I don’t like the rioting and looting happening with the protests, either. But I’m gonna drop some galaxy brain shit here for the slow among us- HAVE THE POLICE STOP MURDERING PEOPLE SO THERE IS NO PRETEXT FOR LOOTING.
I mean seriously- reform the police. It will stop the protesting, it will stop the billions spent each year by cities and locales for payments in court cases, and… it WILL MAKE POLICE SAFER.
Now I know that means it is going to require some of the brutish cops giving up their ultraviolence and will mean that the so-called “good cops” will have to hold the “bad cops” accountable, and may require the public flogging of every PBA head, but I think we can do it.
low-tech cyclist
Meanwhile, while some PDs have joined in the protests, others have responded to a nationwide protest against police violence by – you guessed it – engaging in more of the same.
Just Chuck
There are firefighters who are bad people too, but there’s a reason no one wrote a hip-hop track named “Fuck the Fire Department”
BTW site folks, could we get ctrl-enter/cmd-enter to post the comment, the way most other sites work?
SiubhanDuinne
@Just Chuck:
Why not just use the existing “Post Comment” button?
HumboldtBlue
#BlackLivesMattter
✊?
BGinCHI
I’d like to see a small city or town try an all-female police force, just to see what the outcome would be in terms of a reduction of violence.
Just Chuck
@SiubhanDuinne: Because I asked for a keyboard shortcut.
cope
Hmmm, so you’re suggesting curing the disease rather than treating or responding to the symptoms. What a radical idea. It’s crazy enough that it just might work, though.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
I want to know what Congress is doing. I know a resolution was blocked but I’m gonna call my Congressman and Senators to see what they’re personally doing.
My D Rep is challenging my D Senator in a primary. My vote may very likely hinge on this.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Just Chuck: Well, we did have the fire captain here in Glendale that sidelined as an arsonist. He ended up torching an abandoned(or at least he thought) home improvement store and ended up in the greybar hotel for murder.
No One of Consequence
Meh. It’d never work.
Clearly the solution required here is to increase the prevalence of guns in this country.
Queue the NRA…
All snark aside, I think something along the lines of Police Review Boards with Teeth and Prominent Citizen Involvement is something we should consider. John is right in that bad cops cost more than just the stupid money spent on defending bad behaviour. The non-monetary costs for that same behaviour are arguably far more expensive.
It doesn’t *have* to be this way. We *allow* it. Let’s stop that, shall we?
Peace,
– NOoC
Aziz, light!
If we can’t ban Iraq and Afghanistan vets from becoming cops, can we at least install requirements that their mental health be thoroughly assessed? American neighborhoods are not enemy territory.
Just Chuck
@BGinCHI: When the police force itself becomes “The gang that won”, the women who do apply to such a force are not likely to be any better people. I’d like a bit of screening for better people, and just maybe make the force a more appealing career for non-thugs.
WaterGirl
@Just Chuck:
You want to hit Ctrl-Enter (PC) or Cmd-Enter (mac) from inside the comment box instead of hitting the Post Comment button? I have never heard of that, can you direct me to a site that works that way? (that won’t require a third-party login like Disqus?)
Just Chuck
@?BillinGlendaleCA: It’s almost like he was held accountable or something. I’m told by many police that would bring about the collapse of civilization if we allowed that standard to apply to them, but I’m willing to take a leap now.
Betty Cracker
We can, and we must. In his speech yesterday, Biden proposed a federal ban on chokeholds and stopping the transfer of military equipment to police departments. That’s a good start.
Most of the work will have to be local though. In cities with Democratic mayors, we citizens have to put pressure on local leadership to make police reform a priority. In hick towns like mine, it’ll be a tougher nut to crack.
rk
Social media has opened my eyes to the fact that white people call the police for every little thing like it’s their own private security force. This has to stop as well.
This happened in a nearby suburban neighborhood. The kids were putting up flyers. But Karen decided to call the cops.
facebook.com/anju.madnani.9/posts/3517009811662179
BGinCHI
Anyone else see this?
MisterForkbeard
Yeah. It was mentioned in another thread yesterday that “ACAB – All Cops Are Bad (Cops)” is pretty awful and that “ACAC – All Cops Are Complicit” is much better. And I think that’s it – it really will depend on the Good Cops to stand up and actually get the bad ones fired and shamed and police departments reformed.
That’s going to be very hard – there’s a lot of institutional resistance, especially from the President. And it goes against the Thin Blue Line culture. But it’s the only way they’ll get it done.
This is really silly, but for a lot of white folks it’s instructive to watch the episode of Brooklyn 99 where the black sergeant is racially profiled. It can’t give the problem the depth it deserves and it was done during a slightly more innocent time, but it addresses a lot of racism, police inaction and other problems seriously. And also has a lot of good jokes – clueless white people might be a lot more receptive to it than reading polemics or news on the interwebs. I know a few people for whom it was eye-opening when it aired a couple years ago.
For anyone who wants to see it, it’s Season 4 Episode 16, “Moo Moo”.
cain
Also there seems to be evidence is that all these looting are well organized. So there are basically organizations that are behind the looting. It sucks that there are black men and other PoCs involved in this. It’s just shitty. But there are bad people every where – just like there was 5 black cops that beat up a protesters. Funny how they were thrown under the bus faster than white cops were.
You can always count on the system to fuck over even black cops who pay dues to the cop union.
BGinCHI
@Just Chuck: Not following.
Hire only women. Re-start the culture.
I get that the same conditions would produce the same results, genius.
cain
@MisterForkbeard:
It seems that we really need to bring the police union to heel. It seems that they seem to have inordinate power and they are unions that go after other unions – I would like to see pressure from the other unions. Especially they shouldn’t be going after and busting up other unions.
Just Chuck
@WaterGirl: It means the “Post Comment” button has a keyboard shortcut: I press Ctrl-Enter (or Cmd-Enter on a mac) and it activates the button.
This idiom works on a very large number of sites and software, from Github to JIRA to Discourse. I think even Reddit does it.
feebog
Much easier said then done John. I have been a Hearing Officer for the LA County Civil Service Commission since 2007, I hear a lot of cases involving deputy discipline for the Sheriff’s Department. This is the same department run by Lee Baca, who is currently serving time on corruption charges. There is a culture of “them against us” that is very difficult to break through. Not to say there aren’t a lot of outstanding people in the ranks, but there are also a good share of racists. Everyone in the department knows who they are, but no one says a thing.
Just Chuck
@BGinCHI:
Well bless your heart.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
I thought Obama already did this.
Oh, you mean Obama’s successor is a deranged howler monkey who’s determined to undo everything Obama did? That sounds counter-productive.
cain
@Betty Cracker:
It really puzzles me .. In Portland, we have a Dem governor, Dem mayor, a black police chief and yet this shit goes on? Why with all these pols can we not affect change in cooperation with black and PoC communities?
Betty Cracker
@Aziz, light!: I don’t think we can or should ban vets, but law enforcement orgs definitely shouldn’t present LEO jobs as if serving in a war zone is the perfect background for the work. It should be made explicitly clear that there will be a lot to UNLEARN from that experience.
Just Chuck
@Krope, the Formerly Dope: Obama issued an executive order. We didn’t get a law because the GOP still exists.
HumboldtBlue
@BGinCHI: So what’s happening in this city, which for many years has been deemed among the dangerous in America? Thomson, who took the helm of the Camden police force in 2008, says the biggest factor may have been the change in structure of the department itself. In 2013, the Camden Police Department was disbanded, reimagined, and born again as the Camden County Police Department, with fewer officers, lower pay—and a strategic shift toward “community policing.”
MisterForkbeard
@cain: Agree. And I’m very leery of diminishing ANY union, but I’ve heard several labor lawyers agree with this – the Police Union is extremely powerful and has negotiated a lot of carve-outs and special treatment that they’re just not justifying.
@cain: It takes a LOT of political capital to bring a single recalcitrant police department to heel and politicians that engage on it are going to be attacked relentlessly. Absent a crisis, you can’t do much other than incremental improvements. It’s the same reason St. Louis and Minneapolis’ police departments were so awful despite having some Dem leadership.
Betty Cracker
@cain: My kiddo has been involved in the protests in Tampa and reports that the cops are abusing peaceful protesters. The mayor is a Democrat who was the first (I think) woman who was the city’s police chief and was considered fairly progressive by local standards. We were thrilled when she won, but the problem remains.
I think it’s the “us vs. them” mentality that leads cops to act like an occupying army rather than guardians who serve the public. I don’t know how to get rid of that culture, but it has GOT to change.
Frankensteinbeck
@BGinCHI:
It would mean restarting from scratch, since it’s such a male dominated profession. That right there makes a bigger difference than sex. I think you would see a big uptick in violence because the nature of misogyny is that misogynists feel free to attack women when they would not attack men. How that plays out I don’t know, except ‘violently.’
Krope, the Formerly Dope
Well, unfortunately, the GOP is likely to continue to exist next year too, even if Biden is elected.
Hungry Joe
Start by (mostly) disarming the police. Weapons have to remain in the car unless there’s a reason to remove them — e.g., robbery in progress, arrest of felon known to be violent, etc. If a weapon has been taken from the car, the cop must submit a written explanation, subject to review by a supervisor and an independent citizen board. If the weapon is drawn, that’s subject to yet another level of review. Enough of this macho preening, guns drawn, bursting into the house “GET ON THE GROUND! GET ON THE GROUND! GET ON THE GROUND!” horseshit to nab a suspected burglar who missed court date.
cain
@feebog:
Well consider that we have whole protests and it does end up being us vs them.. hell we feel it is us vs them. So not surprised. But they need to realize that it is their own action that is causing this. With great power comes great responsibility.
The Moar You Know
@MisterForkbeard: I agree, but it’s good to keep in mind that this is not a risk-free proposition for the good cops. Especially in departments like Minneapolis, where it’s sure looking like the bad cops outnumber the good. Remember Serpico? He’s an anomaly…he’s still alive.
The only way LA finally got over the Daryl Gates era was to get put under DoJ control for twenty years. I might add that didn’t fix anything, but did make the LAPD “less awful”. And that obviously wouldn’t work with the DoJ as they are currently constituted.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
Yeah. Even if you have the right leadership, that’s only a start. This requires a whole culture change. Most of my favorite reforms I’ve seen proposed are some form of “create more opportunities for police officers to have positive interactions with the community.” More foot patrols. Community projects (say a public garden) that help people become vested in their own community and the police can participate.
It doesn’t help that the Ds weren’t doing much to challenge the lawn order status quo until maybe around a decade ago.
cain
@MisterForkbeard:
Seems like we need to keep educating the community, and it has to be a drum beat. They might have power, but they can’t fight an entire community – their power comes from their hold on politicians. But they can’t shut us all up. A single minded drive to call them to heel is going to be required.
The police union is not a normal union – it is a union that can attack other unions and by their own admittance they believe they are special snowflakes.. I agree. They get more special rules especially how they act against other unions. We can’t have a union that works to weaken other unions.
BGinCHI
@HumboldtBlue: It’s a really interesting example.
Any example of “actually doing something” is rare.
rikyrah
Black folks just want to be treated by the police how they treat the average White guy.
cain
@Betty Cracker:
It is us vs them.. certainly now – it is. They have choosen to allow a malignant culture to permeate them – they aren’t listening to their community – and they are protected from bad behavior by police unions – there is no consequences to bad behavior which is why we have rioting everywhere. It’s time that we all recognize that.
Get these union chiefs, (not police chief) in front of a camera start asking them hard questions.
BGinCHI
@Frankensteinbeck: Female cops can still be tough. They just don’t have to initiate violence.
cain
@rikyrah:
Shit – the average white guy needs to also change.. they shouldn’t be aggressively coming into govt grounds fully armed and shouting in people’s faces.
I have yet to see black folks doing that. They have been way more respectful than these people have. Entitled assholes.
The Moar You Know
@cain: Just like the Feds, you get two levels of government employee – political and civil. The mayor, the governor, the police chief…they come and go. The cops are there until retirement. So you can vote in as many liberal folks as you like; the cops change glacially or not at all.
(the two shittiest police departments I have ever dealt with were Berkeley’s and San Francisco’s, both cities with liberal government that have been liberal for over fifty years. Doesn’t matter to the cops!)
Police chiefs in most departments have exactly as much power as the union allows them to have. Sure, they can fire bad cops…and then the union promptly drags them into court and very frequently prevails. I am vehemently pro-union but they are not without their problems, and you really see that with the police unions.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
For the record, those aren’t average white guys. (I’d describe them as sub-average)
But any person interacting with a police officer should be dealing with a professional with professional standards of behavior.
MisterForkbeard
@The Moar You Know:
Yep. It’s a huge problem, both physically and professionally – it’s not safe yet for good cops to speak out. And it won’t be without major cover from political and civic leaders, as well as broad popular support.
I’m going to return to that Brooklyn99 episode again, because it’s mainstream mostly-non-political entertainment and even it addresses this aspect: the black sergeant is absolutely punished and his career damaged because he decided to report on his own profiling by another cop to the brass. People need to understand that this is the minimum that could be expected to happen. :(
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Betty Cracker: It might also help if cops were required to LIVE in the area they police. A lot of cops live in the same neighborhoods, outside city or town they work in. Sometimes a lot in one neighborhood. So the only people they really socialize with or are neighbors with are other cops. It’s not always true but it’s true enough of the time that police have NO investment in the people or neighborhoods they patrol.
MisterForkbeard
@BGinCHI: In my own (very limited white dude) experience, I’ve gotten a lot more crap from female officers than male.
Male officers run the gamut. Some have been respectful, others wildly awful. The female officers I’ve interacted with just kind of assume I’m going to be a gigantic asshole to them and treat me like shit.
Notably, they also react much better once I prove I’m not an asshole and treat them respectfully, to the point where I’ve had a couple of female officers apologize towards the end of our conversation.
Again, keep in mind that I’m a respectable looking white dude in a relatively prosperous area, and I only interact with the cops during traffic stops or checkpoints. So this could all be wildly off.
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: I see this a lot, but it ignores that a lot of cops can’t AFFORD to live in their neighborhoods. Especially in the dense cities where real estate is at a premium. So we’d have to pay them more or set up a specific kind of housing voucher where the city pays a dedicated portion of their rent. Maybe even set it up so that the city pays ABOVE the rate, so that having a police officer in your building becomes a desirable thing.
The Moar You Know
@rikyrah: I am very much the living, walking, talking model of an “average white guy” who, back when I had long hair in the 1980s, used to get pulled over every day, get searched all the time, had guns shoved in my face, been screamed at and threatened, and been kicked around a few times.
I think we can do better than “treat them all like the average white guy”.
Calouste
@Just Chuck: Someone wrote a hip hop track called “911 is a Joke” though.
Betty Cracker
@Hungry Joe: I don’t think there’s any possibility of disarming cops with so much of the population armed. It’s part of what makes the problem so damned complex.
I was listening to a guy on a podcast the other day. He was a professor (Princeton, I think) whose done a lot of work on police reform.
One idea he had was simply to reduce the number of cop-citizen encounters on regulatory issues. I wish I could remember the guy’s name! It made sense to me.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@cain:
Happened in California in the late 60’s, the Leg passed and Gov. Reagan signed pretty strict gun control laws.
Just Chuck
Is it too much to ask that a cop who kills someone be subjected to as much review as if he had pulled someone over across state lines? Asking for a friend.
PJ
@BGinCHI: But they do. Recall the female Texas police officer who murdered her upstairs neighbor “because she thought he was an intruder” though he was in his own apartment.
Ruckus
John,
Sounds like a good idea.
Minor point.
I think we may differ just a bit in our definition of easy.
BellyCat
To fix the “shitty cop” problem we just need to reform the entire justice system, too. Easy peasy….
Perhaps I will someday share a personal (and ongoing) experience in which I made the mistake of feeling it was my civic duty to put on record the misconduct of a sociopath police officer. Among a number of other mind-bending details, the Assistant DA stated that I was “the epitome of white male entitlement”.
The entire system is broken beyond multi-generational repair.
BellyCat
@BGinCHI: An all female force (without guns?) is a truly brilliant idea.
RedDirtGirl
Starting with Patrick Lynch of the NYPD Union.
Just Chuck
@WaterGirl: Correct. Check any of the sites I mentioned (discourse runs half the forums out there, I guess discourse.org would be the home site). Can’t think of any that don’t require some sort of login though. If you already have gmail, it listens for those keys too, as do most mail apps and webmail sites.
It should be a pretty quick matter of adding a new event listener for that key combo. My jQuery is pretty rusty so I’ll have to experiment with tampermonkey. Then, I can just send you a script tag to toss into the appropriate plugin/theme.
I’ve blocked Disqus for years. They are utterly noxious and openly worse about privacy than even Facebook. I recommend installing Privacy Badger, going to a Disqus-enabled site, then moving all their sliders to red.
Just Chuck
@RedDirtGirl: The head of the NYPD police union is named “Lynch”. Priceless.
moops
It is time to put away all the riot gear. It has never helped a dam thing. It is also time to discard the turn-out-in-force tactic. For any incident that escalates the cops show up with 10 cops cars and a few dozen cops. Even just a mugging or an assault by a single assailant. Next 15 cops show up. When was the last time a cop actually got taken down by a protestor? what data even supports this riot response tactic in every city in America?
Just Chuck
@moops: Riots do need to be quelled. Otherwise regardless of the cause, they tend to turn into pogroms and worse. Surprisingly enough however, not giving people cause to riot does tend to be the best solution. Another good tip would be not instigating one through brutal naked fascism.
terraformer
I was talking w/my spouse the other day about this, and our fear about not only the police, but the heavily armed white power industrial complex.
For police to reform themselves, and for other institutions that have the power of arrest and really, to mete out violence and death, is that those within those institutions will have to make a choice.
There is a line within each institution – white supremacists or those with relationships with or sympathies for white supremacists on one side, and those who do not on the other. They have to clean up their own house first, and I don’t know that they can, or will, or even want to. Then what?
BellyCat
The core problems are the lack of accountability, oversight, and effective redress.
Racism is undoubtedly an embed issue that creates horrific and widespread consequences. However, to think that it is the ONLY serious problem is to overlook the larger ineffective framework that allows racist actions (and many more odious actions regardless of race, gender, etc) by police without consequences.
geg6
I support this entire agenda. Especially that bolded part. Televised and streamed live.
Ruckus
@Betty
A big part of the problem is that leadership can only change so much at once if the employees can leave at will. This means that in the military a bad commander can fuck up a lot – but that commander can be replaced and the situation can be changed and there really isn’t a lot the troops can do about it. Cops do not have that luxury. Change can really only go at the pace of the lowest common denominator. That’s the bad cop on the street with a club and a gun.
Kirk Spencer
I know, almost dead thread. Still got to speak up.
There are a couple of major psych/soc issues about policing that need acknowledged when working on reform.
They revolve around the fact that a law enforcement officer regardless of title is supposed to enforce the law. Notionally persuasion and maneuver are the preferred processes, but even there the job is getting people to behave . This is resented by a number of people.
So you need people who can make others do what they’re told you get people who are willing to and even want to give those orders.
And in opposition, few people like being told what to do. Some actively resent it and act out in reaction.
If your reform doesn’t take those into account I fear it’s unrealistic.
Jado
@Just Chuck:
I think that might be because when bad firefighters are found out, the police ARREST THEM. They don’t sweep it under the rug, and refuse to investigate or corroborate witnesses. They don;t determine that there were “other factors” in the blatant, illegal, defined-as-against-policy-in-the-training-manual, murder of a defenseless handcuffed human.
Cause that’s what George Floyd was – a fellow human. And these police killed him, because…why again? Because they felt they could? And no other police, after seeing this video, immediately arrested them for murder?
Yeah, i think i’ll take 100 arsonist fire fighters over these police. At least arsonist fire fighters don’t usually AIM to kill people.
SWMBO
Totally dead thread.
Hit the police unions in the wallet. Half of any civil damages comes from the city/county/state. The other half comes from police unions pension funds. They pay out a few million here, a few million there and pretty soon they’re losing real money. The good cops know who needs retraining or kicking out. Losing their pension funds because these asswipes won’t behave will make them more likely to stop them or kick their asses out. It’s different when it’s YOUR money that pays the debt. Stop making the taxpayers cover the entire cost. If they want a culture that covers up for bad cops, pay the price, dicksplat.