TheAgitator.com
Why Not Just Shoot a Couple of People? That’ll Work, Too
Friday, April 25th, 2008So much for “community policing.”
Springfield’s men in black are returning.
The city’s new police commissioner, William Fitchet, says members of the department’s Street Crime Unit will again don black, military-style uniforms as part of his strategy to deal with youth violence.
Fitchet’s predecessor, Edward Flynn, had ditched the black attire as part of an effort to soften the image of the unit. Flynn left Springfield in January to become the police chief in Milwaukee.
Sgt. John Delaney told a city council hearing Wednesday that the stark uniforms send a message to criminals that officers are serious about making arrests.
Delaney said a sense of “fear” has been missing for the past few years.
Worth keeping in mind when you hear complaints about how the public always assumes the worst about the police. I can’t tell you how many older and retired cops have expressed their concerns to me about this kind of thing. That is, the psychology effected by military-style uniforms happens on both sides of the badge. It’s bad enough that Sgt. Delaney thinks it’s the role of the police to instill fear in the people they work for. But the flip side is even worse: When you dress cops like soldiers, some of them are going to start acting like soldiers.
Police in all cities will limit their behavior to whatever city government permits. And elected city governments will conform to the wishes of the voting public. So basically, and I think the evidence will support me on this, we’re fucked.
As the U.S. adopts more and more of the tactics common to police states, police will acquire a reputation for being corrupt thugs, just as in other police states. It’s like a cancer. By the time the patient notices the problem, it’s too late.
It would be really scary if they required the officers to get facial tattoos like mike tyson.
And soon the public will start acting like the enemy.
That cannot lead to a good result.
Part of the problem is in the goals set for the police department. If the main objective is to “fight crime” then police act accordingly: they view themselves in antagonism to ordinary citizens (most criminals come from their ranks, after all), and their cost-benefits decisions value reducing crime much more than harming innocent members of the public. Instilling fear in criminials is worth it even if non-criminals are also afraid.
Change the goal to “protecting the public”, and the attitude is different. But this also requires rewarding police for actions that protect the public as a whole, even at the cost of not reducing crime as much. I’m not sure how to do that.
“If cops continue to play at being an army of occupation, they should expect the subjects to play their role in return. Vive la resistance.”
- J. D. Tuccille
Dave,
There is some counter evidence that police agencies will constrain their actions to the degree permitted by city government: In California jurisdictions where medical cannabis is permitted under local and state law, local police often collaborate with federal multi-jurisdictional antidrug task forces to enforce the stricter federal standard, thereby subverting the wishes of the state and local voting publics.
There is, I think an institutional culture common to modern law enforcement that transcends law, even federal law. Thanks to decades of hollywood crime movie propaganda, law enforcement agents have a mental profile of the sorts of people who they need to “take down”, and they will use any means they can get away with, legal or no, to “win” the conflict of “cops versus crooks”.
fear=respect.
right?
Back in the 1950s cops wore their traditional blue uniforms. They did not Mirandize arrestees. They routinely used extra-judicial violence to enact street justice. They used racial profiling. They sometimes coerced confessions, i.e., the infamous “fifth degree.” The right to counsel, right to remain silent, and rights of suspects generally were minimal compared to today. Police shootings were higher per capita than today, and the Supreme Court had not yet said that deadly force could be limited in effecting a felony arrest. “Stop or I’ll shoot,” really happened and was employed as an arrest technique.
This kind of maudlin false history of the “great cops of the past” does not stand up to scrutiny. Crime is high. It’s not as high as in the 1980s, thank God, and this has a lot to do with the equivalent of locking up Al Capone for tax evasion, i.e., long mandatory minimums for violent drug dealers who are convicted of the much easier to prove drug and firearm possession offenses.
This is why libetarianism is so out of touch. Most of us don’t like criminals. Most of us want criminals to be afraid of the police. These cops work in gang-infested inner cities, where open air drug markets and other kinds of incivility are common. It’s not like white suburbia. These people are out of control and should be afraid of the cops. Their shamelessness is a big part of the problem. Life was better when the public supported the cops and demanded the thugs at least respect the community’s authority.
So I agree with your argument but for different reasons: life was better in the 1950s when cops had more power and more respect and criminals were more afraid of them and the judicial system than they are today.
Lior,
I think you make a really good point. People at any job will tailor their actions to the activities they find to be of the most value to them. If you work in a job in customer service and the company you work for tends to promote the people who get the least negative feedback, then if you want to get promoted you’re likely going to do what you can not to piss off your customers so you won’t get negative feedback. Whatever the criteria are for advancement, those are going to be the criteria that the workers will try to do better at.
By extension, when cops get recognition and advancement for busting up drug rings, big arrest numbers, or writing a lot of citations, then that’s what they’re going to focus on doing. As has been said before, the big problem is that we usually don’t recognize police for keeping a community happy because there’s not always a tangible connection between the police officer’s actions and the end result so it often goes unnoticed by supervisors, the press, government officials, etc. It seems that the biggest problem isn’t necessarily the officers themselves (most of whom are just trying to do a good job while maintaining a career) but the systems that departments use to evaluate their personnel.
Dr. Reality,
I don’t agree with your assessment that life is better under a police state where the cops are free to do what they want. In that case all that happens is the collective group that is favored by those in power (in the 1950s that would be white people) will get preferential treatment at the expense of those who are unpopular. I have no interest in going back to that, regardless of what false sense of security that creates.
But I do agree with you that people tend to overrate how police acted in the past. Police abuses were probably as frequent or more frequent back in the day than they are now…but in the 50s we didn’t have bloggers, or video cameras, or citizen groups to document and spread the word about them. Our news then came through the mainstream press, and they were often a pretty limited and biased source of information that missed a lot of what was going on.
Dr. Reality-
The 50s WERE better police-wise. Our prisons didn’t start over-flowing until Nixon and Reagan started pushing the ‘drug war’. No knock raids were almost unheard of. There were no SWAT teams. Look how many federal agents carry guns (EPA, etc) now vs then. Look at traffic stops now- police routinely search cars and occupants without cause. DWI checkpoints don’t stop DWIs, but they intrude on us. Seat belt laws, speed traps, etc have changed the police department’s motto to “To Serve and Collect” instead of ‘To Serve and Protect’.
Next time, support your claims with facts that can be confirmed.
Yep. Technology will definitely complicate matters for cops who routinely abuse citizens. Lies don’t do generally compete well against raw video footage. But, when it becomes a crime to record cops (as it eventually will), we’ll be right back where we are now.
“life was better in the 1950s”
Bwahahaha!
I hate nostalgia, and those that engage in “life was better when…” arguments are morons. Life has never been better than it is today, and it will be even better tomorrow.
Matt, you are absolutely correct. I’m getting to the age where I’m starting to hear my peers say “we never had that sort of thing when I was a kid”. I have to call bullshit almost every time. Murders, drugs, pregnant teens, school shootings, disrespectful teens, you name it, we had it. There are many things in the news that shock me, but very few that surprise me. Everybody wants to remember the good, never the bad.
Nowadays, everyone has a computer, there are great computer games, the internet has put almost all knowledge at your fingertips, booze is now available on Sunday, porn is legal, and women are easier. So, in terms of the things that matter to me most, I think you’re right, but I suspect those who make up the exploding prison population might disagree.
Dave - That’s a good point. I don’t mean to say that everything today is better, but on balance the things that have improved outweigh the things that have slipped.
“booze is now available on Sunday, porn is legal, and women are easier”
Is this an argument in favor of today’s society, or against it? I don’t think you’ll find many people saying that those are GOOD things, even if they think they should be legal.
Once again proving that libertarianism is a philosophy for men without children.
Sydney - I think all those are good things. And I have children.
Also, there are plenty of other things that have gotten better since the fifties. Entertainment options are richer, technology has improved incredibly, cars can run for 20 years and 250k miles, we live longer. I could go on and on.
Matt, you’d want your daughter to be “easy”? For a good time, call Matt Moore’s daughter? Really? Ok.
sure matt, those things are great, but I think the others were speaking about the powers of the state specifically. And from a libertarian point of view (or conservative or some liberal for that matter) it has gotten worse, and is getting worse.
Sydney - I’ve got no problem with my daughter enjoying sex when she grows up. What’s wrong with that?
JCoke - Yes, you may have a point. But Dr. Reality is stupidly arguing that the fifties were better because they were more authoritarian times. Which, if it was true, would still be one of the stupidest arguments ever.
Only everyone I associate with. Folks who declare those things to be universally bad are almost always the people who want to impose their narrow intolerant morality on my every living moment (usually using children as the justification).
Mostly, however, I was just trying to make the point that there are some classes of people who fare worse today than in the 50s, largely because of present day legislative and law enforcement strategies (which is really what this thread is about).
“Sydney - I’ve got no problem with my daughter enjoying sex when she grows up. What’s wrong with that?”
This is getting off topic, but there’s nothing wrong with enjoying sex. But “easy” is not equal to “enjoying sex.” You can enjoy sex plenty in a monogamous relationship. “Easy” means you screw around with multiple people and don’t care about relationships, really. It’s a pursuit of lust. Moreover, I’m not aware that “easy” meant you had to grow up first. People who are “easy” are people who start out young.
“the people who want to impose their narrow intolerant morality on my every living moment…”
Because we all know that society should have no morals whatsoever. People who don’t want girls to be “easy” are just namby pamby intolerant jerks.
Sheesh.
Good point. You’re right. So, we’re fucked even worse than I thought.
Sydney - She’s 28 days old, so yeah, I would prefer that she grow up a bit before becoming sexually active.
As far as easy: I don’t care if she’s monogamous. I wasn’t always and I think it would be unrealistic to think she will be.
Also: What’s wrong with buying beer on Sunday?
Wow! Sounds like you’ve made the study of “easy” your life’s work. Maybe you should write a book advising women on the evils of lust, the joys of monogamy, and the pitfalls of being easy. Hell, easy women probably aren’t even aware that they don’t care about relationships. And they may be under the misguided impression that these are personal choices they get to make for themselves as part of their pursuit of happiness. You could have a whole section dedicated to defining precisely what’s expected of a woman in our culture if she is going to be deserving of respect.
Next you could take on men who drink on Sunday.
Good Lord Dave,
you’ve gotten yourself into a morals debate with Helen Lovejoy!
…you had to know a “Won’t someone please think of the children reference was coming.
Daley: Chicago police to get assault rifles
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-chicago-police-assault-rifles,0,2104512.story
Well, surely they need to be prepared when they come across someone armed with “semi fully-automatic weapon”.
Dave,
I see I’ve got you pegged. A philosophy for people without children. That’s essentially what libertarianism is. I have no doubt that as Mark sees his daughter grow up, his attitude will change also.
Yep. You see right through me. But just to fill in the details, I have a daughter who is 33. She’s a Tulane-educated lawyer who has been a public defender at the state and federal level in New Orleans, San Diego, and Saipan. She’s traveled to twenty countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa, mostly by herself, and recently spent thirteen months in Afghanistan with the International Legal Foundation where she met the man she married (her first marriage) this last December. He is a U.N. contractor from Morocco, is Arab, and Muslim. Currently she works with the ILF in Nepal and is soon to come back to the United States with her husband where she will probably again take a job as a public defender.
I personally have no idea whether she’s “easy”. It’s none of my business and it’s of no significance to anyone who doesn’t judge people based on mindless moralistic labels. But, for someone who grew up in a strongly libertarian environment, I’m not too unhappy about how she turned out. You seem to have a problem understanding the difference between the words irresponsible and libertarian. They are not interchangeable. And your belief that having children and being libertarian are incompatible is not just wrong, it’s imbecilic (a philosophy for people without brains).
LMAO! You are remarkably even tempered for someone who is probably not getting much sleep.
Is this an argument in favor of today’s society, or against it? I don’t think you’ll find many people saying that those are GOOD things, even if they think they should be legal.
Mark me down as someone that thinks those are good things.
And I have 2 teenagers, btw.
thorn
Sydney - Who the hell is Mark?
Matt,
Mark’s apparently a libertarian guy with a daughter who will eventually develop a hatred of libertarianism and demand that the government protect his kid from all the bad things on the planet once he realizes that the world is all about him.
Wow…that Mark guy sounds like a real loser
Seriously, though, congratulations on the new addition to your family.
Is this an argument in favor of today’s society, or against it? I don’t think you’ll find many people saying that those are GOOD things, even if they think they should be legal.
I’ll be the fourth person with kids to chime in and say that porn, beer, sex and freedom are good things.
Giving cops scarier, more impersonal uniforms… welcome to the basement of Stanford University, folks. Dress them like thugs, they’ll act like thugs.