Asheville police video shows white officer beating, choking black jaywalking suspect
What. The. Fuck.
“Jaywalking suspect”?
Jaywalking?!?!?
Put the word “Jaywalking” with “suspect” and it makes absolutely no sense at all.
[washingtonpost]
And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest
Father raper of them all, was coming over to me and he was mean ‘n’ ugly
‘n’ nasty ‘n’ horrible and all kind of things and he sat down next to me
And said, “Kid, whad’ya get?” I said, “I didn’t get nothing, I had to pay
$50 and pick up the garbage. ” He said, “What were you arrested for, kid? “
And I said, “Littering.” And they all moved away from me on the bench
There, and the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean nasty things, till I
Said, “And creating a nuisance.”
Either you’re jaywalking or not. There’s no ‘suspect’ about it. For chrissakes, they aren’t even trying to come up with excuses anymore. Filthy fucking pigs.
Caine@#1:
Either you’re jaywalking or not. There’s no ‘suspect’ about it. For chrissakes, they aren’t even trying to come up with excuses anymore. Filthy fucking pigs.
I mean, are police even concerned with JAYWALKING?! Shouldn’t they be worried more about people flicking boogers or tearing the warning labels off mattresses or serious crimes like that!?
In Asheville they probably shoot you for littering. If you’re black. Hell, they probably call in the SWAT team if they think you’ve torn that warning label off a mattress.
The alleged perp remains a “suspect” until he has been duly convicted in a court of law for the crime of jaywalking and sentenced to 40 years
picking cottonon the road gang. (Yes, I know A’ville is in country too mountainous for cotton growing.)Why is there no fucking CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT to jaywalk?! Why are the 2nd amendment worshippers silent on this issue?
How did jaywalking even become illegal in a country where cannibalistic internet-dwelling asswipes can openly carry loaded firearms, someone can’t CROSS THE STREET without being hassled by cops?!
I assume the victim has now been successfully removed from the voting roll, so they can’t protest legally against the police state ever again. That’s apart from the police getting their racist rocks off.
Marcus@4
“The Invention of Jaywalking” (https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/04/invention-jaywalking/1837/). And related, “The crisis of pedestrianism” (http://www.slate.com/articles/life/walking/2012/04/why_don_t_americans_walk_more_the_crisis_of_pedestrianism_.html)
I remember reading a bit about the cultural shift away from the primacy of the motor car in the Netherlands, when people started campaigning (their slogan inspired by the title of a column by a senior journalist whose kid had been killed by a driver) using the slogan “Stop the Child Murder” (“Stop de kindermoord”). I derive some hope from its success. Though that’s been almost 50 years and few other places seem to have followed suit (to the same extent).
I wonder how much push-back there would be at this point, not from car companies but from cops that don’t want to give up that means of exerting their power. (I have no doubt there would be push-back from that lot and their enablers; I’m just curious how much of it there would be).
btbb:
Look at this story
and you will understand why we will never follow the lead of The Netherlands. Our host even exemplifies this quite a bit: a chosen rural lifestyle, which can never be accomplished on foot or even by bicycle.
http://www.urbanophile.com/2018/03/16/sprawl-in-its-purest-form-cleveland-edition/
Cleveland is basically stuck. It trails only Detroit. Yet, the footprint of development is THREE TIMES that of 1950, which was the population peak. These people are not going to walk anywhere.
Low density sprawl can only be possible via autosexuality
bttb@#6:
“The Invention of Jaywalking” (https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/04/invention-jaywalking/1837/).
Thank you for that fascinating article!
bmiller:
Oh, I don’t expect that there is going to be a (voluntary) shift anytime soon in US/CAN. It was more musing than describing a likely future. The whole car culture mess is tied up with classism, racism, a particular type of individualism, probably a serving of exceptionalism, and a “the rapture will happen soon anyway” environmental nihilism cherry on top.
I do wonder what all those 60+ years and counting policy choices will end up enabling/encouraging, down the road. Suburban McMansions aren’t very energy efficient. Needing a car to go anywhere, be it shops or hospitals or friends, isn’t energy efficient. So if the Middle East destabilises to the point that oil becomes too pricey, are all those people going to vote for urban redevelopment and giving up their lawns, or will they vote for the populist who promises cheap oil? (Which will only cost an invasion and never-ending occupation or two. Not expensive at all, no sir.)
Jaywalking. Weird, I don’t think the “crime” exists in my province. It is not in the Highway Traffic Act IIRC.
Did anyone notice the traffic in that video. As far as I could tell there was one automobile (a police car) that passed by the scene during the incident. Clearly jaywalking on a deserted street is a dastardly crime.
And two bored police officers have nothing better to do than hassle someone walking across the street. I’d describe Hickman as a little man who loved lording it over people, probably black people if possible though I’d bet that poor white youth would do in a pinch. I mean he is the LAW.
Jaywalking can be dangerous in other parts of the US as well. From an old report in the Guardian Historian arrested for jaywalking. This young man kicked my legs from under me, pinned me to the ground, handcuffed me. Naturally I was bridling, and he called his colleagues. I had five burly policemen pinioning me to the ground.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/jan/11/highereducation.education
Damn, I had not realized British historians were that dangerous.
Where do they train US policemen? The Mafia College?
jrkrideau@#10: I think Mafia College would teach subtlety.
A former employer had an annual conference in Denver. The hotel/conference center straddled the road, with a walkway connecting the buildings at the 2nd floor level. Some of the people in our office warned us before we left for the conference to be careful never to cross the (in the evenings completely deserted) road rather than using the walkway, because the local cops would hang out and ticket every visitor that decided to cross that empty road. I guess the revenue made it worth it. I’m not sure the Denver Tourism people were as fond of the practice.
I guess we were lucky none of the staff who didn’t get that warning ended up in hospital.
Marcus@#8: You’re welcome.
This also happened in Sacramento, almost exactly a year ago. As you can see in the video, he was not jaywalking, as there were no crosswalks or traffic controls. Dude was just crossing the street, and I’m hard pressed to imagine what the officers thought crossing that street legally would look like. Apparently no one knows, not even the police.
The video is hard to watch, but this man was really at the end of his rope with the harassment, and his rage at the injustice was visceral. It’s also very weird to keep reminding yourself that this is an arrest for jaywalking, when you can hear the helicopter buzzing the scene overhead.
The good thing is that the charges were dismissed amazingly quickly for this sort of thing (most likely because of the woman who caught it on her phone and posted it), though the officer got a six month paid vacation out of it. The bad news is that the police union was pissed that they released the incriminating dash-cam footage, having learned nothing of proper procedure from this, other than ass-covering.
As for jaywalking here, “residents of North Sacramento and Del Paso Heights received nearly triple the number of jaywalking citations handed out in the entire rest of the city in 2016.
“Black people received 111 of those citations, nearly 50 percent, but account for about 15 percent of the area’s residents.”
(sorry about the lack of paragraphs. neither p nor br seem to work, at least in preview. Help?)
bmiller @#7
Not necessarily. I live in a country where only half of the adult population has a driver’s license. It’s possible to get literally anywhere with public transport. And the population density isn’t even that high here—it’s only 30 people per km2 (that’s the average for the whole country). It is possible to pull off a car free life in a place with low population density. You need:
– A good public transportation system that lets people get anywhere.
– Shifting perceptions for what constitutes a “walking distance.” For example, the farmer’s market where I buy my groceries is 2.4 km (1.5 miles) away from my home. I always get there by walking. I perceive anything below 10 km as a “walking distance.” I assume that the average obese American has different attitudes.
– Roads for bicycles.
– Replace oversized American supermarkets with smaller grocery stores. Personally, I have never been inside in one of those huge supermarkets, I have only seen them in photos. Where I live, most grocery stores are smaller than a typical American single family home.
– Whenever possible, let people work from home. Why should people drive many km to a remote location, if they can sit in front of a computer also at their home?
Of course, McMansions are a really bad idea, but, assuming that people desperately want to live in single family homes with some lawn around them, it could be possible to design a walkable city with such homes.
bttb @#9
Yeah, same here. We don’t have any “the rapture will happen soon anyway” people here, but otherwise the problem is the same. I live in an 800 years old city. Streets are simply too narrow for cars here. Air in the middle of the city is too polluted, the amount of dust and nitrogen dioxide in the air is above what European Union regulations call “safe.” The obvious solution would be to ban car traffic in the city. Yet it’s never going to happen. Cars are status symbols. Rich people consider it unacceptable to—gasp!—use public transport. All the politicians are rich people. All their campaign contributors are rich people. They will never make a law that forces them to give up on a car and start using public transport instead. The majority of population who are poorer and often don’t even own cars would benefit from banning cars in the city center, but it’s never going to happen, because the rich want to drive cars.
I remember a few incidents of jaywalking from when I lived in Seattle, that made the news. There were some good in depth articles on just how, like so many other aspects of police ‘enforcement’, it was very, very racist. Seems little has changed:
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/11/16/jacksonvilles-jaywalking-enforcement-is-very-very-racist/
http://www.longbeachize.com/the-classist-racist-history-of-jaywalking-and-why-policing-it-should-stop
https://features.propublica.org/walking-while-black/jacksonville-pedestrian-violations-racial-profiling/
I think the solution here is easy: Reverse Atwater v. City Of Lago Vista (2001). In other words, we should greatly restrict the cases where warrantless arrest is permissible. In very short, only permit warrantless arrest in cases of the utmost urgency, and that should be understood to be generally limited to cases of:
* Probable cause of an outstanding felony offense.
* Refusal to stop an ongoing offense; but arrest is only permissible by a personal witness to the offense and only during or immediately after the offense.
* Most non-felony offenses; but arrest is only permissible by a personal witness to the offense and only during or immediately after the offense.
In most cases, the proper solution to criminal activity should be the issuance of a citation or some other summons order to appear for trial.
Similarly, we should also reform bail – e.g. do away with most of it. Many more cases than currently, and arguably even most cases, the person should be released pending trial under their own recognizance, and they shouldn’t even be arrested in the first place. Either the person is too dangerous to release pending trial, and therefore there shouldn’t be money bail of any kind, or the person is safe enough to release pending trial, and again therefore there shouldn’t be money bail of any kind. In almost every case, money bail doesn’t serve a legitimate purpose, and money bail should be forbidden in almost every case.
As a specific example, take the Atwater case. It’s obscene that we permit cops to arrest someone at their sole arbitrary discretion for an offense whose maximum possible punishment is a 50 dollar fine.
Shameless self plug:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EJRrzrZAuWv2tU4wz6GZLATBphmx72D__kV-5rdS2Ro/edit#
Ack. I missed a key word:
Most non-felony violent offenses; but arrest is only permissible by a personal witness to the offense and only during or immediately after the offense.
In other words, getting a mere 10 mph speeding offense is not a violent offense. Arrest should not be permitted for a mere 10 mph speeding offense. However, if a cop sees someone throw a punch, I’m ok with the cop using their discretion on whether to arrest, but again under the requirements that the cop must choose to arrest immediately or not at all (or choose to try to get an arrest warrant from a judge).
EnlightenmentLiberal @#15
I looked up the Atwater v. City Of Lago Vista case. I’d like to point out that:
– Having to spend one hour in jail is also a punishment;
– Being forced to watch your child cry is also a form of punishment; it may even cause a significant emotional trauma for the parent.
For most people (those with a decent job) having to spend one hour in police custody is a harsher punishment that having to pay a $50 fine. Personally, I calculate the monetary value of my time based on how much money I can earn at my job in any given time period. I also look at how unpleasant any given activity is. Given my usual hourly rate at work and the fact that my job isn’t particularly unpleasant, personally, I perceive one hour in jail as worse than having to pay a $50 fine.
I want the justice system to be consistent. If three people get caught driving without a seatbelt (all of them make an identical offense), I want all of them to receive an identical punishment. It’s not OK if one gets a $50 fine; the second gets a $50 fine + one hour in jail; the third gets a $50 fine + six hours in jail + bruises + the emotional trauma caused by being forced to watch your child cry.
Where I live, pedestrians have priority over vehicles on all parts of the Queen’s Highway except motorways. It’s even an offence for a driver to splash a pedestrian with a puddle …..
To Ieva Skrebele
Don’t forget the obvious towing fees that would apply because the cops would have towed the car. That’s several hundred dollars more right there, easy. There’s also the non-monetary damages, especially the emotional harm done to the children.
I agree that generally people who commit the same offense (with the same criminal background, etc.) should receive the punishment.
I’m making a deeper argument that granting discretion to cops will inevitably cause power. That discretion is power, and people abuse power, and the obvious solution to me (and the obvious solution to the founders, e.g. common law according to the founders) was to limit the discretionary power of persons at the scene as much as reasonably possible. That’s the whole purpose of warrants in the first place – to remove as much discretionary power concerning search and seizure, including detention and arrest, from cops as possible.
If you actually looked up the case, you might be interested in the following paper, which explains in great detail the travesty of law that SCOTUS did in Atwater.
> The Fictional Character of Law-and-Order Originalism: A Case Study of the Distortions and Evasions of Framing-Era Arrest Doctrine in Atwater V. Lago Vista
>Wake Forest Law Review, Vol. 37, pp. 239-437, 2002
>199 Pages Posted: 3 Jun 2007
>Thomas Y. Davies
>University of Tennessee College of Law
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=990648
Here, let me copy my political rhetoric from my google doc to better explain myself:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EJRrzrZAuWv2tU4wz6GZLATBphmx72D__kV-5rdS2Ro/edit