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US police brutality stories raise a lot of important structural questions about how policing works here. How can a law-enforcement system repeatedly produce so many spectacularly lethal outcomes? What kind of idiotic operation are cops running, anyway?
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I mean, how do cops with long histories of violent misconduct stay on the force? How do cities end up shelling out millions to bail out violent and crooked cops, and then those cops get to keep their jobs and reoffend until their body-count crosses some threshold?
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What kind of police force produces officers who literally drive down the street indiscriminately gassing unarmed people with their hands in the air?
https://www.reddit.com/r/DemocraticSocialism/comments/gssq9s/casually_pepper_spraying_out_the_window_as_you/
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https://www.reddit.com/r/DemocraticSocialism/comments/gssq9s/casually_pepper_spraying_out_the_window_as_you/
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Criminal defense attorney @greg_doucette lays out fifteen concrete structural deficits in US policing that explain much (but not all) of the violence, corruption and impunity that characterize American policy violence and discrimination.
https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1266053291684827138
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https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1266053291684827138
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Doucette starts with "qualified immunity" - a judge-created doctrine that effectively excuses almost any police misconduct, no matter how blatant it is. Under QI, cops who commit crimes can't be sued if the crime wasn't "clearly established" at the time.
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This superficially reasonable idea is, in fact, a license to commit any crime. Like, California cops who stole $100K in gold coins were not punished because no statute said "Don't steal gold coins" (the statutes merely said "Do not steal").
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As Doucette says, "If a police officer chokes someone to death for sport, you'd say 'killing for sport is illegal!' Then a judge'd say 'just killing them with his shin, not with his knee.'"
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And the double-whammy of QI is that it keeps suits from being brought, which keeps evidence from being entered into the record, which keeps "clear definitions" from being generated, which means that cops can repeatedly engage in the same midconduct without sanction.
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Doucette moves on to other structural issues in US policing, like the fact that cops don't need to carry malpractice insurance, so, on the one hand, there's no difference between the cost of employing a repeat offender vs a cop with a squeaky-clean record.
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And on the other hand, taxpayers have to shell out millions to make amends for crimes committed by cops.
Other issues: cops are undereducated, hired young, don't need to live in the neighborhoods they police.
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Other issues: cops are undereducated, hired young, don't need to live in the neighborhoods they police.
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And police departments aren't required to publish "Brady lists" of cops whom prosecutors have documented as serial liars who cannot be called upon to testify.
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Police unions cut "sweetheart deals" with cities that worsen these deficiencies by tying the city's hands when cops commit crimes.
More: De-escalation is not a mandatory part of police training (quite the contrary, cops are trained and equipped for "domestic warfare").
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More: De-escalation is not a mandatory part of police training (quite the contrary, cops are trained and equipped for "domestic warfare").
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Cops are allowed to use traffic stops as a pretense for fishing expeditions and this power is primarily targeted against people of color.
The arresting cop is also the investigating the crime - so the arresting officer is incentivized to plant evidence, lie, etc, to "win."
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The arresting cop is also the investigating the crime - so the arresting officer is incentivized to plant evidence, lie, etc, to "win."
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Federal prosecutors are extremely reluctant to prosecute cops, even repeat offenders who commit murder. @amyklobuchar did not prosecute #GeorgeFloyd's murderer when he committed other assaults on the people he was sworn to protect.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/28/george-floyd-killing-officers-derek-chauvin-tou-thao-investigated
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/28/george-floyd-killing-officers-derek-chauvin-tou-thao-investigated
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There is no reliable, comprehensive database of police violence and killing. You can't respond to problems if you're not measuring them.
Centuries of court decisions have riddled the 4th, 5th and 8th Amendments with loopholes, leaving the Bill of Rights in tatters.
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Centuries of court decisions have riddled the 4th, 5th and 8th Amendments with loopholes, leaving the Bill of Rights in tatters.
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Doucette: "For example, at the federal level the Supreme Court has ruled it's totally 100% fine for the police to violate your Fourth Amendment rights as long as they do so 'in good faith.'"
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Penalties for crimes committed while wearing a badge are weaker than the penalties for the same crimes when committed by "civilians" (a term I despise, cops should not be a military force). They should be more harsh.
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I said at the start of this thread that Doucette's list of structural deficiencies in US policing is incomplete, and I'm sure he'd agree with me. One important point to raise in the context of the racist elements of US police malpractice is the origin of US policing.
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American policing is rooted in "Slave Patrols" - literally vigilante forces whose job was to return Africans who'd escaped enslavement to the monsters who'd enslaved them.
https://theconversation.com/the-racist-roots-of-american-policing-from-slave-patrols-to-traffic-stops-112816
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https://theconversation.com/the-racist-roots-of-american-policing-from-slave-patrols-to-traffic-stops-112816
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It's conceivable that an institution could overcome roots as blighted as this, but that is a huge, deliberate undertaking. It's not something that happens automatically if you ignore it long enough.
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So to Doucette's excellent list of reforms, I'd add one more: a frank, well-funded, wide-ranging truth and reconciliation process to explicitly grapple with America's white supremacist history and its connection to law enforcement.
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I'm pretty confident that Doucette would agree with this one. After all, he spearheaded the campaign that forced the UNC to abandon its plans to hand millions of dollars to a white nationalist group to build a Klan museum.
http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2020/02/13/silent-sam-settlement-scrapped-but-questions-remain/
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http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2020/02/13/silent-sam-settlement-scrapped-but-questions-remain/
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