Abolish the Police

[Willfully Horn 7916]

40 minutes ago, Incredulity said:

Really?  Read your own description. Good lord.  Do I need to quote the Websters definition?

 

 

Etymological discussions are in my wheelhouse, so, sure. But let’s discuss the word bureaucrat amongst ourselves, and  cease burdening the thread.

Government employees are bad, according to the political right. So, smear them whenever possible. That explains your OP, which you have already agreed was flawed.

1 hour ago, Incredulity said:

 

 

That’s the whole point.

[Incredulity 11555]

1 minute ago, Willfully Horn said:

Etymological discussions are in my wheelhouse, so, sure.

Pedantry is the word you are looking for.

[elfenix 34172]

Tyre Nichols and one of the world's wealthiest companies is some exquisite unrelated grievance signalling

[Judge Roybeanbag 11810]

19 hours ago, Incredulity said:

Pedantry is the word you are looking for.

No, it’s the word you are looking for.   Minor details.  People getting murdered = minor details.  

[Patricio Swayze 17058]

I am not for abolishing. But I sure as hell believe cops should in no way resemble the military. Take away all their toys.

And just a reminder:

[elfenix 34172]

 

[WhatTheBuck 28713]

I agree that it’s generally best not to talk to cops and I avoid them as much as I can. But there was this one time when I was high on LSD and trying to find my hotel in some Wisconsin town (probably Lake Geneva) after a show at Alpine Valley. I stopped into a convenience store to ask for directions and wound up asking a cop who was there. Some other people who were at the show were there and they said they were trying to find the same hotel. The cop volunteered to lead us there. I was first in line behind him and there were at least two cars behind me. Well, that cop was not an experienced road tripper because he didn’t know that when you’re leading a caravan you don’t go through yellow lights. You stop at them otherwise you’ll leave followers stuck at a red light. Well, he drove through a yellow light. I figured fuck it, I’m following a cop, so I drove behind him through the intersection even though the light had turned red. We left everyone else behind.

He got me to my hotel, I thanked him, and he took off. So that was a positive experience. I went and checked in, dropped off my bags at my room, then hit up the bar to have a few cocktails and people watch while I came down.

Good times.

[brakeman 28254]

 

['stache 21777]

I work with an organization that connects elementary kids from low income predominantly Black neighborhoods with cops for activities to “build trust.” I can’t get myself to support it and hate having to bite my tongue. There are 900 cops in this town and about a dozen show up consistently to these things. I’ve met with them and I think they are genuinely good but a small minority. I hate the idea of these kids learning to trust cops from meeting a few good ones when in reality if they have an encounter it almost certainly will not be with one of them and they very well could get shot for holding a stick or panicking even a little bit. Abolish, defund, whatever it takes for a wholesale revamp of how we police people for everyday shit.

Edited January 31, 2023 by 'stache

[brakeman 28254]

[Hermanator 6945]

1 hour ago, 'stache said:

I work with an organization that connects elementary kids from low income predominantly Black neighborhoods with cops for activities to “build trust.” I can’t get myself to support it and hate having to bite my tongue. There are 900 cops in this town and about a dozen show up consistently to these things. I’ve met with them and I think they are genuinely good but a small minority. I hate the idea of these kids learning to trust cops from meeting a few good ones when in reality if they have an encounter it almost certainly will not be with one of them and they very well could get shot for holding a stick or panicking even a little bit. Abolish, defund, whatever it takes for a wholesale revamp of how we police people for everyday shit.

Yeah it's good in theory but it should be mandated for every single cop and they should spend tons of time doing it. That way it weeds out the nut jobs and racists that just want to be a cop to brutalize people. They won't stick around long

[HamsterHookah 112]

An interesting read on how bad studies and folklore can entrench and create a culture, as it pertains to police:

The Police Folklore That Helped Kill Tyre Nichols

A 1992 study claims that officers who show weakness are more likely to be killed. Law-enforcement culture has never recovered.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-police-folklore-that-helped-kill-tyre-nichols

Quote

 

A growing number of police chiefs and district attorneys, though, argue that there is a way to prevent at least some needless killings like Tyre Nichols’s, by focussing on why the police pulled him over. Along with the shibboleth that a failure to dominate encourages cop killing, the nineties study helped implant a second myth in police culture as well—that stopping cars is exceptionally dangerous to officers. That notion rests on the misuse of a statistic: a large percentage of police killed on the job die at roadside pullovers. In reality, such encounters are so numerous that the odds of death at any given stop are no higher than in other police work.

Yet units like scorpion—created to go after gangs, guns, and drugs, not issue tickets for speeding and other traffic violations—often use such trivial infractions as a pretext to justify pulling over a car and looking inside it. Convinced that they risk their life each time they stop such a driver, many officers approach each encounter prepared for a life-or-death struggle. Few may be as hyperaggressive as the officers who killed Nichols, but their fear and belligerence can still evoke a reciprocal urge in a driver to talk back or flee, sparking a deadly cycle.

Stopping cars on little more than a hunch is also hopelessly inefficient. Five or more patrol cars and eight or more officers spent as much as an hour detaining Nichols on a night when they could have been targeting dangerous crime. Multiple studies have concluded that such a dragnet approach is ultimately an ineffective strategy for confiscating the guns, drugs, or other contraband that police seek in cars. Pretextual stops may even be counterproductive: they alienate law-abiding citizens in the high-crime neighborhoods where their coöperation is most essential. “We are talking about using a hammer on a problem that really requires a scalpel,” Stoughton said.

 

 

Edited January 31, 2023 by HamsterHookah

[wildcat09 29260]

1 hour ago, brakeman said:

 

This is misleading. In a hypothetical world in which we actually wanted our police to protect and serve the public, would more training be best? Absolutely. But that's not this world. We don't want our police to protect and serve the public, we want our police to (ostensibly) protect maybe 10-15% of the public by terrorizing the rest (and often terrorizing the portion they're ostensiby supposed to protect as well).  We don't hire police to prevent or even solve crimes, we hire them to beat and shoot people. We don't hire police who want to prevent or solve crimes, we hire police who want to beat and shoot people. We don't train them to prevent or solve crimes, we train them to beat and shoot people more. The problem with American policing isn't a lack of training, the problem is American policing itself. 

[brakeman 28254]

 

 

 

[Willfully Horn 7916]

Saw this on Reddit. This would scare the shit out of me.

 

 

[Willfully Horn 7916]

Ticketing and Turnout: The Participatory Consequences of Low-Level Police Contact

The American criminal legal system is an important site of political socialization: scholars have shown that criminal legal contact reduces turnout and that criminalization pushes people away from public institutions more broadly. Despite this burgeoning literature, few analyses directly investigate the causal effect of lower-level police contact on voter turnout. To do so, we leverage individual-level administrative ticketing data from Hillsborough County, Florida. we show that traffic stops materially decrease (voter) participation for Black and non-Black residents alike, and we also find temporal variation in the effect for Black voters. Although stops reduce turnout more for Black voters in the short term, they are less demobilizing over a longer time horizon. Although even low-level contacts with the police can reduce political participation across the board, our results point to a unique process of political socialization vis-à-vis the carceral state for Black Americans.

 

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/ticketing-and-turnout-the-participatory-consequences-of-lowlevel-police-contact/184A410DFF3DC72F4B9667C8CA3E0730

[WhatTheBuck 28713]

This is a sickness.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/clarissajanlim/tyre-nichols-memphis-police-officer-photo-text

Quote

One Of The Cops Who Beat And Arrested Tyre Nichols Allegedly Took Photos Of Him And Texted It To Friends

A Memphis police officer took photos of Tyre Nichols as he was handcuffed severely injured after the beating, and then texted it to six people, according to documents released by Tennessee officials on Tuesday.

As Nichols sat on the ground handcuffed and struggling not to fall over, Demetrius Haley took out his personal cellphone and took two photos of an "obviously injured" Nichols, the documents from Memphis police said. Haley later admitted that he sent the photo to five people, including two other Memphis police officers, a civilian employee, and a woman acquaintance.

Further investigation revealed that Haley sent the photo to a sixth person as well, according to the documents.

 

[Ten Bears 2479]

Those texts have to released right?  

[NWBuck 8548]

Infuriating (but not surprising) thread:

 

[DigglerontheHoof 21065]

so much for "woke" FBI

[High Plains Drifter 10978]

On 1/29/2023 at 5:16 PM, Brisketexan said:

You have one of our political wings in cult-like thrall to a man who PRAISES cops for beating suspects, and encourages them to be MORE violent (he literally said to hit suspects heads when loading them in cop cars).

 

 

Shows how clueless The DotARd is if he thinks that would be cops being rough on suspects.

 

 

[Mdhorn 5911]

Auxiliary Deputies--no background checks, training, or timesheets? Just guys with guns with no accountability because Culpepper sheriff dipshit deputized them. Sheriff then gets busted by the FBI.  And hey, Dallas in the house.  

https://www.nbcwashington.com/investigations/fbi-seizes-culpeper-sheriff-campaign-cash/3327144/

Spoiler

The News4 I-Team learned the FBI seized $10,000 from the campaign account of Culpeper County Sheriff Scott Jenkins in January. According to campaign filings at the time, it was nearly the entire balance.

In late 2019, as the Virginia General Assembly was considering changes to the commonwealth’s gun laws, Jenkins said several times he would deputize thousands of so-called auxiliary deputies.

Jenkins’ plan, however, was to deputize the volunteers, allowing them to maintain the gun rights the General Assembly may have curtailed.

Those gun law changes did not pass in Richmond that session, and Jenkins’ plan to deputize “thousands” of auxiliaries didn’t come to pass, but today there are dozens of them in a department with roughly 130 full-time deputies.

In searches of court records, the I-Team found 46 auxiliary deputies appointed by Jenkins and sworn in by a circuit court judge. That is more than double the number of auxiliary deputies authorized by a Culpeper County ordinance “not to exceed fifteen (15) percent of the paid force.”

According to the sheriff’s own general order, auxiliary deputies are supposed to be trained. According to the results of a Virginia Freedom of Information Act request, the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services only has training records for three of the 46 auxiliaries.

blah, blah, blah, furthermore, no firearm records, or timesheets, blah, blah, blah, auxiliary douchebag Rahim, who is not permitted to own a gun because of a prior felony conviction...

According to a court transcript the commonwealth’s attorney inquired about where Rahim lived. Residency, the commonwealth’s attorney explained, is one of the requirements for gun right restoration. According to the transcript, Rahim swore under oath he lived in Culpeper. In the same transcript, his “dwelling place” is listed as the very same street as the sheriff's brother – the same street where the sheriff's office holds its annual Halloween charity event.

Even more curious are court documents from a pending lawsuit filed when Rahim allegedly stopped paying for two Lamborghinis. A U.S. Marshals Service form showing addresses where those cars might be located for seizure includes one house the I-Team found is owned by the sheriff himself. Rahim and the sheriff did not answer questions about that.

A second Culpeper County auxiliary deputy, John Guandolo, caught the I-Team’s attention as well. Caleb Kieffer of the Southern Poverty Law Center calls Guandolo’s participation in the auxiliary program “greatly concerning.”

Guandolo was once an FBI agent. He’s now a law enforcement trainer who lives in Dallas and touts being a Culpeper auxiliary deputy on his company biography.

The SPLC tracked Guandolo and his “Understanding the Threat” training program for years, saying it uses anti-Muslim rhetoric and conspiracy theories.

“We view him as one of the leading anti-Muslim figures in this country,” Kieffer said. “We designate his organization as a hate group.”

He went on to say the auxiliary badge helps “legitimize” Guandolo and his work.

Dobrin, the volunteer policing expert, summed up his concerns reminding the I-Team the only people the sheriff really answers to are the people of Culpeper.

"The sheriff is second in command,” Dobrin said. “The voting public is the top of that chart. And so, in an elected official like a sheriff, the answer is that they answer to the public."

Think we found our corruption--not much accountability.  Whackadoodles with badges, deputizing more whackadoodles with guns.  

 

Edited April 12, 2023 by Mdhorn