[RD] George Floyd and protesting while black

[uppi]

any additions? I'm sure I've left something out that's kind of important. Like step 6, mandatory body cameras for everyone all the time. Arrests made without body cam or dashcam footage can be straight-up dismissed in court without sufficient other evidence.

I would add instant automatic arrest for any police officer who kills someone until the incident has been reviewed. No matter how justified the action looks at first glance.

 

[civvver]

Be careful you don't damage your spine doing all that heavy lifting there

Considering your image top lines are BLACK and WHITE in big bold text I think the comment was appropriate.

I certainly support his firing at the very least. His jailing, that’s for the courts to decide and he should be given a fair trial. Based on what I know now, I would vote for conviction.

He had his knee on the guy's neck, at a minimum it's some kind of negligent homicide.

You cannot refute the fact that the police, as an institution, have failed not only the african american community but the entirety of america.

They shouldn't be saved. Nothing beyond a total re-organization or dissolving of the police can ever truly allow america to move past this and i think you know that, no matter how uncomfortable the ramifications of that are

Agreed, inside these departments it's turned into an us vs them where police see the citizens as enemies and their fellow cops as brothers they have to support no matter what. That's just effing stupid. I would never support my own flesh and blood brother if he was doing something illegal or even something legal that was hurting people. Heck I wouldn't support my own wife if she was doing something this wrong and wouldn't cover up her bad deeds. It would break my heart but I'd never help anyone cover up abuse or murder, least of all co-workers.

For true change it's going to take some politicians with a backbone to go in and clean these messes up.

For some reason when I see this chauvin guy with a huge history of complaints and issues and all these cover ups it somehow reminds me of the Nassar case at Michigan State University. They cleaned house cus of that scandal and the president resigned and some other members, and I think but can't recall 100% that Nassar's direct boss the head of department was indicted for something but I might be wrong. Of course what he did was horrible and all those punishments deserved, but it's just such a stark contrast, a guy sexually abuses mostly white suburban women for years and the whole institution burns basically but when cops literally murder people no one really cares. Whoever dismissed his previous complaints needs to be investigated and held accountable as well. If they can't reasonably defend why they let Chauvin remain a cop they should be indicted as well.

 

[amadeus]

He had his knee on the guy's neck, at a minimum it's some kind of negligent homicide.

I would agree with that.

In a de jure sense I don’t know if or how police crimes are treated any differently than crimes not committed by law enforcement. I feel like it would open up some 14th Amendment issues.

 

[gay_Aleks]

If one looks past the legalism, the answer jumps out to you, it is an obvious answer - law-enforcement crimes are not treated in any form or shape, and the fact that only rioting has gotten any movement from your legal system with regard to the crimes being committed by the murderer of George Floyd should be food for thought, as they say.

 

[AmazonQueen]

The only problem with independent investigation of the police is that its still going to require trained investigators who are likely to come from a law enforcement background and share the same assumptions and prejudices as those they are investigating. The Independent Police Complaints Commission certainly hasn't solved all our problems with the police although it has improved matters.

Take judgement of disciplinary matters out of the hands of the police and give it to an independent body or even local government. They couldn't do any worse. Nobody fired for a disciplinary offence should be eligible to be rehired by that force or any other.

Much better training, much more emphasis on conflict de-escalation.

Not sure what you do with the current cops. In some cases it may be necessary to shut entire departments down like we did the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad in 1989.

Unless the US takes this matter seriously and starts acting when cases like this happen (which doesn't mean just firing or disciplining an individual or a few officers) why should black people take liberal cries of anguish and promises of progress seriously? They've heard all that before.

 

[rah]

There are cops in jail for doing illegal things. We need to just make it so it happens more often but still fairly (including harsher sentencing). Not all of them are slam dunks like this one.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

Unless the US takes this matter seriously and starts acting when cases like this happen (which doesn't mean just firing or disciplining an individual or a few officers) why should black people take liberal cries of anguish and promises of progress seriously? They've heard all that before.

Not just that, it's actively being weaponized to discourage people from revolting.

 

[AmazonQueen]

There are cops in jail for doing illegal things. We need to just make it so it happens more often but still fairly (including harsher sentencing). Not all of them are slam dunks like this one.

You're still treating it as a problem of individual officers being at fault, not of attitudes endemic within the police.
How many officers stood by and watched whilst Floyd was killed? I've seen nothing to suggest any of them were at all disturbed by what was happening.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

It's an institutional problem, not a problem with individual officers....

 

[rah]

And they should be punished. (jail time required) I still think stamping it out individually is still the best solution. I still believe that there is such a thing as a good cop.
Which seems to be the biggest point of contention here. One that can not be resolved since it is just an opinion.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

I still think stamping it out individually is still the best solution. I still believe that there is such a thing as a good cop.

It honestly feels like im talking to a brick wall; this isn't a problem with individuals Rah! The system it self is screwed up and as long as you continue to blame it on the former and not hold the latter to account... more instances like these will occur!

If there are as many good cops as you would like us to believe where are they during instances like these? Why did no one tell Chauvin to stop killing that man?

 

[rah]

I believe there are some cops that would have told him to knock it off. There are over half a million police. Not all of them are rotten to the core.
So it must be treated individually. I guarantee if you lock up enough of them, others will break the code.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

But they didn't. And now he's dead and this situation has repeated itself.

 

[AmazonQueen]

And they should be punished. (jail time required) I still think stamping it out individually is still the best solution. I still believe that there is such a thing as a good cop.
Which seems to be the biggest point of contention here. One that can not be resolved since it is just an opinion.

There may still be good cops. I think there probably are.
But they work within an environment where much of the public is seen as the enemy, the law as an impediment to doing their job, and informing on your fellow officer is unforgiveable whatever they have done.
In an environment like that a good cop does their job as well as they can, keeps their head down and ignores what their colleagues are doing.

Nobody is calling for all cops to be imprisoned but until the environment is changed getting rid of a few cops careless enough to get caught on camera won't solve the problem. Rotten apples turn all the apples in a barrel bad if left there.

 

[rah]

I think some are a victim of sample bias. How many encounters with the population do the police have everyday. (millions) How often does the media cover the positive ones? If they do it's a one time shot on the local news. If it's a negative encounter, it's in prime time for days. Of course negative ones are going to happen and they should be punished EVERY SINGLE TIME THEY occur. But we shouldn't ignore the many positive encounters. That's all i'm saying. I have agree many time that there are major issues. But not every cop is as bad as you paint them.

 

[AmazonQueen]

I think some are a victim of sample bias. How many encounters with the population do the police have everyday. (millions) How often does the media cover the positive ones? If they do it's a one time shot on the local news. If it's a negative encounter, it's in prime time for days. Of course negative ones are going to happen and they should be punished EVERY SINGLE TIME THEY occur. But we shouldn't ignore the many positive encounters. That's all i'm saying. I have agree many time that there are major issues. But not every cop is as bad as you paint them.

How many positive encounters do you think a young black male living in an inner-city has with the police?

 

[rah]

More than 40 years ago, but still a major issue. But we see a lot more of the negative ones in the news these days. We have more stats and stats are powerful.
In our town the DWB incidents were well out of line with the populations. After the stats were published the police adopted different policies and the percentages are now in line with the general population. We just need to keep the pressure on. The problem runs deep.

 

[civvver]

I believe there are some cops that would have told him to knock it off. There are over half a million police. Not all of them are rotten to the core.
So it must be treated individually. I guarantee if you lock up enough of them, others will break the code.

Well sure the problem is individual actions but it's an institution that actively protects those individuals from any kind of consequences and somehow attracts those individuals to the force. You can't change individuals, you can only address the institutions that let them thrive in their misdeeds.

The whole system needs upending to fix this.

I think it's pretty simple, you don't need to dissolve the entire police force across america, but you need smart politicians and leaders with backbones to come into the problem districts like where this just occurred and you clean house. Fire every administrator and cop in authoritative positions. Dissolve the entire force in the problem precinct. Start a new one with new leadership and transfer in cops from other areas to staff it. If there are any good cops from the old dissolved precinct they gotta go apply for police jobs somewhere else.

It's maybe harsh on some beat cop who didn't do anything but it seems necessary at this point.

It's also going to take money cus you won't get a new police department without some incentives to actually hire new cops.

 

[rah]

Upending is OK by me. Starting from scratch isn't realistic. But if you simply hold them more accountable, I think that will do the trick eventually.
The question is how do you guarantee more accountability since the current set up doesn't really do it.

 

[EgonSpengler]

There may still be good cops. I think there probably are.
But they work within an environment where much of the public is seen as the enemy, the law as an impediment to doing their job, and informing on your fellow officer is unforgiveable whatever they have done.
In an environment like that a good cop does their job as well as they can, keeps their head down and ignores what their colleagues are doing.

Nobody is calling for all cops to be imprisoned but until the environment is changed getting rid of a few cops careless enough to get caught on camera won't solve the problem. Rotten apples turn all the apples in a barrel bad if left there.

This is it exactly.

That the system is flawed (or corrupt) does not preclude the existence of well-meaning individuals. Nor does it mean every single individual is somehow at fault. I know I'm beating a dead horse, but under the Obama Administration, the US Justice Dept conducted 22 investigations of police departments. These investigations were frequently spurred by an individual incident, but they were not investigations of the incident, which were handled separately. Of the 22 "pattern or practice" investigations, every single one returned a positive finding of things like unjustified uses of force and racially-biased policing.

Unrelated to any such "pattern or practice" investigation by the Feds, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, in Commonwealth v. Warren, ruled that a black man in the City of Boston was reasonable in his avoidance of police, due to a history of mistreatment and disrespect by Boston police towards black men. In the specific case, officers were looking for a suspect in a recent break-in, in a predominantly black neighborhood. They were flagging people down, to ask if they'd seen anything and to see who might resemble the suspect. One of the men they approached simply turned and walked away, refusing to talk to them. They detained him on the grounds that avoiding contact with police was itself suspicious behavior. The Court ruled that it wasn't, that avoiding contact with the police - specifically by a black man - was reasonable behavior, apropos of nothing, purely because of the long history of everyday maltreatment.

Where a suspect is under no obligation to respond to a police officer's inquiry, we are of the view that flight to avoid that contact should be given little, if any, weight as a factor probative of reasonable suspicion. [...]

Second,as set out by one of the dissenting Justices in the Appeals court opinion, where the suspect is a black male stopped by the police on the streets of Boston, the analysis of flight as a factor in the reasonable suspicion calculus cannot be divorced from the findings in a recent Boston Police Department(department)report documenting a pattern of racial profiling of black males in the city of Boston. [...]

According to the study, based on FIO data collected by the department,14black men in the city of Boston were more likely to be targeted for police-civilian encounters such as stops, frisks, searches, observations, and interrogations.15Black men were also disproportionally targeted for repeat police encounters.16We do not eliminate flight as a factor in the reasonable suspicion analysis whenever a black male is the subject of an investigatory stop. However,in such circumstances, flight is not necessarily probative of a suspect's state of mind or consciousness of guilt. Rather, the finding that black males in Boston are disproportionately and repeatedly targeted for FIO encounters suggests a reason for flight totally unrelated to consciousness of guilt. Such an individual, when approached by the police, might just as easily be motivated by the desire to avoid the recurring indignity of being racially profiled as by the desire to hide criminal activity. Given this reality for black males in the city of Boston, a judge should, in appropriate cases, consider the report's findings in weighing flight as a factor in the reasonable suspicion calculus.

Complaints about police misbehavior aren't purely individual or anecdotal. There is a large and growing pile of studies and investigations that find a "pattern and practice" from sea to shining sea. Among the many, many groups of people who would benefit from comprehensive criminal justice reform are the police officers who've been upstanding this entire time and have never misbehaved.