I see the opposite side of it, every day. The area where I work can be less than savory at times. It’s not unusual for a car to get towed in after hours and left outside the gate, and in the morning a window is busted out. One night a vagrant cut through the fence and got into an unlocked car, looking for a place to sleep. I’ve had a strung-out junkie walk in the back door looking for a handout. That kind of neighborhood. And yet day to day I see the cops trying to keep the peace, go above and beyond to help those in need, and maintain a positive presence in the community.
So much so that they have been hamstrung in protecting the law abiding citizens among us. Three times in Feb our shop helper has had to paint over graffiti on the fence and wall. I complain to the cops but they say they can’t do anything about it. Three months ago the street 3 blocks away was shut down, the police responded to a domestic dispute, the police pursued the suspect who eventually aimed a gun at an officer, who then shot the suspect. Instead of thanking the police for eliminating a criminal, the public outcry was asking whether they had to use deadly force.
A thief driving a stolen car deserves whatever he gets.
Crime happens in every city, big and small. But it seems some places will tolerate more of it, and I don’t just mean law enforcement. I mean the public attitude in general, which is what drives law enforcement to some degree.
I knew a body shop manager who suffered enough theft and vandalism from his parking lot that he put razor wire along the top of the chain link fence. The city made him remove it because it would cause serious injury to someone hopping the fence. Protect the criminals but not the auto shop owner.
In terms of criminal liability, that’s fine with me, but don’t let that get in the way of asking whether the police should have called off the pursuit sooner. That’s still a conversation worth having.
Anyone with two braincells can tell that the “show” is being filmed on a closed set in a highly controlled environment. There are health/safety visible in most scenes (of the two or three episodes I’ve seen.). If people actually did exactly what they do in the show; street racing would be about as safe as going to a legit drag strip.
Like I said, it’s all fake. But that doesn’t change the show’s theme. They have all kinds of fake “reality” shows, but this one stands out, for the wrong reasons. And it’s the one brain cell folks I worry about.
That’s a great example of the problem I’m talking about. I postulated a teenager getting pulled over by the cops at night, and you immediately assumed the kid had stolen the car he was driving. I’m sure you didn’t do it intentionally but there’s a real “if you aren’t doing anything wrong the cops will leave you alone” mentality in this country that is simply not borne out by the evidence.
As to deserving whatever they get, well, we disagree there too. The consequences need to be in line with the crime. It’s probably safe to assume that you aren’t in favor of the death penalty if a teenager steals a car for a joyride. But there’s a very real danger that the death penalty, carried out summarily by law enforcement, is exactly what the teenager will get. After all, George Floyd got the death penalty merely for being suspected of passing a counterfeit $20 bill.
If the police do not want their actions questioned, then they should make a better effort to see that their actions do not merit questioning.
If a kid throws a rock through your window and you replace the glass, and then the kid throws another rock through the window and you replace the glass, and then the kid throws another rock through your window and you replace the glass, and then you wake up one morning to find your window broken and a rock on the floor, it’s reasonable to suspect the kid did it. Even if this time the rock was just kicked up by your own snow blower. The kid has established a pattern of bad behavior, and if the kid wants to avoid people suspecting him of bad behavior even when he hasn’t done anything, he needs to stop behaving badly in general.
Cops have established an overall reputation for abuse of power, and it’s not undeserved. That doesn’t mean there aren’t good cops - of course there are, but their good behavior gets overshadowed by bad cops and a system which protects them from consequences when they abuse the badge. Police chases are part of that problem. Some criminals need to be chased, but that list should be limited to the people who will present a great danger to the public if they are not chased and captured. A kid stealing a car does not automatically present a great danger to the public, but chasing him so that he is motivated to speed and run red lights does, as is obvious.
Even if you subscribe to the idea that the kid “deserves what he gets” for stealing the car, I find it hard to believe that you think that woman I mentioned deserved the death penalty merely for being in the kid’s way as he fled the cops. But she was executed regardless, and it almost certainly wouldn’t have happened if the cops hadn’t kept the chase going.
Maybe that is true in the Police Departments you have work in. My experience in the 4 departments I have worked in , in the last 30 years is different than yours.
Well actually, if you have 100 officers covering a city 24/7 you have 21 shifts and usually a city has at least four “districts” that is 84 shifts. now assign those officers to their shifts and you have “detachments” of four or five. An officer working graveyard may never work with an officer working days. So, the four officers working with the “bad apple” complain to the Sargent, Sargent does nothing
now you have two “bad apples” out of the 100.
Hindsight is great, what I would have done differently, is hang out will Bill Gates in High School instead of the gearheads.
We get a lot of alignment work from a couple of body shops. My alignment whiz is a young man of Native American heritage. He was stopped on a test drive, didn’t do anything wrong. Cops just wanted to know why an Indian in work clothes and a half-assed mustache was driving a new Mercedes through the park. He did what was asked, everything went OK. Good thing he didn’t panic and speed off, could have ended badly. Is it fair that he is subject to that treatment? Not at all. But fair or not that’s the reality.
Yes we do. I doubt that will change.
As far as I’m concerned a thief who steals my property is a great danger. Horse rustling was once punishable by death, and I’m OK with that, as long as the rule is applied equitably and known to all.
When I was in high school my friend was driving her Subaru Brat on the Harbor Freeway when an oncoming semi trailer lost a wheel. That wheel went right into her windshield and killed her. She didn’t deserve to be killed that way. The world is a dangerous place, even if you’re an innocent bystander.
FWIW, I think the loose wheel problem is easier to fix than the police problem. And part of the problem is that there is not widespread public support to reform law enforcement. Overt racism is alive and well everywhere around us, an that’s just one part of the problem.
Years ago in Atl,Ga there was a wrong way car chase on the Atl beltway, I 285. the police chased the prep halfway around the loop, I don’t remember what they wanted him for,( but it must have been bad). There were several deaths due to this pursuit, and a a result the Police were forbidden from high-speed chases. Plus the county I lived in in Md, had a notice in ALL county police cars, “This vehicle does Not exceed 55 MPH for any reason”! So no HS pursuits!
Given that you are aware that this event occurred, it’s surprising that you would so eagerly offer a blanket defense of cops. Pulling someone over and harassing them solely because non-White people shouldn’t be in nice cars is abhorrent and indefensible.
It’s a myth that horse rustling carried the death penalty. People killed for stealing horses were killed extra-judicially, or in other words a gang of angry townfolk got together and hanged him without bothering with the justice system. When a horse thief was captured by law enforcement, he was jailed, not executed.
No, she didn’t. But you’re conflating accidents with manslaughter, and I suspect you know that. Just because some people die in accidents does not mean that we shrug our shoulders and say “whelp, kill anyone you want as long as you get to be in an exciting police chase.”
Sure there is, but there’s also a vocal establishment bent on thwarting that support by mischaracterizing it as violent mobs that should be ignored.
It most definitely is unfair and illegal to profile someone that way. The problem is that you can only redress this violation of the law through civil court, not criminal court.
To see you try to excuse this kind of profiling as “the reality” rather than being a behavior in dire need of correction tells me you’re willing to live with it because it doesn’t affect you directly.
When people used to hang horse thieves, they didn’t stop there. That was in the Wild West, where merely being accused of stealing a horse was enough to get you hanged. That’s a mob mentality. Put down your torch and pitchfork for a minute and think this through.
I’ve never worked in a police department, but I’ve been meeting with my former Criminal Justice professor, who is a retired police chief from Ohio, and a couple of his local police chief friends. In early 2020, before the U.S. was responding to the worldwide spread of COVID-19, we started meeting for brunch once a month, but we only got one brunch in before we had to indefinitely postpone our meetings. We have met virtually a couple times during the pandemic, in my capacity as a student of public policy.
One thing I’ve learned from these meetings is that police officers love to gossip, so while it may be true that not all 101 police officers work together on a daily basis, many of them see each other in daily roll call, and everyone knows which officers are dangerous to work with, and which ones are better to work with.
Chances are someone from Internal Affairs knows who the “bad apples” are too, but that blue wall of silence protects the bad apples, even when everyone knows who they are.
First, they aren’t my friends. One is a retired police officer and an adjunct professor who taught one of my undergrad classes. The others are his friends. These gentlemen are taking time out of their busy schedules to discuss public policy as it relates to law enforcement, not to socialize.
With that said, if they told me they were tolerating bad police officers on their respective forces, I wouldn’t need to resort to guilt-by-association, because I’d have a confession.