• Welcome to OGBoards 10.0, keep in mind that we will be making LOTS of changes to smooth out the experience here and make it as close as possible functionally to the old software, but feel free to drop suggestions or requests in the Tech Support subforum!

F is for Fascism (Ferguson MO)

Damning article from The Atlantic about the culture of corruption in the Chicago PD and city of Chicago.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics...pt-system-that-killed-laquan-mcdonald/417723/

Protestors want accountability for investigators whose inexplicable slowness allowed Van Dyke to remain on desk detail and to collect a paycheck from taxpayers. And the civic derelictions of duty run even deeper. They implicate Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the city council, Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, rank-and-file cops, Pat Camden, who speaks for Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police, and members of the press who credulously report police-union talking points.

All played a part in a corrupt status quo. Until it is reformed, more Chicagoans will die needlessly at the hands of police. The failures are especially inexcusable in the aftermath of both a relatively recent police torture scandal and an off-the-books holding facility scandal where rights to an attorney were willfully denied. Each scandal illustrated the importance of sunlight in the Chicago police department.
Click to expand...

...the data for 2015 shows that in more than 99 percent of the thousands of misconduct complaints against Chicago police officers, there has been no discipline. From 2011 to 2015, 97 percent of more than 28,500 citizen complaints resulted in no officer being punished, according to the files.
Although very few officers were disciplined in the years covered by the data, African-American officers were punished at twice the rate of their white colleagues for the same offenses, the data shows. And although black civilians filed a majority of the complaints, white civilians were far more likely to have their complaints upheld, according to the records.
​
Click to expand...

Once you begin digging through the records of individual officers, patterns of abuse on the part of certain men and women begin to emerge that should stun even the most determined denier of racism and police conduct. Officer Raymond Piwnicki, for instance, who works on the Southwest Side, has had sixty-eight different complaints lodged against him since the early 2000s. In one of only three instances in which institutional review found the charges to be sustained, an off-duty Piwnicki, who is white, was found to have instigated an altercation with a black man and his wife as all of them tried to board an elevator. Piwnicki swung at the man, pushed the woman in the chest, and told the man to “Shut up, you fucking coon, you fucking cluck, I do whatever the fuck I want to a fuckin’ nigger coon.” The following year, sustaining a second charge against Piwnicki for abusing a young man and calling him a nigger, a reporting investigator noted that “P[olice] O[fficer] Piwnicki has clearly exhibited a pattern of using profane and derogatory language in his contact with citizens.”
Over and over again, Piwnicki and other high-volume offenders have been brought before investigators because of citizen complaints of abuse. A year ago, an investigation into CPD “impunity” by Truthout found Piwnicki the highest offender in the department, with fifty-five misconduct complaints in just five years. Yet he received precisely zero disciplinary penalties for that misconduct. (Indeed, the Truthout investigators reported, Piwnicki was “awarded the Superintendent's Award of Valor in 2013, for a shooting in which he is now a defendant in a civil suit that cites his ‘deliberate indifference’ to a fellow officer's deadly force.”) Together, repeat offenders like Piwnicki comprise about 10 percent of the CPD’s personnel, but are responsible for roughly 30 percent of misconduct complaints. What this demonstrates more than anything is that citizen complaints – particularly those of black citizens – have no systematic value in the eyes of the police department.
​
Click to expand...

So tell me again how #alllivesmatter.
 
Four men charged over shooting of Black Lives Matter protesters in Minneapolis

All potential jurors called Monday morning indicate they are familiar with Freddie Gray case

I posted this for something the writer noted about the other cases going on at the courtroom:

On Monday, one case after another was postponed in Judge Emanuel Brown's courtroom. The trial of two men, Marcus Johnson and Marshon Floyd, was postponed because the prosecutor in the case wasn't available. Johnson and Floyd have been incarcerated since October 2014 on assault charges, and their attorneys complained that the case had already been postponed "numerous times."
Click to expand...
 
If the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev case was allowed to be tried in Boston (note: I don't believe it should have been) then this case can definitely be tried in Baltimore
 
Facing heat on Laquan McDonald killing, Emanuel tries to buy time with police task force

Appointing a committee to look into an issue is a tried-and-true tactic elected officials long have employed to buy time and breathing room when faced with a scandal or crisis. In this case, Emanuel will give the yet-to-be-named panel four months to make recommendations for changes in the Chicago Police Department.

Calling for a task force is unlikely to alleviate repeated calls for McCarthy's firing or tamp down the #resignrahm hashtag that has surged on social media in recent days. But it gives Emanuel something else to talk to reporters and the public about other than the viral video of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald being shot repeatedly by Officer Jason Van Dyke, much of it with the teenager lying in the middle of Pulaski Road on the Southwest Side.
Click to expand...

Cover-Up in Chicago

We can surmise that each had particular reasons. Mayor Emanuel was fighting for re-election in a tight race. Superintendent McCarthy wanted to keep his job. Ms. Alvarez needed the good will of the police officers who bring her cases and testify in court.

None of that alters the fact that these actions have impeded the criminal justice system and, in the process, Chicago's leaders allowed a first-degree murder suspect, now incarcerated pending bail, to remain free for over a year on the city's payroll.
Click to expand...
 
Watching Rahm's press conference. He says that there are deep and systemic problems. (So much for one bad apple.) But also says he fully supports McCarthy and his record, but is asking him to resign to move the city forward.

Rahm says that there needs to be a way to identify repeat offenders in the police department and correct their behavior. A reporter points out that the cop who shot Laquan McDonald had 18 complaints on his record. Rahm responds by talking about culture in the police department. He's talking about culture a lot. But still, no problems with McCarthy.

Ha, he just talked about his task force, and how he hopes they will bring sustained level of change, and then turned and walked out.
 
I think Rahm's political career is done after this. At least it should be.
 
avalon said:
Watching Rahm's press conference. He says that there are deep and systemic problems. (So much for one bad apple.) But also says he fully supports McCarthy and his record, but is asking him to resign to move the city forward.

Rahm says that there needs to be a way to identify repeat offenders in the police department and correct their behavior. A reporter points out that the cop who shot Laquan McDonald had 18 complaints on his record. Rahm responds by talking about culture in the police department. He's talking about culture a lot. But still, no problems with McCarthy.

Ha, he just talked about his task force, and how he hopes they will bring sustained level of change, and then turned and walked out.
Click to expand...

That seems very familiar.

 
In that it's a classic way to act like you're doing something while ignoring your critics?
 
PhDeac said:
In that it's a classic way to act like you're doing something while ignoring your critics?
Click to expand...

Right. Buys time, gives up no actual power, can be populated with yes-men, makes you look like you care. Task forces don't ever actually do anything. Purely cosmetic.
 
I don't believe the Tsarnaev case should have been tried in Boston. The sentiment up here from most people seemed to be kill this guy as quickly as possible. He and his brother resulted in the city literally being shut down for a day. They should have moved it. Motion for new trial hearing was this morning I believe at the federal courthouse.
 
The Guardian is doing a five part piece on a county in CA where police have killed more people per capita than any other in 2015.

The County: the story of America's deadliest police

A recent history of deadly police shootings by Bakersfield police can be told through the experiences of a single officer.

Rick Wimbish, a Bakersfield native described by one person who worked with him as “a cop to his marrow”, is a department veteran of almost a quarter of a century. For several of those years, his father Mack, a retired state highway patrolman, was the sheriff of all Kern County. Both declined to be interviewed.

Wimbish, who receives a total pay and benefits package of almost $200,000 a year, instructs other officers and leads educational classes with young children in the county on the role of a police officer in the community.

Studies have found that most American police officers make it through entire careers without firing their service weapons. But Wimbish, 54, has been involved in at least four fatal shootings in two years, including that of De La Rosa, during which Wimbish deployed his Taser. None of the four men killed in these confrontations were armed with a deadly firearm themselves. One, a violent criminal, had a BB gun; another was holding a tire iron.
Click to expand...

The story goes on to describe the first, where he was the most senior officer in a group that shot and killed two people, a fugitive and the confidential informant that was helping them catch the fugitive.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top