OT – Eric Garner’s strangler not indicted

[Anonymous]

[quote=CA renter]The vast majority of calls/stops go rather smoothly […][/quote]

That’s a classic argument used by police brutality apologists:

“Well most of the time they aren’t committing assault …”

The vast majority of what murderers and rapists do during their day is not illegal either.

Crime is not measured by a weighted average.

[scaredyclassic]

I guess the base question is whether you have a baseline level if trust that the police will do the right thing and what your tolerance for error is. Depends of course on your dxperience.

Many communities know for a certainty that they do not trust the police.

thus their tolerance for error may be very low.

[spdrun]

Terrorizing a family after killing one of them isn’t error — it’s a crime.

[scaredyclassic]

[quote=spdrun]Terrorizing a family after killing one of them isn’t error — it’s a crime.[/quote]

Fair enough. I meant error in the sense of system failure …

It’s fairly apparent that many police are willing to lie when it is perceived as necessary to achieve justice as they see it.

That’s just human too.

[Arraya]

The hyper-aggressive, highly weaponized and recent militarization of our immune to prosecution, agents of “order”, should be analyzed in light of their historical formation.

http://www.plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-and-origins-american-policing
The birth and development of the American police can be traced to a multitude of historical, legal and political-economic conditions. The institution of slavery and the control of minorities, however, were two of the more formidable historic features of American society shaping early policing. Slave patrols and Night Watches, which later became modern police departments, were both designed to control the behaviors of minorities. For example, New England settlers appointed Indian Constables to police Native Americans (National Constable Association, 1995), the St. Louis police were founded to protect residents from Native Americans in that frontier city, and many southern police departments began as slave patrols. In 1704, the colony of Carolina developed the nation’s first slave patrol. Slave patrols helped to maintain the economic order and to assist the wealthy landowners in recovering and punishing slaves who essentially were considered property.”

If you really look closely at their historic formation, it was primarily to deal with the growing disobedience in regions where the slave class outnumbered the non-slaves.

These militias were essentially replicated in the industrial north to deal with the growing disobedience of labor, who were organizing and striking.

Indeed, the recent militarization seems to be a bit of foreshadowing given the increasingly frequent protests here and around the world

The Nature of Police, the Role of the Left

In this debate, the Right claim that the police are working just fine, while the Left claim that changes are needed to get them working better. Both of them are united in preserving the role of police and keeping real people—neighborhoods, communities, and all the individuals affected by police—from becoming the protagonists in the conflicts that affect us. Similarly, we frequently hear leftists claim that “the prisons aren’t working,” exhibiting a willful ignorance as to the actual purpose of prisons. Sadly, for all their distortions and manipulations, the Right is being more honest. The police and the prisons both are working just fine. As per their design, they are working against us.

[spdrun]

Interestingly, the NYPD wasn’t modeled on a militia (historically), but rather on Robert Peel’s London Met Police force.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_Principles

Seems like they might have broken quite a few of the nine rules recently…

[Author]

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