Ongoing U.S Police Brutality and Corruption Discussion Thread

bar owner's husband stated that the cop who plowed into the building was actually the nicest of the bunch and I guess the investigating officers on the scene were the belligerent fucks looking to start something. but he also said he didn't believe the 'dog' story, especially since that's not the story the officer gave the press.

said also that immediately upon coming downstairs the cops demanded his ID and when he initially refused, they spun him around and cuffed him, only to release him a second later.

the arresting officer on scene sounds like he was a complete prick on arrival and not making any attempt to like, empathize with an owner of an LGBTQ+ establishment that just had his livelihood wrecked at a time when LGBTQ+ establishments are being defaced and vandalized nationally, and just decided he didn't like the gay man who was yelling at him.

lol Colonel Poo

Probably working out how to charge the owners with moving the building in the path of their vehicle.

I like that the press keeps focusing on the fact that the cop who hit the building is fresh out of the academy, as if being a new cop means you're also simultaneously new to driving

he was probably drunk

Maybe Elon Musk is making police vehicles with an autohatecrime feature you can turn on

as if being a new cop means you're also simultaneously new to driving

Well it does mean you're new to driving without regard for any kind of traffic laws or standards at all. Takes a while to get good at flipping on your lights for a half-second to zip through red lights and drive 100 mph on narrow city streets. (Spoiler alert, they never really get good at it. We've had at least two fatalities here in recent years caused by cops driving at insane rates of speed for no particularly good reason. All found to be justified in the course of their duties, naturally.)

lol touchee

an old friend of mine once flipped their vehicle over due to cops running her off the road in a high speed pursuit, then I think wound up arresting her for ....something

oh to clarify, SHE was not the one being pursued

Driving too slow during a high speed chase

Yeah, a friend of mine had a similar, if less harrowing, experience in Myrtle Beach. He was making a left hand turn onto a two-lane road when this cop came SCREAMING over the hill to his right. The cop stood on his brakes and spun off the road, hitting a sign. Needless to say, my friend got cited (and had to go back to Myrtle to appear in court), although the cop's supervisor, who showed up at the scene, was pretty pissed at the cop.

TBC, I don't think the cop was on his way to anything urgent.

I once witnessed a cop car run a car off the road so that it knocked over a sign, then about ten more cop cars pulled up--everyone jumped out pointing their guns, ran up to the driver's window of the civilian car and one cop yelled, "He's white!" The the cops all jumped back in their cars and drove off.

Then the cops

there's witness video! and it doesn't corroborate the police's story!

https://www.advocate.com/news/missouri-police-crash-gay-bar

already been downgraded from felony to misdemeanor - I have a feeling Morris's lawyers will get them dropped altogether

Must have been one small dog.

we are all looking for the guy who did this

xp - about 25 years ago, i had a cop back their car into mine while I was parked ... I was with a couple friends and I was thinking, "oh, a cop is going to follow the law about backing into a parking space, right?" ... they gave me some bullshit excuse why they weren't paying attention. there wasn't any damage to my car. they said that I could file a report if I wanted, but I'd have to wait for another cop to show up to take the report, and it was 1:30am and I was like, "no, I'm just gonna go home. Drive safe, officers!"

ftr it wasn't OPD but Emeryville PD

Deputy scared by an acorn hitting his cruiser opens fire in street

Hernandez and Roberts were shooting in crossfire positions and without cover. Hernandez fired his last shots lying on his left side in the road, yelling: “I’m hit! I’m hit!”

He was, in fact, not hit.

The video is incredible - both utterly harrowing and just unrecoverably humiliating for the police officer. An acorn lands on his car and he drops into like.. a roll? Roars like a walrus? Drops his gun a few times? How the fuck do these people get given guns

"there's FENTANYL ON THAT ACORN"

It’s going to grow into a Fentanyl Tree

sometimes you feel like a nut

Amazing that with two officers firing into the car they didn’t hit the handcuffed guy. If you’re going to be in a car getting shot at, I guess be in a cop car.

It says Officer Acorn was just hired last year. Every police dept in America has hired a bunch of new people because there have been a ton of retirements. And not much of anybody wants to be a cop these days, so they can’t be choosy about the ones who actually apply and manage to squeak through the qualifications.

Which is to say, if you thought cops were bad before …

he didn't know he hadn't been hit until he got to the hospital and they told him.. wtf?

What if they never told him

That guy is going to end up a right wing grifter talking about how god healed his acorn wound

always worth remembering that pizza delivery drivers have a more dangerous job than these clowns

dude needs to lay off the Monster energy drinks

esp since *multiple people* who merely pulled into the wrong person's drive way have been shot by gun-touting homeowners in the last year, each the time police saying "shucks if only we could do somethin"

Not that we want to really amp up every cop’s Delta Force fantasy with more gun training but the yearly qualifications for cops are ridiculously low for a license to carry a gun 24/7 and kill with near impunity.

https://www.politico.com/dims4/default/bae6997/2147483647/strip/true/crop/307x231+0+0/resize/1260x948!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fs3-origin-images.politico.com%2F081116_acorn_campus.jpg

The war against Acorns continues

dude needs to lay off the Monster energy drinks

― Andy the Grasshopper, Wednesday, February 14, 2024 7:44 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Cops drink Bang.

https://abc7.com/tennessee-deputy-missing-found-dead-robert-leonard-first-arrest/14429043/

article focuses 99% on the dead cop and gives maybe a sentence to the detainee in the backseat that died because of him, a mother of two

Yeah really gross

Two stories in a row about new cops endangering/killing people.

I’m sure it’s fine.

Fuck police

There's great pressure to hire more police, and in a shrunken labor pool we are going to be scraping the bottom of the barrel. I expect Republican states to start employing child cops.

My locality is complaining about a persistent shortage of cops (shortage versus ideal staffing levels, whoever determines those) in our otherwise low-crime community. The world has not ended.

not ended due to the alleged shortage.

I expect Republican states to start employing child cops.

Not quite there yet, but our county just dropped minimum age to work as a corrections officer in the county jail from 19 to 18 because they couldn't get enough applicants. So now they have 18-year-olds out there "taking care" of prisoners, I'm sure that's going great.

That episode of South Park surprisingly prescient

Also they raised starting salary for the jailer positions to $50k a year, which I'm sure is attractive to an 18-year-old without other good options. If they went and spent five years getting an education degree and a teaching certificate, they'd come out making less. We're really great at prioritizing around here.

Some may have heard about the killing of Tyre Nichols by police in Memphis last year. Five officers are facing 2nd degree murder charges because of it. After debating and in some cases rejecting proposed reforms, one thing the Memphis City Council did last year was pass an ordinance reclassifying minor traffic violations (expired tags, broken taillights, etc) so that they by themselves can't be used as a reason to initiate a traffic stop. (Nichols had been stopped on vague allegations of "reckless driving," which turned out to be entirely bogus when they reviewed the dash cams.)

So, now, because we live in an aspirational police state, our Legislature has passed a bill nullifying that ordinance and saying local governments can't set policy FOR THEIR OWN POLICE DEPARTMENTS that in any way restricts their powers more than existing state and federal laws. This follows a bill last year that took away any (mostly minimal) teeth that our handful of civilian review boards have. Even though local governments and citizens pay for our local law enforcement, the state is telling us that we can't regulate them.

Hard to see how this could go wrong ...

https://apnews.com/article/tennessee-tyre-nichols-police-memphis-c154e1bde2ddeae5059f42f9e10e27b3

Pretextual traffic stops are what made this country great.

funny i thought we didn’t want the federal gummint telling us what to do

State legislators (and this is a somewhat bipartisan phenomenon, tho more pronounced in the red states) see themselves as the ultimate authority. They see no conflict in saying both that the feds shouldn't tell them what to do and that they should be able to boss around local governments all they want. "It's the United STATES of America," they say.

Yeah, we had a real pissing match in Georgia during the pandemic between Brian Kemp and the then-mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms. Needless to say, this was a red/blue conflict as much as it was a turf war.