mozz

Yeah, and that was why I was asking -- do you have any idea quantitatively? I have to say, I do not; probably my impression is based on a sort of anecdotal impression same as yours is. It would be good to look at something like, how many use-of-force complaints have there been, how many was bodycam footage made available for and what did things look like when reviewing the footage? Things like that.

Just basing things on a general anecdotal impression isn't a good thing to do on either side, I don't think.

you are upset that a few headlines about cops being prosecuted hasn't completely turned the bus around on attitudes towards police yet in the four years since 2020?

To solve the problems in this country, you need to be able to see what's going on clearly.

Back before about 2015, there was clearly a systemic problem of police violence against minorities in this country, and it wasn't taken seriously or identified as a problem by the media. There was a lot of white society that was waking up to it as a real thing that existed, but a lot that were not, and government and media were slow to even realize it existed. I think at the point, regardless of what the scope of the problem quantitatively was, most of what you were saying was accurate just because it was so important to get people to even recognize the problem.

Now, I think it's swung the other way. I think the stereotype that every single cop is the enemy is creating a lot more problems than it solves.

• Underfunding departments leaving real crime unaddressed or leaving them to use substandard police because that's all they have in terms of manpower
• People being pointlessly hostile to cops during normal interactions, to the point that the citizen is the one escalating everything and sometimes creating a serious issue for themselves when the cop is literally just trying to politely do their job
• Attention being taken away from other aspects of the justice system that still badly need reform (imbalance of power between prosecutors and public defenders being a big one)
• Making departments that are trying to take big steps to address the problem have a pretty justified reason to say "you know what fuck it, our funding got cut anyway and everyone I interact with all day just yells at me, so you know what, I'm gonna go back to slamming people on the ground when I arrest them because what's the difference"

You have literally no idea how many of those were justified shootings versus not.

It could be 1,166 execution style slayings of an unarmed black person, or it could be 1,166 people charging at the cops with a machete where they tried everything in their power not to shoot the person.

You've seen bodycam footage of a cop shooting some woman in the face (and now has been charged for it). Great. I've seen bodycam footage of a woman pulling out a gun on a traffic stop and the cop reacting and shooting her, and then absolutely losing his shit with worry and relief because he was scared that he might have hit the people in the car behind her after having only a split second to react, after she left him with no choice but to shoot her when all he wanted to do was check what was up with her and why she was sitting unmoving in traffic.

The quantitative assessment matters. You can't just say that of course 1,166 of those were unjustified shootings, and so all cops are bad, and leave it there, just because that matches up with your self-referential structure for making sense of the world.

It doesn't really matter if some cops bend over backwards to help people when they turn around and circle the wagons every time one of them harms an innocent person, violates someone's rights, beats their spouses, murders someone, robs someone via asset forfeiture, or commits a slough of other crimes.

Dude

About 90% of stories I see in the modern day, with the OP article as a good example, involve the cops involved being brought up on charges

This is exactly what I'm saying: The culture has reformed significantly, and instead of saying "oh cool let's move on to the next thing which is an actual problem, of which there is no shortage", the reaction every time some cop does something wrong and is brought up on charges is "CONSEQUENCES wtf everyone knows cops are bullshit I bet they get off with" etc etc

Portland and Seattle consent decrees:

https://www.opb.org/article/2022/07/27/us-justice-department-portland-police-use-of-force-settlement/

https://seattlepolicemonitor.org/overview

Sounds like Portland PD is a bunch of shit. I may revise my assessment of the bullshit PDs across the country to include them (along with NYPD and LAPD yes) instead of just talking about the Deep South.

The Seattle one is a lot harder to make sense of; the links are broken. For example I was real into reading the article "Don't defund Seattle police without building the right bridges" but I cannot. I actually think I probably will agree with its assessment and that what it's saying is probably a perfect example of what I am talking about.

I've heard from people who are involved in some of these "replace the police with mental health professionals" programs, and they say it's working well. The people get better help, the mental health professionals get to intervene before it's a big violent crisis, and the cops aren't thrust into situations they're not trained for. The cops go along with the call when violence or weapons are involved, but the mental health people lead, and literally everyone wins.

That makes sense to me. It's progress. What doesn't make sense is DEFUND THE POLICE FUCK THE PIGS WE DON'T NEED YOU SHOOTING THIS GUY OH MY GAWD NOW HE STABBED ME HELP HELP HELP. And also starving the department of resources and making it a real shit-on-the-person unpopular job, so now they have trouble hiring people and have to kind of take what they can get in terms of hiring some not-ideal people.

Like you don't need to make somebody into an enemy if they're not. Police are there for a reason. You can't hire them to fulfill a needed societal function and then just shit on them all the time regardless of what they do because of some stereotype based on a big news story about the worst thing that any single policeman anywhere in the country did, back in 2020.

I know in your world every single cop is some dog-shooting civil forfeiture person, but that is not reality. I don't know how to explain it (especially if in your part of the country the PD actually is shitty, which it sounds like maybe is the case in the Northwest), but that's how I see it.

I still remember when the GOP tried to make a scandal about a video of AOC dancing

Like what in the fuck kind of Nathaniel Hawthorne bullshit is this... WOMEN DANCING WHAT THE FUCK WE MUST PUT A STOP TO IT

I thought it was confirmed to be Piefed once that is complete enough to be useful. Idk, though, maybe that is me just imagining things.

Edit: I am imagining things, it is Sublinks

Oh, it might be that. That actually makes more sense.

I just know that I always heard it as so you wouldn’t electrocute yourself, and that the first time I opened up a monitor for something and actually found one, I was beyond delighted

I, too, miss the days when you could write literally anything in XF86Config and that’s the signal it would send to your monitor. There was a warning in the docs that you could easily fry your monitor by sending a signal that it couldn’t handle that would cause physical damage so please be careful.

Also, the good monitors came with an all-plastic screwdriver attached on the inside of the case, so that you would have one available that you couldn’t electrocute yourself with on the big capacitor since at that point you’d already revealed that you planned to open the thing up and start fuckin with it.

It was wonderful days

And, just like AOC, he will understand on a personal level what’s at stake in the current contest for America.

I changed my mind, I like this guy, oil drilling or no.

democracy may not be available in all areas, ask your local TV conglomerate whether democracy is right for you

Sure, here’s one from Audit the Audit. I like that channel because it is more or less unique in taking neither the “pro police” or “anti police” viewpoint and just kind of taking things as they come and judging everyone involved in the interaction according to their behavior. Sometimes the cops are the good guys and sometimes they are the bad guys in it but it’s not like predisposed to one outcome or the other being always the answer, which it seems like is how almost every other person in the debate looks at it.

The Nazis actually picked apart how it was that the systematic dehumanization of blacks in the US made it possible for people to be okay psychologically with straight-up murdering them if they got out of line, where without the symbols and separations that made them a “different kind,” that would have been an abhorrent and inhuman thing for ordinary men and women to do to each other.

Think about that. If you’re old enough to have known some family members born before 1930 or so, in the American South, they probably knew some murderers in their community. Like hung out with them socially. And it was okay because it was “lynching.” There was actually a big backlash when they tried to do “anti-lynching laws.” No murdering blacks if we feel like it? Fuck that I thought this was America!

Having the instructive example to draw on, and just speedrunning their way through a version of it applied to a population that before 1930 had been just a type of German citizen living in Germany like normal (albeit with some prejudices from certain people), was what enabled them to do the holocaust. Without the American example to draw from, who’s to say if they would have been able to make it into a thing that was flavored in a way that was acceptable to ordinary Germans.