481–490 of 650 posts
There are basically two things that the police do: 1> Patrol public spaces to deter illegal behavior in those places, direct traffic, punish traffic offenders, offer directions to tourists, etc 2> Respond to calls from citizens, investigate the crimes that those calls are about, locate and apprehend the associated criminals. I've only lived in places sparsely populated enough that is mostly impractical except along h…
Only 60% of murders are solved. https://www.vox.com/2018/9/24/17896034/murder-crime-clearanc...
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You are incorrect. Not all police departments started as slave patrols, in fact many of them did not. But to deny that it was a widespread event is counterfactual. The first American police dept was founded in the 1850s, well after the split from England. The first police department in England was founded in the 1830s. Prior to that, our communities either took collective action to regulate themselves and the 'spirit…
I'm not denying slave patrols existed, I'm denying this rumor of them being the root of modern police because it's straight up not true. The very simple historical trend that brought us the police we have today started with the King enforcing the peace, was delegated to sheriffs who enforced the peace among other things, was inherited in the colonies where the sheriff took on a primarily peace officer role in early s…
Enforcing the law required acting as slave patrols for well over a hundred years in the US. In 1757 Georgia, for instance, the colonial assembly required white landowners to be slave patrollers, and this continued well past the civil war.
There is over a hundred years of law enforcement, particularly in the South, acting as slave patrols. It's absolutely reasonable to trace the roots from modern departments back through the nation's unique history.
Not all police followed that path, like I mentioned above, police in the North were formed more out of an interest of protecting property and landowners. Places like Boston founded their police to try and prevent crime, rather than simply exact justice post-facto. That's a different historical root of American policing, and it did not involve slave patrols.
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It's on video and that's clearly not true: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnHecVdUysQ The officer starts reaching for his gun between seconds 4 and 5, Brooks fires the tazer in second 5 and then is shot at the end of second 6.
Are you serious? It's clearly true. The officer's gun remains in its holster until after Brooks fires the Taser — you can tell because his right arm is still vertical. The NYT has a good breakdown: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/us/videos-rayshard-brooks... And regardless, let's not move the goalposts to consider only the time after Brooks fired the Taser. After all, it's not like that was the first opportunity t…
>He made the decision to draw his gun in the first place already knowing
Which is different from the gun being drawn. You can clearly see the officer pass his tazer from his right to left hand and then reach for his gun prior to the tazer shot.
>And regardless, it's not like the moment that Brooks fired the Taser was the first opportunity the officer had to calculate how many shots it had left.
Having a second potentially valid argument doesn't change the accuracy of the one made.
>The NYTimes has a good breakdown: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/us/videos-rayshard-brooks....
Perhaps you should read it again since they agree with me:
>In seconds, Officer Rolfe passes his Taser from his right hand to his left hand, and reaches for his handgun.
>While being chased, and in full stride, Mr. Brooks looks behind him, points the Taser
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Blacks are killed by police disproportionately by a factor of around 2-3x The fear may be there, but I don't see it justified in the numbers. It's not just about getting killed - it's about getting unfairly fined, arrested, beaten, jailed, and so on. From my own life experience, the fear is warranted.
Do you have aggregate numbers on how that compares to getting similar treatment from criminals?
But as Erem points out, the situations are fundamentally different in that when one is victimized by a criminal, one has a number of options. When one is victimized by law enforcement, those options are severely limited, especially if you don't have money or influence.
But you do have to do a sanity check with the numbers at some point, and reconcile them with the feelings/beliefs/narratives you get from the media and pop culture
I am a black man, that lives in a poor city with high-crime rates. I've spent significant time in "dangerous" neighborhoods, as a resident and visitor. The number of times I've gotten the treatment I've described from criminals is 0. The number of times I've gotten the treatment from the police is >0. The same can be said for pretty much all of my minority acquaintances here. I, for one, am not getting this narrative from the media and pop culture, I'm getting it from life experience. Yes, that's not the same as carefully collected statistics, but it's not based on nothing.
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Please stop spreading nonsense. For one, this person is not prominent by any definition of the word prominent. Also, you can see the full bodycam footage and UK peoples take on this stop at https://old.reddit.com/r/policeuk/comments/hbbhkb/a_calm_col... Bear in mind she was stopped because the car she was in had (potentially illegally) tinted front windows. All in all, she seems like someone who is ingesting too much…
> Please stop spreading nonsense. This attitude is exactly part of the problem > Also, you can see the full bodycam footage and UK peoples take on this stop at https://old.reddit.com/r/policeuk/comments/hbbhkb/a_calm_col... . The bodycam footage is in the article I linked too, thank you, and the comments on that sub are disgusting examples of exactly the lack of understanding I described. > Bear in mind she was stopp…
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> This attitude is exactly part of the problem No, it's reallt not. The continued projection of American racial and socio-economic issues in to other English speaking countries by dimwits is the issue. If you actually watched the (heavily edited by the guardian) video, you would see the cop was calm and polite the entire duration. > It was established in court that the windows were not illegally tinted. Yes, and the…
When I put myself in the place of the constable, he seemed to be calm and polite. I understand how frustrating it is when you are trying to do your job and people won't cooperate. That is not the question. The assertion is that the lady was terrified, the constable failed to acknowledge this, and failed to act appropriately. The constable doesn't seem like a raging racist to me. That makes this video even more import…
It's not that this officer need to have gone after her for being black. The big issue is that he just simply can not comprehend - as he indicates from the start - why she would be afraid of the police if she hasn't done anything wrong.
And then everything goes downhill once he's made the decision not to believe that she's actually scared, and interprets everything in that light.
Unfortunately this problem self-amplifies - this woman got one more reason to be afraid of the police, and this story gives other people reasons to be afraid of the police, and the only way to deal with that is for the police to learn to deal with that fear.
What people also seem to forget is that irrespective of racism, police needs to be able to deal with people who get panic attacks or have mental health issues or are intoxicated all the time. If they can not understand that someone might be genuinely in panic without being a criminal, and acting accordingly, the racism or not those officers will treat innocent people in ways they don't deserve.
Unions protect bad apples, that shouldn’t be the purpose of unions. It should be illegal.
Police unions are almost all terrible. Seattle kicked their police union out of the local labor council, and it would be great to see more cities do the same.
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>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?
The question to the US is: how can they become less insular and more open to ways of living that aren't strictly 'American'? You would think the constitution is now set in stone: societal progression is at a complete halt after committing to a few rules 200 or so years ago. And I know that sounds hyperbolic, but even in that time it's still the case that race is a fundamental issue in the US.