Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

White supremacy is terrorism.

The revolution will be supervised.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

“Just close your eyes and kiss the girl and go where the tilt-a-whirl takes you.” ~OzarkHillbilly

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Trump should be leading, not lying.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

People are complicated. Love is not.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

When they say they are pro-life, they do not mean yours.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

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Reader Interactions

50Comments

  1. 1.

    Bobby B.

    Is “officer related shooting” like the MSM’s “officer-involved shooting”? Balloon Juice seems to worried about offending Our Boys In Blue. Just call a killing a killing, a corpse a corpse.

  3. 3.

    JordanRules

    @JPL: Thanks for changing that JPL. I know of the finest tongue in cheek tradition from which it sprang, but I cringed.

  6. 6.

    JordanRules

    Regarding the Gaver Fam v. Police brawl at the Walmart here in AZ, a commenter on a hip-hop blog said:

    I think dis really goes back to the whole “white people are afraid of us” thing. I have no doubt if they were black, the situation would have ended quite differently. Its because they feel more vulnerable when confronted by blacks so they reciprocate with extreme violence as opposed to measured hostility shown in this vid. I mean the sh*t looks like a wrestling match Everyone is comfortable. If they were black everything would happen differently

    Then you have the Bundy incidence in Nevada etc, etc. These counter examples are very, very instructive I think and yet are seldom used as such.

  7. 7.

    Comrade Jake

    I mentioned the other night that we went to see Ta-Nehisi Coates talk in Santa Fe.

    One thing I had not appreciated was that he was a classmate of Prince Jones, a guy who was murdered by the police. I’m sure many of you recall the case. The cops got him confused with a suspect they were looking for, and followed him in his jeep across state lines. Then they shot him several times in the back, though his jeep. No officers were ever charged.

    Coates talked about how he went to talk to Prince’s mom after this happened. A lot of this will be in a book he has coming out. The excerpt he read for us was incredibly moving. He calls white people “Dreamers” because in his mind, they are asleep to so much of this.

  9. 9.

    MattF

    @rikyrah: Well, and the whole question of what if it hadn’t been caught on video. There’s been a lot of harrumphing and throat-clearing on that subject but no actual words are coming out.

  10. 10.

    Corner Stone

    @MattF:

    Well, and the whole question of what if it hadn’t been caught on video.

    We most likely would have never heard very much about this beyond the official police report.

  13. 13.

    Corner Stone

    @Bobby B.:

    Balloon Juice seems to worried about offending Our Boys In Blue. Just call a killing a killing, a corpse a corpse.

    Cole called it murder the other day when he first posted about it.

  16. 16.

    Kropadope

    @MattF:

    You may disagree, but it looks to me like a line has been drawn.

    Yeah, don’t get caught on camera planting evidence. Kill on camera, sure, but don’t plant.

  18. 18.

    Corner Stone

    @raven: I don’t know what you mean there but I don’t want to hurt anyone else’s feelings, as apparently it’s quite easy to do, so I’ll just say meh.

  19. 19.

    Comrade Jake

    @JPL:

    I hadn’t read that piece, thanks. The officer was found guilty in a civil suit in like 2006 I think. Not that it matters much to the family.

  23. 23.

    sharl

    @Comrade Jake: Ah, Prince George’s County’s finest; I do remember that incident, and just found something Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about it way back in 2001. Importantly, he noted the role of economic class that allowed that to happen here in this (PGC) majority AA community, without the cop ever being fired or punished* in any way by PGC or Fairfax County** VA (FC is where that state-sanctioned execution took place):

    Police brutality may help Al Sharpton garner a spot on “Rivera Live,” but the black uppercrust sees little point in putting the police on trial here in Prince George’s County, or anywhere else in the nation for that matter. Like their white counterparts, African-Americans will countenance a few police thrashings if that’s the price of keeping their Jags from getting jacked.

    The racial component DOES matter – a lot. But it’s not the only component of the problem, though certainly a primary component – maybe THE primary component.

    *In 2006 Mr. Prince’s family did win a judgment in a civil trial; noted on page 2 of this 2014 article. (Yeah, it’s a Politico link, but it’s to their better-quality Magazine, and also it’s by the guy who covered this story for WaPo back when it occurred.)

    **Fairfax is even worse – in fact, rather notorious (and much in the news of late) – with respect to non-responsiveness to community concerns where police brutality and excesses are concerned.

    ETA: Hah, JPL at #11 beat me to it.

  26. 26.

    Pogonip

    @geg6: I looked for your name and found you! How’s Lovey doing? Is Koda still complaining about kids these days?

  27. 27.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @MattF: If it hadn’t been caught on video, this would be a rerun of Michael Brown/Darren Wilson.

    No doubt in my mind.

    Cops need to swing for these crimes they commit under color of law. No question about it.

  28. 28.

    VincentN

    This was a very depressing article. It sounds like that while things like body cams and dashcams will help get more murderous cops charged they might not actually help get more of them convicted. Not as long as juries are made of people who will give them every benefit of the doubt.

  29. 29.

    RSA

    From the article:

    There is no accurate tally of all the cases­ of police shootings across the country, even deadly ones. The FBI maintains a national database of fatal shootings by officers but does not require police departments to keep it updated.

    Obviously this should change. In fact, I believe it would be helpful if all violent interactions were required to be reported. There would be a lot missing in such reports, but we’d find out something. Even just an up-to-date database would be worthwhile. We hear too many “one bad apple” arguments.

  32. 32.

    JPL

    @sharl: From the politico article
    But while having a police force that resembles the community is a laudable goal, officers of all backgrounds tend to adopt the culture of the police force they are a part of, says Jeannine Bell, a professor at Indiana University’s law school and author of the 2002 book Policing Hatred: Law Enforcement, Civil Rights, and Hate Crime, which developed from her research within the police department of an unnamed large American city.

    That appeared to be the case in SC where a black officer appeared to see the taser being planted.

  33. 33.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @JPL: “Tipsy” will be used for sautes at the coffee shop bistro. Cheffie had whipped butter for the Belgian waffles and Tipsy was just deco. And, as you can see had a rather fallen end at the event today after getting overheated. So there was one “after” picture and 2 “before” shots.

    @WaterGirl: Overheating at the brunch did cause a collapse. The other photos were before the heat go to her. It was kind of amusing how many people liked her, and Cheffie would point say “Bella made it” and I’d say “Allie and I did,” since his wife encouraged me and helped.

  36. 36.

    scav

    And there’s this one from Tulsa rolling across the transom: Video shows Tulsa police killing man as officer uses gun not Taser ‘by mistake

    73-year-old insurance executive reserve officer has a whoops! moment. Some charming comments by officers later after the shot man mentions he can’t breath. And, of course “Oklahoma police have said they do not intend to investigate Harris’s death any further, unless requested to do so by the sheriff’s office.”

  38. 38.

    sharl

    @JPL:

    …officers of all backgrounds tend to adopt the culture of the police force they are a part of…

    Yep, which leads – or should lead – to the question of what determines the “culture of the police force”?

    Police forces are shaped by the communities they serve, and by “communities they serve” I mean the people within the boundary-determined police jurisdiction who are deemed worthy to be served and protected: typically the neighborhoods that provide the local political leaders and/or the citizens whom those leaders relate to/understand/fear* (*because of their power and influence). And occasionally those neighborhoods-of-influence are not even within the police force’s jurisdictional boundaries; the area that includes Ferguson MO comes to mind.

  39. 39.

    Roger Moore

    @sharl:

    The racial component DOES matter – a lot. But it’s not the only component of the problem, though certainly a primary component – maybe THE primary component.

    The underlying problem talking about this is that American society doesn’t make a clean distinction between race and class. I think the problems we’re talking about are basically class problems, but they’re also race problems because non-whites are default assumed to be lower class, and it takes a huge amount of evidence to convince people to go beyond that default assumption. The moment a minority loses their higher class signifiers, they’re treated like criminals.

  40. 40.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Roger Moore: Just as blacks were assumed to be slaves. Automatically.

    This has not changed. It must, if this country is to get anywhere near to the ideals it was founded upon.

  41. 41.

    sharl

    @RSA: Adding to MikeJ’s response (#34), a Nevada journalist (D. Brian Burghart, editor/publisher of the Reno News & Review) has taken on the major task of trying to collect accounts from the public of police killings that don’t show up in official government accounts – and there are a lot of them. His website is Fatal Encounters. He wrote about this at Gawker back in August: What I’ve Learned from Two Years Collecting Data on Police Killings. A long* bit from that (*apologies, but I’m posting it anyway since there is now a thread for HRC’s anticlimactic announcement):

    The biggest thing I’ve taken away from this project is something I’ll never be able to prove, but I’m convinced to my core: The lack of such a database is intentional. No government—not the federal government, and not the thousands of municipalities that give their police forces license to use deadly force—wants you to know how many people it kills and why.

    It’s the only conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence. What evidence? In attempting to collect this information, I was lied to and delayed by the FBI, even when I was only trying to find out the addresses of police departments to make public records requests. The government collects millions of bits of data annually about law enforcement in its Uniform Crime Report, but it doesn’t collect information about the most consequential act a law enforcer can do.

    I’ve been lied to and delayed by state, county and local law enforcement agencies—almost every time. They’ve blatantly broken public records laws, and then thumbed their authoritarian noses at the temerity of a citizen asking for information that might embarrass the agency. And these are the people in charge of enforcing the law.

    The second biggest thing I learned is that bad journalism colludes with police to hide this information. The primary reason for this is that police will cut off information to reporters who tell tales. And a reporter can’t work if he or she can’t talk to sources. It happened to me on almost every level as I advanced this year-long Fatal Encounters series through the News & Review. First they talk; then they stop, then they roadblock.

  43. 43.

    sharl

    @WaterGirl: Thanks. And having just seen the always-welcome Kay show up in comments in the next post, I’ll add this bit from D. Brian Burghart’s Gawker piece that mentions killings by LEOs in rural communities (bolding is mine):

    You know who dies in the most population-dense areas? Black men. You know who dies in the least population dense areas? Mentally ill men. It’s not to say there aren’t dangerous and desperate criminals killed across the line. But African-Americans and the mentally ill people make up a huge percentage of people killed by police.

    And if you want to get down to nut-cuttin’ time, across the board, it’s poor people who are killed by police. (And by the way, around 96 percent of people killed by police are men.)

  46. 46.

    Corner Stone

    @Steve:

    How bout an article about parents who can’t take care of their kids?

    Do you mean the overwhelming majority of kids in the CPS systems that are white?
    Or did you mean irresponsible baby daddies screwing dirty black sluts?
    No, wait. I know what you meant.

  48. 48.

    sharl

    @Steve: Ah, those of us who haunt this site tend not to follow the racist musings of the folks at National Review. So, much like a cat proudly bringing a dead bird or rodent into the house, you’ve done us the “favor” of dropping this here. Ummm, thanks?

    But about that whole black-on-black thingie, it sometimes works (usually on poorly informed white folk) as a way to change the subject at hand, which is often white LEO-on-black violence. But as a valid topic by itself, it tends to not stand on its own merits, as many have noted. Why, here’s something on it from those wild-eyed loonie libs at… Reason??!?:

    The phrase stems from a desire to excuse whites from any role in changing the conditions that breed disorder and delinquency in poor black areas. It carries the message that blacks are to blame for the crime that afflicts them—and that only they can eliminate it. Whites are spared any responsibility in the cause or the cure.

    Excluding them from complicity is harder to do when the killer is white and the killed is black, as in the shooting in Ferguson. Raising “black-on-black crime” right now is not a sincere attempt to improve the lot of African-Americans. It’s a way to change the subject and a way to blame them.

    Steve, please stop bringing your yard kills into the house; just leave them where you found them. TIA.

  50. 50.

    Interrobang

    That defense attorney at the end of the article is skating perilously close to slandering the dead man when he says, “I think you’ll find folks who say [Ferrell] wasn’t necessarily looking for help that evening.” Wow, what a shitty thing to say. (I defy anybody to not be out of it when they’ve just crashed their car and all of a sudden there are a zillion cops around them yelling at them.)

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