Ongoing U.S Police Brutality and Corruption Discussion Thread

http://www.salon.com/2015/07/22/fundraiser_for_baltimore_cops_charged_in_freddie_grays_death_to_feature_blackface_performance/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

oh, it's been cancelled.

http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/do-you-know-why-im-pulling-you-over-being-wildly-a-50916

The "official" Sandra Bland story has become literally unbelievable: Bland was apparently deeply depressed and, though furious about her arrest and not depressive in the eyes of her friends and family, opted to share her pain with intake officers... who nonetheless neglected to take any steps to safeguard her from being injured though they believed she was potentially a danger to herself. Then, while still in custody, she either smoked or ate some marijuana then, while waiting to be released on bail so that she could start her new job and press charges against a cop that acted improperly on camera, instead hung herself with a conveniently available garbage bag.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/24/us/autopsy-of-sandra-bland-finds-injuries-consistent-with-suicide-prosecutor-says.html

Didn't know whether to put this in here or Racism, but Jesus Fucking Christ, what the fuck?

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/bobby-berger-blackface-fundraiser-canceled

Michael's Eighth Avenue in Glen Burnie, Maryland, the venue that was reported to host former police officer Bobby Berger's planned fundraiser, said in a statement late Wednesday that the event would not be held there.

"Bobby Berger will not host a fundraiser at Michael’s Eighth Avenue for the six Baltimore police officers charged in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray," the statement read. "No contract was signed with Mr. Berger. Michael’s does not condone blackface performances of any kind."

see four posts above yours

Bah, thanks.

CNN with legal discussion:

Was Sandra Bland traffic stop legal and fair?
http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/23/opinions/cevallos-sandra-bland-traffic-stop/index.html

The "official" Sandra Bland story has become literally unbelievable

Man, this is OTM. It's like total black is white, up is down territory. If they're going to lie, they might as well make it plausible. If it was just a tragic series of coincidences, then they're doing a terrible job backing up their ridiculous defense, and at this point even doing that would come so late as to raise further doubts. Even reposting the allegedly edited video, "fixing" whatever problems it had, the replacement video is still missing several minutes, and lacks a time-stamp. It's like this super collision of small town cop incompetence. They're not even good at thin blue line lying, which is cop 101.

Devil's advocate here: would you admit to depression in police intake forms if it means a possibility of clemency while in their custody?

in my experience, the only time clemency is given is if someone reports active suicidal ideation --- at which point they are transferred from jail to the emergency department for evaluation

Her admission of depression, as well as admitting to losing a baby, both details supposedly totally unknown to her friends and family, does seem like a weird thing to admit in a police intake form, especially given that she had to be dragged in there against her will under disingenuous pretenses in cuffs and under threat of taser. IMO.

i am extremely skeptical of the official reporting of events in this case, but will say that it is not uncommon at all for pts with depression, miscarriage, suicidal ideation, etc, to keep that secret from their loved ones (as i'm sure some ilxors know v well)

Sure, it just seems weird that she would be cooperative at all, really. Why would she even relate the specific details of a miscarriage to the police, even if it was true? Given she knows her arrest is bullshit and even insists earlier she doesn't need to do anything more than identify herself? I don't know how arrests/booking or whatever work. But given that almost every other aspect of the official accounts scans as false or inaccurate, Occam's razor seems to be in play here.

it would be a really far-fetched imo coverup to falsify that form & specifically write abt losing a baby cuz there just have to be medical records of some type that will confirm/deny if that happened even if family & friends had no idea right

Medical records are confidential

word well anyway I guess the sister confirmed bland did have a miscarriage

Idk i am kinda starting to believe cops version tbh

regardless of confidentiality, there aren't necessarily medical records every time someone gets pregnant and then miscarries

It's also important to always keep in mind that this was 100% bullshit before she even got to the station.

i can't stop thinking about sandra bland tbh

I kinda believe the cops version as well, but it's not as if that stops the story from being horrifying. Basically, she refused to put out her cigarette, and this cop just decided to wreck her life. The whole routine way this has happened: this must happen over and over and over. The law in Texas is just legalized harassment of black people. If it isn't 'murder', she was still killed by white supremacy; the system might not have murdered her, but it sure as hell did everything it could to deny her her humanity.

p much

the marijuana thing... people understand that trace amounts of marijuana are detectable in your system for quite a long time, right? I mean anyone who's ever been drug tested (raises hand) knows this

"she refused to put out her cigarette"

How does anyone still not blindly do whatever a cop says - no matter how stupid or bizarre you might think it is - after everything that happened?

...

if I got arrested you can damn well be sure there's a bunch of weed in my system. that doesnt mean im a savage who deserves to die. or that I smoked weed in the last 24 hours.

did you guys watch her video where she talks about police brutality?

https://www.facebook.com/sandra.bland.5070/videos/10100618184266304/?pnref=story

How does anyone still not blindly do whatever a cop says - no matter how stupid or bizarre you might think it is - after everything that happened?

― StanM, Friday, July 24, 2015 4:05 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you can't be fucking serious

?

I'm not saying that the trigger happy powertripping cops aren't to blame. I'm only recommending that you don't want to find out if the one you meet is like that. Don't talk back, don't struggle, don't talk back, he's got the gun and you are a threat the millisecond you do any of those things. Complain about him afterwards.

no offense stanm, and forgive me if i'm just completely misreading everything about your post, but you do realize you sound like someone's right-wing acquaintance posting on the comments below a news story, in this case dispensing know-it-all advice to a woman who is dead, under extremely fishy circumstances, that are emphatically not her fault.

blaming the victim is generally not cool, like in basically all situations. and the whole thing with this kind of police antagonism is that it does not matter what you do, it is not like they got out of the car thinking "i'll be a nice guy if they pass the putting-out-the-cigarette test." the putting-out-the-cigarette thing is itself an act of unprovoked aggression from the cop. oh, so what, did she do something before that to make him feel "threatened" so that, in his agitated state, he went for the cigarette move? gosh, guess the whole thing was her fault then. i'm sure you don't think that but this is where this kind of logic leads. if the cop is pulling this cigarette shit on you then guess what, the cop you met is already "like that." so whose fault is it if the situation gets worse? if you answered the person being stopped and harassed for no good reason, go back and check your math.

put another way: cops are not grizzly bears in the woods where you just need to know this one trick to make them not think you're a "threat." IOW this situation has fuck all to do with a cop feeling "threatened." i find the idea of cops, who, indeed, have guns and the knowledge that their actions will be supported by a myriad of institutions, feeling "threatened" in the circumstances of a traffic stop just completely nuts.

brutality is not the fault of the brutalized, and it is not for message board posters to tell people how they should react. also btw "complain about him afterwards" sounds really condescending and belittling, like the victims in these situations just need to mature a little and save their irritations for a yelp review. i want to assume you don't mean it that way and it's more "nail his ass to the wall through the legal system afterwards" or whatever but that doesn't change the overall tone. that's without getting specifically to "don't talk back, don't struggle, don't talk back," which i really have to leave to somebody else.

Oh, no, I was wondering what the hostility was about - I'm not talking about any particular person or case, just, in general, if you look at all of the things that went wrong in all of these links, most contain a ridiculously tiny action or word or gesture by the victim that afterwards look like that was (part of) the trigger that the cop needed to go haywire. No, that doesn't mean the victims brought it upon themselves, not at all,just that I would be fully committed to becoming the most docile unquestioning complying cowardly SisYesSir SirNoSir lamb the second I'm stopped by a cop in the USA. That's not right wing or left wing or any wing, I certainly didn't mean to give that impression.

The important lesson here is that I still haven't learned that this kind of thread (complicated issues re: race, politics, religion, etc) isn't for me, I only dig my own grave every time. Ignore everything I said, I can't do this, clearly. I'm going back to the occasional stupid puns and ILM.

Actually a straight answer to yr point'd be nice, I live in New Zealand bt cops here need to be treated like a natural hazard on the order of (yup) bears, kinda doubt they're better in the US

And actually if you obey every idiotic belittling command they often do get their little power fix and let you off. They're (often) pathetic legal bullies. This isn't a theoretical matter for me tho, so I'll bow out.

i find the idea of cops, who, indeed, have guns and the knowledge that their actions will be supported by a myriad of institutions, feeling "threatened" in the circumstances of a traffic stop just completely nuts.
― Gorefest Frump (Doctor Casino), Saturday, July 25, 2015 11:52 PM

Personally I think we need more active citizen pushback against police in every scenario *except* the actual police-civilian encounter. That's a strategic assessment, not a moralizing one.

If it wasn't a cigarette, it would have been something else. Turning the radio off, reaching for something, looking at him in the "wrong" way. He's going to find a reason no matter what she does. No amount of compliance will stop psycho cops in these situations, especially with black people.

I'm going to repost something I wrote on the respectability politics thread I started a few months ago as it takes StanM's post on from a different angle that I don't think people consider very often:

The thing with respectability politics that I think often gets missed with the denunciation is that it oftentimes isn't actually about policing your behavior of a marginalized group so that they will no longer be oppressed or marginalized; it is about removing the excuses that allow others to overlook or ignore the reasons why a marginalized group is being marginalized. If you live your life like Heathcliff Huxtable* and you are STILL being pulled over, singled out in airport security lines, denied favorable loan rates or credit, not granted interviews for jobs that you are clearly qualified to do, passed over repeatedly for promotions in favor of people less qualified than you, graded more harshly on subjective exams than your classmates, etc etc etc, the problem is not your attitude, it's not your aptitude, it's not your performance and it's not your behavior. You are making the good people who are oppressing you show their (sometimes unconscious) bias, which can't be as readily ignored or hand-waved.

Does this work? Probably not, or at least not as well as one would like it to work, largely because people are deeply invested in seeing themselves as the heroes/good guys of their own stories and are therefore wholly unwilling to face the idea that they are contributing to systemic institutional oppression. Do I think respectability politics still have a place in uncovering how pervasive oppression is in modern society? Yes.

* NOT BILL COSBY

IOW, the tactic should be less about keeping yourself safe (although that's obviously a concern!) and more about showing people who think these encounters are rare or sensationalized how pervasive they are, including sometimes the people directly involved in the encounter at the time.

StanM, if you're still reading, I'm sorry for my too-strident response, which was definitely informed more by armchair self-righteousness, and frustrations from elsewhere getting vented in an inappropriate place, than any actual authority in these issues. ILX deserves better.

boxall -

I'm sure you do - but how much more evidence do you need that cops don't think it's nuts? The vast majority of cops do feel threatened during traffic stops, or if they don't, they at least conduct themselves as if they do. It doesn't justify their abusive practices but I think it's incredibly naive to say "the whole thing with this kind of police antagonism is that it does not matter what you do." Would you seriously give that advice to someone who you expected to follow it? Even if they looked more like Sandra Bland than you? (Correct me if I'm wrong in my assumption, I thought I remembered seeing you on Jeopardy though.)

FWIW, I definitely wasn't setting out to dispense advice to potential police victims here - rather to suggest that the implications of StanM's advice struck me as problematic. I don't believe there is a magic set of tactics that will cause the cop in question, who has already started harassing you, to stop doing so or even to decelerate their harassment; meanwhile, I'm in no position to tell people how they should conduct themselves in these situations, which depending on the cop in question may be ultimately life-or-death, or a matter of daily existential choices. I sincerely don't think trying to reverse-engineer cops' subjective sense of being threatened is going to be that useful in any given situation, because these situations are not driven to where they go by good but nervous cops who get agitated when they feel threatened.

I do think that at a macro level, in terms of pursuing police reforms and trying to unravel various ingrained customs, habits, cycles, psychologies and self-sustaining narratives, it could be very useful to get at that subjective sense of "threatened" that gets expressed by someone like Darren Wilson, where clearly his sense that he was in danger (at least, as he claimed after the fact, with his narratives in order) was inseparable from his perception of Michael Brown as supposedly "charging" him, which I think is in turn inseparable from his perceptions of Brown as a black male. I don't believe Brown did any such thing, but maybe realizing he sees things this way can provide useful information for those trying to figure out exactly how to re-train our nation's racist cops. But as for traffic stops, something like the Levar Jones shooting, to me, points up the hopelessness of imagining what constitutes enough of a "threat" to justify firing several shots at someone who was pulled over for a broken tail light.

DJP's passage above is interesting, and difficult. Obviously, shifting into the register of political efficacy changes things a bit. StanM's posts seemed to me to be about how those targeted by the police might increase their odds of getting out of the (immediate) situation safely, rather than how that conduct could change minds of third-party observers (witnesses, media viewers assuming these incidents make it to the media etc). I definitely wouldn't dismiss this kind of tactical respectability politics out of hand, though my (unsolicited) reading is laced with some serious pessimism or even despair (that probably isn't that productive). The Huxtable approach does seem to place a considerable onus on marginalized persons to reorganize their lives (career choices, leisure activities, choice of friends and partners, dress, hairstyles...) around what the powerful will find respectable - but, okay, in this case it's by the activist choice of the marginalized, and to different ends. I'd buy that... I guess it just seems like the various forces that work to discredit, vilify and ultimately erase the subjective lives of victims will always find something. "This just in, news at 11, underneath the argyle sweater, he was no angel." Or, alternately, I feel like since the goalposts were always at least partly bogus, and placed unequally to boot, it's pretty easy for the people in whom one is hoping to provoke a cognitive dissonance to just move them around (consciously or unconsciously) when the time comes.

There are lots of other cans of worms coming to mind here (where does this leave the "unrespectable" in the end?) but these may be more informed by my understanding of queer politics, and I should probably just go read the thread before I shoot my mouth off. And of course, history is full of examples suggesting that "respectability" is a factor in changing minds; civil rights activism from the 1940s to the 1960s gradually made enormous, almost unthinkable gains, in part through considering exactly these factors. And obviously, as has been pointed out, I don't have to face these choices myself, and I'm certainly not interested in telling people who do pursue this strategy that they're doing something wrong.

This is from a couple of months ago. I don't think it was posted here. But when the guy gets caught he lays down and puts his hands behind his back - clearly and visibly. When the sheriffs approach him they proceed to kick the shit out of him. Insofar as being in a position of being arrested, he did everything "right" and still the police let loose on him. I think it just doesn't matter what you do - they're going to behave however they want

http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/10/us/california-san-bernardino-police-beating/

...I see from later articles that he settled with San Bernadino county.

yeah like a week later, in exchange for no further legal action

dude must have needed the money for his legal fees on the uh other matters

ol anderson cooper asked the pertinent question right away: these dudes were all doing this in full view of a news helicopter… so… why????

It's like the fruitlessness of divining bear intent:

Brown/Grizzly Bears: If you are attacked by a brown/grizzly bear, leave your pack on and PLAY DEAD. Lay flat on your stomach with your hands clasped behind your neck. Spread your legs to make it harder for the bear to turn you over. Remain still until the bear leaves the area. Fighting back usually increases the intensity of such attacks. However, if the attack persists, fight back vigorously. Use whatever you have at hand to hit the bear in the face.

Only in this case the bears have guns, too. And you're not allowed to hit them.

And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the cops ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the cops. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in donuts.

haha

http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20150727/flatbush/video-police-punch-suspect-during-arrest-brooklyn-target

lol shakey nice

Not brutalizing but kind of messed up.

A friend of mine was arrested last week for driving w a suspended license and was in jail for 5 days. He is diabetic and was fed mostly white bread and sugar cookies. Apparently there was no running water for the first 2 days and everyone had to ration bottles. He was really supposed to be in and out in a couple of hours but 'the system was down' and his sign-in paperwork was missing so he spent 5 days.

http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2015/07/29/prosecutor-discuss-dubose-shooting-today/30822025/

looks like they're going to release footage of the DuBose shooting today.

xp adam that is more than "kind of messed up"! your friend isn't dead or beaten but i would def call that a brutalizing experience to spend 5 days in jail for a suspended license

murder charges: http://news.yahoo.com/latest-video-ohio-traffic-stop-shooting-public-153334227.html