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FBI Chief Links Video Scrutiny of Police To Rise In Violent Crime (nytimes.com)
HughPickens.com writes: This year, murders have spiked in major cities across America. According to FBI director James B. Comey the additional scrutiny and criticism of police officers that has come in the wake of highly publicized incidents of police brutality may be the main reason for the recent increase in violent crime. "I don't know whether that explains it entirely, but I do have a strong sense that some part of the explanation is a chill wind that has blown through American law enforcement over the last year," says Comey. He says he's been told by many police leaders that officers who normally would stop to question suspicious people are opting to stay in their patrol cars for fear of having their encounters recorded and become video sensations.
That hesitancy has led to missed opportunities to apprehend suspects and has decreased the police presence on the streets of the country's most violent cities. Officers tell Comey that youths surround police when they get out of their vehicles, taunting them and making videos of the spectacle with their cell phones. "In today's YouTube world, there are officers reluctant to get out of their cars and do the work that controls violent crime," says Comey. "Our officers are answering 911 calls, but avoiding the informal contact that keeps bad guys from standing around, especially with guns."
That hesitancy has led to missed opportunities to apprehend suspects and has decreased the police presence on the streets of the country's most violent cities. Officers tell Comey that youths surround police when they get out of their vehicles, taunting them and making videos of the spectacle with their cell phones. "In today's YouTube world, there are officers reluctant to get out of their cars and do the work that controls violent crime," says Comey. "Our officers are answering 911 calls, but avoiding the informal contact that keeps bad guys from standing around, especially with guns."
If the police acted respectfully during encounters with private citizens, I doubt there would be much need to record these encounters. I know I don't record my neighbor getting his mail or washing his car, because I don't consider either behavior threatening. Police have abused their positions of trust and the recording is one of many symptoms of this fact.
Sorry, but do your job withing the confines of the law (including the constitution). You get no free pass. If you cannot do your job within those confines, then press to have those laws changed, in an open and democratic manner. If you do not, you are little (or no) better than the thugs and gangsters you wish to imprison.
Silence is a state of mime.
Here is a radical proposal:
don't choke to death petty criminals, don't shoot fleeing suspects in the back. Don't kill people in the vans on their way to the police station, etc... And more importantly: don't support the police officers who do this!
And finally, actually discipline officers for their misdeeds.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
the best part is that the director of the FBI says police are afraid of kids with phones who mock them. the police should resign if they are so afraid.
2012 had the lowest crime rate since 1970 and even with the so called spike, the murder rate stills remains far below the record marks witnessed two to three decades ago, in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Can someone in the media call bullshit ?
is a license to break the law. Cops need to be held accountable for their misdeeds, just like everyone else. Maybe the cops that are afraid to be recorded don't know how to do their jobs while following the law.
In other words, police have no idea how to do their job without being able to assault people, racially profile them, and generally be dicks. If these police are afraid to do their jobs because they might be filmed, the easiest solution is to hire police officers who don't do anything wrong that will be an issue if it ends up on tape. The reason people are taping the police constantly now is because they expect the police to do something wrong because they have shown in a lot of cases they do. If the police get better and stop setting the expectation they will treat people like garbage, then people won;t expect it and won't feel the need to film them constantly.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
"In today's YouTube world, there are officers reluctant to get out of their cars and do the work that controls violent crime," says Comey.
If they have nothing to hide, why are they afraid of being recorded? If they aren't breaking the law, then they should not fear to do their jobs. That's what they've been telling us all along; if we have nothing to hide, we shouldn't fear their disregard for the fourth amendment. But if the cops have to break the law to save it, what are they fighting for anyway?
The cops are still playing this issue like it's part of the non-existent "war on cops". There is no such thing. Instead, there's a ground swell of support for the idea that the cops should be made to follow the law just like the rest of us, or even moreso. With great power comes great responsibility.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
538 recently ran a piece on this misguided and largely misleading storyline police are touting. It's worth a read if you like facts. But this is /.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...
Could it be that so much police work is done illegally or in violation of policy that they have trouble doing their job unless they can commit criminal acts? And it is racist as it can be. How much stop and frisk and the like goes on in wealthy, white neighborhoods? If cops acted the same way with wealthy people that they do with poor people every cop on the force would get fired quite quickly.
Their "jobs" were never to break the law. All this whining about pressure on cops is utter BS. If they had been doing their actual jobs, instead of being criminals, they'd be fine. This is simply their own malfeasance coming back to bite everyone -- us and them -- in the ass.
Every cop that breaks the law is a criminal. Every cop that knows about such things and does not turn the criminal in is a criminal accessory. That's cop culture. They think they are above the law, instead of its servants. I have no sympathy for their current situation at all. I do regret that they have been allowed, both by their internal culture and by the courts, to screw the public over so badly. And that the courts, in particular the supreme court, has failed to obey their oaths to uphold the constitution, instead wreaking sophist havoc on its meaning and intent.
I honestly do not think there is any chance at all of fixing this. The downhill slide is too profound; the public almost completely unaware of the issues at hand until they too are caught in the toxic, broken gears of the system. When that happens, they often disappear into the depths of the world's largest imprisonment undertaking. When (if) they come out of that, they're treated as unemployable and sometimes worse.
The "retribution, not rehabilitation" mindset the media has inculcated into the American public and to which their legislators pander, creates a permanent lower class whose only hope for advance is more lawbreaking, and this constrains almost all of those who actually pursue an upwards economic path. The rest are hopeless, and rightfully so. There is little hope to be had.
The root cause is bad legislators, bad law, bad police, and bad courts. There's actually no reason to expect this to work well. Nor does it.
Now the cops are paying for it, a little bit, as the Internet makes public what used to be a quiet secret known only to the cops themselves and their victims. It won't be enough, though. Because it isn't just the cops. The entire system reinforces these results, from top to bottom.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.