Kenosha, Wisconsin: Updated
Kenosha, Wisconsin police and counter-protesters, 1 August 2020. Photo by Tony Alter via Wikimedia Commons
Updates 8/27/2020 11:00am
[KW7]
An official release from the Wisconsin Department of Justice has named the Jacob Blake shooter as as Officer Rusten Sheskey, and also announced a federal civil rights investigation has taken over the investigation.
The news release about the shooting said that “during the investigation following the initial incident,” Blake “admitted that he had a knife in his possession.” The release did not specify what type of knife, when Blake allegedly informed officers that he had a knife, or in what context.
“[Department of Criminal Investigation] agents recovered a knife from the driver’s side floorboard of Mr. Blake’s vehicle,” the release added. “A search of the vehicle located no additional weapons.”
The Wisconsin DOJ’s Department of Criminal Investigation is leading the investigation into Blake’s shooting, with help from the FBI, the Wisconsin State Patrol and the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Office. The release said that it expects to provide a full report to the prosecutor within 30 days.
Blake remains in the hospital in stable but serious condition. Attorneys for his family said Tuesday that he is now paralyzed, and that bullets tore through his spinal cord, left holes in his stomach, caused damage to his kidney and liver and required that “nearly his entire colon and small intestine” be removed.
[KW8]
The New York Times Visual Investigation crew has a pretty detailed article and thread on Twitter piecing together various bits of information and video available for the shootings Kyle Rittenhouse now stands charged with.
17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse has been arrested and faces a charge of first-degree intentional homicide in connection to shootings that left 2 people dead on Tuesday in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Our visual investigation took a closer look at his actions. https://t.co/RgpL3k9iOR
— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 27, 2020
Original Post
Things have gone from bad, to worse, to deadly in Kenosha, Wisconsin following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
[KW1]
An Antioch teen has been arrested in connection to the deadly shooting of two people at a Kenosha protest Tuesday night.
Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, was arrested in Antioch, Illinois on Wednesday. He is accused of shooting and killing two people at a Kenosha protest. The Village of Antioch Police Department said the teen was arrested Wednesday morning.
The shooting happened just before midnight near the area of 63rd Street and Sheridan Road. Kenosha police said there were reports of multiple shots being fired and multiple gunshot victims.
Rittenhouse will be charged with first-degree intentional homicide.
[KW2]
President Donald Trump tweeted Wednesday that Governor Tony Evers has accepted federal assistance in Kenosha.
The assistance comes as protests continue in Kenosha over the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
On Tuesday, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said Governor Evers had turned down assistance from the federal government. Now, however, President Trump is saying he has accepted help.
“My team just got off the phone with Governor Evers who agreed to accept federal assistance,” wrote President Trump in a tweet. “TODAY, I will be sending federal law enforcement and the National Guard to Kenosha, WI to restore LAW and ORDER!”
Meadows had initially said he called Evers Tuesday and offered to send more National Guard troops to assist but Evers refused.
“We have National Guard standing by, that if the general for the National Guard needs additional help, we’re there to do it. But today, that request was denied by the governor,” said Meadows.
[KW3]
*Link contains graphic video
As a second video of the police shooting of Jacob Blake emerges, Blake family attorney reiterates that the use of deadly force towards Blake in front of his children was fully unjustified. Source: CNN
[KW4]
Body cameras for the roughly 200 police officers serving Kenosha, Wis., have been endorsed since 2017, but shortfalls in the city budget have contributed to a delay in their acquisition, a city official said.
A lack of funding and technological concerns prompted the city to push its initial plan to buy the cameras this year back to 2022, said Rocco LaMacchia, chairman of the council’s public safety committee.
“We have moved it back so many times,” he said. “I got a feeling this is going to move up on the ladder really fast because of what’s going on around the United States right now. Body cameras are a necessity. There’s no doubt about it.”
The issue was highlighted after Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, was shot Sunday by a Wisconsin police officer.
[KW5] President Trump
We will NOT stand for looting, arson, violence, and lawlessness on American streets. My team just got off the phone with Governor Evers who agreed to accept federal assistance (Portland should do the same!)…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 26, 2020
[KW6] Joe Biden makes a statement calling for justice while condemning violence
Once again, a Black man — Jacob Blake — was shot by the police. In front of his children. It makes me sick.
Is this the country we want to be?
Needless violence won’t heal us. We need to end the violence — and peacefully come together to demand justice. pic.twitter.com/WdNqrxA3PK
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 26, 2020
None of this was EVER going to end well. As noted elsewhere, the police have not yet been incentivized to change. Clearly some armed civilians believe they need to intervene because they apparently don’t like what local authorities are doing. And because Wisconsin is an open carry state the guy wasn’t detained at the time, even for questioning. And now the President, wanting to “look tough’ and reinforce “law and order” is making claims about the Governor and the use of federal forces. We know from Portland how that turns out.
This will not end well.Report
I just watched the police press conference from Kenosha. They’re going to have all the support they need, and the mayor explained that the situation is new to all of them so their initial National Guard deployments were insufficient. As he said, nobody really knew how many might be needed, so he just asked for a figure on the first night. That was insufficient, so he upped it. From the way it sounded, he’s not going to let Kenosha continue to burn like Portland or Seattle. They also seem intent on arresting any agitators coming in from outside who are committing criminal acts. The FBI is on scene, and crossing state lines gets into federal jurisdiction. The video of the conference should still be on Youtube.
They had no comment on stories that Blake was armed. There’s what looks like a hawk’s bill tactical knife in his hand on a video of the incident, just as he’s walking around the front left bumper of his car. I have my own theory of the case, which is that he was desperately trying to get into his car to hide the knife to avoid facing additional charges. His rap sheet was long enough as it was. Of course the cops would assume that he was trying to get a gun out of the car and kill them all. They utterly failed to physically restrain him before things got to that point, despite attempting to taze him during the earlier struggle.Report
I haven’t seen any video that has enough resolution to make any such call as to what is or is not in his hand.
I do agree that the cops created the situation by not getting control of things. From my perspective, it very much looks like a case of an officer with three major problems:
1) He seems unwilling to risk getting his uniform dirty.
2) A nasty case of “Respect muh authoritah!”
3) Leading to drawing his gun long before he had any justification to do so. Once that gun was in his hand, he severely limited his options for detaining Blake. You can’t do a take down or an arm bar if one of your hands is holding a gun.Report
I would agree with your assessment.
His partner wasn’t any help, either. He was just tagging along behind like they were playing follow-the-leader. The incident will no doubt get covered in police training videos. Letting Blake get to his car door was a horrible mistake, because at that point the officers had to assume he was going there to get some serious firepower, because nothing else would make much sense in that moment.Report
Because leaving the scene after the cops showed up to deal with the women fighting call doesn’t make sense?
Because checking on your kids in the car to make sure they are ok doesn’t make sense?
Because going back for ID doesn’t make sense?
Given enough time I can probably come up with a dozen reason that make sense why he went back to his car. But Oscar is right – once that cop drew his gun he was going to shoot blake because he had closed off all his other options. He CHOSE to draw his gun rather then do anything else. He made a CHOICE.
And the fact that he felt it was his primary and best and first choice IS THE PROBLEM.Report
“We need citizens to exercise their 2nd Amendment right to carry arms, so as to deter an overpowerful gummint.”
…
“Well, maybe he didn’t actually have a gun, but he MIGHT have, so the cop was right to shoot him.”Report
Don’t be silly. He could’ve glanced at his kids through the windows that are all around his car. The cops weren’t demanding his ID, they were trying to arrest him. They’d just tried to taze him.
He was wanted on a warrant for rape, in case you’ve not checked his extensive criminal record, which includes lots of domestic violence charges on the street in the video. If there was a fight going on, he was likely the one who instigated it.Report
The report the police were responding to was two white women fighting. So unless he changed his skin color and his gender he was not in any way part of what they came out to investigate.
And i’m not being silly. You looked at a series of cherry picked facts that fit your priors and decided there was no other “reasonable” conclusion they could draw from the situation. I merely pointed out there were many reasonable alternatives. And if he was wanted on warrants then the officers committed professional misconduct well before shooting him by failing to place him in custody prior to the shooting.Report
That report may be in error. Blake’s girlfriend called 911 to get the police to come and deal with him because he was not supposed to be there.
As they were going around the car, the officers were hollering for him to drop the knife.Report
Is that like officers hollering for a person to ‘stop resisting’ as they beat them senseless? Or is it more like Castille or Shaver, where the officer was making ridiculous requests of the person, because the officer had lost their shite and the ability to act rationally (or was playing ‘Ash-hole says’) over the fact that someone had a pocket folder.Report
Oh, wait, new information is here.
Blake tells officers he has a pocket knife. Officers lose their shite, scream for him to drop the knife, and decide to Taser the guy and go nuts. Blake calmly walks back to his car to put the knife in his car, thus alleviating the officers irrational fears that he may win the gun fight while only armed with a knife (he’s black Batman, doncha know), while also avoiding having the cops confiscate his knife such that he’ll never see it again.
Blake gets shot in the back for his trouble.Report
We have no evidence at this time that the police were aware of who he was or that he had any warrants out. I know a lot of people are saying he was ‘known to the police’, but A) that doesn’t mean those officers knew who the hell he was, and B) from what I saw, he had a couple of dismissed charges and one warrant from an altercation with an ex. I mean, if this guy is so well known to the police, I’d expect more of a record. It’s hardly extensive.
So before you can make that claim, you have to show more evidence than some shite passing around Twitter.Report
I think the better answer is ‘so what if he was?’ A warrant or even a prior conviction of some kind isn’t justification to carry out a death sentence.Report
The horror of the situation is how quickly and casually – almost gleefully – the murder of a person can be excused.Report
The argument being made is that the police had good reason to consider the guy a serious threat based upon previous history. In order for that to stand, those officers had to know who the guy was AND his reputation.
If they did know this about the guy, then I fail to see why he was not talking to the officers while sitting on the curb wearing cuffs.
This is all post hoc justifications for officers being fatally stupid.Report
Oh I get it, it’s exactly what Brandon is doing below. Post hoc rationalization where instead of evaluating the actual facts we decide what to believe based on an arbitrary assessment of the character of those involved. Thank God no one besides the armed agents of the state are subject to this standard. We’d be giving out medals when bridges collapse and planes fall out of the sky instead of trying to figure out what went wrong.Report
Given perfect information about the situation leading up to a shooting, the personal history of the involved parties is not relevant. However, that condition is usually not satisfied. In real-world situations, information about personal history and character can be useful.
Does the police officer have a history of abusing suspects? Is this the fifth guy he’s shot? Or does he have a 15-year record of exemplary behavior? Is the decedent a convicted felon, or have an outstanding warrant for a felony? Or is he a pillar of the community with a spotless record?
Character evidence isn’t probative, but you should treat it as probabilistic evidence (unless you’re actually on a jury, in which case the rules are different because the stakes are higher). It’s not a coincidence that a wildly disproportionate share of people supposedly unjustly killed by police turn out, on further investigation, to have been kind of (or very) shitty people. That doesn’t necessarily mean they deserve to die, but it does mean that they’re more likely to violently resist arrest, or otherwise act in ways that cause police to perceive a need to shoot.
The question of whether someone deserves a death sentence for [whatever dirt was dug up on BLM’s current cause célèbre] is not even on the same planet as the point. We not deciding whether to kill Jacob Blake; we’re trying to determine whether the police officer’s decision to shoot was defensible, given the limited information available to him at the time.Report
That’s a lot of words to not make a single coherent point.Report
Here’s my standard. Unless the officer was being shot at, or the officer has body cam (or other) footage of being attacked with a deadly weapon, assume the officer did not have justification for pulling a gun.
Because those are the only justifications I have for pulling a gun.Report
The argument that the officer was responding to some “threat” rests on the ability to expand or contract the word “threat” in arbitrary and capricious ways.
A man who may, or may not be reaching for a knife is sufficient threat to justify shooting.
A man holding an AR-15 and pushing past police and ignoring their orders is….not a threat which justifies shooting.
A man sitting in a car who announces there is a gun legally carried is a threat which justifies shooting.
A young man holding an AR-15 in the middle of a riot advancing towards officers is… not a threat which justifies shooting.
The “threat” argument vests the officer with unlimited and unaccountable privilege to decide what is or isn’t a threat. The word can be expanded or contracted post hoc to justify any action.
We could take each of those actions above and reverse the outcome, and the police would still be equally justified regardless.Report
Kinda my point. Clearly ‘Threat’ needs to be as defined for a cop as it is for a citizen.
It’s a good thing that kind of wiggle room doesn’t exist in military ROE.Report
“I have my own theory of the case…”
Oh, yeah?Report
This crap was inevitable.
We are going to see more of it.Report
I don’t know that I’d use the word “inevitable.” Cops *could* simply not shoot unarmed black men in the back. There’s no necessity compelling their actions.Report
And armed, white, right wing militias could actually NOT go looking to interfere with protests or police activity after curfews.Report
The police chief has made a statement!
Report
“If people would just do what police officers tell them to do we wouldn’t have had all these murders,” Miskinis concluded.Report
The riots are going to continue until the sources of them stop.
Most people I think don’t appreciate how much anger is required to get people to mobilize into the streets, or how much rage is percolating just below the surface.
The calls for “toughness” or “law and order” are laughable. The people who are responding to being brutalized by rioting are going to respond to more brutalization by…what, exactly?Report
It requires either a lot of anger or a desire for a free flat screen TV. In Kenosha one “angry protester” was overjoyed at scoring all the iPhone cases from the phone store she was looting. So it’s kind of a joyous anger. Burning things down, assaulting people, and stealing stuff are so much fun that, sadly, we had to make doing those things illegal. We’re such killjoys.
Maybe Democrats shouldn’t have spent the last four years stoking rage at everything. Now all their constituents are livid, violent, and many of them will soon be in prison for a long long time. Of course if anyone on the right gets even mildly upset about anything, like say the normalization of rampant pedophilia, it just shows they’re part of a tyrannical hate group that should be monitored by the FBI.Report
Poe’s Law is a harsh but fair mistress.Report
the protesters know you’re already going to say this is why some of them have been intelligently scroll graffiti that says you have stolen more than we could ever loot and if there is a statement that’s more true than that I can’t think of what it isReport
say the normalization of rampant pedophilia
Uh…. what?Report
Oh, just the usual goings on in Hollywood. The lastest dust-up is a movie Netflix is advertising called “Cuties”, about 11-year old girls exploring their sexuality by twerking, or some such thing. The trailer is on Youtube, and so far it’s gotten 34,000 up votes and 1,300,000 down votes.
Netflix first argued that the movie had won an award at Sundance, but the co-founder of Sundance is awaiting sentencing for sexual acts with a 7-year-old and a 9-year old, facing 6 to life, so that didn’t sway anybody. Then some Hollywood stars rushed to defend the movie. That didn’t really sway anyone, either.Report
George is full on QANON. Why people engage him like he is rational, serious, and not a tankie is a mystery to me.Report
1.3 million down votes on a Youtube trailer does not sound like a small and oddball group of people. That sounds like just about every parent in America.Report
what a clusterfish and a bloody shame. It’s a very interesting thing that the victim in this case is still alive. I wonder if it will change the dynamic if he survives and is able to give his side of the story. On the other hand, what competent lawyer would let him just give his version of events?Report
The Kenosha PD attack on Mr. Blake indicates how immune and possibly emboldened the cops feel. After months of protests regarding police brutality, they shoot a man 7 times in the back. And now the police chief blames the protestors for the terrorist attack.Report
Kazzy, over here.
“I am pro-shooting back” is, indeed, my take on this.
Was the shooter shooting back? If so, I’d like to defend him and ask you about the mostly peaceful protestors who shot first.Report
Ah. I have to apologize to Kazzy…Report
I’m not a fan of saying “you can’t shoot back”. Certainly not in a situation where the police have abdicated their role of peacekeepers and/or law enforcement.
(We got into this in our discussion over Deputy Scot Peterson hiding in the parking lot during the school shooting.)Report
My housemate, the former public defender, watched the video of the rifle shooting incident and said “He’ll walk free.” If you have an obvious rifle, have not been committing some felony, and are chased down and set upon by a mob (who are obviously stupid for chasing down a guy with a rifle), you are allowed to shoot back to defend yourself, which he did.
One of the legal elements thatalso comes into play, as it did in the Trayvon Martin case, is that even if the attacker isn’t armed with a lethal weapon, they will take your lethal weapon and use it to kill you and perhaps others. This one will get filed under “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”
Some are perhaps confused by all this, thinking the law should punish both sides equally. But it doesn’t. The law punishes criminal behavior, such as assault, rioting, arson, looting, rape, burglary, theft, and murder. It does not prohibit helping people resist those crimes, at least not beyond what a reasonable person would do.
The question is whether the 17-year-old merely got separated from his group, realized he was isolated and perhaps surrounded and then ran for his life, or whether he’d done something else that’s not on the one video that would constitute a criminal act, which precipitated the pursuit. If that’s the case, he would be in trouble.
I think that perhaps the BLM/Antifa protesters have got away with so much for so long that their social media feeds are filled with people who think what they’re doing is somehow legal, making it a situation in which stupid criminals are getting their legal advice from other stupid criminals, instead of asking an attorney familiar with criminal procedure for advice.Report
The report I am reading indicates the video took place AFTER he had already shot people. At which point… aren’t those pursuing him the ones “striking back”?
Or are we at a point where (white) people can shoot others and then claim self-defense when they shoot more people who try to stop them from shooting people?Report
Notice how flexible and arbitrary the excuses always are?
If he shoots , he can be shot by cops or convicted of assault, unless the cops or jury decide he was was standing his ground against a threat.
If he is simply standing there holding a gun, anybody is legally allowed to shoot him on the grounds that he posed a threat.
What is a “threat”? Anything a jury says it is.
But in any case, whether he shoots, or is shot, is arrested or not, convicted or not, the decision is entirely arbitrary and subject to the whims and biases of the authorities.
Which, for the uninitiated, is called the rule of men, not the rule of law.Report
Actually it’s not. Each state has statute law and voluminous case law based on what ordinary people have decided was proper behavior regarding forceful encounters. Holding a gun isn’t necessarily posing a threat, as everybody out hunting or at the shooting range can explain. It’s actually pretty intricate and detailed, varying from state to state of course, about when you are and are not justified in taking a particular action, or making a particular escalation.
Concealed carry courses usually cover the basics pretty well, so that you can stay on the correct side of the law.Report
Intricate and detailed = arbitrary and capricious.
Which is the true purpose; To allow the law to protect some without binding, and bind others without protecting.Report
Uh no.
It’s kind of like thoracic surgery. If you don’t know anything about it, you might assume that a doctor just cuts someone open and does a bunch of random and arbitrary stuff to the innards, and then sews them back up.Report
You and Chip are both right here. The laws around self defense tend to be pretty clearly laid out in every state.
That said, almost every self defense claim is a one sided tale. If the police and DA think you and/or your story is credible, and you didn’t do anything to muck it up (like dragging the body back inside your house), you’ll never see the inside of a courtroom. However, if they don’t like you or your story, even if you followed all the rules, they will indict you and do the trial. And that is where it gets arbitrary and capricious, because self defense is an affirmative defense.
I mean, you killed someone, you broke the law, that isn’t in question. The only question was if you had a good reason to do so, and DAs are totally within their rights to make you stand trial for it and argue your defense to a jury.Report
He crossed state lines – he was arrested in and live in Illinois – to participate in activities that occurred after the 8PM curfew in Kenosha. Thus he was in fact engaged in criminal activity. The feds are now also involved in the investigation owing to the crossing state lines issue and he was arrested on first degree murder charges, which strongly suggests the prosecutors in Wisconsin have enough evidence to lead them to believe he wasn’t just walking down the street and got lost.Report
You didn’t watch the video.Report
You’re right, I didn’t. I figure we’re still at least a week from having a real idea of what actually happened after all of the gossip dissipates.Report
Videos are gossip now?
The gig is up on your supposed libertarian credentials.Report
Again, I haven’t seen the video.
And I haven’t claimed to be a Libertarian since 2015. (Here’s the essay in which I abandoned my Libertarian Credentials. If that matters.)
But if you watched the video and you said “I can see how someone, not me, but someone could watch this video and defend the guy who shot the other guy back”, then that’s good enough for me. I believe you.
If you want to put together the arguments that this other person, not you, but this other person might put together to defend it, lemme know what they are and I’ll help you tighten them up.
Without watching the video first.Report
I’m sorry I missed that essay. I’m not sorry you’re full of shit.Report
Given that, even after people watch video, they can’t always agree upon the sequence of events, or who shot first or who was provoking the violence, doesn’t it seem ridiculous to defend “shooting back”?
Who was “shooting” and who was “shooting back”? How would you even know?
The police defended their decision not to arrest the shooter because um, things were chaotic and they uh, had, ummm, “tunnel vision”, that’s right.
If the police themselves can’t figure out who was shooting and who was not, why would we encourage citizens to go around as self appointed dispensers of violence?Report
Given that, even after people watch video, they can’t always agree upon the sequence of events, or who shot first or who was provoking the violence, doesn’t it seem ridiculous to defend “shooting back”?
Well, my take before the fact is that I am against the argument that says “it is wrong to shoot back”. And certainly in a case where the police have abdicated their roles.
And I am willing, sight unseen, to apply this maxim.
Indeed, I am pro shooting back.
Initiation of force is bad. Retaliation against initiated for?
Well, maybe “pro” is too strong for my position… let me walk it back to “what did you expect would happen?”
Who was “shooting” and who was “shooting back”? How would you even know?
That’s what *I* said! I said “I figure we’re still at least a week from having a real idea of what actually happened after all of the gossip dissipates.”
And Kazzy asked “Videos are gossip now?”
Tell him! Not me!
If the police themselves can’t figure out who was shooting and who was not, why would we encourage citizens to go around as self appointed dispensers of violence?
Imagine what’ll happen after the police are abolished.Report
You’ve spoken a number of times here about Divorce or War, and proposed that people arm themselves, and now you are here advocating people become vigilantes.
In your mind’s eye, when you envision this sort of thing happening, is it you yourself that is walking down the streets of Colorado Springs holding a gun, or are you just encouraging other people to do it?
When you imagine this person raising the gun, who is he looking at through the gunsight?
Who is this person who needs to be killed and why? What is being defended, or attacked with deadly force?Report
Chip, is it your opinion that Kenneth Walker should be arrested for shooting at the police who killed Breonna Taylor?
If your answer is “no, of course not!”, then you may have insight into my position.
My argument is, and has been: we cannot rely on the police. They have no duty to protect you.Report
Again…are you yourself planning to go out armed and enforce the law since the police cannot protect you?
How would this make you any different than those armed vigilantes in CHOP/CHAZ?Report
No.
But I do believe in self-defense.
I have no illusions about whether my household would survive in a “GET HIM!” situation where we were home.
But I can make it pricey for the first guy through the door.
(Do you think that Kenneth Walker should be charged?)Report
If your neighbors took your advice, you might wake up one day to see them patrolling your neighborhood and setting up roadblocks, like as happened in CHAZ.
But, you seemed to take a rather dim view of those guys.
I’m not sure how your logic is supposed to work here.Report
Well, for one thing, I live in Colorado Springs. I’m likely one of the least well-armed people in my neighborhood.
By the time that Colorado Springs starts having this happen, I should have moved. Like, to Montana or something.
But if it happens in my neighborhood, do you think I’d be better off armed? Or better off unarmed?
(Do you think that Kenneth Walker should be charged?)Report
I honestly don’t know much about Kenneth Walker, but I in cases where people shoot, the presumption should be that using deadly force is a last resort after other have been exhausted.
So depending on the facts, I could be persuaded either way.
I just came back from walking the dog.
Outside a bunch of Revolutionary Communists were marching and calling for a people’s overthrow of the government.
Which seems a lot like your position here, a sort of half thought out idea whose consequences are left dangling. A cosplay of war and revolution and vigilantism.
You posit a world where the police can’t be trusted so everyone becomes a law unto themselves and deals out death as they see fit.
Yet…somehow, you are able to travel freely to another state and buy land in a binding contract whose provisions are enforced by…um, hold on. ..enforced by, well something its not quite clear.
Like the RevComs, you’re imagining a world where everything you dislike is swept away, but somehow all the parts you like are left intact.Report
You posit a world where the police can’t be trusted so everyone becomes a law unto themselves and deals out death as they see fit.
I would like to point out that we live in a world where the police can’t be trusted.
And the options are “be armed” vs. “don’t be armed”.
Or did I make a bad assumption there and you still trust the police?
(Do you have an opinion on Breonna Taylor?)Report
You refuse to accept any other options between warlords and tyranny?
You remember how in one of our very first interactions I whipped out the “if you’re a libertarian you should go live in Somalia” and you ridiculed it (and rightly so!).
But…here you are, advocating a Somalia type warlord state.Report
Options? I believe my options are limited to:
1. Move
2. Don’t Move
and
A. Be Armed
B. Don’t Be Armed
Do you see something else?
Is it something like “why can’t we live in a society where everybody trusts each other?”
(Do you have an opinion on Breonna Taylor?)Report
Living in a society of trust seems so hard for you to imagine?
If that’s your perspective, you’re entitled to it.
Just seems a bit dark to my way of thinking.
I also know very little about Breonna Taylor other than she was shot by cops in her apartment. My opinion being hard to imagine any way that was justified.Report
I think that living in a society with High Trust and Collaboration is possible if you do a handful of things.
If you do things that lower Trust, you’re going to lower Collaboration.
We’ve talked about this before. You want some links?Report
Isn’t there an option between warlords and tyranny where Sally Struthers shows up?Report
Strangely enough, being an armed vigilante is legal in most places. In the absence of law enforcement, it’s sometimes encouraged. We pay the police to do our jobs for us, but seeing that laws are enforced is still our responsibility.
In the Kenosha press conference, a reporter asked about deputizing regular people, but with the National Guard and federal forces there, the leaders don’t think that’ll be necessary.
If you defund the police, you do get private or state militias and private security companies. Even Swedes adopted such a system in the wake of recent crime spikes by refugees that kept regular officers tied up. People are going to guard their property and protect their folks. If you think police procedures need reform due to the occasional screw up, wait until you see the “law enforcement” delivered by 17-year-olds who got most of their training playing Call of Duty.Report
You were the first person to mention shooting back. Absent any evidence to support the claim he was shooting back. When presented with video and reports of a white man shooting Black folks, you defaulted to an assumption he was shooting back. When asked if you defend shooting people, you reframed as saying you defend shooting back.
You twisted yourself into unsubstantiated knots because more than anything you want to defend this monster and are now acting as if you are the one true voice of rationale and reason.
You’re not. You’re talking out of your ass because you are desperate to defend this guy. That’s on you. No one else.Report
“You were the first person to mention shooting back.”
Kazzy,
You’re coming at this as though the guy had a moral obligation to let himself be beaten to death by a mob.
Maybe you should address that.
“well he shouldn’t’ve been there in the first place” you’re right, but how does that go on to “and therefore he should have let himself be beaten to death by a mob”?Report
Yes, lets talk about why the mob was chasing him.Report
I’m actually coming at this from a “Why did the cops ignore the guy with a gun who people fingered as the shooter while they were responding to shots fired?”
That’s the real issue to me. WTF were the cops doing?Report
Kazzy, you offered me this choice (and I’m copying/pasting this):
Pick a side: pro shooting people or anti shooting people
And I picked “I’m pro-shooting back”.
Now if you want to argue that it was morally bad for the kid to shoot back, I think that that might be an interesting conversation… but he was shooting back.
If you want to argue that citizens have a moral obligation to get shot, well… I’m not sure that the BLM argument would be the best place to have that sub-argument.
But I’m willing to have it if you are.
I’m not a “you have a moral obligation to get shot” person, myself. I’m pro-shooting back.Report
“… but he was shooting back.”
Objection: Assumes facts not in evidence. Was he shot at? Do you have evidence he was shot at? The NYT piece mentioned a shot fired in the air, with photographic/video evidence to support that.Report
The shot was fired from close range, and the only people around are those trying to chase him down and possibly kill him. Since it occurred behind him, he was perfectly justified in assuming the shots were being fired at him.Report
I’m reminded of my message I posted in my neighborhood about privileged white men cosplaying Che Guevara.Report
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/kenosha-police-chief-daniel-miskinis-blames-protesters-for-own-deaths.html
The police chief’s statements are worse than alluded to in the tweet. They are a full fascist.Report
Yeah, that interview session is something. In the coming days he’s gonna have some splainin to do.Report
Important to note that the actions from NBA and MLB players are not boycotts but wildcat strikes.Report
The Wildcats are an NCAA team, so having the NBA strike against them is rather silly.Report
Unlike NBA teams, NCAA teams have no salary cap.Report
This just in. Wisconsin DOJ: Jacob Blake had a knife on the floorboard of his car when he was shot. “Blake admitted to having the knife during the investigation.”Report
It’s Schrodinger’s knife, simultaneously in his car and in his hand.Report
And it’s not like he has any sort of right to keep and bear arms.Report
See my comment here.Report
Someone who works at the NYT seems to have put together a dispassionate timeline of events.
Without watching the videos, just reading the text, I could see a jury finding for the defendant.Report
Well sure, so long as they overlook the curfew violation, crossing state lines while armed, and being below the legal age in both Wisconsin and Illinois to open carry.Report
Oh, I was assuming that they’d charge him with other stuff.
If they charge him with violating curfew, crossing state lines while armed (A FEDERAL OFFENSE!), and being below the legal age to open carry, I can totally see a jury finding him guilty as hell.Report
None of those are murder charges, sir.Report
True they aren’t – but you do have to believe he was thusly charged for a reason. And its also the highest charge and therefore the easiest to extradite on.Report
The people burning the town down and screaming for blood are not likely to be mollified by him getting six months’ probation for Being Below The Legal Age To Open-Carry A FirearmReport
Why were people chasing him?Report
Ehh, you’re missing the point, Chip. The problem (at least I think it’s a problem) is that the way our laws are currently written and enforced, a guy who legally owns a rifle in an open carry state can show up in a public space (where he has a legitimate right to be) and use that weapon in the event he “legitimately fears for his life”, regardless of motivations, intent, stupidity, normal morality, pragmatics, politics. The arguments will mirror Zimmerman’s in that *regardless* of who the antagonist was, the shots fired were a legitimate use of force for self-defense. “I sincerely believed in that moment he was going to kill me, your honor.”Report
That’s the Florida situation but per a quick google* Wisconsin does not have a ‘Stand Your Ground’ statute and is in fact a Castle Doctrine state. Based on reported facts this is going to be messy from both a criminal and civil analysis.
*Oscar or someone with more info on the state by state distinctions can feel free to correct me. Florida IIRC is unusual even among Stand Your Ground states in the way it handles armed people instigating confrontations. I don’t agree with the Stand Your Ground approach to the law but I believe most statutes expressly do not protect people who instigate a fight then shoot a person when they fight back.Report
Zimmerman’s defense didn’t rely on the specific SYG statutes, though. It was based on the more general self-defense provisions. On the other hand, Mark T mentioned that Florida’s self-defense provisions were some of the more (what’s the word…) robust (??) laws in the country at the time.Report
Gotcha, I hadn’t thought about the specifics of that one for awhile.Report
Most states do not permit a person to claim self defense when they instigate a confrontation unless they can show that they obviously attempted to disengage and walk away.
I don’t know enough about the Rittenhouse thing to form an opinion.Report
That’s what I thought.
Admittedly this is the area where I go all namby pamby on my normally robust 2A stances. I just don’t have a lot of sympathy for people packing heat to pack heat then somehow happening to find themselves in a situation where they kill someone, even if it is statistically a very rare occurrence.Report
This is from the twitter thread above:
Taking it at face value (which, I’m willing to not do, but I’d need to see an alternate explanation first), it says that the guy was disengaging (“running away”) and the other guy fired the first shot.Report
But why were they chasing him?Report
I don’t know. Is the argument that they could have been justified to chase him?
If they caught him, what would they have been justified to do to him?
If you have a handful of arguments for why it might be okay to chase someone and, perhaps, commit violence against him once you catch him, I’m not sure we disagree about the meta-issues here, Chip.
It just depends on the context.
If we’re okay with going by the twitter thread, it says that it’s “unclear”.
Report
There’s a video clip in a PJM story that shows the first person who got shot earlier that night. He’s extremely aggressive and confrontational.
Well, they eventually did! It’s reported by witnesses that he was pursing Rittenhouse and throwing things at him.
The local police leader says he thinks Rittenhouse was part of a group that asked to be deputized. That makes the case against Rittenhouse even tougher, because juries generally like that kind of thing.Report
It depends on the context is exactly what I’m saying.
If Rittenhouse pointed a gun at someone, were they allowed to defend themselves by shooting at him, or throwing something at him?
If, after threatening to kill someone, he fled, were the citizens allowed to pursue a fleeing criminal and apprehend him? (Because as you point out, the police are not reliable).
Is a fleeing criminal allowed to gun down his pursuers?
If, after raising his rifle to shoot at his pursuers, could one of them “shoot back” at him?
See, the logic error here is that you are proposing a Rule of Engagement that is so loose and flexible it can be used to justify shooting nearly anyone, at any time, for nearly any reason.Report
Sure. But if we’re using legal stuff like “you have a duty to retreat and must only engage in self-defense if that doesn’t work”, we have evidence of him retreating.
So now what?
“It doesn’t matter that he was retreating!”?
You want to run with that? Establish it as a rule?
There are going to be more riots tomorrow.
And, at some point, the authorities will start to crack down on the mostly peaceful protestors.
And some of them will try to retreat.Report
“So now what” is we discard the absurd logic of “I have a right to shoot anybody who I deem a threat”.Report
Does this mean that we abandon Castle doctrine?
If so, I’m going to argue that your suggestion of discarding it is also absurd.
(The argument I assume you want to reach for here is Amber Guyger.)Report
The argument I’m reaching for is we establish a principle that deadly force is to be used only after all other reasonable avenues have been exhausted.Report
If we’re willing to use words like “reasonable”, can we point to how it sure as hell looks like the guy was running away and being chased?
Or are we going to point out that maybe it was reasonable for the mob to chase the kid and how we just don’t know?Report
As with every other case in the world, those are facts to be discovered and determined by a jury.
It could be that he threatened them with deadly force, and became a fleeing criminal.
It could be he was innocently walking along and a mob just decided to attack him.
We don’t really know any of that right now.
Which is why its not a good idea to go with “I can see why a jury would acquit him.”
Its an even better idea to drop the whole “Hey, lets all carry guns everywhere, all the time and shoot anyone we think might possibly perhaps sometime become a threat!”Report
Chip, I’m not arguing that he shouldn’t have been arrested.
But, knowing what little we know so far (and as has been described in the twitter thread), I can see why a jury would acquit.
“MAYBE DAMNING EVIDENCE WILL COME OUT!!!”
Sure, maybe it will.
Given the evidence we have so far… I can see why a jury would acquit.
And I’m very interested in the arguments for the justifications of violence on the part of the mob you’re offering. Would you be willing to put those into rules we could apply in other situations?
We’ve got a lot of mostly peaceful protests that are going to happen in the future and I’m sure that those rules will come in handy.Report
I’m not justifying the mob chasing him because, as I’ve pointed out several times now, no one knows what started all this.Report
We could very easily have lots of starts.
The boy made a bad move by being there.
Something stupid happened for him to be alone.
Angry mobs are stupid and very good at “starting” things in general.
The mob might have been chasing him because he was running away.Report
You touch on a good point, that there is almost never a clear “start” to interactions.
It is always a continuum of engagements and interactions each leading one to another.
Everyone who hits, will insist they were simply “hitting back”.Report
Serious question, and maybe the answer is ‘no’ but I’ll ask it anyway. Is there a way to thread the needle in a way allowing us to conclude all of the following?
-Rittenhouse has a right to self-defense
-his alleged assailants assumed the risk of what happened to them, assuming they were the ones shot
-you don’t get to voluntarily put yourself in a volatile, confrontational situation, then walk away with clean hands when things predictably go topsy turvy
Keeping it hypothetical since we will doubtlessly learn more as the facts come out.Report
I would agree with all three of those points.
(I would probably say something about point #3 being universal.)Report
Well at least I’m not taking crazy pills then. But it seems like we’ve got a lot of people who agree with 1 and 2 but not 3 or who agree with 3 but are at best really wishy washy/silent on 1 and 2.Report
I am 100% down with putting all of that out there.
More and more information is coming out about this and the governments (local and otherwise) have a whole bunch of very bad choices before them.
Do they crack down on the Mostly Peaceful Protestors?
Do they crack down on the Mostly Peaceful Community Security Forces?
An election is coming up, after all.
What’s the Party Line, again?Report
You linked to your post yesterday about how you ended up no longer calling yourself a libertarian. I re-read the essay and the comments. Most relevant I think is the discussion on using our freedoms effectively rather than frivolously or in immoral ways. Seems to me like we should all be thinking long and hard about that as individuals with our own agency. Not that we will of course.Report
It’s when I started gaming stuff out that I saw “divorce or war”.
Still haven’t changed my mind about that.
The stuff I think will actually resolve stuff (Police Reform, Ending the War on Drugs, Fewer Laws in general, that sort of thing) doesn’t get much play on the left or right.
I mean, the *IDEA* does… but make any concrete suggestion and no, QI isn’t the problem. Police Unions are good because Unions are good. We have treaties with other countries preventing the end of the WOD. Fewer laws? Why, people will sell loosies on the sidewalk!
It’s going to get worse.
It’s not going to be as good as it is now for a while.Report
The problem with your vision is you are stuck between strawmanning your opponents or just plain not listening.Report
I used to think the ‘divorce or war’ thing was hyperbolic. I’ve started to find it less so over the last few months.Report
I have to be honest and say that at this time, over these issues, I see no way that “divorce” could work.Report
Hmmm. Maybe you’re just trying to smooth over what you see as escalating tensions … but I think the argument is that if 3 applies, then 1 is negated, and conversely if 1 applies, then 3 is negated.
Remember, the thing between Kazzy and Jaybird started because Jaybird said he’s “pro shooting back”, which implies something about his views on 3. He’s presumably walking that back now, I guess. Sort of.Report
I’m pretty sure that I agree with all of those.
I’m not arguing that the kid shouldn’t have been arrested. He should be tried by a jury of his peers.
But I can totally see how the jury might not find for Homicide.
I mean, given the information we have now.
We might get new info tomorrow.Report
I was attempting to challenge Jaybird with bullet 3 because up until his answer I was unclear on his stance on that issue.
As for my own position I don’t think this quandary lends itself to simple math where one of these factors obviously outweighs the other. My suspicion is that most people picking 1 or 3 are doing so based more on political sympathies than logic. I’m no more interested in letting Rittenhouse off the hook for his conduct than I am a any member of a violent mob.
I’m starting to go down the rabbit hole here with assumed facts so I’ll stop there until we are out of ‘developing story’ status.Report
Fair enough, and well done!Report
I posted this on FB a few weeks back:
Report
Well put.Report
Is this directed at the young man openly carrying the gun or the “protestors” chasing him?
For that matter, “volatile, confrontational situation” applies to just joining an angry mob.Report
Read my response to Stillwater and you will have your answer.Report
Unless the video shows that Rittenhouse started the confrontation, which is unlikely, we have him observing his “duty to retreat” like no other, fleeing from a violent mob who were intent on getting him. In the second incident, he fell, so he’s not even trying to stand his ground, he’s getting physically attacked (thwacked by skateboard guy), and only then opened fire at two direct attackers, and didn’t fire on all the ones who put their hands up or backed off.
The odds of a jury finding him guilty him of anything serious on that part of the incident are zero. One handy rule of thumb is that if jurors think “Yeah, I’d probably have done the same in that situation”, you’re very unlikely to get a conviction.
The prosecutors best hope is to paint Rittenhouse as a crazed and dangerous killer, but prior videos of him showing his concern for his community and the safety of his neighbors, and cleaning BLM graffiti off buildings in his own hometown, make him look like a civic-minded Eagle scout who wanted to do all he could to help keep people safe.Report
Everyone should notice here, the arbitrary expansion and contraction of the definition of “threat”.
A few days ago I was talking about how the law allows me to chase and violently subdue a fleeing robber.
Here, a man who confronted people with a gun is chased and…the threat magically shrinks to nothing unless we have video of him shooting someone first.
In the case of Jacob Blake, the mere fact that he had a knife somewhere in the car, expands the word “threat” to justify shooting him 7 times in the back.
We could just as arbitrarily say that since Rittenhouse was walking through the crowd with a gun, they justifiably saw him as a deadly threat and gave pursuit.Report
You’re not getting how this works. Sheskey likely didn’t shooting Blake because he had a knife. Both officers knew he had a knife in his hand while Sheskey had his gun drawn, when he was following Blake and ordering him to “drop the knife”. Blake would not comply.
Had Blake started to turn around, Sheskey would be justified in dropping him in his tracks before he got anywhere near the car door. Cops do that all the time when anyone violent approaches them with a knife with what appears to be bad intent. They don’t have to let themselves get stabbed in the heart or get their throats slit before they defend themselves by terminating the threat.
But given that Blake already had a knife in his hand, yet was intent on getting to his car, what was he doing? Perhaps (to the officers) he didn’t feel the knife was sufficient to kill both cops, so he was going to his driver’s side car seat where lots of criminals keep the serious firepower.
At that point, to keep Blake from popping up with whatever he may have had, Sheskey opened fire, and as long as Blake was still reaching for something, Sheskey was going to keep firing. Then both officers switched to life-saving measures to save Blake and get him to the hospital.
This is a borderline gray area case between “failure to comply” and “attempted suicide by cop.” But in response, the usual folks started a spree of violence, assault, arson, and looting, resulting in two dead so far.
In Milwaukee, another “usual suspect” murdered someone and then shot himself while running from police, so of course the usual folks looted the mall in protest.
If a group of people think they’re justified in committing assault, arson, and looting every time some idiot with a mile-long rap sheet screws up while committing a crime, Democrat cities, at whatever level of civilization, will not long endure.
Appeasement won’t work because there will always be some idiot perp who manages to get shot or shoot himself, and CNN will always be there to show a ten year out-of-date childhood photo of the little angel who got shot. Social media will be there to get all the facts wrong, and another mall will go up in flames and a half-dozen more people will get killed in the ensuing violence.Report
Yep. This is the cycle we are engaged in, and police reform, though necessary, is in no way sufficient to get us out. There will always be video footage of some idiot involved in violent altercations with cops. If half of such numbskulls are black, we will have enough fodder to burn down and loot every city block a hundred times over.Report
George, you’re beclowning yourself with this. Whether he’s guilty of murder or not will be up to a jury to decide, and for all I know the people he allegedly shot won a very stupid prize after playing a very stupid game.
But I’m not going to sit here and defend some dumb underage kid taking a firearm to defend third party property with no obligation to do so, again, assuming that’s what happened. Only a fool would defend such a course of action no matter the politics of it.Report
But it’s not illegal to take a firearm to defend third party property. Half the jury might be made up of people who may have done just that. My housemate, a public defender for a couple decades, looked at the video and immediately concluded that the not-guilty verdict is a foregone conclusion. It’s a trivial case for the defense.
In a murder trial, you don’t have to establish that your client made the best decision at each and every point in his life. He was never obligated to. You just have to establish that the facts of the case do not fit the legal requirements for murder, given his defenses.Report
Would you let your 17 year old son do this, legal or not?Report
In Wisconsin and Illinois it is illegal to openly carry at 17. Once he crossed that threshold – driven by his mom no less – he ceased to be an innocent and naive victim. He both had no legal obligation to be in Kenosha, nor the right to be armed in Kenosha. Whether or not he can be convicted of murder none of the rest of that stuff applies.
Me thinks either your roommate sucked as a public defender, or you aren’t actually listening.Report
Maybe a good place to remind everyone that Tamir Rice was shot to death at the age of 12 simply for holding a TOY gun.Report
Perhaps you are confusing “open-carry” with pistols. It’s pretty hard to shove an AR-15 down your pants leg.
It’s legal for a 17-year old to carry a rifle, in both Illinois and Wisconsin, with adult supervision – which was everywhere that night, including, apparently, his mom’s. In Wisconsin the age for carrying a long gun like that is 16 and older, as long as it’s for lawful purposes, which includes crazy stuff that might happens where a kid needs to step up.
And under-age possession is a rather toothless charge unless you’re trying to get the parent on a misdemeanor. More relevant is Wisconsin law on the use of lethal force in these kinds of situations.
I don’t know. Didn’t watch the video.
According to the text, it’s unknown why they were chasing him.
What’s the narrative for why they were and why they were justified in doing so and continuing to do so after he appears to be retreating?Report
Well, before you decide that he has a case for exoneration, wouldn’t it be prudent to find out?Report
You seem weirdly insistent on not watching the video. What a weird hill to die on.Report
{{I noticed that too.}}Report
You seem weirdly insistent that watching a video of a mob chasing a teenager is an incontrovertibly strong argument that the teenager had a moral obligation to let himself be beaten to death by a mob.Report
I’m not sure I need to.
You seem to be arguing that someone who watched it would see that he was shooting back and, since I’ve already argued that I’m okay with shooting back, then I don’t need to watch it?
We just have to argue theory.
My argument is that if he was shooting back, then, at the very least, you’re going to have to go after him for something like “HE WAS VIOLATING CURFEW!”
Which, while true, is one of those things that I don’t find to be interesting. I mean… wasn’t everyone there violating curfew? That seems like the least interesting thing out there.
So what’s the argument. You’ve watched the video, you’ve concluded that he was shooting back.
You don’t need me to see the video to argue that shooting back is okay.
I’m sure that, even if you don’t agree with the idea that shooting back is okay, you understand how someone else could hold that viewpoint.
Right? You understand how someone could argue that, right?Report
I think Kazzy’s theory here is that innocent people don’t run from the mobs.Report
If we’re gonna roll in that direction, which group was the mob, the protestors or the armed vigilantes?Report
My theory is that this person shot someone in the middle of the street with a rifle, got up, and walked down the street in the direction of police. People around him yelled that he was the shooter. The cops went in the direction of the gunfire (his and other shots that rang out) and seemed to ignore the white kid walking around with a rifle hanging from his neck immediately after shots were fired and while people pointed and said, “He’s the shooter!”
I can’t and won’t speak to what happened before the video. But I can say that it seems rather odd that cops would walk past someone carrying a gun while they’re responding to gunfire.Report
…so what exactly are we supposed to be getting from that video, then?Report
Then the question was what led up to him shooting back? Did he instigate the entire incident then shoot back? Did he shoot someone, then get mobbed leading to him shooting back? Would that be fine and dandy? That would seem to be important.Report
So you’re seeing the mob chasing him and thinking “well, we don’t know what the guy they’re chasing did”?
Does noticing that you’re thinking that help you understand those who instinctively side with the police shooting a person better?
“While it’s true that he shot the guy in the back seven times, we don’t know what the guy did!”
Hey, Greg. He had a knife in his car.Report
So you are defending the cop shooting Blake? Strong work. Are you even coherent here?
We don’t really have a good story of what started the rittenhouse altercation or do we? Without knowing that it’s hard to understand everything that came after. Sure you are fine with him shooting back w/o knowing what started it, but that seems a bit thin.Report
No, Greg. I’m not defending the Blake shooting.
By defending the people chasing the kid and saying “we don’t know what the kid did!”, aren’t you defending the Blake shooting?Report
No. Again are you even coherent? Both cases need to be fully investigated. There are very different standards of behavior for cops and 17 year olds. We have a lot more video of the blake incident than the rittenhouse one. Maybe i’ve missed it, but have we even heard from people who saw the start of the incident? That would seem to be important. We are really lacking a ton of info in the Rittenhouse situation so even being pro shooting back is jumping way ahead of the evidence unless i’ve missed a bunch of new facts.Report
“You seem to be arguing that someone who watched it would see that he was shooting back…”
Where in the hell did I argue that?
What I’m saying is that the video shows some of what happened so rather than say, “Well, how could anyone know what happened?” you could look at the video and say, “Well, that shows some of what happened and here is the conclusion I may draw from that.”
Even if we draw different conclusions. You are weirdly trying to tell us what conclusions we ought to draw from a video you’ve repeatedly admitted you haven’t watched.Report
” you could look at the video and say, “Well, that shows some of what happened and here is the conclusion I may draw from that.””
…what conclusion is Jaybird supposed to be drawing that’s different from the one he’s already done?Report
That the guy shot someone in the middle of the street and strolled right by the police who seemed to be responding to the shooter and they didn’t even acknowledge the guy with the large gun.Report
I’d say they were driving towards a location where they’d heard shots fired, and they didn’t think it was important to take time out to hassle some guy walking along by himself not committing an obvious crime and not acting in a threatening manner.
Unless you think the cops should be going after dudes who Look Like Suspicious Characters.Report
17 year old boy with a gun…”Not Threatening- Do Not Shoot”
12 year old boy sitting on a swingset holding a toy gun..”Threatening- Shoot”.
I bet there is a logic test that explains these different results.Report
Indeed there is, and right there in your summary. The word you’re looking for is “threatening”.
A simple test is “did your blood pressure spike as your body reacted with a fight or flight response?” That doesn’t mean you’re response is justified, just that there’s a big difference between seeing an armed kid pointing a gun at you in a threatening manner and walking past an old man with a rifle at a gun show.
You’re not going to find some convoluted “white racist” deconstructionist narrative that will explain things that are trivially simple to normal people.Report
By your logic, any one of the BLM protesters could have shot both Mr. and Mrs. McClosky dead.Report
Nope. They were trespassing. You see, for centuries we’ve had to deal with “incidents” where person A shoots person B, and the juries have figured out a handy set of rules that need to apply.
If you think that the people engaged in violent criminal acts have the same rights to use force as the homeowners, you are badly confused. We set up those laws so mobs of criminals didn’t rampage through town, raping, killing, and robbing ma, pa, and little junior.Report
So was Rittenhouse (He was going thru a private parking lot, you see).
So anyone could have defended the property by shooting the trespasser who was an obvious threat.
See how easy this is? Anyone can shoot anyone, anytime.Report
You don’t get to just make stuff up. You see, when a jewelry store or convenient store is getting robbed, there could be multiple armed people in the store. But those of use with common sense (who sit on juries), easily distinguish between the guy whose pointing a gun in the clerk’s face demanding money, and other people in the store who aren’t part of the robbery, and who then take actions to eliminate the threat to the clerk.
Rittenhouse, unlike the BLM folks, wasn’t there to burn car lots, he was there to prevent the car lots from being burned, kind of like a bank security guard who has a gun – in a bank – yet isn’t shot as a bank robber.Report
“Rittenhouse wasn’t there to create disorder, he was there to preserve disorder.”Report
You’re thinking of Democrat cops run by Democrat mayors whose cities are being burned by Democrats.
Rittenhouse was there to help stop all the arson and looting that resulted when an armed guy who raped a 14-year-old resisted arrest and got shot.
Everyone Rittenhouse shot, of course, also had extensive criminal records. That seems to be a feature of the current crisis, as if all the worst elements of society, the gangs, sociopaths, rapists, and burglars have come together as an army like they do in a typical Batman movie.
This is not lost on the voting public, who will weigh in on it in November.Report
And there is certainly nothing in this logic which is subjective or arbitrary!Report
This comes back to my constant refrain, that the CJ system (and the law, far too often) expects a consistency of threat recognition and response from untrained citizens that it refuses to demand of highly trained and experienced police. If a citizen had shot Tamir Rice for waving a toy gun around, there would be a better than even chance he’d be convicted.
But the cops aren’t even indicted.Report
A man walking with a gun, whom people are pointing at and yelling, “He’s the shooter!” shouldn’t draw suspicion when cops are responding to gunfire in their immediate vicinity?
This isn’t rocket science. We have Black guys being shot because cops THOUGHT they had a gun and THOUGHT they might use it to shoot.
Here we have a guy who DEFINITELY had a gun and in the immediate vicinity where people were DEFINITELY using guns and the police response was to… look away?Report
This reminds me of a video I saw where a business owner called the cops to report that some guys were trying to break into his store to loot it, and when the cops showed up they cuffed the store owner (he was black) and let the vandals walk away (they were white).Report
Can’t take any chances.Report
It reminds me of another case where a 17 year old boy was being chased through the streets in fear for his life.
Unfortunately he didn’t have a gun, but George Zimmerman did.Report
If memory serves, after the 17 year old successfully got away, he called a friend and told her he felt disrespected and he was going to go beat up the guy who had been following him.
Zimmerman shot him because the innocent 17 year old was pounding Zimmerman’s head into the pavement.
There is a serious disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality.Report
Which is different than traveling from a state away carrying a rifle specifically for the purpose of confronting protesters?
According to your own logic, both teens were looking for a confrontation and were eligible to be shot.Report
Uh, no. It’s legal to show up to defend property from rioters, arsonists, and looters. In fact, governments generally encourage that because it keeps things from getting out of hand when resources are stretched thin, such as occurs after natural disasters. There’s a reason everybody is in the militia. It’s to band together to defend everything that some other group might want to take or burn, including the government that BLM and Antifa are intending to overthrow through violent means.
The objective of people like the police, the National Guard, and Rittenhouse is to prevent crimes like rioting, arson, looting, and rape. Why is it so impossible for you grasp the basics that everyone else in civilization, at least since ancient Babylon or Egypt, has found to be completely obvious?
What’s apparent is that people who cannot for the life of them understand civilization and how to maintain it, can skate by for a while, but once they start enabling its destruction, they should probably be kicked out of the “we have nice stuff” club.
We’re likely going to have to have a major resorting of society, and it’s not going to be at all pretty.Report
“Looking for a confrontation” is not “eligible to be shot”.
“Carrying a gun” is not “eligible to be shot”.
Actively trying to kill someone is “eligible to be shot”. That describes Martin. That probably also describes “angry mob chasing someone”.
In the later case the situation is still unclear because there are things that would justify “angry mob chasing someone”.
Note, “the police killing someone several days ago” doesn’t even come close to “justification for trying to chase down and beat to death some random white guy”.Report
Was Martin the aggressor, or merely defending himself “Shooting back” to use Jaybird’s phrase?
We have no way of knowing.
Which is the point.
The rules of engagement for firearms is so loose and arbitrary they can justify either Martin or Zimmerman shooting the other.Report
We don’t know everything, but we know far from nothing.
Martin was physically superior to Zimmerman. Zimmerman’s story and beating match Martin’s MMA skills. Martin’s friend’s recount of their phone conversation suggests he was fairly pissed off and intended to physically confront Zimmerman.
If Martin had killed Zimmerman, it’s a lot harder to make a self defense case if you’re starting with, “I felt disrespected but while I was beating him we ended up fighting over his gun and I killed him”.
In the real world no, but let’s move to a slightly different universe where Martin kills Zimmerman and his friend doesn’t tell her story.
Martin claims he was stalked and never broke contact. He confronted Zimmerman verbally. Z pulled the gun, they fought over it. The 911 operator says she told Z to go away and thought he was being stupid. Z’s dojo’s master doesn’t have good things to say.
Martin making a self-defense case is harder but he might be able to do it.
I don’t understand why this is a bad thing. The bar for putting someone in prison is pretty high. Both Zimmerman and Martin were idiots and did stupid things.
I struggle to see good alternatives here. I doubt we want to always imprison the shooter even if it’s self-defense.
However the cause of justice is certainly NOT served by pretending the Martin was a thin 14-year-old child and not able to do what he did.Report
The good alternative is to establish laws (like Stillwater posted) which take into account the fact that all human interactions are complex and the nuances of who retreated or advanced, who disengaged or didn’t, are tremendously important.
The good outcome of this would be a world where people understand that they have a duty to disengage and de-escalate and don’t feel license to act out vigilante fantasies.
The argument of “I can shoot anyone who I believe is a threat” is what I keep attacking here.Report
I have mixed feelings about this. It seems like a reasonable idea, but I’m not sure I trust the law to be able to tell the difference between “vigilante fantasies” and “the police aren’t supplying enough order”.
Odds are very good that this kid and Zimmerman were/are idiots… but they’re idiots with a point. The protesters are burning stuff, Zimmerman’s area had crime problems. Laws which insist that the police have control when the police don’t have control are asking the law abiding to become victims.
I also expect any laws which insist on a duty to de-escalate will instantly be used against the protesters.Report
But TTBOMK, there are no laws, outside of maybe Texas, that say that.
In every state, self defense is an affirmative defense, you have to meet a reasonable standard that you were truly in danger of serious injury or death.
SYG laws and Castle Doctrine merely remove the duty to retreat. And the reason those laws were passed was because those legislatures did a crap job of defining the limits of that duty, which allowed DAs to impose arbitrary and capricious limits on what they felt the duty required.Report
Not being a lawyer, I’m mostly responding to the arguments made here and elsewhere that use this logic.
For example, the McCloskys, who actually pointed guns at people, threatening them with deadly force.
There isn’t any reasonable case that they feared for their lives or that any sort of engagement had even happened.
Yet the idea that they had a right to use deadly force is so attractive to so many people that they are now stars of the right.
The love of gun violence is deeply embedded in our culture, and its adherents are constantly working to find ways to justify it.Report
They feared for their lives. A violent mob had just broken through the gate, destroying it. You can’t argue that the mobs aren’t violent after months of videos showing them hurling Molotov cocktails at police, assaulting bystanders, and burning down businesses.Report
STRRRRRETTTTCH that definition wide!Report
The governor and state AG intervened. Trump had the couple speak at the RNC convention (the same convention where violent mobs of protesters physically attacked Rand Paul and many others, and started chanting about burning down a Catholic church last night).
The local DA may be in serious trouble for telling police forensics to make Mrs. McCloskey’s gun able to fire (it was a non-working courtroom prop) to justify charges against her. A prosecutor manufacturing false evidence is a very serious offense.Report
I’m old enough to remember when the conservative ideal of masculinity and independence was that if you found someone f***ing with you, like stalking you, you confronted them and kicked their ass if the didn’t stop.
Now the conservative ideal is that if you confront someone who’s f***ing with you, you deserve to get shot.Report
Zimmerman shot him because the innocent 17 year old was pounding Zimmerman’s head into the pavement.
Deliberate distortions of reality like this are we can’t have nice things.Report
That’s what the jury found. I’m sure CNN’s narrative was different, just like the “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” and the “mostly unarmed” Jacob Blake.
They’ve been gas lighting the left for quite a while now.Report
What are you talking about? Zimmerman’s claim to self defense was exactly this and he had injuries on his head to back that up.Report
Christ listening to you defend that guy is embarrassing, Dark. He stalked the kid because was black, the kid responded. Zimmerman got his ass kicked and pulled a gun. He shouldn’t have f***ed with the kid.Report
We’ve since found out that the testimony provided by Martin’s “girlfriend” was completely false. She and Martin’s family’s lawyers made it all up, including the relationship.Report
What you just said doesn’t disagree with what I said.
Further, if you’re going to stress de-escalation and so forth, it’s odd to skip that Martin had totally eluded Zimmerman and then went back to kick his ass.
There’s also the issue on whether or not Zimmerman’s actions rose to the point of justifying getting his ass kicked.Report
There’s also the issue on whether or not Zimmerman’s actions rose to the point of justifying getting his ass kicked.
jfcReport
Assume Z didn’t have a gun and Martin beat him up but stopped with that. The police had been called, they grab everyone. What happens then?
Does Martin have justification for breaking Zimmerman’s nose and whatever else?
Zimmerman said nothing to Martin. They were on a public road. Z racially profiled Martin as a violent thug and was following him because of that. The duration of the following was a few minutes.
Did I miss anything? Because I’d think from what’s on the table that Martin doesn’t have legal justification for beating up Z.Report
You’re embarrassing yourself Dark.Report
So no answer.
After we strip away the emotion, Zimmerman didn’t deserve to have violence inflicted on him.
Martin was breaking the law by putting his hands on him. Zimmerman was not breaking the law by following him around and reporting him to the police as someone he’s not familiar with.Report
Dude. If Z doesn’t have a gun then why would he even go near Martin. Z just calls the police, sits in his car and sips coffee. Z doesn’t do anything to put himself or Martin in danger. Z just stays the F away. Boom…or actually no boom….nobody dead…nobody beat up.Report
Z had such extreme delusions of competency that I’m not sure his actions change even without the gun.
And I think he started doing CC after this sort of thing became a lifestyle and not before it did. Martin was the 29th person he’d reported. Z had been doing this for years.Report
https://abcnews.go.com/2020/george-zimmerman-jury-told-injuries-insignificant/story?id=19552856
You might recall that Zimmermann never testified under oath. “Pounding his head on the pavement” was something he said during interviews that is not backed up by medical evidence.Report
I don’t think you get it. It shows that Trayvon was beating Zimmerman’s head into the pavement or Zimmerman wouldn’t have had head injuries to photograph. Those injuries don’t have to be “life-threatening” to establish that a little more head pounding could be life threatening. And of course the point was just to knock Zimmerman out and then beat him to death or shoot him.
It’s kind of like when a policemen takes a round through his calf or the top of his ear and returns fire. The fact that none of his injuries are life-threatening does not imply that his life wasn’t under threat.
ABC, of course, assumes it’s viewers are stupid. They are perhaps largely correct about that.Report
Your own link has the examiner claim the number of head-on-pavement encounters might have been as few as one, i.e. that you can get two injuries on the back of your head from one slam.
There is a world of difference between saying “the one head on pavement thing that happened wasn’t life threatening” and “he never had his head slammed against the pavement”.
“Backed up by medical evidence” is a good way to describe what we do have.
The real point you could make is “Martin was just trying to kick his ass and not kill him”. That is a possibility… but how many times do we require someone’s head be slammed into the pavement before they’re allowed to think it’s serious?Report
Also no evidence his head was slammed on pavement. He could have tripped and fallen. He could have hit his head on something after a shove. There’s no telling, since Zimmerman’s statements were wildly inconsistent and he killed the only other person who would know the true story.
But the story that Zimmerman was having his head pounded into the pavement repeatedly is so entrenched now, there’s almost no purpose in pointing out that it’s BS.
Zimmerman also had many stories about Martin and the gun again, none of them told under oath. The only physical evidence is that there’s none Martin ever went neat it.Report
(wiki) following the altercation with Martin, Zimmerman was diagnosed with a closed fracture of his nose, two black eyes, lacerations to the back of his head, a minor back injury, and bruising in his upper lip and cheek.[167]
The police photos show this too. While it’s possible he tripped and fell several times right before meeting Martin, that’s not the way to bet.
An FDLE analysis of Martin’s body and clothes described the distance as “a contact shot”.
As for Z’s statements, I seriously doubt he could tell the same story twice and he’s clearly not a calm, neutral observer.
Our knowledge of what happened is far from perfect, but Martin getting shot while in the process of beating up Zimmerman seems to be reasonably well established. We have the physical condition of both men, both of their statements (Martin’s to his friend before he died), and the calls for help recorded by 911.Report
I know folks have strong opinions about Martin & Zimmerman, but there is no value in constantly re-litigating it. Zimmerman had his day in court & was acquitted.
At this point, no one is changing their min, so let’s let it drop.Report
I am not sure I agree with that Oscar. The re-litigating, not that no one has changed their minds.
The essential problem with the Zimmerman case is that is rather neatly splits two competing narratives of life in the modern US. Is it about a mano, f any race, being cautious about his neighborhood? Or about how a [white] man accosted a black man?
At this point, it has nothing to do with the findings of the court. Until there is a reckoning about which story best represents the country and its history, the argument will always be recurring.Report
Martin was never chased. He charged and attacked Zimmerman, knocked him down, started slamming Zimmerman’s head into the concrete, and tried to take Zimmerman’s gun, which he hadn’t known Zimmerman even had on him up to that point. That’s when Zimmerman beat Martin to the gun and fired. There was a court case about it an everything.
You seem to be horribly confused by all this, as are many tens of thousands of people who are sitting in prison. You’re trying to make it much harder than it is.
Do you do this when you watch movies, too? Wouldn’t that make the plot completely mystifying?Report
The Martin/Zimmerman conversation ended up getting one of the masthead writers banned from the site so maybe we shouldn’t have it again.Report
“Here we have a guy who DEFINITELY had a gun and in the immediate vicinity where people were DEFINITELY using guns and the police response was to… look away?”
…yes?
You got really really mad at Jaybird because he said he didn’t watch the video, and it turns out that what you wanted us to learn from watching the video was that…the cops didn’t hassle a white dude? Like, that’s it?Report
You’re not bothered by what you saw in the video?Report
“You’re not bothered by what you saw in the video?”
I ask again, again again, what you think this video should mean to Jaybird.
I mean, if you want to say “anyone who looks bad on video obviously should have been arrested by the cops,” well, hello Karen, the manager is right over there.Report
I think we should be scrutinizing cops who behaved as the ones in the video did. Instead we’re focused on whether Rittenhouse shot first or second. It’s a Star Wars debate. And meaningless.
Again, Rittenhouse is the coldsore. Those cops are the virus. Why does everyone want to focus on the coldsore? I dare say because they may be okay with the virus.Report
“I think we should be scrutinizing cops who behaved as the ones in the video did. Instead we’re focused on whether Rittenhouse shot first or second.”
The whole discussion is about what Rittenhouse did. You brought up the video in a way that suggested it said something about Rittenhouse.Report
I brought up the video and immediately mentioned the cops, then fell into Jaybird’s trap. I’m done with that now.
I want to talk about the cops. Do you? If not, why engage me?Report
Again…
Initial exchange re: the video
Kazzy in reply to Jaybird
August 26, 2020 at 9:40 am
https://www.tmz.com/2020/08/26/kenosha-shooting-2-dead-1-injured-jacob-blake-protest-police-blm/
Here is the video.
Jaybird in reply to Kazzy
August 26, 2020 at 9:59 am
This made me wonder… is Kenosha a college town?
Yep. It is.
Kazzy in reply to Jaybird
August 26, 2020 at 10:24 am
Can you elaborate?
The image of the shooter walking by the cops, gun hanging from his neck, and them not responding is… well… something.Report
What’s weird is if I were to watch the video, I’d probably pay attention to the parts where there was action and not the parts where there wasn’t action.
But if I watched the video where the kid walked past the cops…
Would that lead me to a conclusion that I couldn’t see why a jury wouldn’t find for Homicide?
I mean, if the main argument were that “this video is evidence that society is totally effed up!”, well…
I agree.
I think we’re on a course toward divorce or war.
And as has been pointed out, divorce doesn’t seem to be on the table either.Report
The cops response — or lackthereof — was action.
Rittenhouse’s actions are the coldsore.
The police’s are the virus that causes the coldsore.
We can debate what Rittenhouse did or didn’t do and what happened before and what can be proven. I fell into your trap of going there (because I’m pretty confident you DID watch the video and are playing your usual games to manipulate the discussion) but I won’t further.
I don’t care about Rittenhouse. I care about those cops who decided that a man with a gun amidst chaos and gunfire was a “Nothing to see here” moment. That is far, far worse than anything Rittenhouse did.
THAT is why we are heading towards divorce or war.Report
Nope, I didn’t watch the video.
But I did say “I’m pro-shooting back” and you immediately took that to say that I’m defending the kid.
Which tells me that you looked at the video and you would describe the kid as “shooting back” which, given what I said, means that I’m pro-what the kid did.
That right there tells me that there’s a lot of stuff going on in the video and reading the text descriptions of what’s happening in the video leads me to the conclusion that… yeah. I can see the kid not getting found guilty for homicide.
If you want to discuss the cops…
Hey. I am fully for Police Reform. Up to and including discussing disbanding the current one and rebuilding a new one from the ground up. (Maybe without a police union this time.)
The cops aren’t doing their jobs or, if they are, they’ve been deceiving the public as to what their jobs “really” consist of.
The cops do not have a duty to protect.
We saw in the CHAZ/CHOP what happened when the cops abdicated their roles.
Kenosha is another example of such.
But, for some reason, the police protestors spend more time setting businesses on fire than police stations.
For the record: I oppose, 100%, setting unrelated businesses on fire in response to a police shooting.Report
I’ll sit this game out. You have fun though.Report
Well, if you want to see a post that isn’t playing around, Oscar wrote a great one about what police reform will likely need to entail:
Check it out.Report
Why would cops think a man with a gun was “something” to see here? They’d been talking to the kid earlier. He’s a very nice kid who supports the blue, and was there with scads of other like-minded individuals and business owners who don’t want to see Kenosha burn to the ground. He’s not the one throwing bricks at police officers, he’s one of the people who were getting things thrown at them – by the mob who throws bricks at police officers.
The anrgy mobs of violent criminals know no restraint. They even attacked the Kenosha Dinosaur Discovery Museum. What kind of inhuman vermin would do something like that?Report
Maybe they saw a kindred spirit:
White supremacists and militias have infiltrated police across US, report says
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/27/white-supremacists-militias-infiltrate-us-police-reportReport
Does that information make you wonder about the motivations of the people who support Police Unions?Report
It would, if I didn’t also know that the set of of “people who support Police Unions” contains nearly everyone in America, from every political persuasion.Report
Jaybird: There’s no way Chip can wriggle outa *this* jam.
Chip
unconvincinglyeasily wriggles out of the jam.Ahhh, well….Report
It’s weird where the associations in the Guilt-By-Association always tend to stop.Report
Here’s the part I don’t get:
Presumably, Chip posted that bit about white supremacists infiltrating police departments and unions for *persuasive* purposes, to incline people to view the police in a certain way. But when someone *did* take the bait and draw the obvious conclusion, he backtracked to defending police unions with empty platitudes about their popular support.
But here’s the thing: there’s nothing *benign* about cop unions being infiltrated by white supremacists unless you think white supremacy is itself benign. Chip doesn’t think that.
So rather than agree with *hisownself*, Chip tried to wriggled outa that *jam* by implying that white supremacists support cop unions too, so the fact that they’re being infiltrated by white supremacists is okey dokey cuz representative democracy or something.
100% stone cold bizarre.Report
I don’t know why we keep circling back to the assumption that there is a big disagreement among us about police unions.
I thought it was pretty much agreed, by us lefty types here on OT, that we are OK with stripping police unions of their control of discipline, while leaving them free to collectively bargain over pay and benefits.
That’s my stated position at least.
So a response to the charge of being infiltrated by white supremacists with “whaddabout unions” just seem strange.
There seems to be a determined effort to make police unions a binary all or nothing proposition, when we’ve repeated shown that isn’t the case.Report
when we’ve repeated shown that isn’t the case.
Akshully, I cited (and linked to a study) showing that it *is* the case. Remember? It’s the one you said you couldn’t comment on.Report
I’m not talking about a study, I’m stating my position that police unions SHOULD be stripped of their control over discipline and still retain collective bargaining rights over pay and benefits.Report
wriggle wriggle
Seriously Chip, you should read the study I linked to way back when. It shows that everything you’ve said on this thread is wrong.
Now, granted, it’s only *one* study ….Report
I’m wrong…about my own viewpoint?
You keep inviting me to an disagreement, to which I keep politely declining.Report
I thought it was that we still haven’t seen any evidence that Police Unions contribute to toxicity and that any reports that people might dig up that demonstrate Police Unions contributing to toxicity are too complicated to really get on board with so Intellectual Humility demands that we not reach any conclusions.
But, okay, maybe we should not let Police Unions continue to control discipline.
What do you have against Unions anyway? Did a policeman kill one of your best friends while she was in police custody?Report
I’ve heard it said that the REAL police union isn’t the formal one that gets certified by the NLRB, but the informal one that is the deep sense of solidarity among police officers, even the ones who aren’t represented by a union.
That the sense of solidarity of the Thin Blue Line is what makes them believe that they are unanswerable and alienated from the people they ostensibly serve.
Therefore, this argument goes, even if the police no longer have collective bargaining rights, they will still have this union, this sense of being occupiers in a hostile land.
I’m partial to this argument, but agree is a debatable point. I can see how some people might think that if only we decertify the police unions, they will be more effectively disciplined.Report
I can see how some people might think that if only we decertify the police unions, they will be more effectively disciplined.
Bizarre.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m super happy you’re beginning to see the light on this issue. Welcome aboard, and all that.Report
Chip, it’s not a magic bullet.
But it is a pre-req.
And people who argue for the importance of unions in the face of people who want to start doing the pre-reqs of reform are not only preventing reform, they’re preventing the pre-reqs of reform.
If you want a list of reforms that I’m on board with, I can link you to a post.
But it’s weird how any one of the things that gets pointed out in the *LIST* gets a “oh, so you think that item #3 is a magic bullet?”Report
The weakness of the pre-req argument is that unionization doesn’t seem to be a defining variable.
There are plenty of nonunion police departments around the country that we can study. Are they more well disciplined? Have fewer complaints about brutality?
Not that I can see.
Secondly, it ignores the idea I propose, of limiting collective bargaining to just pay and benefits. What is the objection to this?
Which is why I am partial to the “solidarity” theory, which stresses the role of the informal sense of belonging as the operative variable.Report
GILLEZEAU: We found that after officers gained access to collective bargaining rights that there was a substantial increase in killings of civilians.
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/876293261/the-link-between-disproportionate-police-brutality-and-police-unions
The Washington post also has statements along this line but they’re behind a paywall.Report
We also linked to a study showing increased toxicity in Police Unions and the argument was that Intellectual Humility demanded that we not reach any conclusions. Here’s when we discussed Police Unions in 2018. Here’s when we discussed that discussion back in May.
Which allows us, a month later, to say stuff like “I *STILL* haven’t seen any evidence for your assertions!”Report
And here’s what I said at the time:
I said I have no way of independently assessing the study and I still don’t. Because, y’know, I’m not a sociologist and don’t have the expertise to dig into the weeds of the study.
And I doubt anyone else here does either.
So I could just as easily post a link and say “This study by Professor Smart E. Pantz says the first study is bogus” and no one here would have any way to refute it.
But look, if you want to say that the strength of police unions gives a tremendous boost to the legal defense of police officers, sure that’s a valid point.
So if someone wants to restrict police unions to just bargaining over pay and conditions, I wouldn’t have much problem with that.
…
The link Dark Matter posted is a snippet of a conversation where the link between collective bargaining rights and killing was an assertion from an unpublished and un-peer reviewed paper.
Look, my support of police unions here is pretty soft, limited to solely collective bargaining on pay.
It is possible that you are right that simply having collective bargaining by itself makes them less accountable, even if it is just limited to pay.I just don’t think the case has been proven yet.
The white supremacy problem seems to go much deeper than mere discipline.Report
Look, my support of police unions here is pretty soft, limited to solely collective bargaining on pay.
So, let’s suppose that unions won’t permit the rollback on its power and uses leverage – strikes and so on – to prevent it from happening. Does your “soft support” shift to anti-cop union at that point?
Cuz we all know that cops won’t allow a rollback of their power without extorting city government to prevent it from happening.Report
I agree with your comment to Swami, that there is really only one police reform movement on the table and from the rumblings I see around the lefty-sphere, collective bargaining for cops may likely be collateral damage along the way.
My nuanced proposal sounds great to me, but I recognize that in the heat of battle, nuance and subtlety often get lost.
So yeah, if they turn it into an all or nothing proposition, then they lose my support entirely.Report
It seems weird to bang on “I haven’t seen any evidence for X” when you’re so willing to run to “I’m not a sociologist” when presented with academic studies on X.
It comes across as “I haven’t seen any evidence for X (and I don’t intend to).”Report
What is it you’re hoping for?
“Hey, this paper which no one has read or reviewed says X, so that’s good enough for me”?Report
I’d settle for “I’ve seen evidence for police unions creating toxicity (or, at least, allowing it to fester).”
Maybe then give a short speech about your own biography. “As a good member of the left, I know that unions are important and, seriously, I wish that all Americans had access to a union.”
And then, from there, talk about why you’d want to keep police unions around despite the toxicity (“as a member of the left, I can’t bring myself to call for a union, even a police union, to be abolished”). And *THEN* talk about how you’ve changed your mind from a full-throated defense of Police Unions in particular (like, you don’t want anyone to think that you’re against any other union out there) to a belief that Police Unions should be limited in scope.
Instead of saying “I haven’t seen evidence for X” and then, when presented with evidence for X, pointing out that you aren’t going to look at the evidence for X, given a lack of training at looking at evidence.Report
Sure, I’m happy to say I’ve seen some evidence. And I’m happy to grant that the case for police unions is open, and not as closed as I once thought.
Whether this evidence grows to “convincingly against collective bargaining for police” is still an ongoing question.
Because academic papers are one bit of evidence, but can never be conclusive all on their own.
As with climate science or any other science, they need to be corroborated by real world demonstrations, like massive glacial melt.
In this case, we would need to test the theory and see what happens when police unions are either broken entirely or just stripped of power over discipline.
If misconduct goes down, the theory is corroborated. If not, it isn’t.Report
Here’s a tweet from your beloved NYPD union Chip. I’ll bungle the link, of course, but they’re demanding DeBlaso resign because he said Trump is afraid of diversity.
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsReport
Awesome.
For the record, you should read about Camden, New Jersey if you want to see what “abolish the police” has looked like in practice, at least in one place.Report
It worked great, too. The key was that by putting in a strong Republican governor and working with conservatives to bypass powerful Democratic machinery, real reform achieved. Other troubled cities should follow suit if they want to chart a way out of their current conflagration.Report
Yes, we should study Camden.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/06/16/camden-nj-police-reboot-is-being-misused-debate-over-police-reform/
Tl;DR is that after drconian budget cuts, the city disbanded the city force and created a countywide force.
The new [nonunion] force actually made things worse, not better, with skyrocketing levels of de minimis arrests and excessive force complaints.
It was only after local activists forced the police to agree to re-write their use of force policy emphasizing de-escalation instead of suppression, that things began to get better.
Which seems to validate the approach of changing police culture, as much as their structure.Report
Wait. You cited a WaPo opinion piece as source material? Oh, Chip. {sigh}
Try these, literally the first two links that came up on google:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/09/us/disband-police-camden-new-jersey-trnd/index.html
https://www.marketplace.org/2020/06/17/camden-new-jersey-community-policing/Report
Thanks.
Both of these links pretty much align with both the WaPo piece and the Politico piece, in that they stress the “Community Oriented Policing” model.Report
Wait. You cited a WaPo opinion piece as source material? Oh, Chip. {sigh}Report
The original link was to Politico, which had essentially the same information, reaching the same conclusion, that changing the culture, in addition to changing the structure was key to making improvements.
Are there contradictory accounts? Feel free to post them.Report
Were there any pre-reqs to changing the culture?Report
Yes, in this case breaking the union.
And then having a police chief and city government that took reform seriously.
And a local activist group to pressure them.
And a financial crisis that offered no other options.
As with all things, there are plenty of pre-reqs.Report
And decreasing the number of officers from 250 down to 400.
Oh, wait…Report
Has anyone looked into what may/may not have happened in Jacksonville (granted, a long time ago) when the county went bankrupt and the city absorbed them?Report
And that this is one HECK of a lot easier without a union working to prevent change and accountability.Report
https://publicintelligence.net/ules-ngic-gangs-infiltrating-law-enforcement-and-correctional-agencies/
I know you see White Supremecy(tm) under every bed and in every mirror, but it seems this problem is not confined to one racial group, no matter the panic du jour.Report
They don’t mention Asians, but you just know the big problem is infiltration by ninjas. I’m sure people like Chip would see ninjas everywhere – if they could see ninjas, which they can’t. But take my word for it, they’re freakin’ everywhere.Report
They attempt it, but does the link say they are more successful than white supremacists?
[no, it does not]
But we do have plenty of documented cases of white supremacists, Klan member and Neo-Nazis serving as active duty police officers.Report
Uhm… That is some nice reading comprehension there Lou…
Yes, it does say that both are problems and doesn’t handwave either of them away like you are trying to do.Report
I wasn’t aware that there is a big problem with Black and Hispanic gang infiltration in police departments.
Got any sources for where they have been found?
Because there’s like a dozen sources showing a lot of white supremacist, Klan and militia types in law enforcement.Report
Unreal.
Since you didn’t read it, I will help:
and
and
and those are just a few from the precis you get straight from the link, there is much more in the actual download. It even talks about the problem in places as far apart as Mexico and New Zealand, surely bastions of the KKK…
Unreal.Report
Hey, I said I wasn’t aware.
So since there are now plenty of documented cases of both street gang and white supremacists infiltrating law enforcement, lets agree that the new administration should do something serious about it.Report
Well, I have known about the issue going back at least to the eighties, so I bet the current admin will have as much success rooting it out as the last five, D’s and R’s alike.Report
Biden praises the good old days – when the entirety of law enforcement in his beloved Democrat South was made up of white supremacists. So how can it be a problem?Report
According to wiki: There was an arrest warrant against Blake for criminal trespass, domestic abuse, and sexual assault.[5][6][7][8] During the encounter, Blake was tasered and scuffled with officers.[9] He was shot as he opened the driver’s door to his SUV and leaned in.Report
God help that city if this happens.Report
Kenosha has to survive some tests in advance of that one, though. If the DA decides that, upon a careful and considered review of the evidence, there will be no charges filed against officer Sheskey, that city will light up.Report
Well, that’s also going to happen, so they might as well prepare for it. Most police might not have let Blake get to his car door, but once it opened, I think most would make the same choice that Sheskey did, lest the guy pull out an Uzi or something.Report
You do see the problem here, right? The police screwed up keeping control of the situation (they lost control of themselves, and thus the situation), and thus a man was shot.
Both cops should never be cops again, at the very least. You can’t train that kind of cool under crisis into someone.Report
If I was playing the odds, I would say this cop is more likely to be commended for his actions than convicted of any wrong doing. I am betting on at least one major riot per month until progressives change their black-victimology narrative (or it snows in hell, whichever comes first)
It is so weird just sitting here and watching people spin themselves into chaos. You can try and explain the ramifications of their framing, but it doesn’t matter. They are committed to their narrative and they will watch the world burn as it plays out.Report
If I was playing the odds, I would say this cop is more likely to be commended for his actions than convicted of any wrong doing.
No commendations because before very long the City of Kenosha’s lawyers and insurance companies are going to tell them there are going to be some lean years when the civil suit settlements come down.
Just as idle speculation, I wonder if Wisconsin had a law like Colorado’s new one — which puts the officer on the hook for a portion of any civil settlements in excess force cases — if the officer would have shot anyone in the back seven times. Or if he would have left the force.Report
Jacob Blake’s ex-girlfriend’s aunt is very angry that the officer shot him in the back seven times – and not fifty times. However, I don’t think she has any grounds for a civil suit against him on that count.Report
Wow, they got that right.Report
Man, I gotta say, there is a whoooooooole lotta Monday morning quarterbacking goin’ on in this thread.Report
That is the nature of any shooting, be it cop or not.Report
These types of clashes are inevitable as I have been arguing for months now. If the police are not empowered to thoroughly squelch rioters and looters and unless they are able to enforce curfews, then citizens are going to take matters in their own (probably even more incompetent) hands.
And if Trump loses (very likely) there is nothing to stop conservatives from encouraging people to fight back against left wing rioters. This is going to get real bad real fast.
The solution is to get behind our cops in restoring law and order and repressing every riot while also pursuing police reform. Yes, we need to do both at the same time.
Police abuse of power is the initial cause.
Left wing “whitewashing” of rioting and the desire to “emasculate” the effectiveness of our police is the amplifying catalyst.
Let’s chew gum and walk. Let’s get behind our cops to restore civility while demanding that they also reform.Report
These types of clashes are inevitable as I have been arguing for months now.
There is nothing inevitable about a cop shooting a black man in the back 7 times. It’s a choice on that cops part. There is no necessity compelling his actions.
The solution is to get behind our cops in restoring law and order
lol it’s like you don’t even know what people are protestingReport
Another lol at “our cops”. “My team, yay!”Report
LOL, it is like you can’t even read.
Read the part about holding cops accountable, that applies to abuses of police power.
The term “inevitable” was applied to clashes between rioters and people who are against riots in the absence of the cops doing their job.
My team, if there was one, would be called “the rule of law.” And I will repeat that it requires both reform and robust support of law and order.Report
My team, if there was one, would be called “the rule of law.”
ROFLOLOLOL!
Right now, it’s effectively *legal* for cops to shoot unarmed people in the back 7 times. Are you seriously this dense, Swami? The protests in Minneapolis began in earnest *after* the city DA said he wasn’t going to press charges against Chauvin.Report
Nobody is objecting to protests. My comment clearly and repeatedly objected to riots. Do you get the difference?
It is not appropriate to burn down things and loot stores and attack people because you disagree with how the DA performed his job. This is pretty much by definition the abandonment of the rule of law.
My guess is there is very little likelihood Chauvin gets convicted of murder. Manslaughter maybe. So we will get more riots.
Will you join me in making an unequivocal stand against riots, looting and mob violence?
Will you stand with me in demanding justice through the system, not outside of it?
I am truly interested in your answers.Report
Will you join me in making an unequivocal stand against riots, looting and mob violence?
What does it mean to take an unequivocal stand against riots? Do I have to show up in Kenosha with a rifle to defend a used car lot?Report
No, that is exactly what I argued against. Reread the rule of law, work within the system part, smarty pants.
Can you answer the questions? Are you against riots and looting? Do you support the police firmly and decisively squelching riots in a professional yet incrementally more forceful way? If not, why not?Report
I’ll give a bit of a nuanced answer here, Swami, because I think you’re being sincere in asking.
I’m opposed to rioting and looting for the reasons you say, but also because in general it’s counterproductive. Given that, I’m *especially* opposed to rioting and looting from white people who aren’t directly affected by the practices people are protesting. I think they’re opportunitsts, cynical idiots, self-interested hell-raisers.
The one exception to the general rule *I* have would be if black people, pushed beyond the breaking point, engaged in that type of violent action. I wouldn’t condone it, but I would very much understand it. As it is, the vast VAST majority of mob-related violence I hear about and see on videos is perpetrated by angry white people, most likely in express contradiction of the will of black community leaders.Report
Okay, Honest and direct answer. Thanks.
I am against all rioting and looting. I believe blacks are, like every race, lucky to be born in this country at this time. We are among the luckiest one tenth of one percent of people to have ever lived, and we need to appreciate it at the risk that we lose it.
If anyone wants to make this country even better, I wholly support them as long as they do so legally or within the system. If I was to make a suggestion of where to start I would say to look at culture. Following the line of reasoning Deirdre McCloskey uses, I would go even further and suggest that before we can change culture we need to change our framing and narrative of the situation.Report
In the extremely unlikely event he’s convicted of manslaughter there will be rejoicing because a cop went to jail for killing an innocent man.
In the VERY likely event he is exonerated then, yes, there will be rioting. And frankly the city and the police will have brought it on themselves.Report
Well, that’s just it, seems to me. The quickest, most effective way to end the rioting would be for the Kenosha DA to charge Sheskey with murder one (book him Danno). Only then would the Kenosha CJ system have the legitimate authority to crack down on the rioters, looters and (what was Swami’s third thing?) mob violence.
As it is, the politicians are trying to tap dance their way through a mine field rather than just disarming the explosives.Report
Wouldn’t the DA have to kill Jacob Blake to make a manslaughter or homicide charge stick?Report
He also wouldn’t say “book him Danno”.Report
I hope you are right, but I am less optimistic. I think the mobs will be infuriated if he beats the murder rap. They are convinced it was intentional murder, not some accidental complication.
By the way, what does, “killing an innocent man” line mean? Obviously he wasn’t a convicted man yet, as that isn’t how the system works. What he was was a suspected criminal who was freaking out on drugs and resisting arrest in the process of overdosing on illegal substances.
If placing ones knee on the neck of a man having a borderline psychotic episode is standard operating procedure, I would agree that Minneapolis brought it on themselves. But to the extent this is operating procedure (I frankly have no idea) then Chauvin’s lawyer will use this as a defense, thus increasing the likelihood of acquittal, and again we get angry mobs.
I am asking all people who care about their country to stand with me and stop trying to incite or excuse riots and mob violence.Report
Everyone, most especially the protesters, wants “Law and Order”.
The point of the protests is that black people are the victims of lawless disorder.
They want a law that protects them. They want an order that defends their rights and freedoms.Report
Poppycock. As I have stressed for three months now, the disparities in treatment between blacks and whites at the hands of cops is primarily a factor of 10x levels of violent crime committed by a dysfunctional subculture amplified by a dishonest media trying to sell a bogus narrative.
Half of all police abuses are going to happen, statistically, to the 3 percent of the population committing half the violent crime. Full stop.
Absent huge revisions in criminality, the stats on confrontations, won’t change, regardless of how much reform we do (and much is needed).
Every time the police appear to abuse their power, the appropriate response is to seek accountability. The absurd response is to pretend it is racism even when there is no indication that this is the case. That just inflames people and is the path to total fishing chaos.
Let me repeat. Half of all stupid confrontations will occur to that tiny sub pop committing half of all violent crime. It’s a numbers thing. Even if we reduce police abuse a hundredfold, we will still get at least one video a week of abuse, played 24\7 to inflame the masses.
It is time we act like mature, responsible adults. Or we watch this experiment in liberal democracy go down the tubes and watch our loved ones buried in mass graves, as we wait our turn. But sometimes I think that is exactly what some people want.Report
You have a remarkable degree of confidence in describing a world you have never experienced.Report
I just moved out of the Chicago area (thank God). They actually map every murder by block. Quite eye opening. It is, to put in mildly, not exactly a random distribution.Report
The argument BLM makes re: police practices as they apply to black communities isn’t limited to cops murdering them, Swami. It’s about an entire culture of institutional racism exhibited by police departments across the country. The death-rate is only one data point on the continuum. You’ve denied that there is systemic racism in policing practices. I’ve provided studies demonstrating that there is. Studies which you concede constitute evidence of institutional racism. Given that, I can only assume that you’re being willfully ignorant of the deeper issues in play in service of some other agenda which, personally speaking, I don’t understand.
Eg, you’ve criticized BLM for framing the issue of police misconduct as motivated by racial animus, yet you concede that DOJ studies have established that differential policing in departments across the country is caused, in part, by racial animus.
I just don’t get how you square that obvious inconsistency in your own head.Report
Key word in my opening sentence above is “primarily.” I put it there for a reason and considered highlighting it.
I agree that racism exists in this world. I agree with you that it was probably a factor in general in Ferguson. I am sure it will be found in other places too. But it is a minor part of the issue, and until we get violence rates comparable between demographic subset events, we can expect confrontations with the police will be wildly disproportionate.
Racism — a form of tribalism — is, like flatulence, theft, and the will to dominate others, a sad part of human nature which is unlikely to ever be completely eradicated. I would strongly warn against tearing down the system based upon our inevitable imperfections. Reforms, yes. Riots and looting and defunding the police. No. Absolutely not.
From the first day, I have stressed that framing general police abuse as systemic racism is a recipe for disaster. Really bad, people-shooting-each-other-in-the-streets levels of disaster.
This will not be the last. It is just the start until the narrative changes. Hopefully Biden can change the narrative. I can only pray. Conversations with you and Chip certainly don’t make me feel optimistic, though.Report
This will not be the last. It is just the start until the narrative changes.
The narrative won’t change until police practices change, Swami. Here’s one way for the narrative to become less polarizing: people like you (deniers, if you will) agree that it’s an accurate description.Report
With the current narrative it will not be sufficient for police practices to change. Let us unrealistically assume that the police become perfect angels and we never get another example of “true” abuse. We will still have a weekly video of “apparent” abuse where video is taken out of context or gives a misleading view. Net result…riots!
And even if there were no more videos taken, we still have the inconvenient truth that half of all arrests for violent crimes are blacks. That is just as easily spun into a need to burn down the system. And your team will indeed have a field day spinning it this way. Footage at 11.
Police practices do indeed need to change. But blacks also need to extinguish their subculture of violence, And the left needs to drop this narrative of the Biggest problem Blacks face is our justice system. The biggest problem they face is a dysfunctional and subculture which promotes violence, crime, and irresponsibility.Report
” We will still have a weekly video of “apparent” abuse where video is taken out of context or gives a misleading view. Net result …Riots.”
Well, since we can’t stop the riots why don’t we focus on changing the cop’s hehavior?Report
Wasn’t that my first recommendation?Report
So you agree with BLM then. Great!Report
Re: Agreeing with BLM.
To what extent do we want to say that the Mostly Peaceful Protests are in alignment with BLM?Report
My own view is that the rioters and looters aren’t BLM.
But let’s suppose that they are. Let’s also suppose that the set of reforms they proposed *perfectly* matched Swami’s ideal reform package.
Should he *not* support BLM’s reform efforts because some of them are rioters/looters?Report
My own view is that the rioters and looters aren’t BLM.
I’d tend to agree… they are, for the most part, orthogonal to BLM.
But criticism of the rioters and looters tends to get responses of the importance of Freedom of Assembly (“did you leave a word out?”) tends to get conflated with opposition to BLM for some reason.
Riots being the voice of the unheard and all that.Report
Don’t be daft. I do however support the general focus of this group. As far as I know they are not a Marxist front group Calling for a disbanding of the American family among a sub population destroyed by absentee fathers.
https://www.joincampaignzero.org/Report
Swami, there’s only one police reform game in town right now, and BLM is playing it. You have a better chance of getting your preferred reforms by hitching yourself to their wagon than not.
I understand the allure of making the perfect the enemy of the good though.Report
BLM has destroyed any chance at police reform. On May 29th everybody had their checkbooks out, ready to pay whatever it would take to fix the police. And then the riots and looting started, and more and ore people put their wallet back in their pocket.
The anti-Vietnam war protests drove support for the war up. It’s not the cause, it’s the behavior of the people pushing the cause.Report
“The anti-Vietnam war protests drove support for the war up. ”
And ironically, it was the incoherent lying of the generals and the nightly videos of the hapless soldiers brutalizing civilians that drove support for the war down.
Food for thought!Report
Gee, it’s like voters don’t like mindless violence and lying politicians, either.
With the BLM/Antifa riots, you have a trifecta of everything that causes massive November storms.Report
But once Donald Trump becomes president, all this chaos and disorder will come to an end!Report
Indeed. As he says, he can shut it down in a couple of days if the governors or mayors will request his assistance. He’s threatened to just invoke his authority to step in and stop the chaos, and the Democrats freaked out and screamed about tyranny.
All you have to do is arrest the rioters and send them to prison for rioting, which is illegal. My city took that approach, jailing dozens when they stepped past a bicycle rack, and it’s been as calm as can be ever since.
You see, most people don’t like spending months, years, or decades in prison. It can serve as a strong disincentive to throwing explosives at people. Do you find it odd that the left seems to agree that this will work, but only against Rittenhouse or members of law enforcement?Report
Honestly, I am starting to think some of the far left actually want a race war. Everything they do is aimed in that direction.Report
Which side would you be on Swami?Report
As I have been clearly arguing, the side rejecting civil war. My family is multiracial, you a*$hole.Report
“Race War/ Civil War” is just the rightwing version of “Come The Revolution”.
That is, it is a half threat, half fantasy, half thought out idea whereby the speaker just waves a hand in the air and says “Bomb ’em into the Stone Age” then goes on to think of something else that isn’t so vexing.Report
No, I would describe it more as a bit of hyperbole to get across the point that you guys are stirring up civil unrest which is going to continue to escalate.
More riots.
More vigilantes.
More clashes between looters and property owners.
More black males resisting arrest
Fewer people focusing on the real problems in inner city black neighborhoods.
Better ratings for news media
More animosity, more violence, less good will and trust.Report
The riots only happen after a Black man gets shot.
Maybe the police can control that variable?
The exchange and links about Camden were very enlightening.
The demographic composition of Camden hasn’t changed, the people are still the same, yet shootings and violence are down significantly, and most significantly, the people don’t take to the streets in fury after each arrest.
The people have much higher level of trust in the police and legal system than before.
There is, as it turns out, a vast middle ground between accepting brutal repression, and bloodshed in the streets.Report
And half the people getting shot aren’t black and the proportion of people getting shot or killed is exactly as expected based upon violent crime and resisting arrest. There is zero evidence that either of these two examples of police abuse has anything to do with race. There is ample evidence that both examples involve violent a-holes who should have not resisted arrest. The police reform issue is real, the racism narrative thrown on top is destructive, spin.
Maybe the BLM organization can make a stand against resisting arrest? I won’t be holding my breath.
I have probably written a dozen comments in this post on the need for police reform. My initial comment was about chewing gum and walking, and chewing gum was police reform. But you and SW glaze over it every time because it doesn’t support your narrative. When have I argued against Camden’s reforms?Report
No, I would describe it more as a bit of hyperbole to get across the point that you guys are stirring up civil unrest which is going to continue to escalate.
So here’s a statement of fact: multiple DOJ studies have concluded that police practices in departments across the country enact practices which are motivated by racial animus against black people.
Your contention is that folks who merely *point out that fact* are fomenting a race war.
Seems to me the better way to prevent a race war is to change the facts on the ground, and institute reforms which resolve the disparity in race-based policing practices, or at a minimum institute fully general reforms which have the same effect.Report
And obviously the best way to change the facts on the ground is to vote Republican. You see, what’s happened is that the Democrat machines in these cities have basically set up as family-run businesses. They employ all their kin to process all the fines they levy on the riffraff, who vote for them, while other kinfolks work in all the city programs providing government services to all the riffraff that are stuck in poverty because of all the fines. They’re farming poor blacks like a crop.
The Democrat machines are never going to change that because it would mean firing their own kin. It will have to be changed by people outside the machine.Report
And obviously the best way to change the facts on the ground is to vote Republican.
Amazing.Report
The violence is in Democrat cities, not Republican ones. What are you folks doing, running minority oppression camps?
As has been noted in the aftermath of Baltimore controversies and the skyrocketing poverty and murder there, Republican cities aren’t heavily segregated along racial lines like Democrat cities. Blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asians are all intermixed, living as neighbors. Cities like Baltimore are divided up almost like a pie chart, with an Asian slice, a white slice, a black slice, etc. The different slices are then pitted against each other.
This of course keeps the disadvantaged minorities in the poor areas where they can’t accumulate wealth via real estate like the white areas, and keeps the poor kids in the wrong schools so they’ll provide a future source of revenue for the courts and city service workers.
In Republican cities, minorities are treated as adults, just like everyone else, instead of being infantilized and pandered to, while getting slapped with tickets and fines for even existing.
Of course not all Democrat cities are like that, many are like Portland and San Francisco, where their policy was to just run out all the black people, who just aren’t compatible with liberaltopia. There’s a recent award-winning movie called “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” about the last remaining stubborn black native facing the decision to leave.Report
No. There are some studies that show that some departments out of tens of thousand nationwide have unfairly targeted blacks, the Ferguson example is one. I would be amazed if we found there were absolutely no examples of racism among human beings on this planet. As I have already stressed, it does exist, and should be neutered by appropriate institutional measures.
There are also various studies that dishonestly imply that disparate outcomes is proof of “racial animus” , when closer study reveals that blacks nationwide are as likely or less likely than other races to be abused by police relative to their share of violent crime. When you commit 10x the rate of murders, you are going to experience 10x levels of difficult confrontations with cops. Anything reducing the numerator without changing the denominator will result in more crime, and more black deaths, not less.
The WSJ editorial by Heather McDonald explained this in detail, and I am unaware of anything substantively contradicting it. Nobody on your pro-race-war side of the debate has offered any contradictory evidence, other than Chip who suggests without any evidence that the data is cooked and thus we should believe (grossly biased) anecdotes.
As for these two particular cases, pointing out the facts would involve arguing that in the Floyd and the Blake cases that X, Y and Z happened. There is nothing factual at all indicating that these are caused by “racial animus.” This is spin, and yes, it is the type of spin that is leading to rioting, looting, and risks deteriorating and Escalating into the destruction of our country.
Stop mongering for civic unrest and racial violence. It is wrong under any reasonable system of morality.
Let me attempt to bow out of this and all future arguments with you two by clearly restating my case one last time.
We need to improve police accountability and reform.
We need to do so in ways which do not unfairly and dishonestly fan the flames of “racial animus.” Failure to do this second part, will create more problems than it solves. See Seattle, Portland, the Miracle Mile, and Kenosha for examples.
That said, you guys are committed to this course. Ranting about racism gets you guys off. As such I predict that things will go from bad to substantially worse.
I’ve said all I need to say.Report
Why do you believe they are the only game in town? Is it because they are the only one you are familiar with? Because it is the only one getting publicity?
My guess is that the general issue of police reform is coming from a thousand directions, with city councils, unions, police departments, town halls, state legislatures, mayors, etc all exploring how to address the situation. As I should have made clear by now, BLM is both a distraction to the real reform and more likely to lead to making the situation worse, not better.Report
Why do you believe they are the only game in town?
Leverage. BLM has it*, no one else does.
*Some. Not much.Report
Adding: Anyone who’s serious about police reform should be backing their play right now, and be trying to get a seat at the negotiating table to institute their preferred reforms.Report
There is no negotiating table. Pelosi and her ilk are determined to block reforms so they can milk the issue till November. Support for “defund the police” has dropped to 16% as of mid-August, and is probably even lower now. The blue cities that might take crazy actions, like LA, Portland, Seattle, and New York, have fallen into chaos. There, the pendulum is going to swing hard the other way, and elsewhere nobody is going to do anything because they’re wanting even more police in case the violent communists descend on their own quiet little towns, demanding money, burning stores, and making threats.Report
They are in no way serious about either police reform or improving the lives of any American. They are about victimology and making everything about race, when it isn’t. They are much more part of the problem than the cure. If BLM is the only game in town then we are in big trouble and we can expect a lot more young black kids to come to bad endings.Report
This not only the least charitable understanding of what they’re doing, it’s so disconnected from reality it reads like right wing propaganda.Report
So the entire left is running around screaming about white supremacists for what reason? It’s like they’re seeing witches, or ninjas, or Jews, behind every rock and tree. Unless they’ve been dropping acid, they certainly didn’t think that all up themselves. No, they were spoon fed anger and hatred for years by a particular party pushing a racist agenda, and that’s what turned them into violent, delusional lunatics.Report
BLM had some leverage in the beginning, and then quickly squandered it by maintaining the violence, which so far has gotten 32 people killed, and injured countless more.
Now they’re out attacking senators, state legislators, and threatening to burn down Catholic churches, using the violence they direct to gather in hundreds of millions in donations. Those are probably going straight to numbered Swiss bank accounts, because that money is certainly not going to poor black neighborhoods, except perhaps to pay people to commit arson and assault.
Some Congressmen have been encouraging the DoJ to go after them under RICO statutes, and that may be how things proceed. It is a well-organized criminal enterprise, and it’s run via social messaging, make it easy to build airtight cases of extortion (they have demanded “protection money” from business owners), intimidation, assault, robbery, arson, and other criminal offenses.
One of the founders was already arrested for running a human trafficking ring (slavery is bad, but only when the wrong people do it!), so we’ll see if the wheels of justice grind slowly but finely on the rest of them.Report
You left out cannibalism, and pedophilia and Zionist bankers.Report
Only someone on the left would equate being a Zionist with being a cannibal or pedophile.Report
“When you commit 10x the rate of murders, you are going to experience 10x levels of difficult confrontations with cops. ”
No. This logic is flawed.
1. Your logic assumes that the group of “Black People Who Murder” is evenly distributed within the group of “Black People”. They aren’t.
Most violent crime is concentrated among a very small percentage of the population. Even in the worst most crime ridden neighborhoods, the vast majority of people living there are peaceful and law abiding. (This is why support for police abolition is low among the people who live there; They want protection, not anarchy).
2. Your logic assumes that “difficult encounters with police” is somehow connected to murder investigations or violent crime. They aren’t.
We see that de minimis crimes account for a lot of the”difficult encounters”; selling loosies, traffic stops, jaywalking or simply being a “suspicious person”. Most murder investigations end with nonviolent arrests.
In addition to being completely at odds with empirical reality, your statistics just don’t tell the story you want them to.Report
Here’s a question for you. American Indians and Alaska Natives are four times more likely (per 100,000) to be killed by police than Asians and Pacific Islanders. Where in police class do they teach the officers how to almost instantly make a racial distinction between a Samoan and a Cherokee, even in the dark, and where can the rest of us sign up for that class?Report
There is nothing in my argument that assumes even distribution of criminality within communities. I do agree that many of the altercations don’t stem from violent crime — Floyd and Blake are cases in point. If you watch McDonald’s video she also mentions a fact which I have been reluctant to repeat without seeing the source of the data, namely that black males are three times as likely to resist arrest than everyone else. Assuming this is true, it would also contribute to the perceived imbalance of altercations.
Here is my suggestions to reform of the BLM agenda. Their first recommendation should be for everyone to stop resisting arrest and initiating violent altercations with cops.Report
If you knew that the police are in the habit of arresting people in your neighborhood, and holding them for the max time allowed before letting them go, or get in front of a judge, even when the police have nothing more than a vague suspicion of guilt of something, I’m betting folks in your neighborhood would stop being complacent about arrest, especially when it means cars get impounded, kids gets get put in foster care, and jobs get lost.Report
And now you are for emasculating the police AND excusing resisting arrest. This is going to turn out well.Report
“emasculating the police”
What a time to be alive!Report
What gets ignored here, even if we accept your premise about the disparity in treatment, is that every single person the police encounter is, at that time, constitutionally not guilty of a crime. It is never incumbent upon the police to render a verdict in the street.Report
I don’t understand your point. Who is arguing that the police are responsible for rendering a verdict? The police are responsible for keeping the peace. In the Floyd case that involved getting the obviously delusional wack- job into their car. He resisted arrest, and they apparently used excessive force in detaining him. While using excessive force he appears to have OD’d.
In the Kenosha case, we seem to have someone again violently resisting arrest, this time while allegedly holding a knife AND reaching for a gun in a car full of kids. The opinions from cops on the case that I have heard is that the shooting officer is more deserving of a medal than being charged with any misconduct (let alone a crime). I will defer to their judgment.
I am all for police reform. Very much so.
I am also all for recommending f’ing idiots to stop violently resisting arrest. When you violently resist arrest, you are opening yourself to negative repercussions both intended and unintended.
The progressive media and the progressives on this site all have giant boners over their delight that they can spin various examples of jerks-resisting-arrest-gone-bad into a narrative that blacks are Innocent victims of a racist white society.
This is the most cancerous narrative imaginable. It is wrong and it risks leading to civil war.Report
“These types of clashes are inevitable as I have been arguing for months now. If the police are not empowered to thoroughly squelch rioters and looters and unless they are able to enforce curfews, then citizens are going to take matters in their own (probably even more incompetent) hands.”
I realize you are describing a “what is” and not necessarily “what ought to be”.
But does it matter at all that this “citizen” wasn’t a citizen of the town where this was happening or even the state? I want to leave aside all that transpired around Rittenhouse since it seems unclear exactly what actions instigated what reactions once he was already on the scene.
I want to talk about his being at the scene in the first place.
If we want to say, “Look… it was inevitable that people would defend their property if we disempowered cops to do so on their behalf,” I would probably agree with you.
But was it inevitable that people would travel into an area to defend someone else’s property without any request that they do so and with no apparent threat to their own property?
I mean, it strikes me from what I’ve read of his behavior on this night and his social media presence that this kid was on a collision course with shooting people. Which means the reason THIS particular incident happened has less to do with the surrounding context and more about someone who is fucked up or just awful or both.Report
I think that it is both inevitable that people will defend their property, and that conservatives will rise up in arms against the rioters to preserve law and order (forgive the obvious contradiction in terms, as I am explaining it from their view). My biggest shock is that it has been so rare so far. I am amazed militias have not driven to Portland to take the streets back or driven to the South to protect statues.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it is a terrible thing and could lead to the death spiral of the rule of law. But the expected reaction to a lawless, angry, rioting left will be a lawless, angry, trigger-happy right.
People tend to punch back when they don’t believe in the system to defend them. The left wing nutcases are punching back because they are convinced (wrongly) that the system is broken. The right wing nutcases will then punch back. This leads to a cycle of violence. I already explained the way off this cycle.Report
In reviewing my comment, I correct it to say the system is broken, but they are wrong to in how they view it is broken, and in how they should go about fixing it. The correction system is not working.Report
The mom drove Rittenhouse to Wisconsin “to protect property.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/CEZBZXPhr5D/?igshid=hu8dl3r0yp3hReport
This could easily make her prosecutable as an accessory to a crime. She might even be even prosecutable for murder under felony murder theories.Report
You realize that no jury in the world is going to convict her of anything, right?Report
When do we see all the mothers of those Antifa basement boys get arrested for accessories to Rioting when they drive their little ones to Portland?Report
Initial exchange re: the video
Kazzy in reply to Jaybird
August 26, 2020 at 9:40 am
https://www.tmz.com/2020/08/26/kenosha-shooting-2-dead-1-injured-jacob-blake-protest-police-blm/
Here is the video.
Jaybird in reply to Kazzy
August 26, 2020 at 9:59 am
This made me wonder… is Kenosha a college town?
Yep. It is.
Kazzy in reply to Jaybird
August 26, 2020 at 10:24 am
Can you elaborate?
The image of the shooter walking by the cops, gun hanging from his neck, and them not responding is… well… something.Report
Watch: Residents fire warning shots as rioters move into residential neighborhoods in Kenosha
The warning-shot stage won’t last very long. Homeowners will just start shooting the “peaceful protesters” when they show up in any numbers after dark.
And the clock tracking the epic civil war moves closer to midnight.Report
An interesting thread on Kenosha and Postmodernism.
Report
Quite a lot of Democrats and media figures are describing Rittenhouse as a “white supremacist” when they know for a fact he’s not. He’ll likely be contacted by Nick Sandman’s lawyer and end up richer than Leonardo DiCaprio. 🙂Report
The Criminal Complaint has been released:
Report
Report
Then it comes down to Rittenhouse having to show that Rosenbaum was somehow attacking him in a manner which would cause a reasonable man to be in fear of his life, and that Rittenhouse was not the instigator of whatever confrontation got the whole ball rolling.
If the DA can provide evidence showing that Rittenhouse came to Kenosha with some kind of hope of getting into a confrontation, his defense is going to have a tough time making that case.Report
(2) Provocation affects the privilege of self-defense as follows:
(a) A person who engages in unlawful conduct of a type likely to provoke others to attack him or her and thereby does provoke an attack is not entitled to claim the privilege of self-defense against such attack, except when the attack which ensues is of a type causing the person engaging in the unlawful conduct to reasonably believe that he or she is in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm. In such a case, the person engaging in the unlawful conduct is privileged to act in self-defense, but the person is not privileged to resort to the use of force intended or likely to cause death to the person’s assailant unless the person reasonably believes he or she has exhausted every other reasonable means to escape from or otherwise avoid death or great bodily harm at the hands of his or her assailant.
(b) The privilege lost by provocation may be regained if the actor in good faith withdraws from the fight and gives adequate notice thereof to his or her assailant.
This reads to me (NAL!) like the Florida statutes.Report
It is consistent with common law principles and other statutes I have seen. And it makes sense. On the one hand a person shouldn’t get the benefit of self-defense in a fight that person provoked. On the other hand, a provoked person should not have license to do whatever they want to another person legitimately retreating, just because the person retreating started it.Report
Yes?
The statute outlines the conditions under which the provoker retains the right to use lethal force in self-defense. (The purpose of my posting it was narrow, a response to Oscar’s suggestion that Rittenhouse couldn’t invoke a self-defense defense if he was the provoker.)Report
Just noting that the approach itself is not an outlier in light of our earlier discussion about Florida/Zimmerman.Report
He can invoke self defense, but he has to show that the deceased was not only attacking him, but also a lethal threat.
If the deceased was not attacking him, but someone else was (and the DA can produce evidence of that), then you have a stray shot problem, and the defense has a tougher hill to climb (in most states, it’s understandable that you might injure an uninvolved third party while defending yourself, but if you did so through reckless action, your claim is weaker).
If the deceased was attacking him, but no reasonable person could think that their life was in obvious danger* (e.g. fit 17 year old versus arthritic 82 year old), then the claim is weaker.
*Note this is a big part of the reforms I’d make to police use of force. I can’t shoot someone because I think they are going for a weapon, I have to wait until I see the actual weapon and have a reasonable belief that they are going to use it against me.Report
I’ve seen it floated (maybe here? maybe elsewhere?) that this situation falls into the “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes” bucket. And that tends to be aimed at the protestors. Hey, what did you expect when you tried to confront or attack a guy with a gun?
But shouldn’t that swing both ways? Like, what did you expect to happen when you shot people?
Seems like both/all parties might have been acting stupidly. Rittenhouse shouldn’t have been there with a gun. The protestors shouldn’t have confronted/attacked him. The protestors got shot. Rittenhouse goes to jail.
Only… wait… somehow that last part might not happen. I guess to the victor goes the spoils.
The protestors don’t get to claim “self-defense” and be healed of their wounds. They don’t get to escape accountability for their actions.
Why should Rittenhouse? They all played the same stupid game. Shouldn’t they all get whatever prize came their way?Report
I’ve made it pretty clear in my comments that I think his role in putting himself in the situation ought to weigh heavily against him, even if the use of force is deemed lawful. Subject always to full investigation of the facts of course.Report
Yes yes… not disagreeing with you. Riffing off you, as the kids say.Report
Very likely yes.
Having said that, there are potential not stupid reasons for him to be there, and it’s also easy to think he might want to have a gun if the police lose control over the “non-violent protesters”.
Has he made any kind of statement on what he thought he was doing?Report
There are video interviews he gave before the shootings of why he was there. I haven’t watched them. They may be in the NYT link Jaybird shared.Report
“They all played the same stupid game. Shouldn’t they all get whatever prize came their way?”
I’m sure that’s what the cops thought when they put holes in Jacob Blake. “He was askin’, now he’s gettin’, if he doesn’t like the taste then he shouldn’ta ordered the meal.”Report
Yea… see? That’s the point: we only seem to apply that logic to certain people.Report
Kazzy, “just shoot EVERYBODY, then” is a valid answer to your concern here.Report
Uh… it’s an answer. Is it valid?
How about DON’T shoot ANYONE but at least talk to people holding guns when gunshots are ringing out?Report
Yes, another example of the law being filled with “it depends” caveats, in that it creates incentives to de-escalate and disengage, and punishes provocation and incitement.
Which seems contrary to a lot of the “stand your ground” and “Castle Doctrine” arguments I see online, where people imagine some sort of legal framework that indulges their desire for maximum intransigence and hair-trigger retaliation.Report
What the defense will argue will likely be along these lines:
Rosenbaum was in hot pursuit of Rittenhouse, as seen in a video. Not far behind Rosenbaum is another BLM activist with an AR-15 (who quickly checks Rosenbaum after Rosenbaum is shot). The video doesn’t show what transpired once both men had run between the vehicles in the car lot, but Rittenhouse was fleeing and Rosenbaum was definitely in pursuit. The “right to pursue” is very limited, and usually only covers recovery of stolen property or an immediate need to stop a crazed criminal who is running amok, which does not apply in this case.
As an aside, anyone who charges a person armed with a gun can be considered “extremely dangerous” by the person with the gun, just given the fact that they’re so intent on an action that they’re willing to risk their own life.
Second, when being pursued by an armed mob, the right to self defense isn’t limited to just the armed attackers, since they are a group, and it can apply to anyone willfully impeding a person’s flight to safety. For example, if one of them is holding you by the pant leg while the spear wielding phalanx is coming to finish you off, you can shoot the unarmed person holding you by the pants to make him let go.
This would apply to the subsequent attack by the guy with the skateboard. A skateboard does not have to be a lethal weapon, because the wielder is using it to assault Rittenhouse and keep him on the ground while another assailant, armed with a pistol in his hand, is approaching. Rittenhouse shot both, got up, and continued his escape, while pointedly not firing at any other potential assailants who had suddenly stopped their pursuit or put their hands in the air to show they were unarmed.
Rittenhouse then fled toward the police with his hands in the air. He’d tried to disengage multiple times and never charged his attackers (that we can see), and did not shoot at anyone who wasn’t actively attacking him, so far as anyone can determine.
The law is likely going to be on his side.Report
I stopped reading after the first sentence. The defense is going to argue that Rittenhouse took every reasonable measure to retreat from and avoid conflict but after continuing to be pursued he legitimately feared for his life.
He’ll even say those words: “Your honor, members of the jury, distinguished members of the press, I only shot because I legitimately feared for my life.”Report
From what I understand, he shouldn’t take the stand.
Will the backgrounds of those he shot be admissible?Report
Will the backgrounds of those he shot be admissible?
The answer varies from state to state, and I don’t know Wisconsin evidence law. It would not be admissible in NY unless the shooter knew the characters for violence of the persons he shot.
Any Wisconsin criminal lawyers out there?Report
He’ll even say those words: “Your honor, members of the jury, distinguished members of the press, I only shot because I legitimately feared for my life.”
The prosecution’s response, of course, is “Members of the jury, he crossed a state line, carrying a firearm, and proceeded on foot into Kenosha in violation of the curfew, then killed people.” I may be wrong, but at this point I trust the suburban/urban Kenosha jury.Report
Is he charged with carrying across state lines as a minor?Report
That would be a federal crime, tried in federal court. I understand that the state of Illinois is being asked to extradite him on charges of murder one under Wisconsin state law.Report
OK, you’re not talking about the kid being charged with those actions, just that it paints a picture of intent and so on which the jury might gobble up.
I’d say that, at least based on my reading of the statute, the legality, morality, motivation, of the kids actions prior to the event drop out of consideration *if* the conditions for the use of lethal force for the provoker have been met. Which is what I’m sure the defense attorney will say in response to the prosecutor.Report
Yeah. The prosecutor puts up this picture
17 miles from home, across a state line, in violation of the same curfew the local police keep hammering on, with no request by officials for civilian assistance. Maybe the Midwest has changed this much since I was a kid there. It’s been a long time.Report
with no request by officials for civilian assistance
There’s video of the cops saying something like “we’re glad your here, we appreciate the help” though!
Michael, all I can say is that I hope you’re right.Report
That can’t last. I’m sure that at least the people higher up in local police departments realize that if their officers are going to let people who look like this roam free, it is only a matter of time before the extreme anti-cop element realize there’s an easy way to get close enough to kill many officers.Report
He can’t be, because that’s not illegal.
At the time his mom undoubtedly drove him home, he wasn’t wanted for anything, and thus wasn’t a fugitive.Report
That is certainly what his attorney is likely to argue, and who knows, he may well prevail.
But you never answered my question above. Would you send your 17 year old out to do this? Guard some random person’s used car lot with a rifle in the midst of civil unrest that has nothing to do with you, possibly committing some firearm infractions along the way? Why so quick to, in the words of the self-defense instructor Oscar referenced, go out and violate the Rule of Stupid?Report
Oh heck yeah. What do you think the tens of millions of parents of military members did? Heck, their kids sailed over and ended up guarding some random Frenchman’s car lot from German panzers. ^_^
They also committed rampant firearms infractions. In Italy my dad fished with hand grenades, in violation of numerous fish and wildlife laws. In France he fired a bazooka round into some Frenchman’s chimney without pulling the arming pin on it, using a water trough and a battery to fire it, just because he’d found a live bazooka round. It probably later irritated the Frenchman, who wasn’t home at the time.
He fired tens of thousands of rounds of German ammunition just for fun – and to kill the boredom. Defending an American business 20 minutes up the road? That’s a no-brainer.
And further undermining the prosecutions case is witness testimony that Rittenhouse treated many members of BLM for injuries, as Rittenhouse is an EMT. He also gave them water bottles and such, which they probably later threw at him. That completely undercuts the narrative that he was only there to cause trouble.Report
No, he’s not an EMT. At best he has some advanced First Aid training. If that qualifies one as an EMT, then I am an EMT.Report
Ah hes, Wisconsin the war zone. And I’m sure all the Euro types clapped after all of those hilarious hijinks.Report
“(b) The privilege lost by provocation may be regained if the actor in good faith withdraws from the fight and gives adequate notice thereof to his or her assailant.”
There’s video evidence of Rittenhouse fleeing from the fight and Rosenbaum pursuing him. The court case will take six months to pick a jury, who will hear one day of evidence and deliberate for five minutes, and find Rittenhouse not guilty.Report
I’m currently wondering about bail and whether it’ll be set.Report
Twitter post that goes back to Andy Ngo.
And with that, Rittenhouse’s defense attorney started doing the Snoopy dance.Report
Oscar,
Because Jaybird mentioned your post on police reform, I’m curious how you would have like to see the police respond in the moment.
https://www.tmz.com/2020/08/26/kenosha-shooting-2-dead-1-injured-jacob-blake-protest-police-blm/Report
@Kazzy
Which moment, there be a wealth of them to choose from in Kenosha?Report
The moment where Rittenhouse walked past and then towards police cars/officers, hands raised, gun hanging from a strap around his neck, immediately after gunfire occurred in the direct vicinity.
I’ve heard he was attempting to turn himself in and admitted to shooting someone, which it does sort of look like he’s doing but I didn’t hear that on the video so will not say that the cops ignored his “confession.”
It is the last portion of the video I linked to.Report
At the very least, he should have been detained for questioning and his weapon checked for recent firing.
If I am being critical (and when am I not when it comes to police), the reason he wasn’t is (IMHO) two fold:
1) He visually coded as not a protester, either becuase he was recognized from earlier, or because he’s white, etc.
2) Officers seemingly pathological need to be able to claim they were in the thick of it, so we get a version of the bystander problem (everyone assumes someone else will take care of it).Report
Point #1 is an interesting one, because if true it makes clear that the police were on “a side”. They weren’t there to keep the peace. They were there to police the protestors and ONLY the protestors.
Patrick Cahalan posted a photo on FaceBook yesterday that showed protestors and counter-protestors in LA. They were standing on opposite sides of a street. The police were all on one side of the street — the protestors — all facing that direction.
So, if we want to use Jaybird’s framing device of “divorce or war”, then we need to recognize that the cops have not only seemingly chosen “war” but they’ve chosen their side.Report
Yeah, kind of like the Russian Army eventually chose a side in WW-II, after noticing that the German troops seemed intent on killing them in encounter after encounter.
The “protesters” constantly chant “death to pigs” and things like that, throw rocks and explosives at them, throw Molotov cocktails at them, blind them with lasers, etc. Cops notice things like that.
Last night In Kenosha a bus and a van full of Seattle protesters showed up. The police put them under surveillance and the interlopers started handing out gasoline containers, so the cops swept in and arrested all of them. We’ll see if they get hit with federal charges, or just state.
They’ve already very likely to have handed Trump a landslide in Wisconsin. Large numbers of Democrats there say they’re flipping to Trump because they don’t feel a bit safe, and don’t feel their local leaders are intent on quelling the violence, while the governor seems to be actively instigating it. Worse, the violence never even got mentioned at the DNC convention.
Michigan and Minnesota will probably likewise shift dramatically as the unrest continues, as may several other states. When people don’t feel safe going shopping downtown, and when they worry that their entire neighborhood might be invaded and burned, they rethink who they’ve been supporting. This is likely especially true for women.
Continued violence will push the election into a choice not between the parties as they were, but between pro-BLM/Antifa riots and anti-BLM/Antifa riots.Report
First off, you need to get over the idea that somehow reducing the power and legal protections of the police, or removing the tools they most often abuse, is somehow emasculating them. It’s not. Almost everything I have suggested police stop doing or give up is something that is relatively recent, and more often than not a direct result of the drug war or the GWOT, i.e. it’s not something they historically needed to do their day to day jobs. In most cases, it’s something that was supposed to be reserved for when shite went biblically pear shaped, and has instead become something used in the most inane circumstances.
That’s not emasculation, it’s telling them to pull on their big girl panties and stop relying on violence as a crutch. The military can somehow manage to respect tight ROEs, but ask cops to do the same, and suddenly they can’t bother doing their jobs anymore.
As for resisting arrest, I don’t recommend it, but I do understand it. In my perfect world, an officer would pay a price for arresting a person for something the DA refuses to prosecute for. Maybe it’s just lost pay for wasting everybody’s time, or maybe it’s that the officer has to go around and explain to bosses and social workers and the impound lot that it was all a mistake and could they do him a solid and make the person whole again. Hooking someone up for ‘Contempt of Cop’ or whatever crap they feel like should have consequences, significant ones. The fact that SCOTUS has long deluded itself into thinking that getting locked up for a weekend has minimal consequences and is a small price to pay for an abundance of caution tells me that we need to stop picking judges from HYPS.Report
Are you claiming the police of yesteryear were less brutal, more professional, and more respectful of civil rights?Report
Hell no, there are still officers who see it as a duty to harass and beat the poor and dispossessed, but they didn’t have QI, or patrol rifles, or APCs, or CAF, or no-knock warrants, or “Officers Bill of Rights”, or seem to be prone* to panic shooting citizens because they live in a self imposed culture of fear.
*AFAIK officers were less prone to panic shootings. I could be wrong, maybe they’ve always been a jittery bunch. We don’t have anything close to good stats on officer involved shootings even today, much less back in the Jim Crow or Civil Rights eras.Report
First, I went looking for numbers for arrests to see if they suggest what you’re talking about is a significant issue. I found the following: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2019/08/26/arrests-report/
You can read that either way so it didn’t answer my question but it is interesting in that it suggests mental health is a big issue here.
2nd, I’m extremely hard pressed to think we’d look back at the Jim Crow era and say we’d want their police tactics. My expectation is that while they didn’t have QI and the rest, it didn’t matter. QI and these others are ways to avoid police reform… but even the idea wasn’t much of a thing back in the day.Report
“Impunity, not immunity!”
I’m puttin’ that on a sign. 🙂Report
We wouldn’t want the racist aspects of their culture that were the norm of the era. But it is useful to remind ourselves that some of these policies treated as sacrosanct by LEOs are pretty recent. The kinds of things Oscar is talking about really only ramped up in the 70s as a reaction to urban blight then intensified through the 80s crack epidemic. That’s when we got mass criminalization, the war footing, the quotas, the warrior mentality, etc.Report
It’s probably also useful to keep in mind that these “recent” inventions were the replacements for practices that were serious vile by modern standards.
In the 1930’s the Supremes ruled that “A confession extracted through police violence cannot be entered as evidence”. That’s as opposed to simply outlawing beating a confession out of someone which apparently was still fine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Mississippi
The South’s police started as the “slave patrol” and one of their jobs was to terrorize slaves, after slavery ended their job became to enforce Jim Crow, i.e. terrorize minorities.
We went to the “military” model to encourage police professionalism. The push for increasing police professionalism in the 1950’s led to the police creating unions in the 60’s and 70’s which was a “resistance to increasing charges of police brutality, corruption and other forms of misconduct”.
https://plsonline.eku.edu/sites/plsonline.eku.edu/files/the-history-of-policing-in-us.pdf
The police have NEVER been run the way you want. As far as I can tell, if we ignore individual practices and just look at brutality, as we go back in time the level of brutality increases and ditto the expected lack of professionalism.Report
I agree they’ve never been the way I would want them run, but then where did I say they had?
The rest of your response addresses none of the actual accountability problems that are at issue. Yea, 100 years ago there were places where the police looked more like glorified neighborhood watches and informal posses and carried out their work accordingly. Crime was also of course a lot lower (with an exception for prohibition) and professional police forces weren’t widespread outside of the largest cities.
All of that is besides the point being made which is that our policy decisions are just that, decisions, many of them relatively recent.
Contra the police line they can be revisited without the world ending. Maybe someone here is arguing they should be revisited in a way that makes them less professional rather than more but if so I’m not seeing it.Report
Yea, that was a mistake without put them under the UCMJ, or something similar.
However, you are making my point for me. Removing power, and/or protections, from the police, is not emasculating them (in the sense of making them weaker or less effective). What I aim to do is to align the power the police wield with the responsibility/accountability appropriate to it*.
A no-knock warrant served on a house that has a weak connection to the target of an investigation should have penalties akin to a home invasion. Or at the very least, if we are going to treat the warrant as a shield from that, then every officer who participated in the raid should be facing perjury charges** for lying on the warrant (or the judge should be facing charges for signing a weak warrant).
The police wield incredible power with very little in the way of responsibility/accountability for how it is used***.
That is what really needs to change.
And if the police are not comfortable with the increased responsibility/accountability, then the power they wield needs to be curtailed to what they are comfortable with.
*Police are civilians, they should be held to a similar standard with regard to the violence they can employ.
**Since the police do not have a command and control structure that is as strict as the military, then every officer is accountable for their own actions. They can not claim they were following what they believed to be a lawful order.
***Remember, the military operates under such constraints and still gets the job done, and they do it for far less pay and social benefit.Report
I generally agree with your recommendations and ideas, feeling that they would be a good step forward to a more accountable and better working police idea. But, and this is very important, many of the issues we are having stem from changes we (via our elected representatives) consciously made in the way these issues were handled.
QI arose out of the need to protect officers who were doing what was perceived as legitimate aspects of the job, and yet departments were being sued left and right. Often for frivolous reasons. It didn’t just pop up out of thin air, it came about due to judicial needs and opinions.
Likewise, all the tactics that arouse from the drug war. We often voted for direct laws to account for this or elected officials who talked about the need to fight this. And in many cases, the people pushing hardest for these laws are now the people being hardest hit by them.
Every bit of “non-lethal” methods and tools has the potential to become lethal at the drop of a hat, and until this is stressed, we will continue to be shocked and amazed that these actions did not work as desired. When I was a kid, LA’s chokehold was one of the most common of these tactics, but people did die, so it was switched to the clubbing that Rodney King was videotaped receiving. And that is one step on the path that leads to a tazor death, or George Floyd being choked.
All of that to say that any changes we make should be very cautious, lest they do greater harm down the line. And no, this isn’t a call to make zero changes but to be careful, lest we cause additional damage.Report
Ya know, while I support the protests, I remain firm in my belief that the people doing the protesting are not really thinking about any of this. They are people reacting to pain, without thinking about why the pain is occurring (Why does a joint lock hurt? Because you are reactively trying to pull out of the lock.). That is why the demands are so vague or all over the map.
You can’t just say, “Stop killing us!” without first coming to grips with why that is happening and how we got to this place.
I mean, of the proposals, things like ending (or even just seriously relaxing) the drug war, and NOT sending police to respond to obvious mental health or vagrancy calls would go a long way towards ending the violence. And ending, or severely restricting*, no-knock warrants would also help a whole lot.
But yeah, it is very important to understand how we got here, why QI exists* in it’s imperfect state, etc. It’s not simply that ACAB. We created a system that attracts the B*stards to the profession, we need to own that.
*Consistent use of Body Cams should alleviate the need for QI, to be honest. I also recommend (as I did in my post some months ago) that each squad car have a camera drone that is tagged to an officer. Have it dock to the top of the squad car or something. Officer leaves the car, drone automatically deploys and starts recording on a 360 camera. We literally have this technology right now, people use it to record themselves doing crazy stunts on ski slopes and base jumping off of mountains.Report
90 days ago, I would have agreed with you 100% about the protests, now I am not so sure. But, that is neither here nor there. I think the fundamental problem is one of what the police are for, and how do they achieve that is what is up in the air, and that is what leads to much of the problems we are encountering. As with much of society in general.
The original role of police, urban or rural, north or south, was to keep the peace. And that is a very nebulous description. It includes everything from slave catching to keeping bikes off the freeway, riot control to traffic control. And not all of it strictly legal as the police are neither judges nor juries, the final arbiters of the law.Report
QI arose out of the need to protect officers who were doing what was perceived as legitimate aspects of the job, and yet departments were being sued left and right. Often for frivolous reasons. It didn’t just pop up out of thin air, it came about due to judicial needs and opinions.
The problem is that the police don’t (only) use QI to defend themselves against tough calls.
They also use it to defend against, for example, cops stealing from someone. (Em wrote a great essay about that.)
If it was used for a rough judgment call? We could have people arguing both sides and each side would have good points for what they’re arguing.
Hospitals has a list of things that are called “Never Events”. You know, operating on Jonathan Smythe instead of John Smith, doing surgery on the right arm instead of on the left arm (of the right guy, this time), leaving a clamp or a scalpel instead of a patient…
They’re not “everybody makes mistakes” events. They’re Never Events. They’re stuff that everybody agrees should never happen. Ever.
If QI was used to defend stuff that required a judgment call… well, you have to understand…
But it’s used to protect against Never Events.
That’s not what QI is for.Report
I am not disagreeing with that analysis in the slightest, and it isn’t really what I am talking about. But what you are showing is how what looks like a standard, normal legal point can get turned on its head and used to defend anything.
And surgeons actually call those Never Events, which would be analogous to the police actions that happen again and again, Normative Faults. As in the specific action, egregious as it is, is a norm for that person.Report
Hospitals have a lot of those “never events”, basically because “never” is a very long time and stack up mistakes happen once every whatever.
Everyone agrees the surgeon should never leave a sponge in a patent. It happens extremely rarely, any specific surgeon may never see it over the course of his practice.
When it does happen, if not caught right away, it kills or maims the patent.
The problem is if it happens once every 10 thousand times, we have more than 120 million surgeries a year. That suggests 12k never events just from this.
Note that’s more than 10x as often as the police killing someone.Report
I’m not going to say you’re wrong about any of this (you have a lot of very sane suggestions), but these are complex systems and I’m not sure we know what we’re doing.
For example, there are a lot of dead innocent people in countries where our military is doing their thing. A few are because we’re killing them, far more because of side effects.
Change “the job” to no innocents can be killed and they’re also responsible for stopping everyone else, then I’m not sure that’s workable even with the military’s higher standards.Report
War is a messy business, innocents will die.
The thing is, if you are a Marine, and you are going door to door looking for someone, and your ROE is ‘Do not fire unless fired upon or you have definitively identified a weapon pointed at your or your team mate’, and some kids gets a bullet for whipping out a cell phone to record you, you absolutely will face an Article 31 hearing, and possibly a court martial, and JAG or CID will not cut you some slack just because you are a Marine.
But at the same time, Marines train nearly constantly so that they don’t make that mistake. Which is a problem for the police, because we don’t demand the same of them. The public doesn’t understand that those are perishable skills.
We could, but we are all too busy having them conduct revenue generation, or do welfare/mental health checks, or harass homeless people, etc.Report
As I recall it, the switch to the military model of policing coincided with the Nixon era “War On Crime”, which also coincided with the public image of urban areas as lawless chaotic war zones.
Which is to say, there was a shift in thinking, where the residents of urban areas were increasingly seen as an alien hostile enemy to be suppressed rather than civilians to be protected.
Which continues to this day.
Overall, the police don’t see us as fellow citizens but as enemies.Report
There were a lot of relevant things going on at that time. States were hemming cities in with, for example, amendments that stopped the cities from annexing (in Colorado, the Poundstone Amendment). There was flight to the suburbs — not just the well-known “white flight” over schools, but big companies were pulling back-office white-collar work out of the urban core at a high rate*, creating a variety of employment mismatches, poverty, etc. The predecessors of the drug gangs/cartels were organizing and there was now a lot of cheap space in those areas. The gangs were heavily armed for fighting with each other. When law enforcement encountered them, the police were frequently outgunned. Militarization was not an unlikely outcome.
* Consider the case of Bell Telephone Laboratories, one of the greatest industrial labs of all time, where I knew people who lived through the following. Until WWII, Bell Labs was located in Manhattan. When they needed to expand, new space in the city was hideously expensive and they built in Murray Hill, NJ. Then they needed on the order of a square mile to test microwave stuff, and they went farther south to Holmdel, NJ**. When they added thousands of coders for switching systems, they put them in the outer reaches of the Chicago suburbs near where the sprawling assembly plant was. Suppliers of high-end services for the Labs followed. Garreau’s Edge Cities has dozens of other examples from across the country.
** Factoid: Rain absolutely kills microwave signals. The Holmdel location was chosen after a bunch of secret research because it sits in a strange local weather anomaly and gets several inches more rain per year than surrounding areas, which was useful for testing.Report
This is part of the problem, right here.
It is not, nor has it EVER been, ‘The police can never kill a person’. No one gets outraged when someone charges a cop with a knife in their hand, or starts shooting at a cop with a gun, and they get dead because of it.
And hell, no one is honestly expecting that the police will never kill an innocent person.
Seriously, all of you doing it, STOP laying that out as if it’s a real argument, It’s unrealistic BS.
It’s about the police refusing to seriously take responsibility for their mistakes.
When a surgeon screws up and leaves a sponge inside a person, the hospital or the surgeon A) probably hands the person affected a check, or at the very least, doesn’t charge them for the screw up, and B) conducts a critical review of what went wrong and seriously attempts to fix the problem (surgical implement counts before the first cut, and again before things get sewn back up, etc.), because the professionals are actually on the hook for the screw up.
The police… they circle the wagons, hide behind investigations, make efforts to muddy the waters*, make empty promises to change policy (or claim that everything was according to policy, with the implicit understanding that the policy is A-OK), and generate post-hoc rationalizations**, and whatever else they can do to avoid taking responsibility.
Hell, in most jurisdictions, if the cops mistakenly break down your door, they won’t pay to fix the door. Let’s not even talk about offering mental health services to your family for the trauma, or cleanup for the bullet riddled body of your dog.
IIRC Most hospitals learned long ago that when a mistake is made, if they just straight out own it, apologize, and work to make things right and the person whole, they get sued a hell of a lot less.
Too bad cops haven’t figured that out.
*See the whole thing about the plea offer to the boyfriend of Breona Taylor, how they were willing to give him probation if he’d admit that Breona was part of his criminal activity).
**Blake is a rapist, but Rittenhouse is a good kid, neither of which is relevant to the actions that led up to the shooting.Report
Oscar (down here!)
I came across the concept of Normative Error on a surgeons blog (don’t remember what I was looking for) and he talked about the three kinds of errors in surgery; Diagnostic Errors, Technical Errors, and Normative Errors. The first is obvious, it refers to a misdiagnosis found in surgery. The second, technical errors, is when a surgeon makes a screwup on the table; nicks an artery, or somesuch. It is immediately acknowledged, logged, fixed before moving on, and discussed afterward in order to prevent it from happening again. The third, a normative error, is the error in the process that goes unremarked. It is the sponge left behind, or other carelessness.* This is what we are referring to many of the issues with the modern police. It’s going to the wrong address and then post-hoc lying on the warrant. Or, not getting a warrant, and getting someone to sign off on the info after there is an issue. And so on. This is “the not taking responsibility for the actions” that you are talking about.
So, to bring it back to what both you and Jaybird are talking about, QI was never intended to cover the normative errors, rather it was intended to cover regular aspects of policing that goes wrong; a non-involved person gets wounded/killed during an arrest, that sort of thing. Technical errors. As you say, no one is honestly expecting that the police will never kill an innocent person. The problem is when normative errors get covered by it, along with the identified technical errors.
*Surgeons will go to the wall on not admitting their mistakes as much as police will. The simple truth with things this is that humans hate to admit error. Surgeons are no better than cops, are no better than priests. And lawyers make money from all of them.Report
That honestly aligns with most of what I am saying. It is a system error, in that something like QI is being used for things it shouldn’t. Problem is, the ‘spirit’ of QI may have been to deal with non-normative errors, but the ‘letter’ of it, at least as far as the courts have chosen to interpret it, is that it considers all errors to be non-normative until the courts decide a specific error is normative (and the courts are not inclined to examine any given error for normative status).
Couple that to Unions being allowed to negotiate for ‘rights’ beyond the bare employer-employee issues, and, IMHO, our root cause analysis is that accountability has been stripped away from the police, and that has attracted, or encouraged, a moral corruption to the profession.
Like I’ve continued to say, making it about race misses the problem. Race enters into because minorities are less likely to drag the PD to court, and least likely to prevail in court, so they are the targets of that moral corruption (bullies tend not to pick on the kids that can beat their a$$). But even if we could magically purge racism from the heart of every cop and DA, these problems would remain.
BTW, I ran across a case today that honestly should have gotten more attention than Jacob Blake, except it happened in 2017. It’s a perfect example of what we are talking about.Report
(Replying to Oscar)
I think a good hunk of the protesters are much less informed and reasonable than you.
My daughters have shown me videos of activists making exactly those claims. Ferguson’s DA got himself elected promising to redo the case against Mike Brown’s shooter. When he had to admit there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him with murder or something, the community that elected him made it clear they’d have to elect someone else to try again.
However, what I was trying to do was show the scale of the problem. The police have something like 1000x as many opportunities for this sort of thing and they do something like 100x less. There are 5 orders of magnitude between hospitals leaving sponges and the police killing innocent people. Events of that order of rarity which depend on multiple human factors are probably going to be hard to iron out because we’ve already gotten rid of so many problems to get to this point.
If we want the cops to use the medical mistakes model for how to handle these things then we need to take prison off the table.
BTW I’m in favor of that. If we use something like a truth and reconciliation model for how to deal with this then we give the cops a pass on everything short of murder one provided they testify honestly on what happened. We treat it as a system error, pay the victims, and everyone tries to avoid it in the future.
As long as we’re going to try to use a criminal justice model for dealing with this, we need to live with everyone acting as we’ve incentivized them to act.
As far as I can tell we have no idea what happened before the shooting.
Blake was there trying to calm down two women arguing. From that we jump to him being tased twice. Three cops pointing guns at him. He opens the door of his car to check on his kids and gets shot in the back.
It feels like we’re missing a full reel of the movie, so I’m going to reserve judgement. Ditto for Rittenhouse although a big part of the problem is I’m slammed at work and have no time to follow that one.Report
Blake wasn’t there breaking up a fight. The last time he was there he broke in, raped his ex, stole her car, and stole her debit cards. The police were there because he ex called 911 to report that he was back, in violation of her protective order, was causing trouble, was violent, and had stolen her car keys. When they got there he was fighting with some women. He then fought the police, put one in a head lock, at some point drew a knife, and was trying to get in the car that had her children inside. His ex-girlfriend’s aunt is mad because the police shot him seven times instead of fifty times.Report
link?Report
That’s every non-MSM news story that’s come out, including the tape of the police disptacher’s call. Here’s one from the MIlwaukee Journal Sentinal, although other sites have the audio.
They’d have pulled up Blake and his priors were for all sorts of domestic attacks at the same address, with restraining orders, car theft, rape and/or sexual assault, etc, plus an outstanding warrant for raping some 14-year old.
In the subsequent video, I’m not sure if he was getting into his own car, somehow have kidnapped the children and shoved them in there, or if he was stealing his ex-girlfriend’s car, along with her kids.
Now what all this illustrates is that the initial narrative that caused all the riots, looting, and resulted in two deaths was almost entirely wrong. Blake was no the hero of the story who was mercilessly gunned down by police because he was black.
But none of that matters to people who are looking for an excuse to burn down the cities and kill some cops. Besides, Democrats are paying them to gin up some unrest, and by gosh they’re going to cause some trouble.Report
See the Snopes post on the claim that he sexually assaulted a child. That doesn’t appear to be true, but there’s a link to the complaint from May, consistent with what George is saying above. Note that the address given in the criminal complaint is consistent with the site of the shooting given here (2800 block of 40th St.)
So the story, as best as I can piece it together, is as follows: The police were called by a woman whom Blake had allegedly raped and robbed a couple months earlier because he was at her house again, and had taken her keys. They tried to arrest him, and failed to restrain him. They tried to tase him, and failed. He may or may not have been holding a knife, but the police seem to have believed that he was. Then he went to his car and leaned in, at which point they shot him.
A known violent felon violently resisting arrest, getting away from the police, and then reaching into his car strikes me as an extremely dangerous situation. If he pulls out a gun, do the police have time to react? I don’t see why they should be expected to risk their lives for the benefit of a violent felon resisting arrest for committing another violent crime.
As usual, the lesson here—equally important for people of every race—is: Never resist arrest. This is extremely unlikely to result in a better outcome for you, and makes the whole situation much more dangerous for everyone involved. Even if you’re completely innocent, the best thing to do is cooperate, ask for a lawyer, and shut up. If police are abusing their power, you might win by fighting them in the courts, but you’re pretty much guaranteed to lose by fighting them in the streets.
Another important lesson is never to trust the initial media reports on the death or shooting of anyone whose family is represented by Benjamin Crump. That guy is to the media what Itzhak Perlman is to the violin.Report
Thank you Brandon and George.Report
My concern with George’s comment really has to do with the post-hoc rationalizations for violence because the guy was not a nice guy. I don’t care if he was a fracking monster, I care what happened in that moment, not 10 minutes or 10 months before.
Him resisting arrest is the important bit. Everything else is noisy BS.
I still think the police have responsibility for not getting control of the situation (two cops should be able to pin the guy, and this will probably be a good case study of how not to detain a suspect). And again, the shooting cop drew his gun way too early*, limiting his options.
But I won’t ignore Blake’s actions.
*I am off the opinion that police training needs to change such that if a gun is drawn, it is because a person probably really needs to die, and not because the officer feels that someone is not listening to them and they want to use the threat of the gun.Report
I am wondering if our current media environment, everything is filmed, no context for anything, is an influencing factor in how Blake was handled. IE if he had been pined as you say he should have been, and everything went as it should have, would it have made the rounds of Twitter and Facebook as a peaceful black man being manhandled by the police? And that is why the officers took the wrong steps which might have looked better for community relations if nothing untoward ended up happening.
I can certainly see that being argued in court.Report
Seems to me, that is why police should want body cams, etc.Report
Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it
-Johnathon Swift, 1710
I am by no means against body cameras, but I really doubt there is a way to get in front of a story as it goes viral. Indeed, most police depts have zero idea something like that is afoot until it hits them in the face. It really is incumbent on the DA’s to be more forthright in what they prosecute and why.Report
+1Report
For non-normative errors, sure. And we kinda already have that (look up Garrity Rights/Statements) But that requires carefully defining what constitutes a non-normative error in policing. For a lot of the cases that enrage the public, those are clearly normative errors. See my link in my reply to Aaron, or look at Breona Taylor, or Ryan Whitaker, or Tamir Rice, or that case from GA a few years back where the baby got to play patty cake with a flash bang grenade.
Those kinds of errors, prison can not be off the table, because those are not mistakes society should tolerate. They are mistakes born of a failure to gather the necessary information prior to acting and employing violence/force, and/or failing to give others a reasonable opportunity to obey orders.
The problem we are currently facing is that we’ve allowed this to go on for too long, and parts of society, the parts that bear the brunt of this, are starting to get understandably sensitive to it. So even cases that would previously have failed to garner attention*, are becoming flash points.
*IMHO the incident of Jacob Blake, I personally think that comes down to a technical error (the two officers should have had him down and restrained, and not given him a chance to walk away from them, and the one should not have pulled his gun as early as he had, because it limited his options). Fire the shooter. Not everyone is cut out to be a cop, and we have no obligation to give them 20 chances to figure out how to do it. This is also a significant failure of our system, that we allow some saccharine narrative of how so-so always wanted to be a cop, so we shouldn’t be so harsh on them for failing to be a good one, blah blah blah.
Nope, fire them. Pull their credentials. Lots of people change careers in their lives.Report
“Carelessness” is probably not a good word for it. Over the course of a several hour surgery you put in a dozen sponges (or maybe 5 dozen) but you don’t put them in all at once and you don’t take them out all at once. There can be multiple people involved just in the counting, there can be unused sponges lying around, sponges can be put inside the patent for a few seconds.
Treat this as a process issue and we realize human memory isn’t great at this. Change the process by adding a computer counter and this problem goes away. Computer counters are MUCH better at keeping track of this, so much so that last I heard we still waiting for the new system to fail so we could figure out how much better.
Then live with the wagons being circled for all cases. When there’s a body on the ground the cops need to know what the rules are for dealing with this ahead of time. If those rules are “maybe jail”, then that’s no different than what we have now.
Saying that some mistakes are worth jail time is total opposite of treating mistakes as a system error.
If the problem is some people shouldn’t be cops, then change how they’re certified so this guy can’t pass the bar, because if it’s a system problem then there are a lot more like him.Report
If a surgeon shows up to surgery stoned, and maims or kills the patient, should he not go to jail? How much malfeasance should we tolerate of a professional before we toss them in jail? Where is that line?
How about just firing them and pulling their credentials forever? Where is that line?
This is what I mean by clearly defining when we hit a normative error. Right now, those definitions are up to the courts, and the courts don’t want to actually define such things (and, TBH, they probably shouldn’t).
For example: Lying, or misrepresenting facts, or failing to do due diligence on a warrant, or otherwise committing perjury? You are fired. If the lie results in harm to an innocent, you lose your credentials. I mean, lying or being lazy is not making an honest mistake. There is very little grey area there.
Shooting someone before you could possibly have assessed the situation, or before they could possibly have obeyed orders? Fired, credentials gone. If it can be shown that the officer was acting with depraved indifference, they stand trial.
I mean, make things clear. But we can not have jail time completely off the table. Again, the military doesn’t do that, why should the police get to?Report
We tend to call that “deliberate” rather than “mistake”. Ditto the surgeon who, literally, carved his initials in the patent because he thought the surgery went really well.
Agreed.
You are using Tamera Rice as your example. The police were told they had someone pointing a gun at random people. They came up with someone who was brandishing a gun. Unless you’re trying to claim the military needs to wait for known-hostile people to open fire, this hits the radar as a system problem.
Similarly, all three cops drew their guns with Blake. This was not one drunk cop making drunk choices.
The military doesn’t use this model. They don’t have unions and politicians with their fingers on the scales. Because they have a LOT more control they can just break people that don’t follow the official rules. They don’t allow for wagons to be circled.
If you want the military model, then we need to outlaw gov unions, break the blue wall of silence by putting serious jail time for cops who lie to support other cops, and we probably need to drastically increase the cost to employ a cop by having them train for a third of a time.
That last issue might be a non-starter from a budget point of view. The others are probably non-starters politically.
And it may be that we don’t really want a fully professional police force because we need someone who can harass the homeless. The military doesn’t need to fix every social issue nor make local businesses happy.Report
Yes, they need to, that’s my point.
Now if the dispatcher had told the cops shots had been fired, I’d been more understanding, but the police still have a moral obligation to give the person a reasonable chance to surrender. And if police have a problem with that, they need to quit, or refuse to respond to such calls.
And yes, I want police unions curtailed such that they can’t interfere in events outside the purvey of a union.
Honestly, I don’t disagree with you, in that I think we the people don’t really know what we want from the police, and that is a huge part of the problem. We want them to protect us, punish criminals, generate revenue, and harass the undesirable. None of which they should really be doing.
What they should be doing is investigating reported crime, and responding to reports of active crime.Report
I’m not opposed, but to the best of my knowledge that’s not the current way police are trained nor expected to behave. Or to put it differently, this is absolutely a system issue and if you treat it as one offs without changing the system you’re just making scapegoats.
Revenue and punishment are inappropriate. However, the alternative to the police protecting people is a lot more CC and/or CC for hire. If we’re cool with that then it’s fine, but it’s going to result in awkward conversations like telling women’s rights activists that society won’t be walking them home if they feel unsafe and so on.
The alternative to the cops harassing the undesirable is… what? What do we want to have happen if a homeless guy is parked in front of a business and is costing the owner money? If the answer is that the police won’t deal with that, then we’re creating a market for someone else to do so.Report
Actually it is, that’s why the cop got fired. Sure, if the PD could have, they’d have swept it under the rug, because PDs and the Unions are morally corrupt in that regard, but training and policy have officers evaluate on site prior to using force.
Police are under no legal or ethical obligation to protect anyone, and right now, there are departments who are publicly announcing they are pulling out of areas that have hurt their feelings. So yeah, I’m good with more CC.
As for undesirables, cities are already fielding teams who respond to non-violent issues, teams who are trained to work with the homeless to get them help, and who aren’t carrying guns, so they have to be more creative to gain compliance.Report
We should be nervous about policies which openly undermine the gov’s monopoly on the use of force. If I go CC because I’m dealing with a personal problem (one lunatic stalking my family) then that’s me dealing with a one-person societal failure. If I got CC because cops can’t be everywhere, that’s a problem that’s not going away and is a known thing.
If large numbers of people go CC because the cops have pulled out then that is on a different scale.
CHOP was an example on how the police giving up society’s monopoly on the use of force creates a power vacuum which is instantly filled. Drug dealers resolving economic and security disputes privately is another example. Gated communities with private security forces is another example although that’s been small scale enough that it hasn’t caused problems.
I’m cynical about this idea’s workability and it’s cost.
If we can get the homeless to change enough to not cause problems without the threat/use of force then great, let’s do that. While we’re at it we should end drunk driving, excessive gamboling, and several other serious problems caused by addiction and/or mental illness.
These problems seem to exist because we don’t have good solutions for them, we’re stuck with bad solutions.Report
Thing is Dark, while I appreciate, hell, even agree with your pessimism, that doesn’t change the fact that something has to change. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about a tiny fraction of police encounters turning deadly without a good justification. The public tolerance for such is breaking (Chip’s analogy here is spot on, IMHO). The public tolerance held for so long because each such incident was very, very local. Now, much like mass shootings, they have become national. Blame the cops, blame the media, blame social media, it doesn’t matter.
Something has to give, and frankly, since we are a democratic republic, the government is what has to give.
Actually, we have good solutions. What we have are shite attitudes about addiction and homelessness. That pervasive belief that every addict is an addict because they have some kind of moral or character flaw and thus they deserve their condition. If we believe they deserve it, then we are not inclined to leverage resources to help them, and letting the police beat on them is seen as A-OK (because they deserve it).
Ergo, instead of letting the PD spend money to increase human suffering, we could move that money to social services and let them spend the money to alleviate human suffering.
Or not, but it’s not about solutions, it’s about attitudes.Report
The trouble is, the police alleviate suffering and curtail expanded suffering by putting drug users and drug dealers in jail. Social services gets their money and power from making the problem worse, so as to form a “homeless/industrial complex”, as exists in Seattle, San Francisco, and other cities.
By leaving the users on the street, you maintain a ready market in drugs. By leaving the dealers on the street, you maintain a ready supply. By leaving people on the street, you maintain a large customer base.
And then you wonder why your streets are filled with homeless drug addicts despite the city spending $2 billion a year giving them food, shelter, cash, and free needles.Report
I hear similar rhetoric from people on how the government needs to stop mass shootings. It’s not clear to me the gov has the ability to fix this in a way the rioters will find acceptable.
It’s not even clear to me the gov has the ability to fix it AT ALL since that requires every local city redo their relationship with the police. Anything less than that just reduces the frequency of these events but we’ll still have the worst of the worst on social media being presented as the norm.
We may end up needing to suppress the riots.
You’re saying we could deal with this with X dollars, but instead we spend that X on the police. I expect the police are a LOT cheaper, like orders of magnitude. One cop can probably “deal” with dozens and dozens of homeless over the course of a year.
Mental health is expensive and is ongoing, ditto addition. Even housing is extremely expensive in various parts of the country. I expect this is one sided from a budget standpoint.
California is trying to fix housing at a per-family cost which might be more expensive that hiring one cop. Math doesn’t care about “attitudes”, but attitudes can change when looking at math.Report
A cop might be, but the courts aren’t, nor are the jails and prisons, since by dint of entering the CJ system, a person rapidly become unemployable.
At that point we might as well just save the money and spend it on a handful of bullets for each. The bullets and cremation is way cheaper.
But… When we think of homelessness, and addiction, and the cost, what is the cost to treat those people and get them back on their feet versus, say, the cost to put cancer into remission?
When my mom got breast cancer, my parents had no insurance (dad was self-employed). Mom rana very small day care for what was effectively spending cash. Her care was paid for by the state, at one of the top hospitals. After surgeries, radiation, chemo, and all the Rx drugs she had to take once it had gone into remission, the cost just for her care was (IIRC) approaching a quarter million.
$250K, for her to live just another 5 years, before the cancer came back and killed her.
But cancer’s not her fault, right? It’s OK to spend that kind of money to try and save her life.
What is it worth to spend to try and get a person back to contributing, rather than just being a cost?Report
If I’m a local mayor or city council, the cop is on my budget but the rest of the entire criminal justice system is not. Further dealing with the homeless is also on my budget.
So my actual budget choice is one cop or treating 50(?) homeless.
I know two people who are mentally ill.
One of them takes a cheap pill every day and he has no problems. He is a functional person with a well paid job, a wife, children, and contributes a lot to society. If I didn’t know his history I wouldn’t know he takes that pill.
The other is worthless. She doesn’t want help, wouldn’t admit she needs it, and anyone who tries to befriend her runs the high risk of being accused of sex crimes. She has no job and probably never will. She makes things interesting for various people in the legal system.
The amount of money to deal with the first is a few hundred dollars a year and he pays for it out of pocket. The amount of money to “fix” the second would be infinite. I don’t think it can be done short of tearing up the Constitution and forcing her to get help, very much against her will.
The answer to your question is “it depends”. For some of them the amount of money is very slight and they’ll transform into functional people. For others no amount of money would work, they’re always going to be a problem for society.
This means for ANY budget, you’re not going to be able to help everyone. We can do better. But we can always do better because for any level of money there’s always going to be someone on the other side of that.
Another nasty way to phrase that is focussing on the people we can help easily and ignoring the ones we can’t will min/max the number of people we help. Arguably this is a triage situation, implying that’s even the ethical thing to do.Report
Yep, even my bleeding heart has limits.
That said, it is something that should be triaged, and if you have someone you can help, then help them as fast as possible.
And yes, at some point, you gotta wash your hands of someone and say, “We’ve spent enough resources trying to help a person who doesn’t want it. They are banned from the system until they figure out a way to meet XYZ criteria.” And it may be that part of the reason we can’t get a handle on addiction and homelessness is that we don’t have good triage for such things. I honestly don’t know.Report
The problem is that none of our solutions scale.
Imagine a single homeless person. It’s easy to come up with a fix. A spartan, utility apartment! It’s got a bathroom, a sink, a counter, a bunk, and a closet.
Not even as cozy as a tiny home, just a place that can hold a little bit of stuff, a place to sleep, and a place to poop.
According to Google, San Fran apparently would need more than 9000 of these.
It’s simple to imagine one of these. 9000 of them?
I suppose we could build something like Cabrini-Green…Report
Checking the Wiki, Cabrini-Green had 3,607 units and housed 15,000 people at its peak.
So something like Cabrini-Green would work.
Unless we have evidence that something like Cabrini-Green would fail catastrophically.Report
It can scale, it can scale nicely.
What it can’t do is scale all in one spot.
I can take 9000 homeless people and house them all across the bay area, but in doing so, I will break social links, and force case workers to travel, etc. There is a utility and efficiency to centralizing the problem, but that comes with it’s own issues.
Whenever I think about the issue, I think back to this. It’s a great idea, but it requires a lot of people with resources who are willing and able to expend some of those resources directly.Report
I think its better to NOT think of homelessness and social dysfunction through the lens of a bleeding heart.
Because this makes it something which is optional, a budgetary nicety like a park or something.
I propose that social ills like homelessness and addiction are a tax on the economy, and treating them is an economic good.
For example, the property values of areas with a lot of homeless suffer. If you were to calculate the cost, you might compare the rents in Skid Row to rents in surrounding neighborhoods, then calculate the sales value of the property. This is in addition to the direct cost of police and medical and cleanup crews and all the rest of the services that cities spend on social ills.
We as individuals can “wash our hands” of a dysfunctional person, but the community can’t. The city is compelled to respond to a shopkeeper with a belligerent customer or a mentally ill person causing a disturbance.
That difference in property values plus the cost of response is the cost that homelessness is inflicting on the property owners. It is a tax in all but name and it is staggering.
A tax in the amount of one tenth of the cost would produce benefits many times over to the property owners.
But we know this already! This isn’t some new insight, its a collective action problem that economists and political theorists have studied for a century.
In every city, there are thousands of property owners and shopkeepers whose fortunes are suffering because of social ills, but they have no faith in the ability of solutions to be effective, or no will to imagine anything better.
Even if one were to agree with them, then the only solution is to accept the status quo, that vast sections of our community will forever be derelict.
And, that this cancerous ulcer will continue to move and destroy healthy areas, as the dysfunctional people who make it up move to new areas.Report
It’s not so much that I see it through the lens of a bleeding heart, I agree that it’s as you describe. The issue is, you can’t help people who don’t want help. What do we do with people who refuse all assistance, or who refuse to do the work to get better?
Do we simply put them in prison, or bring back involuntary commitments? How do we avoid the problems those have as well? I’m not saying we can’t answer those questions, I’m saying we haven’t yet.
This isn’t like trying to build in a flood zone, where we can invest in engineering works to counter the flooding, or simply pay people to leave an area and ban future construction there.Report
Personally, I am in favor of involuntary confinement, but only on condition it is properly funded and overseen so it doesn’t become what it used to be, a snake pit where society’s lepers were warehoused.
Which is a way of saying that the only “solution” will always require some insane amount of money, and a tremendous and persistent will on the part of the citizens that we must care for those who are ill.
Which in turn requires a high degree of trust and camaraderie in our society.
Tough sleddin’.Report
We’ve eared that lack of trust.
The gov ALREADY has that kind of money on hand, it’s just used to pay off politically influential voters… and this hits the radar as a local problem when a lot of the money’ed solutions are federal.
For that matter the big issues with the price of housing are locally created by the influential. And I don’t mean “the 1%”, I mean “the middle and upper classes”.Report
There are also bad incentives here.
1) A community which has great treatment systems may attract the homeless thus increasing their tax burden.
2) We run the risk of functional (or marginally functional) people capturing/using the system.
3) We run the risk of the people running the system having the incentive to “find” (or even “create”) the problem they’re paid to fix.
4) A community which has no treatment system may send their homeless (if only by inaction) to places which have treatment systems and thus lower their burden.
It’s not clear to me that the costs make sense. I.e. that “A tax in the amount of one tenth of the cost would produce benefits many times over to the property owners.” would actually be returning money to the people being taxed, much less “many times over”. These problems won’t go away even if we do have a robust system because not everyone is fixable.Report
Ok I’m convinced.
The property owners along Skid Row, and wherever else homeless congregate just have to suck it.
And the taxpayers who spend billions on policing and courts and medical care for mentally ill and addicts, they just have to suck it as well.Report
The Chinese have developed excellent solutions to homelessness and drug addiction, if we’re just willing to learn from them. Heck, I think they even turn a profit on the programs. If nothing else, perhaps we could just ship our problem cases to China and let them work their Oriental magic. 🙂Report
Or, if they can really make money by investing in the homeless, they’ll invest in the homeless.
Of course if that worked in reality as opposed to just in some utopian paper, then it’s odd the money grubbing capitalists refuse to make money.Report
Ya know, it’s easy to poke hole in ideas.
So step up, how would you deal with the homeless and addicts that doesn’t leave them at the mercy of badged bullies?Report
For the worst of the worst? I.e. the people who refuse help and claim it’s everyone else who is crazy and they’re fine?
That’s easy. I wouldn’t. Afaict anything we do which “helps” that corner case has such massively bad unintended consequences that the amount of harm outweighs the good. I’m think of things which rip up the Constitution.
For the housing crisis, I’d move control over zoning to something like Japan’s federal model. Local control is what is fueling most the housing crisis, we’re past the point where we should assume good intentions.
That helps, a LOT, many, many people, including maybe half of the homeless (maybe more).
Dealing with addiction is something that either waits for technology to fix (there are some very promising techs in the wings) and/or could be covered with insurance.
Mental Health treatment has a history of either curing people and thus destroying itself or being a boondoggle. How to deal with that is beyond my skills… but I will point out that we’re not doing nothing.
It’s not a perfect world. Restructuring the world so a tiny minority can’t be harmed by their own bad choices (no matter what is fueling that) shouldn’t have first call on our public dollar. As far as I can tell we don’t have good options(*) here if the yardstick is “help everyone”.
(*) Beyond what we’re already doing with food stamps and my suggestion on how to increase the supply of housing.Report
PS Speaking of budgetsReport
There was a semi-decent movie that came out in 1997 called “PPlaying God“. David Duchovny was a doctor who used amphetamines to keep going and opiates to help him come down and sleep hard enough that he could get back up and keep going again.
Well, eventually, someone died on the table.
In the film, he had his license revoked. He didn’t go to jail… but he wasn’t allowed to practice anymore.
The movie, apparently, bombed. I didn’t think it was *THAT* bad… anyway, the point was: the doc screwed up and got his license revoked. Instead of being subject to training about proper use of amphetamines and opiates.Report
Speaking of Ryan Whitaker, I’d like to point out that there is still no national news coverage of this story. It’s not that police don’t do this to white people—it’s that the national news media systematically hype up stories about questionable shootings of black people by police while ignoring similar stories about white people getting shot. The racial angle on this story is a product of narrative-driven journalism, not a narrative that naturally arises from an unbiased examination of the facts.Report
Same with Tommy Le, and a bunch of other cases. Even Hispanic shootings get less air time.
I truly believe that focusing just on AA shootings hurts police reform, because it ignores all the other times the police kill people who were innocent and get away with it, which means people who truly don’t care about AA and think BLM is stupid (the ALM crowd, I guess) get to ignore the issue.Report
From my view on the outside, I actually think an underrated part on why police shootings against black people get attention, while police shootings against white people don’t is pretty simple – black people have far more solidarity than white people.
To be blunt, if a black person gets shot by the police, a lot of black people have had enough bad experiences to be able to put themselves in that person’s shoes, even if the black person that got shot isn’t the greatest person.
Meanwhile, if the white person gets shot, even among the working class, the response is usually, “well, he was probably being an idiot, so I don’t have anything to worry about.”
That’s not even getting into things like, the parents or grandparents of the black person likely know a local pastor or community organizer who can get a march organized, while the white family probably would get pushback from their own community if they tried to organize something.Report
Damn. Somebody check the temperature in hell, Jesse and I agree on something.Report
To a certain degree, the problem lies in the Prison/No Prison aspect of what both of you are talking about. About the Blake shooting, or Floyd for that matter, there is a strong argument that the officer is either following written procedure, briefing room instructions, or media implications. All of which can be backed up by other officers, also known as witness’. Sad, fucked up, misguided, criminal, call it what you want, but I am guessing that is what is at the base of the actions. And if that is the case, no amount of screaming will or should make this an offense punishable by prison time.* There are, however, many DA’s who will scream for blood after something like this.** In some cases with good cause, in others not. Indeed, these cases are why QI exists.
What QI is not intended to cover are cases like Tamir Rice, Breona Taylor, Ryan Whitaker, and so on. But, union or no union, a lawyer is going to argue that they fall within the purview of QI. Every. Single. Time. For good or ill, that is what lawyers are supposed to do. Innocent until proven guilty applies to those we don’t like just as well as those we do.
So, to Dark’s point, prison needs to be off the table for issues of procedure being followed, as I can guarantee you that it has been vetted by lawyers and precedent.*** Why? Because police need to be able to do the very necessary job (as seen in CHOP) without fear of politics interfering in that specific, post-hoc manor. But, and here is the important point, we as a society need to be very forceful in taking the egregious cases, the Rices, the Whitakers, and making sure that cases like those are prison bound. And this is a societal issue in that we, or our representatives, put judges into positions that either allow or disallow QI.
*I haven’t seen anything remarking on it yet, but I would bet that in the wake of the Floyd death that police officers made sure to act with kid gloves in every interaction with a black person, lest it was filmed.
**I am pretty sure that this will be the cause for letting the killer of George Floyd off. Any DA that charges before all of the facts are present runs a very serious risk of overcharging. And when this is done to attempt to score political points it only shows us that the DA in question is both bad at being a lawyer and a politician.
***If it hasn’t been vetted, then there is a good opening for any decent lawyer or justice group.Report
Yes. And that is why we need to be very clear where those lines are, instead of what we have now, which is that a line, if there is one, is up to whatever judge is in play.
And if we accept that Floyd was killed because the department had crap policy regarding a situation, then yes, the officer gets off, but the department pays a hefty settlement that includes updating policy and training.Report