Police Misconduct Catch All Thread

[ZiprHead]

Good fucking grief.

Thanks, raunchy Charlie Brown.

 

[Gospel]

That is merely an opinion and is not supported by any existing laws. I challenge you or Derec to present a law that makes it illegal to answer the door with a firearm. While you are entitled to your opinion, whether you believe it was a good or bad decision is entirely irrelevant.

It's a very stupid thing to do in most cases. A defender is expected to not head into danger without good reason. I can see it as a reasonable precaution if you need to verify if something is as it appears. But an unknown? Talk through the door or ignore it.

That's wonderfully true, doesn't make him guilty of any crime & doesn't absolve the officer of his fuck up.

 

[Patooka]

As for my views, their is a national right to guns, and should be better national standards like universal background checks. Then there are state/local level regulations that see to the needs of the area. If you live in an area where your next door neighbor's house is over a mile away, then having a rifle can practically be a necessity. Live in a major city, then a lot more restrictions are likely appropriate.

In my opinion, inconsistent standards exacerbate bias and discrimination and have led to confusion for both law enforcement and citizens who travel between different areas. The law should be impartial and applied uniformly across the board. No citizen's right to bear arms should be easier or more difficult to exercise based on their location within the country.

In my opinion, we have an adequate number of laws, but the issue in America seems to lie in the execution. Decisions often depend on the preferences of local authorities and communities, leading to inconsistent application and enforcement. The very nature of relying on humans and our inherent biases to apply the law is fundamentally flawed & the only way it can be done at that.

If neither the victim nor the cop had a weapon in their possession like in Britain this never would have happened.

If the deputy had a fraction of the training the greenest rookie cop in Britain receives this would never had happened. The US has way too many cops and a sizeable amount of them should never had been placed in such a role in the first fucking place.

 

[laughing dog]

That is merely an opinion and is not supported by any existing laws. I challenge you or Derec to present a law that makes it illegal to answer the door with a firearm. While you are entitled to your opinion, whether you believe it was a good or bad decision is entirely irrelevant.

It's a very stupid thing to do in most cases. A defender is expected to not head into danger without good reason. I can see it as a reasonable precaution if you need to verify if something is as it appears. But an unknown? Talk through the door or ignore it.

That's wonderfully true, doesn't make him guilty of any crime & doesn't absolve the officer of his fuck up.

In the view of police apologists, doing something stupid when dealing with the police automatically gives them carte blanche.

 

[ZiprHead]

 

[Gospel]

Something tells me that cop is frustrated by something that gentleman did. Has all the signs of a meltdown.

Edit: Doesn't mean the officer should resort to the insane repeating of stop resisting while punching a handcuffed man. I mean he's hand cuffed. Get backup Hog tie him and and put him in the car.

 

[Gospel]

This is another from not too long ago that really pisses me off.

 

[ZiprHead]

What the hell was it he had in his right hand?

 

[lpetrich]

U.S. police trainers with far-right ties are teaching hundreds of cops - May 6, 2022, 10 a.m. GMT - "One police instructor who has taught 560 officers in recent years has joined one extremist group and supported other far-right movements. Others have echoed QAnon and other fringe conspiracy theories on social media, a Reuters examination found."

In social media, Richard Whitehead is a warrior for the American right. He has praised extremist groups. He has called for public executions of government officials he sees as disloyal to former President Donald Trump. In a post in 2020, he urged law enforcement officers to disobey COVID-19 public-health orders from “tyrannical governors,” adding: “We are on the brink of civil war.”

Whitehead also has a day job. He trains police officers around the United States.

Not exactly law-and-order stances.

His training has caused some controversy.

A Washington state training commission in 2015 temporarily banned Whitehead from advertising courses on its website because of instructional materials that referred to a turban-wearing police officer as a “towel head” and contained cartoons of women in bikinis, according to emails from the commission to Whitehead that were reviewed by Reuters. Other marketing literature touted Whitehead’s “deception detection” technique that, among other things, teaches officers not to trust sexual-assault claimants if they use the word “we” in referring to themselves and their assailant.

The commission was responding to a student complaint citing “offensive slurs” and “blatant misogyny.”

Teaching cops to be soft on that kind of crime.

He complained that it was one student's negative opinion, and he later added such “pot-stirring” material as “Suspect is a gender-fluid assigned-male-at-birth wearing non-gender-specific clothing born Caucasian but identifies as a mountain panda.”

 

[lpetrich]

The five trainers have aired views including the belief in a vote-rigging conspiracy to unseat Trump in the 2020 election. One trainer attended Trump’s January 6, 2021, rally at the U.S. Capitol that devolved into a riot, injuring more than 100 police officers. Two of the trainers have falsely asserted that prominent Democrats including President Joe Biden are pedophiles, a core tenet of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Four have endorsed or posted records of their past interactions with far-right extremist figures, including prominent “constitutional sheriff” leader David Clarke Jr. and Proud Boys leader Joe Biggs, who is being prosecuted for his involvement in the Capitol riots.

Someone who trains cops not being bothered by attackers of cops?

"Whitehead adheres to the constitutional sheriff philosophy, which holds that county sheriffs should ignore any law they find unconstitutional." Thus making them the supreme law-enforcement in their counties, even more than the President. Seems like the Posse Comitatus movement, which supposedly claims that all government above the county level is illegitimate -- the national one and the state ones are all illegitimate.

"Whitehead was listed in a database of members of the Oath Keepers, a far-right anti-government group ..."

 

[lpetrich]

U.S. law enforcement officers receive far less initial training at police academies than their counterparts in comparable countries, said Arjun Sethi, a Georgetown University adjunct law professor and policing specialist. That opens “immense commercial opportunities” for private trainers to fill the void with ongoing training of active-duty officers, often “in a politicized manner” that normalizes biased policing against Black people and other communities, he said.

Then on how some trainers support some QAnon conspiracies.

Kansas-based trainer Darrel Schenck teaches firearms classes through his own company as well as through the law enforcement division of the National Rifle Association (NRA), the leading U.S. gun-rights lobby. Schenck has voiced the belief that Democrats are pedophiles, called reports of violence during the U.S. Capitol riots “fake news,” and declared the 2020 election illegitimate, commenting: “election fraud is the real pandemic.”

...
Police instructor Adam Davis characterized Biden as a “puppet and a pedophile” on Facebook. In other posts, he slammed people who protest racial bias in policing as “pawns” in the “scheme to destroy this nation.”

A war on cops?

Over the long term, police deaths per 100,000 officers, from both felonies and accidents, plunged from 81 to 20 between 1970 and 2016, a decline of 75%, according to a 2019 analysis of historical Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data in the journal Criminology & Public Policy. Deaths from crimes fell even faster than accidental deaths over the period.

 

[lpetrich]

In light of such data showing declining dangers to officers, many training agencies long ago abandoned training that emphasized putting officers through simulations of threatening situations, said Gil Kerlikowske, who led the police departments of Seattle and Buffalo, New York, before serving as commissioner of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol from 2014 until 2017.

“That’s the worst kind of training to give officers today, to make them feel more vulnerable,” Kerlikowske said. “You want people to have an awareness” of violent threats, “but you don’t want them to be so hypersensitive that it impacts everything they do.”

One trainer says that he uses political content in his social-media feeds to attract customers.

In social posts reviewed by Reuters, Morris and other Tripwire trainers have cast the 2020 election as a socialist plot to seize the U.S. government, echoing Trump’s false stolen-election claims. “You have just witnessed a coup, the overthrow of the US free election system, the end of our constitutional republic, and the merge of capitalism into the slide toward socialism,” read a Facebook post that Morris shared about a month after the 2020 election.

... Morris told Reuters that he and several other Tripwire trainers were “employed” at the Jan. 6, 2021, rally at the U.S. Capitol that devolved into a riot.

 

[lpetrich]

‘I Don’t Want to Be George Floyd’ - The American Prospect - December 7, 2023 - "Another African American dies in Mobile, as police shootings multiply in Alabama."

Two days before Independence Day, two Mobile, Alabama, police officers went to a mobile home park after receiving a report of a suspected burglary. Al.com reported that officers confronted Jawan Dallas, who was sitting in a vehicle. After exiting his car, Dallas replied that he had done nothing wrong and tried to run away. Police caught and wrestled with him, and then tased him. When Dallas arrived at the hospital, doctors pronounced him dead.

On the day before Thanksgiving, after months of requests, including pleas at city council meetings, Mobile Police Department officials finally allowed Dallas’s family members to view the officers’ body camera videos. Harry Daniels, Dallas’s family lawyer, claimed that Dallas struggled during the scuffle and said, “I can’t breathe, I don’t want to be George Floyd.” Of all the grim and gut-churning videos of Black people being killed by police, the civil rights attorney said that the 36-year-old man’s beating was one of the worst he’d ever seen.

A grand jury investigated the case and declined to charge the two police officers. Their names have not been released and they have returned to their jobs. Of the four Black people—one young man and three adult men—who have been shot or tased by Mobile police this year, three of them, including Dallas, have died.

noting
Evidence on Measures to Reduce Excessive Use of Force by the Police - final-Policing-pb.pdf

"Black and Women Officers are Less Likely to Use Force" also, to a lesser degree, Hispanic ones.

"Gun Control Policies Matter" - stricter gun control means less use of force by cops. Most other highly industrialized nations have much stricter gun control - and much less police killing.

"Evidence on Body Worn Cameras Suggest Positive Impact" - especially bodycams that can't be turned off by cops.

 

[lpetrich]

Back to The American Prospect. Although cops kill more white people than black people, they kill black people in a higher proportion to their population. "The stakes are high for African Americans, particularly in encounters with white officers, as the paper makes clear. They are more likely to be stopped, experience harsher tactics, and die in those interactions."

Noting Mapping Police Violence

... we show that Blacks are approximately three times more likely to be killed in comparison to their White counterparts ...

... similarly, other research using Fatal Encounters data finds that Blacks are two times more likely to be killed by police “...even when there are no other obvious circumstances during the encounter that would make the use of deadly force reasonable”

Back to TAP.

The United States has the largest number of civilians killed by police of any of the world’s democracies: More than 1,000 people die that way every year. Mapping Police Violence data compiled to date in 2023 tracks with that statistic: 1,082 people have been killed by police this year, and more than 4,200 people have been killed in confrontations with police since George Floyd died. In Canada, which has the second-highest number of people killed by police, the actual tally is in the low double digits.

Scaling up from Canada's population gives around 250 - still much less than in the US.

The University of Michigan researchers found that police departments that prohibit the use of both chokeholds and strangleholds have 22 percent fewer police killings per capita than departments that lack these policies. It is “unclear,” the researchers concluded, whether the policies themselves produced these results; they surmised that police departments using these policies may be less inclined generally to use force. Similarly, departments that eschew no-knock warrants have lower rates of killings.

Also,

The simplest truth about this dismal chapter in American history is one that opponents of stronger gun control policies and police reform willfully ignore. Given the proliferation of guns, that some American police officers behave the way they do partly due to training—the assumption that everyone carries a gun—and partly due to fear, any encounter could turn deadly on a dime. Instead of confronting the easy access to firearms, Republicans in Congress and statehouses appear determined to loosen gun laws further, particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, which knocked down licensing mandates for open carrying of firearms.

Fewer guns means that cops will feel much less threatened, something that should be welcome.

So I'm surprised that police departments aren't strongly lobbying for gun control.

 

[ZiprHead]

Fontana pays nearly $900,000 for ‘psychological torture’ inflicted by police to get false confession

Detectives grilled Thomas Perez Jr. for 17 hours, deprived him of medications and threatened to have his dog killed if he didn’t confess to killing his father, who was actually alive.

www.sbsun.com

Steering filed a civil rights lawsuit in federal court against the city of Fontana, alleging that police psychologically tortured Perez and coerced a false confession without first determining that the father had actually been slain. The suit was recently settled for nearly $900,000.

Perez agreed to the settlement rather than take the case to trial out of concern that a jury award could be overturned on appeal on grounds of qualified immunity for police. Generally, qualified immunity protects law enforcement officers unless they violate clearly established law arising from a case with nearly identical facts, according to the Legal Defense Fund.

Fontana police did not return an email seeking comment. Three of the involved officers remain employed with the department. One other officer has retired.

 

[Patooka]

I don't think this is going away (and it shouldn't);