Authorities have released shocking video that shows a white police officer in Illinois shooting a Black woman – who called police in fear of a home intruder – in the face, killing her.
Authorities have released shocking video that shows a white police officer in Illinois shooting a Black woman – who called police in fear of a home intruder – in the face, killing her.
Most police in the modern day receive consequences.
Up until about 2010 it was almost never, with exceptional exceptions when something obscenely over the top happened. After that it was hit or miss, until 2020 happened and body cams were universal and ever since then it was pretty much decided. Since then it’s been pretty much all consequences all the time except in insanely Deep South departments that haven’t gotten up to speed with the times or something. And even then, usually some larger agency will step in, and consequences.
The rhetoric on the left hasn’t changed, and still assumes every cop is the enemy at all times and nobody gets any credit for the change in culture in policing to the point that the frontline police are probably the least of the problems in our still pretty overall unjust “justice” system, which kind of pisses me off tbh.
This is pretty out of touch as someone who sees new bodycam videos daily of cops violating people’s civil rights and who has had run ins with crooked cops. In places like Portland and Seattle, the police departments have been under federal consent decrees due to a pattern of violating constitutional rights. This isn’t relegated to the deep south and is actually quite common in the more “liberal” cities of the country (CO police have had numerous issues lately). We’re just a couple years out from George Floyd and things have barely changed.
That doesn’t mean anything though. You can find new body cam videos daily of cops bending over backwards to try to protect people’s rights. Neither of it means anything. It could be happening 1% of the time, or 50%, or 99%, and there would still be daily videos showing one or the other. The US is a big place; there are literally millions of new bodycam videos being produced every single day.
I actually don’t know what the number is - I have kind of my perception that it’s rare but that’s not based on too much hard data tbh. Do you know anything in terms of how quantitatively common it is?
Actually maybe a more basic question - can you send me a couple of these videos from this week? You and I may have different definitions of violating people’s civil rights.
I mean I am biased because in my area the cops are super professional; I’ve seen them in more than one heated dispute with someone and never seen them be anything but cool about it. But like I say I think the real question is how quantitatively common it is.
Can you tell me more / link to a story? I would want to know more about it.
4 years
The big shift that I saw was after 2020 with George Floyd and the other big instances that year and the massive shitstorm that ensued. Honestly, that stuff makes a difference. Without the protest I think things would have stayed more or less in the sometimes-yes-sometimes-no land.
But like I say that’s all just my anecdotal perception. I actually think it would be good to bring something quantifiable to it.
It doesn’t really matter if some cops bend over backwards to help people when they turn around and circle the wagons every time one of them harms an innocent person, violates someone’s rights, beats their spouses, murders someone, robs someone via asset forfeiture, or commits a slough of other crimes.
The issue is the lack of accountability from their departments and the laws that make them immune from being held liable for their actions. The expression goes “a few bad apples spoil the bunch” and those apples have been rotting for decades. Imagine going into your job, shooting someone in the face because something like an acorn falling startled you, and all your boss does is send you on a two week paid vacation. How fucking insane is that?
Here’s some channels to check out:
https://www.youtube.com/@thecivilrightslawyer
https://www.youtube.com/@AuditTheAudit
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbEPXqDvej-3mciZxwYmdew
https://www.youtube.com/c/wethepeopleuniversity
Portland and Seattle consent decrees: https://www.opb.org/article/2022/07/27/us-justice-department-portland-police-use-of-force-settlement/
https://seattlepolicemonitor.org/overview
I don’t think much has changed in the last 4 years. It seems people just dug their heels in about things. I will say there has been progress but it’s very slow.and incremental and only the most egregious cases like this are prosecuted when previously they would have been swept under the rug.
Dude
About 90% of stories I see in the modern day, with the OP article as a good example, involve the cops involved being brought up on charges
This is exactly what I’m saying: The culture has reformed significantly, and instead of saying “oh cool let’s move on to the next thing which is an actual problem, of which there is no shortage”, the reaction every time some cop does something wrong and is brought up on charges is “CONSEQUENCES wtf everyone knows cops are bullshit I bet they get off with” etc etc
Sounds like Portland PD is a bunch of shit. I may revise my assessment of the bullshit PDs across the country to include them (along with NYPD and LAPD yes) instead of just talking about the Deep South.
The Seattle one is a lot harder to make sense of; the links are broken. For example I was real into reading the article “Don’t defund Seattle police without building the right bridges” but I cannot. I actually think I probably will agree with its assessment and that what it’s saying is probably a perfect example of what I am talking about.
I’ve heard from people who are involved in some of these “replace the police with mental health professionals” programs, and they say it’s working well. The people get better help, the mental health professionals get to intervene before it’s a big violent crisis, and the cops aren’t thrust into situations they’re not trained for. The cops go along with the call when violence or weapons are involved, but the mental health people lead, and literally everyone wins.
That makes sense to me. It’s progress. What doesn’t make sense is DEFUND THE POLICE FUCK THE PIGS WE DON’T NEED YOU SHOOTING THIS GUY OH MY GAWD NOW HE STABBED ME HELP HELP HELP. And also starving the department of resources and making it a real shit-on-the-person unpopular job, so now they have trouble hiring people and have to kind of take what they can get in terms of hiring some not-ideal people.
Like you don’t need to make somebody into an enemy if they’re not. Police are there for a reason. You can’t hire them to fulfill a needed societal function and then just shit on them all the time regardless of what they do because of some stereotype based on a big news story about the worst thing that any single policeman anywhere in the country did, back in 2020.
I know in your world every single cop is some dog-shooting civil forfeiture person, but that is not reality. I don’t know how to explain it (especially if in your part of the country the PD actually is shitty, which it sounds like maybe is the case in the Northwest), but that’s how I see it.
These are the egregious cases I talked about right here:
But police abuse happens all the time. It’s just not salacious enough for the national media to pick up the story for you to see.
You can easily Google “Seattle police consent decree” if you’re interested in learning more. You brought up LAPD which us another perfect example as it has been reported that they have actual bonafide gangs operating within the department.
please link to one
I’ve seen plenty where I thought I would beat some ass, and the cops are cool. You won’t find much of that because why would anyone post a routine police interaction?
Far be it for me to defend the pigs, I loathe them.
Sure, here’s one from Audit the Audit. I like that channel because it is more or less unique in taking neither the “pro police” or “anti police” viewpoint and just kind of taking things as they come and judging everyone involved in the interaction according to their behavior. Sometimes the cops are the good guys and sometimes they are the bad guys in it but it’s not like predisposed to one outcome or the other being always the answer, which it seems like is how almost every other person in the debate looks at it.
The problem with cops is similar to the problem we have with corporations/rich folk. Where corpos get to privatize gains and socialize losses, the policing establishment wants to systemically apply good PR/sentiment to the concept of cops while individually applying bad PR/sentiment to individuals(bad apples.)
1,166 people have been shot and killed by police in the past 12 months
Yes it must be the Left’s fault for your feelings.
You have literally no idea how many of those were justified shootings versus not.
It could be 1,166 execution style slayings of an unarmed black person, or it could be 1,166 people charging at the cops with a machete where they tried everything in their power not to shoot the person.
You’ve seen bodycam footage of a cop shooting some woman in the face (and now has been charged for it). Great. I’ve seen bodycam footage of a woman pulling out a gun on a traffic stop and the cop reacting and shooting her, and then absolutely losing his shit with worry and relief because he was scared that he might have hit the people in the car behind her after having only a split second to react, after she left him with no choice but to shoot her when all he wanted to do was check what was up with her and why she was sitting unmoving in traffic.
The quantitative assessment matters. You can’t just say that of course 1,166 of those were unjustified shootings, and so all cops are bad, and leave it there, just because that matches up with your self-referential structure for making sense of the world.
So after more than a century of abuse and coverups that will never see the light of day, decades of (predominantly) black entertainers and comedians ringing the bell on this over and over, and nothing being done, Rodney King not being enough of a wake up call to effect any meaningful change, and despite the fact that the problem is still not fully solved and that to this day people claim Chauvin should not have been convicted, you are upset that a few headlines about cops being prosecuted hasn’t completely turned the bus around on attitudes towards police yet in the four years since 2020?
How about when there isn’t a new story like this once every couple weeks for a few years? Maybe we can check then to see if it’s time for an attitude adjustment on “the left.” Because consequences are great, but if cops are still behaving like this it means that even they figure they will probably still get away with it.
Edited to add:
And when they stop having such non-existent standards for kicking someone out (or hiring them in the first place) maybe we’ll see some actual change. This is about the “good apples” refusing to toss out the bad ones. (and we all know what that does to the “good” ones)
Wonder why he left those other agencies? And I’m not even focusing on the 2x DUI.
To solve the problems in this country, you need to be able to see what’s going on clearly.
Back before about 2015, there was clearly a systemic problem of police violence against minorities in this country, and it wasn’t taken seriously or identified as a problem by the media. There was a lot of white society that was waking up to it as a real thing that existed, but a lot that were not, and government and media were slow to even realize it existed. I think at the point, regardless of what the scope of the problem quantitatively was, most of what you were saying was accurate just because it was so important to get people to even recognize the problem.
Now, I think it’s swung the other way. I think the stereotype that every single cop is the enemy is creating a lot more problems than it solves.
I have zero indication that meaningful change has occurred aside from your assurance that it has and a handful of anecdotal headlines about cops being prosecuted.
Yeah, and that was why I was asking – do you have any idea quantitatively? I have to say, I do not; probably my impression is based on a sort of anecdotal impression same as yours is. It would be good to look at something like, how many use-of-force complaints have there been, how many was bodycam footage made available for and what did things look like when reviewing the footage? Things like that.
Just basing things on a general anecdotal impression isn’t a good thing to do on either side, I don’t think.
Fair, but I remain unconvinced there has been meaningful change even as I acknowledge your point. We KNOW what the starting point was. If I’m to be convinced it has changed, I think the burden is on those (not necessarily/specifically you) who are telling me it has.
This and this are probably the best overviews I could find about what has and hasn’t changed. It’s a little frustrating though – it’s hard to find something substantial about “okay yes but what has the result been.”
And, the things I could find about the result sometimes used very weird metrics (like lumping together all police shootings without making any effort to distinguish justified shootings from unjustified or attempting to determine what percentage were unjustified in order to point to whether that number is going down or not).
Those do look like good articles though, thanks!
I’m going to really frustrate you anyway because although I acknowledge that some shootings are justified, I also don’t trust how they are categorized since (to my knowledge) this categorization is determined by the content of the police reports themselves, and so would require me to believe that every false report was caught out and none slipped through.
Hm, that wasn’t what I was talking about wanting to see. To me, what would be good to see would be a breakdown of, starting from the total number of shootings or use-of-force incidents in any given year:
That’s a fuck of a lot of work, which is presumably why we don’t see it. But that to me would be a good way to analyze whether things are actually working.