The US policing crisis thread

[J70]

Fine stew, let me be the first to call you on it. You and fox and whitey and all the others here are disgracefully resist c***ts, whether you admit it or not.

Nobody is claiming Freddie Gray or Michael Brown or any of the others were saints. That does not mean their lives were there for the cops to do whatever the f**k they pleased with them.

LOL...so were the 6 police officers charged last night rascist too?

You do realize that 3/6 were in fact black, including the guy facing the most serious charges.

You can be prejudiced towards people of the same race, especially when you're probably getting abused by some of them for being a black representative of a police force with a poor relationship with the community. You can embrace a institutional ethos that treats young males of your own race with heightened suspicion and brutality.

[J70]

Ok, one family went bad.  So what?

Not that previous generations of immigrants were all upstanding citizens. I think that the US should have banned immigration from Donegal after Mad Dog Coll. 

Did you ever think the attitudes of Irish Immigrants may be formed by the fact that they actually live here and deal with this stuff every day.

You have the luxury of expressing your views from 3,000 miles away. You dont have to live in a dodgy neighborhood or ride the subway late at night.  I think you said yourself that you hadnt been here since 1987.

You don't have to either, you actually chose to move there.

Was thinking of Mr Coll myself!

And what of all those ethnic organized crime groups?

Or the Irish draft riots and black lynchings in NYC during the Civil war.

[J70]

Really, so this lad catches the eye of a cop, has prior form and decides to do a runner but it is simply 'a little odd' 

I just had lunch today with a cop who lost his best friend in Fon Du Lac Wisconsin not so long ago, his 21 year old friend was on his first day on the job in a cop car on his own, a few hours into his shift he was a first responder to a robbery and drew his gun but waited until the perp fired before firing instead of shooting first, result.................. He died and he killed the sc**bag who killed him, some of you bies would do well to walk in the shoes of a cop and see how you would react when the scum of the earth starts coming at you!

This guy wasn't "coming at" the cops

Your right, the lad I am talking about was said to be afraid of ending up crucified on CNN and MSNBC and decided to wait to shoot until he was shot at................... This made the news for 24 hours.............Locally, double standard here surely?

Where is the double standard?

The suspect was killed. He did not escape justice.

And I don't think anyone would have batted an eyelid if a cop had shot an armed suspect in the midst of a robbery. Happens every day.

[AZOffaly]

I see a cop was shot in the head in New York yesterday. The 5th NYPD officer shot in the past 5 months. Reports that the police are going to start burning buildings in Time Square as as of yet unconfirmed.

Obviously I am being a smart arse, but this is the report. Every black man in America should be cursing this f**king idiot. This is exactly the sort of thing that cops point to when people rightly call them on over aggressive policing.

http://pix11.com/2015/05/02/police-officer-shot-in-queens-village/

[muppet]

I see a cop was shot in the head in New York yesterday. The 5th NYPD officer shot in the past 5 months. Reports that the police are going to start burning buildings in Time Square as as of yet unconfirmed.

Obviously I am being a smart arse, but this is the report. Every black man in America should be cursing this f**king idiot. This is exactly the sort of thing that cops point to when people rightly call them on over aggressive policing.

http://pix11.com/2015/05/02/police-officer-shot-in-queens-village/

Everyone everywhere should be cursing the f**king idiot. He is a lowlife sc**bag and thankfully they seem to have caught him and he will face justice properly.

Hopefully Officer Moore makes a full recovery.

[AZOffaly]

I mean in the context of what we are talking about here. The reason why some cops feel like they can shoot black men indiscriminately/feel nervous or threatened when dealing with 'suspicious' black men (delete as applicable) is precisely this. It's contributing to the whole vicious circle over there.

[muppet]

I mean in the context of what we are talking about here. The reason why some cops feel like they can shoot black men indiscriminately/feel nervous or threatened when dealing with 'suspicious' black men (delete as applicable) is precisely this. It's contributing to the whole vicious circle over there.

I understand your point, but I think they are in the wrong job if they think they can just shoot first and and ask questions later. That is simply a return to The Wild West. I notice in some of the more extreme cases of cops shooting black men, where it is subsequently shown there was little or no threat, the cop is on his own. If things are so dangerous wouldn't it be better to have them working in pairs?

[Eamonnca1]

"In the absence of such evidence, black people have to make the case for not being killed — no criminal record, no questionable acquaintances, no drugs or alcohol in your lifeless body, A-grade students and devoted fathers. If you want the nation to be outraged at your murder, be sure to have led an impeccable life. Nothing less will do."

Full article:

Only justice and equality will fix America's race problem

BY GARY YOUNGE

On November 26, 2007, Brandon Moore, an unarmed 16-year-old, was shot in the back while running away from a security guard in Detroit. The guard made it look like sport. "[He] put one arm on top of the other arm and started aiming at us," Brandon's brother John Henry, who was with him at the time, told me. "Brandon wasn't involved in anything. He was the last one to take off running, I guess." The shooter was an off-duty policeman with a history of brutality. Sacked from the force after he was involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident while drunk-driving, he was reinstated a few years later on appeal. He went on to shoot dead an armed man in a neighbourhood dispute, and shot and injured his wife in a domestic fracas.

The story got a paragraph in Detroit's two daily newspapers. Neither even bothered to print Brandon Moore's name. The policeman was reassigned to a traffic unit until he was cleared by an "investigation". The cold-blooded killing of Walter Scott, who was shot eight times in the back as he ran away from a policeman in North Charleston, South Carolina, is not news in the conventional sense. Such shootings are neither rare nor, to those who have been paying attention, surprising. Sadly, they are all too common. It is news because, thanks to the video footage, we have incontrovertible evidence at a moment when public consciousness has been heightened and focused on this very issue. While in this case the policeman involved has been fired and charged, such a degree of proof is no guarantee of justice. There was video evidence of police choking Eric Garner to death in Staten Island while he protested "I can't breathe", and his killers were acquitted; there was video of evidence of Rodney King's beating in Los Angeles, and his assailants walked free. But in an era of 24-hour news and social media, video guarantees attention.

Black people have been dying for this kind of attention for years. Michael Brown died for it; Kajieme Powell died for it; Tamir Rice died for it ; Justus Howell died for it. The roll call could go on — and until something fundamental changes, not just with American policing but in the American psyche, it will get longer. The fact that Scott was killed on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination makes stark the distinction between the reality of the post-civil rights era and pretensions to a post-racial era. The slogan of the day, born from a Twitter hashtag, is Blacklivesmatter. That says a lot. You wouldn't have a hashtag that said #blackmencanplaybasketball or #blackmusicmatters, because only the most deluded would ever deny that. But the reason #blacklivesmatter has resonated is because it succinctly summarises the current contradictions. We can celebrate a black president, black professors, black astrophysicists and black tennis players all we want. But the issue of the sanctity of black life has still not been settled .

Brutality of the police

The slogan of the day, born from a Twitter hashtag, is Blacklivesmatter. That says a lot. And so Scott's murder stands not simply as an outrageous and horrific incident in its own right but as an emblem for all the Brandon Moores who have gone down in a hail of bullets to deafening silence; a proxy for a reign of racial terror that has not been removed since the civil rights era but merely refined; a harsh illustration of a system that both systemically criminalises working-class black communities and, on occasion, cavalierly condemns those who live in them to summary execution. It lends a name and a moving image to those who have perished unnamed and unseen, and whose deaths could not move the nation's conscience.

"I have witnessed and endured the brutality of the police many more times than once — but, of course, I cannot prove it," wrote James Baldwin in 1966, in A Report from Occupied Territory . "I cannot prove it because the Police Department investigates itself, quite as though it were answerable only to itself. But it cannot be allowed to be answerable only to itself. It must be made to answer to the community which pays it, and which it is legally sworn to protect, and if African Americans are not a part of the American community, then all of the American professions are a fraud." The fact that the country is at least recognising this issue is heartening. But what it took to get it there is sickening. For this is the standard of proof necessary to force a reckoning with contemporary racism.

This is what it takes to thwart a conversation about the ostensible shortcomings in black culture, from parenting to rap music, which — some claim — make such policing inevitable and instead concentrate on the pathology of state violence. If all young black men bought a belt and pulled their trousers up tomorrow, they still wouldn't be able to outrun a trigger-happy cop's bullet. The bar is so high, and the capacity for empathy so low, that apparently no amount of statistics and personal testimony can convince a critical mass of white Americans that the problem is not African-Americans claiming victim hood but their being victimised.

In the absence of such evidence, black people have to make the case for not being killed — no criminal record, no questionable acquaintances, no drugs or alcohol in your lifeless body, A-grade students and devoted fathers. If you want the nation to be outraged at your murder, be sure to have led an impeccable life. Nothing less will do. In The Audacity of Hope, US President Barack Obama recalls sitting in the Illinois senate with a white legislator watching a black colleague (whom he refers to as John Doe) explain why eliminating a certain programme was racist. "You know what the problem is with John," the white senator asked him. "Whenever I hear him, he makes me feel more white." "[His] comment was instructive," Obama reflected. "Rightly or wrongly, white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America."

Guilt, of any racial variety, never achieved much anyhow (even if it did, there are therapists for that). It won't close the pay gap, the unemployment gap, the wealth gap or the discrepancy between black and white incarceration. It won't bring back Walter Scott, Trayvon Martin or Brandon Moore. It's not guilt that people are demanding but justice and equality. Only then will a tragic incident such as this be news for the right reason — because it is both rare and unexpected, not because someone was in the right place at the right time with a Samsung and a conscience.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

[AZOffaly]

Eamonn, are people saying that all cops are racist, and targetting blacks? Or are they saying they are over zealous in their shoot to kill policy on black suspects, or black criminals that are known to them?

I can't accept that all cops are racist, even the black ones, nor can I accept that a large number of them are.

What I can accept is that a large number of cops would rather shoot a suspect if they felt in the slightest threatened of their own life. In many ways I can sympathise with that view, but it's not really a good outlook for someone who is supposed to 'protect and serve'.

Obviously I can also accept that there are a small number of cops who would just look for any excuse to shoot a black suspect, but I think they are in the minority.

[Jell 0 Biafra]

It's not as simple as are they racist or not, AZ.  A lot of the time cops are put into neighbourhoods that they have no connection to or understanding of.

I lived in East Harlem for 8 years, and one night, July 4th, I was having a party in my apartment.  Coming back from the shops, several cops pushed in behind me and got into the elevator, without asking.  They left one of their buddies behind.  These guys, it turned out, were not long out of the academy, and were from Long Island.  They had never set foot in the neighbourhood until that night, and were there for the overtime, it being Independence Day.  As the lift was going up, they were laughing about how they had thrown the guy left behind "to the wolves."  They kept asking why I lived here; they were amazed that a white guy would live in this part of the city.  They may have been decent enough types, but they were completely inappropriate for the neighbourhood.  They clearly had no experience of minority-white neighbourhoods, and going by their chat, not much experience of being around black/hispanic people.

I've no reason to think these guys were particularly racist, but given how nervous they were, I wouldn't have liked to see them have to handle any tense situation that night.

[AZOffaly]

I know it's not as simple as that Jell, I'm just asking what the perception is among the people rioting or protesting against the police. My take on it is that the various PDs in the states are not inherently racist, but the societal issues over there are leading to a lot of tense scenarios where police officers are shooting unnecessarily, partly out of fear for themselves.

Other officers I'm sure are racist and are delighted to have a chance to act out on it, but I don't think that number is in any way high. That's why I'm curious about what the protestors really believe.

That cop in New York died by the way. An Irish American as well, not unusually in the NYPD. RIP to him. His name is Brian Moore.

[J70]

I know it's not as simple as that Jell, I'm just asking what the perception is among the people rioting or protesting against the police. My take on it is that the various PDs in the states are not inherently racist, but the societal issues over there are leading to a lot of tense scenarios where police officers are shooting unnecessarily, partly out of fear for themselves.

Other officers I'm sure are racist and are delighted to have a chance to act out on it, but I don't think that number is in any way high. That's why I'm curious about what the protestors really believe.

That cop in New York died by the way. An Irish American as well, not unusually in the NYPD. RIP to him. His name is Brian Moore.

Yes, its all over the news right now in NYC about Officer Moore.

As for what is driving the protests... surely it is the experience of the black communities at the hands of the police? The city of Baltimore, for example, has had to dish out millions of dollars in compensation to victims of police brutality in the past few years. And whether or not policies such as Stop and Frisk help drive down crime in poor neighbourhoods, they also antagonize and embitter the people who can't go about their lives without being repeatedly stopped and hassled by police for no reason other than their skin colour. 

[AZOffaly]

But *why* do the police have policies like that? Especially given the large amount of black cops in Baltimore. You have to think it's a larger issue than just the police like to pick on black people.

There has to be a holistic view of this, and it has to try and take the gun crime away from the streets as much as possible. If less criminals own guns, less cops would feel the need to brutalise or shoot suspects, in my view at least.

It would take time of course, but berating the cops while expecting them to keep law and order is just not going to be productive, in an atmosphere where they feel like they are basically at war with criminals, and they are the only ones expected to follow rules. It's a recipe for disaster.

[whitey]

But *why* do the police have policies like that? Especially given the large amount of black cops in Baltimore. You have to think it's a larger issue than just the police like to pick on black people.

There has to be a holistic view of this, and it has to try and take the gun crime away from the streets as much as possible. If less criminals own guns, less cops would feel the need to brutalise or shoot suspects, in my view at least.

It would take time of course, but berating the cops while expecting them to keep law and order is just not going to be productive, in an atmosphere where they feel like they are basically at war with criminals, and they are the only ones expected to follow rules. It's a recipe for disaster.

Read the Blindside or The Invisible Thread and much will be revealed

[J70]

But *why* do the police have policies like that? Especially given the large amount of black cops in Baltimore. You have to think it's a larger issue than just the police like to pick on black people.

There has to be a holistic view of this, and it has to try and take the gun crime away from the streets as much as possible. If less criminals own guns, less cops would feel the need to brutalise or shoot suspects, in my view at least.

It would take time of course, but berating the cops while expecting them to keep law and order is just not going to be productive, in an atmosphere where they feel like they are basically at war with criminals, and they are the only ones expected to follow rules. It's a recipe for disaster.

But the cops, who get plenty of leeway if you talk to any of them, HAVE to follow the rules as agents of the law, surely?

And of course policies such as Stop and Frisk are based around poor neighbourhoods, which, in many US cities, happen to be predominantly black. But where does that leave the majority of black people who are law-abiding, yet are continually harrassed by cops when they've done nothing? Or see people they know go down for far more severe sentences than white people get for the same crimes?

I don't know what the answer is. But what is happening isn't working.