Hell, this year’s must read.
I can not figure out what to excerpt, it is all so good. Go read it.
This post is in: Post-racial America, Shitty Cops
Hell, this year’s must read.
I can not figure out what to excerpt, it is all so good. Go read it.
Comments are closed.
srv
Tornado on the ground, Norman OK.
Baud
Anne Laurie never has that problem. ;-)
Howard Beale IV
Balko is good as long as he stays focused on police abuse. But remember that he’s also part of the Reasonoid clique, so a healthy dose of side-eye is very important.
Corner Stone
I hate that stupid Hipster Nature’s Path organic cereal commercial.
Burn! Burn in a fire!
Howard Beale IV
BREAKING: Jim Wright, Former House speaker, dead at 92.
Corner Stone
HAHAHAHAHA!!
Good Sweet Christ, White People.
Brachiator
So, what the fvck is wrong with the cops? In Antonio Morgan you have a law abiding citizen. A law abiding citizen that the cops love to fvck with.
You don’t have the excuse of a person being mistaken for a criminal in a high crime area.
You don’t have someone running from the cops.
You don’t have someone in an ambiguous situation.
What the fvck is wrong with the cops?
And yes, the conservative fools who think that they have Hillary’s and other Democrats’ numbers don’t seem to be able to recognize or deal with the real world.
Baud
Good read. Thanks, Cole.
Lizzy L
Thanks. Word has been passed.
Roger Moore
@Howard Beale IV:
In this case, he’s also being very good about pointing out that the police abuse is the result of a racist system. He goes into some detail about how and why a city government can continue to perpetuate racism even when minorities are in control of the city government. It’s a really excellent read.
Exurban Mom
Agreed, sir, excellent article. Thank you for sharing with us.
Infamous Heel-Filcher
Just got done with that piece. Reasonoids be warned: there’s a full-throated articulation of the structural racism thesis (and concomitant refutation of the “but half the cops who arrested Freddy Gray were black” derailing technique) about halfway through.
Good on Balko.
Baud
@Howard Beale IV:
The Rand Paul shout out gave that away. But as long as he’s a useful tool…
schrodinger's cat
Most columnists for our major newspapers are so clueless and smug. For every Krugman we have ten Cohens and Brookses.
Gex
It’s a great article, but I will ask the same question I asked about a Conor Friesdorf article. While Randroids can get their analysis of these issues of abusive policing right, what do they expect to do to fix anything? The structural issues that perpetuate these situations are very tightly coupled with the economic policies they prefer. Theft of the value of labor by the ownership class was the underlying factor in slavery and it is the underlying factor in the continued racial divide, and indeed of the profiting off of black people via fines or for-profit prisons and sub-minimum wage prison labor. It’s not going to get better as white workers are continually facing worse futures than their parents faced. Lack of opportunity is the big theme. There’s nothing right wing policy has to offer to fix that.
Mike in NC
Richard Cohen being a clueless hack, per usual.
pretzalcoatl
@Howard Beale IV: but he’s basically the best reporter on What’s Up With The Police in the country, even if you can safely ignore anything else he says (and you should)
geg6
Good on Mr. Balko. Doesn’t change that he’s mostly a Reasonoid hack, but he’s always good on crime and punishment. And his veering into explaining structural racism is a very welcome development. Wonder how his compadres feel about this column. I’ll bet they aren’t enamored.
shell
Why commit journalism when you can just fall back onto cultural cliches?
They forgot to add about why these protestors can’t be more like MLK.
Hal
I live in a poorer town that charges 35 bucks for a parking ticket the first three days, then it doubles to 70, then after 15 days you’re up to 140. Imagine getting a ticket on Friday, the day after payday when all your money has been spent on rent and what you have left is for gas, food, to get you to the next check two weeks away. You just resign yourself to pay the 140, if you can afford to, and if not you just hope you don’t get pulled over or get any more tickets.
There’s also alternate side of the road parking everyday, even though I see a street cleaner maybe once every two months. Given the massive potholes in the streets and the constant run down quality of the place, I have no idea where all that money is going.
SiubhanDuinne
Excellent article. I think I need to read Rise of the Warrier Cop.
Mike Furlan
Stop pretending that facts have anything to do with the way people will vote.
Had lunch today with a co-worker who thinks that the 2008-2009 crash was cause by “Clinton making the banks give home loans to deadbeats.”
Related:
As of 2008, nearly half of Russians view Stalin positively, and many support restoration of his monuments either dismantled by leaders or destroyed by rioting Russians during the 1991 dissolution of the USSR.[32][33]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Stalinism
Ridnik Chrome
Saw that stupid Cohen column in today’s Daily News (the only NYC paper that actually carries the results of Cubs games the next day, which is the only reason I still look at it). Excellent takedown…
Betty Cracker
Excellent column; I will be sharing it widely.
@Gex: Great point. And he’s wrong that Rand Paul doesn’t benefit politically; Baby Doc is positioning himself as the GOP candidate who can capture the yoot vote.
Corner Stone
@Hal:
Red light cameras and meter maids!
boatboy_srq
@Corner Stone: That, followed by:
As if “more racial strife” were a consequence of “white people being fed up”. Cohen and Green really are Pieces of Work.
I daresay, though, that people being “fed up” include a decent number that are beginning to realize that what happened to Gray, and what happened to Antonio Morgan, is becoming less a racist thing and increasingly a LEOs-v-citizenry thing – where the cops can do what they did to Gray and Morgan to anyone, and get away with it because they’re cops.
Balko is spot-on about the oversimplification the wingnuts employ against Dems, too:
WereBear
I’ll excerpt my favorite part:
This isn’t Nixonland. Thank every noodley appendage of the blessed FSM.
Phylllis
@Brachiator: Jeff Gunn’s book about Bonnie and Clyde, Go Down Together talks about this as well. Clyde tried to work, to keep on the right side of the law. He’d get a job, Dallas cops would show up constantly harassing him, he’d get let go. Finally, he couldn’t get a job anywhere in the area.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
In that part of Missouri, the problem is with the job, not with the individuals. The local tax structure is set up in a way that prevents poor cities from being able to raise enough tax revenue to support a municipal government, and the only way they can make up the difference is through fees and fines. The local police department has effectively become a revenue department rather than a public safety department.
Balko says that the only way of reforming the situation is to dissolve the small cities, but that this would be a bad thing because it would be a setback to blacks controlling their local politics. It seems to me that this is missing the point. Those local governments aren’t really in charge because they lack sufficient policy freedom to benefit their citizens.
Elie
@boatboy_srq:
This:
I think a whole lot of people of all types are knowing not only the violence of the cops, but the other corruption around tickets and other revenue generating scams.
Corner Stone
@boatboy_srq:
I would strongly disagree. IMO, it’s many times more likely that the white people are fed up with blacks not taking shit as normal cost of going about life while black.
I may be skewed due to wingnut heaven all around me, but the repeated FB posting of “hands up, don’t loot” tell me all I need to know about what white people are fed up with.
the Conster
Good for Radley – police state criticism is his best and highest purpose. Finding Morgan, though, concretizes everything he rails against. I just pray (and I don’t pray) that he didn’t make up Morgan’s story or any part of it.
Hal
Do Cohen or Green mention Willie Horton in their Dukakis/Clinton comparison? The Willie Horton ad was as blatantly racist as Helms white hands and was designed to make Dukakis look like a total wimp. I thought that was the reason he ultimately lost, not because he was championing reform.
Lavocat
@Brachiator: In a word: sociopathy.
Germy Shoemangler
@Gex:
Reduce taxes on the wealthy. Reduce regulations on corporations. Reduce environmental regulations. Cut “entitlements” and there you have it. That’s their solution to everything.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@Gex: Great point, Gex. Damned good question.
Davis X. Machina
Betty Cracker:
Dope. Drones. Domestic surveillance. The rest is just technique. White House here we come!
WereBear
@Phylllis: Oh, yes, that was a fantastic book. I love his work. I just read his biography of Manson. Explains so much, he does.
Hal
@Gex:
I have a white conservatives friend who once posted on Facebook how terrible it was the chevron had to pay all those billions in taxes and has called income tax an assault on liberty. The conservative message that making wealthy people wealthier appeals to at least some of their base.
All these republicans that support privatization, less regulation, flat tax or fair tax; none of them seem to pay for it at the polls.
Woodrow/Asim
@geg6:
I know at least one Libertarian who’s also into Social Justice (I suspect a couple more in my online circles), and based upon my interactions with them will 100% back and celebrate Randy’s post.
I don’t fight them on the Libertarian part much, but I think they sincerely try to fuse those impulses.
Howard Beale IV
@Baud:
That’s why I raised the flag. Just like Fat Tony can sometimes be useful, remember that at his core I don’t even want to know what he wears under his robe to satisfy his Opus Dei sacraments.
Rob
Great article, thanks.
Mandalay
There is also a great column today in the NYT about how America has had a fucking bellyful of police unions.
Those vile shitbags reaped what they sowed when they (unintentionally) got Marilyn Mosby elected:
Too bad, so sad.
jl
@boatboy_srq:
” I daresay, though, that people being “fed up” include a decent number that are beginning to realize that what happened to Gray… is becoming less a racist thing and increasingly a LEOs-v-citizenry thing ”
No time to find it now, but I saw a national poll that said substantial majority of whites (edit: IIRC, slightly over 60 percent) thought the charges against the police involved in the Gray case were justified. The majorities among Democrats and Independents were almost identical. So that leaves white Republicans only group with majority against charges.
So, what you suggest may well have already happened, at least in the most egregious cases.
Also, not to be cold blooded about it (edit: since any wanton violence is bad), but all the race related rioting over last couple of years is nothing compared to what happened in 1960s. I wasn’t old enough to remember all of what happened in 1960s, but that is what I gather from reading about riots before the MLK riots. And I don’t think what has happened recently is much compared to the Rodney King riots either. So, this whole line is sad and vicious wishful thinking on the part of bigots like Cohen and the GOPers.
Pogonip
@Corner Stone: Whites are going to get even angrier as the heavy hand of the oligarchy comes down harder and harder on us too. The question is, will most of us finally get angry at the correct people? Will we finally stop letting politicians divert our anger onto our natural allies?
Pogonip
@geg6: Howdy! Didn’t you have a couple of dogs? If so, how are they doing?
Mike J
@shell:
“A riot is the language of the unheard.”
Howard Beale IV
Another for-profit school faces the music.
Now if we can put the shiv to the for-profit prison system (which should have never been allowed to happen in the first place….)
kc
@Howard Beale IV:
Yeah, he blocked me on Twitter for making fun of some libertardian nonsense he tweeted.
Props to him for covering police brutality long before it was fashionable to care, though.
cckids
@Corner Stone: Soooo agree. “We did good, he’s eating organic!”
No, he’s eating like a goddamn pig. You fail as parents, that he’d do that right in front of you.
Soft bigotry of low expectations.
Sorry for the rant, I’ve been known to yell when that ad comes on, and my family is tired of my opinion on it.
Roger Moore
@jl:
And bear in mind that the Rodney King riots were such a good thing for the Republican Party that the country went out and elected Bill Clinton later that year.
Howard Beale IV
@Roger Moore:
As long as he stays in this domain and doesn’t start to drag the libertarian belief system into this I’ll back him. If he starts to wander off his central thesis OTOH….
boatboy_srq
@jl: Not cold-blooded at all. Rodney King was no picnic and way worse than what Ferguson and Baltimore have seen. But of course to wingnuts, there’s nothing as bad as What’s Wrong With This Country Right Now™. FFS folks, these are critters that soil themselves when they see a US Marshal in a standard-issue sedan and demand Protection (from someone else, naturally) when the DoD schedules a training exercise, yet somehow consider themselves Patriots™: if they’d been in the Colonies in the 1770s, they’d have either run for cover or stood with the Loyalists.
Botsplainer
@Hal:
Classic Calvinism/Randism, the ideology that is their idiot son that inherited everything wrong with both systems, yet is the glue that binds the social conservatives to the fiscal conservatives.
You’re rich because you’re worthy in the eyes of God/The Universe and thus blessed. You’re poor because you’re unworthy in the eyes of God/the Universe, and don’t work hard enough, so you’re cursed.
Conservatism, QED. No programs or policies necessary save for further slams against the poors, because all they need is more motivation through pain to work harder.
Corner Stone
@cckids:
The fact that it’s the mom being all cool with his pigdom and drinking out of the carton just makes me like, whuh?
“Yeah, ya did.”
“I must break you.”
/Drago
Another Holocene Human
@Corner Stone: Ugh, glad I haven’t seen it yet because I go out of my way to buy it (only oatmeal I can stand that’s not Irish and served with Heinz and eggs).
Though the worst cereal commercial of all time had to be that 1990s strip tease ad. Nobody wants to see their breakfast doing a burlesque.
jl
@boatboy_srq: insane people can say strange things, can’t they?
Edit: and the grifters that suck their blood can say strange things too.
Another Holocene Human
@boatboy_srq: They are Tories.
mdblanche
@Betty Cracker:
Um, yeah. That’s only going to work if he’s running for Prime Minister of the land of Make-Believe.
Another Holocene Human
@Pogonip: You know the answer. When US started exploiting the Plains for agriculture and filled then with white families through the Homestead Act, rivalling the Ukrainian corn growing region and leading directly to the Panic of 1872 when an international bumper year caused wheat prices to collapse, did Ukrainian peasants and newly American ‘clay of the West’ point the finger at themselves?
Hell no, it was greedy Eastern bankers and J000000000000s.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
The conservative party was routed in a Canadian election in tar sands producing Alberta by the NDP. Interesting times.
Another Holocene Human
@Davis X. Machina: He appeals to dopes, so he’s good there.
If I were a one issue pro dope voter he would have been off my list months ago. Pro dope and pro Rand = not informed OR wants to vote conservaterian.
sharl
That IS a good post. I hope WaPo doesn’t make life difficult for Balko for publicly calling out their Teflon-coated op-ed idiot boy.
A couple other items on this same general topic came to my attention today.
Yep, it looks real bad.
And getting more to the actual root – well, one of the roots at least – of this problem came this item from a cop on Reddit (via Vox):
Germy Shoemangler
@Another Holocene Human: I keep seeing the almond milk commercial. Little almond guy (almond for a head, leafy body) basically bullies people into trying his product.
It’s right there at their breakfast table. Why does he need to berate them?
And during the news, all the pharm commercials. One really subtle art director designed a bi-polar medicine commercial so that the woman is constantly in striped light, even in full sun. I bet he’s waiting for an award for that one.
Corner Stone
@Germy Shoemangler:
Speaking of bullying, the one I find creepy like that is the guy for Match.com.
The one where he says to the young lady something like, “Ok, then we’re going to try it. We’re going to sign up right now and try it.”
No, asshole. I’m not going to sign up right now. GFY.
mdblanche
Wait. When did we leave Nixonland?
Mandalay
@Gex:
Well, here are a couple of specific things that Paul has actually done:
Now you can argue that Paul doesn’t really give a shit about African Americans, and that it is merely cynical opportunism by Paul (and I’m in that camp myself a bit). But WTF have Democrats in the Senate ever done about these problems before Booker and Paul turned up? They could have tried addressing these issues long before Paul ever became a Senator, but they didn’t. Talk is cheap.
Another Holocene Human
@sharl: no shit. That’s how Gates gate started, some sweet little old lady who thought a Harvard professor struggling with the front door of his over hundred year old wooden house in the Cambridge summer was a burgler.
jo6pac
Hillabilly isn’t the game I want to play.
Germy Shoemangler
@Corner Stone: When I see actors in commercials I can’t help but think of all the effort the casting director & ad agency put in. It’s a science to them.
Like the unshaven guy in the trivago commercials. He obviously represents all savvy business travelers everywhere.
Another Holocene Human
@Germy Shoemangler: The ads for mental health meds piss me off even more than the others. Irresponsible to eleven.
What’s next, tv ads for the chemo you have to be gene tested for? Clinicians must love this shit.
Howard Beale IV
@Mandalay:
This also applies to a metric shit-ton of Caucasians as well, dude-who make up the bulk of the citizenry of the recidivist South. Which, by their own math, the remaining 12 of the 13 are locked out. Love that signalling, there.
Germy Shoemangler
@Another Holocene Human: I agree. The cartoon lady with the cloud of depression following her everywhere.
Abilify? Really?
Another Holocene Human
@Mandalay: First year Obama in office, moved to reduce mandatory sentences for crack cocaine. And he has been pardoning people doing life for pot. Started slow because a Bush plant in a non patronage job was holding up all the pardons so they never reached the president. Finally the press published his name and photo…
sharl
@Hal: That old Willie Horton business just came up today:
Howard Beale IV
@Germy Shoemangler: Using aripiprazole as an adjunct for MDD is a dice-roll that any self-respecting shrink would think twice about, given its insane amount of interference with CYP2D6 which aripiprazole uses as substrate, raising its blood plasma rate by 2-3x.
Now that aripiprazole generics are hitting the market, I suspect we’ll see a flood of ADR’s soon.
BillinGlendaleCA
Hill’s for body cams? Shit, Joe Scar’s for body cams. It’s not exactly a liberal position. Great read.
Rob
@Baud: I also agree, thanks for posting it, John.
Cacti
@Mandalay:
Thanks for the permission.
I’d say his lack of giving a shit was broadcast loud and clear when he went on the Laura Ingraham show to blame Baltimore on a lack of morals and bad parenting, while giving a shout out to the boys in blue.
sharl
OT, I hope Sooner and his neighbors are safely home, and have battened down the hatches.
Germy Shoemangler
@Howard Beale IV: Scary stuff. The “uncontrollable muscle movement which may become permanent” was enough to scare me away.
Also notice that all the commercials for testosterone (underarm application, but don’t let your wife touch it!) are being gradually replaced with commercials for class-action lawsuits for the side-effects of testosterone.
There’s an old doctor (I sometimes see his ads here) who stays young by injecting himself with the stuff daily.
Mandalay
@Howard Beale IV:
So what? If you have served your time you should be able to vote. What’s wrong with that?
Betty Cracker
@Germy Shoemangler: The Trivago guy is hot!
Corner Stone
@Betty Cracker:
What!?
That guy has me completely fucking puzzled. Who thought this low key bum was going to sell me on the travel website?
I look at that guy and I’m like, shouldn’t you be third shift manager of the Peach Pit?
Germy Shoemangler
@Betty Cracker: They must have taken forever to cast him. Just rumpled and unshaven enough, without looking seedy. A seasoned traveler. My wife likes him, too.
I like the young lady in the dish commercial. “With dish, you get more!”
I get crushes on ladies in commercials.
Mandalay
@Cacti:
No argument from me. But he still created two bills to help those who have been in prison. That’s two more than Senators Biden, Clinton, Reid, Boxer, Schumer etc., who might have said all the right things, but didn’t actually do anything to back up their brave words.
So Paul maybe doesn’t give a shit but still creates two bills, while most Dems claim they care and actually do nothing. Actions speak louder than words.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@boatboy_srq:
Someone probably already pointed this out, but Bill Clinton toured South Central LA after the riots and promised community redevelopment if he was elected president. Which he was.
STFU, Richard Cohen.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mandalay:
And the totality of a career means more than a couple of isolated actions.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
And was mocked for “midnight basketball” for his pains.
Howard Beale IV
@Mandalay: You can thank the 14th Amendment for allowing the states to engage in felony disenfranchisement.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Omnes Omnibus:
He may have been mocked, but he was able to get it through. The area around USC is 200 percent improved over where it was 25 years ago. They have two actual grocery stores in the area now, as opposed to the zero that were there when I was in school, and it happened thanks to post-riots community redevelopment.
Peale
@Betty Cracker: it’s not 2008 any more. rand Paul’s toot vote is now in its 40s.
Mandalay
There was a bizarre cop shooting in Georgia today. Tragically for the brave officer, it seems that the victim will actually live, and be able to give her side of the story:
catclub
@Hal:
There was some article on the Minnesota Miracle, and a key part of it was state taxes that equalized town incomes, so that poorer towns still had resources. I am not sure what Vermont did about this for their (nearly infinite) number of school districts, but I think it is similar.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Mandalay:
Call me cynical, but that sounds like someone trying to get rid of a pesky ex-girlfriend in a plausible way.
Zinsky
Great article – thanks for the link! I love articles that debunk commonly held mistaken beliefs. I have thought about starting a blog called Everything You Know Is Wrong, that would be dedicated to this meme.
Zinsky
@Mnemosyne (tablet): I think the “police training exercise” might have been in extramarital intercourse. Just sayin’
dubo
Will the Post just fire Richard Cohen’s racist ass already, jeez louise, what will it take
Mandalay
@Zinsky:
It’s already been done: http://youarenotsosmart.com/podcast/
You can also buy the book, and even the T-shirt.
But it looks like everythingyouknowiswrong.com is available if you want to give him some competition.
Bobby Thomson
Christ, eventheliberal Richard Cohen is a racist idiot.
And that piece made me think of the poor dad in Minneapolis who got tased in front of his kid he was picking up from day care because some piece of shit didn’t like the way he didn’t kiss his ass. It just makes my blood boil.
qwerty42
There were two parts to the article:
– attacking the Cohen nonsense (which was precise and fun)
– description of structural racism (which was precise and depressing)
I appreciate Balko’s focus on these, most especially — for the long term — the latter. I am sure I would have any number of disagreements with Mr Balko on other things (just as I am quite sure I’d have any number of disagreements with Daniel Larison on things other than foreign policy). But it is good to have these issues articulated so well.
maurinsky
The Trivago guy puzzles me. I just wonder what committee was responsible for hiring someone so bland but in a specific kind of way.
Paul in KY
Mr. Morgan has so much more patience & forbearance than I.
I sure hope this harassment has stopped.
Paul in KY
@sharl: They pretend to be ‘distancing’ themselves, but really they celebrate that odious ad.
Mike Furlan
@qwerty42:
For you Larison fans. Here is what he is promoting.
“Last September, Hatewatch revealed that LOS leadership, after years of increasingly violent rhetoric, had taken steps to make its vision for a new southern uprising a reality by forming its own paramilitary organization called the “Indomitables.” LOS president Michael Hill also recently espoused an anti-Semitism worldview in his online writings, posting articles written by disgraced, anti-Semitic professor Kevin MacDonald, claiming the South’s biggest problem is the “Jewry” problem.”
http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2015/04/22/stars-behind-bars-league-of-the-south-joins-republic-of-florida-militia-for-fsu-protest/