maybe poliside? from polis?
Thank god youâre here to defend the noble profession of law enforcement, their egos and social status are fragile enough as it is. Letâs just call this an aberration and put it all behind us.
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Really? Iâve seen the video and I canât seriously believe that anybody would think that the death of this man was intentional. So, if not intentional, then it must be an accident, not many other choices. An accident caused by overzealousness, negligence, incompetence, and violation of departmental rules (Iâve seen sources that say the NYPD forbids the use of choke holds), but still an accident.
Well, âaccidentâ doesnât necessarily imply innocence. If I punch you in the face and you hit your head on a table and die, few people would think I intended to kill you, but equally few would say I wasnât responsible for your death.
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No but it does give you an instant qualification in being a Lickspittle, it does make you complicit in the crimes of those other cops which you happily ignore or help cover up.
Yâknow, for the greater good.
[pronounce that last one in booming âworld of the futureâ voice]
I know a couple of coppers from different ends of the country and they concur in their private criticism; if you want to get ahead in the misogynistic and racist, brutal and invasive culture of the Polis, you pretty much have to sell your soul to advance through the higher-levelled rankings. {in that they all stink}
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Thank Dog youâre here to save the world from the evil profession of law enforcement, a system that is 100% corrupt and deserves nothing but vitriol and open loathing. Letâs just reduce any and all discussion about the complicated nature of law enforcement to simple black-and-white armchair moralizing and nuance-free blanket-statement judgements and put reality behind us.
See? I can be snarky and dismissive too! Shall we continue this absurd dance, or do you want to actually talk about something reasonably?
Defending law enforcement in general is not mutually exclusive with condemning the severe flaws and abuses present in the system. Just because I support law and order does not mean I support authoritarianism or corruption - and just because I refute absurd absolutist claims does not mean I am myself an absolutist serving the other end of the spectrum.
The world is a complicated place, and thereâs no rational place for absolutist thinking in it. To say âall police are badâ is inherently absurd - just as it would be to say that âall police are goodâ. I myself am making no such claims - Iâm merely refuting such claims made by others, as being irrational and unrealistic.
So please, cut it out with the knee-jerk reactions and the reframing of my arguments into strawmen. Iâm not championing jackbooted violence against the masses. Iâm not the idiotic machismo-crazed sycophantic slave to authority and violence you seem to want to paint me as.
Iâm merely, as always, disagreeing with those who believe the justness of their cause is grounds for employing flawed and destructive argumentation and means in pursuing it. I donât want to live in a world where important matters are decided not with regard to rationality and facts, but simply by who can shout the loudest - even if the winning side and I agree completely.
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Yes, because every last career officer is happily ignoring or actively helping to cover up abuses. Not a single one of them is outraged but effectively powerless to have any meaningful impact.
Good cops exist, and they speak out where they can, but the system unfortunately operates in a top-down manner. If youâre a good cop and you object to something, you have limited options.
You can talk to your superiors about it, but that requires superiors who are willing to actually listen to you and pass your concerns along up the chain to their superiors, who also have to be willing to actually listen and change things.
Unfortunately, this makes it simple for the top brass to suppress individual voices of dissent - it isnât the cops on the street who are ignoring or covering up abuses, itâs the people they report to and who can make their jobs and lives hell if they keep pressing the issue. Another route is to go through internal affairs, but that has its own set of hurdles - both in terms of getting people to listen, and in terms of legal entanglements and whatnot.
Going through the proper channels is difficult and time consuming, and it often results in absolutely nothing being done, at the cost of threatening an officerâs livelihood.
âWell then they resign in protest or something!â, some folks would argue. Sure, if an individual officer wants to throw their career away and probably have to change vocations entirely to make a living from now on in the current unfavorable economy, thatâs technically an option.
But thatâs a pretty drastic and destructive step to take for what will ultimately amount to zilch in terms of meaningful change. A single officer quitting the force changes nothing. Half a dozen quitting changes nothing. Youâd need to have a mass resignation to have any significant impact, and there are laws against things like that - for example, the police legally cannot go on strike.
So what do the good officers do? They do the best they can with the deck stacked against them as badly as it is. They do their jobs properly and to the best of their abilities. They go through the proper channels and hope it reaches someone up the chain who can actually enact real change. They rock the boat as much as they can afford to without winding up in the drink, and they try to make a difference, even if itâs only a small one.
Our law enforcement system has a lot of really bad problems that need addressed. But you donât hire a butcher with a cleaver to cut out a cancer unless you want to kill the patient - you get a surgeon with a scalpel, to precisely remove the sickness with as little damage to surrounding healthy tissue as possible.
âŠunless of course people decide to ignore the healthy tissue and just call the entire patient one giant cancer, which they douse in petrol and torch. Then for an encore they go on to throw the baby out with the bathwater and the champagne out with the cork.
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Dang. Touched a nerve.
If you would progress beyond repeating âmalice aforethoughtâ to demonstrate an understanding of the nuances and, nay, meaning of such a term, you might be on your way to refuting, but currently youâre just telling people how to feel about this and simply contradicting. Youâre also condescending to know how the world really works and indulging in extremism by reflecting whatever perceived absolutism you see. Try arguing in good faith.
You help by describing good cops being stymied by superiors, because at that point you help establish the truism that bad cops turn good cops into bad cops, and that the bad parts you euphemize as âthe systemâ are virulent (if not cancerous). Surely you donât think âhopeâ is an acceptable means of improvement.
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Just because one doesnât mean to kill a person, doesnât mean they mean not to kill a person. That specific attitude from the people hired to enforce our laws toward specific social or racial groups is the exact issue here. The officer didnât mean not to kill the man suspected of selling single cigarettes. The other officers at the scene didnât mean for him to die either, but they didnât mean for him to live. The proof is in this conversation.
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#notallcops
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Seriously? Did you miss the section in the discussion where this exact stupid joke was made, and I pointed out that the original argument LITERALLY WAS that every cop is corrupt or amoral?
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Touché good sir, touché.
You just described the eggshell skull rule 
Well, he wasnât really talking about legal concepts, but to the extent he was than he was really talking about the different mens rea requirements for crime of homicide (or wrongful death, in the tort context)
The eggshell skull rule applies to torts where all elements of a tort (including mens rea) are already met, with the eggshell skull doctrine meaning you can recover for all damages/injuries that result from that tort (even if those injuries are unforeseeable). But the eggshell skull rule cannot be used to bootstrap battery into murder, as murder requires the specific intent to kill, and not simply the intent to physically contact someone.
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Every schoolboy or schoolgirl should be told the sad tale of Vosburg v Putney. If you must kick someoneâs diseased shin, wait until recess.
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Apropos of nothing, what the fuck is up with the Greek letters there? On first skim I thought the were protecting the identities of minors, but no, thereâs their names right at the top.
Add this to the obsession with unnecessary Latin⊠(âItâs actus reus! You canât just say âguilty mind,â the peasants might understand!â) The legal profession really does glory in obtuseness for its own sake, doesnât it?
Edit: Iâve just gone and edited the Wikipedia article. It used to say âÎâ or âÎ â anywhere it meant âplaintiffâ or âdefendant,â respectively. This is apparently standard legal shorthand, but obviously has no place in a general reference work. Wikipedia even has a policy about unnecessary jargon.
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It makes things technical, and resistant to certain types of sophistry. Actus reus means one thing and one thing only.
Consider that spacetime under general relativity is sometimes described as a rubber sheet. Is it appropriate to use your knowledge of elasticity and fetishism to criticize the mathematical apparatus of general relativity? No. Itâs just an analogy, and an imperfect one. The authoritative version involves TensorsâŠ
Latin makes it clear that the legal meaning supersedes the common sense meaning.
Itâs apparently also annoying to have to type out defendant and plaintiff several hundred times in a single brief. I suppose you could use macros, but judges also impose page limits, though they may also impose limits on excessive abbreviations,
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True that. And the proper course of action on wikipedia is to hyperlink the phrase to its own article, as that handles the understanding issue without the needless translation with loss of the accuracy.
You wouldnât ever use Ï or â in a brief; itâs mainly a convention used by law students.
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