No shit.
But it’s still pretty much the only post on this board I can find in support of David Clarke. This thread isn’t about David Clarke, but I’m still wondering what this post was about.
I’m reminded of the sequence in A Few Good Men in which Tom Cruise asks Noah Wyle to show him where in the manual it says he should go eat lunch when it’s lunch time.
I’m sorry. I did not mean to give offense. (I forgot about Loach, and mentioning Ducati would have brought it’s own set of issues) You were just the first name that came to mind who was a cop, and whose opinion I trust. I’m not a cop. I just worked around a bunch and lived with a few.
The story—as much as I read of it—struck me as a fabrication, and didn’t read like I was used to those cops writing or talking. I didn’t care for “On Killing” either, though perhaps people who’ve taken lives may find Grossman’s book of use. It did not bolster Grossman’s credibility for me.
I completely agree with your last paragraph, and I’m sorry you had such a bad time at the end of your employment as a peace officer. My relative stuck it out to retire quite high in his city’s department. Though even he said the job got a lot less fun throughout the 90s. God only knows what he thinks of modern policing now.
No. But New York is far, far better than it was in its heyday of corruption, during the Koch years. All things considered, NYC isn’t especially corrupt.
That said, there’s a big problem right now with NYC’s enormous (around 35,000 cops) police force, which is that they consider themselves to be an independent entity not subject to the control of the governor and the mayor.
One only has to watch local television during the current situation and watch the current Chief of Department (Terry Monahan) and PBA boss (Pat Lynch), and even the Commissioner (Dermot Shea), who is supposed to be civilian, but is a lifelong cop, rant and make demands of the governor and mayor to realize that the department is a bit out of control.
Also, just looking at the names of the men referred to above should tell everyone that the culture of the police department hasn’t changed in a long, long time, no matter how many minority officers of either sex have been hired.
Not to diminish the importance of brooms and PBA cards, but I’m curious about LEOs’ and others’ opinions with regard to the credibility of the more substantive parts of the article. Here are a couple of parts I found compelling:
… well over 90% of the calls for service I handled were reactive, showing up well after a crime had taken place. We would arrive, take a statement, collect evidence (if any), file the report, and onto the next caper. Most “active” crimes we stopped were someone harmless possessing or selling a small amount of drugs. Very, very rarely would we stop something dangerous in progress or stop something from happening entirely. The closest we could usually get was seeing someone running away from the scene of a crime, but the damage was still done.
… my job as a police officer required me to be a marriage counselor, a mental health crisis professional, a conflict negotiator, a social worker, a child advocate, a traffic safety expert, a sexual assault specialist, and, every once in awhile, a public safety officer authorized to use force, all after only a 1000 hours of training at a police academy. Does the person we send to catch a robber also need to be the person we send to interview a rape victim or document a fender bender? Should one profession be expected to do all that important community care (with very little training) all at the same time?
As well as his recommendations:
[ul]
[li]No more qualified immunity.[/li][li]No more civil asset forfeiture.[/li][li]Break the power of police unions.[/li][li]Require malpractice insurance.[/li][li]Defund, demilitarize, and disarm cops.[/li][/ul]
I’ll give you my take on those five points, for what it’s worth (I’m not a police officer or in any way in law enforcement).
Qualified immunity? Seems to me police need some degree of immunity. The threat of huge lawsuit verdicts seems like a way to ensure that cops do their best never to leave the stationhouse.
Civil asset forfeiture? It’s legalized theft. Let’s do away with it altogether.
As to the power of police unions, I have nothing against their power as a labor union. As a policy-making political entity, absolutely, they badly need to be broken.
Malpractice insurance. I don’t know how that would work. Anyone can sue the City of New York and the NYPD, etc. Effectively, they’re self-insured. Do you mean that each cop must carry his/her own insurance? They’d just negotiate it as a benefit and part of their compensation (quite rightfully), and then we’re back to the employer covering everything. It doesn’t sound that practical to me.
Defund, demilitarize, disarm – well, I would love to live in place where police don’t have to be armed. I don’t. Thanks to the gun rights fundies, access to weapons is unbelievably easy here in NYC, despite our tough local gun control laws.
Demilitarize? Yes. Immediately. I will say that the NYPD isn’t nearly as militarized as some of the small(er)-town police departments I’ve seen in various news reports. You don’t often see them all geared up riding around in armored cars or anything like that.
Defund? To the extent the department is overfunded, let’s do that, yes. The mayor of New York has already announced he’ll be moving a billion dollars from the police budget to social services.
In 38+ years I have never, ever, EVER heard any type of LEO refer to his activity as a “caper”, not even jokingly. If this person turns out to have actually been a cop, I’ll bet he was a square peg, had little to no buds, wasn’t a member of any clique. Then, out of spite, exaggerated and/or embellished what he claims went on instead of just pointing out some things that may actually have been wrong. But I still say nothing in it looks like an actual cop wrote it.
As far as civil asset forfeitures are concerned, I have long opposed them. But they are not the invention of the police. The judiciary and the legislatures have created and endorsed the use of CAF’s.
Well it does read like he’s saying that no one would ever commit crimes if they didn’t live under capitalism.
I have no idea if the author is authentic or not, but I don’t see how being a cop or ex-cop gives someone the ability to tell whether someone “sounds” like a cop or not. Given the above discussion about ‘get out of a speeding ticket’ paraphernalia was also off the mark, makes me wonder why such a person would even entertain the idea that all ex-cops would write in some sort of uniform and identifiable manner. Quite frankly, the notion that diversity or different-ness makes someone an outsider in a cop’s view scares the shit out of me and reflects the problem with the cop mentality, not the other way around.
The police need way more square-pegs in my opinion.
I think you’ve got it backwards. He makes it pretty clear he wasn’t a member of any clique–which is a good thing. I don’t want peace officers to be in cliques, especially when those cliques prioritize the blue line, and/or when those cliques emphasize differences between wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs. Those are toxic social structures.
And part of the reason he wasn’t invited to the reindeer games is because he was pointing out some things that were wrong. Of course that would make you bitter.
But even if this guy is 100% a fraud, Akaj is correct: the focus should be on the veracity of his larger claims, not on trying to suss out whether he’s using the right lingo.
He does kinda wuss out here at the end, but he doesn’t say what you think:
The “edge cases” are the people he thinks would commit crimes, if extreme poverty etc. were no longer issues. He doesn’t suggest any way of dealing with these folk, and I’m not convinced he’s right that they’re really that rare (I think there are a lot more Brock Turners in the world than he’s admitting).
That said, it seems to me that a tremendous amount of the work we ask police to do could be effectively done by people without guns and with more training in empathy, de-escalation, and counseling. The past two weeks have pretty well radicalized me in this respect.
So, if it’s an 8th grader who is pissed because his police officer mom or dad makes him do his homework, wash the dishes AND clean the cats box, you’re still going to give him credibility?
“ In 38+ years I have never, ever, EVER heard any type of LEO refer to his activity as a “caper”, not even jokingly. If this person turns out to have actually been a cop, I’ll bet he was a square peg, had little to no buds, wasn’t a member of any clique. Then, out of spite, exaggerated and/or embellished what he claims went on instead of just pointing out some things that may actually have been wrong. But I still say nothing in it looks like an actual cop wrote it.”
It’s not a thin blue line, at all.
It’s remarkably wide and thick, in my opinion.
Your posts here are giving a lot of what he says, about police attitudes toward civilians and toward those who speak out against abuse within the department, more credibility than anything else.
Here’s another account (by a non-anonymous source using his real name on Twitter) that’s relevant to this, showing how the notion of officer solidarity and cliques is almost specifically designed to weed out “good apples.”
I didn’t read it as referring to his own activity; I read it as “on to the next crime scene.”
I tend to think the author wasn’t really a cop, but I agree with Chronos that it doesn’t really matter — if he won’t give his name, then he has no authority.
I do think he made some good points, especially about heavily armed officers being extreme overkill for many situations, and I support a less military approach to most police activities, although I think “Defund Police” is a terrible name that lends itself to attack from the right, which Trump has already done.
I also think his conclusions about “no such thing as a bad boy” went out with Father Flanagan. I firmly believe that environment is a very strong influence on a person’s character, but I also firmly believe that there are many people who are twisted from birth. Anyone who has never known such should count himself lucky.
I have some anecdotal evidence about the system not always being rigged toward cops or their friends:
I got a speeding ticket in a northern state, and went to court not to dispute it, but to attempt to get deferred adjudication, which would keep it off my permanent record. The judge, an elderly woman, was doing her best to be charming. Then the guy ahead of me was called, and I couldn’t see it, but he evidently flashed a badge at her as he approached. She became furious, yelling at him for attempting to take advantage of his position, and summarily found him guilty without hearing a word from him. I went up next with a bit of trepidation, but she became charming again and dismissed my case because it was my first offense. FWIW.
The point of my post is to not discuss the author’s identity, but the fallacy of your arguments. I don’t know if the guy is real, but neither do you.
But the points you make reflect the larger problems that George Floyd’s murder is calling for action. The fact that a cop or ex-cop would not even recognize that his own experiences do not reflect that of the whole world or whole country is part of the problem. You never saw X, so you said X didn’t exist despite plenty of evidence that X does exist. This lack of open minded ness is a huge part of the problem. On top of that you get all mean girls about it. Sheesh.
Substitute X for racism bias or whatever. In this particular thread X equals highly inappropriate cop cards.
I sympathize with Defund the Police, but…
… this essay is phony. Sorry, guys. I have a pretty solid bullshit detector and this is a manufactured essay all the way. There may be some kernels of truth taken from someone who really was a cop, but this reads all wrong.
The advice to never trust cops and never talk to them is true, though.
I have no idea if it’s “legit” or not, but the story sounds super similar to the story that two different friends that I have that became police officers and why they quit. One made it 16 hours, the other 6 years. They are in different states and don’t know each other.
Both of those guys were afraid in a way to tell the story publicly, so I know it wasn’t those two guys.
Maybe PKbites worked at a good police department. I’ve seen those.
I also used to work for a place where we were given trucks to drive home. We all had those “1k donation banner” decals on each truck because the owner of the company paid for them so we wouldn’t get pulled over for “commercial inspection.” I worked at another company after that with no stickers. I got pulled over 4 times in 6 months. I never used the washer fluid so I never had a problem (my brother that owned a commercial trucking company have me the tips on commercial truck police scams.)
I worked at a good Sheriffs Office until The Governor appointed a narcissistic despised drunken homicide dick from MPD Sheriff. Then the place went completely to shit. But it wasn’t because of actions by line Deps.
I didn’t say none of the stuff in that manifesto never ever happens. I said it does not read like someone who has been an officer for a decade would write.