Ongoing U.S Police Brutality and Corruption Discussion Thread

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/

Why does this seem vaguely familiar?

https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/state/2024/04/26/frank-tyson-police-death-canton-ohio-i-cant-breathe/73466345007/