Baltimore Cops Kept Toy Guns to Plant Just in Case They Shot an Unarmed Person

I'm not to let anybody get away with it. I'm just saying that without a change of environment the next group of police are likely to end up doing the same things after some time.

> I never said I didn't want to read about it

Then what article do you propose instead? If none that matches your "bar" exists, will you write one? In the meantime, what's more important, people being aware that cops carrying toy guns around to plant is a thing, outrage or not, or them talking about cat robots or something?

How many emotional "this is nice!" posts and comments are on here? How are they intellectual? Why is "outrage" not okay, but elation is? One difference that comes to mind immediately is that one of them can threaten the abuse of power, the other cannot.

> only that the bar should be higher than the bottom of the barrel.

Is this article just the worst outrage bait that is even possible to write, or is "bottom of the barrel" hyperbole? Why not simply ban sophistry? If you can be mad and still think and argue clearly, more power to you. If you can't do that even when you're not mad, tough luck. Wouldn't that be cool?

> You have provided a perfect example of what this discussion does not need, and what articles like the above lead to, thank you.

I asked a question, you don't even attempt to answer it.

No matter how you describe cops carrying toy guns to plant on peoople they murdered (and in my mind, no matter what honest mistakes may have lead to it, once you plant a weapon it does become cold-blooded murder retroactively), it will always lead to "outrage". It ought to.

Do you know, say, a book about the Holocaust that doesn't contain outrage bait? I mean, with such a huge and incredibly important subject, surely some people tried to give it the treatment you consider proper? But how would they do it without hiding what they're describing under euphemisms?

> Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

-- Bertrand Russel

The flipside of love is anger over abuse and murder. You cannot have it both ways. You can keep yourself together, you can react rationally, cold and precise even, but if you don't feel anything, if people feeling something annoys you more than what they are "outraged" about, what you find intellectually gratifying is kind of moot, because the only reason someone would care about it would be a solidarity and empathy you yourself deny.

> In the case of Baltimore, these are massive systemic problems that involve not just the police, but also the community as a whole and forces outside the community as well. How can you discuss the problems with police misconduct without talking about the drug war, inner city poverty, stat based policing and the poisonous incentives they create, the lack of stable homes, and so on and so on and so on.

Instead of my answering how the issue of cops carrying toy guns to plant on people they killed can be discussed without these other things, can you first show how they're connected, like, at all?

> Yes you might be able to solve police misconduct by forcing them to turn on each other and report and aggressively as possible. You probably will utterly destroy any semblance of morale and group cohesion and won't have a functioning police force at the end.

I don't think it's so simple. First off, morale starts with an individual. Yes, all people need support, people in such hardcore professions where they cannot share so much with non-colleagues, doubly so. But still, it starts and ends with individuals, and nothing helps more with enduring the hardships of a job than pride and professionalism. The alienated identification with a group however, "my group right or wrong", lasts exactly as long as that group has power, and the people it "works" for you kinda don't want to have anywhere near any position of authority.

Right now, cops who refused to be crooks get turned on by other cops. So it's not like you have a choice about snitching, you have the choice whether people with integrity snitch on murderers and liars, or whether murderers and liars mob people with integrity. Likewise you have to decide between individuals who can look in the mirror having the back of other individuals who can look in the mirror, or some sort of "group morale" that repels individuals that can look in the mirror.

> Yes, we could ban guns from the population.

That brings me back to the above, I still don't see the connection between the very real dangers of the job and planting toy guns being an alleviating response to it.

> Body cams will help, but even if people trust police, how does that solve the problem where being a drug dealer is probably the best opportunity you have in the inner city?

Again, there's the connection missing between someone being a drug dealer, and killing them then planting a weapon on them.

> People unfortunately tend to focus on their pet issue of choice and ignore the others.

Likewise, people exclude solutions without a real good reason, like cops with integrity being given the means and moral support -- from the population [0], not just each other -- to clean house, because that automagically makes the job impossible, instead of better and easier. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't say just that is enough, but I'll claim it's futile without it. If you focus on the "cohesion" of the "force" part in "police force" at the extent of the "police" bit, you throw out the baby with the bathwater and "at the end" have a domestic enemy that will call anyone domestic enemy who dares oppose them.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkyVsY8j2-8&t=10m28s

The Wire needs to do a new season and incorporate this. Truth is stranger than fiction.

  burglary clearly doesn't justify the, potentially deadly, use of a gun

Problem is, you can't know if it is "just" a burglary until after the perpetrator leaves.