The problem is that in many of Americas inner cities there is a gang war going on. You'll never get ride of the warrior view when they are charged with keeping the peace in war zones.
Law Enforcement’s “Warrior” Problem
121–130 of 157 posts
Re: Law Enforcement’s “Warrior” Problem
#122Warriors go to war. If the police are warriors, if they are going to war, who are their enemies? The answer no one speaks aloud is "We are".
Gangs mostly. This is why cops in cities with gang problems act like soldiers and cops in suburbia are mostly polite meter maids.
Re: Law Enforcement’s “Warrior” Problem
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cops kill 3 people a day, sounds like execution to me. Funny how dead men can't defend themselves or contradict the narrative police give -- which is often wrong when caught on tape. I don't think you fully grok how many more people the US imprisons, a country would have to execute tens of thousands of people per year for decades to match the amount. Police are thugs, far worse than any gang.
And more often right, at least in the tapes I and people I trust have analyzed. In theory (yes, I know, you can stop laughing), per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_v._Garner police can only use lethal force in self-defense and in defense of others, no shooting a non-violent fleeing criminal, they have no more rights in that area than us armed civilians. I wonder if you grok the concept of per-capita statistic…
Its bizarre how people will say something when it flies in the face of observable reality.
the US police state slaughters more people than is acknowledged, it requires a UK newspaper to get the correct amount.
Cite court cases all you want, they directly contradict what the police get away with everyday, you plainly see on tape them beating and killing people, planting evidence, destroying evidence and private property, and it happens without consequence.
You are a police apologist, defending murderous thugs.
Re: Law Enforcement’s “Warrior” Problem
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your definition of police state is an insult to people who have actually lived in one.
We may not have police disappearing people in the middle of the night or conducting summary executions on the street on a regular basis. They don't (well, they might thanks to the NSA and other sources) have extensive dossiers on every citizen. But we do have systemic racism and violence in the current system that leaves a large portion of the population in fear for their safety, and rightly so. Cops conducting no kn…
> We may not have police disappearing people in the middle of the night or conducting summary executions on the street on a regular basis.
You don't need it. You have DA-s and mandatory sentencing ... as effective, but a lot more subtle and less visible.
Re: Law Enforcement’s “Warrior” Problem
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
And law enforcement weren't "heroes" before 9/11??? Now, I'm probably older than you, old enough to have watched the first run of hagiographic Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. F.B.I. TV series that ran until 1974, ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_F.B.I._(TV_series) ), but I assure this is nothing new. E.g. I can remember more than a few debates I had with co-workers in the '90s on the War on Drugs, I said we could have that,…
Your definition of police state is an insult to people who have actually lived in one.
It's all a matter of degree. In the 1950s and '60s, African-Americans in Mississippi were terrorized by the State Sovereignty Commission, a kind of Cracker Barrel Stasi that had files on virtually every black citizen in the state, kept surveillance on anyone associated with the Civil Rights movement, and regularly used their power to hound undesirable citizens out of jobs, call in bank loans, deny credit, and so on. They weren't cross-burning Klansmen -- in fact, they saw themselves as anti-Klan -- but they ran a second-rate police state down in the Delta for decades. And where they didn't operate, Hoover, with his voluminous blackmail archives on politicians and his secret campaigns of vilification against civil rights leaders, did.
Today, we have pervasive state surveillance, a culture of secrecy that permeates every level of government, and a society that maintains a separate class of police and law enforcement officials who arguably operate with near-impunity, with tacit sanction for everything from extrajudicial beatings (and, at the risk of sounding overheated, SWAT-based extrajudicial executions) to prosecutorial misconduct. Thanks to Bennis, SCOTUS has ruled that the government may seize your personal property if you are the innocent owner of an item that the government might proceed against in rem (e.g., United States vs. $124,700) -- and those proceeds then go to fund further law enforcement and security operations.
We live in a state where Lincoln's fear that "all the laws but one go unexecuted" is the spoken and unspoken impetus for all security and law enforcement efforts -- every immigrant may be a terrorist, every demonstration a riot, every black man a gang member. In a state that is organized for the security and convenience of the police power, what else is there to call it?
Re: Law Enforcement’s “Warrior” Problem
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your definition of police state is an insult to people who have actually lived in one.
You have a point due to my lack of clarity, which I've corrected above. This was in the context of the society they were helping to create for their children and grandchildren. We're not there yet, and the reaction to the gun grabbers of that time (Americans arming themselves like never before after 9/11 and its response told us we were own our own) suggests there's a strong and developing counter-force developing, b…
> There are certainly too many politicians in high places and other influential members of our ruling class who'd like to institute a full blown police state. That's one reason I'm interested in Strange Loop controversy.
That is Orwellian state. In it the policing is internalized in the individual.
Re: Law Enforcement’s “Warrior” Problem
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also like the subdued flag patch and ACUPAT trousers. Really sells the hipster "Ramadi 2006" vintage look.
Didn't even notice but when I looked again at the subdued flag patch I noticed he's got a mini eotech on the front rail of that gun. My platoon sergeant would have lost his mind.
Mind explaining the "eotech"/platoon sargeant being upset, for us civilians? ;)
Re: Law Enforcement’s “Warrior” Problem
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd go further and say they need to do the same thing with their vehicles, like in Europe. Police officers and their cars are for public safety, and should be highly visible. Here's a typical Swedish police car: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/autopia/images/2008/12/15/... I think the intention in the US is that cop cars have to be less visible so that they can catch people committing "crimes" in order to fill quot…
Lose the neon yellow, and you aren't far off from what an american police car looks like.
The marked ones. The tax collecting police cars look like any civilian car, with emergency lights hidden behind the back window and the front grill.
Re: Law Enforcement’s “Warrior” Problem
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO, the warrior problem leads to the no accountability problem you speak of. If you program officers to think and act a certain way, then you can't really punish them when they act on their training.
They feed on each other. No accountability means they can be bad actors. Being bad actors encourages them to lobby (directly or through spokesmen in political office or media) for a reduction of accountability.
I'd like to think that most officers really do want to make a positive impact, so I don't necessarily agree with your 'no accountability means they can be bad actors' statement...it makes it seem like the officers have malicious intent. I think it has more to do with the general population and the police community being on different pages when it comes to acceptable behavior. When there is an officer involved shooting, the general population wants the officer to be held accountable for their actions (sometimes), but if the officer followed protocol then there is no case to be made. We need training reform
Re: Law Enforcement’s “Warrior” Problem
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Problem: Larger cities have taxis; many smaller communities do not. Every town have police. For your example to be fair, you'd have to restrict the statistics to only cities that have both police and taxis.
Do you think it would really move the needle that much? And for that matter, there are numerous other jobs more dangerous than being a police officer. The point being that being a police officer isn't as dangerous as many other professions that aren't considered dangerous.
I think statistic lie if you consider a police officer in Detroit or Chicago having the same risk as a police officer in rural Oklahoma. I do believe the statistics would be drastically different for those two groups, and until we have honest statistics, I don't see how we can come up with any conclusion one way or the other. (Unless you're a cop of course, and can speak based on experience, but let's face it, most of us are a bunch of nerds using our elite Googling to verify and prove our version of the world)