I was thinking he looked like a bald, mustachioed Benedict Cumberbatch.
"Again," Burbank says, "we should be asking, what's the least amount of force we can get away with here, and still be safe?"
As for the service of drug warrants, Burbank rejects the conventional wisdom held by so many police departments around the country that aggressive raids make the process safer for everyone. He says the goal in drug investigations should be about improving quality of life and making neighborhoods safe, not necessarily making arrests and racking up convictions....
"I have two goals in policing. First, we need to humanize our police forces. We aren't an occupying force. We are a part of the community. And we need to understand that to do our jobs, we sometimes need to expose ourselves to a little bit of risk. Otherwise we end up doing our jobs out of paranoia, not out of dignity and respect for the community," he says.
Good lord. I think I have a new law enforcement crush. DiBlasio's going to need to hire someone -- I wonder if this guy wants to move to NY?
Formatting error -- everything but the last paragraph is the article, the last bit is me.
Jesus, is a police chief allowed to sound that reasonable?
I was ready to reply to 2 that a particular kind of mustache makes lots of ordinary faces look like that - a 70s effect - but I clicked through and you're absolutely right.
Of course, this is a series of quotes -- I don't actually know anything about how he's been operating.
It's absolutely crucial to have some people like this in power at police departments. Because the DHS-driven trend to give cops military weaponry and body armor and encourage them to see themselves as an occupying force surrounded by treacherous enemies seems like it would lead to a certain type of person being attracted to the job, the type of person who hates humanity in general and thirsts for blood, which can become a vicious cycle.
For reference, deep-red sentencing reform: http://prospect.org/article/prison-reform-no-longer-politically-toxic. Certainly viewable as a bit of a pendulum swing back toward Burkean conservatism from racial revanchism.
You know, reading that, I certainly felt like I could come around to a more nuanced view of policing and police officers if this guy's opinions were the rule rather than the exception. It does seem like, by the time you get up to command level, most cops are pretty chill in a lot of respects. But there is this ideology within police departments (it seems to me) that you have to pander to the lowest common denominator of head-bashers, or people will think you're weak and the police union will walk all over you. I don't really have a solid idea of how accurate that perception is, but it didn't arise in a vacuum.
I mean, obviously, we still have to retain some of our critical faculties here, otherwise we're back to "...and some would call him 'pig'" territory. Obviously, as an anarchist, I think the police, as we know them today, are always an unjustifiable impediment to liberty. Even if they're fluffy Norwegian cops handing out pastries to the heroin addicts or something. Take his drug house example -- now, obviously, it's pretty dangerous to openly confront serious hard drug dealers, because the whole scope of their interactions with the rest of society has been irretrievably poisoned and militarized. If there was some way around that, such that neighbors could get together and sit down with the dealers and explain their concerns, maybe you wouldn't always get a perfect solution, but a lot fewer people would be getting shot over it.
I think I mentioned the drug case that was in the MPLS paper a couple of years ago, where they sent some "kingpin" to prison for 25-to-life for being in charge of a weed-dealing operation. The paper was at pains to sympathize with the prosecutors, who had a tough time making a case, because this guy (who happened to be Mexican-American) was so well liked and supported in the community. He never flipped out and tracked people down to shoot them if they owed him money -- he just stopped advancing them weed. And he made sure that the profits were well-distributed down the food chain, so there weren't a lot of jealous underlings jockeying for power. And he didn't really get involved with the hard stuff, because obviously it would be a lot harder to stick to his more mellow business model. So here you have a situation where the drug warriors are all wrong -- dealing doesn't inevitably lead to all of these huge social harms, and in fact some pretty decent people make their living that way. Not just "bad guys."
So yeah, still not a big fan of the police.
I really hope we can legalize weed soon. Continued cannabis prohibition may be the biggest moral failure in domestic affairs in the US since the civil rights movement. A legitimate, serious movement for legalization might even get me back into activism.
Apropos of crime and punishment topics, I was riding the bus yesterday, and a fellow about my age was complaining about parenting his teenage daughter, who had started hanging out, much to his disapproval, with a 14 year old girl who had stabbed someone. It made me very sad to think about what it means to be 14 years old and feeling like your only option in some situation is to commit a stabbing. Presumably the person stabbed did not die, or the girl would not be walking around on the street, but of course, it's still a horrible thing for the stabbee on any number of levels. But spare a thought for the stabber: What's it going to be like 30 years down the road to look back at a life filled with pain and suffering and failure and replay that stabbing in your head? Makes me realize how lucky I was to have white privilege and middle-class comforts so that, even when I was carrying a knife at school, I never felt like I had to use it.
Would it make you feel better if you thought she enjoyed the stabbing and wasn't cornered into it?
14: Well, I guess that was my other thought, perhaps she feels totally justified or even pleased with how things went down now, but it will be harder to stick to that the older she gets.
I really hope we can legalize weed soon.
It's looking like just a matter of time in California - and not in the next-year-in-Jerusalem sense. A commission of the distinguished (including Gavin Newsom, who just flipped on the issue) is getting together to work out an initiative probably in 2016, when it will have the best electorate.
Having teenagers, I do find myself thinking how much less worried I'd be about them going forward if weed rather than alcohol were our standard social drug. And I love drinking, and never enjoyed weed much.
And we need to understand that to do our jobs, we sometimes need to expose ourselves to a little bit of risk.
Amen. This is what drives me crazy about so many brutality incidents -- the 'The 80 year old veteran suffering from dementia might have hit me with his cane, I HAD to tase him!' argument. Either cops are heroes because they're willing to take some physical risks to better serve the community, or they aren't. If your governing risk model is that any amount of harm to the community is justified to prevent minimal harm to the cops, then police are a threat to everyone around them.
(including Gavin Newsom, who just flipped on the issue)
I am glad that the nature of California politics means that that weaselly, smarmy little shit takes so many decent policy stances.
There's good stuff in that article, but I would like to push back against that linked Matthew Stewart article. That wasn't a no knock warrant on that case and that guy knew exactly what he was doing. That guy was cranking rounds from his front porch at uniformed cops trying to drag wounded out to squad cars. That's not what people do when they think they're shooting at burglars.
14: Well, I guess that was my other thought, perhaps she feels totally justified or even pleased with how things went down now, but it will be harder to stick to that the older she gets.
Believe you me, there's plenty of shitbags out there who seem to have no problem sticking with those types of feelings for decades.
He never flipped out and tracked people down to shoot them if they owed him money -- he just stopped advancing them weed.
You know, reading that, I certainly felt like I could come around to a more nuanced view of drug dealers if this guy's opinions were the rule rather than the exception.
(or what do I know, maybe they are.)
21: Certainly, that could be the case. And it could have been that the stabee was really asking for it too. Rapist or something. Yet and still, being put in the position of stabbing someone when you're 14, even if you feel okay with it, still seems like a pretty lousy way to treat the youth.