Are you delivering to cities that have riots?

t.o.l.e.r.a.t.e.

 

Well..this thug was chasing the cops around and went after them with the knife...the cops responded appropriately

 

Hanoi Jane wouldn’t think so.

You know, for all his faults, I really wish J Edgar Hoover could be here today.

 

It seems that there are (at least) three different conversations happening here:

• Police procedures and accountability
• systemic racism
• the correlation between high poverty and high crime rates.

Each of these issues is independent of the others while at the same time are inexorably linked together. Each is also influenced by a myriad of different factors, yet we try and reduce everything to the lowest common denominator - if only "they" would do "this" then "everything" would be "better". You can interchange police, citizens, politicians for the "they" and a list too long to type for the "this", and no one will agree what better looks like. There isn't a single silver bullet that will fix the problems we are facing, we need to stop pretending otherwise. Similarly we have to recognize that the current state of affairs in untenable and needs to change so we can all grow.

This isn't a red/blue issue. While Kenosha has a large "democrat" population, to the best of my knowledge Republicans have controlled the city council, the county government, and the state government for the last decade. When confronted with clear evidence of officers filing false reports, planting evidence and lying under oath those in power did worse than nothing - they publicly supported the behavior of problem officers. Tax payer money was used to delay and impede investigations into misconduct until the statute of limitations had expired. The police department, the city, and the county hid behind "qualified immunity" and delayed punishing officers for violations of departmental policy "to avoid influencing civil suits". To say that the Kenosha Police Department needs to be reformed is not an attack on police officers, it is an acknowledgment that the Kenosha Police Department makes CR England look like an ethical company that is actively trying to make the transportation industry better.

The officers serving the Brenna Taylor were required to wear body cameras - why didn't they? If the officers were so convinced that Brenna Taylor was involved, why was the search of her apartment abandoned? After the officers KNEW she had died and should have been very aware that their actions were going to be scrutinized - why were their reports riddled with inaccuracies? Beyond that why was a no-knock warrant requested? Why did they feel it was necessary to execute the warrant in the dead of night?

Why do police departments try to keep the data that they collect secret? Why is the FBI Uniform Crime report so inaccurate ( NCJRS Abstract - National Criminal Justice Reference Service )? Why does a newspaper have the most complete database on police shootings?

These are all valid questions that need to be asked. Asking them is not villainizing police officers, it's trying to make the system work better.


Every time the police get caught lying it lends credence to a dozen other claims of misconduct that are unfounded. Yet the problem officers are not dealt with - see Jon Burge, Ronald Watts, or the dozen Giglio impaired officers in Detroit. The Chicago Police Union just elected a man whose police powers have been revoked for policy violations. He won in large part because he argued that the City of Chicago was settling too many of the misconduct suits brought in recent years and "he would make the city defend it's officers". The reason the City of Chicago is settling fast and hard is to avoid discovery - they don't want some shyster lawyer stumbling upon the bodies - both metaphorical and literal. In the aftermath of Ronald Watts' conviction over 60 different people had over 100 different criminal charges dismissed. There is no telling the number of people who are going thru the process of having their conviction expunged due to his misconduct. I guarantee you that many of those people were guilty and are now walking because Watts was a allowed to wear the badge while being a criminal. And what about the officers that served under Watts and knew (and abetted) his crimes? How many of them have faced justice? How many of the prosecutors who KNEW they were acting on inadmissible evidence still have a law license? CPD internal affairs KNEW about Watts a decade before he was charged, yet he was allowed to continue to prey on the community he was supposed to protect?

And how is that community supposed to react? What happens when the sheep dog becomes as dangerous to the sheep as the wolf? What happens when an individual assumes that any interaction with a police officer is likely to end with them in jail or dead? In 1931 there was an "after action" report on Prohibition submitted to Congress. It detailed all the reasons why Prohibition failed and why average citizens began defying law enforcement. If you read it today you could be excused for thinking it is a contemporary document. It is past time that we review what WE want the police to do and how WE want the police to behave.

Moving from police accountability to systemic racism.

In 1948 the Supreme Court ruled in Shelly v Kraemer that racial housing covenants were a violation of the 14th amendment and thus unenforceable. Yet racial housing covenants continued to be enforced into the 1970s, despite the 1968 Civil Rights Act making them explicitly illegal. From the 1920s to the 1970s, white Americans revived Federal housing assistance that was unavailable to black Americans. In the post war years white Americans moved to the suburbs that were built with Federally guaranteed loans. The roads, sewers, and schools for these communities were built with government money yet black people were legally excluded from moving there. After legal segregation was ended, de facto segregation continued - black people of similar financial status pay higher rents, higher interest rates than their white counterparts. Resumes/applications that appear "black" get fewer responses. Don't believe me? Spend some time reading what the Cato Institute of the Heritage Foundation thinks about systemic racism:
If Someone Disputes Racism in the Criminal Justice System, Show Them This
Racist Policies Need to Go
The Success Sequence - and What It Leaves Out
Race, Violence, and Political Illegitimacy
Our Nation Is Not Yet Cleansed of Racism. Here’s What We Should Do.

The question is not "does systemic racism exist?" but rather "how do we end it?".

I won't spend much time on the correlation between poverty and crime. It's universal and not dependent on skin color. Decades of "tough on crime" policies have demonstrated that we cannot police away poverty. We focus on "welfare fraud" and institute all kinds of red tape and insane polices (like "you can only get food stamps if you quit your job, so either work and starve or quit and get government cheese") to try and reduce the welfare rolls yet ignore the corruption and those gaming the system. I know a "gentleman" who owns a couple of apartment buildings in downtown Chicago. They are set up as "mixed-income subsidized housing". The "low income" apartments are filled with University of Chicago medical and law students. The "medium" income housing is generally filled with new hires from several law firms , individuals who are making greater than 100,000 a year but whose pay package is manipulated to reduce their taxable income (ie getting "tuition reimbursement"). This "gentleman" bragged, in my presence, (at least until 2011, once my Dad died I no longer was forced to endure his company) about getting the Chicago Housing Authority to replace his outdoor lighting and then redo the landscaping.

My cousin went to jail in an offshoot of Operation Silver Shovel. He plead guilty to "misdirecting" several million dollars from the CHA and got one year in jail and a couple more of probation. His guilty plea stopped the investigation in it's tracks. My cousin now has a nice house in Kenilworth and works for Accenture. His crimes have done more harm to our society yet his punishment was less than that of my friend Ross who was arrested with a pound of marijuana and refused to give up who he bought it from and who he was going to sell it to.

Jobs and housing have been the time tested cure for crime. Teddy Roosevelt knew it, Eisenhower knew it, LBJ knew it, George H.W. Bush knew it.

 

Only they ALL didn't say that. 1 witness who was upstairs said he heard them announce themselves.

 

Of course, but the cop hater on here would choose to ignore that witness.

 

Ah a voice of sanity in the wilderness. This thread is the epitome of the main problem in the nation. Inability to have a sensible fact based conversation.

 

Here’s a fact, and on topic too!

I’m staying home tomorrow.

Of course, that’s because I’m still on comp and rehabbing my ankle. But even if I was working, I think I would have asked my boss for the week off. Good week to take a staycation.

 

L.o.v.e.

 

I am not going to get involved in this argument, but I wanted to say: watch out for confirmation bias being the "voice of sanity". Just because someone doesn't type a 3,000 word essay on the topic, and has a different viewpoint, doesn't mean their opinion is automatically invalidated. If this were a cut and dried subject, people wouldn't be arguing about it.

Anyways, don't think I'm calling you out. Because I'm not.