these problems. If I didn't have just a low opinion of Hannity and his intelligence, I'd think he was deliberately celebrating white privilege to mock other races.
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Re: Police Misconduct: Tracked

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Give Rand Paul credit for not going along with the usual right-wing interpretation of police conduct: http://time.com/3111474/rand-paul-ferguson-police/
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Re: Police Misconduct: Tracked

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Dr. Medulla wrote:Give Rand Paul credit for not going along with the usual right-wing interpretation of police conduct: http://time.com/3111474/rand-paul-ferguson-police/
I honestly can't think of too many other elected officials of his stature that explicitly call our criminal justice system institutionally racist.

What's been going on in Ferguson has been both incredibly sad and sadly unsurprising.
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Re: Police Misconduct: Tracked

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Flex wrote:I honestly can't think of too many other elected officials of his stature that explicitly call our criminal justice system institutionally racist.
It seems perverse to suggest the comparison, but Robert Kennedy, post-'67?
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Re: Police Misconduct: Tracked

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Everybody's shocked it's happening there and not in New York or L.A. or...hell, even St. Louis the city. But, really, why wouldn't a nondescript suburb in a purple-red state be first?

1. Less job competition for suburban cops. If you can't handle the pressure on the beat in NYPD, you wash out pretty quick and there's always a qualified candidate to replace you. The 'burbs, especially the ones with PD's that have a residency requirement, that talent pool ain't deep. I know at least 3 violent meathead lunatics from my high school who barely got through community college, went straight to the academy, and basically got waved straight through to receiving the badge because they were the kinds of losers who would never ever move 2 miles from home. Stupid always trumps evil.

2. Get a politically fucked-up enough county with labyrinthine police hierarchy, and no one's in charge. The counties around St. Loon have a PD for every municipality whether they have 100 people or 50,000 people. None of them have district police or state troopers covering the ones too small to support or need a PD. You have a hundred people...the first one who walks in the door gets to be chief, the second a deputy. And then the whole county sheriff bureaucracy on top of it. And then the state on top of that. Turf wars, dick-measuring contests, lots of places to hide corruption, too many elected officials pumping hot air instead of qualified career lawmen who know that does more harm than good, and all of this way exacerbates #1. Moranjortstan IS a police state, bureaucratically speaking. It always was.

3. Too many elected officials and too many layers of dick-waving management means no PR chain-of-command. They were all AWOL. You had that one chief who said "Oh God" last night when the journalists were arrested and ordered their release before they even got out of the van to the holding cell to avert disaster when the press came for his head. Then I just heard on the local radio news station in Boston a KMOX reporter on the phone reading off the quotes of another sheriff bragging about how much restraint they showed with the rubber bullets, the reporters (including the Al Jazeera crew who got their whole camera rig smashed to pieces), the teargas and smoke bombs setting people's lawns on fire. And ominous warning that they showed SOOOO much restraint maybe they shouldn't be showing so much restraint if this continues for another day. Bang-up job keeping your stories straight, guys. No one's in charge. Everyone's reacting off-the-cuff. And that goes straight to the top. Governor was AWOL. State congressional delegation was AWOL. It's unrestrained id with the guys packing rubber bullets and the guys giving the orders to the guys with rubber bullets.

4. NYPD does not have such control problems when they fuck it up. And they fuck up in nationwide-worst ways CONSTANTLY! But they do have a rigorous PR chain-of-command for their paramilitary goons and racist shitstain chiefs. When they commit some atrocity they dispatch their minority officers or officers who live on those particular streets to the scene and pull back everyone else. Mobs get too fractured to form at all when there's some token presence of one of "your" guys (ethnically or neighborly). That was the great lesson the big cities took from LAPD's bad rep 20 years ago. And this is why the assumption that it "only happens in the big city" is so dangeously naive. It's arguably less likely to happen there now because they PREPARE for what calming tactics are needed to bail themselves out of a shitshow of their own creation. But when your police force is 90% white in an extremely segregated town and they all live in the whitest neighborhood, and the whitest neighborhood is the battleground pushing their buttons, and these are all dumbfuck townies who only have the job because qualified candidates get better badges in the big city...well, no such options to poke a few holes in the "us vs. them" hegemony. Have shit minority-hiring practices for too damn long at all levels of local law enforcement, and this is what you get.

5. Who disproportionately blows money on paramilitary police forces? Yeah, as Bloomberg boasted he has one of the nth largest armies in the entire world at his disposal. But when Homeland Security money was getting spread around like candy, who bought the toys? EVERYONE. In equal disproportion. Especially the small towns and pork-barrel politicians in rural Congressional districts with a jones for showing up "urban elites"...because free money, toys, and my dick is bigger than you city slickers'. Like when Wyoming got more anti-terror money than NYC that one time. So you got these 'burbs of population 20,000 or lower that all have SWAT teams, but nothing to do with their worthless lives except issue speeding tickets on the 75 ft. of interstate highway that clips their borders and bust meth labs. But...anti-trr'st pork! Of-fucking-course that psychopath who lived across the street from me, used to beat the shit out of his girlfriend, and barely passed the academy exam before getting his badge and gun is going to have fucking Christmas the day he has an excuse to put on that armor. As do all of his other loser friends behind the blue wall. Nashua, NH...they bought a tank with the anti-terror money the Teabagger-controlled state legislature splurged on instead of extending unemployment benefits. At least the citizens there got so uncomfortable seeing it in plain view in the back parking lot that they protested enough to get its future status "under reconsideration". So-called "fiscal conservatism" buys those toys in the municipalities that don't have a Bloomberg's Army-like footprint to pay for it. Missouri's just another partygoer taking a whack at the $$$ in the Homeland Security pinata.

6. Ideological strife. Moranjortstate is nominally a purple electorate, with St. Loo a deep blue enclave and the county 'burbs much redder. Democrat for governor and batshit insane Teabagger legislature. And everyone is chafing in close quarters..."Fuck you! No, fuck you! I got mine!" Battleground state indeed. Now we got the spectre of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton on the scene to do some shit-stirring, and some bored members of Cliven Bundy's militia flying into town. With nobody at the top communicating because it's an election year and "Roar! I'm tough on crime!" and "My opponent kills children!" and Obama's (kinda necessary) visit just sending everyone into talking points territory and the media to "What would Hillary do?" territory.



So why not Ferguson, MO? Could there be any other place? If I had to predict where the first U.S. race riot of the 21st century occurred, I would've said reddish-tint purple state...white-flight suburb surrounded by white-flight-to suburb...open-carry or otherwise hyper-politicized crime policy state with elected police chiefs or sheriffs...Middle America where "folks have values" and shit. Florida, Missouri, Ohio basically. Texas and Arizona a little too red for the requisite chafing in close quarters required for ignition...Michigan a little too blue. I probably would've put money on Florida first. But Trayvon Martin had the misfortune of being flashpoint incident #1 that achieved worldwide alarm, not the "fool me twice..." incident that conditioned the mob to immediately form and conditioned the cops to immediately put on the SWAT armor before the mob formed.

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Re: Police Misconduct: Tracked

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Radley Balko on the tactics of police and protests: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- ... -protests/

I'll add something that I remember reading from the late 90s related to how police treat suspects. The common tactic is to scream at them and threaten them with violence if they don't comply. Intimidation into compliance. However, intimidation amplifies our sense of danger, which amps up our fight or flight instinct, either choice which increases the chances of violence. Instead of screaming, the more successful approach should be to decrease the sense of danger by not intimidating, by not screaming, to appeal to a shared desire to not escalate the tension. All that, however, runs wholly counter to the militarized nature of modern policing, where there is a presumption of danger everywhere and the civilian is the enemy. When the police go out with a sense of opposition and separateness, asking them to relate with civilians as sharing a common goal becomes all the more difficult.
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Re: Police Misconduct: Tracked

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Re: Police Misconduct: Tracked

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As usual, The Onion says the shit that the corporate media can't grasp.
Sometimes Unfortunate Things Happen In The Heat Of A 400-Year-Old Legacy Of Racism
By Thomas Jackson, Chief Of Police, Ferguson Police Department

As anyone in law enforcement knows, upholding the peace often comes down to making tough, split-second decisions. A police officer must assess his options quickly, especially when faced with resistance from potentially dangerous individuals. But try as we might, bad things sometimes happen in the heat of a 400-year-old legacy of racism.

It’s a situation every officer of the law will inevitably face: tensions escalate during questioning or an arrest when, suddenly, in the commotion of four centuries of bias against racial minorities in the United States, the situation takes a violent turn. When emotions run high, it just takes two seconds following dozens of generations of systemic social, economic, and political discrimination toward non-whites—particularly African-Americans—for things to get way out of hand.

Our officers here in Ferguson know that as well as anyone.

You don’t want violence, of course—no one does. But sometimes when you’re out there, in the middle of longstanding policies denying minority men and women the most basic human rights, you must take decisive measures. We train our officers to behave professionally and respectfully toward the communities that they serve. But no matter how much training and experience they may have, they are human beings who, in the bedlam of decade upon decade of racist enculturation and deeply institutionalized systems of inequality, may be involved in a tragic situation.

But it’s important to remember that for members of law enforcement, it’s life or death out there. Without any warning, an officer of the law can find himself in the mayhem of formal and de facto segregationist policies such as mortgage discrimination and redlining that made it impossible for people in the most dangerous neighborhoods to live anywhere else. One minute you’re pulling up beside a couple of teenagers walking down the street, and the next minute you’re face-to-face with racial disparity that dates back to the 17th century and undergirds our culture to this very moment.

Every person who has put on the uniform has been there. Out of nowhere, you’re confronted with the enduring shadow of slavery and Jim Crow—boom!—just like that, and you simply react.

So at the end of the day, keep in mind that police officers are doing the best they can, even when unfortunate incidents occur. When you’re suddenly in the middle of an inhuman situation that’s repeated itself over and over and over for 400 years, you have to act fast.

Sadly, sometimes you just don’t have a choice.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/someti ... %3ADefault
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Re: Police Misconduct: Tracked

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So...

-- State Police in charge tonight. Local yokels removed.

-- Riot cops are stuffed out-of-sight in a holding area on-call, and not on-the-move.

-- Cops wearing plain patrol uniforms, scattered at stationary locations, weapons holstered.

-- Cops are TALKING to the people, striking up conversation. Walking with them as they march. Couple people given rides in the cruisers up the protest route.

-- State trooper in charge tonight is black, resident of the town. Asshole chief who stuck foot in mouth and choked on it is standing off to the side of him...in the background...silently...as an observer. To give the impression that he feels shame or something, whether that's actually true or not. But mostly to give impression that he's been demoted.

-- Looks like damn near every available African-American cop they could round up from the State Police and St. Louis (city) PD was sent to help with the high-visibility patrols. As well as some female cops.

-- Twitter's burning up with reports of how nice everyone's being, how patiently they're being allowed to protest, and how calm and borderline upbeat everyone seems to be.





You moranholes are just figuring this out NOW????

Oh, wait, no you're not: http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crim ... d6cf1.html

DA's gotta be tough-on-crime! Election year...double-down, double-down! :rolleyes:

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Re: Police Misconduct: Tracked

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It's funny though how in an election year, congressman Lacy Clay has been totally absent from an area in his district. St. Louis crony nepotism at its best.

Rattie - how do you know so much about the 'Jortsville, anyway?

I've been involved in helping to organize a few events. One was a rally at the arch this evening. Very peaceful. About 1,000 people there. Doubt it was shown on CNN.
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Re: Police Misconduct: Tracked

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Look at this fucking hippie playing the tambourine in Ferguson. :shifty:

Eta: Nevermind. Picture is too big.
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Re: Police Misconduct: Tracked

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... y-lie.html

I hate the fact that none of this shocks me.
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Re: Police Misconduct: Tracked

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Dr. Medulla wrote:http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... y-lie.html

I hate the fact that none of this shocks me.
From what I've read elsewhere during this whole thing, Ferguson used to be a sundown town back in the "good ol' days". X(

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Re: Police Misconduct: Tracked

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More from the Not At All Surprising Dept.: http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crim ... 252b4.html

3 nights ago: local cops in riot gear all over the place menacing crowds, lots of violence.

2 nights ago: local cops in riot gear sequestered out-of-site, plainclothes state troopers putting on charm offensive, calm prevails.

Last night: local cops in riot gear back out menacing crowds, more eruptions of violence.



What makes me think the people in charge of this are of the same set that reflexively looks at a social inequality situation and defaults to "well, we just haven't given quite enough tax cuts to the rich yet for the wealth to start trickling down, so we're on the right track"? X(

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Re: Police Misconduct: Tracked

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Rat Patrol wrote:
Dr. Medulla wrote:http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... y-lie.html

I hate the fact that none of this shocks me.
From what I've read elsewhere during this whole thing, Ferguson used to be a sundown town back in the "good ol' days". X(
Always useful to remember Faulkner from Requiem for a Nun: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

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