Ongoing U.S Police Brutality and Corruption Discussion Thread

if you can do it in newark, there's no reason you can't do it in any us city.

Weirdly proud of NJ government lately. Legal pot (I don't smoke but still), I'm now getting health insurance from the state instead of the feds, police de-escalation training...

Yeah, stop embarrassing us up in NY already!

it's a little weird to see people suddenly cheering on the cops, I'm not saying they are wrong, but definitely feeling some cognitive dissonance and not sure what to think about it

yeah. no side is good in this situation, but I guess you gotta pick which basket of nazis is worse

the fact that the cops are basically rolling over here though fits the narrative

People will be discussing the inadequacy of cops even more than before. I doubt there will be a groundswell of good feelings like after 9/11.

seeing cops taking selfies with the terrorists is disgusting. The police force needs to be held to account after this.

Also re: Georgia reports earlier:

As far as I can tell no militia actually attempted to enter the capital building in Georgia that was misreporting and secondhand from someone else. I've talked to the militia groups that are actually here, and it's all news to them.

Actually reporting from Georgia. pic.twitter.com/CXdLAwgySA

— Zach D Roberts (@zdroberts) January 6, 2021

that's our "car bomb exploded outside the State building" moment

Never applaud cops. Ever.

Sorry! Wrong thread for my Georgia post. A lot going on today.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-police-officers-who-were-in-dc-during-wednesday-riots-placed-on-administrative-leave/

love that this will be taken more seriously (assuming they were just at the “rally” or whatever and not actually storming the Capitol) than you know, murdering an unarmed black teen.

what an absolutely disgusting institution. abolish.

medium-key psychopathic language in this letter

Minneapolis Police union president Lt. Bob Kroll sent this email to members this morning announcing his retirement at the end of the month pic.twitter.com/j1wphZrEJf

— Max Nesterak (@maxnesterak) January 11, 2021

I’d like him to account for his whereabouts on 1/6.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/nyregion/nypd-james-kobel-racist.html

After two months of investigation, police officials have concluded that a high-ranking officer responsible for combating workplace harassment in the New York Police Department wrote dozens of virulently racist posts about Black, Jewish and Hispanic people under a pseudonym on an online chat board favored by police officers.

The officer, Deputy Inspector James F. Kobel, filed his retirement papers late last week as the departmental inquiry was winding down. But the officials said on Monday that they still planned to bring administrative charges against him as soon as this month for falsely denying that he had written the offensive messages.

“The evidence is strong,” said one senior police official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel matter. “We have no doubt that it’s him.”

/.../

Captain Chris Monahan, who heads the Captains Endowment Association, the union that represents the inspector, defended him in a statement, saying he had served the city and the Police Department for 29 years.

“Given the current political climate and anti-police sentiment, D.I. Kobel did not see it as possible to get a fair administrative trial and decided to avail himself of the opportunity to file for retirement,” the statement said.

ironic.youtube

after this fuckin' week, this is what the pigs care about

https://www.yahoo.com/sports/kentucky-backs-players-right-to-kneel-after-local-cops-burn-gear-in-protest-052523461.html

no UK thread but fuck the police

this article from the Marshall Report itemizes the outrageous costs and blatant kickbacks that lard modern execution and suggests that why this administration legalizes state sponsored murder has far more to do with local economics than justice.

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/01/14/a-6-300-bus-a-33-last-meal-what-new-documents-tell-us-about-trump-s-execution-spree

When Scott Mueller drove to Indiana in July to see Daniel Lewis Lee die, he stayed at a Holiday Inn. The hotel was nice enough, and only a 10-minute drive from the federal execution chamber in Terre Haute where the man who killed Mueller’s father would take his last breath.The two-night hotel stay cost around $200, and the tab was picked up by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. It amounted to a small fraction of the more than $107,000 the agency spent on hotels for the witnesses and staff who flocked to western Indiana last summer for the federal government’s first executions in nearly two decades. 

A review of the expenses for five executions in July and August—including at least $9,376 for plane tickets and rental vans, more than $25,000 for kosher food and roughly $6,590 for tents—paints a stark and intimate picture of the practicalities of death, shedding light on a secretive process typically hidden from the public and shielded under law.

Records providing details of the spending, which the American Civil Liberties Union estimates totaled nearly $4.7 million over two months, were released under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

I know I do this a lot, but I have to say...

it's almost like the US justice system might be irrevocably corrupt!

But really, it reminds me of when my partner and I got stopped for going 75 in a 70 (when other cars were speeding past us) in rural Kentucky. We were moving across the country with tons of stuff and a roof rack, and our car had California plates.

We had less than an 1/8th oz of weed in the car, and so after the two pigs ransacked the whole vehicle— breaking one of my turntables in the process– and turned up nothing, they let us go with a summons.

It turned out that the misdemeanor possession fine was $500, but since I had to pay a lawyer to represent me (because I couldn't go back to rural Kentucky), I ended up having to pay $750 to him and about $700 to the court to make the shit go away.

Of course, it turned out that this lawyer was the only lawyer that represented out-of-towners in the county, and used to work as the county attorney. You can easily see the racket— pigs stop every out-of-state plate they feasibly can, charge em with some bullshit, the person pays a lawyer to represent in court, court gets money to give to the pigs so they can stop every out-of-state plate they feasibly can, and so on and so forth.

I mean whole suburbs of St. Louis were set up as basically speed traps for revenue generation. There's dozens of postage stamp municipalities with no property tax base that subsist almost solely on fines and court fees.

That doesn't make it okay.

Like, it's hopelessly corrupt and fucked up, tbh.

I mean whole suburbs of St. Louis were set up as basically speed traps for revenue generation. There's dozens of postage stamp municipalities with no property tax base that subsist almost solely on fines and court fees.

That doesn't make it okay.

But really, it reminds me of when my partner and I got stopped for going 75 in a 70 (when other cars were speeding past us) in rural Kentucky. We were moving across the country with tons of stuff and a roof rack, and our car had California plates.

We had less than an 1/8th oz of weed in the car, and so after the two pigs ransacked the whole vehicle— breaking one of my turntables in the process– and turned up nothing, they let us go with a summons.

It turned out that the misdemeanor possession fine was $500, but since I had to pay a lawyer to represent me (because I couldn't go back to rural Kentucky), I ended up having to pay $750 to him and about $700 to the court to make the shit go away.

Of course, it turned out that this lawyer was the only lawyer that represented out-of-towners in the county, and used to work as the county attorney. You can easily see the racket— pigs stop every out-of-state plate they feasibly can, charge em with some bullshit, the person pays a lawyer to represent in court, court gets money to give to the pigs so they can stop every out-of-state plate they feasibly can, and so on and so forth.

― Pere Legume (the table is the table), Thursday, January 14, 2021 12:27 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Went through this racket in the town of Roland Oklahoma.

I'm sure this scam has been a plot staple in crime dramas and/or comedies for decades.

There's a Rudyard Kipling revenge story about this very thing, dating from 1913. "The Village that Voted the Earth Was Flat." A politician, some journalists and a music-hall impresario all fall into a village's speed-trap, so to get revenge they orchestrate a massive fake-news campaign about the village and its local judge/MP, manipulate the entire village into taking a collective vote that the earth is flat, and make the whole thing go viral.

la county has 88 (!) cities, most of them tiny and relatively white, and the state had to implement an rule about speed limits because the same thing was going on here.

the rule, on the other hand, is insane and kills hundreds of people every year (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-02-19/speed-limit-reform-vision-zero).

So Illinois passed a police reform bill yesterday and, boy oh boy, are the crybaby cops mad about it. The big "win" is that the whole state will end cash bail within two years. Otherwise it consists of what I'd say should have already been the bare minimum we ask cops to do - body cams for every cop in the state, limits on spending on military gear, fewer acceptable reasons for using deadly force, etc. Obviously this is no patch on defunding, but it's hilarious to see how the cops are flipping the fuck out over be asked to be held even the tiniest bit accountable for their actions.

There are some cops in my extended family, I never see them (thankfully) and usually manage to forget I'm even related to them, but my brother sent me screenshots of their overly dramatic whiny ass FB posts about how they "have no choice but to move to another state" in order to continue their careers in law enforcement and how "this will destroy us financially" or how they "have to quit". I mean, sure, getting all of your cops to quit being cops is one form of defunding.

It’s working for Seattle, big attrition spike after the pigs got their fee-fees hurt all summer by protestors they used chemical weapons on.

xps

the Coburg Oregon speed traps were so egregious that they prompted statewide legislation:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/notorious-for-i-5-speed-traps-coburg-police-clean-up-their-act/

Once, aggressive motorcycle patrols of the interstate supplied nearly half of Coburg’s $1.7 million municipal budget.

Yeah, it's a whole racket in a lot of places. It's still fresh in my mind because I was supporting two people on an adjunct salary and had to do that shit at the same time and it was fuuuucked up

“Tell us where the weed is, it will be easier on you.” - cop who was tearing my truck apart when I hadn’t even seen weed in 3-4 years, being white I at least got to laugh at him pulling that.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-proudboys-leader-exclusive-idUSKBN29W1PE

there are certainly many more

Curious about how Proud Boys and adjacent groups have responded to this news

they are talking to their FBI agents about it

Brock Vond is all over it.

not the main point of the article but even here you have to hear both sides: antifa is often violent, proud boys were founded to protest political correctness, journalistic objectivity will kill us all

good point :(

xp yeah, I read that and was like ... uh, violent against whom? Are dumpsters, newsracks, and cop cars considered people now?

In the USA, a dumpster or a cop car or a Starbucks window is worth more than a life, particularly if that life belongs to a Black or non-white person.

Afaic, this is proof that the society we live in cannot be redeemed.

I blame Straw Dogs

scum

Rochester Police pepper spray a 9 year old girl handcuffed in the back of a cruiser after telling her, "You're acting like a child."pic.twitter.com/QVGCbgN3ep

— Soundtrack to the End (@_WhatRiot) February 1, 2021

would great be if people who ostensibly care about stopping shit like be this would be willing to consider not fucking funding it. hard to forget how passionate a whole bunch of people were about blaming biden's imaginary loss on this extremely modest demand

fuck's sake

I tend to avoid watching these videos, but I watched this one with the sound off and that tweet leaves out the shock of the end of the video when you see that at least half a dozen adult police officers showed up for this. Utterly disgusting.