The officer should probably keep in mind that they are outnumbered by civilians by a significant quantity. Push them hard enough and eventually people will revolt. Even though a sidearm will definitely kill a few people, once the clip is empty the fight is lost.
It took kings a while to learn that, I guess now it’s the po-po’s turn.
interesting. could you provide a citation for the drop in confrontations?
Officer Dutta says “in the overwhelming majority of cases it is not the cops, but the people they stop, who can prevent detentions from turning into tragedies.”
You know what else prevents tragedies? Not coming to work with an “I wouldn’t have to hit them if they’d just stop mouthing off” mentality.
I think people are getting confused.
This is just a mash up of two articles.
One is a sensible article, written by a intelligent, well informed academic, clearly outlining your constitutional rights and how you can reasonably assert them.
The other is a fascist rant written by a moron with an ego problem who enjoys bullying people and subjecting them to physical violence (a policeman, for short).
I read it just today on either HP or Flipboard, but I didn’t bookmark the article. Sorry. It also said that the Ferguson PD actually has some body cameras, but has never used them because of money issues. Maybe they could sell some of their military attack vehicles and raise some cash.
Death rates for cops is actually lower than that of the general population in 36 of America’s 74 largest cities.
Kevin Carson - Center for a Stateless Society » The Phony “War on Cops” and the Real War on Us
I think about 50 police get killed each year, while at least 400 civilians and perhaps 1,000 civilians get killed by police each year. I remember a more detailed breakdown, but I can’t remember where.
Yeah, that 50% claim is total bullshit. It’s much closer to 80%.
this is a drop in complaints against officers; related, but not quite the same. thanks for the link anyway.
ah, okay, the nytimes article says a ~60% drop in use of force during a camera trial in Rialto, CA.
It’s kind of like they took it in turns each to write a couple of paragraphs and then hand it off to the other.
Absolutely.
Until there’s a review of their contracts and pensions and all that shit. Then they magically become selfless public defenders who suffer daily for all of us. Although they’re perfectly willing to lie, threaten, intimidate and bully in those situations too.
Never mind that when these recordings of officers engaging in misconduct surface - OWS beatings, Kelly Thomas’ murder, NYC Critical Mass assaults, etc - it almost never results in any kind of punishment to the dept or the officers. They routinely try to suppress/destroy the recordings, bog things down in official reviews/appeals, or cut the officers loose with a pension, transfer or laughably gentle sentence.
The horror of it is that on the one hand he’s completely, objectively correct: offering physical resistance to an officer, no matter how horrendous his conduct, will not improve your situation.
But then he goes on to blithely suggest that after you extricate yourself from the situation by completely surrendering any notions of civil rights or personal dignity, that you can obtain redress by suing the cop.
Because we all know how well that works…
I can at least agree with him about the camera.
He is quick to mention examples of when police officers must use force, but glosses over the growing instances of unnecessary force so commonly experienced in this country.
What he fails to acknowledge in his article, is the psychology of being an armed authority figure. This sort of work (and also carrying a weapon) fundamentally wires your brain such that you are prone to act out certain behaviors. What’s more this sort of work also tends to attract certain personality types (ones wanting a position of authority, desiring confrontation, etc). These factors compound to make authoritarian behavior almost inevitable.
It is not at all surprising that police abuse of power is so endemic.
Body cameras sound like a great idea. I do kind of feel for all the decent cops who are seeing nothing but anger directed at them. ie. “Fuck the cops” I’ve seen cops go out of their way to help homeless people but you don’t see this on the news. The blame should rest on the cops involved in misconduct and their superiors.
Finally, cops are legally prohibited from using excessive force: The moment a suspect submits and stops resisting, the officers must cease use of force.
It is so weird that he puts it that way round, almost - but not quite - saying that it’s OK for him to use excessive force right up until the moment you stop resisting. For who on earth defines excessive in such a situation? If you switched those two sentences around, you probably wouldn’t notice anything untoward. It’s almost as if he’s trying to confess.
Along with things others have noticed:
and
and
one begins to question the mental stability of Prof Dutta. The man may be unwell.
And Law Enforcement agencies deliberately obscure any factual relevance to those job-related mortality figures.
If you are on duty and carelessly drove off a cliff, that’s tallied up as an “on-duty” fatality. Never mind if it was due to the officer’s own negligence. Same goes for the other multitude of risks any of us face when we step out the door to go to our jobs.
Of course it makes for a more impressive stat and conjures visions of hero cops going down in a hail of bullets with the bad guys. Too bad the mindset of today’s police is to shoot first and cover up any questions later.
You will respect my authoritah!
Sorry, someone had to say it.
Sunil Dutta, a professor of homeland security at Colorado Tech University,
We didn’t have a homeland security major when I went to school.
I think you’re misreading it. The colon says that he’s giving a definition: any force applied after a suspect stops resisting is “excessive force” and therefore forbidden. In the quoted passage, he doesn’t say anything one way or the other about what defines “excessive force” against a resisting suspect.
I learned something today…
At first I thought that “professor of homeland security” might be the sort of degree one gets from an affiliate of the “Hollywood Upstairs Medical College”. However, a quick search for “PhD in Homeland Security” turned up a plethora of programs.
Yeah, agreed on that point.
The problem is that, as an institution, Police Depts and unions don’t care too much for policing themselves and weeding out the wrongdoers within their ranks. You are either for them or against them and when one of their rank commits these grievous offenses, the entire organization rallies to defend their own and intimidate the opposition.
