Maybe De Blasio should just cane his ass then.
Is the Abner Louima Memorial Broom Handle still available?
It’s not the cops’ fault that the people vote so many laws into effect that they have to enforce. If you’re saying that the cops should ignore the will of the people and decide not to enforce “minor” laws, then you’re effectively giving them veto power over the entire democratic process and making them a super-legislature unto themselves.
Quoted for truth.
The NYPD has ~34,000 uniformed officers. If 5% are brutes who should not be allowed in their position, that’s 1,700 officers over 5 boroughs (counties). But the police are indoctrinated with such an “us vs. them” mentality that they do not make serious efforts to weed out that 5%. Or 4%. Or 10%. Or whatever the actual number is. We’ll never know because they are not accountable, and our past two mayors let them keep their dirty laundry as closed off from the public as possible. Of course they are getting upset now that a new mayor wants to open up the books just a little from what’s been going on for the last 2 decades.
Sadly, appeals to fear work even better than appeals to emotion, and that is the nail that the PBA chief is hammering.
Refresh my memory on that one…were the perpetrators adequately identified and punished?
Have O and H done anything at all to try to diffuse what was building?
After the fact, and after public cries of outrage, and almost after Louima’s death. The point was about PD culture permitting the assault to occur in the first place.
Comply or die. Makes perfect sense.
Here’s an example of what Obama has done to “try to diffuse what was building.” After the Ferguson grand jury decision came out, he said this:
This idea that there’s somehow a war on cops is over-the-top nonsense mainly pushed by self-serving opportunists like Patrick Lynch of the PBA.
Yes. Obama has been very careful in his statements on these matters. I think Gi911ani’s blaming Obama borders on criminal psychosis.
Outrage over cop killing and outrage over cops killing others is not mutually exclusive. Just because we are outraged over the police choking a man to death over cigarettes doesn’t mean that we can’t condemn cops being executed.
It’s Fox. Obama could single handedly defeat Satan in hand to hand combat on international television and everyone on Fox would still have to get up in the morning and bash Obama. They are a paid political advertisement.
Resistance is futile.
Yeah, that always ends well.
Respecting their authoritah doesn’t always work, either.
People generally do not vote laws into effect. They vote in lawmakers who make the laws. Unfortunately lawmakers rarely seem to do the hard work of revisiting old laws and modifying them or throwing out ones that make little sense anymore and instead just keep piling on new laws.
As for cops ignoring the will of the people as the numbers I cited above show there is no way any cop can ever have close to all the laws memorized and enforce them equally. Indeed police forces often choose to focus efforts on this or that and go easy on other stuff (e.g. crack down on jaywalking and don’t bother people smoking a joint). Happens all the time at all levels of law enforcement. There simply is no way to possibly enforce all the laws equally.
This of course gives police a great deal of power. They can choose who and what to come down hard on and that often has a racial undertone to it.
Besides, if every law was enforced to its fullest, we’d all be in jail. Cops *do *have to exercise judgment and self-control in what they investigate and arrest for. So it’s critical that they *have *good judgment and self-control.
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I wasn’t aware that “we are outraged over the police choking a man to death over cigarettes”. Which case are you referring to?
Eric Garner died from cardiac arrest. Maybe it’s the repeated lies that police choked Garner to death being made by mob leaders, along with the other anti-police rhetoric, which triggered some assholes to assault police officers for arresting criminals and encouraging another asshole to shoot his girlfriend and then drive to NYC to murder the first cops that he could?
So he suffered a cardiac arrest as a result of being in a choke hold rather than actually being strangled. Get yourself a cee-gar for that insight.
The issue really isn’t whether or not cops should enforce all laws, including minor ones. The issue is whether there are racial disparities and other systemic sources of unfairness in law enforcement, and whether excessive use of force by the police could be reduced (better training, weeding out psychopaths) without endangering cops or unduly reducing their effectiveness.
It’s the age-old question of who will guard the guards themselves. Only in Lake Wobegon do the interests of the guards and the interests of the guarded never come into conflict. The job of people like Obama and de Blasio is to help society strike the right balance between those competing interests.
Unfortunately, there is an authoritarian streak on the right bordering of fascism, according to which any suggestion that the existing balance may be tilted too far in favor of the police is tantamount to anti-cop propaganda, a declaration of “open season” on the lives of police officers.
And starting this week, don’t walk close by a cop car, especially if you are a young man of color. If you do, it could be detrimental to your health.
According to the medical examiner, the pressure on his neck and chest contributed to his death.