Your cites refer to Staten Island and New York areas, (and they are pointing to some years) 538 looks at the federal level and that the numbers are not much applicable to police men, and that was the point.
So yeah, you are just grasping at straws.
And the whole NY state - statewide. You really should read closer. As in: “That includes “superior court informations,” which don’t go to a grand jury. Excluding SCIs, 5.1 percent of actions on Staten Island resulted in “no true bill,” and 4.3 percent did in all of New York State.”
No, 538 looked at the federal grand juries. Not all grand juries in the US. Do you understand that there is a difference between a “federal grand jury” and a state-level grand jury?
“some boroughs” = statewide in Terr’s world it seems. Also “some years”= all years, but that is not my problem, it is once again the typical extreme conservative syndrome of ignoring time or time lines when it is not convenient.
Yes, I understand, do you? As I pointed before then you have to deal with that and not to point to what they are not talking about.
Well, that certainly settles that! We have that on your authority, then? No citation needed?
But leaving aside the ineptitude of Terr, I do agree with many here that what the heads of the police are claiming is the most unprofessional and reckless thing I have seen a police department do of late.
On this I do agree on what Digby at Hullabaloo points out:
Imagine if they weren’t cops – just a gang of dudes dressed like cops – but the events happened exactly as they were shown on video. A gang of dudes accosted Garner, he complained and yelled back, they tried to grab him, he resisted, they struggled, and he died. Would you honestly be arguing that they didn’t kill him?
That doesn’t seem like an honest argument. Yes, they killed him. You might be arguing that their actions, which led to his death, were justified, but it’s pretty ridiculous to say that the cops didn’t kill him.
It says so in the article I cited. You didn’t read it did you?
As the brouhaha spills into its third/fourth day, I’m surprised (or not really) that conservatives don’t realize that blaming Obama and Bill de Blasio for the deaths of those two cops essentially sends the message that if you criticize police officers, you will be blamed and suffer politically the next time a cop is killed. The lesson is: if you want to play it safe, just STFU about cops, unless it’s to wax about how wonderful they are.
So that’s just great. I always thought what our democracy needed was a taboo against criticizing police officers in the public sphere. Let’s just have a totally unaccountable police force, I’m sure they can keep themselves in check.
Excellent point. Do we really want a society wherein one just does not criticize police? Where if one of them kills a citizen it should be assumed that it was entirely justified? It certainly seems that some people do. So many of the people who shout “USA! USA!” seem to want to turn it into Nazi Germany.
Dam, Bob, did you *have *to do that?
Right when we were getting it so entertainingly explained to us that Garner was killed by everyone else in the world but the guy who was choking him?
You didnt read the rest: *At the Legal Aid Society, which represents tens of thousands of defendants every year, some lawyers have aggressively allowed their clients to testify before grand juries. In some years, they said, grand jurors in some boroughs voted not to indict in more than 60 percent of cases in which Legal Aid clients testified.
*
I see that the media is now calling the protests “Anti - Police” instead of “Anti - Police BRUTALITY”, as they were originally termed.
Now, why would you suppose they would do that?
Meaningless without data on how many Legal Aid clients testified. Some lawyers, in some boroughs in some years had 60% of the clients who testified voted not to indict. Pile enough qualifications on it and it’s bound to be true. Some lawyers, how many? We don’t know. Which years? We don’t know, not all years, but definitely some. Which boroughs? Again, not all, but some, probably, if you pick the right year and the right lawyer. Maybe the stars will align for your client.
Big whoop. What if one in a hundred testified? Well then, 994 in a thousand got indicted. Might have been one in a thousand, there’s no data there, just smoke and mirrors.
(post shortened)
OH NO, how will I be able to enjoy the holidays without your permission? How will I ever be able to get my usual 7 hrs of sleep tonight? :smack:
(Post shortened under threat from hamsters)
Some smoke and some mirrors…
See what you did BigT? You should be ashamed of yourself.
Wow. Godwin’s law plus a strawman. Way to go, BobLibDem!
Who’s preventing you from criticizing the police? People can criticize the police AND people can criticize those who criticize the police AND people can criticize those who criticize those who criticize others.
Of course, some people skip the criticism part and go directly to the burning, looting, punching, kicking part of the undermine any government for dummys handbook.
But those protesters should not be considered a part of the protesters because that would be painting with too broad a brush. It’s as if only police officer actions should be painted with that broad brush.
Stop picking on BigT. Have you no common decency?
If you’re a politician, you take huge political risk for pointing out police abuse. Mr. Obama can, as we remember in his true statement about cops acting stupidly. One would have thought Mr. Obama had dug up the corpse of Betsy Ross and sodomized it on television when the right wing heard that one. The NY mayor can tell you all about what happens if you dare say the cops aren’t God’s Chosen People. On this board, you’ve got people who blame the victim for being choked to death, and who condone the shooting of a 12 year old within 2 seconds of the arrival of the cops. These people go batshit crazy at the notion that there is anything that a cop could do that would be wrong.
Some people take to acts of arson or looting when these things happen. They are a small minority. Most of us also think that a small minority of cops are sadistic murderers. All we ask is that those that commit heinous acts while in uniform are prosecuted.
And to the extent that Patrick Lynch and the politicians and media pundits amplifying his temper tantrum succeed in their campaign against Bill de Blasio, the takeaway will be that politicians “can” criticize the police in the same sense that I “can” jump out my 20th floor window. Perhaps you think that would be a healthy development for our democracy. I don’t.
Those people should be arrested. Some of them were.
Thankfully, President Obama and Mayor de Blasio had the good sense not to further inflame the situation by calling those people out as the anarchist bums they obviously are. Had they done so, it most likely would have reinforced the anarchist bums’ narrative of “us vs them,” invited a greater percentage of anarchist bums to the fray, thus further radicalizing the protests and possibly necessitating a harsher police response. The harsher police response may well have resulted in more cops being hurt, more protesters/anarchist bums being hurt, more damage to property, and a non-negligible possibility of escalation into full-blown race riots all over the country.
For that reason, I am glad–as I’m sure you are, doorhinge–to have steady hands and cool heads among our leadership.
The anarchist bums are part of the protesters. They are a minority of the protesters. The majority of the protesters have a more cogent argument and make for a more credible constituency than the anarchist bums. In that sense, it’s self-serving to call the anarchist bums “representative” of the protesters.
When you accused BobLibDem of making a strawman, was it intended as praise?