Guess you don’t believe they’ll browbeat a spoon-fed confession out of a retarded kid either, but they did it in West Memphis.
If she was poor, I highly doubt it.
They’ll cover for their own in the end, though. It’s hard enough when there’s video of the cops screwing up and committing police brutality, and here the only person who can contradict their story (other than the cops themselves, which they have done) is dead.
They keep a drunk on the street with a badge and a gun. Yeah, it pretty much is as bad as most people think it is.
Which their partner can do no wrong.
And you know all this because you work in a museum and your hubby works in a prison, so you’re the absolute expert here and your word is gold.
I can’t hear someone yelling from outside the house. I can hear a door being smashed in with a battering ram (I don’t think a kick will do it against the deadbolts).
One story about bad cops proves that they’re all bad?
Are you kidding me? The grand daughter probably has to shove lawyers out of the way to go out to get the paper. I *guarantee *that she’s been positively *deluged *with offers to take this case on for free.
What looks like brutality to the Average Joe is often ordinary police tactics. Just because it *looks *brutal to the untrained eye doesn’t mean the cops did anything wrong.
There might even be video of this incident. No one has said.
Just because someone is an alcoholic doesn’t mean they’re unable to do their jobs properly. If they’re drinking on the job, that’s a problem, but I don’t see where it’s a public safety issue if they’ve been late to work.
How many cops do you know, personally that you can make such a concrete statement?
He works with the cops all the time. He goes on raids with them, helps with the investigatons and we socialize with them. I am not claiming to be an expert, but I am more familiar with police tactics than the average citizen.
One of these days someone ought to set up a decible meter. If you can hear splintering wood and pounding, I’m pretty sure you’d be able to hear six men yelling at the top of their lungs unless your house is as large as Bill Gates’.
Look, mistakes will happen, but the chances of a mistake happening are greater if the person doesn’t comply with the police commands.
For example, if the person holding the cup, or the remote or the T-shirt hem didn’t put their hands up when the police commanded them to, the cops are going to get worried that the item they’re holding is a weapon. And yes, at that point, you are to blame for not complying with their commands.
I really don’t believe that the noise from splintering wood is louder than six men shouting at the top of their lungs.
No, but a horde of such stories proves that you are either naive, or trying to spin BS. There is no reason to assume that police officers are any different than most other normal human beings. Some are bad, many will shade the truth towards their profession’s benefit, etc.
Because, of course, the people with the authority to legally beat and kill you always know best.
Look, you are going to need to give up this line of argument sooner or later, because it’s just ridiculous. I might well hear something, but I wouldn’t be able to make out what was being said, and there are lots of different plausible scenarios in which a person would not hear such a warning. The difference is that splintering wood and pounding would be sounds that translate directly to the inside of the house (in part because they would be happening inside the house). Are you really going to continue to implausibly argue otherwise, or are we done here?
The story on this very case has seemingly enough wiggle room to have the warning being either before or during the breakdown. Which was it?
This is exactly Balko’s point. It doesn’t matter if you are innocent and the cops incompetent. If YOU make the slightest mistake, being a confused person who just woke up to all sorts of crazy noise and lights and guns, don’t do exactly the right thing, your life is forfeit. Everything is on you.
And, of course, it goes without saying that your family dog must be ritually executed as a matter of entry proceedure.
All of this, of course, only applies if you are poor and DO live in a Bill Gates style mansion. White collar criminals almost never face this sort of treatment. A lot of them get polite calls to their lawyers asking them to appear, and when they are served warrants, there is plenty of knocking.
Or they could have gone the whole other route. Calmly surround the house and then call them on the phone. No excitement, nobody gets shot. Maybe grandma would have flushed the dope but so what? As I and several other have mentioned above, the police are more and more seen as an enemy and effectively an occupying force. It would seem to pay them to try and de-escalate things rather than do the paramilitary thing.
Sure, I admit it’s the law of the land and the cops have no choice in the matter. Nevertheless, the cops are the ones that are seen as evil opressors and are hated accordingly. This thread is a good example. The old lady gets the bulk of the sympathy and the cops that were shot get little or none.
I’m not sure. As I mentioned above, the police could have tried to do this another way. In any event, they kicked-in someone’s door and damn near got killed for it. If I put myself in that old lady’s shoes, I might have done the same. It depends on what kind of assumptions you make. Did the old lady know they were police before they kicked-in her door? Did she understand? Maybe she was in fact just some cop-hating old lady and you’re point is exactly right. We’ll never know now.
I concede the point. I agree with it as well.
It may work like a charm in most cases. On the other hand, it feeds the impression that the police are the enemy. Armed men sneaking around wearing ninja suits do not automatically engender trust, quite the opposite.
We differ on this. Given what we know, I think the police could have handled this very differently. I’ll admit to using hindsight on this and it probably isn’t fair to the police to second-guess them after the fact. Nevertheless, if someone gets a call from the police, looks outside their window and sees overwhelming force, they aren’t likely to put up much of a fight. We’re assuming sanity here. A crazy is just that.
<SNIP>
FWIW, I agree with you on this. Cops are not going to start dumping dope in people’s houses to cover their mistakes. I’ve never heard or seen anything like that. FYI, my father and grandfather were cops for most of their working lives.
Lissa, you are a human being who lives on the planet earth, right? You really can’t see how a person who just awoke naked to a bunch of screaming guys telling them to put their hands up might confusedly try to cover up their genitals first before doing so, almost as if by habit, not realizing that police don’t allow time for basic modesty?
Right, I mean, a large number of corrupt police officers and a corrupt DA would never be involved in framing a large number of black people with narcotics. That’s never happened in our country in our history right? No officers have ever been sent to jail for that, right? We should NEVER worry about such things being a possibility, because they are simply implausible and maybe even impossible…
What it says to me is that brutality is an ordinary police tactic.
Really? So a delayed response because the drunk of a cop couldn’t get his ass to work on time and sober isn’t going to matter if it means they don’t get to your house before the burglar kills you?
I have had enough experience with cops to know that trusting them is a mistake I’m not willing to make again.
Have you ever been on one of these raids? Do you have any police training? Have you ever interacted with them in the course of their work, or is it all just stories from hubby the deputy warden (which sounds rather to me like the way Wal-Mart calls all the cashiers ‘associates’) and the backyard barbecues where you decided that they are all wonderful guys? My distrust of cops and immediate skepticism at their claims comes from dealing with on-duty cops. Not stories told to me at picnics.
You can ‘pretty sure’ all you want. It’s not the case. I can’t hear someone on the other side of the steel door yelling. I can hear someone taking a 7’ tall steel door off the hinges and shoving it into the house. I might not hear it if they came through the garage, but then they have another door that size to contend with to get from the garage into the house.
Noises inside the house are a hell of a lot easier to hear than noises outside the house.
No matter what those commands are, no matter what the cops do, no matter how they violate your rights, beat the hell out of you, threaten you, harm you, sodomize you with a broomstick, you can’t do a damn thing to defend yourself. You have to comply. Blind compliance no matter how bad the cops fuck up is what’s expected in your world. A citizen has no right to defend him or herself against a cop.
Not in my world. If they’re gonna commit urban warfare, which is what these paramilitary cops who believe themselves to be other than civilians are doing, they’re going to come up against people who defend themselves. I am one of those people. They have no legitimate reason to tear my door down and force their way in. None. And will be treated like any other intruder if they do.
You start shooting at police officers as they perform their duty there is no maybe. Glad you are so happy about it. I try to chime in and defend Americans when some Europeans mention how crazy and paranoid Americans with regards to their guns. Seems I was wrong.
For every story of something going wrong, there are probably twenty of everything going according to plan. It’s not national news when a raid is succesful, and so most people never hear about them. Most of the raids my husband had been on haven’t even been covered in our local paper.
Police don’t just make up procedure as they go along. Procedure is formulated by people who have studied these sorts of situations and the methods are almost always challenged in a court of law. So, blame the courts who have said that no-knock warrants are constitutional.
Okay,* even* if you didn’t hear the shouts as the door was being broken down, you’d sure as hell hear them when they entered the room you were in.
CNN says that they announced themselves before they went to work on the door.
Dude, what are the cops supposed to do? Wait until one of them is shot before reacting? They work with very dangerous people and so they have to go off the assumption that *everyone *is potentially violent. They don’t know, looking at you, if you’re actually an innocent little college kid or a drug-crazed thug. For their own safety, they have to assume that everyone is dangerous.
It’s one of my biggest worries about this issue, actually. My eldest dog is very protective. I know if the cops ever raided my home, they would shoot her. I can’t blame them, though, even though it would break my heart. They don’t have to stand there and be bitten.
A good portion of the homes my husband went to raid were owned by white middle-class people.
White collar crime is a different animal. People who have cooked the books at a company aren’t generally armed to the teeth. The drug trade is known for violent acts-- accounting fraud is not.
Deinfe “brutality” first, and then we’ll discuss it.
Provide an instance of this happening, and then we’ll talk. Considering that they’re probably not the only officers capable of responding, it doesn’t really compute.
So, let me get this straight. Your brief, limited interraction is valid evidence that cops are untrustworthy, but my extended more expansive interractions with them is not evidence to the contrary?
He is second in command of the prison, so, no, it’s not a Wal-Mart style “courtesy title.”
No, I have never personally been on one of the raids, but I have no reason to doubt what my hubby tells me. I know him to be an honest man who is deeply concerned with civil and human rights.
Secondly, “stories at picnics” do have some value. An asshole generally wants everyone to know that they’re an asshole. Assholes tell “funny” stories about the people they screw over and the like. When they’re relaxed and comfortable in their enviornment (and especially if they’ve been drinking), their true personality comes out.
I’ve been around cops enough to get to know them very well. I know intimate details of their marriages and personell conflicts with other officers. In short, if they were brutal assholes, I’d know it. Do they fuck up on occasion and do something incorrectly? Yes. Of course. They’re human. But they’re not eager to hurt people or to violate people’s rights. Hell, the headaches and paperwork involved with an incident like that alone is enough to make someone want to do things by the book.
So, either I’m lying, or somehow I ended up in a city which has the only decent police force in the world.
As I said, if you didn’t hear them outside, you’d sure as hell hear them after they came through the door.
Oh, for crying out loud. It’s not like they’re commanding you to have sex with your brother. They’re commanding you to stand still and put your hands up. And no, you don’t have a right to defend yourself violently against the police. If you feel your rights have been violated, you have the means of redress through the court system just like every citizen.
[quote]
Not in my world. If they’re gonna commit urban warfare, which is what these paramilitary cops who believe themselves to be other than civilians are doing, they’re going to come up against people who defend themselves. I am one of those people. They have no legitimate reason to tear my door down and force their way in. None. And will be treated like any other intruder if they do.
[quote]
Urban warfare . . . *sheesh! *If that were truly the case, they’d bomb the house from the air or throw in grenades before they entered, guns blazing.
Well, if you want to try to “defend yourself” have fun getting your head blown off. If you don’t die, you’ll end up in prison, so you’d probably better learn hand-to-hand self defense as well.
[QUOTE=Testy]
Or they could have gone the whole other route. Calmly surround the house and then call them on the phone. No excitement, nobody gets shot. Maybe grandma would have flushed the dope but so what? As I and several other have mentioned above, the police are more and more seen as an enemy and effectively an occupying force. It would seem to pay them to try and de-escalate things rather than do the paramilitary thing.[/quoe]
And what if there was a child in the house and they decided to use the kid as a human shield or put a gun to their head as a hostage? What if they decided to gather all the guns they had and take out as many cops as they could before being shot down themselves?
How many criminals do you think would surrender “nicely?” How long do the cops have to wait before entering the house? What about hostage situations, or setting up booby-traps or any of the other hundred thousand things which could happen if a violent criminal had warning?
A) Yelling outside is insulated by the walls of the house. Crashing a door down, though, generates sound that’s not seperated by a barrier - it’s part of the wall itself that’s the source of the noise, and may be a lot easier to hear than yelling.
B) If you’re asleep, and while this raid was carried out at 7pm, many are carried out in the middle of the night, the sound of the shouting may wake you, but, in a half-asleep state, be unintelligible, but now that you’re awake, the sound of the door coming crashing down is much more clear.
You’re the one who said that the blue wall means drunks are covered for by their fellow cops.
Trusting a cop has never done anything good for me, ever.
I bet you think so. Dennis Rader’s wife thought he was a swell guy too.
Are you sure about that? It’s usually the friends and family on TV after the incident harping that they never would’ve guessed he was capable of whatever violent thing he did…
I think you’re excruciatingly naive, and also guilty of extreme idiocy if you think there’s nothing wrong with cops covering for a cop who’s a drunk.
That’s not good enough. That doesn’t keep me safe from them.
They insist on dressing in military BDUs, wearing night-vision goggles, and conducting raids in military fashion. They insist on referring to themselves as something other than civilian. They made it them versus us, and now they cry that people see them as the enemy. Their desire for military toys, military attire, and their use of military tactics is obvious. So are the big, high publicity raids right before budget reviews and the ‘war on drugs’. The war on drugs. In which the cops dress like the military, equip themselves like the military, and strike like the military.
You tell me why I shouldn’t see it as urban warfare?
Why does this have to be a gun issue? If Americans are paranoid that their police are militarizing, adopting an “us” vs “them” attitude where “them” is the citizenry rather than criminals, and routinely attack any minor problem with overwhelming force, what the hell does that have to do with gun rights?
Then don’t reply to a specific quote when it didn’t have anything to do with what you are saying. In fact you either didn’t understand what was written or chose not to.