They are where I am from. Which makes this even more of a “WTF??”
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Exactly! The intent doesn’t have to be malign… Just stupid and lazy.
Hanlon’s razor is a saying that reads: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. In simpler words: some bad things happen not because of people having bad intentions , but because they did not think it through properly.
Yes, I goggled it because I’m sick of legalistic/ecclesiastic hair splitting
Maybe it wouldn’t if they actually knocked like normal people. And of course they don’t always knock.
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The why is meaningless. It was wrong. We have to stop asking why. There is no why that excuses it. The why opens up a discourse. This isn’t about discourse anymore. The police who behave this way don’t deserve a voice.
We just have to start punishing the acts, ruthlessly.
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And yet, it so very often IS malignant.
The cruelty tends to be the point, especially these days.
Trained police officers “not thinking their actions through” is a weak ass excuse.
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Sometimes they don’t even bother to make it to the door.
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Willful stupidity breeds malice.
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No. This is not just mindless stupidity. It’s calculated to put fear into the Black community. There are piles and piles of research to back that up.
All you’re doing is reinforcing the narrative that racism isn’t a means of social control, but just a few dumb rednecks. It’s actively hurts the cause of ending our racist structures when such narratives are promoted. You’re not helping by promoting that.
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And the police all behave this way. Either because the laws of probability mean that they will encounter a situation in which their conditioning will draw them to immediate violence or by protecting each other at all costs.
I’ve said it before; the whole point of the “bad apples” analogy is not that there are only a few of them, but that they all spoil.
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Institutional racism, reflecting the policy priorities of a racist society, which itself is formed out of the policy priorities of …
individuals like ourselves.
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This is SOP for a fucking stolen car. And most people I know who have had their car stolen barely get help getting it back with police assistance. WTAF.
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Temple Grandin suggested for slaughterhouses that the employees be rotated or regularly transferred out of work that tended to make them numb to cruelty.
I have been pondering that perhaps it is impossible to have “career cops.” The unions are an institutional, racketeering problem, but functionally police officers have a corps mentality, unit cohesion. The only way to break their ability to behave this way is to break that level of connection and trust between officers.
I think they need to be shifted regularly to other duties without the right to assault and murder people. Perhaps the dealing-with-the-public level of policing should have a limited lifespan. Whatever the method, the cult-like, police-bro bullshit has to go.
They have to stop self-identifying AS the law, and start fearing it.
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That’s kind of strange. The WaPo article says:
The latest troubling incident for the Aurora Police Department began just before 11 a.m. Sunday, when police were notified about a possible stolen vehicle near a strip mall on Aurora’s Iliff Avenue, they said in a statement.
It’s not clear how they were “notified”. And apparently they don’t want to divulge that info.
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One silver lining - Cops sure as shit don’t seem to getaway w/ anything now. Almost like the Republican Party. Totally unmasked w/ (one silver lining) Trump.
Citation required.
Briefly being put under a microscope and being publicly shamed isn’t the same as being legally held accountable for their crimes and abuses of power.
And all too often if LEOs do lose their jobs, they just go and get another one with a different police department.
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Right?
Didn’t the prosecutor in Ferguson just decline to charge the man who shot Michael Brown? How is that being held accountable? How is that justice for Michael’s family?
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And it’s rumored that there are departments that consider a history of brutality complaints to be a positive recommendation.
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Also generally on motorcycles.
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I don’t think that would get to the core of the problem. A culture of fear and violence can be instilled in the amount of time it takes to train someone to do the necessary aspects of the job. There is also the subtle effects of buried racial inequities built into our system. There was a piece of research about 20 years ago (I don’t have the paper on hand, but if I remember correctly it was by Prof.Ronnie Dunn) on the discrepancies in traffic tickets by race in Cleveland. When they observed officers in the field there wasn’t anywhere near as large a racial discrepancy in the likelihood of an officer ticketing a speeding driver as the data showed in aggregate. When they dug deeper into the data a lot of the difference came from the fact that more officers were assigned to streets largely used by black drivers, rather than streets used by white drivers (Cleveland has some serious residential segregation issues). At each step, there was no obvious person to blame, retrain, or move out. The cops were stopping people close to comparably (still too big a gap, but way smaller), and the higher ups who set the assignments could factually point to the high rate of speed violations to justify policing those corridors, heavily. You could staff that broken system with perfect robots and it would still create a fundamentally unjust outcome. We have a huge path dependence problem to fix along with everything else.
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