And it’s not about waiting for an election, it’s about participating in them when they happen. After the stuff in Ferguson, one thing that came out was that turnout in the previous election there had been something like 10%. Even getting that up to the frankly pathetic average of 40-50% (depending on whether there’s a Presidential election happening as well) would change things massively.
And there are cops wearing a badge after doing these things too.
While I fully agree that voter turnout is quite important, I would like to see why voter turnout is on the low side. With all the attempts at voter suppression that the GOP implements, I cannot fault a community for having low turnout, when the govt is doing its damned best to keep them from making their voice heard at the poll.
Between cutting early voting hours, making new voter ID demands, closing down precinct and removing machines which increases lines, and all the other tricks that they get up to, I find it hard to blame the victims in the situation.
Even without deliberate suppression, poor people do have a harder time voting than the wealthy. They may not have a car to drive to the polls before or after work, and have to figure out how to fit it into the bus schedule. They may not have an employer who allows them to leave work to vote. When I closed for election day last year, many of my employees talked about how previous employers wouldn’t give them time to vote, even though that is illegal. They may have more pressing concerns at home, kid failing out of school, an ailing parent to care for, any number of things that more well off people just take for granted aren’t obstacles to voting.
…performance standards are only as good as the metrics used to determine those standards.
“Number of speeding tickets issued in a day” is a bad metric. “Arrests made in a week” is a bad metric. Why are they bad? Because in an ideal world we wouldn’t be issuing tickets because people wouldn’t be speeding. Because in an ideal world we wouldn’t be arresting people because there wouldn’t be anyone breaking the law. If there aren’t enough speeding cars for municipal employees to meet their performance standards: then the only way to meet those standards is to find a way to “increase the amount of speeding cars.”
Only a complete moron would support performance standards that are dependent on maintaining a set standard of bad behavior.
Why do you insist that cops are not capable of doing their job without raping women, planting evidence, beating men for sitting on their mother’s porch, or murdering?
I think that the cops should be perfectly capable of performing their duty of policing the community and keeping it safe without resorting to these sorts of activities.
Why do you think so poorly of the police that you think that they need to commit crimes in order to do their jobs?
Why do you insist that cops as a whole are doing all those things on a regular basis when there’s nearly 1,000,000 who go out & do their job w/o incident?
I have made the insistence that there are cops who are doing these things, as well as cops who cover for cops who do these things, as well as prosecutors who do not prosecute as zealously as if it were not a cop under question, and that that is not good for community relations.
Why do you insist on lying about what I have said?
Be mad at specific individuals for things they actually did to help him? Yes. Be mad at cops who got on with their job - that is, served him - no. Be mad at any other cop who may or may not have had any connection to this - heck no.
Um, you think that a local police chief promoting neo-Nazi sentiments and selling neo-Nazi merchandise is just a “hobby” with no implications for the chief’s qualifications to do his job? You think having a white supremacist and neo-Nazi as a police chief (of a town that’s over a quarter nonwhite, by the way) is something that the cops serving under him should just ignore?
The rapidity with which a lot of modern conservatives rush to normalize and trivialize levels of bigotry and hatred all the way up to actual literal Nazi still manages to amaze me sometimes.
I think whether or not he should keep his job should be determined solely on how he does his job.
Maybe not ignore, maybe they should look more carefully to see if he violates any relevant laws than they would with other people.
We probably learned it from the left trivialising the bigotry and hatred coming from the likes of BLM, OWS, the misogynistic, anti-semitic union thugs out there, and many other groups.
Anyway, the threat of Nazism in this day and age is trivial. It’s laughable, and should be treated as such. Such threat as exists from the right is mostly to the poor, and partly to the LGBTQetc community. That needs to be addressed and sorted out, but when there’s constant straw-manning calling who isn’t a leftist in a specific way a Nazi, that won’t happen.
Your hobbies shouldn’t affect your employability. That should include what you smoke, who you have sex with, or what dodgy music you listen to.