And the apologists of these extrajudicial executions, they just shrug their shoulders and go, "meh". It's not one of their own, and when yet another innocent civilian is gunned down by police in this country much like innocent people are gunned down in the streets of Iran, they figure it's just part of the risk of living in the United States. I'm certain people in Syria and Iran feel the same way in their respective countries.

Non-union cops are also protected by the thin blue line.

Local LEOs receive training that fosters a culture of force over deescalation.

that will do everything and anything to preserve the farce that the police exist to protect and serve the taxpayers they're gunning down with impunity. The unions do nothing to weed out the bad actors. The colleagues of these bad actors are mum all the way for fear of "Serpico-style" retaliation. If any civilian tries to sue the police responsible for the execution of their loved ones, they run up against a wall of high-powered attorneys and - most times - are soundly defeated.

But I also agree with the rest of your post. Non-union cops are automatically protected by the thin blue line just like non-union members in any employment group are protected by their respective unions.

Also, good point that LEO's favor a culture of deadly force over deescalation. And this has got to change.

escalate each and every encounter.

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/philandro-castiles-killers-took-course-made-police-paranoid

It's easy to blame the unions and ignore the structure in which they operate.

... report

as saintly as any Saint that's ever lived on Earth? Because that's the message that's being propagated after so many acquittals by cops who have killed innocent even unarmed civilians.

Our soldiers aren't even allowed to be this callous about life! But cops, who are supposed to protect and serve US are ten times more dangerous and we are supposed to keep our mouths shut.

Warms my liberal heart.


Unions work within the larger culture of law enforcement. Blaming the unions for the violence misses the big picture (and as a bonus, it feeds into the destruction of worker protections via collective bargaining units.)

Not on the day of the grand jury's decision that he would not be charged. The had a celebration on the first anniversary of the day Michael Brown was killed.
They behave that callously and politicians still seek their endorsement.

American working class.

Or are we?

As you can read in the posts under this subthread, not all Unions are equal. Police Unions are inherently Republican while labor unions are inherently Democratic.

I will make the distinction when union actions cause even celebrate the deaths of innocent Americans. Will you?

Regardless.

At my hubby's plant, even if an employee does something that endangers the lives of other workers, the union stands behind them.

There are people the union people would (secretly) like to be rid of, but they still protect them.

Unions will stand behind their membership. No. Matter. What. And, if they didn't, why would anyone belong to the union?

No union is 'for the best interests of all people'.

Bust 'em all, I say. Every last damned cop union in the country.

Atlanta cop opens fire on car, kills driver without even knowing if it's the suspect

On June 22, three-year veteran Officer James R. Burns of Atlanta, Georgia, got a call about a suspicious person supposedly breaking into cars outside an apartment complex. As Officer Burns pulled into the parking lot of the complex, another car was driving out. Officer Burns put on his light and siren. When the other car didn’t stop, Officer Burns exited his vehicle, yelled at the driver, and opened fire.

He shot 22-year-old Deravis Caine Rogers in the head and killed him.

An internal affairs investigation determined that Officer Burns had no idea who he was shooting at when he opened fire on the vehicle. Officer Burns was fired July 1 for excessive force.

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/7/14/1548332/-Atlanta-cop-opens-fire-on-car-kills-driver-without-even-knowing-if-it-s-the-suspect

If that means shoot first and ask questions later then so be it. They can do this because the system is set up to protect THEM! The local DA needs the trust of the police department to function so they will not charge them or indict them. All cops, usually including upper management support them no matter the facts. If a cop doesn't then he/she is persecuted, threatened, and cannot get a job as a cop anywhere else.

The best start to changing this would be to have a Special Prosecutors office to handle police misconduct investigations and prosecutions. They need to bust any cop or supervisory personnel that covers for the one that broke the law. Once they are no longer above the law their behaviors will change.

Same could be said for Wall Street. Once we have Publicly Funded Elections and Representative Democracy again, Wall Street, MIC, oil companies... will no longer have influence or be above the law.

and I don't know if anyone has compiled data on the backgrounds of the officers involved in shooting innocent people, but perhaps they did not have the same level of training and discipline? I don't know, just speculating.

The other factor is that the people saying 'well, in the heat of the moment" don't look like the people being killed.

In 1991, a neo-Nazi white supremacist gang was terrorizing the streets of Lynwood in Los Angeles County. The reason these violent thugs could run amok was because they were deputies at the Lynwood Sheriff’s station, having the power of blue privilege.

A federal judge acknowledged that the gang of deputies carried out “systematic acts of shooting, killing, brutality, terrorism, house-trashing and other acts of lawlessness and wanton abuse of power.”

These maniacs were not the sudden appearance of a unique group of individuals among law enforcement, but the progeny of a decades-long effort by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to infiltrate police departments wherever possible.

That’s why it is so difficult to believe the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) when it said on Tuesday that there was no racial profiling in any of the 1,365 allegations leveled against the department from 2012 to 2014.




http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/kkk-has-infiltrated-us-police-departments-decades

reported that the KKK was infiltrating Police Departments:

here is a 2015 article reminding us of this:

http://www.mintpressnews.com/fbi-says-racist-organizations-have-been-infiltrating-police-departments-for-years/205796/

Too many of our police are white power guys, recruited for their racism. Too many of the instructors are in that mold and don't teach the recruits to go through other steps prior to killing, Police aid and abet the murderers all the time. Only when there is a top down change, when racism isn't tolerated, when unnecessary violence isn;t tolerated and killer cops are put in jail and abusive ones fired publicly will this change Assholes like drumpf and the repug party make it worse by glamorizing the uniform and downplaying the actions. Stupid racist jerks.

Of the police shootings in St. Louis were committed by black cops. Are those guys white power guys too?

Still part of the problem.

Last edited Sat Jul 16, 2016, 05:05 PM - Edit history (1)

"I'd rather be tried by 12 than carried by 6" they know that in all probability the 12 will find them not guilty of everything.

Notice the trend in kops electing for bench trials.

I've gone through checkpoints. Nobody drew a gun on me. I watched down the line, as 20 cars went ahead of me, and didn't see a gun. Some people had to get out. Cars were searched. Oddly, nobody was killed.

"Police go immediately to murder" would say at least 100 people and my wife and kid must be murdered. Thing is, they don't go immediately to murder, as you can see from a couple million police-civilian contacts or encounters per year and about 1000 killed by police--with the unarmed being a couple hundred people. In other words, the take-away message is false.

Some rules of engagement in Iraq said anybody in a building from which fire had come was a legitimate target. That means if you're in an apt. building with 50 apts and a shot comes from one window and 5 minutes later on the other end of the building and a floor below you see somebody at the window, you can shoot. Might not be the same person. Under some rules, if a military-age male was running away from you, fine. Legitimate target.

Other rules of engagement were restrictive, esp. after some really big politically prominent incidents happen. You kill the driver and passenger in a "car possibly carrying explosives was barrelling down" on you and you find you killed civilians. Bad thing. You get in trouble. But it makes the higher ups sweat because, well, your soldiers just killed civilians not in an active battle space. Even worse, it makes it hard on the politicians, who look to battlefield deaths, news reports, and to the polls.

In other words, there was no one set of rules of engagement. They varied by place; they varied over time. It's easy to confuse an anecdote with the generalization. That's a fallacy.

If he violated the rules of engagement, he was under the UCMJ. That's different from a civilian court.

When he signed up, he said his life was at the discretion of commanders. If he was put in a situation where he could die, it was an accepted risk and if he quit he's in trouble. He was a tool for use during war, which is politics by other means. Police do not sign up to be used as cannon fodder; don't like your assignment and turn in your badge, you're not taken to jail and tried.

Part of the problem with current war, though, is that under occupation or during peace-keeping operations (which is largely what a lot of Iraq operations were) you're doing politics-based policing. But the soldier's life already devalued compared to civilians'; ethnocentrism would say that "our soldiers" are more valuable than "their civilians"--you get this stated explicitly by some countries today, like Russia. You should expect more dead soldiers under the current US political framework. Of course, we complained about the death toll in Iraq, with a website that updated daily and got quoted repeatedly. They were being put in harm's way. Life's not perfect, Schroedinger's cat is both dead and alive only until it's observed, not dead and alive after it's observed.

But let's finish the military analogy. Nine dead enemy for every 1 collateral dead--since people like this OP's analogy, they may as revel in their analogy--would be a stunningly wonderful bit of news for the commanders. It would be celebrated by most politicians. It would be a wild success. It's not, because nobody likes where this analogy leads. We stop not when the analogy fails but when the analogy fails us. The problem is, that we care less about a death when it's "not one of our own."

Of course, it's only really the difference between baseline death rate and the death rate for individual cohorts that matters. We don't like that, either, because the stats don't falter, they just don't do their job of saying we're right.

So yes. We are in an active battle space.

In the military, you follow those rules of engagement, though.

As you said:

In other words, there was no one set of rules of engagement. They varied by place; they varied over time.

The difficulty in the USA right now is that the situation is unclear and nebulous. There is a theoretical set of rules of engagement between police and citizens, but how do we know when they're being broken? To my (admittedly untrained) eye, it would seem that the shooting of Tamir Rice, the officers over-reacted, made no effort to de-escalate, and shot the boy within 2 seconds of arrival. Neither of the officers involved in that incident were indicted, so it would seem that gunning down a 12-year-old without any attempt at de-escalation, or determining whether the gun is real, prior to firing is within those rules of engagement.

There are plenty of other examples, we even have a few here in Toronto. Sammy Yatim, Andrew Loku, Jermaine Carby. And for each of these shootings, yes, there are dozens of police interactions that go smoothly. The trouble is not that -all- cops are bad or trigger happy, the trouble is that -any- cop -could- be, and there' no way for someone to know in advance if this officer is nervous, or afraid of POC, or like the officer that shot Tamir Rice, that the force:

[the officer] was unable to follow "basic functions as instructed". [The police chief] specifically cited a "dangerous loss of composure" that occurred in a weapons training exercise, during which Loehmann's weapons handling was "dismal" and he became visibly "distracted and weepy" as a result of relationship problems. The memo concluded, "Individually, these events would not be considered major situations, but when taken together they show a pattern of a lack of maturity, indiscretion and not following instructions

If we're going to encourage the militarization of the police in North America, then it will become necessary to also have a military level of discipline and obedience to strict orders. If the citizens don't know the rules by which LEOs are operating, then there will be no way for people (and at a higher rate POC) to know what to do. If Philando Castile can comply with the officers involved and still be shot while following their orders, there's a missing link between what the rules of engagement are, and what we're being told they are in the streets.

what's missinfg here? The whole point of who is being extrajudicially killed? The diversion to the military element of this OP is so much..............diversion, distraction, diminishment. American cops murdering innocent unarmed civilians of brown skin are racist and more than likely are ex-miluitary. These type of people are being recruited by local police forces. .

Expectations are somewhat different. If you know you are in a real war zone, you at least are looking out. Cops may not expect to find themselves in such a situation. I know they will call the inner cities war zones but that's not literal. So the conflict can still seem unexpected.

White Supremacists. Of course they will take any excuse to kill black persons. It is not so much about training. It is about screening, culture, and justice.

A sheriff's deputy lives next door to us in Colorado. He has a motor cycle riding friend who wears a jacket with a large confederate flag on his back. What does that say?

departments throughout the United States or else this will keep happening.

This sheriff is in El Paso County, right? I mean, surely not metro Denver...

Maybe Weld - those crazies wanted to secede from Colorado...LOL

Maybe Larimer?

and I believe they are afraid. Every time they stop someone, that person could have a gun. Also, stereotypes of people "they should fear" the combo is dangerous

Everyday in the academy. 5 days a week, at least once an hour, for 6 months and then for everyday during FTO, which last 4-7 months, we are told to be afraid and that our main goal is to go home at the end of the day. Believe me. It's hard to keep one's nerves when your taught to walk up to any car with either your hand on your weapon or with your weapon drawn depending on the location of the stop and the time of day. Most of us come out realizing we don't have to be that fearful, but some don't.

What do you think should be done?

Right now the training is paramilitary and we were taught that the public is the enemy. That's just not the case in reality. We should be taught to help the public and approach with caution. I think the only place paramilitary training should come into play is specialized units like SWAT and not the front line everyday cops.

Heck, I'd even go so far as to say that most of the front line cops should not be armed with guns. There's no need IMHO. Less lethal works much better and there's better chance everyone gets to live at the end of the encounter that way.

Too many cops think they're in an action movie where they're the hero.

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(My guess, actually, is that he was recovering from a clutzy trip on a tree root and that embarrassment caused him to be extra rough with the teens for witnessing his embarrassing performance. But it sure does look like he is acting out an action hero fantasy.)

There are cops in Los Angeles and New York City that go their whole career on the force and never have to pull their gun even once.

You can make the jump to lethal without going through all that other stuff depending on the sitation and your perception of it...

I feel that there should be a five year break between a veteran with any combat time and riding solo in a squad car.

PTSD is still not fully understood so a time to decompress is necessary.

I know that Marine MPS are entirely too Gung ho for civilian interaction.

Consider the Ferguson response. That was an armed invasion.

We need more Adam 12 and less Terminator.

This explains a lot of it:

The KKK Has Infiltrated U.S. Police Departments for Decades
During the Civil Rights movement, one of the KKK’s first orders was to infiltrate police departments around the country.
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/kkk-has-infiltrated-us-police-departments-decades

Well, maybe because dumb guys like you need clear rules so the rest of us can live to see another sunset.

Not everyone proofreads their posts, especially when posting while distracted or rushed, so such errors often don't get corrected.

Many other errors occur when one is revising the way a sentence is worded. For example, someone might write, "I have never figured out," but then revise to say, "I can't figure out," but not remember to change the main verb as well as the auxiliary verb. Even if the person does proofread, the inconvenient reality is that we tend to see what we expect to see, so it is easy to just not spot a physically small error while proofing.

It was absolutely ridiculous what they had to go through to defend themselves. And how many bad guys got away because they couldnt act before they left
And people ask why we dont "win" wars anymore? Because the troops arent ALLOWED to.

None of which has anything to do with what was said about the cops needing to be better trained, my comment is just about the stupidity of a dozen levels of ROE for the military.

I agree. Of course most cops are good folks, but a small number seem to think you can kill someone for not following orders. You cannot do that in the military, you have to article them.

And not in wartime, in peacetime.

There is no oversight or accountability and the dark side of an ugly human nature is allowed to go bonkers unfettered.

They put license plates on cars for a reason. It would save everyone a lot of grief it the cops just sent a ticket to the owner, saying his light was out, he owes some fine and get it fixed.

This would eliminate all the needless death and heartache.

Yes, it was mainly propaganda to pump up the "law and order" mindlessness. However, one thing I vividly recall from that program was that they emphasized take-down shots -- shots that would incapacitate the suspect so that he could be safely arrested. This came up almost every show. Maybe that was all BS and all part of the propaganda even back then. But I don't think so. I think they really were trained to do take-down shots if they could do that without endangering themselves.

What strikes me about policing today, and ESPECIALLY when approaching black suspects, is hos cops empty they entire magazine on the suspect. That seems to be the rule now. If you start shooting, you don't stop until you have emptied your gun and the suspect is dead.

I also recall a news report a year or two ago where the FBI investigated itself, and golly, determined that 100% of the cases where they killed suspects they were using the right procedure and we're all good.

Simple question: what ever happened to shooting the suspect in the leg to take him down?

nt

My theory is that somewhere around Reagan's time, the militarization of police forces started in earnest, fed by the arms merchants that were eager to move old military stockpiles to local police departments. This allowed the arms industry to sell new arms to the Pentagon to replace the stuff moved downstream to state and city police forces. Everybody was a winner.

Add to that the large number of soldiers returning from Vietnam, and more recently Iraq and Afghanistan. Many, many of these people are seriously disturbed and ended up in police fores all over.

It was natural for them to approach the citizens as "resistors" that needed to be mowed down. And they got away with this for a long time with the help of a continuously consolidating media industry (the Military-Industrial-MEDIA complex.)

These smart phone videos and the networks to distribute them (Youtube, FB, Instagram, etc) are a very recent phenomenon. The state-sponsored murder we have been seeing on Youtube so much recently has actually been accelerating for decades.

- Mark Twain

First, what that post doesn't say about the military ROE is that while all those escalating steps are recommended, they are not mandated and it is ultimately at that person discretion what steps can be safely taken without undo risk- if the situation escalates so quickly that lethal force is needed as the first step that's how it's done.

The second false premise is that cops jump straight to "murder". That's proven false by how many arrests every day, thousands of which the person arrested resists with violence. The escalation of force continuum in a modern policy agency is like the ROE rules mentioned in the above post in that there are many steps, but just like them it's all based on the officers judgement and risk to them and the public. Different agency's have different models but they all are something like this:

Officer presence- just being there fixes the problem.
Soft words- commands given at normal voice and tone
Harsh words- commands given loudly and forcefully.
Empty hands- taking hands on to force compliance
Striking weapons (not always used now and something swapped in position with the next one)- items like a baton or ASP
Less lethal weapons- taser, OC spray, etc
Lethal force

And the officer can move from one step to any others in a matter of seconds depending on the situation- if an officer is using soft voice and a person pulls a knife and runs at them they will jump over all the rest to lethal force and be justified in it, as an example.

Being a cop is one of the only jobs that having a high IQ can disqualify you from, since most people with other skills do not stay in the position (unless if they really enjoy it). It's a thankless, infuriating job that takes an emotion toll.
Combine that with its culture of toxic masculinity and rampant steroid use, and police outfits have been severely degraded in quality.
Somehow, the cops stopped being part of the community and instead became an occupying force. This cannot last and needs to change.

We're up to 8 out right nurders and at least 15 wounded in the last week or so.

and how many people shot and killed by police? It's possible to deplore the senseless killing of police officers, on the one hand, and acknowledge that there seems to be a problem with use of lethal force by police, on the other hand. Some of us CAN walk and chew gum at the same time.

Military ROE are dictated by civilian politicians that have never been under fire in a combat or geurilla war skirmish. These ROE have gotten many a good soldier killed. When battlefield conditions are dictated by a suit in DC instead of a commander on the ground it is done for political purposes, not military. This isn't just in current engagements, the ROE in the 60's were just as ridiculous and got many US military killed.

So in a way I agree with the OP, it's backwards, the Military should be able to use the same tactics for situations that domestic police do, and the police should be a bit more restrained in use of deadly force.