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[Luke_Prowler]

Huzzah to the lynch mob! 

Thomas Jerfferson also said that during a time when the people really did have no alternative, we do now but no one wants to because real reform would take real effort

[DJ]

Has the NRA called for arming every citizen in Los Angeles yet?

Aren't they already armed?

[GlyphGryph]

No. Simply thinking that is extremely naive. Real change takes time, pressure from the public, and initiatives from up above. Stop thinking in the patterns of a goddamn Hollywood action scriptwriter. It's incredibly offensive to see such otherwise intelligent people indulge in pure childish power fantasies and populist violence-mongering.

My thinking is naive? Hah! Nothing I wrote except the first part would be of any interest to Hollywood, and that's the problem. In real life, "initiatives from up above" just plain isn't going to happen, ever, for a great many things, and unless the pressure from the public comes in a way that threatens the power of those up above, it's going to be ignored. Hell, even managing pressure from the public is difficult without acts most people would consider extreme - the vast majority of the public has far greater concerns than righting wrongs and fixing broken systems by replacing them with slightly less broken systems. They are busy with already difficult lives and more immediate and personal problems.

Hollywood likes to pretend its not hard. Holywood likes to pretend that killing bad people is enough. It's sometimes required, because the bad people have power and guns and will kill YOU if they think you might take that away. But as a solution, it's barely a first step. In order to dismantle a corrupt system, truly dismantle it, you need popular support. You need continued pressure. You need power. And you need better people to replace them with, or the ability to live without that system and insure it doesn't rise again.

Most coups stumble on that last point, and hard. Hollywood tends to ignore that step and all the hard bits in between. And it's not something that works often.

Violence is never more than the start of a solution, but it can be a required component to one... the one's who ultimately decide whether or not it's required are the ones opposing the solution.

(This is why Democracy was such a big deal! Suddenly, everyone agreed NOT to bring it that far, even if they were going to lose! And it works, so long as everyone plays by the rules. Sometimes, though... sometimes you get the Civil War, and "killing people" becomes a necessity because the other side won't settle for anything less)

Do I think that's the situation the LAPD is in? Probably not. But I don't think it's hard to see where someone is coming from if they were to go off the deep end and decide it was. When change from within is impossible, and passive change from without is impossible, your options are either acceptance or change by force. From the point of view of one person, with no other options, that option can be might attractive.

It won't work, of course. Like they say, "A few bad apples spoil the barrel." You can't kill your way out of a system that can create replacements as fast as you can kill them.

[fqllve]

And taking it one step further, perhaps reaching too far at this point, but I'll throw it out there anyway...  What if there is a deadline?  What if the environment is collapsing, with a point of no return in sight, and police corruption is one of the obstacles that must be overcome before anything will be done about it?

I'm bypassing any questions of plausibility and assuming here that environmental collapse is a clear and immediate danger. In that situation they would present a direct threat to a huge number of lives. But they aren't presenting that kind of threat here. Don't get me wrong, I think the LAPD is fucked up, but going straight from doing nothing to vigilante murder is too far. Where have the protests been? The appeals to the government? I don't think violence would be justified in any situation where people's lives weren't in immediate danger, but it certainly isn't if we haven't given recourse to other options.

Saying it's not going to work (and it might very well not) doesn't absolve you of at least trying.

[Flying Dice]

And taking it one step further, perhaps reaching too far at this point, but I'll throw it out there anyway...  What if there is a deadline?  What if the environment is collapsing, with a point of no return in sight, and police corruption is one of the obstacles that must be overcome before anything will be done about it?

I'm bypassing any questions of plausibility and assuming here that environmental collapse is a clear and immediate danger. In that situation they would present a direct threat to a huge number of lives. But they aren't presenting that kind of threat here. Don't get me wrong, I think the LAPD is fucked up, but going straight from doing nothing to vigilante murder is too far. Where have the protests been? The appeals to the government? I don't think violence would be justified in any situation where people's lives weren't in immediate danger, but it certainly isn't if we haven't given recourse to other options.

Saying it's not going to work (and it might very well not) doesn't absolve you of at least trying.

Gee, I don't think that I see any. Of course, I only searched for about twenty seconds, so I might have missed one.

Police corruption and brutality are systematic problems that people have been railing against for generations. There's been little/no noticeable change, and conditions have arguably worsened, at least in certain respects. I'm not explicitly going to advocate violence, especially revenge attacks against the families of police, but these issues have been raised time and again and nothing has changed.

[fqllve]

Well of course there are protests against police brutality. But where are the ones against the LAPD? And look at how small those protests were, 100 people, group of university students, 50 people, 22 people. The only one of any size was the Occupy Wall Street and they were protesting police brutality against Occupy Wall Street. And while OWS did do a good job of showcasing police going to far, they never seemed to have much credibility with the populace and anything they might have done on that front was overshadowed by criticism that they weren't actually doing anything and controversies over cities trying to stop them.

Seriously though if you're going to effect change of something as deeply rooted as corruption in the LAPD it's going to require a protest of more than a hundred people. And if someone's going to advocate escalation to violence, I don't really find that a sufficient attempt.

[Grakelin]

There are a number of organizations that could probably do with being targeted by a vigilante. The Los Angeles Police Department's emergency contact list probably isn't one of them.

[SalmonGod]

Would the 4 days of rioting in Anaheim about half a year ago count?  Sparked by police shooting and killing 6 people in a rather short period of time that most people didn't think deserved to be shot.

[mcclay]

One intersting thing that I've noticed is that this guy has partly accomsplished some of his goals already. He clearly hates the state that the LAPD is in and wants to do something about it. This incident will cause people to look at the LAPD and other departments with more scrutinty, which will hopefully bring about change and reform because of social outcry. All this guy really has to do is to stay hidden and keep this in the public eye and the police maybe reformed all on its own.

[Neonivek]

Well of course there are protests against police brutality. But where are the ones against the LAPD? And look at how small those protests were, 100 people, group of university students, 50 people, 22 people. The only one of any size was the Occupy Wall Street and they were protesting police brutality against Occupy Wall Street. And while OWS did do a good job of showcasing police going to far, they never seemed to have much credibility with the populace and anything they might have done on that front was overshadowed by criticism that they weren't actually doing anything and controversies over cities trying to stop them.

Seriously though if you're going to effect change of something as deeply rooted as corruption in the LAPD it's going to require a protest of more than a hundred people. And if someone's going to advocate escalation to violence, I don't really find that a sufficient attempt.

I think if you are looking for a place where people are most in favor of police brutality it is LA.

I remember one show I watched that was about police dogs and they asked them why they were using one to chase the man down when they obviously could... just walk up and nab him... and the police officer said it was to "punish" the criminal.

You forget that a lot of people are entirely for brutality towards criminals and even find laws against police brutality to be a bad thing.

[fqllve]

Would the 4 days of rioting in Anaheim about half a year ago count?  Sparked by police shooting and killing 6 people in a rather short period of time that most people didn't think deserved to be shot.

Yeah the Anaheim rioting is a much better example. And while I'm not sure any of the officers involved ever faced any punishment, that might have had some positive effects. It's too early to say but the Anaheim PD surely got some kind of message. It's a good start, but its still not enough to say "Ok, time to give up, let's resort to violence."

This incident will cause people to look at the LAPD and other departments with more scrutinty, which will hopefully bring about change and reform because of social outcry. All this guy really has to do is to stay hidden and keep this in the public eye and the police maybe reformed all on its own.

Or people will dismiss everything he said because he clearly went crazy and was maybe always crazy and the LAPD will become paranoid because they feel obviously targeted. If anything's going to put scrutiny on the LAPD its shit like opening fire on vehicles because they looked like the suspect's and not really anything Dorner himself did.

[SalmonGod]

Which pisses me off, because it's not a police officer's job to determine who is a criminal or what a fitting punishment is.  Placing that responsibility on people who are not in a position to do it properly only results in innocent people suffering for no reason.

Edit:

Did some quick digging on the subject of protests against police behavior in California.  It would be way too hairy trying to put together a comprehensive view of what that struggle has looked like.  I could easily waste my whole weekend on it.  Riots are easier to look up, and tend to be representative of deeply repressed discontent within a community.  When they're not the result of fanatic sports fans losing their shit  , they're usually the result of dissatisfaction with long-standing problems, where normal protest and legal action has failed to produce results.

Wikipedia's list of incidents of civil unrest in the United States seemed like the best starting point for that.  I can tell it's an incomplete list.  It doesn't include the Anaheim riots, for example.  But so far I've gathered that there have been 9 riots in the U.S. in the past 20 years in response to police behavior.  Five were in California, and two of those in the Los Angeles area.  One is among the worst riots in U.S. history.  The other is I believe still the most recent, and in response to stuff far worse than the Rodney King beating.  Seems pretty significant to me.

[SethCreiyd]

No. Simply thinking that is extremely naive. Real change takes time, pressure from the public, and initiatives from up above. Stop thinking in the patterns of a goddamn Hollywood action scriptwriter. It's incredibly offensive to see such otherwise intelligent people indulge in pure childish power fantasies and populist violence-mongering.

Childish as armed conflict may be, history is full of examples where it has led to drastic change (good or not).  The French, American, Belgian, Spanish and October revolutions come to mind as prominent examples.  I expect that the Chinese People's Liberation Army was a persuasive form of public pressure that had little to do with initiatives from above.  They certainly shook things up a bit, and I doubt even a single peasant conscript had ever heard of Hollywood.

Armed conflict -is- childish and rightfully hated, but to deny its historic potency is like denying that light comes to us from the sun.

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." -Thomas Jefferson

I'd pay a pretty penny to hear the thoughts of the various founding fathers on this. It sounds rather like what they intended the Second Amendment for.

I imagine he'd be very upset about the two innocent women who were shot by police wanting to deliver street justice to a suspect.  There's no excuse for the number of bullet holes in that blue truck when it's unimaginable that the women inside presented any kind of threat.  There needs to be some accountability for that, and most likely, no charges will be filed over this haphazard attempted killing gone awry, because what cops get away with is criminal. 

So a vindictive, well-armed, trained killer has been driven berserk after getting shafted by a powerful organization revealing itself day-by-day to be a self-serving force engaged in brutality and sitting above the law it is sworn to enforce - tell me how no one saw this coming?

[SalmonGod]

I've started reading through the manifesto.  You don't have to get very far to see that he's been unstable for some time.  He described early on how he put his hand around another officer's neck for saying "nigger".  He's a good example of someone who would be a really decent person if not for being insanely overzealous.

[Cthulhu]

I like how we all immediately assume this guy's telling the truth.  It's never "Crazy guy gets fired by the police and goes on a rampage," it's "Upstanding police officer gets shafted by LAPD devils and snaps."

This is Trayvon all over again, it doesn't matter what really happened because we've already decided what narrative we like the most.