It is one hell of a misnomer…
That’s a crappy photo, bad balance(?)/contrast(?) (IANAP).
You’d think the Fraternal Order of Police would have some level of respect for their own profession. When a doctor screws up, it’s other doctors that strip them of their medical license. When a lawyer screws up, other lawyers are the ones who get them debarred. Why do lawyers and doctors have respects for their own professions while cops do not? (Unless the FOP considers shooting non-threatening black men to be the job, in which case, fuck them).
When these kinds of stories come out, I really do have to wonder about the people who are such strong supporters of cops.
The line they keep parroting is about the “thin blue line” that separates society from savagery.
Let me ask you - what the fuck do you think is on the other side of the line, that’s scarier than an armed thug who believes that a “regular person” who isn’t a cop is of “limited value” and that’s told by the government “go ahead and do anything you like out there, qualified immunity has your back” and told by his trainer “your number one job is coming home alive”?
Are you really so blind to the danger that this setup poses? Or so easily controlled by vague gesturing tot he scary stuff “out there”?
The biggest lie told by cop apologists is that, “Only an itsy, bitsy, tiny, inconsequential percentage of cops are bad. The vast, vast, vast, vast majority are good.”
Clearly this is not the case.
It’s all in the definitions. “Bad” = “beats up or shoots people I care about.” “Good” = “Does whatever else a cop does, without being ‘bad’.”
I have literally never known a a cop (of any race) for any length of time who hasn’t said very scary things about either specific groups of people (Blacks, “Mexicans” and women most commonly) or of non-cops in general.
I happen to live in a community with lots of police and police families (a heavily Irish-American suburb of a major city). Most of the cops work in “the city” (either Boston or a ring of more diverse smaller cities) and to say that they sound like the Royal Ulster Constabulary in the bad old days is not an exaggeration.
During the Black Lives Matter flare-up in 2020, I posted a message responding to the blind support of police by my neighbors by saying “I also support Law Enforcement, I was a big supporter of the RUC.” To say that the blowback was hostile and threatening would be an understatement.
To become a doctor or a lawyer requires considerable effort and expense on the part of the aspirant, hence, each respects the trouble that the next one has gone to in order to join the club. By contrast, the municipality will let just about any old asshole who wants to become a police officer, with comparatively brief training, sometimes paid for by the municipalityr
Also, as professionals, doctors and lawyers have a sort of code of conduct that requires them to treat everyone with equanimity, and those who do not are more the exception than the standard. The very nature of modern police work, as much as they protest otherwise, literally involves the very opposite of fairness and equity.
I have. Several. But I live in the exurbs of Chicago, where policing is less stressful.
One was my baseball coach as a kid. He didn’t have a kid playing, he just wanted to help the community. He’d regularly be on patrol, and stop and talk to the kids hanging out at the mall. Later on, he coached one of my kids in football. Great guy.
One was a highschool friend of my brother’s. Sometime after the whole OJ thing, he was examined in court. Defense attorney says “Have you ever used the ‘N’ word?”, and he replied "Yes, I have, in one circumstance. As you can see, I’m as Irish as Paddy’s Pig. My partner is Chinese. Our favorite line from any movie is from the end of Blazing Saddles, where the Mayor says “OK, we’ll take the (n-word) and the (derogatory term for Chinese), but we don’t want the Irish!”
Black people. Any black person.
Sorry, that’s not fair. Any Hispanic/Latin person too.
And anyone who even casually resembles either.
Anguish in an Immigrant Community After a Sheriff’s Deputy Kills 2 Teens: The sheriff in Syracuse, N.Y., had said his deputy acted in self-defense, but footage of the shooting cast the account into question.
[The sheriff] has justified the shooting, saying that Deputy Rosello had acted in self-defense. He was trapped between the vehicle and a heavy metal-and-wood workbench sitting in the parking lot, Sheriff Shelley said. “He had nowhere to flee to,” the sheriff said, adding, “The deputies have a right to defend themselves by whatever means necessary.”
But that narrative was punctured, in part, when the state attorney general, Letitia James, released security footage on Tuesday showing the deputy ramming the car and easily evading it before shooting. The deputy was uninjured.
Neither of the teens killed was the driver of the car.
This is controversial, a miscarriage of justice, incredibly stupid and gun news.
Asshole retired cop, who should have fucking known better, uses gun like a toy and accidentally shoots and kills someone. He gets a 3 year sentence.
LA County Sheriff’s deputy was shot and killed in his car, and authorities believe it was a targeted attack (i.e. presumably specific to the deputy, not just targeted at any deputy). Now they have arrested a suspect.
I am putting this here because of all the awful things I have read about the LA County Sheriff’s department in this thread. I don’t know anything about this deputy or his behavior or attitude towards his job. This is sort of a place-holder for whatever is released about the investigation of the killing, or whatever shows up later in news reports.
In Birmingham the police got the bright idea to demand a band director stop the band’s performance after a football game, because the police wanted to go home. They berated him, and when he didn’t immediately comply, they surrounded, assaulted, tased and arrested him. All over finishing a song that had 1:30 left.
There’s a separate thread on that incident
Thanks. I was surprised I hadn’t heard anything about it in this thread.
We do not know why the police thought it was so important that the band stop playing, so saying it’s “because the police wanted to go home” is making up parts of the story.
The police did not surround the band director until after he had stopped the band playing music.
When they attempted to arrest him, he resisted. At that point they tazed him.
They specifically said, “we’re going to charge you for the overtime.”
Show me in the video where that happens. And arrested him for what ? Not immediately following a police officer’s request to stop playing? What law is that exactly?
At 4:25 in the released bodycam footage, the officer with the camera approaches the scrum of officers around the director. They are already at this point attempting to arrest him. Much of what happens after that is obscured because the officer with the camera is standing behind other people, but for the next 80+ seconds the police are physically attempting to put handcuffs on him and telling him to put his hands behind his back.
At about 5:45, about a minute and a half after the police began attempting to arrest him, we first see the tazer. The band hasn’t been playing for almost 2 minutes at this point, so the tazer is not deployed in an attempt to stop the music. Apparently the first attempt to taze him failed, at which point they order him to put his hands behind his back. He does not, and at about 6:00 he is tazed and falls to the ground.
So he resisted arrest for nearly two minutes before the tazer was deployed.
According to the article, Disorderly Conduct. No further details are provided and the video does not help clarify.
I missed that. Where does that happen?