Officers claim they have no obligation to put themselves in harm's way because they actually don't.
Thanks. I was wondering when our boys in blue would give up even the pretense of that "protect and serve" nonsense. Now we can all acknowledge them as the knuckle-dragging cowardly bullies they are, instead of "the City's Finest."
BTW, no, "crutality" isn't a word. It's a typo. Probably because I was thinking of the word "cruelty" when I was typing "brutality."
but what trained officers are supposed to do is expect the subject to do the worst possible thing...
No. Not even soldiers are trained to do that. Civilian law enforcement is trained to use good judgement. It is more important to know when NOT to shoot than it is to know when TO shoot. Keep running Mad Max fantasies through your head like anyone who COULD pull a gun WILL pull a gun, and you end up shooting a kid for no good reason like one ex-officer I personally know.
If you haven't been in a situation where a person wants to argue with cops and then for some unknown reason pulls out a gun,
Here's another nonsense argument I'm sick of. Since you're pressing the point, yes, I have been shot at. No, it's not pleasant at all. No, the fear that someone MIGHT take a shot at you is no excuse for beating civilians bloody.
My Lai was a national disgrace. The Wikileaks/Reuters video depicts cold-blooded murder. You can hang them all as far as we're concerned. We don't want to share a uniform with filth like that.
A jury found him guilty of felony non-compliance, so he must have done more than just stepped out of his car.
Actually, from the reports, that's EXACTLY what he did, and the judge basically cut him loose for it.
he did so at border patrol, which by definition carries a higher risk for officers,
I am so sick of hearing this. Cowardice is no excuse for brutality. I grew up military. Come to one of my family dinners and let the Vietnam veterans in my family explain what a dangerous job is.
Looking at the Department of Labor statistics, being a cop is a VERY safe job. You know who gets killed on the job more often than police officers? Construction workers. Cab drivers. Fast food workers. Hotel clerks.
Hop over to the forums on "Officer.com" and listen to the boys on blue in their own words for a while. They'll tell you quite openly they feel absolutely no obligation to put themselves in harm's way for the "sheeple," and they proudly proclaim "I AM GOING HOME TONIGHT" no matter how many receptionists and secretaries have to die to make that happen.
I spent some time with the State Fire Association. Seems like everyone last one of those guys is missing an eye, ear or finger, and has a quietly proud story of how they traded that part of their body for some stranger's kid. I stand in awe of their dedication, sacrifice and courage.
The institutional cowardice and crutality of law enforcement stands in stark contrast.
I grew up military. What I heard over and over again was that "The honor of the unit lies with each man."
You see, the fine police officers you know? They have a DUTY to police themselves. That's why "the few bad apples" argument doesn't hold up. Those fine police officers you feel sorry for? They have a duty to ARREST and TESTIFY AGAINST those bad apples.
That's why you can't say, "It's just a few bad cops." The supposedly "good" cops have an obligation to put a stop to it, and they're shirking their duties by refusing to do so.
This makes them culpable as accomplices. That's why there are no "fine police officers" any more, because if there were, they'd clean their house.
"This law includes offenses ranging from assault and battery to simply standing too close to an officer..."
"Standing too close to an officer" is a crime? OK, that's about the walking definition of a bad law.
What was Watts' crime? He asked the officers what they were doing.
He didn't strike anyone. He didn't kick anyone. According to the record he didn't even use harsh language. Apparently our law enforcement community has become so vicious and cowardly they'll beat people bloody just for looking at them wrong.
Peter Watts is a geek scifi writer. Judging from his photos, he weighs about 160. My wife could smack him around. He's about as threatening as a tuna sandwich.
But somehow, these law enforcement officers felt they needed to beat him senseless, leave his blood all over the pavement, and then mace him for good measure when honestly, a wedgie probably would have been overkill.
Scifi novelists, small-town mayors, Chinese diplomats, 75-year-old grandmas, epileptics having a seizure -- Is there ANYONE law enforcement doesn't want to beat bloody before talking to them any more?
Oh, c'mon. We counted black people as 3/5ths of a person.:-)
Seriously, though, it's a question of where you want ultimate judicial power to reside, with the State or the Populace. I understand the Bench thinks it makes all the right decisions, and no Judge, having spent nearly a decade in study of the Law, and then a career in it, will think any jury of twelve WalMart shoppers can come to a better decision than Bench can. I've heard more than one judge openly ridicule the entire idea that twelve random people can even understand the law, much less apply it.
Which is why it is now more crucial than ever that Juries seize the power that is rightfully theirs.
College has become prohibitively expensive. I worked my way through college. Looking at costs now, there's no way I could do today what I did back then. Law school admissions are obscene. Passing the bar, making the political connections to get an appointment to the bench, getting the political clout to make decisions that matter -- judges are overwhelmingly drawn from the wealthy and connected strata of society.
Even barring corruption, of which there is an unconscionable amount, being raised in wealth makes you tend to view the poor as contemptible. It's simple psychology. Children who are told a story about an unfortunate child begin to fabricate reasons why that happened in the story. The unfortunate child was bad, lazy, breaking the rules, etc. People want to create reasons for misfortune so they can feel secure that it won't happen to them.
Which means that most judges today are fundamentally ill-prepared to dispense justice, speak truth to power, and to be the sword and shield of the poor, which according to the mottos we carve into the stone of our court buildings, is the whole reason for a justice system.
Will juries in Alabama make lousy decisions? Sure. But the cure for Alabama isn't to clip the wings of juries. The cure for Alabama is to flood the state with education and light until those cousin-loving mouth-breathers begin to get the neurons in their skulls firing...:-)
Jury Nullification was the whole point of a jury of twelve common men. The entire idea was to take the ultimate power out of the hands of the Crown/State/Judge and give it to The People, as in "We, the People."
One of the preludes to the Revolution was that King George was trying to direct verdicts using juries as political cover. George would order a guilty verdict, and then claim it wasn't his decision. He went so far as to jail some jurors who returned a "not guilty" verdict despite his instruction.
The right of juries to follow their conscience was one of the issues addressed in all the discussion around the Revolution...
When Colorado Springs announced that they were going to shut off 2/3rds of their street lights, they neglected to mention that the 1/3 that stayed on would all be in affluent neighborhoods
"The killing came a day before Colorado Springs City Councilman Sean Paige questioned in an e-mail why streetlights throughout the city had been turned off to save money while the affluent Old North End neighborhood had been spared and still had all its streetlights."
Oh, don't worry. I'm doing plenty of both today.:-)
...the importance of their computer systems...
on
Terry Childs Found Guilty
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I know absolutely nothing about the San Francisco network. But I find it interesting that Childs said, "These idiots can't be trusted with the passwords," and the second the idiots got the passwords, they published them for the world to see.
Sure enough, those idiots should not have been trusted with the passwords. Hard to fault a guy when they immediately proved him right.:-)
By the way, since this is a municipal system, here are some of the functions I've seen municipal systems handle:
1. 911 calls over VoIP. 2. Fire dispatch, as in "Building on fire here" 3. Police dispatch, as in "Crazy guy with gun over here." 4. Police data, as in "The license plate you just pulled over is driven by a violent felon." 5. Videoconferencing that connects lawyers to their clients 6. Utility billing/disconnect, as in "These people need their water/power/garbage cut off."
I could go on and on.
Wanna see your basic "evil hacker" movie play out in real life? You couldn't take over the world, but you could make some people miserable. Maybe even get a few of them killed when help doesn't arrive when it should...
Not all computer networks are about making sure Sally in accounting gets her email.
Slandering the jury is totally appropriate. It's part of the system. They made a bad call. They made a ridiculously bad call. They made a howlingly, ridiculously bad call. Morons, one and all.
Part of the loveliness of living in this country is that I now get to stand up and sing out like Monty Python that twelve mouth-breathing baboons -- no offense to the ACTUAL baboons in their red-butted glory, mind you -- twelve pin-headed boot-licking idiots just sent a man to prison for poor social skills.
And it is entirely appropriate that the denizens of this board call them on it.
First, Socialists? Read my other posts. I'm the resident hippie communist.:-)
Second, low flush toilets were and still are a horrible idea. Look at the studies. People now, on average, flush their 1.6 gallon toilets two or three times. Because of the multiple flushes, we now use more water than the old 3.5 gpf toilets did. The tinfoil hat crowd notes that most of the political push for "low-flow" toilets came from the manufacturers who wanted to turn repair jobs into new sales.
Yes, I miss my old toilet.:-)
Third, I don't own any guns. Can't really imagine shooting anyone. Would much rather face Judgement Day as someone who got shot than someone who killed.
Finally, I learned my lesson about letting someone else control my thermostat in college. Rented an "all utilities paid" apartment once. The management company made a ton of money by setting the thermostat at 90 in the summer and 40 in the winter.
Let me put it this way. Do you really want to trust your thermostat to the same Enron crowd that caused rolling blackouts in California to line their own pockets? How long do you think it would be before "classes of service" came into being to keep rich neighborhoods cool at the expense of poor ones?
Cool. Got promised that for the first time in 1971.
I'm still waiting.
Currently such panels can almost pay for themselves before you have to replace them.
Don't get me wrong. I LOVE the idea of solar power. I yearn for the day when we cover a quarter of New Mexico in solar panels and provide cheap clean electrcity for the whole country. I can't wait until the day we no longer send men into the coal mines to die at the hands of greedy bastards.
I realize Poe's Law addresses fundamentalists -- roughly stated, "It is impossible to distinguish between sincere Fundamentalists and Parody of them" but we need a more general law of that special case to describe your post.
You should forgo roots, stability and long-term relationships -- i.e. your life -- to further your company's aims -- aka your career ambitions.
The sad thing is I can't tell if this is tongue-in-cheek or not.
Oh please. The tulip mania had the practical outcome of leaving Holland awash in pretty flowers for centuries to come, contributing to the tourist trade.
You don't think our current financial geniuses and other leaders could come up with something that practical and beneficial, do you?
If you are working your way up the tech ladder you should really be living as transient a lifestyle as is possible. This means renting rather than buying a home, not buying roomfulls of furniture (harder to move all of your stuff), limiting debt, etc.
Renting rather than buying. Forgoing the one investment the middle class can make to build wealth.
Not buying roomfuls of furniture. Living like a starving student forever. Unable to hold something even as simple as a Saturday barbecue at your place.
As transient a lifestyle as possible. No marriage. No children. No long-term friends. Never putting down roots. Never building a support system. Depending on the company for everything.
You're going to arrive at 40 to find you've sacrificed everything for a career that couldn't care less about you.
Slashdot Mirror
they need only act when they perceive a threat
Dammit, Boys, IT'S A CANADIAN! Git him before they burn the White House again!
Officers claim they have no obligation to put themselves in harm's way because they actually don't.
Thanks. I was wondering when our boys in blue would give up even the pretense of that "protect and serve" nonsense. Now we can all acknowledge them as the knuckle-dragging cowardly bullies they are, instead of "the City's Finest."
BTW, no, "crutality" isn't a word. It's a typo. Probably because I was thinking of the word "cruelty" when I was typing "brutality."
Try not to tase me for it. :-)
but what trained officers are supposed to do is expect the subject to do the worst possible thing...
No. Not even soldiers are trained to do that. Civilian law enforcement is trained to use good judgement. It is more important to know when NOT to shoot than it is to know when TO shoot. Keep running Mad Max fantasies through your head like anyone who COULD pull a gun WILL pull a gun, and you end up shooting a kid for no good reason like one ex-officer I personally know.
If you haven't been in a situation where a person wants to argue with cops and then for some unknown reason pulls out a gun,
Here's another nonsense argument I'm sick of. Since you're pressing the point, yes, I have been shot at. No, it's not pleasant at all. No, the fear that someone MIGHT take a shot at you is no excuse for beating civilians bloody.
My Lai was a national disgrace. The Wikileaks/Reuters video depicts cold-blooded murder. You can hang them all as far as we're concerned. We don't want to share a uniform with filth like that.
A jury found him guilty of felony non-compliance, so he must have done more than just stepped out of his car.
Actually, from the reports, that's EXACTLY what he did, and the judge basically cut him loose for it.
he did so at border patrol, which by definition carries a higher risk for officers,
I am so sick of hearing this. Cowardice is no excuse for brutality. I grew up military. Come to one of my family dinners and let the Vietnam veterans in my family explain what a dangerous job is.
Looking at the Department of Labor statistics, being a cop is a VERY safe job. You know who gets killed on the job more often than police officers? Construction workers. Cab drivers. Fast food workers. Hotel clerks.
Hop over to the forums on "Officer.com" and listen to the boys on blue in their own words for a while. They'll tell you quite openly they feel absolutely no obligation to put themselves in harm's way for the "sheeple," and they proudly proclaim "I AM GOING HOME TONIGHT" no matter how many receptionists and secretaries have to die to make that happen.
I spent some time with the State Fire Association. Seems like everyone last one of those guys is missing an eye, ear or finger, and has a quietly proud story of how they traded that part of their body for some stranger's kid. I stand in awe of their dedication, sacrifice and courage.
The institutional cowardice and crutality of law enforcement stands in stark contrast.
I grew up military. What I heard over and over again was that "The honor of the unit lies with each man."
You see, the fine police officers you know? They have a DUTY to police themselves. That's why "the few bad apples" argument doesn't hold up. Those fine police officers you feel sorry for? They have a duty to ARREST and TESTIFY AGAINST those bad apples.
That's why you can't say, "It's just a few bad cops." The supposedly "good" cops have an obligation to put a stop to it, and they're shirking their duties by refusing to do so.
This makes them culpable as accomplices. That's why there are no "fine police officers" any more, because if there were, they'd clean their house.
"This law includes offenses ranging from assault and battery to simply standing too close to an officer..."
"Standing too close to an officer" is a crime? OK, that's about the walking definition of a bad law.
What was Watts' crime? He asked the officers what they were doing.
He didn't strike anyone. He didn't kick anyone. According to the record he didn't even use harsh language. Apparently our law enforcement community has become so vicious and cowardly they'll beat people bloody just for looking at them wrong.
Peter Watts is a geek scifi writer. Judging from his photos, he weighs about 160. My wife could smack him around. He's about as threatening as a tuna sandwich.
But somehow, these law enforcement officers felt they needed to beat him senseless, leave his blood all over the pavement, and then mace him for good measure when honestly, a wedgie probably would have been overkill.
Scifi novelists, small-town mayors, Chinese diplomats, 75-year-old grandmas, epileptics having a seizure -- Is there ANYONE law enforcement doesn't want to beat bloody before talking to them any more?
Oh, c'mon. We counted black people as 3/5ths of a person. :-)
Seriously, though, it's a question of where you want ultimate judicial power to reside, with the State or the Populace. I understand the Bench thinks it makes all the right decisions, and no Judge, having spent nearly a decade in study of the Law, and then a career in it, will think any jury of twelve WalMart shoppers can come to a better decision than Bench can. I've heard more than one judge openly ridicule the entire idea that twelve random people can even understand the law, much less apply it.
Which is why it is now more crucial than ever that Juries seize the power that is rightfully theirs.
College has become prohibitively expensive. I worked my way through college. Looking at costs now, there's no way I could do today what I did back then. Law school admissions are obscene. Passing the bar, making the political connections to get an appointment to the bench, getting the political clout to make decisions that matter -- judges are overwhelmingly drawn from the wealthy and connected strata of society.
Even barring corruption, of which there is an unconscionable amount, being raised in wealth makes you tend to view the poor as contemptible. It's simple psychology. Children who are told a story about an unfortunate child begin to fabricate reasons why that happened in the story. The unfortunate child was bad, lazy, breaking the rules, etc. People want to create reasons for misfortune so they can feel secure that it won't happen to them.
Which means that most judges today are fundamentally ill-prepared to dispense justice, speak truth to power, and to be the sword and shield of the poor, which according to the mottos we carve into the stone of our court buildings, is the whole reason for a justice system.
Will juries in Alabama make lousy decisions? Sure. But the cure for Alabama isn't to clip the wings of juries. The cure for Alabama is to flood the state with education and light until those cousin-loving mouth-breathers begin to get the neurons in their skulls firing... :-)
Jury Nullification was the whole point of a jury of twelve common men. The entire idea was to take the ultimate power out of the hands of the Crown/State/Judge and give it to The People, as in "We, the People." One of the preludes to the Revolution was that King George was trying to direct verdicts using juries as political cover. George would order a guilty verdict, and then claim it wasn't his decision. He went so far as to jail some jurors who returned a "not guilty" verdict despite his instruction. The right of juries to follow their conscience was one of the issues addressed in all the discussion around the Revolution...
http://www.fark.com/cgi/comments.pl?IDLink=5249894
When Colorado Springs announced that they were going to shut off 2/3rds of their street lights, they neglected to mention that the 1/3 that stayed on would all be in affluent neighborhoods
http://www.gazette.com/articles/springs-97715-police-colorado.html
El Ranchito employee gunned down in darkened parking lot
"The killing came a day before Colorado Springs City Councilman Sean Paige questioned in an e-mail why streetlights throughout the city had been turned off to save money while the affluent Old North End neighborhood had been spared and still had all its streetlights."
Oh, don't worry. I'm doing plenty of both today. :-)
I know absolutely nothing about the San Francisco network. But I find it interesting that Childs said, "These idiots can't be trusted with the passwords," and the second the idiots got the passwords, they published them for the world to see.
Sure enough, those idiots should not have been trusted with the passwords. Hard to fault a guy when they immediately proved him right. :-)
By the way, since this is a municipal system, here are some of the functions I've seen municipal systems handle:
1. 911 calls over VoIP.
2. Fire dispatch, as in "Building on fire here"
3. Police dispatch, as in "Crazy guy with gun over here."
4. Police data, as in "The license plate you just pulled over is driven by a violent felon."
5. Videoconferencing that connects lawyers to their clients
6. Utility billing/disconnect, as in "These people need their water/power/garbage cut off."
I could go on and on.
Wanna see your basic "evil hacker" movie play out in real life? You couldn't take over the world, but you could make some people miserable. Maybe even get a few of them killed when help doesn't arrive when it should...
Not all computer networks are about making sure Sally in accounting gets her email.
Slandering the jury is totally appropriate. It's part of the system. They made a bad call. They made a ridiculously bad call. They made a howlingly, ridiculously bad call. Morons, one and all.
Part of the loveliness of living in this country is that I now get to stand up and sing out like Monty Python that twelve mouth-breathing baboons -- no offense to the ACTUAL baboons in their red-butted glory, mind you -- twelve pin-headed boot-licking idiots just sent a man to prison for poor social skills.
And it is entirely appropriate that the denizens of this board call them on it.
First, Socialists? Read my other posts. I'm the resident hippie communist. :-)
Second, low flush toilets were and still are a horrible idea. Look at the studies. People now, on average, flush their 1.6 gallon toilets two or three times. Because of the multiple flushes, we now use more water than the old 3.5 gpf toilets did. The tinfoil hat crowd notes that most of the political push for "low-flow" toilets came from the manufacturers who wanted to turn repair jobs into new sales.
Yes, I miss my old toilet. :-)
Third, I don't own any guns. Can't really imagine shooting anyone. Would much rather face Judgement Day as someone who got shot than someone who killed.
Finally, I learned my lesson about letting someone else control my thermostat in college. Rented an "all utilities paid" apartment once. The management company made a ton of money by setting the thermostat at 90 in the summer and 40 in the winter.
Let me put it this way. Do you really want to trust your thermostat to the same Enron crowd that caused rolling blackouts in California to line their own pockets? How long do you think it would be before "classes of service" came into being to keep rich neighborhoods cool at the expense of poor ones?
Cool. Got promised that for the first time in 1971.
I'm still waiting.
Currently such panels can almost pay for themselves before you have to replace them.
Don't get me wrong. I LOVE the idea of solar power. I yearn for the day when we cover a quarter of New Mexico in solar panels and provide cheap clean electrcity for the whole country. I can't wait until the day we no longer send men into the coal mines to die at the hands of greedy bastards.
It'll be voluntary today.
It'll be mandatory tomorrow.
If they weren't planning on making it mandatory, they wouldn't do it in the first place.
Seen it a billion times.
Kratos laughs at your facial recognition software.
...why did he just start playing William Bell on "Fringe?"
Sheesh, gimme a smilie or something. I'm lost in Poe's Law on this post.
Kid, I think you and I have different definitions of "long-term." :-)
I realize Poe's Law addresses fundamentalists -- roughly stated, "It is impossible to distinguish between sincere Fundamentalists and Parody of them" but we need a more general law of that special case to describe your post.
You should forgo roots, stability and long-term relationships -- i.e. your life -- to further your company's aims -- aka your career ambitions.
The sad thing is I can't tell if this is tongue-in-cheek or not.
These are the cheerful murderers we want to give control of routing and DNS to?!
Oh please. The tulip mania had the practical outcome of leaving Holland awash in pretty flowers for centuries to come, contributing to the tourist trade.
You don't think our current financial geniuses and other leaders could come up with something that practical and beneficial, do you?
Should have used "depraved."
If you are working your way up the tech ladder you should really be living as transient a lifestyle as is possible. This means renting rather than buying a home, not buying roomfulls of furniture (harder to move all of your stuff), limiting debt, etc.
Renting rather than buying. Forgoing the one investment the middle class can make to build wealth.
Not buying roomfuls of furniture. Living like a starving student forever. Unable to hold something even as simple as a Saturday barbecue at your place.
As transient a lifestyle as possible. No marriage. No children. No long-term friends. Never putting down roots. Never building a support system. Depending on the company for everything.
You're going to arrive at 40 to find you've sacrificed everything for a career that couldn't care less about you.