I agree with this, provided we also acknowledge that for many law enforcement officers, being ‘the good cop’ means not only confronting the bad apples but actively obstructing anything they see as an abuse of power. That latter part is difficult enough within a single level of the hierarchy, but it becomes an order of magnitude more difficult when that bad apple is one’s superior.
Visibly doing any of this is likely to catch flak from the hive and make your job as ‘the good cop’ a daily hell, assuming you aren’t reassigned to pen-pushing or fired.
Yes. That’s why we can’t put all of this on the “good cops.” We have to work to change things so that they can do that sort of thing and be supported when they do it, and this really has to happen on a national level, so that even if you are in some podunk police department, there is a support network that you can use if you need to, and you aren’t simply at the mercy of the local corrupt police chief, if the local police chief is corrupt.
This is what makes the Dallas shootings even more tragic. They were one of the few PDs exemplary of the kind of change we need at all levels of law enforcement. David Brown, the chief of the Dallas PD at the time (and several years before then), played a critical role in that turnaround. And now he’s not only stepped down but retired from the force.
If the Dallas example is the way forward, it seems to me that we can’t really call on Congress to make these changes. They have to come from within or developed by state and local legislatures. And we, as citizens, must pressure them to do so.
And no one has screamed. Still, I declined to flag @Justin_Barker’s obvious driving trollies because in this case the rebukes he received calling him on his straw man are on point, contemptible though his own comment was.
Liked because it’s good advice. But do bear in mind that we’re not all supporting this, far from it. It happened so incrementally that there was no single specific point where we lost officers of the peace. It was a dozen growing trends over the years. The War on Drugs overwhelmingly targeting the poor. The War on Crime criminalizing being black or latino. Police unions growing in power and corruption. The systematic unraveling of police accountability. Police demanding drugs, bribes and sex from gangs and underage sex workers without any recourse against armed thugs who can commit murder with impunity. Dirty cops using the carrot of drug money and the stick of reprisal to corrupt and silence cops with a conscience.
Think about it, it’s not an exaggeration to say that we the people of America no longer have police that protect and serve. We have legally-protected organizations that can shoot a child or a child’s father for no other reason than the way they look. There have been other armed organizations like that throughout history, but we don’t look back and call them just police. We call them Interahamwe, Sturmabteilung, NKVD, occupation forces, paramilitary forces, secret police…
If it’s a young single white woman, many men will beat a path to “help” her in the hopes of pressuring her into giving them her contact information. If it’s someone who superficially presents as wealthy, many men and some women will help because Americans are culturally conditioned to serve the monied classes. If it’s anybody else, but especially a large black man, most non-black Americans will fear him and call the cops. Some Americans are still good Samaritans, but most are not. Most Americans only care about other people when its convenient for them, or they stand to gain something from it, or they think they are being scrutinized. If that sounds tragic, try living within such callousness. It really is heartbreaking.
It is amazing how the position taken by major news organizations like the New York Times always default to showing the side of the police first, until proven otherwise.
Throughout the article we hear time and time again that he “acted erratically,” “refused to comply with several orders,” didn’t show “cooperation.”
Did it mention he was a father of four? That he was coming home from a music appreciation class?
My strong hunch is that the officer had a jumpy trigger finger (big black man that they call — based on nothing but his appearance — a “bad dude”). The other officer shoots the taser. The first officer is surprised by the sudden motion (body jerks erratically) and shoots. Problem caused by fear, having weapons drawn, gang mentality, and the desire to put the brute to the ground with a taser. Of course, the camera angle is such that they can just say “he reached for something” when that plainly makes no sense, and get the benefit of the doubt.
So the lesson learned is when ever pulled over by the cops, immediately roll over on your back, expose your stomach, piss yourself, and hope that is enough.
I think the officer realized she goofed right after she shot him. If you listen to her say “shots fired” at 1:15, it sounds like the voice of a person who knows they made a big mistake.
I was going to try to stay out of this thread, but I can’t.
Listening to the radio in the car on the way in this morning (my first mistake…), and they’re talking about this, and how "the police need more training. COMBAT training, so they know how to fight without automatically going for a sidearm."
Jesus Christ. That’s not the solution.
More training, yes. But the training has to be about de-escalation. Once it’s become a physical altercation (weapon or no), things have already terribly wrong. It’s about preventing that from happening in the first place.
It feels like the police are about compliance at all costs, and that’s a terrible thing- it leaves no dignity to the other party. And with no dignity, people do regrettable things.
Also: you can become a police officer with 6 months of training? Really? That’s appalling.
It is possibly true that most cops want to get through their entire career without killing anyone.
But I submit that every single cop takes the job knowing and expecting they will encounter situations where they are required and entitled to use force, even deadly force, to compel obedience to their commands.
Wanting to be a cop should be considered strong evidence that a person is not temperamentally suited to the task.
Yes, all cops are either guilty of this or support their colleagues in such actions, one way or another - lying to support their narratives, implicitly supporting their abuse through silence, because otherwise they just don’t last in the police force.
Ah, well he failed to show due deference by pissing himself, you see.
The police academy of North Rhine-Westphalia calls the weapon usage courses “non-shooting” with a heavy focus on deescalation.
But there’s a but.
Brave new world. A few states here implemented a new LEO category (Hilfspolizist or Wachpolizist, auxiliary policeman) with a minimal training, Saxony had the great idea to let the candidates on the street within 3 months. Naturally armed.
Currently it’s resticted to Hesse and Saxony (the Berlin variant is only used to stand in front of embassies and can be easily avoided) but I fear the worst.
That was probably it. He was unarmed, and they assumed he was trying to arm himself by getting into a car while completely surrounded by armed police officers.
I guess they had no choice. Cut and dry defense considering how black males are prone to unpredictable acts of violence and posses superhuman strength. Too bad they didn’t have something non-lethal to stop him like,12 muscular arms and some sort of non-lethal take down training.
It’s like a gang. You either keep your mouth shut or you leave feet first. Hell, it isn’t like a gang, the police are a gang.
It will only get worse until the government stops throwing police at every problem, which means the American people need to stop tolerating that non-solution, which means the still large and blissfully unaware voting bloc of middle and upper-class white people need to wake up, listen to the black, brown and poor people who live in constant healthy fear for their lives of all cops, and stop lapping up the tough-on-crime police militarization that authorities double-down on every time it takes away another family’s son or father. Otherwise their naivety makes them accomplices to each and every murder, just as history has always recognized that people who stand by and avert their eyes from the discomfiting reality of sanctioned mass murder share responsibility for them.
I don’t agree with everything he says in this video, but Trevor Noah makes a very good point. I’ve queued up the video to start with it, but the whole segment is well worth a watch.
