He should have been totally complaint
Oh, he was totally complaining.
If I had a taser.... I'm trying to provide content here, amigo. Posting from my phone with my old, tired eyes. What are you doing, front-page poster? Drinking wine. Smoking dope.
I pretty much quit drinking wine.
How is this even slightly contrarian at all? There is no respect for tradition and institutions left in this country, none.
That's what happens when you let The Blacks do as they please.
I couldn't even finish watching/listening to that. These old bones need to step away from that.
Marge Gundersson's Evil Twin. "The black man is strolling away from the interview."
9: Aaaaaaahghghgh for fuck's sake.
Now be fair here guys, they were obviously in their rights to arrest him for suspicion of trespassing since he was attempting to flee the scene of the crime. Or possibly that he refused to stop resisting arrest so they had to arrest him for it. Or something. I'm sure Gswift will be along explain this eventually.
Hey, I know: Let's all go downtown and yell at a building! That will make things better!
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Watch 100 topless people get tasered by their loved ones
The extended is indeed the better video
I felt the demographics were interestingly imbalanced.
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You know, perhaps this may appear to be mere pedantry, but I would really like it if people would stop conflating Tasers and stun guns. Tasers have fucking BARBS on them. The EMTs have to pull them out. Plus, as with that case that was just mentioned here or elsewhere, every time you pull the trigger, it's another jolt, which you can do from far away, so there's no risk to the torturer/murderer.
Reminder to myself: Never read the comments. Just don't.
Stats Problems and Shoot/Don't Shoot Experiments
I'm not convinced of anything by the shoot-house experiments. If one knows one isn't going to be the target of real ammo, one's mental set is going to be pushed towards not making a mistake rather than reacting hyper-quickly.
The next case that's likely to get national attention. Pastor describes what the family saw in a snippet of surveillance video.
"What they saw really, really bothered us," Hilton said Thursday. "They saw the police coming in and John Crawford III having this air gun pointed toward the floor, looking at the shelf. The next thing they see is he drops to the floor, he's been hit by bullets. We're very concerned about that. We just need to get the entire video released so the community can know what happened."
17: I guess it pales in comparison to videos already linked in this thread, but this interview with the smug racist shitbag who called the cops in that incident is really sickening.
17: I didn't feel up to taking the girls to the vigil there today, though I was tempted. It's one thing to talk about Michael Brown, but this one I just can't explain to them at all, especially because it's so close.
Thanks, potchkeh. I was looking for that but couldn't find it.
Oh, and here's another relevant story, which manages to combine both police malfeasance and bicycles (since we haven't had a bike thread in a while).
The police-reported-x-and-then-someone-caught-them-lying really is a constant feature of these stories, isn't it. It's not even obvious to me why. I mean, they don't generally end up in trouble anyway so why make something up?
Did anyone link this Cracked article about Ferguson? Aside from the obnoxious Cracked humor, the quantity of documented lying by cops around Ferguson is infuriating.
I was thinking of that, but didn't see it here.
21: Wood initially said that Olin had swerved from the bicycle lane on Mullholland Highway into the path of his patrol car, the statement said. But the district attorney's office concluded that "evidence examined in this investigation shows that this tragic collision occurred as a result of Deputy Wood crossing into the bicycle lane." Oh, well then! (And that's a rich white dude he ran into and killed.)
22: Sometimes, just to make a case stronger with no consequences to themselves. In 1963 I had one do that to make a traffic ticket a more severe charge. Silly stuff.
21. So the cop lies, and the DA lets him off because apparently police being allowed to use a device while driving means they can also use it negligently.
That just makes no sense unless you believe police are allowed to do anything they want, or that bicyclists are actually human.
27: That is seriously insane. The DA flat-out says it was reasonable for the cop to endanger lives rather than take a couple seconds to pull over before typing on his computer, because otherwise another officer might have responded unnecessarily to a call. Well okay as long as he had a compelling reason like that!
Well, given how dangerous it is for everyone else when police officers are driving around* clearly it's best to avoid any unnecessary amount of it.
*(E.g., this case!)
Or something. I'm sure Gswift will be along explain this eventually.
Calm yourself there Miss Priss. No need to get all catty about it.
So, can they detain him and does he have to identify himself? A couple dozen states, mine included, have statutes that mandate you provide identifying information to the police on an involuntary stop, meaning the police at least have met the reasonable suspicion threshold on the stop. MN is not one of those states.
As to the trespass, the statute requires that it be intentional. If this is a seating area adjacent to a public walkway with no signs then yeah, people are going to sit there and perhaps give some pushback if a mall cop type tells them they have to leave.
The other issue is that state laws invariably prohibit the police from making an arrest on a misdemeanor or infraction they don't have some direct knowledge of. That video makes me think the police encountered him after he'd already left the supposed private area and was walking in the public skyway. That's a problem. If the entirety of the complaint is "this man is on our property and refuses to leave" and when I the cop arrive I observed he's already left the property then my cause to detain him is gone. I can still go try and talk to him but at that point it's a level 1 (consensual) stop.
Tasers have fucking BARBS on them. The EMTs have to pull them out.
That's the least of your worries with the taser. I heard them pop the barbs out of me but didn't even feel it.
every time you pull the trigger, it's another jolt
Not just a jolt. A pull of the trigger is a five second cycle. And if the cop is amped and his finger is still on the trigger then it just keeps going. If you release the trigger at six seconds it'll still complete the cycle so it won't stop until the ten second mark
Aside from the obnoxious Cracked humor, the quantity of documented lying by cops around Ferguson is infuriating.
We're using "documented" rather loosely here. Which is not to say there's not a bunch of issues out there but that article is shit. I didn't make it past the first page.
#7: Of course there's a police report. His allegation that there's not is because yet again apparently no reporter on the planet can be bothered to research or know anything about anything. That's obviously just the dispatch log from the call they're releasing at this point. That's why it has a bunch of things like timestamps of units being dispatched, arriving, etc. So he glanced at the dispatch log and now is claiming there's no report, no narrative, no witness list, and no witness interviews because he's an idiot. The full police reports should be released but I'm also skeptical of anyone's claim that they need to see it now now now ahead of other parties like the grand jury doing the investigation.
#5 In an encounter that lasted 16 seconds in which two cops had to shoot a guy with a knife, they might be off by several feet as to distance or how high he held the knife. It's a perfectly normal discrepancy on a memory of a fast high stress event, as anyone could find out with some cursory googling. Anyone but "Cody" from Cracked, I guess.
#4 If you're going to claim "the police are lying" you could try limiting yourself to police statements rather than the anonymous police sources being cited by news outlets, the/gate/way/pundit, etc. And it's bullshit to point out that Wilson was fired from a department because the "department had a history of racism, violence, and corruption" without mentioning the guy was in his rookie year at that PD.
This kind of thing irritates the hell out of me because I think we can all agree that malfeasance in a police force is a pretty big deal and aggressive measures should be taken to address it. But I also think this kind of half assed outrage undermines the push for reforms.
As far as I recall the police have already indicated that Wilson did not fill out an incident report, though I assume some other officer/s did.
"Several feet" is being generous: they said something close to three or four and the actual distance was sixteen.
His allegation that there's not is because yet again apparently no reporter on the planet can be bothered to research or know anything about anything.
He links to this, which explicitly says
Critics and news media outlets have questioned why Ferguson police released an incident report from a robbery in which Brown was a suspect, as well as security video showing the robbery, but not the report on the shooting of the unarmed 18-year-old a short time later by Officer Darren Wilson.
The reason, according to the office of St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert P. McCulloch, is that it doesn't exist.
Why would the prosecutor say that if there was in fact a report from the Ferguson PD?
34: Ferguson not writing one wouldn't be odd if the decision was made pretty quickly to call in a larger outside agency, and it sounds like that was what happened. If the county is doing the investigation then you (the shooter) don't write a report on your agency's system, you get interviewed/give a statement to the outside agency and it's a part of their report.
But he's claiming St Louis County didn't write one. At all. Like they're doing the grand jury presentations by acting things out with puppets or something.
Wasn't the decision made pretty quickly to release as little information as possible to the media (e.g. reporters arrested with no record as to who made the arrest, officers removing identifying information). This seems more a part of that.
I think they know who those officers are? Or at least the one who is being sued for allegedly hog tying a twelve year old. Which, I know, sounds bad. But not near as bad as the guy who used to work there and apparently had a thing for pistol whipping kids.
But aside from all that, the report thing. That St Louis County PD would just decide to not write a report on a godamn homicide investigation knowing the feds are looking over their shoulder is crazytalk.
There's plenty of evidence that we aren't dealing with competent people here.
31: Thanks for the clarification. I have never been tased or stunned, but I think my point still stands that we're talking about significantly different experiences of electrical shock devices.
Also, I don't think legally it makes a lot of difference, but the skyways in St. Paul are owned by the city, and built with city funds. (In Minneapolis they're owned by the connected buildings.) So they are public space by any definition. I just read an article from 2008 where the St Paul cops were saying that they have very few calls to the skyway system as compared to the streets below, despite the skyways often getting as much as twice the amount of foot traffic.
39: There is, but come on man, be for real. Even if the DA and the department conspired to try and throw this in Wilson's favor their gameplan isn't going to be to show up to the grand jury with "fuck it, we decided not to investigate, we're out, bitches".
And if the cop is amped and his finger is still on the trigger then it just keeps going. If you release the trigger at six seconds it'll still complete the cycle so it won't stop until the ten second mark
What the fuck? Why not something like having the current only flow when the trigger's down--or even better, when there's a sequence of squeezing/release of the trigger--so that the infliction of pain requires continuous action on the part of the user? The design you described seems intentionally set up to maximize pain as well as reduce the user's explicit control of the situation.
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Dude! Gatwick Airport has a skyway that planes can go under! That is awesome.
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43: Shit, I'm wrong about the completing the cycle thing. I just tested it right here in my living room ( I even remembered to take the cartridge out of the end first). Five seconds is standard cycle and it'll continue past five if the trigger is still depressed. But if you hold the trigger past five it'll disconnect once you release, not continue a new cycle.
Natilo, you're totally right about the taser being way worse and I need to make it out to a meetup and we'll just try out a stun gun. I kind of want a tv style stun where it knocks people unconscious. In real life it just hurts a bit and the person then tries their best to punch you. No way am I getting tased again. My reaction to getting tased was basically, "oh, no wonder people sometimes die from this".
"fuck it, we decided not to investigate, we're out, bitches"
I was thinking more "delay presenting evidence as long as possible in hope that some of the media attention will have gone away."
Also, I don't think legally it makes a lot of difference, but the skyways in St. Paul are owned by the city, and built with city funds.
Probably makes a significant difference. If it's common knowledge the skyways are public property then any kind of adjacent easily accessible space is going to have to be pretty clearly marked in some fashion if you're going to try and allege a trespass.
47: right, and you can hear the guy make exactly that point at the beginning of the video; he says "there's no sign saying it's not a public area". For all the good it did him.
45.1: Okay, that sounds less bad. Thanks for looking into it!
Well, I guess I mean then that it doesn't seem to make much day-to-day difference in enforcement between the two cities. Recently, they've been doing a lot of those ASBO-type things where people are trespassed from all of downtown, or certain blocks, or the skyway system, but that's generally been for habitual offenders. The Mpls skyways are treated like public space by pretty much everyone. One thing that freaked me out last year, walking around DT St Paul, was that there are apartment buildings with skyway-level apartments, where you just walk out your front door and boom, you're in the skyway. They were pretty heavy-duty steel doors, but still. And in Mpls, you walk right through the Macy's 2nd floor displays (bounded by some retractable barrier tape, and watched by a few clerks).
It's the Macy's with the world's largest display of caps with ear flaps.
Possibly. I don't think most people around here shop for their serious winter gear there though. (Wm. H. Macy's office in Fargo overlooked the Macy's building, I believe. Dayton's back then, of course.)
38: I can't tell whether you're saying, "Wow, they didn't do a report, and that's crazy" or "Wow, it's crazy of you to suggest that a police department would not write a report."
Either way, it looks like both the Ferguson PD and St. Louis County PD reports that have been released are very bare-bones. Both less than two pages long, and mostly blank.
From the linked article:
Brian Schellman, a spokesman for the county police, said...that the document contains only those details that the department is required to share by law. The rest of the information is "protected until the investigation is complete," he said.
I look at a comment like that, and the fact that the report doesn't even include the barest semblance of complete information (no middle name), and I come away with a very clear sense of contempt toward the public.
That quote does make it seem consistent with there being more documents than that one that taken as a whole would constitute the incident report, but the police are refusing to turn them over despite the lawsuit.
Again I say(drunk), if you think your ass gets to jump the line on the grand jury then maybe it's time to reexamine your perceived place in the world.
You know what would help in a situation like this? A statement from the prosecutor saying something like "as soon as we're done presenting to the grand jury, we'll release this information". If they're not saying that, it's not really anybody's fault that people are making assumptions but their own.
41/44:
I just read an article from 2008 where the St Paul cops were saying that they have very few calls to the skyway system as compared to the streets below, despite the skyways often getting as much as twice the amount of foot traffic.
Probably because, not despite - places with lots of footfall are often self-policing (enter either anarchist utopian or Foucaultian self-surveillance nightmare musings here).
Dude! Gatwick Airport has a skyway that planes can go under! That is awesome.
Yes, yes, it does! And I once ran up one end of it, across it, and down the other end because I thought I was late for a flight, and arrived at the gate drenched in sweat so someone asked if I was afraid of flying, and it turned out I had 45 minutes to wait! That was less awesome!
57.1: Yeah, that's a good point. It was the cop/reporter who was saying "despite", or implying it. Frankly, there's just not that much to get up to in the skyways. Almost the only crimes I've ever seen being committed there are people absconding with liberated merchandise from a connected retail establishment. Even your most hardcore public urinator is going to be a little grossed out by pissing on a carpet indoors, I think.
57.2: That sounds EXACTLY like something that would happen to me. Airports could definitely be designed better.
But at least the food on airplanes is beyond complaint.
Really? All but the least sensitive information going before a grand jury can legally be sequestered?
I'd like to see a rule to this effect. From what I can tell, grand jury secrecy traditionally applies to their proceedings, as in transcripts and juror identities and so forth, not specifically the evidence they see. And the Missouri Sunshine Law at http://www.moga.mo.gov/statutes/C600-699/6100000200.HTM explicitly requires police to divulge records about suspected crimes, with the only two exceptions being to protect someone's safety or to avoid jeopardizing a criminal investigation.
"to avoid jeopardizing a criminal investigation" could be interpreted broadly.
It is the well-known habit of the criminal justice system to publicly release and/or leak only that evidence and those documents which tend to exonerate the accused. So nothing at all unusual going on here.
And grand juries are equally well-known for their habit of standing up to prosecutors. Who among us has not seen a prosecutor shrug helplessly, saying "Why in the world did I run this past the grand jury when I could have filed charges all by myself?"
So if the grand jury by some twist of fate refuses to convict, that will tell us nothing about the district attorney's intent.
I thought the consensus was always that if the prosecutor was trying, the grand jury would indict a ham sandwich.
Ham sandwiches are guilty, of weakifying ham.
Not if you use chicken patties as the bun. Or at least, not by much.
It's an actual saying.
While "prosecutors with 7 or more years of experience could successfully indict a ham sandwich 50% of the time" is an actuarial old saying.
The only way to get the sandwich exonerated is through the great writ of habeas porkus.
That actually hurt. But in a good way.
Ham sandwiches can indict themselves on rye is a counterfactual old saying.
Dagwood's sandwiches were indicted in a stackuarial old saying.
He famously challenged the stacktute on constitutional grounds.
You can indict a ham sandwich, but you can't make it plea.
A ham sandwich doing time did crime.
A ham sandwich in the pen is worth two in county lockup.
If the ham sandwich didn't do anything wrong, it has nothing to worry about.
The ham sandwich was accused of stealing lettuce but it turned out to be a trumped up chard.
78: Where do I go to get my good name back?
A sandwich in the ham is worth two in the pig.
This thread started out about police misconduct, and now all you're talking about is pig products.
In reference to the earlier topic, though, it looks like there wasn't a sign there.... (I suspect they're going to regret that photo.)
The link in 83 is already dead. What was it?
84: Are you signed in to FB? It worked for me. It's a picture of the seating area where Mr. Lollie was sitting before being tasered. I can attest that, like many parts of both Mpls and St Paul's skyway systems, this is an area where there is very little obvious demarcation between public and private space. If anything, St Paul usually seems a bit worse on that score, with various lobby areas blending in to the regular skyway system pretty seamlessly.
The skyway itself is under a public easement, actually, so it's the legal equivalent of a sidewalk (which only adds to the problem). He's legally in an effectively-public space, and the security guard couldn't (legally) ask him to leave.
But the photo really does seem like an amazingly regrettable posting. I am actually a little surprised it's still up there.
(The especially regrettable bit, I mean, being the "Need a quick five? Enjoy a seat on the skyway." caption.)