Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Jopax]

And people wonder why there is so much hate for law enforcement as of late.It's not the mistakes so much as bullshit that they do to cover them up.

[Funk]

with the rise in number of swat teams,  call out and no knock raids  this type of events, happens far to often.

every little town want to have a swat team, and Federal grants and free equipment get them up and running, but  the more traditional uses of SWAT teams— emergency situations like barricades, hostage takings,snipers and bank robberies are so few all thay do is drug raids.

[Bohandas]

with the rise in number of swat teams,  call out and no knock raids  this type of events, happens far to often.

every little town want to have a swat team, and Federal grants and free equipment get them up and running, but  the more traditional uses of SWAT teams— emergency situations like barricades, hostage takings,snipers and bank robberies are so few all thay do is drug raids.

So in other words the SWAT teams usually serve no useful purpose at all.

[Lord Shonus]

A pretty accurate statement. Besides the advantage of potential Federal cash, smaller town pride themselves on their independence, so in the unlikely event that they ever need a SWAT team, they don't want to have to call up to get one. Once they have one, however, they don;t want to see it sitting around wasting cash.

[Aqizzar]

A pretty accurate statement. Besides the advantage of potential Federal cash, smaller town pride themselves on their independence, so in the unlikely event that they ever need a SWAT team, they don't want to have to call up to get one. Once they have one, however, they don;t want to see it sitting around wasting cash.

Which is pretty clearly demonstrated in that video, with commentary from people who know what they're doing.  Those guys clearly had little if any actual SWAT training, and just wanted a good excuse to unlock the armor cabinet.  They look like a paintball team fumbling around.

[mainiac]

SWAT overuse is serious a problem.  They busted into the home of a mayor of a town near to me last year, arrested him and his entire family and then shot their small dogs in the back as the dogs ran away scared.  Thankfully, a few people lost their jobs for that particular fiasco, but we can't all be mayors of small towns.

If I ran a small town police department, the first thing I would do would tell the SWAT team that they need to become real cops or clear out their desks.

There's a saying that 10% of cops give the other 90% a bad name.  I'd buy into that saying.  But the fact is that is way, way too high a percentage.  Cops are our primary interaction with the law and the law isn't going to work if we have a very reasonable fear that when we see a cop, some asshole with a badge and a gun is going to give us a hard time.

[Bohandas]

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes

[Aqizzar]

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes

That's really more prescient that your cynicism tells you it is.  The main problem with why events like this keep happening is that there is effectively no structure for policing police forces.  All investigations are internal investigations, and even if there are state-level mechanisms for such an investigation, they rarely if ever act and come back with real charges even less, because they're almost all former local officers themselves.  And like you can see from some of the actual news article's extended links, no matter what a police officer does, even blatantly illegal acts off the job (like the Pima County attorney who defended an officer in a kidnapping case), they will always close ranks and refuse to allow any information in or out that they don't want.  Even if an officer is convicted of a real crime (same case), police unions still act like an aggrieved party and refuse to denounce them.

It's ultimately a problem that all police forces have basically no check on their activities except themselves, and any outside mechanism that might be able to act against them, like state Attorney Generals and such, are either products of the same system themselves, or enthralled with the myth of moral infallibility.

[Nilik]

If it makes you feel any better it varies greatly by state, and Arizona is well-known for its gestapo-esque police force.

[sluissa]

Something I've noticed is that the American police are growing increasingly estranged from the populace. Both police and civilians have a strong "us vs them" mentality. There seems to be a sense among both of them that the other party is out to get them.
There also seems to be a sense that this is the natural way of things, although I could be wrong here.

With a few exceptions, this is how I've always felt with the local police around here. I've never had a pleasant run-in with the police except for a couple of occasions when they came to my elementary school and did an anti-drug thing, in that case it was obviously PR and obviously trying to make themselves seem nice around the kids.

Even the few times I've needed their help with something, I came away feeling like I had done something wrong (even though I hadn't, other than simply asked them to do their jobs.) I'm not saying they're all like this, I have known a few that are nice, at least once you get to know them, but outside of a personal relationship with them, like I said, nothing but bad feelings.

On my visit to Europe though, things were completely different. Now, I wasn't there long enough, nor had enough contact with the police over there to make a informed opinion, but the couple of times i had to deal with them, and then adding in the security at their airports, I never felt scared, or worried or even bothered by their presence. They were there doing their jobs, and part of me even felt a slight relief at it. There was a bit of annoyance at the traffic laws (especially the speeding cameras in some areas) but I never felt like the police there were a threat or bullies. Forgive me if my opinion is completely off, but it was just something I noticed. I also noticed this, although to a lesser extent in Mexico, and the police there carried SMGs on their hips. Somehow their demeanor didn't make that seem like anything to be worried about though. Somehow that submachine gun worried me less than the tazers our police carry. Silly, maybe, stupid, quite possibly, but that's just how I felt, and for me, the feeling I get from having those sorts of officials around is one of the more important things to me. I'd much rather feel reassurance than fear and paranoia. But again, maybe I was just too ignorant about those areas, and too knowledgable about my own to feel the right emotions in the places I wasn't familiar with.

[Lord Shonus]

I suspect that much of that is because you were a tourist. Cops in any tourist-heavy location tend to be able to recognize them, and take painsnot to hurt the tourist trade because so much of their salary can be affected by it.

[sluissa]

I suspect that much of that is because you were a tourist. Cops in any tourist-heavy location tend to be able to recognize them, and take painsnot to hurt the tourist trade because so much of their salary can be affected by it.

While I did spend some time in tourist heavy areas in Europe, most of it was not. I have family there and they live in a more rural area where I spent the majority of my time.

Mexico, however, was nothing but tourist areas, so I won't argue there.

[Sensei]

I spent a little while trying to figure out what painsnot was.

Anyway, there needs to be more checks and balances on people with that much firepower.

[nil]

Blame can not only be laid on police, but on the judges who issue these warrants.  As far as I know there's nothing (save various political pressures of course) preventing a judge from simply refusing to issue a no-knock warrant, and I'm sure police will take a regular warrant if that's all the judge is willing to give them.  I don't blame the judicial system for trying this whole no-knock warrant experiment, but the experiment has clearly failed--the benefits (reputed to include safety of the officers, but in practice limited to preventing destruction of evidence) simply don't outweigh the costs and risks.

Hell, if you live in a place where judges are elected...

[Sensei]

It's dubious whether they had a warrant for this.