5 ms·

Almost all of this is completely non-starters if we don't end the blue wall of silence and qualified immunity. The first autopsy in this case came back blaming

Almost all of this is completely non-starters if we don't end the blue wall of silence and qualified immunity. The first autopsy in this case came back blaming existing health conditions and other causes (someone standing on his neck). If there had not been a video the cop would never have faced any action. That report, while possibly factually true, was written in a way to make it possible for the police officer to get off.

aspenmayer 6y ago
There’s no excuse for policing that doesn’t accommodate existing (when being stood upon by the neck) or pre-existing health conditions. If the insurance companies don’t get to discriminate on these grounds, why do the police? The police and those defending their actions are basically saying the bar for acceptable police use of force for the general public is as much as deemed necessary by the individual officer in the field, up to and including killing a person. All for a nonviolent offense. To say that he died because of his health conditions is to say that “healthy” people wouldn’t, and so the officer’s use of force was therefore within acceptable limits. I guess the public doesn’t find that acceptable any longer. Good for them.
- gruez 6y ago
  >There’s no excuse for policing that doesn’t accommodate existing (when being stood upon by the neck) or pre-existing health conditions. Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull. Literally double standards for police vs everyone else.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    I don't see it as a double standard if the incident occurs when police have done everything they can to de-escalate a violent situation, resort to the minimum force possible, and the suspect still gets hurt. But this is why things like body cams that are always on and robustly tamper proof are needed, along with strict discipline or automatic firing if the officer does manage to disable or obstruct the camera.
    - dwaltrip 6y ago
      > when police have done everything they can to de-escalate a violent situation, resort to the minimum force possible, ... My understanding is that it is very common for this not to happen.
      - ineedasername 6y ago
        Yes, very unfortunate. Given the wave of the last years of incidents like this, some departments have begun having additional emphasis on de-escalation, but that's not enough. It needs to be ingrained in training from day 1, and for current police it needs to be an intensive retraining requirement. That said, there will always be incidents that cannot be safely (for the officer & surrounding public) brought to closure with force, even with perfect training. That has to be understood and baked into the expectations we have of police conduct. But always-on body cameras that are robustly tamper resistant with stiff penalties, like getting fired for disabling or obscuring them, are necessary to make this happen. We have to be able to audit police actions to know if they made a best-effort to de-escalate, to avoid force. Failures caught on tape need to be replayed and dissected in after-action reports by the rank & file to know how they can avoid similar mistakes. I mean, this is standard stuff in plenty of jobs: something screws up, you fix the immediate issue ASAP, then you figure out why it went wrong and gather the stakeholders to review and figure out how not to screw up in the future.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  I'm not sure pre-existing conditions are so cute & dry. Given violent subjects unwilling to deescalate means some level of force (which should be the absolute minimum possible) may be needed, and any use of force risks bumping into pre-existing conditions. How do you know the person with a gun that you're chasing has a heart condition? Minimal force might mean tasering, and when you taser them there's a risk of cardiac issues, but what is the lesser-forcen alternative when de-escalation fails? (Though tasering is used all too frequently for very little reason)
  - aspenmayer 6y ago
    Simply because police declare a constitutionally-protected protest activity unlawful doesn’t make it so. The police are an authority to make the call, but they aren’t the last call on unlawfulness, and they don’t have unlimited lawful uses of power to disperse peaceful assembly. The Geneva Conventions still apply to individual and collective police conduct, as treaties we have signed and ratified are equal to the law of the land under the Constitution. And ultimately, citizens have a right to protest. The police aren’t a part of the Constitution. Police in early America didn’t exist as such. The closest we had were colonial slave catchers. Ultimately, we have direct democracy and direct rule all the time already, right now. It’s just unevenly distributed. Private citizens self-organizing to shield, shelter, protect, and share free speech with protesters, inside their homes, to escape police brutalities outside, all proves that the state needs the people’s authority, not the other way around. The police, private property representatives, politicians, and laws exist as an escape valve, short circuit, methodology, and framework for such a democracy to exist as it was able to be conceived of administered upon its founding. These are not bad ideas or implementations. But we should have more of a say in how our country is run at every level. With current technology, we have the means to enact instant direct democracy with no politicians, only bills, amendments, and voters; with instant implementation, and with instant lawsuit argument and just-in-time adjudication. The question is, do we have the will?
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      I don't disagree with really much of anything you said, but my comments was in regards to the inability to perfectly take pre-existing conditions into account and still perform their job of protecting the public from violent suspects that don't respond to even the best, most perfect de-escalation techniques. A person attacking a bystander, or a cop for that matter, especially with potentially maiming or lethal force, may have to be dealt with using police force. That force, even when it's the minimum necessary to protect the public, may nonetheless trigger a pre-existing condition, and I don't think there is any realistic way of avoiding such edge cases.
- Spartan-S63 6y ago
  Not to mention there's probably enough surveillance these days to allow us to identify the perpetrator, allow them to leave the scene of the crime, and then track them down later and a detain them away from the inciting incident. I would imagine that arresting someone away from the inciting incident of the crime would likely lead to a less-adversarial interaction because they're in a less stressful situation.
austincheney 6y ago
The answer to that is body cams and a strong body cam policy. I live in a city with one of the 100 largest police forces in the country. All officers are required to wear and activate body cams when performing a police action. Once the video starts the officer cannot interfere with it, though they can pause audio, since it is transmitted to a precinct building and not stored on the officer or their vehicle. Access to stored videos is limited to oversight authorities. In that case there is little to nothing a thin blue wall can do to protect police officers from misconduct, because it would require destruction of logged evidence on the part of a supervisor or oversight authority.
- js2 6y ago
  Body cams allow police to be held accountable after the fact, but haven't conclusively led to a reduction in violence. They are part of the solution, along with use of force policies. https://www.joincampaignzero.org/ https://www.joincampaignzero.org/
  - mehrdadn 6y ago
    It seems the results have been mixed and inconclusive, rather than conclusive that they don't lead to a reduction in violence.
    - js2 6y ago
      Thanks, I’ve edited my comment slightly.
- glangdale 6y ago
  Body cams are only part of the solution; if the rest of the system is broken, police misconduct won't be punished regardless of how hi-res and accurate the images of the misconduct are. We've been this before: brutality all the way up to homicide caught on tape, then let go with a slap on the wrist.
  - austincheney 6y ago
ineedasername 6y ago
qualified immunity almost doesn't matter because of the need for prosecutors to work hand-in-glove with police. Even without such immunity, prosecutors would be reluctant to bring charges except in truly egregious cases because of how much harder it would make their jobs working with the police. So anything mostly out of the public eye that isn't truly horrid they largely leave to the discipline process of the force & Internal Affairs. I'm not sure how to fix that. Automatic outside investigators/prosecutors from a different jurisdiction might help, though the blue wall would still pose a problem.

aspenmayer 6y ago

There’s no excuse for policing that doesn’t accommodate existing (when being stood upon by the neck) or pre-existing health conditions. If the insurance companies don’t get to discriminate on these grounds, why do the police? The police and those defending their actions are basically saying the bar for acceptable police use of force for the general public is as much as deemed necessary by the individual officer in the field, up to and including killing a person. All for a nonviolent offense. To say that he died because of his health conditions is to say that “healthy” people wouldn’t, and so the officer’s use of force was therefore within acceptable limits. I guess the public doesn’t find that acceptable any longer. Good for them.

gruez 6y ago
>There’s no excuse for policing that doesn’t accommodate existing (when being stood upon by the neck) or pre-existing health conditions. Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull. Literally double standards for police vs everyone else.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  I don't see it as a double standard if the incident occurs when police have done everything they can to de-escalate a violent situation, resort to the minimum force possible, and the suspect still gets hurt. But this is why things like body cams that are always on and robustly tamper proof are needed, along with strict discipline or automatic firing if the officer does manage to disable or obstruct the camera.
  - dwaltrip 6y ago
    > when police have done everything they can to de-escalate a violent situation, resort to the minimum force possible, ... My understanding is that it is very common for this not to happen.
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      Yes, very unfortunate. Given the wave of the last years of incidents like this, some departments have begun having additional emphasis on de-escalation, but that's not enough. It needs to be ingrained in training from day 1, and for current police it needs to be an intensive retraining requirement. That said, there will always be incidents that cannot be safely (for the officer & surrounding public) brought to closure with force, even with perfect training. That has to be understood and baked into the expectations we have of police conduct. But always-on body cameras that are robustly tamper resistant with stiff penalties, like getting fired for disabling or obscuring them, are necessary to make this happen. We have to be able to audit police actions to know if they made a best-effort to de-escalate, to avoid force. Failures caught on tape need to be replayed and dissected in after-action reports by the rank & file to know how they can avoid similar mistakes. I mean, this is standard stuff in plenty of jobs: something screws up, you fix the immediate issue ASAP, then you figure out why it went wrong and gather the stakeholders to review and figure out how not to screw up in the future.
ineedasername 6y ago
I'm not sure pre-existing conditions are so cute & dry. Given violent subjects unwilling to deescalate means some level of force (which should be the absolute minimum possible) may be needed, and any use of force risks bumping into pre-existing conditions. How do you know the person with a gun that you're chasing has a heart condition? Minimal force might mean tasering, and when you taser them there's a risk of cardiac issues, but what is the lesser-forcen alternative when de-escalation fails? (Though tasering is used all too frequently for very little reason)
- aspenmayer 6y ago
  Simply because police declare a constitutionally-protected protest activity unlawful doesn’t make it so. The police are an authority to make the call, but they aren’t the last call on unlawfulness, and they don’t have unlimited lawful uses of power to disperse peaceful assembly. The Geneva Conventions still apply to individual and collective police conduct, as treaties we have signed and ratified are equal to the law of the land under the Constitution. And ultimately, citizens have a right to protest. The police aren’t a part of the Constitution. Police in early America didn’t exist as such. The closest we had were colonial slave catchers. Ultimately, we have direct democracy and direct rule all the time already, right now. It’s just unevenly distributed. Private citizens self-organizing to shield, shelter, protect, and share free speech with protesters, inside their homes, to escape police brutalities outside, all proves that the state needs the people’s authority, not the other way around. The police, private property representatives, politicians, and laws exist as an escape valve, short circuit, methodology, and framework for such a democracy to exist as it was able to be conceived of administered upon its founding. These are not bad ideas or implementations. But we should have more of a say in how our country is run at every level. With current technology, we have the means to enact instant direct democracy with no politicians, only bills, amendments, and voters; with instant implementation, and with instant lawsuit argument and just-in-time adjudication. The question is, do we have the will?
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    I don't disagree with really much of anything you said, but my comments was in regards to the inability to perfectly take pre-existing conditions into account and still perform their job of protecting the public from violent suspects that don't respond to even the best, most perfect de-escalation techniques. A person attacking a bystander, or a cop for that matter, especially with potentially maiming or lethal force, may have to be dealt with using police force. That force, even when it's the minimum necessary to protect the public, may nonetheless trigger a pre-existing condition, and I don't think there is any realistic way of avoiding such edge cases.
Spartan-S63 6y ago
Not to mention there's probably enough surveillance these days to allow us to identify the perpetrator, allow them to leave the scene of the crime, and then track them down later and a detain them away from the inciting incident. I would imagine that arresting someone away from the inciting incident of the crime would likely lead to a less-adversarial interaction because they're in a less stressful situation.

austincheney 6y ago

The answer to that is body cams and a strong body cam policy. I live in a city with one of the 100 largest police forces in the country. All officers are required to wear and activate body cams when performing a police action. Once the video starts the officer cannot interfere with it, though they can pause audio, since it is transmitted to a precinct building and not stored on the officer or their vehicle. Access to stored videos is limited to oversight authorities. In that case there is little to nothing a thin blue wall can do to protect police officers from misconduct, because it would require destruction of logged evidence on the part of a supervisor or oversight authority.

js2 6y ago
Body cams allow police to be held accountable after the fact, but haven't conclusively led to a reduction in violence. They are part of the solution, along with use of force policies. https://www.joincampaignzero.org/ https://www.joincampaignzero.org/
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  It seems the results have been mixed and inconclusive, rather than conclusive that they don't lead to a reduction in violence.
  - js2 6y ago
    Thanks, I’ve edited my comment slightly.
glangdale 6y ago
Body cams are only part of the solution; if the rest of the system is broken, police misconduct won't be punished regardless of how hi-res and accurate the images of the misconduct are. We've been this before: brutality all the way up to homicide caught on tape, then let go with a slap on the wrist.
- austincheney 6y ago

ineedasername 6y ago

qualified immunity almost doesn't matter because of the need for prosecutors to work hand-in-glove with police. Even without such immunity, prosecutors would be reluctant to bring charges except in truly egregious cases because of how much harder it would make their jobs working with the police. So anything mostly out of the public eye that isn't truly horrid they largely leave to the discipline process of the force & Internal Affairs. I'm not sure how to fix that. Automatic outside investigators/prosecutors from a different jurisdiction might help, though the blue wall would still pose a problem.