The Gaming Den

Thought about this before bed last night.

PoliteNewb wrote:I personally have no power to hire or fire any police officer; they are not elected, and they are not answerable to me except by civil suit.

This is all true, but you can influence them. Write and call the mayor and the police chief, councilmembers and the newspaper. Citizen complaints matter, especially in an election year, or if they come from several people. You're paying those idiots to represent you, so let them know they're screwing up.

Also, filing a complaint with Internal Affairs will really screw with a police officer's advancement. It's difficult to get a cop fired (and in reality, it SHOULD be hard to get one fired), but there are things that can be done.

Also, in Virginia the County Sheriff is in fact an elected position. And I can make the move to fire them every two years.

Sir Neil wrote:Pepper spraying peaceful protesters isn't an officer safety issue, but we aren't limited to using force just to protect ourselves. If someone disobeys our lawful commands, you gave us the authority to use force to make them. It's right there in the title: "Law Enforcement".

It's mostly an issue of police officers being given illegal orders and then following them. That's a systemic issue that cuts across national boundaries. Whether you're overthrowing the corrupt Romanov dynasty or president for life Mubarak, you can pretty much always count on the police to show up on camel back to beat the shit out of unarmed demonstrators and the army to storm the palace to protect them.

It's fundamentally how the social positions are constructed. Police are there to defend the status quo and the army is there to protect the people of the country. Most of the time that's pretty much the same thing, but as soon as a majority of people become unhappy with the status quo and start requesting change... then it's the police who show up to fire water cannons on the Blacks of Birmingham and the soldiers who show up to force the governor to let the school buses through.

For most of your life, the police are on your side. Because the status quo is the thing that allows you to get energy and water brought to your home and to go to work and spend money without being eaten by Mad Max cannibals. But right now, a super majority of people want taxes on the super-rich increased and that would be a very large change in the way things have been going for several decades. So right now, the police are finding themselves structurally the enemies of the American people, and that's why they are pepper spraying pregnant women and beating the crap out of petite Asian students with clubs.

The police can always be counted on to side with the oligarchs in every country in every circumstance where the oligarchs are at odds with the population. And that is why the police never busted peoples' heads at Tea Party rallies and they go apeshit at OWS.

-Username17

Sir Neil wrote:

DSMatticus wrote:The point is that you can refuse to immediately comply without being dangerous.

No, you really can't.

We don't read minds, and have no way to know how far they'll take their resistance.

Reading minds is really rather easy, Sylvia Brown does it, after all. It's all about playing the probabilities. Certain assumptions are going to be true more often than not. Certain assumptions are going to be true in almost all circumstances.

The majority of people you meet, well over 99.99% of them, don't want to kill you. It's a fairly safe assumption to make.

PoliteNewb wrote: #3 shows a misguided set of priorities; LE departments seriously do consider speed trapping a higher priority than crime patrolling, because it pulls in big money.

There were over 42,000 traffic-related fatalities in the US in 2006. There were only 32,000 traffic related fatalities in the US in 2010. That's 10,000 lives saved.

There were only 17,000 homicides in the US in 2009 and 15,000 in 2009.

You can seriously save more lives by improving traffic safety than you can by stopping all violent crime.

hyzmarca wrote:The majority of people you meet, well over 99.99% of them, don't want to kill you. It's a fairly safe assumption to make.

I would think that assumption is significantly less true for police officers than it is for the average people. Not much, but less, and certainly more circumstantial.

FrankTrollman wrote:It's mostly an issue of police officers being given illegal orders and then following them.

This is the reason that eliminating the social safety net is critical to the formation of a police state. It really changes the equation if disobeying wrongful orders means your kids will starve. Putting up a strong safety net will curb this kind of bullshit and encourage whistle-blowing in general.

A little more food for thought regarding police use of force, changes to it, and the way it is viewed by the public.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/radley-ba ... 23848.html

That reminds me of the article I was linked to the other day here . This sort of shit is happening too often.


The next one isn't as related, but figured I'd link it.
This Sergeant has more than 40 IA investigations and a personnel file that looks more like a rap sheet. Still on the force.

I amend my previous statement. Citizen complaints can be effective if you don't live in Florida.

I've never heard of SWAT being used outside of drug raids or hostage situations, PoliteNewb, and I'm puzzled why they felt the need to waste all that money when most of those could be accomplished just as safely and cheaper with a few cops and a ticket book.

Expense isn't a big enough issue to enforce any restraint at a lot of departments due to the proliferation of soldier-to-cop programs and procurement deals that shifts military surplus to police departments at steep discounts. It leads to situations where you may very well have a department that is understaffed and over equipped because buying gear keeps suppliers happy and nets you political backers while hiring more cops and giving them a stick and an old .38 costs you money but doesn't really do your buddies any good.

Whipstitch wrote:Expense isn't a big enough issue to enforce any restraint at a lot of departments due to the proliferation of soldier-to-cop programs and procurement deals that shifts military surplus to police departments at steep discounts. It leads to situations where you may very well have a department that is understaffed and over equipped because buying gear keeps suppliers happy and nets you political backers while hiring more cops and giving them a stick and an old .38 costs you money but doesn't really do your buddies any good.

Not to mention, once the department has all that whiz gear and a highly-trained SWAT team, there is considerable pressure on them to put it to use, if only to demonstrate that it is not a waste of money. And to justify further expenditures/expansions.

Much like many government agencies are required to spend their entire budget, because showing a surplus is basically an invitation to a budget cut. If the LE agencies don't make use of their SWAT teams and tanks, people are going to wonder if they really need them. Which in many cases...they honestly don't. They are seriously swatting flies with a chainsaw.

I mean, there are people advocating that SWAT teams should be employed regularly and unnecessarily just to they can 'stay in practice' for the times when they're really needed.

Neil, I strongly encourage you to read Balko's piece "Overkill", about the increase in militarization of police in America.

PoliteNewb wrote:They are seriously swatting flies with a chainsaw.

Heh.

Sir Neil wrote: I've never heard of SWAT being used outside of drug raids or hostage situations, PoliteNewb, and I'm puzzled why they felt the need to waste all that money when most of those could be accomplished just as safely and cheaper with a few cops and a ticket book.

I was in a bit of a rush earlier but I have a bit more to say. You gotta be careful with the connotations attached to the word "drug raid" when talking about no-knocks or failure to announce situations. People tend to get all aboard the presumption of guilt train and start thinking about some gangsta rap or Miami Vice bullshit with big bales o' cocaine laying around when the reality is typically way more mundane than that and the number of no-knocks have predictably increased over the years as departments have gone from viewing them as a novelty to another thing in the tooblox. In any case failing to identify no longer necessarily results in evidence being thrown out depending on what state you're in thanks to a '06 SCOTUS ruling. So in a lot of cases the only thing that really encourages the cops to restrain themselves is the notion that to fail to do so would make them bad people who should feel bad about it. It really doesn't do public safety any favors, particularly once you factor in that this shit still happens in states where homeowners ostensibly have the right to defend themselves and their homes with firearms. Apparently the official stance on killing a marine in their own home is "Well, shit happens."

PoliteNewb wrote:Neil, I strongly encourage you to read Balko's piece "Overkill", about the increase in militarization of police in America.

Falls sort of flat for me. I think it's ... horrific that address mistakes and lying snitches get innocent people killed, but I don't see it as an inevitable result of police militarization. I do see it as a good argument against "quantity over quality" of arrests, and federal funding keyed to the same.

(Personally, I am more concerned about the ... policification of the military.)

Inevitable is a strong word, but I think it is reasonable to expect such things to follow from a fundamentally adversarial approach to dealing with the public and for the most part I believe that has been borne out.

FrankTrollman wrote: The police can always be counted on to side with the oligarchs in every country in every circumstance where the oligarchs are at odds with the population. And that is why the police never busted peoples' heads at Tea Party rallies and they go apeshit at OWS.

-Username17

Explain yourself, Frank.