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Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

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Re: Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

#231

Post by pandaman »

hobs wrote: post #222
steveeq1 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, downvote instead of answering the question.

While there are dozens of answers to your strawman, here is a simple one: Black people are not responsible for the safety of the citizenry, black people are not defined by the need to protect and serve us, black people are in fact, just people. Cops on the other hand are responsible for the safety of the citizenry, are given special powers due to the additional trust and responsibility we (all the other people) grant…

>The comparison is ridiculous.

Indeed. It's very rare for people to call local gang/NCAAP/#BLM/ACORN/other black orgs when police breaks into their house. The opposite, though, happens all the time.

Re: Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

#232

Post by Frondo »

jensen123 wrote: post #206
Frondo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of police are corrupt, and there is an absolute ton of racism in this country so we believe it when the cop tells a lie that implicates a black guy. Not racist like we're out in klan hoods on the weekend, and it's definitely not like we're consciously choosing to be racist--this is just lifetimes of unexamined biases, media information, etc. We have these little biases that tell us not to trust the black guy's…

I guess you are correct that there is a lot of racism here and there. However, there is also a lot of rabid anti-racism. For example, you'll never read an article in the mainstream press about how blacks, on average, have lower IQs than white people, although this clearly is relevant in the whole crime debate. Why are blacks more likely to commit crimes than whites? The IQ explains a lot, but mentioning it is taboo,…

I have noticed a lot of this "scientific racism" junk creeping into HN lately. It's a little worrying to see it on a tech forum like this.

Re: Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

#233

Post by KirinDave »

jMyles wrote: post #230
KirinDave wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely agree the "war on drugs" and racial bias in enforcement disproportionately hurts people of color. No one disagrees with that in this conversation. What we disagree with is your decision to blame the law in this specific case rather than a racist conspiracy. The reason your actions are scary here is that they follow a pattern of dehumanizing the crime and divorcing the responsibility for said disgusting a…

> They were not following a racist law. Prohibition is a racist law. It is designed to strengthen the institution of racism. It was openly created for this purpose. It seems that you are trying to act like this isn't the case. > ignoring the perpetrators instead of the victims. The perpetrators include not only those who participated in these acts in Alabama, but also those who conspired to pretextually pass these la…

> The perpetrators include not only those who participated in these acts in Alabama, but also those who conspired to pretextually pass these laws in the first place.

Which law specifically legalizes planting evidence on people and then covering up evidence of it?

> They aren't two different things; prohibition (and its material form, the prison state) is the same thing as racism.

No. Prohibition is part of what racism is in the west, but it is not the "same thing." There are many forms of racism people struggle with every day that don't have anything to do with prohibition.

As far as I can tell, you're appropriating this argument to turn an important chance to remind people how brutalized black people are in America and turn it into a conversation about drug use and enforcement. I find this reprehensible and racist in and of itself, and I will no longer entertain a conversation with you.

Re: Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

#234

Post by seany »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #22
hackuser wrote: post #8

It seems like there is a smoking gun in this case (though I didn't review the evidence thoroughly). Widespread availability of video recording and distribution has provided many more smoking guns. Certainly, there are many more incidents where no smoking gun evidence is available. For a long time, black Americans have been claiming that such things happen and were widely ignored or disbelieved. It was and is a grave…

Opinion: 1) Police are corrupt. Maybe not all of them, but enough of them that "police are corrupt" is true. This will always be the case. Police don't fight crime, nor prevent it. They create it. If you think this isn't so you haven't had enough exposure to them. Maybe my opinion is coloured by my experience: illegal search of person, car, and house. They ransacked my house, stole money and property from me. It took…

I'm a white guy that lives in the bay area, and I've had this opinion of police for years (20+?). They only exist to enforce the rules of the state, they have no duty to protect or help you in any way.

Re: Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

#235

Post by lectrick »

rewqfdsa wrote: post #202
lectrick wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correlations with race are highly suspect as well as self-reinforcing. I believe they should be abandoned because the damage they cause (by perpetuating a problem) may be greater than any possible benefit they provide.

Correlations with race are _facts_. Impartially collected data collated with robust statistical methods results in race falling out of the mix as an important correlate with all sorts of things; we then publish these correlations. Which part should we abandon? Impartial data collection? Robust statistics? Publication of the results? Are you suggesting that certain facts are too dangerous to know?

Correlations with eye color may also be _facts_, but this does not mean that they are important. And (hopefully by definition, since these are all just physical attributes), such correlations (as ridiculous as it sounds) should be no more, or less, important than racial, gender, age or other correlations. They're all just tools to oppress minorities and treat people as groups rather than individuals, which is good for a single brain trying to make sense of the world but bad for the individuals in the group.

Are you aware of the blue eyes/brown eyes experiment by teacher Jane Elliott? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott

In any event, the problem, if any, is cultural and economic, NOT racial. I lived with a white Irish guy who grew up in an entirely black neighborhood, and if you closed your eyes you would have zero doubt he was black. One of the coolest (and most mind-blowing) guys I've ever met.

Have you read "Night" by Elie Wiesel? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_(book) The Nazis had plenty of correlations (I'm sorry, _FACTS_) to being Jewish, put it that way... and we all know how that ended up.

The only racial correlative that makes any sense to track, to me, is sickle-cell anemia, because it is helpful.

The problem is your brain (and my brain, and everyone's brain). As soon as you learn of an unfortunate correlation with race (or sex... did you know almost all rapists are men? Did you know most people interested in math and science are male? Etc.), you tend to lean on it too much to make judgments across ALL of the correlate, and therein lies the serious problem, because the outliers get _the_shaft_. The well-meaning black man experiences bias on a daily basis and gets worse jobs, the science-interested woman gets scoffed at and thus discouraged by male teachers, and the good gentleman never gets the girl because she crosses the street before actually meeting him out of fear.

So, fucking quit it, man. It's not helpful, in any way, shape, or form. It is disingenuous to all humans, to restrict a handful of them based on a correlation with a physical attribute. It's giving in to the laziness of your brain trying to oversimplify a complex world. It's actively evil, in fact, the equivalent of grouping all Koreans together and calling them "gooks" because the idea that you're shooting actual humans is just too distasteful a thought.

Don't you see? It's ENTIRELY easier for you to not hire an entirely qualified black man, if you're spouting this bullshit.

Re: Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

#236

Post by jMyles »

KirinDave wrote: post #233
jMyles wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They were not following a racist law. Prohibition is a racist law. It is designed to strengthen the institution of racism. It was openly created for this purpose. It seems that you are trying to act like this isn't the case. > ignoring the perpetrators instead of the victims. The perpetrators include not only those who participated in these acts in Alabama, but also those who conspired to pretextually pass these la…

> The perpetrators include not only those who participated in these acts in Alabama, but also those who conspired to pretextually pass these laws in the first place. Which law specifically legalizes planting evidence on people and then covering up evidence of it? > They aren't two different things; prohibition (and its material form, the prison state) is the same thing as racism. No. Prohibition is part of what racis…

No need to be hostile.

Perhaps you just haven't been exposed to the facts about drug prohibition (and its history) before.

Let me recommend a book which will crystallize these things for you:

http://newjimcrow.com/

> how brutalized black people are in America and turn it into a conversation about drug use and enforcement.

So, you keep making this mistake. I didn't change the topic; supporters of prohibition did when they argued for its passage.

You keep acting like prohibition is about "drug use" - it's not. It is about racial oppression, plain and simple.

Be reminded that "drug use" is almost completely legal. Of the tens of thousands of drugs in the contemporary pharmacopoeia, just a few are prohibited. These were selected specifically (and openly) because of their traditional use among non-white people.

Everybody uses drugs. Out of everybody, only poor people, and overwhelmingly poor people of color, suffer the effects of prohibition.

In fact, it's only recently (in the past 30 or so years) that prohibition (the "war on drugs") has even had a pretense of being race-neutral. From 1914 until ~1970, drug laws were open discussed as a way to perform racial oppression.

> "There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others."

> “Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men."

These are things that our current prohibition's earliest champion, Harry Anslinger, appears to have said whilst holding national office as the chief of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

So again: prohibition is not currently, and has never been, about drug use. It is a policy enacted in a spirit of racism, with a racist intent, and per its design, continues the institution of racism. It has no other goal.

No matter what other policy change may come to this land, if prohibition continues, racism will not have been defeated.

Re: Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

#237

Post by hsod »

saiya-jin wrote: post #210
policestate101 wrote: post #124

America is a police state, ruled by a corrupt elite Willing to break laws, rewrite them if possible, create secret ones when needed, they will torture, murder, commit war crimes, this the country Americans reside in, only they do not want to except this increasingly glaring truth. What happens instead is people who speak out are ignored, derided, and silenced.

actually, what stroke me hard when I went from Europe to US in 2003 for summer student work was how much more repressive the whole system felt. For example coworkers (in central Hollywood) openly afraid of cop cars going in opposite direction, because they had forgotten an unscrewed bottle of alcohol which was not in the trunk. It might very well be we'll be in similar place in 10 years here, but it was quite a shock…

Maybe it's just my American blinders, but I don't see how "you can get arrested for driving with an open container of alcohol" is particularly repressive.

Re: Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

#238

Post by jMyles »

simoncion wrote: post #198
jMyles wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're talking past each other. I'm not saying that fabrication of testimony isn't possible - I fully acknowledge that perjurious conduct occurred in this very case! What I'm saying is that fabrication of testimony and planting of evidence aren't the same thing. You aren't going to be oppress an entire class ( / race) of people by producing "victim" after "victim" whose basis is perjurious. Some, sure. Especia…

> What I'm saying is that fabrication of testimony and planting of evidence aren't the same thing. Correct. Planting of evidence is more difficult and more unlikely than fabrication of testimony. Fabrication of testimony is lying about the facts of a matter. Planting of evidence is lying about the facts of a matter in addition to leaving physical traces that corroborate your lies. > But in order to have this assembly…

I agree in full with everything you have said.

Where I'm a little lost is how you project this into a future where drug prohibition (and other consensual "crime") doesn't exist.

So, sure, you have a few gnarly guys who will perjur themselves for you - but what do you accuse people of? What is the crime that replaces drug possession?

Without victims, you can't really make this work...?

Re: Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

#239

Post by drdeca »

sukulaku wrote: post #201
NamTaf wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try again without the facetiousness. I don't mean like a piece of paper saying 'thou shalt'. I mean by implementing systems where, by design, the decisionmakers over roles that police each other have no way to influence one another. For example, those who are in charge of policing the police shouldn't also be in charge of working with the police on policing other people. I don't mean auditors, I mean those who then r…

Sorry but what you're suggesting basically just amounts to rearranging the chairs on the Titanic's deck. Besides, it's been "tried" already, in this form: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers - and by now it's clear how much that helped, right? In reality, "the separation of powers" was just a bullshit PR-distraction, meant to give us a false sense of security, to alleviate the nagging subconscious awar…

So, you are proposing ancap? Or, just the an part I guess.

Re: Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

#240

Post by jack9 »

iamsohungry wrote: post #215
pdkl95 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe not all of them, but enough of them that "police are corrupt" is true. Usually I would never generalize the actions of a subset to the entire group, but in this case there is a key difference that justifies "(all/most) police are corrupt": the failure to clean their own house of the "bad apples". When a supposedly "good" policeman gives cover and protection to a criminal in their department instead of reporti…

It's worth noting that it's not enough for police to passively not cover for each other's crimes. It's the job of police to actively investigate crimes. When corruption is so rampant, any police department which doesn't have a well-funded internal affairs bureau with extensive prosecutorial support is not doing its job.

> It's the job of police to actively investigate crimes.

In the US, this is not true. The police, at large, are there to control a situation and assign blame. Investigation is to those ends.

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