Ongoing U.S Police Brutality and Corruption Discussion Thread

For years, white supremacists in a Dothan, Alabama, police department planted drugs and guns on black people. According to Internal Affairs documents obtained by the Henry County Report, their superiors, several of whom have since been promoted, knew about the practice and helped cover it up. Indeed, the lieutenant implicated by the documents is now the chief of the department. The sergeant who obstructed the Internal Affairs investigation went on to become sheriff and then director of homeland security for the state, a position he continues to hold today. The district attorney at the time (still in office) sat on exculpatory evidence and proceeded with felony prosecutions against the individuals the officers had framed.

https://newrepublic.com/minutes/124937/years-white-supremacists-dothan-alabama-police-department-planted-drugs-guns-black-people

I'd seen this floating around and it's fucking insane

i have not read it myself yet but i see that there's already some questions about that report

the SPLC has retracted their tweet of it:

https://twitter.com/splcenter/status/672466511886422018

slate's criminal justice reporter gave it a hard look and interviewed the report's author:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/12/dothan_county_alabama_police_corruption_what_do_we_actually_know.html

SPLC ‏@splcenter 3h3 hours ago
Questions have arisen about the reporting and readers should not assume the claims are true until more information is provided.

hmm

SPLC's pretty reliable

Yeah, thought that might happen.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/police-tear-protest-camp-minneapolis-4th-precinct-35551810

Word on the ground is that this is a pretty pleasant and whitewashed version of how things went down

holtzclaw guilty, recommended sentence of 260+ years

he didn't take it well

Fake crying like the psychopath he is. Good luck, USA.

so we have our own case in SF now: http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Family-of-man-shot-by-SF-police-to-file-federal-6691945.php?cmpid=brknow

although tbh I'm a little ambivalent about this one, dude was armed and is suspected of having just stabbed somebody. Could they have captured him without killing him? I suspect so but there lies the rub (I haven't watched the video fwiw, I don't watch snuff films)

Fake crying like the psychopath he is. Good luck, USA.

― Three Word Username, Friday, December 11, 2015 4:04 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

why fake? even psychopathic serial rapists can cry when they learn they will spend the rest of their life in prison

yeah, i'm not exactly sorry for the guy in any way but he's almost certainly going to be in jail through 2045; you're allowed to lose your shit

dude is gonna get it in prison

:(

"it" = "a college degree"

shakey, the video is pretty incredible. the guy was pretty much encircled (against a wall) by cops, one of them tries to cut him off from the side, 'he lunges' or whatever bullshit they say, and then it's like a firing squad

SF Police Chief is using this as an opportunity to argue for arming cops with stun guns. Which I guess is progress of some sort (also sounds practically like an admission of wrongdoing)

jesus. that is absolutely horrifying. shakey i understand about not wanting to watch the video, but if you are not going to watch the video imo you need to not cast aspersions on what he was supposedly armed with or was suspected of having done. i don't think the latter is a good thing to do in any case because it aligns with the way police consistently slander victims, but i think in particular it does not look good to say "and don't show me anything to contradict this, either." like, that's what video evidence does, as absolutely terrifying and heartbreaking as it is to see a person shot fifteen times by five police officers - it cuts through those narratives and exposes them.

i don't care what you're "suspected of," it's profoundly unlikely that anybody needs to be shot to resolve the overwhelming, overwhelming majority of situations. certainly not shot so many times as to ensure death beyond a shadow of a doubt. a firing squad is a very apt analogy. god, that's horrible.

I would think that my average level of trust in police departments is well documented around here but I guess not

I don't "trust" the police version of events beyond the dude being armed and the fact that there was a stabbing nearby. My "little ambivalence" is due to these as mitigating factors distinguishing this from the countless instances of cops just shooting unarmed people when they felt like it - this one is slightly different. That doesn't make it right.

does it even makes it slightly different though? you're innocent until proven guilty, not innocent until proven guilty unless you are suspected of being responsible for a recent stabbing in the vicinity.

(maybe not quite the exact right set of rights to invoke here to make my point, but hopefully it's still clear.)

because even if he was known 100% to be responsible for the recent stabbing, shooting him fifteen times against a wall is not justified. shooting him at all does not seem justified actually. i'm pretty sure most stabbing cases get resolved in some other fashion.

it's slightly different in that it makes it not entirely unreasonable for a cop to have drawn his weapon (as opposed to say, shooting a small child playing in a park, or shooting an unarmed driver during a traffic stop, or strangling a guy selling cigarettes etc.) Cops to have shot him 15 times is excessive and crazy, obviously. And no I won't be shamed into watching people murdered sorry.

xp

is this one of those classic ILX times when two people who agree about something argue over semantics cuz um

DC otm, you can't give them an inch on this. the job of the cops is to arrest - not try, convict, and sentence. the suspect's alleged prior actions are irrelevant and bringing them up as an excuse is a slippery slope.

whether the guy was armed and had just committed a crime is obviously an important bit of context. why 5 different cops have to shoot to kill rather than, shooting him once or twice in the legs, is the question

sorry for extraneous commas

would never say anybody's obliged to watch these videos. just that ''not gonna watch it'' and in the same breath ''but on the basis of other evidence that i take more seriously, this case seems less clear cut than others'' doesn't 100% wash with me. but to be honest, i've moved past that, because i'm more where sleeve's at. like i don't know that there's any surrounding circumstance which makes this kind of killing something about which i'd be ambivalent. put another way, i do think it remains entirely unreasonable for one cop, let alone five, to have guns drawn and ready in this situation. i recognze that knives are dangerous weapons but... really? this seems ''reasonable''? imho it seems crazy and i don't want to be in on the project of naturalizing crazy policing, or accepting it as a long-established norm.

i do think we probably agree on huge swaths of things related to this issue - pushing on the places where we don't because i think they're important, not because they're semantic.

xp yeah then come the 'i wuz trained to shoot to kill' bullshit justifications

aside from watching videos like these just to help things bring home to myself sometimes, mostly i am just interested in being able to calibrate my rejoinders to people who are oblivious to the things they can see in such videos or blinded by idiotic beliefs from even seeing them. i.e. i want to make sure i don't overstep any line of credibility when talking to them, and i want to be able to choose what's most salient to talk about.

been teaching some ethics students around this topic in the past year and while at times it's been good, the buildup of protests all year seems to have stimulated some of them to cling to the crudest pro-police garbage. : /

"Fake crying" = head down, eyes dry, head shaking no. Yes, bad people have real feelings and cry for real; he looked like he was fake crying to me.

this isn't an important matter but imo he was overdoing it for the camera but may also have been very emotional

Don't really care how he feels or acts. Awesome he got all those years behind bars to act however he wants without any power to cause harm.

once it sinks in that he ain't coming back he can start getting some cool swastika neck tattoos

does the aryan nation accept people with Japanese heritage?

i think the Japanese were only given honorary white status in apartheid south africa

Not even an indictment on this? Even if he's holding a knife, it sure looks like he's surrendering.

http://gawker.com/officials-release-second-video-in-fatal-police-shooting-1747834692

I never knew that. There's also this little tidbit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorary_Aryan#To_the_Japanese

Baltimore is on pins & needles right now waiting for first verdict in Freddie Gray case. Saw cops in camo on my way to work today. Druid Hill Park right now:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CWSSbwwUkAAFGQS.jpg

Letter from yesterday warning students that they will be arrested for walking out of school

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CWNep_lUYAAf7Qx.jpg

it doesn't say they will be arrested, it says they will "face consequences"

yeah the people whose jobs it is to make big deals out of everything are making a big deal of that. obviously kids should be allowed to protest too but schools have a reasonable interest in keeping their kids safe, and there's good reason to believe that it's not going to be safe out there if the verdict turns out a certain way

that said i'm sure this is partly being used as a cover for preventing kids from protesting

sometimes i visit the chicago breaking news Facebook and i guess this doesn't precisely count as police brutality but i noticed that the son of the police chief of bridgeview IL had quite the opinion abt minorities on one of the recent news stories, i wonder if that trickled down from dear ol dad.

i'd post the screengrabs i took but i'm unable to upload them right now and it's just sort of depressing anyway.

Got a link?

sent you an ilx mail with the pics i screencapped. it seems like the low hanging fruit of scandals but it's just gross imo.

wasn't sure how to link from the story itself and not just the whole FB page and wasn't sure it was worth posting more about, but it's on that page in the comments of a story about a cop threatening Gliniewicz investigators.

I wish that letter had said, "Like Mayor Rawlings-Blake and city police officials I am very concerned about the distinct possibility of a miscarriage of justice resulting in civil disorders following the announcement of an unjust verdict allowing corrupt and criminal behavior on the part of the police to go unpunished."

xp thanks, I have a somewhat vested interest in bridgeview politics and wasn't having any luck with my searches after reading your initial post

i read that page and sometimes click on particularly appalling posters just out of morbid curiosity, like "who the hell is this person?" and then i saw that photo of him with his police chief dad and i wasn't as shocked as i wish i could have been, in another slightly better world.