Police Misconduct Catch All Thread

[Derec]

US finds Phoenix Police Dept violates civil rights of city residents

In one example, police created a so-called "challenge coin" that depicted the image of a protester whom an officer had shot in the groin.
The coin had a star over the image of the man's groin with the words: “Good night, left nut.”
On the back, the coin read, “Making America Great Again – One Nut at a Time.”

Trumpworld.

 

[Gospel]

It's astonishing that despite finding widespread issues within that police department, there haven't been any arrests—not a single one. It feels like our police departments are run like McDonald's. Addressing health violations and making preventive changes is one thing, discovering civil rights violations like a McDonald's employee spitting in food is another. It requires more than just operational changes; it demands accountability.

Edit: For the obtuse. I'm am not claiming a McDonalds employee spiting in food is a civil rights violation.

 

[Gospel]

I take that back—McDonald's is actually run better. If a McDonald's employee spits in your food, you can press charges. But if a police officer is found to have acted out of 'reasonable fear' of an acorn falling from a tree and discharges their weapon, there's nothing you can do about it.

 

[Gospel]

In fact, millions of citizens argue that because most police interactions go well, specific issues are not significant and don't require attention. Imagine if we applied that logic elsewhere. For instance, if someone had interacted with citizens daily for 50 years without incident, would it be acceptable to overlook the one time they killed someone?

 

[Shadowy Man]

In fact, millions of citizens argue that because most police interactions go well, specific issues are not significant and don't require attention. Imagine if we applied that logic elsewhere. For instance, if someone had interacted with citizens daily for 50 years without incident, would it be acceptable to overlook the one time they killed someone?

Depends. Did that someone “look at them aggressively”?

 

[marc]

'reasonable fear' is such an elastic term.

this type of bull was debunked waaaaay back in South Park Season 1, Ep 3

 

[Loren Pechtel]

No human can distinguish ditching contraband from drawing to shoot fast enough to defend themselves. The only actual scenarios are either you shoot because they are grabbing something or you decree that police must simply accept the bad guy shooting them.

Someone aiming a gun looks different to someone simply holding something. Even if it is a gun, as the cop already has their gun aimed, they can shoot faster than the opponent who has to aim their gun.

Reaction time--we don't actually live in the present, but a few hundred milliseconds behind the present. The bigger the decision the more this lags.

A while back in a discussion of biometrics on guns I grabbed a random YouTube video of someone drawing and firing. IIRC it was 8 frames from contact with the gun to the flash. Call it 260ms. Identify an object and make a shoot/don't-shoot decision in 260ms? Not happening. And contact doesn't translate to having enough of an image to identify.

The person on the other end will in all probability be able to return fire but that won't stop them from being hit. The thing is motivations are very different. A fair number of police shootings are people with an I'm-not-going-back attitude for whom an exchange of fire is preferable to surrender.

Consider another example: You never let your gun get close enough to your opponent that they can grab it. (Or, if from behind, you don't do anything that reveals where your gun is--for example, prodding them along with your gun.) The reason for this is a skilled opponent has a good chance of deflecting the gun away before you can fire.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I challenge you to read the the entire article I'm about to share from WaPo. It's not about police shooting an unarmed person. It's about a large number of police from many different parts of the country, raping, molesting and sexually abusing in other ways, children and teens. I might add some more article later about this problem but apparently there are way too many police who are criminals and many of them are never charged or get very light sentences, when prosecuted.

https://wapo.st/3Xhtg9R

I have repeatedly said the police have a big problem with such things. It's just everyone wants to focus on shootings rather than the real issues.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Seems like someone here watches a lot of action movies!

Action movies that almost always get it wrong??

 

[laughing dog]

I challenge you to read the the entire article I'm about to share from WaPo. It's not about police shooting an unarmed person. It's about a large number of police from many different parts of the country, raping, molesting and sexually abusing in other ways, children and teens. I might add some more article later about this problem but apparently there are way too many police who are criminals and many of them are never charged or get very light sentences, when prosecuted.

https://wapo.st/3Xhtg9R

I have repeatedly said the police have a big problem with such things. It's just everyone wants to focus on shootings rather than the real issues.

In what world would shooting unarmed civilians not be a real issue?

 

[Toni]

I challenge you to read the the entire article I'm about to share from WaPo. It's not about police shooting an unarmed person. It's about a large number of police from many different parts of the country, raping, molesting and sexually abusing in other ways, children and teens. I might add some more article later about this problem but apparently there are way too many police who are criminals and many of them are never charged or get very light sentences, when prosecuted.

https://wapo.st/3Xhtg9R

I have repeatedly said the police have a big problem with such things. It's just everyone wants to focus on shootings rather than the real issues.

What, in your opinion, are the real issues that should be focused on?

 

[Gospel]

While yawl wait in line for an answer (that will likely disappoint) I must say

I challenge you to read the the entire article I'm about to share from WaPo. It's not about police shooting an unarmed person. It's about a large number of police from many different parts of the country, raping, molesting and sexually abusing in other ways, children and teens. I might add some more article later about this problem but apparently there are way too many police who are criminals and many of them are never charged or get very light sentences, when prosecuted.

https://wapo.st/3Xhtg9R

This is so fucked up.

 

[southernhybrid]

Regardless of what Loren thinks, shouldn't we all be outraged and disgusted that so many police have abused children and women? Shooting innocent people by the police is one terrible problem, but in I think this is even worse, as these police didn't shoot someone out of fear or a misunderstanding, as is sometimes the case, they purposely chose to groom and then sexually assault these girls.

Here's more from the link I posted:

James Blair, a Lowell, N.C., police officer, met a 13-year-old girl who ran away from home. He offered to help with her school work and presented himself as a mentor. Months later, court records show, he got the girl pregnant.
Convicted in 2017

Neil Kimball, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, was accused of sexually abusing a woman after stopping her near a hotel. Prosecutors concluded there was insufficient evidence to file criminal charges. Kimball was still allowed to become a special victims bureau detective. Then he sexually abused a 15-year-old girl whose case he’d been assigned to investigate.
Convicted in 2019

Brian Hansen, a Nevada, Mo., police officer, brought a 16-year-old girl who was interested in becoming a cop on ride-alongs. According to state investigators, he sexually abused her in his patrol car and at a police shooting range. When Hansen pleaded guilty to statutory sodomy, he was sentenced to probation.
Convicted in 2022
Cases like these are not unique. The Post identified at least 1,800 state and local law enforcement officers who were charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse from 2005 through 2022.

Reporters spent more than a year unearthing thousands of court filings, police records and other documents to understand who these officers are, how they gain access to children and what is — and isn’t — being done to stop them.

The Post also conducted an exclusive analysis of the nation’s most comprehensive database of police arrests.

Press Enter to skip to end of carousel

Counting police crimes​

The Abused by the Badge series examines police officers accused of sexually abusing children and the systemic failures that allow those crimes to occur. The Post’s data on at least 1,800 officers was built and analyzed in collaboration with Bowling Green State University’s Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database.

Not all allegations of police misconduct become public. Sex crimes, especially those involving children, are widely believed to be underreported. Children may be more afraid to come forward; courts may be more likely to seal records involving juveniles; and law enforcement agencies may not release information about the arrests to the media.
Read more about our methodology and how this series was reported.
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This database, managed by Bowling Green State University, tracks news reports of arrests of law enforcement. Of the hundreds of thousands of sworn officers in the United States, only a small fraction are ever charged with crimes. And not all arrests are reported in the news media. But from 2005 through 2022, Bowling Green identified about 17,700 state and local officers who were charged with crimes, including physical assault, drunken driving and
drunken driving and drug offenses.

The Post found that 1 in 10 of those officers were charged with a crime involving child sexual abuse.

This type of police misconduct has gone largely unrecognized by the public and unaddressed within the criminal justice system. When pressed by The Post, some police officials, prosecutors and judges admitted that they could have done more to hold officers accountable in the cases they handled. But nationwide, there has been little reckoning over child abusers within the ranks of law enforcement.

 

[southernhybrid]

I'm sharing another article, if anyone is interested, that explains how the Post investigated this type of misconduct by the police. These are rather long, detailed articles, but it does make you wonder what kind of people are being hired in law enforcement and why so many aren't even brought to justice for these crimes. Of course, there are good people in law enforcement, but apparently, there are too many criminals doing police work as well.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/03/14/police-child-sex-abuse-how-we-reported/

Jessica Contrera was reporting on child sex trafficking in 2021 when she started to notice the headlines. They appeared in her inbox a few times a month, the product of Google alerts she had set to be notified of stories regarding kids, abuse and the criminal justice system. She was accustomed to seeing stories in which law enforcement officers were mentioned because they were investigating child sexual abuse.

But in these articles, the officers were the abusers.
“Former Lewisville police officer sentenced for sexually assaulting a child”
“Ex-Chicago cop sentenced to 25 years in sex trafficking of young girls”
“Sex abuse victim of former LVMPD officer: ‘I was turned into a human pet’”
These headlines frequently called the officers “former.” But they were “former” officers only because they’d resigned or been fired after being accused. Many of them had used their jobs to find their victims, who were almost always described as young, vulnerable teenage girls.
She had no idea then just how often this was happening. To find out, she teamed up with investigative reporter Jenn Abelson and data reporter John D. Harden.
The Washington Post has spent more than a year examining police officers accused of sexually abusing children. We discovered that, on average, a law enforcement officer has been charged with a crime involving child sexual abuse twice a week, every week, for 18 years.
But knowing that police officers are sexually abusing kids was just the first step. We wanted to understand how these crimes happen and who is being hurt by them; how officers are investigated and what consequences they face; what’s being done to stop predators with badges; and, perhaps most importantly, what isn’t.
This year, The Post will be publishing stories about what we’ve found, including our data on officers’ charges, convictions and sentences. We’ll introduce you to real kids targeted by officers, take you inside investigations of attempted coverups and show you what happens in courtrooms, where prosecutors and judges decide what abusive cops deserve.
Along the way, we’ll keep updating this page to help you understand our methodology: where our information comes from, how we obtained it and what we’re still hoping to learn.

 

[bilby]

Reaction time--we don't actually live in the present, but a few hundred milliseconds behind the present. The bigger the decision the more this lags.

True. Which is one reason why it isn't possible to use a gun for defence.

Guns are offensive weapons. Only in movies can a person shoot an attacker before they are shot themselves.

Only in movies does a "Mexican Standoff" make sense - in the real world, the first person to shoot takes out his opponent, long before the opponent can retaliate. If someone is aiming a gun at you, and you are aiming yours at them, then your only viable option is to try to kill them as quickly as possible.

Hollywood has a lot to answer for, and the longstanding theme of hugely unrealistic depictions of guns as defensive tools is a major reason beging the insane demand that people be permitted guns for 'self defense' or 'home defense'.

The use of guns for 'defense' always entails their use to kill someone because you are scared. By the time a threat is apparent, and a killing could be justified, it is too late for a gun to help you.

Your "solution", of allowing fear as a complete justification for lethal force (as long as it's being employed by the authorities), is immoral, unethical, and downright evil.

 

[bilby]

A fair number of police shootings are people with an I'm-not-going-back attitude for whom an exchange of fire is preferable to surrender.

Then perhaps the police should drop that foolish attitude, and learn to de-escalate. They are supposed to be professionals.

 

[Gospel]

I challenge you to read the the entire article I'm about to share from WaPo. It's not about police shooting an unarmed person. It's about a large number of police from many different parts of the country, raping, molesting and sexually abusing in other ways, children and teens. I might add some more article later about this problem but apparently there are way too many police who are criminals and many of them are never charged or get very light sentences, when prosecuted.

https://wapo.st/3Xhtg9R

I have repeatedly said the police have a big problem with such things. It's just everyone wants to focus on shootings rather than the real issues.

Have you considered that it might seem that way because people tend to react strongly when something bad happens? No shit right? Should people be expected to not care? When the police do their job well, there usually aren't any complaints. If you think about it, police interact with many citizens every day. Many of them shootings that are justified. The lack of complaints in those interactions could be seen as agreement and appreciation for a job well done. So, no, not everyone is solely focused on police shootings as if it's some insignificant issue that doesn't deserve attention. They're focused on it because it's a real issue. It's an issue of improving communities to create safer working conditions for police officers, as well as enhancing law enforcement practices to ensure safer interactions with the communities they serve.

 

[ZiprHead]

It's just everyone wants to focus on shootings rather than the real issues.

Oh holy hell!!!

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I challenge you to read the the entire article I'm about to share from WaPo. It's not about police shooting an unarmed person. It's about a large number of police from many different parts of the country, raping, molesting and sexually abusing in other ways, children and teens. I might add some more article later about this problem but apparently there are way too many police who are criminals and many of them are never charged or get very light sentences, when prosecuted.

https://wapo.st/3Xhtg9R

I have repeatedly said the police have a big problem with such things. It's just everyone wants to focus on shootings rather than the real issues.

In what world would shooting unarmed civilians not be a real issue?

Please address the point rather than derailing.

Are you not aware that the "unarmed" category includes simulated weapons? There are very few where the person who was shot was truly unarmed and not trying to grab the cop's gun.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Regardless of what Loren thinks, shouldn't we all be outraged and disgusted that so many police have abused children and women? Shooting innocent people by the police is one terrible problem, but in I think this is even worse, as these police didn't shoot someone out of fear or a misunderstanding, as is sometimes the case, they purposely chose to groom and then sexually assault these girls.

Why the dig at me? I'm agreeing with the problem you point out! What I'm objecting to is the focus on shootings rather than the actual problems such as the ones you describe.