Body cams on police and actual consequences for misconduct. Some of the videos of people (of all colors) being unlawfully murdered have led to absolutely zero consequence for those responsible. Those with authority granted by the public should have HIGHER accountability and more severe consequences, not be able to subvert them altogether. It's not difficult to imagine the level of misconduct that is likely occurring in the cases where no video evidence is even available.
And while the racial component of police shootings has been portrayed in a way which differs sharply from the actual data on race/crime/police lethal force, there IS still some element of uncertainty in the exact figures. The fact that there is any uncertainty at all in police killings being reported correctly is absolutely INSANE to me. This is not an area where we can have sloppy data. If a government agent is responsible for the death of a citizen, it is unacceptable that we not have a very clear record of all surrounding circumstance.
The price for this should be massive. Doing this once or twice corrupts the justice system and destroys public trust in police. This invites gangs to become the law and order. Look how that’s worked out in Chicago.
I increasingly believe there are kinds of anti-system crimes which should be punished with highest sentences. I'm thinking of crimes that have disproportionate, negative impact on stability and security of society. Like this. Or fucking with vaccinations, like CIA people did.
(Incidentally, I also believe that the guy responsible for fake bomb detectors (from the other thread on the frontpage today) should get at minimum a murder-level sentence, for willfully putting lives of lots of people in danger.)
Perhaps I'm taking what you say too literally, but you couldn't equate it with murder. It would be mass attempted manslaughter. So it would have to be at that level.
That's not to say we shouldn't treat it as seriously just that it's a different intent.
Murder? Quite frankly, that's either akin to terrorism or it is terrorism. It destabilises entire regions of harmless civilians.
The CIA did this as well in Central and South America in the previous century. They got away with it as well, of course. The series Narcos and movies American Made and Che Part One and Che Part Two are albeit partly about these subjects. Not to mention more recently the collateral murder video.
I'm not entirely sure why? I guess if you got the military and economic high ground you get away with doing things like that?
Drill rap, the music of Chicago's gangs, is ultra violent and serves as a method of calling out other crews and taunting them into a response. Thanks to Youtube, Soundcloud, and social media the spread of this music is now easier than ever. The threats that come from this music are often followed up on.
Why do they do it? As one rapper says:
“If I wasn’t doing this, would you even be down here in the low incomes? Would you even care that I exist?”
“You know, white people, Mexicans, bitches, those people don’t live the life, but they love hearing about it. People want the Chiraq stuff. They want a superthug ghetto man, and I’m giving that to them. I’m just playing my role.”
Er no. It's not. I'm not saying police conduct in Chicago isn't an issue. I'm saying that the issues of inner city Chicago are much larger than just police conduct. To properly understand the issue you need to consider all the angles.
Yes, but Chicago seems to be a fairly unique place. Also, most of the police shooting incidents don't come out of Chicago. What are you trying to say by pointing out that gang violence is bad in Chicago?
The point that I'm making isn't that gang violence is bad in Chicago. I'm trying inform others why and what drives a significant portion of gang violence in Chicago and show it from the perspective of the people who drive that violence and what they're about.
The parent poster was talking about how gangs become the law and order because of the lack of trust in police. I'm saying the issue is wider and deeper than that. If you read the article, it becomes clear that one of the large driving factors for these rappers is the notoriety and fame they get from doing this is oftentimes the only way they can feel significant. It's a way for them to get money, sex, notoriety. Maybe even a record deal so they can get the hell out of the place they are in. What kind of chances and opportunities does an inner city youth really have?
This notoriety can twist back in its own ways too:
"The guy having the hardest time was Blaze. He seemed to be battling depression. At one point, after a shooting on a corner, he said to me, “Man, I’m so sick of this. I feel like a prisoner in my own neighborhood. I can’t go anywhere. I can’t go to my job because I don’t know if the opps will be there to come after me.” He was wallowing in how badly he wanted to be done with the gang life. He told me he wanted to move to California, but his reality felt inescapable to him. He started using PCP at an alarming rate. It was his way of coping. He became difficult to be around. He would stutter and trip over his words. His complexion got bad. His hygiene, too."
It's one hell of a life and not one that I could begin to imagine.
I think I saw a segment on maybe Vice about Chicago. Yes, it is a hell scape. There are a lot of reasons, and some date back to the founding of the country. I think presently, the three big ones are: 1. As a country, we don't take care of our citizens, 2. The only solution we have to our societal everyday type problems is to call the police and let them handle it, 3. Police are trained to be police in the traditional sense, so their go-to method is to be aggressive and arrest people.
It's a downward spiral that has been going on for decades. To make matters worse, policing is delegated to the state and local levels, which aren't under the microscope that the federal government is.
It's also not just a black or minority problem. I say this because I believe many white voters are more complacent because they don't believe they would be affected by it. If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong police officer, you aren't immune to disastrous results. White voters shouldn't fool ourselves to believing they are unaffected. Remember blacks get killed disproportionately to the national population, but whites get killed in higher numbers.
Holding public office is a privilege that rightly should come with a different threshold of privacy/transparency.
And yes, no nation is taking the issue of police conduct seriously if it's not even recording wrongful death consistently and reliably.
Some colleagues ran a trial on body cameras and found improved metrics, particularly around stop-and-search. The success rate of stop and search increased, officers reported feeling safer. They also noted an increase in allegations but I don't think dug into that as much as they wanted to (it may be an area where the behaviour feedback loop was slow enough to need a longer study duration).
I agree with you in an ideal world. These concepts are obvious. Unfortunately, we don't see this implemented so I'm pretty sure that it isn't our timeline.
The police are not here to protect you, but to ensure the functioning of society. This isn't pessimism; it's a fact of legal precedent - they have no obligation to protect any citizen [0].
Justice only happens when the crime unpunished would lead to undesirable destabilization of society. Sexual harassment was rampant in Hollywood for decades, only now that it threatens stability does it receive attention.
Our ideals of justice and freedom only but tools and illusions to keep the gears of society turning.
I did some investigation based on the Washington Post data for Skeptics Stack Exchange [0]. There's a significant difference between black and white killings.
white killed by police: 495 (49.5%)
black killed by police: 259 (26.1%)
hispanic killed by police: 172 (17.3%)
other: 67
About 13% of the US population is black, and 12.5% is hispanic. Both groups ARE over-represented in police shootings, with black people being about 2x more likely to be killed than their population figure would suggest. Compared to the way this is portrayed in the news, however, I would suggest that these figures already run contrary to the narrative that this is primarily dictated on the basis of racist behavior by police. The fact that there are more white people killed by police annually ALONE (despite their larger representation in the population) is a fact that most people would be surprised to hear.
What really offsets the data is once you begin to include racial statistics on crime. Obviously police officers aren't just taking individuals out of the population and random and killing them (isolated outliers not included), so it would be irresponsible to just compare the racial component of police shootings with population representation. This data, however, varies greatly by area. However, in urban environments in particular, the racial component in crime is enormous. In Chicago, for example 75.3% of homicide was committed by black people, 24.6% by hispanics, and 3.5% by white people. To expect equal representation in police shootings, given those crime statistics, would be completely insane.
So the long story short is: given a straight comparison to population distributions, there is an overrepresentation of black/hispanic shootings by police. With the inclusion of racial participation in violent crime though, the motivation for police fatalities cannot responsibly be attributed to a racial motivation without a serious multivariate analysis.
I would add Education to the forefront of accountability. Police officer careers require no more education than a high school diploma/GED and the police academy, which is roughly 27 weeks. Imagine if being a police officer meant having a deep understanding of ethics, psychology (not just tactics) and law.
Stop accepting any physically fit hothead off the street because they can be trained into the role. Lastly, as a citizen, be willing to pay more in taxes knowing that the person who pulled you over cares, is qualified, and will not shoot you and try to cover it up.
Police have also gained the hard-fought-in-court prerogative to screen candidates on the basis of intelligence, excluding anyone unusual in any direction. It creates a monoculture as opposed to an ecology of diverse intellectualism.
I don't think training on ethics is required, nor would it be sufficient if not accompanied by a substantial change in accountability. Today's police are virtually untouchable. They know it, and act accordingly.
> It is not just Baltimore cops. It is cops. They will shoot you in the face in front of your infant daughter. They will choke you to sleep for selling cigarettes.
The article is about people literally trying to get away with murder. The last two sentences are references to well-documented cases of police officers killing non-dangerous citizens. There's no reason to be polite about this.
There is - the tone of the article affects the tone of the thread. Hacker News is supposed to be about intellectually gratifying discussion, but an article whose purpose is to spark outrage results in comments full of invective and tedious boilerplate. Cathartic for people who want to rant about Americans and guns and ACAB... but we've already been there and done that and read that a hundred times.
>You're confusing "intellectually gratifying" with "apathy".
You're confusing endorphin hooks and virtue signalling with action. Being outraged on an internet forum doesn't lead to progress against police corruption.
> Cathartic for people who want to rant about Americans and guns and ACAB
How are such straw men intellectually gratifying? How is that not tedious boilerplate? How is you reading something a hundred times even a factor compared to hundreds of murders swept under the rug? Don't wanna read about it, put an end to it.
I'd love to hear a discussion of methods to solve the issues with our police and the despair of the inner city that were comprehensive. In the case of Baltimore, these are massive systemic problems that involve not just the police, but also the community as a whole and forces outside the community as well. How can you discuss the problems with police misconduct without talking about the drug war, inner city poverty, stat based policing and the poisonous incentives they create, the lack of stable homes, and so on and so on and so on.
Yes you might be able to solve police misconduct by forcing them to turn on each other and report and aggressively as possible. You probably will utterly destroy any semblance of morale and group cohesion and won't have a functioning police force at the end. Yes, we could ban guns from the population. Except that would not only require a constitutional amendment, but also solve the logistical issues of tracking down guns while simultaneously solving the problem of an armed criminal element who now has a helpless population in a massive country where response times can be 20 mins or longer. Body cams will help, but even if people trust police, how does that solve the problem where being a drug dealer is probably the best opportunity you have in the inner city? And it goes on and on.
It's a similar issue to homelessness. It's a multivariate problem that requires many different targeted approaches to deal with the entire thing. People unfortunately tend to focus on their pet issue of choice and ignore the others. Worse yet, political interests often will try to shut down each other from getting funding in order to push their own cause du jour.
I never said I didn't want to read about it - only that the bar should be higher than the bottom of the barrel. A subject like this can be discussed without resorting to polemics.
> How is you reading something a hundred times even a factor compared to hundreds of murders swept under the rug?
You have provided a perfect example of what this discussion does not need, and what articles like the above lead to, thank you.
It's not about being polite, it's about coming to absurd conclusions that generalize a million people based on a handful of carefully selected malefactors. We can say, "we want to reduce police corruption" without peddling or subscribing to this complete nonsense (which is unfortunately The Root's wheelhouse).
If it was only a handful of malefactors, then the rest of them should be forcing the bad apples out quickly, and calling for justice. The fact that the vast majority of police officers remain silent lends some credence to the generalisation.
The difference is that bad cops are a minor percentage, the fact that the rest protect their own is the generalization you are looking for. The other comment proposes the generalization that all cops will shoot you in the face, which is comically wrong on many levels.
The article is about a sub-group of these people, but the tone to me as well was one of sweeping generalizations.
Edit (instead of replying to all of the individual replies):
I'll be the first to acknowledge that there are systemic problems in police forces worldwide, just like there are systemic problems in any large organization, especially one endowed which so much executive power.
However, any argument that paints a picture of "uniform equals bad" is, in my opinion, not only delusional, but is also a severe injustice to the good apples in public service, that is: in service to the public.
I'm originally from Brazil and I hear that same argument about cops over there, that bad ones are a minority, that we shouldn't generalise.
I don't buy it, the system itself enables this, if it didn't then those bad apples would have been detected and expelled before they could cause so much damage. It can be a minority doing that but they have affected so much that the whole itself is no longer trustworthy and requires reconstruction from the ground up, the foundations themselves have been damaged and as it would be for a structure or a car, when the base structure that supports everything else cannot be repaired you need a new one.
That's what should happen in Baltimore, that's what should happen with the Brazilian military and civilian police, their foundations aren't good enough to be trusted anymore.
Well the saying is bad apples spoil the bunch, and obviously in some cases the whole bunch is spoiled but we refuse to believe it, and instead still think we’re at the few bad apples part.
Any member of the force, its leadership, or the surrounding politicians who is not 100% supporting the investigation and calling for heads to roll, is complicit. If that's a large enough group, then a sweeping generalization is absolutely warranted.
"Bad apple" arguments only work if there's actual evidence of "good apples" working to expel the bad ones.
"Is there evidence of 99% of supposedly non-complicit muslims standing with victims of terrorism, insisting on justice for those guilty?"
"Is there evidence of 99% of supposedly non-complicit blacks standing with victims of black crime, insisting on justice for those guilty?"
If you assume that everyone in a group is guilty of some crime committed by a tiny fraction because there isn't evidence that 99% of them condemn the guilty, then you're participating in a conspiracy and you're validating a dangerous line of reasoning that can be weaponized against anyone, including groups that you care about and/or belong to.
But police _as an institution_ are entrusted with the public safety. The relationships between the officers and the institution and the institution and the public are both totally different than for the other groups you named.
First of all, police in the U.S. aren't an institution--they're beholden to local governments (and state governments in the case of state patrol). Ergo you can't [reasonably] generalize about police nationally based on a handful of malfeasants.
The idea that police nationally get together and conspire violence against the public or even a particular racial group is beyond absurd. This is among the most dubious of conspiracy theories, and I don't know how such theorists can hope to be regarded as credible, reasonable people.
So apparently our police force is equivalent to ISIS. I guess it would be better if gangs ruled the streets. At least they don't do as many bad things as the cops do.
> This is the tone and conclusion of this "article"
Why on earth did you put "article" in quotes. Are you questioning whether it is, in fact, an article? Because that seems quite self-evident.
You might disagree with it but be assured TFA is, in fact, an article and putting the word in quotes just makes it look like you don't know what quotes are for. Hint: quoting.
The term “article” used to refer to a piece published in a newspaper or periodical that went through a thorough drafting, editing and review process before publish.
Nowadays anyone can post an article on the internet. That’s great. But because of this, the definition of “article” has become basically meaningless. An article could be entirely fact based, full of falsehoods, or misrepresent facts by mixing them with opinions. There really should be a distinction between different levels of reporting. Most of the problems cropping up these past two years can be traced to the fact that people put the same credibility in a piece by some random person on the internet as they do in one by a career journalist.
I changed it now. But wow, that was quite the reaction. Your interpretation is correct and at least in my cultural circle, quotes around nouns serve as a way to express the lacking quality of the thing. Ie. this is a rant pretending to be a news piece. But that's just my opinion. Equally IMO, the actual source is more important than an opinion on the source.
The use of quotes to question the authenticity or true nature of something is accepted in English. You could have said "journalism" and I wouldn't have jumped on you.
On "article" though it's inappropriate. The other comment notwithstanding, an article is an article, no matter if it's written by a journalist, an amateur, or a monkey banging its head on a keyboard. There is zero credibility implied by the word.
Example:
> The "food" from that restaurant was awful
Correct usage. You are (humorously, snarkily) questioning that what you received was food at all.
> The food from that "restaurant" was awful
Incorrect. No matter what you thought of the food, the fact is that it is a restaurant (ie, a place that dispenses food, with no consideration of quality implied). This usage betrays a lack of sophistication and should be avoided.
Incorrect. No matter what you thought of the food, the fact is that it is food (ie, something that can be digested as a source of nutrition). This usage betrays a lack of sophistication and should be avoided.
> The food from that "restaurant" was awful
Correct usage. You are (humorously, snarkily) questioning if the establishment you visited qualifies as a restaurant.
Based on your explanation I would say both of those are valid, depending upon one's own personal definition of "restaurant" is.
If one thinks of a restaurant as a business that accepts money to serve you food then the comparison is the same. No matter what you thought of the restaurant, the fact is they took your money and served you food.
Food is food, with no consideration of quality implied, so that doesn't quite work as an explanation of why it would be right around food, but not around restaurant.
Can you point to some of the things in this article which are "falsehoods, or misrepresent facts"?
Some of the worst and most inaccurate articles I've ever seen have been written by career journalists. (Admittedly I live in the UK where the majority of newspapers are on a par with Infowars for honesty and fact checking. Maybe you live somewhere where professional journalism is more respectable).
See the referenced quote that started this sub thread for example:
> It is not just Baltimore cops. It is cops. They will shoot you in the face in front of your infant daughter. They will choke you to sleep for selling cigarettes. They will shoot you in the back for walking away.
This is drawing a false equivalence by assuming the actions of a subgroup represent the group as a whole. It’s no different than citing a few brutal murders from black people and then concluding with “this is black people. They will murder your children...”
No editor would ever allow a line like that to make it to publication. It’s needlessly provocative language that reveals the author’s bias and reduces the credibility of what might otherwise be a decent piece of writing.
>No editor would ever allow a line like that to make it to publication.
I'm sorry, but have you ever read an actual newspaper other than the New York Times? That kind of thing makes it into newspapers with editors all the time. Hell, a lot of the time it's the editors writing it! [1]
> Most of the problems cropping up these past two years can be traced to the fact that people put the same credibility in a piece by some random person on the internet as they do in one by a career journalist.
Have you missed the whole “fake news” fiasco? People will upvote and share any article that reinforces their existing beliefs and world view. Rather than approaching articles with a healthy skepticism and critical thinking, many people are consuming content based on what “team” the author seems to be advocating for. Instead of asking questions like, “what is the author’s agenda?” or “does this author have a track record of reliability?”, people are asking “does this author believe the same things I do?” If the answer to that is “yes,” then not even a follow-up article from a Pulitzer Prize winner will be sufficient to discredit it for many people.
> People will upvote and share any article that reinforces their existing beliefs and world view.
People do that with accredited news already. For example, in communist circles there is some groups that believe that no matter what, everything that Stalin did was justified. They will bring up no amount of obscure scholars, and disregard large amounts of citations from modern scholars and new evidence to protect this world view. The same goes for any world view. Look at all the people hoping against all evidence that bitcoin is a fad.
Ultimately, people will do this no matter what quality of the evidence presented is (aside from one or two people who decide that they like X news source, there is a chance they will reverse with a citation from that news source, but no other, even if the quality of the evidence is the same). 'Fake news' existed long before it came to that name.
The whole "fake news" thing is mostly one side losing an election and putting the blame on a strategy they also used for years. It doesn’t matter if the fake news comes from reputed newspapers institution or not, the media game always have been a power game and the internet is just rebalancing a scale that was heavly tipped for years towards one world view.
If you look at bias in the news it's been Republican leaning for the last 20 years. Which is what happens when someone decides to make a major news source devoted to propaganda and the other side does not.
Which is really a response to how unbalanced the US political process has become. When the facts disagree with your point of view, ignore them. -> Reality now seems biased.
When some cops are corrupt, does it matter that the rest might be decent? An individual police officer represents the entire force. They wear the colours and the badge as a representative of the whole establishment.
Would you call the police if you knew there were such troubling corruption issues? It would definitely make me think twice - you just don't know which officer will turn up.
Zero tolerance is the only way forwards when it comes to this, otherwise the few destroy trust for the masses.
A minority? I don't understand where that argument comes from. A minority generally doesn't hold power - police hold far reaching powers. Minorities normally do not choose to be part of a minority.
From wikipedia:
"A police force is a constituted body of persons empowered by a state to enforce the law, protect property, and limit civil disorder"
If there are a corrupt few breaking the law, the body of persons cannot be said to be performing its duty.
>When some cops are corrupt, does it matter that the rest might be decent?
Of course, if you replaced "cops" here with "black people", you basically arrive at the attitude of the corrupt cops themselves, and those who justify their "zero tolerance" policies, including those mentioned in TFA.
But I didn't replace "cops" with "black people", you did.
An ethnicity is a completely different thing to a law enforcement agency.
edit: If you want me to explain why, I can. A law enforcement agency is a group of people who have decided to perform a particular duty. An ethnicity is a group of people who are born that particular way.
A law enforcement agency has a strict set of rules governing behaviour, which when broken purposely constitute corruption. An ethnicity does not a have a particular set of rules, they follow the same rules as wider society. If they did have a specific set of rules, it would be considered an apartheid style society.
A member of a law enforcement agency has far reaching powers beyond a typical citizen. A member of an ethnicity is supposed to have the same powers as everyone else.
What's interesting is that by comparing the two you get a good idea of why police corruption is a terrible thing.
The same rationale used to blame police as a whole for the corruption of a few is also used to justify the attitudes of the police presented in this article, on the basis that any random black individual is more likely to be violent or prone to criminal activity.
That the police and black people are not precisely the same sort of entity is irrelevant.
"The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act authorized the United States Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division to bring civil ("pattern or practice") suits against local law enforcement agencies, to reign in abuses and hold them accountable.[9] As a result, numerous departments have entered into consent decrees or memoranda of understanding, requiring them to make organizational reforms"
Now apply your logic to black people, and you'll find that your views are worrying.
The basic issue is, that when the department/agency as a whole is not held accountable, they're able to avoid reforms that circumvent the issues in the future. Punish just the one police officer, and another later is able perform the same levels of corruption. It's systematic abuse of power.
This is why we must hold 'cops' or 'Baltimore cops' responsible, not just the few perpetrators.
>Now apply your logic to black people, and you'll find that your views are worrying.
I'm assuming based on your comments here and elsewhere in this thread that you're being purposely obtuse, and therefore I'm choosing not to engage with you further.
That's fine. I don't really understand why you have an issue with concepts like zero tolerance for corruption, police reform, collective responsibility, police accountability.
They are fairly commonly held opinions–that individual actions can destroy trust in an organisation, and that passiveness or tolerance within an organisation of such actions is equally as damaging.
I also think I've made fairly strong points about why your comparison is, in my opinion, incorrect. Not sure I'm being obtuse, but sorry if you think that is the case.
I agree with that. There are always shades of grey to every argument.
However the point that I'm trying to make (maybe badly) is that the Police are different to most other organisations. They're probably closest to healthcare in that the population, or maybe even distinct communities of a country needs to be able to trust the entire police force has its interest at heart.
From an outside perspective, this is failing in a bad way in the US. It is more than likely the actions of a few that is causing it.
That failure has bad repercussions, things get worse because people start taking justice into their own hands ... it leads to riots, clashes and worse. That's why you can never tolerate any corruption in a justice system.
I've witnessed first hands the riots here in London that resulted from questionable Police actions (we still don't know the full story of those events). It feels like society is crumbling when things get that bad.
I agree that law enforcement policy in the US needs to be reformed, but the idea that police en masse are murderous is wildly inaccurate and generally damaging to police, to communities, and to any potential law enforcement reform (how can you make good reforms if your understanding of the problem is ridiculously flawed? How can you mobilize support for your reforms when more than half of the country rightly opposes you?). To be clear, this is directed at those who put forth these ridiculous generalizations, and I trust that you're not among them.
At this point I can't imagine the local community, particularly minorities, have any trust in the authorities.
Isn't that failure, why not train a new police force with new uniforms and then phase out the old?
Hmm. Population of NI: 1.8m. Population of Baltimore: 600k (declining! as shown by a helpful google graph). So NI is three Baltimores.
Worst year of Troubles: 1972, 479 troubles-related deaths. I'm unclear as to whether that includes "background" non-political crime, so I'll round it up to 500 (current NI murder rate is about 1/100k pop).
Current Baltimore murder rate: 373 in 2017.
Murder rate for three Baltimores: 1119.
That makes today's Baltimore twice as lethal as Troubles NI, with all its carbombs and troops on the streets.
That is a fascinating comparison but one aspect that may not make it a fair is comparing NI region vs. city. It would be interesting to compare just Belfast to Baltimore because thats where the majority of deaths happened.
But as you note, the NI figures is only the political murders so it can only really be compared against a similar subset of Baltimore homicides e.g. "gang violence".
I think the Cosmological Principle can be applied to these situations. The CP roughly states that when we observe the Universe we are seeing a representative part. We are not living in some "special place." Applied here (and in other situations where groups of people act for good or for bad), it would mean that the bad behavior is not because the police are inherently any worse than anybody else, but rather the evolution of the situation led them to this behavior, and, importantly, would lead most sets of people to this behavior.
So replacing the actors would either need to be done periodically, or would have to be done with an entirely new set of rules.
This is also my bias for things like the banking crisis. When something like that happens, it's too easy to blame something like greed. But that's missing the point. If you don't change the rules or some other aspect of the game, you are going to get the same situation again.
Where is the line between the environment and the individual? Even if the Baltimore environment drove the police to criminal behavior, it is unacceptable to let them get away with it.
Obviously there is an issue with the environment but that doesn’t really affect the current situation: namely bad behavior in the police department.
Corrupt and criminal cops need to be prosecuted. The system needs to change going forward (equipment, policies, training, community outreach, etc).
I'm not to let anybody get away with it. I'm just saying that without a change of environment the next group of police are likely to end up doing the same things after some time.
That's definitely true. Punishing the egregious cases is a step in the right direction. But, there are a million other things that need to be fixed, including many things outside the police department's control.
Since the Freddie Gray case in 2015 and the subsequent riots, Baltimore and its police force have undergone significant reforms. The murder rate is up 50% since then for the third year in a row.
Dropping the hammer on police may sound like it would be satisfying, but if I lived in a place where the community suddenly decided to cast the whole police force as villains, I'd move my family out for fear of the spike in crime that will certainly result. I can't think of a city in the US that hasn't endured a murder wave once the vilification of police became fashionable.
Do you have any links showing a connection between police criticism and increasing murder rates in Baltimore?
Or is your argument that police brutality and dirty methods are necessary to keep minorities in line?
Is this like Minority Report's Pre-Crime division, where the Baltimore PD just knows these kids are gonna commit murders when they grow up, so it's better to plant guns on them and remove them now?
Also, "vilification of police" has never been "fashionable"; it's arisen for decades in response to police crimes, and will continue until we restructure wholesale how PDs work.
This isn't a problem with cops, or blacks, or whites, or anything like that. This is a problem with the USA. In some countries the entire police force of the country combined uses fewer bullets per year than the average police officer in the States. The homicide rates can be 40 times smaller in European countries than there. There's just something fundamentally wrong with that country and it would be a mistake to attribute it to something simple like race relations.
It's insane seeing videos of routine traffic stops in the US where both officers leap from their vehicle with guns drawn, ready to escalate the situation at the slightest provocation.
Future, more civilized, societies will one day study the ruins of America with bafflement. Like, what were they thinking? Was this what liberty was to them?
> It's insane seeing videos of routine traffic stops in the US where both officers leap from their vehicle with guns drawn, ready to escalate the situation at the slightest provocation.
Routine traffic stops, or felony traffic stops? I've never heard of that happening for the former, although there may be a few examples out there, but it's far from the norm. But that is indeed normal for a felony traffic stop, like when pulling over a stolen car, or after chasing a suspect from the scene of a crime, or if the car waited a really long time to pull over, or if an outstanding warrant was found when they ran the plates.
That is the point. It looks like outlawing firearms tends to reduce overall gun-related fatalities. Who knew? Apparently USA has some catching up to do.
It's impossible to understate how much your comment has oversimplified the gun debate in the US.
However, let's assume that the government has ideologically came to the same conclusion you've made and drafted a new constitutional amendment which outlawed gun ownership. There are incredible practical issues with actually enforcing it. How do you expect to collect 300 million firearms[1]? What do you do with 300M firearms once you have them?
There are also high rate of illegal (and therefor untracked) gun ownership in gang controlled areas. How do you expect people to feel about being disarmed when they live in an area surrounded by violent, illegal gun owners who haven't been disarmed?
What about the people who are gun collectors? Who may have spent their entire lives tracking down and collecting antique guns? Who's personal wealth may be largely in gun assets? Does the government pay them for each gun? Who the hell is going to trust the government to set a fair price for these guns? How much would it cost to buy 300 million gun and all of the related accessories and ammunition?
I'm barely scratching the surface here and this is assuming that Congress has already passed a constitutional amendment! Banning guns in the United States will never happen, because before any of these practical implications become relevant a new amendment needs to be passed in order to override what our founding fathers and a lot of the country see as the second most important amendment.
The second most important amendment that is responsible for thousands of deaths each year. Sure, the ban will never happen, that's why the USA will just have to deal with an enormous toll of completely avoidable deaths because of theoretical technical difficulties of outlawing such outdated and dangerous concept as civilian firearm ownership.
The problem goes way beyond the US borders, and is a clear sign of corruption among the ruling class.
When a cop is acquitted for murdering some innocent thanks to some intervention form above, he could become in the future a pawn of a private army for whoever was helping him/her from above.
Suppose you're a high profile politician who needs some dirty job to be done, who would you trust more, some thugs recruited around or ex cops who don't serve jail time because of you?
Name one more western first world country besides the US, where cops shooting someone is hardly news. And no, the problem probably isn't guns.
In the US there's about 1 gun per resident, Germany 0.3, UK 0.06, and Canada 0.3. Meanwhile there were about 987 fatal shootings by cops in the US in 2016, compared to 13 in Germany, 4 in the UK, and 9 in Canada. Even adjusting these numbers for population and number of guns per resident, you will still be off by an order of magnitude.
The biggest factors do revolve around guns though. Not just numbers, but the culture which feeds into itself and the perception that guns are not a problem, but a solution ("The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun"). Of course, this then provokes a "Have-a-go-Harry" take on confrontation where people who are woefully ill-equipped to deal with a situation attempt to do so. The lack of training, the fetishisation of guns, and the sheer number of guns are all extremely significant factors in gun crime. Take away any one of these and the rate of gun crime would drop significantly. Unfortunately, any solution has to work within the framework of "no further regulation" to even get close to implementation which rules out swathes of methods
I agree - from afar there seems to be a very unique culture of fear and urge to "protect" prevalent in the US.
I was reading a reddit discussion some time ago, where most commenters concluded that it's fine to shoot a burglar entering your house at night, which feels very alien to me. Sure, it's a frightening situation, but in my mind a burglary clearly doesn't justify the, potentially deadly, use of a gun. Those are not equal actions and measures.
How many cities in the US have police who "murder unarmed black men" regularly to begin with? Of course if that number is small, then the number of cities who regularly convict them will be small. You can't take the small number of cities that regularly convict as evidence of a problem.
Well-documented cases of cops murdering unarmed black men and not being convicted have occurred all over the United States. This isn't a Baltimore problem, it's a US problem.
1. There are well-documented cases of cops murdering unarmed men and not being convicted. "unarmed black men" is a red herring, because there is no evidence that this happens disproportionately on a racial basis.
2. My claim was that there are not many cities with a trend of cops murdering unarmed black men, so your comment isn't a valid rebuttal, however true it may otherwise be.
Your entire claim is a red herring, unless you're claiming it's somehow better that cops murder non-black people and get away with it.
This is like the game where you can say a sentence where emphasis on different words changes the meaning, i.e. "I don't agree that cops murder black people" versus "I don't agree that cops murder black people." In text you can be ambiguous, and if anyone disagrees with your defense of cops, you just back off into the weird statistical claim about race that isn't that important.
So I ask you: are you defending cops murdering people and getting away with it? If not, why are you posting? I suppose it's academically interesting if cops murder all the races evenly, but it sure comes across as if you're defending cops murdering people and getting away with it.
> Your entire claim is a red herring, unless you're claiming it's somehow better that cops murder non-black people and get away with it.
It's not a red herring. The implication that "police murder blacks" is that there is a racist component in police murder, but the data show that this isn't the case, at least not in the last decade. I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether or not this is better or worse.
> So I ask you: are you defending cops murdering people and getting away with it? If not, why are you posting? I suppose it's academically interesting if cops murder all the races evenly, but it sure comes across as if you're defending cops murdering people and getting away with it.
No, of course I'm not defending murder. I'm posting because fixing problems requires properly understanding them. I understand that many people have no qualm with worsening the problems they purportedly care about so long as it lets them get a punch in against some group of people they dislike; however, that's not really my style.
> there is no evidence that this happens disproportionately on a racial basis.
There's actually considerable evidence that adverse interactions with law enforcement of all kinds (and not just LE murder) are not evenly distributed by race.
Whether that is a result of deliberate LE racism vs. other factors which contribute to such encounters being distributed disproportionately by race has more mixed evidence.
Nevertheless, all of the data on LE murder agree that there is no racial disparity in victimhood. We can and should collect better data, but "police disproportionately murder blacks" is not supported by the evidence.
I did a deep dive into the WashPo 2015 and 2016 datasets which are more both more recent and complete than the FBI datasource used by propublica. Further, you can actually inspect in detail the circumstances in which the shooting took place, including whether or not the deceased were armed.
I'm glad the cops in Toronto are paid extremely well. A Constable can earn $90k. There's less likelihood of a cop going to such extents if they don't need to. Of course that's not the only reason, but is likely part of the solution.
Police in big cities get paid well to. Its the FOP union. Cops in my mid sized city make over $100K after 10 years. That's with full health and pension.
I always suspect that a big part of the problem with the US police system is that it's made up of loads of regional forces. In countries with national forces, internal investigations are easier; just bring in people from the other side of the country, who have no particular loyalty to the people they're investigating.
In this particular case, it appears that some of the wrongdoing involved a lieutenant in Internal Affairs. So yes, they do have internal investigations departments.
I am very aware of that but overall it still looks like it if you have a look at all topics, personal stories and experiences etc.
I'd be rather fearful to go the the US, starts at the border, then their cities and then I'd be fearful of their police.
Not to mention all the other issues this country seems to have. The poverty in the USA is worse than in some ex 2nd world countries, so bad that even the UN called upon it.
How many hundreds of thousands pass through American borders with little hassle every day? That is not news (but maybe it should be as well).
Also, one cannot paint with such a wide brush as "The USA." It is the same mistake as any American visiting London, Paris, and Berlin -- and then saying they have seen "Europe." They didn't see Europe -- they saw globalized mega-regions that happened to be located on the European continent.
Unfortunately, Baltimore is an outlier when it comes to violent crime, corruption, and poverty. It is an urban center in decline and in need of all kinds of help. (This is where I stop, else it becomes political very quickly).
Compare Baltimore to places like Denver, Dallas, or Phoenix, and you will see very different cities. The US is huge in geography, population, and economics. Pinpointing an outlier and concluding that the entire country is poor and dangerous does not make for constructive conversation.
We would do ourselves a favor to talk more about the specific problems Baltimore faces, and then look at the broader American context to see which sister similar cities have tackled similar problems.
Hehe, sure.. but these numbers are so low that individual incidents can completely skew the stats for one year.
It's actually more interesting to track number of times weapons are drawn, which is usually also reported as a use of force. It's less precise, but numbers are slightly higher.
Well what about the Innocence Project and all the false narratives it has uncovere? Do some web searches around this kind of stuff and I think the US crime statistics also become similarly unreliable. Maybe look up Ken Dilanian, Gary Webb, Steven Avery, Michael Hastings, etc. Our policing force also has corruption and its share of false narratives. There are a lot of cases like this.
Ignoring the content of the article, why are so many articles on sites like these written so "weird"? There is lots of text and it seems there is very little actual content.
It is like only a few lines actually have something to say, but the rest is just filler content. It is like someone wrote an article of a few lines, and someone else just extended it with random sentences to fill a page.
To make matters worse, usually the page is also polluted with advertisements and referencing articles in between paragraphs.
Because the article is not a primary source, and it’s published on a website that rarely if ever “breaks” a story. The only way for the site to stay in business is to publish glorified rewordings of whatever primary source published a set of facts today. The further you get from the primary source, the more “filler” content is required to justify yet another piece about the same subject.
Are you talking about this specific article? I thought it was unusually factually dense for a blog site, since it is in effect a tl;dr of another, very meaty story.
Not sure about any niche audience here (haven't hung around that long), but that last paragraph got all my red flags up as well. Writers like this need a body cam of their own. Oh wait, that's right, there is one already - called the internet...
Which may prove that proof of rotten behavior is not enough to solve the problem when the root cause is confusion as to what is appropriate behavior in the first place.
But all of those things in the last paragraph happened, and I believe all of them were outside of Baltimore.
Cigarettes was NYC, shot in the back was SC I believe. I don't remember where the person was shot in front of his daughter. I think that was the school cafeteria worker who was shot in his car. None of the police were convicted except the SC one, and the whole incident was caught on video.
> It is not just Baltimore cops. It is cops. They will shoot you in the face in front of your infant daughter. They will choke you to sleep for selling cigarettes. They will shoot you in the back for walking away.
It appears his main point is to say because these Baltimore cops have been accused, all cops are guilty.
Not the OP, but I would say that is implying that _all_ cops could do this. I don't think that is the case. As with anything, you have a small group that thinks it is above the law and acts that way.
The unfortunate reality is that the other LEOs that don't do something about the bad LEOs make themselves just as culpable. Worse, the LEOs that try to do something get punished by their fellow LEOs (even the 'good' ones) and their union. With that situation being the case, a blanket statement about LEOs being bad is not totally off base.
Although this is a topic that is easy to get angry about, I can't honestly trust anything that I read from theroot.com since I have seen many articles that are just racially charged and completely biased. Just a few days ago, they posted something about the ousting of London Breed here in SF (https://www.theroot.com/london-breed-had-a-clean-shot-at-bec...). The problem with that article, is that it blames the ousting purely on racial issues. I feel neutral against London Breed, but I have several SF teacher friends that straight out don't like her. Why? Not because of the color of her skin, but because of some policies that she was supporting. Long story short, the teachers union had a deal with the city to finally get a super crappy raise amount. Something was better than nothing (I still think they are completely underpaid), but to add insult to injury, the raise was dependent on a new property tax to be passed. Since the new property tax is not popular for various valid reasons, London Breed had the bright idea to tell the teachers that "if they wanted the raise", they "had better go out and campaign". This ended up being completely unpopular with the teachers. Stuff like this is IMHO why she lost support. Of course, it is easier to tell a story that she got ousted because she is a woman of color that got knocked out by the rich white man... zero mention of any of these issues. That to me is theroot.com, so I can't take it seriously. Just another Fox News.
Tone aside, most of this is from the transcripts of an on-going court case. And although some of the witnesses are highly dubious, most of these accounts have come from police officers who are testifying. So yeah, they might be lying under oath but I'm not sure that helps your point much.
I think you meant to say teachers. Cops in my town get over $100K after 10 years with full health an pension. My neighbor cops down the street put their kids in private school. The FOP is a powerful union.
Hackers released a bunch of FOP/city contracts a few years ago across the country.
So basically the system is built so that officers can steal from suspects if the money they have is acquired through illegal means. Is there a racial subtext here? Obviously this could not continue unless a significant portion of the police community was fine with it. What's the common police officers pay in Baltimore? How long are they trained? Are they trained professionals (lots of training) or just thugs with guns (very little training)?
I have no experience in this field but I would guess they have a low pay (financial incentive) and very little training (leading to lack of professionalism). Is it so?
And while the racial component of police shootings has been portrayed in a way which differs sharply from the actual data on race/crime/police lethal force, there IS still some element of uncertainty in the exact figures. The fact that there is any uncertainty at all in police killings being reported correctly is absolutely INSANE to me. This is not an area where we can have sloppy data. If a government agent is responsible for the death of a citizen, it is unacceptable that we not have a very clear record of all surrounding circumstance.