Today in cops gone feral

The “punishment,” whatever that means, would not be happening without that code of silence bullshit.

If bad cops were fairly punished, there would be fewer bad cops and much fewer dead Black people.

 

Due respect to your friend, but I've never heard a cop say otherwise.

I think they believe it when they say it. They say it earnestly.

But it can't be true.

 

Maybe not feral, but I don't think he was collecting evidence, either.

 

Beau put out a video a couple of days ago about Memphis disbanding the Scorpion unit. He said he'd gotten questioned about whether he thought that would change things in Memphis. He laughed and said "No. Not unless they also commit to changing policing tactics. As long as they have plain clothes units out there with little supervision stuff like this is going to happen. It's funny, Hollywood figured out long ago that this was true and started making shows and movies about these sorts of units and what has consistently gone wrong with them. "The Shield" and "Training Day" are good examples. If Hollywood writers can figure this out, why can't police chiefs?"

He says it better than I do. I don't bring him to the board often anymore.

 

FWIW, our local chief of police has been quite vocal about NOT doing special units due to incidents like in Memphis. In fact, the only silo unit we have is the community outreach team. They show up at the farmer's markets, school events and other stuff to shake hands and give out swag.

 

i liked it better when we were treated as heroes and constantly praised and made admirable for the 2 percent who are

 

See also: public school teachers

 

This anecdote sets up a thought that I've been mulling over the course of this and several other police brutality incidents and I want to present it for discussion:

I had a brilliant sixth-grade teacher who taught us chess in class. One of the concepts he taught us was a "pin." A pin is when you have one of your pieces positioned in such a way in front of one of your opponents' that they can't move it because doing so puts themselves in check.

I fear that the police have a pin on society and they know it. I recognize that in many settings, their existence does as much or more harm than good, but they'd rather quit than reform, and criminals and other negative outcomes will fill that vacuum much faster than social services and all of the other 'non-violent' alternatives we have proposed.

I think there's a pin politically as well. The number of people in this country whose legislators represent an urban district isn't enough to build the votes necessary to institute meaningful reforms, and because the natural of urban and rural communities and the policing therein is so different, the vast majority of people in this country don't vote for meaningful reform because the only cops they know are good guys and if we don't show them enough "appreciation," they might get sad and quit and then everything is like "Detroit" or "Minneapolis". Police incidents lead to riots which leads to the majority of voters opting for "law and order" over reform, which leads to more police incidents and so on.

I think this probably reads as a lot of "thin blue line" theory, which I'm sure has been thoroughly debunked, but it might be easier to come up with non-violent alternatives to crime reduction in large communities that have the trained professionals at hand, but in a city of 50,000 outside of a major metro, is there any qualified person other than a cop to do that job?

 

Why can't it be true?

 

If the math was anything like 98 / 2 , we'd see more good cops intervening in episodes like Tyre Nichols or George Floyd or Eric Garner.

We'd see more cops coming forward to identify and fight departmental corruption.

We'd see more cops willing to testify against other cops.

We'd see many fewer citizen review board complaints and many fewer millions paid out in settlements.

'Decent human beings' wouldn't stand for it.

I'm sure there are plenty of good cops in plenty of places, but it's unlikely to be anywhere near 98% of the entire police population.

 

OK, I see where you're coming from. Not necessarily agreeing with you, but neither am I disagreeing.

Perhaps it's the case that in the aggregate the percentages are skewed that drastically but that in certain environs the prevalence of bad cops is far greater. Alternatively (and I would incline to this position), the vast, vast, vast majority of cops never are actually put to the test (thankfully): It's one thing to say that thus-and-such is wrong when talk is cheap.

 

Or not decent enough.