Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/09/15/berkeley-police.html
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How authoritarians hate the people. But where would they be without us?
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I’d prefer the police to stay out of the narrative-defining business, period.
Policing for the Benefit of the Police, Episode #32,428
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There are good cops and bad cops. Much depends on the culture of the individual police department. Denver in 1960 had a doozy: Quoting Wikipedia:
“In 1960, the largest police corruption scandal in the U.S. to date began to unfold. More than 50 area law-enforcement personnel - almost entirely Denver Police Officers were caught in a burglary ring. Cops had stolen over a quarter of a million dollars from businesses they were supposed to be protecting on their beats over a ten-year period. Police cars would close down a few blocks of a major business avenue, such as University or Broadway, then burgle and steal the safes from the businesses along the closed down portion of the street. Alarms would be going off all up and down the street, they would take their loot, then respond to the alarms and take the reports. It all came to a crashing halt when an officer named Art Winstanley literally had a safe fall out of the back of his police cruiser. He testified against his fellow officers and by the end of 1961, 47 police officers had lost their badges.”
So no, I don’t automatically give cops the benefit of the doubt.
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I live in Southwest Berkeley. Berkeley cops are great, if I am judging them against other cops in other towns where I’ve lived.
But who becomes a cop? And what is the job of a cop? My father, a government lawyer, told me once that cops are megalomaniacal by nature, and I’ve seen little to make him wrong. Good cops don’t get promoted.
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Fire them, charge them for hacking government computers, and throw them in jail. They will get a proper trial.
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Probably mussolini smirking at the podium to an assembly full of robots.
A very good paper/blog, with long form articles on local & national news, one of the last independents in the country.
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