Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Shelter in place is one thing. shelter in pants is quite another.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

This is a big f—–g deal.

I’m going back to the respite thread.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

This fight is for everything.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

The house always wins.

Han shot first.

I’m only here for the duck photos.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Reality always wins in the end.

Deploy the moving finger of emphasisity!

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

It’s been a really long fucking year.

Everybody saw this coming.

You are here: Home / Archives for Civil Rights / Criminal Justice / Shitty Cops

Shitty Cops

I’m Confused, Please Help Me

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Please watch this video:

So help me out here- which cop is the bad apple? Is it the one beating him on the legs? Or the one who blasted him in the face with pepper spray? Or the ones beating his upper torso? Or the ones cracking his hands with a baton?

I’m so confused.

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My God

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The cop who shot Rayshard Brooks at a Wendy’s in Atlanta was charged with felony murder today. If you’ve read about the case, Brooks, who was shot in the back, had gotten a Taser from one of the officers.

The cops knew who he was, they knew he was drunk, and they knew what he had in his hand was essentially a useless piece of plastic. Yet one of them shot him in the back. There was no justification to kill him even if he had a loaded Taser, but this is just an open-and-shut case of murder.

It may be an important detail that the DA in Atlanta is facing a runoff election against an opponent with a 2:1 fundraising advantage.

(via LGM — they just had a fundraiser and I chipped in, you can, too.)

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Trump signed a piece of paper

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Trump signed a piece of paper that didn’t mean shit a while ago. CNN’s account of the Sharpie action notes that by signing an executive order on “police reform,” Trump is taking “his first concrete steps on Tuesday to address growing national outcry over police brutality.”

Yeah, right. It’s a bullshit feint at “reform” because Trump doesn’t give a shit about changing a broken system, but he does very much want to be reelected. To his surprise, the unrest isn’t helping him like it helped Nixon in 1968 — no matter how many times a day Trump tweets “LAW & ORDER” and “SILENT MAJORITY.” That’s because, unlike Nixon, Trump is the incumbent.

He’s also mind-bogglingly stupid. Here’s a quote from the idiotic signing ceremony that shows how unserious/dumb/deluded/inarticulate Trump is on the topic:

If “the really good and great police officers” wanted to get rid of the shitty cops, they’d speak up instead of ignoring or covering up for psychopathic colleagues. Until that starts happening a lot more frequently, it’s not unreasonable for the public to assume all cops are okay with the status quo. More from CNN:

Trump said Americans “demand law and order” and hailed the efforts of law enforcement to quell violence during protests against police brutality earlier this month.

“Without police, there is chaos,” Trump said.

There was a lot of chaos WITH police last week. In Tampa, they repeatedly chased, tear-gassed and fired projectiles at peaceful protesters and needlessly arrested people. In Bethel, Ohio, local cops stood by while violent, gun-toting pro-Trump creeps assaulted peaceful protesters right under their noses. In New Mexico, cops referred to armed right-wing agitators who menaced protesters as “heavily armed friendlies.”

Trump signed a piece of paper today. It didn’t mean shit. Nothing will change at the federal level until Trump and his GOP enablers are out of power. But the real fight will happen at the local level, if it happens at all. And it will take more than paper and a Sharpie to fix this mess. Open thread.

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It’s All So Unneccessary

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Another black man was killed by police in Atlanta yesterday- apparently drunk in his car and passed out in line at the Wendy’s. Cops were called, they talked for a while, a struggle ensued, he was tazed, ran, and they shot him in the back:

A 27-year-old man was shot and killed by police in Atlanta, Georgia, on Friday after resisting arrest, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigations (GBI). The GBI said it was asked by the Atlanta Police Department to investigate the incident.

A press release from the agency said Atlanta police were called to a Wendy’s drive-thru late Friday night after receiving a complaint that the driver of a vehicle in the drive-thru had fallen asleep, forcing customers to drive around him. When police arrived around 10:30 p.m. they performed a sobriety test on the man, later identified as Rayshard Brooks.

According to police, Brooks failed the test and then resisted arrest. He allegedly struggled with officers outside the fast-food restaurant.

“A field sobriety test was performed on the male subject. After failing the test, the officers attempted to place the male subject into custody,” reads the press release. “During the arrest, the male subject resisted and a struggle ensued. The officer deployed a Taser.”

Brooks was allegedly shot after he took an officer’s taser. The officer who fired the fatal shot has not been identified.

Why? Why not just let him run away? You have his fucking name. You have his fucking car and license plate. You were arresting him for being drunk and asleep- it’s not like he was on a murder spree. Just call more cops, follow him, and get him when he sobers up or passes out again. What the fuck is there to be gained from this?

The same with Breonna Taylor. The entire reason the cops broke down her door was because she and her boyfriend were under surveillance because GUYS DOWN THE HALL were suspected of selling drugs. Breonna and her boyfriend sometimes accepted packages for them, AS NEIGHBORS FUCKING DO, so they got pulled into the dragnet. If they had them under surveillance, then they had to know WHEN they went to work and WHEN they would not be there, so they could go search the apartment either when they were not there and apprehend them in the broad daylight on their way to work. There literally was no fucking reason to do a no-knock raid and come in guns blasting other than that the VIOLENCE IS THE FUCKING POINT.

Qualified immunity has got to go, and the police have got to be retrained and priorities have to be set straight.

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Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: The ‘President’ Went to Dallas…

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… Because he had a $10 million private fundraiser scheduled at the home of “the CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, one of the nation’s largest pipeline companies” — and he certainly wasn’t gonna pay for the flight down there himself.

So far so anodyne, according to the Dallas News:

At a discussion in Dallas on race and policing, President Donald Trump recommitted himself Thursday to a policy that police should “dominate the streets,” a stance that has alarmed minority advocates fighting to tamp down the use of force after a police killing in Minneapolis.

The White House took heat for excluding the county’s three top law enforcement officials, who are all black, from an event that at times felt much like a campaign rally, albeit far smaller than usual for Trump…

The president drew cheers time and again from hundreds of supporters at Gateway Church as he forcefully rejected complaints about widespread police brutality and mocked “radical efforts to defund, dismantle and disband the police.”

“You always have a bad apple. No matter where you go you have bad apples, and there are not too many of them … in the police department,” he said. “What happens late at night when you make that call to 911 and there’s nobody there? What do you? What are you doing, whether you’re white or black or anybody else? … There is no opportunity without safety.”…

Hundreds of guests attended the event at Gateway Church’s campus in North Dallas, in one of the city’s more affluent areas.

Gateway is a conservative evangelical megachurch, one of the nation’s largest, with half a dozen campuses in the area and a mostly white congregation. A senior White House official rejected the suggestion that it was a strange choice for a conversation on “disparities” and “underserved communities.”

“Everyone cares about these communities. And this is about bringing people together from all walks,” the official said.

Outside the church, police barricades separated several hundred Black Lives Matter supporters from a few dozen Trump supporters. Shouts and vitriolic insults crossed the divide in both directions…

The (more than usually) scary part was the tangle of words emerging from the Squatter-in-Chief:

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ACAB

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With the proviso that it’s not clear that it was really written by a cop, this Medium post, Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop, is worth a read. It sounds pretty believable to me:

To understand why all cops are bastards, you need to understand one of the things almost every training officer told me when it came to using force:

“I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6.”

Meaning, “I’ll take my chances in court rather than risk getting hurt”. We’re able to think that way because police unions are extremely overpowered and because of the generous concept of Qualified Immunity, a legal theory which says a cop generally can’t be held personally liable for mistakes they make doing their job in an official capacity.

When you look at the actions of the officers who killed George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, David McAtee, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, or Freddie Gray, remember that they, like me, were trained to recite “I’d rather be judged by 12” as a mantra. Even if Mistakes Were Made™, the city (meaning the taxpayers, meaning you) pays the settlement, not the officer.

Once police training has – through repetition, indoctrination, and violent spectacle – promised officers that everyone in the world is out to kill them, the next lesson is that your partners are the only people protecting you. Occasionally, this is even true: I’ve had encounters turn on me rapidly to the point I legitimately thought I was going to die, only to have other officers come and turn the tables.

The whole thing is worth reading. ACAB is another catchphrase that sounds overly radical but you might change your mind about that after you read this.

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‘Things We Cannot Have’ Open Thread: Bill ‘Ever Lower’ Barr Hears A Bus Rumbling Up

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“History is written by the winners.” There’s something of a GOP tradition in sacrificing an Attorney General when the rabble is dangerously dissatisfied with an overconfident regime. Barr assumed there was no bus with a clearance high enough to throw him under, but now he seems to be reconsidering.

As far as I’m concerned, the defenestration cannot happen too soon, or to a more deserving defender of the Kakistocracy.

These are not the responses of a lawyer secure in his arguments:

Former prosecutor steps up…

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