The city of Olympia, Washington, will pay $600,000 to the family of a Black man shot and killed by police in a settlement that also stipulates that officers will be banned from personalizing any of their work equipment.
Lawyers on Monday announced the details of the settlement of a wrongful death tort claim filed by the family of Timothy Green, who was shot and killed in 2022.
The settlement stops the display of symbols on city police equipment such as the thin blue line on an American flag. The symbol has become associated with Blue Lives Matter, a term which has been used by some police supporters in response to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Officers had displayed Blue Lives Matter emblems and a sticker reminiscent of the yellow Gadsden flag, with its rattlesnake and “Don’t Tread on Me” message on items at the time Green was shot.
Good. Police are not the goddamned military. They have no excuse to be creating an “us vs them” mindset.
Symbols are rarely the MOST important thing in a specific incident, but from a broader perspective, they matter, and particularly for police, because they’re the living embodiment of government power and need to send exactly zero political messages (beyond whatever is unavoidable by their mere presence).
maybe we need to mandate a minimum 15 pieces of flair. let’s see who the whackos really are. looking at you, Brian.
Too many get the “us vs them” in their training and daily briefings. It’s a systemic problem.
Military can’t really customize their equipment anyway. No bumper stickers on an MRAP.
Relevant Apocalypse Now quote “They train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won’t allow them to write ‘fuck’ on their airplanes because it is obscene.”
they live in cop ghettos because they don’t want to live around the people they oppress.
and by cop ghetto i mean rich people neighborhoods that keep extra rooms/houses around their houses that they offer for cheap rent to police.
cops in the USA are broken