These are twelve MORONS who should be “ex-cops” immediately!
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and this is okay to you?
“controlling the situation” is acceptable? … bill of rights, …
please be assured, i am not saying “YOU ARE BAD”.
I am truly curious if we have become the country that accepts this type of violation in exchange for a perception of safety
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Why is the link at the bottom of this story not to the original publisher of the story?
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These geniuses are getting paid out of your tax dollars, right? Then get on the horn to your council people, mayor and the city manager ASAP. Voice your displeasure, demand that these 12 idiots be fired along with their boss. And tell everyone you know to do the same thing.
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I for one am happy that our police employ a Grimm to protect us these supernatural monsters inhabiting the bodies of black children:
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I originally posted this in response to the murder of Scout Schultz. It’s a post that is, regrettably, increasingly relevant.
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Please tell me where I said it was OK. Please. Did you actually read everything I wrote?
…until they had her in custody and realized that they had fucked up badly.
That doesn’t make it right, and cuffing the hysterical 11-year-old was a stupid move, but the account in Cory’s linked article didn’t include those relevant details.
When is having more information, provided by non-spurious news sources - including actual police body cam video, a bad thing?
People in this thread were getting outraged at things that didn’t actually happen. Cory typically chose an “alternative” news source to link. I love the guy, but he has a tendency toward yellow journalism at times.
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Quite. But remember, POC get a lifetime of practice having to be the only cool head in interactions with cops who are routinely trained to fly off the handle at the mere sight of brown skin.
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was not meaning to imply you are the green magoo
I was trying to understand - and you did absolutely help - if people are starting to think it is okay
yeah - i am pretty certain we are on the same page
everything about what happened - even with El Cory’s often willy-nilly sources 
- everything here is aeffed up mess. fo SHO!
I’m going to respond to you honestly, but I’m warning you in advance that this will be a really long reply and I’m asking you to read everything I’ve written so you can understand my thoughts on this subject - since you asked me what I thought.
I’m trying not to make too many assumptions, but what this means to me is that they were looking for an armed fugitive and were compelled to deal with a situation that presented itself unexpectedly. They apparently weren’t planning on encountering people leaving the house while they were cautiously approaching it. When they did, their response was to try to control the situation because it was dark and they didn’t know who was armed and who wasn’t or how the people would react in that situation - knowing that many people hate and distrust cops (for good reason).
Cops do put people in handcuffs temporarily sometimes when there is a doubt about a situation, to establish control and protect themselves. It’s a shitty, fascist thing to do to people who haven’t posed a threat to them, but I guess it helps them feel safer. I honestly don’t know if a court would treat it as a violation of the detainee’s rights.
If you are familiar with Ray Bradbury’s story The Pedestrian I had something similar happen to me once in Florida when I was in my thirties. I used to get up really early - often when it was still dark outside, to walk 7 miles every morning because it gets too damn hot and humid later in the day and because my knees didn’t allow me to jog anymore.
One time when I was out walking at the crack of dawn, this police car cuts across the center line, jumps the curb, and screeches to a stop right in front of me, Starsky & Hutch style. Two cops jump out and within seconds two other cars pulled up and I was swarmed by cops. One of them put me into handcuffs, another searched me, while another was grilling me about where I was coming from and where I was going and what I was doing outside before the sun was up.
It turns out that there was a burglary reported in my neighborhood a short time before that and they thought I fit the description of the suspect - which at least temporarily made ME a suspect, because they were idiots. They explained this while another police car pulled up and shined its high-beams in my eyes so I couldn’t see into the car but so that the burgled party - riding in the back of the car, could get a good look at me to tell whether I was the burglar or not.
During this process I was laughing quietly to myself because, given my tubby physique, I couldn’t imagine anyone thinking that I was going to climb through second-story windows to burglarize homes - the whole thing was surreal. That’s when I discovered that some cops really hate it when people laugh at them performing their duties. Later that same day I found a bogus eviction notice from the sheriff’s office plastered on our front door. Interesting coincidence.
I don’t think any of this is OK, nor should it be the new normal - but in response to your question I do think that the police in the US are trained to protect themselves and take control of iffy situations, and sometimes they don’t care too much about the rights of people that they deem unimportant.
I wasn’t coming to the defense of the police, their policies, or their behavior in my original comment - at all. I was trying to provide a more complete picture, including literal pictures in the form of a police body cam video. From all of these stories in the news the last several years I’ve gotten the impression that cops today are more cowardly than they used to be, or at least I’m becoming more aware of that cowardice.
Ideally, Cory would have linked to a more complete and reputable news source in the first place, but he seems to have a taste for breathless sensationalism and clickbaity content at times.
Thank you for reading my response to your questions. Sorry that I couldn’t do it in fewer words.
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Disgusting.
This is the same “best practice” shit that wound up with the death of Daniel Shaver by trigger happy police that don’t give a fuck about what they are doing. Making her walk away from her mother using several simultaneous verbal commands to the three police officers bearing arms at her, backwards no less, while ordering her mother to stop yelling and demand trust is absurdity. No human being should be looking at that footage and move away thinking this was good police work to simply arrest every single person they come across no matter what. They were not even SWAT, and even that is horseshit policy.
And reading the article of course some consulting firm is to blame for this shit. “21st Century Policing” was the ones brought in for this training and who the police chief referenced in who they are going to to “improve” their training. I am not surprised at all some consulting firm is involved.
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What judge signed off on this hare-brained scheme? It’d seem really important to make sure someone’s running against them come election (that is, if they’re elected).
Well, that’s just false and illegal imprisonment. That’s a hanging offense in any civilized nation. You can’t just have the cops going around “disappearing” people as part of an investigation. That’s no different than organized crime.
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Thing is, I hear all the time from cops that basically all the fucked up things they do is for their own safety and that’s why it’s okay.
But we all know that’s bullshit. Cops don’t have an obligation to respond to any situation. They have no obligation to protect the public, this has been decided in courts of law.
Handcuffing someone out of the blue doesn’t enhance a cop’s safety, between the fact that getting kicked and headbutted is pretty dangerous, and that handcuffs are both very easy to pick, and very easy to shim.
If cops really cared about their own safety instead of caring desperately about their macho reputations, they’d work hard to de-escalate situations, stop bullying people, and instead communicate and back off a lot more.
I’m sure to some fucked up pig, binding someone on their own property, unexpectedly at night is a good idea. But that doesn’t really make anyone safer. Not even the cops. It just makes the cops assholes who are bad at using words. You know, that skill you were expected to learn in preschool instead of hitting others with the wooden horse?
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Thanks for the reply. So I guess we can agree that cops are trained to abuse the rights of the citizenry and will place their own safety over that of the people whom they are not only charged to protect but who are also the source of their policing powers by consent.
I can’t think of a single moral justification for such abuse or for training officers to start with ignoring the rights of the people in some misguided attempt to “control”.
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I look at cops in the UK, and wonder why our cops in the US can’t be more like that. I know that the UK has armed police available, and that individual cops are still capable of being shitty people and doing shitty things.
I understand that widespread access to firearms makes policing in the US more dangerous. I also understand that Britons are still killing each other with knives, axes, cricket bats, and guns when they can get them. It’s just that in the stories dealing with US cops that we see in the news they seem more hateful and willing to kill or cause serious injury to suspects and bystanders than cops in the UK - who are trained to use non-lethal techniques in situations that don’t call for them.
It doesn’t seem like it’s just a few bad apples in US law enforcement anymore, it seems like higher-ups and the legal system are excusing if not straight up encouraging that kind of behavior.
If my family had the means to magically move to the UK while still maintaining our current standard of living and legal residence status, I’d go. I’ve followed their news and done enough reading and have enough British friends to know that life isn’t perfect there (or anywhere), but my wife and I lived in Europe for two years and Asia for another two years in our twenties and I could definitely see us finishing out our days in some quiet corner of the UK.
Sorry I’m just rambling now, but if the country keeps heading in the direction it’s been going under Trump then leaving the US wouldn’t be that great of a loss to me. If I had the health and financial means I’d already be gone.
Bear in mind it is cold and wet and has Daily Mail readers in it. Proper fish and chips, on the upside, though.
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Now you’re talking!
I’m forever amazed how people have come to use the phrase “a few bad apples” forgetting the rest of that quote “spoils the whole bunch”. The phrase is intended to convey the idea that once you have a few bad apples, there are no good apples left anymore. Yet these days people use it as a way to say that most cops are still good cops which is exactly the opposite of the actual meaning of the saying.
But you are right. The problem is not isolated to a few bad apples. The whole bunch is spoiled. Police brutality, racism, and a general attitude of ‘use vs them’ exists systemically throughout this nations police forces.
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