Check out these Crips and Bloods:
Over the past four years, more than 100 people have won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil rights violations [by the Baltimore police department]. Victims include a 15-year-old boy riding a dirt bike, a 26-year-old pregnant accountant who had witnessed a beating, a 50-year-old woman selling church raffle tickets, a 65-year-old church deacon rolling a cigarette and an 87-year-old grandmother aiding her wounded grandson.
According to state law, the Baltimore cops cannot be sued for more than $200,000.
Evidently, they need to add a zero to that.
David Simon weighs in.
I find his latest statement hypocritical…because he also said this:
“We’re either going to do that in some practical way when things get bad enough or we’re going to keep going the way we’re going, at which point there’s going to be enough people standing on the outside of this mess that somebody’s going to pick up a brick, because you know when people get to the end there’s always the brick. I hope we go for the first option but I’m losing faith.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/david-simon-capitalism-marx-two-americas-wire
The people are at their end…
Based only on the quote, it’s not hypocritical. He said what people are going to do not whether it will work or whether it’s should happen.
The despair and frustration we read in the exchanges between Simon and various people in his comments thread are chock full of frustration, anger and despair. I’ll be damned if I know what these people should do tonight, and it’s frightening to see that trying to talk tonight’s problem through can lead nowhere. I know the wholesale withdrawal of public and private money, physical and social resources from minority populated areas of cities like this, combined with the essential and permanent police state which are pressed upon the residents, has grown so monstrous that it must be made to change as quickly as possible.
While it must be upsetting for Mayor Rawlings-Blake to witness her city on fire, and while Baltimore certainly has a number of great things about it, it is upsetting to hear her complaining tonight about the looters who are debasing “our great city.” Mayor, tens or hundreds of thousands of Baltimore residents are telling you that your city is pretty shitty to them. And there is plenty of evidence that this very large portion of your population is right about that. And it sounds like many of them have been telling you this for a while. And it sounds like your responses so far have been inadequate.
Nonviolence as Compliance; Officials calling for calm can offer no rational justification for Gray’s death, and so they appeal for order.
Also, billmon’s twitter feed is just on fire tonight. But I’m always a sap for someone who really, truly, sticks it to the fucking libertarians (god I hate them):
Should be noted that I saw the numbers Booman quoted via Friedersdorf several days ago.
Why should that be noted? It’s fine to highlight these things, but the point is that you cannot end police brutality and occupation without economic revival; economic stagnation and crumbling which is a direct result of racist state and private policy, of which the glibs either wish to continue and amplify.
See also Mark Ames:
pando.com/2014/09/25/ferguson-is-our-libertarian-moment-but-not-in-the-way-some-libertarians-want-yo
u-to-believe/
They want lower taxes? Great. So where does the funding for police come from, when you believe the only function that the state and loc government is responsible for is arming the police and protecting property? Oh, fleecing the poor and minority populations! That is the essence of the police state and white supremacy: stealing from and plunder of wealth from said populations.
None of this is to say you support or endorse such things — I know you don’t — but I see no reason to give glibs credit for anything. If I was a law maker id make common cause wrt specific legislation (like Booker/Gillibrand/Paul). But that’s about all we have in common, and with those reforms passed, they are once again my enemy.
Another example is the Kochs, or even Gary Johnson. “But the Kochs and Johnson are pro choice, want to end the war on drugs, and are civil libertarians!”
How do they vote? Their wallets, every time. And even if they got elected, which judges do they pick who are arbiters on how the law should and can be enforced? Oh, they always value property, even at the expense of human beings (or treat being a woman as property as a result). So their views on individual matters means nothing.
Just a tangent.
You may be preaching to the choir here. But do you suppose economics has something to do with Iraq? When people – young men – have nothing to look forward to other than more of the same or jail bad things happen. I still think we can fix this. But we need to get the people to take control of it. Protests help but the only real solution is change through the ballot box. How can we get everyone out there to vote?
…real solution is change through the ballot box. How can we get everyone out there to vote? Build it and they’ll come?
Seriously, those ballot boxes offer bait and switch change. Let’s not blame non-voters for declining to choose between which candidate is going to send their jobs overseas the faster, which one will say yes the least to Wall St., which one will fund the MIC the most lavishly, or privatize schools, roads, and health care most quickly.
Some large portion of the electorate has been showing up for decades with the expectation that contraceptives and abortions will cease to exist. As if the choice were between a woman having legal control over her reproductive health care decisions and denial of such medical services. The choice is legal and safe or illegal and unsafe and/or ineffective (except for those of wealth who always have access to whatever they want). Same with drugs. There is no shortage of personal activities that others don’t like and are only too happy to demand laws outlawing such activities.
Make votes matter. Too many politicians have abandoned their end of the deal with the public that votes for them.
Too many people take the attitude that it’s not worth voting because the politicians have been bought off. Getting voter behavior to change is harder because politicians have in fact been bought off of fear large-dollar campaigns against them if they do the right thing.
Ferguson may have an intractable budget problem, but Baltimore doesn’t. Plus, Gray’s and Brown’s deaths are just flat-out psychopathy. Both were just going down the street and a cop decided to kill them. That’s not needed even for a white supremacy police state. This is much worse than even brutal economic exploitation. This is killing black people for the fun of it.
Noted because he was digging into the stats of this report and discussing it before the people here. And the response is to slag on him? Confront the issue of where you get those resources sure.
On a more policy note, you can’t have economic revival without ending the law enforcement practices that keep people down and cut off any economic revival efforts at the knees. War on drugs? Police taking you in meaning you lose your job.
Personally what I’d say I have in common with libertarians is that I’d like to leave people alone as much as possible. Its that last phrase where the lines are drawn differently.
Putting it all in perspective that even someone like me that cringes at violence and destruction — Baltimore Orioles COO John Angelos:
Maybe this jackass could be a bit more circumspect about his tax funded circus and the lost futures it represents to communities in need.
It’s all good for Larry Hogan. He might become a Vice-Presidential candidate just like his predecessor Spiro Agnew.
By coinkydink, Police Commissioner Batts is a former police chief in — ta-daaaa- Oakland, California.
Also, the school systems shut down and sent kids home at the same time that the mayor ordered the transit system to shut down. Thousands of kids dumped out mid-trip with no way to get home. Some parents are still trying to find their kids.
Around 20 of those kids got kettled near where the police lines were. The reports are that some of those kids popped off and took it out on police cars.
Congratulations, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. Intentionally or through police-Fusion Center procedural baloney, you sure know how to create the stochastic violence needed to escalate the situation and force the intervention of the National Guard. Nancy Pelosi’s dad had the 82nd Airborne there in 1968; you might try for that.
But Tommy d’Allessandro didn’t make the situation worse. Unlike 2015, there were no nonviolent peaceful protests after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and no police department trying to silence them. The anger at the assassination was much more immediate and intense. He got worried as the roving crowds started moving toward the more white neighborhoods.
This is where the “law and order” meme got attached to the Nixon campaign and the vice-presidency of Spiro Agnew. And proved the 1966 election of Agnew as governor over segregationist Democrat Mahoney a true Hobson’s choice.
Swedish police officers on NYC vacation subdue fight on subway. Detain aggressor and comfort injured victim. Honored by NYC police chief Bratton.
Yes, Chief Bratton, just like your NYC police officers handle situations. (Surprised he didn’t mention that the Swedish cops weren’t hampered by service revolvers and Tasers that frequently fire all on their own before the cops initiated their approved take down procedures.)
Two or three days later, Robbery suspect fatally shot by police in East Village
Both police officers were hospitalized with non-life threatening injuries. (LEOs nationwide to take notice that this is the updated version of how to score that get out of jail free card.)
How about we send US cops to Sweden and the UK for training instead of Israel?
Interesting to me is that (in remembering my time there) the Swedish police are very visibly armed. Yet they never use their service weapons.
They might have the type of service weapons that don’t spontaneously jump into a cop’s hand and automatically fire.
thank you for the explanation about the monetary limits.
Being from a city that has paid out $500 million over the past 10 years to settle police misconduct suits, that number I read from Baltimore seemed so small to me.
“According to state law, the Baltimore cops cannot be sued for more than $200,000.”
I abominate repeating myself — it is disrespectful, for a start — but I will keep saying this until someone listens.
It’s the unaccountability, stupid.
This is the common thread. It is the background to police misconduct as well as to the concentration of wealth.
Sometimes it is explicit, as in the above-cited statutory limitation; more often, it is implicit, resulting from the exercise, at some level, of “prosecutorial discretion” — which is merely a euphemism for corruption.
It is the background to all the Tea Party/Christian-Fascist screaming about “freedom” and “liberty” — which today are merely euphemisms for unaccountability.
We got where we are by letting people off the hook. It doesn’t matter who, it doesn’t matter for what. Every instance is equally corrosive.
The law is the thing you enforce against your friends. If you can’t do that, you don’t have a system. You have a jungle. A jungle may be a very stable and orderly place, to all outward appearances; there may be long periods of deceptive quiet.
Quit framing this in terms of the victims. They don’t matter. The only thing that matters is that police are unaccountable. The victim-selection algorithms are local and fungible. There are many rural areas where the black population is zero or negligible. In those places, the targets of convenience may be Native Americans, or certain categories of poor whites who have the wrong affiliations. Take race off the table and the police would instantly pivot to some other target; the problem would still be the same problem, which is the unaccountability.
Order without law.
Absolutely raise (or abolish) the limit.
But why should taxpayers be on the hook for all that official misbehavior?
25% of the settlement cost to be taken from the cops retirement account.
25% of the settlement cost to be taken from whatever city official HIRED the cop.
Years ago the Police were known for the moto “To Protect and serve”. The problem is that police forces are not training officers to help people any more. They have decided that their role in society is to oppress and they do so with the utmost diligence against minorities and the poor.
The first time I saw “protect and serve” in relation to the police was when they were rebuilding their PR after the police riots in Chicago in 1968.
That’s also when they came out with the too-clever-by-half “Pride. Integrity. Guts.”