The last I checked, the FBI does not keep statistics on police involved shootings. BIAS ALERT: I'm white, so keep the following in mind. I don't get why people think that this issue is a black issue only. I certainly think it's much more prevalent with blacks due to several things, which include racism on several levels. That being said: People in the US have got to wake up and address (all of us) the militarization/police issue, as they are closely related. We are seriously seeing damage to our civil liberties and our very lives because the people that are supposed to protect us, all of us, view us as nothing more than potential threats. I would say that the combined issue of defense spending/policing in this country are far and away the two greatest threats to our country. There's a reason Eisenhower (a General, by the way) warned of the Military Industrial Complex in his farewell address. Stop believing that this shit doesn't affect, directly or indirectly, all of us. Besides getting elections publicly funded (which I think would help solve this problem) I consider this the second most important issue facing this country.
I'm white, middle class, and from a melting pot community with a high crime rate (druggy hobos). I call it a black issue because it is primarily black people getting executed for misdemeanors*. My sheriff is under investigation by the FBI for fuckery during and after black guy shootings. It is also a police militarization issue. It can be both. This shit is just goofy. Most places, you vote on Sheriff. Go vote them out. Politicians condoning police violence, lax training, or the use of military weaponry/tactics, vote them out too. The only way this kind of crap stops is voting. Because suing the shit out of them does not work. Most police departments have slush funds precisely for paying off accidental deaths or injuries administered by LEO. Millions spent in payouts in my county alone has not stopped them or brought about reform yet. *If you check that gun fatality link, a couple random ones I opened were domestic disturbance on white trash gone wrong.
The messed up thing is if white folks acted like black folks whenever police shot and killed a white person, there would be police reform yesterday.
Governor Dayton has ordered a federal investigation. Part of me feels disturbed at how you can't avoid seeing Castile's dying moments online now, but the other half realizes it's probably necessary in order for shit to happen. Didn't realize camera phones would have this consequence.
It's a policing problem, regardless of race. Here's a story from this past weekend in my city about a guy who was walking across the street holding a bag of fast food and the cops got pissed at him and threw him on the hood of a car so hard it dented the fuck out of it: http://www.castanet.net/news/Kelowna/169954/Disgusting-holiday-arrest This is in a Canadian tourist city during a long weekend, and everyone involved was white. The fucking cops didn't even leave a note on the car that they fucked up before they left... a passer-by did that. The issue is the way police are trained to deal with a situation; they are taught to dominate by force and take control, which naturally escalates the issue. They need to de-escalate the issue, but they don't. They are naturally aggressive, and tend to take shit personally, and abuse their authority to achieve that servitude. Do they target black people? Yes. I would guess there's a bias there as well. But they also target white people, or anyone who does something that even remotely pisses them off or shows a lack of respect, or immediate subservience. You can argue context all you want, but it does everyone a disservice to believe that it's not a problem for all of us, not just black people. I've said it before, and I'll say it again... go watch the COPS shows from other countries and see how radically different things are. Probably the best example of this is the BBC show "24 Hours in Police Custody". It's amazing how humanizing the cops are, and how they actually deal with people with respect, and how immediately that de-escalates any tension in the situation. If you watch that, then see how most North American cops are portrayed, the difference is shocking.
You and I have had this talk before. Even watching the Canadian version, "To Serve and Protect," especially episodes from the 90s, shows a vastly different police culture than the US. When you watch COPS (the show), it's appalling how militarized and polarized they are. The officers speak to the camera as if they're filling out a report and nowhere does it enter their minds that these "suspects" are actually human beings and members of the community.
I remember in my last year of undergrad, I got to go on a police ride-along for one of my classes. They paired me with this smokeshow of a cop. A 25 year old athletic blonde who was looking for trouble. She was new to the force and I could tell she didn't feel very respected. When we were out, we got a call of some teenager who was caught stealing a PS2 or something. So we got to the address and she immediately drew her gun, and went to look for him. When she saw him, she scaled a fence and jumped on to him tackling his ass to the ground with a gun in his face. I'm not gonna lie, I got a half chub from watching her, but the amount of force she used was breath taking. They found a small nugget of weed in his pocket and took him to jail. I feel like cops get bored a lot and want to find some shit to do. That's the impression I got from the younger ones. The older guy I rode with had been a 9/11 first responder and had a totally different take on shit. He wanted no trouble from anyone. Didn't give a shit about speeding unless the driving was reckless. Didn't run plates unless it was obviously expired. The blonde girl ran every plate she was near just looking for shit. While her hotness made up for a lot, I felt she represented overzealous policing.
Would a populace with less access to firearms alleviate some of the desire of police officers to militarize?
I think it's more around the adrenaline of the action and shiny dangerous hardware that gives them the overwhelming force that pushes the militarization. It feeds into the desire to absolutely control a situation, and doing it by force is the easy option to accomplish that.
While I think this is part of it, the other difference now, as opposed to when I was younger (it wasn't like this when I was younger) is the military and police have become almost indistinguishable. Most cops now have a military background. We send the military to foreign countries more and more, and with the nebulous purpose of 'peace keeping' and policing people and not knowing who the good guys and bad guys are because of the types of wars we fight. They get out. They come home. They gravitate to law enforcement where they are asked to be 'peace keepers' and policing people and not knowing who the good guys and bad guys are because of the types of crimes they respond to - mostly drug crimes. This is why militarization is a bad thing. This isn't like WWI and WWII where there was a clear mission, men were drafted, sent to achieve an identifiable goal, muster out, come home, and resume their civilian lives. Now we are perpetually at war, and most of these guys come home without much support and they gravitate to like minded jobs to what they know how to do. We are treading on very dangerous waters. Every empire in history's decline was hastened by the reliance of being at war, using mercenaries and vast income inequality. I am not speaking in hyperbole when I say I am concerned, very concerned, what this country is going to be like in another generation. How it looked for me at 10, and now less than two generations later, is alien.
I think there is a fundamental problem for anyone encountering LEO's. They say their motto is to serve and protect but as soon as they start speaking to you they're trying to build a case and prosecute. They can take someone to jail based on their judgement and thats very dangerous I think. If an officer decides to arrest me I can't tell him I disagree and would like this reviewed, I'm going to jail. I also think cops should have a separate court. Not going to happen but I see a huge problem here. The cops are the ones arresting people bring suspects to the DA's office, they support they DA, they are integral to the DA. When a cop is charged with a crime a DA is supposed to impartially prosecute this officer with the same zeal they would for someone who's accused of child porn. It's not going to happen. I also think Net is right. The general attitude is don't fuck with cops, don't piss them off, don't catch them on a bad day, and don't you dare second guess them. Cops demand total cooperation to your own detriment. This needs to be changed. Cops act as judge and jury for who's going to jail that night and seemingly lack accountability if they get it wrong. Lets say a guy gets arrested but the charges don't pan out. That person spends nights in jail, goes to trial, spends tons on lawyers, this person sacrifices a lot to defend their freedom. If the charge is dropped, the cop who arrested them feels no repercussions. The officer might shrug and say oh well I guess he was innocent and move on. That officer should be prosecuted for falsely imprisoning someone. American LEO's have a lot of issues, accountability, and their attitude toward suspects are at the top of that list.
Good point. When I think about it, more and more relatively uneducated people are serving in combat, and they were pulled into the military because they had no other real options. Not everyone, of course, but a large number. When they come back, they're finding themselves back in the same position that they were in before they enlisted, except now they have one very particular skill set which doesn't really have a civilian counterpart, except in law enforcement Again, not saying this is always the case, but this would help push the law enforcement agencies more and more towards a military force. That's all unsubstantiated musings, of course, but it'd be interesting to track down some numbers around military hires in police forces over time.
I would say emphatically yes, along with what Nettdata and others have said regarding police training. That almost 600 number of people killed by cops this year honestly seems low to me – for America – and I’m still not sure I believe it. If I was an American cop, trained to deal with a frequently armed populace in a militaristic way, I’d be jumpy too. At the same time, I think police gun deaths get more outrage because they’re a sexier thing to protest. Meanwhile, the 2,000 civilian gun victims (at least 319 deaths) in Chicago alone can’t ALL get on video, so we don’t hear much anger about that. It’s something that Americans in general, and gun lovers specifically, don’t realize looks so absurd to people from other western countries: more guns equal more gun violence (and suicides). To argue otherwise is willfully ignorant (it is not a correlation/causation fallacy). At this point, with the number of and easy access to guns, getting a gun for protection makes a bit of sense, but ONLY because the problem is already so far gone. Racism no doubt plays a role. Add that to the second amendment -- specifically the extreme to which Americans today defend it and fetishize guns – horrible drug and sentencing policies, and it makes up the country that, as a whole, Americans want to live in. People massacring kids, kids accidentally shooting themselves, trigger happy cops, obscene incarceration rates – this is why the rest of the western world laughs when someone says “’Merica’s the most free-est country in the world!”
Let's just end the myth that America will ever disarm themselves, let alone by legislative decree. As I said to Gravy, that toothpaste ain't going back in the tube. One of the tenets of our basic founding principles, important enough to make the number 2 spot on the list, is the right to bear arms. Nobody is trying to reconsider that. Limit aspects of it, yes (as has been done with other amendments), but not outright repeal.
I have a family friend who is a cop and his favorite saying when people disagree with him in the streets: "You may beat the charge but you won't beat the ride." He patrols Pinellas Park which is a disgusting shithole part of Clearwater, he knows where the meth labs are and who the gang members are and he literally just patrols the neighborhood, picking these guys up every time he sees them on the street, no matter what they are doing. To paralllel what Nett said; he's not a bad person, not the brightest either and god help you if you cross him or his cohort......people die that way. He conveyed a story to me about a guy who ran from one of his colleagues, he tazed him into a pond and then just let the guy drown. He said the guy flatly didn't give a fuck. To some degree, I don't think that is who that guy was when he started policing the neighborhood, I think that is a product of seeing the same thing day in, day out. You can only go to so many child molestation calls, drug deal gone wrong calls, innocent people killed due to gang activity calls and not have a lesser opinion of the people you interact with every day. EDIT: Just a thought and it's not meant to be racially insensitive but does anyone think that maybe if the police demographics closely matched the demographics of the neighborhoods they patrolled that it would make a difference? I understand the concern that there is racism in policing but perhaps this could alleviate one of the stressors in the situation? I know that this relates to the guy above; he has said in no uncertain terms that he has never been treated as poorly as when he patrols a predominantly black neighborhood. Rightly or wrongly, I'm sure they have reason to be mad at police (we see it everyday) but when you are called racist names while trying to do your job, it makes it hard to be fair, I'm sure.
To respond to the second part, I think it's an issue no matter what. I mean, that if a bunch of white cops are policing largely black neighborhoods, people don't like that because it's racist. If a police force of black cops are policing black neighborhoods, they see them as uncle toms or people just working for the white man. The idea here is that these neighborhoods need to be policed less. Or be allowed to police themselves. The amount of directed police activity to poorer neighborhoods is disproportionate to that of middle class or higher places. A large majority of the crimes they look for are drug related. How much drugs do you think there are in rich white neighborhoods?
I don't know how much I agree with this notions simply based on skin color. Anyone regardless of race can become jaded with shithole neighborhoods or become influenced by the power dynamic. I would assume having actual citizens from the community making up more of the force would have a much more beneficial impact on the community. A vested intrest would go a lot further in my mind. Plus it would help alleviate the us vs them mentality to a degree. Ive argued both sides of this topic. One of my best friends is a cop, he tells me the horror stories of working with criminals day in and day out. You really feel for the type of pressure they are put under and the circumstances of the reality they live in. On the other hand our relationship dynamic with cops in this country is off. I lived in Shanghai and the police were a lot more hands off as far as interactions with civilians. If two people got into a fight in the street, they'd leave it alone, it wasn't their business, it was the business of the two people fighting. It was like they weren't tasked with mediating issues that could rise to legal matters. Here the cops interject themselves, take over the situation with force or threat of force, then go about finding the guilty parties. Just a world of difference between interactions. As the police are trained, according to my friend, is that they are to escilate the force, mainly to their side arm, before any situation can turn againt them. It's a fucked up way to look at the world and I do think we need to reevaluate how this is handled.
So, apparently the State Department just re-opened the probe on the handling of Hillary's emails. Hmm.
It's all they really have left on her at this point. Even though it's been pretty much finished up, the horse just isn't quite dead enough now.
It's an internal probe. One would have figured this kind of investigation should have been undertaken by now. Congress grilled FBI Director Comey over the Clinton investigation. He was, uhm, not pleased: They just lost their allies in the FBI and vice versa. Comey was a big time GOP'er. They just shit all over his credibility. To accuse him of such things is a serious, *serious*, allegation. Same thing with Trump accusing Loretta Lynch of being bribed. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...led-about-decision-not-charge-hillary-n605206