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Author Topic: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread  (Read 1285900 times)

Bohandas

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #11040 on: December 09, 2015, 05:57:24 pm »

I'm all for more women in the police forces, but the problem isn't that it's just men. It's the culture inside the police forces that is contributing to the issue.

Yes, and it's not even that it's a culture of violence or racism. The real issue is something called the "Blue Wall", where police officers will not ignore crimes committed by other officers but also cover for them if they get called out on it.

The most effective solution to whis whole issue would be some kind of measure designed to create an environment of discord and backstabbing and stamp out runaway esprit de corps in our nation's police departments.
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Helgoland

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #11041 on: December 09, 2015, 09:22:09 pm »

You do realize that National Socialist or Soviet style denunciation programs are not too efficient, right?
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Strife26

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #11042 on: December 09, 2015, 09:25:51 pm »

Either way the system sucks. I think that more independent prosecutors and internal affairs as well as continually improving information (that is released to the general public. Not improving information that totally shows he was rushing for the cop before they shot him. Take their word for it, plz) would hopefully improve things 
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MetalSlimeHunt

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #11043 on: December 09, 2015, 09:39:08 pm »

A big thing that would help is disestablishing preference for cop-sourced information in court. A cop's eyewitness testimony is automatically preferences over that of others and is often treated as "equivalent to a recording". A massive number of prosecutions succeed based off of the cop being able to claim whatever they want and make the person they're accusing out to be a conniving liar if they tell a different story. They'd be a lot less rowdy in the field if they knew the law looked upon their testimony the same as everyone else's.

For example, this is how the stop and frisk program functioned. Carry around a dime bag, see someone you want to fuck over, drop it next to them and then run them in for having marijuana. Tell the court your version and bam, easy conviction. I remember an explanation by a retired judge that being clumsy with bags of weed must be the most common side effect of walking while black.
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ArKFallen

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #11044 on: December 09, 2015, 10:17:33 pm »

A big thing that would help is disestablishing preference for cop-sourced information in court. A cop's eyewitness testimony is automatically preferences over that of others
As I understand it that is because cops are supposed to be trained to spot things in a less fucked manner than your average Joe.
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and is often treated as "equivalent to a recording"
This is fucked though.
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Helgoland

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #11045 on: December 09, 2015, 10:19:33 pm »

Maybe step zero should be to train your cops better, then. Maybe you should do an officer exchange program with a couple European countries.
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MetalSlimeHunt

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #11046 on: December 09, 2015, 10:25:26 pm »

Police academies are pretty fucked up, but the way they teach cops is just them adapting to the environment they exist in. It's not the actual source of the problem. Even I, with my fuck the pigs attitude, will freely admit that there are good-natured cops out there, plenty of them. The thing is though, the way the system functions preferences immoral cops to moral ones, and overrides what good they might actually do or try to do.

Besides, the way Europe's political climate is going they'll probably take lessons from American cops, not the other way around.

And it's been tried.
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Sheb

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #11047 on: December 10, 2015, 04:26:03 am »

I dunno, well, separate internal affairs would probably be a good start. The stories you hear of those truly terrible PD all lack separate internal affairs department. I must say that the kind of autonomy that US PD enjoy never cease to amaze me (and I'm from Belgum, where our approach to government is "break it into pieces until it stop working"). Internal affairs should be a state-level thing.
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Grim Portent

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #11048 on: December 10, 2015, 05:35:13 am »

Internal affairs should be a state-level thing.

I'd probably have it be a federal thing myself. Making sure the police are ethical and following proper procedures is the sort of thing that should transcend state boundaries if you ask me (though I'm not a huge fan of the state system as is.)

Then again I'd probably have the police be federal level as well, law enforcement has never struck me as something that should be too heavily devolved.
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Strife26

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #11049 on: December 10, 2015, 07:27:06 am »

I dunno, well, separate internal affairs would probably be a good start. The stories you hear of those truly terrible PD all lack separate internal affairs department. I must say that the kind of autonomy that US PD enjoy never cease to amaze me (and I'm from Belgum, where our approach to government is "break it into pieces until it stop working"). Internal affairs should be a state-level thing.

Y'know, one would think that America could do that too, what with the political ideals in separation of powers and things.
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EnigmaticHat

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #11050 on: December 11, 2015, 06:18:10 am »

American police are indeed fucking terrified of the general populace, compared to a lot of other places I've been. What's up with that?

Because they're widely and increasingly reviled as a class of people for things that they themselves likely don't even do, and the general populace is unpredictable at the best of times. We also have lots of guns. They also spend most of their time interacting with the worst in society, and it colors their perspective of the whole. It's not surprising in the least that some of them feel like they have targets on their backs.

Its like this in most big nations with a diverse, melting pot society, altough there does seem to be something specially awful in regards to society's relationship with cops in amurica. Its still quite sad and hilarious how many young people forget that cops are just guys with a dangerous job that often makes them a target, and that they have families to take care of, as well. Hell, I've seen kids who have never had actual contact with any policeman and go on making tumblr posts about hating cops. Hating cops in some parts of the US has basically become the new hip and cool thing to do.
Not really?

First of all, cops aren't actually in that much danger in the US as a whole.  Looking at the actual statistics there are an average of less than 3 cop deaths per year per state.  Furthermore, less than half of these are violent deaths.  No law enforcement agency currently is responsible for tracking police killings, but wikipedia gives a low ball estimate.  Assuming that the highest year is complete accurate for all of them (as a very very vague way to estimate for the aforementioned low-balled-ness), the US police force kills 625 people per year.  Most estimates I've heard are a little under twice that, but anyway let's be generous since no one really knows.  That means that the average US citizen is over 1000% times more likely to be killed by a police officer than to kill a police officer.

Now, its entirely possible that that just means that the police are simply good at fighting in our gun-and-criminal infested old west of a nation.  None of those statistics imply any kind of fault either way, so maybe those were all justified killings in combat.  It seems highly unlikely, considering that deaths prior to the 9/11 police militarization craze are about the same as they were post 9/11.  But you know, benefit of the doubt.  This is all rendered highly moot by the fact that there have been several high profile cases over the previous few years that have revealed that A US juries and the legal system as a whole will basically never charge cops with on-duty murder and B the police force as a whole goes utterly fucking nuts when any member is under criticism in a way that no other profession including the fucking army does.  The most hilarious recent example of this is the police PR statement low-key implying that officers would shoot up a theater playing Hateful Eight because Tarantino showed up at an anti-police protest.  Furthermore, there have been some revelations, most notably in at least one Jon Oliver segment I don't care to dig up, that policemen have "confiscated" millions of dollars of assets from varying US citizens who have not been charged with crimes, mostly due to very liberal anti-drug legislation.  So regardless of the actual facts (which STILL contradict your and many other people's narrative about the police) its not surprise that people don't trust them.

This brings me to the my second point.  The current anti-police sentiment is a new-ish trend but its coming off of the tail end of an anti-police sentiment generated from the war on drugs.  Before that it was the civil rights movement, prohibition and probably a bunch of other things I don't remember.  Throughout US history its always been something.  People in the US have been hating cops before cops in the modern sense even existed, usually with at least some modicum of justification, to say nothing of the fact that early US law enforcement could be fucking brutal (which can mean very different things at different points in history).

All of this is not even touching the race issues that are endemic to the US as a whole that the police department basically inherited from some nastiness more-or-less originating with the failure of Reconstruction.  Which is complicated but very real don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
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Rolepgeek

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #11051 on: December 11, 2015, 09:41:33 pm »

Additional possible confounders:

Police officers who get shot will almost certainly receive medical attention very swiftly; this is less true of individuals shot by police officers, for various (mostly obvious) reasons.
Police officers often wear protective equipment where they are likely to be shot at; the average individual being shot likely does not.
Police officers usually take precautions so that they are the ones shooting, not the ones being shot at, as far as I know.
They're probably taught to shoot to kill. Multiple rounds, center of mass, pretty good likelihood of killing you.

More productively:

I'm fairly sure it's a systemic problem, in the way cops are taught and the stuff they have to handle, but I'm not sure how to make sure this gets fixed. Blue Wall of course, doesn't help, but really, neither does massively dropping recruitment rates. When your people have to work doubleshifts in what are perceived as dangerous neighborhoods...it's not an excuse, but it's an explanation. People who dislike the current state of the police force ought to try and get good people to work in it. People who won't reinforce the current system.

Really, I think, the problem is, that cops are people too. And people fuck up. And while the army drills discipline into you and is mostly separate in it's activities from the civilian population, more authority and more power, without having responsibility and caution (against overuse, rather than vice versa) forced down your throat leads to trouble. And since they're people, they want to protect their friends, through thick and thin. And that creates this atmosphere of the police department being unaccountable for it's failings, despite being just as prone to them as any other industry.

At least it hasn't become privatized yet.
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MetalSlimeHunt

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #11052 on: December 12, 2015, 01:23:15 am »

I do love how twisted it is that whenever things get so bad that they call out the national guard to keep order, often because the police intentionally escalated the situation, it tends to get a lot better since the national guard has something resembling actual discipline and a sense of duty.

It's a rough day when I can honestly say that I'd rather have the military doing the police's jobs.
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sluissa

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #11053 on: December 12, 2015, 08:22:18 am »

I do love how twisted it is that whenever things get so bad that they call out the national guard to keep order, often because the police intentionally escalated the situation, it tends to get a lot better since the national guard has something resembling actual discipline and a sense of duty.

It's a rough day when I can honestly say that I'd rather have the military doing the police's jobs.

The military aren't trained to treat civilians as the enemy. At least not civilians in their own country. I've seen the national guard vs the police during emergencies a number of times. The guard are a mix of relaxed and bored. Police are constantly on alert. Even for things as simple as directing traffic at an intersection during a power outage. Which... as far as police duties go, is pretty inoffensive even to the most anti-police person, and probably unlikely to draw violence toward them.
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Bohandas

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #11054 on: December 13, 2015, 05:10:02 pm »

You do realize that National Socialist or Soviet style denunciation programs are not too efficient, right?

I'm not talking about asking them to inform on their friends. I'm talking about finding some way to make them see their co-workers as enemies.

EDIT:
Also, you left "McCarthyist" out of that list.
« Last Edit: December 13, 2015, 05:12:01 pm by Bohandas »
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