Turns Out When Police Act Cordial, Rather Than As An Oppressive Military Force, Things Work Out Better
from the shockingly-unshocking dept
After covering the militarized police fiasco in Ferguson, Missouri the past few days, including highlighting Anil Dash's rather simple point that the way to deal with angry protestors isn't to make them angrier, it appears that someone finally got the message. Missouri's governor kicked out the St. Louis County police, who were responsible for much of the previous escalation, and sent in the Missouri State Highway Patrol, who almost immediately set a very different tone -- one that involved a much smaller police presence, and one that was a lot friendlier. It even involved talking with (not just to) protestors in a cordial manner. The most striking image -- a complete reversal of the day before -- has to be Captain Ron Johnson, who was put in charge, walking with the protestors (in ordinary police garb) rather than having militarized police aiming high powered weaponry at them.
Capt. Ron Johnson of the Missouri Highway Patrol walks along with the Ferguson march. Compare this to Wednesday. pic.twitter.com/Vtezu4MuHk
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Filed Under: cordial, ferguson, militarization, missouri, police, police brutality
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my 2 cents
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Maybe it does happen, but I cannot recall any instance of it.
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That's precisely what I'm saying. I just took this cop as an example. I don't know the details and if there's evidence of him shooting hte boy I haven't seen yet. But there is animosity towards him. It doesn't matter if cop or civilian, the question here is that sometimes withholding the names involved may be the best course of action to avoid mob justice.
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However, at this point, anyone not a police officer involved in a shooting like this would be under arrest and the public would have been given their name. Let's start by treating police and citizens the same way when a potential crime has been committed - they are supposed to be held to a HIGHER standard, not a lower one.
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Yes... but...
These riots had very little to do with the shooting and much to do about the scum of the earth using a tragedy to profit by starting looting - unless someone can tell me how looting helps the poor dead teen in any way - or his family?
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Most of the demonstrations and gatherings resulting from the police shooting had absolutely NOTHING to do with looting or violence, unless you count the police firing tear gas and rubber bullets into the protesters. Nice fucking try, though.
"These riots had very little to do with the shooting and much to do about the scum of the earth using a tragedy to profit by starting looting - unless someone can tell me how looting helps the poor dead teen in any way - or his family?"
As a matter of proportion, the riots also BARELY EXISTED. Your racism is showing.
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Calling people racist in this way is just a method to shut down the conversation. You should know better.
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Because the looting has been minimal, the protests have been ongoing, and a flip was switched when the police began acting like human beings. Bringing up looters in this story made zero sense at all and if you don't think "looters" is a conflation with "dem blacks", then you have your head in the sand....
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/van-jones/black-people-loot-food-wh_b_6614.html
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Frankly, we still don't have a very clear picture of what happened (or is happening) in Ferguson, because all we've been getting is one side of the story, and Techdirt (rather uncharacteristically!) jumping on the exact same bandwagon as all the rest of the media is really not helping.
I will say, though, that people screaming "RACISM!!!!!" at every opportunity looked silly 20 years ago, they looked ridiculous after we elected a black president by a landslide, and today they mostly just look dangerous, more harmful than what pitiful amounts of actual racism still remain in this country.
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I want the rest of the Techdirt community to take a moment and read this, because it's important to highlight what problems we still have in this country, and Mason Wheeler is a huge part of the problem. This isn't about "screaming" racism, it's about battling the idiots that think only a "pitiful amount" of racism still exists just because we elected a black President with something like 55% of the popular vote.
Fuck you, dude. Seriously....
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No, the problem we have in this country is that there are a lot of people with an agenda who don't want racism to be dead, because they make plenty of hay out of it. And then there's the problem of people believing it. It's really another expression of the same problem we see in legacy media companies: when the problem you're solving goes away, there's no more need for your services, so the natural reaction against legitimate obsolescence is to use illegitimate, underhanded tactics to push back against it.
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but racists are held in about the same high regard as pedophiles in the USA, and for good reason: they're idiots who make trouble, and we're sick of it. Problem is, these days so is the other side. Martin Luther King's dead, his heirs (as reported by Techdirt!) are a bunch of worthless parasites on society, and sometimes it seems like all we've got left are the Malcolm X types.
The fact that you think that just underscores how serious the problem is. You're being taken for a ride and you don't even know it. Have a look at what was going on in this case before any of the stuff being covered in the news started. Yes, what happened to the kid was a horrifying tragedy, but it was a local issue, and there were no riots requiring militarized police response and major news coverage before a bunch of activists showed up in Ferguson to "spread awareness" and drum up some outrage.
Seems to me the racism-ists didn't get the race riot they wanted in the Trayvon Martin case, so now they're trying again with a more sympathetic dead kid to rally around. That's about as cynical and ugly as it gets.
Did I say "just because"? Pay attention, folks, if you're taking a moment and reading this. That right there is a sure sign of someone who knows their argument is crap: misrepresentation and mockery. Make people laugh at the other side's argument so they won't think about it.
The fact of the matter is that we've got successful black people being very successful at every level of society, private and public, and nobody is stopping them. Meanwhile, we've also got a bunch of unsuccessful black people with really screwed-up lives... and a bunch of unsuccessful white people with really screwed-up lives. That actually sounds a lot like equality to me!
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Hi. I'm on the other side.
I'm on the other side because I understand that racism did not magically disappear when we elected a black president.
I understand that entrenched institutional racism has survived even though don't see quite the level of public use of overtly racist language as we used to (although I could introduce you to a cousin of mine who will disprove that in about 5 minutes of "conversation"), the spirit of this lives on in the carefully crafted language of coded racism: "food stamp president", "welfare queens", and yes, "states' rights". You can hear it for yourself: http://www.thenation.com/article/170841/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-stra tegy
Oh, and there are also the ongoing efforts to restrict voting rights, under the guise of "preventing fraud". Here's some reading for you that documents how most allegations of fraud have been completely unsubstantiated, and others have been cases of simple bureaucratic error: http://www.brennancenter.org/issues/voter-fraud
And yes, racism is still a problem, even though we no longer see heavily armed police using dogs and tear gas and fire hoses against peaceful protesters -- oh, wait. We just saw that. (Although the fire hoses were replaced with grenade launchers. Yay. Progrss)
And that's all just racism in the public sphere. We haven't even gotten into private sector employment discrimination, housing discrimination, and oh so many things.
So, yeah, Mason Wheeler. Count me on "the other side."
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Again, that is not at all what I said. If anything, my position is the exact opposite: we were able to elect a black president because racism is long dead in the US.
These are economic issues that racism-ists try to disguise as racial issues to raise their own profile. Last I heard, most food stamp and welfare recipients in this country are white.
Which, again, are blown heavily out of proportion. Opponents of voter fraud reform like to toss around statistics like "there were only six cases of confirmed voter fraud discovered IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY in the last Presidential election." (Not sure if that's the actual number, but it was definitely low enough to make it look like a non-problem.)
This is a classic example of lying with statistics. Because what the last election (the last several, in fact) also have had were many, many precincts in which more ballots were cast than there were registered voters, particularly in swing states. That right there is prima facie evidence of the existence of fraud, and if they only figured out who and how six times, then something is very, very wrong. That makes perfect sense.
You know what doesn't make sense? The racism-ist argument that this is voter ID laws are maliciously designed to impose undue economic hardship upon minorities to keep them from voting. If anything, this is (yet again!) an economic problem being hijacked and made to look like a racism problem, but in reality it's not even a genuine economic problem!
The last time I got an ID, it cost me $20. It's good for 5 years. And I don't care how poor you are; there's no one who can't find some way of coming up with $20 once every 5 years! The entire argument is ridiculous on the face of it.
Probably the biggest mistake anyone can make when analyzing any complex system is to think in only 1 degree of cause and effect. Yes, there was a heavy-handed police response. That was bad. But if you stop there you reach wrong conclusions.
Here's a better conclusion for you: You know what's even worse in every way than a heavy-handed police response? Riots in the streets. You know, the sort of thing that happened when activist media blew the Rodney King story way out of proportion? The sort of thing that almost happened in response to the Trayvon Martin case? And now when a bunch of the same people who went around stirring up trouble in the Trayvon Martin case appeared in Ferguson to try again... well, if I were a cop and someone did that in my town, I'd be inclined to err on the side of caution too!
Racism in the US is a thing of the past, and the more that people from generations who grew up before the Civil Rights movement die off, the more whatever's left of it dies with them.
The last software company I worked for was quite a melting pot. The second (or maybe third) most senior developer on the team I worked with was a South American immigrant of native descent. One of the lead developers on another project was an Indian woman. One of the guys who wrote significant parts of the codebase and then left to take another job before I started with the company was arabic, and so on. We had people of all races and colors all over the company... and one black guy. We had nothing against hiring minorities of any type, but so few black people ever even applied that you might not know it if you were just to look at the org chart.
I'll leave the reasons why to a sociologist, but from the research I've seen, in the majority of cases today in which people with an agenda want to raise the hue and cry of racism, the cold, dispassionate data points instead to economics or (particularly among blacks) to self-sabotaging cultural issues within minority communities themselves.
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....and racism is dead. Awesome.
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> ....and racism is dead. Awesome.
To be fair, such "self-sabotaging cultural issues within minority communities" do exist -- but of course, he's nonetheless largely confusing cause and effect. The self-sabotage is a symptom of the problem, that amplifies the problem and makes them worse, in a pernicious feedback effect.
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Spoken like a True Believer who cares more about his dear ideology than about facts.
When a sizable majority of black children are born out of wedlock and denied the opportunity to be raised in a stable family environment, is that the fault of white racists?
When drug abuse is so prevalent among African-Americans that, years before the economic crash of 2008, economists were already pointing out that blacks as a whole had given up all of the social gain that they had fought so hard to win during the Civil Rights movement, is that the fault of white racists?
When black parents literally teach their children to actively not strive for success because they'd be "acting too white," thereby trapping them in a cycle of failure, poverty and misery, is that the fault of white racists?
Ideology can scream "racism" all he wants, but once Data looks under the hood, a very different picture emerges.
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Here's the statistics for anyone else who is interested. In 2011 2/3 of every black child was born into a single parent household. White children, while having a higher number in total, only have a 1/4 chance of being born to a single parent. Here's the thing: if you opened up the prisons and released the non-violent drug offenders, those numbers will look quite different as prisoners return home to raise their kids. So, he's not wrong that it's a problem to have so many black kids grow up with one parent, but when he asks if it's the fault of racism, the mass incarceration of blacks in this country says yes.
http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in-single-parent-families-by#detailed/1 /any/false/868,867,133,38,35/10,168,9,12,1,13,185/432,431
"When drug abuse is so prevalent among African-Americans that, years before the economic crash of 2008, economists were already pointing out that blacks as a whole had given up all of the social gain that they had fought so hard to win during the Civil Rights movement, is that the fault of white racists?"
It's not, because on this one you're just making things up. White people are twice as likely to abuse drugs than blacks, it's just that blacks are 300% more likely to get some/more/longer jail time than whites.
http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/07/study-whites-more-likely-to-abuse-drugs-than-blacks/
"Wh en black parents literally teach their children to actively not strive for success because they'd be "acting too white," thereby trapping them in a cycle of failure, poverty and misery, is that the fault of white racists?"
Citation please. By the way, anyone reading this exchange, this part in particular, still want to defend Mason the racist?
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First, nice job moving the goalposts. I say "born out of wedlock," you respond by conflating it with "Daddy's in prison."
Second, citation needed. The difference between 2/3 and 1/4 is about 42%. If I were to take your argument at face value--implying that parity could be achieved, or mostly achieved by this one step--you're saying that approximately 40% of all black kids being born these days have at least one parent in prison due to "non-violent drug offenses." I've never seen statistics anywhere like that published anywhere.
Third, you're building on a horrendously mistaken premise, a lie that costs lives: that drugs aren't a "real" problem. That's an idea that's in vogue lately in certain political circles, and it's malicious and false. Look into it, follow the money, and what you'll find is that it's being pushed by people who either are now or would end up making obscene amounts of money selling drugs that are currently illegal.
Meanwhile, drugs kill, and do worse than kill. If there is anything in this world worse than murder, it's drug dealing. A murderer kills you and you're dead, and it's over. A drug dealer strings you along for years or decades, extracting every last drop of wealth that he can, along the way dragging you, your family and your loved ones into misery (and frequently abject poverty,) often forcing you to turn to crime to feed the habit, and only when every last good thing in your life has been crushed are you finally discarded and left to die.
As Mother Teresa once said about the poor, it's very fashionable to talk about drug addicts, and much less so to actually talk with them. I've done that. I've worked in rehab. I've seen first-hand what it does to people, and they were the lucky ones, the ones who managed to get out at some point, or at least to reach a point where they sincerely wanted to try to. There are plenty more who don't, who have it even worse.
The only drug policy that makes any sense is one we've never actually contemplated: call a spade a spade. Prosecute, convict, and execute drug dealers as the mass-murderers they are, and treat addicts as victims, not criminals, getting them into treatment and counseling.
Translation: I haven't done any actual research like you have, and it doesn't fit my preconceived biases, so I'm dismissing it out of hand.
Yet another example of lying with statistics. Nowhere in that entire article does it mention the elephant in this particular room: cocaine. Cocaine, particularly crack, has far more severe soul-destroying and family-destroying effects than most common drugs. (Though meth can give it a run for its money.) It's also disproportionately popular among black drug addicts, and much less so among white drug addicts. And again, this is consistent with what I've personally seen working in treating these problems.
My mistake. When going back and looking this up again, it seems I mis-remembered, and most (but not all) of the pressure in this particular issue comes from black peers, not black parents. But that doesn't make it not a pervasive, self-sabotaging cultural issue.
“Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach kids to learn.They know that parents have to parent, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.”
—Barack Obama, Keynote Address, Democratic National Convention, 2004
(Cited in http://educationnext.org/actingwhite/. The entire article is worth reading, particularly the graph about two pages down that shows starkly just how bad the issue is, both among black and hispanic students.)
"[One] generation gap, for instance, is that a lot of black youth now are anti-education and anti-intellectualism, who feel that getting an education is being white, is acting white. We never had that in previous generations, this is something new. I think this is very, very disconcerting that black youth are culturally adapting such postures when the high school dropout rate is so high, when they’re going to jail at increasing rates, it’s in fact really very high, and in jail about 70 percent of inmates have not graduated from high school."
Dr. Alvin Poussaint, explaining the real problem behind high black incarceration rates, and it's not drugs.
-- Bill Cosby, speaking at the 50th Anniversary commemoration of Brown v. Board of Education. The entire thing is worth reading.
See also http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/52025/
How typical of the intellectually dishonest. Anyone with an apposing viewpoint, especially if he should dare to back it up with hard facts, must immediately be countered with ridicule and portrayed as not only wrong but malicious. Anything to keep the audience from actually thinking about what he has to say and possibly taking it seriously!
I'm about the least racist person you'll ever meet. I've lived in too many places, known and formed close friendships with too many people of too many distinct backgrounds, to ever buy into the pernicious lies that tell you that certain people are worth less as people because of who their ancestors were. But people like this guy are so desperate to make reality fit the preconceived narrative that they call the facts themselves--and by extension anyone who dares to bring them up--racist should the facts be inconvenient.
The only serious racists I see today are the people who blame the faceless "White Man" for perpetrating made-up oppression because it's simpler than facing the fact that they are responsible for their own failure by not putting forth the effort necessary to become successful. If that's not racist, what is?
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http://reason.com/blog/2014/08/14/ferguson-police-have-a-long-troubling-re
http://articles.latim es.com/2008/oct/23/opinion/oe-ayres23
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873
http://www.urban.org/exposing-h ousing-discrimination/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447729/
http://www.justice.gov/opa /pr/2009/November/09-crt-1187.html
http://www.ajc.com/weblogs/get-schooled/2014/mar/21/new-federal-re port-racial-disparities-school-disci/
There's more, a lot more, but I don't want to fill up an entire comments section with links (especially since I think I may have accidentally broken a few URLs).
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Are all races represented equally?
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-- Bill Cosby, who's actually put his money where his mouth is and given a lot of money and effort to help improve conditions for black youths. You gonna call him racist next?
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My cousin (whom I mentioned earlier), upon being called racist:
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I find it fucking hilarious that your calling someone a moron because of their perceived political views while at the same time defending them from being a racist.
LOL?
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I love the internet....
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You just can't make that shit up!!!!!
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And try to understand that "I work with a black guy and it doesn't look to me like he's had a problem with racism" is not a data point.
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It truly sickens me how when things like this happen, the fact that looters come out is used to brush aside the real issues that people are pissed off bout.
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The idea is to make those doing the violence/looting look like idiots, a minority, and have them well documented. Looting stops pretty quickly when you have 50 smartphones recording the people's faces and a police officer standing by taking statements. It's when you project the image that the police are no longer in control, but instead are on the defensive (fatigues does this) that looting/riots escalate.
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Best stick with there is no demonstrated reason that a police stop over jaywalking should have resulted in a corpse.
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But it's most likely because the police force there also didn't respond in military gear?
http://gawker.com/rallies-for-michael-brown-spread-across-the-country-1622023982
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Causal effect with the police
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Re: Causal effect with the police
Hard to tell, every situation is different. But when you form a line with shields, guns, and riot gear, your setting a tone of violence, violence is what your going to get. When you show up dressed as professional police officers, mingle within the crowd, and "control" as best you can the escalation or intensity of the protest, you have a shot at it staying peaceful.
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Re: Causal effect with the police
When the police act like the military, they tend to make the situation worse than it would otherwise have been. If the police behaved in a more profession fashion, it would probably have made at least some difference. Even if the difference is small, it would still be an improvement.
The police reaction certainly did no good whatsoever. Even if the crowd would have been just the same with a decent police force reaction, at the very least there would have been a lower cost in terms of injuries, police reputation, and monetary outlay.
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Re: Causal effect with the police
If cordially means "not shooting unarmed suspects dead" then yes, it would seem to be the case.
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Re: Causal effect with the police
Almost certainly, yes. Remember that the protest were non-violent until the militarized riot police came in and started threatening people.
Basic psychology. You take normally non-violent people, put them in a group where they are angry and in an emotional state, and give them the impression that their anger is not justified (by telling them to disperse and go away). Then start threatening them with violence (pointed weapons, tear gas), and of course they are going to react and respond in kind. What else would you expect?
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When you talk to and connect with the people your sworn to protect, hear their grievances, and let them know your there to keep the peace AS WELL AS to protect their right to protest you are much more likely to have this. Especially when you show up as professional police and not soldiers.
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Like a military force?
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So apparently, the organization which neither should handle demonstrations nor actually wants to is better trained for it than the police in some places. Maybe we should militarize police in that regard...and while we're at it, somebody tell those hobby soldiers not to carry the entire armory with them. Small wonder they break up every assembly after two hours, with something like three times the regular combat load on their backs they probably can't keep upright much longer.
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It does, yes. And justifiably so because that's exactly how they're acting.
"If they actually did that, officers would be taught proper Escalation of Force, and have strict rules for when to stick a gun in somebody's face."
Again, you're talking about a good, well-trained military. That's not the only kind of military.
"Maybe we should militarize police in that regard"
Absolutely not. Better the cops be a bad military force than a good one.
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Except that they don't, as I just explained in a sentence you even quoted yourself...
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Escalation of Force is so basic psychology that even stopping a bar fight - something many patrol cops see weekly or daily - can use it. When it comes to handling weapons I know for a fact they have pretty extensive training in how to use them properly. I don't think there is a clear overarching hole in education that covers what has happened. It seems to have deeper roots in misinterpreting the situation.
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Re: Like a military force?
Really, you don't see it?
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What a well-executed PR exercise
Of course, the murdering cop still goes free.....
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A second issue, do the officers who work in Ferguson actually live in Ferguson?
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Zero?
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I doubt it.
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2. police react with "show of force"
3. more and more escalation
4. state troopers take over and restore order
To me, this looks pretty much like the pattern that Cory Doctorow used in Little Brother: Coincidence?
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But, but, but...
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Finally some reasonable police work
maybe now this issue can move forward if he did have his hands up as witnesses say the cop should face charges just like any other person who shoots an unarmed person
actually more so as they a supposedly trained for this
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I see this as an escalation
How is that de-escalation?
This conversation has become dated. The convo now includes the on-the-ground army commander from Katrina as an actor in this community field.
Is this further de-escalation?
I don't see how those actions are serving that purpose.
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Re: I see this as an escalation
I'm holding off judgement on what happened since we don't have all the facts yet (thanks to the local PD being idiots and not releasing them right away). However to say that the local and county cops mishandled the aftermath would be a huge understatement. The local police chief needs to be fired. If for nothing else that the fact that his department has dash-cams but never had them installed. Dash and/or bodycam recording of this incident would have made it much clearer what actually happened here. They local PD should have also been more forthcoming up front with all of the information on the situation that first day. Instead they only told a fragment of what happened, which made zero sense (some kid randomly assaults a cop, wtf?). Then they let everything fester for almost a week, and I feel that hey are still withholding important facts about the case from the community even after today's revelations. They failed to keep order during the first night of demonstrations when some people took advantage of the protests to turn violent. Then they brought in the county cops who turned militaristic against the peaceful demonstrators and the press the following nights, antagonizing the community and creating more violence and tension in the process. In addition, due to the way this was handled, even if (big if, but still) the cop turns out to be in the right in all this, by trying to "protect" him and the rest of his department, the police chief has instead totally fucked him.
The whole situation is the very definition of a world-class cluster-fuck.
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Re: I see this as an escalation
The later problems seems to be caused by the local police releasing a video presumably showing the kid participating in a robbery.
If the testimony of the police officer holds up, knowledge of a theft goes to the credibility of the deceased and will give a self-defence claim more meaning. However, even if the kid was part of the theft and even if he did wrestle, 7 shots and ending up POW-style quite a distance from the cop just ain't gonna look good no matter how you spin it. The discrepancy between the police officers statement and the witness statements is the real controversy and nothing about that equation is gonna change by adding character evidence of a lesser crime than murder. The police releasing such evidence now and withholding more relevant evidence seems extremely unfortunate and smears a dead persons character. Not very tactful or well-timed since the eye-witness testimonies haven't been officially discredited to a point of irrelevance. Furthermore the black cop in charge wasn't consulted on the release of the information from Ferguson Police department who have changed their description of the event several times and DOJ warned the police not to release it... Ferguson Police have lost any shed of credibility as an objective part they might have held earlier. Letting others take over the jurisdiction is a prerequirement for getting an even remotely trustworthy investigation.
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credit to the state and especially capt johnson.
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Where's the fun in THAT?
These guys don't sign up to "Protect and to Serve"....
They sign up to shoot and loot, blast away, and feel what it's like to kill with impunity.
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Overcome by events
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