US Anti-Police Protests and Riots Thread II

[Nobel Hobos 2]

If only the US had pubs instead of bars, they could have a punch-up outside the pub every Friday night and there'd be no need for that rioting. It's more economically rational to get satisfaction losing brain-cells, than burning down property. Brain-cells are never insured for one thing.

Or we could burn down the pubs.

It's a licensed pub, mate. Leave that cocktail outside!

[Kowani]

Or we could burn down the pubs.

It's a licensed pub, mate. Leave that cocktail outside!

...I don't drink.

[Nobel Hobos 2]

It's a licensed pub, mate. Leave that cocktail outside!

...I don't drink.

We keep an old keg of some rotten Indonesian beer, for a fire extinguisher, and if some of that were to get in your mouth you'd only have yourself to blame. Standing there with your commie cocktail in blatant disregard of fire safety or common sense!

I could pour you a glass of water while we're waiting for Jacko to bring up the keg? Water is free.

[Kowani]

...I don't drink.

We keep an old keg of some rotten Indonesian beer, for a fire extinguisher, and if some of that were to get in your mouth you'd only have yourself to blame. Standing there with your commie cocktail in blatant disregard of fire safety or common sense!

I could pour you a glass of water while we're waiting for Jacko to bring up the keg? Water is free.

...Water it is.

[Kowani]

San Jose bans the use of rubber bullets for Crowd Control

[Greed and Death]

San Jose bans the use of rubber bullets for Crowd Control

So police will use wooden bullets then.

[Ifreann]

San Jose bans the use of rubber bullets for Crowd Control

Let's see if the police actually abide by that law.

[Greed and Death]

San Jose bans the use of rubber bullets for Crowd Control

Let's see if the police actually abide by that law.

They have plenty of other bullets to use. Plastic bullets, bean bag rounds, and wooden bullets.

[Nobel Hobos 2]

Let's see if the police actually abide by that law.

They have plenty of other bullets to use. Plastic bullets, bean bag rounds, and wooden bullets.

I thought you were joking before. Wooden bullets sound medieval.

[Vassenor]

San Jose bans the use of rubber bullets for Crowd Control

Let's see if the police actually abide by that law.

Given that the police in Seattle kept tear gassing protesters even after the city banned it, signs point to them ignoring it.

[Gig em Aggies]

Let's see if the police actually abide by that law.

Given that the police in Seattle kept tear gassing protesters even after the city banned it, signs point to them ignoring it.

well it seems that they are giving police the green light to use lethal rounds since all have been struck tear gas, bean bags, rubber bullets

[Solvokina]

San Jose bans the use of rubber bullets for Crowd Control

Let's see if the police actually abide by that law.

Looks like the police are going back to shield and truncheon

[Page]

Maybe when this thread reaches 500 pages the next one could have a clever title.

"Captain ACAB vs. The Supreme White Whale"

[Mirjt]

Here is a video from a former police officer detailing his experiences and some of his views of the protests, I think it is relevant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ3SSNJIQ2k

[Gravlen]

Ah, the consequences of a broken system:

Half of All False Convictions in the U.S. Involved Police or Prosecutor Misconduct, Finds New Report

When innocent people are falsely convicted of crimes and later freed, in more than half of the cases, misconduct by police and prosecutors played a contributing role.

That's the primary theme of a new report, "Government Misconduct and Convicting the Innocent," released today by the National Registry of Exonerations, which has been tracking all known exonerations in the United States for the past 30 years. Every year they release a report documenting trends in exonerations, how often DNA evidence plays a role in determining an innocent person is behind bars, problems with eyewitness testimony, and of course, misconduct by officials.

This new report drills into all of the exonerations they've archived up until February 2019. That's 2,400 cases. These are people who have been convicted of crimes, sentenced, then later cleared based on new evidence showing their innocence.

In 54 percent of these cases, misconduct by officials contributed to a false conviction. The more severe the crime, the more likely misconduct played a role when an innocent person was convicted.

Police and prosecutors, in general, engaged in misconduct at about equal rates, 35 percent for cops, 30 percent for prosecutors at the state level. In drug cases, though, cops were four times more likely to have engaged in misconduct than prosecutors. When it came to federal cases, prosecutors engaged in misconduct at rates more than twice as often as police. In white-collar cases, federal prosecutors engaged in misconduct seven times as much as police.

The most common type of misconduct involved concealing exculpatory evidence, which is evidence that suggests the defendant is not guilty. The National Registry of Exonerations found that evidence was deliberately concealed in 44 percent of the cases that ultimately resulted in exonerations. The 218-page report documents the many ways that police and prosecutors break the rules in order to get convictions, from fabricating evidence and manipulative conduct during interrogations to fraudulent forensics and flat-out lying in court.

But what happens when a person is ultimately exonerated and the truth of police and prosecutorial misconduct is revealed? Are the police officers or prosecutors disciplined for their behavior? Often the answer is no. The report analyzed what happened to cops and prosecutors who engaged in misconduct and found that some sort of discipline was imposed in only 17 percent of these cases. Prosecutors are hardly ever punished for misconduct, even though the report notes that they are equally culpable as cops. In only four percent of cases did they find prosecutors disciplined in any way for misconduct. Just two have been fired, three disbarred, and only two have ever themselves been criminally prosecuted and found guilty of misconduct.

Police officers, on the other hand, were disciplined in some fashion in 19 percent of all exoneration cases involving police misconduct. That's still remarkably low, but police are far more likely than prosecutors to be criminally charged with misconduct in these cases. At least 30 officers have been convicted. That number may seem low, but the report notes that a single police officer may actually be responsible for several false convictions (most notably in Chicago, which has seen mass exonerations over police misconduct).

After examining a couple of specific cases where problems in police and prosecutor culture contributed to the convictions of innocent people, the report gets to the heart of the matter: Are there any specific, substantive policy changes that can reduce behaviors that lead to false convictions? The final quarter of the report is devoted to recommendations: record police interrogations; have forensic crime labs operate independently of police departments to reduce the pressure to fudge results; create special units in prosecutors' offices to revisit old cases and look for errors; implement open-file discovery and better information-sharing practices with public defenders; and, obviously, institute actual consequences for officers and prosecutors who engage in misconduct that leads to the innocent being convicted.

As the report notes, the vast majority of miscarriages of justice remains hidden from view, so the scope of the problem is much greater than these numbers show. This should worry everyone, as in all of these cases, the police and prosecutors - in effect - have helped the real criminal get away, and contributed to eroding the public trust in the rule of law while destroying innocent lives.

This is basic stuff, and it's frankly astonishing that the numbers are so high. I'm sure we all knew it was bad, but I have to admit I'm left surprised at how bad it is.

[Kowani]

Salt Lake City police officer charged with felony after ordering K-9 to bite man.

[Uiiop]

Ive talked on a another site with an progressive activist who actually works in government about recent actions for police reform and was told an interesting argument.
She went about how about QI was actually a good thing and if didn't exist a trial lawyer lobby would sue the government into smithereens.
To be clear she did want to remove that for police killings and brutality but was worried about the implication for non-police agencies.

Thinking on it even if i bought into those lobbyist concerns(I don't. At least because they only asserted these concerns without bringing up actual proof) i don't see how these problems mean the government deserves special treatment.

Anyways i ask thee NSG (and Gallo) what's y'all take on this? Does qualified immunity serve a purpose regardless of whether or not it's being abused a lot? What alternatives are there in other countries where this wasn't made from the courts? Are they actual people who sue because coffee is hot even if that one time actually caused some nasty burns?

I moved this because of lack of responses but if y'all think it's better as it's own topic even if it's heavily related with police reform then i'll remake the topic.

[Gig em Aggies]

Ive talked on a another site with an progressive activist who actually works in government about recent actions for police reform and was told an interesting argument.
She went about how about QI was actually a good thing and if didn't exist a trial lawyer lobby would sue the government into smithereens.
To be clear she did want to remove that for police killings and brutality but was worried about the implication for non-police agencies.

Thinking on it even if i bought into those lobbyist concerns(I don't. At least because they only asserted these concerns without bringing up actual proof) i don't see how these problems mean the government deserves special treatment.

Anyways i ask thee NSG (and Gallo) what's y'all take on this? Does qualified immunity serve a purpose regardless of whether or not it's being abused a lot? What alternatives are there in other countries where this wasn't made from the courts? Are they actual people who sue because coffee is hot even if that one time actually caused some nasty burns?

I moved this because of lack of responses but if y'all think it's better as it's own topic even if it's heavily related with police reform then i'll remake the topic.

QI serves to protect police from illegal suits for legitimate uses of force or other actions done while on duty however QI does not protect officers who do illegal acts while on duty so having people say we want to get rid of QI really means we just want to make money by suing the police for every "transgression" we see even if it was a lawful use of force.

[Phoenicaea]

^a shadowy yet substantial cause for this may be, for classical literature (hugo, toqueville, eccetera), that the code of justice is ‘hysterical’ in the gap between the principle and the punishment.

procedure and overall frame of justice is made of guarantees and fair trial, and then this same is filled with a punishment code with evidently excessive punishment for some of the most eye-catching offences.

that means some offences, evidently not harsh and which make scandal for moderate voters, get a punishment while other offences get ignored. the root of this same has been described by authors.

the root is a ‘dictature of majority’ applied on a local scale, from which laws derive. the ‘misconduct’ you say is the far consequence of a self-contradiction, you have to choose which law to apply.

if the officers do not misconduct they have to heroic apply two opposite approaches.

[Kowani]

Ive talked on a another site with an progressive activist who actually works in government about recent actions for police reform and was told an interesting argument.
She went about how about QI was actually a good thing and if didn't exist a trial lawyer lobby would sue the government into smithereens.
To be clear she did want to remove that for police killings and brutality but was worried about the implication for non-police agencies.

Thinking on it even if i bought into those lobbyist concerns(I don't. At least because they only asserted these concerns without bringing up actual proof) i don't see how these problems mean the government deserves special treatment.

Anyways i ask thee NSG (and Gallo) what's y'all take on this? Does qualified immunity serve a purpose regardless of whether or not it's being abused a lot? What alternatives are there in other countries where this wasn't made from the courts? Are they actual people who sue because coffee is hot even if that one time actually caused some nasty burns?

I moved this because of lack of responses but if y'all think it's better as it's own topic even if it's heavily related with police reform then i'll remake the topic.

Sovereign immunity: Good
Qualified immunity: Bad


It's too late for a nuanced take

[Great Confederacy of Commonwealth States]

Ive talked on a another site with an progressive activist who actually works in government about recent actions for police reform and was told an interesting argument.
She went about how about QI was actually a good thing and if didn't exist a trial lawyer lobby would sue the government into smithereens.
To be clear she did want to remove that for police killings and brutality but was worried about the implication for non-police agencies.

Thinking on it even if i bought into those lobbyist concerns(I don't. At least because they only asserted these concerns without bringing up actual proof) i don't see how these problems mean the government deserves special treatment.

Anyways i ask thee NSG (and Gallo) what's y'all take on this? Does qualified immunity serve a purpose regardless of whether or not it's being abused a lot? What alternatives are there in other countries where this wasn't made from the courts? Are they actual people who sue because coffee is hot even if that one time actually caused some nasty burns?

I moved this because of lack of responses but if y'all think it's better as it's own topic even if it's heavily related with police reform then i'll remake the topic.

QI serves to protect police from illegal suits for legitimate uses of force or other actions done while on duty however QI does not protect officers who do illegal acts while on duty so having people say we want to get rid of QI really means we just want to make money by suing the police for every "transgression" we see even if it was a lawful use of force.

You really have no idea what you are talking about. In practice, QI has protected officers who have done heinous shit. Murders and other transgressions have been protected by QI.

Ive talked on a another site with an progressive activist who actually works in government about recent actions for police reform and was told an interesting argument.
She went about how about QI was actually a good thing and if didn't exist a trial lawyer lobby would sue the government into smithereens.
To be clear she did want to remove that for police killings and brutality but was worried about the implication for non-police agencies.

Thinking on it even if i bought into those lobbyist concerns(I don't. At least because they only asserted these concerns without bringing up actual proof) i don't see how these problems mean the government deserves special treatment.

Anyways i ask thee NSG (and Gallo) what's y'all take on this? Does qualified immunity serve a purpose regardless of whether or not it's being abused a lot? What alternatives are there in other countries where this wasn't made from the courts? Are they actual people who sue because coffee is hot even if that one time actually caused some nasty burns?

I moved this because of lack of responses but if y'all think it's better as it's own topic even if it's heavily related with police reform then i'll remake the topic.

In the Netherlands, we have no special civil system for police officers. They are liable in the same way that other citizens are. However, self defence is interpreted a bit broader than for other citizens. In a civil suit, the court will determine whether the officer in question violated the force manual established by the government. If they did, then they cannot claim self defence. If they followed the manual, they can claim self defence (even though that is not the end of it, and in special circumstances judges might rule differently).

Litigation is expensive. Especially in the US, where you have to pay for your own attorney fees whether you win or lose. Frivolous lawsuits generally do not exist, because they are either thrown out in early stages, or not even undertaken because of the mounting costs. And even if police foces get their socks sued off... What then? That just means these police officers have to start acting according to what the law dictates. No judge is going to award damages to a case that does not make sense, whether there is qualified immunity or not.

The argument seems to be that "if officers are not completely held above the law, they may be held accountible for bad acts, and we cannot have that", which is nonsensical.

[Nobel Hobos 2]

^a shadowy yet substantial cause for this may be, for classical literature (hugo, toqueville, eccetera), that the code of justice is ‘hysterical’ in the gap between the principle and the punishment.

procedure and overall frame of justice is made of guarantees and fair trial, and then this same is filled with a punishment code with evidently excessive punishment for some of the most eye-catching offences.

that means some offences, evidently not harsh and which make scandal for moderate voters, get a punishment while other offences get ignored. the root of this same has been described by authors.

the root is a ‘dictature of majority’ applied on a local scale, from which laws derive. the ‘misconduct’ you say is the far consequence of a self-contradiction, you have to choose which law to apply.

if the officers do not misconduct they have to heroic apply two opposite approaches.

Your written English has gotten better.

1. I'm particularly impressed that you tried for "hysteresis" which almost no English speakers know. Cycling or wavering between one extreme and the other?

2. "Officers" will surely be taken as "police officers" when I guess you mean "the judiciary" ?

3. "Dictatorship of the majority". Though that is a heavily used phrase and carries overtones of "all democracy is unjust"

the ‘misconduct’ you say is the far consequence of a self-contradiction, you have to choose which law to apply.

4. Uh. "far consequence" seems to make sense in the context of hysteresis, but maybe you could clarify this sentence for me?

5. The overall gist is that the officials of the law have to operate somewhere between ideal law (which doesn't strictly exist) and the law-as-it-is-written.

6. This complies well with my perception that judges (in particular) tend towards leniency when they find the written law too harsh, and towards harshness when they find the written law too lenient.

7. I approve of that, with major qualifications. A judge has to be clearly wrong to have their part in a trial be overturned on appeal. I think this is to discourage appeals being taken at every opportunity, but it also limits 'peer review' of judges. An easier appeal process (which would of course be more expensive) would allow judges collectively to move further towards "ideal law". It's also necessary to avoid racial, gender or socioeconomic bias in any one judge.

8. Minimum sentences in the US were motivated (at Federal level anyway) by a desire to remove racial bias from sentencing. They succeeded to some extent, though they had no effect on racial bias in conviction. The idea was that if the judge can only recommend or apply a narrow range of sentences, for the crime described in detail in the book, they can't punish much more harshly one criminal (eg for being black) for the exact same crime as another was found guilty of. But still there was a range for the judge's "discretion" to be applied. And here's where the whole idea falls down. The wider the range, the more racism (etc) is allowed. The narrower the range, the less judges have discretion.

9. Minimum sentences (and btw maximums, usually not mentioned because maximums were there already) remove discretion from judges in sentencing. This prevents the judiciary, who know the 'crime problem' in the nation better than anyone, from leading the lawmakers towards a more ideal law. Minimum sentences have simply got to go. The original intention to stop judges influencing sentencing by racism, is fine, but there is absolutely no way of achieving that without limiting judicial discretion.

10. Instead of trying to stop judges applying racist bias (and other biases) by taking away one part of their discretion (and leaving them able to influence the actual conviction as much as before) ... stop trying to cover up the symptoms of racism. Just sack the racist judges!

11. How exactly to get racism out of the judiciary, and then start on sexism, will have to be left for another post. This is long enough.

(Sorry about the jihad on Minimum Sentences, it may not be relevant to your more abstract points. Your post inspired me.)

[Nobel Hobos 2]

She went about how about QI was actually a good thing and if didn't exist a trial lawyer lobby would sue the government into smithereens.

Thinking on it even if i bought into those lobbyist concerns(I don't. At least because they only asserted these concerns without bringing up actual proof) i don't see how these problems mean the government deserves special treatment.

Anyways i ask thee NSG (and Gallo) what's y'all take on this? Does qualified immunity serve a purpose regardless of whether or not it's being abused a lot? What alternatives are there in other countries where this wasn't made from the courts? Are they actual people who sue because coffee is hot even if that one time actually caused some nasty burns?

I moved this because of lack of responses but if y'all think it's better as it's own topic even if it's heavily related with police reform then i'll remake the topic.

Maybe QI could be eased off gradually, to spare government the smithereening?
Or we could re-purpose 90% of the civil suit lawyers for a while, digging potatoes in Alaska ...

But ultimately, the government taking financial punishment for police misconduct is necessary. That's what is going to put pressure on them to do what only they can do. Which is reform the police so there's less misconduct for them to be (successfully) sued for.

I think the main disincentive for people to bring frivolous suits is that they will lose their money if they lose the suit.

And even without QI ... even with judges banning police from wearing uniform, and instructing the jury to disregard that the defendant might be a police officer, focus only on whether they harmed the plaintiff ... police will never be a soft target for an opportunistic suit.

"What was this "fine young man" actually doing wrong when allegedly assaulted by this alleged bad cop?" will still be running through the juror's minds.

Anyone here think it might be possible to have all relevant evidence disclosed to the jury, without telling them the defendant is or was a police officer? I'm asking seriously.

[Fartsniffage]

Officers requested a "heat ray" weapon for possible use against protesters in a park next to the White House in June, a National Guard major has testified.

Military police allegedly asked for the Active Denial System (ADS), which makes targets feel their skin is on fire.

It was before authorities cleared Lafayette Square of demonstrators on 1 June amid protests over the killing of black man George Floyd.

The National Guard did not possess the heat ray and it was not used.

In normal times this would warrant a thread all of its own. But this is Trump world.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-54187961

[The Huskar Social Union]

Officers requested a "heat ray" weapon for possible use against protesters in a park next to the White House in June, a National Guard major has testified.

Military police allegedly asked for the Active Denial System (ADS), which makes targets feel their skin is on fire.

It was before authorities cleared Lafayette Square of demonstrators on 1 June amid protests over the killing of black man George Floyd.

The National Guard did not possess the heat ray and it was not used.

In normal times this would warrant a thread all of its own. But this is Trump world.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-54187961

Just whip some of them flying saucer bad boys up into the air, bam sorted and the job is done.