while the jump out car beatings may have slowed or stopped, the police lies march on:

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/breaking/s_787399.html

h/t: Packratt.

Now don’t get carried away. To use just one counterexample during my lifetime, police used to do a lot more chokeholds than they do now.

The key is that it has to be the police department’s insurance company that tells the popos. We don’t get to see those conversations, but they occasionally happen.

Right now the trend seems to be for police departments to rewrite more restrictive taser use policies (basically, no tasering passively non-compliant suspects). If you go to cop boards, you can see there is much less support for tasering passive people and/or for repeatedly tasering than there used to be. Lot less sick j/k’s about us regcits riding the lightning. Lot fewer cops proudly telling us how they endured 3 seconds of a stun drive on a gym mat one time. Fewer controversial youtube tasering vids. Surprising number of stories of departments having their tasers taken away. The police aren’t lissening as well as they should on the tasers, but they are lissening (and, again, I mean lissening to their insurers).

In Jordan Miles case, the problem was a jump out squad. and, yeah, police kind of get that those are a bad thing, or at least subject to abuse. They don’t talk publicly much about the Jordan Miles story. Cuz they know they did bad on that one. They are denying that they did bad in court and in the media. But they know they did bad. You can tell by what they say and don’t say.

remember folks: know your opponents. the internet is crawling with cops. real life, working stiff cops. in blogs, on boards. they speak publically all the time — comment earnestly (or not!) on the cases that you read about here at the Adge. the more you read what they say, the more you find out about your own misconceptions about them. there is stuff you wouldn’t think they get that they get. otoh, there are areas of deep stupidity and intransigence, even when it comes to the relatively smart ones. and, of course, each one is an individual snowflake, so they have some fair amount of difference of opinion among themselves about controversial cases where police arguably did bad.

One last tip for navigating cop boards: In cases where a policeman wants to criticize a video of excessive police force, the phrase he will use is “looks bad.” at first it sounds like the police commenter is only saying that it “looks” bad, but it really isn’t bad. That seems like something a policeman would say, but that is not what “looks bad” means. What he is really saying through the words “looks bad” is that he is having a hard time imagining any mitigating or exonerating circumstances (not shown in the vid beating) that could possibly exist to excuse the beatdown (or whatever violent abuse the police did that day). That way the policeman can express disagreement with another policeman’s use of force in a tactful way that seems to be generally acceptable to the police community.

Oh. You’re one of those.

See, the problem really is the violence. The lies only matter at all to the extent that they enable it (cops can lie all they want about the biggest fish they ever caught or whatever and I couldn’t care less). What if they really didn’t identify themselves as pigs, and told the truth about that, and still got off clean? Would that make this case better?

The problem just is that cops are a privileged caste who can appeal to the mere fact that their victims inconvenience them as an excuse for (occasionally fatal) beatings. Sometimes they lie about it, but even the lies they choose to tell are signs that we grant them too much.

“Telling the police to hold back their force against a physically actively resisting suspect is a non-starter.”

Telling the police anything at all is a non-starter. It’s far too late to accomplish anything by pandering and cajoling the pigs. Like it or not, see it or not, it’s war, and they’re the enemy. Maybe the best tactics for fighting them are nonviolent, but the task is not to persuade them. It is to crush them.

There is no dichotomy. Brutality and dishonesty are in no sense exclusive of each other. However, some ppl think the brutality is the worse problem, and others who think the lying is the worse problem.

These differences have strategic consequences for rhetorical operators like us. For example, I think it was counterproductive for society to get outraged over the Rodney King beating (and I thought so at the time). I didn’t like the King beating, but I don’t see it as a big deal. I can still very much sympathize (if not empathize) with the officers who beat King. Frankly, if King did again what he did in 1990 then he would probably get a worse beating than he did in 1990 and nobody would bat an eye. The King beating case is like the child who cried wolf.

If society had cared half as much about Kathryn Johnston, as it did about Rodney King, we would have a much better police force in the US.

In the Jordan Miles case, we each had to make a decision about how to prioritize the bad aspects of the police behavior. It was one of those cases where you can really see who cares more about brutality and who cares relatively more about police dishonesty.

The problem with the Jordan Miles case wasn’t that they beat him. He fought back. They pretty much have to beat him at that point. The problem with the Jordan Miles case is that they didn’t appropriately identify themselves as police officers and then they lied about that aspect of the case. If they had announced then it is likely that Miles would have presented no opportunity to do a beating. If they had announced well (that is, without any possibility of being misunderstood) and Miles still ran and fought, then, yeah, he deserved what he got and should get it again if the same thing were to happen again tomorrow. This just goes back to the fact that the proximate cause of the injuries was the lack of good announcement, rather than the fists and clubs and hard sidewalk. It is the announcement part that COULD be done differently next time (if only the poor announcement was seen as the central fundamental problem here). Telling the police to hold back their force against a physically actively resisting suspect is a non-starter.

That’s sort of a false dichotomy. On one hand, brutality always goes hand-in-glove with deception and dishonesty of the most brazen kind; fighting one involves fighting the other to some extent. On the other hand, the same “solution” would probably work whether or not the cops are willing to tell such asinine lies to rationalize their violent urges.

The problem really is the violence. The dishonesty only matters to the extent that it rationalizes the violence*. If cops want to lie about the size of their dicks or how many donuts they eat or whether or not they smoke the occasional joint, I couldn’t care less.

*And in this case, the lie, if it is a lie, is in fact so absurd, that it proves all too much about the law and its priorities.

Maybe, maybe not. Forensic experts (for those who can afford to hire them) can probably figure out a LOT about where a Mountain Dew bottle came from and went based on the bottle.

Police had to decide whether they “felt lucky” in regards to any fake bottle they could conjure up. Would the fake bottle contradict the story?
It would be difficult, or impossible, for police to predict that prospectively (whether the fake bottle would lead to police shennanigans being caught), so they said they lost the bottle when the judge asked. They did not feel lucky. Now that Jordan Miles case seems to be on the ropes, maybe police wish they had bought a Dew and brought it to court. However, at the time of the hearing, police didn’t know whether Jordan was going to get Robert Shapiro and subject them to that awesome level of scrutiny that a Shapiro can bring.

Now it turns out that the police probably could have brought in a half used tube of Aim Toothpaste to court, and it still probably would have passed muster as the magical, mythical Mountain Dew bottle.

Frankly, I am surprised that Mr. Balko seems to accept the Mountain Dew bottle story. I think he secretly knows there was no Mountain Dew bottle, but he feels like he will sound conspiracy theorist-ey if he does not embrace the Dew bottle lie, so he lays down a little white lie about believing in the Dew with the apparent hope of moving to the larger issue that the beating was wrong even if there was a Dew bottle.

Speaking for me, Burgers Allday, I almost always think the lie is more morally repugnant than the excessive force that the lie is being put forward to cover. And I think that here. The story should be about the Dew bottle. Even though Miles denied having the Dew bottle, this Dew bottle is treated like established fact, by the media, by commentators like professor Kerr and so on.

Look at it this way:

If the problem is merely police brutality, then Miles could avoid that by staying in at night or dressing like Brother Muzzone or whatever. Not an ideal solution, but a practical solution. However, if the problem is that the police are willing to lie in order to justify beating him up, then he is not safe from them anywhere at any time no matter what he does. None of us are.

As far as Mr. Miles’ physical injuries, just take the hospital bill and double it (for pain and suffering in addition to paying the hospital bill). That is probably what is already happening with this settlement with the municipality.

I only really start to see MILLIONS when I think about the lies the police probably told about Mr. Miles. The money suitable to cover the physical injuries doesn’t begin to cover that alleged injustice.*

FOOTNOTE:

* Miles’ lawyer is saying that the beating hurt him cognitively and made him drop out of community college (PSU BEAVER, same thing). If that is true then Mr. Miles would deserve more for the physiological injuries to his head, but I am highly skeptical about this particular claim. This suspicious claim may hurt Miles (in the credibility dept) more than it helps (in the additional damages dept).

I may be wrong but don’t think you can trace a can of mountain dew to a particular vending machine.

You win the prize for the most blatant obfuscation in this thread! No one was discussing “worker organizations,” but rather police unions, which represent the collective office and privileged interests of state agents. To call this a mere organization of “workers” severely offends both common linguistic sense and one’s basic intelligence.

The problem is settlements. I’m sure almost all of these numbers would be much larger if a jury decided them.

Actually, if you’ll notice:

They’ll all get $250,000, plus $80,000 in medical and education expenses, the maximum allowed understate law.

Empasis added. In most cases, there are statutory caps that keep it too low to matter.

Suing them will not accomplish anything. Shooting cops in self-defense/revenge needs to be legitimized, step by bloody step, if need be.

I bloody well hope it doesn’t “need to be” so, but that is what it will eventually come to – in one form or another, they must be held personally liable before any of this changes, and if the state won’t do it, eventually, the people will. I really REALLY hope it never gets that far… but I’m honestly surprised it hasn’t already.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u06K7-TfeU

Hmmmm. Chicago cops and Mainstream Media. Kinda hard to take sides on that one. Sort of like Aztecs vs Conquistadores.

More like Nazi Germany and the USSR at the battle of Stalingrad; as bad as the conquistadors were, the Aztecs made them look like Andy Griffith.

And the dummkopfen refuse to see that 9/11 was inside job.

http://rt.com/news/utah-data-center-spy-789/

Well done, you’re a corporatism!

Poppycock…you statist.