I don’t trust the police at all, and I think this is a perfectly reasonable stance to take. Given the amount of power they have, versus the lacking oversight, numerous examples of corruption, and over a century of brutalizing dissidents and the less fortunate, I think that working class people in particular should view them as our adversaries–the more privileged, merely as dangerous people not to be crossed.
Generally I think that citing personal experience is bad form, because the only way to counter anecdotal evidence is through character attacks, but sometimes it’s necessary.
I have no experience with San Francisco but Atlanta PD once hospitalized me with a concussion…I was charged with a municipal traffic violation (being in the street). Granted I was disruptive, but peaceful. Sometimes police just punish people, extrajudicially of course, who don’t respond the way they want. I still haven’t found in the law where it says a bloody beating is the punishment for jaywalking. (Bail, replacing my glasses, and a new phone cost over $1,000. Thankfully I had friends who posted bail.)
At other times police attacked my neighbors’ children with pepper spray while they were playing on the playground in their public housing neighborhood. This led to a bunch of children rioting the next time they tried it. How ridiculous, children rioting, but that’s what it descended into.
Someone else I knew was caught with cocaine and when the trial came around it was discovered that the evidence sample was smaller and they were going to get a lighter sentence. They insisted on having had more, accused police of taking the drug for their own purposes, and both that person and an officer went to prison. They got a lengthier sentence for the higher amount but wanted to see the cop go to prison for being crooked. I imagine most people just thank their lucky stars and keep quiet.
92-year-old Katherine Johnston was infamously murdered in her home by police while I was living in Atlanta, in a raid on the wrong house. This led to some convictions after an attempted cover-up (trivia: they handcuffed her corpse after shooting her dozens of times) and a very intense investigation. The infamous “Red Dog” unit was subsequently “disbanded” (they’d been involved in numerous scandals), but clearly not before many years’ of abuses. In fact they were just renamed as APEX and continue to carry out the same kinds of activities to this day.
I’m just saying, a lot of people have reasons to distrust police, and in addition to that we have the obvious situation in which a powerful institution can release reports that nobody else is fact checking or validating in real time. It has to be done after the fact in an investigation, and by then the facts are old and police have time to alter evidence. Plus, for purely ideological reasons, in everyday life mainstream thinking just accepts whatever police say as the God’s-honest truth unless somebody can without a doubt disprove it, which perverts the idea of the burden of proof. Just this situation alone is setting the whole system up for the kinds of abuses that people all over the country experience every day.
Nobody knows yet what happened (as far as I know) to Ian Murdock. It would be prudent to hold off until we all know more because the initial media storm is not going to be very forthcoming with a consistent narrative that bears the test of time.
