from the us-vs.-them-means-they-still-get-to-kill-us-with-impunity dept
Mon, Jan 9th 2023 08:10pm -
Tim Cushing
"Law enforcement agencies have no interest in tracking how often
officers kill people. Despite all the talk about police reform, very few
states require accurate reporting on deadly force deployments.
Even the DOJ doesn’t care. The federal face of law enforcement has
been required to compile this data for over two decades. It has yet to
provide an accurate account
of US law enforcement deadly force use. Part of that isn’t the DOJ’s
fault. It can’t mandate reporting due to the US Constitution, which
limits how much direct intervention the federal government can engage in
when dealing with state and local level issues.
The other factor in this perpetual under-reporting is due to the DOJ’s disinterest in obtaining accurate force deployment stats. Doing the job correctly would just turn local agencies with a predilection for killing against the DOJ, which means less cooperation when things the DOJ actually considers important (drug busts, forfeitures, etc.) are on the line.
This means that, for years, the private sector has been forced to do the government’s work
for it. Multiple efforts have been mounted to accurately track killings
by police officers, utilizing open-source data and public record
requests to provide a fuller picture than the DOJ — with all of its
billions in funding — has continually failed to provide.
What’s treated as “official” by government agencies is a massive misrepresentation
of the actual facts. The private sector doesn’t need billions to
accomplish what governments won’t. All it needs is people interested in
reporting the truth.
And the uncomfortable truth is that law enforcement at all levels
hasn’t been reformed, at least not noticeably. The tally for last year
outpaces the years leading up to the supposed law enforcement reckoning
that followed the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. Here’s Trone Dowd, reporting for Vice News:
Mapping Police Violence’s 2022 tracking found that 1,176 people died during encounters with police last year, the highest number the organization has ever recorded. Samuel Sinyangwe, the creator of the project, said the number includes
anyone who was killed by police, be it by shooting or other forms of
force. According to Mapping Police Violence, police killed the
equivalent of 3.2 people per day in 2022—and there were only 12 days in
the whole year when a deadly police encounter was not reported.
Suppose you were an idiot. You might respond to this by saying
something like, “Well, cops routinely deal with violent and dangerous
people, so it’s no surprise they’ve killed [this year’s death total].”
Well, let’s talk about the “danger” and “violence” you (a rhetorical
idiot) might present as a supposedly valid counterpoint. Here’s more
data… again not collected, compiled, reported, collated, documented, or distributed by any actual government-powered clearinghouse.
More than a third of those killed by police encountered the
authorities during a traffic stop, a mental health and welfare check, or
a non-violent offense.
Cops turn routine stops into dangerous encounters by engaging in pretextual stops
predicated on minor moving violations that soon escalate into
full-blown, warrantless, ad hoc criminal investigations that convert
“routine stops” into Ralph-Wiggum-on-the-bus without any assistance from
those being pulled over.
When you create the danger, you can’t use that danger to excuse your
actions. I mean, theoretically. In practicality, it happens all the
time. So, if traffic stops turn deadly, it’s probably because officers
are engaging in fishing expeditions, rather than getting to the alleged
point of the stop.
The other cases are the unhealthy side effects of sending cops out to
“help” people. That’s not their job and it’s certainly nothing they’re
trained to do. Most training involves securing scenes and neutralizing
threats. Mental health issues present cops with people behaving
unpredictably. And their training mandates they treat unexpected
behavior as a threat to their safety. Consequently, people in need of
mental health assistance are often helped to death by officers whose mental health toolkit is composed of bad information and bullets.
The same thing can be said about welfare checks. Cops see welfare
checks as an opportunity to happen upon other criminal activity. People
in need of a welfare check seldom expect police to react with violence
to a secondhand cry for help. Case in point: Ft. Worth police officer
Aaron Dean, who was recently convicted of manslaughter for shooting a
woman through the window of her house while performing a “welfare check”
that involved him walking around in the dark outside of Atatiana
Wilson’s home without announcing his presence and shooting her within one second of spotting her through her window.
It’s all broken. And all the efforts to reform police haven’t changed
a thing. It’s still the way it’s always been. Cops can kill. With
impunity.
According to the data, 98.1 percent of officers involved in the
death of a citizen between 2013 and 2022 faced no charges. Less than 0.3
percent of officers were convicted.
There’s a lot that needs to be fixed. Unfortunately, after decades of
neglect and rot, a lot of this seems irreparable. But if we could just
stop cops from killing people they were asked to help, we might finally
see a drastic reduction in annual “killed by cops” numbers. But if cops
don’t even want to be honest about killings they assert are always
justified, what hope do we have that reform efforts that ignore the root
of the problem (entrenched law enforcement culture) will ever succeed?
Filed Under: deadly force, police, police killing, police violence
from the evil-no-longer-constrained-by-public-perception dept
Tue, Jan 10th 2023 09:30am
from the the-house-select-committee-on-waaaaaaaaah dept
It took a week of nonsense, in which we got to see just how
dysfunctional this session of the House of Representatives will be, but
late last week, Kevin McCarthy sold just enough of what was remaining of
his soul to get the Speaker of the House gavel. And, apparently, part
of the many favors he doled out to convince the nonsense peddlers who
were demanding “concessions” was to create a panel to investigate the incredibly misleading nothingburgers of the Twitter Files.
The new panel, the Select Subcommittee on the
Weaponization of the Federal Government, is partly a response to
revelations from Elon Musk in the internal documents he branded the
“Twitter Files.”
We’ve already discussed how much nothingness
is in the Twitter Files so far released, and unless they’re somehow
saving “the good stuff” for drop #69 to appease Musk’s sophomoric
sensibilities, it seems unlikely there’s any actual meat there. Even in
the rare case where the files have turned up something marginally interesting,
I have no faith that this new panel will be willing (or able) to
present it accurately or fairly. Instead, get ready for months of
grandstanding hearings, misleading leaks and releases, and a bunch of
other nonsense.
But, as I’ve been saying all along, these are the same Republicans
who would be completely losing their shit (rightly so, by the way!) if
Democrats set up a similar panel demanding that Fox News reveal its
close contacts with the Trump White House, or the details of its
editorial decision making process.
The 1st Amendment protects editorial decision making, whether its Fox
News pushing bogus stories to help Republicans in the election or
Twitter choosing to limit the spread of election misinformation (and, I
should note, these are not equivalent, at all).
But, alas, in these stupid stupid times we live in, the party of
petty snowflake grievances and no actual policy positions will grievance
away.
Filed Under: congress, house of representatives, jim jordan, kevin mccarthy, twitter files
Companies: twitter
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