In Secretly Recorded Phone Calls, Officers Say Innocent People Were Framed

https://gothamist.com/news/mount-vernon-police-tapes-innocent-people-were-framed

by danso • 6 years ago

598 245 6 years ago

Caught on tape by a whistleblower cop, the officers said they witnessed or took part in alarming acts of police misconduct, from framing and beating residents to collaborating with drug dealers, all as part of a culture of impunity within the department’s narcotics unit.

Probably the single most effective thing to reduce police abuse in America would be to end the war on drugs and decriminalize drugs.

No-knock warrants were originally used to try to catch drug dealers before they could flush the drugs down the toilet.

Civil forfeiture was originally created to try to take money from drug dealers.

The war on drugs has taken a wrecking ball to the Fourth Amendment restrictions on search and seizure.

kyleee2• 6 years ago

Yep, and the legal market prices must not be pushed too high due to excessive regulation and taxation, lest the black markets (and crime associated with them) continue to flourish

JumpCrisscross• 6 years ago

lest the black markets (and crime associated with them) continue to flourish

Black markets of tax evaders are vastly superior to those avoiding criminal penalties up to life in jail.

AuryGlenz2• 6 years ago

I’m curious - which drugs do you think should be available for sale commercially? All of them? The libertarian side in me says yes, but the pragmatic side says easily available meth wouldn’t exactly be a great thing for society.

aidos• 6 years ago

Your parent said decriminalise rather than legalise. It’s a strategy that Portugal has had a lot of success with.

noarchy• 6 years ago

This remains an issue in Canada with regard to cannabis, now that it is legalized. And we still have a thriving black market in cigarettes, due to high taxes.

swiley• 6 years ago

I’m honestly pretty pissed off with the Democrats picking a candidate that’s not pro legalization.

The one alternative we have to the republicans is just doing the same crap.

hawkice• 6 years ago

I highly recommend telling pollsters you'll be voting Libertarian, as that will help them get into debates. Someone should be on that stage saying drug laws are wrong.

Edit: vote for whoever you want, I just think the debates will be better with their voice.

rayiner3• 6 years ago

On the national stage, Democrats have to run someone who can appeal to people in Mississippi as well as New York.

The more important thing is why this article is about a city in the suburbs of New York City. The Westchester County Board of Legislators has 16 Democrats and 1 Republican. Why can’t Democrats make any progress even in places where they have total control and don’t need to compromise? Westchester County can’t change federal drug laws, but they have total control over their own police force and how they’re trained and what they focus their efforts on.

Ididntdothis9• 6 years ago

Democrats haven’t had the courage to take a real position for a long time. Their program is basically to run as the slightly better Republicans.

Obama wrote a really nice article a few days ago. But when he was running things he basically did nothing to improve the situation although the issues with police were well known.

evanelias• 6 years ago

the Democrats picking a candidate that’s not pro legalization

That's putting it mildly. Biden was an active participant in the war on drugs. He was the primary sponsor of the RAVE Act in 2002: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reducing_Americans%27_Vulnerab...

Nevermind the fact that his home state of Delaware didn't have much of an electronic music / rave scene at the time. Or that the music genres in question were all originally created by people of color. Or that most music venues (regardless of genre or clientele) have been over-charging for water for decades.

It's also cruelly ironic that this act primarily targeted a drug that causes people to become perma-grinning touchy-feely overly-emotive types, which (in my view) is essentially how Joe Biden seems to behave on a regular basis.

Needless to say, as a Democrat I share your deep frustration with this candidate.

tastyfreeze• 6 years ago

Then don't vote for that candidate. Vote for who you think will do a good job regardless of their party affiliation. Even if you need to write them in. The only wasted vote is an unused vote.

mullingitover• 6 years ago

For both parties, the only constituencies they really care about are big businesses.

The big corporations backing republicans are benefitted by a smaller government, so that's what republicans advocate for.

The big corporations backing democrats are benefitted by a larger government, so that's what they advocate for.

(There are of course other non-corporate groups in play, e.g. unions, but the idea stands).

Beyond that, there's a lot of overlap in what big businesses want, and that's were you get bipartisan agreement. Corporations generally care about drugs in the sense that they want a labor pool that's not on drugs, so both parties kowtow to them on this topic.

Parties will pay lip service to the wedge issues of the day, but ultimately the parties do not actually concern themselves with the common voter except to make the appropriate sounds that those voters want to hear.

brenden2• 6 years ago

And now the DEA has been mobilized against citizens to quell protests and criminalize dissent. The DEA is now the Gestapo.

op03• 6 years ago

With the blame games, polarization and mistrust simple problems aren't getting solved. Forget about big ones.

As Herbert Simon in his Nobel speech pointed out, if you can't solve 2nd grade problems don't run into the 10th grade classroom and cry about what's on the blackboard.

mschuster916• 6 years ago

The war on drugs has taken a wrecking ball to the Fourth Amendment restrictions on search and seizure.

The "war on terror" is probably even worse, given how many citizen rights were all but wiped after 9/11 across the world.

wahern2• 6 years ago

How many Signal-using techies have been asphyxiated by cops kneeling on their necks or gunned down simply for daring to walking around in public?

Let's not equivocate abuses. It's unnecessary. And moreover changing the way our most vulnerable citizens are treated will likely go a long way toward changing the way everybody else is treated.

pdonis• 6 years ago

Probably the single most effective thing to reduce police abuse in America would be to end the war on drugs and decriminalize drugs.

I agree 1000%. I wish more people would realize this.

akvadrako2• 6 years ago

That the protestors aren’t using this as one of their main demands gives a clue as to their motivations.

They clearly aren’t above advocating extreme solutions and the far left generally seems to recognize the importance of legalization.

agustif3• 6 years ago

In my opinion, politicians love wars on drugs because that way they can keep the monopoly of whatever they want to sell.

If you make the laws, you make something illegal, and then don't follow your own laws because you're also the enforcer

lowdose2• 6 years ago

Alcohol beverages was a $1,439 billion market in 2017. There is no movie recorded since the prohibition era without reinforcing this drugs as social acceptable every 30 minutes at least once.

https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/alcoholic-beverages-mar...

rch• 6 years ago

It's possible the 'war on drugs' was an excuse used to establish those capabilities. I think it's telling that the DEA has been given the authority to take part in other enforcement actions on a temporary basis in response to the current protests. The agency could easily shift focus to e.g. human trafficking and continue unabated post-legalization.

toyg• 6 years ago

There is only so much human trafficking one can do.

I don’t see anything with the potential production volume of what is, essentially, a foodstuff (cheap to produce and consumed multiple times a day, every day). Scaling down would be inevitable at the first sign of economic crisis, in the same way the defense sector was hit significantly post-89.

jrs235• 6 years ago

And get rid of two party recording consent laws?

splitrocket2• 6 years ago

That, making civil forfeiture funds go to the general coffer, and forcing police departments to pay settlements out of their own budget.

They socialize the costs and privatize the profits of their misbehavior.

FYI, 1/3 of all people killed by strangers in the US are killed by the police. [0]

Police take more money from people through asset forfeiture than criminals do with theft. [1]

[0]https://granta.com/violence-in-blue/ [1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...

anigbrowl3• 6 years ago

From a legalistic point of view you are correct. But if it wasn't that it would be something else. Already the DEA is being repurposed to investigate networks of 'professional anarchists' who are supposedly the architects of the current unrest. While support for the drug war is waning, reactionaries are just switching back to tropes about 'communist agitators' that were used prior to the drug war to delegitimize civil rights activism in the 1960s.

benmw333• 6 years ago

100% agree.

kingbirdy• 6 years ago

Civil forfeiture was originally created to try to take money from drug dealers.

I agree with your premise, but this statement is incorrect. Civil forfeiture originated from the British Navigation Acts of the mid 1600s. It continued to be accepted practice in the US after the revolution, and was relied on during Prohibition as a tool against bootleggers much as it's used against drug dealers now. Usage has certainly escalated due to the war on drugs, but it's not where it originated from.

daseiner12• 6 years ago

prohibition was just an earlier battle in the larger war on drugs as far as i’m concerned

utkarsh_apoorva• 6 years ago

Police brutality videos on twitter have left most of us, even in the developing world, in utter shock.

I am in Bangalore, India

For most of us in developing world, US has been a model state - with problems yes. But a great example nevertheless.

For God's sake, WE were supposed to be a third world country, always looked at with sympathy in popular media (usually grossly incorrect depiction though)

In India, civil unrest is common, and has increased over the past decade. Cops know one thing very very clearly - they are outnumbered. If civilians start to become violent, it will be impossible to control them.

So they stand down.

I have read umpteen number of articles talking about how policing could be improved in the US, from removing powerful weapons to changing the training programs.

I feel that the solution is probably simple - sensitisation to the fact that they are outnumbered. If war mentality is what they get into the field with, better factor everything in.

No army in the world engages with a superior force unprovoked.

People, the citizens, ARE the most superior force - not just morally, but Truly . F*ing . Practically.

rcpt• 6 years ago

Police may be outnumbered but the US already called in the military in many cities.

slg• 6 years ago

This equation changes when the police are militarized. In the wake of the War on Terror, it is now a common occurrence for police departments around the US to purchase excess or outdated equipment from the military. They are allowed to use chemical warfare against civilians in ways that wouldn't be allowed in actual combat. They have electrical equipment that can track or jam civilians' phones. They have literal tanks. The list goes on and on. Even if civilians outnumber the police, there would be a mass slaughter of civilians if it came to all out combat.

ponker• 6 years ago

For a hilarious contrast, I once witnessed an example of "police brutality" in Delhi... a police officer pulled over a car with four guys inside. I don't speak Hindi so I don't know what he was saying, but the four guys piled out of the car, threw the cop against the car and threatened him until he literally just ran away.

storyinmemo• 6 years ago

American military doctrine is about being the superior force via tactics and equipment, being able to easily dispatch a larger or less trained enemy.

American policing has inherited this idea.

mythrwy4• 6 years ago

If they ended the failed and ridiculous drug war not only would police departments have less friction with the community they would also free up massive resources to deal with real problems. Maybe even start preventing property crimes! One can dream.

The old adage about go catch some murderers instead of chasing kids around with a joint.

syshum2• 6 years ago

Thank you for being one of the few people that recognize the real reason many people want to legalize drugs

So many times it is countered with "You just want to get high that is why you want to legalize drugs"...

No I dont want to have my home invaded at 3pm and be shot dead by a trigger happy gang member because the "informant" the police bullied in to snitching gave them a random address for their "dealer"

//true story that has happened more than once in the USA

vkou4• 6 years ago

Probably the single most effective thing to reduce police abuse in America would be to end the war on drugs and decriminalize drugs.

No. No, no, no. A thousand times no.

The war on drugs is just an objective of the police. The objective isn't why brutality happens. Brutality happens because of a systemic problem - the complete lack of accountability. Drugs are just the impetus for some fraction of police-public interactions. They are not the reason for how those police-public interactions are carried out.

The police are completely out of control in my neighbourhood. There are walls of tear gas rolling down the streets, rolling into people's apartments, their living rooms and bedrooms. Nobody, not the city mayor, not the state government is willing to reign them in - which is why this is happening.

The war on drugs is a bad thing, but if you end it tomorrow, it won't solve a single one of these systemic issues.

mhh__2• 6 years ago

but if you end it tomorrow, it won't solve a single one of these systemic issues.

Why not? The war on drugs is absolutely unenforceable - that leads to police picking and choosing what to enforce which amplifies systemic biases they have. You cannot enforce drug laws accountably, not least because it is largely racist in origin and as such targeted at specific minority groups - let alone practicalities

There's a fantastic Vice interview of an British ex-undercover drugs officer: He summarizes most of his career as having been spent ruining the lives of poor people around him and his crowning achievement being a bust that (in the words of one of his colleagues apparently) "interrupted the illegal drug trade in stoke for upwards of 20 minutes"

tonystubblebine• 6 years ago

This and cash bail are the two most obvious ones. 1/3 of incarcerated people on any given night are unconvicted people who just couldn't afford the bail.

This gives police an enormous amount of power to coerce people. It's also deeply un-American because people are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. And then on top of that, it's serves no practical purpose as the vast majority of released people show up for their court dates.

jandrese3• 6 years ago

The War on Drugs was really just a casus belli on black males. The civil rights movement had eroded the Jim Crow system the authorities had set up to keep themselves in power, and were seriously worried about more educated well spoken minorities starting movements in the country. They needed a way to suppress their minority populations without drawing the ire of the rest of America, so they manufacture a drug crisis by taking a small problem and blowing it way out of proportion as an excuse to crack down on their potential political opponents. It has worked amazingly well.

zdragnar• 6 years ago

To say that drugs were a small problem is rewriting history. We would have all been better off treating it like a medical issue rather than a legal / criminal matter, and the long tail effects of enforcement have definitely cemented a lot of structural issues in society- and admittedly, some drugs are far less harmful than others. Pot and crack use have two wildly different outcomes, obviously.

You can look at examples in history when oppressors used the opposite tactic: wars were fought to force China to keep opium legal, lining pockets of mercantile companies while keeping China hooked (and earning it the old 'sick man of asia' moniker).

camgunz• 6 years ago

90% yes, 10% pharmaceutical/alcohol/tobacco companies lobbying.

georgeecollins• 6 years ago

This reminds me of the Ramparts Scandal in Los Angeles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_scandal

It's amazing how bad that was. I believe policing in Los Angeles has improved since then. It still has tons of problems, and the justice system in general in Califronia, has tons of problems. But it is amazing how bad it got in this incident.

jeegsy4• 6 years ago

Probably the single most effective thing to reduce police abuse in America would be to end the war on drugs and decriminalize drugs.

I have very much thought the same thing. We might be overly optimistic but it would solve so many problems.

leereeves• 6 years ago

Prosecutors have a constitutional obligation to disclose information to defendants that could help establish their innocence. But there’s a big debate in criminal justice circles about when police misconduct allegations in unrelated cases fall under that requirement.

Why is this debated? If there is convincing evidence that an officer committed perjury or fabricated evidence, isn't there reasonable doubt about anything else they've done?

downerending3• 6 years ago

Playing devil's advocate for a moment, information from unrelated cases is often excluded from trials. For example, you generally cannot discuss a victim's prior sexual history in a rape trial, etc.

The debate, then, would be about which cases such exclusions should be appropriate in and which not. There's general agreement that neither "all" nor "none" is an appropriate answer.

merpnderp• 6 years ago

But the cop isn't on trial, so why does the prosecutor get to hide facts about them from the jury?

seiferteric• 6 years ago

Isn't evidence that establishes a witnesses credibility relevant and allowed? Wouldn't this information ruin their credibility?

pavon• 6 years ago

Yes, but in those cases it is the judge who decides what information will and will not be allowed to be shown to the jury. There is no legitimate reason for the DA to unilaterally decide to withhold relevant information from the defendant and judge.

ordinaryradical• 6 years ago

My theory on how to fix this is to maintain the adversarial nature of the courts. Don't force the DA to prosecute cops. Have them maintain the relationship as it currently works and let the DA become the the cops' lawyer by default while the Public Defenders' office take over the role of prosecuting police.

Since the PD and DA are already set-up this way in relationship to policing, this makes more sense than trying to wring impartiality out of the DA; they have to work hand in hand with police to convict criminals and need to maintain a cozy relationship. The simplest solution would be to keep the dividing lines the way they are.

thelittlenag• 6 years ago

That it doesn't already work this way, or something similar to this, I find bizarre.

philjohn• 6 years ago

Or have dedicated prosecutors who aren't already overloaded and underpaid as public defenders are.

macintux2• 6 years ago

My suspicion is the Public Defenders’ offices are nearly universally underfunded and overworked, so the only way to make this work is to make sure they’re resourced appropriately, which would be a tough battle politically.

akvadrako2• 6 years ago

It sounds like a good idea. It might be easier to get public support for being "tough on police" then defending accused criminals.

ciarannolan• 6 years ago

My suspicion is the Public Defenders’ offices are nearly universally underfunded and overworked [...]

By design.

ardy42• 6 years ago

My suspicion is the Public Defenders’ offices are nearly universally underfunded and overworked, so the only way to make this work is to make sure they’re resourced appropriately, which would be a tough battle politically.

That would be a worthy battle in itself. Public Defenders' offices should be funded as well as criminal prosecutors' offices, and organizationally be (at least) peers of them.

hpoe• 6 years ago

Public Defenders are already vastly overworked and under resourced, with only about 10 minutes to spend on a case on average.

My hats off to those folks they are some of the greatest heroes in society right now. If I were to be able to cash out of tech I would either become a school teacher or public defender.

drocer882• 6 years ago

How about having the judge do some questioning?

annoyingnoob• 6 years ago

It should be obvious by now that our 'law and order' approach over the last several decades has gone too far. We did this in Los Angeles less than 30 years ago and here we are again. When will we learn?

splitrocket2• 6 years ago

Here's the police lying to the NY Post: https://twitter.com/keithcalder/status/1268204578421407750

Police: $2.4 million in Rolexes stolen. Rolex: No watches were stolen. Only broken windows.

bufferoverflow• 6 years ago

I believe the police in this case. Why would people break into a Rolex store and not steal expensive watches that are close to impossible to track.

throwawaygh• 6 years ago

Well run jewelry stores don’t leave 2 million worth of untraceable merchandise in unguarded display cases during times of unrest.

I 100% believe that there were no watches on display. Why would the store spokesperson lie?

throwgeorge• 6 years ago

what possible incentive could Rolex have to lie? if it actually happened they couldn't possibly claim insurance having controverted the police.

hammock• 6 years ago

How are they impossible to track? They have serial numbers

filleduchaos• 6 years ago

No offence, but even basic perfumeries will clear out their window displays and put them in safes or other secure storage for the night, to talk of a store that sells watches with price tags in the thousands of dollars - unless your argument is that the alleged looters were kitted out for a full-on burglary heist and not, as is usually the case, simply lashing out opportunistically.

Beyond that, there are other holes in the story like how exactly the police managed to come up with the $2.4M figure apparently without any collaboration from the store itself, or what motive Rolex SA would have to lie about losing $2.4M in merchandise.

But as always, people are primed to believe that the police _must_ be telling the truth somehow, even in a post about a whistleblower laying out years of lies and deception on their part.

IvyMike2• 6 years ago

The watches were not stolen, because, as the article states, the watches had been moved long to a safe location long before.

But I'm wondering about your scenario: if the watches had been stolen, how would it make sense for the store to lie about this? Rolex, a member of a conspiracy against the police?

afthonos2• 6 years ago

You believe the police over the alleged victim literally saying it didn’t happen?

fchu• 6 years ago

This unfortunately isn't surprising anymore: 1. State and local governments wanted order above all 2. They created laws and regulations that gave too much leeway to police with little oversight 3. Cops think they can act with impunity.

In this moment of reckoning, I wonder if the US will be able to undo some of these terrible policies

Relevant References: https://www.joincampaignzero.org https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km4uCOAzrbM

boomboomsubban2• 6 years ago

I can never find the survey, but I remember reading that something like 80% of officers think they've never arrested the wrong person for a crime. Which would imply that these officers thought they were just closing loopholes that would let these criminals go free.

That is what makes these stories truly terrifying. The cops still probably think they're righteously pursuing justice.

metalliqaz2• 6 years ago

this is human nature, and it's why criminal protections exist in the first place

it applies elsewhere too. I'd be willing to be a lot of HN readers have broken the rules governing code quality because they felt it was justified by the outcome, ignoring the reasons those rules were put into place

dec0dedab0de• 6 years ago

I'd be willing to be a lot of HN readers have broken the rules governing code quality because they felt it was justified by the outcome, ignoring the reasons those rules were put into place

Which rules are they again?

boomboomsubban2• 6 years ago

Though I understand what you're saying, I don't see the false infallibility in other careers. I doubt any programmer has ever thought they shipped a bug free product.

Drip33• 6 years ago

Prosecutors have a constitutional obligation to disclose information to defendants that could help establish their innocence. But there’s a big debate in criminal justice circles about when police misconduct allegations in unrelated cases fall under that requirement.

Contrast that with Prosecutorial immunity

Prosecutors cannot be sued for injuries caused by their own misconduct. For example, even if a prosecutor deliberately withholds exculpatory evidence in violation of professional ethics and a defendant’s constitutional rights, and this willful misconduct results in an innocent person spending decades behind bars for a crime of which they are subsequently exonerated—the prosecutor remains immune from civil liability.[0]

What incentive do they have to provide the evidence? If prosecutor happens to be caught hiding evidence the remedy is dropped charges nothing more. They'll move onto the next case and do the exact same thing.

[0] https://fedsoc.org/events/prosecutorial-immunity

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutorial_immunity

Pxtl• 6 years ago

I assume they can still be disbarred for professional misconduct.

In general the justice system seems to have extensive functionality built to prevent its inner workings from facing the kind of personal liability that everyone else faces.

raincom• 6 years ago

There are two extremes: (a) hiding evidence that helps defendants; (b) prosecutorial discretion to help their allies by not pressing charges. One may get disbarred for(a); however, no one gets disbarred for (b).

afthonos2• 6 years ago

They can. As in, it is a possibility contemplated, and almost never implemented.

Buttons840• 6 years ago

Whistleblower cops should receive $500,000 for every fellow cop or administrator their testimony helps convict. As a tax payer, I will happily pay my portion of that award to help keep my local police clean.

mythrwy4• 6 years ago

Wow it's looking like you'd be broke pretty quick. At least at first.

blacksqr• 6 years ago

"Let us abolish policemen who carry clubs and revolvers, and put in a squad of poets armed to the teeth with poems on Spring and Love."

--Mark Twain, 1900

stronglikedan• 6 years ago

So, instead of bludgeoning or shooting them, bore them to death!

jandrese3• 6 years ago

In violent cases they will send out the S.W.A.T. team. Song Writers Against Terrorism.

foxfired• 6 years ago

I want to remind people of Chris Dorner[1]. Chris Dorner was a black police officer that based on his manifesto, had witnessed many use of excessive force by his colleagues. When he reported them, he was fired in retaliation.

When the manhunt begun, the police started shooting at people that vaguely fit his description. The police shot 102 bullets at a mother and daughter delivering newspaper. People had to paint messages on the back of their truck so the police don't shoot at them.

Watching it at the time was unreal. The police and media portrayed him as a psycho, while the people whose car he stole had a different story.

In the last stand off, he was in a cabin and the police burned it to the ground. The police denies burning it down, but they did use tear gas and in the police recording, you can hear a man say "use the burners".

One year later, LAPD chief Charlie Beck, admitted that 8 LAPD officers had violated the use of force policy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Dorner_shootings_a...

Edit: as the comment pointed out, Dorner killed 4 people, including 2 officers and the daughter of a police captain. I did not omit this information, it is included in the very first paragraph of the wiki.

MauranKilom• 6 years ago

It would be great if you could add the information that he killed people (police officers and their families) in retaliation for his firing to your post. Otherwise it makes very little sense without reading the wiki article.

skrebbel• 6 years ago

You accidentally forgot to mention that the manhunt wasn't because of his manifesto but because of the people he killed.

Doesn't excuse the behavior of the police, but it's a weird thing to skip over.

mythrwy4• 6 years ago

Part of the problem may be the budgets of cities.

Real policing, with councilors, with recording, with community involvement may be prohibitively expensive. Especially with those kick the can down the road pension plans.

I suspect this has resulted in the strategy of hire goons, don't pay them that much (yes I know cops in CA are well paid), let them bust the occasional head to keep the rabble somewhat down and the goons happily employed and stick your fingers in your ears and go la la la until the whole scheme blows up.

As another poster mentions, ending the drug war may go a long way towards freeing up resources for better policing.

pnw_hazor12• 6 years ago

Bad policing or bad police is a consequence of bad governance.

Bad local policing is the consequence of bad local governance.

It seems that the urban cores with the most problems are under complete control by a combination of democratic politicians or democratic socialists. In many cases, they control the county and state of the cities with the most problems.

Why won't democratic constituencies hold their own politicians accountable?

edit-to-add:

I expected the insta-downvotes, but why is no one addressing the issue?

It would take one local election cycle in most urban cores to start fixing the police. Or, at least one police contract negotiation, assuming progressives already control the local government (e.g., Seattle, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and many more).

Why is the blame directed toward those who have little if any influence in the governance of local police in urban cores?

IvyMike2• 6 years ago

It seems that the urban cores with the most problems are under complete control by a combination of democratic politicians or democratic socialists. In many cases, they control the county and state of the cities with the most problems.

There are not a ton of big cities that lean conservative, so of course any problem occur in cities, they will occur in liberal cities--that is just the distribution of city politics. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/08/08/chart-of-th...

With that in mind, I don't see any evidence that the conservative big cities are immune to problems with police brutality. I mean, type "Mesa AZ police brutality", or "Oklahoma City police brutality", etc, and it seems like the problem is endemic in all cities.

Floegipoky• 6 years ago

Why won't democratic constituencies hold their own politicians accountable?
Why is the blame directed toward those who have little if any influence in the governance of local police in urban cores?

This is an election year, and instead of voting out crooked politicians people are rioting. Either these people are too stupid or incompetent to figure out how to vote, or this theoretical model of government accountability to The People through voting does not hold in practice.

anigbrowl3• 6 years ago

I expected the insta-downvotes, but why is no one addressing the issue?

Because nobody is obliged to take your bait.

jes5199• 6 years ago

defund, demilitarize, disband

netsharc• 6 years ago

It's bad news for the protesters where police departments are corrupt; if the cops are dirty, they will fight hard against reform and accountability (because if someone actually audits them they might go to prison). I suppose it's the same with the Trump-enabling GOP politicians...

The book "Thieves of State" (a long review/synopsis of it: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/19/corruption-rev... ; an AMA by the author: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2t244h/iama_anticorru... ) is eye-opening; as an example, in Egypt police officers had to pay their higher-ups monthly a cut of their racketeering money, and this continues all the way up to the minister level. So when the revolution happened, the police fought hard to keep the regime standing, because they would've been personally held accountable too.

rlewkov• 6 years ago

I'm shocked, shocked I say

justinclift• 6 years ago

... the officer said he was unwilling to go further with [the FBI] because he did not want to wear a wire or take a polygraph test.

Why is the FBI still using widely discredited tech (polgraphs)?

magwa101• 6 years ago

Defund Police.

In Secretly Recorded Phone Calls, Officers Say Innocent People Were Framed

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