“Undoes it’s narrative” is a funny way of saying got caught lying. Almost as if unquestionably taking the police’s word was a bad thing all along.
TechDirt here is reporting and commenting on the existence of a news article by another source, namely Reason. The original article is here.
The underlying settlement and court order is here.
TechDirt is adding additional information that the Reason article didn’t have, including some facts in addition to the commentary.
Just FYI, but reason magazine is a center of right libertarian news source owned by the Reason Foundation.
In the past they have been highly critical of all things Urban, and were actively anti-mass transit, which I have found vexxing. Just keep that in mind when reading their media.
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/reason
Fun fact:
Reason Foundation cofounder Robert Poole is an MIT-trained engineer and the author of Cutting Back City Hall.[7] The book provided the intellectual support for Margaret Thatcher’s privatization efforts in the United Kingdom.
It’s true. On issues of police violence, right-libertarians and progressives tend to be pretty well aligned, though. Right-libertarian authors like Radley Balko have been beating that drum for many years.
Bodycams exonerate the innocent every time. They’re an absolute, indisputable record of what happened, and if you didn’t do anything wrong they’ll prove it to everyone. If you’re lying, bodycams will prove that too.
Keep that in mind when you see police fighting tooth and nail against body cams or, when they can’t entirely prevent the use of a camera they fight to make sure they’re the only ones with access to the footage. This is because they’re a street gang, they know it, they break the law on a regular basis and rely on one another to lie. That’s what the police do. They don’t prevent crime, or we’d see that more police would lead to less crime and vice versa. They don’t solve the vast majority of crimes. They give people an illusion of safety and order, and they apply violence indiscriminately to anything outside the normal order without regard to the law. They explicitly do not know the law, and thanks to qualified immunity they are simply not responsible for their actions. This is because the people who decide what the responsibilities of the police are know that they won’t be the ones pulled out of their cars and beaten to death in the middle of the street.
I’ve changed my opinion on police over the past few years. As someone who rides public transit a lot, I’m often scared. My city (Portland) wasn’t so dangerous in the past. I carry a gun now after some bad situations and I wish I didn’t feel the need to.
90% of my interactions with police around here have been positive and I’m disagreeing with you about adding cops not reducing crime.
1000% yes to body cams though.
An ABC OTV analysis of state and local police funding and violent crime data in the U.S. overall between 1985 and 2020 found no relationship between year-to-year police spending and crime rates. (An analysis by the Washington Post found similar results from 1960 to 2018.)
This isn’t a matter of agreement or disagreement, the numbers are there. The number of police, their training, and their equipment have nothing to do with crime rates whatsoever. Cutting police budgets doesn’t increase the crime rate. Getting more cops and giving them better toys doesn’t decrease the crime rate.
Interestingly enough, Portland was almost twice as violent 20 years ago as it is today. The violent crime rate has wiggled in the past few years, but mostly has leveled off after a steep plunge that began in 2004.
So does the 13M come from taxes or an tax-funded insurance policy? Did the premium just go up?
should be coming from the fucking pigs pension plans and union dues.
That’s just taxes with more steps once the government bails out the pension fund.
You’re right.
Lets do nothing instead.
Worked so fucking well so far.
Flipping some accounting details on lawsuits isn’t going to fix anything. Real accountability is needed, cops need to go to jail or be barred from ever being cops again with far more frequency.
Law enforcement exceptions need to go away as well, if people can’t touch a phone while driving cops shouldn’t have a laptop up.
All this requires getting legislators on board though.
When have governments ever bailed out pension funds? I’ve mostly seen states rolling them back or removing them completely in recent years.
Bet those fuckos didn’t lose their retirement though. Nah, some other programs are going to suffer…
Gives people back their own fucking tax payer money. Laughable.
