Great idea TomNess about police malpractice insurance. The union could pay the first $100/month toward the premium and the individuals would be stuck with the rest. Of course, then the City wouldn't just pay $10,000 for frivolous claims (like they do in my city), they'd be incentivized to actually fight them in court and win. The bad cops would eventually not be able to afford to stay on the job.
The comparison of unarmed UK policing to armed US policing is helpful in some ways and not in others. I wish my officers all had their manners and abilities to deescalate. But what would an unarmed officer have done yesterday when two of my officers responded to a radio call of two males with guns in a housing project where we've had an incident of gun violence every day for a week? The officers saw the two males and their guns and initiated a foot pursuit. The bad guys split up and as the officers closed in on the one bad guy he drew his gun. The female officer fired one poorly aimed round which hit a UPS truck. The bad guy thought better of it and dropped his gun. He was arrested without injury. Would it be fair to expect unarmed cops to chase those two armed thugs (the one they caught has a long criminal record including a shooting death)? Do you really think there would be any chance of catching them if they had to wait for the armed police to arrive in 12 minutes? Apples to oranges in many ways.
I have no problem with police being armed. The problem in the US is, as Mr. Martenson details above, is that police have been trained to use guns as a first resort, not a last resort. As a result American police are drawing their guns in completely inappropriate situations, and then firing before they've given themselves even a fraction of second to determine whether deadly force is justified. Americans with concealed weapon permits are safer to the public than police simply because as private citizens they know they can't get away with mistakes or short tempers that police know they can just have a good laugh over with their colleagues. Police are not going to make themselves accountable, and it's clear from their actions and attitudes after they have administered shootings or beatings to citizens that they are smugly reveling in their being above the law. That's where civil courts and professional malpractice insurance can force them to change their culture.There's an old saying among US gun owners: "You can have a gun, or you can have a temper, but you can't have both." The saying should apply to police, too.
Your solution uses the same theory as Chris’s. Making one’s peers pay for one’s mistake in hopes that peers will straighten out the perp. That’s a basic military tactic, and it works. Except your solution brings in a middle man, the insurance industry that is well known to be as corrupt as any industry. When premiums go up most people will react as I do when my premiums go up, with some variation of f—ing blood suckers.
The more directly your peers can connect your bad behavior with their increased cost the more likely they will be to apply peer pressure. Involving the insurance industry in anything ensures everyone’s costs will go up.
True THC.
If you want an unarmed police force then first you must have an unarmed population. And then we have a people afraid of the government, which in my opinion is the worst situation.
So why don't I miss behave? (Long contemplative pause.) It is because I was brought up by my father. The giving of life and the taking of life are both sacred acts.
The giving of life is best undertaken with joyous spontaneity, the taking of life requires the opposite. It requires long and careful consideration.
We need more Fathers.
Afterthought: Ghengis Kahn was fatherless
The training in Israel is crucial. The police who murdered de Menezes in London, by shooting several bullets into his head, at point blank-range, were also trained in Israel, under 'Operation Kratos'. Kratos being the Greek demi-God of Strength who held Prometheus down as he was shackled to the rock. The Israeli approach to the imprisoned Palestinians is pure racism, the race hatred of the colonial over-lord to the native untermenschen who will not disappear so that the Herrenvolk can obtain their lebensraum. No Israeli EVER faces justice for murdering a Palestinian, adult or child, in cold blood, not the army, police of the 'settler' Judaic Taliban thugs.
This statement here:
"had the subject complied with the officer's directives from the initial contact and beyond, we wouldn't be sitting here talking about this today," Lewis said."
The requirement is unflinching submission to authority. Do this, and you shall live, subject.
Being a human, being a member of a community means being accountable. The "us and them" mentality that is endemic in all aspects of our society has made rival tribes of us all. Social cohesion is necessary for a 'civilization'. A police force militarized for the purpose of maintaining order in such a situation means maintaining the barriers that prevent us from returning to a more civilized way.
Aaron
In the last 6 months, 6-7 instances of police alleged police brutality have been cited, out of at least tens of thousands if not millions of arrests,
Only because it is a news story, is the reason for the outcry, and benefits to Sharpton , NAACP, and race baiters. Each week, in Chicago, more black lives from black on black shootings are lost than that. Black lives matter to whites,and the MSM, NOT blacks.
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I hope I haven't misinterpreted you Arthur. Are you saying that people/you feel the need to arm themselves/yourself against the government?
If so this is a very sad state of affairs, Arthur. Firstly that people are afraid of a democratically elected government, secondly that people feel the need to arm themselves against it and thirdly that people think that you have any chance against the government in an armed conflict.
We are the police. We are the government, We are employees, We are employers. We are part of a community. We are are responsible of our own actions. We trust others not to do us harm. If not then we are not civilised
Chris has listed a list of jobs"more dangerous than being a police officer. As best I can observe, people working on fishing boats, in the logging industry, trash and refuge workers, on cattle ranches, don't have to worry about getting SHOT. on a daily basis in some neighborhoods or the "hood". Exception, taxi drivers in Chicago, often have to worry of getting shot, by a black passenger (which they avoid), by the way.
So there is a difference.
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Yes we shouldn't minimize the number of good cops out there day after day. It's complicated and self-reinforcing when police fear the community and the community fears the police. And I'm worried the narrative just keeps reinforcing itself. E.g. this "joke" from the Correspondent's Dinner: http://kyidyl.tumblr.com/post/117449847377/quinn-ineminor
I've been thinking lately of episodes of police brutality I have either witnessed or heard about first hand from people I trust. The number is four, two personally witnessed and two from first hand accounts. None involved anyone drawing a gun or, in the case of the victims, even having one.
One was on a black guy in the deep south in 1971. It was ugly and completely unprovoked. To be fair the other I witnessed was also in the deep south, but involved two white victims. The latter one I would characterize as excessive force, but perhaps understandable under the circumstances.
The two first hand accounts were from friends, both white, and both completely nonviolent people. One was a case of mistaken identity (not excusable, but at least explains the cop's motivation), the other involved a thuggish detective just deciding to beat on a guy for no reason other than the cop was drunk. (it turns out he had a long history of such behavior) Both were charged with resisting arrest and pled to non-criminal offenses, although neither resisted arrest or committed any other offense. In the mistaken ID case the judge even warned the cop that he was close to stepping over the line. In reality, he was way over the line.
Another incident I was personally involved in did not result in violence, but came very close. There were three of us and all, again, completely nonviolent people. One was a woman. One of the cops came as close to total hysteria as I have ever seen despite no provocation, even verbal, from any of us. He was literally apoplectic, beet red face, fists clenched at his side, screaming and liberally distributing spit all around, including on the other guy:
http://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/apoplectic
[quote]Someone who is apoplectic is not just mad — they're so filled with rage, they can barely communicate. [/quote]
Fortunately for us, the female member of our trio happened to be an assistant DA complete with gold badge. After a call to headquarters they decided the best course of action was to let us go, although we were clearly guilty of a very minor traffic offense.
The ugly truth is that police in the US have a long history of violence against people with insufficient if any justification. It used to be a truism that police came from the same social background as common criminals and retained the same lack of impulse control and willingness to engage in violence. I don't think that's as true as it used to be, but the militarization of police forces gives the remaining antisocial personality disorders the feeling of invulnerability that can send them over the edge.
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2015/02/12/differences-between-a-psychopath-vs-sociopath/
[quote]The common features of a psychopath and sociopath lie in their shared diagnosis — antisocial personality disorder. The DSM-5 defines antisocial personality as someone have 3 or more of the following traits:
- Regularly breaks or flaunts the law
- Constantly lies and deceives others
- Is impulsive and doesn’t plan ahead
- Can be prone to fighting and aggressiveness
- Has little regard for the safety of others
- Irresponsible, can’t meet financial obligations
- Doesn’t feel remorse or guilt
Symptoms start before age 15, so by the time a person is an adult, they are well on their way to becoming a psychopath or sociopath.[/quote]
I don't believe by any means that all cops are bad, but they seem to tolerate those who are. I have friends who are cops and one is even a kind of mentor in guiding me through my relationship with guns. He is a top notch trainer and has an exhaustive knowledge of guns. They are all good people or they wouldn't be my friends.
Doug
You are right, It is an expected dumb remark by a libtard.,and laughing by an equally dumb audience.
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"An estimated 17.7 million persons age 16 or older indicated that their most recent contact with the police in 2008 was as a driver pulled over in a traffic stop. These drivers represented 8.4% of the nation’s 209 million drivers. " From the Bureau of Justice Stasticics. This is 44% of face to face encounters with police (BJS).
Quick math shows over 40 million police/civilian encounters in the year sampled. To have 20 or 30 bad encounters in one year seems almost statistically insignificant. Granted…no human life is insignificant, and we must strive for perfection, but to dwell on the 20 or 30 aberrations and not applaud the police for over 40 million encounters done properly seems shortsighted at best and biased and prejudiced at the worst.
If you watch the local evening news you would think that all apartment buildings are on fire and most cars are in gruesome wrecks. Who's going to report on the apartment building where the sprinkler system was checked on schedule, or the millions of drivers who carefully obeyed the traffic signals?
Please …lets take a step back and get some healthy perspective so that we might not incite fear and hatred.
Doug above beat me to it. I may also be biased by living in the South, but the first part of this article should surprise no one. If you were young and had long hair in the 1970s, you knew this as standard police behavior. If you are dark skinned, ever, it is no surprise. There have always been police who have been unjustly brutal to anyone they could get away with being brutal toward, and mostly, the system protected its own. Only two things have changed, the first is the widespread availability of video technology. John Q has suddenly become aware of what's been reality forever.
Chris, I love your stuff, but the definition of civilized you found couldn't be more wrong. Civilized means subject to a civilization, and every civilization has enforced it's rule at the point of whatever the state of the art weaponry was. I'm not saying this because I like it. It's just the way it is.
If anything, it occurs to me that if the publicity around these recorded events causes policing to become less brutal toward the "internal proletariat," that will probably be a sign that the end of this particular civilization is not far off. The center cannot be held. Well, that's not quite right, and that probably points to what has really changed, and the second part of the article, where I think you're spot on.
That is the militarization of the police forces. Where in the past it was Boss Hawg and deputy Bubba doing a usually amateur job, today we have full-blown occupation of large swaths of the countryside. Not just the urban landscape, but that's probably where it's the most concentrated. Again, I'd love to have some way to fight it, and to do what I can to stop the slide down that slippery slope to cultural disintegration, but I suspect it's just a sign of the times.
We have reached a point, at all levels of society, where shame is no longer an outcome of bad behavior! Permissiveness has dictated that all behavior is acceptable or at the very least justified by ones environment, upbringing or lack thereof, or discrimination. Hence, murder, mayhem, rape can be justified and the offender should not be or feel shamed by their actions because they are not responsible!
My father told me when I was a teenager, an adult decision to refrain from dragging main street on a Saturday night and rather stay home and read a book or practice a musical instrument, or workout, would likely keep me out of harms way! Not a difficult concept to wrap ones head around.
However, when our political leaders openly flaunt the law and ignore the Constitution from the POTUS on down the food chain, modeling to the voters unchecked bad behavior, why are we surprised that lawlessness has become an entitlement among those without any moral clock.
Life is tough and not fair but ignoring responsibility for one's bad behavior will not solve the problem of social injustice! Yes, those who are smarter than the you and I have succeeded in separating the Church from the State and they have now succeeded in separating Lawlessness from Shame!
Why? Because they can then justify their own bad behavior if they are not guilty of pointing out others! There is no right or wrong, good or bad, because all behavior can now be equivocated!
And we wonder if we have lost our way? You think! Duh…
except I'd put one more twist on it; I don't think these people are capable of shame (i.e., sociopaths). And that is what makes not caring about the consequences of their actions so easy; I think they literally don't care.
Sorry; my comment posted again after edit
Sorry; my comment posted again after edit.
You're right, these sociopaths don't care, but because the politically correct accept all behavior and eschew any accountability, these aberrants will never care! Either they need to experience punishment that results in a changed behavior or they need to be removed from society and grouped with others of the same ilk!
This is why I have a problem criticizing the police. They are the ones dealing, on behalf of the few of us whose moral clock is still running, with societies worst malcontents who, as you point out, don't care. Woe to anyone who believes that society should hold the offender's feet to the fire! Using Ferguson, Missouri as a case in point, we must equivocate robbing a convenience store as society's problem!
Step out for the weekend and the situation goes to you-know-where.
Baltimore Police Warn of 'Credible Threat' to 'Take-Out' Law Enforcement Officers
Going to be some amped up, stressed out LE in the area. Proceed with caution.