Really appreciate this insight. Thanks.
Rward
6017
I was wondering about this after reading a link I think jpinard posted a bit back about the cop that unloaded on some kid, THROUGH HIS WINDSHIELD.
I was wondering what was going on in that cops mind - does he presume he’s being constantly hunted, everyone is out to kill him…?
It turned out he thought the person had a gun in their back pocket but it was a hammer. EVEN IF it was a gun … why does he think that the first reaction the person is going to have is to pull it and shoot him?
Mentally, that’s where he’s at driving there… To be shooting through your own windscreen … wtf!
Holy shit.
I mean, I have nothing useful to contribute here, but:
Clearly.
Aceris
6019
What the US needs is a de Klerk to back the right down from their awful racist hill.
Like, I dislike the vengeful nasty parts of the left as much as anyone, but the entire left being angels is not going to make a lot of progress in solving the US’s issues
ShivaX
6020
Apparently the Feds are in Portland and last night the entire city was basically a wall of tear gas.
So that’s fun.
Thrag
6021
This guy gives a great perspective on the issue of having a police force that does not live within the community it polices. Not only are there all the us vs them issue such a situation often creates, but in literal terms it causes vast amounts of money to be taken from a community’s tax base and given to another. When 95% of a city’s police live in the suburbs it takes a large amount of money from the city and transfers it to the suburbs, exacerbating the issues of poor inner cities and better off suburbs.
(forgive the twitter random link, couldn’t quickly find an independent source of the video.)
Thrag
6022
Are police departments trained to constantly shoot themselves in the foot?
Are they… are they actually saying “give us the money or we’ll fire all the brown people?” Because it kinda looks like that’s what they’re saying.
Thrag
6024
I’ll give the deserves to be fired immediately along with everyone in PR department spokesperson the benefit of the doubt that that was not what they were trying to say, but yeah, that’s pretty much what they just said.
Though even the nicest possible assumed alternative of “hey, this would harm these not white people too!” is still a terrible terrible look.
I live in a country where policing is basically a jobs program, where they hire many more police than they need and send them out in groups of 4 to wander the streets on foot or bicycle, and mostly it’s just all for show. But they don’t give them all guns.
2nd world country smarter than supposed world’s best country.
It’s more of a systemic problem than an intentional decision at the PD level most likely - what you often see is in a lot of pro-diversity work forces is that minorities disproportionately make up the lower ranks most at risk - sometimes due to a glass ceiling, sometimes simply because those companies only started hiring minorities a few decades ago and not enough rose up the ranks yet .
That’s how you can make what seems to be reasonable policies that hit certain jobs/roles equally yet still end up with uneven outcomes in terms of who’s impacted.
What was explained to me was that this is actually in their contract… indirectly. The SPD has been under a Federal Consent Decree for racist policing for nearly a decade. One of the things they did was to hire more POC cops. The thing is, their current contract (that expires in December) mandates that any cutbacks or layoffs first target the least-senior cops. Therefore, gosh, our hands are tied here, we just have to fire all our POC police. Fucking assholes.
That also means that the Police Unions are involved since those contracts are usually negotiated between the city and the union. Another reason to rethink that whole relationship, I suppose.
Yeah, we’ve had a bunch of ongoing problems with the Police Guild here. A few years back (in the midst of the consent decree, remember), the city council voted on accountability legislation. Then the Mayor (who’s biggest claim to fame before the office was doing work in the Federal Justice Dept under Obama, so she comes from that ‘criminal justice’ ‘law-and-order’ background) underminded that with a new contract, which the council approved. That was 2018.
Last fall, though, we basically got an entirely new, more-progressive council, which isn’t taking any shit- those tweets are because the council is ready do defund them by 50%, with a veto-proof majority. This whole BLM time the police have constantly lied and acted in bad faith (such as the tweets above), and last month the largest local Labor Council (kind of the Union of Unions) expelled them, so they are now on their own with no other union support, and are lashing out and trying to throw their weight around.
If this is the case, why isn’t defund the police more popular? Not saying it should be over 50 given the 18%, but I would expect it to be in the 30s-40s.
