You say Police State, I say potato. Either way let's discuss surveillance and government overreach.

What were the answers? "Disturbing" could, unfortunately, go in a lot of directions on that one.

The Dallas LEO's decision to subdue the suspect with an improvised explosive device is highly concerning.

To use a local example, a public inquiry is ongoing as to the conduct of the police force during the Lindt cafe siege. The police snipers told the Court they didn't have any extra or special powers that permitted the taking of the suspect's life at will, they had to wait for him to demonstrate a clear threat to life before they could take a shot. They never got the chance and authority to shoot especially as they were camped behind two glass plates that affected LOS and trajectory. It was the close combat officers that stormed the building after the gunman executed a hostage who went in and terminated the gunman.

It sounds like in Dallas it was the cheap and easy option to blow him up first and ask questions after.

It's not like they couldn't gas him, flashbang, taze or wait him out.

Farscry wrote:
Chimalli wrote:

While, not every shooting is justified, in how many of them was the officer found at fault? An officer found guilty means that at the time of the shooting (not using any facts found afterwards i.e. the weapon was actually a cell phone) that the officer knowingly used lethal force on a suspect, and no other officer in the same position would have done the same. In some cases the person that is shot and killed is deliberately disobeying direct orders from the officer, they do not give suggestions to be followed.

Considering the absurd incidents that in recent years alone we know of where the officer(s) were not found to be at fault on the most specious and self-serving flimsy excuses, you can f*ck right off with this bullsh*t justification for LEO's engaging in voluntary manslaughter.

Edit: Hell, look into your link (which I also pointed out earlier) and maybe make note of the fact that only roughly half of those police deaths are due to being shot. So in other words, yes, cops are killing more unarmed civilians than there are cops being killed by gunmen.

I am sorry you are getting upset about this, but you are taking what few are doing and blaming the entire police for it. It is the same as saying that ISIS represents all Muslims. I am not justifying what anyone does, and you are completely correct there are cases that the officer should not have been let off. But, there are also cases that people call BS on based on facts the officer did not know at the time. All I ask is to make up your mind by trying to look at the entire picture and not just a few incidents. The media is blowing all of these things out of proportion and this is just fueling the fire regardless of the side that you are on.

Also, I never said anything about police only being targeted by guns, the two highest are being shot and auto crash (most likely high speed pursuit but that is just a guess). However, I can see how it is inferred sorry for that.

Yonder wrote:
Chimalli wrote:

While, not every shooting is justified, in how many of them was the officer found at fault? An officer found guilty means that at the time of the shooting (not using any facts found afterwards i.e. the weapon was actually a cell phone) that the officer knowingly used lethal force on a suspect, and no other officer in the same position would have done the same. In some cases the person that is shot and killed is deliberately disobeying direct orders from the officer, they do not give suggestions to be followed.

Also, 93 civilians in 2015 compared to the 123 officers that same year, using the same link. 2016has 56 officers killed so far.

Your first link says that 123 LEOs died in 2015. Your second link says that only 58 did, and that half of those were killed in traffic accidents.

I think you will also find that most people concerned with the amount of people killed every year by police officers will not have the trust you do that "if the officer was not found to have been officially at fault then the officer did nothing wrong".

I would say a lot of people are more like "if the officer murders a white person and there is video footage of the event the police officer may be found to be at fault."

There are exceptions of course, for example, if the video shows that the black person is actually running away from the officer and then shows that the officer plants evidence on them than the officer could be indicted and might even be convicted.

When I posted about a black person running away from the cops so that they get shot in the back earlier it wasn't a hilarious joke. It is literally the only thing that gives that black person a snowballs chance in hell of actually getting any form of post-mortem justice. In any other scenario enough people can be convinced that the video actually shows our brave uniformed officers of the peace sh*tting their pants and unloading into hulking black monsters that could at any moment tear them into pieces and rape their women.

Remember the Ferguson shooting. Darren Wilson stated that Michael Brown was coming at him "like a demon". Not like a man, not like a person, like an inhuman monster that deserves no empathy. Which is why you can usually shoot them without being "at fault".

The second link was comparing Jan to June of 2015 and 2016, that is why the number changed.

Again I want to reiterate that I agree there is injustice happening, not just to African-Americans, but all minorities. And for some reason you are only hearing about it when it happens to the African-Americans. Why do you think that is?

Chimalli wrote:

Again I want to reiterate that I agree there is injustice happening, not just to African-Americans, but all minorities. And for some reason you are only hearing about it when it happens to the African-Americans. Why do you think that is?

Because they're tired of being killed at a disproportionate rate and rarely get justice? Because now we have social media to talk about these injustices? What answer are you fishing for?

I don't know the answer, nor am I fishing for one just asking a question, of why don't we see the injustices of the Hispanics, Middle Easterners, and Asians in the news?

Dare I invoke Occam and say it's because they aren't getting murdered by law enforcers at the same rate? Low to mid-level systemic prejudice is terrible, but when you are literally getting killed as a result of your skin colour the problem becomes a little more immediate.

Chimalli wrote:

I don't know the answer, nor am I fishing for one just asking a question, of why don't we see the injustices of the Hispanics, Middle Easterners, and Asians in the news?

DSGamer wrote:

Because they're tired of being killed at a disproportionate rate and rarely get justice? Because now we have social media to talk about these injustices? What answer are you fishing for?

I'll just re-quote it. Because it's epidemic amongst African-Americans. Wesley Lowery and some other folks on the Washington Post have been putting together a database of police shootings, because one did not exist. It's really interesting stuff. What it comes down to is about twice as many whites a year are shot by police as blacks, but there are about five times as many whites in the U.S., meaning blacks are killed about 2.5 times more often. Even more ugly, shocking, and horrifying, in 2015, 32 unarmed whites were killed by police. African-Americans? 38 killed by police.

I would say also the reason we don't see much about injustices against the Hispanic, Middle Eastern, and Asian population is those populations were not actually enslaved as property in the U.S., and then had decades upon decades of laws specifically passed to keep them down, not to mention the endless "SCARY BLACK MAN GONNA RAPE YOUR WOMAN" bullsh*t that's been bandied about for decades. There just isn't the level of injustice against other populations, just because injustice against African-Americans was literally codified in the Constitution and has never stopped.

Chimalli wrote:

I am sorry you are getting upset about this, but you are taking what few are doing and blaming the entire police for it. It is the same as saying that ISIS represents all Muslims.

If American police were a quarter as diligent about reporting their extremists as American Muslims are we wouldn't be having this problem, because all of the corrupt cops would have been fired or behind bars. Right now we're in the reverse situation, where their are enough thugs with a badge that they have rewritten the entire culture. It's the police that actually report on their coworkers that are drummed out (or themselves arrested).

My definition of a good cop is "a cop that would attempt to physically subdue even three or four of their coworkers that were acting up, would report them after the fact, make sure the report wasn't buried, while documenting the events to whistleblow if the chain of command didn't stop such events from repeating."

There are a tiny minority of those cops in the US right now, because those people don't fit in. They are fired, their life is made miserable, or false charges are laid against them and they are arrested.

What we have instead is a very sizable minority of cops that will regularly abuse their power knowingly, or go completely off the handle if there is too much stress, and a really big majority of cops that don't do that, don't particularly like those that do, but for their own various justifications do not go against the Blue to anywhere approaching the extent needed to actually maintain a force of "good" cops.

Chumpy_McChump wrote:

What were the answers? "Disturbing" could, unfortunately, go in a lot of directions on that one. :(

1) Does there exist a national or federal database that allows police departments to report officers that were terminated for reasons related to violating the public trust? If not, why not?

No and it is disturbingly common for discipline cases or even criminal police officers to hop from department to department. There appears no mechanism for getting police "disbarred" short of a prison sentence.

2) If such a database exists, what, if any, sanctions are placed on departments that knowingly hire officers that appear on that list? Do these, for instance, include the loss of department accreditation?

Nope.

3) Considering the known side effects and prevalence of abuse of anabolic steroids (e.g.: paranoia, hyperaggression, loss of impulse control...), are officers required to test consistently for these substances? Are such tests part of use of force investigations? What sanctions are typical for steroid abuse?

Not only is drug testing not allowed (because of police union contracts), but police unions have actually insisted that anabolic steroid use should be allowed so that police can have physical advantages over the citizens they control.

4) Is membership and/or affiliation with known hate groups sufficient and/or mandatory cause for termination from police departments? Are such rules standardized across departments or can, for instance, a department in Banjo County, South Carolina decide to recruit exclusively from the Aryan Nations?

The department of justice is aware of white supremacist groups infiltrating police departments and has published numerous papers of the severity of same. There has been no federal action on the subject and no restrictions exist that preclude departments from hiring known members of hate groups.

Chimalli wrote:

I am sorry you are getting upset about this, but you are taking what few are doing and blaming the entire police for it.

Nowhere have I said as much (in fact, we go to great pains to clearly state the opposite), so it's interesting to read that somehow this is your takeaway. Unsurprising given the false equivalency you continue to cling to, but interesting.

Chimalli wrote:

All I ask is to make up your mind by trying to look at the entire picture and not just a few incidents.

I did look at the entire picture over the course of the last ten years in particular, and that's how I made up my mind. I pivoted quite a bit from my old perspective because of taking the time to look at the entire picture.

MilkmanDanimal wrote:
Chimalli wrote:

I don't know the answer, nor am I fishing for one just asking a question, of why don't we see the injustices of the Hispanics, Middle Easterners, and Asians in the news?

DSGamer wrote:

Because they're tired of being killed at a disproportionate rate and rarely get justice? Because now we have social media to talk about these injustices? What answer are you fishing for?

I'll just re-quote it. Because it's epidemic amongst African-Americans. Wesley Lowery and some other folks on the Washington Post have been putting together a database of police shootings, because one did not exist. It's really interesting stuff. What it comes down to is about twice as many whites a year are shot by police as blacks, but there are about five times as many whites in the U.S., meaning blacks are killed about 2.5 times more often. Even more ugly, shocking, and horrifying, in 2015, 32 unarmed whites were killed by police. African-Americans? 38 killed by police.

I would say also the reason we don't see much about injustices against the Hispanic, Middle Eastern, and Asian population is those populations were not actually enslaved as property in the U.S., and then had decades upon decades of laws specifically passed to keep them down, not to mention the endless "SCARY BLACK MAN GONNA RAPE YOUR WOMAN" bullsh*t that's been bandied about for decades. There just isn't the level of injustice against other populations, just because injustice against African-Americans was literally codified in the Constitution and has never stopped.

That is interesting data, I looked at all of the that data and I noticed that a good deal of the shootings (in the areas I am familiar with) happen in lower income areas, and areas known by the public that are unsafe.

So then I looked into population sizes, and income data.

There are roughly 17,198,000 blacks (all, not alone) used in the data from 2014. 84,228,000 whites (non-Hispanic) used. This verifies your data of 1:5 black:white ratio.

Then I looked at income. Looking at under $35,000 a year (I chose this because I feel that 50,000 would not be considered low income in many places) the percentages work out to be 49.2% of blacks and 29.7% of whites. Crunching the numbers 8,461,416: 25,015,716. Which is roughly 1:3.

So assuming this correlation is true and not just coincidence. It still concluded that blacks are getting shot at a higher rate just 1.5 times higher (still shouldn't be happening).

I wish I had more data on the location of the shootings by race instead of just in general. To further extrapolate this.

Chimalli wrote:

All I ask is to make up your mind by trying to look at the entire picture and not just a few incidents. The media is blowing all of these things out of proportion and this is just fueling the fire regardless of the side that you are on.

The entire picture is that the police have killed 569 people so far this year and they killed 1,146 in 2015 according to The Guardian's database of police shootings.

Those numbers (and the numbers from the Washington Post) are important because prior to 2015 no media organization actually investigated the number of people that were killed by the police and the circumstances. They simply trusted that the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports were accurate.

Unfortunately, the FBI's numbers were aggregated from the reports of justifiable homicide that thousands of individual police departments submitted. And those police departments fudged the f*ck out the numbers claiming that only about 425 people per year were justifiably killed by the police between 2010 and 2014.

But once the media started to look into police shootings that number almost tripled. And one can reasonably assume that police have been killing *way* more people than they officially reported since, well, forever.

So rather than the media "blowing things out of proportion," they are simply accurately informing the American public for the first time about the real level of lethal police violence against civilians (especially minority citizens) that has existed for years and years and years.

And, even worse, the projects by The Guardian, the Washington Post, and others still don't provide Americans with an accurate picture of how violent the police really are. There's no database of people who survive getting shot by the police and certainly no database of people who get beaten up by the police or suffer mysterious injuries while in police custody.

Chimalli wrote:

The second link was comparing Jan to June of 2015 and 2016, that is why the number changed.

Those numbers are wrong because you failed to look into the details behind them.

First, those numbers are for law enforcement officers, not just police. That's basically anyone with a gun and badge and the powers of arrest. That covers everyone city, university and college, county, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies. That's Barney Fife to a border patrol agent.

Next, the numbers you used were the total number of LEO deaths. Those include everything from officers getting killed in a common traffic accident, to getting struck by a car, to being shot or stabbed, to simply dying from "other" causes.

The only number that matters for the purposes of the argument you were trying to make are the number of LEOs that were actually killed in the line of duty. What the FBI calls "feloniously killed."

It just so happens that the FBI tracks that number (and one can reasonably assume that the various police departments reporting the information aren't going to lie when one of their brother-in-blue is killed). In 2015 only 41 LEOs out of 123 LEOs that died that year were actually killed by the bad guys. That's one third of the number you were using.

So the bad guys killed 41 LEOs (not all of whom were cops) in 2015 while the police (according to The Guardian's tracker) killed nearly 1,200 civilians. And nearly 20% of those civilians, 229, were completely unarmed. That's five and a half times the number of LEOs killed. Heck, the police managed to kill 79 unarmed blacks, nearly double the number of their fellow officers killed.

Chimalli wrote:

Again I want to reiterate that I agree there is injustice happening, not just to African-Americans, but all minorities. And for some reason you are only hearing about it when it happens to the African-Americans. Why do you think that is?

Look at The Guardian's tracker again. At the top under "Race and Ethnicity" you'll see that black people are being killed by the police at twice the rate (per million) of Hispanics. They are literally the canary in the coal mine of police violence.

And it's not just getting shot by police. When the NYPD was forced to show the data behind their "stop and frisk" policy it was revealed that they stopped nearly 351,000 blacks at the policy's peak in 2011, or 53% of all "stop and frisk" stops for the year.

Blacks only make up a quarter of NYC's population. Hell, there's only about 2.1 million black in the city. That means that pretty much for all of first decade of the 2000s, the NYPD stopped and harassed about 16 out of every 100 black residents for no real reason other than they were black. (And it was actually worse because the police overwhelmingly focused on males between the ages of 14 and 24. If you fell in that group you pretty much had to expect you were going to be stopped by the police at some point.)

Hispanics had it slightly better. Only 224,000 Hispanics were stopped in 2011, representing 34% of all stops while only making up about 28% of the city's population.

So we have a situation where police are killing (and harassing) black people at rates that are extremely out of whack with the rest of the population and have been doing so since, well, forever. And the past several years there have been extremely visible incidents where the police have killed black people under highly dubious circumstances.

Again, those situations don't represent the media "blowing things out of proportion." They represent the media forcing white America to look at the police's horrible treatment of black communities--treatment that no middle-class white American would quietly suffer for a week let alone decades and decades.

I started a petition for my congressman. Please look at it and determine if you agree. If you do, please sign it.

deleted - didn't mean to post

The outcome the right wing seems to want to have is a War on Police.. that is their story and they are sticking with it. The ugly truth is there is a war.. a war that the police have started since they replaced the White Sheets with the Blue Uniform and badge. This is nothing new and something Black people in America have been living with since the day the slave ships arrived on this country.. instead of being shocked when Police are killed we should be shocked they aren't being killed every day in every state until some sort of justice and equality is served in this country.

At some point the targets will start spreading to Judges, Lawyers, DA's, and the Federal and State Prison system for systematic detention of black people. Why would anyone be surprised or shocked when it does? You really think you can continually oppress a race of people living in a country and not think at some point collectively people will snap and fight back?

TheGameguru wrote:

The outcome the right wing seems to want to have is a War on Police.. that is their story and they are sticking with it. The ugly truth is there is a war.. a war that the police have started since they replaced the White Sheets with the Blue Uniform and badge. This is nothing new and something Black people in America have been living with since the day the slave ships arrived on this country.. instead of being shocked when Police are killed we should be shocked they aren't being killed every day in every state until some sort of justice and equality is served in this country.

At some point the targets will start spreading to Judges, Lawyers, DA's, and the Federal and State Prison system for systematic detention of black people. Why would anyone be surprised or shocked when it does? You really think you can continually oppress a race of people living in a country and not think at some point collectively people will snap and fight back?

I feel the frustration and don't want to diminish it by saying I understand it. I am not in your shoes so I will not trivialize it by saying so.

That said, I think that the visibility of these sorts of incidents, through the use and widespread adoption of technology like video capture, is actually beginning to make a significant impact beyond the black community. We are seeing now what you have always seen and are increasingly unable to deny it, explain it away, or simply justify it without bald, naked racism -- a racism that many of us find disgusting and terrifying.

I would hate to see this visibility squandered by acts of violence that take the focus away from the struggle. I don't think it is inevitable in the way you seem to be hinting.

The more I read about the inadequacy of state, local, and municipal oversight of law enforcement, the more I am convinced that we need to federalize the profession in the same way Sweden, Norway, Ireland, and several other advanced countries did. Leaving the power of life and death, freedom and incarceration, and lawfulness and criminality in the hands of some Banjo County sheriff elected by his barely educated peers is simply madness.

Considering the known side effects and prevalence of abuse of anabolic steroids (e.g.: paranoia, hyperaggression, loss of impulse control...), are officers required to test consistently for these substances?

All other considerations aside, that would probably be a very good idea.

From what I know, airline pilots have to test before they fly, every time.

I can't see why we wouldn't want to regularly test those who carry the badge and firearms on a habitual basis (it doesn't have to be as frequently as a pilot).

I actually wouldn't care much at all if police were using pot or getting drunk (off duty, anyway), but harder drugs or steroids should be way out of bounds.

North Carolina decided that lying about body cameras malfunctioning and/or being turned off was just too much work, so they decided they'll just make it a giant pain in the ass for anyone to get access to the footage.

http://www.acluofnc.org/blog/gov-mcc...

North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory today signed into law HB 972, which allows law enforcement agencies to keep officer worn body camera footage from the public unless ordered to release the footage by a court.

That's some malarkey right there.

TheGameguru wrote:

The outcome the right wing seems to want to have is a War on Police.. that is their story and they are sticking with it. The ugly truth is there is a war.. a war that the police have started since they replaced the White Sheets with the Blue Uniform and badge. This is nothing new and something Black people in America have been living with since the day the slave ships arrived on this country.. instead of being shocked when Police are killed we should be shocked they aren't being killed every day in every state until some sort of justice and equality is served in this country.

At some point the targets will start spreading to Judges, Lawyers, DA's, and the Federal and State Prison system for systematic detention of black people. Why would anyone be surprised or shocked when it does? You really think you can continually oppress a race of people living in a country and not think at some point collectively people will snap and fight back?

I don't know if you'll be able to watch this in the US. Hope you can (or have already had it on your TV.)

NYPD: The biggest gang in New York?

One comment that stuck with me was from a Hispanic police officer who is speaking out about racism in the police. He said there is no filtering system for weeding out racist police officers. In fact he knew of one police officer who had a racist tatoo, involving someone being lynched, on his arm and he still got into the police.

Bloo Driver wrote:

North Carolina decided that lying about body cameras malfunctioning and/or being turned off was just too much work, so they decided they'll just make it a giant pain in the ass for anyone to get access to the footage.

http://www.acluofnc.org/blog/gov-mcc...

North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory today signed into law HB 972, which allows law enforcement agencies to keep officer worn body camera footage from the public unless ordered to release the footage by a court.

That's how Chicago was for a while. I'm actually impressed by how much more open it's gotten, even if that means coming to terms with how many recording devices aren't working.

CPD alerts cops that 3 West Side gangs plotting to shoot officers

So is there any evidence that these sort of "alerts" are real? The idea that a gang has a "sniper" and is supplying automatic weapons to 2 other gangs seems like a bit of a stretch.

It is the Chicago Police giving this alert...right after some very bad press about them killing an unarmed man. I don't believe it. Not just because of the source but because the article says

The Four Corner Hustlers also are supplying the other two gangs with automatic weapons, which all three factions also have agreed to use against police, the alert states.

I think it would be pretty stupid of a gang to supply automatic weapons to their rivals. It would be far more likely for such weapons to be used against them than police.

The best part of the article is the Police union president complaining about inflammatory rhetoric.
something, something, pot, kettle.

I guess this goes here. Although it is kind of sad that it could apply to several threads we have here.

Baltimore police have racial bias, Justice Department reports

Most telling to me personally -

BPD officers found contraband twice as often when searching white individuals compared to African-Americans during vehicle stops and 50% more often during pedestrian stops

So it isn't even that stopping more Blacks found more crime. In fact stopping more whites seemed to find more crime. So if they are so concerned with protecting the public/stopping crime then why don't they stop more whites?