Pasco County is doing it’s best Nazi impression in weeding out the “undesirables” in their society. How is anyone okay with stuff like this regardless of their race?
French journalist who infiltrated the country’s police force has described a culture of racism and violence in which officers act with impunity.
Valentin Gendrot claims the violence was so frequent it became almost banal and describes one incident where he was forced to help falsify evidence against an adolescent who had been beaten by an officer.
“It really shocked me to hear police officers, who are representatives of the state, calling people who were black, Arab or migrants ‘bastards’, but everyone did it,” he says.
“It was only a minority of officers who were violent … but they were always violent.”
But if they are bad at their job, it’s worth asking why that is, in a way that goes beyond your rather reductionist argument about salaries.
I live in the United States, and I’ve lived for extended periods (years) in three other predominantly English-speaking western democracies - Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. I’m not going to claim that cops in those places are perfect–far from it–but they do, in general, seem capable of doing things like issuing traffic tickets and executing misdemeanor arrests without shooting people to death or suffocating them. I’m not sure that cops in those places are paid substantially more than police in America, although I’m happy to be proven wrong.
As someone who teaches American history to college students, I’ve always been resistant to American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States is, for better or worse, fundamentally different from everywhere else in the world. But it does seem that there is something, if not unique, then at least different, about the United States and its approach to law enforcement, at least among wealthy democratic nations.
Doing traffic stops in a country that has very few guns is fundamentally different from doing it in one that has more guns than people.
I’m steeling myself now for the Atlantic’s award-winning journalist Graeme Wood to be canceled for daring to say sensible things about the Jacob Blake shooting on Sam Harris’s podcast (from 18:52 - 28:55):
One thing that I hate most about Harris podcasts is that they don’t have transcripts, and I’m not going to listen to an hour to find out what it is that someone refers to.
I have no idea what Wood said, but this is not the first time he’s been on the Harris navel gazing show. At the very least, since you have made this prediction, if it turns out that Wood is not cancelled, does that mean that we can finally put this whole cancel culture nonsense to rest?
The guy who was the leading suspect in the shooting death of the Patriot Prayer member in Portland, was himself killed by police trying to arrest him earlier today.
Ah, I had not seen that. All the searches for him only turned up more recent news about his encounter with the Marshalls.
Don’t do sound at work, so hard to tell exactly what he said. Without audio though, he looks a bit… out of it. Not a doctor, but I’d say he could back off on his meth prescription.
Still curious as to his citation for having a loaded gun in public. Doesn’t say that it was an illegal firearm, or that he was not allowed to have one. Just that he had one in a public place. Is that actually against the law, and if so, why are those who are bringing loaded guns into public places allowed to do so?
My understanding is that he claimed self defense. I really can’t tell what’s going on in the video, but, as he’d been shot by the right wing before, I could possibly see how his paranoia about being in danger could be elevated.
I’m not sure I buy the self defense argument, but then I also don’t buy the Rittenhouse self defense argument either.
As far as how the actual arrest went down, what are you saying was controversial about it? Unless there ends up being video that contradicts the reports on how things played out, it seems fairly reasonable to me.
Other than that Trump was demanding his apprehension several hours after he was already dead, of course. But that’s just because he is stupid, and that belongs in a different thread.
I had thought the “loaded weapon” charge was related to him being shot somehow. I was mistaken about that and the charge was from early July according to your article. While it doesn’t state exactly where the violation occurred, it appears to me that it was at a protest in Oregon.
Oregon is also an open-carry but cities and counties are free to limit public possession of loaded firearms by individuals who do not have an Oregon Concealed Handgun License. The cities of Portland, Beaverton, Tigard, Oregon City, Salem, and Independence, as well as Multnomah County have banned loaded firearms in all public places for those without a license.
So if he was a Washington resident he probably didn’t have an Oregon license as they are reportedly rather stingy with them.
So WAGing that if it was a legitimate citation he was in one of the above cities for a protest.
Yes, they would be in violation if they don’t have Oregon CCW permits. But I’m not familiar enough with that group to know if they’re primarily from Oregon or not.