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Cont: The behaviour of US police officers - part 2

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*sigh*

‘We’re terrorized’: LA sheriffs frequently harass families of people they kill, says report

Los Angeles sheriff’s department has routinely retaliated against victims’ relatives who speak out, NLG and ACLU say in report

The authors collected detailed accounts of alleged harassment from the families of Paul Rea, an 18-year-old killed during a traffic stop in 2019, and Anthony Vargas, a 21-year-old shot 13 times in 2018. The report, also produced by Black Lives Matter LA and Centro Community Service Organization, alleges:

LASD deputies regularly drive by or park in front of the Rea and Vargas families’ homes and workplaces and at times have taken photos or recorded them for no reason.

Deputies have repeatedly pulled over relatives, searched their cars and detained and arrested them without probable cause, allegedly in retaliation for their protests.

Officers have shown up to vigils and family gatherings, at times mocking and laughing at them or threatening to arrest them, and have also damaged items at memorial sites.
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Home surveillance camera catches a cop deliberately damaging a person's car while executing a search warrant.

The village police chief says there is an internal investigation into a video that allegedly shows a Massena patrolman intentionally damaging a vehicle while executing a search warrant.
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https://www.northcountrynow.com/news/massena-police-launch-investion-after-officer-shown-damaging-property-video-0298641

Video captures the cop deliberately and repeatedly slamming a side garage door into the parked car. Pointless and deliberate vandalism.

https://twitter.com/davenewworld_2/status/1390052753985228807
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
Home surveillance camera catches a cop deliberately damaging a person's car while executing a search warrant.



https://www.northcountrynow.com/news/massena-police-launch-investion-after-officer-shown-damaging-property-video-0298641

Video captures the cop deliberately and repeatedly slamming a side garage door into the parked car. Pointless and deliberate vandalism.

https://twitter.com/davenewworld_2/status/1390052753985228807
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Here I thought they just slashed the tires when looking for fun.
 
Belz... said:
Hell.

Might be time to purge those departments and just start over, this time not hiring the school bullies, if possible.
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Even if you're not someone calling for large defunding or abolishment, I'm not sure any meaningful reform is possible without a pretty significant turnover of current police staff. Not just leadership, but rank and file cops.

The culture of policing, especially in some of these more notorious, large departments, is rotten all the way through. You have cops that have spent their whole careers being shaped by this poison, years and decades of normalizing abuse and contempt for the rule of law.

Sending new, fresh faces into this machine is just bound to produce more of the same. I don't see how meaningful reform is possible without starting from a near blank-slate.
 
Belz... said:
Hell.

Might be time to purge those departments and just start over, this time not hiring the school bullies, if possible.
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I'm as against school bullies as anyone, but I think lumping them in with the unrepentant murderers of the LA County Sheriff's Department is unfair.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
Even if you're not someone calling for large defunding or abolishment, I'm not sure any meaningful reform is possible without a pretty significant turnover of current police staff. Not just leadership, but rank and file cops.
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It's my impression that at least a portion (not all, of course) of the people who speak in terms of "abolishing" this or that police department, really mean this - that they're not against the theoretical idea of having a police department, but that they believe reform of the currently existing one is simply not feasible; that there is no baby anywhere in that bathwater, and the whole mess needs to be thrown out and something new created entirely from scratch in its place.
 
"It was a case that came as a shock to many across the Cape Fear region. A well-known police lieutenant and youth football coach, criminally charged following an investigation by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (SBI). The accusation: that Shaun Appler offered a woman a “free pass” to get out of trouble with Wrightsville Beach Police, in exchange for nude photos or sex.

On Thursday, Appler entered an Alford plea in New Hanover County court... He will now have two convictions for obstruction of justice on his criminal record, and agreed that he would never wear a badge again in North Carolina."

South Carolina is probably OK, though, right?

https://www.wect.com/2021/05/06/victim-speaks-out-after-cop-propositioned-her-sex-pleads-guilty/
 
Matthew Best said:
"It was a case that came as a shock to many across the Cape Fear region. A well-known police lieutenant and youth football coach, criminally charged following an investigation by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (SBI). The accusation: that Shaun Appler offered a woman a “free pass” to get out of trouble with Wrightsville Beach Police, in exchange for nude photos or sex.

On Thursday, Appler entered an Alford plea in New Hanover County court... He will now have two convictions for obstruction of justice on his criminal record, and agreed that he would never wear a badge again in North Carolina."

South Carolina is probably OK, though, right?

https://www.wect.com/2021/05/06/victim-speaks-out-after-cop-propositioned-her-sex-pleads-guilty/
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Part of the problem the USA has now with plea deals.
 
Aridas said:
*sigh*

‘We’re terrorized’: LA sheriffs frequently harass families of people they kill, says report

Los Angeles sheriff’s department has routinely retaliated against victims’ relatives who speak out, NLG and ACLU say in report
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I used to think that we had a problem with institutional racism in policing. Then, I realized the problem is so much worse than that. The thugs, we're bringing into policing now are also racists. How we screen and select applicants for police jobs and how we promote people needs a complete overhaul.
 
Belz... said:
Joking aside, you don't think there is probably a significant overlap between the two groups?
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I don't. I think police culture is a separate, broken place where people go in decent and end up monsters.
 
The real problem with U.S. policing:
According to a federal survey in 2016, there are more than 12,200 local police departments nationwide, along with another 3,000 sheriff’s offices. And most of those don’t look like the New York Police Department, which employs more officers than Brooklyn Center, in suburban Minneapolis, has residents.

Nearly half of all local police departments have fewer than 10 officers. Three in 4 of the departments have no more than two dozen officers. And 9 in 10 employ fewer than 50 sworn officers. Brooklyn Center, which has 43 officers, and Windsor, which reported a seven-member force, fit comfortably in that majority.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...y-changing-policing-is-difficult-experts-say/

So when we talk about "police," we are talking about many thousands of wildly different agencies, with different standards for hiring, training, supervision and discipline.
 
Bob001 said:
The real problem with U.S. policing:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...y-changing-policing-is-difficult-experts-say/

So when we talk about "police," we are talking about many thousands of wildly different agencies, with different standards for hiring, training, supervision and discipline.
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However it isn’t the fact you have these very small police forces, there are plenty of examples of “bad apple” events from officers in large urban police forces, employing 1000s if not more.
 
Bob001 said:
The real problem with U.S. policing:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...y-changing-policing-is-difficult-experts-say/

So when we talk about "police," we are talking about many thousands of wildly different agencies, with different standards for hiring, training, supervision and discipline.
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Darat said:
However it isn’t the fact you have these very small police forces, there are plenty of examples of “bad apple” events from officers in large urban police forces, employing 1000s if not more.
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True but it does make it harder to sort out - as well as reducing oversight.
 
jimbob said:
True but it does make it harder to sort out - as well as reducing oversight.
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I also see that Bob001 and I have been making the same point about sheer number of police forces - and that large forces in the US are also problematic since at least 2015 that I can find...

My first quote is because the UK did have a lot of the issues that the US has. Just as there was a gun culture until well after the First World War - read any Sherlock Holmes story and see how normal it is considered for Dr Watson to have his service revolver. It's obviously fiction, but *that* part wasn't supposed to be the interesting part.



jimbob said:
Yes, I realised that you were adding context in your previous post.

When you post on your experiences of US policing, your posts make me angry. The UK is far from perfect, but in this, and healthcare, it used to make the same mistakes as the US... but it improved.

UK police forces used to be organised at the town level ( according to a close colleague who's the son of a retired police sergeant) but they changed after the Victorian era.

The reason why the UK police were set up as an unarmed force is also relevant. The Peterloo massacre was as a result of using the army against protesters and the outcry was one reason for a civilian force.

Gun control is another - even after the first world war, the UK was a gun culture but it managed to disarm without any loss of freedom, except around guns.

ETA: Homan square and Baltimore were two reasons why I was thinking that scale wouldn't fix all the problems.
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jimbob said:
So that leaves, what? still more than 570 police forces in Missouri?

According to a US DoJ 2008 Census of police forces

there were over 12,000 police forces in the US, with the median size being about ten sworn personnel.
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jimbob said:
Yes that was my point, I used the US DoJ census which is pretty out of date, but the median force size is just over ten officers:

https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=2216



The smallest UK force is the Civil Nuclear Constabulary, which is rather specialised (and also probably the heaviest armed, as they have used 30mm cannon in the past)
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Darat said:
However it isn’t the fact you have these very small police forces, there are plenty of examples of “bad apple” events from officers in large urban police forces, employing 1000s if not more.
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The other side of that is that a bad cop in a department of thousands is a tiny percentage compared to the bad cop in a department of two dozen.

The story makes the interesting point that we may hear more about problems with big-city departments because they are in media centers with large legal and advocacy communities. If you are abused by a small-town cop, who you gonna call?
“The places you hear the most about might not be the worst places,” Lopez said. “They might be the places with the loudest advocacy groups, the most robust media markets or even just they’re better about sharing their information.”
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Bob001 said:
The other side of that is that a bad cop in a department of thousands is a tiny percentage compared to the bad cop in a department of two dozen.

The story makes the interesting point that we may hear more about problems with big-city departments because they are in media centers with large legal and advocacy communities. If you are abused by a small-town cop, who you gonna call?
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As I said elsewhere - it looks as though Chief Wiggum or even Boss Hawg might be affectionate idealised versions of smalltown cops rather than harsh stereotypes.

And Homan Square (or Baltimore PD) show that even large forces can be utterly out of control - especially with Homan Square. Whole management branches should have been fired for that.
 
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