Cops: We Need Rights More Than You, Citizen
popehat.com
popehat.com
This is the part people need to internalize. Police departments in most cities are insulated from accountability for the same reason public employees are in general--they have incredibly powerful unions that can decide elections. The recent scrutiny of police activities presents a once in a lifetime opportunity for liberals and conservatives to come together and both get something they want: Improve police accountability and take a major bite out of budget-sapping public employee benefits in one shot.
Historically, American cops were used to violently break up strikes, so their fraternal orders have never been seen by other unions as trusted members of the same cause. Quite the contrary. And while the resulting animosity may have diminished in recent decades, police unions are still viewed by other unions as a thing apart. Given the increasingly visible role of police unions in backstopping egregious behavior, current events are extending this view to a broader segment of the public.
Indeed, what's becoming clear is that while the standard concerns of unions are shared by police unions (working conditions, pay, etc.), they also serve a more fundamental purpose that's unique to law enforcement; shielding their members from legal accountability for acts of violence committed against the public.
Unfortunately, this is not an entirely unreasonable thing for them to demand. In essence, they're expected to do a lot of the dirty work demanded by those in power. And by "dirty" I mean fundamentally disrespectful of people's basic rights. To the extent that an establishment is supported by the general public, special protections for the heavies are unnecessary. But the moment sentiment turns against them, the cops know full well that they'll be hung out to dry - even if their abuses were an unavoidable result of following specific orders (e.g., meeting quotas for arrests, prosecuting the drug war, growing department budgets via dubious asset forfeitures, etc.)
This use 'em and abuse 'em approach to outsourcing violence is not a new phenomena. In fact, the situation that police unions exist to protect their members against was detailed by Niccolo Machiavelli in 16th century, when he provided an account of Cesare Borgia, who was unburdened by heavy scruples, and Remirro de Orco, a brutal but useful man for whom things ended very badly.
http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/churchhistory220/Lecture13...
In Europe, the left generally ranges from broadly accepting of (social democrats), to wholeheartedly embracing (many anarchist or other anti-authoritarian groups), the generally very strict limits on the powers granted to police unions vs. other unions, on the basis that large parts of the European left see police as a potential threat to democratic society if their power is left unchecked (whether or not said group have a positive or negative view of police in general), and not insignificant numbers have relatively regular direct run-ins with police in the context of demonstrations etc.
E.g. in the UK police has been denied the right to strike is the 1919 Police Act. In Norway police may strike, but only subject to very strict limits on when and how, and with the caveat that the government may at any time declare a continued strike illegal - only a few other groups (military, essential hospital staff and similar) are subject to similarly strict regulation of strikes.
The limited strike right is often used as an invitation to substantially limit these unions influence.
Both the police and correctional officer unions often donate to the Republicans as much if not more than the Democrat politicians.
http://maplight.org/us-congress/interest/L1400
Source Please.
edit: I didn't go to the end of my idea. That means that the left doesn't care for the police unions. Half of the police is part of the army anyways, where there is no union.
Hopefully Americans can eventually learn from others' histories before we have to go through the police state, neighbors disappearing in the night, and all that nastiness, ourselves....
What's that point of your comment?
And questioning their powers and motives are all on the list of badthinks that must not be spoken.
In "Why Civil Resistance Works" Erica Chenoweth calls it the 3.5% rule - basically that there's a really low threshold for change.
Here's a WaPo article summarizing it: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/11/05... . She has a book on it with a much more thorough study from Columbia press here: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/why-civil-resistance-works/9780...
In "The Rebel's Dilemma", Mark Lichbach outlined how if 5% or more have sustained civil disobedience, it has always led to successful downfall and complete regime change of government - not that we need that here.
In more modest proposals, you have things like the Human Rights Campaign (the largest gay-advocacy group) boasting a 1.5 million membership - about 0.4% of the country. They are making dramatic gains for being such a small percent.
In the 1960s, the most powerful civil rights group in the south, the SCLC, had around 250,000 members which was equally, about 0.5%.
One of the main issues, in poor neighborhoods is the government of these places invest very little in them and typically the only governmental presence is the police, which is the last line of governmental assertion (via show of force), and provide little else to get the community going strong. That is to say, there is little put into resources for 'community building', yes, some people in those communities are less cooperative than people of more affluent communities --by cooperative I mean working together to improve and build on their vision.
In these cases, one can hardly fault the police for complaining that they feel the brunt of the frustration of a population while politicians politick and like Janus, speak from two mouths and their only policy to address issues is to send in the police to stabilize a place instead of engaging the community and establishing enhancement programs.
Even if you don't agree with removing government 100%, it gives you a new way of thinking about these services. There are a lot of fascinating examples of societies in history where many of these systems were not primarily controlled by the state. It is also a great mind-bending thought game to try and figure out how you would structure, say, a defense organization or a road company if the government disappeared tomorrow.
I had a lot of fun reading this book, and I think it provides a lot of useful ideas for thinking about how government should function.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Freedom-Guide-Radical-Capita...
PS: Ditto schools. Also, this is about funding nothing says control can't remain at the local level, but traffic ticket revenue for example should not end up in a small towns budget.
The problem is... Where does this money go?
(Obviously, what's going on is that extra money is being given to the schools with the worst students. But it's not at all obvious that spending extra money at a school makes the education any better than it was.)
Imagine I am in charge of a budget for two departments. One I really like, and want to give it as much money as possible, and the other I do not, so I want to give them the smallest budget possible that keeps them running. Imagine you do not like that, and start giving X amount money to that department. When the next budget comes along, I'll just lower their budget by X, and give it to another department. The end result is that all you did was let me give more money to the department I like. You can tell yourself your money really helped your favorite department though, but unless you gave them more money than their old budget, you didn't help them at all.
Privatization can incorrectly incentivize an industry - look at the recent Corinthian college or the red light cameras where they reduced the duration of the yellow lights in order to induce more tickets (and thus create more accidents).
In both cases, these companies totally won at the game of capitalism but totally failed at addressing the social need that society expected of them.
The problem is that structuring these as capitalism encourages these types of activities. If we then ban the current offences but keep the profit incentives in place, the problems will only manifest in other ways. The problem IS the incompatibility of privatization with addressing a particular problem - not mitigating the natural obvious consequences and deluding ourselves into thinking it will still work.
It's also why open-source community linux has done better than privatized commercial unix: Keeping the incentives of software-making aligned with making good software ( as opposed to an artifact of monetary profit ) produces better solutions. You get better results without the neo-classical logic of capitalism in play - there's no incentive for closed ecosystems, planned obsolescense, forced horizontal integration, crippleware, releases timed with the market, information siloing, etc. All those problems just magically dissappear.
I would argue that most of the time those go hand in hand. If the most people freely gave you there money for a problem, then you accomplished that problem best.
> red light cameras
Hah! This has nothing to do with capitalism! The only reason people pay tickets is because they want their license and they don't want the government to lock them up. If a truly private institution came to you and told you to pay a ticket because they claim you did something wrong, you would tell them to pound sand. This goes for "private prisons" too. Neither of these things are capitalist at all.
I'm not familiar with the Corinthian college case, but I am willing to bet they benefited from government student loans, federal education grants, and a public school system that warns children of a life of failure if they don't go to college. The higher education system in this country is propped up chiefly by government, so I hesitate to call a college failure a failure of capitalism. In fact, after reading the Wikipedia article, it looks like that college was improperly accredited. Isn't this a failure of the department of education?
Should there be strong encouragement to charge people for things that are effectively free?
Should the winner be whoever cut the most corners, cheated the most people, had the greatest deceptions, and paid their employees the worst?
Should we have a system where sending things around the world multiple times to be manufactured is seen as the best solution?
Should we really exalt those who provide the cheapest service at the most unreasonable price by defrauding people?
Should not taking responsibility for the consequences of ones actions be to their advantage? Should exploitation really be how one gets ahead?
Should we have a system that defines success and progress by the volume and speed of such swindlers and con-men?
If you think about it, none of these forces exist for government. Government employees often have no rights (military doesn't even follow constitution). They have little choice. The "shareholders" of government don't even get to have clean elections (not since 2001, voting fraud has not gone away, it's just no longer a big news story.) You have no choice.
And of course the customers- you can't boycott he government. No matter how much you don't want to fund drones that murder teenagers for the crime of being brown and living near a desert-- you have to pay for it. IF you don't you go to jail, and if you resist, or try to escape you get shot. Can you imagine if walmart could compel people to shop there? Government doesn't even think twice about using the threat of violence for even its most insolent whims.
Thus it's extremely important that government be kept in check, otherwise it will grow beyond all proportion until it undermines everything that opposes it and there's little, short of a revolution, you can do to stop it.
I can think of examples for each of your points for government run services:
> Should there be rewards for lying?
Police want a suspect more than they want justice because, especially in high profile cases, being able to say they get to say they solved the case. There's evidence of widespread incidents of just convicting whoever they can convict of the crime without any pursuit of justice (eg: the hair forensics that the FBI was faking for decades.)
>Should there be strong encouragement to charge people for things that are effectively free?
Like the national parks? The massive amount of taxes people pay at all levels of government-- a charge-- for the pitiful results they get? For example, in Washington state the roads are less than %1 of the state budget, but they often increase the taxes charged by well more than %5 a decade, with repeated claims to use the money to fix the roads. How about he spectrum that he US Government claims to own and sells, even though it's free and everyone could use it at the same time (using spread spectrum technology).
>Should the winner be whoever cut the most corners, cheated the most people, had the greatest deceptions, and paid their employees the worst?
It is in the case of government. Poorly run services, under paid, overworked employees, entire industry of elections predicated on massive deception of the people, no real investigations when major events happen, pathological lying from the figureheads at the top, etc. etc.
>Should we really exalt those who provide the cheapest service at the most unreasonable price by defrauding people?
Have you ever been to a campaign rally? Seen how emotional and choked up people get about even really the most heinous examples of psychopathic politicians? Charisma is pretty much like magic. Meanwhile we pay unreasonable taxes compared to the benefits we get and the government defrauds on a massive scale-- from social security which returns less than %3 of net present value of the money taken to the welfare system which loses %75 of the money in overhead and only distributes %25 in benefits, etc. etc. If a retirement fund in the private sector or a charity were run like this, they'd be shut down for fraud. Yet government gets away with it- and people turn around and DEFEND IT! Talk about exalting those who are cheating you!
> Should we have a system that defines success and progress by the volume and speed of such swindlers and con-men?
You mean how politicians get re-elected by passing laws and claiming that this makes them "tough on crime" or "standing up to those moooslims in the middle east" and the like? Where success comes from backroom deals and selling access as Hillary is being alleged to have done, but as republicans and democrats have been doing since forever?
You mean like the common shake down racket of threatening heinous regulations that would put whole industries out of business, yet backing off once a nice fat campaign contribution has been made? (And after you retire, don't those campaign war chests go into the politicians back pocket?)
The thing we currently have is enormously unstable and teeters on the brink of collapse every 8 or so years. It allocates resources grossly ineffeciently and can only keep going with a 2% global growth. This isn't going to work if we want our civilization to survive the next 100,000 years.
We need to do better than the antiquated 19th century economic models or 18th century goverment models we've been using. There are exciting systems out there, but we need to get past the cold-war era polemics first. It's time to grow up as a species.
Ah, Doctor Pangloss. I thought I had killed you in Istanbul.
Government doesn't have any external force keeping it in check. All of the "checks and balances" are other parts of the government or controlled by government (Eg: who counts the votes? Government. Who decides which two candidates get on the ballot? Those currently in charge.)
Companies can be naughty, for sure. It's just when they do there are consequences.
Government never seems to suffer from the consequences of their own actions-- in fact, when government screws things up they always have a scapegoat and use it as an excuse to take even more money and power.
Look at what happened after 9/11-- more money, more power, more wars.
Look what happened after snowden? No reforms, more expansion of spying. Hell, spying grew under Obama and the Patriot Act was made permanent. Which means the travesty enacted under Bush wasn't even weakened by giving the democrats control over two branches of government!
Governments often suffer from the consequences of their actions.
But I suspect you're taking such an ahistorical and afactual view not out of a rational weighing of the evidence, but because the far right has steeped the U.S. in anti-government propaganda for decades, and many people have simple fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker.
Voting. If that doesn't work, revolution.
Private property (read "capital") must have the threat of violence behind it. So you either have a system where people have their own force (feudalism), ~ or ~ you have a designated body which enforces communal rules - a governing body if you will.
Functional capitalism requires a functional government. Otherwise it's feudalism[1]
What the anti-government proposal usually boils down to is:
"I'd like my property protected, no requirement to treat my workers or the environment well, and have my workers pay for this by contracting everything out to for-profit companies owned by people like me."
It's a sweetheart deal where everything is privatized and capitalized on by some tiny elite group (let's call them royalty) who don't have to pay any taxes and keep all the profits and are protected by large armies --- hey this sounds like feudalism again, but worse!
This leads to over-concentration of capital manifesting itself as speculative bubbles, mass indebtedness (a carryover from feudalism), currency devaluation wars, quantitative easing, labor and tax inversions...etc.
For instance, now there's a negative yield on the 1-month T-note. The Fed lowered interest rates to try to spur domestic investment, but that money has already been invested overseas or gone to speculative gambles like real-estate - just like it did 10 years ago after the last recession.
This means housing goes up, interest rates stay low, but monetary velocity remains dormant, economic liquidity doesn't move, and overall GDP growth happens but only as a function of rising investment valuation, not increased production. Furthermore, capital is spent on debt-obligated interest instead of a goods & service marketplace so demand remains stagnant ... the entire system just doesn't work. If you take away the money to be spent, then there's no money to be made, and capital investment goes elsewhere.
Look at European austerity program -- reducing government spending was supposed to spur job creation and rebound economies. But as Greece did more Reaganomics, unemployment spiked upwards of 60% (http://www.tradingeconomics.com/greece/youth-unemployment-ra...). The creditors who got the money invested it outside of Greece where the returns were better. The movement of capital went from the taxpayer to exiting the Greek economy. Check NYSE:NBG to see it affected one of the in-country banks.
So small-government capitalism just doesn't work. It leads to a de-industrialization, a de-population of the marketplace, a rise of speculative finance, and an exit of investment. In this case to BRICS (next is Africa, then Zomia). Just like in the US it went from NAFTA -> CAFTA.
It's so fun listening to EconTalk or Steve Forbes because they have a correct description of the economy and the current instruments behind it, but then scratch their heads thinking "hrmm this shouldn't have happened according to our classical models! This is a mystery! All of our predictions were wrong. Hrmm! Maybe we forgot to carry the one somewhere!"
Even though they openly admit neoliberalism is wrong, they've convinced themselves so much of their bogus models that it doesn't matter. It's like watching Dora the Explorer fail to find the huge mountain drawn right next to her.
An this will continue to be a problem as long as it is treated with such unquestioning religious fervor.
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1. Which is where proto-capitalism began and was finally able to take over in the 1840s through reforms of governance throughout Europe. It's worth noting that there are no functioning capitalist economies in places without functioning governments.
But to be clear private companies do a great job making shoes. Lots of evedence suggests they do a poor job at making fighter jets. The problem is clearly incentives. Less well known there are also issues with private companies making army boots. And again the problem seems to be capitalism only applies when lots of little choices are being made, if each private chose his own boot from say 5 companies you would expect much better outcomes vs the current approach.
IMO, you can only call it capitolism when the government buys the same products as any other person on the market. As soon as one person is making a multi million dollar deal you lose feedback that keeps the system in check and are forced to rely on regulations. IMO, this means government contractors are inherently a bad idea.
When we talk about government and big business propping each other up, I don't want to get into the chicken and egg problem of whose fault it really is (if such a thing could even be defined). I just like to address the fact that whatever the cause, government mixing with big business is not capitalism. In fact, part of the definition of capitalism the absence of government.
I guess I just get confused when people point out things that are failures of the state, blame capitalism, and then go on to blame profit, or owning businesses and capital. Indeed, part of the beauty of a free market is the power of choice. When you make all decisions through a central authority, you lose that power of choice.
I wouldn't say it had incorrectly incentivized the industry, considering the 19 of the top 20 US universities on the latest US News rankings are private, as are 25 of the top 30.
The problem with Corinthian is not that it was private. It was that it was for-profit. Those private colleges that dominate the top colleges list (Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Princeton, yadda yadda) are all non-profit.
Usually when people say "privatize" they mean "make it for-profit" and not "establish a separate charter and incorporate as a not-for-profit".
My only claim is that the goals of the underlying impetus of the organization can be at conflict with the premise for its existence.
The theory is that a large enough mismatch of these effort will only give rise to dysfunctionalism.
Much of the "argument" I see is where people thing that their pet generalized economic model is clearly the best one for all of societies needs. It's a bag of hammers approach. The problems are too divergent for a unified solution to be the most efficacious.
We need to stop the cheerleading and start the analysis.
One of the reasons they often invest very little in those places is because they have very little...local services like police and public schools are often largely funded out of local budgets, which come largely out of local taxes. I think things would be a lot better if public services were locally administered but funded entirely from the state budget, with a large fraction of the allocation determined by the number of relevant people in the district of the service.
I grew up in a mixed neighborhood with UMC, middle class and poor kids. Poor kids had a pernicious tendency to want to avoid learning and actually made fun and put down kids who attempted to get serious about studying. It was a kind of bullying. Fortunately, I got along with them so they did not bother me, except rib me about being the 'kid who studied and did homework.'
But I think the GP was referring to poor neighborhoods within larger cities.
Privatizing the prison force has led to an influx of prisoners, as well as for-profit wardens colluding with judges to increase the prisoner count (ie: profits) for their prison.
Privatizing colleges into for-profit colleges led to rampant abuse of education loans, rampant lies from recruiters, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for hundreds of thousands of people. Until Obama cracked down on the practice and regulated the heck out of them.
I don't understand why libertarians take various institutions, slap "privatize" on them and then assume that things will work out in the end.
This has nothing to do with unions.
Police forces are protecting their members from being investigated for felonies. That's a little different. The only reason the police are investigated internally is because they happen to work in the same building that employs people who respond when you beat and/or murder someone.
I think the police of the police is famous for being tough when an investigation starts, there is probably no bail if someone was killed.
For a ticket, there is a presumption of truth from the policeman (you have to prove he's wrong), anything higher he's a witness or a defendant like the others (still only talking about the law, judges tend to believe policemen).
Yeah, we should get rid of public defenders to save a few bucks too. All those lousy public defenders defending poor people who commit crimes. Bastards.
Frankly, when the cops in NYC went on a "soft" strike a few months back nothing bad happened. That suggests that we have too many cops. But if the politicians and the people (because, by and large, the majority in many places want more cops, not less) don't have the guts to do what is right, then they get the police force they deserve.
On top of the structural analysis, civil service protections pre-date, and are independent of, public sector unionism.
Yet here we are in the U.S. where union membership is today disproportionately public sector works or quasi-government workers (companies that derive most of their revenue from government contracts.)
The only way to make police accountable is to make this a private service. Otherwise people are paying their own money for being harassed on a regular basis.
I'd be willing to pay more as a taxpayer for that (rather than just more poorly trained and paid cops and urban assault vehicles).
The DA's office, which depends on the police to perform investigations for them, is quite reluctant to investigate police officers in the first place. And when they do, the police force will behave quite uncooperatively, testify only in favor of the accused police officer, evidence will get "lost" mysteriously, and so forth.
Plus, if somebody sues a police officer for brutality, the usual reaction is to counter-sue for slander or false accusation (falsely accusing somebody of a crime is itself a crime under German law). In these cases, the best one can hope for is that the police drops its charges if you drop yours.
I remember a case from a few years back that exemplifies the problem over here quite well: The police had a warrant so search the home of somebody accused of drug trafficking. They did however, by accident, drive to the wrong address and - because of alleged "imminent danger" - kick down the door. They did not find any drugs or other illegal stuff at the place (because it was the wrong place). But the person whose appartment they searched wanted the police to pay for his door. The police refused, so he sued. The judge's statement when he dismissed the case came down to "Tough luck, dude, deal with it".
I find the very idea of a "Police Bill of Rights" repulsive. The police's job - formally speaking - is to enforce the law; as such, the law should be applied to them the same as to everybody else. If anything, the police - precisely because they are allowed, under certain circumstances, to beat and kill people - should be held to a stricter standard.
It is also interesting that the police union here in Germany rarely if ever does what a union is supposed to do, namely to work towards better working conditions - better pay, shorter hours, and so forth - for their members, instead they mainly seem to advocate for more surveillance and against police accountability.
I'm not sure, though, how it even currently works in most places. Does anywhere do it like that?
Unfortunately, police are still extremely uncooperative and it has had more or less teeth over the years, depending on who gets appointed.
In the same way it shouldn't be the DoJ that investigates Congress for acts of corruption. DoJ is huge and has many agencies that depend on Congress to give them more powers and increase the budget. Therefore DoJ is reliant on Congress in a big way.
There should be a special agency with its sole purpose of investigating political corruption, like it exists in some countries in Europe. This makes their mission clear, and it encourages that agency to enforce the laws against corruption to justify their existence.
This person is pretty much arguing for a legally different, privileged class of citizens to be created. The New York Times published an article by someone asking to create two classes in American society.
Have power hungry nut jobs been publishing this stuff in the most respected media outlets forever? Or is this new?
The rich and famous, the politicians, and the police/military already have elevated status and treatment within most societies even if it is not officially written, and this goes back to the earliest human establishments.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/29/baltimore-an...
It's linked from the popehat.com article, but not made completely obvious.
You seem to be implying that they shouldn't have published this. Personally, I'm much happier with having powerful nutjobs like this get attention for their views than keeping them hidden away. Mr. National President of the Fraternal Order of Police is going to think that police need their own separate "bill of rights" whether or not he gets space in the New York Times. By publishing him, the NYT is merely making us aware of that fact, and I think it's good for everyone to know.
Censorship solves nothing. If he gets support by doing this, then we need to counter that by providing a better argument, not by trying to silence the opposition.
Perhaps it is because Canadian municipalities - and their police services - are subordinate to the provinces - and to the provincial service. (The SIU is part of the OPP, the Ontario Provincial Police.)
I'd be very curious to learn more from those more in the know.
You forgot to add "and nothing ever happens"...
Remember Sammy Yatim? The teenager who was begging for the cop to shoot him that was posted to youtube in 2013?
Well, the cop shot him to death, and then another cop ran on the ttc car to taser him (trying to cover up the fact that his buddy shot and killed him at point blank range with no provocation), and even more cops were filmed kicking away shell casings (in an attempt to make it look as though fewer bullets had been fired?? I don't know...) That's destruction of evidence.
There still isn't even a trial date set almost 2 years later now. [0] Forcillo is still working in law enforcement with Crime Stoppers. And when the trial does finally occur, the entire thing is under a publication ban, so nobody will even hear about it. It will be on page 7 of the toronto star that James Forcillo was found not guilty and is now working for another police division.
If he does get 10 years in prison I would be incredibly surprised.
[1] http://www.8newsnow.com/story/21557505/cover-up-alleged-in-c... - A woman was sexually assaulted by a police officer during an alleged "search for drugs," walked back into the family court she had just come from to tell the judge about it, and was arrested in front of her daughter for "making a false accusation against a police officer" (which, it turns out, isn't actually a crime in Nevada where this took place). The cop and the judge that watched her get arrested and refused to intervene while playing with the woman's daughter were both eventually fired but not criminally charged.
Does anyone know if any officer involved death starts off as an administrative investigation or as a criminal one?
If a law enforcement officer is under investigation and is subjected to interrogation for any reason which could lead to disciplinary action, demotion, dismissal or criminal charges, the interrogation shall comply with the following requirements...
That sounds broad enough to cover "Criminal Investigations".
This might just be just Wisconsin though; the law might be different where that commenter lives.
[0] http://www.legis.state.wi.us/statutes/1979/79Stat0164.pdf
I think some of Canterbury's comments speak to a population not waiting for an investigation to complete before it reacts to events which have not reached an official conclusion (just or unjust). Let's say the family of a rape or murder victim does not wait till a jury reaches a decision and vents its frustration against the accused, or in some cases unrelated bystanders -resorts to extrajudicial procedure.
In reality the problem is not the speed of justice but rather the reactions and impatience is a product of lack of access to the mainstream economy, some of this is due to biases and some of it is due to socio-cultural issues (same as Appalachian whites). It's not as if some police brutality and injustice does not happen in other communities, but generally those communities don't feel disenfranchised so they don't need an outlet for their frustration. When an injustice happens they have access to the justice system to address their complaints and they have political power to bring attention to issues.
Which is it? Your two sentences stand diametrically opposed to each other. The history of civil rights in the US suggests that your first sentence is absurd, and your second dead on.
Say what? You really want some kind of robocop-chip embedded in you that reports you?
"The police department is like a crew, it does whatever it wants to do."
Repeat it very quickly in a crew, for example
Overseer, overseer, overseer, overseer
Officer, officer, officer, officer
Yeah, officer from overseer
You need a little clarity, check the similarity
I will never understand how anyone can defend or support or even respect the police in the US when they are nothing more than the most powerful, most corrupt, most violent, and most murderous (we think since most figures are suppressed) gang in the country. Fear, yes. It seems to me that at least in other countries, people are less deluded about their police situation (which is generally similar, though the details may be different).
What we need are much higher standards for police conduct and independent investigation and prosecutorial forces that are strictly separated from the regular police force / prosecutors (and closely monitored for corruption) to investigate police abuses. There will be plenty of work for such full-time, permanent positions in every single jurisdiction given the amount of corruption and violence police cause. This idea that a police officer's testimony is somehow impervious to scrutiny, so much so that it will be accepted even when the judge knows the officer is lying needs to end. Basically, we have set up a huge, elitist "society" of cops, prosecutors, judges, and the rich people who support them who are beyond the law, not to mention justice. Of course we then get pissed off when these people talk about justice and even more so when they are either acquitted or not even charged with the serious crimes they commit, up to and including murder. Atrocious indeed.
Fixing this situation seems rather tricky since the layperson only has the power to vote and there are no candidates who are willing to address this problem at any level. Fixing other laws that criminalize everyday activity, while incredibly difficult, seems to be the only way to try to go about at least reducing the ability of police to insert themselves into everyday situations they have no business inserting themselves in the first place. Still, at best, it's a workaround to reduce abuse, not one to actually eliminate it or deal out justice after the fact. In the case of police, the criminals (police) always get away with it.
For those of us who are illiterate when it comes to legal matters, the best we can do about it is to first fix our ignorance.
When computers break, folks look for their local computer geek to fix it. When laws break, computer geeks should seek the counsel of their local law geek (or become one themselves).
Now, if the law geeks say their system is so broken that there's nothing they can do to reasonably fix it, that's when the wider community can take alternative steps.
The fact is, police have gotten so comfortable in their untouchable-ness that they've stepped over the line that defines the amount of corruption and abuse "we" are willing to look past. Apparently it is somewhere around cops straight up robbing (civil forfeiture) and killing us.
Feel free to criticize the soldiers themselves, of course. I just don't see the point, and I don't think you'll get very far. Even if you vilify utterly in the public mind, you'll accomplish nothing. The people who decide where to send those soldiers are the ones who count.
If your prospects are that dim it's likely they won't take you.
That is, by the way, a myth.
My guess is, a whole lot of silence.
These are indeed largely ignored outside of local news, after perhaps one or two brief mentions nationally.
What seems to generally happen then is that they are investigated, and the killing is found to be somewhere between clearly justified and criminal, so there are no criminal charges but a good chance of a successful civil suit for wrongful death. That will often get a brief mention in the national news.
Another large group of deaths that doesn't get a lot of attention, in either the press or on the streets, are the ~20 mostly young blacks killed per day by homicide. While some of these are due to criminal gangs attacking other criminal gangs, many are innocent people killed by mistake. It's sad that they are largely overlooked.
And considering that one of the few times I'd consider lethal force justified would be when someone actually pulls a gun on a cop, that makes them especially useless.
I mean, what scenarios do you see guns being a good solution for, compared to nonlethal self defense tools like pepper spray?
It's not about protecting yourself from cops. It's protecting yourself from criminals..but it seems with all of the latest news stories, criminals are protected, adored, and idolized.
It's also not even about the actual effectiveness of the gun. When it's well-known that you have a weapon, crime decreases.
"I mean, what scenarios do you see guns being a good solution for, compared to nonlethal self defense tools like pepper spray?"
Pepper spray is also heavily regulated in nearly every state and isn't really that effective. The way I see it, if I can't legally own a gun and a criminal hurts myself or my family, the people that passed the laws prohibiting me from protecting my family (and those that supported these laws) should go to jail as well.
Do you have some citation for that? Curious to read it.
More generally, Lott's book "More Guns, Less Crime" is a study on the subject - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Guns,_Less_Crime - though not without opposition.
So, the result is an increase in bank robberies. Because the criminals don't really care about the laws and know they will always be given cash, it puts more people in danger when they get the money and run. People potentially (and do) get hurt, etc.
The right to have a gun is a much more powerful force than the actual act of having a gun, assuming that people do actually take advantage of that right, which they do. It makes the police and military think twice about breaking into people homes and taking them over, committing violence against them, or killing them. Mind you, just because they think twice about it doesn't mean they'll make the sane decision and not knock down doors in the middle of the night serving warrants to the wrong house (in which situation the police are asking to be shot at so I can't really feel bad for them and their insane decisions). Yes, the police and military have much bigger and better guns so the situation is not quite balanced, but it is as balanced as it's going to get. Without the right to bear arms, it's almost impossible to enforce one's natural rights, spelled out in the constitution. The police, who don't want you enforcing those rights, are certainly not going to help you. It is the right itself and the exercising of the right to bear arms itself that keeps most of the violence away without even a single shot being fired.
So no, pepper spray will not help.
Also an attacker can kill you a couple of thousand times before you can even pull out your gun from the holster.
Seriously, as someone who's had "hard, rigorous, proper training", I am continuously amazed by all the people without it who responsibly defend themselves. Over two million times a year in the US (in the vast majority of these cases no shot is ever fired).
And your latter point seldom holds true, when it's gun vs. gun, the armed citizen is generally smart enough to draw his gun when he believes his assailant won't have enough time to respond. One of the reasons the canard about criminals taking guns away from women never seems to actually happen.