Today's Odd Thing

Surprise, surprise, surprise.

When police departments are made less people-hostile, and more citizen-friendly, things can get better.

We have to be careful not to fall into a Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc thing, but still - fewer cops and crime goes down?

Or is it more like "things get better when we get rid of the bad cops"?

IDK.

Half the Police Force Quit. Crime Dropped.

In a staggering report last month, the Department of Justice documented pervasive abuse, illegal use of force, racial bias and systemic dysfunction in the Minneapolis Police Department. City police officers engaged in brutality or made racist comments, even as a department investigator rode along in a patrol car. Complaints about police abuse were often slow-walked or dismissed without investigation. And after George Floyd’s death, instead of ending the policy of racial profiling, the police just buried the evidence.

The Minneapolis report was shocking, but it wasn’t surprising. It doesn’t read much differently from recent Justice Department reports about the police departments in Chicago, Baltimore, Cleveland, Albuquerque, New Orleans, Ferguson, Mo., or any of three recent reports from various sources about Minneapolis, from 2003, 2015 and 2016.

Amid spiking nationwide homicide rates in 2020 and 2021 and a continuing shortage of police officers, many in law enforcement have pointed to investigations like these — along with “defund the police”-style activism — as the problem. With all the criticism they are weathering, the argument goes, officers are so hemmed in, they can no longer do their job right; eventually they quit, defeated and demoralized. Fewer police officers, more crime.

Lying just below the surface of that characterization is a starkly cynical message to marginalized communities: You can have accountable and constitutional policing, or you can have safety. But you can’t have both.

In accord with that view, some academic studies have found that more police officers can correlate with less crime. But the studies don’t account for factors that the Minneapolis report highlights — the social costs of police brutality and misconduct, how they can erode public trust, how that erosion of trust affects public safety — and they don’t account for the potential benefits of less coercive, less confrontational alternatives to the police. We don’t have as many studies that take those factors into account, but to see the effects in real time, you need only step over the Minneapolis city line.

Golden Valley is a suburb of about 22,000 that in many ways is as idyllic as its name suggests. The median annual household income tops $100,000, there’s very little crime, and 15 percent of the town is devoted to parks and green spaces, including Theodore Wirth Park on its eastern border, a lush space that hosts a bike path and a parkway.

But the town’s Elysian charm comes with a dark past. Just on the other side of the park lies the neighborhood of Willard-Hay. There, the median household income drops to about $55,000 per year, and there’s quite a bit more crime. Willard-Hay is 26 percent white and 40 percent Black. Golden Valley is 85 percent white and 5 percent Black — the result of pervasive racial covenants.

“We enjoy prosperity and security in this community,” said Shep Harris, the mayor since 2012. “But that has come at a cost. I think it took incidents like the murder of George Floyd to help us see that more clearly.” The residents of the strongly left-leaning town decided change was necessary. One step was eliminating those racial covenants. Another was changing the Police Department, which had a reputation for mistreating people of color.

The first hire was Officer Alice White, the force’s first high-ranking Black woman. The second was Virgil Green, the town’s first Black police chief.

“When I started, Black folks I’d speak to in Minneapolis seemed surprised that I’d been hired,” Chief Green said when I spoke with him recently. “They told me they and most people they knew avoided driving through Golden Valley.”

Members of the overwhelmingly white police force responded to both hires by quitting — in droves.

An outside investigation later revealed that some officers had run an opposition campaign against Chief Green. One of those officers recorded herself making a series of racist comments during a call with city officials, then sent the recording to other police officers. She was fired — prompting yet another wave of resignations.

The typical Golden Valley police officer makes a six-figure salary with good benefits. The city has almost no violent crime. It’s a good gig. Yet in just two years, more than half the department quit.

“I haven’t been on the job long enough to make any significant changes,” Chief Green said. “Yet we’re losing officers left and right. It’s hard not to think that they just don’t want to work under a Black supervisor.”

The interesting thing is that according to Chief Green, despite the reduction in staff, crime — already low — has gone down in Golden Valley. The town plans to staff the department back up, just not right away. “I’ve heard that the police union is cautioning officers from coming to work here,” Mr. Harris said. “But that’s OK. We want to take the time to hire officers who share our vision and are excited to work toward our goals.”

Mr. Harris is quick to point out that Golden Valley may not be the perfect model for the rest of the country. “This is a wealthy community with very little crime,” he said. “We can afford to go through this change. I realize that may not be the case in other places.”

There is reason to think it may. When New York’s officers engaged in an announced slowdown in policing in late 2014 and early 2015, civilian complaints of major crime in the city dropped. And despite significant staffing shortages at law enforcement agencies around the country, if trends continue, 2023 will have the largest percentage drop in homicides in U.S. history. It’s true that such a drop would come after a two-year surge, but the fact that it would also occur after a significant reduction in law enforcement personnel suggests the surge may have been due more to the pandemic and its effects than depolicing.

At the very least, the steady stream of Justice Department reports depicting rampant police abuse ought to temper the claim that policing shortages are fueling crime. It’s no coincidence that the cities we most associate with violence also have long and documented histories of police abuse. When people don’t trust law enforcement, they stop cooperating and resolve disputes in other ways. Instead of fighting to retain police officers who feel threatened by accountability and perpetuate that distrust, cities might consider just letting them leave.

Today's Cops

Here's an idea: Whenever there's a lawsuit that results from cops getting frisky and overzealous, and there's a negotiated settlement because it's obvious the cops were on the wrong side of the fucking law - let's take the money out of the cops' pension fund instead of foisting that shit on the taxpayers.

Watch how fast the cops themselves start to make changes to that behavior.

WaPo:

‘Watch the show, folks’:
Va. trooper no longer employed after playing to camera in violent stop of Black driver

A Virginia State Police trooper who is seen in a viral video telling a Black driver “you are going to get your a-- whooped” before violently removing the man from his car in 2019 is no longer with the agency, a spokeswoman said.

VSP Communications Director Corinne Geller said her agency was prohibited from releasing additional details, but an attorney for the driver said he was told in talks held during settlement of a lawsuit over the incident that Charles Hewitt was fired for cause in February, months after the video became public.

Joshua Erlich, the attorney, said the federal lawsuit claiming Derrick Thompson had been assaulted and had his constitutional rights violated by the trooper was settled this month for $20,000, with no admission of wrongdoing by the state. The Virginia Attorney General’s Office confirmed a settlement but did not characterize the deal or offer any other comment. A working phone number could not be located for Hewitt.

"Mr. Thompson filed this case because Trooper Hewitt's behavior was unconscionable, and Mr. Thompson is happy with the outcome," Erlich said. "He thought he deserved — and received — monetary compensation. And although the VSP did not admit to any wrongdoing, Mr. Thompson is heartened Trooper Hewitt is no longer on the street and thinks Virginia is safer for it."

The video, which Erlich first posted on Twitter last summer, has been retweeted thousands of times and was featured widely in news reports, begins after Thompson, 29, of Woodbridge was pulled over on the Beltway in Fairfax County in April 2019 for an expired inspection decal. A trooper who initiated the stop said she could smell marijuana wafting from Thompson’s car, but Erlich said no drugs were found in the vehicle.

Hewitt was one of three troopers at the scene and did all of the talking in the video.

Thompson filmed the encounter with his cellphone. The video shows him sitting behind the wheel of his car claiming that he was not a threat and that a request for him to get out of his vehicle was unlawful. For much of the video, he has his hands raised in the air and he passively resists Hewitt.

At one point, Hewitt leans toward Thompson and yells: “Take a look at me. I am a f---ing specimen right here, buddy. You have gotten on my last nerve, all right?”

Thompson tells Hewitt he has his hands up.

Hewitt then tells him: “You are going to get your a-- whooped.” He then goes on to say: “I’m going to give you one more chance. You can bring that with you — I’ll let you film the whole thing.”

After some more discussion, Hewitt tells Thompson he is being placed under arrest, looks into the camera and says, “Watch the show, folks.”

Hewitt then forcefully removes Thompson from the car, takes him to the ground and arrests him. Thompson pleaded guilty to misdemeanor obstruction of justice last year in Fairfax County General District Court.

Geller declined to comment on the video, but Col. Gary T. Settle, the Virginia State Police superintendent, said shortly after it became public that Hewitt’s conduct was inappropriate. A previous internal investigation into his use of force had cleared him of any wrongdoing, and Fairfax County prosecutors declined to press charges against him.

“The conduct displayed by Trooper Hewitt during the course of the traffic stop is not in agreement with the established standards of conduct required of a Virginia trooper,” Settle said in a July statement. “Nor is it characteristic of the service provided daily across the Commonwealth of Virginia by Virginia State Police personnel.”

Our Boys In Blue

As always - nobody with a living thinking brain would make a blanket statement condemning all cops for the actions of a few.

That said, it seems like "a few" falls quite a bit short of reality.

So the truth sounds something like: What the fuck is wrong with all these fuckin' cops?

When the whole world is watching us to see what we're doing to stem the tide of authoritarianism, how do we go stumbling on with these mixed signals?

WaPo: (pay wall)

As Derek Chauvin’s former bosses line up to condemn him, ‘policing in America is on trial’

One by one, Minneapolis police leadership and veterans took the stand in former officer Derek Chauvin’s murder trial to view the video footage of him pushing his knee into George Floyd’s neck.

“Pulling him down to the ground, face down and putting your knee on the neck for that amount of time is just uncalled for,” the department’s longest-serving officer testified.

“That’s not what we train,” said an inspector who used to lead the department’s training.

“Not part of our training and is certainly not part of our ethics or values,” the Minneapolis police chief said.

The testimonies offered by these and other high-ranking police officials, punctuated by a chief appearing in uniform, marked an unprecedented courtroom condemnation of an officer by so many of his own department’s leadership, according to law enforcement veterans and legal experts.

They also underscored how policing remains at the heart of a crucial debate that could decide the trial’s outcome. Prosecutors say Chauvin “betrayed this badge,” describing his actions as beyond the pale for police, while the defense argues the ex-officer was using necessary force and “did exactly what he had been trained to do.”

"...exactly what he had been trained to do" is a stunning indictment - and not just in its "I was only following orders" dumbfuckery. Chauvin's attempt to use the Nuremberg Nazi defense has to show normal people what a sorry fucked up state of affairs we're dealing with here.

The cops are being trained to kill us? And the cops are sure we're going to understand all this and let them off the hook, cuz hey - that's what we're paying them to do?

Please tell me the irony is not lost on us.

Meanwhile, also via WaPo:

Officer fired amid call from Va. governor for investigation into pepper-spraying of Black Army officer

A Black Army officer held at gunpoint during traffic stop was afraid to get out of his car.

‘You should be,’ police said.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam said Sunday he is directing Virginia State Police to investigate a traffic stop during which two police officers held an Army second lieutenant at gunpoint months ago in the southeast part of the state. Town officials said later that night that one officer was fired.

Northam (D) said the incident — in which body-camera footage shows police pepper-spraying, striking and handcuffing Caron Nazario — “is disturbing and angered me.” Nazario, 27, who is Black and Latino, filed a lawsuit this month against Windsor officers Joe Gutierrez and Daniel Crocker that alleges excessive force due to racial profiling.

And just in case things aren't already FUBAR...

WaPo - one more time:

Police fatally shoot man, 20, in suburban Minneapolis, sparking protests

Police fatally shot a man after a traffic stop on Sunday in suburban Minneapolis, sparking clashes between hundreds of protesters and officers in an area where tensions are already high during the ongoing trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin.

The victim’s family identified him as 20-year-old Daunte Wright. Hours after the shooting, hundreds of protesters surrounded the police headquarters and clashed with officers in riot gear, who fired flash bangs and tear gas. The Minnesota National Guard, which is deployed to the Twin Cities for the Chauvin trial, later arrived to assist police as numerous businesses in the area were broken into.

Police said the shooting happened just before 2 p.m., when an officer stopped a car on a traffic violation and found the driver had an outstanding warrant. As police tried to arrest him, he got back into the car and an officer fired at him, Brooklyn Center Police Chief Tim Gannon said in a news release.

- snip -

Aubrey Wright identified the victim as his son, Daunte, who is Black. He said police pulled him over because an air freshener was allegedly blocking his rearview mirror — a claim Aubrey Wright questioned because the car had tinted windows.

- snip -

The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota called for an “immediate, transparent and independent investigation by an outside agency.” It also demanded the quick release of any body-camera footage, as well as all the names of the officers and agencies involved.

“We have concerns that police appear to have used dangling air fresheners as an excuse for making a pretextual stop, something police do too often to target Black people,” tweeted the ACLU of Minnesota.

At the risk of being just too darned repetitive:

What the fuck is wrong with these fuckin' cops?

Don't Forget The Guns

Everyone being kinda preoccupied with COVID-19 makes it harder to remember some of the other shit we need to deal with - issues we'll have to take up again once we get past the current dual crises of the pandemic and the potential collapse of American democracy.

What was it about "one's impending demise tends to focus the mind"?

Anyway, along those lines, here's a piece talking about how we get all wacky sometimes just because we're walking around with the means to fuck somebody up - it can make us believe (mistakenly) that everybody else is walking around with the some means, which easily translates to our believing they have the intent to fuck us up.

Colorado State University, College Of Natural Sciences:

Accidental shootings of unarmed victims are tragically common, and sometimes they happen because the shooter misperceived the victim as also having a gun.

Nearly a decade ago, cognitive psychologist Jessica Witt wondered if the mere act of wielding a firearm could bias someone to perceive another person as wielding one, too – and more importantly, if such a bias could be scientifically measured. A series of experiments later, Witt and her research team concluded, yes and yes.

The team has recently published a new set of experiments further underscoring what they call the “gun embodiment effect” in the journal Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications. Their original research was published in 2012 when Witt, now a professor in CSU’s Department of Psychology, was a researcher at Purdue University. For this recent study, they’ve replicated the experiments with larger sample sizes and more confidence in their claims that the gun bias exists; that it can be measured via controlled laboratory experiments; and that it seems universal – that is, not changed by an individual’s prior experiences, general attitudes about firearms, or personality traits.

“To prove something is universal, you have to rule out all possible alternatives,” said Witt, an expert in the intricate links between human vision and cognition. “We have not done that yet, but we have some really good first steps.”

Speed and accuracy

Witt’s team recruited over 200 CSU students to help suss out the original hypothesis. Participants, holding either a fake gun or a spatula, were hooked up to a motion-tracking system. The system recorded both the speed and accuracy of their reactions to images on a screen of people holding either a gun or a neutral object – in this case, a shoe.

The researchers found strong evidence that when holding a gun, participants were a little slower to make their judgment about whether the other person was also holding a gun. The difference was about 8 milliseconds – a small effect, but it was unmistakable. They read this result as the person needing to take the time to inhibit a primed response caused by carrying a gun themselves.

They also found that holding a gun affected participants’ accuracy, with a 1% greater likelihood to misperceive the other person as having a gun too. “It’s as if, when they’re holding a gun, they are prone to see a gun,” Witt said.

The effects they saw in the lab were mercifully small. “But if you have this small effect, and put it on a national scale, and you talk about how many people have guns in this country, even these small effects are important,” Witt said. “For example, if 100 officers wielding guns interact with 10 unarmed people a day for 100 days, in these 100,000 interactions, our data suggest there were will be 1,000 misperceptions of an unarmed person as holding a gun.”

Addressing the replication problem

The subtlety of the gun embodiment effect challenged Witt’s team to strengthen their original work, in part in response to the replication crisis in psychology experiments that’s plagued so many research teams. “Our study ended up serving as a replication check and revision to our earlier claims,” Witt said.

They hope they can next dive into what circumstances might change the bias for people holding guns. For this recent test, they looked at a host of possibilities, like participants’ attitudes toward guns, personality traits, and measures of their impulsivity. None of these individual circumstances seemed to change the gun bias, but the absence only sparks more questions. For example, does the bias change depending on the situation? If the shooter is scared? Or fatigued?

If she can secure more funding, Witt hopes to answer such questions, and delve into them using a more diverse sample among the general public, with better representation across ages, races, education levels and prior experiences with guns.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation. The Department of Psychology is in the College of Natural Sciences.

Wow - maybe guys like Wyatt Earp knew what they were doing when they decided it would be better for everybody if nobody carried guns while they were hanging out in town.

It's a wonderment.

And There It Is

We have a "president" who thinks he gains politically by stirring up shit.

He has repeatedly invited the inference that violence in spite of the law is something we need - something that will solve some problems for us. And on some occasions, his rhetoric has been far more direct.

WaPo:

Protesters in Albuquerque wrapped a chain around the neck of a bronze statue and began tugging, chanting “Tear it down,” shortly before sunset on Monday. Their efforts to pull down a monument of Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate suddenly stopped as four shots rang out.

Most people instinctively turned toward the noise, videos from the scene show. A few screamed. Just yards away, a group of militia men sporting military-like garb and carrying semiautomatic rifles formed a protective circle around the gunman.

The gunshots, which left one man in critical but stable condition, have set off a cascade of public outcry denouncing the unregulated militia’s presence and the shooting, although police have yet to announce an arrest or describe exactly what happened. The victim is also unidentified.

“The heavily armed individuals who flaunted themselves at the protest, calling themselves a ‘civil guard,’ were there for one reason: To menace protesters, to present an unsanctioned show of unregulated force,” New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) said in a statement. “To menace the people of New Mexico with weaponry — with an implicit threat of violence — is on its face unacceptable; that violence did indeed occur is unspeakable.”

Sometime this afternoon, 45* is set to deliver his latest executive order, which is supposed to line out what he thinks we should do in the area of Police Reform.

He's hinted that he'll be addressing specifically "the sheriffs".
Given what we know about the Daddy State movement, these bozos believe strongly that the office of County Sheriff is the repository of all "real power" under the constitution.

This could be very interesting.

On Privilege

I have privilege as a white person because I can do all of these things without thinking twice:

• I can go birding (#ChristianCooper)
• I can go jogging (#AmaudArbery)
• I can relax in the comfort of my own home (#BothemSean and #AtatianaJefferson)
• I can ask for help after being in a car crash (#JonathanFerrell and #RenishaMcBride)
• I can have a cellphone (#StephonClark)
• I can leave a party to get to safety (#JordanEdwards)
• I can play loud music (#JordanDavis)
• I can sell CDs (#AltonSterling)
• I can sleep (#AiyanaJones and #breonataylor)
• I can walk from the corner store (#MikeBrown)
• I can play cops and robbers (#TamirRice)
• I can go to church (#Charleston9)
• I can walk home with Skittles (#TrayvonMartin)
• I can hold a hair brush while leaving my own bachelor party (#SeanBell)
• I can party on New Years (#OscarGrant)
• I can get a normal traffic ticket (#SandraBland)
• I can lawfully carry a weapon (#PhilandoCastile)
• I can break down on a public road with car problems (#CoreyJones)
• I can shop at Walmart (#JohnCrawford)
• I can have a disabled vehicle (#TerrenceCrutcher)
• I can read a book in my own car (#KeithScott)
• I can be a 10yr old walking with my grandfather (#CliffordGlover)
• I can decorate for a party (#ClaudeReese)
• I can ask a cop a question (#RandyEvans)
• I can cash a check in peace (#YvonneSmallwood)
• I can take out my wallet (#AmadouDiallo)
• I can run (#WalterScott)
• I can breathe (#EricGarner)
• I can live (#FreddieGrey)
• I can be arrested without the fear of being murdered (#GeorgeFloyd)

White privilege is a real thing.

Adventures In Good Government

Constituent Service - services provided by the government - paid for by those constituents - in service to the community - the way it's supposed to be.

What a grand idea.

The Baltimore Sun, Luke Broadwater:

In Baltimore’s most crime-ridden zones, city officials are conducting an experiment in government. They started last year by targeting four small, deeply troubled areas to be flooded with more police patrols and city services. They called them “Transformation Zones,” at first, then rebranded them as “Violence Reduction Zones.” They’ve since added three more zones, bringing the total to seven.

Each zone gets several dedicated police officers, called Neighborhood Coordination Officers, and an extra focus across city government for ramped-up services. Mayor Catherine Pugh has put $1.6 million in the city’s budget for two “rapid response” crews from the Department of Public Works to quickly clean up these areas, three more housing inspectors to enforce code violations such as peeling lead paint and extend hours at local recreation centers.

The idea is simple: If it can be rightly said that these areas were for far too long over-policed and under-served — and if this punitive style of government did not produce lasting crime declines — then officials should try the opposite: The zones should be drowning in services, from job training to street cleaning.

Everything costs something

So if you want this:

You'll have to stop doing this:

Today's Eternal Sadness

WaPo:

Police say they saw an object in Stephan Clark’s hand before they fired 20 bullets that killed him in his back yard Sunday night in Sacramento, a disturbing moment that was made public through body camera footage released Wednesday night.

The two officers were responding to a 911 call about a man breaking vehicle windows when they encountered, then killed, Clark, an unarmed black man.
Two things get stuck in my mind. I guess the main thing is this: 

Why are the cops so afraid that everybody has a gun? 

But the second big thing in my mind is: Why do the Press Poodles never ask that question at the news conference as the authorities try to explain that killing an unarmed citizen was somehow the only viable option at the time?

And a third one comes to mind as well - why don't the cops do some more to support initiatives that might make it less likely that they'll have to kill somebody with their guns, by making it less likely that someone will kill them with a gun?

Genius is not required to figure out that gun violence has something to do with guns.

Without cars, nobody dies in a car crash

Without airplanes, nobody dies in a plane crash

Nobody gets killed by hand-thrown bullets

Not Just Another Dumb Jock

Gregg Popovich struggles at times to find the words, but if this is at all representative of how people in positions of influence are thinking, then we're doing better than I thought.

And Steve Kerr talks about the Warriors taking a pass on their White House visit - making a very solid statement on values:

BTW - nobody is protesting the national anthem, and nobody is protesting the flag.

BTW2 - stop telling me 45* has accomplished something positive. You might as well say it was a good thing those 300 passengers were killed in just about the most gruesome way imaginable because we got all these great new data points on how to improve airline safety.

3 Dead In Charlottesville Yesterday

All three died while serving their community as best they knew how.

Heather Heyer

VSP Berke Bates

VSP Lt Jay Cullen

Tim Wise

Re: Cops beating on people - mostly people with dark brown skin, and the ridiculousness of pale people thinking they know much of anything about what it's like to live black in white America.

It is bad enough that much of white America sees fit to lecture black people about the proper response to police brutality, economic devastation and perpetual marginality, having ourselves rarely been the targets of any of these. It is bad enough that we deign to instruct black people whose lives we have not lived, whose terrors we have not faced, and whose gauntlets we have not run, about violence; this, even as we enjoy the national bounty over which we currently claim possession solely as a result of violence. I beg to remind you, George Washington was not a practitioner of passive resistance. Neither the early colonists nor the nation's founders fit within the Gandhian tradition. There were no sit-ins at King George's palace, no horseback freedom rides to effect change. There were just guns, lots and lots of guns.

We are here because of blood, and mostly that of others; here because of our insatiable and rapacious desire to take by force the land and labor of those others. We are the last people on Earth with a right to ruminate upon the superior morality of peaceful protest. We have never believed in it and rarely practiced it. Rather, we have always taken what we desire, and when denied it we have turned to means utterly genocidal to make it so.

 Read the rest of it at Alternet

Zimmerman III

...or IV, or whatever we're up to now.  It's hard to keep track.  I guess I'm wondering when they'll finally get tired of fucking around with this guy and just Cop-Murder him, and I'm not advocating for the cops to punch this asshole's ticket BTW, but isn't that kinda what we do now?  We have a Criminal Justice System that doesn't work for shit, and an awful lot of our cops have come out of a military where the basic policy is Kill Your Way To A Peaceful Resolution - what're we waiting for?

Or maybe he's still alive because he's not anonymous enough to be disposed of discreetly.  Celebrity has its privileges here in USAmerica Inc.

CNN:

George Zimmerman -- the man acquitted by a Florida jury over the death of Trayvon Martin -- was arrested Friday in Florida on suspicion of domestic violence with a weapon, local authorities said.

Zimmerman, 31, was arrested by police in Lake Mary around 10 p.m. and booked into the John E. Polk Correctional Facility, according to that facility's website.

In addition to domestic violence, Zimmerman faces a charge of aggravated assault, reports the Seminole County Sheriff's Office, which operates the Polk Correctional Facility.

And one more little thing - battalions of Daddy State Chicken Chokers spent buttloads of time and energy defending George Zimmerman and slagging Trayvon Martin; when might we expect them to step up and tell us they got that one wrong?

Skeptical Poe

And The Beat Goes On

Rolling Stone has a bit on 11 instances of Cops Killing Brown People:

Brown and Garner were two people living a thousand miles apart, at very different points in their lives. But they share one tragic fact in common: They were both black men executed in broad daylight by cops. And unless the U.S. Justice Department nails their killers on federal civil rights charges, neither of their families will get even the cold comfort of a day in court.

Sadly, there's nothing new about this pattern of lethal racial profiling. For far too long, African-Americans in this country have had to worry about whether police will kill their loved ones on the slightest pretext without facing any meaningful punishment. Racist violence is a deep-rooted part of this country's history, and it's going to take substantial nationwide reform of the policing and court systems to change this awful reality. Here are 11 of the most heartbreaking examples of black men, women and children killed by police in the last 15 years. Their stories are different in many ways, but none of them deserved to die the way they did – and we could fill many more pages with others like them.

1. Amadou Diallo (1999)
2. Patrick Dorismond (2000)
3. Ousmane Zongo (2003)
4. Timothy Stansbury (2004)
5. Sean Bell (2006)
6. Oscar Grant (2009)
7. Aiyana Stanley-Jones (2010)
8. Ramarley Graham (2012)
9. Tamon Robinson (2012)
10. Rekia Boyd (2012)
11. Kimani Gray (2013)

'Conservatives' spend a buncha time and lung capacity carping about Da Gubmint being overbearing and repressive, but not when it comes to killing brown people - then it's nothing but "cops making a noble effort to do a very dangerous job".

Almost as an aside, in all but a couple of these cases, the cops testified to being afraid the 'suspect' had a gun.  So, also too, 'conservatives', maybe you could rethink some of your bullshit rhetoric about the absolute-ness of the 2nd Amendment.  

After all, if it's OK for you guys to have any gun you want, and it's OK for you to do whatever you want with your guns (including defending yourselves from a violent and repressive Gubmint), then you should be praising brown people for doing exactly the same for themselves, and you should be condemning whoever shoots them down.  Unless of course y'all actually are the racist assholes your arguments and actions usually reveal you to be.

The Inevitable Chart Emerges

Every time the cops get slammed for a bogus shooting, we hear the standard argument from one side that cops have to go to work every day thinking they might not make it home; and from the other side, we get the contention that a career cop faces far less potential for death on the job than lots of other occupations.

Being the Google Sapien that I am, I looked it up and made this handy-dandy little chart for your referential convenience (hat tip = Democratic Underground):

Ain't none of that the point, kids.

The point is that it appears an overeager (and likely under-trained) asshole, who prob'ly shouldn't have been allowed out with a badge and a gun in the first place, confronted a young man who was walking in the middle of the street, and when he resisted the officer's orders to move to the sidewalk, was shot something like six times - including twice in the head.

Michael Brown was no angel - and BTW, Officer Wilson didn't know Brown had stolen anything at the time of the shooting - but if being something less than perfectly charming is a capital offense, then it wouldn't be so hard to find a parking place downtown on a weekday.

Two in the hat, boys and girls.  That's the fuckin' point.

Let's Try Something Else

Retribution and punishment.  That's what is seems we're all about now.

Mom Danielle Wolf was grocery shopping at a Kroger store in North Augusta, South Carolina when she was arrested for disorderly conduct after cursing in the presence of her two daughters, WJBF News Channel 6 reports.

--and--

Ms. Richardson, 28, was arrested after an officer saw the kids playing in the park with no adult supervision, parked her patrol car, and saw the kids waving her over. What then, Bay News 9?

Maybe the cops involved in those incidents could've just done a little mediating and defusing and admonishing; or maybe they could've concentrated a little more on the whole "To Serve" part of the customary motto that's supposed to be kind of a guiding principle for Law Enforcement.

But peace-making isn't what's cool now.  It isn't sexy like blowin' shit up.  When you've trained an entire generation to be soldiers (a shitload of rookie cops are coming straight outa the US Military these days), and you've reduced everything to the binary - "you're either with us or you're against us" - when it's always and only either good or bad, right or wrong, black or white - what you end up with is the mindset that wearing the uniform makes you the hero, and that means everybody else is the bad guy.

So the default position is Shoot-First-And-Fuck-You-And-Your-Questions, which doesn't leave a lot of room for anybody who wants to do the real work involved in keeping the shit from hitting fan in the first place, which is what makes it way too extraordinary when real cops like Ron Johnson come along who understand what the job is supposed to be all about, with the first tenet being that a fellow American is not the fucking enemy.

Prevention is always more cost-effective than remedy.  It costs us a lot less to provide food, clothing, housing and a decent education for a kid in the first 18 years of his life than it does to hunt him down, arrest him, put him on trial and to keep him in jail for the next 3 or 5 or 10 years.  And the costs of grinding him up in the "Justice System" are only the direct costs; the ones we can easily see and identify.  There are plenty of other costs associated with whatever his "crimes" happened to be that we usually don't even acknowledge - the Opportunity Costs of lost productivity, insurance, emergency response, recovery and rehab and on and on and on.

What's been going on in Ferguson is a really great example of all those hidden costs kinda poppin' up all at once.

And the question is: why do the people of Ferguson have to pay that price for us, instead of Wall Street and General Dynamics and Corrections Corp of America?

Know Your Shit

I hate this.  I hate thinking I need to teach my kids that the cops are not their friends, and are not looking out for them.



(hat tip = Balloon Juice)

Chickens Come Home To Roost

Gee - it's just like 1970 again.  The cops are not your friends...

(hat tip = The Agonist)

From care2 make a difference:

Sometime between the time he was arrested on March 27, 2009 around 2:00 p.m., and March 31 at 1:23 p.m. when he was pronounced dead, Christie had been sprayed with ten blasts of pepper spray, also known as OC (Oleo-resin Capsicum), which is a derivative of cayenne pepper.

  ...and the world is a ghetto.

Corporatizing The NYPD

One puzzle has at least been solved. Wall Street’s criminals have not been indicted or sent to jail because they have effectively become the police.

Wall Street Firms Spy on Protestors in Tax-Funded Center (truthout.org)

Police State

Calling all Libertarians and Anti-Gubmint Independents:  This is what's happening in Indiana, after many years of "conservative" erosion of civil rights in the guise of "common sense laws and law enforcement"; and under the watchful eye of a very popular Republican, Governor Mitch Daniels.

This is what's happening because of who you've been allowing to get elected.  Make no mistake here.  Every time you say something like "they're all bad" or "they're all the same" or "why can't the ballot say None Of The Above" or anything else that's just fuckin' stupid, you're taking yourselves and others out of the process, which is exactly what these shit-heels want you to do.

(hat-tip to Little Green Footballs)

INDIANAPOLIS— People have no right to resist if police officers illegally enter their home, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled in a decision that overturns centuries of common law.

The court issued its 3-2 ruling on Thursday, contending that allowing residents to resist officers who enter their homes without any right would increase the risk of violent confrontation. If police enter a home illegally, the courts are the proper place to protest it, Justice Steven David said.

“We believe … a right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,” David said. “We also find that allowing resistance unnecessarily escalates the level of violence and therefore the risk of injuries to all parties involved without preventing the arrest.”

Chicago Tribune

And the circular logical is impeccable.  The police break down your door; they take whatever they want; they can stomp you and your family if you "resist" (and of course you will get stomped, because of course the cops will claim you resisted); and if you claim they've made a mistake, you can hire a lawyer (with whatever you can scrape together after  the cops have taken everything) and go to court; but since you had no right to "resist" in the first place - even when it was an UNLAWFUL entry - you have no case.

Let me be clear (if that's at all possible at this point): The scenario above is not meant to illustrate what's bound to happen every time the cops go to somebody's door.  There will be many more legitimate incursions than not.  But that's not the point (that's NEVER the fucking point).  The point is that when you grant the kind of power that this bullshit decision entails, you will get abuse - because you're inviting abuse.  Get it?