Senate No Donuts For You: The U.S. Police Brutality Thread

Since we're living in current year and posting every single video of police brutality I come across in the U.S. Politics thread would very quickly clog the entire thing up, it felt appropriate to make a new thread for the occasion. Police Brutality is currently absolutely rampant in the United States, and minorities and lower-income individuals are the primary targets of it. So, to kick off this glorious thread, here's a video I came across earlier of police secluding a man behind a wall before beginning to beat him as he's lying on the ground. They only stop when a woman filming announces her presence. But it's OK though, because apparently he got a B- once in High School.

 

No donuts ... just paid leave.

 

"After an internal investigation, we've found no evidence of misconduct."

That's if it's addressed at all, of course.

 

Fun Fact: It's very likely that police retaliated against prosecution witnesses in the case. One witness was fired from her pharmaceutical job after complaints of her being 'anti-cop', and another was gunned down outside of his apartment, which police attributed to a 'drug deal gone bad'.

 

casual reminder that many of the Ferguson BLM leaders and organizers have died or committed suicide by happenstance......just gonna leave that there

 

You'll be all glad to know that a grand jury in Leon County (the county where Tallahassee, Florida's state capitol) took a look at three recent police killings, including one where the cop turned off the bodycam, and another where the cop screamed "I'll kill you!" before... well, you know. They indicated that each case showed significant cause to proceed to a criminal trial.

Ha ha, just kidding. While the grand jury was 'disappointed' with some of the actions of the cops, they determined there was no reason to waste time in a courtroom. Protests have ensued, and a curfew declared, and protesters arrested by the cops.
Just a reminder, folks - grand juries are effectively worthless nowadays. They are primarily a tool for prosecutors to initiate criminal proceedings - out of 162,000 Federal cases in 2010, for instance, grand juries declined to indict in only 11 of them. And yet, grand juries rarely, if ever, indict cops. Part of the reason being that prosecutors decide what to present to the grand jury - it's not a trial, after all - so they can put on a big show whenever cops kill someone, and then clear them without ever having to go to trial, giving the illusion of 'civilian oversight' when, in actuality, it's a kangaroo court designed to make sure cops aren't put on trial. Unless, of course, there's an overwhelming negative public reaction, in which case it's more difficult to simply blow off an actual trial.

The Florida Police Benevolent Association had this random word salad to say:
"“We are aware of the many issues facing law enforcement and the minority communities in this country, but it is our hope that we can begin to heal together. It must start somewhere, so we urge all community leaders, to join together to promote conversation and tolerance for all.”
What a bunch of vague, worthless stream of ********.

 

(insert "feared for my life" in every cop's official statement)

 

I've said it in the other thread, and I'm going to say it here. Police need to not have special protections from violence. Right now, if you saw someone beating the **** out of someone else, and you intervened to save the victim's life, legally speaking, your actions get looked at under mitigating circumstances: "self defense or the defense of someone else." You are legally allowed to save someone's life. But you aren't allowed to do this if the aggressor is a police officer. The police officer gets to claim that they were acting within the scope of their duties, you get charged with "assaulting a peace officer" or "obstruction of justice" and those do not have any kind of mitigating circumstances. And that's of course if you don't get killed in the process. Everyone who stood and watched George Floyd get murdered was legally prevented from intervening to save his life. That's unacceptable. When you assault a police officer, it needs to be looked at through no special lens. It needs to be looked at as regular assault and battery, where context is brought up and mitigating circumstances are considered. This would still legally punish someone who ambushes a police officer or assaults a police officer without cause, but if a cop is attacking or killing someone else, then it becomes justified. Cops will hem and haw at this because they're used to being able to use violence on anyone in order to get compliance, but with this legal protection taken away, their actions will start having real, physical consequences. Derek Chauvin, if the law was not unjust, would have been pushed off George Floyd and subdued until he couldn't harm anyone. But that didn't happen, because we're all forced to just stand and watch while a cop murders someone.

 

This is absolutely sickening.

Police shoot autistic 13 year old boy several times after mother calls for help

If you or a loved one is ever having a crisis, you should not call the police. Ever. They aren't in any way trained to handle those (or any) situations, and even if you call 911 and specifically request only an ambulance, they'll still send cops out with them.

 

Yeah there was no need for those neighbors to turn that robbery into an assault or murder.

 

They did their job. They saw someone society considers less than, they shot him.

 

Golda Barton told KUTV she called 911 to request a crisis intervention team because her son, who has Asperger’s syndrome, was having an episode caused by “bad separation anxiety” as his mother went to work for the first time in more than a year

Instead, she said, two officers went through the front door of the home and in less than five minutes were yelling “get down on the ground” before firing several shots.

From these two lines we see two things:
1) Police need to not be called unless someone's life is in danger. If you're calling the police on someone, you better be thinking you're going to get that person either beaten, shot, or even killed. Police should not be sent for "crisis intervention" because of point 2.

2) Police literally are a hammer that sees every problem as a nail. Holy **** lol their first action for anything is to pull out their gun and yell at people to get on the ground.

 

Being a police officer appeals to the exact kind of person who is quick to violence. They get to legally beat people if they don't do what they say. It's the same reason why something like 40% of police officers are also domestic abusers, and why more than half of those actually convicted for it keep their jobs. It's a bunch of high school bullies with guns and near legal immunity.

 

Who the hell shoots a small, unarmed, anxiety ridden 13 year old kid with Asperger's? I wouldn't shoot him even if he had a knife or even a gun (he didn't). I just wouldn't. I don't care if he shoots me dead. I'm not shooting some kid with Asperger's having a meltdown over his mom leaving. Not doing it.

 

Wait, you wouldn't shoot an unarmed 13 year old with Aspergers? Gimmie your badge.

 

And of course, the dirty little secret that many people don't want to acknowledge is that this case isn't as much an aberration as people would like to pretend. There's something profoundly wrong with the police in the United States. Not just "cops need to be tested for implicit racism and then everything will be fine", but that the very fundamental way the police work in the US treats escalation and violence as standard protocol across the board (even though that is disproportionately falling on some groups more than others). If it turned out that the police were taking bribes routinely, but that there was a racial discrepancy in who they took bribes from, the response shouldn't be "well, if only they took bribes equally" it would/should be that they shouldn't be taking bribes, period.

I do think that it plays into helping the police to act like there are groups that are 'safe' from police violence because it also sends the message "This can't happen to you, so you don't need to prioritize it" when I think the biggest thing that could be done is to make it clear that the vast majority of Americans are at risk of police violence. For example, watch how quickly a cop investigating a neighbor's call of domestic violence decided to attack the woman because she didn't want to talk with them, and didn't want them entering her home. It takes him less than ten seconds from when she steps out after the second officer has arrived before he starts violently handling her and reflects a fundamental issue with how police behave.

More related to the 13 year old, and why the cops should never be called to help someone, would be Tony Timpa, who called the police because he was having a mental crisis and needed help. So they were called to someone who voluntarily wanted the police there because they were in trouble. And the police killed him by holding him to the ground and joking about it as he stopped breathing. The same sort of pattern as has also been seen with George Floyd and Daniel Prude being killed by police in similar fashion.

The rate that people are killed by the police in the US is high when compared to other countries. For example, the list here has 23 people killed by police in the UK since 2015. That works out to just over 4 people per year killed by police in the UK, or a rate of about .06 per million. For Canada, it's about .75 to 1 death per million people over the last several years. In the US, the rate is about 3.4 per million, and while it's 6.6 per million for black people, it's still 2.5 per million for white people, which is well above the other countries there. The intentional homicide rates for those countries are 4.96 for the US, 1.76 for Canada, and 1.2 for the UK, so the police killings are disproportionately higher in the US even if they're tied to homicide rates. To think of it in terms of numbers of lives, though, the US is averaging around 1100 people killed by police every year. Dropping to the Canadian average would be around 800 fewer people killed by the police, and the UK average would be around.. well.. around 1100 fewer people killed (it would only be around 20 deaths per year).

The speed with which police escalate force is, I think, a huge root of this problem. I think it's emblematic in a case like the death of Kajieme Powell. Powell was killed in St Louis in 2014. The police had been called as he was behaving erratically and had a knife. However, when police arrived, there was no one near him. This should have meant that police could easily keep at a safe distance and try to gain control of the situation. Instead they get close enough that within 15 seconds of arriving, and with Powell only walking, the situation is now that they are "fearing for their lives". There's little willingness to question how their actions may have led to this situation reaching a point where they felt they could 'justify' the use of violence. This problem with investigations was even highlighted by the father of someone killed by the Kenosha police in 2004: when police killed Michael Bell over what has been argued to be one of the cops yelling, in error, that Bell had grabbed his gun, Bell's father questioned why it was the investigation was concerned simply about clearing the officers, and not figuring out how to prevent a similar situation from happening in the future in the same way that airplane crash investigations are concerned with not just figuring out what happened but also what steps can prevent it from happening again.

The whole system is broken, and nothing put that on display like the attacks not just on peaceful protesters, but the egregious attacks on the press nationwide this year. That absolutely means some groups are feeling the impact of that more than others, but so much of this stems from an unequal application of procedures that shouldn't be happening in the first place. This is not a good system that has some bad people misusing it, this is a system that is fundamentally flawed in its current design.

 

I think we should bear in mind that while the United States is an extreme outlier in terms of the number of police killings because we're the best at everything awful, the culture of brutalizing those at the margins of society-- or just people who get on their bad side-- is common to police everywhere.