oops… slinks away into a little-used corner of the internet
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YODO! You WILL forget it.
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“Police apologists”? Yeah, I’ll bite.
FWIW: grew up in inner-city Chicago, you wanna talk about tough cops? Had a girlfriend murdered. Was prime suspect, briefly. Was interrogated. Was treated decently. By Chicago cops. In a murder case. The actual murderer was caught in less than a week. He’s currently serving his sentence (the fuck).
If that was me, I wouldn’t be resisting and/or screaming. It’s not like they’re (intentionally) hurting her. It seems like the usual entitled histrionics in police/citizen interactions I see reported here on BB.
Provoke a cop, expect to get treated with less than the utmost courtesy.
I guess the thing that gets my goat on Boing Boing is the whole I-did-something-stupid-or-provocative-and-the-cops-were-mean-to-me-fuck-the-police! attitude.
Do cops do bad things? Yes they do. And they should be punished when they do things that are wrong or illegal.
Whatever. You wann jaywalk, come to Chicago, everyone does it here all the time. Also, we give you dirty looks if you honk at us because you nearly hit us when we popped out between two parked vans. How dare you.
Be cooperative. Don’t be a prick. Smile and always look down, so you don’t make eye contact and remain deferential. Offer to spitshine the nice officer’s shoes. Give the cop a twenty, or whatever the highest denomination bill is in your wallet. Offer to let the cop take an appliance from your home, or set up a weekly tribute payment. Try crying, if you can do it on cue, or get on your knees and beg for mercy and forgiveness. The lady did none of these things, she probably deserved the treatment for her disrespect.
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Congratulations seem in order for the Chicago Police Dept. - apparently they have at least a few cops who live up to their badge.
Pff.
Here’s a story for you.
2am on a Sunday morning I’m riding home on my bike with a weed-whacker over my shoulder. Get pulled over by plainclothes detectives. Fucking no-neck 'roid-boy pig gets out and asks me where I got the whipper-snipper (what we call em here). Cash Converters (a pawn shop chain), I say.
Tell me another one, he goes. I wasn’t lying, so I look at him as if to say, ‘fuck you’ and say I haven’t got another one.
Festering cunt flips, goes, don’t you fucking eyeball me cunt, comes around his car, puts me over his bonnet (breaking the car’s aerial), pulls his gun and sticks it in my face, and tells me, ‘I could fucking kill you, cunt - and get away with it.’
Don’t fucking talk to me about cops and courtesy.
I’ll look at em with whatever damn facial expression I please (particularly when insulted), and I shouldn’t have to be worried about potentially PTSD-inducing threats on my life.
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Exactly. Don’t you think it’s entirely possible, (doggo) that the police stopped her, said show us your id and she said, “I’m RUNNING. I don’t carry my ID when I run.”
“Well you were weaving in and out of traffic.”
“Yes, I was trying to cross the damn street, is that illegal?”
“Yes it is and you have quite the lip on you young lady.”
“Don’t give me that shit you pig, I’m EXERCISING. That’s a lot more than YOU can say.”
Tell me that’s not an unreasonable response to some dumbass stopping you because he doesn’t like your jogging style and wants to flex his muscle. Take candy from babies and kick the innocent in the heads. It’s how small people feel big for a day.
I’ve known respectable cops. But if a cop is being a shit, he or she deserves to be called on it. Now, expect consequences, because people can’t take it when you stand up to them. But stand up with your spine. Don’t compromise your morals just because some dumbass says you need to. I’m with Kimmo on this. Stand your ground.
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I live in an extremely pedestrian/cyclist friendly area (just about the only one in the “former” Confederacy, sadly) and my closest calls have been in crosswalks, crossing with the little walky man telling me to walk.
And, at least in my experience, second only to crosswalks as a great place to be run over, is a church at closing time. Those people seem very intent on getting away from there as fast as they can.
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I’ll give you a third one: parents driving up to or pulling away from their children’s school. With children in the car. There seem to be extra points if they hit (or nearly hit) a kid in the pedestrian crosswalk. You know, after driving through the stop sign without stopping.
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One of the (supposed) shining points of American Freedom (TM) is that we don’t have to answer to “papers please.”
That’s one of the reasons all those laws in Arizona saying “if you look brown you have to provide papers saying you aren’t an illegal immigrant” are such bullshit.
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I called the police in Savannah once to report the appalling parking / double parking / driving at one of the local churches. I don’t think anything ever happened about that 
The way drivers approach stop signs drives me nucking futs (it was atrocious in Savannah, but it isn’t much better in Seattle). Everyone rolls straight through them up to the junction. If I’m walking I’ve take to deliberately walking across in front of cars I know aren’t planning to stop at the actual stop sign just to scare the drivers.
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I keep having to remind my wife that I am paying very close attention in those instances; I simply act as if I’m not for the benefit of the clueless fuck behind the windshield.
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And you’re from Victoria too; I would have guessed QLD.
But but Austin is not like the rest of Texas!!!1!
…except it clearly is.
Whoa man… What area are we talking about? Did you get the fuckers name?
I hate to channel our American brethren here but it’s time to sue those motherfuckers.
…and then you filed a complaint. You did file a complaint, didn’t you? And followed up on it. Maybe talked to the press?
Well, that’s certainly a courageous stand, awjt. But I’m not sure it’s reasonable, considering, as you say there are consequences to expect.
I was a long haired teenager in 1970s Chicago, and I’ve gotten stopped and frisked more times than I can remember. Only once was I thrown against a wall and screamed at. I’ve been in a car being chased by multiple squad cars (guns were drawn when they dragged us out of the car), and I’ve sat in the back of squad cars being questioned.
Except for the car chase, I’ve never been really frightened by the cops. If you do what they tell you to do (within reason), and answer their questions, they usually treat you ok.
And, for what it’s worth, I’ve never been arrested, or seen the inside of a police station until my girlfriend was murdered. And I’m no angel.
Cop are our fellow workers. And I mean that in the Marxist-Leninist sense. They “Serve & Protect” the people of their community. They’re subject to the same laws the rest of us are, and in addition, the professional standards of their department. If they act outside of those laws and standards, it’s your duty to make sure they get called on it. But standing there and having a confrontation over it in the moment is asinine, and good way to get your ass kicked.
Painting all cops with the same brush is as good as the burnt out cops who think every civilian they see is a bad guy. If you want to see better policing, then I suggest you work toward getting cops, and the law enforcement institutions to recognize that they work for us, not the 1%, and calling out bad behavior and corruption, legally, whenever you can.
I’m no apologist for bad cops. Every cop that sprays innocent protestors with pepper spray should be booted from the force and prosecuted for assault. Every cop on the take, or who physically assaults someone who is not resisting, should be brought up on charges.
But hating cops in general, because you had a bad experience with one, or calling cops “pigs” and “cunts” is no better than their worst behavior. Try swapping out the nouns in that last sentence, maybe substitute “cops” with “dogs”, or “trees”, or “cholos”, or “Samoans”, or even “white bread college students”.
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Here in Victoria, if a cop has his gun out, you just do whatever it takes to de-escalate the situation.
So no, getting his name never got to the top of my list of my concerns. At first I was too busy trying to get him to put his fucking gun away, then preventing him from arresting me for breaking his aerial, and then from him leaving my bike on the footpath and bundling me into the car so we could go around the corner to my place, where I’d told him as soon as he pulled his fucking gun, I could show him a bloody receipt.
So anyway, I managed to talk them into following me to my place, but they wanted to take the whipper-snipper in the boot. Wouldn’t fit, so they had to put it in the back seat. They follow me to my door, which I leave open but explicitly state, ‘you can wait there’ - pig with gun’s mate complies, but pig with gun just walks in with me. I turn around, go, ‘are you right?’ and he says some crap about just making sure I don’t have anything I shouldn’t. I think, fuck you, pig, but just let it slide since I knew the bong was out of view.
I spot the receipt, and it seems at this point as if this arsewipe is finally getting the picture. He blathers some drivel like ‘oh, you can see how it looked’ but I managed to muster the balls to cut him short with ‘just fuck off and gimme my whipper-snipper back’… that was sweet*, but I should’ve got his name and number at that point, dammit. Too much adrenaline to think clearly.
*the best was yet to come…
I rang the cops and made an informal complaint; rather than risk reprisals (not sure how likely but definitely more than 0%), I just wanted this guy’s boss to chew him the fuck out. I said, he’ll be the one with the broken aerial and no result. Rein in your fucking goons. I figured that was an end of it.
But shortly after that, my next-door neighbour gets home and I catch him at the door to tell him the story and show him the whipper-snipper… which was missing its fuel.
BWAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH, motherfuckers…suck shit 
Make that, he’ll be the one with no result and a ruined car!
That was 2-stroke, baby
Pretty sweet instant karma; never seen the like before or since. I’m pretty sure his boss chewed him the fuck out. I guess if the subject of police bullying and violence comes up in the local public arena I should write a letter to the editor of The Age or something…
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Sure, they’re fellow cogs in the machine. But as you admit, they’re a special class of cog.
As for accountability and professional standards, I hope you’ll forgive me if I take a dim view those concepts as applied to the po-po. A certain amount of faith in that system is necessary for it to be worth a damn.
So I have as much respect for a good cop as I do for a good paramedic. It’s tough from all angles. But I employ discrimination in deploying my epithets, thanks very much.
Problem is, something about being a cop isn’t too conducive to being a good cop. Life is fucking tough or even impossible for truly good cops in many places.
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That’s an interesting personal history. But I find myself asking, does it bring anything to bear on this situation?
My premise, which you did not address, was that her reaction of outrage in the moment is justifiable, no matter what she said short of threats. She was unarmed and harmless, and very likely committed no offense. To be treated how she was was unjustifiable and simply unjust.
So, are you saying she has no right to express her outrage to those cops’ faces? That’s what I’m hearing from you, and I disagree.
I also disagree with the premise that it is the suspect’s sole responsibility to de-escalate a situation. No, the cops are the trained professionals. THEY should be responsible for the lion’s share of de-escalation. They should be responsible for at least 75% of effort to defuse a situation. Not 0%. Not 50%. MOST of it. It’s their fucking JOB, and they have guns, tasers and SWAT teams with tanks. So the onus is on the police to de-escalate.
And it applies here, to this jogger. The onus was on the patrolmen to act in a plain-dealing manner; the onus was not on the jogger to be prepared to face off and de-escalate a situation with the police. And these guys failed. They should be removed from the force. Are they the kind of guys you want around your children? No way. Not these thugs. Get them away.
Sure, these annoying stories just flog our outrage, but how else are we going to get these jerks to see the error of their ways? By filing lawsuits? By submitting ourselves to their thuggery and then just trying to correct it later? heheheh, that’s not my world. Might be yours and a lot of people’s, but I’d rather stick it in their eye.
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I figure these annoying stories piss people off somewhat incrementally; the more of them get around, the more people are unhappy about their performance. And maybe, eventually, that leads to something.
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