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My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

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Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#391

Post by FireBeyond »

eyerony wrote: post #91
bane wrote: post #71

When I was younger I lived in a fairly rural area. I was driving home late from work one day on a remote highway and came across one of the most horrific accidents I've ever seen. A driver was pulling onto the highway and was hit by a police cruiser at an almost impossibly high speed. The highway was marked at 55mph, and under normal conditions, the driver of the other car would have had plenty of time to pull out, s…

Once saw a police car in a smallish town whip a u-turn for no clear reason, no lights, nothing, nearly hit a car that was pulling out of a bank parking lot and the driver of which had clearly already looked that way and seen no-one coming, then the cop freaked out, u-turned again (lights this time) and pulled over the car they nearly hit. Guess whatever they were breaking traffic laws and driving very dangerously to…

Absolutely. I'm a firefighter. I was the designated driver for two friends. We leave a bar, and I pull up to the intersection. I have a flashing red traffic light, and the cross traffic has a flashing yellow. There is a police car sitting at his flashing yellow, windows down, watching (it's closing time, and there are several people milling about on the street, the usual). I wait. He doesn't move. I wait for approximately 10 seconds before turning, with my signal, left.

I'm immediately lit up. "Failure to yield". In addition I get an FST after "failing" the vertical nystagmus test (bear in mind at this point, my one and only pint of beer is coming up on five hours old). Cop is insistent I'm drunk, says he can go the DUI route, because my "behavior" in "failing to yield" shows I'm impaired, regardless of actual numbers. I'm lucid, but frustrated. Debates merits of blood draw, etc. Tickets me, "Get out of downtown and get home, I think we both know you're getting off lucky".

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#392

Post by dragonwriter »

jeffdavis wrote: post #328
Kluny wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How confident are you that your numbers are accurate, given that police self-report their numbers? For instance, I've been reading lately that black men have been found hanging from trees by nooses in California recently, and that the deaths were ruled suicide. Do you believe that these deaths were suicide?

I have quite a bit of faith in numbers related to deaths. There is a lot of paperwork involved, a body (with bullet holes), perhaps a 911 call, often a medical examiner or coroner's report, potentially lawsuits, funerals, etc. And now there are cameras a lot of places. I guess there could be outright premeditated cold-blooded murders that are disguised as suicides, but I can't imagine that's very common. I mean, you…

> I mean, you can't bring a body in with a zillion bullet holes and tell the coroner it was suicide.

Well, no, because “zillion” isn't a number.

But with actual numbers of bullet holes, yes, history shows that happens. And that the inconsistent injuries either get convenient explanations, or are left off the report as if they didn't happen. Now, when these things get additional public scrutiny, it's an embarrassment, but that usually hasn't happened, which is why there is a culture of impunity.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#393

Post by bdamm »

noobaccount wrote: post #356
Wohlf wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Or, from another angle, it means that criminality in US is so much worse than the average EU country that it's ok to kill so many people in the name of safety. Number of homicides in the USA in 2017: 19,510 Deaths per 100,000 population: 6.0 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm Number of homicides in Italy in 2017: 357 Deaths per 100,000 population: 0.6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Italy

Wow, how can we be more like Italy?

Or really, like pretty much any developed nation.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#394

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #316
pjc50 wrote: post #22

> “I blame myself,” she kept saying. “I never let him out on Halloween. A bunch of Black boys together. I shouldn’t have let him out. But he begged me.” Notice that while average white parents might worry about criminals before letting their kids out on the street, the black parents worry (with good reason) about the police. (Just to spell it out: this is why so many BLM activists feel comfortable saying "abolish the…

Coming from a poor (and incidentally very white) area myself, I understand the sentiment behind 'defund the police', but being comfortably middle class now, I also recognize it's something of a nonstarter with people who don't have that experience. I prefer 'Police Out Of Poor Neighborhoods'. Police actually add value in rich neighborhoods (maybe by definition), and it's got a humorous acronym. Edit: And police are m…

I'm sympathetic to the idea that neighborhoods have a right not to be policed if they don't want to. But historically, the alternative to effective policing hasn't been peace and harmony; it's been protection rackets and violent mobs. I think we need to have some confidence that we're not plunging cities back to the crime rates of the 90s before we go down that route.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#395

Post by austincheney »

krapp wrote: post #341
austincheney wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everyone in southern states visibly carry guns. That is not an excuse to ignore or forgive an absence of data or accountability.

>Almost everyone in southern states visibly carry guns. Umm... no they don't.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Texas

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Arizona

As two quick examples check out the open carry laws in Texas and Arizona where registered personally owned firearms per capita is among the highest in the country.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#396

Post by mancerayder »

mancerayder wrote: post #354

Why are certain political hit-pieces getting flagged, and others, like this one, are somehow immune?

Here's an example. If I were to post an article that shows data that NYC shootings are up 30% since activist-pushed disbanding of cops took place, it would get downvoted to oblivion, flagged repeatedly and such. It's an interesting discussion point, and there are some very calm and rational pro and cons to different approaches. Instead, an article like this one from Propublica gets upvoted to the stratosphere.

As long as we admit there's some sort of double-standard at play, I'm fine with it. Or we're consistent.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#397

Post by FireBeyond »

hundchenkatze wrote: post #184
Jtsummers wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the town I used to live in in GA (about 125k people) accidents like this (though not that severe) were frequent on a couple of hilly roads. Marked as 35-45mph depending on the section, the police would drive at 80mph or more down the road. Usually they ticketed the person they hit. At least one cop I knew was actually proud of how he was able to stick it to the guy pulling out of a fast food restaurant. I respect…

Several years ago I was test driving a car owned by a cop in rural Tennessee. He was riding with me and I turned onto a smaller road with a 45mph speed limit. I was taking it slow and easy when he said "ah don't worry about the speed limit, I've got an E-Tag, let's go" I didn't know what an E-Tag was at the time but apparently it's an "Emergency Vehicle" tag given to officers to put on their unmarked, personal vehicl…

You can get FOP bumper stickers etc., in some states to show your civilian "support" (financial, and otherwise) of police.

You can also buy them on eBay, unofficially. Of course, the police unions have gone after sellers there, for some reason.

In one state the union went so far as issuing registration-like tags for your FOP bumper sticker, so that if a cop was pulling you over, he'd know whether you were "paid up", so to speak. Of course, it's only about support, and not legalized proactive bribery, just to be clear...

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#398

Post by bJGVygG7MQVF8c »

foxfired wrote: post #255
bJGVygG7MQVF8c wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Notice that while average white parents might worry about criminals before letting their kids out on the street, the black parents worry (with good reason) about the police. A minor but significant adjustment: Average black parents worry about both

Let's put it like this. Everyone worries about criminals, to the point that a mother will always tell you to be careful when you go out. But when I went out, my mother (and elders in our community) would say specifically, may God protect you from the police. That is a significant statement.

> Everyone worries about criminals.

Patently false. It wasn't until I went to an elite, mostly white, almost exclusively upper-middle-class-and-above college that I learned this.

Anyone — especially any minority — who grew actually up in urban poverty understands this well.

If your memory needs refreshing or if you're the kind of "pick me" minority favored by the sort of elite whites who populate this platform, maybe listen to Mos Def's "Beef" on repeat for a few hours to pick up some of the flavor. The whites will love it.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#399

Post by korijn »

noobaccount wrote: post #356
Wohlf wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Or, from another angle, it means that criminality in US is so much worse than the average EU country that it's ok to kill so many people in the name of safety. Number of homicides in the USA in 2017: 19,510 Deaths per 100,000 population: 6.0 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm Number of homicides in Italy in 2017: 357 Deaths per 100,000 population: 0.6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Italy

Wow, how can we be more like Italy?

Get rid of your guns

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#400

Post by justin66 »

austincheney wrote: post #340
justin66 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> invent their own narratives Your comments in this thread are recursively ridiculous and I'm not sure how far I want to unwind them, but people are "inventing their own narratives" (this is an astonishingly bad way of characterizing the problem here) in preference to siting hard numbers because the police are not holding themselves accountable, a phenomenon that includes the suppression of the hard data on how many…

Then advocate for better data. You either want accountability or you just want to have something to complain about.

Literally every person who is advocating for greater police accountability is, by definition, advocating for better data. I don't think there's an argument here about that. The point of disagreement would seem to be, most people don't believe being unable to fully quantify the corruption of the police means it does not exist.
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