I know people who live in Baltimore. They don't seem very stressed.

I can say from personal experience that people who live in Baltimore have a pretty good sense of what areas (and times of day) are safe and what areas aren't. What stresses them is when there are shootings in unexpected ("safe") areas.

It's like the recent shootings near Nationals Park in DC. The area around the park is "safe" if you don't wander too far in the wrong direction, so gunshots near the park are unusual and stressing. (Not to mention the national coverage they got isn't going to help Nationals attendance.)

The nice thing about the Pirates is they get low attendance the old-fashioned way, by playing really poorly.

When I moved to Baltimore I figured out the borders between "my" and everyone else's territory quickly. The famous blue-light cameras are like territorial flags. They're not so much for surveillance and more for indicating the borders. The police were also very helpful! They would literally stop and let me know I was in the wrong neighborhood, or near the wrong neighborhood. I gather I rated this kind of help given my age, gender, and race. The police would usher my kind quickly back to Charles Village, Hampden, or Mount Vernon.

When I moved to Baltimore I figured out the borders between "my" and everyone else's territory quickly. The famous blue-light cameras are like territorial flags. They're not so much for surveillance and more for indicating the borders. The police were also very helpful! They would literally stop and let me know I was in the wrong neighborhood, or near the wrong neighborhood. I gather I rated this kind of help given my age, gender, and race. The police would usher my kind quickly back to Charles Village, Hampden, or Mount Vernon.

link. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n15/gary-younge/out-hunting

McNulty and Bunny were a sanitized version of:

The GTTF's flamboyant malpractice spanned a decade, from 2007 to 2017, and Fenton's account is set against changing local and racial politics. A demand to bring down the murder rate pushed the city's leaders to encourage tougher policing practices, with an emphasis on increasing the number of arrests. The GTTF stopped and searched more people, providing stats which gave the impression that it was a success. This emboldened Jenkins and his squad, and their seeming impunity made them increasingly reckless.

Once the system is in place, the colour of the people enforcing it is at best of secondary importance, and often irrelevant.

The race of the people enforcing it can be secondary or irrelevant, but the race of the people victimized by it is of central importance.

Similarly, having Ben Carson around didn't make the Trump admin about dominance rather than racism.

but there is a jolt which might get comments out of the usual tramlines here

I refuse to be diverted from my usual tramlines.

There was a young man who said "Damn!
It is borne in on me that I am
A being that moves
In predestinate grooves --
Not even a bus, but a tram.

Since the Nationals are mentioned in 2... With the new Cleveland Guardians announcement, I was wondering if the Atlanta baseball team would ever change its name, which lead me to remember that a major alternative to Washington Nationals was Washington Grays after the Negro League team, which led me to looking up the name of the Atlanta Negro League team to see if it's a viable alternative... But it turns out, I shit you not, that the name of that team was the Atlanta Black Crackers.

I would go to at least one game.

Which would double the number of major league games I have attended.

Let me just add this: https://rodlee.bandcamp.com/track/dance-my-pain-away

I enjoyed 10.

I read the book -- I believe one of the old City Paper diaspora recommended it, or possibly one of the Defector/Gawker people (these are overlapping circles in the Venn diagram, of course) -- and it's very good.

10 is excellent. ah the knoxes!

How can you live through the last year and then just blithely say that policing in Baltimore is not related to white supremacy?

I blithe all day, every day. It's a lifestyle.

A blithestyle.

18: Given our very different media consumptions there's lots of ways in which I haven't lived through the same last year as you presumably have. But in any case the serious answer is that the piece, and all the commentators here who've said that they've never had any danger in Baltimore, show, I think, that the problem is systemic, as GY says, and not related to the practices of individual guilt, confession, and absolution that I associate with the phrase "White supremacy".

Of course poverty and class are racialised in the US* but to trace the ways in which this happens is really complicated.

* And in the UK, hence GY's remark that if he wanted to escape racism when he moved back from the US he'd not have settled in Hackney.

It occurs to me that one difference is that less than 100 years ago, poverty and class were not skin-colour* racialised in British society -- a throwaway jotting of Auden's to the effect that he could remember when people saw nothing odd in saying "I travelled all alone to Bonn, with a very boring maid."

The distinction between real, fully human people (like us) and the unfortunate, shadowy Others of the servant classes really does not require a history of transatlantic slavery.

*Because there were understood to be white "races" too -- Irish, Jews, Boers, all considered racially distinct in Kipling's world, for example. cf that extraordinary document Heebie once put up here showing the supposed characteristics of different ethnic groups among the immigrants to ?Pittsburgh.

I was the one who used the phrase "white supremacy", so I thought I was the shocking one.

Please, Miss, may I be shocking too? Please? Please? Just this once!

I don't know, but I'm willing to listen. Let's see what you've got!

I thought I had been, simply by associating myself with you.

We're electric.

"the practices of individual guilt, confession, and absolution that I associate with the phrase "White supremacy"."

??? i have zero idea what this means.

I thought that the point was that even if white people aren't doing the hands-on violence, it can still be because of white supremacy.

29 to whether Baltimore's problems can be said to be caused by white supremacy or not.

30. Are any of you familiar with the concept "class"?

I am, but as far as I can tell from American politics, the concept has only ever been successfully used to help white people.

AHEM!

the problem is systemic, as GY says, and not related to the practices of individual guilt, confession, and absolution that I associate with the phrase "White supremacy".

If you don't want to use the words "white supremacy" to describe the system that targets Black people for abuse, I think that's okay. But it's a vocabulary issue, not a substantive descriptive issue. I agree that the individual Black cops here are not white supremacists, even as they serve a system that is reasonably described as white supremacist.

I'm with 28, because it sounds like you think that WS is a state of mind that afflicts white people who don't like the idea of WS rather than the description of an actual thing upon which social systems are based/sustained. And if this is a fair description, this isn't just a vocabulary issue. It's more like a version of 'Black people are the real racists.'

Idea was the wrong word in context in 35, because that might be misinterpreted to mean that WS isn't real. It's real, and it's a term used to describe a system of thought on the part of people running society, and/or for whose benefit society is run.

I'm happy to say the system is racist but I have two quibbles. The first is that you don't "serve" a system: that implies a choice not to serve. But the thing about systems is that we're all part of them. We don't have that choice. I can't easily choose to leave the capitalist system, certainly not by declaring that I am opposed to it. What you can serve is a particular power group within the system.

And this leads to my second difficulty. If GY is right, and power in Baltimore is divided between corrupt and violent militias, of whom the police are one, the most pressing political question is "which should we support? Which is the least worst?"

Answering "none of the above" is just ducking the question. It just says "Let the city stew in its own juice until that Atlantic washes it away". And hypothesising some kind of overwhelming and benevolent force that could bring the benefits of true democracy to Baltimore, as it did in Afghanistan and Iran is not very helpful either.

I've spent a little time in places where order is enforced by non-state actors and they have not been idyllic ones. So my instinct is to say the the police are a very bad option, but probably the least worst, and the least difficult to reform.

36: I'm not American, and I don't think that "Black people are the real racists". But WS seems to me a bad explanation for the whole system. It's a good description of parts of the system -- an entirely accurate and illuminating description of the Republican Party's approach to elections and to voting rights. That is clearly aimed at minimising the number and power of Black voters. It's also an excellent description of the colonial spread across the continent, which involved crimes against people of all sorts of colours.

But the larger system of American inequality and cruelty to the weak within which it operates looks from here as if it has other motives as well.

If GY is right, and power in Baltimore is divided between corrupt and violent militias, of whom the police are one, the most pressing political question is "which should we support? Which is the least worst?"

This is a very weird "most pressing political question" to pick. Why not "can we reform the police to the point where they are not a corrupt and violent militia?" Or, if the answer to that is no, "can we take power from the police in favor of some new locus of power that serve some of the same purposes without itself being a violent militia?"

Assuming that nothing about the situation can possibly improve is never going to give you attractive options.

And comparing the difficulty of achieving a nonviolent social order (on the level of non-violence common to most American cities) in Baltimore to the difficulty of achieving an American-friendly regime in Afghanistan is also super weird. People who live in Baltimore are Americans who participate in the same society as the rest of the country. There's nothing magic about the people of Baltimore that keeps the violent crime rate high, it's a combination of high poverty and terrible policing. Both of those can be changed.

The first is that you don't "serve" a system: that implies a choice not to serve.

Again, a vocabulary issue. "Servitude" is characterized by the lack of volition. "Service" implicitly contains the idea that somebody else is making the choices. "Servants" follow somebody else's agenda.

But if you don't like the word "serve," the phenomenon still exists. Give us another word and we can talk about it.

The whole point of discussing systemic racism is to discuss the ideals people can serve without even being aware of it -- much less exercising an individual choice. If your point is that systemic crimes tend to obscure the responsibility of individuals, I think we can agree. If your point is that systemic crimes absolve people of individual responsibility -- of "individual guilt, confession, and absolution" -- that's what we're discussing. I don't agree with that.

I feel like Martin Beck is relevant here.

oh wait, is the argument that the existence systems of oppression absolves individual members of oppressed groups from personal responsibility for their own oppressive actions? i mean, anyone advancing that argument in the us context hasn't listened to black women. or darker than other skinned black women. or pretty much any native americans. or ever paid attention during the most cursory school lesson re the holocaust. this can't possibly be the argument? i'm back to not understanding. anyways lz per usual making sense. i'll go back to post swim eating!

We joined a gym, so I'm now swimming again. It turns out it's really tiring.

But the larger system of American inequality and cruelty to the weak within which it operates looks from here as if it has other motives as well.

Fair enough, and I'd be interested in what the big ones look like from outside.

From inside, part of what makes the whole thing so stable is that all the motives have been defined somehow as being the same thing -- so people will be racist to not look poor and be sexist to demonstrate their racial power and expend all their spare cash to demonstrate their racial and sex-role power. When you *think* you've persuaded someone that they could loosen up on one of these, whatever their biggest fear/weakness is tends to rise up and say Keep the borders. ("Someone" absolutely including "myself".)

Is part of Baltimore's problem that it's close enough to NYC for the, as it were, good parts to get sucked into NYC and the bad parts to get exported? I think about that in the rough counties so often found next to nice university or resort towns.

38 While WS isn't the only thing in play, imo it's the biggest barrier to progress on nearly anything else. I think we as a society would be a lot more willing to have, for example, universal health coverage, if it wasn't for the fact that people of color would be disproportionately (or even proportionately) represented amongst the beneficiaries of moving from what we have to that.

46: Not NYC, but maybe Philly and DC? I don't know Baltimore at all.

Baltimore is close enough to DC that it's possible there, but it's too far away from Philadelphia.

Is part of Baltimore's problem that it's close enough to NYC...

Eh, I lived in Baltimore for 5 years. It's not all that close to NYC, and is just worlds away in so many ways. Close to DC, of course, but also another world away. Charm City is its own, unique place/thing!

A weird thing about Baltimore is that it had a huge decline in size and importance both relative to the country and especially relative to DC. Here's a good chart. Other metro areas with similar declines (New Orleans, Saint Louis, Buffalo, Cincinatti) often have similar problems.

Very true.

In the old days Baltimore was #4 of the Society cities, and the Southerner of the group. The original ranking was Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore. Baltimore dropped out, Philadelphia declined, and New York overtook Boston. Then Society died.

To be fair to Society, it lasted long enough for other types of assholery to take its place.

Huh. It seems really pretty straightforward to me.

1. It's WS, b/c the goal, the *goal* is to control and oppress Black people. That the -agents- of that oppression are themselves Black doesn't change things.
2. In India, in the 80s (maybe today, dunno) there was an epidemic of "bride burning". Young wives would end up dying in kitchen fires. Turned out, it was their [female] in-laws setting them on fire, so that the [newly] widowed husband could get a new wife and [thereby] a new dowry. The willing and even enthusiastic cooperation of the oppressed does not legitimize the oppression.
3. Yes, the perps themselves are guilty. Of course.

Sigh. Show me the many more (b/c Black people are a small fraction of the US population) instances of cities where po-po oppress poor white populations, like they oppress poor Black populations. Or heck, show me just as many.

Sigh.

Also, racism couldn't have been a major part of the fabric of the British Empire because Gurkas!

47: completely agree with that, yes. It's the only factor that explains how American health care is politically possible in a democracy.

56: one of my grandfathers was a judge in the Indian Civil Service. My mother spent the happy years of her childhood out there. Believe me, I know how much racism underlay that empire. I also know -- and look at India today -- how much so to say internal racism underlay the caste system.

55: It's not a question of legitimising the oppression; I'm interested in understanding it. In that context I think the racism is contingent. It is the particular form that oppression takes in the US, perhaps the West more widely, today. As such, any attempt to make a fairer society involves dealing with it or fighting it. But there have been slaveries and genocides in the past that didn't involve anything we would recognise as US-style racism. I expect there will be in the future, too, if there is one. That's what I mean by "contingent" -- not "unreal", or "unimportant".

LB:

This is a very weird "most pressing political question" to pick. Why not "can we reform the police to the point where they are not a corrupt and violent militia?" Or, if the answer to that is no, "can we take power from the police in favor of some new locus of power that serve some of the same purposes without itself being a violent militia?"

There is a certain amount of crosstalk going on here. Your alternative questions were to me implied in my question. I think the answer to your second question is clearly "No; that's not practical." If it's been tried anywhere, and succeeded, then I'm wrong. But otherwise I do file it under "bringing democracy and women's rights to Afghanistan."

You say that this is entirely different because "People who live in Baltimore are Americans who participate in the same society as the rest of the country." but as far as I can see this just isn't true of the people who live in the ghettoes. Admittedly, my view is shaped by David Simon, by the statistics, and by the testimony of white residents for whom the experience of Baltimore has been entirely different. But it looks from here as if black people who live in the poorer parts of Baltimore almost completely excluded from the mainstream of US society. They live under different laws (as the criminal justice statistics show), with different schools and different family structures. All this is the outcome of racism, not of course a justification of it. But changing social systems like that is a huge undertaking. It takes decades and billions, and a vast creation of social capital as well.

Assuming that nothing about the situation can possibly improve is never going to give you attractive options. Yes, but I'm playing at realistic options here.

58: "But it looks from here as if black people who live in the poorer parts of Baltimore almost completely excluded from the mainstream of US society. They live under different laws (as the criminal justice statistics show), with different schools and different family structures."

ISTR a famous sociologist [I wanna say William Julius Wilson, but don't reemember] pointed out that this all flowed from lack of jobs, and that if white people were similarly deprived of jobs, they'd suffer the same failures of family and social formation. And then, Charles Murray [he of _Bell Curve_, spit] wrote a book (IIRC) _Coming Apart_ about this very phenomenon among poorer white families. That is to say, when jobs disappear for a generation or so, the families fall apart, single motherhood rises, drug abuse rises, crime rises, education falls, etc. And that's what's happening in many places.

In short, it's not as if Black families in Baltimore are somehow living in a different country from the rest of America: they're just ahead of the curve, but there are areas where poor white families are in the process of joining them. it seems that we as a nation are capable of imagining what needs to be done to bring those poor white families back from the brink, but we don't seem to be able to do the same for poor Black families. And yet, it's the same things, they need.

I think that holds true in the UK, too. What has happened to some of the post-industrial areas since the Eighties is fucking grim. But I would be inclined to say that those places, too, *are* living in a different country to the rest of us. And, while we're capable of *imagining* some, perhaps most, of the things that need to be done, no one seems able to bring these imagining into reality, because it would disturb the comfortable too much.

For an example if I were supreme ruler of the universe, or even of the united kingdom, my government would have two obvious financial targets: to double (at least) the budget of the justice system so the courts worked quickly, with proper legal aid, and the prisons were less entirely hellish; and to double the minimum wage for carers, raising taxes and lowering allowances as necessary to fund this. There is absolutely no hope in hell of getting elected on that platform. Yet it would clearly provide more jobs, greater public safety, and, ultimately, a better and more fair society.

-- and I think, without much evidence, that there is in the US a much more racialised divide in styles of law enforcement than in this country. Compare the treatment of moonshiners with cocaine dealers. That is of course partly due to the fact that England is very small, and the US is not.

Police reform is a thing that has happened -- while the police now are still unacceptably bad, they've been much worse in terms of violence and blatant racism in the past. Believing that policing can change is not an unrealistic fantasy, and starting the conversation from the belief that the police, particularly the Baltimore police, are as good as they could possibly be is not well-supported at all.

And defining poor people in Baltimore as outside American society to the point that they can't possibly be helped is also nuts. These are people who live walking distance from good schools and decent jobs (not enough of them, but they're there), who are exposed to the same media environment as the rest of the country. It's not Mad Max, it's just a city with poor neighborhoods, bad schools, and bad police. Fix the police and make jobs available, and it'd be like any other city in a couple of years.

It's been a while since I mentioned my high school classmate who works in Lincoln but won't live anywhere nearby because Lincoln is too dangerous.

Your friend has a point.

A different starting point would just be to look at the number of police killings regardless of race and realize that American police kill far too many people compared to most other developed countries. (Same for incarceration). Even if there were no racial disparity, the numbers would be horrible. There have been many factors leading to harsher policing in justice in the US: wars on crime, drugs, terrorism, and immigrants, three strikes, zero tolerance, mandatory minimums, children tried as adults, "broken windows", police trained to respond instantly to the *possibility* of a gun, police trained to "protect the badge". A huge transformation of American society since about 1980

There are all kinds of ultimate causes of this viciousness, but racial fears are high among them (even though white people are killed / imprisoned too). It didn't "just happen", either; it's a program people have put in place.

Police killings per capita vary by a factor of 9, with Rhode Island at the bottom and New Mexico at the top. The stereotypical liberal states of NY, IL, MI and MA rank in the bottom 10 for least killings. The worst states are mostly western.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123317/rate-people-killed-police-us-state-population/

It doesn't help that every asshole does have a gun.

Believing that policing can change is not an unrealistic fantasy

Watching police kill on camera with impunity is discouraging and sometimes feeds hopelessness, but I think the reverse is actually true. Actually seeing this stuff can be a catalyst for change. The failures of the past don't have to be repeated.

New failures is always a possibility.

You know, I'll never find the post I'm thinking of, but Werdna is making a mistake that Dsquared wrote a good post about back in the day -- I'm not sure the context was policing, but if it was, it might have been about the Brazilian guy the London police shot about ten years ago. But the fundamental idea works in a lot of contexts.

It's easy to look at a situation where there are a bunch of countervailing forces, and naively believe that it's been optimized to the point that any improvement on one metric is always going to turn into a degradation of performance on the other metrics. There's no such thing as across-the-board improvement, only tradeoffs. But this is only true in a situation that's already on the cutting edge of having been optimized as much as possible, and a lot of real world situations, particularly ones that look fucked up to the casual observer, genuinely aren't that tightly optimized.

There is literally no reason to believe that making the Baltimore police less corrupt and brutal would make Baltimore gangs stronger. Cities with police that are less corrupt and brutal than Baltimore's don't have worse crime. Sometimes, there's room to just make things better without meaningful tradeoffs.

I think the police are actively trying to let things get worse as a way to block reforms.

Yeah, I'd believe that. But they're a problem, not a law of nature.

There is literally no reason to believe that making the Baltimore police less corrupt and brutal would make Baltimore gangs stronger

And there is, in fact, plenty of reason to believe that the problem of lawless gangs is worsened by lawless police. The police (and prisons) are only sometimes enemies of these gangs, and only sometimes competitors. They are often collaborators.

70: Once you accept that the police are just another gang, you render your society helpless against blackmail of this sort. I think that's NW's point -- that we are helpless.

You say that this is entirely different because "People who live in Baltimore are Americans who participate in the same society as the rest of the country." but as far as I can see this just isn't true of the people who live in the ghettoes.

Does this echo the argument if Chris Hayes in _A Colony In A Nation_?

LB, you misunderstand me: I don't think, and didn't say that the police can't be reformed or that the attempt shouldn't be made -- only that it will be a long, slow process. I said that the police were the least worst, not the best, of the available militias, and -- I thought -- implied that they were also the easiest, or the least hard, to reform. I really don't believe their workings have been optimised: how could anyone, after Emerson's statistics?

NickS, I've not read that Chris Hayes, but I think he's made a very similar argument elsewhere, and I think it's credible.

The thing that's tricky is that it's easy to take away control of the police from one particular militia, the problem is that if you're not careful that'll just mean it being taken over by another one.

For a more intractable case, see police in Mexico. Rooting out genuine police corruption is a much harder problem than firing police who commit un-organized misconduct.

74: So, what on earth did it mean to say that the most pressing political question was which militia to support? Depending on whether you think of doing whatever is necessary to break up the current power structures that make the police corrupt as supporting the police or as not supporting the police, the answer is going to be obvious regardless (that is, either "the police" or "none of them"). Like, were you picturing someone answering that question with "I think the people of Baltimore should be supporting this particular criminal gang"?

74: "I thought -- implied that they [the po-po] were also the easiest, or the least hard, to reform."

Um, actually, that's not true. reform of the po-po will require changing hearts and minds [of stone racists and fascists] which is very hard. Reforming the situations that poor people find themselves in is much easier: it merely takes spending money: adequate schools, housing, income support, etc. And taxation: take money away from the rich, so that they cannot hoard all the opportunities for themselves.

If it's all poverty then why don't we see the same murder rates across low income ethnic groups? Why wasn't there a murder spike after the 2008 recession?

The way online progressives talk about police and crime is totally detached from reality. The residents of those neighborhoods see it much more clearly.

https://twitter.com/SteveBellow/status/1419349757747621892

See also this angry Philly resident demanding they lock up the shooters.

https://twitter.com/RealJabariJones/status/1418658900174381060

If you really want to learn something on the topic a good place is Mosko's Violence Reduction Project. This is one of the essays by Steve Bellows, a retired black police officer from L.A.

https://qualitypolicing.com/violencereduction/bellow/

Texas leading the way in alternatives to policing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tyS-eubxxw

78: I think link 1 really makes clear the police view of police violence, and for that matter, the media view of police violence. There are two choices: Either you tolerate police racism and violence, or you get no policing -- that's the assumption in the way the poll is framed. Moby explained this in 70.

In link 2, you've got an individual who wants to see harsher sentencing for gun crime. I think I understand the connection you're making, but I'd really like to see you spell it out.

And link 3 again promotes the idea that unjustified violence is a necessary adjunct to policing, and that it's only outside agitators that are angry about police violence.

The crimes that we see committed by police on video -- and the public endorsement of those crimes by police organizations and individual officers -- are going to continue to haunt these departments.

If it's all poverty then why don't we see the same murder rates across low income ethnic groups? Why wasn't there a murder spike after the 2008 recession?

That, by the way, is a fine question for the "class not race" crowd.

75: I recently read an article or a twitter thread or something, that I'm not going to try to find, by an American living in Mexico. Maybe Rose McGowan? Anyway she had the perspective that while Mexican police are corrupt, it's corruption on a level that allows the plebes to benefit from it- you can bribe a cop to get out of a ticket or whatever. Whereas corruption in the US requires you to be a billionaire or a corporation or a drug lord to benefit. I haven't thought or read about this deeply but it seems like a significant difference.

80: The neighborhoods that actually endure the crime spike want more cops and they want criminals locked up. It's a small percentage of the community committing these crimes. Targeted proactive policing will disproportionately benefit those communities and they know it. See also the voting demographics that just made a cop NY's likely next mayor.

82: Uh, maybe you should get some input from actual working class Mexicans before you go down that road. Or anyone from a country where the police are always shaking down citizens for petty bribes. In my experience the attitude is definitely not "man this sure is good for the masses."

I agree with 83, but I do think Baltimore has had a special problem with police corruption that's somewhat different from other big cities. But along with more cops, we do also need a police force that isn't going to quit doing their job if their feefees are hurt, and a police force that sees their job to protect and serve and not to act as the military wing of the republican party.

gswift comes across all "telling hard truths". As if he doesn't know that our VP, Kamala Harris, she latterly the AG of San Francisco, in her first (IIRC) campaign ran on precisely this! That is to say, that Black families also want police to properly police their neighborhoods, also want crime to be fought and decreased. I mean, No Shit, Sherlock! Did you get a PhD for that discovery?

What these same families want, is that their children not, y'know, fear for their lives, when they're out-and-about.

This assumption that you *cannot* fight crime without random and unjust executions and other brutality towards poor Black Americans, this assumption is dehumanizing.

85: Everyone's feelings are fine. What you can't do is disincentivize proactive police work and then go all shocked when that work does in fact stop being done.

What's the disincentive? That you might go to jail if you straight up murder someone?

disincentivize proactive police work

Is that what they're calling it nowadays? The Baltimore police union said the discipline against the cops who killed Freddie Gray threatened to "perpetuate a police force hesitant to exercise judgment when interacting with the public."

Bouncing Gray around in a van was "exercising judgment," but I think it's also fair to describe it as "proactive police work."

We see again and again the police responding with threats against the public -- threats that, in fact, they do carry out:

"Crime is at an all-time high, while arrests and convictions are at an all-time low," Ryan said. "The only losers in the decision to continue persecuting these five officers are the citizens of Baltimore City."

NW tells us that the police are just another gang, and this is the police view, too.

88: Any kind of targeted proactive policing is going to result in disproportionate stops and arrests of black and brown people. It's also going to inevitably result in police violence disproportionately involving those same people. If your politicians and city councils are then going to tell the police that disparity is because they're a bunch of white supremacists then they're going to pull back. A lot of them might continue if they thought they'll still be able to make an impact but rushed poorly thought out pushes for decarceration and bail reform have turned a lot of jurisdictions into revolving doors, including here. I can book a guy on multiple felonies and often he'll be out in less than a day, sometimes before our shift is even over. That old guy in Philly linked above is yelling about the same thing, suspects out and about doing shootings when they already have pending gun charges. Or this shooting in Houston where the suspect was out despite having seven pending felonies. Targeting these types is risk seeking behavior and if they're going just keep releasing them immediately then you start to question why exactly you're bothering with that risk.

https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2021/07/01/woman-dead-1-year-old-injured-in-shooting-suspect-out-on-seven-felony-bonds-police-say/

politicalfootball: "We see again and again the police responding with threats against the public"

100% correct on this. We saw it last summer during the protests against police brutality: the police went on a nationwide *riot* in many major cities, and none of them were brought to account. We saw clip-after-clip of vehicular assault, brutal violence [remember that old guy who got knocked down and had a cranial and brain injury?] and more, and none of these po-po got prosecuted.

They as much as told us: "nice life you have there; don't push us, or We. Will. Fuck. You. Up."

84: uh, thanks for the advice!

I'll try to remember to check in with you first, next time I'm tempted to contemplate the different types of police corruption that exist in the world.

gswift, given that policies that lead to something like the Chauvin case are unsustainable, what should policies be going forward? You can't be seriously suggesting that nothing needs to have changed from the status quo of a few years ago.

90: "rushed poorly thought out pushes for decarceration and bail reform". The surge in incarceration in the U.S. [glances at wikipedia] started about 1980 and has been at current levels for 20+ years, leading the world. I don't see pushes toward decarceration as "rushed." And citing one or two anecdotes about crimes committed by people out on bail is weak sauce. I'm sure it would make the job of police easier and more emotionally satisfying if every person arrested were locked up and the key thrown away. To be extra proactive, lock up anyone who might cause any kind of trouble. Then throw away the key. But the job of police forces is not to make their own jobs easier and more emotionally satisfying. That Gswift actually says "why bother taking risks to make arrests if the arrested people can get out on bail..." is why police shouldn't be in charge of policing.

Any kind of targeted proactive policing is going to result in disproportionate stops and arrests of black and brown people.

Disproportionate to what? The answer, in practice, is "disproportionate to the actual amount of crime going on." For instance:

More than one in four people arrested for drug law violations in 2015 was black, although drug use rates do not differ substantially by race and ethnicity and drug users generally purchase drugs from people of the same race or ethnicity.15) For example, the ACLU found that blacks were 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites in 2010, even though their rate of marijuana usage was comparable.16)

gswift:

It's also going to inevitably result in police violence disproportionately involving those same people.

Police assert a right to criminal violence against white people, too, and that's also a huge problem. But yeah, there's little question that even if you controlled for crime rates, the burden still falls harder on Black people.

You might get criticized by some people but nothing will actually come of it but still that's enough to have you not do your job is exactly what I meant by feefees.

The effects of the pandemic on the legal system (jails are death traps, courts can't handle their usual load) have to be playing a huge role in any issues this year around bail and incarceration. I still stand by my prediction that the pandemic is playing a large role in some way.

96: One of the stranger parts of the past five years is the normalization of powerful people whining like little bitches.

I feel like a lot of the problems with policing would be solved by just having a vaccine mandate. Get rid of all the crazies (and it turns out half of them are crazy), raise base pay pay, cut overtime, add a bunch of social worker first responders to deal with stuff that police shouldn't have to deal with, and hire new people who are vaccinated.

I think a reasonably large minority has decided to try to poison society because they can't control it and that they have been successful to an alarming extent.

"Any kind of targeted proactive policing is going to result in disproportionate stops and arrests of black and brown people."

At least you came right out and said it, you fuckin' bigot.

99: I'm sure the culture of impunity contributes to low vaccination rates, but I bet if you mandated vaccines a majority of the unvaccinated would get vaccinated and would remain horrible.

Also I wonder how much veto power they would have over doing this at all, via union contracts.

Chetan writes: Um, actually, that's not true. reform of the po-po will require changing hearts and minds [of stone racists and fascists] which is very hard. Reforming the situations that poor people find themselves in is much easier: it merely takes spending money: adequate schools, housing, income support, etc. And taxation: take money away from the rich, so that they cannot hoard all the opportunities for themselves.

It has got to be a whole lot easier to change the hearts and minds of a police force than of the other militias currently contending for Baltimore. Gang leaders may not be "stone racists and fascists" but they are just as obnoxious in different ways -- and if you think that money can be pumped in to poor communities currently run by gangsters and benefit the poor, rather than the gangsters, I invite you to take a tour of southern Italy. If the government doesn't tax you, the mafia does, and in ways that make you long for the inland revenue.

Why do people otherwise really keen on state interventions (and rightly) all of a sudden want to privatise local monopolies of violence?

Police forces are disciplined, more or less; bad police can be sacked rather than shot; all these things make it much easier to reform the police rather than gangs, especially when the police need reforming.

If your choices are between police and gangsters, the police don't look so bad.

If the rate of violent crime and especially gun violence is disproportionately high among ethnic minorities, as it certainly is in eg London and Sweden and I suspect Baltimore and other US cities, targeting it proactively will inevitably result in a disproportionate number of stops and arrests of black and brown people. That's not bigotry: it's the outworking of a racist system, in which the motivations of individual cops are largely irrelevant.

It's a perfectly legitimate position to say that racial proportionality of stops and arrests is more important than driving violent crime down. But that's the choice you are in fact making.

97 is interesting and possibly important. I don't know how it can be distinguished from gswift's explanation. Time scale?

104: Very important proviso -- if the police can't protect you from the gangsters, all bets are off. Policing does ultimately depend on consent, but consent relies in unobvious ways on force.

Crimes get cleared up because people talk to you. If they are too frightened of the gangsters to do so (as in Derry/Londonderry under the IRA) the police are replaced by the gangsters.

103: I don't think it's fair or accurate to meaningfully compare the non-police street gangs of Baltimore with the cartels of Southern Italy. Maybe that's naive of me.

"Police forces are disciplined, more or less; bad police can be sacked rather than shot"

Objection, assumes facts contrary to the evidence.

Police forces are disciplined, more or less; bad police can be sacked rather than shot.

Nope, flagrantly bad behavior routinely slides through the deliberately forgiving administrative process; firings are the exception.

They are the exception. They shouldn't be. But they happen.

103: look again at the description in the original piece of the gang leader in prison: "Fathered five children by four prison guards and bought a BMW and a Mercedes Benz while in prison". I bet he was running the business from inside too. How is that different from Colombia, or Calabria?

A good example of just how fucked the US is around not firing cops is that John Balcerzak returned a 14-year old child litterally bleeding from his buttocks and with a hole drilled in his brain to serial murderer/cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer without bothering to check that Dahmer had a previous conviction as a sex offender for molesting this same child's older brother. He was put on probation and sued to be reinstated.

10 years later he was elected to run the police union by a vote of 521-453.

What are you going to do in a world where a majority of cops will vote for the worst offender to run the union so that they know that no matter what crimes they commit the union will have their back?

109.last is right. In Baltimore specifically (and probably some other cities, but not the US in general) there's a corruption problem that's rather different from the general issues around policing in the US, and which is at least somewhat related to other places where large chunks police have been incorporated into organized criminal enterprises, like in Mexico or southern Italy.

105: NW, the evidence that I've seen is that, even taking into account the rates of crime in different demographic segments, Black people are policed more heavily than white people. This is what gives the lie to the argument that it's just about fighting crime.

I specifically remember that during the stop-and-frisk era in NYC, white people were more likely to be carrying weapons that Black people, and yet Black people were disproportionately targeted.

But we can set all that aside. All of it. The protests against police brutality were protests overwhelmingly by law-abiding people. And yet, and yet, the po-po went riot on those people. They *created* violence and destruction. How is that acceptable? How is that in any way related to the public purpose of crime detection and prevention?

P.S. And the argument that "oh, but there were violent rioters among the protestors" is basically the argument of "collective punishment". What we watched was stark: the po-po were quite happy to beat completely legal protestors, because *other* people were committing crimes.

103: "It has got to be a whole lot easier to change the hearts and minds of a police force than of the other militias currently contending for Baltimore."

two thoughts:

1. You don't change the hearts and minds of the militias. Instead, you just offer better life chances to the people who would become recruits. Why would some kid join a militia, risk getting shot, when he could get a decent job, have a house and family?

2. The history of police misconduct pretty clearly gives the lie to the idea that they can be reformed. Frankly and brutally, ALL COPS ARE BAD. Let me give a proof:

Last summer, every major city had demonstrations, and in those demonstrations, some subset of the cops went wild, committing flagrant crimes in plain sight, on video FFS. On. Video. Let us suppose that there were "good cops". Those "good cops" are *sworn* to uphold the law. They saw men commit violent crimes under color of law, and did *nothing* about it. A good cop could not act thus. Ergo, they aren't good cops. QED.

Does anybody here remember the First Women's March in DC? Right after TFG's inauguration? I remember watching TV reports that the DC cops were being told "it's just women, don't break out the hard man stuff". By a few years later in Portland, even for marches by women, they were breaking out tear gas and other violent tactics. Remember that? When the moms of all the protestors came out, and the police *still* attacked them?

You just had your fucking democracy saved by the police. Physically saved by the Capitol police violently resisting a neofascist uprising and risking -- sometimes losing -- their own lives to do so. And you're claiming to have proved that "ALL COPS ARE BAD"?

The reason you're still living in a democracy is because some fairly ordinary, unexceptional cops protected your constitution when it mattered. But I'm sure you wrote some really scalding comments about how dumb the rioters were.

NW: really, you're going to overlook the evidence from cops all over the country? It's *two* departments: USCP and DC MPD. That's it. Show me enough other departments like that, and we'll talk.

BUT ALSO:

Yes, the DC MPD saved our democracy. Do you think they're also immune to police brutality? Immune to murdering poor Black people? Or is it enough that they save White People's Things? Is that enough?

Look: I'm a well-educated, had an excellent career, pretty comfortable, etc. But even I can see that Black and Brown people are policed differently from White people. And that some of those police are against destroying our Republic, doesn't mean that they aren't still 100% down to murder Black people. That latter bit requires proof.

Last: there's a hashtag, #NotAllMen . It has a story: instead of accepting that the vast majority of men are *complicit* (by their silence) in gendered oppression, this is pushback, arguing that only a few men are responsible for gendered oppression. Denying the evidence of our eyes, that clearly many, many, many men are silent when they see it happen before their eyes.

This is the same thing: The VAST MAJORITY of cops in these major city police departments stood by, silent, while their colleagues ran riot on innocent civilians. Don't go adducing the few departments that did a good deed, as if this is some *exoneration*.

115: You're going to claim no true scotsman or whatever but the Capital Police are functionally an entirely different category, albeit one that suffers from many of the same dysfunctions that plague other United States police forces. They are tasked with defending a fixed target population against all sorts of threats while ensuring reasonable access to the public. They're afflicted with racism and mismanagement like most police, but they don't routinely inflict violence on the populations they control.

In an abolitionist world that was not also anarchist (in the Bakunin sense) the national legislative bodies would still merit a protective detail. Pretending this is like some episode of wild hypocrisy is... honestly, reads to me like an argument of opportunity than a sincere desire to understand or critique.

I also hear that in an abolitionist world that was not also anarchist (in the Bakunin sense) everyone would get a pony.

Hey man if you want to pretend that there aren't serious people who've devoted their careers to thinking and writing about prison abolition that entirely on you. Disagree, sure. Critique, all you want. But this casual snideness is really pathetic.

Prison abolition. I was raised in a small, white Texas town. Among the common clay of the New West. And I imbibed prison rape jokes with my Little Debbies, corn dogs, Frito pies, and chicken-fried steaks. But we can grow up. And the idea that we tolerate the current and long-existing *epidemic* of prison rape without being aghast and up-in-arms about it, is a reflection on us as a people.

And I can say that, even though, somewhere deep inside, I still snicker at the idea.

Back to "defund the police": nobody thinks that we don't need forces of public order. But you can't go faulting people who basically never see police as their friends, always as an occupying force, brutalizing their family and their neighbors, because they come out with slogans like this. I mean, do you discredit the *entire* Conservative movement (let us say, circa 2000) because of Grover "drown the Federal government in a bathtub" Norquist? Some of us have an understanding that movements have many members, with different levels of influence and irateness. That the center of mass of a movement is the thing to judge, and not its fringes.

Dude, you've retreated into a fantasy world. I'm not following you there.

121 to 119.

NW: [in the spirit of l'esprit de l'escalier] The USCP officers were beaten with Blue Lives Matter flags (and testified to this effect). Police unions around the country did not come out with statements of support for them. The idea that somehow, we're supposed to think better of police all around the country, when they didn't do the *minimum* of support for their beleaguered fellow officers, kind of gives the lie to the idea that all those cop unions are peopled by good, decent, kind, honorable cops.

IIRC, one of the USCP officers has even noted that they've received no support from other police departments and unions [with the notable exception of DC MPD -- notable exception being An Internet Tradition (tm)]

Notice how I haven't actually advocated an abolitionist perspective here, I just pointed out that even principled abolitionists don't generally dispute the need for the bodies of civil governance to need defense. But have fun patting yourself on the back or whatever.

NW: https://www.rawstory.com/police-union-abandoned-dc-police/

Eh ben, voila.

""I finally picked up the phone and called the president of the national FOP, Patrick Yoes and, and described to him the displeasure I felt that there was no outreach being done not only to myself but to other officers," said Fanone. "And I asked him to do a few things to make up for that lack of support, and he was unwilling to do any of them. I asked him to publicly denounce the 21 house Republicans that voted against the gold medal bill.""

Yeah, the national cops' union didn't supposed these guys. Yeah, "not all cops are bad". Yeah right sure fine bye.

Trumpist.

Wait, I'm confused: Why can't the frothy, santorum-like mob of fascist hooligans, the lickspittle legislative toadies of the oligarchs, AND the sneering, well-compensated upholders of the honor of the men who squished George Floyd to death ALL be horrible people who are helping to destroy what few shreds of freedom we have left here? This isn't "Marry, Fuck, Kill" ferchrissakes! You can pick more than one bad actor.

If you think about it, we might be a lot better off right now if the Cap-Po-Po had fucked up even worse and a couple of congresspeople or aides or whatever had gotten killed. What if they'd gotten fucking Pence? DJT might already be shuffling around in some free plastic house shoes. I guess we'll never know....

Natilo: I know you know this, and I'm not really chiding you, but: sure, I'd have loved if it Pence had snuffed it. Hell, we could probably have an amusing game of "which one of these wastes of protoplasm should snuff it". But if the chance was that Speaker Pelosi would be the one, or some other decent human being [heck, Rep. Cheney] .... well, it gets a little more real, doesn't it.

As much as I fantasized about being teleported right behind these bastards with two AR-15s and a dozen full clips of ammo, it was just fantasy. I'm thankful that our elected officials weren't harmed.

With the insurrection, there were very fine people on both sides. This is from a story on the Capitol riot eye-gouger:

Mr. Webster is one of several current or former law enforcement officers charged in the riot, a subset that surprised Capitol officers.

"I actually encountered two police officers that day," said Officer Harry Dunn with the Capitol Police in an interview last week. "One of them showed me his badge.'"

These two commemorated the moment with a selfie.

And somewhere between 6 and 35 DC officers are suspected of collaboration with the insurrection

"Many cops are bad, and some are very bad indeed" -- which nobody would dispute -- is a considerable step back from "ALL COPS ARE BAD". The demand that all cops denounce the bad ones on pain of being considered fascists seems to me a little like the demand that all Muslims renounce terrorism on pain of being considered terrorists themselves.

(And if you're calling me a Trumpist because I praised the police who saved the country from an actual Trumpist coup, your argument is even further up its own arse than seemed possible before. That's a very long way.)

That reminds me. I'm 50 and my doctor thinks they need to do a procedure.

129: Not only are you making claims which are trivially falsifiable (I can introduce you personally to people who would *violently* and I mean that literally disagree with the premise that "many cops are bad"), you're overstating the claims of your interlocutors.

That may not be exactly Trumpian, in which the debater generally doesn't feel any need to establish any sort of grounding in reality, but it's a style of discourse tediously common among right-winger commenters in particular that I guess I've generally found absent here, or at least roundly derided in times of yore.

The ugly conflation of bigotry against adherents to religious faith and anger at public servants is... yeah. Okay. We're done here.