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“Protect and Serve”…the ruling elite.
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Or by nominally pro-reform candidates like Andre Dickens in Atlanta.
I genuinely think that we are past the point where we can expect local politicians to be able to affect police reform. They have tried again and again, all over the country. It’s not just the yo-yo of election cycles. It’s that police hold more power than the cities and even states that they nominally serve.
And it’s a wonder that people call for outright abolition of police?
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Absolutely. I’ve heard cops talking when they thought they could do so freely. They serve affluent white people, especially ones who are property owners, and especially those who own businesses. Everyone else is fair game, a source of power tripping and fine revenue.
They would also sometimes talk about how current court cases and reform efforts would amount to nothing, but they weren’t pretending it was an unfortunate situation.
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Don’t they frequently respond to all of those with violence?
Some would even say, “as they trained”.
That they didn’t repond this time with violence may be a larger wonder. Even way later, long after they should have, when it was no longer required, and when their personal risk was reduced.
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They don’t actually have a duty to enforce the law, either, or to arrest law breakers.
“ThAtS HoW tHeY cAn LeT yOu oFf wItH a WaRnInG”
they literally have zero obligations or requirements to do jack shit.
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When you have a hammer, everybody is wearing a nail shaped hat.
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I need to do more research into that and prison abolition. I would like to be for both of those, but I admit to not being well informed.
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The perjury bit was the only thing they had a real chance on (given established legal precedent on the other bits).
But I have to say, for all the Hollywood fantasies about what cops do, the police just don’t have the training to deal with these situations because they almost never have to face them (collectively, much less individually). Facing shooters is what soldiers do, or, sometimes, SWAT teams. I question whether we really even want cops to have this training - if that’s the focus, then the vital training they’d actually use (and already don’t get) would be neglected (or absent), and all their interactions would be through this training, making all the issues around “warrior cops” even worse. Even specialized teams are problematic, resource use issues aside: witness how SWAT teams are used, especially in more rural areas - they end up violently serving warrants for even non-violent crimes, and innocent people get hurt and killed as a result. Even their effectiveness for their supposed purpose is questionable - e.g. Uvalde.
All of which is to say: cops in schools aren’t, can’t and probably even shouldn’t be effective against shooters, and have no place in schools at all. And that’s before taking into account how detrimental they are to the students in day-to-day interactions and how, if anything, they probably attract mass shooters (who often are looking to suicide-by-cop). Even the vague, unsubstantiated belief that cops should (or do) deal with these situations is how we end up with militarized cops, which is just, in general, bad. The cops aren’t going to save us - only getting rid of the guns will.
Well technically that wasn’t part of his job at all. The only reason they’d have to fire him is that he made them look bad, but the police “union” protects people from that kind of treatment, so I’m guessing, at worst, he quietly got an early retirement (or will, now that he was found not guilty).
Unfortunately the take-away, for certain people, will be that obviously the solution is to give completely untrained people (e.g. teachers) guns to solve the problem.
We should do it, but in a way that might actually work. It’s been legally established that cops have no duty to protect, so this had no chance of winning as a legal strategy. There were other approaches that had a chance of doing something, but apparently no one wanted to do those. Choosing a strategy that they knew would lose was a response to public outrage that made it seem like they were doing “something,” while not actually doing anything.
Security theater. And yes, that is grotesque. That cops on campus end up ruining lives - and even killing students - for this theater makes it even more grotesque.
Because it’s not his job? There’s this big disconnect between what the public thinks the cops job is, and what it actually is… I think if people realized what cops actually do (and are expected to do by their superiors), the “defund the police” movement would get a lot more support, whatever you called it.
They really aren’t trained to deal with it, though. Police gun training is really more about shooting someone who isn’t shooting at you. Most police training (such as it is) is about procedure. Not following procedure is what gets cops in trouble, mostly.
Hmmmm…
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How else to keep them quiet about what really goes in the force?
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But the targets they use in practice show Black men pointing a gun! 
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yes of course there is
just not if you’re a cop
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Then why the fuck do they even exist, if that’s the case?
Wait, don’t answer that; I already know:
Thank fuck for small favors…
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The law is not immutable. This is the kind of case that can and should change precedent. Giving up is not an option.
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Amen to that.
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Sure, if you intend to take it all the way up to the Supreme Court and you think there’s a chance that they’ll rule in a way that they didn’t the last several times… but that’s clearly not the case here.
Given the actual, current state of the (very settled) law, this just looks like some sort of performative protest without any real intention of changing the status quo.
This analysis completely ignores that the current SCOTUS has pissed all over “settled law.” Not that this SCOTUS would overrule it, but a subsequent, more legitimate Court could. Not to mention, a lower court could rule differently and SCOTUS could just not take the case up. We won’t know until we try. Shrugging it off is to agree with it.
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Those traffic tickets aren’t going to write themselves…
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True story
You forgot ‘full body slam child’ onto concrete floor.
