Reminder that the bulk of police abuse is non-violent
Killings make the splashy headlines, but the Ferguson’s of our country are where the bulk of police abuse happens.
Where does a tiny town that got by on a $431K total budget in 2016 spend all this money? More police, of course! And so the town that failed to report a single serious crime the year Jones took over as chief, now spends $646,620 on policing. The town is actually losing money chasing more fees.
But it does have a riot control tank! Which is one of the few symbols openly identifiable to the public as law enforcement.
And the sad thing is that the Sheriffs and state police agencies that should put a stop to crap like this, just can’t be bothered to care.
This is of a piece with the struggles and pushback that even the most modest police and carceral reforms get.
OUTTACONTROL CRIME is a trusted tool of authoritarians.Report
I’ve made the comment before that treating the issue as being primarily about unarmed people killed by the police, outrageous as many of those incidents are, can be fundamentally misleading about what’s really going on.Report
A friend of mine in Seattle has been part of this:
https://twitter.com/TechBlocSEA/status/1480625714151919616?s=20
She says its PTSD inducing stuff to pull it all together. I believe her.
And yet I don’t see this changing anything in the discussion.Report
I’d be interested in a discussion on how QI applies to this, because frankly I see one of the big holes in QI reform as not really addressing this sort of thing.Report
Arguments for cops to wear body cams don’t address it either.Report
Nope because cops are still doing it with their cameras on. Or doing after turning their cameras off.Report
Oscar wrote a lovely little essay a year and a half ago called “Altering the Police Paradigm“.
At the bottom of his essay, he has a list of additional suggestions. Six things. I think that one of the things we hammered out in the days and essays that followed was that “Reform Asset Forfeiture” was on there too.
There is a long list of things that need to be done to reform the police. None of them are a magic bullet. Many of them will have no impact on the other things that also need to be done.
It sucks.Report
Seems to me that means we need to start over with a new approach, not keep looking for band-aids for the current one.Report
If you would like to read an article (and comment thread!) about Camden, NJ and how they disbanded and remade their police department, you can read one here.Report
As best I understand it, QI applies as follows:
“We’ve ruled that seizing 43,000 dollars from a 34 year old man is outside of the scope of the officer’s legal abilities. as he didn’t know that, he’s not in any trouble.”
followed immediately by:
“How was he to know that seizing 43,000 dollars from a 35- year old man is outside the scope of his duties? Well, the Courts have told him off, so he won’t do THAT again.”
and then:
“How was he to know seizing 43,001 dollars from a 34 year old man was outside the scope of his duties?Once again, we thank the Court for it’s explanation but sadly the officer was acting to the best of his knowledge and understanding of the law, and is again thus immune…”
The amount of exaggeration in the above is far, far, FAR less than anyone wants to believe.Report
QI doesn’t. Everything they are doing is legal-ish, and by that I mean, a judge might very well dismiss the tickets/charges, but they won’t do anything more than that, so even if it’s not legal, as evidenced by the dismissal, it’s allowed.
Every once in a great while, you’ll hear about a town having it’s police &/or government dissolve because the state FINALLY starts taking a hard look at it, usually after the media writes a blistering article, or they manage to nail someone with friends in high places, but it shouldn’t take that.
But because PDs and local courts are treated as practically sovereign, county or state governments rarely demands stats which would easily expose such places with a simple SQL query.
So short of making sure fines and forfeitures always go anywhere but police or court budgets, this will remain an issue.Report
Is the headline image on this post shuffling through different pictures for everyone else? It’s kind of amusing to watch it go from religious to fine art to sci fi but I assume it is not intentional.Report
A lot of people are reasoning from consequences to culpability. If someone dies, the killer must have done something really bad.
But that’s not valid reasoning. A cop who plants evidence or punches a restrained suspect just because he can is much more culpable than one who mistakes a handgun for a taser, yet we have people crying out for the blood of the latter while ignoring the former.Report
It’s what we see (because the media reports on it).Report