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To the 4 white male policemen who beat me for checking the health of [detainee]

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Re: To the 4 white male policemen who beat me for checking the health of [detainee]

#81

Post by harry8 »

AWildDHHAppears wrote: post #51
williamgb wrote: post #11

Interesting to see that "white" managed to lead the spate of pejoratives toward the end of the article ("Each of 4 white, ignorant, racist asshole police officers"). I've been the victim of interracial crime, at least once due to my race. I did not consider the race of my assailants to be anywhere near the top of the list of characteristics to which I should like to object.

Without any facts, I'm skeptical. He should either move on with his life, or make a formal complaint and/or a lawsuit. Taking the middle road with a story with few details on Medium doesn't help anyone.

I didn't believe Bill Cosby's accusers. Neither did law enforcement. Seeing the cover of the magazine with so many accusers, yeah maybe I and law enforcement were both wrong and it needed a closer look. Didn't want to believe it.

It could be the same with all of these stories of law enforcement behaving very badly. It seems like a weird thing for so many disparate people to be fabricating. Maybe there is a problem and reporting it isn't getting toward a solution? If it happens to you, silence is almost certainly the wrong course of action. I don't want to believe there is an endemic problem with law enforcement either. What I want shouldn't matter at all.

Re: To the 4 white male policemen who beat me for checking the health of [detainee]

#82

Post by M_Grey »

berntb wrote: post #26
soneil wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's always made me sad. My ex was American - when we moved to Ireland, I made a habit of routinely (once a week or so) asking random policemen for directions to places, just to teach her that they're entirely approachable here. The closest thing we had to a bad experience, was one chap who took it upon himself to walk with us until we could see our destination, just to make sure we found it. I'd only wanted to was…

Weird, it seems counterproductive. Why doesn't the US police in bigger cities try to integrate with the citizens? Is the violence risk so big or are there legal reasons?

The history of policing in the US is a bad one, rife with torture and abuses that are heard about for decades until various notorious cases force the public to demand change. You also have generations of people who were legally allowed to be abused by police because of their race, or economic status.

That shapes the character of a country's police, and the people's response to them.

Re: To the 4 white male policemen who beat me for checking the health of [detainee]

#83

Post by refurb »

fnbr wrote: post #62
pmalynin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats interesting, I'm not sure which part of Canada you are from, but here in Edmonton the police are very friendly and as far as I know that is the majority opinion. Personally, and even amongst my friends (which ranges from Tim Horton's Employees to CS Professors) the opinion is the same. In general, especially in parts of downtown, I feel safer with the police around. I don't, however, have the same feeling in th…

Not trying to nit pick here, as my experiences with Edmonton police have been similar, but my fiancee, who's black, has had different experiences with Edmonton police. Nothing as negative as this, but experiences that left her disheartened (police saying: well what should do you expect us to do? when she was jumped by a number of gang members at WEM). I also suspect that if you were to speak to Aboriginal Edmontonian…

I remember a long time ago, I think it was in Saskatchewan, where the RCMP would pick up drunk indians, drive them way out of the city and drop them off. In the middle of winter. Keep in mind this is Saskatchewan where it's typically -30C at night in the winter.

Several of them froze to death.

Re: To the 4 white male policemen who beat me for checking the health of [detainee]

#84

Post by [deleted] »

davesque wrote: post #54
whatshisface wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Each of 4 white, ignorant, racist asshole police officers." While he was probably trying to use it in an aggressive sense, I'd avoid getting too offended. You can't expect people to talk nicely right after being wronged like that. If I were telling people about something like that I would try to speak as calmly as possible, but I'd be pretty upset if someone found a slip-up as an excuse to ignore me.

I feel like it's important to point out that, while it's certainly understandable that a person might latch onto characteristics like that in reaction to that kind of a situation, it is, nonetheless, racism. In order for racism to stop, it eventually has to stop with no exceptions.

[deleted]

Re: To the 4 white male policemen who beat me for checking the health of [detainee]

#85

Post by trungonnews »

trungonnews wrote: post #64
otterley wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you didn't intend any offense, but for future reference, "colored" is considered archaic and borderline racial-epithet in the U.S. (I realize it's quite normal and non-offensive elsewhere.)

I didn't mean to offend. What word is more appropriate to describe cops who are not white?

I only learned English after 11 year old. What a confusing language... I thought you guys might know some fancy word, but you only switched the words around.

Re: To the 4 white male policemen who beat me for checking the health of [detainee]

#86

Post by fake-name »

eternalban wrote: post #22
rayiner wrote: post #19

This shit has been happening to poor black and Hispanic people for a long time. In a sick way, it's a good thing that it's happening to doctors now. It's easy for comfortable suburbanites to vote pro-police, but now that the cancer has spread and police are brazenly abusing everyone else, it won't be so easy to ignore. We need a system of collective punishment for such conduct. "Good" police officers should fear losi…

> "Good" police officers should fear losing their livelihoods for helping cover up the abuses of "bad" ones. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/16/baltimore-joe-cryst... There are good cops out there, no doubt about it.

Maybe, but the few "bad apples" have spoilt the bunch.

Re: To the 4 white male policemen who beat me for checking the health of [detainee]

#87

Post by gravypod »

skywhopper wrote: post #29
trhway wrote: post #7

>“He is resisting arrest!” >They were running this weird fake dialog in the background. it seems to be a pattern how they run plausible deniability and can do whatever they want - one policeman may "see" something, like a gun, and announce it thus providing the other with full legal reason to act, i.e. shoot in the case of gun. If that "seeing" by the first happens to be just a mistake, such mistake can never be puni…

Yes they are trained (whether explicitly or informally between each other) to do this. It will continue so long as it works.

I'd like to ask you for a hypothetical. Say you are a police officer and one of your coworkers shouts "GUN" and you don't directly see one. You see your coworker freaking out, you see them drawing, and you see the other suspect moving.

What do you do? Do you draw your gun/taser? I'd do that just going off of what my coworker has said. It's entirely reasonable to suspect there to be a gun.

Now I'd like to run through two things that can happen from this point. The suspect either has a gun or does not. If I draw my gun, point it at the suspect, and wait till I see a gun (what the officers of the law are trained to do) is that not a reasonable reaction?

What happens if I say "Oh I don't see it so I'm going to stand here and watch"? My partner and some innocent by-standards might very well get hurt because now I have to wait for my senses to catch up with what's going on before I react.

I don't think it's unreasonable for cops to be allowed to go off what other cops are saying. If it can be proved that a cop has lied then that's another story. They should be punished to the full extent of the law for lying. Sadly though it's not illegal for them to lie to or about us, it's only illegal for us to lie to them.

Re: To the 4 white male policemen who beat me for checking the health of [detainee]

#88

Post by pessimizer »

rayiner wrote: post #19

This shit has been happening to poor black and Hispanic people for a long time. In a sick way, it's a good thing that it's happening to doctors now. It's easy for comfortable suburbanites to vote pro-police, but now that the cancer has spread and police are brazenly abusing everyone else, it won't be so easy to ignore. We need a system of collective punishment for such conduct. "Good" police officers should fear losi…

> "Good" police officers should fear losing their livelihoods for helping cover up the abuses of "bad" ones.

Good police officers do fear losing their lives and their livelihoods for not looking the other way.

I'm a strong advocate for hotlines specifically for police officers to report other officers, backed by civilian investigative authorities with no loyalties or connections to the police force, but with the ability to investigate and a primary mandate to protect the reporting officer. Plenty of police officers are disgusted by a lot of the people they work with. I've met them.

I also think that policemen involved in cover-ups of police shootings should generally be punished more than the shooters. For the shooter, this was a usually spontaneous act spurred by fear and rage, and happened in an instant. The same cannot be said for the cover-up. The cover-ups create an environment of impunity that make future shootings more likely.

Re: To the 4 white male policemen who beat me for checking the health of [detainee]

#89

Post by trungonnews »

Meegul wrote: post #57
trungonnews wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't pay the cop. I had to pay the towing company. The cop told the towing company to impound my car.

That makes no difference in the end. The police caused you financial harm, with no restitution. They should be held liable for that under civil law.

Forgot to say that they also took away my driver license for a whole month. I wish I knew how I can get the tow fee reimbursed.

Re: To the 4 white male policemen who beat me for checking the health of [detainee]

#90

Post by SwellJoe »

duaneb wrote: post #47
Meegul wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it at all legal for the government to demand payment for something when you are not convicted of a crime? It's effectively a 100% discriminatory, corrupt, and unaccountable tax. Completely reprehensible.

This isn't even the most absurd part about citizen/cop cash transactions: under civil forfeiture, they can take up to (iirc) $10,000 of your cash no justification or remediation path. Really, all they need is a traffic stop or a (suspect) smell of cannabis in the air.

There is no such limit, in most jurisdictions, as far as I know...and, if you happen to be carrying a lot of cash, it is viewed as evidence of wrongdoing.

Hell, Oklahoma has begun using a device that allows them to take money from debit cards, as well.

My position on police has evolved over the years to the point where I don't even really believe in "good cops", anymore. The entire system seems built to excise honest cops and reward bullies; I can't name a single whistle-blower cop who has kept their job, while the crimes they documented have generally gone entirely unpunished and the perpetrators often remain on the police force.

The only reasonable path forward I see is tearing the whole damned system down and starting over, with a focus on prevention, rehabilitation over punishment, restitution when plausible, de-escalation rather than military style raids, and overall a lot better training in psychology and community policing and less training in how to kill and maim people.

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