And, as others have noted, not what is happening today regarding police officers and departments.
There is a deep cultural support for unethical conduct among police officers. That's the only way you can get a situation like Chauvin, with 18 complaints against him. In any reasonable professional setting, one complaint of unethical conduct can get you fired and your license to practice revoked. In most cases, you have to positively exonerate yourself to avoid this; actively demonstrate that the claim itself is fraudulent or mistaken, by showing other information that justifies your actions or which demonstrates that the claim is a lie.
Without that? One complaint and you're gone. Not 18 and you're still on the fucking job. That means everyone in Chauvin's chain of command was complicit in allowing that abusive officer to continue abusing people, until he eventually took it just a little bit too far into actual murder. In broad daylight. While being filmed, by multiple witnesses. Because if any of that shit weren't true, we'd be looking at Complaint #19 and Chauvin, the murderer, would still be working.
The response to Chauvin was not because of internal measures to protect against unethical conduct, it was because of public shaming that forced the department to take action, and more specifically, the city council that employs them (since the department was dragging its feet, unsurprisingly).
The difference is that someone who's white or black can't choose to distance themselves from their ethnicity. They're going to remain that ethnicity forever, and had no choice in being that. It's just who they are. It isn't formative of their beliefs and views.Not all white people are racist.
Not all black people are thugs.
Not all police are bastards.
None of that is true of police officers. They can quit, any time they feel their department is corrupt. They only remain an officer as long as they choose to. They had to deliberately choose to become an officer, to enter into that profession, to seek out the required training, and they did so with the implicit understanding of what that internal culture would be like. It is formative of their beliefs and views, deliberately so. And their choice to remain indicates, if nothing else, that "beating the shit out of people and arresting them for being black" and the like, those things are not deal-breakers, to them. They're fine with their colleagues doing so, even if they won't do it themselves.
That is why ACAB is a thing. Every single officer in a department with a problem like this is complicit in the bad actions of their worst members. Every single last one of them. Sure, it would be unfair if there were some enlightened department in a small town that aggressively prosecuted its own officers for any slip-ups, but I imagine those departments aren't seeing public pushback from their communities right now, either, in the first place.
I specifically compared one police force to another.Regarding your comparison of current United States police officers to Nazi Germany soldiers:
Check your bigotry at the door.
That you can recognize that this is a seriously condemnatory comparison, because all Nazis were bastards, demonstrates that even you understand why ACAB is a justifiable position, you're just choosing to back the corrupt cops for some reason.
#NotAllCops is a bullshit stance for the same reason #NotAllNazis would be. If you think someone pushing the latter hashtag is a white supremacist Nazi-loving piece of shit, you've demonstrated you understand why the former is a bullshit stance and why those who take it up are gonna face backlash.
And if you think I was arguing that police officers are Nazis, then you need to take a few minutes and re-read what I posted and stop making shit up, because I never said that.
This argument would only work if every branch or police precinct was connected somehow like a hive mind or as one collective unit.
It's not.
And that is why ACAB is a stupid, idiotic, fucking disgusting and useless designation that is pushed by idiots with quite a different agenda than getting a better police force.
Not only that, but if we disregard economy, like having a job is not important. Why dont black people just move out of the places or inner cities that are violent? They can move if they want to. Nobody is forcing them...its a free country...
Last edited by Aurgjelme; 2020-06-23 at 10:05 PM.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...cy-hires-them/
Here's some data on Florida. And that's just for the officers who did shit that was bad enough to get fired over, which, as we've seen over the past few weeks, is an extremely high bar and one that usually isn't even put up as officers frequently try to cover up and protect their own.First, during any given year, there are about 1,100 full-time law enforcement officers working in Florida who had been previously fired from other Florida agencies — that’s roughly 3 percent of all full-time law enforcement officers working in the state. Second, police officers who are fired tend to get rehired by another agency within three years. Third, officers who’ve been fired and land another job tend to move to smaller agencies with fewer resources and slightly larger communities of color. Finally, when a wandering officer gets hired by a new agency, they tend to get fired about twice as often as other officers and are more likely to receive “moral character violations,” both in general and for physical and sexual misconduct.
Why don't the coal miners move out of bumfuck nowhere and move to places with jobs? Why don't people living in poor rural areas move to the jobs? Why don't people move out of some of these small cities that have been plagued with criminal activity stemming from the opioid epidemic (that's still a thing!) to safer places?
If we're asking pointless questions, I figured I'd add a few to the pile.
I did not claim that every precinct in the US is racist or not. That claim is made by people who say ACAB.
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Florida? That whole place is a meme, and still is not the entire U.S.
And excellent question on the coal miners and people who live in rural areas. If its easy to quit a job as a police officer, then surely it is easy to quit as a coal miner too?
No, not really. I said the idea of Endus would hold water IF the precincts where linked up like a hive mind. And made no claim about the actual state of any precinct.
I will gladly admit to you here and now that I have no idea if every precinct in America is racist or not.
You didn't specificy it had to be "not-Florida", so I'm not sure why you're dismissing it? The goalposts must be heavy, but I'll help you out.
Does Philly count? - https://www.inquirer.com/news/a/phil...-20190912.html
How about that one guy in Arizona? - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48969432
Texas, though this is more about the difficulty in firing them to begin with? - https://therivardreport.com/in-san-a...lice-officers/
If there's some pre-approved list that I need to look at first let me know.
Are we gonna sit and argue state by state, precinct by precinct, cop by cop??
My issue is with the ACAB slogan is that it is just as idiotic as saying all people of color are thugs, that all white people are racist.....
Because you know its not true. You know there are good cops.
I mean...you argued that these precincts aren't connected or a hivemind. Fair, they're not a hivemind. But to argue that they're not connected is nonsense. Between actual agreements where they assist each other locally to the fact that there's a "brotherhood" in policing that allows for bad cops to consistently be hired in other precincts while they turn a blind eye to their behavior speaks to that.
Again, the analogy falls apart when you remember that every single law enforcement officer chose to become a law enforcement officer. And those choosing to call out sick because one of their colleagues was charged with a crime chose to do so.
You don't get to choose the color of your skin at birth.
Depressingly, we've seen very, very, very, very, very few examples of this over the past month. Quite the contrary, we've seen officers repeatedly assault, detail, harass, and straight up torture in some instances, peaceful protests. We've seen other cops stand by and do nothing, or worse, help their colleagues assault protesters. We've seen bad cops getting fired and investigated over almost murdering someone, or actually killing someone, and their colleagues stand in solidarity with them rather than in shocked horror at their actions.
I've been desperately looking for good cops this past month+, and I hate to say it but I've maybe seen a few of them so far. On the other hand, I've seen countless acts of shockingly terrifying behavior by both individual officers and police forces writ large, including corralling a group of peaceful protesters into an area, blocking them in, and then laying into them with tear gas, rubber bullets, and batons. That's no a few "bad apples", that's an entire police force that is a bad apple.
Except that 1> police departments aren't entirely separate unto themselves; officers transfer around between departments regularly, and there's often central training for local PDs and such in various states. And 2> I specifically, clearly allowed that some precincts might actually be fine, but that I doubt their communities are raging against them if that's the case. This is very much a "look at all the smoke, where's the goddamned fire" issue.
But we can identify those precincts by noting if any of their officers have any number of active complaints while they're still working, whether they aggressively pursue internal investigations against their own officers, and so on. It should be easy to see if their internal culture is so far divergent from standard American police culture. It should be really obvious. If it's not, why would we assume that precinct is any different than all the others?
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And those officers who get pointed out as "good cops" are, almost always, long-time officers of departments with massive corruption issues, but they're one of the "good ones" in the department who's only got a couple complaints against them in a 20-year career or something.
Fuck. That. That's a bad cop. For one, those complaints should've probably gotten them fired early on. For two, they haven't changed the internal culture in the department, and have chosen to continue working in that environment, and that makes them complicit in that entire department's conduct and culture. They're the mob family member who runs the local deli and doesn't directly deal drugs or conduct hits, he just lets his family use his back room for their deals and keeps his mouth shut. He's still a crook and part of the organized crime family. If he doesn't want to get described that way, he can go to the cops and sing, telling them every last goddamned detail he knows to take his family down. He won't? That's because he's crooked, and a criminal, and should not be seen as a "good guy".
So here's a story. In law school, I was debating between joining the prosecutor's office in Manhattan (DANY) or the public defender's office (Legal Aid, in my case). I spent a summer between years in law school working full time at DANY. It is one of the most "progressive" prosecutor's offices in the nation. And yet everything I saw was about how ADAs felt their hands were tied by cops who they couldn't trust and couldn't prosecute, that a police report wasn't worth the paper it was written on if they wanted the truth, and that NYPD was constantly jamming the courts up with nonsense nuisance cases against citizens just to....idk, boost their numbers? Harass people? It wasn't as bad in the Centre Street location I was in, because that's downtown and it's mainly China Town/the Village/Wall Street, which isn't very non-white, but it was a rampant problem in the Harlem offices, where I would occasionally go and work offsite.
Then, in my 3rd (IE, last) year of law school, I spent the entire year spending one day a week in two different prosecutor's office in Suffolk County, MA (I went to school in Boston). During that year, the same thing happened to me, as I was acting as an actual prosecutor. Cops didn't accurately represent what happened on their police reports, they stopped people for no legally justified reasons (and I had to dismiss cases for it), and they often wouldn't show up for court dates because they knew they had no case, and they were hoping for people to just mail in their summons with guilty pleas on them so they could be assessed fines.
In the spring of my 3L year, I decided, "Naw, fuck this." And I interviewed with Legal Aid to defend people from this shit behavior. And that's what I did, for the first five years of my legal career.
In this situation, I, as the person of good morals and standing, decided I didn't want to be part of a system which acted like this and refused to change. So I became the opposition, even though my initial goals in law school were to go the DANY > U.S. Attorney > DoJ route, and then maybe dip into politics, since most Dems back then had to have the "tough on crime" appearance to win elections with purple constituencies, like my hometown.
Good cops don't stay cops.
This is depressingly accurate.
We see "good cops" often forced out of departments for being "good", to the point where they suffer harassment from their departments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft
Cop records hard-evidence of wrongdoing. Reports it to the authorities to weed out corruption in his department.
Allegedly harassed by fellow NYPD, assigned to a desk job, the NYPD illegally sent an ESU unit into his home to abduct him and force him into a psychiatric facility where he was held for almost a full week
And when he just gave the stuff to local media, the media found out that NYPD confirmed his allegations against them but never released the report. Why? Because as we're increasingly seeing, good cops are as rare as unicorns and last about as long as one of those god-awful unicorn coffee drinks from Starbucks. You know, the ones people thought would be neat, bought, and almost instantly threw out because they're gross as hell.
And this is just one of many, many instances. I've had multiple friends and folks I know join various law enforcement groups. Not a single friend still works at any, as they all found themselves forced out directly or indirectly to the point that some moved counties to get away from being harassed by former coworkers who he had reported for misbehavior. Those still in? Generally the acquaintances that are the literal people you don't want being law enforcement officers. Folks who bragged privately about lying on psych evals to get into the force, folks who spent their lifetimes as bullies. Thankfully, some of them couldn't even pass some of the psych evals and were not allowed on the force.
Even aside from anecdotal evidence, we have plenty of examples mirroring what happened above. Good people, good cops, trying to hold their own accountable and ensure that people can trust the department that "protects" them. Only to be met with institutional corruption and behavior that more often than not would be better fitting for gangland or organized crime.
Reminds me of this:
https://www.theatlantic.com/national...system/282360/
Ten years ago, when I started my career as an assistant district attorney in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, I viewed the American criminal justice system as a vital institution that protected society from dangerous people. I once prosecuted a man for brutally attacking his wife with a flashlight, and another for sexually assaulting a waitress at a nightclub. I believed in the system for good reason.
But in between the important cases, I found myself spending most of my time prosecuting people of color for things we white kids did with impunity growing up in the suburbs. As our office handed down arrest records and probation terms for riding dirt bikes in the street, cutting through a neighbor’s yard, hosting loud parties, fighting, or smoking weed—shenanigans that had rarely earned my own classmates anything more than raised eyebrows and scoldings—I often wondered if there was a side of the justice system that we never saw in the suburbs. Last year, I got myself arrested in New York City and found out.
On April 29, 2012, I put on a suit and tie and took the No. 3 subway line to the Junius Avenue stop in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville. At the time, the blocks around this stop were a well-known battleground in the stop-and-frisk wars: Police had stopped 14,000 residents 52,000 times in four years. I figured this frequency would increase my chances of getting to see the system in action, but I faced a significant hurdle: Though I’ve spent years living and working in neighborhoods like Brownsville, as a white professional, the police have never eyed me suspiciously or stopped me for routine questioning. I would have to do something creative to get their attention.I kept walking and reached a bodega near the Rockaway Avenue subway station. Suddenly, a young black man started yelling at me to get out of Brownsville, presumably concluding from my skin color and my suit that I did not belong there. Three police officers heard the commotion and came running down the stairs. They reached me and stopped.
“What’s going on?” one asked.
“Nothing,” I told them.
“What does that say?” the officer interrupted me, incredulously, as the other two gathered around. I held the stencil up for them to read.
“What are you, some kind of asshole?” he asked.
I stood quietly, wondering whether they would arrest me or write a summons. The officers grumbled a few choice curse words and then ran down the stairs in pursuit of the young man. Though I was the one clearly breaking a law, they went after him.