Yes, they are out of control:
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.
As the tally of fatal police shootings rises, law enforcement watchdogs say it is time to treat deadly force as a potentially serious public safety problem.
“The numbers reflect that there could be an issue, and it’s going to take a deeper understanding of these shootings,” said Chris Gebhardt, a former police lieutenant and sergeant who served in Washington, D.C., and in Utah, including six years on SWAT teams and several training duties. “It definitely can’t be written off as citizen groups being upset with law enforcement.”
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.
How about that douchecanoe giving up the game- cops don’t look at the general population as “us” anymore, they are “them.” It’s the same kind of mentality that allows people to be dehumanized, so the “enemy” isn’t a person, it’s a gook, or a kraut, or a nip, and you don’t have to think about what you are doing because you are in the right no matter what. It’s so internalized that while struggling to show some concern for the fact that 15% of fatalities in Utah are from cops shooting people, he points out what we all know- they dismiss their critics and the watchdog groups. Why? Because they can. No politician is going to stand up to these guys, and rush for their endorsement.
Add to that the military grade weaponry, the demagoguery of the war on drugs and the fact that the Supreme Court has basically given law enforcement carte blanche when it comes to civil rights, and it is no surprise that there is blood in the streets in the town of New Haven or that civil forfeiture is out of control or that people locked up in jail for decades for nonviolent offenses. It’s no surprise that the first thing we see in everyone of the videos of police wrongdoing is a cop beating the hell out of or shooting some cowering civilian all while screaming “STOP RESISTING! STOP RESISTING!”
Our current situation would make the STASI blush. Or jealous.
BTW- anyone have a figure on how much the state of Utah spends annually on gang violence?
JPL
Unfortunately, the police might have the opportunity to kill more citizens later today after Wilson is free to patrol once again.
mai naem mobile
I would like to know the color of the Utah victims because i think it would strengthen the argument that they’re out of control because thats how it has to be presented to white goprs.I’m guessing Utah is a pretty white state.
CONGRATULATIONS!
That’s going to take a long fucking time. About 30-40 years last time around. Less now, because internet.
But it’s a hard road, especially with the middle class. Poors don’t need much convincing, they’re the victims every day. Richie Rich doesn’t care, because he’s always immune.
skerry
Reposting from downstairs:
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about American-on-American crime in “The Gospel of Rudy Giuliani”
MattF
@mai naem mobile: And also socioeconomic status.
And, if it turns out that the non-white (or at least very tan) criminal classes are infiltrating into Utah from Nevada, then that would explain it. Or, on the other hand, possibly not.
srv
Since gangs, drug and child abuse don’t exist in Utah, it’s no surprise that only those that needed to get shot got shot by the proper authorities.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@mai naem mobile: Cop apologists seriously no longer give a shit. We had some street kid – one of those annoying fuckers who rode around on a unicycle and played the ukulele all the time – get cross shot, both cops on either side of him decided to shoot him at the same time, sadly they didn’t kill each other in the crossfire. He had a squirt gun. He was as white as a sheet and had no record of any kind.
No one gave a fuck save his parents. Clean kill as far as the DA ruled and that was the end of it.
Tommy
@skerry: It is hard to put to words. I live a few miles from East St. Louis, which might be the murder capital of the country. Upstate Chicago. We are killing each other in large numbers. I am not remotely worried about ISIS. I am worried about the guy with a gun next door to me.
Ripley
Inciting or overreacting?
BGinCHI
Utah: most conservative state, most pr0n downloading, and most homicides by cop.
Conservative values?
Mormon values?
I’m sure it’s all someone else’s fault.
scav
@srv: Low violent-crime areas have traditionally been under-served in police violence. Good to see the Utanans taking up the slack and doing their bit to address the inequality!
FromTheBackOfTheRoom
It’s important for us to not feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. A lot of those cops were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots. Let’s look forward and not backward, M’Kay?
srv
More people die from guns in Utah than cars
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/54170435-78/deaths-gun-utah-accidents.html.csp
You people just can’t take your gliberal statistics from the crime wards you have created and apply it to Utah with all your pre-disposed bigotries.
Drive through Utah just once, and you’ll see a state with the right priorities. Slower traffic always yields right. Good people. Cops just want to keep it that way.
different-church-lady
Two-way streets: how do they work?
Suzanne
Not that this is a defense, but I would be terrified to be a cop in Utah, with all those people with a cavalry’s worth of armament in their basements, along with their two years of canned food. Prepper central. Even worse than AZ, where 1/3 of drivers has a gun in the car.
My friend’s parents, who hate Obama and love Jesus, are convinced that the government will come to take their guns. So they built a panic room and have at least 60 guns. Sitting around, waiting for shot to go down.
I’m scared of those people.
samiam
Zero critical thinking ability Cole still obsessing over cops doing cop stuff while sitting on his ass in front of his computer in butt fuk Virginia. He read that a cop did something bad and now it’s an out of control situation because…..internet said.
Felonius Monk
I’m guessing the biggest gang in Utah wears badges, so we could start with their budget.
Belafon
@Suzanne: They need some giant undergound bugs to shoot at.
Snarki, child of Loki
If they had, that kid would be sitting on death row, convicted of killing two cops.
#NotAllCopsAreKillers
#NotAllDogsAreRabid
KG
@mai naem mobile: according to the 2010 census, Utah is 86% white, 2% Asian, 1% Native American, 1% Black, 6% “other”, and about 3% mixed race.
Ejoiner
Maybe I missed this somewhere else but who is this samiam commentator? Seems to be a real douche with some kind of issue – and no life since he spends it here slamming Cole. Very sad.
Felonius Monk
@BGinCHI:
Undoubtedly, they will all blame Obama.
patrick II
I worked as a part time security guard while going to college. It was my job to watch everyone to see what they might be doing wrong, from stealing to bullying, to assault to car theft in the parking lot. I began to look at everyone in a different light, as potential offenders. I was glad to get away from that job because it was changing the way I looked at people that I didn’t like.
I think cops who work in black neighborhoods can be racialized by their job. They spend their down time with their white family and friends, and then go to work and, because they are police officers working in a black neighborhood, deal with potential offenders who happen to be black. They begin to think of people as potential offenders just as I did, but since they are dealing professionally with mostly black people, that suspicion is limited to people who look like those who they deal with on the job.
Belafon
@samiam:
I love it when trolls can’t look in a mirror.
Suzanne
@Belafon: These two are the poster children for “likely to shoot each other”. Especially if they tried to live in a panic room together for more than a couple of hours.
They also do not have the physiques of survivors. I wonder if there are donuts in the panic room.
skerry
@Suzanne: Donuts might go bad. I suggest Twinkies.
Eric U.
@KG: huh, having lived there I thought the Hispanic population would have registered a bit higher. If you watch the local news in SLC, there is a fairly constant rate of violent crime, much of it in West SLC. I suppose if you have a million plus people in such a small area it is to be expected.
PA Merritt
and the answer in the interim 2014 budget is $292,600.00 For closing out the existing program, fwiw.
Another Holocene Human
“Us” anymore? A couple threads down is a bunch of Giuliani talk. He ramped police violence up over the last few decades. The corrupt nasty cops had too good of community relations so let’s turn it into war.
I’ll tell you why Giuliani put his well-worn clown shoes on and starting telling ME Dyson a few things about the Negro. Because he and his buddies are mucho butthurt that his arch-nemesis Dinkins’ protoges have moved into the mayor’s house AND that despite Cuomo’s obstructionism and institutional intransigence, the much feared change in tone from the mayor’s office is rolling forward with respect to victims of police violence (as imperfect as that may be).
It’s a repudiation of absolutely everything Giuliani has stood for in his entire political career–moral cowardice, hypocrisy, and police brutality.
Now, hyped up by his cop buddies who are mouthing off and his dumb fan/minions, he’s gotta tell the world why deBlasio’s making a biiiiiig mistake–you’ll be sorry for this! You will!
Giuliani and his fans are completely incapable of looking at nationwide crime stats and, you know, drawing a few conclusions. Much too pleasing to believe that crime went up because Dinkins, crime went down because stop’n’frisk.
The poster child for post hoc propter hoc fallacy and correlation is not causation.
Giuliani is a clown and the people of New York repudiated him in the last election.
FlipYrWhig
@samiam: Hey, that’s West By God butt fuk Virginia.
Another Holocene Human
@patrick II: That second paragraph is true to the degree they start coming under pressure and feel disrespected and endangered on the job and the fear and status anxiety start ramping up.
That’s one reason that maybe it’s a good idea to have more mixed police forces and more police from the neighborhood who have prior relationships with residents.
You don’t want a total closed system … that has its own issues … like in a tight-knit community and a young girl complains that her uncle is molesting her and the uncle has a ton of ties in the community where he can make shit very uncomfortable.
But to have a force that’s entirely from out of town is a big problem.
My experience with Irish cops patrolling Catholic neighborhoods is that they had compassion for the kids they were dealing with. Saw a bit of themselves in the kids. For one thing, they didn’t have CompStat which is a tool that is being utterly misused in NYC (for multiple reasons). They had discretion, something that tends to reduce negative community interactions. But they also had a cultural understanding, often they knew some of the kids’ parents, they’d done the same things, they could relate. They weren’t guessing and going paranoid. They didn’t run the risk of going to the kids’ parents telling them what their kid did and having that turn into a confrontation. They knew if they called dad to pick junior up that dad was going to read junior the riot act.
Black communities in many parts of the US don’t get this luxury to have community police from the community. Several time in history we’ve seen community organizations, paramilitary or not, organize in Black communities to attempt to fill these kinds of needs that are not being met by hostile, indifferent policing.
wasabi gasp
Guns are like candy. Too much and someone is getting a cavity.
Bobby B.
More police violence, more yawns from the “here’s a cute kitty you have to see to believe!” media.
Another Holocene Human
If you ever watch the reality series THE SHIFT about Indianapolis Homocide Squad, the different in attitudes displayed by the detectives, white, black, male, female towards the different community members they had to deal with in the course of investigations was astounding.
One of the white guys in particular seemed to have this very black/white shut on or off attitude towards Black community members, they’re either victims or perps. That can be a problem.
hoodie
Not sure you’re doing the “deeper understanding” thing, as these statistics alone may be insufficient evidence for what you seem to be concluding. Utah has a lot of gun nuts and gun deaths, so maybe cops there encounter an unusually high number of armed wackos and end up in a disproportionate number of gun fights. Given the nature of the state, I imagine that some of these incidents occur on lonely highways in the middle of nowhere. I had a high school friend who was a state trooper, often working alone on highways in the sticks. A guy pulled out a gun and shot him on a routine traffic stop in the middle of nowhere in south Georgia. He ended up having to kill the guy, and that, coupled with his own wounds, put him on disability. No doubt some of these shootings are suspect, but how many is anyone’s guess. You have to know the identities of the victims, the locations of the shootings, etc.
KG
@Eric U.: those numbers don’t include Hispanic/Latino, which is ethnic category rather than a racial one. another source puts the Hispanic/Latino population at 13-14% as of 2013. White, non-Hispanic is 80% in 2013.
Another Holocene Human
@skerry: Yeah, no shit. We only look like a safe haven if you’re coming from certain parts of Central America or Jamaica (which has exploded in violence recently–my friend who was born there says it’s political … it’s also very sad for her because she wanted to return and retire there).
The US has very high murder rates … very high gun violence rates … and pretty high traffic deaths as well. (In some area it’s open season on pedestrians.) Inequality is a factor, free access by criminals to guns is another factors, and our culture is a factor. We don’t touch our children (hug, kiss) as much as, for example, the far less violent French do. We toss touch-starved children with social pathologies into a dog-eat-dog high stakes world where there is no mercy and no net to catch you when you fall. Mood disorders are the inevitable result. And violence. And criminal behavior as an alternative to legitimate employment. And so on.
The US has an epidemic of white male family annihilators. Mixture of depression (the decision to commit suicide) and homocidal arrogance (they can’t exist without me).
Another Holocene Human
@hoodie: I thought most troopers killed on highway stops were actually hit by cars, not killed by the desperado they pulled over.
hoodie
@Another Holocene Human: No doubt true, but it does happen from time to time. No one is disputing there are too many homicides by cop, but there are all kinds of cops out there in all kinds of different situations. This wasn’t a particularly convincing piece of evidence.
catclub
@Another Holocene Human:
… which are down 50% over the past 25 years. Also almost all other crime statistics are down.
Lead?
Tree With Water
Remember the Alamo, the Maine, Pearl Harbor..
…and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows. It’s as good a place as any to begin figuring out that state.
J R in WV
@samiam:
Dude, You can’t spell shit, and you don’t even know the diff between Virginia (Leading state of the Confederacy) and West Virginia (Seceded from Virginia to leave the Confederacy!).
Come back after you repeat grades 8-12, successfully this time, dope!
billb
A civilized country, as we aspire to be, should confiscate all civilian and police guns. No one needs to own or use guns unless they are the military defending our shores. You want personal defense get mace, use it when in trouble, it works. I used to ride my bike to work, and then ride the train home at night. One night, a bit later than rush hour, the train was deserted and I was standing in the doorway [as bike riders were reqd to] and this group of young hispanic dudes comes in at the stop. They all look at me like they are going to mess with me, a lone white guy that they could rob.
Then as they each get up near me they see the mace mounted on my handlebars. The look on their faces was priceless, they knew I could take down all six of them in a second. They quietly went to the far end of the train.
My friend grew up in Scotland, a rough place back in the day, his cop dad and grandad before, kept the peace with only a billy club. Guns were not needed.
John Weiss
Whel, John
I’m sommat older that you. I remember quite well what the scene was like before I became silver-haired and (more or less) respectable.
I was ‘busted’ for MJ possession around 1966. I was in the same *field* with some pot someone had squealed about. I was beaten, arrested (oh! did those assholes want me to handle the baggie!) and no-billed ’cause my Grannie put up 5 grand to buy the grand jury.
I don’t think that cops are suddenly out of control. I think that this sortta shit has been going on for a long time.
jw