I have a cousin who was (is) a defense attorney in Texas. Years ago, I remember telling her at a Thanksgiving day dinner conversation (debate, maybe) that “I supported the police,” and she pretty nonchalantly told me that ‘you wouldn’t if you knew all the bullshit they did.’ She said that there were some good ones, but pointed out that they didn’t make up for the things that bad cops do and also said that none of the good ones will ever rat out what the ones who don’t play by rules do to people (referring mostly to minorities and/or people without means).
That was in the early 90s when I was in college and I was skeptical back then, but everything that’s been well-documented and that I’ve read about since has pretty much backed up what she said.
Some years later, there was a story (forgot where - Dallas, I think) in which cops (it might have been one or two rogue ones) were found to have planted bags of sugar or flour in peoples’ cars and charged them with cocaine trafficking. I referenced that earlier conversation, basically telling her that I think I’m beginning to come around to see what she was talking about. She said “You seem surprised - this goes on all the time.”
Even if this writer is a fake, that doesn’t change the fact that there’s a real ongoing problem with corruption in law enforcement and there’s a terrible problem with police who cover other police doing bad things. If you’re a law enforcement officer, don’t get mad at liberals of black/latino activists - get mad at the dirty cops who ruin the image of law enforcement and get just as mad at cops and unions who do absolutely nothing to make them accountable.
It might if he worked in one or two places with a shitty department culture and that’s the only place they had ever worked. Just like a teacher can work in one or two schools and quits because she thinks that administration and parents in the community don’t care about education - it’s possible that said teacher’s experience and outlook would be completely different with a different set of experiences.
I think I mentioned earlier in the thread that I don’t think every department of every officer is as bad as described in the article. But I think it’s absolutely possible that someone could have worked in a nightmare department in which corruption was the norm. I think we’d be naive to assume that there aren’t some departments like this.
What’s kinda weird is, the people who can’t believe it was ‘a few bad protestors‘ inciting looting, but have no problem believing it’s just ‘a few bad cops‘.
In which Loach posted they are mostly a northeast thing and cops in other parts of the country don’t know what they are or don’t care.
Which backs up my claim that the only time they were around here (SE Wisconsin] is a phony PBA was selling them and it was a scam. And that maybe NE U.S law enforcement isn’t as rigid as it is here. No offense to LOACH or his agency, just a polish job to my own area.
Funny how nobody really balks at Joe Six Pack getting out of a ticket by paying a pre-bribe to some association, but if I were to whisper the [in all actuality] rare practice of professional courtesy cop to cop many on these boards would have a conniption!
Funny in the sense that it’s not at all true, is that what you mean? The very first post that brought them up said:
I think everyone else agrees that they’re a pretty terrible perversion of justice and shouldn’t exist, but didn’t bother saying so because it’s completely obvious.
As for that “professional courtesy,” yeah, that’s some serious bullshit. You know what professional courtesy looks like in my field? It looks like the music teacher giving my daughter free violin lessons for a couple of months after her work hours were done. It sure as shit doesn’t look like me bending the rules for other teachers so their kids avoid consequences for choices, Christ almighty.
At least you’re apparently abandoning calling that post “horseshit,” though I appear to have missed your apology for that.
I don’t understand how in a country with thousands of police departments in 50 states, police are all expected to use the same “lingo”. Do you really think that cops in Alabama use the same slang as cops in Maine? Part of the whole problem is how decentralized American law enforcement is.
Our system ensures that it will always be decentralized but the federal government can be used to implement a set of standards, reinforced with some positive reinforcement. In essence, local law enforcement agencies could use standards from the federal law enforcement agencies. Those that adhere to these standards get funding; those that don’t, don’t. That would be a start.
I know this thread’s been dormant for a few months, but I thought some folks might be interested in this Vice article about police “courtesy cards.” There seems no doubt at all that the cards are real, at least in some parts of the country, and the article has a criminal justice professor who is also a former NYPD cop talking about them.
As the author of the article, and a couple of her interview subjects, point out, an important part of policing is not only who get nabbed, but also who doesn’t get nabbed, and police discretion tends to produce fairly predictable patterns in the types of people who end up with their face on the ground and the type of people who get to drive away with a tip of the hat after a traffic stop.
There’s also a link to a NY Post story about the cards:
This guy was a cop, so if he says all cops are bastards, without giving a single name of another bastard, how am I to refute him? I don’t believe him for a minute, mind you, but since I can’t disprove what he says, I’ll just move on.
I unequivocally believe that the “defunders” have a point. A major point. Police should do the work they are trained best for, and leave other duties to the experts in those areas. But since there are certainly at least a few bastard cops, unsuited for the job because they lack the mentality to keep things under control when most required, it annoys the hell out of me every single time a white cop kills a black person that the assumption, at least on MSNBC, is that racism MUST be involved. You have people on that very channel saying what we who believe in defunding are saying, without acknowledging that. And it does no good in the long run to make a wrong accusation about racist motives. This only exacerbates the problem, and takes the spotlight off of the truly racist tragedies.
Do you acknowledge the existence of hidden bias? That a person can act in a racist way without realizing it? How about institutional racism?
When a series of events occur that seem to target a specific race over another race, doesn’t that count as racism even if there are no overt racists involved?
If it walks like a duck…
If you have time, I highly recommend this PBS Frontline documentary (especially the first 15 minutes):
They follow a police unit in Newark, NJ on a night shift in 2016, with a mostly black/Latino community and police. You see several instances of the police stopping people for essentially no reason and frisking them. You also completely see why - in addition to finding drugs on a few people and there are two cases where they nearly get into standoffs with people with guns and manage to stop and arrest them without anyone getting shot, but so many of the people they hassle have done nothing wrong and absolutely nothing to warrant getting harassed. Also, at around 28:45 they actually escalate it to violently throwing someone on the ground in what was a very minor confrontation.
I think it’s really worthwhile to look at this because this isn’t “bastard” cops who on an individual level are trying to racially target and abuse people - it’s people doing what they’ve been trained to do who are in a system that perpetuates abuse and reinforces to minorities from an extremely young age that they shouldn’t trust police.
They don’t really discuss it much in the doc, but the biggest aspect of institutional racism happens before they ever go out on a shift. The entire way the police dept is organized and the heightened sense of distrust towards everyone that permeates through the dept is completely different in a poor, heavily black/Latino, high crime area is different from one in a middle-class or rich heavily white area with less crime.
Also I just wanted to say regarding the drugs - I don’t think police should be looking to arrest people with a little bag of cocaine in the first place, but I don’t blame these cops for it. BTW it is another example of institutional racism/classism that drugs that are associated with either rich and/or white people aren’t punished as harshly and are less likely to be seen as something that requires police to go to extreme measures such as stop-and-frisk than drugs associated with poor and/or black people.
EDIT: Also apparently frontline is going to have a 2020 update to this doc that I really want to see.
I’ve often pondered whether or not intent is required for something to be racist. That is, if you say something disparaging about another race and you do NOT believe it, but you say it for some ulterior motive, does that make you a racist, or just a conniving S.O.B.? Or both? I lean toward the latter. An absolutely reprehensible S.O.B., but not a racist.
But when you talk about a series of events, we are no longer talking about the same thing. I am talking about specific incidents, for instance the George Floyd killing. I have yet to see any evidence that he died because of racism on the part of the cop. And that is what I’m getting at. It makes the problem seem even worse than it is, and that is a recipe for disaster as far as getting people together for a reasoned discussion of the issue.
This is an idiotic, meaningless, harmful distinction should make. We need to stop caring about whether someone is a racist. I don’t care about what someone is “in his heart,” as the Christians put it.
What matters is whether your words and deeds fit into the racist infrastructure of society. Do they take advantage of the racism? Do they perpetuate it? Do they fail to oppose it? That’s what matters.
Stop asking yourself whether you or someone else “is a racist” or has “racist motives.” That’s not what is important.
In any case, it’s obvious that the act was racist. He wouldn’t have done that to a white man. He did it to a black man because he was pretty sure he would get away with it. That’s the face of racism in our society.
