Headline in the paper today: Police Pursue Reforms.
Right. We shall see. The city of Cleveland has entered into a consent decree with the Dept. of Justice after the DOJ found that the Cleveland cops were little more than brutal thugs with badges.
I don't think the worm has yet turned on this. As long as the cops can limit their brutality to mostly poor people, I doubt if there will be any sustained movement for reform. And yes, the po-po seem to be using race as a proxy for economic class, which is why the NYPD has gotten away with repeatedly frisking nearly every Black and Latino male in the city.
By now it's occurred to nearly every person with a carry permit that they are held to far higher standards on the use of force than the supposedly professional gun-toters. The cops (and I include the Feebies in this) can and do shoot damn near anyone or anything at anytime without the repercussions that would come down on a civilian who did the exact same thing.
Don't be fooled: The current "push for reform" is more the authorities trying to outlast the news cycle than anything else. Oh, sure, a few of the outliers on the brutality scale will be sacrificed. But real change in the use of force by police won't come until the Boyos in Blue lose their sense of perspective and begin wholesale abuse and killing of white folk.
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Sunday, December 7, 2014
4 comments:
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An interesting thought, if some attorney got a Federal position and some support, could a local level police department ever be charged under the RICO Act?
ReplyDeleteI'm just wondering if that's the level of action it would take to change policing in these United States, or if even that would result in a collective "meh". The ugly reality is that discrimination is, and has been, present in the world since time immemorial. Even the Black community fights its internal fights against things like the brown bag test to joint fraternities. The police have been, and are, the enforcement arm of this behavior. That's why change, when it comes, is likely to require a huge shift in paradigm...and thus why, like you say, it ain't happening yet.
The related thought is just what it will take to make this seismic change? The Dallas DA, Craig Watkins, made a significant contribution to the good by exposing false prosecutions and agreeing to testing of DNA evidence in almost any case where it was present and haven't been tested. Unfortunately, He also was found with a hand in the till, and was swept out of office. We wait to see if his "law and order" replacement will continue with this cause or if it will quietly sink into the sea of the general public's apathy.
It is generally accepted that Gov. Perry allowed the execution of an innocent man because he was a "bad person", and the mainstream happily re-elects him and/or his cronies. All this clearly suggests that you are, sadly, correct for now Comrade. It also shows the shift will be seismic, and likely not "peaceful". How big the shaker is and how far it reaches are the things to worry about now.
I grew up around cops. My father's shop was five blocks from the local police station and many of his customers were cops. One of my best friends growing up was a cops' kids. (He was a little psycho too, but that's another story).
ReplyDeleteThese guys were big boisterous Irishmen. Very white Irishmen. Very friendly people. But the stories I heard growing up as they talked amongst themselves, as they talked about going to "nigger town" to go "nigger knocking" (a.k.a. beating the shit out of any black person they saw outdoors) in order to "keep the niggers in their place", were chilling. In those days, no black person would have dared complain about police brutality because they knew it would a) be futile, and b) subject them individually to even more police brutality. In that, things have changed since my childhood in the 1960's. But little else seems to have changed. What was, is, and will be. Until, as you say, it's white people who are getting brutalized. And I'm not so sure what will happen then, even, because we've slid so far towards being a police state that the police may well decide that rather than subject themselves to civilian rule they'll just go ahead and seize power formally, like Putin did in Russia.
I once hoped I would be dead and in the ground before it happened. Now I'm not so sure.
Part of the problem is the "Blue Wall" – a Mafia-like code of omertà that says you don't rat out a fellow cop.
ReplyDeleteThat has to be dealt with from the get go, the very first day in police academy. If young recruits are repeatedly instructed that if you don't report crimes by your fellow officers – or even racist comments that could lead to cop hate crimes – your are lower scum than any common criminal, because you take an oath to uphold the law.
As a young newspaper reporter many decades ago, I followed a police brutality case in which an innocent partner failed to rat out his older partner when they beat up a woman in Harlem. There were no legal repercussions per se. He if there are none today, imagine the 60s. But the "innocent" party kept his mouth shut and his career went down the tubes along with the senior member of the pair.
There are cops who would turn in other cops if it didn't mean their lives would turn into hell. We've got to make cop whistle blowers heros, to set an example.
None of this will make police misbehavior and racism go away. But it will reduce it some. And some is better than just keeping going the way we're going.
I know, I know, this kind of indoctrination in police academies ain't gonna happen. Not soon, anyway. But we should be pushing for it.
Crankily yours,
The New York Crank
The code of omerta is unfortunately not something that will ever go away in any business where dealing with violence -- and dealing out violence -- is a possibility. If you have to deal out violence as part of your job, you want to know that your fellows have your back, and if there's someone who has shown by squealing that he doesn't have your back, you don't want anything to do with him. This is human nature. We aren't going to change it no matter how much instruction we give to over-testosteroned candidates at the police academy, who would be all, "yeah, right, now get back to talking about procedures for handling domestic violence calls."
ReplyDeleteBut the problem goes so far past omerta as to be ridiculous. It isn't omerta that kept a cop from being charged with negligent manslaughter for using a chokehold he knew he wasn't supposed to use because it was dangerous. It wasn't omerta that kept a cop from being indicted for killing a 12 year old boy who was playing with a toy gun exactly two seconds after arriving on scene. It is an entire system of "justice" that is set up to allow cops to perform these acts with impunity, especially towards people of color.
Black people have known this for centuries. It is only white people who are surprised, surprised I say, that their pet pit bulls are now starting to take down some of their owners as well as those darkies that they've aimed'em at for oh so many years...