Exactly.
If the rule of law does not apply to all citizens equally, then those disenfranchised by the law will cease to respect it.
And really, at that point there is no reason to, as it’s no longer the rule of law at all. It’s just rule by force.
The police officer that fatally shot a motorist was acquitted of manslaughter charges. This was the incident where the driver (who is black) was pulled over because either he had a taillight out or he resembled a suspect in a relatively recent robbery in a relatively nearby suburb. The driver, who had worked in an elementary school for years, and was a respected employee, also was a licensed gun owner. When the police officer that pulled him over asked him if he had a weapon, the motorist answered in the affirmative, at which point the officer (who is not black, but neither is he white) feared for his life, and started blasting away at the motorist, narrowly missing the motorist’s girlfriend in the passenger seat and the girlfriend’s daughter in the back seat, but hitting the motorist most of the time. The motorist died. His girlfriend streamed his death on Facebook. The defense for the officer made a point of saying that the motorist was too impaired by marijuana to follow the officer’s instructions, and that the officer thought that the motorist might very well have been reaching for his pistol with intent to kill the officer when the motorist had two hands attached to his arms.
Emotions are running high. So far I have not heard the National Rifle Association comment on a law abiding gun owner getting killed because he admitted to legally owning a firearm.
Juries often seem to be full of scared people who think police are constantly being targeted and, because they’re largely white and not subject to being stopped for Driving While Brown, tend to endorse pretty much any action of the police on the grounds that the officers have to protect themselves (never mind that we’ve come to the point where the entire purpose of the police, apparently is to protect themselves, and no one else). I suppose there may well be cases too of juries who are so intent on making a statement about police brutality that they swing the other way, but I can’t recall them off hand.
Essentially, the police have pitched a narrative of being under siege, the population making up the juries has zero experience being at the nasty end of police abuse, and moreover are pretty much, if subconsciously, operating under the belief that anyone who is doing anything wrong–DUI, weed, petty theft, killing Jimmy Hoffa, whatever–is by extension guilty of whatever the cops say he or she is guilty of. This is compounded by a near total forgetting of the actual purpose of law enforcement, which last I checked was not to exterminate non-whites because they look scary.
I’ve helpfully bolded all the irrelevant details for the decision to shoot!
But I was surprised the jury, which included 2 black people, came back with a not guilty for manslaughter. That seemed pretty incompetent even if he was stoned and not listening to orders. And it was on the same day they convicted that poor Big Pharma-addled girl for texting her friend to kill himself.
This will sort itself out, we’ll just have more Dallas shootings until the police learn to behave themselves.
I honestly can’t believe more police employees aren’t targeted at their home for these straight up murders. I guess their families are relying on the courts to treat the police the same as ordinary citizens. Show that’s an illusion and there might be more vigilante justice…
Which is terrible, because we should be able to rely on the court system to be fair.
I love the “weed card,” too. Never mind that there’s no discussion of just exactly how the person was “impaired,” or any actually evidence as far as I can tell of substantial impairment or even quantification of how much was consumed. All you have to do is mention “drugs” and juries of scared people will immediately buy anything the police say about the victim. It’s like somehow exposure to marijuana magically turns you into a raving monster…oh, wait, they watched Reefer Madness in high school, probably.
It’s all part of the demonization of the poor, the non-white, and the culturally different by the hegemonic power that can’t abide the fact that white people are no longer the God-like majority.
I’ve tried several times to come up with a clever dramatization of this - it’s been all over the news here, as one might imagine.
I got nothing, you guys. A man is dead because a cop was too much of a coward to not shoot him several times at no provocation, and said cop has now been acquitted of all charges.
I’m sure this will go great.
Personally, I’m more of the opinion it’s a systemic problem and not entirely an issue of personal behavior. Certainly, individual officers need to be held accountable better than they are, and nothing can erase that individual responsibility. But more than any one officer doing or not doing any one thing, this sort of thing, to me, is emblematic of a totally broken system. A system that trains officers to regard the citizenry–or at least, non-white citizens in particular–as dangerous, that inculcates a sense that the overriding imperative is officer safety even at the expense of “collateral damage,” and a system that encourages and feeds on and off of a general culture of fear that serves to elevate law officers, in some of their own minds and the minds of many citizens, to the status of heroic warriors holding back the barbarians at the gate, and demonizes people deemed to be threatening because they don’t fit certain social and cultural assumptions.
It’s also a systemic problem that money is more often available for traffic light cameras, fancy parking meters, and other revenue producing crap than it is for realistic training, reasonable salaries to attract higher quality recruits, and more robust research and development of non-lethal weapons for civilian law enforcement.
Over the years, I’ve talked with a lot of law enforcement officers and people associated with the criminal justice system. I’m not an expert, nor do I have personal experience in the field; I’m sure it’s a tough, stressful, and often dangerous job, no question about it. But I’ve seen a lot of consistency in attitude over the year, and the attitude is, eventually if the officer stays in long enough, one of disdain and even disgust with pretty much everyone who is not a cop. I’ve seen young people in CJ programs who want to be cops and read their papers and listened to them discuss issues, and many, many of them have already, before they even put on a uniform, developed an us vs. them attitude and a general willingness, in theory at least, to use force at the drop of a hat because to them that’s what cops do. Ideally, this sort of attitude would be worked out of them in training, but from what I can see, it’s just reinforced.
The net result is that we send officers out on to the streets who are in effect programmed to shoot first, ask questions later, and justify everything by shifting the conversation to how dangerous it is to be a cop. We also send folks out who, in fairness, often seem to have plenty of training in how to shoot, but very little training in how to avoid having to shoot. It seems that everything gets truncated to “always assume they are going to kill you so if they do anything the simplest bit out of line, don’t take chances.”
Which is a terrible way to run law enforcement it seems to me at least. Especially as the “they” is usually non-white and often someone who the police can plausibly paint as a miscreant in some fashion. The police play on the culture of fear by labeling everyone they stop as a drunk, a drug addict (even better for cultural reasons, because you can as we’ve seen even get non-whites on juries to acquit officers if the victim can be painted as an evil drug user), someone guilty of some other crime in the past, or anything else to make the public feel “ah, what the hell, just another crook, who cares.”
Again, I don’t think it’s necessarily individuals setting out to do these things, though it may be in some cases. I really think it’s an entire culture. It’s not everywhere, and it’s not at the same extreme level everywhere, but most major metropolitan areas and many not so major and not so metropolitan regions seem to have all of this going on.
It’s almost as if just enforcing laws and protecting the community wasn’t enough. It’s like police departments had to have an ongoing crisis to justify budgets and their own self-esteem, and thus, voila, they manufacture this narrative of “war in the streets” with them as the heroes.
Unfortunately, it’s pretty much everyone else as the bad guys.
This, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this
It’s that attitude and a lot of them just being cowardly. They’re so terrified of everything that they instantly go to lethal force in almost any situation. A scared person with a gun is rarely a good thing.
I’ve found that state troopers are generally way better than local cops.
True. Troopers tend to be better paid, and the requirements are stiffer in most cases.
Agreed with the above.
I do wonder, however; we’ve often talked about how law enforcement draws people who want to have power over others. However, I suspect it also draws those who are afraid of the people around them. Why else would you feel the need to put your life on the line to protect (and serve) the public, unless you had a genuine fear of some element out there? That makes me think that the odds of getting a cop that isn’t power-hungry AND isn’t overly afraid of “others” a sadly slim chance.
Oh popehat.
The situation is the same in the military, team sports, frat houses, etc. There may be a difference in degree, but not in kind. The training starts long before they enter the workforce.
I just stumbled into this thread. What is popehat?
This is going to lead to riots.
You gotta have more faith in people.
Holy crap. That is some terrifying footage.
Edit: Also, WTF at this?
[quote]
“As that was happening, as he was pulling at, out his hand I thought, I was gonna die and I thought if he’s, if he has the guts and the audacity to smoke marijuana in front of the 5-year-old girl and risk her lungs and risk her life by giving her secondhand smoke and the front seat passenger doing the same thing then what, what care does he give about me?”[/quote]
Yeah, because smoking around other people–something everyone of my generation grew up with as a matter of course–is exactly equivalent to shooting a cop. Ho. Lee. Fuck.