I'm not at all sure it hinges on genuine belief that they won't be able to get a conviction. Jeff Sessions is the boss of the man who didn't prosecute.
To be scrupulously fair to racists who run cabinet departments, the bar for civil rights charges is much higher than the bar for ordinary state-level murder charges. And they did fail to get a grand jury indictment for those.
The story that I can't believe is this one where the cop has gotten three mistrials so far.
Crawford is enraging, but on some level, I believe the cop there made a mistake. A mistake bad enough to be criminal, but I don't think the cop purposefully intended to kill an unarmed Wal~Mart shopper.
Shannon Kepler, on the other hand, very plausibly seems to have intentionally murdered a teenager because he didn't want his daughter dating a black kid. And while at least he's been charged, and at least they keep retrying him, what the hell is wrong with those jurors?
6 to 6 isn't just one lone racist. Wow.
Who the fuck declares a mistrial after four hours of deliberation?
I don't even understand what a non-racist or corrupt justification for that could be.
Send killer cops to jail is what I say. Give police departments some fucking incentives to train people better, give police some more incentives not to make "mistakes" like this. I mean, when I'm, for instance, doing something difficult that could hurt me (to use a radically inappropriate example, when I'm making candy and working with 300 degree sugar syrup on the stovetop) I am super fucking careful because burns hurt.
This whole "I had to flip out and shoot Philando Castile because it was a mistake and I was scared" thing is fucking garbage. If you are sure and certain that making a mistake will send you to jail, you don't make that mistake. If you're sure and certain that your officers will go to jail if they make a mistake, you train them until they don't.
A point: I live in a neighborhood with lots of crime. I'm sure I pass people on the street who are carrying illegal firearms pretty regularly. And yet somehow those people manage not to flip out and shoot each other because they "get scared" and "make a mistake". I have had a couple of encounters with men who were very, very scary people - they were perfectly nice to me, but they were dangerous. And you know what? Those were not trigger-happy guys.
The cops should at least be able to rise to the level of professionalism of low- and mid-level drug dealers, is all I'm saying. If they can't, start jailing them until they start.
I worry because our police force just got permission to live outside the city and I'm very certain that "unwilling to live in the city" correlates very highly with unfounded fear of people who aren't white.
I agree with you about prosecuting cops even when they claim to have screwed up because they were scared, and that it places the incentives in the right place.
Just to quibble with your other point: you've encountered drug dealers who were careful and not trigger-happy. But you haven't encountered all that many drug dealers. Most cops are careful and not trigger-happy too: the problem is that the small minority of racist incompetents out there is way too big, and that they get organizational backup as if they weren't racist incompetents. But it's still nothing like most cops that are like that, just like it's not most drug dealers.
Give police departments some fucking incentives to train people better, give police some more incentives not to make "mistakes" like this.
I saw an interesting argument that the entities which have the most leverage to create those incentives may be insurance companies:
But it turns out that, while you can bullshit the public and browbeat your constituents, trying to do that to your insurance company is less likely to succeed, because (a) they're big and (b) they are not interested in being financially on the hook for your mistakes. So insurance companies actually have a set of very non-perverse incentives: do what it takes to make the people they insure don't mess up in the first place, from requiring them to have good policies, to providing access to training and resources that individual insured places would normally not be able to get, to simply telling people that if they don't shape up, they can go and insure themselves.
Hence the Republican push for tort reform.
Frowner is completely right in 9. And I share Moby's fears in 10. Thanks, PA Supreme Court.
Hence the Republican push for tort reform.
Hmmm, yes.
We just had a judge find that a state law on confidentiality of LEO personnel records is blanket enough to bar the sheriff from sending the DA his own managerial list of "problem deputies" with histories of lying or other bad conduct that could impeach their testimony in court. I can't begin to imagine the management, oversight, and maybe contracting issues that led to there being such such a long list in the first place, reportedly 300 in the case of LA County, out of 11K sworn employees. (Apparently this information exchange was routinely happening in other counties without it reaching the courts, and this may now choke off there too.)
Is the only conviction that's happened the one who shot Scott in the back, and that's because he plead guilty? Oh, there was also the cop who lost his shit and shot the guy (who lived) at the gas station because the entire encounter was on tape, unlike Castile.
Wasn't the New York staircase one a conviction, where the newbie cop accidentally killed an older woman who got hit with some shrapnel or something?
I'd forgotten the victim was an older woman, but yeah, the Asian cop in the Housing Authority stairwell? That was a conviction -- reckless manslaughter or something.
Technically yes but essentially no punishment- 800 hours community service, no jail time. 28 year old killed, not older woman.
Liang, 28, is the first New York City police officer convicted in an on-duty shooting in 11 years. A jury found him guilty this winter of a manslaughter charge carrying up to 15 years in prison.
But Brooklyn state Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun reduced the offense Tuesday to criminally negligent homicide, which carries up to four years in prison. He said prosecutors hadn't met the legal burden for the manslaughter charge: proving that Liang consciously disregarded a substantial, unjustifiable risk of death.
That one doesn't bother me as underpunished, actually. Criminally negligent homicide sounds about right -- that story didn't even sound as if the cop made a bad decision, it sounded like he was holding his gun in a stupidly incompetent way and shot someone because he was startled. Worth a criminal conviction, and worth never working as a cop again, but not something where I was calling for a long sentence.
I also get super angry about the cases where shooting a dog gets an outsized punishment. I know it's civil and a fine, not criminal, but there's a clear systemic punishment and outrage over the dogs.
Actually, I'm fine with there being a punishment for killing dogs. It's just how it highlights the radical indifference to the death of people like John Crawford III.
18: that's been discussed here before; I remember the idiot advancing in his defence the fact that he had been wearing really thick gloves so couldn't hold his pistol properly. Probably shouldn't have been wearing really thick gloves then, huh. The problem "I have really cold hands but I need to hold a weapon properly" has been solved by the militaries of the world.
11: But my assumption, based on crime statistics and a general perception of my neighborhood, is that I am actually around a higher-than-normal percentage of people who are carrying illegal weapons because of their involvement in crime. If my assumption is correct, they pretty much have to be non-trigger-happy on average or else there'd be random shoot 'em ups all the time. The key being the randomness and the mistake - not a lot of "whoops, I carry a gun and got fidgety and shot a guy to death for no reason" around here.
I'm not saying that there isn't gun violence, or that innocent people are never killed, but there simply isn't a parallel with the police - actual criminals who carry guns for business purposes aren't as trigger-happy and don't pull their guns out to shoot people because they're anxious or bored.
24: Still no. Look, the rate of police violence is horrifying and unacceptable, but it's horrifying and unacceptable at the rate of dozens of cases nationwide over the last few years. When you count that up against how many cops there are in the country, the rate of "whops, I shot someone to death for no good reason" is unacceptably high, but still absolutely very low.
The fact that you haven't directly observed drug dealers accidentally shooting people for no good reason doesn't mean they're better with their guns than the police -- you're comparing nationwide news coverage to your direct experience of a small group of your neighbors. You're going to hear of more fuckups looking at all the police in the whole country than you are going to see fuckups among the smallish group of local drug dealers you personally interact with because you're comparing the number of fuckups committed of by hundreds of thousands of cops to the number of fuckups committed by maybe a dozen dealers.
And this is quibbling! It is absolutely true that the rate of police violence is unacceptably high; that they need to be better trained; and that "I got scared because I saw a black person so I shot them" should not be an acceptable defense, and it's nuts that it isn't. I completely agree with you about everything substantive we're talking about.
I'm just sticking on the idea that armed criminals are, as a class, more competent and reasonable in how they use their weapons than the police. I don't think that can be backed up at all.
actual criminals who carry guns for business purposes aren't as trigger-happy and don't pull their guns out to shoot people because they're anxious or bored.
I suspect gswift has some hilariously terrifying stories of actual criminals doing exactly that.
Here's one:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/3100402.stm
Cops get trained to be scared and are constantly told that they have giant targets on their backs, despite all objective evidence being that they are safer now than ever.
When you are trained to be scared and trained that you have to shoot before the threat manifests itself fully (bc it can happen OH SO FAST!), then all gun owners are in danger.*
older white middle class gun owners excluded.
Most of the black people shot were not armed, even with fake guns. Having hands or arms that might end in hands is enough.
30:
The presence of a gun is totally unnecessary. The only requirement is that they have a hand or arm or some other device that could possibly pull out a gun.
I just don't know how anyone can watch the Tensing, Rice, or Crawford videos and not be outraged. WTF does it take.
And then there's the 5'2", 115 pound girl in Bakersfield who police mistook for a 5'10", 170-pound machete-wielding maniac with a shaved head. Apparently she spun her shoulder into an officer with enough force to knock him down. The officer recovered well enough to punch her but she then deftly managed to get "back" on top of him, at which point he was forced to release the dog, who mauled her. After her release from the hospital she was charged with assaulting an officer.
One hundred and fifteen pounds.
And now the defenses of DJTJR speaking of the 39-year-old as a "kid" who just made an honest mistake. As below (adultification of Black youth to impute guilt), so above (infantilization of white men to remove guilt).
33: That's psychological reparations for the years when all Black men were called "Boy".
32: I guess they're more afraid of being seen as abusive then too weak to safely arrest a little girl. So, progress, but of a really minor kind?
22: Sarah Silverman: "If Africa was all labradoodles dying of AIDS, we'd take care of it in one day"
Frowner, can we bring this back to earth? Chicago, for example, is pushing 2000 shootings for the year with about 365 of them being fatal. IIRC the police account for a grand total of 8 of those. A lot of low level drug dealers are, brace yourself, using the product they're selling. I'd prefer we not have the police aspire to the level of your local guys dealing crack and PCP.
I suspect gswift has some hilariously terrifying stories of actual criminals doing exactly that.
Like this guy, whose incident made an appearance in more detail as "Cheddar's uncle".
You need to adjust that for population. About one half of one percent of Chicago is police, but they have over 2% of the fatal shootings. I suppose I would need to adjust those figures for the fact that the general population in Chicago includes babies, the elderly, and people without fingers. That might bring it back into the police's favor, but it's not a landslide.
Alla them policemen is cawmuniss
That would explain it; communists are historically very keen on shooting unarmed civilians.
24: I think the answer might be somewhere in the observation that you quite often hear of criminals being involved in a dispute of some sort, then going to fetch a weapon and coming back to shoot/stab the other guy. In practice, they use them for retaliation (and perhaps deterrence) rather than defence, which saves the police trouble of packing all the time.
38
You also need to adjust for being in situations where you might need to use a firearm. Police account for somewhat more than 2% of those, I would venture.
I absolutely agree that most police officers do a great job.
But if you can't prosecute police when they kill someone on video in pretty clearly bad circumstances, then how many other lesser beatings and bad stuff do you think goes unpunished.
I don't get why more cops don't take a stand against the bs.
In practice, they use them for retaliation (and perhaps deterrence) rather than defence
Presumably because, in a lot of cases, they aren't legally allowed to carry firearms around with them, and they don't want to go to prison on a random search.
If you're black and the police officer is racist or scared, "legally allowed to carry firearms" doesn't protect you.
44, 45: Yep, with reservations on "great job", where I'm really not qualified to have an opinion. But most policemen aren't killing/injuring random citizens for no good reason, certainly.
Even those that are killing/injuring citizens for no good reason aren't doing it randomly.
If it were random, it would be much easier to accept the explanation that it's a tough job and a certain level of mistakes are inevitable.
Oh, right. Random was meant to say "Unrelated to reasonable policing", not that the risk of being assaulted or killed by a policie office is unrelated to race.
I know. I'm just picky about the word "random." Occupational hazard.
44.last: The downsides of testifying against someone who if acquitted may one day hold your life in his hands has to be part of it. Also a desire not to harm someone with whom one identifies and who may well have saved your life or the life of a colleague. I think it's hard to overstate the strength of bonds formed between people who hold each other's life in their hands. I'm actually quite sympathetic to the problem faced when a colleague does something a little over the line - you don't want to hand punishment to someone who will potentially be right back next to you two weeks later. Mutual hostility and fucked up morale can get people killed.
54
I think it's hard to overstate the strength of bonds formed between people who hold each other's life in their hands.
Sounds logical, but police work is safer than construction and how many other segments of the economy?
It's probably safer than pizza delivery, but I bet it doesn't feel that way. If you work in construction you're essentially doing routine things over and over and, sure, when it goes wrong it goes seriously wrong. But in police work you don't know what's going to turn up in the next ten minutes, so you have to improvise a lot.
This is not to justify cops shooting middle aged Australians who have called them out and are standing in their pyjamas talking to their (the cop's) colleague. Just that I bet you get a lot more adrenaline doing routine cop stuff than routine construction stuff. So different kinds of training should be obligatory.