Breakdown In Civil Order

[bilby]

if you put a bunch of people together without rules you'll have even more problems.

Who said anything about "without rules"?

It's not necessary to set a curfew in order to have rules. It's not necessary to treat people like infants in order to have rules.

The law applies to all adults. Nobody's suggesting an anarchist colony.

And if stuff gets broken, fix it.

If individuals are vandalising stuff, arrest them, and charge them with criminal damage.

Don't collectively punish all those whose circumstances appear superficially similar, as though they were a bunch of indistinguishable and interchangeable parts.

The current rules aren't adequate to ensure safety in the shelters, yet the argument is for looser rules.

Rules don't exist on a simple linear spectrum from loose to tight, or lax to draconian.

The argument is for a minimal set of reasonable rules that influence people to minimise violence and damage to the infrastructure, while maximising the liberty of residents to live as they choose.

And note that one of the rules being objected to is shower everyday.

Fucking right that should be objected to. What difference does it make to anyone whether or not someone else showers every day, or at all?

This doesn't sound like a rule intended to prevent violent or destructive behaviour, it sounds like a rule intended to make it more practical to provide sub-standard facilities, where people are required to live communally and in close proximity to strangers.

Only if you cannot avoid sharing a small space with strangers do other people's shower habits become an issue.

You still can't see your way clear to understanding that each individual homeless person is a unique and complex individual, who needs to be treated with dignity and respect - regardless of how often they take a shower.

Nobody's told me how often to shower since I became an adult, and nor should they unless they want a punch on the nose. Homeless people aren't infants, convicts, or soldiers. They don't want, or need, some tit who thinks himself their superior to tell them what to do.

There's a massive difference between saying "Here's a nice shower facility; We recommend that you take advantage of it every single day!", and saying "If you don't shower daily, there will be severe consequences".

Fuck your rules. Fuck your authoritarianism. Fuck your infantilisation of adults who have just as much right to make their own choices as you have.

 

[TSwizzle]

I suspect that the people protesting are people who neither live nor work anywhere near that encampment.

A brief look at their website indicates they are probably professional agitators.

I’m actually wondering if this clean up in Little Tokyo was more to do with the LA Marathon taking place this weekend.

 

[lpetrich]

How the Drug War Dies | The Nation - "Just a few decades ago, the left and the right, politicians and the public, universally embraced the criminalization of drug use. But a new consensus has emerged."

But we aren't out of the woods yet. I think that we have a long way to go before we can declare the end of drug warring.

Referring to the 1980's and 1990's,

Back then, Democrats and Republicans tried to outbid each other in terms of who could create the longest, harshest sentences for drug offenses and the most onerous corollary consequences, like banning formerly incarcerated people from public housing, student loans, food stamps, and other welfare programs. But today candidates vie to appear more compassionate—even Donald Trump signed a criminal justice reform bill.

In 1989, then-Senator Joe Biden criticized President George H.W. Bush’s call for more police and prisons to fight drugs as not “tough enough.” The year before, polling had shown that 90 percent of the population favored the drug war.

Now, however, 18 states have fully legalized marijuana. Oregon decriminalized the possession of all drugs in 2020, with more states looking to follow suit. And a bill for full federal decriminalization has been introduced in the House.

This era of drug warring started as a way of attacking the 1960's counterculture and activist movements. Richard Nixon was a big drug warrior, and it looks like we still have this Nixon legacy to kick around some more.

In the 1980s, Democrats had signed on to the War on Drugs for strategic reasons: Their goal was to start winning elections and stop being dismissed as immature hippies who were soft on crime.

Even most Black politicians—who might have been expected to protest a policy that would inevitably criminalize people of color—bought in.

Joe Biden was a big drug warrior back then, and Republicans were also big on drug warring.

 

[lpetrich]

How the Drug War Dies | The Nation
continues with how one cop, Ed Jackson, made a discovery.

He knew firsthand that the people getting arrested for drugs weren’t drug barons or kingpins; they were mostly hapless young men who’d grown up where he did. “I’m thinking, ‘Boy, many of these people are victims for a lot of reasons—and this is not what I thought it was,’” he says.

Others were making similar discoveries about the drug war.

For Jackson and many other Black leaders, a major turning point came in 2010, when the New Press published civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The paradigm shift that this book spurred in the Black community would drive reform elsewhere as well.

Scholars and activists had previously noted the extreme racial disparities in the enforcement of drug laws. None, however, had made their analysis as accessible as Alexander’s, which connected the mass criminalization of Black people under the guise of the drug war to Jim Crow laws that had used the criminal legal system more overtly to suppress Blacks.

...
Alexander backed her argument with facts and data. She gave context to ideas that had been put forward by rappers and radicals but had not found mainstream acceptance—especially within the Black church, where drug use tended to be viewed as an individual sin and those who engaged in it were often rejected as a threat to “respectable” Black people.

... Police officials he knew confirmed what she had written about how whites sell and use drugs at least as much as Black people do—but rarely go to prison.

Which suggests a strong racial bias. I find it curious that police departments don't even try to be even-handed.

 

[lpetrich]

Cenk Uygur on The Young Turks mentioned that some police departments have arrest quotas, and that some police departments pick on black people rather than white people because they get less pushback that way.

Arrest quotas? Like this: Bill banning police ticket or arrest quotas embraced by unions, civil liberty groups - The Nevada Independent

Even though quotas for tickets or arrests aren’t written down in official policy, representatives of police unions told lawmakers that many agencies still operate under a cultural assumption that the more tickets issued or more arrests made, the better.

“The belief is that an officer producing high numbers in these stats is a productive police officer and vice versa, one that is not producing in these areas is not productive,” Las Vegas Metro Police Managers and Supervisors Association vice chair Troyce Krumme said. “If policing were a Fortune 500 company, this belief would be accurate, but policing is not a Fortune 500 company dependent on profits to exist.”

Four NYPD cops say quotas targeted Black, Latino New Yorkers - New York Daily News

Four NYPD officers say in new sworn declarations that an off-the-books arrest quota system targeted Black and Latino New Yorkers — with one cop recalling a white supervisor asking, “Are you going to take someone’s freedom today?”

The new documents, soon to be filed in Manhattan Federal Court the Daily News has learned, add further detail to a long-running suit launched by four other minority cops claiming they faced retaliation for not arresting enough people of color. White officers allegedly did not face the arrest expectations.

Matthews v. City of New York (Challenging punitive quota system in 42nd NYPD Precinct) | New York Civil Liberties Union | ACLU of New York

This lawsuit challenges the repeated retaliation against a veteran police officer who has disclosed the use of an illegal quota system for arrests, summonses and stop-and-frisk encounters in the 42nd Precinct in the Bronx. The lawsuit, filed on Feb. 23, 2012 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, maintains that supervisors in the 42nd precinct have developed a detailed quota system, which includes regular color-coded computer reports used to track compliance with quotas. Officers who fail to meet the quotas are highlighted in red ink on the reports and subject to a wide range of retaliation. Recognizing that the quota system is illegal and abusive, Officer Craig Matthews repeatedly reported it to the precinct's commanding officers. In retaliation, he has been given punitive assignments, denied overtime and leave, separated from his longtime partner, given poor evaluations, and subjected to constant harassment and threats.

Wikipedia has  Ticket quota - mentioning quotas for traffic tickets and the like.

 

[lpetrich]

Back to How the Drug War Dies | The Nation

What happened with opioids is revealing.

Simultaneously, extreme racial disparities in the way addiction was treated by the criminal justice and medical systems became even more obvious, as journalists reported on the massive increase in prescription opioid addiction and overdose deaths over the past two decades.

In the media, opioids were portrayed as a white middle-class problem: Innocent users had gotten hooked thanks to the misdeeds of rapacious physicians and corrupt pharmaceutical companies. This wasn’t exactly accurate: Prescription drug addiction hit the working class and poor hardest, and 80 percent of new users started by taking the medications illegally, obtaining them from friends and family, not doctors. But the perception garnered sympathy.

So if honkies are getting addicted, they should not be punished. Especially if they are upper-middle-class honkies.

As the concern about prescription opioids began to rise, though, the resistance to harm reduction began to fall. When white middle-class parents thought it was their kids who might die or be incarcerated for decades, harm reduction no longer felt like “sending the wrong message”—it seemed like the right thing to do. “All of a sudden, with the opioid crisis, we now see it as a public health crisis because there’s a white face attached to it,” Haynes says. “We did not do that with the crack cocaine epidemic.”

This noticeable shift toward compassion made Alexander’s point almost as strongly as her book had. “I think the concept of harm reduction was important,” says Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, “and I think it became more effective when we got the idea that harms are not just associated with drugs but with drug prohibition. What The New Jim Crow laid out really incredibly was the harm.”

People want softness on crime when the criminals might be them or their favorite people.

 

[lpetrich]

Meanwhile, change was also brewing on the right. Most conservatives who began rejecting the drug war were not influenced by The New Jim Crow. Instead, many revised their position via a process that political scientists call “identity vouching.” Essentially, the idea is that the persuasive capacity of an argument depends in part on the speaker’s identity: If the speaker is “one of us,” the argument will carry much more weight than it would if the speaker is “one of them.”

Mentioning the likes of Watergate conspirator and born-again Xian Chuck Colson, someone who would be hard to dismiss as a left-winger.

While libertarians had long been concerned about the costs of the drug war, that argument alone rarely convinced culture warriors. Colson, portraying reform as an issue of justice for the Christian right, helped convert staunch right-wingers like Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist.

Identity vouching also helps explain the success of The New Jim Crow among Black leadership and faith groups, which had previously avoided taking on the drug war. Arguments made by white policy reformers or radical Black activists often failed to move Black churchgoers.

The Internet makes it *very* easy to do research. "Because the early users of the Internet—mainly academics, libertarians, Deadheads, and computer geeks—were hardly in favor of drug crackdowns, drug policy reformers have long had an outsize voice online."

The task now is to avoid a backlash led by people who benefit financially or politically from the current system and use specious arguments to scare the public about change. We also need to do more than just stop arrests and incarcerations; we must replace those harmful tactics with approaches that actually do fight addiction, mental illness, and homelessness.

We’re starting to see change in Oregon, which is currently distributing $270 million to expand addiction recovery, housing, and harm reduction resources as it decriminalizes drug possession. New York has become the first city to allow overdose prevention and supervised consumption sites, where people can take drugs with medical support, and others are working to open similar spaces. Although millions of injections have taken place at these sites in dozens of cities around the world, there has not been a single fatality. According to the organization OnPoint NYC, which operates the safe injection sites, New York has already seen the reversal of more than 100 overdoses.

 

[Hermit]

The so called War on Drugs was aimed at blacks and lefties from the word go: President Nixon didn't say 'black' when he declared his 'war on drugs' in 1971, but everybody with two synapses between their ears knew what he meant. In 1994 Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, John Ehrlichman explained it to those who did not:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

and

"Look, we understood we couldn't make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue...that we couldn't resist it."

- John Ehrlichman, White House counsel to President Nixon on the rationale of the War on Drugs.

"[Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks" Haldeman, his Chief of Staff wrote, "The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."

http://www.thomhartmann.com/forum/2012/09/nixons-drug-war-re-inventing-jim-crow-targeting-counter-culture#sthash.YCOFmFZO.dpuf

 

[bilby]

Cenk Uygur on The Young Turks mentioned that some police departments have arrest quotas, and that some police departments pick on black people rather than white people because they get less pushback that way.

Arrest quotas? Like this: Bill banning police ticket or arrest quotas embraced by unions, civil liberty groups - The Nevada Independent

Even though quotas for tickets or arrests aren’t written down in official policy, representatives of police unions told lawmakers that many agencies still operate under a cultural assumption that the more tickets issued or more arrests made, the better.

“The belief is that an officer producing high numbers in these stats is a productive police officer and vice versa, one that is not producing in these areas is not productive,” Las Vegas Metro Police Managers and Supervisors Association vice chair Troyce Krumme said. “If policing were a Fortune 500 company, this belief would be accurate, but policing is not a Fortune 500 company dependent on profits to exist.”

Four NYPD cops say quotas targeted Black, Latino New Yorkers - New York Daily News

Four NYPD officers say in new sworn declarations that an off-the-books arrest quota system targeted Black and Latino New Yorkers — with one cop recalling a white supervisor asking, “Are you going to take someone’s freedom today?”

The new documents, soon to be filed in Manhattan Federal Court the Daily News has learned, add further detail to a long-running suit launched by four other minority cops claiming they faced retaliation for not arresting enough people of color. White officers allegedly did not face the arrest expectations.

Matthews v. City of New York (Challenging punitive quota system in 42nd NYPD Precinct) | New York Civil Liberties Union | ACLU of New York

This lawsuit challenges the repeated retaliation against a veteran police officer who has disclosed the use of an illegal quota system for arrests, summonses and stop-and-frisk encounters in the 42nd Precinct in the Bronx. The lawsuit, filed on Feb. 23, 2012 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, maintains that supervisors in the 42nd precinct have developed a detailed quota system, which includes regular color-coded computer reports used to track compliance with quotas. Officers who fail to meet the quotas are highlighted in red ink on the reports and subject to a wide range of retaliation. Recognizing that the quota system is illegal and abusive, Officer Craig Matthews repeatedly reported it to the precinct's commanding officers. In retaliation, he has been given punitive assignments, denied overtime and leave, separated from his longtime partner, given poor evaluations, and subjected to constant harassment and threats.

Wikipedia has  Ticket quota - mentioning quotas for traffic tickets and the like.

"... the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them" - Robert Peel, 1829.

Two hundred years later, police forces still don't grasp this founding principle of their existence.

 

[steve_bank]

This kind of event is increasing, teen gun violnce and crime. It crosses racial demographics.

4 minors, ages 11-16, arrested for drive-by shooting on I-5 in Pierce County

Four minors between the ages of 11 and 16 were arrested in connection to a drive-by shooting on Interstate 5 in Pierce County last weekend.

www.q13fox.com

SEATTLE - Four minors between the ages of 11 and 16 were arrested in connection to a drive-by shooting on Interstate 5 in Pierce County last weekend.

On Sunday, March 20, a driver was cut off by another vehicle on the northbound I-5 interchange ramp to S 38th Street. When that driver honked, the suspect vehicle slowed down and the right front passenger fired five shots at the car. Two shots actually hit the vehicle before the suspects sped off.

Washington State Troopers located the suspect vehicle and the suspects near Eatonville High School on March 24. When deputies with the Pierce County Sheriff's Department tried to reach out to them, they drove off, leading police on a chase that ended in Roy.

Deputies and Roy Police were able to take all four suspects into custody.

The suspects, ages 11, 12, 14 and 16, were booked into Remann Hall Juvenile Detention Center on first-degree assault and drive-by shooting charges.

WSP also learned that the group may have been involved in an ammunition theft shortly before the shooting.

Recently teens robbed a pot store at gunpoint. They were released to home comfinemt with ankle monitors. They cut them off, robbed anoter store, and killed somebody.

This is becomming routine.

 

[Emily Lake]

The left coast needs to filter the brain worms out of the water supply. Just saying.

It's a shame, because it's such a beautiful geography. But I'm really very happy that I moved away from the Puget Sound area almost four years ago.

 

[bilby]

This kind of event is increasing

[citation needed]

 

[Loren Pechtel]

... Police officials he knew confirmed what she had written about how whites sell and use drugs at least as much as Black people do—but rarely go to prison.

Which suggests a strong racial bias. I find it curious that police departments don't even try to be even-handed.

It's an economic bias.

It's far easier to catch street dealing. It's also easier to catch them when there are other crimes involved. The people who don't need to resort to crime to afford drugs are much harder to catch.

 

[Toni]

... Police officials he knew confirmed what she had written about how whites sell and use drugs at least as much as Black people do—but rarely go to prison.

Which suggests a strong racial bias. I find it curious that police departments don't even try to be even-handed.

It's an economic bias.

It's far easier to catch street dealing. It's also easier to catch them when there are other crimes involved. The people who don't need to resort to crime to afford drugs are much harder to catch.

Especially if you don’t look for them—or look the other way because they have nice addresses and are likely to have decent layers who aren’t crippled by enormous case loads so the police must make good arrests and follow the rules.

The truth is that our court system is very bogged down with criminal drug cases. Maybe we’re doing something wrong….

 

[steve_bank]

I started the thread curious as to wheter or not it is just bussiness as usual, or if anyone is acyually concerned about their own future and security?

 

[steve_bank]

... Police officials he knew confirmed what she had written about how whites sell and use drugs at least as much as Black people do—but rarely go to prison.

Which suggests a strong racial bias. I find it curious that police departments don't even try to be even-handed.

It's an economic bias.

It's far easier to catch street dealing. It's also easier to catch them when there are other crimes involved. The people who don't need to resort to crime to afford drugs are much harder to catch.

Especially if you don’t look for them—or look the other way because they have nice addresses and are likely to have decent layers who aren’t crippled by enormous case loads so the police must make good arrests and follow the rules.

The truth is that our court system is very bogged down with criminal drug cases. Maybe we’re doing something wrong….

In Seattle and Washington where drugs are fall all practical purposes decriminalized it is not about courts..

It is about people having the freedom to do drugs in public wherever they like without fear or consequences from police. The drug crisi proclaimed by our politicians resulting in more crime, robbery, and assaults was created by public policy and law.

Make it easy to do drugs and be able to get food without a job and more people will do drugs. Human nature.

We see it right around our building. We have had ODs on our doorsteps.

 

[Politesse]

I am. It's going to be a hot, violent summer.

 

[steve_bank]

I think people today ar becoming so universally satiated with gratification all day everyday that it just does not register.

Seattle residents are starring to respodd] because it is becoming so common. IAfew blocks from me recently a woman was repeatedly pushed down stairs going down to a light rail station. It is a station I use. It is what used to be a considered a a safe Chinatown.

We had a long stretch of serious hate crimes and assaults in Chinatown. People were afraid. Peole inhter neighborhds are becomming afraid to go out.

 

[Hermit]

Make it easy to do drugs and be able to get food without a job and more people will do drugs. Human nature.

How is life in a fact-free world treating you, Steve? Until you back your wild and wooly assertions up with empirical evidence I assume that is where you live.

 

[bilby]

Make it easy to do drugs and be able to get food without a job and more people will do drugs. Human nature

Nah.

People do drugs if their lives suck.

That's basically it.

Human nature is to have a pleasant and productive life as part of a community of friends. Drug addiction is what happens when society forces them not to live that way. If they can live that way, drugs become a rare indulgence, and purely recreational.

The problem you are seeing is a toxic society. And your attitude as expressed in this thread is the root of this toxicity.