Manslaughter is all well and good, but I consider the cops who kill as people who are simply unfit for the difficulties in the position that they are working. They are not capable and trained to handle the stress, and so they end up making a poor error in judgement, one that ends with someone dead at their hands. I think that such a cop shouldn’t have a job, and we should do what we can to avoid such things in the future, but there will always be controversial shootings, there will always be cops that fuck up. We can try to lower the level, but I do not think that we can ever get it down to zero.
Now, it is the cops that don’t fuck up, but actively commit heinous acts against their communities that I have a rel problem with. The ones that plant evidence, or rape people that call them, or beat a man for sitting on his mother’s porch… the list goes on. These are not people who, in the heat of the moment made a bad judgment call, these are people who deliberately set out in the morning to cause someone else harm. These are the ones that can create a situation where having the cops around makes a situation worse than not having cops around. These are the ones that make it so that ordinary law abiding citizens will not call the police when they are victims of a crime, because they do not wish to be further victimized by the police who show up. It doesn’t matter if 90%, 95%, even 99% of the police are good people, it doesn’t take all that much raping to leave a bad taste in the community’s mouth. It’s bad enough when we watch one cop plant evidence to secure a false conviction against a member of the community he is sworn to protect, but several other officers just stand there and watch. It is one thing when an officer mistakes a tennis player for a suspect in a credit card fraud case, tackles him to the ground, handcuffs him, and then lies and says that it never happened, but 5 other officers backed him up on that story. If an officer decides to assault and falsely imprison a nurse because she will not obey his authority, that is bad enough, but then you have his peers not stopping him from violating her civil rights in an attempt to violate someone else’s.
These officers are sometimes caught, and sometimes when they are caught, they are actually held to account, but that’s really not enough to repair the relationship that the police has destroyed with their communities. That they sometimes get caught, and sometimes get prosecuted, and rarely get convicted does not do much good for someone who was just abused by a cop, and no one will believe his story. We have seen that as many as a dozen officers will blatantly lie about what they saw in order to protect their own, how can justice possibly prevail in that sort of environment?
Cops need to stop protecting their own above that of the the community. If they know that there is a dirty cop, they should tell their superiors, they should be honest in their reports, they should testify honestly against them in court. If you are a “good cop” who lies to protect dirty cops, then you are not a good cop, you are a bad cop. As long as the citizens of the community see these thugs in uniform acting with impunity in terrorizing them then community relations will be strained. If you are a cop, and you have raped a person who called you for help (or at all, really), or planted evidence, or beat someone for no reason, then you are doing more harm than good for your community. If you are a cop, and you have witnessed any of this, and not brought it up with superiors, then you too are causing more harm than good to your community. If you are a superior, and you are covering for your cop’s misconduct, you are the reason that there are cops that are doing more harm than good.
If you are a cop who does his job, arrests the bad guys and respects the good guys, then you are fighting an uphill battle to keep your entire police force from causing more harm than good. Your job is made harder by these other cops, your job is made more dangerous by these other cops, your community is made poorer by these other cops. I would like to think that these cops would be the majority, but, as in any workplace, if poor employees are left to continue being poor employees, the good employees either quit or lower their standards.
As far as Steophan’s claims of police causing more harm than good in general. I think iiandyiiii has already defended his position well enough, but I don’t know about MrDribble’s posts. I didn’t know that he had posted in here, and I do disagree with him on quite a number of things. If Steophan wanted to point out the post where he made the comments that steophan claims he made, there is a reasonable chance that I will join in criticizing him, assuming that the post is in any way actually reflective of what steophan is claiming. If that is the case, then Steohpan can continue his argument against MrDribble, and can stop trying to paint all of those he disagrees with the same.
But, going into the idea that police can cause more harm then good, all you have to do is look back through history, all over time and all over the world, where law enforcement was used for the sole purpose of oppressing the population, not for protecting it. As recently as the 60’s I would certainly say that the police were causing far more harm than good to some black communities. I like to think that there are no communities in the US where the existence of the police is an overall negative factor in the community, but I certainly can’t rule it out on a “never happens, can’t happen” basis.
Unfortunately, there are those who like the authoritarian bent, who like the idea that there are people out there with a state sanctioned monopoly on violence, and no accountability. They feel they have a lot in common, so those who the authoritarian oppresses will be those who the authoritarian sympathizer doesn’t like. And that’s how authoritarians get their power in the first place, by only oppressing and harming the groups of people that their supporters want to see oppressed and harmed. The funny thing is, is that once they have consolidated their power, and no longer need the toadying bootlickers, they are the next to go.
While we look for ways of improving the police force in such a way to improve the safety of our communities and the relationship between the citizens and the cops, which would decrease the harm, and increase the good done, the bootlickers are looking for ways of justifying the harm, encouraging and enabling this behavior. As long as people feel that cops are above the law, they will be.
Meh, stupid busy today, that’s probably all I have time for.
