7 ms·

Police Drop Bomb on Radicals' Home in Philadelphia (1985)

50 points by learc83 12y ago

MarioSpeedwagon 12y ago
If it happened today: "OMG WE HAVE GOTTEN SO VIOLENT." Nope. We just have the Internet. Interesting story.
- sk5t 12y ago
  Here's another story you seldom hear about; it's from 1927 and had a worse outcome than recent school shootings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
Killobyte 12y ago
For those interested I highly recommend the documentary "Let the Fire Burn". http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2119463/ http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2119463/
glenda 12y ago
I would love to read something about how the police didn't kill someone. It seems like most of the people that help other people are "strangers" - are there any kinds of statistics on how often the police actually help? I'd imagine that situations like domestic abuse are cases when they're really successful but other than that it often seems like the police cause real problems that tear people apart.
- mhurron 12y ago
  That couldn't possibly be because bad news makes headlines a lot more than good news does, could it? Mundane things don't make the news so why would a cop not killing someone make the news?
  - glenda 12y ago
    Well, for instance we heard about Charles Ramsey finding those three missing women. Also, today on the local news I saw a report about truckers saving a woman and child from a burning car on the freeway. The things that police are used for are things like 'the war on drugs' etc... not necessarily positive, helpful, community level things.
    - dandelany 12y ago
      But aren't you overlooking all the thousands of everyday things that policemen do, things that aren't newsworthy? Little things like giving people directions, explaining why your Metro card isn't working, or simply being someone to call and talk to and file a report with when someone steals your stuff; along with bigger things like stopping an abusive spouse or arresting assaulters, rapists and murderers; all of these are things that policemen do every day, which of course makes them non-newsworthy. IMHO the silent majority of cops are good people doing good things most of the time, but there's nothing to report there, so instead our perceptions of the police force are completely skewed by the reporting of rare, horrific actions.
      - glenda 12y ago
        Don't get me wrong, there are definitely good cops, but at the same time - they protect the bad ones, so it's hard to say. The same officer that helps someone with their Metro card can be the officer that 5 minutes later is "stopping and frisking" someone.
      - tedks 12y ago
        I would never ask a cop for directions or ask why my metro card isn't working. For all I know I could look at some roided-up armored highschool graduate funny and end up with a hole in my face. Police are horrible to rape and domestic assault survivors. They resent doing the paperwork for cases and often are totally unsympathetic. Police aren't trained well at all in how to relate to trauma survivors, so they end up causing vastly worse outcomes. This is why things like rape crisis centers exist, precisely because the police were not helping. In domestic violence cases, police will frequently side with the abuser and in states without mandatory arrest laws, often leave the survivor with the abuser, which obviously isn't a good thing to do. I think the majority of cops are people doing a job. They see themselves as good people, but they're part of a system that hurts and kills people. Regardless of the above, the primary job of police in the united states is to fight the drug war, which is really just a modern variant of jim crow.
- ganeumann 12y ago
  Police don't kill people almost all the time. Police generally are a net good. I read this book once called Crisis Management. The main idea was to minimize the consequences of rare actions. So, even though train cars carrying lethal chemicals rarely derail, you build the train tracks so if one were to derail, say on a sharp curve, it derails far from populated areas. Or, even though nuclear reactors rarely release deadly radiocative gases, you don't allow people to build shanties nearby, where they would get lethal doses of radiation if there were an accident. You can't get rid of adverse cases completely in most real-world situations. But you can work to minimize the consequences when the adverse case shows up. There are times when improving the worst case is pretty cheap, if you think ahead. Policing is like this. The police very rarely need to use force ('rarely' in the sense of force used/interaction with civilian.) But when they do it makes sense to reduce the worst case: that the force will cause mortal injury. In the MOVE case, just wait them out. There is definitely increased cost, but it improves the expected value of the worst case by much more than the cost. Or, as I saw someone ask, speculatively I have to assume, on Twitter 'what would you do if some 6'4" guy was running at you threateningly?' The rational answer might be 'close your car window and call for backup.' It's never 'get out of the car and shoot him in the head.'
  - glenda 12y ago
    Right, at a certain point it comes down to the officer's life versus the life of the civilian. This is a tough situation because you essentially saying "I am going to kill you before you kill me" - which is definitely not how police should operate. Unless the civilian is armed I see no reason why the police should even arrive at the scene with a gun, unless the situation is violent to begin with, or after being called in as backup.
  - Russell91 12y ago
    Police are not supposed to be a net good. They are a classic solution to a game theoretic prisoner's dilemma. If there were no enforcement of laws by police, it would be in everyone's best interest to e.g. steal. Regardless of whether other people steal, you'd be better off doing it. So as a classic solution to the prisoners dilemma, you introduce a force that strictly decreases everyone's utility function. How can this be a good thing? Well, because it changes everyone's optimal strategy from stealing to not stealing, reaching a global optimum. Now you'll notice that this strategy only improves things if it actually changes people's behavior. If people continue stealing anyway at the same rates, then things have only gotten worse (unless you subscribe to punitive, rather than deterrent punishment). So the primary purpose of police is deterrence through the threat of negative reinforcement, not "helping people". Further, whenever police actually have to enforce laws, its a sign that something has gone wildly wrong. The deterrent didn't work, and things are worse off than if there were no police at all. Of course, in reality criminal behavior has a lot of motivators and it's not possible to change everyone's optimal strategy just by raising punishments, so you're going to have police enforcing laws. But there is no police department that is more successful than one where the police just sit around and do nothing.
- quaffapint 12y ago
  I believe it was Mayor Goode that called for the action.
- bcoates 12y ago
  It isn't their job to help people. They're bureaucrats, it's their job to show up after and take notes, give interviews and file paperwork. There is no reason to give these people guns, tanks, helicopters, or bombs -- giving them cars is a stretch (we have mass transit, after all). The US Postal Service has a better justification for being armed and having bombs and guns than the police do -- they at least have a positive mandate to defend the mail in their custody from robbery.
  - varkson 12y ago
    So you won't complain if your family are killed in front of you and the police don't do anything? GG dude this is why everyone thinks anarchists and the like are fucking dumb.
    - glenda 12y ago
      So you won't complain if your family are killed by the police?
newobj 12y ago
"Let the Fire Burn" documentary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9eCA0bIezA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9eCA0bIezA
trhway 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege - another fascinating read (beside everything else, the fire decomposing tear gas into chemical weapon grade gases)
quaffapint 12y ago
I was a kid living in the Philly area when it happened. It got lots of local TV coverage of course and it honestly did feel quite crazy having a military like action against a house in Philly, but it never seemed to go much beyond that after it was all over. IIRC it was Mayor Goode who called the action, and being african-american, maybe that helped keep racial tensions down. I can only surmise if it was today that there would be much longer lasting coverage and repercussions.
- pmorici 12y ago
  I think when you get down to it isn't quite as much about race as the news would have us believe. It is more about the plight of the poor vs. authority trying to keep them in their place but by highlighting incidences with racial components like this they can polarize the various groups that would otherwise have common interests. The Tea Party and the Occupy Wall St. movement is another example of two groups that basically want the same thing (hold big banks accountable no more corporate bailouts etc...) but they are often portrayed as polar opposites and played against each other in the news and politics.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > The Tea Party and the Occupy Wall St. movement is another example of two groups that basically want the same thing (hold big banks accountable no more corporate bailouts etc...) Except not. While the TPP and OWS were, in some senses, responses to the same circumstances, TPP seeks generally right-libertarian approaches to addressing those circumstances, and OWS seeks generally left-wing solutions. There's some overlap, but also deep and fundamental opposition. TPP is anti-tax/anti-regulation, OWS is generally for restoring regulations that were removed that they see as having enabled the situations that both TPP and OWS respond to. This isn't really surprising -- major, widely-felt economic pain is shared, but different ideologies offer different approaches to addressing that pain.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    I've made the point elsewhere that a lot of activists in the US are shooting themselves badly in the foot by playing up the race aspect over and over in these cases. They are missing that while there certainly is racism in the US, these problems correlate much stronger with poverty than race: The vast majority of differences in violence along racial lines disappear when you start adjusting for social equality. By tying it to race, these activists are pushing away large groups of people - both poor people of other ethnic backgrounds, and other people who don't find the race issue comfortable for various reasons (including not so savoury reasons). And by focusing on the police, rather than the underlying social inequalities, they are likewise pushing away groups that see the police as fundamentally protecting them against a lot of the people that are demonstrating. At the same time, address the poverty issue, and 1) it has a much more significant impact, 2) it leaves the remaining race issues in much starker relief (it is far easier for racist cops to justify their behaviour when the victim is black and live in a poor area where it is easy for people in the community to accept that a black kid in that area can be scary) It is heart wrenching to see how off the mark these things end up going.
will_work4tears 12y ago
I swear I saw this before, or a similar thing. Also I swear I saw something similar in Independence, MO; but I cannot find a thing about it. Perhaps I was conflating it with this event.
rwhitman 12y ago
One of the houses on Osage Avenue that was burned down was my dad's childhood home.
Gracana 12y ago
I don't get it. What's the rush with situations like this? They're not going anywhere. Surround the area, stay well protected, and think, negotiate, anything seems better than this.
- dfxm12 12y ago
  There was no rush. >A 90-minute shootout this morning came after a week of growing tension between the city and the group, known as Move. Residents in the western Philadelphia neighborhood had complained about the group for years.

50 points by learc83 12y ago

MarioSpeedwagon 12y ago

If it happened today: "OMG WE HAVE GOTTEN SO VIOLENT." Nope. We just have the Internet. Interesting story.

sk5t 12y ago
Here's another story you seldom hear about; it's from 1927 and had a worse outcome than recent school shootings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster

Killobyte 12y ago

For those interested I highly recommend the documentary "Let the Fire Burn". http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2119463/ http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2119463/

glenda 12y ago

I would love to read something about how the police didn't kill someone. It seems like most of the people that help other people are "strangers" - are there any kinds of statistics on how often the police actually help? I'd imagine that situations like domestic abuse are cases when they're really successful but other than that it often seems like the police cause real problems that tear people apart.

mhurron 12y ago
That couldn't possibly be because bad news makes headlines a lot more than good news does, could it? Mundane things don't make the news so why would a cop not killing someone make the news?
- glenda 12y ago
  Well, for instance we heard about Charles Ramsey finding those three missing women. Also, today on the local news I saw a report about truckers saving a woman and child from a burning car on the freeway. The things that police are used for are things like 'the war on drugs' etc... not necessarily positive, helpful, community level things.
  - dandelany 12y ago
    But aren't you overlooking all the thousands of everyday things that policemen do, things that aren't newsworthy? Little things like giving people directions, explaining why your Metro card isn't working, or simply being someone to call and talk to and file a report with when someone steals your stuff; along with bigger things like stopping an abusive spouse or arresting assaulters, rapists and murderers; all of these are things that policemen do every day, which of course makes them non-newsworthy. IMHO the silent majority of cops are good people doing good things most of the time, but there's nothing to report there, so instead our perceptions of the police force are completely skewed by the reporting of rare, horrific actions.
    - glenda 12y ago
      Don't get me wrong, there are definitely good cops, but at the same time - they protect the bad ones, so it's hard to say. The same officer that helps someone with their Metro card can be the officer that 5 minutes later is "stopping and frisking" someone.
    - tedks 12y ago
      I would never ask a cop for directions or ask why my metro card isn't working. For all I know I could look at some roided-up armored highschool graduate funny and end up with a hole in my face. Police are horrible to rape and domestic assault survivors. They resent doing the paperwork for cases and often are totally unsympathetic. Police aren't trained well at all in how to relate to trauma survivors, so they end up causing vastly worse outcomes. This is why things like rape crisis centers exist, precisely because the police were not helping. In domestic violence cases, police will frequently side with the abuser and in states without mandatory arrest laws, often leave the survivor with the abuser, which obviously isn't a good thing to do. I think the majority of cops are people doing a job. They see themselves as good people, but they're part of a system that hurts and kills people. Regardless of the above, the primary job of police in the united states is to fight the drug war, which is really just a modern variant of jim crow.
ganeumann 12y ago
Police don't kill people almost all the time. Police generally are a net good. I read this book once called Crisis Management. The main idea was to minimize the consequences of rare actions. So, even though train cars carrying lethal chemicals rarely derail, you build the train tracks so if one were to derail, say on a sharp curve, it derails far from populated areas. Or, even though nuclear reactors rarely release deadly radiocative gases, you don't allow people to build shanties nearby, where they would get lethal doses of radiation if there were an accident. You can't get rid of adverse cases completely in most real-world situations. But you can work to minimize the consequences when the adverse case shows up. There are times when improving the worst case is pretty cheap, if you think ahead. Policing is like this. The police very rarely need to use force ('rarely' in the sense of force used/interaction with civilian.) But when they do it makes sense to reduce the worst case: that the force will cause mortal injury. In the MOVE case, just wait them out. There is definitely increased cost, but it improves the expected value of the worst case by much more than the cost. Or, as I saw someone ask, speculatively I have to assume, on Twitter 'what would you do if some 6'4" guy was running at you threateningly?' The rational answer might be 'close your car window and call for backup.' It's never 'get out of the car and shoot him in the head.'
- glenda 12y ago
  Right, at a certain point it comes down to the officer's life versus the life of the civilian. This is a tough situation because you essentially saying "I am going to kill you before you kill me" - which is definitely not how police should operate. Unless the civilian is armed I see no reason why the police should even arrive at the scene with a gun, unless the situation is violent to begin with, or after being called in as backup.
- Russell91 12y ago
  Police are not supposed to be a net good. They are a classic solution to a game theoretic prisoner's dilemma. If there were no enforcement of laws by police, it would be in everyone's best interest to e.g. steal. Regardless of whether other people steal, you'd be better off doing it. So as a classic solution to the prisoners dilemma, you introduce a force that strictly decreases everyone's utility function. How can this be a good thing? Well, because it changes everyone's optimal strategy from stealing to not stealing, reaching a global optimum. Now you'll notice that this strategy only improves things if it actually changes people's behavior. If people continue stealing anyway at the same rates, then things have only gotten worse (unless you subscribe to punitive, rather than deterrent punishment). So the primary purpose of police is deterrence through the threat of negative reinforcement, not "helping people". Further, whenever police actually have to enforce laws, its a sign that something has gone wildly wrong. The deterrent didn't work, and things are worse off than if there were no police at all. Of course, in reality criminal behavior has a lot of motivators and it's not possible to change everyone's optimal strategy just by raising punishments, so you're going to have police enforcing laws. But there is no police department that is more successful than one where the police just sit around and do nothing.
quaffapint 12y ago
I believe it was Mayor Goode that called for the action.
bcoates 12y ago
It isn't their job to help people. They're bureaucrats, it's their job to show up after and take notes, give interviews and file paperwork. There is no reason to give these people guns, tanks, helicopters, or bombs -- giving them cars is a stretch (we have mass transit, after all). The US Postal Service has a better justification for being armed and having bombs and guns than the police do -- they at least have a positive mandate to defend the mail in their custody from robbery.
- varkson 12y ago
  So you won't complain if your family are killed in front of you and the police don't do anything? GG dude this is why everyone thinks anarchists and the like are fucking dumb.
  - glenda 12y ago
    So you won't complain if your family are killed by the police?

newobj 12y ago

"Let the Fire Burn" documentary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9eCA0bIezA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9eCA0bIezA

trhway 12y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege - another fascinating read (beside everything else, the fire decomposing tear gas into chemical weapon grade gases)

quaffapint 12y ago

I was a kid living in the Philly area when it happened. It got lots of local TV coverage of course and it honestly did feel quite crazy having a military like action against a house in Philly, but it never seemed to go much beyond that after it was all over. IIRC it was Mayor Goode who called the action, and being african-american, maybe that helped keep racial tensions down. I can only surmise if it was today that there would be much longer lasting coverage and repercussions.

pmorici 12y ago
I think when you get down to it isn't quite as much about race as the news would have us believe. It is more about the plight of the poor vs. authority trying to keep them in their place but by highlighting incidences with racial components like this they can polarize the various groups that would otherwise have common interests. The Tea Party and the Occupy Wall St. movement is another example of two groups that basically want the same thing (hold big banks accountable no more corporate bailouts etc...) but they are often portrayed as polar opposites and played against each other in the news and politics.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > The Tea Party and the Occupy Wall St. movement is another example of two groups that basically want the same thing (hold big banks accountable no more corporate bailouts etc...) Except not. While the TPP and OWS were, in some senses, responses to the same circumstances, TPP seeks generally right-libertarian approaches to addressing those circumstances, and OWS seeks generally left-wing solutions. There's some overlap, but also deep and fundamental opposition. TPP is anti-tax/anti-regulation, OWS is generally for restoring regulations that were removed that they see as having enabled the situations that both TPP and OWS respond to. This isn't really surprising -- major, widely-felt economic pain is shared, but different ideologies offer different approaches to addressing that pain.
- vidarh 12y ago
  I've made the point elsewhere that a lot of activists in the US are shooting themselves badly in the foot by playing up the race aspect over and over in these cases. They are missing that while there certainly is racism in the US, these problems correlate much stronger with poverty than race: The vast majority of differences in violence along racial lines disappear when you start adjusting for social equality. By tying it to race, these activists are pushing away large groups of people - both poor people of other ethnic backgrounds, and other people who don't find the race issue comfortable for various reasons (including not so savoury reasons). And by focusing on the police, rather than the underlying social inequalities, they are likewise pushing away groups that see the police as fundamentally protecting them against a lot of the people that are demonstrating. At the same time, address the poverty issue, and 1) it has a much more significant impact, 2) it leaves the remaining race issues in much starker relief (it is far easier for racist cops to justify their behaviour when the victim is black and live in a poor area where it is easy for people in the community to accept that a black kid in that area can be scary) It is heart wrenching to see how off the mark these things end up going.

will_work4tears 12y ago

I swear I saw this before, or a similar thing. Also I swear I saw something similar in Independence, MO; but I cannot find a thing about it. Perhaps I was conflating it with this event.

rwhitman 12y ago

One of the houses on Osage Avenue that was burned down was my dad's childhood home.

Gracana 12y ago

I don't get it. What's the rush with situations like this? They're not going anywhere. Surround the area, stay well protected, and think, negotiate, anything seems better than this.

dfxm12 12y ago
There was no rush. >A 90-minute shootout this morning came after a week of growing tension between the city and the group, known as Move. Residents in the western Philadelphia neighborhood had complained about the group for years.