Some good news on the Tamir Rice front:
Cleveland Municipal Court judge has found probable cause that police officer Timothy Loehmann should face murder and other charges in the slaying of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.
Judge Ronald B. Adrine released the opinion Thursday afternoon, days after a group of local clergy and activists filed affidavits asking the court to find probable cause to arrest Loehmann and Frank Garmback on aggravated murder, murder, involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, negligent homicide and dereliction of duty charges.
The judge did not find probable cause that either officer should be charged with aggravated murder. Adrine also determined that there was not probable cause to charge Garmback with murder.
But the judge found probable cause for charges of murder, involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, negligent homicide and dereliction of duty against Loehmann.
He also found probable cause for charges of negligent homicide and dereliction of duty against Garmback.
Adrine forwarded his opinion to city prosecutors and Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty.
At which point McGinty can then throw the case and make sure the cops never see a jail cell. See also, Bob McCulloch.
In other shitty cop news, it looks like the police in Baltimore are still having an extended hissy fit, and it is costing lives:
Forty-two people were killed in Baltimore in May, making it the deadliest month there since 1972.
When asked what’s behind that number, a Baltimore police officer gave an alarming answer. Basically, he said, the good guys are letting the bad guys win.
“The criminal element feels as though that we’re not going to run the risk of chasing them if they are armed with a gun, and they’re using this opportunity to settle old beefs, or scores, with people that they have conflict with,” the officer said. “I think the public really, really sees that they asked for a softer, less aggressive police department, and we have given them that, and now they are realizing that their way of thinking does not work.”
He was one of two active Baltimore police officers who spoke to CNN on Tuesday about crime in their city. They also touched on the death of Freddie Gray, a young black man who died in police custody, and the riots that followed.
The officers were not given permission to speak from their department. Because of that, and in an attempt to allow them to talk candidly, CNN agreed on their condition of anonymity.
Apparently to these douchebags, there are two ways to police- The Doing Whatever the Fuck We Want With No Repercussions model, or doing nothing at all. When did cops become such candy-asses? Cops are rarely prosecuted when they step over the line, but now because some cops have been charged for killing someone, they think all of a sudden it’s open season on cops who do their job correctly? Man, fuck these guys. You want to know what it is like doing a tough job with no institutional or public support, no union really backing you, and with no one afraid of you? Ask a school teacher, you pussies.
Just fire the whole goddamned force and start over. They have crime statistics. Use them. Figure out who is doing jack shit and can their asses. Fuck the police unions.
I love the fact that the cops are wearing hoodies to disguise who they are in the CNN video. For young black men, wearing a hoodie is a capital offense.
greennotGreen
The problem with the quoted cop’s thinking is that he still doesn’t see the difference between shooting a perp who is armed with something that can actually do damage who is actively threatening the cop or others and a guy who is walking while black or riding a bike while black or talking on the phone in Walmart while black. Until people like him are either purged from the police force or undergo some serious retraining, nothing will change.
Pogonip
I saw the video and you’re darn right there’s probable cause. I hope they throw the book at the cop and then some.
How’s Thurston feeling?
greennotGreen
So the judge in the Tamir Rice case realized that there was insufficient time for Tamir to react to a command to drop the weapon before he was shot. Why didn’t the grand jury who saw the security camera footage of the John Crawford murder realize the same thing?
Omnes Omnibus
FWIW, I don’t think that McGinty threw the Brelo case.
JPL
Unless the police are indicted, this is just news.
srv
You seem to want cops that do nuance, but every shooting is binary, every shootee is a victim. Next up, you’ll want cops to have liberal arts degrees or something.
Reagan’s work is done.
Starfish
the Conster
This sounds Pollyannish, but aren’t things around policing issues and their inability to police themselves, changing? I think this is how change happens, little by little at the margins at first, then it seems like this year has been one awful obvious indefensible police murder after another so that the unarmed black men’s names start all blurring together, and then… we see it. All of a sudden, in the past few months, we SEE it, and once seen, it cannot be unseen. Call me naive, but, it’s dawning on the police that they might be held accountable. I’ve instructed everyone I know to tape every cop encounter, because that’s the difference. Camera phones and social media are game changers.
Napoleon
I am a lawyer from CLE but will keep this short since the Cavs are on. To date McGinty has been great. If you see anyone dissing the CLE muni judge he is highly respected.
MattR
@greennotGreen: They are all black so there is no difference.
Omnes Omnibus
@Napoleon:
That was the impression I have been getting from a distance. Nice to see it confirmed by someone on the scene.
KG
Following up on what Napoleon and Omnes Omnibus are saying, keep in mind that McGinty (and his office) are regularly going to have to appear before this judge. A pretty solid rule among lawyers is “don’t piss off a judge”, particularly if you are going to be appearing before them often in your career (which, generally speaking you will). McGinty would be practicing career suicide (and possibly career genocide for those in his office) if he were to not take the judge’s recommendation seriously and/or half-ass the prosecution.
Eric S.
Cole: When did cops become such candy-asses?
I’ve come to the conclusion that the answer to this and similar questions is, “It is airways been thus.”
Recently The Calc Teacher (the gf) told me about a situation dealing with a transgender student. We are both in our 40s and I wondered allowed about not ever having to deal with this in our youth. She said it had always been there but it wad hidden. Never acknowledged.
I think the answer is the same here. It is my contention the modern Internet age has pulled the rug off the dark corners of society. One gets revealed and we start to deal with it and another gets uncovered. I know I’m not the 1st or 2nd or even 1000th person to make this observation but I do believe we need to keep it at the forefront of thought on “societal changes.”
Avery Greynold
Police get to do things their way, or they will shut down and won’t do it at all. Anybody else see the Republican model of governing at work?
Keith G
Two threads covering troubling news and a soccer thread on top.
Fun.
Eric S.
@the Conster: Slow progress. Very slow, but I think, I hope, you are correct.
EZSmirkzz
So how’s your ass anyway John?
You and I know that reporters can find any number of people to say whatever in the hell supports (their/your favorite outrage here,) and make a little hay with it. On a slow news day like today, we’ll we get a CNN reporter scraping their shorts for an angle to feed us poor under informed citoyens, so that we are duly informed that democracy sucks, and life is hard, so hard, especially for (your/their) nattering nabobs of negativity, (Spiro Agnew yet lives!,) it almost makes me want to laugh and cry and let it become a part of me, wait! That’s Night Court! Inwhich I hate it when that happens, yet I digress. Also too, summer rains.
Having got that off my chest, it’s hard to remember when you’re up to your ass in alligators you came to drain the swamp, (inwhich I devolve into jus foke sayings,) whether you’re a cop or an observer of over the line behavior by some cops. Obviously the rotten eggs are going to stink up the news, whether I’m talking about cops or reporters I leave to you.
One of the Libertarian insights is that politics is motivated by what they hate, and while their self loathing is justified IMHO, I find it to be a self defeating in myself, so I have to be motivated by what I love, and those are the things in America that make the world a better place. That’s hard to do these days, especially down here in Texas where we are under constant threat of invasion by the United States and according to some reports, reportedly pot bellied pigs. With ISIS just over the border in Mexico and AQ threatening to attack our coastal cities, and Putin just over the horizon, (I can too see Russia from my house!!,) it makes it even harder to see the basic good of our fellow human beings.
That being said I don’t believe we can fight injustice with injustice, intolerance with intolerance, or hate with hate.
I do believe however that we can write a good article about God by opening up with a line about the virtues of river catfish as opposed to pond raised catfish, inwhich I can even spell inwhich in which just to appease the butt hurt of American letters.
Contrary to most conventional wisdom, conservatives aren’t saying really stupid things just to piss off liberals, knowing that we take the Apostle Paul’s counsel to heart and do not show ourselves to be heated up at unrighteousness, but because they wish us to hold them in the same low esteem as they hold themselves, which we unfortunately are not ignorant enough of them to do.
Anyway, I’m off to prepare for the invasion of pot bellied pigs, governments, and various and sundry evil doers of the not right sort of American or foreign ilks.
And such.
Poptartacus
Bunch of whiney crybabies, I come from a cop family and they wear me out with their bullshit. Only thing they care about is retiring at 55 with a fat pension
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: Definitely not mclaren.
EZSmirkzz
@efgoldman: Nope, EZSmirkzz using cliches and being the same as he ever was.
EZSmirkzz
Obviously my low profile is not working anymore.
EZSmirkzz
For those that do not recall, I’m the ambidextrous liberal – and I always hit my mark.
Mike J
Or not:
jl
John Cole should welcome the new Barbarian Warrior Ethos, He is harshing on all the thrills and chills and emos.
Why does Cole insist on leaving his war gaming mentality on the computer console, and not bring it into democratic self-governance? What would the Founders and Framers say about that kind of attitude?
Omnes Omnibus
@jl:
What the fuck is a computer console, pray tell, sir?
Aleta
@jl: No person shall be subject to more than one punishment ?
jl
@Omnes Omnibus: Actually, I do not know for sure what that is. Probably some ancient thing I used in my first computer class in Middle School. I was trying to refer to whatever these dang kids use to play their durned ‘puter games with. I never got beyond whatever Microsoft puts in Accessories and once I wasted a couple of days on a freeware tetris I saw in a computer lab. And some in-laws had a cool wii thingge quite a few years ago, and I beat the crap out of computer superstars at wii tennis bowling and horseshoes. But, hey, I am a computer gamer, just like Ted!, so shut up about it, OK? I stone cold know what I am talking about.
Back to the topic of the post.
I know some people in law enforcement and most of them are sane and professional. But some of them seem just nuts to me. They are in this fantasy world that consists of Sheep, and Wolves and Guardians. And if you talk to them about anything at all, soon they are straight out IDing you as one of those three. And unless you are a Guardian, you are a loser. And then they get to the Warrior Etthos crap.
These people have guns and license to shoot, but they are lost in some fourth rate Conan the Barbarian script.
And the problem is that, this World of Warcraft fantasy BS has become a kind of dominant public myth in the US today. Some of it supposedly justified to some extent by conservative social science research from decades ago that was only half right at best. But the BS is peddled by the corporate news media, full of idiot savant morons who are clueless about anything other than marketing to low info hapless types. And some of it peddled by shrewd reactionary politicians. And some of it peddled to criminal justice and national security grifters who know it is a path to money and influence.
I have to give credit to the sane competent ones, because they remain sane competent and professional inside this public myth. But too many nutcases have bought into it completely.
Omnes Omnibus
@jl: Hey, I was just saying what I thought the Founding Fathers would say.
Chris
Funny thing is, those two things are sides of the same coin. Doing Whatever The Fuck We Want often translates, in terms of actually cracking down on hardened and/or organized crime, into Doing Nothing At All.
If you want a police force whose main focus is getting good statistics in terms of the number of people they arrest and Making Sure These People Understand Who’s Boss, then what you’ll get is predictable; a force thugs who’ll patrol the poor and mostly-nonwhite neighborhoods looking for any pretext to beat up and/or lock up somebody (hence the enormous number of people in our prisons for minor drug offenses, and the slightly alarming number of people who’re ending up dead for the crime of looking at a cop sideways). But that also means your cops aren’t targeting hardened criminals, just picking up the first people they find who sorta fit the profile and allow them to fill their quota and go home. (Essentially, anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time). Which, of course, means that real crime continues to proliferate.
Chris
@efgoldman:
@Omnes Omnibus:
Ya, it’s way too short to be Mclaren.
jl
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh Sorry. Carry on. I’m gonna see if Battleship is still on my PC someplace and catch up on my ‘gaming’ I want to be able to follow Ted when he starts slinging the gaming lingo around when he is president.
Steeplejack
@Omnes Omnibus:
Should have used quotes, Mr. Bigshot Oxford Comma.
jl
@Steeplejack: That Omnes would ever refer to the likes of me as ‘sir’ should have tipped me off.
Edit: For I am a hapless loser Sheep and I believe he is a Guardian of some sort or other.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steeplejack: I’m sorry. I have a cold.
Chris
@jl:
Yeah. Conservatives will use exactly those words (well, “sheep,” “wolves,” and “sheepdogs”), and the problem – and the entire point – of the ideology is, exactly, the built-in contempt for the sheep. It divides the world into the Warriors and the weak, contemptible, cowardly, and unworthy, whose only proper function in life is to provide a swooning audience, but who really don’t even deserve to be protected by these exceptional and awesome warriors.
This exact analogy shows up in the first five minutes of American Sniper as The Lesson Chris Kyle Learned From His Pa Around The Kitchen Table… and there’s a reason why, as soon as he’s made it, Papa Kyle furiously pounds the table and shouts “We’re not raising any sheep in this family!” There’s no similar admonition that his children better not become wolves; that’s basically irrelevant. People who make this analogy see a world of Weak (and unworthy) and Strong (be they wolves or sheepdogs), and like all good machoness-fixated lunatics, are simply obsessed with proving that they’re not among the Weak.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Steeplejack: Okay, that’s really funny. Go easy on Omnes; he seems to be under the weather. I should check to see if he has a sufficient store of commas.
I have a sister in law who fancies herself an author. She writes in a style that would embarrass Rod McKuen. I’m always tempted to ask her position on the Oxford comma, as I’ll be surprised if she has one. And people apparently pay her to edit their work. Poor fools.
jl
@Chris: i’ve heard both Guardians and Sheepdogs. These are conceived as a Godhead Atman style ultimate ground of reality things with these people, so I capitalize them.
Edit: I think you are on to something. Underneath the public myth is an idolatry of strength and license. One commenter, Baud or Delenda maybe, called it the New Barbarism a while back Whoever it was said it ends up with setting losers on fire and betting on how long it takes them to die. Looks like things are heading in that direction with a certain debased and degraded (and mostly white bigot? I don’t know.. maybe..) part of the US population.
Omnes Omnibus
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): I am fine. It was a bad Monty Python reference.
the Conster
@Chris:
Or, they were the bullying losers in their high school glory days who know that there is no other path through life for them that accommodates that particular skill set, and who make up a fantasy story for themselves and the others like them who all seem to gravitate towards that particular line of work.
MattR
@jl: To add to that, it seems like TV cop dramas convince people that the Guardians are all pure hearted individuals, so we should not worry if the occassional innocent Sheep gets hurt by the Guardians’ attempts to get the real bad guys. Unfortunately in the real world, the Guardians are humans so they are a mix of good and bad which is why we need to have and enforce policies and laws to keep the bad Guardians in check so they don’t abuse the power they have over the Sheep.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m slightly diminished this evening, so I missed the joke.
Chris
@jl:
Well, the thing I’ve noticed due partly to a long exposure to people here and elsewhere talking about how much labor has been devalued… is that pretty much the only jobs left that we’re supposed to admire are the Job Creators on the one hand, and the armed and uniformed services (military, police, intelligence/security) on the other.
That would be, to use the old Marxist frame, the bosses and their enforcers.
Everyone else has pretty much been ruled Unworthy. We’re talentless scum who should be grateful that the Job Creators are generous enough to reward us with jobs at all, and that the Warrior Class is noble and high-minded enough to protect us at all, even though in both cases, we don’t really deserve it.
Omnes Omnibus
@the Conster: My grandfather had a theory that the vast majority of cops were bullies. Some could control the impulse better than others, but, at heart, they were bullies.
notorious JRT
This seems like S.O.P. for cops who don’t like the feedback they are getting. Seattle cops – after learning of the DOJ’s requirements for them to clean up their act – refused to help an agency serving mentally ill adults escort a problem person from a facility. Excuse was “we can’t ‘lay hands’ on people.” This meant they could not even direct the trouble maker to leave and escort him out. A simple situation was converted into an hours long stress for workers already underpaid and overworked. This sort of juvenile petulance by police officers costs them credibility, respect, and sympathy. It just further demonstrates that cops have forgotten they work for the public – rather than the other way around.
MattR
@Omnes Omnibus: And gossips. If something is going on, they need to know all the details and part of the reason is so they can get “respect” from other officers when they share those “exclusive” details. Overall, they are quite like stereotypical teenage girls.
Omnes Omnibus
@notorious JRT: Is there a consent decree with the DOJ? If so, that kind of behavior doesn’t go over well. And the DOJ takes its consent decrees very seriously.
notorious JRT
@greennotGreen:
The Crawford case continues to amaze me. Prejudice, lousy training, and no better ideas than to shoot first and sort out the facts after. I hope they throw the book at the cop that shot Tamir Rice and that Cleveland gets slapped hard enough that it wakes up to die right.
notorious JRT
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yes, there is a consent decree. Agency folks between a rock and hard place. To report this would (in minds of staff anyway) put relationship with police in jeopardy. With the population they serve, they need to be on good terms. No making waves, if you know what I mean.
ETA: Besides cops would plead “We were just doing what we thought you wanted.” They practically said as much.
Omnes Omnibus
@notorious JRT:
The DOJ would simply give a mom look at that kind of excuse.
greennotGreen
@notorious JRT: So the judge in the Tamir Rice case realized that there was insufficient time for Tamir to react to a command to drop the weapon before he was shot. Why didn’t the grand jury who saw the security camera footage of the John Crawford murder realize the same thing?
I never understood why Michael Brown became the poster child for Black Lives Matter when John Crawford seemed an unassailably innocent victim of militarized cops.
All these lives lost are tragic, and things have got to change.
joel hanes
@Eric S.:
When did cops become such candy-asses?
Shortly after they completely stopped walking beats.
The police cruiser separates the cop from the community,
insulates him and isolates him and darkens his vision —
in place of daily speaking relationships with normal citizens,
he has a relationship with the dispatcher, and a universe categorized by radio codes.
I think even Sam Vimes would become isolated and disconnected if he had to spend his duty shifts closed up in a black-and-whte.
(Of course, most Americans with jobs have also retreated into their own cars,
so walking a neighborhood is not what it was.)
MattR
@joel hanes: Retreated into their cars? With the internet, some of us have retreated into our apartments. I have semi-seriously joked that there have been times that I would have gone days without leaving the house if I didn’t have to walk my dog.
Steeplejack
@MattR:
I don’t have a dog, and I work at home, so I have gone days without leaving my apartment. In fact, I think the last time I was out before I ran some errands this afternoon was Sunday night (dinner at my brother’s house).
MattR
@Steeplejack: Time to get a dog :)
Steeplejack
@MattR:
I do have a cat, who keeps me pretty busy on the home front.
MattR
@Steeplejack: So at least you have someone to talk to. I realized how much I mutter random things to Ellie (and how much I depend on her to clean up table scraps) when I took her to the dogsitter the day before I went on vacation.
Omnes Omnibus
@MattR: I always talked to my dog; he got me.
ETA: Sometimes, I still talk to his photo. But I am weird.
Steeplejack
@MattR:
Oh, yes, I talk to the cat, but I try to keep it civil. Which is hard when she is nagging me to feed her at dawn.
MattR
@Omnes Omnibus: I am not as bad as Patton Oswalt in his car but it is definitely inane banter I would be embarrassed if others heard
Omnes Omnibus
@MattR: Beau and I had serious conversations, damn it.
Cheap Jim, formerly Cheap Jim
Well, local media here in Baltimore is reporting that there was a large, very large, amount of opiates looted in the recent unpleasantness. It doesn’t take a David Ricardo to realize that that will have an effect on the drug trade. And the people in that trade, if they have disputes, cannot rely on the civil courts to sort things out. I’m not saying this is the root of all the increase in shootings and killings, but I’ll bet it’s a factor.