Yeah, what have the Romans ever done for us, anyway?

Papists really do tend to suck up to authority, as do Germans.

Some have written that one of the worst things to happen to the USA was all of those German refugees from the failed 1848 uprisings arriving here. I swear, I think all germans are genetic socialists. They had a lot to do with the founding of the Republican Party, the original centralizing, nationalizing party, and a lot of them fought on the side of Abraham Lenin during The War.

It’s us versus them, guys and gals. It’s not rich versus poor, it’s decent humans versus bullies.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/141512/Congress-Ranks-Last-Confidence-Institutions.aspx

The detailed data are on page two.

The police somehow had almost twice the level of public trust as the “criminal justice system” (sic.; the terminology was sloppy). This could have some very bad implications if the grievances about the criminal justice system were that it was too lenient.

My acquaintances on the West Coast seem to have a lot less trust in the police than my East Coast acquaintances. Part of it is probably selection bias, but I don’t think that’s the only explanation. When I used to mention police misconduct to buddies in Philadelphia, they would often look at me like I had two heads or give me cues to shut up. In Humboldt, I’m more often told other bad (and occasionally good) stories about the police in response. For example, one of my friends swears that the Arcata Police are a bunch of assholes and thugs (my personal impression of them is a lot more positive) but that the cops she encountered in Sacramento were wonderful.

But, I think our own perception of public attitudes is skewed by the fact that we hang around a lot of people who think like we do and who are as outraged as we are by law enforcement abuses. Because of that we tend to think the public is really more in tune with our perspective than they really are.

Although it runs counter to our “it can’t happen here” mentality, I think things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. And, because of sheer inertia, they might not get better at all in our lifetimes.

I agree that those shows are a bad thing, and the broader pattern of “become a superhero by discarding laws and morals and doing whatever it takes to win” is pure poison. But how can we see how much penetration that propaganda has had, vs how much word of police abuses has gotten around and made an impression?

I’m sure there’s polling data out there on this stuff, and I suspect it will be pretty depressing. But you absolutely cannot count on the MSM to provide you a true picture of public sentiment. They will (demonstrably) refuse to cover stuff that doesn’t fit with their narratives, or that threatens their relationship with their sources and advertisers. The picture of the world we get from the MSM is horribly distorted. So simply not seeing much outrage about SWAT raid abuses reported on Fox or CNN or MSNBC doesn’t tell you much about whether that outrage is out there–it might be, and those news sources might find themselves deciding not to report on it.

It isn’t just producers catering to the depraved tastes of their audiences. It’s a positive feedback loop in which audiences unthinkingly absorb whatever the hell their favorite crime shows portray. In fact, it’s worse than that: many viewers are too delusional to know the difference between nonfiction and undisguised fiction.

Case in point: I once came across an online recruiting bulletin from the Phoenix Police Department advising applicants that contrary to popular belief the department did not have a unit by the acronym of CSI. The stated goal of this bulletin was to reduce the number of inquiries that recruiters had to field about the Phoenix CSI application process, since there wasn’t one.

CBS didn’t mislead these idiots. It has never described the CSI franchises as anything other than dramas, and none of the franchises is set anywhere in Arizona.

Garbage in drama is fine if the audience can tell fact from fiction and cares to do so. For example, I can recite litanies of accuracies and inaccuracies in various police dramas because I’ve read extensively about the actual agencies that are portrayed. The problem is that a fairly large part of the television audience is as functionally psychotic as people who call the Scotland Yard switchboard and ask for Det. Sherlock Holmes. As a society we seem to be forgetting how to put fiction into any sort of context, e.g., that it’s called fiction for a reason, and that’s a big problem.

For that matter, those who can’t tell a drama from a documentary can’t be expected to notice misconduct on police ride-along shows, either.

Maybe there are educational and media solutions to this pickle. I’d certainly like to think that there are.

CNN isn’t showing any signs of coming through for us yet on its involvement in the war on cameras. I didn’t expect immediate action, but I even less expected AC360 to turn into the bizarre, surreal spectacle that it did tonight.

The main international story that Anderson Cooper covered tonight was the torture and death of Hamza al-Khateeb, the thirteen-year-old Syrian boy whose body the authorities returned to his parents shot, covered in cigarette burns and emasculated. This poor boy seems to be turning into the Syrian Mohamed Bouazizi, and it’s no wonder why. This case is a genuine bombshell that sparked huge protests and could finally force Bashar al-Assad from office.

So far, so good. AC360′s domestic coverage tonight, however, was a damned freak show. One of Cooper’s two main domestic stories was a blow-by-blow recap of the Casey Anthony murder trial, with a lengthy moderated debate (almost a screaming match) between Nancy Grace and Mark Geragos.

The other main domestic story was what we might call Weinergate. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) apparently sent a picture of a wiener, presumably his own, to a young lady he befriended via Twitter, or something like that. (Mel Brooks would have a hard time making this shit up.) Either that or his account was hacked. Dana Bash, one of CNN’s political reporters, was one of the main questioners at a press conference during which an exasperated Weiner dissembled at length and offhandedly called another reporter “that jackass.” Several minutes of the press conference were aired uninterrupted, followed by a brief discussion with legal oracle Jeffrey Toobin, who could barely contain his amusement.

Something like half of the broadcast was devoted to these stories. It was a disgrace. The Casey Anthony trial is lurid, but it doesn’t appear to involve any irregularities. It merits such heavy coverage regionally but not nationally. Weinergate is even worse. For one thing, Andrew Breitbart was involved in bringing it to light, and as Toobin pointed out in his brilliant legal insight, that raises some questions about credibility. (It’s stupefying that CNN keeps him on hand to make such banal observations.)

More to the point, though, Weinergate is a penny ante extracurricular goof. Local coverage of the affair in New York outlets is warranted because Weiner’s constituents might not want to be represented by a dissembling, juvenile fool, but if I’m not mistaken he’s pretty low on the Congressional totem pole. A sideshow like that deserves no more attention on a national newscast than a Taiwanese parliamentary brawl.

What I’ve described wouldn’t be very noteworthy on a trashy show, but CNN is a major news network with a large staff of specialized reporters. Hopefully tonight was just a one-off fuck-up, but the domestic desk was absolutely toothless, and that doesn’t bode well.

There is that and it’s very important. But I wonder how much of this is a non-deliberate subversion of the traditional, popular American love of “rugged individualist” heroes who buck regulations and the system to do The Right Thing*. That’s a very sad kind of irony, I think.

*As long as it involves violence or domination; American pop culture has never been very sympathetic to people who buck the system to do nonviolent, harmless things; even when they romanticized cowboys and smugglers and stuff it involved exaggerating how much violence they engaged or dealt with, or were somehow connected to.

One way you might gauge what most of the people in the U.S. think about cops is the popularity of cop shows on TV. For every news event like this where cops assault someone and destroy evidence, there are a dozen episodes of cop dramas on TV that portray the cops, not only as having integrity, but also brains (BRAINS, for Christ’s sake!). And if that weren’t enough, a lot of Hollywood cop shows make it look like all that civil liberties stuff is nothing but a millstone around the neck of the poor cops who are just trying to save us from pure evil. When a cop on some TV drama breaks the law to get his man, he’s a friggin’ hero.

And this propaganda is pumped into the mass public as if they had a pipeline directly into their brain.

Of course, I might be wrong. Hollywood could be cranking out shows like this for no reason, but I’d bet they’re measuring the public pulse with great accuracy. For every person outraged by police abuse, there are fifty who practically worship cops (at the same time as they’re condemning Walmart, illegal immigrants, gay marriage, and transfats as being our biggest enemies).

I think he might be on to something here.

Benoit recorded that same shooting with his cell phone camera. But he says a police officer ran over and grabbed his camera phone and smashed it.

“He didn’t say nothing. He just snatched me by my head and threw me on the ground and stepped on my back, threw it on the floor, stepped on it and was cussing me out the whole time,” said Benoit.

Benoit says he plans to file a complaint against Miami Beach police for what he feels was excessive force.

Umm, I hope by ‘excessive force’ he means, ‘assault, robbery, destruction of property, and destruction of evidence’.

bruce (#19): “Cops stealing and destroying cell phones is infuriating. Fortunately we are not far from a time when every picture or video you take will be instantly uploaded to a server ‘in the cloud’.
Then they will have to send swat teams to the server farms to destroy the evidence.“

Satire is nearly dead. I recall many a sarcastic prediction of authoritarian shifts from years past which sadly have come to pass in this, the “Land of the Free”.

Mayor says Detroit police chief won’t be disciplined…

Fear not, Obama WH to the rescue!

How do you know what most of the people of the US think about this, or what they would think, were they informed? I don’t think watching what the MSM reports is a very good guide to that. The near-blackholing of antiwar protests and sentiment in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, the blackholing of the pre-emptive arrests at the RNC convention in St. Paul, and the weirdly skewed coverage of Tea Party events and candidates in the last couple years all re-enforce that.

One of the things that makes me hopeful about the future of the country is that the MSM is losing its stranglehold on information. I fully expect to see strong moves to regulate the internet in various ways as this continues, precisely because a lot of uncomfortable topics that used to just never be allowed to come up will start coming up regularly.

So the situation is cloudy – but an officer was ok in destroying evidence. Wonder if they’ll get a reprimand.

As the reverse question. What would happen if a citizen destroyed evidence. Shouldn’t the officer face the same?