Ongoing U.S Police Brutality and Corruption Discussion Thread

maybe you don't belong in the zoo

It's what you get for casually referencing the destruction of non-white people. The lurid speculation about what violence might be done to someone is...it brings images to mind that are very very real for some people, even if they seem like just a recitation of facts to others.

Yes, it does bring images to mind that are very very real to some people, including me. My observation was far from casual however it might have read to you. These issues make me deeply angry and deeply sad, partially for personal reasons I'd rather not disclose when a troll with a penchant for ad hominem attacks is trying to control the direction of the conversation.

does anyone not feel sad and angry about the sort of things documented here? at best it adds nothing to the conversation, nor is it particularly realistic, for while there is evidently no limit to what police are capable of doing, in the most likely scenario if that person was not i) white ii) upper middle class iii) middle aged iv) an attorney, the police would just have just intimidated them into going away with the spoken or unspoken threat of arrest

power works in far more insidious ways than just shooting people, that clip is so striking precisely because the extraordinary power and confidence displayed by that woman is the conferred upon her by various systems of inequity and is usually used to perpetuate rather than mitigate them

does anyone not feel sad and angry about the sort of things documented here?

lol let's peruse some comments sections shall we

"here"

ANYWAY, here's another, from my neck of the woods. Similar in circumstance to the Hammond one above -- car pulled over for a minor infraction, woman driving, child in back, male passenger asked to identify himself -- but with a lot less violent result.

http://www.toledoblade.com/Police-Fire/2014/10/06/Video-of-Sandusky-traffic-stop-goes-viral-after-man-records-his-arrest.html

It's worth noting in the story: "According to a Sandusky police report, Officer Denny saw a vehicle, driving without headlights . . . The video shows that officer pulled over the vehicle at 7:07 p.m." Assuming this was taken the date it was uploaded to YouTube, sunset in Sandusky that day was at 7:16pm. And based on the visible weather in the video, while it might be polite to have your headlights on already, there's no legal requirement to do so.

shakey you are really lamentably dense

who is shakey? i don't see a post by a shakey recently.

If you were to take a guess who would you say is shakey

what's the point of creating new socks if you're just gonna abandon the pretense

I'm not a sock I got sick of having an old name I couldn't change

i have no idea who shakey is. other than neil young.

https://twitter.com/KilledByCops

An undercover NYPD officer rushing in to aid uniformed colleagues making an arrest kicked one of them in the head after apparently mistaking him for a suspect, a video obtained by DNAinfo New York shows.

http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20141023/coney-island/video-nypd-officer-kicks-colleague-head-during-arrest

that kick was totally unnecessary!

come on tho, the guy could have been the one beating up those innocent subway fares

oh look

In the past 20 years, at least 17 police officers in the United States have been charged with murder for their actions in line-of-duty shootings. None of these officers, though, was convicted of murder — and most weren’t convicted of anything,

"Why would you kill her? He shot her in the head and in the chest," Stephens said. "It was a woman with a knife. It doesn't make any sense."

http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2014/11/witness_in_ann_arbor_police_sh.html

http://www.theawl.com/2014/11/serial-and-white-reporter-privilege

cross post with rolling thread abt race

"Why would you kill her? He shot her in the head and in the chest," Stephens said. "It was a woman with a knife. It doesn't make any sense."
http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2014/11/witness_in_ann_arbor_police_sh.html

― Andy K, Monday, November 10, 2014 1:26 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i hate how there's this whole vein of "police theory" that is always trotted out in response to these commonsensical objections, that serve to explain how police are in fact justified in shooting first and asking questions later in every conceivable circumstance. one thing that bothers me is how police can take almost any action they want if they have even the remotest fear of bodily harm. shouldn't police be willing to risk harm more than the average person? that's why they're police. maybe it's police unions that are to blame for a lot of this.

sorry if this post isn't very well thought through, this stuff makes me so angry and then the inevitable justifications by very calm-sounding police apologists make me angrier.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/17/is-texas-getting-ready-kill-innocent-man/

this seems completely insane

xxp along the lines of your "shouldn't police be willing to risk harm": I remember seeing coverage after Ferguson of recently-implemented policies by (iirc) Seattle & LAPD that would make officers liable for mishandling/escalating situations to the point where lethal force becomes necessary, EVEN IF that actual use-of-force is 'justified' by an imminent threat to the officer's life or w/e

remains to be seen what actual enforcement of this will look like, but it seems like a step in the right direction

http://www.sltrib.com/news/1842489-155/killings-by-utah-police-outpacing-gang

In the past five years, more Utahns have been killed by police than by gang members.

Or drug dealers. Or from child abuse.

And so far this year, deadly force by police has claimed more lives — 13, including a Saturday shooting in South Jordan — than has violence between spouses and dating partners.

Through October, 45 people had been killed by law enforcement officers in Utah since 2010, accounting for 15 percent of all homicides during that period.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/24/cleveland-police-kill-12-year-old-boy-wielding-bb-gun-that-looked-like-a-semi-automatic-pistol/

On Saturday afternoon, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was sitting on a swing outside a recreation center in Cleveland, wearing a camouflage hat and hiding a BB gun in his waistband.

http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/11/cleveland_police_officer_shot_1.html

CLEVELAND, Ohio – A Cleveland police officer fatally shot Tamir Rice immediately after leaving his moving patrol car while his partner stayed at the wheel, surveillance video shows.

The video showed Wednesday by police captures the Saturday afternoon shooting at a West Side recreation center in which 12-year-old Rice was shot.

The video contains no audio.

A rookie officer pulled the trigger, said Jeffrey Follmer, president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association.

Police were sent to the Cudell Recreation Center at Detroit Avenue and West Boulevard about 3:30 p.m. when someone called 9-1-1 to report a "guy with a gun pointing it at people."

The caller told dispatchers twice that the gun was "probably fake," but that detail was not relayed to the responding officers, Follmer said.

This is a developing story.

I...

They also fucking did this story

http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/11/tamir_rices_father_has_history.html

wtf

i bet some of the 9/11 victims had parents who also had histories of domestic violence, did they report on that?

New video emerges of black cosplayer running for his life from cops who then shot and killed him

12 y/o american youth seen playing with toy gun, clearly must be some history of violence/neglect in his family history to explain this unsettling development. Can't possibly be that he's the same as every other 12 y/o male to ever live in this country since its inception.

fuck fuck fuck

Otm, as Zellie Imani said: "Black parents have to justify why their sons play with toy guns as rural White American children play with real ones."

re the Eric Garner non-indictment:

At the spot on Bay Street where Eric Garner died, his stepfather, Benjamin Carr, said he hurt anew.

“It’s just like getting a knife stabbed in my heart,” Mr. Carr said. “You might as well choke me.”

Around him, a sparse crowd yelled, “No Justice,” “I Can’t Breathe,” and obscenities about the police.

Mr. Carr said that he had expected this outcome.

“I’m not surprised,” he said. “The federal government got to do something about it.”

He took a phone call, and his tone turned from sad to pleading.

“Tell everybody else, don’t start nothing,” he said. “Please, Eric wouldn’t want it, and I don’t want it.”

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/03/the-death-of-eric-garner-the-grand-jury-decision/

what can the federal govt conceivably do about these kinds of cases? (serious legal question)

I mean beyond civil rights violation charges

fucking cops . check the comments

http://www.policeone.com/Crowd-Control/articles/7921845-Lawyer-No-indictment-in-NYPD-in-custody-death/

Nothing I know of... but Al Sharpton just spoke to Holder. #stuntman

xp

xp to shakey, not much is my impression, a federal civil rights case has even more hurdles than a regular state criminal case from what I can tell

Abolish Federalism

wasn't even aware of the darrien rice case until just now, fuck

Good resource for this bullshit:

http://filmingcops.com/

I think it's really important that these protests go on and get coverage , it looks like there is a lot of ignorance out there, protest legitimates the critical viewpoint.

idk that it achieves much of substance besides providing a place for protestors to commiserate tbh

(which is also how I felt about all the anti-Iraq war protests I participated in)

Holder opening federal probe into Garner case

this shit is sickening

i'm sure that wrt to this stuff holder's heart is in the right place but his promise of "federal probes" basically just serve to calm dissent at the moment it's about to erupt. nothing will come of the probes of the ferguson or NY PDs.