Ongoing U.S Police Brutality and Corruption Discussion Thread

fuck, one of my friends is in that article about the shooting in St Paul, she was working at the coffee shop nearby.

http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/attorney-east-point-police-used-taser-against-man-/ng9RG/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/30/daniel-holtzclaw-cop-rape_n_5740714.html

the cops here are open-minded enough to kill white people too:
http://host.madison.com/news/local/crime_and_courts/newly-released-police-records-shed-additional-light-on-paul-heenan/article_315e18ac-82e0-11e2-b277-0019bb2963f4.html

this was a couple years back, but it was a block and a half from my house, lots of my friends knew the victim (he was a musician), etc.

the cop was cleared of any wrongdoing for the shooting but fired for other reasons (yeah, ok), but i believe that external investigations into police shootings are now required in WI due to the efforts of his friends & family.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/die-hard-director-john-mctiernan-731171

damn

boy with toy sword shot from behind

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/race-utah-police-shooting

I saw that, horrifically sad

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/58409680-78/hunt-family-police-sword.html.csp

Multiple witnesses say he was running away AND an independent autopsy report found that he was shot in the back

Direct contradictions of the police officer's report that he 'lunged' at the officer

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-utah-police-shooting-20140914-story.html

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/blog/bs-md-ci-police-suit-20140915,0,6933088.story

It seems to me that police doctrine is that the instant you are suspected of unlawful behavior, you are presumed to be dangerous and are fair game for any amount of force to be used against you, with the idea that it is far better that you are killed or wounded than any police officer ever be hurt. This doctrine goes back a very long time in the USA, but the difference now is that it has become officially recognized and codified by the legal system and courts.

It apparently does not matter whether the suspicion is justified or not. It apparently does not matter whether you present any clear or present danger by your actions. So long as the officer "felt threatened", any amount of force is justified to nullify that imagined threat. In practice, this, of course, nullifies the entire concept of "excessive force".

Autopsy report shows police shot Darrien Hunt in the back, lawyer says

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/darrien-hunt-carrying-toy-sword-shot-and-killed-utah-police

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/16/darrien-hunt-shot-in-the-back-by-utah-police-says-family-attorney

“We haven’t even interviewed the officers yet,” said Taylor. “We’ve talked briefly with them just to kind of get an idea of what the scene was at the time.” He said officers were typically interviewed within 48-72 hours of a shooting. One is now scheduled to be interviewed on Tuesday and the other on Thursday, more than a week after the shooting, he said.

“I’m stunned. I find that almost incomprehensible,” Edwards, the attorney for Hunt’s family, said after being informed of this by the Guardian. “You want to speak with the officers almost immediately afterwards, when their memories are fresh and before they have had a chance to corroborate their stories.”

"just to kind of get an idea of what the scene was at the time"

Just, you know, see how their day was goin' 'n' stuff.

“You want to speak with the officers almost immediately afterwards, when their memories are fresh and before they have had a chance to corroborate their stories.”

This assumes that "you" are interested in the truth.

http://gawker.com/nypd-officer-filmed-slamming-pregnant-woman-to-ground-1638487177

An NYPD officer was filmed violently throwing a pregnant woman to ground early Saturday morning. Sandra Amezquita, who is five months pregnant, reportedly suffered vaginal bleeding after the incident, and her arms and stomach remain bruised.

The two officers who shot and killed John Crawford were not indicted

That is fucking insane.

jesus christ that fucking gawker clip possibly the most disturbing thing I've seen in awhile

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/d97584cfd10d48b5a3ea366850f4f06d/woman-punched-california-highway-patrol-settles

holy crap

http://gawker.com/trigger-happy-cop-shoots-unarmed-driver-in-just-release-1638993749

dude in that last video is the most polite assault victim i've ever heard; how the hell do you maintain the patience to call the man who just shot you sir and apologize to him

Easy: You are black and he is white.

christ, do these cops get any training at all?

“Why did you pull me over? I was just pulled into the gas station.”
“Your safety belt violation, sir.”
“Seatbelt… I just pulled it off right there at the corner at the gas station!”

arrested:

http://boingboing.net/2014/09/25/south-carolina-cop-who-shot-bl.html

would not have happened w/o dashboard video

dude in that last video is the most polite assault victim i've ever heard; how the hell do you maintain the patience to call the man who just shot you sir and apologize to him

I don't know if I can articulate why this post enrages me so much. How many times black people must tell stories about their survival strategies for existing in America before you start listening and understanding what they mean?

d, if you're not reading that post with a sense of headshaking wonder, shock and sadness at what the police state demands out of black american men then you are misreading the intention

"american police state" / "black men" rather

I dunno forks, your post also struck me as tone deaf

And maybe your response shouldn't be "become a better reader"

my response was "you misunderstood my intention"

And my response is you miswrote your intention

I had no trouble understanding forks' intent. He knew why the black victim of police assault was so polite, but was at a loss to fathom how he managed it.

i can certainly see how that can read differently than it was intended and, if taken as "gosh that guy sure is subservient why wouldn't he be more angry" as opposed to "the degree of restraint he shows under literal fire is fucking superhuman" is good grounds for enragement

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/30/ernest-satterwhite-just-craven_n_5907544.html

Even when the prosecutor seeks a felony indictment...

this thread is like pure undiluted rage-a-hol

yup

TS: pure undiluted rage-a-hol vs a reminder that a capricious, unpredictable death sentence lurks for you and every member of your family as long as you stay in this country

worst poll ever

I know which side I'm on and which side dan's on and mine is by far the easier side to live on.

I'm not disputing that

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/01/michael-dunn-guilty_n_5913926.html

Some good news - Michael Dunn, who killed Jordan Davis at a gas station for playing loud music, was convicted of first degree murder

v gratifying

not a cop tho

Well, shit

http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/wayne/2014/10/03/weekley-trial-aiyana-stanley-jones/16636179

A Detroit police officer accused in the fatal shooting of 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones walked into a Detroit courtroom Friday facing a felony and misdemeanor charge.

Officer Joseph Weekley walked out of the courtroom with just the misdemeanor charge after Wayne County Circuit Judge Cynthia Gray Hathaway dismissed the involuntary manslaughter charge against him. Weekley still is charged with careless discharge of a firearm causing death in the May 2010 shooting, which happened as police executed a search warrant for a murder suspect.

http://gawker.com/nypd-thugs-caught-on-video-pistol-whipping-teen-with-ha-1643271317

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/family-sues-hammond-police-over-traffic-stop-violence

In cell phone video captured by a terrified 14-year-old sitting in the back seat of Mahone’s car, you can hear Mahone on the line with a 911 operator saying that she fears for her life and that moments earlier officers had pulled their guns on the couple.

http://abc11.com/340724

The parents of a Wake County high school student are outraged that police pepper-sprayed him inside their home after a neighbor mistook him for an intruder.

The video of that is absolutely horrifying xp

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.

Yep, those tensions are always there (see NYC vs. every NY governor), but in the red states where all the big cities are blue, it's much more heightened. We've already had Mississippi state government trying to deploy its own state police in the middle of Jackson, I won't be surprised to see more and more of this shit — sort of a backdoor way to create a state police force, by limiting local control over them.

Oh, our own governor also wants to deploy some of the state Highway Patrol in "high crime" areas in Memphis.

hell, DeSantis as usual is one step ahead in turpitude. He's got his own team, the Florida Guard.

And of course we have Abbott building a National Guard military base in Texas to "protect the border." These guys are very into having their own military. And this is the kind of stuff that really chips away at what I've always thought was one of our best structural protections against having a real police state, because power over law enforcement is so generally decentralized and historically there's actually been a lot of tension between fed-state-local agencies. To the degree that all of that gets "streamlined" under the command of governors and state legislators, it's obviously bad news.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2024/new-orleans-police-child-sexual-abuse-rodney-vicknair/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/03/14/trial-new-orleans-police-child-abuse/