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F is for Fascism (Ferguson MO)

1 millionth "not guilty" verdict again shows that the legal standard for prosecuting cops is way too fucking high. We're seeing graphic evidence that police officers are incapable of following their own procedures without killing innocent civilians. It's about fucking time that we criminalize their procedures and force them to change how they handle the risk of life threatening confrontation.
 
Buddy of mine posted this on Facebook. Excellent take:

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On propensity of juries to acquit police officers: this is a societal issue, we shouldn’t jump to blame individual jurors, it won’t change any time soon so long as the public perception of what police officers jobs are like is so grossly disconnected from the reality of their jobs.


Due to PR for decades and media portrayals of police work focusing mostly on the high intensity events (from CNN to Hollywood, reporting of news to fictional), people generally believe that a police officer’s job is far more intense and dangerous than it actually is. Maybe we should call it the “C.O.P.S. Problem” because that tv show, which so dominated the public conscious for more than a decade, portrayed police doing their “normal” jobs, but of course 98% or more of their camera footage never made it on air. And so we have a public that largely considers police to be frequently in serious danger and willing to put their lives on the line for the public. They are seen as heroic and on the same plane as forward deployed military. Truth is the median experience for a cop is far more mundane than this and the danger is grossly overstated. Their job is surely more dangerous than mine, and probably more dangerous than yours, but it is much less dangerous than you probably think. It’s hard to quantify the danger, but it’s fair to say that the median officer will face a serious threat once in every 10,000 or so calls. Fire fighters, for example, are in far greater danger when doing their job. None of this is to denigrate the police as an institution or to devalue the work that they do, it shouldn’t be seen as an attack to discuss the factual realities of what they do.


And so, once we take this generally held misconception, and we put these people on juries and give them actual power over the liberty and life of a police officer while assessing that officer’s active duty shooting, feelings of guilt and hesitation are going to creep into the brain in ways they don’t creep into jurors’ brains with the general criminal defendant being on trial. And so what I think likely happens for many many jurors is a thought process (largely subconscious) that goes something like this: “well this looks really bad, I don’t understand why he didn’t just do x y or z, but his job is so dangerous that I can’t even begin to understand it and what would be going through his brain in this moment, and so rather than destroy his life, maybe I should just err on the side of caution. Because who am I, as a common citizen who never risks anything for my community, to stand in judgement over someone who does on a daily basis?” And before jumping in and claiming that you wouldn’t do the same, consider that when you’re viewing one of these videos and reaching a conclusion, your conclusion carries with it no actual power. That officer won’t actually be spending his adult life in prison because of it.


So what’s the solution ? A better informed public. An effort by Hollywood to resist the urge to cash in on police movies that feed the misconception. It would be nice of course for this problem of juries responding so differently to police defendants to be rendered moot by the system changing In ways that these situations just don’t occur so often...but that’s another topic and a much longer post.
 
riscdeac said:
Any thoughts?

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/b...ale-lakes-deputy-shooting-20171208-story.html
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i think in most countries, that guy would not have been shot. In this country, the dude was a complete idiot to assault the officer like that and signed his own death warrant when the second officer pulled up and he still would not back down. So I don't exactly feel sorry for the guy, but at the same time I can recognize that there are other ways to deal with an amped up - but unarmed - attacker.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/london-police-knife-wielding-suspect_us_56636dc5e4b08e945fefcacd
 
Inside a secret 2014 list of hundreds of L.A. deputies with histories of misconduct
It was a critical piece of evidence: an inmate’s shirt, bloodied from a jailhouse brawl.

When it went missing, Deputy Jose Ovalle had an idea.

He picked out a similar shirt, doused it with taco sauce and snapped a photograph, which was booked into evidence with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, law enforcement records show.

When confronted later, the deputy admitted to faking the blood.

Ovalle kept his job, but his name was placed on a secret Sheriff’s Department list that now includes about 300 deputies with histories of dishonesty and similar misconduct, a Los Angeles Times investigation has found. The list is so tightly controlled that it can be seen by only a handful of high-ranking sheriff’s officials. Not even prosecutors can access it.

Amid growing public scrutiny over police misconduct, Sheriff Jim McDonnell wants to give the names on the list to prosecutors, who are required by law to tell criminal defendants about evidence that would damage the credibility of an officer called as a witness. But McDonnell’s efforts have ignited a fierce legal battle with the union that represents rank-and-file deputies.
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land of the free.

 
[h=1]Bexar County Deputy Shoots, Kills 6-year-old Schertz Boy While Chasing Felon[/h]https://m.sacurrent.com/the-daily/archives/2017/12/22/bexar-county-deputy-shoots-kills-6-year-old-schertz-boy-while-chasing-felon

A Bexar County sheriff's deputy killed a 6-year-old boy Thursday afternoon while chasing down a wanted felon at a Schertz mobile home park.
The felon, 30-year-old Amanda Lenee Jones, was trying to break into the boy's family trailer at Pecan Grove Manufactured Home Community when she was apprehended by four deputies. They fatally shot her.

One of their bullets, however, pierced through the trailer wall and hit the boy, identified as Kameron Prescott. Kameron, who was home early after his Cibolo elementary school released students at noon for Christmas break, was later pronounced dead at University Hospital. According to Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar, Jones had no apparent connection with Kameron or his family — she was just trying to evade police.
 
oh man, that's so sad.

Worth noting how other residents reacted to the woman:

Rhonda Campbell, 58, was in her bed watching TV when she heard a loud boom. The woman eluding police had forced open her front door, breaking the door hinge into splinters.

Anthony Fritcher, 33, was closing the back door when the front door was flung open and the wanted woman walked in, demanding the keys to a Kia Soul parked in the driveway.

Fritcher, along with Campbell and her husband, all charged toward the woman, who then ran off the porch and curved around the yard and out of sight.

Valerie Mills, 58, another resident of the mobile home park, walked outside her home on Oak Bloom after hearing helicopters in the area. At that point, a woman approached her.

"She ran towards me, asking for help, waving her arms at me," Mills said.

"She was about 20 feet away from me. I just turned around and walked off."
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They didn’t shoot her dead.

What kind of callous idiot shoots at a trailer home?

One who doesn’t have to deal with consequences.
 
Right, a (seemingly unarmed?) family rushed her and another woman turned away nonplussed. Four police officers opened fire.

"Right now, what I’m dealing with is, is a tragic accident," Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar said at a news conference Friday, although he added the shooting is still under investigation and other authorities like the district attorney’s office would make a final determination.

"In my opinion, it's a tragic accident that led to the death of this young man," he said.
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"young man" wtf, he's referring to a six year old child.

171222-kameron-prescott-714p-rs_e70bfdbe78f603a1ff23be3cce03e2e9.nbcnews-ux-600-700.jpg


Link
 
Love it when the cops protect you by firing their weapons at your home, killing your children. Very sound strategy of enforcing the law.
 
Don’t worry. They’re going to investigate it and not punish the people responsible.
 
Heart breaking story of a teen’s police-assisted suicide. A cop decided he couldn’t stop a 5-2, 120 lbs 15 year old boy with a crowbar without using a gun.
————

The mourners filed toward the funeral home’s white double doors, some of them in black suits or dresses and others in orange T-shirts, because that was Ruben’s favorite color.
As they passed, a woman handed out copies of an open letter that Ruben’s father, Oscar Urbina, had written to Officer Robert Choyce, the seven-year veteran of the police force who shot his son.
“A Letter Of Forgiveness,” it was titled, but most of what came next was laced with fury.
“Regardless of the circumstances surrounding my child death....he didn’t do anything wrong...you did,” wrote Urbina, who’d been traveling when Ruben was killed. “The difference between you and us is that...you are GUILTY. Our baby is innocent.”
Urbina contended that the officer, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, should have used a Taser or pepper spray to stop Ruben. His older boy, Oscar, agreed, but he also believed the encounter ended exactly the way his brother intended it to.
Already, Prince William County Commonwealth’s Attorney Paul B. Ebert had concluded the shooting was justified because, he said, Ruben “was ready, willing and able to inflict death or serious bodily harm upon the responding officers.” Ebert said he considered it a classic “suicide by cop,” the only one involving a juvenile he could remember in his 52-year career as a prosecutor.
“You wouldn’t think a young person would want to commit suicide by cop,” Ebert said. “He had to be thoughtful, extremely premeditated.”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/clas...c8f33a-deaf-11e7-bbd0-9dfb2e37492a_story.html
 
This is so sad.

 
Call of Duty gaming community points to ‘swatting’ in deadly Wichita police shooting

Wichita police say a man was fatally shot by an officer who was responding to a call about a homicide and hostage situation that turned out to be false.

Officers went to the 1000 block of McCormick, preparing for a hostage situation and they “got into position,” he said.

“A male came to the front door,” Livingston said. “As he came to the front door, one of our officers discharged his weapon.”
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According to posts on Twitter, two gamers were arguing when one threatened to target the other with a swatting call. The person who was the target of the swatting gave the other gamer a false address, which sent police to a nearby home instead of his own, according to Twitter posts.
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Arrest the guy who filed the false police report and lock up the dumbass cop who pulled the trigger.
 
Good read. Should be posted on the Role of the Media thread though.
 
We Were Wrong about Stop-and-Frisk

Today in New York City, use of stop-and-frisk, which the department justified via the 1968 Terry v. Ohio Supreme Court ruling, has crashed. Yet the statistics are clear: Crime is lower than ever. It’s possible that crime would be even lower had stop-and-frisk been retained, but that’s moving the goalposts. I and others argued that crime would rise. Instead, it fell. We were wrong.

Major crime in New York City has continued to decline almost across the board in the four years of the de Blasio administration, to the lowest rates since New York City began keeping extensive records on crime in the early 1960s. Crime is literally off the charts — the low end of the charts. To compare today’s crime rate to even that of ten years ago is to observe a breathtaking decline.
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