Posted on 05/13/2015 7:34:35 PM PDT by babygene
Note that even with the last post, I do have concern for the over-militarization of police forces, having their own SWAT teams, assault weapons, assault vehicles, and so on.
I think THAT level is crazy. So even with what I said, I do have concerns.
Exactly! I remember when the Brown shooting took place, and the idiots were here talking about police killing the innocents again.
Then the facts came out and it was a clear cut case of the officer having already been assaulted and trying to defend himself.
I’m sick of this place looking more like D. U. all the time when it comes to the police.
When cops deserve to be prosecuted I’m all for it, as long as the circumstances truly warrant it.
I am not convinced that the Baltimore situation is such an instance. Some folks are sure certain of it.
The information will come out in time. It’s my take that this is not a clear cut case of abuse under color of authority.
That’s the truth of it right there.
You wouldn’t want their job. And you know what, all the loud mouth anti-cop folks don’t want the job either. Even though they claim to know exactly what it takes to make a good cop, they won’t stick their necks out to do the job.
What they will do is make blanket statements based on false assumptions and slander all cops at will.
As I have said a number of times, this is the old hippy civil unrest attitude from the 70s. “Cops are pigs.” It makes you wonder if these people here were hippies in the 70s. Today it’s D. U. and other Leftist sites that hate the cops.
It isn’t a Conservative mindset. Conservatives are law and order people, support conformance to reasoned law and order tenets, and are respectful of law enforcement.
Visualizing How Many Cops Are Trashed by Free Republic Posters And How Many Freepers Are Sickened By These Black Panther Wannabees Pretending To Be Conservatives
+1!
I don’t think there should be a swat team on every corner so to speak. There are times when they are warranted, and many times they are not.
In some cities the police have one at each station and school campuses and other interests may have their own.
I would like to see some regulation of Swat teams, so that there would be resources available, but not enough resources so that they are over used.
Set up reasoned guidelines, and stick to them.
Stop the no-knock raid nonsense. Serve a warrant and exercise due process.
End all confiscation of assets, until after a conviction is made. DO NOT give the funds to local law enforcement.
There should not be an incentive for officers to confiscate for their own gain.
Perhaps the assets that are confiscated for reasonable cause, should go to a victims fund or some such.
Police widows could benefit from that sort of thing. I think that is reasoned.
Police departments and federal agencies have over-stepped their bounds with asset forfeiture. It needs to stop.
Agree. Recently had the next door neighbor screaming obscene abuse at the cops for 45 minutes because they wouldn’t arrest a neighbor kid simply on his say-so.
I know what you mean about cops and the people they routinely interact with. Used to work with a guy named Kevin who had much “interaction” with cops earlier in his life. Our job had us out and about the community all the time, so we frequently encountered LEOs.
Every single one of them was familiar and friendly with Kevin. Not one of them knew who I was. Which was fine with me.
+1
I'd be interested in your take on this post in a previous thread.
The problem lies not in a particular group, but in the human heart.
See my Post #15.
When all cops (and their fraternity) defend the bad apples, they all share the guilt.
I cannot disagree with much you said in that post, and I think those points can be made without sounding like an extremist (but often aren’t) which you did in that post.
I think the issue of ubiquitous video is indeed a double-edged sword, and the issue is, oddly enough, both worse than you described and not as bad as you described.
Worse in that it provides the State the access to track your movements nearly seamlessly. I know that sounds like hogwash to some, and completely a done-deal to others, and I think that I can belong to the latter because if it is easy to visualize the method and IT methods used to accomplish it...then it is reality. With the proliferation of cameras that can snap a photo of your car and store your license plate on a server for the collection of revenue (which I find ABSOLUTELY appalling and abhorrent) one can envision how well the technology works, and it works well. License plate numbers are small information data points. Easy to capture a shot for recognition. Easy to transmit and store. They already do it. All you need is large server banks to store the tiny little pieces of data which are EASILY retrievable because they are simple alphanumerics. Add to that the sheer volume, and how hard would it be to track someone who isn’t actively covering their tracks? Not hard. Couple that with transponders to pay tolls, and it can be done. Power like this used for good is pretty cool. Power like this used for the wrong purposes, which is nearly beyond the ability of many government entities to resist BECAUSE IT IS THERE, is evil. It is things like this that the framers of the Constitution wanted to defend us from: the inability of humans to “do the right thing” when governing others. (You can see this particular aspect bugs me, primarily because I got a speeding ticket in Maryland from a camera that had been set up on a highway, and after sitting through THREE HOURS of stopped traffic as I was passing through, they had the camera set up SPECIFICALLY to capture people as they accelerated after spending all that time in traffic. It was revenue generation, pure and simple, which DID infuriate me.)
Bottom line: If you have ever read “Fahrenheit 451”, and how they would track enemies of the state as they fled, transmitting it to EVERYONE, who would look out the window and put their eyes on the fleeing person, so there was no possibility of escape...we aren’t far from that, and that is worth lots of concern.
Back on subject, it is incongruously better than described as well, and I chalk that up to the “Russian Dash-Cam Effect”. I recently became aware of the proliferation of dash-cam video from Russia (after the meteorite footage, I wondered how so many people got something like that on camera, and found out because a lot of people in Russia have dash-cams to protect themselves from both a corrupt government that will side with whoever pays them the most money in a traffic incident, and also to protect themselves from other drivers.) When you begin watching the footage which is all over the Internet you can only come to a single conclusion: Nearly all Russian drivers are either crazy, on drugs, drunk, incompetent, have never had formal driving training, or are just plain stupid. You can watch hours of these videos, and they are wildly entertaining and hair-raisingly scary at the same time. I had a party where we spent most of it watching this footage on a wide screen television.
It did occur to me that perhaps I was overrating it, that all that insane footage is simply due to the fact that people ARE recording it, and it is just as crazy in America on the roads as it is in Russia. So, I work with a young, female physician, and I asked her one day: “Dr. X, I have an odd question to ask you, and I hope you won’t take it the wrong way, but I have been watching video of Russian drivers that leads me to the conclusion that nearly all Russian drivers are either crazy, on drugs, drunk, incompetent, have never had formal driving training, or are just plain stupid. Is it really that bad?”
Without even a single flicker of any emotion, amusement, anger, astonishment, humor, or hesitation, she simply said: “Yes.” No elaboration, a simple statement of fact.
The point is, the ubiquity of camera video is not the reason there is so much craziness on the roads in Russia...it IS that they are crazy.
But I do believe that one might not reach the same conclusion with law enforcement, that it IS that bad. I believe much of what we see is targeted video. People rarely take video of cops doing good things, but it is a given that they will take video of bad things. I was on a plane recently and someone was having an argument with a flight attendant, and the creepy thing was, from where I was sitting, I saw the incident not just once with my own eyes, but also could see it being played out on dozens of cell phones being lifted up above the seats to record it as well. It was COMPLETELY creepy. THAT is stuff you see on the Internet.
So, I do believe that the bad stuff is concentrated, which makes all of the police misbehavior seem FAR worse than it might actually be.
And on the subject of police closing the ranks: I understand why they do that, and it is getting worse, but it is human nature to people doing a crappy job who feel that the people criticizing them don’t have any clue what it is like to walk in their shoes. (That is their side, and I understand that mentality because I have seen it in other professions such as medicine, the military, etc.) Doesn’t make it right, but it is human nature.
That’s nice - hard to come to a truly fair assessment when the job will put the cops in front of the worst society has to offer by design. It’s pure numbers w/o any statistical data to explain how any of the killings happened on either side.
How about when controlling for the difference in number between cops and non-cops in Detroit?
Though really, this is something of a silly argument, with cops paid to go into the most dangerous, criminal-infested situations around.
(And cops are too rough with people across the country—thus making themselves an easy political target for Obama’s attempt to effectively nationalize them.)
Nobody is saying the non-cops were right for killing anyone. What people are complaining about are the instances where cops kill people without appearing to have a valid reason and people seem to think that's OK.
The FR Friends of Mumia are unworthy of respect.
Speak kindly of a cop and they attack like a pack of rabid dogs but only if they feel like they’re in the majority. In a sense, they’re no different than the animals who came boiling out of a gas station parking lot to beat Steve Utash nearly to death.
Just more of Obama’s useful idiots.
Thanks TigersEye. I’m tires of these retread hippies on the forum.
It’s getting very tiresome.
Why this perception then? I think it's the 24-hour news cycle. Both the evening news (who actually watches that these days?), and the rest of the news-gathering apparatus has a voracious hunger for stuff to fill time, pages, and websites. So, what would have just been a local story 50 years ago is a national one today. You take all those local-now-national stories and add them together and it leads to a misperception that these things are happening much more often than they used to.
The societal implications of this are almost uniformly bad IMO. Because people think there is an epidemic of crime paedophilia, or whatever, they are willing to let the powers that be use much more coercive methods to 'deal' with it than they migt otherwise.
The same thing goes to a great degree with the whole 'police violence' meme, in that things that would have been a local story are now national, thus confounding people's perceptions of reality. On the other hand, this drumbeat affects police in the same way. They are led to believe that their job is much more dangerous than it actually is, (if they want actual danger, they could try being a lumberjack or commercial fisherman) and react to that situation in a way that seems appropriate to them. Unfortunately this reaction sets up a feedback loop when dealing with citizens that is definitely not positive. Now, you add in 'policing for profit', and the general up-arming of police forces (even little podunk ones) nationwide, and you have a recipe for increasingly negative confrontations with citizens, which will in turn reinforce any negative attitudes they may have.
I'd be really interested in seeing stats on police killing dogs over the past 40-50 years to see if it really is something that is increasing (seemingly) exponentially, or if it's that local-to-national thing. I've never seen numbers on this, so I just really don't know, but it concerns me because it points to an unnecessary escalation of force that will ultimately end badly for us all.
One interesting thing I've noticed is that government in general is completely besotted with the idea of gathering statistical data about just about everything. Everything, that is, except those things that could somehow embarass them. With all the data government demands of us, I find it hard to believe that noone in the government is interested in collecting and classifying incidents where an officer fires a gun. I know that in most departments there is a fair amount of paperwork to file when a shot is fired. Why do they seem not to then care to make use of that information?
This leads me to your comments about the monitoring our movements. I'm a nerd, in a professional sense. If people really had any idea how easy it is to put this data together, they'd be up in arms. I remember when the cameras first started going up on intersections. They really freaked me out, because I was telling people about them, and people would just look at me blankly. They were driving by these things every day, yet did not even notice them. Of course, nowadays, people don't notice them because they are freaking everywhere. We don't know how much automation has been tied into all this, I think mainly because if we really understood how much they are actually monitoring us, we'd probably not be pleased about it. We should look to the Gatzos in Britain and Austrailia for inspiration on how to deal with these things.
I'm constantly amazed at discussions on this site about the Snowden documents. There is an amazing (to me) amount of antipathy towards him, probably based largely on his stated motivations. Personally, I don't really give a damn what his motivations were. His actions shed som much needed light on the extent of the secretive survellance state that has been built over the past many years, largely in the shadows. What was once dismissed as 'conspiracy theory' has now been confirmed by their own documents. Some monitoring is necessary in this day and age, but the wholesale vacuuming of data on American citizens is far beyond the pale IMO.
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