McKinney Texas pool party?

by Marvin Shilmer 305 Replies latest social current

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  tenyearsafter

  To clarify, police officers are not civilians...they are constitutionally sworn to an oath similar to the military oath to uphold the US Constitution and State laws. By taking this oath, they are given certain authority that civilians do not have. They can effect arrests, use force to effect arrest, protect themselves or the public at risk by using force up to and including lethal force, and are able to detain and investigate suspected criminal behavior for reasonable suspicion (not to be confused with reasonable cause, which is the standard for arrest). Police are granted far broader powers than civilians. With that comes responsibility to use discretion when possible to diffuse situations rather than escalate them, If someone actively resists lawful efforts by an officer, that is when escalation of force comes in to play. Once a citizen escalates to a level of violence where they endanger the police or public with weapons, police are trained and authorized to use the level of force to overcome that. That may not sit well with people, it is, in fact, the law of the land. I doubt highly the British system would work in the US. There are far too many weapons available here versus other countries. Gun control is an entirely different discussion, but what we currently have to deal with is a glut of guns in the streets. Unarmed police would be ineffective against that scenario. Training and selection is the best answer to the current situation. Until we have RoboCops, mistakes will happen and emotions will cause bad decisions.

  I would encourage anyone who can, to avail themselves of doing a citizen ride along with their local police department. It will give you an interesting perspective of what happens on a daily basis doing the job. I guarantee you will see things differently...
• 

  Simon

  paulmolark: you seem determined to believe that police officers are out to get black people. Every example you refer to, everything you say is based on this premise. I notice you never seem to touch Baltimore though - is that because so many of the officers concerned are black? Do you think officers are only abusive if they are white and the 'victim' is black? Or is it a "some cop was mean to me once so all cops are bad" logic? In which case your logic justifies any racism of others and also the same mentality by the police you accuse if they've had experience of "bad apples" in certain groups. Hating the police simply for being police is a type of racism - they happen to be blue.
  

  Time and again we get the same incidents trotted out as "evidence" of police brutality against black people such as Michael Brown which has been completely discredited but it still goes on the list. Heck, I've seen people evoking the name of Trayvon Martin as proof of police targeting black kids which is simply retarded. The fact that there are complaints doesn't make things true. My sympathy has actually gone down since more of these highly publicized cases have been in the media because the complaints have always been the same regardless of what the facts show. What am I supposed to believe but that the complaints are sometimes / often contrived? People are looking for incidents to support the complaints, not make complaints based on the actual facts of the incidents.

  Why are so many of the 'poster child' cases always some moron committing a crime or doing something incredibly stupid?

  In many places the police have been told to be tough on crime and to clamp down to bring it under control. So is it the police or the people making those decisions who are to blame if anyone is?

  I think the former officer should be charged with assault

  The world you want to build is one where police are afraid to tackle any crime for fear of personal liability and criminals know they can defy any and all requests. Welcome to you new home of New Baltimore.

  All this talk of rights of the people who have committed crimes not the be tackled and not to be touched. What about the rights of all the decent law abiding citizens not to suffer their harassment and criminal behavior? Why aren't their rights as important in all of this? I personally think they deserve far more consideration than the punks running around showing no respect to others.

  Laika's, says that in some situations US citizens needn't respect authority and comply with orders. So, let's reverse the situation: in some situations, US officers needn't respect US citizens. Would you go along with this?

  That's a damn good question!

  Over reaction to teenager behavior because of teenager skin color... Is that possible? Yes. Probable... Welllllllll

  Is it also possible that you have a biased view because people chose to film and upload video of the cop dealing with the african american girl but not of the cops dealing with the white woman? Selective exposure and media bias to present a warped story?

  Re: what the officer is saying and his boss is saying - I think this is all irrelevant as proof of anything as neither is speaking freely without any threats.

  The cop and his family are getting death threats for gods sake and had to take his family into hiding. Think about that. Yes, some lovely people out there - I wonder who they are? We'd best make sure the cops aren't rough with them mustn't we. Remember cops, you shouldn't get emotional and don't ever feel threatened even if you are being threatened it's never proof that it is valid for you to respond to any threat, even if they threaten your family.

  His boss threw him under the bus to avoid a Ferguson situation plain and simple. Now we have the group of idiots threatening unrest and intimidation to get their way and get cops fired who shouldn't be fired over something trivial. This should be stopped and stamped out.

  This whole narrative being endlessly promoted of "all cops bad, all blacks good" is ridiculous. We should look at each case and only the facts of that case. Every time people want single cops to pay for the perceived injustices of the past that others have experienced. Is that fair?
• 

  Simon

  The child had done nothing that required physical force, let alone assault, body slamming and handcuffs.

  Depends what the non-compliance is for, if the officer is being unreasonable or telling someone to do something they have no obligation to do, then no, I don't think the office should be laying a finger on them and should get on with their job - it then becomes harassment

  His request was reasonable. They were breaking the law and being a nuisance to residents. The cops wanted people to disperse. She defied the request.

  At some point the cops have to stop asking, then start telling and finally start making people comply. At that point it's normally enacting an arrest which involves handcuffing people.

  Again, the cops will ask people to put their hands behind their back. If they don't then they are made to.

  At every stage the requests are simple, clear and reasonable and it is completely in the individuals control how the situation unfolds - whether they chose to comply or keep resisting and defying the requests.

  There are cases where the police do behave in a reckless and unreasonable manner and go in shooting when they shouldn't but I don't think this is it and unfortunately, an experienced cop is now gone as a result of the hyperbole and media fad of endless replays of selected edited incidents and riling up of crowds by supposed and self-appointed "leaders".
• 

  Simon

  I doubt highly the British system would work in the US. There are far too many weapons available here versus other countries. Gun control is an entirely different discussion, but what we currently have to deal with is a glut of guns in the streets. Unarmed police would be ineffective against that scenario. Training and selection is the best answer to the current situation. Until we have RoboCops, mistakes will happen and emotions will cause bad decisions.

  I agree. The British policing works because the cops are reasonably confident that the majority of the time for day-to-day policing they are not dealing with someone with a gun. There are armed police called when there is a shooting situation and they have an exemplary record - the number of shots fired by police marksmen each year is extremely low but the number of shots on target almost exactly matches it.

  I imagine the fact that someone could be armed and pull a lethal weapon at any time dramatically changes the dynamic and makes things into more of a confrontation where people are understandably on edge. Whatever your opinion on gun control you have to accept that simply having guns be available will generate a number of shootings by police that otherwise wouldn't happen. This doesn't mean the police have overreacted - they have to react or they can die and I'm sorry, that is *not* what anyone signs up for. I believe there should be a Asimov style 'law of robotics' for cops which starts with protecting your own life and the lives of others.

  We've all seen the videos of cops talking some someone politely who suddenly pulls a gun and bang, the cop is dead. For some reason these never get the endless air-time that "oh no, a black criminal got pushed" ones do but they put paid to the lie that is isn't dangerous and there's no reason for them to ever feel threatened unless someone is obviously holding a bazooka right in front of them. If you are dancing round like an idiot and putting your hands out of sight and making sudden moves then I'm not surprised that sometimes the cops pull their weapons as a result and occasionally shoot unarmed people. There simply isn't time to carefully consider - it's split second reaction time.

  It's why it's more important, given that is the context, that when police make reasonable requests that people comply, especially when they are dealing with a whole mob of people.

  But no, precious little "I should be allowed to use other people's property and don't have to do what anyone tells me" shouldn't have to do what anyone says, especially a cop, eh?
• 

  Oubliette

  Obviously, the situation in England is different than here in the US, but tenyearsafter raised an interesting point.
  

  I haven't been to Britain in over 10 years, but last time I was in London roughly half of the street cops were carrying sidearms.

  Can someone that lives there or that has been there recently give us an update?
• 

  Simon

  I haven't been to Britain in over 10 years, but last time I was in London roughly half of the street cops were carrying sidearms.

  That was probably around the Iraq war time when Tony Blair was manipulating public opinion for the war by having the military drive tanks round London and cops carry machine guns round airports. Also, after the subway bombings there were probably more armed police for a time.

  It's rarely like that normally although there were often visibly armed police in airports for a number of years after - I don't know if they are still there.
• 

  Billyblobber

  This whole narrative being endlessly promoted of "all cops bad, all blacks good" is ridiculous.

  That's a large bit of hyperbole. The original narrative is specifically a dual one; that there is an institutional problem with how police treat minorities as compared to others in the U.S., and has been for over a century, and, also how police treat citizens in general.

  Certain extreme right personalities know this narrative is one that is relatively easy for ANYONE to support (except for the people who worship authority, no matter what), so they re-spin it to create a strawman to shift the argument to a strict "us vs. them" thing that is easier to use to polarize their followers. They shift things like "black lives matter," which is a statement that black lives are not less valuable than others people, into a statement that ONLY black lives matter, and then report it as such to provide an easy strawman argument to argue against. Biased listeners don't even recognize those tpes of strawmen and argumentative tactics, and they repeat the filtered argument as the ACTUAL argument, and bam, the narrative shifts more towards what you are intending.

  This is probably less evident for people that don't live in the U.S., as they are typically getting the post-filtered reports as opposed to the original 24-hour news cycled reports blasted in their face constantly BEFORE the personalities get a hold on them and put even more of a spin on them; which would probably explain why people keep getting confused as to your opinions on what's happening here as opposed to the reality of what is happening.

  Even in this thread (not to mention the other, related ones), we have people speaking of things filtered through the most extreme right wing personalities, who raise things to a level of fearmongering. To realize how ridiculous some of them are, the LEFT in America would be far, far right in most of Europe.
  
  That's also why the "the truth is in the middle" stance is not really a default when it comes to these cases, no matter how reasonable a stance that can be at other times - normally, the point being argued has already been taken AWAY from the "middle" because it has been filtered through one or the other partisan sides to an extreme that only has a yes or no answer to it.
• 

  Billyblobber

  tenyearsafter,
  
  While your anecdotes are apreciated; the issue with police anecdotes are that precincts and districts vary so ridiculously widely across the country that the only dualities between them may be the most core facets of the job.

  Police in Baltimore were literally trained to beat up kids standing on the corner idling, or beat up suspects in the back of the cars that got "too lippy" with them, because they were trained that their Districts were basically war zones, where the only way to keep those people in check were with threats of more violence. Police on Coronado Island, San Diego basically hand out a few traffic tickets or handle a domestic dispute from time to time. In a mixed area like I grew up in (where city lines shift poverty lines greatly), you see almost the entire range of officer. What an officer in Bloomfield Hills has to deal with is hugely different than one in Warren, which is just 15 miles away.

  What is being asked for IS for more of the "bad" police, or bad policies, like were enacted in Baltimore, to be filtered out. A person's personal safety should never be left to the whim of if someone in authority was having a "bad day" that day or not if possible, and there should never be "beat them up when no-one is looking" policies in place for ANY departments. And do away with that whole "code of silence" thing where officers stick up for and cover for each other no matter what as well. That's the kind of stuff that people are trying to change, and those things CAN be changed from an institutional level.

  You can't make poor desperate people not do bad things as a whole, because that's human nature, but you CAN try to fix things on an insitutional level so that there aren't so many poor, desperate people. Similarly, some power hungry jerks will always try to gravitate towards positions of authority, such as police, but you can attempt to make it harder for those types of people to run around unchecked once they're there. That's what the main focus really is.
• 

  Oubliette

  Simon: That was probably around the Iraq war time when Tony Blair was manipulating public opinion

  That's a good point. In fact, when I was in London last, there was an IRA bombing a few blocks from where I was staying in Soho.
• 

  Marvin Shilmer

  The original narrative is specifically a dual one; that there is an institutional problem with how police treat minorities as compared to others in the U.S., and has been for over a century, and, also how police treat citizens in general.

  And I when it comes to policing, I don't see any mistreatment based on racial minority in the McKinney pool party incident and I don't see anything I'd fire a police officer over.