I genuinely forgot about Joe Biden.

Who did do a video.

Also, after the Russian interference in our elections, I feel the need to ask a question that I would have felt reflected paranoia in the past: is there any evidence of foreign instigation of violence.

Uncle Joe is truly a disappointing candidate. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world...Joe Biden? Really?!

That said, if the Orange Menace wins re-election in November, the US is truly over. A grand experiment in large-scale democracy, but a failed experiment, nevertheless. America cannot, and will not, survive a second term under Trump....

Now is not the time to express anything but enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate [aka Joe Biden}. Because you guys really need to win this thing....

3 No, and we certainly don't need outside assistance in the realm of white supremacy, Nazis, and racist violence.

The situation with Biden is curious. He regularly puts out videos, which the media the completely ignores. The only media attention he's gotten is for the Tara Reade accusation, and a gaffe about black Trump supporters. Trump has permanently broken the culture.

What would Obama achieve by going on the TV?

Reassure people that the country has been less insanely governed in the past, and maybe we can get back there? I don't know how useful it would be, but something like that.

8: The big question is whether he could do it in a way that would build up Biden or if Biden would look weak in comparison.

Not sure what happened in Baltimore last night. The news I can find is emphasizing that things were mostly peaceful, but last night between about 10 and 1:45, downtown sounded like the 4th of July. Someone was shooting off a lot of something for about 30 or 40 minutes. I'm assuming it was teargas and rubber bullets, but it's hard to find any information.

It appears the police strategy to deal with being filmed is to do so many things that on their own would be outrageous that no single thing can stand out. It's the Trump scandal approach to police relations.
The original description, of course, is Monty Burns syndrome.

The targeting of journalists by police is really nuts and ominous.

Someone set the mountain on fire last night, about a mile from my house. Fortunately it was contained after burning 20 acres; people are suspecting arson.

Holy shit.

Okay, pictures have the fire attempting to spell "F U OPD" so guessing not a lightning strike.

I WORK IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS

Who's down with OPD? Every last homie.

Hey, do you happen to know the guys who pushed an old man with a cane to the ground for no reason? I don't know how big the Salt Lake City police force is, but it seems like you might -- there were several of them.

Right? We seriously had a protest yesterday that involved BLM honoring the officer shot this week in a domestic violence call, a thousand people taking a knee on the main street in protest of police violence, and generally good police-resident interactions. Then someone sets the mountain on fire on a day with 50 mile an hour winds (which fortunately blew it in a good direction.)

I knew that "Trip the Elderly" day would eventually turn bad.

Would be a great defense argument to make. Just as people with common health conditions coincidentally die at the very moment an officer is kneeling on them, lightning strikes can randomly take on patterns that appear designed.

The "fuck these 6 fish in particular" defense, first deployed by Clarence Darrow.

A lot of people seem to be getting shot by rubber bullets in the head. A reporter(!) lost an eye. This seems deliberate. They're supposed to aim for the legs or even ground before them so it bounces. A rubber bullet to the head can kill and has killed. This is attempted murder.

The Salt Lake City police department only has 620 officers? That's surprisingly small -- is it one of those things where there's some different jurisdiction that covers most of the area: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Lake_City_Police_Department

Anyway, with that few of them, it's actually not that unlikely that Gswift knows the guy who got caught on camera shoving an old man with a cane down on his face in the street. I wonder if he's the kind of guy you'd expect to do that, or if it's a surprise?

23- $5.1M settlement from the city, $10M from the weapon manufacturer. Demotion for supervisor and 45 day unpaid suspension for the officer, no prosecutions and the officer is still on BPD today. That model of "nonlethal" weapon was removed from many departments.

Or, I suppose it could be that it's not a surprise, because anyone with a real understanding of the necessities of policing in a riot situation would have understood that the old man had to eat a little concrete to keep the officers safe. The video doesn't make that obvious to me, but I'm not a cop.

24: Presumably they bring in state police or police from elsewhere in the state for this. If I recall correctly, when Penn State students were rioting for Joe Paterno my brother's police academy class got sent there.

Could be. I guess gswift would know if that video shows the SLC behaving according to their training and policies, but he seems to be busy.

A reporter(!) lost an eye.

We had a thread about her years ago, if that's the same person. Guessing she's long since burned through the $100K. She sounded remarkably upbeat on Twitter about her misfortune.

LB, with all due respect, it would be great if we could avoid having yet another thread revolve around gswift arguing with everyone. There have been so goddamn many already.

This was a different reporter.

Wait. Maybe not. I thought you meant the reporter lost an eye years ago, not that there was a thread about her for other reasons. Sorry.

I get confused with people are notable twice, but not more than twice.

It's like two-hit-wonders. A one-hit wonder just got lucky, a career success is very good at what they do, but how does someone manage two hits without being able to make a third?

They got two songs in them, and they just wrote the third.

Weirdly, I didn't say anything in that other thread.

I am feeling paranoid, a la (gensym), that the Trump administration is counting on benefiting from all this, and also paranoid that they may succeed in benefiting from this, kind of like the Kent State massacre in advance of Nixon's re-election.

29: I don't know who you are, obviously. But I'm interested by gswift's perspective, as a police officer, on police murders and police violence generally. So far he's disapproved of killing unresisting people by kneeling on their necks, but has described the problem as generally overblown -- I don't remember the thread enough to find the comment, but he said something about how it's not 1960 anymore, suggesting that the problem wasn't that bad and people shouldn't be so upset about it.

So I'm curious, looking at the specific organization he works in, what he thinks of seeing his coworkers push a frail old man to the street? Not a problem; wow that's awful and the offending officer will definitely be disciplined but honest it doesn't happen much; yes it's bad, yes the SLC force has a problem, and by extension other forces have a worse one. And I'd also be interested in how he feels about the police response to the current protests -- whether he feels that it's generally appropriate or abusive on the part of the police.

He doesn't seem to want to talk about those issues, admittedly. But right now I'm not super interested in talking to a cop who doesn't want to talk about them.

I didn't write 29, but I took it to mean to leave that discussion to the other threads which already have it, rather than saying not to have it at all. I could be misreading it, but if that's what it means I kinda agree. (I'm also assuming it's from a regular who didn't intentionally leave it blank. The website has gotten a lot worse at filling in names for me of late.)

36: That's not paranoia. It's not certain, but it's not paranoia.

Yeah, I'm probably going to keep bringing it up in any thread I notice gswift commenting in. But he appears to have stopped commenting in this thread, so there's no reason for it to go on.

Let's all post our SAT scores and how many people we know who have hit the elderly.

Is it bad if the numbers are too close to be obvious which is which?
Also you should ask him about how police seem to have taken on a widespread acceptance of attacking clearly identified members of the press.

Because the press is reporting them doing things that they aren't supposed to do.

Oh sorry, 29 was me. Point is taken.

Yeah, my paranoia involves the realization that the MPD police union chief, Kroll, is not shy about his ties either to literal white supremacists or the Trump administration (a distinction without a difference, to be sure), and would be on a short list of, oh, twenty names you might think of if you were a Stephen Miller type and specifically wanted to instigate Some Kind of Incident to get the damn coronovirus headlines off the newspapers and rile up the lefties and the black folk for a good old-fashioned crackdown.

Obviously, there's absolutely no evidentiary basis for this crazed speculation, and there never will or could be. But... we are talking about the same political party that, within living memory, discussed firebombing the Brookings Institute, sold heavy weapons to enemies to fund death squads, invaded a sovereign nation to buttress a reelection campaign.

There is, quite literally, nothing that I would put past them doing in pursuit of power. Nothing.

|¦
My brother's Boston brain poisoning/WEEI-syndrome is so advanced he told me "That one Kevin Garnett movie is really good"
|>

I just saw a picture of peaceful protests in Colorado with people very close together - many wear8ng basks, to be sure. But then I had this pasta kid thought: what if this murder was done intentionally to promote protests in large crowds that would spread the virus among the kind of people who oppose Trump.

Stupid iPad typing.

I'm trying to tell if pasta kid thought is a typo or a real phrase.

I guess gswift would know if that video shows the SLC behaving according to their training and policies, but he seems to be busy.

I don't know about busy, just hanging out with my daughter and going to Costco and not being online.

620 is employees, not sworn, which is more like 475 I think? I probably know the person the video, can't tell from the footage. What I'm hearing is that instructions to clear out were broadcast and some people decided not to. Well yeah, you're going to get pushed and everyone is going to be amped up because a handful of idiots decided to burn a cop car in that same block.

I was not expecting that. Shoving an old man with a cane down on his face on the street is policing you're going to defend?

If you're trying to figure out people aren't totally supportive of cops, that might be something you should do some introspection over.

For sure on its face it looks like it would be more aggressive than how I would handle it. It's also a short clip without much context and I know for a fact it was on the heels of one of our female officers getting surrounded and her car set on fire so I'm not going to jump to any conclusions.

Not going to jump to any conclusions about whether it was necessary for a cop in riot gear with a number of other cops with him to shove an old man down on his face on the street? I figure you must be relying on some professional knowledge a out how that reasonably could have been necessary for the safety of the officers involved, because it's not clear at all to a layperson.

Let me try it a different way. Is one of the conclusions you're not jumping to that the office was violently abusive to that old man without justification and should be disciplined for it? I'm not saying you have to be certain of it, but does that strike you as a possibility? Or is it definitely in the realm of not your own personal style, but under the circumstances acceptable?

52: Oh, boy. This is the thing that always gets me. Somehow police life is more valuable. I want police to be safe, but they are paid to go into these situations and should be better than the average Joe at facing them without using excessive force.

Part of deescalation is the ability to independently gauge the risk of each situation. Is this old man on the street an immediate threat, regardless of what may have been done earlier by other protestors? If you can't do that it's just revenge and collective punishment, not policing.

I'm not saying you have to be certain of it, but does that strike you as a possibility?

Absolutely.

I want police to be safe, but they are paid to go into these situations and should be better than the average Joe at facing them without using excessive force.

New guys start at 21 an hour, and we're one of the better paying agencies. The retirement these days is a minimum 25 years and we don't get Social Security. Recruitment is a huge problem. There's a lot of people on the job who shouldn't be. Nobody is willing to do something about it, so that's where we're at.

When you say it strikes you as a possibility that the cop was violently abusive, is that a shock? That is, are you surprised that one of your coworkers would do that, or is it something that shouldn't happen but of course it does reasonably often?

The Republic of Georgia fired their entire highway police force -- top to bottom, commanders, senior officers, everyone -- and replaced it with a far smaller, better-trained, better-funded set of officers. Corruption stopped immediately. In the space of about a year or two they went from universally reviled to widely trusted.

And that in a middle-income post-Soviet country in a notoriously corrupt part of the world.

The Americans who advised on the implementation ought to try this at home.

Camden, NJ sounds like a similar success story.

Not a shock. He was pushed too hard and then they helped him up and got him out of there. Probably could have been done better. Definitely something I could see out of a 25 year old not ready for those stress levels.

56: It clearly isn't just about some of the people who shouldn't be there though. It's some of the training & tactics designed to protect police that are the proximal cause of mistakes resulting in the injury or death other people - sometimes completely unrelated non-police. Many (most?) police seem to find this situation completely acceptable, but you have to see how other people may reasonably disagree? There can't be very many people who genuinely believe that police ought to be less safe doing there jobs - but that doesn't mean they don't think other people being more safe in there interactions with police might be more important than holding that line, even.

60: genuine question, what sort of negative job consequences and/or remedial training do you expect that 25 year old to experience because of this?

Cops always find a way to excuse and explain cop behavior in a way that that flatly never do for the population they serve/hate.

62: And how would they compare with the criminal penalties for a non-police officer who shoved an old man with a cane down on his face on the street? I mean, that would be a crime if it wasn't a cop doing it, right?

62: Would depend on what led up to the push. Probably not a firing offense. Could get mandatory re training and/or unpaid time off.

64: Again, depends on totality. Use of force code here is pretty broad.

https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title76/Chapter2/76-2-S403.html?v=C76-2-S403_1800010118000101

65.last Wow, that seems unreasonably broad at first read. Especially with your point in 56.

What if the old man has his nose out of his mask and it's standing right in front of the cheese and not moving while blocking the aisle?

I'll say it seems unreasonably broad, if Gswift reads it to plausibly permit making an old man standing at a bus stop hit his face on the asphalt. I don't see a plausible arrest, risk to the old man, or risk to cop, but Gswift thinks there's a possibility that the force was justified.

Must be kind of freeing. I mean, most of the time no ones filming, so no one has a shot of second guessing you. You're presumably one of the good ones, so you wouldn't rough anyone up without a good reason, but you certainly wouldn't jump to conclusions that any other cop had done anything wrong without not just video evidence, but video evidence with full context.

Recruitment is a huge problem.

I often despair, but I see opportunity here. It's quite clear to me many others, that at least a plurality of the police departments in this country are unfit for purpose. You have situations like Baltimore where a succession of leaders have failed to tame a culture of violence and impunity. We have, or will soon have, a surfeit of the young and unemployed and police officers who should be replaced. So, replace them, en masse. Why should all the jobs go to the oathkeepers?

Makes sense. You can't fire the current cops, there are union contracts, but you can take the ones who've been trained to believe that something like the video we've been talking about is a plausibly justified use of force, and keep them away from the public.

Well, in other news, it looks like we are going to be heading for another round of Palmer Raids with Barr and his incorporated mob designating "antifa" (which is neither terrorist, nor an organization) as a terrorist organization. I don't know if they'll do the mass round-ups that Palmer orchestrated -- he wound up getting a small fraction of those arrested deported on immigration violations, but presumably the decline of anarchist activism in the US after 1919-1920 and the preeminence of Bolshevik communism were the ultimate, if not exactly the desired, effects.

Once again "I told you so" -- a new wave of state repression against anarchist organizing is a perfect wedge issue, since most liberals will readily believe anything they're told about kids who occasionally break a bank window or punch a Nazi. I really am glad that my health is so poor in some ways, since if they cut off my access to high blood pressure medicine in jail, they can only torture me so far before I have a heart attack and die. I've been pretty scrupulous about not knowing what illegal activities my friends might be engaged in, so they can get some names and fake crimes out of me if they try hard enough, but nothing that will actually do them any good.

What a day! What a day, for an auto-da-fé!

69: It's long been my contention that if every eligible Black person applied to become a cop, the fascists would be quaking in their jackboots. Similarly, if every eligible Black person went out and bought an AK tomorrow, there might be some changes made.

I don't know about the last, there are plenty of black cops in the NYPD and it hasn't fixed the culture.

56: according to my colleagues in CJ, the perception of police as jackboots is part of the problem. Good kids who might want to be cops are turned off by the militarization of the police, and what's left is proportionally more jerks.

I would believe that. I think the Georgia solution of shutting police forces down and reorganizing from scratch would probably get much stronger applicants.

73: From the Brooklyn Eagle, September 3, 2019:

In 1988 and again in 1998, 90 percent of the force at ranks above captain was non-Hispanic white. Today it remains 79 percent non-Hispanic white -- while overseeing a force of police officers that is 45 percent white.
Commanding officers in 48 of the city's 77 neighborhood precincts are non-Hispanic white as of this week. That includes 13 white COs running precincts where the population is at least 80 percent non-white.
While the share of Hispanic and Asian patrol officers has risen dramatically, challenges in recruiting black officers persist, helping drive under-representation in higher ranks. The share of patrol officers who are black rose from 13 percent in 1988 to peak at 18 percent in 2008. But that figure has since dropped to 15 percent -- in a city where 24 percent of the population is black. (Emphasis mine)

75: Seems to make sense. If the hypothesis is that leadership is also foundationally flawed, recruiting alone can't possibly fix it unless you are willing to recruit into top positions from outside. This of course can work well, but given the context seems unlikely.

Probably could have been done better. Definitely something I could see out of a 25 year old not ready for those stress levels.

Gosh, maybe the 25-year-old in riot gear surrounded by by a bunch of other cops also in riot gear on an otherwise empty street shouldn't have been there at all, if the presence of an old man with a cane is so stressful that he calmly walks up to him and knocks him over, and probably the other cops shouldn't have been there either, because what the fuck were they doing, and what the fuck could anyone with half a brain predict them to do, but causing harm to others?

Quaere, LB, what, other perhaps than some pleasure from passive-aggressively needling him, do you expect to get out of gswift here? Is finely parsing the exact degree of impropriety involved that helpful to anyone?

the perception of police as jackboots is part of the problem

They're sure doing yeoman work to combat that.

Annoyingly, I can't find MPD demographic data newer than 2013. Back then, however, Black officers were less than 8.8% of the force, while Black people made up between 17 and 18% of the city's population.

If every class of incoming MPD officers was say, 80% Black, it might take a few years, but there would be some significant changes to the department's culture. Even better, if it was 80% Black women, that would really shake things up.

challenges in recruiting black officers persist, helping drive under-representation in higher ranks

Another thing that drives under-representation in higher ranks, at least according to several complaints w/r/t the NYPD, is the corrupt administration of tests to advance to those ranks. Shutting it all down, diverting funds to social services, and maybe starting over with a much different model seems like the minimum viable approach here.

78: This looks passive aggressive to you? Longer answer when I get home from the vigil I'm at.

80: The next two lines of that article basically say the same thing -- I don't know the details, but it doesn't sound like they're following what one would consider normal civil service procedures.

This looks passive aggressive to you?

We haven't all got a lawyer's finely tuned sense of which probing questions are actively aggressive and which passively, especially those of us who'd rather just tell the guy to fuck off.

Longer answer: I'm not crazy about banning people so long as they're not making it sort of mechanically difficult to carry on a conversation. I'm not sure I'm right about that, certainly, but that's where I'm starting from.

On the other hand, I'm not crazy about having our adorable pet cop from the reliably liberal force who's not like all the other ones hanging around explaining that black people love him while worthless white protesters fear him, and his inside special cop knowledge tells him that "antifa" is responsible for all the property damage, and it's going to be really hard to prove that Chauvin was responsible for George's death with that preliminary report saying George had health conditions. All of that? Sort of disgusting. But people do like hearing the cop perspective, such as it is.

So I want to make it clear that the adorable pet cop from the liberal force looks at video of one of his coworkers pushing an old man with a cane to the ground and isn't sick and sorry and ashamed to be a member of the same organization. He looks at it and snivels for sympathy for the thug in riot gear shoving the old man over because the thug in riot gear is underpaid and "not ready for those stress levels". Further, gswift can't be sure it was really an unjustified use of force because there might be something that happened before the video started that made it necessary for the thug in riot gear to shove the old man with a cane down on the ground for someone's safety.

So, people want to listen to the cop perspective, that's good with me. I just want clarity that the cop perspective we're listening to is one that means sometimes old men with canes need a little gravel rash on their face to keep the cops safe.

84: I feel like the GSwift with the shitty job at eBay would not have tried to justify that.

"from the reliably liberal force who's not like all the other ones"

So what to infer, if in fact gswift is one of the `good` ones?

85: Yeah, I think so too. It's really hard to resist when you're immersed in a sick culture.

Pretty much, I think any cop who this week at least isn't sick and sorry and ashamed on behalf of his profession as they blind journalists and drive into crowds to punish protestors for objecting to police murder is pretty worthless. If Gswift were coming in talking about how to change training to keep cops from hurting protesters, I'd be interested in what he knows and I wouldn't be giving him a hard time. Selfrighteousness about yeah, murder's not great but the big problem is how unproductive the community response is makes me a little ill.

I have no patience for the idea that police can't do their job when they're emotional. As a foster/adoptive parent, I get not quite $21/DAY and fairly minimal training on never resorting to violence while putting up with whatever traumatized children throw at you. I have a non-fostering friend who said that she she slapped her five-year-old for calling her a bitch and I was honestly shocked because how is that even a thing? You're the adult, period, and if you can't handle someone else's irrational violence or upset then you shouldn't have that responsibility at all. You don't get to just say "well, THEY started it," because every parent knows what a pitiful excuse that is. But sure, it's different for police. We should hold them to a lower standard and tolerate their petulant violence.

86: Honestly, I'd bet that by my standards he's much, much better than the average for the profession. But there's a line I've been seeing about how if you have three bad cops, and a thousand good cops who don't do anything about the bad ones, you have a thousand and three bad cops? Better than average doesn't mean good.

Honestly, it's kind of freeing. All those people with canes and mobility aides. Now I can smack them around too without judgement from the authorities. No more limiting myself to the hale.

88: I think we are on the same page. As per 87 if he's on the better end of what we can possibly expect the response to be, it says pretty dire things about the state of the profession.

89: Qualified immunity plus a culture that accepts even pretty casual use of force is a really bad combination, especially when unchecked by something arms length.

This just in from my S Mpls living SIL: neighbors just ran off two trucks with no license plates full of white men- they were trying to set our neighborhood branch library on fire.

52 is reminiscent of William Calley's justification for My Lai. Check yourself, dude.

88: One of my kids put me through at least partially the same kind of wringer you describe with yours and it's not the same kind of stress. These guys are clearing a block where another cop was surrounded, had her car flipped and set on fire, a firearm stolen from the car before they set it on fire, along with visibly armed open carry types in the crowd.

Two hit wonders? Jimmy Jones. Johnny Preston.
Johnny Burnette?

93: Yeah, an old white guy getting momentarily pushed down and the promptly helped to his fee is just like a war zone massacre.

92: This is making the rounds, black MN residents telling supposed white allies to cut that shit out.

https://twitter.com/Freeyourmindkid/status/1266626242905886721

I don't see why we have to assume they are "allies".

97 She does not believe, and her neighbors do not believe, that these people are protesting the death of Floyd, but rather that they are out-of-town white supremacists striking a blow for white power, knowing that they have total impunity to do so at this moment. As a group, the police is so obsessed with the threat that 4 of their own might face justice that they are intentionally overlooking the much more serious danger to the health and safety of the public. This is a catastrophic failure of police leadership.

94: I'm not saying at all it's the same kind of stress, just that there are a lot of jobs that involve stress and adrenaline. I'm saying you know this shit when you sign up for the job. So either you can do your job or you can't. Managing your response is part of what's required. I'd feel this way even if we DIDN'T have the disgusting hero cultural narratives about police, but it's extra ridiculous given that.

98: Likely a lot of both. Wingers and antifa both taking advantage and making things worse.

Yes, that's why I was pushing back.

Not to get all Bayesian, but if you know two things about somebody (they are white Americans and disrupting a BLM protest), your priors should tend toward thinking they are racist.

96 The reasoning is similar. Sorry you can't see that.

Longer answer: I'm not crazy about banning people so long as they're not making it sort of mechanically difficult to carry on a conversation. I'm not sure I'm right about that, certainly, but that's where I'm starting from.

Well, I believe the point with some of the complaints from Tia, and a point that's been made over and over again in various venues that I'm sure you're aware of, is that there are a lot more ways to make it difficult to carry on, or enter into in the first place, a conversation, than making it mechanically difficult. In fact, the first person we banned, as I recall, didn't make it mechanically difficult at all (Clownae). Sh/arer maybe did, though I'm not sure it was all that clear cut; read and the ToS definitely did. The mere having of a mechanically copacetic conversation can itself be a deterrent to other conversations and other conversationalists, and is something that shapes what kind of community one has.

I'd feel this way even if we DIDN'T have the disgusting hero cultural narratives about police, but it's extra ridiculous given that.

Aren't there lists that circulate periodically of jobs that are more dangerous than that of police officer? Delivery driver, construction worker, lots of things.

We didn't really ban Clownae, did we? He self-banned after the horrifying confession; we just didn't let him change his mind. And if I remember rightly, there were off-blog considerations for that as well. So special circumstances.

Mostly, though, I disagree with enough people vehemently enough that I don't like drawing the line between people I disagree with enough to ban and people I don't. Banning one person would make me feel responsible for then going on to ban the next wrongest person, and so on. But like I said, I'm not sure I'm right about this. If you want to ban gswift, however the governance of this blog works, you have as much of a voice as I do, and I'm not going to argue that hard against it.

Addressing 106.1 would require violating the sanctity, etc., but that's not how I remember it. I'm not sure I can dig up the details at this point, though.

however the governance of this blog works,

It's really very unclear!

The casual brutality: https://twitter.com/the7goonies/status/1266989439160590336?s=21

I'm aware that using Twitter as the means of getting the sense of the events is a weird lens, biased towards the most extreme episodes captured on camera, but even taking that into account: American police writ large are not salvageable.

There are newspaper stories about how they are safekeeping Trump in the White House and I wish those people who project things on to Trump buildings would project the loop of Khaddafi being hauled out and stabbed/beaten to death onto a Trump property.

I vote for not banning gswift. I don't have any other access to cop perspective. The cop who pushed the guy down doesn't think he's a monster and it's interesting to hear how he might justify himself.

I'm intrigued by the idea of firing the entire police force and starting from scratch, but how would we make sure that it goes better this time? Maybe just by paying higher salaries? Maybe by being a lot more sparing with who gets issued a gun? Maybe a different system for deciding who gets promoted?

Yeah, see 108 is really the problem a 3 second clip. The kick isn't just unjustifiable, it's clearly a criminal act. Half a dozen police officers know who committed this crime and none of them is going to say a fucking thing. Because they don't care at all about enforcement of the law. OK, that's not fair: they don't care enough about the law to enforce it against a friend or colleague.

If it was up to me, everyone there would be summarily fired, that's it. Let their union try to argue that there are some values more important than enforcing laws against unjustifiable violence.

Or that if you don't turn a blind eye to blatant thuggery, and to the open tolerance of blatant thuggery, then you won't be able to staff a police department at all. I don't know, maybe we should try that experiment.

I'd be interested in hearing whether Gswift could identify/recall his conversion. I mean, he was here before he was a cop. I wonder if he remembers how his sympathies re-aligned to cop-first, then justify.

Like, they were interpersonally nice to him, so he couldn't believe that they can also hold corrupt philosophies? A dude helped him with some task, and that dude thinks it is funny to bully civilians, so it can't be that bad. Mordant black humor became racist humor and anti-trans humor and he didn't notice the difference? His co-workers are nice to him and he just gets abuse while patrolling and no one is ever grateful when he genuinely is a real help because the cop image is so tarnished, so fuck 'em anyway? If Gswift could recreate that conversion (his internal prompt would be 'how being a cop showed me reality'), it would be interesting to me. But. Eh.

112:

Even more outraging: we are paying these cops. Honestly, this last week may be the tipping point where we decide we don't care to buy this bundle of services any more.

Police brutality is ESPN and the Golf Channel?

I have a non-fostering friend who said that she she slapped her five-year-old for calling her a bitch and I was honestly shocked because how is that even a thing?

This was my reaction to the old man getting pushed down. How is that even a thing? I mean, what has to be going on in your head you when you see an old man standing alone with a cane and you want to push him? At least they helped him up.

In Cincy, protestors took the flag down from the county justice center and smashed a window on Friday night. The sheriff's office hung a Thin Blue Line flag in its place. The level of willful cluelessness and arrogance is pretty amazing.

Yeah. As it stands, we have to buy the casually kicking seated protesters when we're hoping to get fast response to a mugging.

Watching the local cable news (Boston), which is weirdly flipping between the tones of "after an afternoon of peaceful protest, things went bad when the police took action" and "here's a bunch of live footage of looting of stores, we're appalled".

I'd be interested in hearing whether Gswift could identify/recall his conversion.

By my count, this is the third person to note that gswift's experiences have changed his perspective. I am a fourth.

I am curious about this, also.

I think those are two pretty consistent reactions right now. My friend was at the protests 'til 1 last night, to be a white shield if she could. She said that she felt real bad when the cops were acting and real bad when looters were looting. She felt both things and we don't have a lot of experience or skill at teasing them out yet.

Given how humans are, it is probably as basic as 'my co-workers are consistently nice to me, and everyone else is consistently shitty', but maybe there's more to it.

The kid in Pittsburgh who trashed the police car was arrested. White kid from the suburbs. Not a bad suburb, but not one of the ritzy ones. I think the moral of the story that the real treasure is the backpack you abandoned along the way when the protesters chased you. Anyway, he was wearing an anarchy bandana, with the 'A' made out of AK-47s.

This is probably not the week Amy Klobuchar wanted to have after the week with stories about how she was being vetted.

I don't have any other access to cop perspective.

Regardless of banning or not banning, I think this argument is actually destructive. No one who cares about these issues should be relying on a single person's perspective on them, no matter who that person is. I don't think that's a good or healthy relationship for a community to have with its members in general.

117 is fucking horrifying (I saw it earlier) -- hope all your extended circles of people stay safe, Thorn.

I wouldn't say I'm "relying" on it, I just find it interesting. I'm all internet ears for other police officers who are interlocuting in real time. Where is Cop Rant a la how Waiter Rant used to be?

Just biked by Uber HQ, they boarded it up. A Starbucks a few blocks west of me got busted into.

125.2: The girls' families didn't participate as far as I can tell. I suspect I'll know a number of the people arrested but that most of them knew what they were getting into. I haven't heard of any serious injuries to people I know, but several friends witnessed some gruesome stuff. Rubber bullets are terrifying. Things here have been less intense than Columbus or Louisville, though.

I was informed by my building's management that they would be boarding up the windows today, given the civil unrest. I just watched on the news as a protester threw a hunk of burning board into the lobby of my building.

You could go down and get on the tv.

This footage apparently showing Boston cops smashing and tagging their own vehicle is wild: https://twitter.com/hongpong/status/1267308401211645953?s=21

I'm reaching for a charitable way to interpret what I just watched and there's just nothing there, even if you disregard the voiceover.

If you all want other cop perspectives, there are other blogs written by cops. While I doubt you will agree with (anything) that is written there - it might give you some sense of how at least one other cop views the situation.

http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com

The cop who pushed the guy down doesn't think he's a monster and it's interesting to hear how he might justify himself.

From what I'm hearing he just pushed the guy harder than he intended in a chaotic moment, that's why they immediately picked him up. A mistake for sure, but one I can understand. 108 on the other hand looks straight up criminal.

I'd be interested in hearing whether Gswift could identify/recall his conversion.

Not off hand. Maybe not a conversion as much as just strengthening existing leanings? Did fraud investigations for seven or eight years prior to this job, probably was already inclined towards the enforcement side.

131: We don't want that person commenting here.

in a chaotic moment

I didn't see any evidence of a chaotic moment. It was just an old, slow guy, complying with instructions but not quite quickly enough.

this last week may be the tipping point where we decide we don't care to buy this bundle of services any more.

I think this is very optimistic, for any relevant value of "we". The voting public at large likes and trusts the police and always has. In theory, it's an honorable profession, and it still is on TV. What we have is a war of position. Why would a politician take a risk doing the right thing when the majority of their voters don't want it and will punish them for it?

134: I know a bunch of guys who were there and chaotic is how they describe it. Protesters had literally just overturned a cop car and set it on fire.

Pushing the guy in any way is straight assault, differing from boot in the face or any of a few score such incidents I have witnessed just this evening on the twitter only in degree.

136: With your apparent gift for assessing motives, it's weird you can't perceive this obviously self-defensive bullshit.

gswift: You've said variants of this a bunch of times it the thread: "Protesters had literally just overturned a cop car and set it on fire. " - what do you think that justifies? Are you calling for looking at the larger context there, or is that just for police actions?

137: Legally we can physically push people out of the scene of a riot.

138: The actual consensus from the guys I know is that it was a mistake and shouldn't have happened.

The voting public at large likes and trusts the police and always has

Yeah, but. My feeds are obs selected by me, but they're not selected for anti-cop bias. Everyone, the blandest, most bourgie, randos from high school, the most normie people I know, mostly women, lots of scientists and profs, they are all, every last one, furiously anti-cop right now. This may not cross the tipping threshold, but it must be one of the most dramatic shifts in public opinion I've ever witnessed. Like, the head of my agency, as craven a political striver as I've ever witnessed, thought he'd be better off spontaneously condemning the police on Twitter than not doing it. At the very least, he felt free to do that. Also, he never tweets.

Are you calling for looking at the larger context there

Yes. He didn't just blitz some guy randomly walking down the street, they were clearing the block during a riot. Definitely a mistake, but by all accounts knocking the guy down wasn't his intent.

142: Ok, but I meant the larger-larger context. I mean, do you think the average officer in your area out interacting with these protestors and/or rioters understands that they need to be particularly careful and circumspect in their actions right now? Do the understand that regardless of their own personal history, they are representing an institution that is very much at the heart of these protests, and are they mediating their behavior accordingly? Do they accept the responsibility they collectively share in this? Or are they resisting it, and falling back on "respect my authority?" I don't know what's going on in SLC (except, apparently a nutbar with a bow today wtf?) but it's pretty clear we've seen examples of both responses in media these last couple of days.

I mean, do you think the average officer in your area out interacting with these protestors and/or rioters understands that they need to be particularly careful and circumspect in their actions right now?

I think so. A lot of our guys were ticked about the push for that reason. The chief has already called the old guy and apologized and the officer has been taken off of crowd control.

111.2 Here's the short Wikipedia note on the subject of the Georgian solution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_Georgia_(country)

Something longer from NPR:

https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=4849472

Something even longer from "Innovations for Successful Societies" at Princeton, which I have not read but only glanced over:

https://successfulsocieties.princeton.edu/sites/successfulsocieties/files/Policy_Note_ID126.pdf

American assistance and advice played a big role in the reform. It's not as if America doesn't know what good policing is like, it's that entrenched power structures in America often prefer the existing kind of policing; or if they don't prefer it, they are unwilling to take on the power of the police and their allies to make a change.

116:2 The LEOs who helped the old man up did not include the one who shoved him. He was pushed from behind and struck a railing before he hit the ground. I don't think he even understood what was going on - people have suggested he was waiting at a bus stop.

I think the screening for LEOs in some areas seeks to weed out people with empathy and select for bullies and racists.

Not sure what this says about gswift and attempts to excuse the cop culture. If you can't handle a petulant child, or if your "stress" is such that you take it out on an elderly, disabled man, then you are definitely not cut out to be a police officer.

I am in an unusually bad mood because I'm still in pain and I'm cutting out the opioids before I end up addicted, so I may not be on my best behavior, but: Holy shit does everyone suck on Unfogged these days. (There are a few exceptions. I particularly appreciate Frowner's thoughtful comments.) This will probably sound stupid, but I think of all of you as my friends. It's particularly stupid because you clearly all hate each other.

I want to pettily call out nosflow's 78 as particularly fucking stupid, since he's been around forever and should know better. LB is obviously deploying her incredibly effective "python swallowing a goat" argument style. It doesn't carry the same thrill as shouting "Fuck off!" but pythons can't really be described as swallowing goats nicely.

I am much closer to Tia's world view than most people here, but her behavior has been particularly egregious. Her "I'm too fragile to handle this level of conflict, so I must depart dramatically, but I'm not flouncing" flounce was straight-out embarassing. We all got shit going on these days, dude. Unfogged has always been an argumentative site, for people with sharp elbows. All she did for weeks was stir shit, speculate about our character flaws for not banning gswift, and then when it didn't work quit. Apparently not being in a bubble where everyone agrees with you about everything is unbearable.

And gswift has frequently been an asshole. He was clearly trolling Tia over trans issues, when she asked him to drop it. Being a cop has clearly blunted his ability to see police misconduct clearly (though not completely). But why would he be banned? He doesn't dominate every thread. He isn't a fucking white supremacist like Shearer, who everyone tolerated for like a decade. I don't even know what to say to fucking bullshit like lurid's 125. At this point, I've known gswift (in as much as you can know someone online through a blog comment section) for years. I could get some random cop's opinion that I don't know anything about, or I could get the opinion of someone where I know half their life story and I have a pretty good sense of their pre-existing biases.

In short: Fuck the fucking fuck.

I couldn't agree more with Walt's remarks about Tia's recent conduct, though I have learned a great deal about the quasi religious nature of what I now think of as tianity from our interactions and these were, I feel, valuable learnings, that made me a better person. Seriously, I think the blog would die if it became Tia's therapy group (or anyone else's); I don't think that makes her a bad person or a malevolent one.

We're all under considerable strain at the moment what with the virus, the lockdown, and the meltdown of the USA. It must be much worse for American patriots, which American liberals are. It's much easier for someone like me to remain detached because the country I loved and was loyal to has been and gone. So I'm a rootless cosmopolitan, and I can't feel the pain of rooted ones.

With all that said, it seems to me that the particular character of Unfogged, which distinguished it from other places where clever educated people gather "to seek in play the success that life has denied them", arose from two things presently at risk.

The first was a willingness to assume good faith or at least a lack of malevolence on the part of the people we were arguing with.

The second was a certain distance from our own beliefs: not blank-eyed irony, but an awareness that there is a ridiculous side even to our own virtues.

These are rare and precious qualities online. I would be a shame to see them dissipate because they can't quickly or easily be reassembled.

47-49 was supposed to say paranoid thought, or would have considered paranoid in the past. I realize that this thread has moved on, but I feel embarrassed about not catching that autocorrect.

I heartily agree with Walt that Frowner's comments have been very thoughtful.

And I'm more inclined to agree with Walt than not.

For what it's worth - and I'm sure that's almost nothing - I' don't think it would be a good idea to ban gswift.

Protests in Boston were peaceful until last night. Seeing this in my own city breaks my heart in a way that it didn't when it was elsewhere.

Clearly this is my fault for saying out loud that air was grateful we had managed to avoid violence here.

Let me join in on the love for Frowner, who is amazing at having a very strong and clear point of view that they don't hedge or waffle about while still somehow not creating hostility or conflict. I can't pull that off myself, but it's really terrific to have around. And to generally sympathize with Walt's frustration, without picking my way through the specifics.

Frowner is great.

148 I know you've had heated arguments with Tia on the blog but I think that's out of line.

Let's all post our SAT scores, income, and who we hate most on the blog.

154: Too much, not enough, and every last one of you.

Myself most of all.

Cry, cry, masturbate, cry.

Personal bio: Jewish math prof (with I think fairly stereotypical views); ex-military (went through a phase); long-time blog fan (you guys are awesome). Something like half the people I trained with became cops and we stayed in touch for a little while.

Gswift isn't getting his points across very well, but (at least in this thread) seems to basically be right. I watched the video of the cop hitting the old man, and don't think you could have a recognizable police force if you saw that as a firing offence. I don't want to analogize violence to grading, but just to translate between two populations I've known well: firing a cop for shoving too hard during a riot would have a similar effect to firing a prof for grading an exam or homework incorrectly. Some profs are scrupulous enough to pass this standard already, and a few more would figure it out - but most people would be fired within a few years. Actually I might be overstating things - while I've met several profs who are this scrupulous, every cop I've interacted with for a substantial period of time has done something worse than this video (though I know more profs than cops at this point).

I'm not saying that the cop in the video was doing something that is OK in any ethical sense, or that it is OK in any other context. People can and should be angry when cops hit them. I'm just saying that the police force couldn't function if this sort of mistake were severely penalized. For myself, this sort of observation requires me to do a bit of mental alchemy to turn shitty actions into things that let me sleep at night: the job is necessary; we couldn't do the job if our standards were higher than X; therefore we are acting morally as long as we don't do X.

With all the justifications out of the way: yes, of course people should be able to be explicit about it if this is the justification, and of course they should act on it. If you acknowledge that even median-quality police officers in are going to turn into little engines of destruction who would happily beat up old men for walking too slow, that should have a big impact on where you send them!

PS: gswift keeps on mentioning that a cop car got overturned and this means people are amped up, and people are jumping on him for it. I think he's REALLY right about this one - it is not reasonable to expect people to be completely reasonable when they're in the middle of some amount of violence and tasked with inflicting more.

132.1 and following: "From what I hear, in the heat of the moment he committed a marginally more serious casual assault on the old man standing at the bus stop than intended."

When I was (a lot) younger a friend of mine applied for a job as a policeman.* At the job one of the questions was "If you had to shoot a child, how would that make you feel?"

He did not, thankfully, get that job. There's no way that it was the only reason they went with someone else, but it's hard to believe that his answer didn't count against him. ("..... bad?")

*My, potentially unfair, read on his reason for applying had a lot to do with sexy cop uniforms.

Sorry, that wasn't concise. To try again:

LB seems to be asking: is it morally permissible to shove somebody into the pavement? (Obvious answer: no).

gswift seems to be answering: does the current system for cops let you shove somebody into the pavement? (Obvious answer: yes) Is the current system morally good? (less obvious, but he says: yes).

I was trying (and failing) to get at the second question. I don't think I have much insight except having spent a lot of times learning to inflict violence, alongside a bunch of people who became cops (and were in training because they wanted that career). That experience suggests to me that you're not going to get a system for which shoving somebody into the pavement in the riot is impermissible - people willing to be cops are mostly pretty OK with inflicting violence, it is really hard to keep your head when violence is going on near you, and I don't think there is a large reserve group of calm, empathetic, reliable, and very competent 25-year-olds who are willing to inflict violence for $25/hour.

Stay safe,
-CAF

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/politics/russian-interference-race.html

The NY Times reports that Russia is trying to incite racial violence.

Ooh, thanks for 157 and 159. I'm going to come back to them when I'm done with some stuff (to disagree about them, of course) but they set up a point I wanted to argue about very clearly, in a way that I was having trouble doing myself.

158: Rocks and bricks were being thrown, a gun possibly looted from a burning cop car, and one of our guys got blindsided from behind with a bat to the head. I don't know the guy who did the push but I'm guessing there was nothing casual about anything going on at that scene. That kid question is nuts. I never got asked any kind of bizarre stuff like that. We had to take an MMPA style psych test along with an in person interview with a psychologist but there were no crazy questions.

Is the current system morally good? (less obvious, but he says: yes).

Hard to describe the system as a single unit in the U.S. I think we're doing fairly well around here. But the stuff I'm seeing Minneapolis do on camera? A bunch of those guys need to get fired like yesterday.

I want to pettily call out nosflow's 78 as particularly fucking stupid, since he's been around forever and should know better. LB is obviously deploying her incredibly effective "python swallowing a goat" argument style. It doesn't carry the same thrill as shouting "Fuck off!" but pythons can't really be described as swallowing goats nicely.

What, precisely, do you think I should know better? I didn't think LB was just idly asking questions, musing, musing. It is clear that she's going for something and it's clear that it's aggressive (albeit, IMO, passive aggression, because it's in the form of polite engagement). My question, as I should think was obvious both because it was in the comment in question and was reiterated, I believe, more explicitly subsequently, is, so what? What, when she's demonstrated that gswift's reaction to the video is callous and horrible (something that did not need demonstrating by her in the first place), will eventuate? The people to whom it seems as if we tolerate someone with callous and horrible views as an equal participant in our fun little group will not get a different impression. The people whom it flatters to have such a one will not be less pleased about how they got an interesting, valuable perspective. You say that this tactic "incredibly effective", but what, actually, do you think it will effect? I note that despite having called my question out as particularly stupid, you haven't supplied an answer. She gave an answer! Though again, once we've achieved the clarity she notes in 84.last, then what?

Apparently not being in a bubble where everyone agrees with you about everything is unbearable. ... I don't even know what to say to fucking bullshit like lurid's 125.

Is this a valid argument form now? It really does seem as if gswift is treated the Cop Opinion Source, and that isn't a position (mutatis mutandis) I would love to be in (I don't love to be in that kind of position--the go-to person for questions about such-and-such--at my job where I get paid for it), and it doesn't seem like a great dynamic for a community as a whole. And it's ludicrous to characterize unfogged as a bubble, and even more ludicrous to characterize (at least some of) Tia's complaints as "there is disagreement" (I have to qualify because, you know, I've been largely absent for a while). More infra.

The first was a willingness to assume good faith or at least a lack of malevolence on the part of the people we were arguing with.
The second was a certain distance from our own beliefs: not blank-eyed irony, but an awareness that there is a ridiculous side even to our own virtues.

Love too be distant from my own beliefs, including (?) those in my own virtue (?) and about friendly associations with police, in a place beset by a police riot.

It's amazing to me that it's still necessary to make the case that the content, and not merely the form, of a conversation or community is important. (I seem to recall that, pace Walt's implicit argument, there was a lot of shilly-shallying around the very idea of banning Shearer, who also did not dominate every thread, from folks who thought he wasn't so bad, or who liked being able to debate him, or whatever, and the breaking point wasn't that he finally said something that was just bad enough but enough people getting sick enough of it.) People can show up with their beliefs and present them faithfully and non-malevolently and still be harmful, actually. As far as I can tell unfogged is pretty moribund (how many new commenters have we accrued in the past five years?) so perhaps the argument that participants like gswift are a partial explanation of the fact that we have a non-diverse commentariat isn't the strongest, but we can still choose to be a community that does or doesn't welcome certain actors without, I think, becoming Puritanical monsters of sincerity. (I think this in part because we've done it.)

But why would he be banned? He doesn't dominate every thread. He isn't a fucking white supremacist like Shearer, who everyone tolerated for like a decade. … At this point, I've known gswift (in as much as you can know someone online through a blog comment section) for years. I could get some random cop's opinion that I don't know anything about, or I could get the opinion of someone where I know half their life story and I have a pretty good sense of their pre-existing biases.

He doesn't dominate every thread but he sure does dominate the threads he's in, as does the bizarre deference to him and eagerness to, as I said, finely parse his opinions about every last little police-related thing. (I'm not sure if the second sentence is intended to suggest that we should have continued to tolerate Shearer, or that since we let him stick around so long we have no ground on which to object to anyone else, or that since Shearer got 10 years gswift should get 25, or what, but on any construal, it seems to be, what's the phrase, "fucking bullshit".) AFAICT, we all have enough of a sense of gswift's "pre-existing biases" that we can supply his opinions without consulting him. Here's the argument: he's not in the threads he isn't in; he's unilluminating, offputting, and gross in the threads he is in; lots of people dislike having him around, both in general and because he's a cop. People have been tired of his shit for literally years--in public on the blog, not just in private--so it's very disingenuous to act like Tia just started in on this in a recent moment of excessive fragility. (OTOH, strike while the iron is hot, no?)

157 Someone bring the fruit basket. Make sure to include a few bad apples.

it is not reasonable to expect people to be completely reasonable when they're in the middle of some amount of violence and tasked with inflicting more. … people willing to be cops are mostly pretty OK with inflicting violence, it is really hard to keep your head when violence is going on near you, and I don't think there is a large reserve group of calm, empathetic, reliable, and very competent 25-year-olds who are willing to inflict violence for $25/hour.

So, police abolition it is, then? How necessary could a job that's staffed only by incompetents itching for a fight actually be?

Maybe I should let LB follow up to the putative justification about rules here, because I have to get dressed/make coffee/start work etc and I'm curious what it will be, but it strikes me as a pretty weak one in a number of ways.

(albeit, IMO, passive aggression, because it's in the form of polite engagement).

Super irrelevant, but I think this is wrong. Passive-aggressive is needling someone indirectly because you aren't willing to say it directly. Politeness is neither here nor there. Unless you're claiming that LB has an invisible unstated other goal than her apparent one - to hammer Gswift politely about his inconsistencies - I don't think she's being in any way passive-aggressive.

Indeed, the delineating the precise contours of passive aggression is super irrelevant.

But are the police "tasked with inflicting more violence" or tasked with keeping the peace? The news is full of scenes of police chiefs kneeling or walking with protesters.

162: It starts with a shove here, a slap there, and 19 years and 17 complaints later with no disciplinary action taken against the offending officer you have Chauvin so convinced of his impunity that he kills a man, even as people shout at him to desist, and even knowing that his actions are being recorded.

The strangest part to me is that all four officers apparently thought they could spin this as "he was resisting arrest," and again, I think it's because at least two of them had successfully dodged accountability for other complaints.

19 years and 17 complaints later with no disciplinary action taken against the offending officer

Maybe in Minneapolis? Here he gets removed from crowd control and the incident reviewed by both internal affairs and the civilian review board.

But the stuff I'm seeing Minneapolis do on camera? A bunch of those guys need to get fired like yesterday.

My impression is this is a revolutionary proposition. None of them expect to EVER get fired. Not a possibility. Just the idea that being fired would be a normal consequence of being a scumbag or thug could change everything.

the bizarre deference to him and eagerness to, as I said, finely parse his opinions about every last little police-related thing.

"Bizarre deference" is not the way I would describe how gswift's been treated over the last few weeks here.

And, yes, people are keen to know his opinions on police things, because he's a policeman officer, and he isn't shy about talking about it, like a lot of other people on the blog aren't shy about talking about their jobs - if we're talking about drought someone is going to ask Megan for her opinion, etc. I don't talk much about my job exactly because I don't want that to happen, and frankly if I were doing gswift's job I definitely wouldn't bring it up, but that's a personal choice. But "deference"? Gswift probably receives less deference than any other commenter here. "You are wrong, and you are a bad person for being wrong" is not a bad summary of a lot of comments directed at him, in this thread and elsewhere - far more than for anyone else. We don't even defer to him in the sense of granting him the basic assumption that he's being representative of police sentiment, even if we think that sentiment is wrong!

I just want to contrast 169 with gswift's first comment in reaction to the video:

Well yeah, you're going to get pushed and everyone is going to be amped up because a handful of idiots decided to burn a cop car in that same block.

Just as a topical aside: I dunno exactly what it was like for NYCers after Sept. 11, or LA folx after the '92 riots, but it's just a weird mindfuck to have the most talked-about events in the country and perhaps the world happening within a mile or two of where I live, at intersections I've visited regularly for much of my life. Sure, to some extent what's driving the story now is the nationwide protests -- there've been big multi-day riots in other cities in the recent past, but they usually get reported as "Ho-hum, another night of violence in St. Louis (or wherever), here's a picture of a burning cop car." I used to get off the #5 bus at 38th and Chicago on a regular basis when I was unemployed in 2011 and doing volunteer childcare work (organized by fellow anarchists, they never mention that, do they?). I've literally walked over that spot where George Floyd was murdered dozens of times. My school bus in HS went through that intersection every day. And of course I worked right next to that police station for several years. Bought my daily soda pop at the liquor store across the street several hundred times.

I dunno how much of this stuff is getting out there, but the community solidarity work that's been going on OUTSIDE OF THE CONTEXT OF GOVERNMENT, WHICH HAS BEEN AWOL AS USUAL, is kinda staggering. An anarchist/fellow traveler friend of mine who lives just off of Lake St. organized the big community meeting on Saturday that spurred the creation of the block-by-block vigilance committees that were so instrumental in preventing more right-wing arson on Sat. and Sun. night. Many of the street medics who have done an incredible job of keeping people healthy are anarchists, or at the very least got their training at anarchist-created events. A generic call for food for a few dozen students at the Jr. HS my father went to generated enough food and other donations for thousands of families. And that was just one of half-a-dozen similar initiatives that were similarly well-stocked. The online fundraisers for affected people and small businesses have all been very successful. And the vast majority of this is happening in a context of white people getting their shit together on supporting the community and not making it all about themselves, to an extent I've never seen or expected to see. "We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old" has transformed from a metaphor to a daily reality. I've had to work hard to discount all this, because I'm pretty sure a lot of it will evaporate in a month or two, but what if it didn't?

CAF, it's precisely when things get tense that the leadership is supposed to be working harder still to remind every single officer that those people protesting are the ones with the authority here, not the officer. 'You're hitting you boss, and never forget it.'

I wouldn't say that pushing the guy down, of kicking the woman,or shooting a reporter, is necessarily a firing offense. It puts leadership on notice that an officer needs to be taken out of the situation, and the circumstances need to be examined to determine whether (a) this was a bad hire (as in, did we get someone more interested in people respecting his authority than in serving and protecting) and (b) the officer can be trained well enough to do the actual job. I would say, and did say, that failure to internally police, to observe a sort of omerta, should be a firing offence. If an officer thinks that part of his job is protecting his brothers in blue from accountability for either intentional lapses or mistakes, that officer is misunderstanding the job. And that this sort of thing is ever tolerated is a failure of police leadership.

Building off 173, I know we've got one book group already on the go (and I will get my writeup in this week, honest) and so I shouldn't really be pitching another, but how would people feel about the extremely topical Solnit "A Paradise Built In Hell"? Have many people read it already? Does it sound interesting?

163: It is exactly how LB has argued for the entire history of her participating on this blog. There's nothing passive-aggressive about it. And you should know this. Unless you secretly hated the way she argued for all these years, and you finally couldn't hold back anymore.

I'm glad you put a number on it, though. We should in fact give gswift 25 years. The math checks out. I get lots of people complain -- so it's collective fragility rather than individual.

165: Right? When people say "we should abolish the police" I think they're insane, but I got to the end of those two comments, and I thought "Wow, maybe we should abolish the police." Sending out young guys who get so amped up that they punch out innocent bystanders is not a service the government needs to provide.

Re: nosflow's use of the word 'passive-aggressive' about me. I think it's mistaken, or I wouldn't have immediately yelped about it. But I think Walt and maybe heebie are taking it as more insulting than it was meant -- there are contexts and people where I would have thought of it as an unduly hostile thing to say, but not from nosflow to me here.

[comment has been lightly edited to reflect, ironically, an indiscretion error]

On the broader politics of the thing, I wonder if Donald Trump's gross cheerleading of police violence will end up undermining public trust/deference in the police.

(In 174 I mean shooting at reporters with non-lethal means.)

178.last: I wouldn't count 'non-lethal means' used in a manner that violates training guidelines so as to make it more dangerous and plausibly lethal as 'non-lethal'. You didn't do this specifically, and heaven knows I'm not trained in any way in the use of rubber bullets for crowd control, but what I'm reading is that you're not supposed to be shooting people in the head with them if you're using them as non-lethal crowd control.

There's nothing passive-aggressive about it

If the objection is to the characterization as "passive-aggressive", I'll withdraw that! It hardly seems essential.

This "fragility" line is pretty shitty. You could have said the same thing about Shearer! It isn't fragility to want those you associate with not to be bastards, and, as we should all be aware, being welcoming to some people just is being unwelcoming to others. (I honestly can't tell if your position is "I actively don't want anyone here who can't hack it around gswift" or "we can allow everyone to come along, including gswift"; NW's seems to be the latter but perhaps yours is the former. The former does not sound like a very attractive basis for an enjoyable blog to me.)

177: whose use?

173- Indeed, we experienced that with the Boston Marathon bombing. My brother in law was in the area of the explosion and I tracked his phone location to make sure he was still moving. The MIT cop was killed across the street from my office. I sometimes go to the gas station where the hostage escaped. In the subsequent manhunt (our very own practice for future lockdowns!) I accidentally left our basement door open and my wife was freaked out that maybe he was hiding in our basement. I regularly drive through the intersection where the older brother was killed in a shootout, and a coworker lives two blocks from where they caught the younger one, and I now work by the courthouse where all the trials happen (plus new exciting trials like the college admission bribery scandal.) Some other local commenters were adjacent to events as they happened which is in the relevant threads.

181: Aieee! The dreaded reflexive-nosflow-indiscretion error. I will edit.

FWIW, I didn't think "passive aggressive" was something to be considered particularly hostile. Anyway, withdrawn.

Oh, never mind, you did.

There's no way she's withdrawn.

Also, I think reflexive is completely wrong there. Self-referential, also not quite. I don't know what it was.

I don't have time to write a guest post about this, but this 2016 Pew poll is incredibly revealing about the split in perceptions of between white police officers and the white general public. The topic is whether the US needs to "make more changes" to ensure that Black people have equal rights.

172: what is the contrast between "people who remain in an area that cops are trying to clear are likely to get pushed" and 169's "the person who does the pushing is likely to get in trouble" that you have in mind? They don't seem contradictory to me. Maybe you're highlighting a difference in tone, or in what's getting attention paid to it?

188: I was just about to drop that link here!

92 percent!

173, I remember that with the 2009 G20 in Pittsburgh. The same sort of thing on a very small scale. (no fires that I recall, not much police brutality but a lot of indiscriminately arresting random people) Thousands of peaceful protestors in a neighborhood and one guy from California running around breaking windows. Police telling people to disperse, not saying where to disperse to, getting mad when people dispersed in the wrong direction and then creating chaos. People on Facebook monitoring the police scanner and reporting very scary things happening that absolutely were not happening. Surprising deployment of a crowd intimidation technology that nobody had seen before but then became commonplace (LRAD sound cannon).

189: The complete failure to identify the pushing as wrong or unacceptable or misconduct in any way in the first.

The link in 188 is interesting - black police and white non-police are almost identical on "are black deaths in custody the sign of a larger problem".

I feel like that's analogous to the Twitter trope of "X sure is silent about Y" where it's like, not everyone with a Twitter account is required to say that every obviously bad thing is bad.

TY Doug for the link to the Wikipedia article and NPR thing about Georgia. Couldn't get an objective read from them on how much things improved -- the Wikipedia article was stubby and the NPR was literally an interview with the former pres who executed the policy. Will have to read the longer Princeton one at some point.

I can only imagine that in the last four years of progress in some areas along with backlash led by POTUS that the white cop number saying we've done enough has to be close to 100%.

194.1: When police brutality is the subject under discussion, and gswift's initial reaction to a video showing an old man with a cane being shoved to the ground is to positively say that it's the sort of thing that's obviously going to happen, and negatively fail to say that there's anything bad about it, I think that does say something about whether he believes it's acceptable policing. You obviously may differ.

CAF, I think I know where you are coming from, but don't really think I agree. Then again, I thinK the militarization of police has been an (completely predictable) unmitigated failure. While it is true that the police undeniably ability have occasional need to use force in their work, they can never be casual about it. If it becomes a defining characteristic at either a force or individual level, they have failed.

I don't know all the details of the incident with the guy with the cane, so agree that firing the officer in question might be an over correction. But it wouldn't be nearly as bad an overcorrection as accepting it as Just part of the job and move on.

A lot of the best commenters here have gone, I'm guessing in some cases partly because they got tired of all the tiresome people here, maybe if you'd got rid of Shearer and some other people earlier it would have helped. I wish Gswift all the best and would have liked to have him around if it weren't for his current conduct and bad opinions, and I'm not here that often anyway, but if various people you value care they'll eventually leave even if they don't consciously quit because of him, it's more a habit that you lose when it's not rewarding.

196: I explicitly said I wasn't going to make a conclusion until I had more context. We're talking about a scene where one of my buddies had a godamn hatchet fly by his head. So I asked around about the lead up to the guy getting pushed. Turns out he wasn't one of the ones throwing shit or being violent and the push was an overzealous mistake and I said so.

Turns out the old man with a cane standing motionless on the street wasn't a violent threat to the police? You really needed firsthand police testimony to confirm that?

200: A white guy in his 50's just murdered a cop up in Cala's town. I wasn't going to make a lot of assumptions without getting more info from the scene.

A lot of the best commenters here have gone, I'm guessing in some cases partly because they got tired of all the tiresome people here, maybe if you'd got rid of Shearer and some other people earlier it would have helped.

A lot of them went to Facebook, which has much worse control over tiresome people, but much more control about starting your own comment threads and posting other content, and blurring the lines between your various groups of people. So I'm guessing it's not Shearer per se.

however the governance of this blog works,

It's really very unclear!

Blog governance is difficult! My position in this case and in previous conversations about banning is that it's probably not possible to have a clear and transparent process; that it will ultimately fall on the FPP to decide one way or the other, and that I don't envy the decision (as I type that now I might summarize it as, "hard cases make bad law and any instance of banning a long-standing commenter is likely to be a hard case." I do have a much longer version if anyone really cases)

I don't know what to do. These conversations have been frustrating. As long as people are venting, I'll not that, I don't comment much, but in a couple of these threads I have made an active attempt to engage in what I thought was a positive way, and to try to be thoughtful about both the substance of the conversation and the meta-discussion and those comments were almost completely ignored. I honestly don't even know if people thought I was being helpful or if they're pissed at me too for extending the discussion.

Which is to say, again, that it's not easy to find the precise best tone for a contentious subject, and that it's good to give people some slack.

For example, I do like having the option to engage with what gswift is saying, and there are times that Tia's impulses for how to handle the situation strike me as unhelpful. But, at the same time, I think Tia's concerns are valid, and I appreciate that she's put a tone of energy into trying to articulate her concerns and be open about her emotional engagement with the blog, gswift clearly does troll people, and, as I said above, when I try to act on my sense of how best to approach things that hasn't yielded any results. So, I don't feel like I can tell people what the best solution is.

But I think Walt and maybe heebie are taking it as more insulting than it was meant

I think neb consistently misreads and negates both gswift and the pushback that gswift gets. Unlike neb, I don't find gswift any more predictable than, well, I am, for instance. But I've been genuinely surprised and informed by a lot of the response to him. The problem with "passive aggressive" was not that it was insulting. It is that it was an importantly inaccurate description of what was going on, and that error and similar ones are essential to neb's subsequent analysis.

I am normally an interested participant in these meta threads, but have been mostly an observer here both because I'm having trouble articulating my views and because I find that I don't entirely agree with anyone here. But I can co-sign ajay's 171. I will add that I have seen gswift cut against the Unfogged consensus and be unambiguously correct.

Paradoxically, I feel as though I am in substantial agreement with both Tia (in general) and Walt (in 174) -- though I wouldn't be surprised if both Tia and Walt found that absurd. My major disagreement with Walt is that he is excessively and unreasonably critical of Tia, who has -- with care and precision -- articulated an entirely reasonable set of opinions. I do disagree with the consequences of Tia's opinion -- that gswift ought be pushed out of this blog any more aggressively than has already happened.

Tia was the first, I think, in this conversation to differentiate the idea of a "community" and a "forum." I understand the distinction, but in pretty much every community of any size that I participate in, there are worse people than gswift, and certainly people who are less capable of contributing usefully to a conversation.

It's amazing to me that it's still necessary to make the case that the content, and not merely the form, of a conversation or community is important.

It's hard to discuss broad principles while being both intelligent and brief, but I will say that I think I disagree with neb here. Process dictates results. Neb's refusal to reckon with the arguments being made here has led to error on his part. Gswift walks in the door here steeped in error, but plays fair, doesn't troll, listens and describes the world he sees sufficiently accurately that everyone can see, for instance, that when he wheels a police car around to confront a heckler, he is engaging in intimidation, even when gswift himself doesn't see it. I find that useful. Others can reasonably differ.

204: I'm curious how long it took you to write that comment, because I'm amused that we were probably significant overlap while we were both writing (I spent 10-12 minutes).

I'm not going to parse it closely, but another vote for 'C_A_F's comment leads me directly to abolition'. (Although I was already there, cause my tiny baby brother who somehow became an adult works for an anti-incarceration group and he explained abolition to me.) If reliable people tell me that you can't have what policing does well without accepting that they become inured to dishing out violence, then, well, I don't want any of it. The negatives outweigh the positives (especially considering the balance over the past ten years of negatives and positives. It is worth saying that I'm not real impressed by the positives. They don't solve most murders. They don't show up quickly for most stuff. When I wanted to file a home burglary report, they laughed at the idea that they would do anything in person. Although, tbf, they were fast about it when I ratted out a guy who was loudly discussing stealing catalytic converters outside my window the other night.)

I was already arguing that a lot of what it does well could be unbundled and given to other organizations. Then we can make decisions about the violent parts.

I mentioned that civil settlements should come out of the police budget on Twitter and a genius countered that they should come out of the police pension fund and that is now my position too. Would really align the incentives as I'd like them.

I posit that the informal criteria for banning commenters, or asking them to leave, are too process-centric. I'm not sure the best articulation of what is needed, but if we keep reacting "I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people", that should be a tell.

Anyway, I promised a reaction to C_A_F's comments. I think this paragraph sums it up:

Gswift isn't getting his points across very well, but (at least in this thread) seems to basically be right. I watched the video of the cop hitting the old man, and don't think you could have a recognizable police force if you saw that as a firing offence. I don't want to analogize violence to grading, but just to translate between two populations I've known well: firing a cop for shoving too hard during a riot would have a similar effect to firing a prof for grading an exam or homework incorrectly. Some profs are scrupulous enough to pass this standard already, and a few more would figure it out - but most people would be fired within a few years. Actually I might be overstating things - while I've met several profs who are this scrupulous, every cop I've interacted with for a substantial period of time has done something worse than this video (though I know more profs than cops at this point).

I think the bolded language is probably accurate, which is why people have been talking about ways to create an unrecognizable police force. Shoving around peaceable citizens who aren't doing anything wrong is a big problem even if you're not injuring them -- I've been hammering on "old man with a cane" and "on his face in the street" because it was really ugly to watch, but it would be abusive and terrorizing even if the person shoved were young and healthy and stayed on his feet -- unless it's necessary for the safety of the people being shoved or the safety of others. This video, and the other videos that have come out of these protests, show that police are consistently not applying that standard for the use of force against peaceable citizens, either because they don't accept it and think they're allowed to use force to make people comply with their orders even when the orders have nothing necessary to do with public safety, or because they're insanely deluded about what public safety requires.

So if we can't have police as currently constituted without them believing that they're allowed to drive cars into crowds, blind journalists, and shove old men to the ground (only if there's a possibility that some police officer is willing to say that they believed the old man was a threat to the officer's safety. That testimony from a cop would make the assault on the old man appropriate, apparently), I don't want police as currently constituted.

There have been ideas floated about what to do -- take away most of their functions, raise hiring standards (I'm willing to stimulate the economy by hiring new police officers at $90k a year and requiring a sociology masters, or something along those lines). I don't know what specifically is doable in the sense of "can we get there from here", but when you say that that level of bad behavior is inevitably going to happen given police as currently constituted, I agree with you. I just think the next step is to fundamentally change the police rather than to accept them as a militarized occupying force.

Hah, drafted while Megan was typing, and largely preempted by her.

201: That looked to you plausibly like someone arresting someone they thought of as a threat? Plausibly enough that you couldn't leap to judgment because it might have been the right thing to do? You keep on making my point.

Given the value commentators here place on expert opinion, I find it darkly ironic how quick they are to disregard expert opinion on the difficulties of policing "a scene where one of my buddies had a godamn hatchet fly by his head."

Folks who attribute PTSD to rude language seem to have difficulty getting into the mindset of someone who is "clearing a block where another cop was surrounded, had her car flipped and set on fire, a firearm stolen from the car before they set it on fire, along with visibly armed open carry types in the crowd."

Finally, as a 90's kid who was raised to believe that censorship was one of the Bad Things that demonstrated the moral failing of the Right, I find efforts to ban contributors because of their "bad opinions" grotesque.

211: "censorship", lol

I'm sure that higher pay would help, but only in conjunction with a whole lot of other more substantive changes; otherwise you just get higher paid jackboots. The average pay for a Toronto police officer is over $100K (CAD, but still) and that hasn't made them into a model department. And I think with the more substantive changes the higher pay wouldn't add all that much. Badly paid cops still make lots more (and have way better benefits etc.) than social workers, community outreach workers, harm reduction workers and so on. They also already make a lot more than people who work in much more dangerous jobs.

Right. Had I worked harder, the line that LB bolded is the line that caught my eye as well. We've arrived at this bargain (a third to half the city budget in exchange for good services and bad side effects) and I don't want it any longer.

Yeah, I wouldn't just raise the pay without requiring the sociology masters. Or ten years experience as a classroom teacher, or something. But if the pay is an obstacle to getting people in the job who don't lash out violently and irrationally when under stress, I'm fine with raising the pay.

The average pay for a Toronto police officer is over $100K (CAD, but still) and that hasn't made them into a model department.

At least some members of the NYPD are extremely well paid.

Workers in the Department of Corrections make up nearly half of those people earning more in overtime than in base pay so far in 2017, according to public records available on See Through NY.

Top earners so far this year include:

• A correction officer who's made $373,900 so far this year; his annual salary is $82,000.
• An NYPD officer who's made $371,380 so far; his annual salary is $85,290.
• A corrections department engineer who's made $344,771 so far; his rate of pay is $556 on a daily basis.

An insistence on "it's all about impartial debate and discussion" is itself deeply political, especially when it refuses to orient around clear and patterned systemic crimes and injustice, and puts the burden of proof on the system's victims. Comments like 147 and 148, while well-attested in this place's history and culture, increasingly make me think there is nothing for me here either. (Tia's was not a "flounce-out", which is insulting; she was super-clear about her goals and needs, and responding to her call would have made us better.)

210: What point do you think you are making? Gswift appears to be saying that police are going to make mistakes in the application of force in the chaotic and stressful environment of a riot.

You appear to consider that some kind of concession. I'm not sure why. You state an intent to "fundamentally change the police rather than to accept them as a militarized occupying force". But that is just a trite slogan - like "abolish capitalism".

Can you support your evident belief that a police force of sociology majors would make meaningfully fewer mistakes while also being able to effectively suppress a riot?

Yes, 217 is well put. And as a 90's kid whose ability to think about both politics and group dynamics did not end in the 90s, the charge of "censorship for bad opinions" is risible.

Toronto isn't a great example, for the same reasons as 216. Outside of summer at least, it seems like you can't go a block there downtown without seeing a uniform or two standing around uselessly - or at most doing a job that could be handled perfectly well by a flagperson - detailed to a construction site or city works crew. It's an astonishing waste of money.

The idea that the police as presently constituted have been suppressing rather than inciting riots is sure an interesting one.

Seconding 219, 217 is indeed well put.

Carvell Wallace made the point that at a protest against the police, the police are counter-protesters.

They not the neutral refs.

218: a differently constituted police force would face far fewer riots. That's the point. The existence of the riots of a direct response to the existence of militarized and racist police force.

220: A 1st class constable in TO makes $101K salary, exclusive of overtime. The high pay isn't because they're just overpriced traffic wardens and film set security. In fact, among the biggest complaints about TO police-- as big as the concerns about racial profiling and brutality-- is that they've pretty much entirely abandoned enforcing traffic laws.

212: Quality comment. Pat yourself on the back.

217: When you reject the norm of "impartial debate and discussion" then all that remains is who can scream the loudest. When you condemn "refus[ing] to orient around clear and patterned systemic crimes and injustice, and put[ting] the burden of proof on the system's victims" you are merely demanding that your interlocutors accept your correctness as a precondition for engagement. Get bent. Goals and needs are not inherently legitimate - the world is full of utility monsters whose goals and needs can never be reasonably satisfied.

I feel I ought to post a measured, thoughtful, judicious response to "I don't even know what to say to fucking bullshit like lurid's 125," but of course, there's nowhere to start. Let me try a more direct approach. There have never been, and probably never will be, enough votes to ban gswift from Unfogged, assuming he doesn't cross some brighter line in the future. The guy gets attacked, defended, attacked, defended, attacked, defended ad infinitum. Someone needs to propose another remedy, if this problem is important enough that people are leaving or thinking of leaving over it (which is just such a fucked-up situation to begin with -- it feels like a popularity contest with knives out).

My position, fwiw, is that banning gswift would be an act of ridiculous scapegoating bullshit, but there's no serious chance that it will happen, so it seems gratuitous to say even that. Gswift, sorry to talk about you in the third person, and thank you for that old story about the homeless guy stealing the Porsche for a joyride, which I have retold to various people over the years. It's one of my favorites.

205: I am embarrassed to say that it took me a lot longer to write my comment, without a better result than yours. Not sure how long because there were several false starts and interruptions. Also, it's about my fourth attempt at that comment over the last several days. I do find this discussion interesting and helpful to me, but it's hard to shake the suspicion that my best contribution might be silence.

Not sure how long because there were several false starts and interruptions.

Thank you for indulging my curiosity. I wasn't counting the time I've spent mulling it over. I had a sense of what I wanted to say, I was just counting the time from when I started scrolling the thread to decide which comment I should reply to and how I wanted to begin.

212 was, indeed, a quality comment. (I say this entirely unironically.)

221: Couldn't have said it better myself.

Thank you for indulging my curiosity.

Hey, to me it really is all about process, and the amount of time spent ruminating is part of the process. For instance: I pretty much have to take full responsibility for that one, because it was a product of careful consideration. Other times I might be able to blame haste or emotional heat for a poorly constructed thought.

Perhaps this is a good time to remind everyone that even philosophical liberalism hero Rawls rejected the norm of impartial debate and discussion for all comers and didn't think that that meant that all that was left was screaming the loudest. Plato, not notable for being a philosophical liberal but the person whose depictions of Socrates inspire a lot of uninformed "debate" fetishization, has Socrates at multiple points pause in his argument to make a meta-point with his interlocutors that they have to agree on fundamentals to get anywhere further. Hume, as we all know, didn't think there was much to talk to his "sensible knave" about.

Get bent. Goals and needs are not inherently legitimate - the world is full of utility monsters whose goals and needs can never be reasonably satisfied.

It almost seems as if you think that in some cases you have to exclude people, namely these utility monsters, from the conversation in order to make have a sensible, impartial debate and discussion, and I applaud you for leading off your admission with something not unlike a scream.

232: And couldn't have said this one nearly as well.

I don't really want to see gswift run out of town, but what most disturbs me about his (and Cop_Adjacent_Fan's) comments on the old man with the cane (precisely because I don't see gswift as someone predisposed to psychopathy) is the shift from the already very extreme (a) "excuse police brutality when there's some significant chance the policeman thought, even if unreasonably, that the person being beaten might have had threatening intentions, or might have been trying to resist arrest" to (b) "excuse the use of casual and humiliating police brutality to ensure prompt compliance from bystanders".

Almost no-one in the rest of the First World would accept either. It is not necessary to accept either in order to have a functioning police force. But at least the weirdly high number of Americans who spam news report comment threads advocating (a) can attempt to justify themselves with the possibility that the recipient of the brutality had a gun, given that the country is awash with them. When people are so used to advocating (a) that they slide into (b) you have a police state.

224: Traffic laws aside, there are a bunch of issues the local population has with the Toronto force, but I won't pretend to know how that compares to, say top 10 US metros by population. Torontonians, at least the ones I know, definitely seem to think they pay too much for too little services there.

By the way, you are quoting the top constable pay rate, and they start at around 70k (52K USD, today's prices). That's about 25/hr so a little better than gswifts 21, but not wildly so. I guess factor health care in too. Currency shifts complicate things a bit but the general idea holds, there are bound to be a lot more constables 3rd and 4th class that 1st, I would expect. If that's the case the average pay being north of 100k (74 USD) means there is a lot of overtime going out.

234 pwned in essentials by LB's 208. (And, hopefully obviously, I'm not taking myself to be prominent enough have any sort of vote as to whether anyone stays or goes.)

Rawls rejected the norm of impartial debate and discussion for all comers and didn't think that that meant that all that was left was screaming the loudest.

I think it's important to draw a line between nope's argument, which I have no sympathy for, and the argument of 147 and 148, which make a more serious point. Obviously the conversation is about where to draw lines, and not whether.

At any rate we agree Toronto's force isn't a great model - it shares a lot of issues that will be familiar to those in the US (carding, excessive force, claims of racism, etc.). I see that this weekend there were a number of protests there not without sympathy to US protests but it seems proximally started by the police involved death of a young black woman last week - details of that seem fuzzy. And so it goes.

"excuse the use of casual and humiliating police brutality to ensure prompt compliance from bystanders".

I kinda think that gswift's argument is even worse than this. I read gswift as saying, basically, hey, you gotta understand, this cop was under a lot of stress. He was having a bad day. There really wasn't any kind of functional rationale for the officer's behavior, given that just letting the old guy go would have gotten him out of the way quicker.

While the Toronto comments are interesting and informative, I'm kind of sad about having my "Canadians are all peaceable and civilized" bubble popped. Having a idiot teenager who spent last year in Toronto and will be going back once the engineering skule reopens, I was kind of hoping the cops there were all warm-hearted and level-headed in a fantasy-Canadian way.

nosflow is cleaning the floor here, cannot endorse strongly enough. will only add this, inspired by 226 but really following on from my comments in the other thread. lk says:

"The guy gets attacked, defended, attacked, defended, attacked, defended ad infinitum. Someone needs to propose another remedy, if this problem is important enough that people are leaving or thinking of leaving over it (which is just such a fucked-up situation to begin with -- it feels like a popularity contest with knives out)."

the first bit - "The guy gets attacked, defended, attacked, defended, attacked, defended ad infinitum." - doesn't really happen just like that. he repeatedly engages in a v careful drip drip of comments over, at and just behind a line, to rile up and revolt one set of usual suspects while keeping juuuust enough of the rest here on side and then ogged swoops in to bless.

bc this is absolutely true: "it feels like a popularity contest with knives out" - bc it is! every group of humans is a popularity contest! its called forming a hierarchy whether spoken/formal or unspoken/informal, we all do it, we are condemned to do it by our social nature as a species!

all the more reason for those who participate in this cycle to have a bit of a think about what your role in it says *about you*. valuable data here folks, don't leave it on the table!

it only works bc he gets engagement, a huuuuuge amount of it over the years. who is whose pet here?

I was kind of hoping the cops there were all warm-hearted and level-headed in a fantasy-Canadian way.

Thinking of the final punchline in the ABOF&L "privatisation of the police force" sketch - a knee to the balls, followed by "well, you haven't changed that much then."

Thanks for the responses and interesting discussion. Just dropping in to say, because I think it wasn't clear: I largely agree with Megan's conclusion at 206, and certainly don't view them as being at all opposed to my post.

I was compelled mostly because nobody else here seems to actually be a cop, and I was at least cop/violence-adjacent for a good chunk of time. Based on my very limited but nonzero experience, the pool of people who are potential cops at the current pay rate are mostly people who would be expected to tackle the odd old man with a cane every once in a while. If you want to do the current job of policing at something like the current budget and with the actually-existing pool of potential cops, I think this implies that your standards have to more-or-less let that go.

Like Megan, I think the obvious conclusion is closer to "police should mostly avoid stressful situations with big mobs" rather than "police should be allowed to beat the crap out of random civilians." Going all the way to "abolish" is terrifying to me - there really are things like armed terrorist groups out there - but I'm not a public policy expert, so who cares what I think.

239.2: Well, to give every possible benefit of the doubt to the police officer, I imagined the situation as being an evacuation -- let's say a bomb was about to explode and the cop was desperate to get the men away to save the man's own life. Now in this instance it would still have been the wrong thing to push the man so that he falls down, but that would be an understandable error.

OK to dial back the lefty-ness a bit: While the cop in the old-man-with-a-cane seems to have acted badly, I don't think it was egregious and can't imagine how this can be solved by raising pay by 10 percent or whatever. Walking into a riot with a uniform can be scary and people will not behave the way you want.

I don't get this. Walking into a riot with a uniform can be scary, but how could the cop possibly have been afraid of the old man?

I'm not saying that the good police functions should go undone. They could be parted out and done by specialists.

And, I'm open to a conversation about where the state should approve the use of force, but I don't want it muddled with supremacy, masculinity, competence, hero worship, or hiding behind "but think of all the good things we do!".

I know it is late, but I really have to respond to this: " I would say, and did say, that failure to internally police, to observe a sort of omerta, should be a firing offence. If an officer thinks that part of his job is protecting his brothers in blue from accountability for either intentional lapses or mistakes, that officer is misunderstanding the job. And that this sort of thing is ever tolerated is a failure of police leadership." Charlie Carp 174

I think this is a central issue described wrongly on the internet.

I don't think it really makes sense to say it is a failure of police leadership at this point. It is systemic and has been for a long time. Protecting your brothers in blue from accountability is essential to being allowed to keep and do your job as a peace officer in the US.

I feel like everyone who has had the experience of reading even 25% of the arguments around gswift here should already sense this even if it wasn't also very evident from both the news and popular culture, as well as practically every account of sexual harassment on the job.

People are passionate about this for good reason. This is life or death stuff. Can they really hire half the working class to kill the other half? Conversations we have with gswift constitute evidence about that. I understand why people might not want to look at that but I think we should pay attention to things that might affect our own survival.

They might have been revved up because it was an upsetting day, but those cops didn't appear to be and weren't acting as if they were under immediate physical threat. Deferring to professional expertise is one thing -- thinking of the behavior in that video as meaningfully explained or ameliorated by the scariness of a 'riot' consisting in the immediate vicinity of a couple of people standing around seems misguided to me. I think training people to be present in riots like that without physically abusing peaceable bystanders is practical.

249 to 245

248: I have to think that making civil settlements come out of the police pension fund would radically re-align that police omerta.

People who don't behave towards ordinary citizens -- their bosses, not their enemies -- the way we want have to get assessed about whether they belong in the job. That seems to be happening in SLC. That does not seem to be happening to the degree necessary in MSP.

I'm not sure abolition is the answer, but cutting wildly back on qualified immunity, enforcing standards of the use of force aggressively, and firing people for what amounts to misprision might be enough to make a real difference. People who don't want to protect and serve the citizenry need to find another line of work.

Obviously, someone like the President who endorses brutality and pardons war criminals is exactly the wrong guy -- and his followers are the wrong guys -- to make this happen.

246 to 245

240: If it helps, I would take the Toronto ones over Houston, NYC, LA, or Chicago any day of the week. And unless your son happens to be Black or First Nations, I wouldn't have any particular concerns about interactions with them. That said, they are a big metro force with a (North) American way of looking at policing, so....

I hadn't seen 248 yet. Yes, obviously, it's not *just* that the leaders are failing to change police culture, though they are. Politicians that turn a blind eye (or like the President cheerlead) to that failure also need to go.

I should post something about qualified immunity -- I have thoughts, that circle around my not being temperamentally suited to lawyering in some ways. (Dogged argumentation, sure, that I'm fond of. Taking appellate law seriously as an intellectual enterprise? I'm kind of bad at that, and I'd be better at my job if I were better at reactions other that "it's all mostly bullshitting.")

254: Oh, he's Whitey McWhiterson. Just also a teenage idiot.

I think it's a commonplace and correct argument that war crimes are simply a function of war -- that you can't have a war without them. The proper response to this, of course, is not to say: "Well, that's just what happens. Whattya gonna do?" The proper response is to stay the hell out of wars, and to police the conduct of warriors in the exceedingly rare cases when war is necessary.

Nothing important to add here except further agreement with 217 and thanks to Tia and LB for making gswift be explicit with his views. Looking back as a long time reader of the site it's pretty horrifying how much gswift's comments have gone from enjoyable to 'that's how the police think?!'

I'm not on the banning side (is anyone?) but I'm really glad of the pushback he gets.

In Canadian news, Halifax police just had the stop and frisk report release. I haven't read the results but it's already known that Black Haligonians get stopped way out of proportion to their population size.

243 "I think this implies that your standards have to more-or-less let that go."

This is I think the crux of the issue; some people are saying "the current setup assumes you have to kind of accept this as part of the package". Others are saying "that's not good enough, how can we do something different".

FWIW I don't think the ideas behind police abolition envision leaving the population unprotected against armed terrorist groups, but I don't know enough about it to be sure. My superficial understanding is that these people believe that policing as we know it is so fundamentally broken and coupled with other problems that meaningful reform isn't really possible, and it would be better to start over with a clean slate.

For a less US centric view, since Canada came up by way of Toronto: I know that there are activists there who believe that the RCMP has fundamentally been unable to divest itself from its origins as a tool of imperial conquest, and think that best thing to do would be to dissolve it and replace the functions (lots of remote areas, for example) with new organizations defined from the beginning with different goals. They aren't suggesting a state of anarchy.

Thanks. I just learned a new word.

Deferring to professional expertise is one thing -- thinking of the behavior in that video as meaningfully explained or ameliorated by the scariness of a 'riot' consisting in the immediate vicinity of a couple of people standing around seems misguided to me. I think training people to be present in riots like that without physically abusing peaceable bystanders is practical.

This is where the militarization of police comes in. Even if you have no desire to dress like a space marine and drive a Humvee around, the fact that you're asked to do so as part of your normal responsibilities will mean you logically expect to see danger and terror around every corner. Or else why would you have to protect yourself so much?

256 : obviously outside my area of expertise but I always thought that qualified immunity was sort of like civil forfeiture in that, as currently instituted you can sort of see how someone could make an argument for why they wanted to do it, but what they ended up with was such an obviously flawed position that it's hard to imagine how anyone let it be law without basically being on board with the stupid & evil parts. Or being entirely ignorant of human nature. Perhaps both?

262 is one of the (many) reasons militarization of police has always been a bad idea, and has failed in such predictable ways.

I would like a more detailed explanation of QI because my non-lawyer understanding is approximately: SCOTUS chose the 1970s as a milestone after which any crime by police that had not been precisely committed before that day would henceforth not be a crime because how can you be expected to know something was a crime if the exact same situation didn't happen before the 1970s?

As I understand it, which is mostly as a layperson (I don't do this professionally and haven't devoted professional-type effort to thinking about it, so I could be flat wrong about the following), that's not quite the case. Each QI decision lets that defendant off the hook, but closes off the loophole for the next precisely similar defendant. Case 1: "Defendant had qualified immunity, he was not clearly on notice that beating the shit out of plaintiff with brass knuckles was a violation of his constitutional rights." Case 2: "Defendant had qualified immunity: while under case 1, it is now clearly established that beating the shit out plaintiff with brass knuckles is a violation of his constitutional rights, defendant was not on notice that beating the shit out of plaintiff while wearing a set of separated heavy metal rings purchased from a site identifying them as 'for self defense' was a violation of his constitutional rights." Case 3: "Defendant had qualified immunity: while under cases 1 and 2, it is clearly established that beating the shit out of someone with metal weights of any kind on your hands is a violation of the victim's constitutional rights, defendant in this case, although he was wearing brass knuckles, stopped the beating short of the point where the victim shit himself, and therefore defendant was not on notice that his conduct was a violation of the victim's constitutional rights."

The thing I don't understand (and again, I haven't thought about this professionally, there may be an embarrassingly obvious answer) is why judges generally buy into the incredible fineness of the salami slicing. Each decision is bad on its own merits, because it treats any minor change in the circumstances as enough to bring the doctrine into play, but I don't see what about the doctrine compels the badness of the decisions. I can imagine a QI doctrine that treated obviously similar situations as enough to give notice of the law that wouldn't be so bad.

That was the whole possible future post, which everyone should stop holding their breaths for now. Except that I probably would have done the research necessary to resolve the "I could be flat wrong about this" disclaimers.

My best friend in Minneapolis has a brother who is a Minneapolis cop. He's been a cop for about 20 years (first in Atlanta; in Mpls for maybe 15?). Over that time, my friend's general ability to assess and discuss anything having to do with police has gone from "we agree mostly and can learn from each other when we don't" to "I haven't checked in with her this week because I don't know if I will hear a bunch of pro-cop nonsense and I don't feel like dealing with it yet."

And she doesn't even like her brother! They barely speak, for unrelated reasons. But having him, having a cop, in her family has been like a drug or a cult or an evil spell or something. Conversations around the topic just don't make any sense any more. So I can't imagine what it would do to you, to actually BE one.

Which makes the problem really, really hard to solve. It's not only that reasonable people don't become police officers, it's that when they do, they stop being reasonable. The cops who manage to stay people must have amazing amounts of inner strength. That's obviously not a scalable solution.

do you need a cop's special insidery perspective to move the needle? hmmm maybe not!

https://twitter.com/samswey/status/1267167593657511937?s=19

note most tasks on that list require pulling local political levers not remaking the fed judiciary (although great goal, also necessary work). hit the phones folks! had an interesting conversation with a nervous scott wiener aide this morning. ahhhh felt great.

eh wrong thread, try this as usual on phone bad typing etc

https://twitter.com/samswey/status/1180655701271732224?s=19

270: Thanks for the link DQ. I scrolled down to my city and was dismayed at local use of force requirements... it sounds like something we need to remember and ensure is fixed in the next police contract negotiations. We even failed on requiring deescalation, so that's something to push our council people on.

😍 mk, all the love to fresno!

Each QI decision lets that defendant off the hook, but closes off the loophole for the next precisely similar defendant.

Unfortunately not any more, at least not necessarily. About 10 years ago, the Supreme Court held that it wasn't mandatory for courts to first consider whether the challenged conduct was unconstitutional before asking whether the unconstitutionality had been clearly established. So you can get decisions that only look at the "clearly established" question, and skirt the substantive constitutional issues. I don't have a sense of how often that happens (the one case I was involved in where the cops asked the court to skip to step 2, they declined to do so; and I know I've seen plenty of other decisions that decline to take that approach, for the obvious reason that it would mean nothing would ever get clearly established), but it's just another indication of what a ridiculous joke it is.

I can imagine a QI doctrine that treated obviously similar situations as enough to give notice of the law that wouldn't be so bad.

The doctrine in the abstract leaves plenty of room for this: in principle, you don't need to show that the precise action in question was previously held unlawful, just that the unlawfulness should have been "apparent" in light of prior cases, so that the cops have "fair warning" that their conduct was unconstitutional. But of course in practice that gives judges who want to defer to the police plenty of room to find that the unconstitutionality wasn't sufficiently apparent.

I second 268.last. And it's not just about police-specific issues, joining the police has pushed my brother right on all issues. It's complicated because he's Black himself, but he was basically arguing it was ok when the golf course he and my dad go to kicked out a group of Black women because they didn't kick them out for being black they kicked them out for being liberal. He used to be my favorite brother and it's really really hard for me to see him now.

I was wondering if something like that was the case, and was too lazy to look it up.

268- Some people do have a lot of inner strength. That doesn't matter. They have get on board with thinking that systematically defends cops right or wrong in this system. Otherwise they either aren't going to be able to continue to be police, or they aren't going to survive generally. The other officers applying social sanctions in law enforcement circles are generally going to be able to make sure of that. I'd doubt you even need close to a majority of them to make the code of omuerta basically unbreakable. How did Serpico's career go anyway?

I'm not saying the new recruit is facing death threats on day one. Social groups have have plenty of more subtle ways to get people to buy in a little bit at a time.

closes off the loophole for the next precisely similar defendant
It will never be June 1, 2020 again.

Watching what's been happening in the US with pretty much nothing but a feeling of dismay. The two thoughts I have, for what little it's worth, are first, that there seems to be a radicalisation problem with American police forces - i.e. too many of their members have been tuning into 4chan far, far too often - and American police forces may actually now be quite far out of step with the populations they serve, in terms of beliefs. (As evidence for this: the recent poll in which only 4% of respondents thought that Chauvin acted properly.) Most people don't read 4chan (or wherever the worst fascist & racist material gets posted these days). The second thought I have is that American police might be in some sense brutalised by being endlessly witness to extremes of inequality and the things (including, obviously, crimes) that follow from that. If policing is social work, then the overall health of a society is bound to have some sort of effect on police forces. At least this is plausible to me. If this is so, you won't fix the police independently of everything else.

And she doesn't even like her brother! They barely speak, for unrelated reasons. But having him, having a cop, in her family has been like a drug or a cult or an evil spell or something. Conversations around the topic just don't make any sense any more. So I can't imagine what it would do to you, to actually BE one.

Which makes the problem really, really hard to solve. It's not only that reasonable people don't become police officers, it's that when they do, they stop being reasonable. The cops who manage to stay people must have amazing amounts of inner strength. That's obviously not a scalable solution.

My theory is people's views become more extreme and hardened because of the internet, like in most subcultures. There must be police discussion groups online where police and family members spend most of their time interacting with each other and nobody else, that you join to get updates on BBQ fundraisers and day care recommendations, that then turn into a stream of news about police being attacked, media unfairly reporting only when police do something bad, police being disrespected by loony libs in city government, police being disrespected by Taco Bell employees, stories of the filth and degradation in inner-city war zones where police must brave their lives but loony libs never would go, etc, plus rumors about activists planning scary coordinated attacks on the police that never actually happen or end up consisting of four people.

why judges generally buy into the incredible fineness of the salami slicing.

Judges are alternatively none too bright or eager to make very narrow decisions because they like the cops?

No to the first -- they're not perfect, but most federal judges are at least pretty good lawyers, and many are very good, and on the second I wouldn't have thought of them as being as monolithic on this point as my impression of the caselaw is. Really, I just don't get how QI got this bad, but it really has to go.

Jessop v. City of Fresno, 9th cir. 2019, cert denied recently, https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/09/04/17-16756.pdf is a fun qualified immunity case. The police raided a home with a valid search warrant. "the City Officers gave Appellants an inventory sheet stating that they seized approximately $50,000 from the properties. Appellants allege, however, that the officers actually seized $151,380 in cash and another $125,000 in rare coins. Appellants claim that the City Officers stole the difference between the amount listed on the inventory sheet and the amount actually seized from the properties." The criminal investigation of the Jessops was dropped without charges, and the $50,000 on the inventory sheet was returned to them. Ruling: "We recognize that the allegation of any theft by police officers--most certainly the theft of over $225,000--is deeply disturbing. Whether that conduct violates the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures, however, would not "be 'clear to a reasonable officer.'" The Court ruling does not definitively advise future police officers whether or not in the future, stealing large amounts of money should be considered unreasonable conduct.

There's a whole series of them along the lines of: It's established that the conduct in question is bad if done for x amount of time, but in this case it was done for y amount of time and y

There's a whole series of them along the lines of: It's established that the conduct in question is bad if done for x amount of time, but in this case it was done for y amount of time and y is less than x so QI applies because we can't expect a cop to know just how long is an unreasonable amount of time to make a prisoner sit in their own feces. And I think there was a case where x was 7 days and y was 3 days?

No to the first -- they're not perfect, but most federal judges are at least pretty good lawyers, and many are very good, and on the second I wouldn't have thought of them as being as monolithic on this point as my impression of the caselaw is. Really, I just don't get how QI got this bad, but it really has to go.

This is reminding me of the Hostile Witness podcast's discussion of the Supreme Court's relentless removal of all restrictions on bribery and political corruption. After going through all the details of the decisions since 1980 or whatever that got us to this point, one host basically just interrupted the other one and said "So why is this happening? Normal people, both on the right and the left, think this is... bad. It makes them look bad. It's not self-interest. The judges aren't using this to be corrupt themselves. And yet these decisions are not just happening, they're at least 7-2 every time. And they are unquestionably changing the law." And it seemed to be a mystery?

No to the first -- they're not perfect, but most federal judges are at least pretty good lawyers

Is it so implausible that being a "pretty good lawyer" is compatible with a professional deformation that to many on the outside looks a lot like being none too bright?

It's clearly illegal to steal $50,000 and to steal $52,000, but not $51,000?

Not unless you're using "not too bright" in a sense that I'm not getting. "Feels constrained by professional norms to do bad things" is completely plausible, I'm just puzzled by the mechanism in this case. Acts in ways that generally resemble the ways genuinely stupid people act, though, doesn't IME describe most federal judges. But you may be making a point that I'm not following.

I realize that my deformation is to look at these things and think, "aha, this person is a bozo!". Really though in these cases I think what's more likely is that the person is malign.

232: "It almost seems as if you think ..."

No. I don't think that. But thanks for playing! Everyone gets a say, everyone gets an opportunity to speak. So simple.

As for group dynamics, I have certainly noticed that illiberal leftists enter groups with diverse viewpoints and, once they have achieved critical mass, systematically exclude viewpoints they disagree with.

Scientists also systematically exclude certain classes of views they disagree with. You are at this point rehearsing completely predictable and always already addressed points, so why don't you nope on out of here?

ogged swoops in to bless

gswift was a regular here well before he was a cop; he's not here as the token cop mouthpiece; he's a commenter who became a police officer, and we've continued conversing with him.

On the police thing, my own political/familial/temperamental instincts are to be anti-cop, but one thought I come back to is that we need to work harder to see the police (in most cases, people from the middle and working classes without a bunch of other great options) as themselves part of the dispensable and traumatized class. We're very good at seeing what in the life of a young black man makes him shoot someone dead during a $20 robbery, but not nearly as good at seeing how someone might be affected by spending their days interacting with and opposing him. I'm all for police reform, and the thread dq linked is excellent, but the larger problem is that environments exist in this country in which almost no one can stay truly sane.

281 : I think my point up above was that like the problem with civil forfeiture , this seems to be the *expected* outcome. The incentives are all wrong, so unless there is a structural way to counter that has teeth, it seems almost inevitable ...

Someone's started to compile a spreadsheet of documented incidents of police brutality over the past few days: https://twitter.com/jasonemiller/status/1267546935470088192

Incidents range from indiscriminate use of tear gas to boots in the face and ruptured eyes.

292. I have a lot of empathy for people who through some combination of training, culture, and character are not able to do a good job of being police. So I'm all for ideas for finding them something more suitable to do. But I don't think any of that means you want to have them stay in place .

gswift's problem is not that is he is a cop, it's that he shows up in threads and acts like an asshole. Which, I personally think is an offense properly remedied by telling him to quit acting like an asshole, but what do I know, I mostly lurk anyway.

291: Analogy ban. For science.

208: please don't require a Masters degree. There are so many areas in government where people get promoted du ego having a masters that the quality of the degree goes way down, and really good people get pushed out for lack of a credential.

Yeah, I was spitballing ideas rather than committed to anything particular. I kind of liked the ten years of classroom teaching.

194.2: I'm sure that I could find better write-ups if I spent more time on it, but I am glad you like them for a start!

Unfortunately, the Georgian option was exercised after a people-power revolution pushed out a corrupt president and the state was close to failure. It would be nice if the US could improve policing without getting to that state.

I had two interactions with the new force during the 3.5 years I lived there. First was as a passenger in a chartered minibus that was taking two non-Georgian families around the western part of the country. The driver committed some minor offense and got busted. Even invoking hospitality and not losing face in front of guests -- two tenets of Georgian culture that are basically sacred -- did not suffice for getting out of the ticket. Routine you might say, but so, so different from any of the neighboring countries.

The second was when I made a slightly questionable left turn to get coffee (road was poorly marked) and someone who was passing a long line of traffic in a more-than-questionable way wound up with his front end in my driver's side door. Fortunately, I was in a big SUV and he was driving a little Yugo-like thing, and he managed to mostly stop before hitting my vehicle. Anyway, the cops came, shoo'd away a crowd that was trying to gather and then rapidly organized a translator for me because my Georgian was in no way up to the task of an accident report. They were calming, level-headed, and professional. Every bit what you would want to see from a First World force, and very different from their peer countries.

169:
Here, allow President of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis by repeated landslide votes, Bob Kroll, to explain what the Minneapolis Police Department is...

I've had numerous conversations with politicians at the state level. I gave a detailed plan of action including a range of 2000 to 3000 National Guard, their deployment allocations throughout our city and St.Paul, in a phone meeting with Senate majority leader Paul Gazelka. The Senate was ging to try and run the actions that the governor displayed he is clearly incompetent to do. I've worked with other police leaders from New York to Las Vegas to push our messaging on a national level. What is not being told is the violent criminal history of George Floyd. The media will not air this. I've worked with the four defense attorneys that are representing each of our four terminated individuals under criminal investigation, in addition with our labor attorneys to fight for their jobs They were terminated without due process.

It was hard to pick a passage but I thought the one where he explained that he had been plotting a coup with the Senate majority leader was too good to pass up.

So, apparently we're going to have the army sent everywhere? That'll work.

The army has superior firepower, but a lot better training and is more representative of the population in general, so probably a lot of people in the army will refuse to attack people at random with no rules of engagement. Senator Tom Cotton's request for "no quarter" (this means make no arrests, kill everyone instead, right?) is also probably a no go.

That is very optimistic, Ned!

300: We are already at or past that point.

243: the pool of people who are potential cops at the current pay rate are mostly people who would be expected to tackle the odd old man with a cane every once in a while.

You're kidding, right? *Starting* pay for a Minneapolis cop is $54k. Not including overtime, benefits or extremely lucrative off-duty jobs. I make significantly less than that for a job in which I have 15 years experience. Not to mention, if I commit a crime at work, there's every likelihood that I will serve federal prison time and be banned from my industry for life. Cops who commit crimes at work either get a medal, or they get shuffled off to the next town like a pedophile priest. Boo-fucking-hoo, Chauvin's been a cop for 19 years and he only has one fancy suburban house and one winter place in Florida. Won't somebody pleeeeze think of the poor police officers of Minneapolis, huddled around a tiny flame like the little match girl?

Regarding the thread title, Obama did publish something on medium, and it's pretty bad!

The medium is the message.

Ok, thinking more seriously about joining Team Fire Them All. This is fucking SS shit.

Apropos of nothing except the anniversary in two days, who feels like chatting about Tiananmen Square? (Those of you with long memories: has there ever been a long thread about Tiananmen? I can't remember having seen one.)

I don't remember one, and my guess is that there's no angle for a big argument so when it comes up in passing, it doesn't become a topic.

Trump's STRENGTH! tweet and "domination" language were very reminiscent, to me, of how he spoke about Tiananmen Square:
(from Playboy, 1990)

When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength," Trump replied. "That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak...as being spit on by the rest of the world."

Oh, HK's 6/4 memorial has been cancelled for the first time.

It's been a good few years for dictatorship.

311: True, but people love counterfactual history here, so a lot of conflicts get rehashed in detail that way. I didn't remember this one in particular, though.

I wish I could post the entire account from John Gittings' The Changing Face of China (which is now 15 years old; I thought it was worth reading in 2017 or so).

Months after the massacre, soldiers who had been involved would invariably insist that their unit had not fired -- or only in the air. It also remained impossible to establish just who had given the order to open fire. According to one account, the troops were instructed to use all necessary means to attain their objective. On meeting resistance they sought clarification, but received the reply: 'You have received your instructions. Do not ask again!' If true, this suggests an effort even at the highest level of command to avoid explicit responsibility for the killings.

By far the most severe casualties were suffered by the ordinary citizens of Beijing who sought to prevent the army from entering. Many hundreds were killed during the army's western advance, and dozens more at the top of Tiananmen Square and eastwards as the soldiers 'opened the road.' Most reliable estimates, based on the number of bodies reported in local hospitals, put the total of deaths somewhere below the one thousand mark, with at least three thousand non-fatal casualties. The regime would only admit that 'nearly 300' died including at least 'several dozen' soldiers. . . .

The use of firepower enabled the hardline regime to intimidate two separate opposing forces: it cowed its critics in the Party leadership, and it taught the people of Beijing who had defied martial law a bitter lesson. Thousands would also be arrested and beaten up (and a number of them executed) in the ensuing repression. The students in the Square suffered fewer casualties, although the eyewitness reports suggest that worse violence was only avoided by their disciplined decision to leave. (pp 244-45)

Obama did publish something on medium, and it's pretty bad!

Obama is an incrementalist and an institutionalist. He isn't the man for this moment. But I did think that a speech might calm things a bit. A Medium post, not so much.

He wasn't the man for 2016, either. I am disgusted that he chose appearing gracious over responding appropriately to threat. He won't be the one to pay the costs of his inadequacies.

The departure was disciplined; the decision itself sounds a bit chaotic:

At 4 a.m. all the lights were turned off. Though expecting an imminent assault, the students stood calmly while their loudspeakers played the 'Internationale'. People began setting fire to the now-abandoned tents and piles of rubbish, although urged not to provoke the army by doing so. The loudspeakers then broadcast two conflicting appeals. A student leader insisted that the Square should not be abandoned. 'We will now pay the highest price possible, for the sake of securing democracy.' But a leader of the Workers' Autonomous Federation then urged withdrawal: 'We must all leave here immediately, for a terrible bloodbath is now about to take place . . . To wish to die here is nothing more than an immature fantasy.' He was supported by Hou Dejian. Soon after 4.30, the tanks to the north started up their engines, conveying the threat that they were about to roll forward. A rather confused voice vote was taken which was interpreted to be a decision in favour of leaving. Between 5 and 5.30 nearly all those in the Square filed out quietly, carrying their banners, while a few spectators applauded. A student picket line guarded the rear, retreating slowly as the tanks advanced. (243)

312: without a fucking doubt.

313: what do you think will happen? I worry.

Is this going to be the Trump Steaks of martial law?

The Trump. University of white nationalism.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjmkJ6th-LpAhVkZTUKHQVnDZMQFjAVegQIAhAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Freligion%2Fbishop-budde-trump-church%2F2020%2F06%2F01%2F20ca70f8-a466-11ea-b619-3f9133bbb482_story.html&usg=AOvVaw0CtX6MSfl1R2od_84RzfFb

Trump decided to pose in front of St. John's Lafayette square with a Bible, and they gassed the crowd of protestors to clear the way for him to cross the street. This makes me so angry.

A speech by Obama would clearly not calm police officers. What would calming protesters accomplish, not that I think he could do that, but why would you want that?

Brown shirt gangs with baseball bats roaming in Philly, have apparently beaten up at least one reporter: https://twitter.com/jpegjoshua/status/1267599264257015816

apparently with the active blessing of the police.

319. I honestly don't know. Beijing has been moving their own security forces in, and they're just going to tighten the noose. They've been starting shit on all fronts, internationally, and no one ever got fired for being too chauvinist. So, not great on that end. What the umbrella folks are likely to do, I have no clue.

This is praetorian guard shit: https://twitter.com/CBPMarkMorgan/status/1267571804056489984

By a careful combination of alcohol and ignoring things, I'm trying to avoid becoming either too depressed or too enraged to do anything useful. "Joe Biden or the end of America as a decent society" isn't a good place to be in and keeps making it hard to me to sleep.

One of the best tools I have gotten out of Unfogged is the ability to say, "What if people in power are doing exactly what they intend to do?" Obama, police, it works well for lots of people.

historically, the perceived failure of a a right wing fed admin to deliver repression led to an upsurge of white power violence. honestly in this moment i do not give a shit about the reported impressions or opinions of current leo.* i'm looking for 1) empirically confirmed as effective policy measures we can implement at a political level we have a chance of influencing (link posted above) & 2) good research informing our my understanding of our present shitty moment. i cannot recommend highly enough kathleen belew's bringing the war home & bc time is rather fucking short her interview here is invaluable: https://blubrry.com/jacobin/39238477/the-dig-the-roots-of-white-power-violence-with-kathleen-belew/

queue it up, take a walk, & come out the other side much better equipped to tackle the work from 1).

* i'll sail along merrily with my (sincerely well meant) advice about not sinking hours nay moments of your one life on assholes but clearly most don't care so oh well. solidarity for now you'll figure it out.

That particular shooting really did bring the war home for me, even though I was in he rental car facility in Omaha when I heard about it.

I don't actually know how to listen to a podcast, but maybe I'll figure it out.

I have an iPod. It's the kind with no screen and the wheel. It's basically nothing but Aimee Mann and Roxy Music. I was in a weird place when I loaded it and now i can't change it.

"historically, the perceived failure of a a right wing fed admin to deliver repression led to an upsurge of white power violence"

Not sure about this - when were the big spikes previously? 1960s? 1990s? How does that fit?

Watching on ADSB EXCHANGE a few C130s head back south from Andrews after delivering whatever. Now seeing a C17 and a C130 flying south fun Fort Drum. Currently seem to be heading toward Washington. Maybe they're going elsewhere.

Yeah, they landed at Andrews. A KC135 also landed. I missed earlier 2 C17s heading south from Andrews. The southbound C130s landed near Fort Bragg. The southbound C17s seem to be heading further south.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/708464

Strongly seconding ajay's recommendation in 175 of Rebecca Solnit's "A Paradise Built In Hell" for a book post.

306: I don't think you're providing a counterexample - the $54k wasn't worth it for you, so you're not bringing your compassion and moral light to the benighted local police force. It wasn't enough for me either, even though I was also making a lot less for a long time.

I think you said you've lurked for a while, but if you have you must know that's just silly. If you were going to start listing reasons Natilio never applied for a job as a cop, it'd take quite a while before you got to the salary. The top several dozen would be particular idiosyncrasies of his politics and personality, and then if you got past all of those you'd probably get to a reasonable and justified belief that he didn't want to join an organization with a poisonously evil culture.

I said above that I wouldn't mind paying cops more than we do now, but I have no belief whatsoever that just raising salaries would fix anything.

Does strike anyone else as being something out of The Hunger Games? The fanfare and security forces make him look like President Snow. And Scott Walker praised Trump for his bravery in taking a stroll across the street.

340: The whole thing freaks me out. It seems like a clear escalation. What's next? Orders to shoot protestors? A coup? I'm having trouble keeping perspective.

If the protesters would kill a journalist, Trump will send them the weapons.

341: Leslie_Nielsen_NothingToSeeHere.gif

WTF happened to Posse Comitatus?

339:

Yes, exactly - a modest raise wasn't worth it for him! One example doesn't mean much, but it wasn't worth it for me either, and I don't think its worth it for very many people.

I mean, just looking at recent events: part of the job as it exists right now is "clearing" areas. Nobody knows how to do this without inflicting some harm on a bunch of strangers whose worst offense is being near some bad event and unwilling to move (asking nicely won't work). Lots of people don't want to do hit strangers at all. Many people who are willing to hit strangers can't be relied to do it on the say-so of their immediate boss (who is, after all, a bit of a jerk and sometimes cooks fish in the microwave), who may be relaying orders on behalf of somebody who is even more of a jerk (I really don't need examples of this).

I don't know great references here, but it is a well-known "problem" that most people won't reliably inflict violence when ordered to do so (the most famous study I'm aware of is "Men Against Fire," but I'm not an expert).

They're going to use the Insurrection Act which under certain conditions overrules Posse Comitatus. Whether or not the current conditions actually meet those requirements will be up to Bill Barr.

Right! Which is why we are talking about redefining the job to be much less about inflicting violence on people. That lets you hire people who aren't attracted by being authorized to hurt people with impunity.

Your specific example, having to "clear" areas is necessary and involves inflicting violence on peaceful, law abiding citizens, so we need to hire the kind of filthy thugs who like hurting people is crap. "Clearing" areas of peaceful protestors isn't necessary, so we don't need cops who enjoy that kind of thing.

And to your point in the first paragraph, that doesn't mean the pay isn't good enough. It means the pay isn't the fundamental problem, the culture is.

341. I can easily imagine orders to kill rioters/looters but not protesters. The details would be worked out by QI, and let God sort out the mistakes. (In the spirit of the times I have to add that the previous is intended as irony.)

On the topic of police salaries, we've had a ton of scandals recently in Boston (actually MA as whole, though most of the action was in town) about police getting paid for overtime they didn't work, and other time-tested ways of padding the pay packet. Some made six figures and higher beyond their regular salaries via such scams.

"Clearing" areas of peaceful protestors isn't necessary

This is a bit sweeping - I can think of a lot of examples where it is entirely necessary.

I'm willing to accept whatever loss in public safety comes from not hiring thugs who enjoy violence, and accepting that compelling the public to obey when it is necessary for some good reason may be less efficient as a result.

To be clear, when I say that I'm willing to accept the loss in public safety, it's because I don't believe there is one when you net everything out.

But now, is there any reason to clear a peaceful protest? They are in some cities very clearly choosing to clear peaceful protests while giving looters a pass.

And overall, I think clearing areas of protestors is much, much less often necessary than police claim. Gswift was talking about how the video we were discussing showed an area being cleared because there was rioting, so even if decking the old man with the cane was unnecessarily rough, the general shoving and bullying was necessary and justified. I don't believe that leaving that block uncleared would have resulted in a single person getting hurt.

Or what Moby said.

It's a good strategy if you aren't troubled by ethics and stuff. It's less good if you don't want government services to be a protection racket.

But now, is there any reason to clear a peaceful protest?

Yes, there are several reasons that almost everyone here could support - and have in some cases supported in the past.

I'm not confused here, right -- CAF is basically giving the Jack Nicholson speech from A Few Good Men, not on his own behalf but on behalf of the kinds of people you need to hire if you want to staff a police force as presently constituted? You weren't supposed to buy that as a good argument. Nicholson was not the hero of the movie.

356: The reason I can come up with is "when it is necessary for their own safety or the safety of others, and police action to clear the crowd would actually make people safer." That's not an impossible set of circumstances, but it's not the norm.

Again, I'm very willing to trade off lessened enthusiasm for inflicting the kind of violence necessary to clear a crowd in the rare circumstances when it is necessary, for lessened enthusiasm for inflicting violence on crowds when it isn't necessary.

I opened up a new thread on this exact topic (probably for no good reason). I'm only bringing it up to keep from having competing threads on the same topic, (should anyone start commenting over in the new thread). (It's all fine, comment wherever you want)

357: no, you're not; it's a bad argument.

(Further to 356: this is a purely esthetic criticism, but the "I have a very strong argument that you'd agree with but it's so obvious that I refuse to say it explicitly" routine seems to me to be unproductive. I like guessing games plenty, but not when I'm trying to talk about anything important.)

Not quite that extreme - CAF's argument is I think that sometimes the police will need to be the first to use force in a situation that has not so far become violent. How else do you deal with someone who is doing something non-violent but illegal, and won't stop when you tell them to? Or who runs away? Even if you just physically move them away from whatever they're doing, or restrain them, that's still use of physical force.
And, CAF is saying, most people aren't prepared to do that. Which sounds likely.

362 to 361.
But if you want examples, how about: Malheur nature reserve? Peaceful protest. No violence. People here were very annoyed at the authorities' unwillingness to clear that IIRC.
How about, for that matter, Little Rock? Lot of protesters there very keen that those kids shouldn't get into school. They had to be cleared off the school steps by troops.

I hope that makes it clear to, what was that lovely phrase you used the other day? "Clear even to the most obtuse among us".

What you're defining as "physical force" is different from what CAF is talking about. He's talking about the "problem" that most people won't inflict violence when ordered to (so, presumably, we need to hire cops without that reluctance). Physically moving people or restraining them is not in the same category of violence that you need to find, hire, and train unusually violent people to carry out.

Nope@nope.com demonstrating his prognostication skills on March 10th of this year:

I expect that we will get 5-10K cases in the US in the next two weeks or so. People will go absolutely apeshit. There will be widespread quarantines and imposition of social distancing. In the three weeks after imposition of these measures, the number of new cases will peak and begin to decrease. All told, about 30K will get the virus and about 600 will die in that time period.

After that it will get weird, as there will continue to be 10 - 20 cases per day and 1 or two deaths. People will remain vigilant, but panic will decrease. The economic toll will be brutal, but confined to certain industries (e.g., entertainment and hospitality).

Is this a cheap shot? Yes. Sort of. But this mfer has not in any way shape or form been an intellectually honest interlocutor at Unfogged and I see no compunction to treat them as such.

351 I'm not convinced crime would go up in most places. It's too bad American policing doesn't have a Peelian tradition, at least to the best of my knowledge.

Armed people occupying government property with guns seems like kind of a different category than peaceful protest, and as I recall people here were perfectly happy with waiting them out. There was some upset that they were being permitted to resupply themselves, but that's different.

And again, defining Little Rock protestors, who were trying to physically attack schoolchildren, as peaceful seems desperately fucked up.

None of that stuff is happening right now and quite a bit of other stuff is happening. Also, I would object to calling Little Rock peaceful on the part of the racists. They put in men with guns first.

368 is correct.

363.1 I don't regard a heavily armed protest as peaceful.
363.2 is on point.

364: Yes, the clarity does make it much easier to argue with. Once you actually stated the type of peaceful protestors you were thinking of, it looked pretty clear to me that we don't need to hire violence-happy thugs to deal with that kind of situation.

I'm really slow.

369 Ah right, I just remember reading the jeering but it did get much hairier than that.

333: the specific ex she discusses in the interview i linked to is reagan coming to power in 1980 & his perceived failure to deliver the goods despite enthusiastic "dog whistling" while campaigning (scare quotes bc i don't agree there was anything particularly coded, kicking off your campaign at the neshoba county fair isn't subtle or coded).

i may be reading your comment wrong but i think you may have misread me as saying "only" when i was saying this is *a* dynamic not the only dynamic.

the book is enormously informative. the interview i linked to provides a v good summary.

ALso the thing about Little Rock is that the police, local or state, were employed for that purpose, nor were the National Guard because they were all racist shitheels. Eisenhower used the 101st Airborne for good reason.

CAF's argument seems to be that the only way to get someone who will use force when it is clearly, unambiguously justified by public safety concerns is to get people who'll use force for shits and giggles, or to gas people who don't even have a way out. Plenty of people have observed that the use of tear gas in general and that specific use would be war crimes if used against another nation's soldiers, and that military rules for engagement are tighter than those of the police, and yet ... there is a military. (Not, obviously, to suggest that the US military doesn't commit such crimes. But those are the formal rules, at least.)

The general point seems very far from obvious. Are most people reluctant to be "the first to use force in a situation that has not so far become violent"? Sure, maybe (though you're talking about much more restrained force than he was). Is the only way to get around that to hire goons? I saw some protesters defuse a potential fistfight on Sunday (some (white) rando was all het up because a (black) guy had "gotten in his way" (?)) and they separated them, got the aggressor away, and moved on.

The general position that the police actually need to be held to lower standards than the civilians regarding misuse of force is one that I find completely odious, and to the extent that it can be backed up at present, it just means that the institution needs to be redone root and branch.

I hope that makes it clear to, what was that lovely phrase you used the other day? "Clear even to the most obtuse among us".

I don't get this hostility. Was there any reason you didn't just produce these examples? Is it so weird to be annoyed that you were merely alluding to them? LB, I'm sure, is kind of tense lately (as am I).

Using minimal necessary physical force to remove people who are intentionally refusing to obey a lawful order to disperse is different to suddenly attacking an old man who had no intention of being difficult. Or what LB said at 365.

We just had a bunch of armed people protesting on public property, and while it was deplored plenty, I don't recall hearing or thinking that the police should use violence to clear statehouses etc.

378.last: I believe he's crabbing at me about perceived inconsistency. The other day I said something sarcastic about planning and scheduling riots, and he came back by saying that was silly, no one plans and schedules riots, and I thanked him for making my point plain to the slowest among us. So there I was being less than perfectly explicit, and now I'm bitching at him for doing exactly the same thing. I don't myself think it is exactly the same thing, but that's the structure of the complaint.

Or nosflow at 378.

I don't believe that leaving that block uncleared would have resulted in a single person getting hurt.

Over a dozen injured cops along with the burnt car. Turns out they were unable to loot the AR15 in there and it instead melted into the pavement. Out of the cops hit with bricks at least one had to get stitches, another had his hand broken so badly it's going to take multiple surgeries to fix and maybe never quite functions as well again.

I spent 15 hours in Kevlar yesterday on round 2. Less injuries to us and less property damage. We didn't let them get too close to the police and city buildings and enforced an 8pm curfew. Still didn't really clear them out until 11 or so, and even then a couple little groups kept trying to rove around and break stuff.

During the main thrust of it one charmer decided to crank a round off from a rifle at an old retired police building. We surrounded the block and he wisely decided to give up when the SWAT guys in an armored vehicle rolled up on him. A rock thrower with a golf club decided to run from my team and some of the SWAT guys into a parking structure. We found him, still had a loaded .380 Beretta in his pocket.

None of that makes the public safety necessity of shoving around a bunch of people who were standing peaceably on a street clear to me.

also hamfistedly unleashing the relentlessly militarized security forces against white citizens at e.g. ruby ridge & a whitewashed waco have a role in the hideous history we are living through, acting to this day as organizing & recruitment totems for the right.

to be clear i'm replying to ajay.

Here's how the old man who got shoved over describes the scene: https://www.abc4.com/news/salt-lake-city-riots/man-with-cane-speaks-out-after-being-pushed-down-by-officer-in-riot-gear/

"Ten minutes before the armored vehicles showed up that's when I got there," said Tobin. "When I went down there to take pictures there was no mob scene. It was just a bunch of people standing around taking pictures. I was at the end."

347-360: Sorry, I think my internet-ese is rusty - the quotes around "problem" were meant to scare quotes, indicating skepticism/detachment. My uneducated personal opinion is in 243, but the link in 270 seems vastly better and more specific, so I should shut up.

292 is good. also, on 300, the UK disbanded and replaced a police force (its third-biggest) within the last 20 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Commission_on_Policing_for_Northern_Ireland

Was there any reason you didn't just produce these examples?

Well, because if you produce examples then the argument immediately turns into an argument about whether your examples are exactly appropriate or not. Hence the analogy ban!

to in this moment decide what you really need is a good nice wallow in the reported inner life of overwhelmingly white men who've voluntarily joined relentlessly militarized domestic security forces & are enthusiastically demonstrating their willingness to brutalize fellow citizens is ... a look, i'll give you that.

It does say something about how easy it is to find obvious good examples of when non-violent protestors must be forcibly compelled to comply for public safety. Good examples are kind of hard to come up with.

the UK disbanded and replaced a police force (its third-biggest) within the last 20 years

I think you meant "reformed and renamed". It certainly did not disband it in the way that Camden, NJ did (as far as I understand it) - sack all the officers and hire new ones. If you were in the RUC in 2001, you were in the PSNI in 2002.

great resource of research here: https://twitter.com/margaretomara/status/1267654453236133889?s=19

For another example of unnecessary police violence, and a sense of how weird American accommodation of it is, here's a clip from right-leaning commercial news in Australia about a recent incident where their news crew, covering Washington protests, gets attacked by American police. Even the pro-Trump Australian prime minister felt compelled to make a diplomatic incident of it.

And actually the attack in the clip at 395 seems if anything less egregious ones than some others - the policeman with the shield might for a split second have thought the camera was a gun.

If you were in the RUC in 2001, you were in the PSNI in 2002.

Didn't they get a lot of the previous members - not a majority, certainly - to take early retirement? I thought a policy they instituted was to strive or a roughly even Cath/Prod split; and presumably they needed to get rid of a lot of problematic people regardless.

The claim that the cops need extraordinary powers to e.g. clear the streets to ensure public safety takes a few knocks when a. we see the cops doing more violence than they ever could have forestalled and b. we see, repeatedly, the cops protecting certain groups' privileges to commit violence.

I'm obviously a lot more sympathetic to the idea that force is a fundamental part of police work than many people here. But what makes it distinctively *policing* rather than a military occupation is that it is force exercised by consent. Unless the majority of the community being policed feel that the cops are on their side, it's not very effective. This at least is a peelite perspective but I could back it up with examples.

In lots of countries there are two police forces, or two parts of the police force, to deal with exactly this problem. There are the minumum force guys, who do the detective work (to the extent that there is any in the real world) and the low-level keeping of order, the crime deterrence, the stuff that's almost social work, the provision of authority figures in confused situations, and all the other things I have watched cops do. Somewhere in reserve at the boys who crack heads, and who are there to break up potential riots. These are the people CAF seems to be talking about. Often they are far too enthusiastic about their work. But the point is that they are so seldom deployed that they don't wreck the other sort of policing. And in an ideal world they'd be the ones deployed to deal with the vans who are threatening Frowner.

And I don't understand why that isn't the pattern in the US. Why is it that the same people, in the same uniforms, are expected to do both soft and hard policing? Is it simply the legacy of racism? Is there some organisational thing? Is it, perhaps, a phenomenon in some parts of the country and not others?

I know a lot of European police forces are structured like that, but not any I know of in the US. There are internal divisions between groups with different duties, but most places it's all one force with one culture.

I don't know anything about why the difference, though. Just historical practice?

399. Makes me wonder how realistic "Vera" is. The police characters (mostly detectives, not "uniforms") on the show rarely use force, and I know that's a worldwide stereotype of British police and detectives. Also CCTV every 50 feet, of course. They enter homes and businesses w/o a warrant, get anyone's electronic records (phone, internet, credit cards, etc.) at the drop of a hat. As expected, lots 'o knives. Interesting contrast.

399: nw - free ebook on police violence from univ of chicago press

https://press.uchicago.edu/books/freeEbook.html

Peaceful protest. No violence

Heavily armed right-wing gun thugs take over and completely trash a government building, and of course there's no violence -- the cops are on their side. Remember when Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney got bombed by right wing thugs, and the FBI showed up to the hospital and arrested them for bombing themselves? Of course you don't, cause it doesn't fit in with your pigs-are-always-right nonsense.

Remember the sheriff's deputies torturing environmental activists by swabbing pepper spray in their eyes? Of course you do, you jack off to that video every night.

You may be able to bullshit the credulous here on the internet, but the people of Minneapolis know *exactly* what the pigs are doing to destroy this city they despise so virulently.

There.
Will.
Come.
A.
Harvesting.

I hope not in the Hunger Games sense.

thanks DQ. clicked.

400: As far as I know the same is true of the Met here in London. There isn't really a riot-control force and a separate detective/public safety force. It's all one Met. Yes, there are specialist units, and yes, those include TSG - Territorial Support Group, who turn up in packets of 22 at public order situations and also serve as a sort of general reserve to allow the Met to reinforce boroughs that need a bit of extra manpoweractually, official vocab guidelines say we should say staffing, cos, er, manpower is a bit sexist.

But there are only a few hundred of them, out of 32,000 police men officer policemenofficers. So it's not the case that the rest of the Met simply stands back in riots etc and lets TSG take the strain - they're all supposed to be public-order qualified, though the TSG are specialists. (By contrast, since the 1980s it's only qualified MO19 who get anywhere near firearms.) It's not like France, where you have the CRS and the PN.

The specialised units, though, did feel entirely different to the unspecialised ones when I was there. A long time ago, I agree, but travelling around cooped up in vans full of testosterone, aftershave, and farts does prime you for a different kind of interaction with the public even than driving a panda car.

There.
Will.
Come.
A.
Harvesting.

"...cleanse them in the crimson of... am I on speakerphone?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io8nlxyMTd8

No doubt. But don't US police forces have something similar? I had a quick look and the NYPD Strategic Response Group sounds pretty much like the TSG. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Response_Group

Yes. So the real difference is that the supposed beat cops are far more militarised in the US. And that will have something to do with gun culture, which is a hard thing to change.

Neb on the twitter's pointed to this classic dsquared post

413: I did not recall ever seeing that from dsquared but it is perfect, and particularly so for this moment.

Obama finally listens to ogged

Former President Barack Obama is set to make remarks regarding countrywide protests ignited by the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old man who died after being handcuffed on the street in the custody of the Minneapolis police on Memorial Day.

Obama is set to address the nation on camera Wednesday at 5 p.m. Eastern, live on his website.

https://www.wthr.com/article/barack-obama-address-floyds-death-first-time-camera

He is definitely going to come out with some insubstantial horseshit!

It's what ogged wanted.

When it comes to horseshit, insubstantial is my favorite kind.

This is very good: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/trumps-collaborators/612250/

I suppose that 418 makes a sound point.

420 would you rather deal with substantial horseshit?

416: I think you mean
There.
Will.
Come.
A.
Manuring.

Oh Jeebus, this thread is glorious: https://twitter.com/keywilliamss/status/1267929996430991360

Did an NYPD union really put out a statement saying "we will the war on New York City"?? WTAF?

The motto is "To Protect and Serve." No object was specified.

Article about the choice of charge against Chauvin suggesting that it's wildly inappropriate.

424: yes, and saying that they serve a higher authority, and a bunch of other fucked-up bullshit.

423: Yeah, and the comments are a celebration. I liked the woman who said 'looks like my Wednesday calendar just filled up!'. If that was a previously scheduled meeting, the timing is glorious. And they have to sit there and look at the camera!

This kinda helps with the problem of public comment I was talking about before (that it felt like it was hovering near violence). It isn't quite as satisfying as being there in person, but also, there's less menacing presence.

And they have to sit there and look at the camera!

Actually a consistent if occasional thread from the people calling in is that the people they're addressing aren't doing a very good job of looking as if they're paying attention/not looking at their phones/giving a fuck about the proceedings.

Can we put a bounty on the cops? Like $100-$500 if you fuck a cop's spouse and cause a divorce. I'd seriously kick in for this.

You're a pimp now.

430 A lot of sex workers are out of work now. Just sayin'

Update to 426; Ellison apparently intends to (a) elevate the charge to second-degree murder and (b) charge the other three with aiding and abetting murder.

426,32:
I am not a DA, but I am concerned enough about the likelihood of obtaining convictions on any charge that I wasn't angry about the undercharging and I'm not entirely sanguine about pursuing what seems to be the correct one. Felony murder? I mean, yes, it is technically the case, but tell it to the Castiles.

You're pretty unlikely to attain a conviction on a charge that the defendant cannot in law be guilty of.

For anyone who's confused and didn't click through 426, it argues that third degree murder isn't just an undercharge, Chauvin doesn't fit the elements at all. The idea is that third degree murder is for actions taken with a depraved heart, indifferent to whether you killed anyone, like shooting blindly into a crowd. The article claims (I don't myself know to confirm) that caselaw holds that actions directed clearly toward a single individual (like kneeling on someone's neck) don't fit the necessary pattern for third degree murder -- it's only for killing someone by doing something dangerous to a mass of people.

This kind of nonsense is why I keep on throwing up my hands and saying "State law". I'd want to be a MN lawyer or spend a fair amount of time on it before I was sure myself.

If a battalion of unidentified federal cops are now on the streets of DC, where were they pulled from?

437 was me.

Bureau of prisons is the latest theory, but lots of speculation yesterday that they were mercenaries (because they had no clear or consistent uniform).

I saw the speculation that they're mercenaries. Fuck.

But if they're in DC, they aren't elsewhere. Could pressured be applied where they aren't?

I assume statehood has something to do with it?

441 : as usual, DC gets the short end ?

Virginia sure does try its best at that.

441: Someone opined that Trump has done more for the DC statehood movement in the last few days than anything in the previous 50 years.

419: yeah, Applebaum's articles are a recurring guilty pleasure for me: they give such soothing clarity that I know to be a mirage, and yet I keep gazing as long as I can. This one is especially good.

Nothing quite so dramatic happened after McCain's funeral. But it did clarify the situation. A year and a half into the Trump administration, it marked a turning point, the moment at which many Americans in public life began to adopt the strategies, tactics, and self-justifications that the inhabitants of occupied countries have used in the past--doing so even though the personal stakes were, relatively speaking, so low. Poles like Miłosz wound up in exile in the 1950s; dissidents in East Germany lost the right to work and study. In harsher regimes like that of Stalin's Russia, public protest could lead to many years in a concentration camp; disobedient Wehrmacht officers were executed by slow strangulation.

By contrast, a Republican senator who dares to question whether Trump is acting in the interests of the country is in danger of--what, exactly? Losing his seat and winding up with a seven-figure lobbying job or a fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School? He might meet the terrible fate of Jeff Flake, the former Arizona senator, who has been hired as a contributor by CBS News. He might suffer like Romney, who was tragically not invited to the Conservative Political Action Conference, which this year turned out to be a reservoir of COVID‑19.

Possibly the only conservative commentator I can stand to read.