She recalled another time when she told a man and his four-year-old son to leave a playground because they "couldn't just stand around" and "needed to move."
Hardly the worst thing in the report, but... just wow.
The whole thing is so depressing.
The war on drugs has a lot to answer for. I know there were plenty of racist police prior to the WoD, but the whole war metaphor has driven a wedge between police and the community and encourages a violence first approach to dealing with problems.
More wow:
the [shift commander's] template contains blanks to be filled in for details of the arrest...but does not include a prompt to fill in the race or gender of the arrestee. Rather, the words "black male" are automatically included in the description of the arrest.
Yep. That was the one that struck me.
It's surprising to see "black males" pre-filled on the form only because based on the rest of the article I would have assumed they would also be targeting black women for harassment.
I don't think this kind of policing started with the War on Drugs, though that exacerbated it.
Twitter outspokens have not yet convinced me that police aggression is an essential ingredient to capitalism - I think it's more of a gratuitous self-sabotaging pattern of behavior - but I could still see my mind being changed.
I hate to go all enlightened topless Europe about things, but I do have the impression that, e.g., UK policing is fundamentally less interpersonally hostile, while capitalism over there is ticking along just fine.
6.2: I mean, jeez, as a capitalist wouldn't I rather have black people being able to safely earn, accumulate, and spend money on my products or services? Especially in times of supply surplus. I don't see a convincing argument that the upper class is oppressing African-Americans to make labor cheap and reaping the benefits, or whatever. It's just racism, and that's orthogonal to the axis that capitalism is on.
Is anyone else familiar with DOJ reports on police forces to concur/dissent with the conclusion that this is "one of the worst"? (It's awful and upsetting of course, and all the more awful and upsetting in that it's totally unsurprising.)
6 because other-than-capitalist countries have, historically, very benign policing? Right.
Am I the only one who mentally pronounces DOJ as 'dodge'? Because I really want there to be scenes in places like Baltimore and Ferguson where g-men swagger around saying things like 'So you thought you dodged the bullet, huh?'
I sometimes pronounce DOD as in "ALL HAIL DOD."
I hate to go all enlightened topless Europe about things, but I do have the impression that, e.g., UK policing is fundamentally less interpersonally hostile, while capitalism over there is ticking along just fine.
Well it's totally different over there. For one thing, in their drug war they were on the side of drugs.
7: we had a few Black Lives Matter protests over here a few days ago, to mark the fact that it was five years since the last black guy got shot by the police.
15 - Huh, I was pretty sure you had two or three other black guys living there.
Or, rather, since the last time a black guy was shot by the police. We still have lots left.
I do have the impression that, e.g., UK policing is fundamentally less interpersonally hostile
I am not a working class black person, but I wouldn't bet the farm on that.
You know what the key to comedy is?
Of course interpersonal hostility is a lot less dangerous to life and limb when most cops not only don't have guns but aren't even qualified to be issued with them; hence 15.
You know what the key to comedy is?
Interpersonal hostility?
I'm not sure if this is better or worse, but I've read reports that BPD just straight up aren't doing their job, or rather are doing some half-assed work-to-rule facsimile thereof. It's been going on since the Freddie Gray thing. People are getting hurt out there.
7,8, et seq: I agree, for now! But it's so goddamned persistent (and in other countries, aggression / hostility can show up lots of ways short of shooting) that it does nag at me whether it's something deeper.
22: What burns me about that kind of thing is the fundamental confusion it reflects between doing an effective job as police, and abusing and terrorizing citizens. "If we can't harass people randomly, we won't function at all!"
The UK does have issues with disproportionate stops and searches of racial minorities, and I think also deaths in custody.
I think the lack of police shootings is a reflection of a general police attitude to the use of guns, as well as the smaller percentage of cops who carry or are allowed to carry guns. So, it's probably true that there are more enlightened attitudes to the use of extreme force (in general), but not that there are universally better attitudes to race.
"I don't think this kind of policing started with the War on Drugs, though that exacerbated it. "
Well it provided the justification for this sort of policing once explicit racism went out of style.
25.1: IIRC those "deaths in custody" figures include more than you might think. It's all deaths, whatever the cause, that occur in custody, or after release from custody, or after any form of contact with the police where there might be a link between the reason for the contact and the cause of death. The CPS, in its guidance to prosecutors, recommends counting all of these examples as "deaths in custody":
a custody officer releases someone on bail from a police station whilst they are suffering from an undiagnosed illness from which they later die;
a homeless person is found frozen to death after the police checked on their welfare;
a person suffers a fatal heart attack running away from a police officer who is trying to arrest them;
a death that happens whilst in transit from police detention to a medical facility, whether being transported by the police or an ambulance;
where the police attend a siege situation and the besieged person kills themselves or a hostage.
a person suffers a fatal heart attack running away from a police officer who is trying to arrest them;
That's what happens when your national dish is white bread and margarine.
There are about 20-30 deaths in custody, under this definition, every year.
What this means is that, if you are in the UK, you are roughly as likely to die in police custody as you are to die in your bathtub.
I just made the mistake of reading the fox news piece on this story. The comment section is astoundingly racist and knee-jerk authoritarian. Surprise! I'm still naive enough to be shocked by people endorsing outright racist policing.
31: That's why I found Hott Fuzz so unrealistic.
I can't tell if 24 is serious or a dry joke. On the off-chance that it's serious, I can assure you that "confusion" has nothing to do with it. Policing is being withdrawn as intentional 'payback' against the citizenry for daring to criticize the BPD. If that sounds too impossibly nasty to be a widespread, quasi-official policy, well, read the article linked in the OP again.
Under what conditions does the DOJ actually take over a police force? ISTR they did that in New Orleans after Katrina.
OTOH British bathtubs are more dangerous than you might think:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Joseph_Smith
22, 24, 34: the Seattle police department says somilarvstuff ( or the union twitter does and then deletes it and tries to deny it, iirc).
35: You mean the consent decree in 2013? That seems to be when it gets so bad DoJ has the ability to get a federal judge involved. But Oakland has had one of these in place since 2003 and progress has been piecemeal, with the judge having to add even more mechanisms of control over time.
34: The NYPD said they were doing the same thing after they were ordered to stop 'stop and frisk'. They seem to be head and shoulders better than the BPD, in that whatever it was they actually stopped doing, it wasn't something that related to reducing the crime rate. But they certainly publicly claimed that quitting stop-and-frisk meant quitting policing.
I spent a good half minute trying to figure if "somilarvstuff" was a clever portmanteau or something.
NY Daily News admits they were wrong about the topic in 39. They still want to claim that the original ruling was wrong, but they really deserve credit for this apology: it's not a nonapology at all.
As I said at the other place, it's truly impressive that they're not just trolling the Post and NRA with headlines, but are actually taking this shit seriously.
The sooner police departments nationwide acknowledge that stop and frisk doesn't work, the better, obviously. Short version of that article: after stop and frisk was scaled back in NYC in 2013, alarmist predictions were that crime would go up. It hasn't.
Re: the Baltimore thing, I saw an interview with Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake on the PBS Newshour (I think) yesterday, and man is she a master of spin, too much politician for her own good. I hadn't paid much attention to her prior to Freddie Gray's death.
Pittsburgh police were under a consent decree from 1997 through 2001. I'm working my way through this comprehensive-seeming report (PDF) from the Vera Institute (whatever that is). The Exec Summary basically says that it worked pretty well (although, form what I can tell and can remember, the problems were nowhere on the scale of BPD). But here's a relevant bit:
Some officers complain about a decline in morale, an increase in paperwork, and a reluctance to engage in enforcement actions. Trend data refute these claims, showing no increase in the use of sick time, discipline, or separations from the department, no decline in summons rates, and a steady downward trend in arrests from well before the decree.
38: Apparently yes. Skimming the intro, this is legally a settlement of a civil litigation brought by the DOJ? This seems to me a painfully roundabout way for a sovereign to regulate its component parts.
45: What are you, a topless European? The US Government isn't sovereign here, the states are.
Well, they're all sovereign. It's a mess. I blame John Wilkes Booth -- if Lincoln had lived, he would have fixed it.
I was under the impression that a binding settlement verdict been issued in Appomattox County.
I am not a working class black person, but I wouldn't bet the farm on that.
Relevant art (40 years old at this point, so a historic document, but well worth a listen).