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Friday, April 17, 2015

The Thinking Housewife: On “Comply or Die” Policing

American Cops Fired More Bullets At One NYC Man Than All German Cops Fire In A Year

One Small Town's Cops Have Killed More People Than Combined Police Of Germany And U.K.

Alan: American cops kill far more citizens than police in any other developed country because American "cop culture" -- like American culture at large -- teaches the virtue of "quick killing." We nourish the "positive value" of "quick killing" by making guns as available as bread, a social and political behavior that reinforces an essential pillar of American Exceptionalism: Six shooter "justice" is the nation's default solution and by using guns quickly-and-often, violence becomes the spiraling justification for more violence, now manifesting as police militarization at home and perpetual warfare abroad.


"Gun Cartoons and Gun Violence Bibliography"

Diane Rehm Guest Gets To The Nub Of Police Violence And How Easily It's Prevented

Cleveland Police Shoot And Kill 12 Year Old With Toy Gun

Killer Cops: Slow Motion Serial Killing By White People

Within 2 Seconds Of Arrival Cleveland Police Shot And Killed Black 12-year-old Tamir Rice, 
Playing By Himself In A Park, Carrying A Toy Gun

Open Season On Unarmed American Black Men, A Compendium Of Pax Posts

Australian Comedian Jim Jeffries Nails 2nd Amendment Evangelists
(This is a great companion piece to Jeffries shtick above.)

Lists Of Americans Killed By Cops In 2013, 2014, 2015

Compendium Of Pax Posts: What's Wrong With Race Relations - Hatred, Cops And The Law

Walter Scott’s Killing Is the Sum of Every Black Nightmare About White Cops

Blacks Arrested For Contraband Twice As Often Though Much Less Likely To Have Contraband

Killing Good Black People Over Dysfunctional Tail Lights

Not All Cops Lie To Cover Up Their Crimes. But Many Do

On “Comply or Die” Policing

April 10, 2015
JOE A., who frequently sends articles about excessive police force, writes:
I’m not the only one to use “comply or die!” to name the de facto cop policy of “fire at will.”
To those “conservatives” who defend killer cops because they are “the good guys,” I say:
I assume you mean to say, “the cops will protect us from gangbangers, Mexican drug cartels and al Qaeda terrorists when all hell breaks loose.  So please do nothing to alienate them because I will die without them.”
If so, you could not be more wrong. Why? Because cops like that animal in South Carolina – a product of police state New Jersey, by the way – are what the cowboy shows called “man killers.”  They have acquired a “taste for blood” and they are, in a real sense, animal predators that have lost their natural fear of Man.  There is no redeeming them and they will shoot a man, white or black, just the same.  Don’t believe me?  Why do you think I forward all these police brutality stories?  To prove to you cops [can be] Equal Opportunity Killers without regard to race, class, national origin or especially Vietnam Status.
So please, get good with reality because our civilization is falling down in front of our eyes.  If we cannot even enforce standards of humanity among our hired hands, we are unworthy of the civilization we are losing.
“Cowboy up.”
Demand official decency even if you must fight for it yourself.
           — Comments —
Dan R. writes:
In the past two years we’ve been through major traumas concerning Trayvon, Eric Garner, and Ferguson. Now the howling has begun for the head of the Charleston police officer. Maybe this one will prove to be the odd one out of the bunch, but I’m not about to jump onto another bandwagon calling for the execution of a white police office killing a black man. Can we just let things settle down and wait for a fuller accounting of the story?
Dan adds:
Here is a piece by Nicholas Stix.
Laura writes:
I don’t agree with Stix that it is a “lynching” as Slager is obviously going to go to trial, but he makes some good points:
Following its M.O. since at least the Rodney King case in 1991, the MSM chopped up the bystander video of the incident in order to make the incident look like a cold-blooded murder. The MSM deleted the beginning, in which Scott fought with Officer Slager, and then fought again with him for the officer’s Taser, showed the shooting completely out of context, and either tacked on Scott’s fighting with the officer twice at the end, or not at all.
He also writes:
There is no basis whatsoever for the Murder One charge (willful and premeditated) against Michael Slager for killing Walter Scott. Scott had fought with Slager not once but twice, ran away twice, and Slager acted in the heat of passion.
Participants in the War on Police will say that my qualifiers mean nothing. But they mean everything. While, due to the ridiculous TENNESSEE v. GARNER decision they do not absolve Officer Slager of killing Walter Scott, they are mitigating factors, under which Slager’s alleged crimes should be prosecuted as manslaughter or second-degree murder.
D.E. writes:
Joe A. wrote:
Because cops like that animal in South Carolina – a product of police state New Jersey, by the way – are what the cowboy shows called “man killers.”
I’m very skeptical of this event.  If you follow the aftermath closely, you’ll see that like the Garner death in NYC Al Sharpton has been told to stay away. Reading the information from Conservative Tree House you see the same BGI professionals involved. My more extreme side says this was a set up. My rational side says wait and see.
Paul L. writes:
I think ‘conservative’ who have bought into the idea that police should be met with deference and presumptions of good intent are not seeing the real picture. The quality of one’s police force is highly situational. The NYPD for example might have a very different ethos to a county sheriff in a more conservative part of the country. Indeed many big city police forces are actively hostile to conservative values right up to the moment that they need our support because they are facing pressure over some allegation of abuse.
We need to remember that Police are unionized public servants, with all that implies. I live in Chicago. Chicago is a melting pot of all the worst Democrat Party big-government union ideas. What this means in Chicago is that they are basically unaccountable. So much so that they are free to run black siteswhere they can disappear detainees at will.
It means that they can continually have torture and abuse scandals so bad that they once caused a state wide a moratorium on capital punishment because so many murder convictions were tainted by detainees, some of whom were as young as 13, confessing with an electric cattle prod inserted in to a particular bodily cavity.
It means that they are often not recruited based on merit or promoted on merit while they seem very gung ho at dealing with minor offenders, it also means that they are not effective at dealing with any criminal threat that is systemically willing to fight the police. This is evidenced by their complete ineffectiveness against Chicago’s disney aged street gangs who are broadly composed of miniature street thugs aged 16 or less.
I can see why. I served and deployed in the Army for some years. I used to shoot defensive pistol competitively. I still shoot on a regular basis. I have seen the police from several big city departments on the range. They really are quite poor shots. Handgun qualification standards are generally quite easy and are consequently kept away from the public’s eyes. Here is the NYPD’s test that I was able to find only with some difficulty.
“It’s no major secret. You shoot 50 rounds. 5 at 25 yards, 15 at 15 yards, 30 at 7 yards. You need to shoot a 75 I believe. That means you can miss 12 shots. So if you miss all 5 shots at 25 yards, you can miss 7 shots at 15 yards, and you still pass.
To put this all in context, you’re shooting at a bowling pin shaped target that is about 3 feet tall and 2 feet wide.”  I would say that there are a substantial number of police officers who would not pass this very very easy test based on the shooting that I have seen.
Police are often said to have a dangerous job. This is a perception that the police themselves actively encourage. They might even superficially believe this themselves. But conservative need to ask ourselves this: If a police officer’s job was that dangerous, why would the police be so lax in training in their marksmanship standards? It is supposed to be the last line of defense against a deadly threat. But it is one that they seem very confident that they will never need. This is borne out by statistics that show that the homicide rates for police are comparable to deaths from car accidents in any given year. We should bear that in mind when they complain about a need for the next round of MRAPs.
The miracle is that the society is as safe as it is today ( and is getting safer). This is despite the police being only a moderately useful force, at best, against crime. We need to be more skeptical of hysterical crime stories. Evil is out there, but most people are not out to harm us. And for those that do, we need to be armed ourselves, because the police may not be effective at helping us when they do.
Lastly, there are certain police departments that are organized around principles that are evil. They are visiting this evil on people that are on the edges of our society. It is unjust that this is going on.
Laura writes:
Your condemnation of American police is extreme.

Not All Cops Lie To Cover Up Their Crimes. But Too Many Do

Police unions are necessary, not in themselves bad. Police work is dangerous, even if the homicide rate is comparable to that in auto accidents (and I don’t know what the rate is.) Large urban police departments in which detainees are “disappeared” and continuous torture takes place are extreme anomalies, if they do exist. These are things that happen in China, rarely in this country so far. I believe you are Chinese, is that correct?
There is corruption in some departments, yes, but still there is widespread accountability and honesty. The militarization of the police is a dangerous trend. Perhaps that’s what you mean when you speak of “evil principles.”
Joe A. writes:
Dan R. reminds us of what he calls national traumas caused by the Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and all “Ferguson.”
Quite true but it is essential to separate the underlying offenses from the media propaganda. Blacks are upset because their people are killed more or less with impunity by home grown gang members and government forces alike.  “Ferguson” was, for the first few weeks, fury over light infantry units patrolling the streets of an American city for the second time in a year, the first being Irish-Catholic Watertown, Massachusetts.
It is regrettable the media was so easily able to redirect alarm over militarized cops into classic race hatred, and do it within a matter of days.  It is like watching sports fans argue in the parking lot before the game.
Fact is, Life is Cheap in These United States.
No conservative should applaud this state of affairs because the Golden Rule works both ways.
 Laura writes:
I don’t think anyone is applauding excessive use of force, if that’s what it is.
Alan: "... if that's what it is." Wake up Laura. Read the first two links below to get some sense of the breach between American Barbaria and The Reality of Civilization in most other developed countries. 

American Cops Fire More Bullets At One NYC Man Than All German Cops Fire In A Year

One Small Town's Cops Have Killed More People Than Combined Police Of Germany And U.K.

Australian Comedian Jim Jeffries Nails 2nd Amendment Evangelists
(This is a great companion piece to Jeffries shtick above.)

Open Season On Unarmed American Black Men, A Compendium Of Pax Posts

Killing Good Black People Over Dysfunctional Tail Lights

Diane Rehm Guest Gets To The Nub Of Police Violence And How Easily It's Prevented

Cleveland Police Shoot And Kill 12 Year Old With Toy Gun

Has there been an outcry by black leaders about those killed by other blacks?
Alan: Yes there has been outcry in the black community over black-on-black violence. 
A reader writes:
Comply or die?
An alternative name might be “Hands up, OR I’ll shoot.
Hannon writes:
Accepting the unionization of state employees, police or otherwise, is destructive and should be met with as much scorn as police brutality itself. I often think of this quote when the subject of state unions comes up. It is attributed without name to a New York Supreme Court judge in 1943, who said:
To tolerate or recognize any combination of civil service employees of the government as a labor organization or union is not only incompatible with the spirit of democracy, but inconsistent with every principle upon which our government is founded. Nothing is more dangerous to public welfare than to admit that hired servants of the State can dictate to the government the hours, the wages and conditions under which they will carry on essential services vital to the welfare, safety, and security of the citizen. To admit as true that government employees have power to halt or check the functions of government unless their demands are satisfied, is to transfer to them all legislative, executive and judicial power. Nothing would be more ridiculous.
 Laura writes:
There are all kind of problems with unions of state employees. Whether on principle it is wrong is not something to which I have given enough thought.
Paul L. writes:
I am racially Chinese, but have nothing else to do with China. Why do you ask? I have worked in Chicago for quite a few years and but was previously based internationally. I sometimes agree with the lurid stuff you post from that anti globalist expatriate commentator. But I will say from experience that Chicago easily rivals many places in in the sinosphere when it comes to graft, corruption, incompetence and other pathologies.–Though there are really very few places like Chicago in the U.S. This is the state where nearly half of our former governors ended up in federal prison by the end of their terms, and the one which successfully sold a senate seat to the highest bidder by phone auction. One of our former secretaries of state demanded that all DMV related fines and fees be paid in the form of checks addressed to him. I could go on. There is also a lot of corruption that is not public knowledge or not yet public knowledge. I hope you get the picture. I wish to move to Texas in the future to be away from all this. With that said, I think some of the adverse characteristics of the CPD are shared in part by many police departments in the U.S. and indeed around the world, because their incentive structure works that way. But few in America are as bold as Chicago’s.
–The total death rate for police is actually quite low. less than 20 per 100,000. much safer than many common professions like driving a cab. About four per hundred thousand of the total death rate comes from homicides. Being a police officer in aggregate is about as risky as living in a high crime city like Chicago. Of course being a Chicago police officer is more dangerous than being a police officer in a small town, but the risk is still less than many common urban professions like delivering pizzas. Here and here.
–Chicago police and torture have a history that you seem ignorant of. Every few years an officer is charged with systemic abuses involving hundreds of detainees or journalists discover some black site somewhere in the city. The city argues that this was the incredulously this was the fault of a lone officer or a very small group of them. They get charged or retired and the matter goes away only to resurface in the next few years. This is a track record that goes back 30 years and everything I have mentioned are things the city of Chicago admits its officers have done. This is not new at all. So I would contend that it is not an anomaly. This is Chicago, Illinois we are talking about here. See here and here.

Americans, Especially Catholics, Approve Of Inquisitorial Torture

Christianity's Bedrock Commitment To Torture: Remaking "The Faithful" In God's Image

"The Catholic Voice In The Torture Debate," John A. Coleman S.J.

"Good Romans" Considered Jesus' Torture Necessary For Imperial Safety

On Balance, Torture Is Massively Counter-Productive And Self-Destructive

– Police abuse is not easy to measure in America. Even the FBI does not keep complete statistics of officer involved killings. One indication of the extent of the problem is indication is the massive settlements that get paid out to victims. its an imperfect one for sure, but I think it takes it difficult to deny that there is a systemic problem. See here and here.

FBI Director James Comey Excoriates Sloppy-To-Non-Existent Data Collection For Killer Cops

–I think that there are very few people outside of police circles that actively celebrate police brutality. With that said, Police brutality cases are rarely clean and clear cut. There is a culture where police protect their own and deflect blame. They will always come up with a counter narrative to what their victims say. Saying that ” I oppose police brutality” is easy. On the other hand, being sufficiently skeptical of police when they are abusive is not easy for a lot of people. You seem to have a trust and belief in police officers because you believe in America. I will agree that most of then are trustworthy and decent people right up to the moment that one of their own is caught in wrongdoing.–In which case you are the enemy and you will be lied to. If you watch that video, you will see several police officer causally permitting Officer Slager to plant evidence on the victim. One of the officers is black. All of them signed off on Officer Slager’s false account of events. this would have gone unchallenged were it not for the video emerging. Conservatives are good at picking up systemic patterns of institutional deception from many other professions. We pick these patterns of deception from social activists, unionized public school teachers, the race lobby, many Federal agencies. We need to have the same ears towards the police. Trust but verify.
Laura writes:
I asked whether you were Chinese because of your comment about detainees being disappeared. You did say that has happened in Chicago, and maybe it has for all I know. But I think it is an extreme anomaly.
The original post suggests that I don’t automatically rush to support everything the police do. All  use of force by the police should be scrutinized and officers who have hurt or killed without sufficient reasons should be tried and punished.
As I said, Joe A. sends me almost daily news items about instances that involve the questionable use of police force around the country. Here’s a recent example. There is a serious problem with the militarization of the police. This problem is another manifestation of the fraying of social bonds in this country at their most basic level. I also believe more police officers are mentally unstable because of the havoc of their family lives. Many of them, such as Slager, have had broken families as children and face divorce in their marriages.
Anti-Globalist Expatriate writes:
How often do you interact with police? Especially urban police?
Urban dwellers interact with police far more than those who live in the suburbs. And as an urban dweller, I can tell you that for at least the last 40 years or so, urban police in general, in many locales across the United States, routinely act and speak with the swaggering demeanor of occupiers, not of public servants.
A lot of this has to do with the aftermath of the black riots of the 1960s and the police astonishment at and ineffectiveness in dealing with the Black Panthers and their ilk (storming the California state capitol in Sacramento with loaded weapons, etc.). Many police departments and their parent municipalities swore that they’d never again be subject to such indignities, and so police recruits are trained from the outset that they must ‘establish control’, ‘dominate the situation’, etc. – even in normal interactions with reasonable, law-biding citizens.
This mentality has made its way into suburban and rural police departments over the years, as they seek to learn from and emulate their big-city colleagues. The constant barrage of nuisance lawsuits against police departments has also played a role; officers are instructed and conditioned to disallow any freedom of action of the citizens with whom they interact in order to reduce the possibility of *anything* taking place which could later lead to a lawsuit. Police officers as a matter of course intimidate citizens into following their instructions under threat of arrest and/or physical violence because they’ve been trained to ‘dominate’ even the most innocuous situations.
Couple this with the paramilitarization of police forces across the country, with armored SWAT teams in armored vehicles and clutching fully-automatic submachine guns (in urban settings, where the chance of collateral damage from missed shots ricochets is high) and equipped with lash-bang grenades, and it’s guaranteed that the hyped-up young men (and, increasingly, women) in control of all that force and firepower are going to look for any excuse they have to use it. And since many police officers covet the opportunity to serve in one of these so-called ‘elite’ units (good for one’s career advancement), ordinary patrol officers are thus encouraged to act aggressively in even routine situations in order to prove that they have ‘the right stuff’ for promotion into these paramilitary squads.
I could go on about how the tactics and behavior of the various Federal paramilitarized ‘law enforcement’ units, along with Federal funding for local police departments to acquire paramilitary weapons and training, contributes to this mentality – but you get the drift.
Laura writes:
You ask how often I interact with the police. Not often, but I can tell you, while I don’t think torture and the disappearing of detainees is common, militarization and the rush to escalate incidents with dramatic shows of police power are visible in suburban areas.
As one example, my son about eight years ago looked out the window and found police all over the place, in our driveway and hiding behind bushes in all the neighboring yards.
They had come because the son of a neighbor had violated a restraining order that resulted from fights with his wife or girlfriend. They came to arrest him and when he said, “You’ll have to come in and get me,” the neighborhood was filled with swat teams. It was truly ridiculous and suggested to me that even in this minor incident they were either afraid and lacking in confidence, thus compensating with excessive actions, or they were just all too ready to show off their fancy training for the sort of events that rarely happen.
A reader writes:
Joe A. commented:
Because cops like that animal in South Carolina – a product of police state New Jersey, by the way – are what the cowboy shows called “man killers.”  They have acquired a “taste for blood” and they are, in a real sense, animal predators that have lost their natural fear of Man.  There is no redeeming them and they will shoot a man, white or black, just the same.  Don’t believe me?  Why do you think I forward all these police brutality stories?  To prove to you cops [can be] Equal Opportunity Killers without regard to race, class, national origin or especially Vietnam Status.
As with Travon and Michael Brown in Ferguson, the facts are substantially more “nuanced” than the way the MSM has been selectively presenting them:
I wonder why so many white people, even conservative white people, still believe the MSM and peddle their “white cops (and white people, by extension) are savage, subhuman, murderous dogs” shtick. It is demoralizing to hear white people automatically believe the craziest nonsense, like Trayvon, Ferguson, and UVA in a rush to judgment that experience tells us is just silly. Gang rape of a white woman, by seven young white men, in the dark, on shards of broken glass, for hours, as part of a traditional hazing ritual, yet no one needs so much as a single stitch, let alone an emergency room visit?  But since they were white and “privileged”, no barbarity was beyond them.
Laura writes:
Joe A. expressed an opinion based on the news reports he had seen. To see a man shot in the back when he’s running away! It’s not fair to say Joe was peddling a “white-people-are-bad” shtick. The story you refer to from Conservative Tree House also speaks of a visceral reaction at the start:
On the first day we saw the North Charleston, South Carolina, shooting video of Walter Scott by Officer Michael Slager we were as shocked as everyone.
I wouldn’t worry, if I were you, about instantaneous judgments based on early reports. I would worry about confirmed prejudice that defies the facts once they are revealed.
"Given FL's "Stand Your Ground Law," Can This Black Woman Kill The White Cop Who Assaulted Her?"

Walter Scott’s Killing Is the Sum of Every Black Nightmare About White Cops

Blacks Arrested For Contraband Twice As Often Though Much Less Likely To Have Contraband

Lists Of Americans Killed By Cops In 2013, 2014, 2015

Compendium Of Pax Posts: What's Wrong With Race Relations - Hatred, Cops And The Law

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