Today's Beau

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

Following up - WCVB-Boston:

Massachusetts State Police aware of only 1 possible resignation over vaccine mandate, source says

There is conflicting information about the accuracy of the claims made by the union representing members of the Massachusetts State Police regarding resignations over the state's COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

Gov. Charlie Baker and his administration are requiring state workers, including state troopers, to be vaccinated against the coronavirus by Oct. 17. If they cannot show proof of vaccination or receive approval for an exemption, those executive branch employees will be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including termination.

The State Police Association of Massachusetts is standing by a statement that it made last week, which reads, "To date, dozens of troopers have already submitted their resignation paperwork."

However, a source within the Massachusetts State Police told 5 Investigates that the department is only aware of one person who has submitted paperwork to resign as a result of the COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

The union will not provide a specific number of troopers that it claims are planning to resign beyond saying dozens.

On Monday, Baker said the state will hire new troopers to fill the ranks of retiring troopers, regardless of the reason for their retirement.

"I think it's really important for public officials who deal directly with the public on a regular basis — who have no idea whether the people they're dealing with are vaccinated or not, and those people who are dealing with them ought to be able to believe that they are vaccinated — I think it's critically important for those folks to get vaccinated," the governor said.

The conflicting numbers from SPAM and MSP come after the union unsuccessfully attempted to fight the mandate in court.

It is possible for state troopers to file retirement papers directly with the Massachusetts State Retirement Board, but the source said the department is not aware of that happening.

Ending Another War

I'll go ahead and be critical of Joe Biden, and the Clintons, and Republicans, and myself - and anyone else who was more than a bit dumb about all that get-tough-on-crime bullshit from back in the 80s and 90s.

Seemed like a good idea at the time, but...

And I'm not trying to be all woke and shit. I don't think I'm simply following a trend again, which is pretty much what we were all doing 35 years ago - I just got fooled.

I had plenty of company of course, but that's not an excuse, or even a good way to explain it.

I was just wrong. My outlook, my attitude, my philosophy - all of it - flat fuckin' wrong.

If there's nothing particularly racist about our criminal justice system - which, BTW, doesn't exist in isolation from the society it's supposed to serve - then that justice system wouldn't be choked with brown people all the fuckin' time.

And if that society isn't racist, but somehow POC are still way over-represented in the statistics and the prison population etc, then there must be something actually wrong with POC, and if that ain't racist thinking, then the whole fucking universe is upside down and backwards.

There is something very very very wrong with the way we've been doing things.

Brookings Institution:

The War on Drugs, not the war in Afghanistan, is America’s longest war. It has used trillions of American taxpayer dollars, militarized American law enforcement agencies (federal, state, and local), claimed an untold number of lives, railroaded people’s futures (especially among Black, Latino, and Native populations), and concentrated the effort in the country’s most diverse and poorest neighborhoods. The War on Drugs has been a staggering policy failure, advancing few of the claims that presidents, members of Congress, law enforcement officials, and state and local leaders have sought to achieve. The illicit drug trade thrived under prohibition; adults of all ages and youth had access to illicit substances. Substance use disorders thrived, and policymakers’ efforts to protect public health were fully undermined by policy that disproportionately focused, if unsuccessfully, on public safety. It is time for an American president to think seriously about broad-based policy change to disrupt the manner in which the United States deals with drugs.

Despite its dramatic policy failures, the War on Drugs has been wildly successful in one specific area: institutionalizing racism. The drug war was built on a foundation of racism and xenophobia. As I have written in Marijuana: A Short History, the historical foundation of drug policy in the United States was to vilify African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants from Asia and Mexico, and other outgroups, and to turn White America against each. Michelle Alexander and numerous others have effectively highlighted how America’s criminal justice system from arrest to trial to incarceration to post-release conditions disproportionately punish people of color, creating a cycle of harm in their communities.

We know the design and enforcement of America’s drug laws were racist in intent and in practice. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 enacted penalties for possession of crack cocaine (a substance predominantly used by poor and minorities users) that were 100 times higher than for the possession of powder cocaine (a substance used more often by wealthier, white users). And while Congress in 2010 reduced that disparity in penalties from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1, and in 2018 President Trump signed a law making that change retroactive, thousands of low level offenders were left out from resentencing because of a loophole. And in 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to extend the retroactive resentencing effort for those low-level offenders.

In addition, research shows that Black and white Americans use cannabis at roughly the same rates. However, Black Americans are more than 3.6 times more likely to be arrested for a cannabis offense than are white Americans. And even in states that have reformed their cannabis laws, the institutionalization of racism in police departments’ enforcement of the drug war sustains, as Blacks are more than two times as likely as whites to be arrested for cannabis offenses in those legal jurisdictions. And while cannabis offenses have plummeted in those states, the impact of those remaining arrests and convictions are felt in an outsized way across Black and Brown America and in Native American communities.

The 2018 law mentioned above was titled the First Step Act. This label was fitting in that it described the long road toward broader criminal justice reform and for justice in the communities that the War on Drugs targeted for decades. And in his 2019 State of the Union Address, President Trump praised that bill becoming law, by noting that it addresses the explicit racism in the American criminal justice system. He noted,

“This legislation reformed sentencing laws that have wrongly and disproportionately harmed the African American community. The First Step Act gives nonviolent offenders the chance to reenter society as productive, law-abiding citizens. Now States across the country are following our lead. America is a nation that believes in redemption.”

President Trump was right that America believes in redemption, but only in theory. It rarely advances redemption in practice. Every president in the 20th and 21st centuries helped perpetuate, in some way, a drug war with one “crowning achievement”: systematically harming minority communities in America with intent and malice. Supporters of prohibition, be they presidents or other elected officials, advocates, law enforcement leaders, or everyday citizens wrap themselves in a mystical cloak of “protecting the children” and “keeping communities safe.” In reality, that hypocrisy has sought simply to protect white children (a failed effort) and to keep white communities safe (another missed target).

If prohibition supporters cared deeply about children and the safety of communities, they would look at what the War on Drugs have done to Black and Brown children and communities and be sickened. They would see families divided, young people (especially young Black men) have dreams dashed and future opportunities restricted, communities rocked by gang and police violence, systematic underinvestment with simultaneous over-policing in cities, and dozens more disastrous consequences because of their failed drug policies. Prohibition supporters from Main Street to Pennsylvania Avenue should consider how the drug war has harmed specific American communities and recoil, but instead, they ignore reality and refuse to advance legitimate alternatives.

It is time for President Biden to face the reality of his role and the role of his colleagues and predecessors in advancing the drug war. He must consider vast reforms—some which require the cooperation of Congress and others than can be implemented via executive action—that deal with drug policy in a thoughtful and reasoned, rather than anachronistic and heartless way. Mr. Biden must realize that choices about drug reform—pardons, sentencing reform policy, the expansion of mental health and addiction services, cannabis legalization, police reform, prison reform, community reinvestment—should not focus on whether those reforms come without costs. Mr. Biden must compare whether those reforms are a policy improvement over the status quo: prohibition.

Too often elected officials, policy analysts, advocates, and citizens hide behind the cowardice of highlighting the challenges that drug reform can potentially cause, while refusing to speak and think bravely about the comprehensive failures and harms perpetuated by current policy. Mr. Biden can no longer do what he and his predecessors have done: sit idly by, awaiting a perfect policy to replace the unmitigated failures of the War on Drugs. A significant part of the electoral coalition that swept Mr. Biden to the Democratic presidential nomination and eventually to the White House were Black, Latino, and Native Americans who have been harmed the most by the War on Drugs.

Part of that solution must be an embrace of full-scale criminal justice reform that works to inject fairness into a system that has, for centuries, disproportionately punished people of color, the poor, the undereducated, those without personal or political connections, and any others in our society who fall on hard times. Drug reform—and particularly—cannabis reform must sit at the forefront of the president’s efforts to chase the type of justice that has eluded so many for so long. Legalizing cannabis, focusing broader drug reform efforts around public health policy rather than inhumane criminalization, prioritizing law enforcement funds toward violent crime rather than petty crime, coordinating an intergovernmental effort to harmonize criminal justice reform through legislative and executive efforts, and reinvesting in the communities that our government has targeted and persecuted are a requirement for President Biden to be the humane and justice-oriented president he marketed himself to be in the 2020 campaign.

Eight months into this administration, Mr. Biden faces an embarrassing reality with regard to drug policy. Donald Trump, who received only 8% of the Black vote in 2016, did more as president to change drug policy and ameliorate the effects of the drug war for communities of color than has Joe Biden, who won 87% of Black support in 2020.

In the same way this president took the bold step of ending America’s second longest war in Afghanistan, he should take the equally bold step of ending America’s longest war: the War on Drugs.

Today's Deep Thought

Cops are quitting because of a vaccine requirement.

This seems like an elegant solution for a different problem.

@PaulCogan

On Bad Apples

Of course it's always important to keep things in context, and to remember that the anecdote is not the trend.

That said, when the anecdotes pile up to the extent we've seen lately, we have to admit that we've got more than a bushel or two of bad apples. It's just possible that what we've got is a full-blown blight.

Brookings:

For nine minutes and 29 seconds, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin held his knee on the back of George Floyd’s neck until the life left his body. This occurred while dejected onlookers raised visible frustration for what many correctly perceived to be a murder occurring in broad daylight on a major street. While observing, participating, and standing guard, other police officers seemed to be ok with what was occurring or did not have the courage to intervene to stop it and engage in an appropriate duty of care.

After being convicted of second and third-degree murder as well as manslaughter for the killing of George Floyd, Chauvin was sentenced to 270 months (22 years and 6 months). Chauvin will probably serve two-thirds or 15 years of this sentence. While some may view this chapter of police brutality closed, others know Chauvin is the tip of the iceberg regarding changes needed to improve law enforcement.

The city of Minneapolis paid out $27 million to the Floyd family for his wrongful death days before the start of the Chauvin trial in March. During the less than two week trial, police in the United States killed over 60 people. A person could watch a major league baseball game and a basketball playoff game and come to the realization that police probably killed a person at some point during that time span.

Chauvin’s actions were not isolated. Indeed, he did it previously. Since 2015, Chauvin is on record for kneeling on people’s necks and/or putting them in chokeholds at least six times. Of the people involved in these incidents, two were Black, one was Latino, one was American Indian, and two others were of an unknown race. In 2017, Chauvin kneeled on the back of a 14-year-old Black boy for 17 minutes. These incidents make up a small portion of the over 20 complaints that Chauvin received during his 19-year law enforcement career.

These facts may explain why Eric Nelson, Chauvin’s defense attorney, rambled off a series of “what ifs” during the sentence hearing that Chauvin allegedly stated over the past year. The what ifs focused on whether the officer should not have come in to work that day or not responded to the call. Interestingly, none of Chauvin’s what ifs included what clearly is the most important consideration: what if Chauvin pulled his knee off of Floyd’s neck when he stated he could not breathe?

How could Chauvin get away with this brutality for so long? Why didn’t anyone intervene or stop him? Why wasn’t he reprimanded or even fired? Chauvin was not simply a bad apple, but a bad apple that helped rotten the barrel and poison good apples that could have been, like the two early-career officers who watched him kill Floyd and participated in it. For all the good officers protecting and serving their communities, there are more Chauvins than there should be.

So, how should police departments ensure that officers like Chauvin do not brutalize our communities? Overall, accountability must be increased to ensure that these incidents become nonexistent rather than a regular occurrence. Focusing on duty to intervene legislation, malpractice insurance, and positive police outcomes are central.

Implement state-level duty to report programs

States need to have duty to intervene laws that protect police officers who report bad behavior. Moreover, simply having duty to intervene laws is not enough. Officers who report misconduct need protection from retaliation. I call it GAPP (Good Apples Protection program for law enforcement). This requires state legislatures creating an independent reporting and investigation program at the state level. If it stays local, officers will be less likely to report or more likely to be targeted for reporting. This recently occurred in Prince George’s County, Maryland (one of the 30 largest police departments in the country) when two officers reported that another officer used excessive force. In retaliation, some officers were told not to back up the officers who reported the excessive force. The two reporting officers just happened to be Black.

If there is a state or federal program for officers who report misconduct, officers may be more likely to intervene and report misconduct. The blue wall of silence does not simply exist because officers are loyal to the badge and each other. The blue wall of silence exists because there are consequences to breaching it. This is the same process that happens on streets plagued with violent crime. People who provide information to law enforcement are rarely given immediate protection for that information. Instead, they are further exposed to retaliation. In this regard, the same process of reporting and retaliation that operates in neighborhoods plagued with violent crime also operates in many of our police departments. This is a huge problem and needs to change.

Link law enforcement certification to malpractice insurance

Municipalities need to restructure civilian payouts for police misconduct. Cities and counties need to think through a plan that does not include using funding from general tax revenue to pay for misconduct settlements. While many states and municipalities are waiting to determine what will occur with The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act that aims to absolve qualified immunity for law enforcement, police department insurance policies and individual officer liability insurance may be the key regardless.

Municipalities and states can establish a certification program that requires officers to carry liability insurance. If they have engaged in misconduct, their insurance premium will be higher, just like drivers who are careless or reckless behind the wheel. If officers are unable to obtain liability insurance, they should not be able to obtain certification to work in law enforcement just like a person who is unable to obtain insurance cannot get a license.

Additionally, it is vital for municipalities to carry their own insurance policy on the police department to not simply throw officers under the bus and absolve the organizational structure that helped create the bad apples. This is important because municipalities are spending billions of dollars in misconduct settlements. Some small cities like Inkster, Michigan and large cities like Chicago do not have the funding to cover these misconduct settlements. Consequently, people’s property taxes are increased and cities take out “police brutality bonds” with very high fees and interests to cover these costs.

Replicate departments with low misconduct and low crime

Law enforcement finally needs to start replicating the changes that have taken place in cities like Newark and Camden. Newark police did not shoot a single shot in 2020 and recovered over 500 illegal guns. Camden had fewer shootings in 2020 than it did in 2019, one of the few cities in the country. Part of these positive outcomes are driven by the police department working with community activists to ensure transparency and accountability for law enforcement, which, in turn, gains the trust of people living in the community. These outcomes are also driven by oversight to ensure more accountability.

For too long, negative and deficit outcomes have driven law enforcement. It is time to change policing culture by scaling up positive outcomes. This is especially important since research documents that violent crime rates are unrelated to police killing rates. This suggests that we can decrease crime as well as decrease police killings and brutality. Only accountability, transparency, and equity can make this happen.

Today's Eternal Sadness

It's next to impossible to tell a good guy with a gun from a bad guy with a gun in a heated situation, so the scenario we've always warned about unfolded almost exactly as we feared it would.

And it's an extra shitty feeling to think this turned out to be even worse than I imagined...

In my old hometown.

Buzzfeed:

Police Killed A "Good Samaritan" Who Fatally Shot A Gunman Who Had Killed A Cop

Johnny Hurley "undoubtedly saved many lives" when he killed a shooting suspect, only to be fatally shot himself by police responders in Colorado.

A "good Samaritan" shot a man who ambushed and killed a Colorado police officer, likely saving other lives, only to be fatally shot himself by responding officers, officials confirmed Friday.

"We lost two heroes," Arvada Police Chief Link Strate said in a video message Friday, acknowledging that Johnny Hurley "undoubtedly saved many lives Monday afternoon" before he was shot and killed by a responding officer.

The incident occurred at about 1:30 p.m. on Monday, June 21, in Arvada, Colorado, where Officer Gordon Beesley responded to a report of a suspicious person.

Beesley, a school resource officer, was walking to the area when the suspect, 59-year-old Ronald Troyke of Arvada, parked his truck and started to run behind him.

Troyke, police said, was armed with a 12-gauge semiautomatic shotgun.

Video of the shooting released by police shows Troyke running behind Beesley while holding a firearm and wearing a hat and face mask.

Officials said Troyke yelled out to Beesley, who is seen suddenly turning around in the video.


The video does not show the shooting, but police said Troyke then shot Beesley twice, killing the 19-year veteran.

Troyke continued to fire his weapon, police said, shooting out the windows of patrol cars. Video shows witnesses running and looking for cover in the parking lot after the shots were fired.


According to police, Troyke left behind a document, which stated that he had intended to target police officers in a deadly rampage.

"My goal today is to kill Arvada PD officers," the document reportedly stated. "We the people were never your enemy, but we are now."

The note contained several other statements targeting police, including "This is what you get, you are the people who are expendable" and "Hundreds of you pigs should be killed daily."

"Gordon was targeted because he was wearing an Arvada police uniform and a badge," Strate said at a news conference on Tuesday.

Troyke returned to his truck at one point and changed weapons, picking up an AR-15. As he was walking back to the busy commercial area, police said, Hurley confronted him.


"It is clear that Mr. Hurley intervened in an active shooting that unfolded quickly," Strate said in his statement Friday. "He did so without hesitation."

Hurley shot the suspect with a handgun, Strate said, and "undoubtedly saved many lives Monday afternoon."

But when another officer arrived at the scene, the police chief said, he saw Hurley holding Troyke's AR-15 and shot him.

Strate's confirmation that police shot and killed the same man who stopped an unfolding shooting in the middle of the day contradicted his department's assertions earlier in the week that Troyke had shot and killed Hurley, who had not yet been identified.

In his statement, Strate called Hurley a hero.

"Our police department and our community's view of Mr. Hurley and his actions are heroic," he said.

On Thursday, Arvada police posted a link to a GoFundMe page that had been set up to raise money for Hurley's family.

Today's Eternal Sadness

Cop A shoots Cop B.

Cop C thinks the suspect did it, shoots suspect - twice - killing him.

Cops

As of April 18th

There's something very wrong with our cops.

https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/

Today's Eternal Sadness

We don't know the details on this one of course, but I think it's safe to say it seems we're not making a lot of progress on the "Cops Need To To Stop Killing People" issue.

Axios;

Unarmed Virginia Black man shot by sheriff's deputy while on 911 call

Virginia state police are investigating reports that an unarmed Black man was shot by a sheriff's deputy who mistook his cordless house phone for a gun. The deputy had earlier given him a ride home, authorities said.

Driving the news:

• Spotsylvania County Sheriff's Office released video late Friday of the shooting of Isaiah Brown, 32, who's in critical condition in a hospital with 10 bullet wounds following the shooting early Wednesday.

Details:

• Sheriff Roger Harris released body camera footage and a 911 call from Brown at a news conference confirming that the unnamed deputy had been placed on administrative leave.
• During the call, a man identified as Brown can be heard saying he'll kill his brother and "give me the gun" after his brother won't let him in to retrieve his car keys. He tells the dispatcher several times he does not have a gun.
• The deputy who gave Brown a ride home some 45 minutes earlier after his car broke down responded to the call as a "domestic incident."
• The deputy can be heard saying "he's got a gun to his head" before telling him to drop it and to stop walking toward him. Gunshots can be heard ringing out.

What they're saying:

• Brown’s lawyer, David Haynes, said in a statement to news outlets, "The officer mistook a cordless house phone for a gun.
• "There is no indication that Isaiah did anything other than comply with dispatch’s orders and raised his hands with the phone in his hand as instructed."

Can we at least acknowledge one tiny detail that should be obvious to anyone who's not blind, deaf, quadriplegic and lobotomized - the assumption that everybody's got a fucking gun has to be part of the fucking problem!?!

Today's Question

“Why is lethal force the only measure they seem to have with us?”

WaPo:

Ohio police fatally shoot Black teenage girl just before Chauvin verdict

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The fatal shooting of a Black teenager by Columbus police on Tuesday stoked grief and anger just as the murder conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was being celebrated as a sign of long-elusive accountability for law enforcement.

Police said at a late news conference on Tuesday that the girl had threatened two others with a knife before the shooting, playing segments of body camera video that showed the victim lunging toward someone in a driveway before an officer fired four shots. A knife is visible in the driveway next to the girl as police perform CPR on her.

“We know, based on this footage, the officer took action to protect another young girl in our community,” Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther (D) said at the news conference. “But a family is grieving tonight, and this young 15-year-old girl will never be coming home.”

It's possible that the action taken by that officer was the right thing to do, but they shot that girl four times. How do I just sit with that, knowing what we know about the kind of knee-jerk reaction a lot of these cops have developed?

It's possible that the cops couldn't have done anything to de-escalate - that there just wasn't time for OODA - that they had no alternative - but they shot that kid four times.

Four times.

On the day we saw a glimmer of hope for the advancement of justice because of the Chauvin verdict - they shot that girl four times.

And I have to sit here and further contemplate having a lot of work to do re-evaluating my own tendency to sympathize with law enforcement, even while acknowledging the obvious problem that too many cops are too eager to go for their guns, probably because that's what they've been conditioned to do - just as I've been conditioned to defer to their discretion.

Reconciling all this cognitive dissonance shit is a real bitch.

Four fucking times.

Today's PSA

I've never felt overly threatened being pulled over by the cops, so I have no real frame of reference, and it's hard to imagine the kind of abject terror someone of color would experience.

I may flash on something like, "Well shit, I guess this could be the end of my 20-year streak of no traffic tickets", but I've never ever ever thought, "Fuck me - I could be dead in a few minutes."

Here's something that may be of some help - and of course, I'm thinking there's a whole mess of authoritarian assholes who'll be attacking this with fervor and all due haste, using the usual sly reverse shit to fool the rubes into offering themselves up to be sacrificed by convincing them that it's actually just another scam by Soros and his cannibalistic space alien pedophiles to sucker them all into providing their personal data and specific location and blah blah foil-hat-bullshit blah.

Anyway, it's our right - and our responsibility - to accept a certain level of risk in order to hold power to account, and I think that's what this is aimed at accomplishing.

(I think this is kind of a stoopidly long and involved process that will likely flummox the majority of users, but here it is - it's a start anyway.)

Business Insider:

How to use the Siri 'I'm Getting Pulled Over' shortcut to record police encounters during traffic stops with your iPhone

Launched as part of Apple's iOS 12 update, the Shortcuts app lets you create automated routines for your phone. In other words, with the Shortcuts app, you can say a phrase or tap a button, and your phone will perform multiple tasks at once.

Although it's made to let you create your own shortcuts, you can also download pre-made shortcuts from third-party apps or developers.

Arizona resident Robert Petersen used this update to create his own third-party shortcut, initially known as "Police" and now known as "I'm Getting Pulled Over." It aims to assist users during traffic stops by automatically recording their interactions with police officers.

Here's how to download and set up the "I'm Getting Pulled Over" shortcut, and then activate it with Siri.

How the "Siri, I'm getting pulled over" shortcut works

First developed in 2018, the shortcut activates the Do Not Disturb feature, turning off all incoming calls, messages, and notifications. This is to reduce the chance that a police officer will be startled by your phone ringing or flashing, and act aggressively.

Next, it'll send a text message with your current location to all the contacts that you've selected beforehand.

At the same time, your phone will start recording a video with the front camera (i.e. the one above the phone's screen).

These are the default settings, but you can customize them in various ways — for example, you can set it so it records with the rear camera instead.

How to download the "Siri, I'm Getting Pulled Over" shortcut

Enable Untrusted Shortcuts on your iPhone

Since the shortcut is made by a third-party, your iPhone will consider it an "untrusted" shortcut. This means you'll need to adjust your phone settings before you download and use it.

Important: Before you can enable untrusted shortcuts, you'll need to run at least one "trusted" shortcut. If you haven't done this yet, open the Shortcuts app and set up — then run — one of the "Starter Shortcuts." It should only take a few moments.

1. Open your Settings app and tap on Shortcuts. Depending on your version of iOS, it'll either be listed with the other iOS apps, or with the larger list of apps at the bottom.

2. Toggle on Allow Untrusted Shortcuts. Again, remember that before you can select this, you'll have to create and run at least one "trusted" Shortcut.

3. A pop-up window will warn you of potential risks. To continue, tap "Allow," and then enter your passcode.

Download the shortcut

1. Open this link in your iPhone's Safari browser.

2. The Shortcuts app will open, listing all of the shortcut's features. At the bottom, tap "Add Untrusted Shortcut."



3. Choose which contacts will receive a message with your location. Then hit "Continue."

4. Next, select which contacts will receive a copy of the video.

5. Now select "Done."



6. Back on the My Shortcuts tab, tap "All Shortcuts," and then tap the three dots (...) on the I'm getting pulled over shortcut.

7. Scroll down to the "Location" section and select "Allow Access," then tap "Allow While Using App."

8. Scroll down to the Messages, Camera, and Photo sections and do the same thing — tap "Allow Access," and then "OK."

9. In the Camera section, select Front or Back depending on what camera you want to start the recording with.



10. Scroll down to the Scripting "Choose from Menu" settings and choose where to store your video when the shortcut ends. You'll have the following options:

• iCloud Drive
• Dropbox
• Do not upload

You can tap one of the red minus options to delete a location, or the green plus to add one.

11. When complete, choose "Done" to confirm your settings.

Two Weird Things

Cops who kill or maim people because of inappropriate application of force - no matter what their intention was - should face long prison terms and an absolute forever banishment from any job having anything to do with law enforcement.

Also, cops are so fearful of people having guns that they act like they're in mortal danger every second of every shift - operating on the edge, and behaving in a manner far more befitting a post-apocalyptic dystopia than a nation of laws and lawful demeanor.

I put those together and I get common cause - like we should be able to agree that we need to do something about guns and gun culture and the macho bullshit that pervades American society now.

But it seems like all we get is more shitty behavior from everybody - like we're in some kind of dead-end intramural arms race, and the "winner" is the last surviving human. 

And that is nine kinds of fucked up right there.

shit's gotta change, dammit

Overheard

"The officer isn't a racist asshole, she's just dangerously incompetent" is not the slam dunk defense you might think it is.

Shit's Gotta Change

Trevor Noah - The Daily Show

On Qualified Immunity

Cops have to be held accountable, but cops also have to have some leeway so as to operate as freely as necessary. And there's the rub.

Ruth Marcus at WaPo:

U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves couldn’t do justice for the plaintiff in his court, who had sued over police abuse. The Supreme Court won’t let him. So Reeves issued an opinion that dutifully followed the law — and blistered the justices for the all-but-insurmountable barrier they have constructed to shield police officers from being held to account.

Reeves, a Barack Obama nominee who sits in Jackson, Miss., and is the second Black federal judge in the history of the state, produced one of the most powerful pieces of legal writing I have encountered. His opinion is a 72-page cri de coeur directed at the Supreme Court, arguing that it must do away with the doctrine of “qualified immunity” for law enforcement officials.

Reeves begins with the larger context. “Clarence Jamison wasn’t jaywalking.” Footnote: “That was Michael Brown,” shot by police in Ferguson, Mo. “He wasn’t outside playing with a toy gun.” Footnote: “That was 12-year-old Tamir Rice,” shot in a park by a Cleveland police officer. “He wasn’t suspected of ‘selling loose, untaxed cigarettes.’ ” Footnote: “That was Eric Garner,” the Staten Island man who died after an officer put him in a chokehold.

Clarence Jamison was a Black man driving a Mercedes convertible.” In 2013, in Pelahatchie, Miss., an hour south of Philadelphia, Miss., where Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were killed in 1964. Because his temporary tag — he had just purchased the car — was allegedly folded over.

As Reeves recounts, Jamison’s fate was less dire than that of many others: “As he made his way home to South Carolina from a vacation in Arizona, Jamison was pulled over and subjected to one hundred and ten minutes of an armed police officer badgering him, pressuring him, lying to him and then searching his car top to bottom for drugs. Nothing was found. Jamison isn’t a drug courier. He’s a welder.”

Jamison wasn’t shot. He wasn’t killed. But he was frightened and humiliated, and his car suffered several thousand dollars in damage to its seats and convertible top. And, as Reeves found, his constitutional rights were violated: Officer Nick McClendon’s search of Jamison’s car violated the Fourth Amendment, and Jamison’s supposed “consent” to the search could hardly be deemed voluntary.

“In an America where Black people ‘are considered dangerous even when they are in their living rooms eating ice cream, asleep in their beds, playing in the park, standing in the pulpit of their church, birdwatching, exercising in public, or walking home from a trip to the store to purchase a bag of Skittles,’ ” Reeves wrote, “who can say that Jamison felt free that night on the side of Interstate 20? Who can say that he felt free to say no to an armed Officer McClendon?”

But none of that mattered, which brings us to the larger context that Reeves explores: the purpose of the federal civil rights law under which Jamison sued McClendon. Its popular name tells the story: the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, a Reconstruction era-effort to respond to what a later court described as the “reign of terror imposed by the Klan upon black citizens and their white sympathizers in the Southern States.” The law, now commonly known as Section 1983, provides for damages against state officials who deprive individuals of their constitutional rights.

All good, but for the fact that the Supreme Court began to eviscerate the law more than 50 years ago. As Reeves explains, “Judges have invented a legal doctrine to protect law enforcement officers from having to face any consequences for wrongdoing. The doctrine is called ‘qualified immunity.’ In real life it operates like absolute immunity.”

We keep seeing an elasticity in the steady progress towards equality, as we take our small steps towards that "more perfect union".

Whenever black folks (eg) have made significant strides, there's come a stretch of years that have seen white people push back, trying to make it the way it was - trying to Make America Great Again - trying to undermine the progress.

Every fucking time.

We have to do better. We have to raise people up, and we have to make it stick.

Our Descent

hat tip = J Gorman

Salon:

Let's have the decency not to pretend we weren't warned about this, shall we? Since virtually the day Donald Trump was elected, if not before that, people like journalist Masha Gessen and historian Timothy Snyder have told us that his presidency would be a sustained assault on democracy, and that America stood at a historical fork in the road, with at least one of the paths leading into darkness. We began to talk about "fascism" and "authoritarianism," and maybe those terms seemed metaphorical or melodramatic, for a while. Do they seem that way now?

It didn't feel like the end of democracy, did it? To use Gessen's language, did it feel like the dangerous moment between the "autocratic attempt" and the "autocratic breakthrough"? Not the way that alarming news reports from Hungary and Russia and Turkey and the Philippines do. The problem is, as history informs us, that we're not likely to notice such dangerous moments while they're happening. So the insults and outrages piled up and the news cycle grew ever more discordant and surreal, but there was still takeout and Netflix and Amazon. Life was about the same, for most people most of the time. Maybe it was all an "aberrant moment in time," in Joe Biden's immortal phrase. There was no Reichstag fire. There were no troops in the street. Not until now.

We can argue about whether Trump is simply the vector through which the authoritarian current flows — the Forrest Gump of fascism — or is, after his stupid-brilliant fashion, a very small Great Man of History. Both things can be true, which is effectively what Gessen argues in her new book "Surviving Autocracy." We can argue that this is all part of a larger global pattern of democratic crisis, which is clearly true, and that the United States had already become a degraded and dysfunctional pseudo-democracy in 2016, because only such a society could have allowed Trump to rise to power. Bernie Sanders literally went red in the face telling us that, over and over again, during his 2016 campaign. He sounded more like an Old Testament prophet than a presidential candidate, and made way too many normal people uncomfortable.

So, yes, a lot of us — probably all of us — should be called to account for how we got here. Because whatever we believe we did or didn't do, it wasn't enough, and here we are: Fourteen weeks before a presidential election, there are troops in the streets.

OK, we're not supposed to call them "troops." They're not members of the military. I don't think that improves matters. For the last week, armed men in camouflage uniforms marked as "POLICE," who do not seem to have recognizable insignias or badges, and do not have names on their uniforms, have been battling Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon. But even the language we use to describe these events grows slippery — another consequence of encroaching authoritarianism, which drains the meaning out of ordinary words. These police are not real police, and the protesters in Portland (and many other places) have moved past the Black Lives Matter agenda to something much larger and more difficult to define. They are standing up against autocracy, I think we can say, while these so-called police are trying to enforce it.

Today's Turnaround

I kinda question his judgement, but boy do I admire the grit.

That takes balls.

The Rot Has Spread

WaPo:




and an update:

Notice now that Cult45 want to declare AntiFa as a "terrorist organization", so they'll have justification for using all their new toys against us.

Daddy State Update

It seems clear.

Now, maybe this is one of those times when the obvious isn't what's really happening, but c'mon - the disproportionality is there, and it's been there for decades.

But expand it out and look at the bigger picture - the scope of the problem gets pretty fucking alarming. 

And for the moment, let's leave aside the usual complaint that "Oh, I see - now it's a real problem cuz white people are starting to notice how they're being fucked over too."

WaPo:

Despite the unpredictable events that lead to fatal shootings, police nationwide have shot and killed almost the same number of people annually — nearly 1,000 — since The Post began its project. Probability theory may offer an explanation. It holds that the quantity of rare events in huge populations tends to remain stable absent major societal changes, such as a fundamental shift in police culture or extreme restrictions on gun ownership.


Let's keep in mind that All Lives Can't Matter 'Til Black Lives Matter Too, and concentrate on what we can do to make it better overall.

A Death In Minneapolis

Those 4 cops got fired with uncommon alacrity.

Maybe it's because the mayor is in knee-jerk mode ...



... and maybe it's because he knows there's a lot more to the story that's yet to come out.

Over to you, Justin King:

We can hope we're seeing one of those "Jesus-Fuck-Enough-Of-This-Racist-Cop-Shit-Already" moments.

Today's Eternal Sadness

32-year-old Tony Timpa died at the hands of poorly trained cops in Dallas three years ago.

It took over two years and a decision in federal court to get the video released.

Dallas Morning News:

The officers pinned his handcuffed arms behind his back for nearly 14 minutes and zip-tied his legs together. By the time he was loaded onto a gurney and put into an ambulance, the 32-year-old was dead.

Timpa called 911 on Aug. 10, 2016, from the parking lot of a Dallas porn store, saying he was afraid and needed help. He told a dispatcher he suffered from schizophrenia and depression and was off his prescription medication. The News first reported Timpa’s death in a 2017 investigation that showed Dallas police refused to say how a man who had called 911 for help ended up dead.

Those three officers -- Kevin Mansell, Danny Vasquez and Dustin Dillard -- were indicted by a grand jury in 2017 on charges of misdemeanor deadly conduct, three months after The News published its investigation into Timpa’s death. Following two days of testimony, the grand jury’s indictment stated that the "officers engaged in reckless conduct that placed Timpa in imminent danger of serious bodily injury.”

But in March, Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot dismissed the charges.

Creuzot previously told The News that he met with "all three medical examiners" who had testified to the grand jury. They reportedly told him they did not believe the officers acted recklessly and "cannot, and will not, testify to the elements of the indictment beyond a reasonable doubt."