Far too many of them are indeed highly trained. As soldiers. Who are trained to kill people and break things. That’s the #1 most important thing they are expected to do. So that’s what they’re trained to be very good at. It’s just a simple fact.
Now this isn’t to badmouth soldiers. They serve important functions, do very dangerous jobs, and aren’t often compensated what they deserve. But having excellent credentials as a solider in no way qualifies one to be a cop. Cop’s jobs aren’t killing people and breaking things. Cop’s as a class aren’t meant to occupy a hostile territory by any means necessary. Cop’s jobs are to uphold order, de-escalate bad situations, be a mediator and voice of reason in disputes between private citizens, be a resource for the community and directly protect those who can’t protect themselves.
Soldiers are fine people who offer up their very lives in service to the country. But cops, they are not, and we should stop with the favorable job placement as cops. That’s just asking for trouble.
Good point. I still say that war-traumatized soldiers don’t belong in law enforcement, but it does appear that the armed forces chain of accountability is far better than the cops’.
In any case, the police in this country are fucked up, rarely held accountable for their actions, often abuse their power, and insufferably complain that nobody trusts them after they’ve violated our trust over and over. Add on top of that the fact that an obscene amount of military gear is handed to the police, and then they’re given no strict oversight or rules on how to use their new toys, and the whole system becomes ripe for abuse, misuse, and acting like an army occupying a hostile territory.
They’ve decided that the job they’re supposed to do isn’t “fun enough”, so they’ve decided to do something other than what we’ve hired them for. This is unacceptable.
Apparently the trespassing charge was for walking in a bus lane. That’s apparently an arrestable offense? The police are now saying the kid wasn’t jawalking, he was trespassing … by walking in a bus lane (he left the crosswalk early and cut across the bus lane to the sidewalk) … as if that somehow makes the officer’s handling of the situation justified. Anyone who thinks the response should have been anything other than the officer calling out to the kid like, “Young man! Young man! Hold up. Next time stay in the crosswalk until you’re all the way across the street. Walking in the bus lane is really dangerous!”, is wrong.
As you can hear the woman shouting in the back ground, over, and over again, this is a child. That young man is only 4 years older than my daughter. They do not need to be treating children like this. Ever.
The news reports I’ve read say the officer did tell him to move and the boy refused. There were also buses waiting to pull up to the bus stop which couldn’t because the boy was in the lane.
For this one, we can’t forget it’s effen Stockton. Stockton is rough. It’s always been rough, like all the big Big Valley towns: Fresno, Bakersfield, Stockton, Sacramento. I don’t know why they are such magnets for so many criminals, but it’s been like that since the gold rush. Failed miners descended the hills and landed in the valley instead of continuing on to try to get to San Francisco or LA. Guess what other towns are doing to Stockton right now? They are busing their freshly released offenders to Stockton and dropping them off. SWAT tanks are out sweeping neighborhoods that normally are not subject to those types of activity. The place is a den of iniquity. It’s sad.
Plus, Stockton just went through a bankruptcy with lots of layoffs and downsizing in the police department. Guess why Stockton is bankrupt? Graft and corruption. As far back as the memory can serve, Stockton has been rough, corrupt, drug- and crime-ridden, and… most sadly… never able to change.
That in no way justifies this harsh, uncivil treatment of a kid.
Is this to my comment about the woman having an axe to grind? I’m not sure what this has to do with the young man’s treatment, though. Are you explaining why the cops might have overreacted to the kids demeanor? Isn’t this a major part of the overall problem - that young black men are assumed to be criminal minded in the first place? And of course high crime rates are a major problem for black communities across the country, because the cops have often spend their time policing black behavior and the boundaries of their community rather than policing crimes and protecting black citizens from those crimes.
I’m not refuting anything you say. I’m suggesting:
-that Stockton is not representative. …It’s worse.
-that many of the cops remaining on the force there are probably the hardened ones who somehow managed to avoid layoff. That sucks to throw them all under the bus, because I’m sure there are some good cops on that force still. And doing truly horrid work there.
-that the entire town is under siege, worse than ever. Recent FBI sweeps netted over 70 criminals hiding out in Stockton.
-that this in no way justifies or absolves police of their actions towards the poor kid.
-that we keep talking about this incident as an example and I’m really suggesting that as much as it looks like a good example of a bad thing, it really isn’t because Stockton sucks so bad. It’s a horrible example of the worst.
So, on one level, it illustrates police brutality front and center. Sure. But on another level, it just has Stockton written all over it and that just makes me feel like it’s a tainted example.
That poor kid. So what if he was being defiant. He probably has both cops and criminals up in his face every day and crawling his neighborhood and is sick of it and feels a giant fuck you every day, walking around there, trying to grow up and not die. Makes me sad and gets me worked up. I need to probably back off this thread; it hits too close to home for me. I have family there and a ton of friends that I grew up with and I want them and their families all to be safe.
