17 ms·

In Iraq, I raided insurgents. In Virginia, the police raided me

600 points by webmonkeyuk 11y ago

whoopdedo 11y ago
> It’s not standard to conduct investigations beforehand because that delays the apprehension of suspects, he told me. When a man's job depends on him apprehending suspects, then he will find a way to create more suspects for which to apprehend.
- wmeredith 11y ago
  This was the line that stuck out to me as well. What a bunch of disgusting hypocrites. What happened to serve and protect? What about innocent until proven guilty?
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    What happened to serve and protect? Police in the United States have never had any such legal duty, and this has been backed by court precedent. It's purely a motto. Two relevant cases are South v. State of Maryland (1855) and Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005).
Retra 11y ago
I'm confused as to why a report of a squatter requires any kind of raid to begin with...
- hmottestad 11y ago
  It might be a terrorizing terrorist Or a drug overlord. Or Harry Potter. :D
- bostik 11y ago
  I'm going to go full-on cynical here: A) because they can, and B) because it counts towards SWAT gear maintenance To expand on point B, I would not be the least bit surprised if police departments' beancounters actually kept tabs on the average cost of SWAT gear maintenance costs. Higher number of conducted raids means a lower bolded number in metrics spreadsheet. ... which actually brings up another item. Do the personnel on a raid get paid dangerous duty bonuses?
  - Retra 11y ago
    I don't think the article said it was a SWAT team conducting the raid. I mean, I could see some off-hand justification by saying that they get to practice for real raids in an unfamiliar situation... but raids are prone to inciting over-reactions and media attention, which clearly doesn't provide long term value.
    - justizin 11y ago
      > .. which clearly doesn't provide long term value. The police are not interested in long term value. They want action, they want to play with their toys. It is simply not more complex than that.
      - chucksmash 11y ago
        That's a mighty broad brush you are painting with there.
        sbov 11y ago
        It's a pretty good explanation. Part of why the militarization of the police is so scary is because most of that equipment is given under a "use it or lose it" clause. So they have to use their tanks, otherwise the federal government will take them back. So, they have to find "reasons" to use them even if they aren't necessary. Maybe one day in the far future they might be useful, but in the meantime they're basically toys.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    I believe SWAT duty does get extra pay.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Qantourisc 11y ago
  The only logical explanation is: something is seriously screw up ! This kind of behaviour is basically a dead thread.
gokhan 11y ago
> The culture that encourages police officers to engage their weapons before gathering information promotes the mind-set that nothing, including citizen safety, is more important than officers’ personal security. This seems like the thing police forces need to change in order to fix the situation.
- justizin 11y ago
  If wishing made it so. The institution of the police is intrinsically corrupt and unbalanced. This has nothing to do with the fact that your neighbor or your Uncle Joe is a police officer and seems like a perfectly nice person, and joined for all the right reasons, their job is not to keep you safe, it is to keep you under control. All of us, collectively. I know it's a big complex discussion to have about, "if we didn't have the police, what would blah blah", but instead of recoiling from fear, it's important to address the facts.
  - Qwertious 11y ago
    And yet this is a bigger problem in the USA than in Europe or Australia.
    - Elrac 11y ago
      My German wife says this is (to a large part) a direct consequence of the fact that the US has a much larger population of people with nothing left to lose. Middle class workers working off a mortgage in suburbia are a lot less likely to become violent killers than underprivileged folk who have precious few career options outside of drug dealing in gangs.
      - adventured 11y ago
        That's an incorrect conclusion. Check out the historical murder rate of Appalachia in the US. Extremely high gun ownership, extremely low murder rate. I grew up there, deep in poverty, everyone owned guns, and the murder rate was on par with the best of Europe per 100,000 people. The difference? Cultural. Where I grew up, people simply did not believe in killing each other, period. Desperation was widespread, yet there were no gangs, there were no drive-by shootings.
zajd 11y ago
Karma's a bitch
ghufran_syed 11y ago
I sometimes find ex-military folks analogies between their wartime service and situations in civilian life rather forced, but this analysis is exactly right. I used to ask myself why the Israeli Defence Forces would risk innocent palestinian civilian lives to kill the terrorists who hide among them by using drones or airstrikes instead of the kind of techniques they would no doubt use if the terrorists were surrounded by Israeli civilians. The simple answer is that the life of an Israeli civilian is considered (by the IDF) to be worth more than that of a palestinian civilian. The same was clearly true in the United States' early approach to counter-insurgency in Iraq, as described in this piece, where the life of an American soldier is clearly much more valuable to the US Government than those of the Iraqi civilians we went to 'save'. The sad thing is the comparison I would always quote was "what would the police do in the United States, if you had a dangerous criminal surrounded by civilians?" They probably wouldn't use an airstrike, they would probably use some other technique with a higher risk to the police, but a lower risk to the civilians they are sworn to 'protect and serve' This article (and lots of other data) suggests that is changing: if everyone is a suspect until proven innocent, there is no need for police restraint. The worse that can happen is a dead 'perp' I guess...
- jessriedel 11y ago
  > The simple answer is that the life of an Israeli civilian is considered (by the IDF) to be worth more than that of a palestinian civilian. It's important here to draw a philosophical distinction between the claim that the lives of some groups are more important than the lives of others, and the claim that a particular person or organization has a greater duty to some groups than others. It's perfectly consistent to think that each parent has a greater duty to protect their own children (possibly at the expense of other lives), and that each military has a greater duty to protect its own civilians, without actually thinking that anyone is more intrinsically valuable than anyone else.
  - justizin 11y ago
    > It's perfectly consistent to think that ... If you say so.
jessriedel 11y ago
This discussion of strategies for reducing the use of force by police is more constructive and sensible than most on this issue: http://harvardlawreview.org/2015/04/law-enforcements-warrior-problem/ http://harvardlawreview.org/2015/04/law-enforcements-warrior...
- ghufran_syed 11y ago
  I just took a quick look, but it looks like a great article, might be worth doing a HN submission?
  - an_ko 11y ago
    44 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9699893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9699893
  - gknoy 11y ago
    It's a great article, and was posted in June: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9699893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9699893
    - jessriedel 11y ago
      Yep, this must be where I read it originally :)
jxm262 11y ago
This is a really well written article. This also echo's alot of the sentiment that many people have. I remember reading recently about the differences in police training from Germany vs the US. One of the things that stuck out at me was the huge amount of hours they spend training to "not" shoot, and learning how to de-escalate situations. It's no wonder we have so many issues here in the US, it makes me sad.
- tajen 11y ago
  What does it mean for us Europeans, who still have, for the moment, more lenient police? Should we expect that America uprises against their own police? Draw a Fergusson every 3 months? Becomes either less economically stable or more economically agressive? Should we expect that US' political influence requires us to step up our police, the same way France escalated an NSA-style law six months ago? It worries me that a friend country's police goes more totalitarian, but are there actual consequences on us? It's an open question. For the last 6 years I've refused to set foot in US (and even declined free tickets to a very important tech conference in my field) because of your unpredictable trigger-friendly police [1] and your guantanamo-friendly interviews at border control [2]. I wonder it your unstability could reach me in Europe. [1] Being a foreigner, I'm not protected by your constitution and the officers haven't sworn to protect and serve me. [2] I do believe an intent to go to a conference could randomly be recategorized as seeking work, which is illegal, and using a false Facebook name could be recategorized as identity theft. I do believe it's therefore possible to be retained at your border for an undefined amount of time, with no record and no rights to a lawyer. I do believe I'd be upset in this situation and I could end up sentenced for life in your prisons.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    Your reaction is extreme. Working professionals from rich countries that come to the US on short term Visas are not subjected to intense scrutiny. No one is prosecuted for the name on their Facebook account.
    - Elrac 11y ago
excitom 11y ago
I feel like if the author had been black he wouldn't be around now to write that article.
- hellbanner 11y ago
  Quite possibly. But while tackling racial biases and avoiding historical violence is a noble undertaking, he focuses his efforts describing the effects of police attitude.
calibraxis 11y ago
Now that whites are far more directly endangered by police, one sees articles like this pop up all the time. "In a very real sense, the 'middle class' is not an economic category, it's a social one. To be middle class is to feel that the fundamental institutional structures of society are, or should be, on your side. If you see a policeman and you feel more safe, rather than less, then you can be pretty sure you're middle class. Yet for the first time since polling began, most Americans in 2012 indicated they do not, in fact, consider themselves middle class." http://gawker.com/ferguson-and-the-criminalization-of-american-life-1692392051 http://gawker.com/ferguson-and-the-criminalization-of-americ... The author still argues in favor of policing. (Just like he doesn't question whether he had any right to invade another country.) Advocating that police return to his side, against the common domestic enemy.
rayiner 11y ago
I'm both disappointed and not all that surprised. I grew up here, and this is the product of something that has been brewing for twenty years. The citizens here are to blame. The police are just giving the public what it wants. It's a county full of McMansions and extreme paranoia. Lots of upper middle class people terrified that their fragile existence might be upset by [Mexican immigration, terrorism, <insert fear here>].[1] I'm not sure if 9/11 was a turning point per se, but planes crashing into the Pentagon in neighboring Arlington didn't help. It wasn't always like this. When I was growing up you'd almost never see a Fairfax County cop. Vienna was always a police state, but the small-bit speed-trap kind. Today, there are cops crawling around Tysons (where the biggest danger is rowdy teenagers). [1] It's notable that this story takes place just across the Potomac from where those parents got in trouble with the police for letting their kids walk home less than a mile from school.
- fiatmoney 11y ago
  "Lots of upper middle class people terrified that their fragile existence might be upset by [Mexican immigration, terrorism, <insert fear here>]" It probably doesn't help that your average Northern Virginia McMansion is owned by a .gov / defense / national security contractor who under a variety of scenarios might see himself on one indictment / target list or another.
- tzs 11y ago
  > It's notable that this story takes place just across the Potomac from where those parents got in trouble with the police for letting their kids walk home less than a mile from school. It's interesting to compare the different fears people are cultivating nowadays. We have many people fearing that if a child is not near its parents or a teacher at all times, the kid is at great risk of getting snatched by predators, to the point that parents that know this is nonsense and let their kids get out of their sight have concerned strangers calling the police, and child welfare services investigating their fitness as parents. And as you also noted, we've got upper middle class and above people thinking that someone is going to be coming for them in their homes. In a comment on another thread a few days or a week ago, someone linked to an article explaining how it is reasonable for a woman, any time she is in a place with men, to fear sexual assault or rape. The author did some hand waving math to show that statistically a woman encounters several rapists per day. Every man had to be treated as potentially her rapist and so she should plan accordingly (keeping in public places, making sure someone knows her plans and can call the police if she is late, and so on). Here on HN, the impression I get is that the first fear (child predators everywhere) is believed to be greatly overstated, the third (rapists everywhere) is a reasonable thing to fear, and the middle one (not safe in our homes) has not been discussed enough (that I have seen) here for me to figure out what the majority thinks of it. I took a brief look at the numbers for the child predators everywhere fear and the sexual predators everywhere fear. It's kind of annoying, because different sources give different data, but from what I could find it looks like (1) the probability of some random child being abducted for the purpose of sexual molestation in a given year is about the same or a bit higher than the probability of a given random woman being sexually assaulted in that year, and (2) the probability of #1 where the abductor is a stranger is about the same or a bit higher than the probability of #2 where the sexual assault is a rape. For comparison, both of the above are higher than the probability that a given random person in the US will be injured in an automobile accident in that year, but only by a factor of around 2 or less. I think we have too many people living in fear over things whose risks they have greatly overestimated.
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jowiar 11y ago
FWIW Fairfax County, VA is about as rich, white, and suburban place that you can find in the US.
- AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
  I wholeheartedly disagree with that. Alexandria, maybe. But Fairfax County is pretty large: it encompasses Annandale, Springfield, and Centreville. Springfield has a heavy latino population, and Centreville and Annandale have like a 25% Asian population. Annandale even has a section called "Little Korea" for pete's sake. To be fair, though, Alexandria is not fair from Arlington, and about the only people who can afford to live in either of them these days are trust fund babies.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - mikeash 11y ago
    "Rich" is accurate. Fairfax County is #2 in the US for median household income. "White" not so much. It's about 63% white, which is similar to the nation as a whole. "Suburban" for sure. So I'd say two out of three on that one.
  - cwisecarver 11y ago
    I live in Alexandria and I can assure you that I am not a trust fund baby. Only child of a single parent with no college education, self-taught web developer with a decent income. It is a diverse area. My neighborhood is single-family homes and I would wager half of them are just scraping by. Two blocks in either direction and you'll see abject poverty or McMansions nestled on too little land next to military housing from the 30s.
rogeryu 11y ago
This reminds me of Sandra Bland who was put into jail for three days because of improperly signaling a lane change. Police in the US is totally out of control it seems.
- an_ko 11y ago
  It's mentioned in the article; even linked from the words "threaten to Taser a woman": http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/07/21/much-too-early-to-call-jail-cell-hanging-death-of-sandra-bland-suicide-da-says/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/07/21...
- letitgo12345 11y ago
  This may be downvoted but she was stopped for not signaling but arrested (according to police statements anyway) for assaulting. This may or not be true but we should reserve judgement I feel while the investigation is proceeding.
  - fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
    Unless more video becomes available or the trooper changes his story, all the evidence we will ever have that an assault took place is the trooper's word. So, a judgement on this is really a judgement on the character of the trooper as to whether or not you think he might lie or exaggerate his account of events in order to attempt to cause a certain result. My opinion of the trooper's character is not favorable in this respect. Without regard to our conclusions about the trooper's character though, we ought to at least be able to agree that it was never necessary for the trooper to order her to exit her car, and thus it was not necessary for Bland to be jailed.
- fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
  She was put into jail for committing an unwritten infraction called "Pissing Off the Police" Most officers feel entitled to a considerable amount of respect and many of them are prone to use their discretion in order to extract revenge for perceived personal insults. This has always been the case. Recently we have technology that increasingly exposes this and other sorts of wrongdoing.
pasbesoin 11y ago
There was no report of anyone being harmed -- of any violence occurring. The police escalated the situation to a violent confrontation. Fail. P.S. If they had raised a sudden firefight, where might some of the resulting rounds traveled and impacted, particularly in what might be a fairly population-dense apartment building(s) setting?
- grecy 11y ago
  They could have landed in a baby's crib, but that doesn't matter - http://www.thewire.com/global/2012/05/german-police-used-only-85-bullets-against-people-2011/52162/ http://www.thewire.com/global/2012/05/german-police-used-onl...
sago 11y ago
"nothing ... is more important than officers’ personal security" I'm not sure this is true. If it were, why would they put themselves into potentially violent situations? It seems to me the priorities are 1. Make the arrest. 2. Officer safety. 3. Public safety. 4. Justice. In that order. They are related, to get 4 you sometimes need 1-3. But not always. 'Militarised police' is correct, because this corresponds exactly to what we'd want of our warfighters. 1. Carry out the mission. 2. Be safe. 3. Keep 3rd parties safe. 4. Be ethical and moral. It's a far cry from 'to protect and serve'. Personally I'd be happy with a squatter in an empty apartment getting away more often in return for not deploying an armed raid with no confirmation based on a single report.
- manish_gill 11y ago
  Wouldn't you say Public Safety should triumph Officer Safety?
  - sago 11y ago
    Yes, that was the subtext of my point: the priorities are wrong, if the mission is to 'protect and serve'.
suprgeek 11y ago
In the US the Police are a "Guns & Badges" Culture thru & thru. Only the truly "macho" are regarded with respect. There is no concept of de-escalation. The bigger problem is that the policies & incentives are built to reinforce this. They get promotions/assets based on forfeiture laws, weapons based on Pentagon Surplus & publicity based on Shootouts. No one ever got promoted for not shooting a (potentially innocent) suspect. Very very rarely does a cop get prosecuted for pulling a gun or inflicting other violence. SO put a bunch of arrogant, power seeking people in a system which glorifies violence & rewards forfeitures. What else do you expect?
- analog31 11y ago
  I wonder if this influences the civilian population too, by promoting the idea that the only way for citizens to protect themselves is by being prepared to shoot their way out of any situation.
hackaflocka 11y ago
This article doesn't add up. Even highly-paid local government servants (i.e. the police in this case) aren't usually this stupid. What it's claiming is: if someone calls up the police to report that a squatter is occupying a neighboring apartment, there's a SWAT raid on that apartment? Nope. This was either in a very high-security zone, or there was some other extenuating circumstance. Here's my guess at why they didn't bother with asking the security guard or management, and just went with the word from a neighbor. The neighbor is a high-ranking member of the local SWAT organization.
- function_seven 11y ago
  Nothing in the article indicates that a SWAT unit was dispatched. It was likely a couple of patrol units. Sadly, the article does add up for me.
DominikR 11y ago
I once used to believe that the problem in the US is that guns are so widely available, but today I'm not so sure about that anymore, because there are many very safe countries that rank high in number of guns per capita like Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Austria, Canada and Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_c... In Switzerland every male has a military type machine gun and two magazines at home and in my country, Austria, there are regions that rival Texas in terms of gun ownership. Today I tend to believe that this might be a problem of city planning (and preventing ghettos). The US has cities that are much larger than the largest cities in the countries cited by me. But I might be wrong here. Anyways, I do not doubt that police in Austria and Germany would act no differently than in the US if they had reason to expect that they could be shot every time they stopped a car. Thankfully this is not the case.
- mattstreet 11y ago
  The rules about every male having a weapon and ammo went away in 2007 or so. There is a lot of regulation there about who can have a weapon or buy ammunition.
  - DominikR 11y ago
    Well, Switzerland still ranks very high in terms of gun ownership. (4th place in the world) My point is that the mere availability of guns can't be the only reason. This is most likely a very complex problem with many different issues that have to be tackled. Better police training, preventing ghettos, hopeless economic situation for people of certain race, racism - these are all issues that will have to be tackled to get this under control. Just taking away the guns wont solve the problem I fear.
    - rodgerd 11y ago
      > Well, Switzerland still ranks very high in terms of gun ownership. (4th place in the world) If you're insisting that the situation with firearms in Switzerland resembles that of the US you are either ignorant, obtuse, or dishonest. They are not even remotely comparable.
joesmo 11y ago
"I understood the risks of war when I enlisted as an infantryman. Police officers should understand the risks in their jobs when they enroll in the academy, as well. That means knowing that personal safety can’t always come first. That is why it’s service. That’s why it’s sacrifice." I think that sums it up well. Many police officers do indeed act like they don't understand the risks or even purpose of their own jobs. Policing has become an end in and of itself. It's no longer about protecting and serving but about policing and arresting and jailing. It doesn't matter if there is no crime, people will be arrested. It doesn't matter if there is serious crime, low-level offenders will be the primary target. And of course, nothing is more important than officer safety. These officers are cowards who should be ashamed of themselves. They don't have an altruistic bone in their body and probably wouldn't lift a finger to save a baby out of a burning building. It is the citizens' lives that matter, that the police are sworn to protect. It is the citizens they serve. But that indeed has been lost. Given all this, is it any wonder that much of the population no longer trusts police, many from negative personal experiences? The author is right. Until there is a huge shift in the way police treat citizens, this problem of trust will get worse. For many, it is a problem of hate, and in many cases, rightly so. Yet the police and many other people insist that the change has to come from citizens. If only we give up our guns. If only we give up our freedoms. These things just make the problem worse by blaming the victims and forcing the citizens to give up even more for the well being of the police. There is no movement from the pro police camp, and it's been their turn for decades now. Until there is, hate and animosity from the community will continue to grow.
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sudioStudio64 11y ago
I, for one, get tired of the constant refrain of hero worship while these guys say that there number one job is to get home safely. They are afforded terrible powers to intervene in, and disrupt, someone's life. That trade is made under the assumption that they do a dangerous job. A benefit is afforded to them due to the responsibility that they bear. Obviously, they want to have as much power with as little danger as possible. They want to maximize the benefit the receive (largely being above the law and a middle class existence) and minimize the repercussions of what they owe for it (possibly being in danger). Its the same in other areas of American life where elites have abdicated their responsibilities but have become accustomed to the benefits afforded them to the point that they think it's owed to them. That has to change. EDIT: for clarification and spelling.
- zurn 11y ago
  Same in Iraq.
- tessierashpool 11y ago
  Their number one job is not to kill anybody innocent, and they are terrible at it. Source: http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Americas/dp/1610394577 http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Americ...
  - sudioStudio64 11y ago
    great book.
  - PopeOfNope 11y ago
    > Their number one job is not to kill anybody innocent No, that's what you want their number one job to be. Their number one job is to punch the clock and claim their pension. I relate it to the phrase "to protect and serve." The words "protect" and "serve" are nowhere in the job description for police officer. The motto was devised by the LAPD in the 50s, probably for PR reasons.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    I think this should be taken a little bit farther, and we should say that their number one job is not to kill anybody at all. Sometimes they have to, but it's not acceptable just because the person they kill is guilty of a crime, even a heinous crime. Killing should only happen when it is the only possible way to stop an imminent life-threatening situation. Any use of lethal force should be viewed as a great failure, even if it may sometimes be a necessary one. Even if one believes in the death penalty, killing as punishment should only be carried out by the justice system after a fair trial.
puppetmaster3 11y ago
The issue is in USA only police kill if you don't obey them (follow their verbal commands), possibly due to reduced middle class. Here is a hypothesis: to lower the issue, either the US citizens increase gun ownership or police don't carry guns; till parity. Data point: Stanford experiment. More middle class and power balance. Then they'd be polite, like in the rest of the world. On you tube, you can see police outside of USA interactions... and there is 'pushing' and such involved and sometimes their feelings get hurt. In USA, if you don't obey or hurt their felling: you are dead.
curiousjorge 11y ago
I read these type of people walk the fine line that separates criminals, the propensity for violence and murder while wearing a uniform doesn't fix psycopathy. Not to say all police officers are built this way, and certainly there are elements that I can observe as an outsider that makes American style policing to be particularly and overwhelmingly lethal and excessive. I have a hard time buying the liuetenants response that this is the norm. What kind of fucked up policy allows guns drawn officers with questionable safety margin to kick out a suspected squatter? It raises even more questions like, what if the author was African American? Or maybe he had tattoo on his face? If people wearing a uniform are free to choose a response in their own thinking, how much of past fatalities by police force were caused by trigger happy and blood thirsty individuals that are clearly psychopaths? How can the public trust enforcers who more than coincidentally use excessive force before the usual buckshot is laid out? It must be truly terrifying to be American, and stories like this makes me inclined to keep my Canadian citizenship. Not taking the higher ground, we've had exactly such police brutality, but almost in most cases they've resulted in criminal conviction. On the other hand a super lax and incompetent police force like those in Korea or Japan is equally frightening, but much less than a trigger happy, God knows what type of disorder suffering badge wearing individual will react in high stress situations, especially one that is escalated entirely by themselves.
brownbat 11y ago
Virginia is a special puzzle. For Violent Crime in 2011, it ranked 46th of the 50 states. Property Crime was 43rd. The Federal & State Incarceration Rate was 13th, and general funds spending on corrections (2008), it was ranked 11th highest. Sometimes Europeans are alarmed by the high US incarceration rates, with our 700-800 per 100,000 over twice most other countries. If you want your eyes to just pop out of your head though look at the state by state numbers. (The US is a big place, and all social trends are not perfectly distributed.) Louisiana incarcerates over 1400 of its 100,000, four to fourteen times most other countries. The one thing you can say for Louisiana, though, is that it also has over double the national murder rate. So maybe it has other endemic problems that are running both numbers up simultaneously. Virginia's up there in incarceration with 900-1000 per 100k, but it doesn't have the violent crime stats that could even attempt to excuse it. It has below average homicide and violent crime rates. It's a high incarceration state for no damn reason. Some resources: http://www.justicepolicy.org/uploads/justicepolicy/documents/va_justice_system_expensive_ineffective_and_unfair_final.pdf http://www.justicepolicy.org/uploads/justicepolicy/documents... http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-state#MRord http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Louisiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Louisiana http://www.vsp.state.va.us/Crime_in_Virginia.shtm http://www.vsp.state.va.us/Crime_in_Virginia.shtm
c5karl 11y ago
The chief of police has posted a response: https://fcpdnews.wordpress.com/2015/07/25/a-message-from-the-chief/ https://fcpdnews.wordpress.com/2015/07/25/a-message-from-the...
- koenigdavidmj 11y ago
  Very carefully worded. The original article never said anything about Special Weapons and Tactics, which is what the chief denied using. In fact, the whole point is that this procedure is decidedly normal.
nchammas 11y ago
The author's recommendation that the police build up community relationships to increase trust and reduce unnecessary confrontation reminded me of a book, Fixing Broken Windows [1], that made a similar recommendation for what it called "community policing". [1] http://www.amazon.com/Fixing-Broken-Windows-Restoring-Communities/dp/0684837382 http://www.amazon.com/Fixing-Broken-Windows-Restoring-Commun...
toolsadmin 11y ago
Time to invest in Taser Corporation. With policing like this, another Fergusson is right around the corner. Not that people in Fergusson were angels, but still, they got something right - fighting against state fashism.
vaadu 11y ago
I live in Fairfax county. It has some excellent officers but the dept is atrocious when it comes to transparency and honesty with the citizenry. The officer involved shootings of unarmed people are consistently swept under the rug.
droithomme 11y ago
Why would they sent an assault team to look into a report of a squatter?
downandout 11y ago
"Rhoads defended the procedure, calling the officers’ actions “on point.” It’s not standard to conduct investigations beforehand because that delays the apprehension of suspects, he told me." That is dereliction of a police officer's duty. The entire purpose of a police force is to investigate potential crimes, and then, if it is determined that a crime has occurred, to arrest those involved. This man, a shift commander, is literally saying that their policy is to shoot first and ask questions later. He should, at a minimum, be fired. Additionally, if he has actually structured his department in a way that has officers arresting people without prior investigation, he and all others carrying out this policy should be criminally prosecuted for false imprisonment.
graycat 11y ago
The solution in the US is supposed to be US democracy. A first step is freedom of the press so that citizens can become informed. A second step is for problems to be exposed in the press as in the OP. A third step is for citizens in the area with such problems to inform their elected officials that the police need better supervision to solve the problems. Fourth, with enough concern from voting citizens, the political supervision of the police needs to tell the police chief, etc. to clean up their act. If problems continue, then the mayor, etc. needs to get the Chief of Police a new job, say, cleaning the sidewalks with a toothbrush -- "Get'm nice and clean, now, y'hear. Good to see you doing well at the work you are best suited for.". With more concern, lawyers, including the local prosecutors, can bring legal cases against the police. As in Baltimore now, a few serious legal cases against the police can calm down the whole police force like a few million pills of Valium. Net, via our democracy, the power, essentially all of the power, really overwhelming power, is fully in the hands of the voting citizens. All citizens have to do is find a sympathetic candidate and pull a lever in a voting booth. With any kind of serious activity by voting citizens, police arrogance can disappear like a snowball in a hot July in Vegas. The police need to be worried now: Somewhere in the US is a billionaire who believes in the US Constitution and is ready to spend a little money to set up police sting operations, have hidden cameras recording everything, make a really big public story about the abuses, have teams of lawyers filling the court dockets with every legal case they can come up with, and then organizing some political activity to get the politicians on board. The story for the police? Simple: Clean up your act on your own or the voters, politicians, and lawyers will do it for you. Too much of the police have talked to themselves too much and talked themselves into believing a lot of nonsense reasons why they should treat the citizens like dirt. Well, that treatment and those reasons won't cut it, not for even a minute, once the sunlight shines on the situation -- instead, voters, politicians, and lawyers have the power, overwhelming power, and will stop the nonsense.
roymurdock 11y ago
I wonder if the majority of cops become more empathetic after reading pieces like these and take extra precautions not to become those cops under public scrutiny? Or do they just get even more set into the us vs. them and we know what's better for the dumb masses mindset? I would love to hear an actual cop's opinion on how the recent media coverage has affected his/her individual performance and the overall performance of the police force in general.
e12e 11y ago
> He explained that it was standard procedure to point guns at suspects in many cases to protect the lives of police officers. Their firearm rules were different from mine; they aimed not to kill but to intimidate. That's nuts. At least they haven't gone that crazy in Norway - the police instruction on firearms are still: "Only aim at someone you're authorized to kill" -- eg: someone posing an immediate threat that can't be avoided by de-escalating the situation (so it's not enough for someone to threaten to kill a police officer, if that officer can easily back away and secure the area/wait for backup -- but more along the lines of someone aiming a gun at someone). And this makes more sense to me too: Everyone is entitled to self-defense if they fear for their life -- if someone threaten you with a deadly weapon -- be that a knife or a gun, it's entirely rational to try and kill them in order to save yourself. You might of course serve out the rest of your life in prison if you make the wrong call -- but you'll be alive. Just because someone is a cop, doesn't mean they can't be(come) a murderer. This is why it's so important for police to practice restraint. They work for us, not against us after all (or should, anyway).
dmourati 11y ago
This story could have easily ended much worse if the Iraq vet had armed himself against the intruding police as suspected home invaders.
lectrick 11y ago
Every time you aim a gun at an innocent persons' head without first doing due diligence before escalating, you increase the chances of an accident or misunderstanding which results in an innocent person dead. Which we hear about all the time. So WTF? In any event, why would a squatter merit such a hostile response?
maehwasu 11y ago
Two years ago, I was in the US for a month and volunteered to chauffeur two Chinese students to a Celtics game as an outing (I was working for a homestay/education consulting company at the time). On the way back at night, driving through a small town in central Massachusetts, I passed a cop car, going at the speed limit. The cop immediately pulled out and began tailing me, but did not turn on his lights. I tried to maintain a constant speed, a couple miles above the 35 mile per hour speed limit, since I know cops treat excessively slow speeds as an indicator of drunk driving. Eventually, after 15 minutes of being tailed, I hit my foot a bit too heavily on the gas, and went to 45 miles per hour. He instantly turned on his lights, and pulled me over. The officer was extremely skeptical when he got to the car, especially since the name on the car's registration was my company's, not mine, and I had two minors in the back. After some questioning and prodding about where we had been and what we had been doing, he let me go with a warning. I shudder to think what would have happened if I had pulled over in the same situation, but black. The officer was serving no sort of duty except to troll for problems where none existed. I haven't returned to the US since: it turns out there are many places I can live where I don't have to have nerve-wracking interactions with hostile law enforcement, ever.
- toephu2 11y ago
  So because of one isolated incident you think all cops in the U.S. act this way and therefore will never visit again? You think what you see on TV isn't just handpicked? and is actually representative of the thousands of pull overs cops perform daily? You think every single black person pulled over gets shot?
  - manish_gill 11y ago
    This excuse ("bad apples") is getting pretty old. One anecdote can be discounted. Tens and hundreds of them in the past several years are a bit hard to ignore. US cops are bad. Face it.
    - rsanek 11y ago
      The plural of anecdote is not data.
joeax 11y ago
To understand all of this, a great FB page to follow is CopBlock (disclaimer: not affiliated with them but a great news source). The way the police in America act today is borderline Orwellian, or perhaps it's already crossed that line.
snambi 11y ago
Probably the best article I read this year!
dunkelheit 11y ago
Can this be the consequence of liberal gun ownership laws in the US? When anyone police interacts with can carry the gun it makes perfect sense to act as if they did. Hence excessive violence in trivial cases.
kelvin0 11y ago
I am baffled how he can even compare the military raids done in Iraq to the experience he mentions. Of course I'm not saying it`s not a harrowing experience, but it didn't end up with him dead, or worse yet jailed in some obscure military jail without any recourse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_to_the_Dark_Side https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_to_the_Dark_Side
rbcgerard 11y ago
It blows my mind that the police would not check with the management office security guard as to whether the unit was currently occupied...what if it had been rented that day? this feeds into a problem that is a corollary to the above, which is the whole see something/say something mentality with no repercussions for those that call the police on others...
GizaDog 11y ago
The comments here are amazing!

600 points by webmonkeyuk 11y ago

> It’s not standard to conduct investigations beforehand because that delays the apprehension of suspects, he told me. When a man's job depends on him apprehending suspects, then he will find a way to create more suspects for which to apprehend.

wmeredith 11y ago
This was the line that stuck out to me as well. What a bunch of disgusting hypocrites. What happened to serve and protect? What about innocent until proven guilty?
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  What happened to serve and protect? Police in the United States have never had any such legal duty, and this has been backed by court precedent. It's purely a motto. Two relevant cases are South v. State of Maryland (1855) and Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005).

Retra 11y ago

I'm confused as to why a report of a squatter requires any kind of raid to begin with...

hmottestad 11y ago
It might be a terrorizing terrorist Or a drug overlord. Or Harry Potter. :D
bostik 11y ago
I'm going to go full-on cynical here: A) because they can, and B) because it counts towards SWAT gear maintenance To expand on point B, I would not be the least bit surprised if police departments' beancounters actually kept tabs on the average cost of SWAT gear maintenance costs. Higher number of conducted raids means a lower bolded number in metrics spreadsheet. ... which actually brings up another item. Do the personnel on a raid get paid dangerous duty bonuses?
- Retra 11y ago
  I don't think the article said it was a SWAT team conducting the raid. I mean, I could see some off-hand justification by saying that they get to practice for real raids in an unfamiliar situation... but raids are prone to inciting over-reactions and media attention, which clearly doesn't provide long term value.
  - justizin 11y ago
    > .. which clearly doesn't provide long term value. The police are not interested in long term value. They want action, they want to play with their toys. It is simply not more complex than that.
    - chucksmash 11y ago
      That's a mighty broad brush you are painting with there.
      - sbov 11y ago
        It's a pretty good explanation. Part of why the militarization of the police is so scary is because most of that equipment is given under a "use it or lose it" clause. So they have to use their tanks, otherwise the federal government will take them back. So, they have to find "reasons" to use them even if they aren't necessary. Maybe one day in the far future they might be useful, but in the meantime they're basically toys.
- pjc50 11y ago
  I believe SWAT duty does get extra pay.
deleted 11y ago
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Qantourisc 11y ago
The only logical explanation is: something is seriously screw up ! This kind of behaviour is basically a dead thread.

gokhan 11y ago

> The culture that encourages police officers to engage their weapons before gathering information promotes the mind-set that nothing, including citizen safety, is more important than officers’ personal security. This seems like the thing police forces need to change in order to fix the situation.

justizin 11y ago
If wishing made it so. The institution of the police is intrinsically corrupt and unbalanced. This has nothing to do with the fact that your neighbor or your Uncle Joe is a police officer and seems like a perfectly nice person, and joined for all the right reasons, their job is not to keep you safe, it is to keep you under control. All of us, collectively. I know it's a big complex discussion to have about, "if we didn't have the police, what would blah blah", but instead of recoiling from fear, it's important to address the facts.
- Qwertious 11y ago
  And yet this is a bigger problem in the USA than in Europe or Australia.
  - Elrac 11y ago
    My German wife says this is (to a large part) a direct consequence of the fact that the US has a much larger population of people with nothing left to lose. Middle class workers working off a mortgage in suburbia are a lot less likely to become violent killers than underprivileged folk who have precious few career options outside of drug dealing in gangs.
    - adventured 11y ago
      That's an incorrect conclusion. Check out the historical murder rate of Appalachia in the US. Extremely high gun ownership, extremely low murder rate. I grew up there, deep in poverty, everyone owned guns, and the murder rate was on par with the best of Europe per 100,000 people. The difference? Cultural. Where I grew up, people simply did not believe in killing each other, period. Desperation was widespread, yet there were no gangs, there were no drive-by shootings.

zajd 11y ago

Karma's a bitch

ghufran_syed 11y ago

I sometimes find ex-military folks analogies between their wartime service and situations in civilian life rather forced, but this analysis is exactly right. I used to ask myself why the Israeli Defence Forces would risk innocent palestinian civilian lives to kill the terrorists who hide among them by using drones or airstrikes instead of the kind of techniques they would no doubt use if the terrorists were surrounded by Israeli civilians. The simple answer is that the life of an Israeli civilian is considered (by the IDF) to be worth more than that of a palestinian civilian. The same was clearly true in the United States' early approach to counter-insurgency in Iraq, as described in this piece, where the life of an American soldier is clearly much more valuable to the US Government than those of the Iraqi civilians we went to 'save'. The sad thing is the comparison I would always quote was "what would the police do in the United States, if you had a dangerous criminal surrounded by civilians?" They probably wouldn't use an airstrike, they would probably use some other technique with a higher risk to the police, but a lower risk to the civilians they are sworn to 'protect and serve' This article (and lots of other data) suggests that is changing: if everyone is a suspect until proven innocent, there is no need for police restraint. The worse that can happen is a dead 'perp' I guess...

jessriedel 11y ago
> The simple answer is that the life of an Israeli civilian is considered (by the IDF) to be worth more than that of a palestinian civilian. It's important here to draw a philosophical distinction between the claim that the lives of some groups are more important than the lives of others, and the claim that a particular person or organization has a greater duty to some groups than others. It's perfectly consistent to think that each parent has a greater duty to protect their own children (possibly at the expense of other lives), and that each military has a greater duty to protect its own civilians, without actually thinking that anyone is more intrinsically valuable than anyone else.
- justizin 11y ago
  > It's perfectly consistent to think that ... If you say so.

jessriedel 11y ago

This discussion of strategies for reducing the use of force by police is more constructive and sensible than most on this issue: http://harvardlawreview.org/2015/04/law-enforcements-warrior-problem/ http://harvardlawreview.org/2015/04/law-enforcements-warrior...

ghufran_syed 11y ago
I just took a quick look, but it looks like a great article, might be worth doing a HN submission?
- an_ko 11y ago
  44 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9699893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9699893
- gknoy 11y ago
  It's a great article, and was posted in June: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9699893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9699893
  - jessriedel 11y ago
    Yep, this must be where I read it originally :)

jxm262 11y ago

This is a really well written article. This also echo's alot of the sentiment that many people have. I remember reading recently about the differences in police training from Germany vs the US. One of the things that stuck out at me was the huge amount of hours they spend training to "not" shoot, and learning how to de-escalate situations. It's no wonder we have so many issues here in the US, it makes me sad.

tajen 11y ago
What does it mean for us Europeans, who still have, for the moment, more lenient police? Should we expect that America uprises against their own police? Draw a Fergusson every 3 months? Becomes either less economically stable or more economically agressive? Should we expect that US' political influence requires us to step up our police, the same way France escalated an NSA-style law six months ago? It worries me that a friend country's police goes more totalitarian, but are there actual consequences on us? It's an open question. For the last 6 years I've refused to set foot in US (and even declined free tickets to a very important tech conference in my field) because of your unpredictable trigger-friendly police [1] and your guantanamo-friendly interviews at border control [2]. I wonder it your unstability could reach me in Europe. [1] Being a foreigner, I'm not protected by your constitution and the officers haven't sworn to protect and serve me. [2] I do believe an intent to go to a conference could randomly be recategorized as seeking work, which is illegal, and using a false Facebook name could be recategorized as identity theft. I do believe it's therefore possible to be retained at your border for an undefined amount of time, with no record and no rights to a lawyer. I do believe I'd be upset in this situation and I could end up sentenced for life in your prisons.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  Your reaction is extreme. Working professionals from rich countries that come to the US on short term Visas are not subjected to intense scrutiny. No one is prosecuted for the name on their Facebook account.
  - Elrac 11y ago

excitom 11y ago

I feel like if the author had been black he wouldn't be around now to write that article.

hellbanner 11y ago
Quite possibly. But while tackling racial biases and avoiding historical violence is a noble undertaking, he focuses his efforts describing the effects of police attitude.

calibraxis 11y ago

Now that whites are far more directly endangered by police, one sees articles like this pop up all the time. "In a very real sense, the 'middle class' is not an economic category, it's a social one. To be middle class is to feel that the fundamental institutional structures of society are, or should be, on your side. If you see a policeman and you feel more safe, rather than less, then you can be pretty sure you're middle class. Yet for the first time since polling began, most Americans in 2012 indicated they do not, in fact, consider themselves middle class." http://gawker.com/ferguson-and-the-criminalization-of-american-life-1692392051 http://gawker.com/ferguson-and-the-criminalization-of-americ... The author still argues in favor of policing. (Just like he doesn't question whether he had any right to invade another country.) Advocating that police return to his side, against the common domestic enemy.

rayiner 11y ago

I'm both disappointed and not all that surprised. I grew up here, and this is the product of something that has been brewing for twenty years. The citizens here are to blame. The police are just giving the public what it wants. It's a county full of McMansions and extreme paranoia. Lots of upper middle class people terrified that their fragile existence might be upset by [Mexican immigration, terrorism, <insert fear here>].[1] I'm not sure if 9/11 was a turning point per se, but planes crashing into the Pentagon in neighboring Arlington didn't help. It wasn't always like this. When I was growing up you'd almost never see a Fairfax County cop. Vienna was always a police state, but the small-bit speed-trap kind. Today, there are cops crawling around Tysons (where the biggest danger is rowdy teenagers). [1] It's notable that this story takes place just across the Potomac from where those parents got in trouble with the police for letting their kids walk home less than a mile from school.

fiatmoney 11y ago
"Lots of upper middle class people terrified that their fragile existence might be upset by [Mexican immigration, terrorism, <insert fear here>]" It probably doesn't help that your average Northern Virginia McMansion is owned by a .gov / defense / national security contractor who under a variety of scenarios might see himself on one indictment / target list or another.
tzs 11y ago
> It's notable that this story takes place just across the Potomac from where those parents got in trouble with the police for letting their kids walk home less than a mile from school. It's interesting to compare the different fears people are cultivating nowadays. We have many people fearing that if a child is not near its parents or a teacher at all times, the kid is at great risk of getting snatched by predators, to the point that parents that know this is nonsense and let their kids get out of their sight have concerned strangers calling the police, and child welfare services investigating their fitness as parents. And as you also noted, we've got upper middle class and above people thinking that someone is going to be coming for them in their homes. In a comment on another thread a few days or a week ago, someone linked to an article explaining how it is reasonable for a woman, any time she is in a place with men, to fear sexual assault or rape. The author did some hand waving math to show that statistically a woman encounters several rapists per day. Every man had to be treated as potentially her rapist and so she should plan accordingly (keeping in public places, making sure someone knows her plans and can call the police if she is late, and so on). Here on HN, the impression I get is that the first fear (child predators everywhere) is believed to be greatly overstated, the third (rapists everywhere) is a reasonable thing to fear, and the middle one (not safe in our homes) has not been discussed enough (that I have seen) here for me to figure out what the majority thinks of it. I took a brief look at the numbers for the child predators everywhere fear and the sexual predators everywhere fear. It's kind of annoying, because different sources give different data, but from what I could find it looks like (1) the probability of some random child being abducted for the purpose of sexual molestation in a given year is about the same or a bit higher than the probability of a given random woman being sexually assaulted in that year, and (2) the probability of #1 where the abductor is a stranger is about the same or a bit higher than the probability of #2 where the sexual assault is a rape. For comparison, both of the above are higher than the probability that a given random person in the US will be injured in an automobile accident in that year, but only by a factor of around 2 or less. I think we have too many people living in fear over things whose risks they have greatly overestimated.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

jowiar 11y ago

FWIW Fairfax County, VA is about as rich, white, and suburban place that you can find in the US.

AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
I wholeheartedly disagree with that. Alexandria, maybe. But Fairfax County is pretty large: it encompasses Annandale, Springfield, and Centreville. Springfield has a heavy latino population, and Centreville and Annandale have like a 25% Asian population. Annandale even has a section called "Little Korea" for pete's sake. To be fair, though, Alexandria is not fair from Arlington, and about the only people who can afford to live in either of them these days are trust fund babies.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- mikeash 11y ago
  "Rich" is accurate. Fairfax County is #2 in the US for median household income. "White" not so much. It's about 63% white, which is similar to the nation as a whole. "Suburban" for sure. So I'd say two out of three on that one.
- cwisecarver 11y ago
  I live in Alexandria and I can assure you that I am not a trust fund baby. Only child of a single parent with no college education, self-taught web developer with a decent income. It is a diverse area. My neighborhood is single-family homes and I would wager half of them are just scraping by. Two blocks in either direction and you'll see abject poverty or McMansions nestled on too little land next to military housing from the 30s.

rogeryu 11y ago

This reminds me of Sandra Bland who was put into jail for three days because of improperly signaling a lane change. Police in the US is totally out of control it seems.

an_ko 11y ago
It's mentioned in the article; even linked from the words "threaten to Taser a woman": http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/07/21/much-too-early-to-call-jail-cell-hanging-death-of-sandra-bland-suicide-da-says/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/07/21...
letitgo12345 11y ago
This may be downvoted but she was stopped for not signaling but arrested (according to police statements anyway) for assaulting. This may or not be true but we should reserve judgement I feel while the investigation is proceeding.
- fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
  Unless more video becomes available or the trooper changes his story, all the evidence we will ever have that an assault took place is the trooper's word. So, a judgement on this is really a judgement on the character of the trooper as to whether or not you think he might lie or exaggerate his account of events in order to attempt to cause a certain result. My opinion of the trooper's character is not favorable in this respect. Without regard to our conclusions about the trooper's character though, we ought to at least be able to agree that it was never necessary for the trooper to order her to exit her car, and thus it was not necessary for Bland to be jailed.
fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
She was put into jail for committing an unwritten infraction called "Pissing Off the Police" Most officers feel entitled to a considerable amount of respect and many of them are prone to use their discretion in order to extract revenge for perceived personal insults. This has always been the case. Recently we have technology that increasingly exposes this and other sorts of wrongdoing.

pasbesoin 11y ago

There was no report of anyone being harmed -- of any violence occurring. The police escalated the situation to a violent confrontation. Fail. P.S. If they had raised a sudden firefight, where might some of the resulting rounds traveled and impacted, particularly in what might be a fairly population-dense apartment building(s) setting?

grecy 11y ago
They could have landed in a baby's crib, but that doesn't matter - http://www.thewire.com/global/2012/05/german-police-used-only-85-bullets-against-people-2011/52162/ http://www.thewire.com/global/2012/05/german-police-used-onl...

sago 11y ago

"nothing ... is more important than officers’ personal security" I'm not sure this is true. If it were, why would they put themselves into potentially violent situations? It seems to me the priorities are 1. Make the arrest. 2. Officer safety. 3. Public safety. 4. Justice. In that order. They are related, to get 4 you sometimes need 1-3. But not always. 'Militarised police' is correct, because this corresponds exactly to what we'd want of our warfighters. 1. Carry out the mission. 2. Be safe. 3. Keep 3rd parties safe. 4. Be ethical and moral. It's a far cry from 'to protect and serve'. Personally I'd be happy with a squatter in an empty apartment getting away more often in return for not deploying an armed raid with no confirmation based on a single report.

manish_gill 11y ago
Wouldn't you say Public Safety should triumph Officer Safety?
- sago 11y ago
  Yes, that was the subtext of my point: the priorities are wrong, if the mission is to 'protect and serve'.

suprgeek 11y ago

In the US the Police are a "Guns & Badges" Culture thru & thru. Only the truly "macho" are regarded with respect. There is no concept of de-escalation. The bigger problem is that the policies & incentives are built to reinforce this. They get promotions/assets based on forfeiture laws, weapons based on Pentagon Surplus & publicity based on Shootouts. No one ever got promoted for not shooting a (potentially innocent) suspect. Very very rarely does a cop get prosecuted for pulling a gun or inflicting other violence. SO put a bunch of arrogant, power seeking people in a system which glorifies violence & rewards forfeitures. What else do you expect?

analog31 11y ago
I wonder if this influences the civilian population too, by promoting the idea that the only way for citizens to protect themselves is by being prepared to shoot their way out of any situation.

hackaflocka 11y ago

This article doesn't add up. Even highly-paid local government servants (i.e. the police in this case) aren't usually this stupid. What it's claiming is: if someone calls up the police to report that a squatter is occupying a neighboring apartment, there's a SWAT raid on that apartment? Nope. This was either in a very high-security zone, or there was some other extenuating circumstance. Here's my guess at why they didn't bother with asking the security guard or management, and just went with the word from a neighbor. The neighbor is a high-ranking member of the local SWAT organization.

function_seven 11y ago
Nothing in the article indicates that a SWAT unit was dispatched. It was likely a couple of patrol units. Sadly, the article does add up for me.

DominikR 11y ago

I once used to believe that the problem in the US is that guns are so widely available, but today I'm not so sure about that anymore, because there are many very safe countries that rank high in number of guns per capita like Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Austria, Canada and Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_c... In Switzerland every male has a military type machine gun and two magazines at home and in my country, Austria, there are regions that rival Texas in terms of gun ownership. Today I tend to believe that this might be a problem of city planning (and preventing ghettos). The US has cities that are much larger than the largest cities in the countries cited by me. But I might be wrong here. Anyways, I do not doubt that police in Austria and Germany would act no differently than in the US if they had reason to expect that they could be shot every time they stopped a car. Thankfully this is not the case.

mattstreet 11y ago
The rules about every male having a weapon and ammo went away in 2007 or so. There is a lot of regulation there about who can have a weapon or buy ammunition.
- DominikR 11y ago
  Well, Switzerland still ranks very high in terms of gun ownership. (4th place in the world) My point is that the mere availability of guns can't be the only reason. This is most likely a very complex problem with many different issues that have to be tackled. Better police training, preventing ghettos, hopeless economic situation for people of certain race, racism - these are all issues that will have to be tackled to get this under control. Just taking away the guns wont solve the problem I fear.
  - rodgerd 11y ago
    > Well, Switzerland still ranks very high in terms of gun ownership. (4th place in the world) If you're insisting that the situation with firearms in Switzerland resembles that of the US you are either ignorant, obtuse, or dishonest. They are not even remotely comparable.

joesmo 11y ago

"I understood the risks of war when I enlisted as an infantryman. Police officers should understand the risks in their jobs when they enroll in the academy, as well. That means knowing that personal safety can’t always come first. That is why it’s service. That’s why it’s sacrifice." I think that sums it up well. Many police officers do indeed act like they don't understand the risks or even purpose of their own jobs. Policing has become an end in and of itself. It's no longer about protecting and serving but about policing and arresting and jailing. It doesn't matter if there is no crime, people will be arrested. It doesn't matter if there is serious crime, low-level offenders will be the primary target. And of course, nothing is more important than officer safety. These officers are cowards who should be ashamed of themselves. They don't have an altruistic bone in their body and probably wouldn't lift a finger to save a baby out of a burning building. It is the citizens' lives that matter, that the police are sworn to protect. It is the citizens they serve. But that indeed has been lost. Given all this, is it any wonder that much of the population no longer trusts police, many from negative personal experiences? The author is right. Until there is a huge shift in the way police treat citizens, this problem of trust will get worse. For many, it is a problem of hate, and in many cases, rightly so. Yet the police and many other people insist that the change has to come from citizens. If only we give up our guns. If only we give up our freedoms. These things just make the problem worse by blaming the victims and forcing the citizens to give up even more for the well being of the police. There is no movement from the pro police camp, and it's been their turn for decades now. Until there is, hate and animosity from the community will continue to grow.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

sudioStudio64 11y ago

I, for one, get tired of the constant refrain of hero worship while these guys say that there number one job is to get home safely. They are afforded terrible powers to intervene in, and disrupt, someone's life. That trade is made under the assumption that they do a dangerous job. A benefit is afforded to them due to the responsibility that they bear. Obviously, they want to have as much power with as little danger as possible. They want to maximize the benefit the receive (largely being above the law and a middle class existence) and minimize the repercussions of what they owe for it (possibly being in danger). Its the same in other areas of American life where elites have abdicated their responsibilities but have become accustomed to the benefits afforded them to the point that they think it's owed to them. That has to change. EDIT: for clarification and spelling.

zurn 11y ago
Same in Iraq.
tessierashpool 11y ago
Their number one job is not to kill anybody innocent, and they are terrible at it. Source: http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Americas/dp/1610394577 http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Americ...
- sudioStudio64 11y ago
  great book.
- PopeOfNope 11y ago
  > Their number one job is not to kill anybody innocent No, that's what you want their number one job to be. Their number one job is to punch the clock and claim their pension. I relate it to the phrase "to protect and serve." The words "protect" and "serve" are nowhere in the job description for police officer. The motto was devised by the LAPD in the 50s, probably for PR reasons.
- mikeash 11y ago
  I think this should be taken a little bit farther, and we should say that their number one job is not to kill anybody at all. Sometimes they have to, but it's not acceptable just because the person they kill is guilty of a crime, even a heinous crime. Killing should only happen when it is the only possible way to stop an imminent life-threatening situation. Any use of lethal force should be viewed as a great failure, even if it may sometimes be a necessary one. Even if one believes in the death penalty, killing as punishment should only be carried out by the justice system after a fair trial.

puppetmaster3 11y ago

The issue is in USA only police kill if you don't obey them (follow their verbal commands), possibly due to reduced middle class. Here is a hypothesis: to lower the issue, either the US citizens increase gun ownership or police don't carry guns; till parity. Data point: Stanford experiment. More middle class and power balance. Then they'd be polite, like in the rest of the world. On you tube, you can see police outside of USA interactions... and there is 'pushing' and such involved and sometimes their feelings get hurt. In USA, if you don't obey or hurt their felling: you are dead.

curiousjorge 11y ago

I read these type of people walk the fine line that separates criminals, the propensity for violence and murder while wearing a uniform doesn't fix psycopathy. Not to say all police officers are built this way, and certainly there are elements that I can observe as an outsider that makes American style policing to be particularly and overwhelmingly lethal and excessive. I have a hard time buying the liuetenants response that this is the norm. What kind of fucked up policy allows guns drawn officers with questionable safety margin to kick out a suspected squatter? It raises even more questions like, what if the author was African American? Or maybe he had tattoo on his face? If people wearing a uniform are free to choose a response in their own thinking, how much of past fatalities by police force were caused by trigger happy and blood thirsty individuals that are clearly psychopaths? How can the public trust enforcers who more than coincidentally use excessive force before the usual buckshot is laid out? It must be truly terrifying to be American, and stories like this makes me inclined to keep my Canadian citizenship. Not taking the higher ground, we've had exactly such police brutality, but almost in most cases they've resulted in criminal conviction. On the other hand a super lax and incompetent police force like those in Korea or Japan is equally frightening, but much less than a trigger happy, God knows what type of disorder suffering badge wearing individual will react in high stress situations, especially one that is escalated entirely by themselves.

brownbat 11y ago

Virginia is a special puzzle. For Violent Crime in 2011, it ranked 46th of the 50 states. Property Crime was 43rd. The Federal & State Incarceration Rate was 13th, and general funds spending on corrections (2008), it was ranked 11th highest. Sometimes Europeans are alarmed by the high US incarceration rates, with our 700-800 per 100,000 over twice most other countries. If you want your eyes to just pop out of your head though look at the state by state numbers. (The US is a big place, and all social trends are not perfectly distributed.) Louisiana incarcerates over 1400 of its 100,000, four to fourteen times most other countries. The one thing you can say for Louisiana, though, is that it also has over double the national murder rate. So maybe it has other endemic problems that are running both numbers up simultaneously. Virginia's up there in incarceration with 900-1000 per 100k, but it doesn't have the violent crime stats that could even attempt to excuse it. It has below average homicide and violent crime rates. It's a high incarceration state for no damn reason. Some resources: http://www.justicepolicy.org/uploads/justicepolicy/documents/va_justice_system_expensive_ineffective_and_unfair_final.pdf http://www.justicepolicy.org/uploads/justicepolicy/documents... http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-state#MRord http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Louisiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Louisiana http://www.vsp.state.va.us/Crime_in_Virginia.shtm http://www.vsp.state.va.us/Crime_in_Virginia.shtm

c5karl 11y ago

The chief of police has posted a response: https://fcpdnews.wordpress.com/2015/07/25/a-message-from-the-chief/ https://fcpdnews.wordpress.com/2015/07/25/a-message-from-the...

koenigdavidmj 11y ago
Very carefully worded. The original article never said anything about Special Weapons and Tactics, which is what the chief denied using. In fact, the whole point is that this procedure is decidedly normal.

nchammas 11y ago

The author's recommendation that the police build up community relationships to increase trust and reduce unnecessary confrontation reminded me of a book, Fixing Broken Windows [1], that made a similar recommendation for what it called "community policing". [1] http://www.amazon.com/Fixing-Broken-Windows-Restoring-Communities/dp/0684837382 http://www.amazon.com/Fixing-Broken-Windows-Restoring-Commun...

toolsadmin 11y ago

Time to invest in Taser Corporation. With policing like this, another Fergusson is right around the corner. Not that people in Fergusson were angels, but still, they got something right - fighting against state fashism.

vaadu 11y ago

I live in Fairfax county. It has some excellent officers but the dept is atrocious when it comes to transparency and honesty with the citizenry. The officer involved shootings of unarmed people are consistently swept under the rug.

droithomme 11y ago

Why would they sent an assault team to look into a report of a squatter?

downandout 11y ago

"Rhoads defended the procedure, calling the officers’ actions “on point.” It’s not standard to conduct investigations beforehand because that delays the apprehension of suspects, he told me." That is dereliction of a police officer's duty. The entire purpose of a police force is to investigate potential crimes, and then, if it is determined that a crime has occurred, to arrest those involved. This man, a shift commander, is literally saying that their policy is to shoot first and ask questions later. He should, at a minimum, be fired. Additionally, if he has actually structured his department in a way that has officers arresting people without prior investigation, he and all others carrying out this policy should be criminally prosecuted for false imprisonment.

graycat 11y ago

The solution in the US is supposed to be US democracy. A first step is freedom of the press so that citizens can become informed. A second step is for problems to be exposed in the press as in the OP. A third step is for citizens in the area with such problems to inform their elected officials that the police need better supervision to solve the problems. Fourth, with enough concern from voting citizens, the political supervision of the police needs to tell the police chief, etc. to clean up their act. If problems continue, then the mayor, etc. needs to get the Chief of Police a new job, say, cleaning the sidewalks with a toothbrush -- "Get'm nice and clean, now, y'hear. Good to see you doing well at the work you are best suited for.". With more concern, lawyers, including the local prosecutors, can bring legal cases against the police. As in Baltimore now, a few serious legal cases against the police can calm down the whole police force like a few million pills of Valium. Net, via our democracy, the power, essentially all of the power, really overwhelming power, is fully in the hands of the voting citizens. All citizens have to do is find a sympathetic candidate and pull a lever in a voting booth. With any kind of serious activity by voting citizens, police arrogance can disappear like a snowball in a hot July in Vegas. The police need to be worried now: Somewhere in the US is a billionaire who believes in the US Constitution and is ready to spend a little money to set up police sting operations, have hidden cameras recording everything, make a really big public story about the abuses, have teams of lawyers filling the court dockets with every legal case they can come up with, and then organizing some political activity to get the politicians on board. The story for the police? Simple: Clean up your act on your own or the voters, politicians, and lawyers will do it for you. Too much of the police have talked to themselves too much and talked themselves into believing a lot of nonsense reasons why they should treat the citizens like dirt. Well, that treatment and those reasons won't cut it, not for even a minute, once the sunlight shines on the situation -- instead, voters, politicians, and lawyers have the power, overwhelming power, and will stop the nonsense.

roymurdock 11y ago

I wonder if the majority of cops become more empathetic after reading pieces like these and take extra precautions not to become those cops under public scrutiny? Or do they just get even more set into the us vs. them and we know what's better for the dumb masses mindset? I would love to hear an actual cop's opinion on how the recent media coverage has affected his/her individual performance and the overall performance of the police force in general.

e12e 11y ago

> He explained that it was standard procedure to point guns at suspects in many cases to protect the lives of police officers. Their firearm rules were different from mine; they aimed not to kill but to intimidate. That's nuts. At least they haven't gone that crazy in Norway - the police instruction on firearms are still: "Only aim at someone you're authorized to kill" -- eg: someone posing an immediate threat that can't be avoided by de-escalating the situation (so it's not enough for someone to threaten to kill a police officer, if that officer can easily back away and secure the area/wait for backup -- but more along the lines of someone aiming a gun at someone). And this makes more sense to me too: Everyone is entitled to self-defense if they fear for their life -- if someone threaten you with a deadly weapon -- be that a knife or a gun, it's entirely rational to try and kill them in order to save yourself. You might of course serve out the rest of your life in prison if you make the wrong call -- but you'll be alive. Just because someone is a cop, doesn't mean they can't be(come) a murderer. This is why it's so important for police to practice restraint. They work for us, not against us after all (or should, anyway).

dmourati 11y ago

This story could have easily ended much worse if the Iraq vet had armed himself against the intruding police as suspected home invaders.

lectrick 11y ago

Every time you aim a gun at an innocent persons' head without first doing due diligence before escalating, you increase the chances of an accident or misunderstanding which results in an innocent person dead. Which we hear about all the time. So WTF? In any event, why would a squatter merit such a hostile response?

maehwasu 11y ago

Two years ago, I was in the US for a month and volunteered to chauffeur two Chinese students to a Celtics game as an outing (I was working for a homestay/education consulting company at the time). On the way back at night, driving through a small town in central Massachusetts, I passed a cop car, going at the speed limit. The cop immediately pulled out and began tailing me, but did not turn on his lights. I tried to maintain a constant speed, a couple miles above the 35 mile per hour speed limit, since I know cops treat excessively slow speeds as an indicator of drunk driving. Eventually, after 15 minutes of being tailed, I hit my foot a bit too heavily on the gas, and went to 45 miles per hour. He instantly turned on his lights, and pulled me over. The officer was extremely skeptical when he got to the car, especially since the name on the car's registration was my company's, not mine, and I had two minors in the back. After some questioning and prodding about where we had been and what we had been doing, he let me go with a warning. I shudder to think what would have happened if I had pulled over in the same situation, but black. The officer was serving no sort of duty except to troll for problems where none existed. I haven't returned to the US since: it turns out there are many places I can live where I don't have to have nerve-wracking interactions with hostile law enforcement, ever.

toephu2 11y ago
So because of one isolated incident you think all cops in the U.S. act this way and therefore will never visit again? You think what you see on TV isn't just handpicked? and is actually representative of the thousands of pull overs cops perform daily? You think every single black person pulled over gets shot?
- manish_gill 11y ago
  This excuse ("bad apples") is getting pretty old. One anecdote can be discounted. Tens and hundreds of them in the past several years are a bit hard to ignore. US cops are bad. Face it.
  - rsanek 11y ago
    The plural of anecdote is not data.

joeax 11y ago

To understand all of this, a great FB page to follow is CopBlock (disclaimer: not affiliated with them but a great news source). The way the police in America act today is borderline Orwellian, or perhaps it's already crossed that line.

snambi 11y ago

Probably the best article I read this year!

dunkelheit 11y ago

Can this be the consequence of liberal gun ownership laws in the US? When anyone police interacts with can carry the gun it makes perfect sense to act as if they did. Hence excessive violence in trivial cases.

kelvin0 11y ago

I am baffled how he can even compare the military raids done in Iraq to the experience he mentions. Of course I'm not saying it`s not a harrowing experience, but it didn't end up with him dead, or worse yet jailed in some obscure military jail without any recourse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_to_the_Dark_Side https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_to_the_Dark_Side

rbcgerard 11y ago

It blows my mind that the police would not check with the management office security guard as to whether the unit was currently occupied...what if it had been rented that day? this feeds into a problem that is a corollary to the above, which is the whole see something/say something mentality with no repercussions for those that call the police on others...

GizaDog 11y ago

The comments here are amazing!