Bad police files - the Derek Chauvin case is giving us a rare look behind the scenes

[GreyICE]

If you want to converse without pretending to be an idiot, I'm always open. If you want to continue, well, after a while you risk becoming your mask.

You might not want to call a moderator an idiot or a person pretending to be an idiot there Greyice. It might not end well for you.

If one chooses to shoot the messenger, one simply finds they receive no warnings.

[TGLS]

You might not want to call a moderator an idiot or a person pretending to be an idiot there Greyice. It might not end well for you.

I've got thick skin.

I am slightly wonderous that after 8 months you have not been able to move past a simple slogan to attempt to grasp more. However, I have a suspicion that you're not actually an idiot. Given that, this seems to be an attempt to deflect away from an actual conversation by pretending to be an idiot. Which is... not helpful.

Well, half-right. The idea was to throw out a softball of a question to move the thread in an interesting direction, namely, how to restructure the police to stop the Derek Chauvins of the world to begin with. Chauvin himself isn't terribly interesting to me, he isn't going to go back to being a cop after this unless the American criminal justice system is totally fucked up.

So I go and post this and leave it to percolate and I get this back:

Because by their nature the police are made to support the interests of the powerful and keep the lower classes in line.

And now I'm confused. I'm fairly sure I didn't mix-up what the goals of the protests are (at least in abstract). So I dig in my heels a little and see what response I get back. I throw in my hot-take on the slogan that I've had sitting around for the last year or so, given that the main police thread has been jammed up in circles for just as long (though I'm willing to admit these things take on a life of their own).

[GreyICE]

Well, half-right. The idea was to throw out a softball of a question to move the thread in an interesting direction, namely, how to restructure the police to stop the Derek Chauvins of the world to begin with. Chauvin himself isn't terribly interesting to me, he isn't going to go back to being a cop after this unless the American criminal justice system is totally fucked up.

Well again, I'm surprised a bit to encounter American exceptionalism. In that this is not a particularly insolvable problem. Most of the first world has solved it. While no police force is absolutely perfect (and in fact in many ways the duty of policing precludes perfection) in Europe police don't view themselves as soldiers. They don't view themselves as "sheepdogs". They don't have a "with us or against us" mentality. And they certainly are not infested with white supremacists and racists. So this isn't an insolvable problem - it's a problem that's been solved many places on earth. And it's worth looking at and eliminating the ways American policing is different.

First, America very uniquely has an attitude that police should not have local ties to the communities they are policing. This is so wrong-headed, it's almost like it's designed by police states (oh wait - it's a common tactic of police states). It's the policing equivalent of mercury laxatives - even if they might solve one problem, the cure is far far worse than anything it might be curing.

As far as I can tell, it originates from the 1950s ghettoization of American cities, and the view that police are essentially "wardens at the zoo". The racist overtones of this are obvious. The police were heavily racist, and no particular effort was made to remove racist cops except at the very highest levels. Unsurprisingly removing the top level of racists and promoting new racists who then promoted other racists did not make the police less racist.

Second, police have become virtually every social program in America. As Reagan and the right wing cut social program after social program, the spending went right to the cops, who handled every problem the cuts in social programs created. This is insane.

Third, there's been a constant propaganda effort of "good cops being held back by the rules" and "cops as action heroes". The sort of people who go into policing is, of course, heavily media influenced. If media presents engineers as nerdy, nerds want to become engineers. If media presents cops as violent, dangerous, and living on the edge, then people who want to be action heroes become cops. That mentality is dangerous. The military recognizes it as dangerous and beats it out of its recruits as fast as possible (wanting to be a hero on a battlefield is bad). The police nurture it - and wanting to be a hero on a police force is far worse than wanting to be one in a warzone.

So yeah, proposals
- Dissolve the police. Use Camden as a model to start with. Reform them without a guild, and based around policing
- Shift non-police responsibilities to non-police.
- Set residency requirements for police forces, limit non-residents, recruit residents to police forces.
- Strip undue protections, and shine more light. Not just "bodycams", but have policing become more open
- Encourage reports, and investigate incidents. Use bodycam footage in investigations. If you tell a target manager an employee spat on you, do you expect them to ignore it?
- Cut down on nuisance citations and low level ticketing. HEAVILY.

Basically, we need to get America to a point where seeing a cop somewhere causes relief and happiness. And we can't do that by lying to people, it has to actually be the truth that seeing a cop is a good thing. People react that way to firefighters and EMTs because they believe that firefighters and EMTs are there to help. And they believe that because that's almost always the truth. Cops should get the same reaction, and to do that they need it to also be the truth. You can't lie to people forever.

[Thebestoftherest]

Yeah, I do wonder why we are the ones with all these problems?

[GreyICE]

Yeah, I do wonder why we are the ones with all these problems?

As I said, the ghettoization of American cities in the 50s had a lot to do with it. That was when the idea was very much that cops were wardens of the zoo. Or to be clear, the white cops were wardens of the non-white zoo. As white flight to the suburbs started, and then racist tactics like blockbusting became prevalent, the entire civil rights movement, etc, the police very much became soldiers for that war. Police forces were specifically selected for that.

The other big factor is probably the cop as the action hero. Bureaucracies and "the government" were often antagonists as much as criminals in cop movies. War movies are used as recruiting tools by militaries. Cop movies are recruiting tools for police forces. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, they shape who they recruit, and the 80s and 90s were full of turning our cops into military. And the literal term for "cops as military" is "police state". Very predictably it pushed us towards being a police state.

Really, our situation isn't particularly unique either. We're a quasi-police state. There's lots of other states like that. Nor is empowering it with prejudice unique. Saddam Hussain used the Suuni-Shiite divide with his own police force, for instance.

[Thebestoftherest]

Yeah all the cops brutality means I won't be able to look at Dirty Harry thr same way again.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

I'm already wincing when I watch Lucifer and I've given up on Brooklyn 9 9 altogether.

[TulipQulqu]

Yeah, I do wonder why we are the ones with all these problems?

American policing basically started one of two ways: slave patrols or warehouse guards. You can guess why there are some legacy issues.

Also we're not alone in this. See my post earlier in this thread that links to a state department report on the post-US invasion Iraqi police. They are even more intensely criminal than ours because we broke their country, made it illegal for everyone who ever was in the government before we showed up to ever have almost any job again, and then offered to give new people a bunch of guns.

Central and South America have similar problems. The CIA did a lot of bad things to every country ever, but especially those in the western hemisphere. There are probably also countries where it is not the CIA who caused the problems, but because of how the CIA operates we can never know.

The USA makes brutality, but it is still mostly for export.

[Makeshift Python]

I'm already wincing when I watch Lucifer and I've given up on Brooklyn 9 9 altogether.

Clips like this from LETHAL WEAPON 3 really do not hold up especially.


youtu.be/3A3iNVaLod4