And yet when there’s been completely public investigations, with independent grand juries making the decisions - such as in Ferguson - where the evidence exonerates the officer involved completely, people still say it’s “controversial”.
Justice is not served by bringing cases to trial where there’s not a strong likelihood of conviction. It’s not the function of a prosecutor to bring every case to trial because people think it’s a good idea, it’s to investigate and to determine if it’s in the public interest to try the case.
The double standards that exist on this issue are amazing. You have right-wingers (elsewhere rather than here) saying that cops should be given the benefit of the doubt but not other criminals, and you have the lefties here saying that the “prison industrial complex” leads to the railroading of suspects, but want the police held to much different standards, and tried and punished even when the investigation shows it’s unwarranted.
The Grauniad citing an Amnesty International report is so far from an unbiased source as to be laughable. The idea that the police can’t use lethal force to defend themselves or others without first trying something else and warning the person who is an imminent danger to either the police or the public is fucking ridiculous.
I’ll put the hyperbole aside – the black people in America I’ve spoken to tell me that they are treated differently by police. When black people in America have spoken of mistreatment in unison (or nearly in unison) through our history, they’ve uniformly been correct.
I see no reason to believe that suddenly, just now, most black people are wrong about how they are treated when they’ve been right for the decades and centuries before.
Simply put, I don’t trust white people in America or elsewhere to tell me accurately whether treatment of black people is appropriate. I trust black people to tell me how black people are treated, and that’s it. Not one black person, but black people collectively. And collectively, the story I hear from them is one of disparate treatment by police and the justice system in general. This is true regardless of the details of individual incidents, and true regardless of the fact that sometimes in America, force is used against black people by police in appropriate ways.
A prosecutor who depends on the cooperation of police departments is not able to make that determination. That is why an independent prosecutor should be appointed.
I like how he quietly slides from “America is totally not racist” (based on one survey with a laughably flawed methodology, BTW) to “besides, Michael Brown was No Angel”. Smooth as you please, like goose shit on grease.
Further – in an environment in which black people are actually mistreated, sometimes but not all the time, by the police, it makes it constitutionally more difficult and challenging on the part of black people to behave in a way that maximizes their safety around police. It means that despite the fact that you have legitimate and real reasons to feel fear and to behave in a way that reflects this rational fear, if you act in such a way you might be more severely injured or killed. This feeds on itself over and over again – the fact of some mistreatment will increase fear and anxiety on the part of black people, this fear and anxiety (based on legitimate and rational reasons) adds to the fear and anxiety of police officers, this fear and anxiety from both parties increases the chance that someone will act in a violent way based on this fear and anxiety.
But the mistreatment is real, and it’s always been around in some form at some level. And this mistreatment is the ultimate source of fear and anxiety on the part of black people. It’s the mistreatment that needs to change, and it’s the only way that this issue could possibly be resolved.
Body cameras will, and indeed are already, doing this. Complaints about police behaviour fall dramatically when they’re introduced. Whether that’s due to the police behaving better or to people making less fallacious claims isn’t really relevant.
What’s clear is that any answer will involve looking forward, and ensuring that both the police and the public behave appropriately, not looking back and saying that, because certain people were mistreated in the past, it’s inevitable they will continue to be mistreated.
No, because the grand jury only sees the evidence presented by the prosecutor. If he doesn’t want to prosecute because of deference to the police department, he can manipulate the grand jury. Not the same difference at all. The only way to achieve justice is with an independent prosecutor.
Bolding mine. I strongly disagree, and to explain why I’ll bring back some hyperbole that is nonetheless part of the direct line of history to the present state of affairs.
Undoubtedly during slavery, some slaves in America at some point were violent with their masters or with other white people, and they were whipped or executed. But the answer to this extreme mistreatment was (obviously) not anything close to ‘ensuring that both the masters and the slaves behave appropriately’ – the answer was entirely one-sided – masters and white society in general needed to stop mistreating black people. Similarly, in the 1920s-30s Deep South, it’s very likely that, at some point, a black man raped a white woman and was lynched. And again, the answer to this extreme mistreatment was obviously not to ‘ensure that both the white mobs and the black citizens behave appropriately’ – it was entirely one-sided again.
And I hold that it’s still entirely one-sided – the answer to police mistreatment of black people is for all police departments in the US to openly commit themselves to stop all bad and unfair treatment, and commit to stop defending mistreatment, and commit to openly discussing past mistreatment including calling out and publicly sanctioning those who have committed such mistreatment.
I hold that the present situation is part of the direct line of historical mistreatment of black people in America – there’s nothing special about now, and while much progress has been made and black people in general are less likely to have their rights violated (and they are violated less severely) today, the mistreatment in the justice system is real and a direct descendant of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and the like. It was never the responsibility of black people to change their behavior in order to be treated equally and fairly, and nothing has changed in this regard. As it was during slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation, it is today – black people are mostly decent, law-abiding, peaceful, and non-violent citizens, and most have no responsibility whatsoever to change their behavior. And as it was then as far as the treatment of black people, it is now (to a substantially less but still significant extent) – black people are still largely mistreated by certain aspects of government, authority, and society in general.
No. The answer to police misconduct lies with the police, but the answer to people getting injured and killed resisting the police or threatening them lies to a large extent with those resisting and interfering with police operations. Claiming people aren’t responsible for their own actions, especially when those actions are criminal, is a big part of the problem here.
In most if not all of the cases mentioned in this thread, the actions of suspects made it necessary for the police to use some level of force, even if not the actual level they did use. The idea that, whatever you think of the police’s conduct, that Michael Brown or Eric Garner did nothing wrong and their criminal actions were irrelevant is absurd.
‘If that ****** didn’t want to get lynched he shouldn’t have raped that woman’.
You’re not saying exactly those words, but to my mind it’s a very similar sentiment from a direct ancestor of the present scenario. My point is that it’s irrelevant – in the larger issue (for lynching) it doesn’t matter one iota that some black men may have actually committed rape, and for the larger issue of police mistreatment of black people it doesn’t matter one iota if Michael Brown or Eric Garner acted in poor ways.
I’m not saying that Brown and Garner did nothing wrong, I’m saying that their behavior is absolutely irrelevant in the discussion of police mistreatment of black people – as irrelevant as any potentially legitimate accusations of rape against black men were during the time of lynchings.
Comparing illegal vigilante justice to supposed “mistreatment” that’s completely legal and has nothing to do with race entirely undermines your entire argument.
The police are entitled to, and sometimes required to, use force to deal with criminals. Criminals can prevent that by not running from or resisting the police, or otherwise making it necessary for force to be used on them - and remember, the minute you run from the police or resist them, you become a criminal, even if you were innocent to begin with.
There are many claims made that innocent people are being harassed by the police because of their race, and I’m sure some of them are true. But most of them fall apart under investigation. It’s not harassment or mistreatment when the police stop someone who’s car is illegal, regardless of their race. Neither are the police doing anything wrong by arresting someone who has multiple warrants out on them, and if someone feels they can’t call the cops because of those warrants, well they should have thought of that before they decided not to bother paying fines or showing up to court.
Your repeated claims that black people aren’t responsible for their own actions when they meet the police, that they can’t control their fear or anger, or that they aren’t to blame for their own criminality, is uncomfortably close to the rhetoric used by white supremacists - and it’s racist bullshit when they use it, and it’s bullshit when you use it. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you’ve not actually thought through what you’re saying though.
Black people are not incapable of treating the police with civility and respect, and nor are they incapable of getting by without breaking the law. When they don’t do those things, they are (at least in part) responsible for the consequences. So is everyone else, of course, but you’re not trying to give them a pass.