The Caron Nazario Video: Watch It For Yourself
Caron Nazario Video from bodycams
The viral Caron Nazario video of a uniformed soldier being stopped, pepper sprayed, and eventually wrestled to the ground by police also has a lawsuit to go with it.
Caron Nazario had his arms raised in fear from the window of his newly purchased SUV when two police officers held the Army second lieutenant at gunpoint during a traffic stop in Windsor, Va.
Nazario was confused as to why police were yelling for him to exit the car last December for not having a permanent rear license plate, according to a federal lawsuit filed this month.
When Nazario told police on Dec. 5, 2020, that he was “honestly afraid to get out” of the car, the officer replied, “Yeah, you should be!”
From there, body-cam footage shows police pepper-spraying, striking and handcuffing the 27-year-old, and using a slang term suggesting that he would face execution, the complaint says. The lawsuit claims police also threatened to end Nazario’s military career if he spoke out about the incident.
“I’m serving this country, and this is how I’m treated?” said Nazario, according to body-cam video.
Nazario, who is Black and Latino, filed a lawsuit this month against Windsor officers Joe Gutierrez and Daniel Crocker alleging excessive force that the lieutenant says was due to racial profiling. The federal lawsuit obtained by The Washington Post, which was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia on April 2, is seeking at least $1 million in damages and for the court to rule that Gutierrez and Crocker violated his constitutional rights, specifically the Fourth Amendment.
“Short of people getting murdered, it’s the most egregious conduct I’ve seen on film by police,” Jonathan Arthur, Nazario’s attorney, said to The Post.
Neither Windsor Police Chief Rodney Riddle nor Mayor Glyn Willis immediately returned requests for comment Saturday. A town manager told the Virginian Pilot that Gutierrez and Crocker still work for the police department.
Watch the Caron Nazario video here:
I would like to remind everyone who thinks “There aren’t really that many Black people getting killed by the police, it’s all blown out of proportion, single instances get huge amount of attention” that the fact is…most horrifically racist interactions with the police do _not_ result in death.
They’re things like this, where the Black people kowtow to the cops enough to _not_ get shot. Yeah, in most cases the guy manages _not_ get shot.
The ‘putting a knee on a man’s chest in full view of everyone while he obviously sufficates’…that is, indeed, an outlier. That is rare-ish.
This, on the other hand, is not rare. This is not even close to rare. This is all the time, 24/7, and I mean that, at any given moment in the US, a Black man is probably being randomly threatened by the police, at gunpoint, for literally no reason. Probably pepper sprayed, hit with sticks, tasered, threatened.
99.9% of the victim will walk away from that…a few won’t.
You just don’t hear about it when the guy lives. Or when there aren’t any witnesses.
But the thing is: That sort of behavior by police is not acceptable even if the victims do walk away.
And a reminder: This man is in the military, he’s not worried about retribution…he’s probably not even in the state anymore. And he’s not stupid enough to think random police officers assaulting him could impact his military career.
How many people don’t come forward, fearing retribution? How many people don’t come forward because _literally nothing will happen_…except retribution?
This man is probably not going to win anything, at all. He happens to be in a situation where he can afford a lawsuit, and he happens to be in a situation where the police can’t harass or even kill him for doing this. So he sued.Report
Reforming the police is pretty much a pre-requisite for pretty much any major social changes we’re hoping for (via legislation, anyway).
If this is what law enforcement looks like, a new law ain’t gonna get us to where we want to go.Report
This just isn’t close to being true. The cops and the way they do their jobs have next to nothing to do with, for example, tax reform, voting rights, LGBTQ rights, labor law reform, minimum wage increases, infrastructure, health care, antitrust policy, regulation of the tech giants …… the list goes on.Report
I was mostly thinking “Gun Control”.
But, you’re right. Major social change like raising corporate taxes, building things, and Bidencare don’t rely on police reform at all.Report
On a plus note, Maryland repealed it’s Police Bill of Rights.Report
Should be an interesting experiment and it certainly removes a barrier to accountability. What will be telling is how the agencies and local governments respond. They’re the ones with most of the control.Report
I’d suggest that it’s instead a return to the mean. Police Bill of Rights (or whatever the hell a state decides to call it) are a relatively recent concept (none of them are older than me), and are, IMHO, an objectively failed experiment in dealing with lawsuit abuse, since they went too far in the other direction.Report
That’s certainly the hope. However remember, just because investigating/prosecuting authorities no longer have to agree to privilege LEOs doesn’t mean they won’t find discretionary ways to do so. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good the de jure barrier is gone, but I expect changes of what happens in practice to take time and maybe even some departmental turnover.Report
Totally agree. But it’s very hard to change a culture when the existing culture is protected by law. My like Dennis’ latest post, the CRA didn’t cure racism, but it did undercut the ability to enforce racism under law.Report
There has been success at the state wide level, blue states only so far.Report
Pity that Red States like Virginia still keep having stuff like this happen.Report
There is so much madness in this video, but rather than fisk the entire thing, I’m just going to point out this gem.
2:42-2:53
“Keep your hands outside the window. Keep your hands outside the window. Get out of the car now.”
So should he keep his hands outside the window or open the door?Report
It’s more than a bit disturbing that these officers are so secure in the culture that they behave this way knowing full well their body cams are on.Report
New York Times reports that the cop has been fired.
My dumb ass has a question: Is what the cop did not only fireable, but kinda illegal as well?Report
Don’t get greedy.Report
Given that I expect his job to be re-instated shortly, I suppose it’s merely an academic question.Report
Damn those cops were stupid.
Here’s the moment: when the dude in the car said, “I’m afraid of you.” At that moment, the cop could have easily defused the entire situation. Instead of saying, “You should be” — which is in fact the most stupid thing any human has ever said — he could have said, “You don’t need to be. We won’t hurt you if you don’t try to hurt us. We just need to talk to you about your missing license plate.”
That’s it. Just let the dude know why he’s being stopped.Report
A lot of cops love their power though and the ability to not only bully a Black/Hispanic American but a Black/Hispanic American in uniform must have been too much to resist temptation.Report
License plate wasn’t actually missing though, was it? He had the temporary in the window? Like, as soon as the reason for the stop is being faked, the situation is completely out of control.Report
I understand that he kept driving because he didn’t want the incident to happen on a poorly lit street but in a well-lit location.
Which, you know, makes sense.
Allahpundit wrote a decent post about it.
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Well. they have probably gotten away with this before and the only thing different about this situation is the victim was active duty, in uniform, and there were independent cameras from the gas station recording the encounter. As much as I hate SP, they had Cartman dress as a police officer in aviator shades for a reason. The profession tends to attract “respect my authoritah” types.Report
Orin Kerr has a nice thread here:
Report
I’d quibble a bit with this, though I recognize that Kerr is being very charitable and diplomatic in his writing there:
“The officers are meanwhile thinking, “why is this person committing the crime of refusing my lawful order?””
My hunch is that many officers — and very likely the ones here given their other behavior — are thinking something more like, “Got ’em!” They know they’re setting a trap and they’re happy when their victim falls into it.
I’ve said it elsewhere but it stands out to me that cops often behave one way when they claim they are fearing for their lives (taking increasingly aggressive and violent action) and often behave another way when their lives are actually in real danger (approaching with caution; taking cover; fleeing).
So, do cops react with aggression to folks who are slow or refuse to exit their car because they are wondering why they are acting so? Or because they know the law is on their side given this “lawful order” thingy and that they can rough up someone who likely isn’t going to fight back?Report
I think it’s one of those things where the cops aren’t, like, actively *THINKING* in these situations as much as they are “relying on their training” or reacting or similar.
Kerr is putting together a handful of policies that, in theory, would reduce the number of these interactions. Change the training the cops are relying on and thus change what they do in any given situation.
I’ve said it elsewhere but it stands out to me that cops often behave one way when they claim they are fearing for their lives (taking increasingly aggressive and violent action) and often behave another way when their lives are actually in real danger (approaching with caution; taking cover; fleeing).
I kinda agree with this but I think it’s more that they have this constant knowledge that they’re in fear for their lives at baseline. It’s, like, 5% “fear for my life”. It’s when this baseline 5% turns into an actually assessed 15% that they suddenly discover that, you know what? Part of our training involves going home safely at the end of the shift.Report
I would 100% support Kerr’s efforts.
And I think your assessment of my quasi-theory. makes more sense. Thank youlReport
It’s interesting to see this post alongside Dennis’ posts about Afro-pessimism.
While its certainly true that there is ample cause to celebrate progress and be optimistic, it is also true that this video would be immediately familiar to any black person in 1965, when a traffic stop led to the Watts riots.
Consider that the officers involved weren’t even born then, the conclusion is that America continues to churn out racists with every generation.
White people, generally speaking, aren’t doing a good enough job suppressing these sorts of people and keeping them out of positions of power.Report
Two reactions, I suppose.
A: We need to reform the police! And, like, that involves seven or eight things!
B: We need to teach CRT in Elementary School!Report
We can reform the police all we want but if shitty people continue to be shitty than everything that looks good on paper won’t have much impact in reality.Report
The thing is, both of those cops could have joined the force with the best of intentions, and could be good people 95% of the time (i.e. truly want to help people, are really decent people out of uniform, etc.), but if the department has a culture that views the public, or some segment of the public, as “the enemy”, and the enemy must be dealt with in a specific way, then that is what happens.
This is what makes the problem so tough. You have to change the culture AND identify and get rid of the officers who can be rehabilitated to a more positive culture. If all you do is purge the bad cops, the culture will persist and make more bad cops. If all you do is change the culture, the cops who like the old culture will undermine the efforts to implement a new one.Report
Yeah, there is a long list of “necessary but insufficient” actions that need to be taken.
I’m following the struggle of our local reformist DA, George Gascon as he is fighting attacks both from within his office, and without.
And the various states struggling to rein in qualified immunity.
And of course the national dialogue about race.
I’m hopeful that the winds are in our favor, but I also know that the office in this video has a network of family and friends and co-workers, all of whom offer him support and affirmation.
I mean, it isn’t plausible to think that he was a peaceful and honorable cop who treats people with respect and dignity, but then, suddenly…one day, he just sorta snapped and treated people like this?
No, he likely has a very long trail behind him of encounters like this, and his friends, family, other cops all know that history and turn a blind eye to it, even if not actively encouraging it.
So yeah, this problem is deeply rooted, and will take a lot of work to resolve.Report
Congrats, you’ve just hit the primary reasoning behind the ACAB concept.
If you’re not a bastard cop, you work for a police department that means you act it — or at the very least, stay silent as others do — because you’ll be punished or drummed out if you stand up for what’s right.
And once you realize that a department with this “culture” is not an aberration, but the norm…..Report
my current favorite meme on this:
If you have 1300 good cops
and 12 bad cops
and the 1300 cover for the 12
you have 1312 bad copsReport
Yep, I know.
My point isn’t that ACAB, it’s that the Blue Wall doesn’t see themselves as the villains, and their support networks don’t see them as the villains.
There is reformative value in helping the public see the cops as sometimes villains, because it will gradually (assuming we can avoid fatigue) undermine the value of the Blue Wall for the police themselves. It also helps to disassemble the legal structures that protect bad cops.
That said, the ACAB narrative reinforces the current culture that the public are the enemy. If it persists, we may find that reform is impossible, and all we are left with is complete overhaul* and the pain that doing so will involve.
Personally, I’m fine with that kind of pain, but I suspect a lot of people will not be OK with that.
*Not just disbanding and reforming police, or the concept of policing, but our laws as well; read: de-criminalizing. If we continue to insist that police get involved in every little bit of law breaking, we will return to the current mean.Report
Decriminalization is probably a good idea for some different things here and there, but lets not get it mixed up with abusive policing.
As the video, and that Axios link demonstrate, over half of police killings don’t even involve any underlying violent crime.
Traffic stops are almost always mere infractions, literally decriminalized, yet somehow the cops find a way to turn them into lethal shootouts.Report
Among the (many) problems with the law is that it doesn’t account for the creation of a volatile situation by the police. It tends to assume competent training and standards. The courts then apply a ‘no Monday morning quarterbacking’ kind of rubric that at best only makes sense when the police are responding to an out of control situation, as opposed to one they create.Report
Decriminalization doesn’t have to mean “X is not a crime”, it can simply mean X is not a crime that officers are going to spend time making contact over. It means eliminating the offense as probable cause*.
Every cop car is fitted with a Dash Cam. Sandra bland would be probably alive today if the cop had merely noted the time and plate number of the misdemeanor lane change and used dash cam footage to validate the offense, then sent a summons in the mail. We insist that the officer conduct a stop and make contact. We also insist that officers attempt to use such contact to look for other violations of the law regardless of how small.
Now the kid in Brooklyn Heights might be alive today if there wasn’t a law against hanging stuff from rear view mirrors. Is there a good reason folks shouldn’t be hanging crap from rear view mirrors? There sure is! Should it be illegal? Probably not, but if we insist that it is, it should not be the kind of thing police will make contact over.
We can reduce the list of what police are going to engage with the public over without making it a free for all.
*Lawyers, do I have that right?Report
Where is it mandatory that cops make contact?
Officers have plenty of discretion to not make contact, (they do it a million times a day with speeding and jaywalking etc) and plenty more discretion to give a warning, and even more discretion to de-escalate.
But they don’t use that discretionary power, at least not when they don’t feel like it.
But even if there were protocols in place suggesting they not make contact, it can’t possibly be forbidden because police DO have a legitimate need for the discretion to make contact based on nothing more than hunches and feels- that’s part of community policing, even in its most idealized version.
The reason I am so wary of the idea of reducing the contact points between cops and citizens is that it implicitly accepts that cops are like rabid bears who should be avoided at all times, instead of trusted servants of the people.Report
If a cop wants to give you a traffic ticket, they have to make contact. They can’t just record your plate number and mail you a summons.
But more to that, police are evaluated (not just officers, but also departments) based upon how many contacts they make, and how many citations and arrests are made. They have an incentive to make contact and escalate because it gives them more opportunity to issue citations or make an arrest. They have that incentive because government has to have some metric* for accountability for the budget, and we the people want our governments to be accountable for our tax dollars, so that metric is…
Well, it sure as hell isn’t how many friendly verbal warnings officers issue.
But you are right, police should be able to exercise judgement on contacts, and we need to give them incentives to be peace officers, not citation or arrest machines. I can think of two ways to adjust those incentives:
1) Reduce the opportunities for citation or arrest.
2) Discard the metrics of citation or arrest.
*This totally ignores the use of police to generate revenue through fines, fees, and CAF.Report
Radar/camera combination for speeding tickets. Intersection cameras for running red lights. Most parking tickets. I sometimes wonder why jurisdictions don’t have a vehicle driving around taking pictures of parked cars and issuing out-of-date plate tag tickets.Report
We had all those thing in Maryland. Judges hated them. If you got a speed camera ticket and went to court and pled guilty you’d generally get only court costs which were way less then the fine and which never went to the ensuing jurisdiction.Report
“it’s that the Blue Wall doesn’t see themselves as the villains, and their support networks don’t see them as the villains.”
That’s because, bluntly, they see violence against minorities — especially blacks — as laudable. They’re putting “thugs in their place”. You can see the gleeful support and racism for it from their loudest supporters (r/JusticeServed has plenty of examples, and that’s technically moderated to remove the worst of it).
And it’s nothing new. The town I grew up in was a sundown town well into the 70s. No busses because ‘the wrong sort’ might ride the busses from their urban hellholes there and do god knows what. (it has gotten better over the last 30 years, I admit. Still no transit). Cops in America have always had the unspoken job to put the boot into “undesirables” (blacks, gays, hippies to name the usual suspects) to make them “learn their place”. It’s baked into the culture of American policing, and to many it’s something to cheer on.
Look, I’m 45. Almost 30 years of driving. I’ve never once been asked to step out of my car at a traffic stop. I once got pulled over for doing 20+ over the limit, WITH EXPIRED TAGS, and the cop was clearly angry about something (whether it was my driving or something else about his day, he was clearly furious as hell) and….I got a brief lecture about speed, a ticket written for 14 over (so I wouldn’t have to pay the larger fine), a ticket for the tags (and told that if I fixed them within a week they’d dismiss the ticket for 20 bucks), and a brief lecture on the fact that wild boars liked to cross that road and it’s a real PITA to clean up after someone hits them at 60 mph.
Furious cop, me massively speeding, expired tags.
I didn’t get so much as berated. Much less told to exit the car. Much less tased. Much less SHOT.
And it’s because I’m white. If I was black, I would bet my bottom dollar I’d have spent a lot more time outside of my car while a police officer shouted at me, searched my car, and tried to find something to arrest me over.Report
Yes to all that.
But you haven’t suggested a path past it. How do you get people to recognize that they are the baddies, so they will cooperate in reform?Report
Honestly? Well, the simplest is denazification — I mean just fire the whole lot and start fresh with something built from Peelian principles. That’s not really workable for lots of reasons, starting with total lack of public support and moving onto the large gap between “fired police force” and “new police force”.
Slightly more workable is “defund the police” or more aptly “break up the police”.
First, take everything the police do that isn’t core competency stuff and give it to someone else. An unarmed someone else. Expand social services, etc. If you don’t need armed police showing up, but do need some form of government authority, there should be another group to send.
Second, split apart the core police functions into “need to be armed/don’t need to be armed”. If you’re pulling over speeders and stuff, why are you carrying a sidearm? You know how many traffic stops there are a day? You know how many actually require a firearm (less than the number where one was pulled out, by a LOT)? Can’t mistake a taser for a handgun if your handgun if you don’t have one, or it’s secure in the trunk like your long gun.
Third, decriminalization of drugs use — if cops stop seeing anyone around them as possibly criminals because they may be high, maybe they’ll stop scaring themselves to other people’s deaths.
Fourth, ditch asset forfeiture.
Fifth, ditch qualified immunity and force police unions to cover judgements, not the city. I betcha if their premiums skyrocket, the thin blue line will open up enough to push the biggest problems right out.
Sixth, demilitarize the police. You don’t need a tank. If they equip you like a soldier going to war, you’re going to feel like you’re in that much danger. When in fact, your squad car is the biggest danger you face.
In short: Reduce the number of cops. Reduce the number of cops carrying firearms, and reduce the number of things they need to carry firearms for. And get rid of at least the most obvious perverse incentives to light people up, and give police unions real, pointed reasons to push out the worst offenders and keep them out.
I mean it goes contrary to our beloved lone wolf hero mythos, but we’ve been paying for that crap in the blood of real people so that, bluntly, a bunch of a**holes can swagger around strapped.Report
Cosign completely.Report
All sounds like something I would have wrote. All sounds like stuff I have written.
We should go grab a beer sometime!Report
We can reform the police all we want
We can?
Why haven’t we?Report
From a liberal local level politicians perspective reforming the police can be done but It’s hard and doing it pisses off people who’s opinions we care about. Shoving dukats into Robin DiAngelo’s pocket for a White Fragility seminar is easy and only annoys people who’s opinions we don’t care about.Report
Fixed it for ya.Report
There’s some truth to that but I think it glosses over the biggest challenge. The places where these abuses are most common want (good) law enforcement. It isn’t easy to respond to conflicted constituencies.Report
Too narrow. They also care deeply about votes.Report
Exactly. No one wants to get hassled, or God forbid something much worse, just for being in the ‘wrong’ part of town. But they also don’t want crack houses on the corner that periodically erupt in gun fights spilling out into the neighborhood. The only reason we’re even able to have this conversation at all right now I think is that the later has tampered down a lot over the laat 25 years.Report
That sounds a lot like “okay, maybe we can’t”.Report
It’s hard =/= it’s impossible.Report
It’s still a fur piece from “we can reform the police all we want”.Report
We can reform the police all we want. But it’s a lot of work and responsibility for reforming it lies mostly on diffuse local levels, so it seems we don’t want to reform the police all that much.Report
“All we want” seems to cover getting rid of the Police Bill of Rights in a handful of places and getting rid of QI in a few but…
Well, it looks like we’re fixing to have another summer like last summer.
Nothing galvanizes support for the cops than “holy crap, this is even worse than the cops!”Report
It’s a miserable slow push and, worse, it’s a push at a sub-national level which makes it boring, uninteresting and beneath the notice of the internet and national media. If these idiot police fishers keep fishing up, though, the push will keep going.Report
This may be deserving of it’s own post, but via Axios
https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-pm-0a34d58c-ab1a-44e4-8906-1a785f62ed28.html
Note item 2, the infographic.
The linked source is also interesting, because it leads to this:
https://policeviolencereport.org/Report
Nearly 200 years ago, Robert Peel introduced the Peelite rules of policing: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2020/06/01/sir-robert-peel-never-came-to-america/
The rules are:
“1. The basic mission for which police exist is to prevent crime and disorder as an alternative to the repression of crime and disorder by military force and severity of legal punishment.
2. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police existence, actions, behavior and the ability of the police to secure and maintain public respect.
3. The police must secure the willing cooperation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain public respect.
4. The degree of cooperation of the public that can be secured diminishes, proportionately, to the necessity for the use of physical force and compulsion in achieving police objectives.
5. The police seek and preserve public favor, not by catering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to the law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws; by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of society without regard to their race or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humor; and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
6. The police should use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to achieve police objectives; and police should use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
7. The police at all times should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police are the only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the intent of the community welfare.
8. The police should always direct their actions toward their functions and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary by avenging individuals or the state, or authoritatively judging guilt or punishing the guilty.
9. The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.”
I think a lot of our problems with policing could be solved by the adaptation of Peelite principals but it seems like a big division is people who see total abolition as the only option and/or would prefer to just cases like this as ideological axes to grind against Democrats.Report
Obviously, I am a huge fan of Peelian Principles, and I know there are police officers who try to serve those principles.
But we still have a lot of people see those principles as living that old Robin Williams joke:
They want every cop to be like the Texas Ranger’s motto (One Riot, One Ranger), but they don’t want to pay for that kind of training.
But before we can get the police to adopt Peel, we need the public to do so, and that means we first need to make the public aware of Peel (I doubt too many in the US have a clue who he was). Then they need to be convinced that’s the way to go.Report
Are y’all watching the same video I am? First off all these news stories mention how there was a paper license plate in the back window but I didn’t see one, granted it wasn’t the best quality. Second, what would you do if you were the cops? Sing kumbaya with him? They can’t see inside the car. They asked him to get out of the car to minimize the danger of the Lt. pulling something dangerous out. I do recognise that the Lt.’s fear is justified given all the stories but almost no one actually watches the whole body cam videos; they just watch the cut ones that give no context. I commend y’all for looking for the whole video.Report
How is a uniformed U.S. Soldier a threat to local American police officers?
I don’t care what they can see in the care – the level of disrespect to the uniform you are suggesting those officers had is beyond the pale.Report
Well, you see, it’s a threat to their self esteem, because active duty military are actual gorram heroes (ain’t they just), while certain cops are just bullies with badges who need to act all rage-aholic in order to feel tough.Report
Tinted windows mean you won’t see one unless your view is directly behind the car, but it was a new car, and last I checked, dealerships don’t let you leave the lot without one of those in the back window. So if the claim was it was there, and the police have offered up no evidence to the contrary, it’s safe to assume it was there.
Second, at what point did the LT do something that warranted that kind of response? I mean, he calmly drove to a well lit area with cameras (damn near every gas station has cameras for drive offs and security), what the hell is he gonna do, go all Rambo on them in full view of a people and recording devices? If he meant to do harm to the cops, he would have pulled off into a nice, quiet, dark road; or he would have bolted at high speed.
So if I was the cops, what I would not do is work myself into a violent lather because my ego was damaged by the fact that a citizen did not immediately do what I wanted, and instead acted to protect themselves and others* and took care to be calm and rational.
The cops knew they f*cked up, they knew they escalated the situation out of their own control, and they proceeded to threaten and lie to try and cover their asses.
So perhaps a better question is, why are you so eager to excuse violent and irrational behavior on the part of law enforcement?
*And hey, letting the stop happen at a gas station gets everyone off the road, which is safer than sitting on the side of the highway.Report
Exactly. Which is why after they had him out and cuffed they told him they wouldn’t report it to his unit if he didn’t make a stink.
They knew what they were doing. And did it anyway.Report
Oh, I don’t think they knew what they were doing, but they sure as hell knew what they did.Report
Hey, fun fact everyone: Even when we explicitly pass laws to explicitly outlaw specific behavior of the police, nothing happens.
New York passed a law designed to stop NYPD officers from kneeling on people’s necks back last May.
An NYPD officer did just that in January.
The police bodycam, released by the DA’s office, as justification for not charging them: https://youtu.be/u1-LmCbeb-s?t=69
Now, I will admit he only kneels on the guy’s neck for around ten second, but last I checked, you can’t break the law for ten seconds. New York made a pretty clear damn rule of ‘Stop kneeling on people necks while arresting them’ and the police refuse to follow it, and the DA refuses to prosecute.
The DA decided not to charge them under the grounds there was ‘no evidence that bloodflow or airflow was restricted’. Of course, there’s literally no way to prove this after the fact unless the person dies, once we dismiss the testimony of the victim who indeed said he couldn’t breath, so the law is apparently pointless. (And once they do die, it was probably of some other thing, right?)
Oh, and…they never had any sort of medical expert look him over, just to see if there were any injuries…which apparently, there were. You can’t prove airflow was restricted, but you could prove, for example, that he was pressed into the ground hard enough it had to be impacted. But they didn’t bother to check.
The police are completely lawless at this point.
Police reform is bullshit. It cannot work.
Oh, and additional fun fact: This guy was not resisting in any way.
I don’t mean he wasn’t resisting but the police pretended he was resisting, I mean, the police didn’t even charge him with that, at all.
You can see it in bodycam footage, if you keep going. they roll him to the side, he just goes with it. They have to actually help him up from the ground, and at no point whatsoever is he even slightly struggling.
But maybe he was struggling before they got him down, right? He has to be on the ground for a reason, right?
Except…that’s even weirder. Rewind the video back to 50 seconds and try to figure out what the hell is going on there. He’s calmly sitting on his ATV that he’s illegally driving, with a flashing police car in front and in back of him, obviously waiting for them to get out their car and arrest him, and the officer wearing the camera runs up and starts swiping something at him, and he darts back to avoid whatever the hell is going on there. It looks like they’re hitting him with sticks, or rolled-up newspapers, and he’s trying to avoid it! He’s not even running away, just dodging. Once they actually grab him instead of trying to hit him (Seriously, what the hell is going on there?), he just goes along with. (As far as we can tell, there’s a black part that means the camera is pressed against someone, but we don’t know who or what is going on.)Report
Police reform is bullshit. It cannot work
While I appreciate this argument, I’d say that the options we have are between “actually doing something” and “not doing something”.
The problem with police reform is that it’s not one thing, there is no silver bullet. It’s 6-7 things and each of them, by themselves, won’t accomplish Police Reform. This state might get rid of QI but that’s not police reform. That state might legalize pot but that won’t result in police reform either. This other state over there might have a city that elects a prosecutor that doesn’t believe in cash bail for rioters.
But until you do stuff, a *LOT* of stuff, we’re still going to have Never Events.
And if we find ourselves in a place where crime is a lot closer to the early 90’s numbers than the numbers from the twenty-tweens, we’re going to find ourselves saying “exuberant policing, WHICH I DO NOT CONDONE, is better than *THIS*.”Report
That said, it’s always a fun moment when we pivot from “NOBODY IS ARGUING X!” to “X is the only moral position”.
I’m beginning to suspect that “Slippery Slope” is not a fallacy.
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So what the hell are we supposed to do? Convert the neighborhood watch into a militia? What could possibly go wrong?Report
Federalism, but for neighborhoods.Report
decentralized fascism.Report
Don’t see it as fascism. See it as collectivism.
Separately, we break easily. Together, we combine to form an unbreakable bundle!Report
(I just want to say this was a neat pun.)Report
Also, Ben & Jerry’s.
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I’m all for tossing the whole thing and starting from scratch, but I don’t think people have really thought about the political and social (and biological) pain that will involve.
In your specific case, we could take such charging decisions away from local DAs. Bump it up a level, or appoint something like a Special Master (or whatever you would call a prosecutor that is not associated with a specific office and thus not experiencing a conflict of interest with regard to the police being prosecuted).Report
It’s interesting to see what “tossing the whole thing” looks like in action.
For instance, the ideology of the New Deal (aggressive government management of the economy and social safety net) was reflected in government policy and politics for about 40 years, ending with the rise of Reagonomics and the DLC centrism in the 90s.
It wasn’t one single silver bullet, it wasn’t some sort of visible revolution, but just a slow sea change in how people thought about things, and a million policy changes at every level in every state.
I think the end of militarized policing will be like that, where the mindset that allows “Tough On Crime” to be a consistent winning slogan will change, and newer slogans about community control will start winning.
I’m feeling more optimism recently, but still wary because fear and a hatred of some outgroup is an eternal feature of human politics.Report
I think the end of militarized policing will be like that, where the mindset that allows “Tough On Crime” to be a consistent winning slogan will change, and newer slogans about community control will start winning.
Depends on the crime.
Because I can see “bad policing was better than *NO* policing” as a reachable conclusion.
If last time is any indicator.Report
But that’s not “tossing the whole thing”. A steady sea change is, well, reform. It’s slow, and it’s a hearts and minds kind of thing, backed up with legislative changes.
And there a lot of reformers who are not patient enough for that.Report
Probably because we’ve tried ‘police reform’ for like 20 years at this point, and not only are things not changing, a rather large part of society seems to oppose the entire concept, and quite likes the result. (And it’s actually clear, historically, that this is on purpose.)
But let’s turn the question around: Can you point to a single thing that is better about police behavior now than 20 years ago? Just one thing?
No?
Then how is there ‘reform’ in any manner? How can we ‘wait’ for something to happen that literally does not have forward movement?
To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., when do we start admitting that ‘wait’ actually means ‘never’.
At some point, it is clear the system is completely immutable, and cannot be altered. It will not allow itself to be altered, and it has more than enough power to stop that from happening.
All that can be done is complete destruction. And honestly that _itself_ is dangerous…the police are already flying their own damn flags and ignoring the law, and there is a real risk that they will literally just refuse to disband.Report
Probably because we’ve tried ‘police reform’ for like 20 years at this point, and not only are things not changing, a rather large part of society seems to oppose the entire concept, and quite likes the result.
Linking back to Oscar’s awesome post!
Anyway, the thing that I think is weird is that we read Oscars post and we can probably agree that, of the stuff he talks about, only a few things off of that list have happened, onesy-twosy, in a few locations.
Denver is getting better at not sending SWAT for Wellness Checks, a couple of states have dropped QI, and Southern California has elected a new DA.
So, I guess, technically… we have tried ‘police reform’ in a handful of places?
But I honestly think that things would be a lot better if we did the things in his post in multiple places.
I also think that we need to be a lot better at measuring risk. “Can you point to a single thing that is better about police behavior now than 20 years ago? Just one thing?”
Well, I’m not going to go 20 years ago but if we can go back to 1985, I’d say that we seem to have stopped doing stuff like this.
There *IS* progress. The problem is that there still is stuff like (a dozen examples from last couple of years, let me know if you want links).
The cops who used to get off are now being prosecuted. This is one of many things that needs to be done.
Lemme tell ya, “abolish the police” got turned around in Oakland. If Oakland couldn’t hold the line, I’m not sure that we’ll be able to get (insert city here) to do so.
Why not just actually try reforming the police with stuff that actually has teeth this time? Abolish QI! Limit the Unions! Get rid of Asset Forfeiture!
Like, do that stuff for real. And, after that stuff has been done for real, maybe then we can say “okay, Police Reform has been attempted”.Report
Like I said, I’m fine with tossing the whole thing out. But I’m an outlier. This past year has shown that even the people who really hate the police are not quite ready for what tossing it all out will entail.
And I’m not even someone who thinks that tossing it all out will lead to unchecked anarchy, but it will lead to sh*te getting bad before it gets better, because transitions are always rough.Report
So Buffalo, NY just passed Cariol’s Law, which requires officers to intervene if one of their own is using excessive force.
Be interesting to see how that works out.Report
“You mean, like, we–”
“No, Charley, ‘intervene’ does not mean that you also put the boot in.”Report
How on Earth is that going to be ‘interesting’? They’re just not going to do it, then won’t get in trouble for that.
I like they made it super-double illegal to falsify reports. That was only _normal_ illegal before.
Oh, and they have to file reports immediately after incidents…or, at least, pretend to. It might actually be interesting to see what they decide there…will they pretend that no incidents qualify under the law as something they file reports on, will they file nearly empty reports, or will they simply not file anything and then hurridly backdate everything.
So maybe it will be interesting to see how the police break this law?Report
Break it, ignore it, whatever…Report