5 ms·

I'm a black ex-cop, and this is the real truth about race and policing

70 points by jrs235 11y ago

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
kelukelugames 11y ago
Chris Rock wrote something a while ago. He says until very recently "mainstream" didn't believe at all that police treated brown and black people this way.
fweespeech 11y ago
Yep. I don't know about the percentages but many, many people are easily susceptible to mimicking the behavior of their top brass & peer group in any employment situation. After all, if you fit in, they'll fire that guy over there instead of you [maybe].
- doragcoder 11y ago
  I think the percentages make a lot of sense. I think there could be a fair amount of, "I think this is wrong, but nobody is really saying it's wrong, so, maybe it's not as wrong as I think it is." And that police officer basically does nothing or rough up a suspect with a colleague who's more aggressive every now and then.
  - fweespeech 11y ago
    I think more than 15% of people are decent and less than 15% are abusive. I think the problem is the vast majority just goes along with the culture and a few bad apples at the top create an abuse prone culture.
jrs235 11y ago
http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2015/05/a_word_on_guilt_police_brutality_the_squirt_gun_pedal_pub_assailants.php http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2015/05/a_word_on_guilt_p... "Either you think it is OK or not OK that police follow a different set of rules than everyone else does, even when they are off duty. Either you think it is OK or not OK that mainstream media institutions are at best police apologists (like the Star Tribune and WCCO) or at worst straight-up mouthpieces for the police unions, like KSTP proved to be with the Pointergate scandal."
markbnj 11y ago
A very thought-provoking piece. Thanks for posting it.
Zigurd 11y ago
We should not presume that current cops deserve their jobs. We need to rebuild almost all big PDs from the good 15% on up. We need to identify that 15% and increase their number fourfold or more, or cops will continue to perform very poorly. Anyone not in the good 15% is bad for everyone and is not qualified to be a cop.
- fsk 11y ago
  That can be said of any organization. Think of a typical corporation. Some people are toxic (the 15% bad). Some people will try to do the right thing no matter what (the 15% good). But in a typical corporation, the toxic people will usually eliminate the people who can see through them. The vast majority will do whatever is rewarded. When the average person sees that toxic behavior gets raises and promotions, that's what they'll emulate. The problem with our society is that the bad 15% are in charge and the good 15% have no power. (Although I would estimate it closer to 5%/90%/5% instead of 15%/70%/15%.) It becomes an (unstable?) equilibrium, when all the leaders are toxic, and the good people are locked out of making important decisions. This leads to myths like "only toxic people make good leaders", because anyone non-toxic gets weeded out by the toxic people.
  - Zigurd 11y ago
    Not all countries have PDs as bad as we have in the US. Maybe because some police are not armed. Or maybe they have better hiring practices. But we're certainly not doomed to have the cops we now have.
LordKano 11y ago
This officer watched another officer forcibly enter someone's home without probable cause or reasonable suspicion, assault an infirmed bystander and lie about it, then saw another officer arrest that same innocent citizen based upon that lie and then assault him again. What did he do about it? He didn't stop it. He's a part of that 70%. I suspect that he feels guilty about it and that's why he wrote this piece. This sort of thing happens EVERY DAY, all across the country. For generations, this kind of abuse only happened to the black and the brown. Then, low income whites were subjected to it. Now, middle income whites are being subjected to this kind of treatment and because of that, it's entering the sphere of public debate. We need good officers to stand up and speak out when they see citizens being abused. Otherwise, it'll never stop.
- quizotic 11y ago
  Too dismissive. I thought the piece was excellent, told stories I hadn't heard before, and made me think about the problem differently. It's not easy to act correctly in insane situations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment. Plus other experiments show that most of us can easily be manipulated into doing horrific things. These are not necessarily rotten police officers. It may be a rotten system. One nice insight of the post was that modifying the behavior of the few at the top of the hierarchy can effect widespread change. And somehow, we've got to find a way to stop brutalizing and incarcerating so many people. The more Reddit Hudsons there are, the faster we'll get there.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >This officer watched another officer forcibly enter someone's home without probable cause or reasonable suspicion, assault an infirmed bystander and lie about it, then saw another officer arrest that same innocent citizen based upon that lie and then assault him again. What did he do about it? He didn't stop it. He's a part of that 70%. Yeah, so? It's not about what this officer is, it's about what happens out there.
  - LordKano 11y ago
    Yeah, so? If you have to ask, I can't explain it to you.
SovietDissident 11y ago
I'm become convinced, thanks a book by Radney Balko and articles such as this one, that the drug war and the militarization of police departments (including the proliferation of SWAT teams) has done the most amount of harm to the Fourth Amendment and community policing. Without no-knock warrants and military-style training, the rotten 15% mentioned in the article could only get away with so much. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323848804578608040780519904 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873238488045786080...
- SovietDissident 11y ago
  *I've
Torgo 11y ago
If you've lived in an almost all-white part of the United States in the past, it's pretty obvious that this is a result of legal impunity and the drug war and not "institutional racism". Somehow we weren't spared the harassing, beating, and killing just because we were white. We grew up knowing which cops to stay far, far away from, and to never let yourself get into police custody. You just didn't hear about it then because people didn't have cameraphones and the Internet. A friend of a friend was pulled through a screen door and beaten until she miscarried by her ex-boyfriend cop, he was moved to the nex town over. An artist college student was shot dead by a cop who saw the building door open and went inside and just executed him (he was literally on the phone when it happened so we know it was unprovoked.) A person in my church was arrested for domestic abuse, his family had a fire sale in the family business to get the money to bail him out, and the police STOLE 10,000 dollars from them in a civil forfeiture when they pulled over his brother on the way to the jail with the cash, so he stayed in jail and their business went under. They were all white. This shit has been happening for DECADES and the irony of people whining that this happens because nobody cares about blacks is that NOBODY IN THE MEDIA GAVE A SHIT until recently when it could be framed as a racial issue.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >Somehow we weren't spared the harassing, beating, and killing just because we were white. Being white poor (and especially homeless) is not very different from being black, from the "institutional racism" standpoint. But even in that case, whites are usually spared more than blacks, including in the courts. The incarceration rates speak for themselves. That said, police over-reaching authority and institutional impunity goes a long way even for middle class clean cut white families. If you have a $2000 suit and a Tesla, on the other hand, not so much.
- erikpukinskis 11y ago
  You're right to bring up the other ways cops get "permission" to abuse people. But just because there are other excuses for abuse doesn't mean race isn't one of them.
known 11y ago
Let black Police deal with black Culprits; http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/ http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...
jdalgetty 11y ago
The internet has really made me want to be a cop just to add one more to the non-racist, non-corrupt good cops. It's too bad that writing something like this post would probably be used against me and prevent me from even being considered.

70 points by jrs235 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Chris Rock wrote something a while ago. He says until very recently "mainstream" didn't believe at all that police treated brown and black people this way.

fweespeech 11y ago

Yep. I don't know about the percentages but many, many people are easily susceptible to mimicking the behavior of their top brass & peer group in any employment situation. After all, if you fit in, they'll fire that guy over there instead of you [maybe].

doragcoder 11y ago
I think the percentages make a lot of sense. I think there could be a fair amount of, "I think this is wrong, but nobody is really saying it's wrong, so, maybe it's not as wrong as I think it is." And that police officer basically does nothing or rough up a suspect with a colleague who's more aggressive every now and then.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  I think more than 15% of people are decent and less than 15% are abusive. I think the problem is the vast majority just goes along with the culture and a few bad apples at the top create an abuse prone culture.

jrs235 11y ago

http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2015/05/a_word_on_guilt_police_brutality_the_squirt_gun_pedal_pub_assailants.php http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2015/05/a_word_on_guilt_p... "Either you think it is OK or not OK that police follow a different set of rules than everyone else does, even when they are off duty. Either you think it is OK or not OK that mainstream media institutions are at best police apologists (like the Star Tribune and WCCO) or at worst straight-up mouthpieces for the police unions, like KSTP proved to be with the Pointergate scandal."

markbnj 11y ago

A very thought-provoking piece. Thanks for posting it.

Zigurd 11y ago

We should not presume that current cops deserve their jobs. We need to rebuild almost all big PDs from the good 15% on up. We need to identify that 15% and increase their number fourfold or more, or cops will continue to perform very poorly. Anyone not in the good 15% is bad for everyone and is not qualified to be a cop.

fsk 11y ago
That can be said of any organization. Think of a typical corporation. Some people are toxic (the 15% bad). Some people will try to do the right thing no matter what (the 15% good). But in a typical corporation, the toxic people will usually eliminate the people who can see through them. The vast majority will do whatever is rewarded. When the average person sees that toxic behavior gets raises and promotions, that's what they'll emulate. The problem with our society is that the bad 15% are in charge and the good 15% have no power. (Although I would estimate it closer to 5%/90%/5% instead of 15%/70%/15%.) It becomes an (unstable?) equilibrium, when all the leaders are toxic, and the good people are locked out of making important decisions. This leads to myths like "only toxic people make good leaders", because anyone non-toxic gets weeded out by the toxic people.
- Zigurd 11y ago
  Not all countries have PDs as bad as we have in the US. Maybe because some police are not armed. Or maybe they have better hiring practices. But we're certainly not doomed to have the cops we now have.

LordKano 11y ago

This officer watched another officer forcibly enter someone's home without probable cause or reasonable suspicion, assault an infirmed bystander and lie about it, then saw another officer arrest that same innocent citizen based upon that lie and then assault him again. What did he do about it? He didn't stop it. He's a part of that 70%. I suspect that he feels guilty about it and that's why he wrote this piece. This sort of thing happens EVERY DAY, all across the country. For generations, this kind of abuse only happened to the black and the brown. Then, low income whites were subjected to it. Now, middle income whites are being subjected to this kind of treatment and because of that, it's entering the sphere of public debate. We need good officers to stand up and speak out when they see citizens being abused. Otherwise, it'll never stop.

quizotic 11y ago
Too dismissive. I thought the piece was excellent, told stories I hadn't heard before, and made me think about the problem differently. It's not easy to act correctly in insane situations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment. Plus other experiments show that most of us can easily be manipulated into doing horrific things. These are not necessarily rotten police officers. It may be a rotten system. One nice insight of the post was that modifying the behavior of the few at the top of the hierarchy can effect widespread change. And somehow, we've got to find a way to stop brutalizing and incarcerating so many people. The more Reddit Hudsons there are, the faster we'll get there.
coldtea 11y ago
>This officer watched another officer forcibly enter someone's home without probable cause or reasonable suspicion, assault an infirmed bystander and lie about it, then saw another officer arrest that same innocent citizen based upon that lie and then assault him again. What did he do about it? He didn't stop it. He's a part of that 70%. Yeah, so? It's not about what this officer is, it's about what happens out there.
- LordKano 11y ago
  Yeah, so? If you have to ask, I can't explain it to you.

SovietDissident 11y ago

I'm become convinced, thanks a book by Radney Balko and articles such as this one, that the drug war and the militarization of police departments (including the proliferation of SWAT teams) has done the most amount of harm to the Fourth Amendment and community policing. Without no-knock warrants and military-style training, the rotten 15% mentioned in the article could only get away with so much. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323848804578608040780519904 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873238488045786080...

SovietDissident 11y ago
*I've

Torgo 11y ago

If you've lived in an almost all-white part of the United States in the past, it's pretty obvious that this is a result of legal impunity and the drug war and not "institutional racism". Somehow we weren't spared the harassing, beating, and killing just because we were white. We grew up knowing which cops to stay far, far away from, and to never let yourself get into police custody. You just didn't hear about it then because people didn't have cameraphones and the Internet. A friend of a friend was pulled through a screen door and beaten until she miscarried by her ex-boyfriend cop, he was moved to the nex town over. An artist college student was shot dead by a cop who saw the building door open and went inside and just executed him (he was literally on the phone when it happened so we know it was unprovoked.) A person in my church was arrested for domestic abuse, his family had a fire sale in the family business to get the money to bail him out, and the police STOLE 10,000 dollars from them in a civil forfeiture when they pulled over his brother on the way to the jail with the cash, so he stayed in jail and their business went under. They were all white. This shit has been happening for DECADES and the irony of people whining that this happens because nobody cares about blacks is that NOBODY IN THE MEDIA GAVE A SHIT until recently when it could be framed as a racial issue.

coldtea 11y ago
>Somehow we weren't spared the harassing, beating, and killing just because we were white. Being white poor (and especially homeless) is not very different from being black, from the "institutional racism" standpoint. But even in that case, whites are usually spared more than blacks, including in the courts. The incarceration rates speak for themselves. That said, police over-reaching authority and institutional impunity goes a long way even for middle class clean cut white families. If you have a $2000 suit and a Tesla, on the other hand, not so much.
erikpukinskis 11y ago
You're right to bring up the other ways cops get "permission" to abuse people. But just because there are other excuses for abuse doesn't mean race isn't one of them.

known 11y ago

Let black Police deal with black Culprits; http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/ http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...

jdalgetty 11y ago

The internet has really made me want to be a cop just to add one more to the non-racist, non-corrupt good cops. It's too bad that writing something like this post would probably be used against me and prevent me from even being considered.