No, there’s a need for no-knock raids, but they should be very rare.
They should only be used in a SWAT raid where there is solid evidence there are several heavily armed and dangerous perps.
Not for drug raids where the worry is that the evidence might be flushed. That is another stupid consequence of the war on drugs.
No, but is is the country that we live in, and rather than deny it, we should get used to it.
Heh.
Yes, they should.
But you shouldn’t assume that they will.
And the are holding a kidnapping victim. or sitting on an atomic bomb.
The only time I was pulled over by the cops was 30 years ago or so.
I was working the middle shift at the time, and I was driving home around 2:00 in the morning. All of a sudden this car came zooming up behind me with no lights on, and started tailgating me. I mean like right on my bumper. I got to the next intersection, stopped, and proceeded. Car behind me stays on my bumper (and didn’t stop). I get to the next four way, and I stop and make a left-hand turn (blinker was on). Car behind me doesn’t use blinker nor stop and continues riding my ass. This keeps up for another 10 blocks or so. All I can see of the car is what appears to be a ski rack on the hood.
Well, finally I get to another intersection and I stop quick and then go. Suddenly, blue lights and sirens and I pull over. Then another four other cop cars pull up on all sides of me, lights flashing, sirens blaring.
I’m freaking out inside and about ready to crap my pants.
Lady cop walks up asks me if I knew why she pulled me over and I said no. She said (and I quote as I remember it exactly to this day): “You kind of rolled through that stop sign a wee little bit.” I explained I was scared because she had her lights off and was tailgating me. She said it was no excuse and gave me a ticket!
I have no idea why the four other cops pulled up. It wasn’t a bad part of town or anything. Note: And I’m white so it’s not like they pulled me over for racism (unless they didn’t know I was white until I pulled over).
To this day I wish I would have fought the ticket. And it still pisses me off.
We are both arguing for change. I am arguing for changing police procedure while you are arguing for cowing the populace.
My proposal was a little bit of a “Modest Proposal”.
I’d love to see the reaction of white middle class parents at the PTA meeting where this is proposed.
It is a reality that poor black children need to learn, in order to have a chance of getting through their childhood alive and unvictimized by the “law enforcement community”.
That the reality would have to come home to the suburbs as well is my point. If they had any thought that it would be their kids that were treated this way, they’d be for police reform so fast they’d get pulled over on the way there.
Though some basics on how to interact with police would actually be a good idea, as I and a couple others have related incidents with police that would have gone more smoothly had we been better informed as to how they would go. Sessions on your rights and how to invoke them would also be extremely useful.
I would say facetious but yes I was (although it comes close for me)
There’s a problem when a black guy with a knife is seen as such a serious threat he needs to be shot seven times in the back but a white guy walking into a school with an automatic rifle isn’t seen as somebody who should even be questioned.
Some questions: A guy with a knife, comes at your children, not you, but hey you have a nitestick, or a taser, how do you stop the threat (prior to him doing damage and possibly killing the children?)
The general rule of thumb is you use whatever force necessary to stop the threat. I don’t disagree that sometimes the cops use excessive force, and those cops should be sanctioned, fired, or prosecuted but trying to lay out what item to use for a different item as a rule, is a guaranteed way to have a tragedy that wasn’t taken into account on your hands.
But what is the problem Litttle Nemo, you lay it out as if it’s a racial thing (black guy with knife, white guy with gun)? Is that what your point was?
It’s not the only problem. But it certainly is a major problem.
When the motorist goes for his wallet, he whirls faster than warranted and goes into the vehicle with both hands. Even as a police skeptic, I was worried he was pulling out a long arm, because that’s sure how it looked like to me.
What happened after that isn’t terribly clear thanks to bad audio, but I think I hear a shot, then the motorist raised his hands, then the cop shot him… 2 more times after he raised his hands? I don’t know their rules of engagement but that looks pretty egregious.
How many unarmed black children is it OK for the cops to shoot each year just so that, in the very unlikely event that someone is coming at your child with a knife, the cops don’t feel any hesitation before shooting the attacker?
Is that a trick question? None should be ok but mistakes can and do happen as in any walk of life.
My point was that hard and fast rules , while easy to follow, usually result in missed coverage, or things that get missed and tragedy follows.
What we should expect is that the police, able to think on their feet, make the right decisions much more often than the bad ones. What we can’t expect is that they will never make a bad one.
Currently, the eyes are on them, meaning , only the bad ones get reported. But from the actual data, too many bad decisions have been happening and that needs to change. Now to the how.
Training, being more selective in hiring (maybe require a degree), and get them involved in the community that they are supposed to be defending (like rural towns are to a degree) all, IMO , go a ways towards bringing them back into the fold of us instead of the US vs THEM mentality that is currently trending.
Blaming it all on racism, isn’t helping these goals.
Your comments on community integration go straight to the heart of it. Whites are capable of peaceful coexistence with minorities in many communities, but these communities have never been integrated with one another and never will be. (I’m talking about America here. There may be a day when whites integrate peacefully as equals with other races, but America in its current form will not exist on that day.)
White police officers don’t seem to accept black people as full American citizens. Black Americans are never going to trust white police officers to be part of their community. American policing originated to protect whites from unruly slaves, it’s in their cultural DNA.
It’s a major Occam’s Razor violation to engineer big systematic solutions that try to address everything except the biggest part of the problem. If you want people making good judgments, they have to be capable of compensating for their biases. To do that, you have to be aware of biases, and racism is the biggest most common bias on the police force.
Just go right to it, just outlaw any and all white people from being on the police force. Problem solved right?
Somehow I doubt that would solve a damn thing but I am willing to try it.
There might be a need, but as you say, it’s very rare. They should be used in conjunction with solid, airtight surveillance. A no-knock raid that ends up getting an innocent person like Brianna Taylor killed should end up with someone being criminally charged for manslaughter.
You are right, this suggestion no one made probably wouldn’t work.
No one did eh?
Why not? If racism is the underlying cause of all the issues, why wouldn’t this work?