Thanks for sharing this, NickS!

Thanks! The saddest thing about the linked article is that I read it and my first reaction was "this is news?"

2: Maybe that's why things are getting through this time, the sustained attention plus priming from Ferguson and the following abuses?

I can see the unthinking model being, "Yeah, that's bad, but I never hear about it. so it must be rare" -- which winds up matching the whole wolf-whistle/catcall pattern. There, because women-with-guys are rarely whistled, men assume it's rare, but once women's talk was foregrounded it turned out to be omnipresent (and for a horrifying range of ages).

Similarly, after six years of sustained effort and only brief receding from the headlines, white America is primed to hear that it's stupid common? One good illustrative piece on twitter was by a white woman who kept getting pulled over, only realizing after someone thought her car in the driveway was being stolen by a black man that it was because her dog's profile looked like an afro when viewed from behind.

Or, worse, this feels like change... but 2014 felt like change and I've forgotten, and will forget again. I hope not, but given the continued lack of change, it's probably not the smart way to bet.

The socialization of people who are "violence workers" (police, regular soldiers, child soldiers, mafiosi, drug gangs, ancient Spartans) is the same throughout history.

Read This. Isn't. Sparta. (it's only seven parts!) (plus a Glossary!). He's "only" interested in showing that contra "300" the Spartans sucked. But seriously, the stuff described by Officer Cab is a subset of the training and socialization that the Spartans went through, and what your grandfather went through in Boot Camp. It's a proven formula: teach people to bond with each other through shared terrible experiences, teach them to support each other, teach them that you don't rat people out, make them fear and hate the Other(s). They learn to mistrust and denigrate even the people they are allegedly protecting ("sheep"). The linked OP article and the linked Sparta article are only the two most recent descriptions of how this works that I've read.

It happens to every group of "violence workers", and even ostensibly non-violent jobs (social work, for example) that have some of the same characteristics (group bonding, stress, fear) produce similar outcomes.

The socialization of people who are "violence workers" (police, regular soldiers, child soldiers, mafiosi, drug gangs, ancient Spartans) is the same throughout history.

I understand (and expected), that one reaction to my question, "is it possible to imagine incremental reforms which would meaningfully address the criticisms?" would be, "no, incremental change is doomed to fail; we must start afresh."

But I would be curious, if you're willing to humor me, if you do think there would be to approach incremental change, given your believe that there are certain ways that violence work tend to be organized.

That Sparta thing is fascinating. Mostly not relevant to modern cops beyond the single point you raise, but still a good read in its entirety.

bond with each other through shared terrible experiences, teach them to support each other, teach them that you don't rat people out, make them fear and hate the Other(s)
This is the fundamental theory of why exclusive groups have hazing and initiation rituals. Fraternities, sports teams, prep schools, some religions, even law and financial firms.

Seconding 6. I hadn't seen the series, I've read the first two entries, and they're horrifying and fascinating.

This is a fundamental flaw in how we teach Sparta - in high schools and in college. We teach Sparta like it was a free citizen society with a regrettable slave population that, while horrific, was typical for its time - something more like Rome. But it wasn't: Sparta was a society that consisted almost entirely of slaves, with a tiny elite aristocracy. The spartiates were not the common citizens of Sparta, but rather the hereditary nobility - the knights, counts and dukes, as it were. We should as soon judge 17th century France by the first two estates as judge Sparta only by the spartiates.

think there would be to approach incremental change

Incremental change has been going for decades but I'm not hopeful that reality is going to have a seat at the table this time around.

Anyways, if you want relatively quick achievable progress then you have Biden hire someone like an Anthony Barksdale to draw up some federal standards on use of force and such and make compliance necessary for eligibility for federal funds. Just stealing a bunch of our policy manual right out of the gate would get you no choke holds, no tear gas for crowd control, and an explicit "duty to intervene" when another officer is doing something excessive.

9 I think I object to your claim if "reality", there, if only because decades of incremental change doesn't have that much to show for it. Successes, sure, but seems meagre for the time involved. I have a lot of sympathy for people who aren't willing to wait another 30-50 years for the process to get somewhere reasonable, even if aspects of the weren't getting worse over time (and there are decent arguments that they are). Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't trade 2020 for 1980 wholesale, but there are some bad trends, too.

10: Police shootings down 90 percent since the 70's. Minority majority LAPD last year had simultaneously the lowest homicides in 50 years and the lowest police shootings in 30. It only seems meager because none of you live where the violence is.

Or this.

https://twitter.com/PeterMoskos/status/1270503840954159106

In 2018 NYPD had 17 "adversarial incidents" (shooting at somebody), the lowest number ever. Cops shot & killed 10 and shot & wounded 5 more. In 2016 there were 37 incidents. In 2009, 47. Back in 1971, there were 810(!) shooting incidents. In 1971 NYPD shot 314 people, killing 93.

11 it's disingenuous to suggest that shootings tell the whole story. Or the fact that things were worse in 1975 means they were ok in 2015. I already posited that. Silly to pretend somehow you know that nobody Here has or had experience living where the violence is, too.

13 pretend s/b presume, damn phone

13: yes, but gswift's argument wasn't that things were OK now, but that incremental changes had made an improvement since 1975 -- which seems to be backed up by the statistics -- and, while shootings don't tell the whole story, they do seem an important part of it. If the graph of shootings had gone the other way, no one would be saying that this proved nothing at all about police racism.

The thing that bothers me is the dishonesty among the police officers. How are you ever going to have confidence in what the police are telling us when they do not tell the truth. We see it over and over again. I have personally seen it as I have been pulled over a number of times when I have been driving through town after midnight just to have the cop give me some bogus reason for pulling me over. After I am stopped they see that I am an old white guy so tell me that they are giving me a verbal warning to signal more than 100 feet before making a left turn, completely stop at a stop sign, etc. even though I know I did all those things. I was the foreman on a grand jury for three months, every Thursday, and never understood why all these people with drugs in their car give the police permission to search their car. Then there was this older woman on the grand jury who refused to accept that there was no evidence by stating "I know he's guilty. I know how they do. I watch cops."

GOOD PEOPLE ARE IN BED BEFORE NINE O'CLOCK

I probably didn't need to add that last line. I guess the issue to me is that the police have so much power to ruin someone's life or end it that dishonesty or coverups are absolutely unacceptable.

I was also on the compensation committee and voted to not give our overpaid sheriff a raise. I was actually a little worried about that and he was eyeballing me at an ACLU meeting that one time.

Yes. The willingness of juries to believe lying police is a really important factor in the ways that institutionalised racism plays out.

The London cops I wrote about were not, I think, deliberately framing people they believed innocent. But the old school ones were certainly convinced that it was part of their job to fit the evidence around someone they "knew" was guilty. One of them actually said to me "Justice is when someone gets his just come-uppance, even when its for something he didn't do".

But that (1987) was on the cusp of a culture change brought about by PACE, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which was itself a response to some dreadful corruption scandals -- and was bitterly resisted by sections of the police. "Right, lads, we're going out on the streets to combat PACE" said one particularly rigid and authoritarian inspector at the start of a shift.

hey, gswift, did you ever read the book? You asked for a copy years ago.

https://consequenceofsound.net/2020/06/black-sabbath-black-lives-matter-shirt/

21 that's great.

a white woman who kept getting pulled over, only realizing after someone thought her car in the driveway was being stolen by a black man that it was because her dog's profile looked like an afro when viewed from behind.

I know I shouldn't find every single bit of this story hilarious, and yet.

bond with each other through shared terrible experiences, teach them to support each other, teach them that you don't rat people out, make them fear and hate the Other(s)...It happens to every group of "violence workers"

You really need to get some knowledge or experience of boot camp that isn't just watching "Full Metal Jacket", Dave, because that film is a) set fifty years ago b) about a DI who is explicitly meant to be unusually abusive even by the standards of the day and c) a made-up story. It's like holding forth about student life in the UK today based on "Brideshead Revisited".

For example, hazing rituals don't work, they've never worked, they actually harm unit efficiency, and that's why the army has banned them and prosecuted a load of people who were involved. Law firms and banks still do them because they are run by people who are bad managers, and are also far more likely to be undiagnosed sociopaths than army unit commanders are.

12: those figures suggest one very easy way to cut deaths: the NYPD should start using 1970s firearms training techniques again, because they were clearly utterly shit.
Back then they didn't even manage to hit two-thirds of the people they shot at, and the ones they hit generally survived. Now they hit someone 15 times out of 17, and 10 of those 15 died. Those aren't good odds. If NYC must have ungovernable racist cops bumbling around shooting at innocent people, let's at least make sure that they'll generally miss.

Right now the NYPD is feuding with local NY prosecutors over their declining to prosecute charges from the protests. Felix has the correct take. Mere reform is not enough.

25 Isn't it also possible that the police are now using deadlier guns or ammunition, as well as pointing them more often in the intended direction?

hey, gswift, did you ever read the book?

I did! Quite a few years ago. I'm sure it's on one of my bookshelves, that's a good idea for a Covid re-read.

I confess that 25 may not have been entirely serious.

27: Ammo is definitely leaps and bounds better than the 70's. And they were using double action revolvers back then. If you're not doing a lot of practice with a revolver that double action pull when you're under stress is a recipe for some wild shooting.

I also wonder how much of an undercount the total shootings is. If it's graveshift 1971 and you crack a round off at a guy in the dark and miss I'd bet some of those just weren't bothered to be reported to the sgt or whatever.

In the same way that "Abolish The Police" apparently means "...And Replace Them With Slightly Different And Better Police", we could start a Disarm The Police movement which would advocate taking away the Glocks and shotguns and M4s and replacing them with flintlock pistols, smoothbore muskets and L85A1 rifles.

gswift, I appreciate that you have a perspective on how much can be achieved by incremental changes.

I'd be curious for your opinion on the stories that Amber Ruffin tells (when you have time to watch a 12 minutes videa) -- particularly the first 3 of the 4. We only have her perspective on the encounter but all three seem to me to clearly violate what I would think of (as a member of the public) as reasonable professional behavior from somebody in a public safety role. I'm curious if you agree, and what you think it would look like to get to a place in which police and members of the public can have a shared vocabulary and some shared assumptions about what professional behavior looks like? I think that's crucial, unlikely to be achieved, and requires members of the police to be actively involved in articulating a sense of professionalism.

I also think of this article about a police chief in a small town WA right on the Canadian border.

People often ask me why I decided to become a police officer. I tell them a story about an incident I had while living in Ferguson, Missouri, in the late 1980s and attending community college there. Incidentally, I lived in the same apartment complex where Michael Brown was shot and killed many years later in 2014.

One Sunday morning, two cars of mostly friends and one relative decided to go horseback riding at a horse farm in an adjacent county. After about 45 minutes of driving, I decided to exit the interstate so we could get a bite to eat. We ate our meal, got back into our cars and entered the ramp onto the interstate to continue our journey. As we entered onto the entrance ramp, we were pulled over by four or five police cars. Both of our cars were pulled over. The officer approached my driver's side window and asked me where we were going. I told him we were going to ride horses. I then asked the officer the reason why he stopped "us"? The officer said he stopped us because I failed to use my electric signal (blinker) when I exited the interstate an hour ago. I was stunned and I knew this encounter was about much more than an alleged signal violation. This encounter was about why two cars with young black males were in this county on a Sunday morning.

Thereafter, the officers summoned us out of the cars, demanded identification from everyone, thoroughly searched us from head to toe and demanded to search the vehicles. I asked if searching my car was legal and he said to me, "Oh, you must be one of those smart niggers." The officer told me if I did not let him search the car then he would arrest me for "Failure to Signal" and the arrest would give him the opportunity to search the car. In Missouri, traffic offenses are criminal charges and officers can arrest and book someone into jail at their discretion. As a young black man surrounded by four or five white police officers on the side of a road in a majority white county in Missouri, I did not have much choice. Jail was not an option. I agreed to the search. The search was overly extensive, illegal and unjust; seat cushions removed, and parts of the dashboard disassembled with a complete disregard of property. The officers found nothing of interest to them. I recall the female officer asking one of my friends, "Why you niggers didn't go horseback riding in St. Louis?" He told her he wasn't aware of any places to ride horses in St. Louis.

It's obvious that the incident still bothers him, and that he never felt like there was a chance for the frustration to be legitimized and answered.

A few weeks after telling the story to a new recruit class, I received a phone call from a lieutenant of a neighboring county. You see, when I told the story I used the officer's name. I never forgot it -- his name is etched in my brain like my social security number and my birthdate. The now ranking officer wanted to know why I was defaming his name and he had no idea who I was or what incident I was referring to. I respectfully told him what he did to us on that entrance of the interstate; how unjust and illegal his actions were, how that one car stop of his impacted me and led me to the desk I was sitting in. He warned me that he would file a complaint against me if I continued to defame his name. I thought that was ironic considering a few years back I was not afforded the opportunity of filing a complaint.

In the OP I alluded to the idea of "restorative justice." I don't know whether police officers should be punished if they do things which are unprofessional but not against the law or regulations, but I think it is important that there be a process in which there can be an acknowledgement that a wrong was done, and that some gesture is made to correct the wrong and to recognize that, if the person who has been wronged is willing to forgive that is an act of grace on their part.

||
I know this is a violation of the 40 comment rule but I am trying to think/write about the supreme court decision extending anti-discrimination protection in employment law to LGBT people. Two things occur to me -- the first is a point raised by Nathan Williams: that, in practice no one has any employment protection with a damn in most states anyway, so this won't change much on the ground, however symbolically important.
The second is where I need help from a lawyer
As I understand it, you can't at the moment discriminate against someone on the grounds of their religion under Federal law. There is some exemption for "Ministers of Religion" which seems essential. Otherwise I could apply for a job at Liberty Baptist and salt all my lectures with the news that I personally thought this was a load of crap.

Except that I wouldn't be a minister. But it makes no sense for the exemption to stop at that point. There are a whole lot of jobs where you expect the employee to live up to the code of employment -- ie to believe in the company's values, or the church's ones. And if they act contrary to these values, they can be sacked, surely.

To offer a concrete example, it seems to me that a Catholic church employee who claimed that trans women are women would be sacked and a devout Catholic Google employee who claimed trans women are really men would also be sacked. In both cases this would be -- surely -- religious discrimination. In neither case could it be punished or sued against.

But I am not a lawyer. I don't understand this stuff at all. Can people please explain what I have got wrong. [this is not trying to start a huge thread. I'm interested in the law here, not in whether either hypothetical sacking could be justified morally]

33 was me. Sorry

I'm not really clear on what you're asking. That is, most employees in the US are at-will, and so yes, they can be fired for saying anything: for saying either "trans women are men", "trans women are women" or "the sky is blue." Civil rights law only come into it if you can make an argument that the firing is actually because of race, religion, sex, or some other protected class.

Does that cover what you wanted to know?

15 yes, I don't disagree with that. I don't think it is inconsistent to believe that incremental change has had an impact *and* that this impact has been unacceptably slow, is it?

I don't know enough of the details to know how I feel about the plausibility of incrementalism getting there in a reasonable time, but I do hear people active in the area saying basically: look, it took 50 years to get a fraction of what we need, this just isn't working well enough and we need to try something else.

35: But, as Gorsuch talks a lot about, you can't fire someone for being trans or Christian just because you also had another reason that is allowed. If you only fire the trans people expressing trans-inclusive viewpoints then you're still breaking the law.

(Your more general point that US employment law doesn't really make sense is valid. It's very difficult to ban discrimination while still having at-will employment.)

And you can't fire someone for saying "I am a woman" because that's sex discrimination, since you wouldn't fire a woman for saying "I am a woman."

Canonically, you're supposed to roar.

To offer a concrete example, it seems to me that a Catholic church employee who claimed that trans women are women would be sacked and a devout Catholic Google employee who claimed trans women are really men would also be sacked. In both cases this would be -- surely -- religious discrimination. In neither case could it be punished or sued against.

IANAL, but I'm not sure there is a category of "religious discrimination" that is legally significant; isn't it more "discrimination on the basis of an individual's religion"? And I think in the first case, the individual is being fired for something vaguer like heterodoxy, which is not (alas) protected, unless they form a splinter church that meets some baseline criterion for being a proper religion. (In the second case, I think these cases generally hinge on whether the individual's religion was in conflict with, or prevented them from performing, necessary job duties. Thus, is it legally protected for pharmacists to withhold medication from patients because of their religious beliefs and so on.)

The Christian Science people should get in on that.

To put it another way, you're allowed to discriminate against employees on the basis of what they say or do because of your religious beliefs. If you want to fire any of your employees who swears, or drinks alcohol, because of your religious beliefs, you can do that no problem. What you're not allowed to do is discriminate against your employees on the basis of their religious identities.

The hard question is under what circumstances do you take what an employee says or does as a stand-in for their identity. "I'm not discriminating against members of any religion, but I'm firing anyone who prays five times a day" wouldn't pass the laugh test. I don't think there's any statement about trans people that's that kind of religious shibboleth, but the right set of facts could convince me otherwise.

The short summary I saw is that you can fire someone for no reason but not for the wrong reason.

IANAL
That's been constitutionally protected since 2003.

The "ministerial exception" goes beyond just ministers. It's also not limited to religious-type discrimination. The argument is that no secular court can second-guess any employment decision by a church for any reason. Whether it extends as far as "ordinary" Catholic School teachers fired by the Catholic church is going to be decided by the Supreme Court very soon. Here's a report on the oral argument:
https://www.scotusblog.com/2020/05/argument-analysis-argument-analysis-justices-divided-in-debate-over-ministerial-exception/

This was already said, both of the concrete examples aren't about freedom of religion, they're about freedom of speech, and there is no protection under federal law for an employee fired based on their speech (including outside of working time). Some exceptions for union-related speech, and for specific kinds of whisstleblowing if you do it exactly right.

Fun fact pattern on the intersection of freedom of speech and freedom of religion: A print shop owner refused to print a brochure for the organization, Catholics for Choice (Catholics advocating abortion rights). The customer claimed he was being discriminated against because he was Catholic. The printer said that was ridiculous, the printer was Catholic himself and had lots of Catholic customers! This was discrimination on the basis of political belief, which is legal. There was some evidence that the print shop had printed a job for a different pro-choice organization. A State Supreme Court divided and wrote several different concurring and dissenting opinion. I don't remember the name of the case but I think it was Vermont.

But I would be curious, if you're willing to humor me, if you do think there would be to approach incremental change, given your believe that there are certain ways that violence work tend to be organized.

As a usually grumpy pessimist, I could easily just say "if you have violence workers, they will all end up alike." The long history of violence workers teaches us that there is a sameness to the way they are socialized. On the other hand, if you reform bits and pieces of that method (what turns a person into a violence worker or to be fair, a bad violence worker) maybe things get better. It all hangs together and if you knock some of the supports over, maybe it stops happening.

One thing (pie in the sky in the US) is to have fewer guns on the streets. Fewer guns mean less fear, and fear/hatred of the Other is a big part of what makes bad cops happen. Guns are scary. A cop making a traffic stop is thinking "Does someone in the car have a gun?" Same with a cop knocking (with a warrant) on the door of a house or apartment. In some ways police having a monopoly on internal state violence is less the problem than the combination of fear/hate that a significantly armed citizenry causes in LEOs. Second Amendment fanatics might say, "That's GOOD!" but it isn't, of course.

I'm not at all sure that trying to get rid of or water down QI wouldn't just make things worse. It would make LEOs more edgy and fearful. On the other hand, getting rid of bad cops, and getting rid of or reducing the oversight power of Police Unions would probably make things better.

We have actually tried lots of incremental stuff over the decades, and we still have police killings. We've tried community policing, we've tried allowing women to be police, we've increased the number of minority policemen. Of course every state goes about it differently and to different degrees. In fact crime has dropped, and the number of police killings has dropped significantly.

Sorry this is all sort of random, and reading it over it sounds too goo-goo wishy-washy liberal.

Thank you, kind lawyers. I was interested partly in what seemed and seems to me the incoherence of employment law when you have at-will states. The answer to that seems to be, yes, it it ludicrously incoherent.

Then if we assume that there are in practice someprotections on the ground s of religion, I'm interested in how far they go. Are there cases where someone does something that would be a fireable offence had not their religion demanded it? Say they won't work on Saturdays or for that matter Sundays. Obviously if this were known in advance they just woouldn't be hired, but I can imagine a case where someone converts either to a much more Orthodox form of Judaism, or to something like Seventh Day Adventism. WOuld they then be protected?

I have the impression that the debate in the US is mostly understood as being about the employer's right to fire people, rather than the employee's right not to be fired. This is not the way it plays out in Europe.

Two recent cases here are relevant. There was a family bakery in Belfast run by fundamentalist protestants who refused to ice a cake with a pro-gay-marriage slogan and two figurines of Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street. That was held by a lower court to be illegal discrimination against the gay man who had ordered the cake [as, I think, a piece of high class trolling]. A higher court, and eventually the ECHR, concluded that the bakers could not be compelled to produce a message so much at odds with their beliefs. So their religion allowed them to refuse the commission.

The whole thing was complicated by the very narrow laws on freedom of speech in Northern Ireland, in ways I won't go into here because I have forgotten them.

The second was that the ECHR turned down an appeal by two Swedish midwives who claimed their consciences and religious beliefs would not allow them to take part in abortions. English law certainly had such a conscience clause built in.

We just watched the video of Officer Karen goes to McDs and my kids are now repeatedly mocking her so there goes the future of LawnOrder.

My kid had a strong Mary Poppins streak, so we listened to the soundtrack a lot. He insisted that the name of the male lead is "YouBert" because Mary sings the song lyric, 'quite a lovely holiday with you, Bert'. Then we found a birthday cake candle with Bert perched on the number four, so we called him FourBert. Then our dog significantly chewed on the candle, but we nevertheless kept it until we could use it on our kid's 4th birthday cake.

It is hard to know what response Officer Karen thought she would get for that. I do like that individual police officers are aware that public sentiment is turning against them.

Oh, 48 was mine.

47 I really don't like the idea of someone so prone to paranoia and panic out on the streets with a gun and a badge.

As a usually grumpy pessimist, I could easily just say "if you have violence workers, they will all end up alike."

But this just isn't true in any meaningful sense. "Violence workers" just within a single country covers everyone from the enlightened topless modern Norwegian police to the less-enlightened SS-Wiking Division. From the Mounties to the Canadian Airborne Regiment. From the Highlands and Islands Constabulary to the B Specials. It's a pointless analysis.

Too much of the debate over what to do about policing is abstract. If police abolition represents the radical boundary of our discourse, if "defund the police" sounds baffling to people who are rarely policed and scary to people who believe they depend on police for their safety, it might be easier to move from the general to the specific. What should be done about the Minneapolis Police Department? If you're scared of what sound like radical demands, or on the fence about a slogan like "defund the police," I urge you to read both of these articles, and think about "the police," not in the abstract or even in the personal (who would I call if someone broke into my house?) but in terms of the currently existing institution of the Minneapolis Police Department. Maybe the question "Does Minneapolis need cops?" can be answered after a more urgent question: "Does Minneapolis need the Minneapolis Police Department?"

From this very good article by Alex Pareene.

NW, if I'm understanding you correctly, one of the issues you're getting at is addressed in US anti-discrimination law by the concept of bona fide occupational qualifications -- apparently there's an analogous thing, genuine occupational qualifications, in the UK. From Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act:

It shall not be an unlawful employment practice for an employer to hire and employ employees, [...] on the basis of his religion, sex, or national origin in those certain instances where religion, sex, or national origin is a bona fide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of that particular business or enterprise ...

In other words, yes, being a believer is probably a BFOQ for being hired as a priest or something. Naturally this has led to a whole lot of complicated doctrine over the last 55 years about what counts as a BFOQ and why. But the core concept is that that's a valid exception.

And yet religious anti-abortion pharmacists claim they're discriminated against if they're fired for refusing to sell contraceptives. The job of a pharmacist is to sell legal medication, if your religious beliefs prevent that then you are not qualified to do the job.

And of course there are accommodations possible where an alternate can fill those orders, like at a supermarket where kids under 21 can't man the checkout for liquor purchases. But typically they're looking for the legal confrontation.
I think all the county clerks who refused to provide same sex marriage licenses have either been fired or have agreed to do it?

54/55: I worked with someone in grad school whose wife was that kind of pharmacist. She delighted in refusing prescriptions. It was horrifying. She would be the only one available on purpose and turn women away. He dropped out to become a preacher and eventually moved their family to Benghazi (no joke) where he taught English and proselytized. He was murdered while jogging (likely for trying to win hearts and minds for Jesus), and I feel not one bit sad about it.

omg. What a shithead.

56 Christ, what a pair of assholes.

51: "from the Mounties to the Canadian Airborne Regiment" is not that big of a gap, if we're talking about bigoted, authoritarian violence workers with a pathological "us vs them" mindset.
And hey, we managed to abolish the Airborne!

59: so true! Now do the SS and the Norwegian police. I'll wait.

56 Where was this, and approximately what year (if you're willing to share)? I know that it's been an issue for a while, but I think of it as (somewhat) uncommon, and that is horrifying.

|| You guys ready to be hijacked by the DACA case? |>

60: See, I didn't say anything about the SS and the Norwegian police. But you had three pairs of examples, and one of them didn't show anything close to what you wanted it to.

For the curious: just this month the Mounties have killed as many Indigenous people just in New Brunswick as the Airborne killed civilians in Somalia, a scandal that led to the Airborne being disbanded.

62: Yes.

Specifically why no one else joined Justice Sotomayor's self-evidently correct dissent to Part IV of the opinion?

I didn't see that in the news yet.

I should read that now.

'Why are you people ignoring the fact that this whole policy is based on the President's racism?' would be another way to put it. The man is a walking (barely) talking (mostly gibberish, to be sure) Equal Protection Violation. I suppose I could look back at what it was that some Colorado bureaucrat said that got Justice Kennedy so wound up in the cake case, but the unwillingness to deal with the bad-faith-as-a-badge-of-honor administration isn't going to wear well.

just this month the Mounties have killed as many Indigenous people just in New Brunswick as the Airborne killed civilians in Somalia

Three is actually more than two.

68: Good reelection campaign is also using the same symbol for its opponents as the the Nazi party used for them.

I hate this phone. Good s/b his.

And, you know, some awful centrists might argue that setting a baited trap for civilians, shooting them in the back as they flee, torturing them to death over a period of several hours, and using their corpses as teaching aids to demonstrate proper first aid techniques...

...some people might argue that that is an indication of a somewhat more degraded organisational culture than two separate incidents in NB, one of which as far as I can tell didn't involve RCMP at all, but Edmundston Police.

Chantel Moore shot and killed by Edmundston Police: https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/n7wn4z/police-killed-a-young-woman-in-new-brunswick-during-wellness-check
Rodney Levi shot and killed by RCMP: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkygwy/canadian-police-killed-rodney-levi-second-indigenous-person-in-a-week

Here's a quote from the cake case -- get ready to clutch your pearls:

"I would also like to reiterate what we said in the hearing or the last meeting. Freedom of religion and religion has been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the holocaust, whether it be--I mean, we--we can list hundreds of situations where freedom of religion has been used to justify discrimination. And to me it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use to--to use their religion to hurt others."

And here's quote from Sotomayor's opinion today:

The Batalla Vidal complaints catalog then-candidate Trump's declarations that Mexican immigrants are "people that have lots of problems," "the bad ones," and "criminals, drug dealers, [and] rapists." 291 F. Supp. 3d, at 276 (internal quotation marks omitted). The Regents complaints additionally quote President Trump's 2017 statement comparing undocumented immigrants to "animals" responsible for "the drugs, the gangs, the cartels, the crisis of smuggling and trafficking, [and] MS13." 298 F. Supp. 3d 1304, 1314 (ND Cal. 2018) (internal quotation marks omitted). The plurality brushes these aside as "unilluminating," "remote in time," and having been "made in unrelated contexts."

I'm glad that DACA recission hasn't gone through, and expect to be able to use CJ Roberts opinion to bludgeon the government, as I have already used his census opinion, in my work. Still, the idea that they're going to just ignore what everyone understands is happening here, and in the census and travel ban cases, is pretty demoralizing.

Once again, here's what Justice Kennedy had to say about the Colorado commissioner quoted in 73:

To describe a man's faith as "one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use" is to disparage his religion in at least two distinct ways: by describing it as despicable, and also by characterizing it as merely rhetorical--something insubstantial and even insincere. The commissioner even went so far as to compare Phillips' invocation of his sincerely held religious beliefs to defenses of slavery and the Holocaust. This sentiment is inappropriate for a Commission charged with the solemn responsibility of fair and neutral enforcement of Colorado's antidiscrimination law--a law that protects discrimination on the basis of religion as well as sexual orientation.

OK, fine, I can live with holding public servants to a high standard. Let's actually do it.

(Actually, not fine, since this is a somewhat gross mischaracterization of the commissioer's views, but whatever . . .)

I personally would feel a little bit safer if Canada had an airborne regiment. Which I guess demonstrates it's part of the racist system.

76 They should be airborne Hussars.

76: Rest easy, Canada still has infantry who jump out of airplanes. (My cousin, for one!) But relevant to the 'abolish the police' discussion, what the Canadian Forces does not have is the Airborne Regiment, because as ajay rightly notes it was a toxic and broken institution, and needed to be destroyed.

Where ajay and I are disagreeing is whether the RCMP is a similarly toxic and broken institution that needs to be destroyed. Were it destroyed, something-- perhaps even something better, less centered on violence work!-- would take its place. Maybe we can even keep the musical ride and the fancy uniforms, and get rid of the rest of it.

12: those figures suggest one very easy way to cut deaths: the NYPD should start using 1970s firearms training techniques again, because they were clearly utterly shit.

Yglesias mentioned that a big part of the reduction in shootings was rules to prohibit shooting a moving vehicles. Which seems like a good policy, and would make the distinction between, "number of shots fired" and "number of separate incidents in which shots were fired" (and I'm not sure which measure gswift is referencing). I could imagine police firing a number of shots at a moving vehicle -- with or without stopping it.

This stony heart is warmed. Or perhaps chilled.

It was 1982 before science discovered that bullets fired into a street don't melt away into nothing if they miss their target.

It was 1982 before science discovered that bullets fired into a street don't melt away into nothing if they miss their target.

And then another 10 years to convince police unions that was an important consideration. . . .

Googling, it appears that NYC was the first department to restrict shooting at moving vehicles, and that the justice department currently recommends that policy for all departments, but that's recent, and it isn't universal.

For example, here's the description of when the LAPD changed their policy.

... Bill Bratton, then the police chief of Los Angeles, moved to reform the policy at California's largest police department.

After a string of controversial cases, the final straw for Bratton was the death of Devin Brown, an unarmed African American 13-year-old, who had stolen a Toyota Camry in February 2005. Devin was shot eight times by officer Steven Garcia when he reversed the car toward officers. Investigators found he was travelling at 1 mph.

Instructions came down from Bratton that LAPD officers were now permitted to fire on moving vehicles only when drivers threatened them "with deadly force by other means than the vehicle".

Apparently some of the Airborne Regiment was found to use Confederate States of America-themed decorations (among worse stuff like swastikas). People sure know what it means!

"Where ajay and I are disagreeing is whether the RCMP is a similarly toxic and broken institution that needs to be destroyed."

From the anecdotes you provided, you'd probably be better off destroying the Edmundston Police and replacing them with the RCMP.

Charley, you're talking about the American cake case? I don't remember that language from the Belfast cake.

[I mean, I take for granted that any ideology and any religion can be used to justify horrendous crimes: as far as I can see the Kennedy quote is crazy bullshit, because of course there were Christian justifications of slavery and of apartheid, and maybe he'd like to read Luther on the Jews some time. I don't think a republican would find much to object to in Luther's views on peasants, though.]

Also, ydnew's couple seem really to have deserved their martyrdom.

53 - thanks, X. I thought there must be something like that.

Yes, the US cake case, which arose from a Colorado administrative action.

It's the perfect illustration of everything wrong with Justice Kennedy's jurisprudence. He more or less says that it's ok for a state to require businesses to serve gay people, but then overturns this instance because the state guy said something mean. Which ends up meaning that states can't require businesses to serve gay people, because the precedent will be applied as is even in cases where the bureaucrats weren't mean at all.

Nearly a decade ago, the Montana Supreme Court called out this same bullshit maneuver wrt Citizens United. All sorts of language in Kennedy's opinion about what was, and wasn't in the record, what facts there were, so our supreme court said, well we have specific facts and a specific record and so we can distinguish the statute overturned in Citizens United from the one before us. A specific history of corporations buying government. Which drew an angry rebuke from Kennedy -- in an opinion issued in advance of briefing -- that no, it doesn't matter what the facts are, you have to ignore all that hedging and just look at my bottom line.

His travel ban opinion totally set the tone for how they deal with Trump: they're just going to ignore the motivation of the guy directing the policy, and judge whether the underlings have successfully concocted a pretextual justification for what he wants them to do. They have to not say it's a pretext, and they have to check the boxes. But the fact that the driving force of the policy is white fragility/supremacy, well, that's just not relevant.

Anyway, I'm hoping that right wingers are losing their shit on Roberts today.

Only 2 days left where opinions are scheduled.

Title VII was a clear win, but DACA was a narrow technical win that will be short-lived if Trump is reelected. Being pessimistic, I can't help but think that Roberts is seeming reasonable to set us up for an egregious opinion about how Trump is just too darn busy watching 6 hours of TV a day presidenting to allow his accountants to comply with a clearly valid subpoena.

seeming reasonable to set us up

I honestly don't think he cares what *we* think, especially with respect to opinions to be issued in the next 10 days. I don't think this describes his motivation even a little.

"We" being broader society, press, legal scholars, whatever. I think he cares about his overall reputation as a CJ.

61: They were from the Detroit area (she was from a family of Persian immigrants), but this was in Austin in the early 2000s.

85: Yes, they did.

Yeah, sure, but not on a weekly basis. With both the census and DACA, he's picked the most absolutely limited way to say no to Trump -- going on narrow proceduralism, while ignoring the basic attack on the norms of civilized society. In contrast, Shelby is not carefully limited, and will be legacy defining.

This fivethirtyeight article is wrestling with somewhat similar questions as the OP.

Defunding the police is a big departure from the reforms we've seen before. But although there are disagreements between activists and researchers about how sweeping change should be, pretty much everyone we spoke with agrees that the system is broken, efforts to measure it are highly flawed, and now is the moment to think big about how to fix it. In many ways, the movement to defund the police is exposing gaping holes in how we measure what good police work really is, and how we gauge a reform's success. Because after decades of research on policing and police reform, we still don't know that much about what police are doing, how their presence actually affects the people who experience police violence, and what people in those communities want from reform.