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Author Topic: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice  (Read 445407 times)

Max™

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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #3585 on: June 21, 2020, 02:00:37 am »

I figured maybe dude just didn't know about shit happening elsewhere with cops being harmful, after being shown examples of it, figured maybe they were just really hard up on the value and utility of police forces, now... man I was kinda using you as practice for different ways to try and get my point across to those who are particularly certain that the way things are is not just the right, but the best way.

At this point though? Fuck man, I hope this isn't a commonly held position with this much certainty behind it, because I concede nothing, but I can't even begin to see where further exploring my position to try and explain it better is going to do any good here. I mean, why bother when it doesn't even elicit explanation on your part beyond "this is how it is, and it would be worse if it wasn't" apparently?

Good luck folks, and frustratingly fought Dwarf_Fever.
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Dwarf_Fever

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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #3586 on: June 21, 2020, 02:15:45 am »

In order for the populace to uphold the law, the populace must understand the law to which they are subject. Inevitably, they will understand this through mechanisms which are at best supplemented by texts, whether dictionaries (Nietzsche has a very interesting critique of these, by the way, and calls them the "columbarium of language") or philosophical writings.

Nietzsche is better thought about than taken at face value, but I am impressed that you not only recognized my sig but had a relevant thing to add to the discussion based on it.

I don't disagree with your thoughts on the law. Certainly there is value there. However, we were discussing the "thin blue line" and if it is a synonym for "us vs them" so I did not want to engage in muddying that water, because a traditional interpretation of the word is no doubt going to be more useful there.

At this point though? Fuck man, I hope this isn't a commonly held position with this much certainty behind it, because I concede nothing, but I can't even begin to see where further exploring my position to try and explain it better is going to do any good here. I mean, why bother when it doesn't even elicit explanation on your part beyond "this is how it is, and it would be worse if it wasn't" apparently?

I'm not saying police in the US won't benefit from reform, probably on a wide scale. However, what will make things worse is going about the reform in a reactionary, knee-jerk manner. The amount of funding that police alone receive is nowhere near enough to enact the sort of social change that the US requires to start fixing some of the systemic issues, and if you try to force that to happen on their dime, you will gut law enforcement with some bad results. On the flip side, skimming just a bit from the cops will not achieve any real results. For that you would have to, in my opinion, dip into the insane amount of money the military is getting, on the feds side.

My gut feeling is that most cities will pay lip service to reforms demanded, and cut cop budgets by a fraction to appease people, then go about business as before, basically just having made things a little bit worse long term, for peace in the mean time.

The article about Camden is inspiring, but I worry that most places may not have high union officer wages to cut, and I'm not big on getting rid of unions in the first place. Either way, hopefully they will continue to do well, and if so, they might be a model.
« Last Edit: June 21, 2020, 02:31:31 am by Dwarf_Fever »
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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #3587 on: June 21, 2020, 03:12:41 am »

Good luck folks, and frustratingly fought Dwarf_Fever.

Yeah, I'm out, too.  I don't exactly get troll vibes, but it feels about as pointless as a conversation with a troll.
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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #3588 on: June 21, 2020, 04:56:45 am »

You're out because someone is arguing their point in a seemingly logical and non-reactionary way?
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scriver

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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #3589 on: June 21, 2020, 05:59:51 am »

I will add that your sarcasm is unnecessary and indicates sophistry rather than good faith argument.

In his defense, so does overly purple and high-speaking paragraphs that talk around the point rather than to it.
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Frumple

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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #3590 on: June 21, 2020, 06:09:05 am »

You're out because someone is arguing their point in a seemingly logical and non-reactionary way?
Mate, someone equating protesters to sporadic rioters, among other stuff that's happened in the last few pages, ain't actually doing that. If that mess seems logical or non-reactionary, somethin' gone wrong with your measure of either.

Ain't the worst I've seen coming out of folks trying to downplay the problems with cops, for what it's worth, but it isn't worth much.
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scriver

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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #3591 on: June 21, 2020, 09:56:58 am »

Seize the means of procoption

Redistribute the police!
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Doomblade187

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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #3592 on: June 21, 2020, 11:13:42 am »

The longer the protests go on, the more reforms we get.
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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #3593 on: June 21, 2020, 01:27:02 pm »

In his defense, so does overly purple and high-speaking paragraphs that talk around the point rather than to it.

shoosh shoosh pap pap


Nietzsche is better thought about than taken at face value, but I am impressed that you not only recognized my sig but had a relevant thing to add to the discussion based on it.

I don't disagree with your thoughts on the law. Certainly there is value there. However, we were discussing the "thin blue line" and if it is a synonym for "us vs them" so I did not want to engage in muddying that water, because a traditional interpretation of the word is no doubt going to be more useful there.

*shakes hand*


I haven't been here for the past 200 pages, let alone the last 3, so I'm going to comment from that perspective to clarify my actual point:

-> The police are authorized to use lethal force, but we know a few things from experience. First of all, the actual use of that lethal force seems to devolve disproportionately on the mentally ill (50% of the deaths, according to a statistic I keep seeing floating around). And second, stop and frisk policies result in men of color being disproportionately targeted for, say, drug arrests, when we also know that the "average" drug user is white.

-> For this reason, two things seem very clear to me. 1. Police force is being misapplied to situations where social workers or the like would be better deployed. A gun is not an adequate response to people in crisis. 2. The police are being directed, through policies such as stop and frisk, to take actions that are based on ideology rather than facts. This ideology manifests itself through the written law in this country.

-> The maintenance of "law" and order is an acceptable grounds for the use of lethal force only as that law has legitimacy through the consent of those governed. The order currently defended by the police through occasional and, as of recently, highly visible applications of lethal force has a white supremacist, misogynistic, homophobic, and extractive capitalist bent, because those are the grounds through which this country was founded.

(This is a good place to mention the wavering between "life, liberty, and property" vs. "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" in one of our famous documents. Most of the founding fathers owned slaves.)

-> We also know that police departments in this country were founded originally as escaped slave patrols. This does not mean that they must currently have that form, but it's a historical note that we need to keep in mind, because it partially informs how educated citizens are going to conceive of those charged with policing their behavior. And, also, it might have something to do with how many police offers currently act. One of the assumptions in this structure is that the police officer is of a different kind of human being than the prospective criminal, which encourages "wolves and sheep" thinking. Policing would be very different if all police officers understood themselves to be fundamentally like the criminals they are tasked with thwarting.

-> We should assume as a premise that most of our law enforcement officers, lawmakers, and members of the public are fully steeped in the ideology of manifest destiny, white supremacy, ends-justify-the-means thinking that is pro-capital (in other words, I have the right to kill in order to defend or acquire property), and the necessity to use force to "resolve" situations, because teaching these four things is one of the central aims of the education system, along with obedience to authority whether legitimate or otherwise in the case of the public schools, and assumption of that authority in the case of the more privileged students of the private schools. This is a generalization, but I believe it is generally true, and should inform the policies chosen as we try to adjust the situation.


OK, so those are the premises of my argument, which make it clear that we have a problem which is larger than the police. Setting that larger problem aside for a moment, let's talk about the smaller problem of policing.

-> We know that crime, broadly, is often caused by one of two things. 1. Brain not yet fully developed + opportunities available. 2. Desperation.

-> If the true purpose of policing is to reduce crime, then we can call policing anything that a. changes the kinds of opportunities available or b. changes the desperation that is present.

-> We also know that a criminal record acquired in youth can cause desperation in middle age. Therefore there should be special care that all trials of young people -- say, below the age of 25 -- be treated with as much humanity, care, and thoughtfulness as possible, advocating for the person that that young person might become, and protecting their future. I claim that a young person should not be charged criminally based on the circumstances of their birth.

-> Similarly, all children must receive an excellent moral, political, and scientific education which teaches social responsibility, cultural competence, and problem-solving skills, including resilient responses to difference/conflict and, yes, de-escalation. Trade school must be available after 8th grade (which of course requires that the fundamentals of citizenship be taught before then).

-> All children must be offered two healthy meals a day through the public schools. This will require an increase in school budgets and a willingness to redistribute funds which are currently allocated on the basis of the property tax base. It is not acceptable that children receive education of variable quality based on their zip code. This is a crime against the child as a future member of the community.

-> In many countries, e.g. Finland, teaching is considered an honored profession requiring the equivalent of a masters' degree and the academic potential of a PhD-holder. Japanese riot police take months-long courses in martial arts, which do not just teach about force, but the proper attitude to it. As an experiment: if we are going to give human beings the authority to kill others, a right which we do confer, then maybe the people with that right should be required to demonstrate excellence first. Note that "excellence" is a different thing in this case than aristocratic and political power, in fact, the opposite.

-> The victims of juvenile crimes, who will often be juveniles themselves, must still receive adequate care and restitution. It is not Brett Kavanaugh's fault that he was a young man in a misogynistic society, but we need a way to recognize that crimes were committed so that amends can be made without destroying the life of the perpetrator. Community service hours might teach someone the virtue of toil, but they will not heal a person who was raped. Public recognition of crimes committed by the wealthy and privileged is critical for a democratic society.

-> Whatever is going on with doctors inappropriately prescribing painkillers has got to stop. This is a case where the law hasn't been nearly active enough in pursuing criminal behavior.

-> Similarly, worker exploitation a la Jeff Bezos. Why is there not a strong anti-trust suit against this guy? He is committing crimes?

-> We need to put an end to overpolicing policies a la stop and frisk in black and brown neighborhoods, three strikes laws, and broken window policing. All of these policies, along with a lack of de-escalation training, increase unnecessary arrests of young people; and through them, desperation. Those black and brown neighborhoods were often created through redlining, which, as an illegitimate law/practice, results in illegitimate and targeted results. If debtor's prisons are illegal, then why is targeting poor neighborhoods for increased police activity and then placing the target into prison an acceptable response to the crimes of poverty?


There will always be scenarios in which it seems appropriate to meet force with force, but I think that the problems we use police departments to "solve" are mostly caused by a system which legitimizes and prioritizes the use of violence. Delegitimize and deprioritize the use of violence in other parts of the system and policing looks like both a symptom and a cause of the disease.
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Dwarf_Fever

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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #3594 on: June 21, 2020, 01:58:38 pm »

That job we pay them to do, keep "law and order" isn't what they're doing by killing people

Gosh, really?

Did you look at the charts I posted side by side showing civilian gun deaths vs law enforcement gun deaths in the US compared to other developed nations? Did you notice how similar the "jump" from other nations to USA looked in both cases, civil vs law enforcement?
Despite all the individual issues being cited in this thread (which, while being problematic, are being generated by around 900,000 police officers, if you include part timers with arrest powers), do you have any actual evidence that the same underlying causes which generate civilian gun deaths aren't a much bigger factor for this situation?
Of course police reform could be beneficial (as reforming anything can be) but why would we place special "systemic" blame on the police rather than focusing on gun control, a culture where violence is glorified, and similar issues?
Are you really going to talk about an "us vs them" culture without mentioning the source of all the anti-police rhetoric on news media, social media and hip-hop? How are you going to ignore all that and then ask "why don't they love us like we love them?" Have you even considered that maybe the situation is as frightening to law enforcement as anyone else, or are you intentionally choosing to demonize them so you can comfortably continue on in your polarized 'murrican mindset? "Fuck the Police" indeed.
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Dwarf_Fever

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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #3595 on: June 21, 2020, 02:14:40 pm »

-> The police are authorized to use lethal force, but we know a few things from experience. First of all, the actual use of that lethal force seems to devolve disproportionately on the mentally ill (50% of the deaths, according to a statistic I keep seeing floating around).

Many states scrapped whatever mental health institutions they had over the years if they really had that much to start with. As a result, many homeless are also mentally ill. Rebuilding those as a special focus on public healthcare would be spiffing, and help police not to have to deal with people they're not especially trained to handle.

-> The maintenance of "law" and order is an acceptable grounds for the use of lethal force only as that law has legitimacy through the consent of those governed. The order currently defended by the police through occasional and, as of recently, highly visible applications of lethal force has a white supremacist, misogynistic, homophobic, and extractive capitalist bent, because those are the grounds through which this country was founded.

A criminal can't just say "I did not agree to the law for which you are arresting me." The law is black and white, your accusations of politically incorrect mindset are something else entirely, and the country was certainly not founded on them.

-> We also know that police departments in this country were founded originally as escaped slave patrols.

Please have a care when you throw around "facts" like this. That was generally only true in the south, and not of all police departments there, either. Additionally, this was 150 years ago. You could probably study the police stations that were founded as "Slave Catchers" and compare their levels of issues with those of the stations around them, but I feel pretty confident this is going to end up demonstrably meaningless rhetoric. (Outside of the background racism in those areas in general, which you have to account for.)

-> In many countries, e.g. Finland, teaching is considered an honored profession requiring the equivalent of a masters' degree and the academic potential of a PhD-holder. Japanese riot police take months-long courses in martial arts, which do not just teach about force, but the proper attitude to it.

This is also a valuable thought, and most police are well under-trained, but it does not align with the general "defund the police" notion without a lot of further consideration.

-> We need to put an end to overpolicing policies a la stop and frisk in black and brown neighborhoods, three strikes laws, and broken window policing.

Black neighborhoods are patrolled disproportionately because black populations are disproportionately poor, and poor people are disproportionately prone to resorting to crime. This does not imply racist policies, but it does imply a vicious cycle of poverty impacting black populations more than others, simply because all of them happened to have started there in the first place. (This is in the lap of the north as much as anyone, since they went in GW Bush style to just fuck everything up and go "it'll probably sort itself out" afterwards.)

It also means, unfortunately, that patrolling "black neighborhoods" is more often justified.

However, I don't necessarily agree that they are overpoliced by virtue of being black neighborhoods. I do agree that poverty is a problem in the US in general (the "american dream" has been dying for a while) and blacks in particular could use the help to get out of it.
« Last Edit: June 21, 2020, 02:29:06 pm by Dwarf_Fever »
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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #3596 on: June 21, 2020, 02:23:27 pm »

I don’t know what you are trying to argue about.  But... police are not above the law.  They are not judge, jury and executioner.

Society should not tolerate the ‘law keepers’, covering up extrajudicial executions, ‘giving culprits a rough ride’, or manufacturing wrong-doing to put someone in jail and cover their own arses.

But here we are, with our ‘law and order’ police, actively protecting cops when they do these things and get caught.  Time and time again, we have seen the police cover up such incidents, including actively putting a gun/toy-looks-like-gun/drugs into people’s hands(or similar) to justify their actions after the fact.

If you believe letting them continue doing this is a price worth paying for the continuation of this ‘security’ you know now, then there is no convincing you.
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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #3597 on: June 21, 2020, 02:24:48 pm »

If you believe letting them continue doing this is a price worth paying for the continuation of this ‘security’ you know now, then there is no convincing you.

Please don't put words in my mouth.
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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #3598 on: June 21, 2020, 03:13:20 pm »

RE: me being "against" oversight- I'm not going to defend that misappropriation of that point. We need to look at fundamentally what's caused the need for it so badly

I think we agree we need external oversight. I misappropriated your point because your point misappropriated mine. The humor of the irony was, unfortunately, lost.

Since per the 'thin blue line' ideology that you've so generously handwaved, 'ratting out' your own doesn't work.

Right, you're talking about the "blue wall of silence" which is a problem, but which is also different from the "thin blue line."

This behavior, which creates the fundamental need for oversight, is what people are protesting.

Oversight in government is a basic need and not created from any specific behaviour. This is like building a car without brakes and then blaming the driver for hitting someone. "If we didn't have this terrible behaviour, we wouldn't need brakes." No mate, you have this terrible behaviour because you put a driver in a crappy car with little training. Obviously there will also be some drivers out there that just enjoy hitting things. You'll have to separate these two issues in your mind in order to effectively fix things.

The police brought the confrontation to them.

Things aren't usually that simple in real life, though.

Thin blue line- lawful civilization is order, lawless civilization is chaos. [...] That's an us-vs-them mentality.

Or maybe it's a law vs chaos mentality? I don't choose to equate the concept of justice with individuals, and I feel like you're clearly jumping to conclusions in order to generalize negative perceptions about the police.

RE: Modern treatise of government, checks and balances- the police aren't the government, or we'd have to conclude we live in a police state. This is a non-starter.

The point I was making is that police are a part of the government, and the government is in need of oversight. By extension, the police are in need of oversight, and this has to be external to be effective. This is not a problem unique to police, just a fact of government.

« Last Edit: June 21, 2020, 03:25:13 pm by Dwarf_Fever »
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scriver

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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #3599 on: June 21, 2020, 03:42:06 pm »

Since per the 'thin blue line' ideology that you've so generously handwaved, 'ratting out' your own doesn't work.

Right, you're talking about the "blue wall of silence" which is a problem, but which is also different from the "thin blue line."

If they aren't the same thing, then what is the difference?
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