I just read this piece about the idea that cops should be “certified”, just like an optometrist or mortician or plumber, and if you do something questionable you face losing your certification. Apparently a few states already do this, though I’m curious how much it helps. At best it removes disciplinary action from superiors or internal affairs departments and hands it over to an outside office, someone outside the “blue wall”, so it wouldn’t be the officer’s own co-workers who decide his fate.
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Yup. It’s a good idea. Currently, the police officers who are supposed to be serving us are held to lower standards of accountability than a pharmacy technician or the lady who does your mani-pedi.
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I can’t figure out who is the bigger asshole here?
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The beating was the least of the cop’s crimes.
Conspiracy to falsely charge him with a felony is a much bigger deal. That one should see all of the cops involved serving lengthy time (in an imaginary just universe).
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I agree with this EXCEPT for the last phrase.
Misuse your weapon once? You lose it until you’ve been retrained.
Misuse your weapon twice? You lose it for good and your post is now behind a desk, permanently.
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Yeah, “things you are okay with shooting” is what I was taught. I thought you were saying “things you intend to shoot.” I’m sure these cops were okay with the idea of shooting Faulkenberry.
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gonna be a lot of desk cops… 
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Nah, most cops retire never having fired their gun on the job.
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You can misuse your weapon even when it’s unloaded.
They are not toys.
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What are you talking about?
This kind of thing, but IRL:
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And that is with literally less than a minute of googling ONLY ARTICLES ON BOINGBOING! Misusing a firearm when it is unloaded or without firing it/not planning on firing it is much more common than misusing a firearm by actually firing it or intending to.
EDIT: Here are some more fun ways to misuse a firearm without firing it, if you are a police officer!
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The above is routinely stated by gun owners, but I doubt that it has ever been observed by any US police force at any time in history. Police routinely use their weapons as tools of intimidation to force compliance, rather than as the last-resort lifesavers they are claimed to be.
Similarly, when Tasers were first introduced in Australia, protests from civil libertarians were rejected on the grounds that police would only ever use the Tasers as less-lethal handgun substitutes in situations where force was required to save lives. Instead, as in America, we find that police are routinely using Tasers as intimidation/torture devices in order to force compliance.
They use the tools that you give them. Which makes the proliferation of sniper rifles and armoured vehicles amongst US police forces particularly alarming.
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Sure the police do it. It’s still misuse and mishandling of deadly weapons. Just because it’s a widespread behavior doesn’t mean it’s okay.
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Please don’t rely on a third-party site to protect/avenge your life. At best, a police inquiry to BB would net a metric shit-ton of cat GIFs (rotated g with an onion/KY jelly declasse) and perhaps a strongly worded paragraph or three.
I, too, have a family member who’s a cop, and I’m fortunate to say that I trust him with my life. Sorry to hear about your family member–that would definitely be troubling.
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Dispatches from the Police State.
I think it’s quite hard for affluent white people to really grok that we live in an actual police state where cops can beat and kill people with virtual impunity – because such things rarely happen to the white and affluent, who are in fact the minority benefactors of the system the police exist to protect. Video is starting to unpack this hidden terror and citizens are waking up. Calls to disarm the police will only grow when folks realize a poorly-trained standing army (which is what the police have increasingly become) is more dangerous to a free citizenry than any criminals.
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They will not do anything of the sort, for that would be admitting culpability.
And to admit culpability once would mean doing it twice, and so on…and to a certain way of thinking, open a floodgate that would wash away their authority.
Never mind that they filled the dam themselves. Or that it isn’t as if the country would go unpoliced if the lawbreakers in their ranks were given justice…
Police fulfill a necessary, and dare I say natural function in society.
What’s going on here is just a perversion of what could be.
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The police received a report of an armed man waving a gun around. I’m guessing their approaching the likely suspect with their firearms drawn is is within policy for the situation as a felony stop or armed suspect stop.
Their actions of taking him to the ground may have been within policy still (if they hadn’t lied). At the point they take him down his hands were not cuffed, so a reasonable explanation would have been that he was somehow resisting.
I’m not saying I agree with the above policies or these officers actions, but under policy almost everything on that video would probably have been found to be clear of any wrongdoing on the officers’ part. ugh.
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Don’t mistake Texas for the rest of the US.
It is it’s own sovereign little country in everything but name only.
Not that this doesn’t go down in other parts of the country… At all. But violence is ubiquitous down there.
It’s meaner than you can imagine.
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Just like Alex’s Droogs, too violent for anything but police work.
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