The Hoosegow or The Clink ?
The Hoosegow’s got better food…
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That’s the way things were before professional government employed police forces became popular in the 19th century.
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From the article, “a call-handler uses set criteria to assess whether somebody should be sent.”
Let me guess: this “call-handler” is someone with no real police training who makes minimum wage. It wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve even outsourced this to a remote call center. After all they’ve got to cut costs any way they can.
Mixed messages:
Derek Grant jailed for killing son’s mugger in Greenock
Derek Grant, 38, confronted Patrick Bradley after the 29-year-old had held up his son Jordan in Greenock on 30 August last year.
During the confrontation, Bradley stabbed Grant in the eye, after which Grant then fatally stabbed him.
…
The judge added: “All you needed to do was to phone the police and give them the information. However, you armed yourself with a knife and, along with your three sons, went looking for him.”
An eye for an iPhone.
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Not entirely true: if you are poor, the police do rely on you “donations”:
“We wanted to do some work to help out folks in the municipal courts because there’s no representation,” says Thomas Harvey, the organization’s 42-year-old executive director. There are public defenders available to criminal defendants who can’t afford attorneys, but no publicly appointed lawyers for the sort of minor violations that ended up gumming up Artez’s life with a cycle of debt and low-grade warrants.
Harvey and his colleagues quickly found that, without that representation, the municipal court system had spun out of control. “Our clients started telling us all these crazy things that would happen in these courts, and we didn’t believe them because they were so insane,” he recalls. Among the most egregious—and common—violations the Defenders observed: People being hauled before a judge on a minor violation, ordered to pay a fine on the spot without any inquiry into their economic means, and being thrown in jail when they were unable to do so. Canvassing the long lines standing outside St. Louis County municipal courts over the years, the Defenders’ legal team would ask people why they were there. Time and again, Harvey says, they were met with some variation of the same answer: “I’m here because I’m poor and I’m black and it’s about the money.”
From the Intercept: AMERICA WITHOUT THE MAKEUP / Artez Hurston’s Ferguson
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The Inspectorate of Constabulary says that police now tell victims of
property crimes to “solve the crimes themselves,” directing them over
the phone to review CCTV footage and canvas their neighbourhoods for
witnesses.
Sounds like modern-day Oakland. My downstairs neighbor repeatedly vandalized my car in our “secure” garage multiple times over the course of two years. He also harassed me day and night, poured noxious substances on my front door and doormat, and in general was a bizarre creep.
I eventually bought a motion-activated “trail camera” and got photos of him vandalizing my car, more than once even. Handed them over to OPD along with the guy’s name and address, and 15 pages of documentation about all his activities. Just the last incident alone did $7000 worth of damage to my paint, making it a felony. They never even came out to arrest the guy. Eventually he moved.
That’s the OPD for you: they arrest people for trivial drug offenses, but ignore serious crimes.
An irony of Oakland is that for all the abusive and racist behavior of the OPD, people would support hiring more police, because they were worried about the high rate of violent crime in the area – which the OPD wouldn’t do anything about.
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And I was a poor little professional middle class white lady being terrified by a possibly-crazy black man… and still couldn’t get help.
(Maybe it was my ambivalence about playing into that narrative… I had to turn on the waterworks to get the staff at the city courthouse to give me paperwork for a restraining order, but I was unwilling to go down to the police station and get hysterical and imperious to get them to enforce it. You would have thought, though, that open-and-shut photo evidence to boost their CompStat numbers would have been too tempting to pass up.)
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