361–370 of 419 posts
A landline call tagged as "same town" or cell call tagged as "pinged tower near reported location" could be treated more seriously than a VoIP call from "Fly-by-night VoIP Gateway Plc".
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Did you read Platt? Its a mistake to grant any assertion as valid, especially given what we now know about academic fraud. The Platt article is freely available and does not reference slavery in any way that I can see from searching (the bad OCR) and quickly reading through the paragraphs. Potter: The genesis of the modern police organization in the South is the “Slave Patrol” (Platt 1982). Potter: Platt, Tony, “Crim…
I have noted we have shifted from "I can't find a single example" to "I don't trust the first provided source", and yet there are plenty of other sources, if you're searching in good faith. The history of the United States is well documented - it was only for a brief period during reconstruction that policing was deracialized in the American South, and even saw a number of formerly-enslaved lawmen. There were numerou…
If evidence for your claim was as plentiful as you claim, you would just add another link. You didn’t.
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While some night watches were public safety distributed among community members, they were often there to protect the goods of merchants rather than protect the ordinary citizens of an area from petty crime. As merchants grew, and their goods became more valuable targets, the merchants would hire on guards, but saw the opportunity to turn the existing night watch systems in place to their favor, essentially insisting…
For the warehouse guards, to summarize, you're saying that night watchmen and city watchmen were de facto warehouse guards before the formation of professional police forces? That seems a far cry from "evolved out of warehouse guards". Police still put resources into protecting property, but this does not make them "warehouse guards" any more than resources put on petty crime make them "cutpurse chasers" unless you'r…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While some night watches were public safety distributed among community members, they were often there to protect the goods of merchants rather than protect the ordinary citizens of an area from petty crime. As merchants grew, and their goods became more valuable targets, the merchants would hire on guards, but saw the opportunity to turn the existing night watch systems in place to their favor, essentially insisting…
>>> That concept is from the mid 1800s. They evolved out of warehouse guards and slave patrols. >> This is not accurate. > I do not claim that's in the history of all depts, but across the south there are many cases of patrols becoming formalized into police departments. What percentage of current police departments were conversions from slave patrols? What is the source of this data?
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This seems like a genetic fallacy. Police might have been former slave patrollers at one time in some places. That doesn’t mean all US police are the same or have anything in common with them. I’m not sure what it means for US police to have “evolved out of” slave patrols in places that never had slaves, like New York City (northern states didn’t want to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act), or even in places like Hawaii…
They still exist for that purpose in the US.
They do not exist to protect people. They are a tool of the state and capital.
The years post slavery still were used to enforce Jim Crow laws, segregation, and violence against minorities. They still used dogs to attack peaceful protestors. SWAT teams are a continuation of an ethos of being warriors, willing to do violence at the behest of the government and capital at the expense of the people.
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> slave patrols Yeah, right. Those were distinctly US-ian things; somehow, the rest of the world managed to develop a similar form of police force at similar time, too.
The militarization of law enforcement and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Your comment is a bit off topic IMO. Swatting can occur regardless of how "militarized" a police force actually is.
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For the warehouse guards, to summarize, you're saying that night watchmen and city watchmen were de facto warehouse guards before the formation of professional police forces? That seems a far cry from "evolved out of warehouse guards". Police still put resources into protecting property, but this does not make them "warehouse guards" any more than resources put on petty crime make them "cutpurse chasers" unless you'r…
The establishment of the Charleston police department directly traces roots into slave patrols. The department was formed from city guard, who were used to round up spaces and put down slave revolts.
The antecedent organizations to the modern Charleston police department, notably the Town Watch and the City Guard, were both dissolved in the aftermath of the civil war, while civil order was kept by federal forces until the end of reconstruction.
But regardless of whether we can chase down a chain of organizations that meets the colloquial meaning of "evolved", it does not appear that either the City Guard nor the Town Watch were principally slave patrols, although they did enforce the slavery regime as part of their policing functions.
An organization that participates in the suppression of slaves as part of its function is not a "slave patrol". If the statement "[modern police forces] evolved out of warehouse guards and slave patrols" is to be parsed as "modern police forces evolved out of earlier organizations that sometimes protected private property or enforced slavery laws" then I grant the accusation, but it is rather hollow and meaningless at that point.
I've made this comment before but technology could help here. If the call was tagged as landline, cell, or VoIP along with approximate location info it would help a lot. A landline call tagged as "same town" or cell call tagged as "pinged tower near reported location" could be treated more seriously than a VoIP call from "Fly-by-night VoIP Gateway Plc".
This is no more complicated than grade school playgrounds: don't give the bully what they want.
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I should have been more clear about the question. I am wondering how many of the calls made by THIS GUY resulted in actual swat deployments, how many got someone shot or killed, etc. That gives a scale of the severity of the crime. Like if you fatally shoot someone, that is murder. If you shoot them and they survive, or if you shoot and miss, that's attempted murder and you tend to get a lighter sentence than if you…
Even if nobody died, it depends how you want to classify intentionally swatting someone. 50 counts of attempted murder? 50 counts of inciting violence? 50 counts of assault?