Riot police holding their position during a protest in Baltimore, Maryland against the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody, on April 25, 2015 (AFP Photo/Andrew Caballero-Reynolds).
Some Baltimore bigots have been fired, which is a good thing, but I want to address a different part:
Baltimore police have fired some officers in the wake of a scathing review by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Kevin Davis, the city’s police commissioner, said Wednesday that the department has already fired officers who committed the most egregious violations outlined in the federal report, the Associated Press reported.
The report found that Baltimore police officers routinely target and discriminate against black people, use excessive force and are not adequately disciplined for misconduct.
The Justice Department is seeking a court order to force the police department to commit to improving its procedures to avoid a lawsuit.
There, that last sentence. Why does the justice department need a court order and the threat of a lawsuit to get one cop shop to do the right thing? If this does not highlight how utterly rotten the police system is, I don’t know what will get through to people, to make them wake the fuck up. Considering the current state of police – citizen relationship right now, I’d think they would be eager to clean house without being threatened, if for no other reason, for appearance’s sake. Naturally, there was the all too expected mealy-mouthed cop response:
Davis said the department was committed to making meaningful changes, but he said those could take some time.
Right. Go fuck yourself, Davis, and after that, clean house.
Via Raw Story.
This’ll just depress you all over again:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-fired-police-officers-often-end-up-back-on-the-job/
Lot of the time, cops get fired but it’s on the understanding they’ll move down the street and go terrorize a different neighborhood, or become mall ninjas.
Yep, depressed. This is just like Catholics playing Where’s Pedo Priest?
Caine@#2:
This is just like Catholics playing Where’s Pedo Priest?
Exactly like it.
As I’ve been saying, there needs to be individual and personal accountability for cops when they fuck up. This is the only way. Everyone should be equal before the law, but right now cops are not equal before the law. They’re “more equal“.
I’ve heard ideas of having some review board, but I am dubious whether that can be set up in the current culture.
My personally preferred idea is to 1- drastically curtail or outright remove all special immunities and powers enjoyed by the police (we need to make everyone equal before the law), and 2- allow victims to initiate criminal prosecutions and give priority to victims to initiate criminal prosecutions and to nominate the criminal prosecutor. It seems crazy, but the more I think about it, the more I become convinced it’s actually quite workable, and it seems like the only plausible solution that can work. There will still be government police, but we will treat them as what they are: Bounty hunters. Hired goons. A necessary evil, but one which needs greater oversight, a very tight restriction on their special powers (if any), and equal or greater accountability.
EnlightenmentLiberal , I like those ideas. They have the added bonus of actually being not that hard to implement, which means there’s not a chance in hell of it happening. :-(
To Crimson Clupeidae
The problem is too many people, most people, have wrongly bought the idea hook, line, and sinker, that a police state is necessary to maintain our security. It’s often known as “the thin blue line”. It’s flagrant bullshit. Unfortunately, it plays well into the Christian Republican right’s authoritarian leanings, and it plays well into the well-meaning liberal Democratic left’s leanings to use government power to make the world better, and the seeming universal naivety about the potential for abuse of that power.
Unfortunately, I have to adopt rhetoric which, at first glance, might seem like libertarian or anarchist. I am not. I am a card carrying Marxist / social democrat. I just happen to believe that we can use taxes and public works to improve our lot, and simultaneously believe that we can greatly restrict the police powers of the government. For example, one doesn’t need “stop and frisk” in order to have taxes and Obamacare. They’re orthogonal concepts. So, I’m currently quite rabidly against the current police state, but I’m also equally rabidly in favor of progressive taxation (income, property, and inheritance taxes) in order to fund public works for the express purpose of wealth redistribution in order to prevent gross wealth inequalities because gross wealth inequalities are gross power inequalities, and because a stable free society cannot survive for long when there are gross power inequalities in its citizenry.