American Cops Doing What They Do Best

The charging document, filed in Baltimore District Court, says that Gray “suffered a medical emergency” during transport to the Western District station.
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Wrong but this immediately made me think of Herc talking about kicking peoples ass "the western district way".
 
Took this yesterday. I didn't realise the biker cops were this tooled up.

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That incident with cop running over the guy, one of my facebook friend from Arizone posted 'Ouch, that ought to hurt.. Don't break the law stupid'. Ended up gloating as if the police had done some glorious act of chivalry.
 
Nobby style said:
Biking while black . . . Another execution. Check that, he is only paralysed now. Guess the cop got busted later on for lying about it.

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That's one of the worst I have seen. No scuffle, no standoff, just "Oh, there's a black guy on a bike. I'm going to pull over and shoot him". And of course, another incident of nothing happening to the cop until a video surfaces.

I read a report on it and it said "At the time of the shooting, Sheriff Ric Bradshaw defended the deputy, saying Stephens pulled out a black object that could have been a threat to the deputy's life, the Palm Beach Post reported."

So someone talking on a phone that might be the same colour as a gun gives the cop reason to fear for his life and shoot him four times. Riiiiight.
 
You'd think (or at least like to think) we're reaching a critical mass for this now. There's too much mental behaviour being made public for it to be brushed away with rhetoric. The Stephen Lawrence case was a watershed moment in the UK for adressing the unaccountable institutional racism of the police in the early 90s. It hasn't solved the problem by a long stretch, even 20 years later, and the case itself was a notorious clusterfeck, but it's impact on public opinion has led to a significant shake up of the Met since, as well as a change in the law regarding Double Jeopardy, an official apology from the police comissioner and (most amazing of all) a genuinely good egalitarian use of the Daily Mail's populist witchhunting power! And yet the actual murder case itself had nothing directly to do with the police at all....

The US seems to need in excess of 20 such cases, directly involving policemen, and caught on video, in an alarmingly short space of time, to even start taking the issue seriously as an institutional problem. It's times like these when social media hacktivism can genuinely be a force for good, if only to ram home how ubiquitous the problem is.

I mean, if officers can do this shit knowingly in the age of video phones and camera vests, how blasé must they have been about it before?
 
JustAFan said:
Doesn't seem the cops are the issue there
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Certainly not the primary issue but on what grounds do police have the right to lock out a newly elected mayor?

Sounds like obstruction to me. And grandstanding. Considering the amount of corruption that has been unearthed in that town, I smell something fishy. Perhaps the police are involved. More to follow I would imagine.
 
MrMarcello said:
Certainly not the primary issue but on what grounds do police have the right to lock out a newly elected mayor?

Sounds like obstruction to me. And grandstanding. Considering the amount of corruption that has been unearthed in that town, I smell something fishy. Perhaps the police are involved. More to follow I would imagine.
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Well I would guess from the article they were working on the orders of the attorney and town council who had moved to impeach the mayor. Messy situation in that town ,small town politics and corruption just as bad as big city corruption.
 
Rado_N said:
It's almost like there are cops sitting around in stations all over the country and when one of these incidents hits the press their reaction is "how can we top that?".
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Well, at least in this station, they´re standing around, laughing, fist pumping, joking about the brutal beating they had just given to Floyd Dent, in no hurry to take him to the hospital, while Floyd sits just off camera a bloody pulp with broken ribs having to listen to them.

 
Eyepopper said:
Its taken a couple of hundred years but the US has finally developed a complete Island mentality. The majority of Americans have no idea what life or values are like beyond their own nation.

God bless america and the rest are inferior and out to get us. We are entitled to denfend ourselves, against something - we don't know what - so we'll arm ourselves to the teeth, shoot first and ask questions later.

That's a dangerous receipe particularly when you throw racial and social inequality into the pot.
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Great fecking post. I love the part in bold.
 
Can't tell if this thread is full of sarcasm or self-righteous, ignorant people making broad generalizations about a nation and its police over the actions of a few.

Eyepopper said:
Its taken a couple of hundred years but the US has finally developed a complete Island mentality. The majority of Americans have no idea what life or values are like beyond their own nation.

God bless america and the rest are inferior and out to get us. We are entitled to denfend ourselves, against something - we don't know what - so we'll arm ourselves to the teeth, shoot first and ask questions later.

That's a dangerous receipe particularly when you throw racial and social inequality into the pot.
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Eyepopper said:
If you want to know something really scary, US governments communication strategies in the last 70 years having been based on the exact theory which enabled the fascists to gain such blind loyal devotion in Germany in the 30's. A very basic theory on the psychology of crowds.

The US aren't alone, its just the biggest crowd, the bigger the crowd the more extreme the devotion. The difference between fascists and the US is that with the fascists the devotion was to a man as the embodiment of the nation, in the US its to the sacred constitution.
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I'm guessing these are examples of the latter.

Are you British?
 
JustAFan said:
Well there goes my planned trip to Baltimore later this year.
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You don't want to visit this place?



At about :20s, a rioter throws something at a white dude who catches it and throws it back hitting the rioter. Rioters attack the white dude. Around 6:40 someone throws a trashcan at a lady in an electric wheelchair. At some point, there's a lady running around with the rioters pushing a baby stroller. Not sure if there's a baby in it.

Then there's the guy who cut firehoses being used to put out fires the rioters set.
 
JustAFan said:
Attacking random people on the streets, stealing purses, looting stores, unfortunately may drive many people into backing even more forceful police activity.
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Yep. Lots of idiots thinking they're Huey P. Newton or Malcolm X fighting "the Man." Actually, many of them probably aren't even seriously considering what they're doing, but a lot of people are excusing the rioting and damage they're causing. When the cops started throwing rocks back at the rioters after being pelted with them for a sustained period, what reaction did they expect?

How do they expect a serious conversation to happen when one side is constantly throwing stones, both literal and metaphorical? At least some of the people get it. I saw a video of a guy in a Punisher shirt stopping people from trying to start something with a line of riot cops. There are others, mostly older people, who realize that rioting accomplishes nothing. Look at what happened to Detroit after their riots in the 60s. The same could be said for parts of Baltimore and parts of LA.

There's no excuse for it. It's just as stupid, if not more so since it actively harms their position, as the morons who rioted after their teams won/lost in other cities around the country.
 
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Complete idiots!

We want to be heard so let's - burn our own city, beat any white people we see, loot our neighborhood stores, burn police cars...that should help accomplish our goals.
 
Eboue said:
Those riots are widely misunderstood. They were a symptom, not a cause.
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The effects of the riot are the same. White flight had been happening before, but after the riot, it was accelerated and resulted in what Detroit is today. Nearly 200,000 people left the city in the two and a half years after the riot. With them, they took the businesses, jobs, and money to the suburbs or elsewhere entirely.
 
Sir Matt said:
The effects of the riot are the same. White flight had been happening before, but after the riot, it was accelerated and resulted in what Detroit is today. Nearly 200,000 people left the city in the two and a half years after the riot. With them, they took the businesses, jobs, and money to the suburbs or elsewhere entirely.
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It was already gone. Detroit's population peaked in 1950. My grandfather stayed till 1979 but he always said the city had changed well before the riots. A big issue was the riots of 1943, which was covered up by the government during wartime.
 
MrMarcello said:
Eric Bolling should be drawn and quartered. He's a racist asshat. Shep Smith took him to town and called him out over Bolling's riot remarks. Gets him around 3:20 mark.

Edit: I need to add Greg Gutfield in there too. He's also asking stupid questions.

http://mediamatters.org/video/2015/04/27/shep-smith-rebukes-fox-hosts-insistence-on-blam/203440

It's a sad incident but I can understand the psychology behind it.
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I was listening to that. It was hilarious how Shep made him out to be a cnut live on air. Jon Stewart was right about Bolling. Gutfield is a hateful little prick too.
 
In Ferguson there was much concern leading up to the riots about the heavy police build up and the use of military equipment etc. In Baltimore the officials seemed to take an approach towards not building up for handling the riots.
 
I've been to some of the most war-torn, impoverished and desperate places on the planet, and yet I'd still never visit Bmore.
 
Simply put, this is the result of the ages old American policy of segregation, lack of social investment (while they invest trillions in Iraq and Afghanistan), racist housing and loan policies, severe lack of education and school funding, unemployment, aggressive racism (seems like a there´s a region and mindset in the USA that has never forgiven blacks for getting their freedom) . . . and of course with these conditions, these areas are vulnerable to crime and violence and drugs. And it´s all left to a questionable police force that often must act as a occupying force.

And when the shit hits the fans, you´ll get the old refrain of, "you see, these people are animals." As if it were a self fulfilling prophesy.
 
JustAFan said:
In Ferguson there was much concern leading up to the riots about the heavy police build up and the use of military equipment etc. In Baltimore the officials seemed to take an approach towards not building up for handling the riots.
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Absolutely amazing - they just sat there and watched crime after crime take place and did nothing about it. The Mayor of Baltimore is out of her depth and has made all the wrong decisions. I can't imagine the folks that owned businesses that were looted or burned...their entire livelihoods were taken from them. For what? I am not for or against cops and take my stance on each individual occurrence, but if we want to know what our neighborhoods and communities would be like without police, all we have to do is take a look at last night.
 
Nobby style said:
Simply put, this is the result of the ages old American policy of segregation, lack of social investment (while they invest trillions in Iraq and Afghanistan), racist housing and loan policies, severe lack of education and school funding, unemployment, aggressive racism (seems like a there´s a region and mindset in the USA that has never forgiven blacks for getting their freedom) . . . and of course with these conditions, these areas are vulnerable to crime and violence and drugs. And it´s all left to a questionable police force that often must act as a occupying force.

And when the shit hits the fans, you´ll get the old refrain of, "you see, these people are animals." As if it were a self fulfilling prophesy.
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Yep. I'm just finishing Crabgrass Frontier which goes into this exact issue.
 
Eboue said:
It's really not that bad. Neither is Detroit or flint or whatever.
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I'm sure suburban Detroit and most of Michigan is alright, but you can't be serious about inner city Detroit. Isn't the crime rate in some neighbourhoods something ridiculous like 1 in 7? That's Juarez numbers.
 
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