Why are the police losing face all over the place, but especially in Ferguson? Because they despise the communities in which they work, and go out of their way to express their contempt. By finding new uses for police dogs, for instance.
What happened next, according to several sources, was emblematic of what has inflamed the city of Ferguson, Missouri, ever since the unarmed 18-year-old was gunned down: An officer on the street let the dog he was controlling urinate on the memorial site.
The incident was related to me separately by three state and local officials who worked with the community in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. One confirmed that he interviewed an eyewitness, a young woman, and pressed her on what exactly she saw. "She said that the officer just let the dog pee on it," that official told me. "She was very distraught about it." The identity of the officer who handled the dog and the agency he was with remain unclear.
The day brought other indignities for Brown’s family, and the community. Missouri state Rep. Sharon Pace, whose district includes the neighborhood where the shooting occurred, told me she went to the scene that afternoon to comfort the parents, who were blocked by police from approaching their son’s body. Pace purchased some tea lights for the family, and around 7 p.m. she joined Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, and others as they placed the candles and sprinkled flowers on the ground where Brown had died. "They spelled out his initials with rose petals over the bloodstains," Pace recalled.
By then, police had prohibited all vehicles from entering Canfield Drive except for their own. Soon the candles and flowers had been smashed, after police drove over them.
There’s no hope at all that those officers can ever again get the cooperation of their community. Fire the lot of them.
Not just fire, but blacklist; none of them should ever work in law enforcement or security in any capacity whatsoever, ever again. Any such agency that employs any of them should be subject to an immediate probe by the Federal DOJ, and face dissolution under the same conditions if the slightest irregularities are found.
…I wouldn’t trust these officers to serve food. Anyone with that level of contempt for the public can’t be trusted to interact with the public.
Fucking hell… it’s like they think they’re rival gangs or something. What the hell is wrong with American police? I know it’s not all of them, but come on… how can professional officers or the peace even think of acting this way? Let alone actually feel comfortable enough in the support of their fellow officers that they’d do it?
No words, towering rage.
Protect and Serve, eh? :spits:
As one Senator said during Watergate waiting for the other shoe to fall, “I don’t know how many more shoes there are to fall. I feel like I have been dealing with a centipede.” The incidents keep piling up.
These ones do seem like bastards. But I watched a mini documentary about stop and frisk in New York, and they interviewed regular friskees and got that side, exactly the crap you’d expect. But they also had cops, identity protected, who said how much they hated it all, but would be penalised if they didn’t stop enough, frisk enough, even arrest enough people a month. Disciplinary action that included being disregarded for promotion, and being stationed the most dangerous areas of the city, alone. And literally everyone above them is breathing down their neck, because their superiors all the way up to the Mayor benefit from getting those numbers.
And I have to wonder now, knowing as I do that most cops join up because they want to do good, how many are genuine pricks and how many are being forced by the higher-ups to choose between basic decency and their career.
frankb:
I think it’s past time to stop using the word incident and start using the right one: crime. If Random J. Person allowed a dog to piss all over a memorial, then drove over and smashed a good portion of the memorial, they’d no doubt find themselves arrested for vandalism.
In case I wasn’t clear, the “crap” I mentioned was their experiences with stop and frisk, not an aspersion on their recounting of it.
Callinectes:
Here’s an example of decent people doing the right thing: http://libcom.org/news/hands-dont-ship-minneapolis-ups-workers-protest-shipments-missouri-police-27082014
In the past, decent people who happened to be cops helped to expose and stop corruption in police forces. If most cops are decent people, they have the power to change things.
@8 and @9 — there is a great deal of recruiting among urban and suburban police department specifically targeting the dumb and angry. They are more malleable, question authority less, demand less in terms of wages and benefits, get bored less, and stay on the job longer. Your “if most cops” is a big if, in many communities. I have seen the cops in my own city and state evolve from no-nonsense community protecters into ‘roid-rage bullies over the past 20 years. Examine the way you were treated when pulled over for a speeding ticket in the 80s, versus now. It seems that the “Code” is now to bully the fuck out of every person you encounter. I even see it in doggie parks, if someone has the audacity to toss their retriever a ball when the sign says on-leash; the cop doesn’t point to the sign and say “dogs gotta be on-leash here, ma’am, but there’s an offleash park 3 blocks from here”, but instead they thrust their chest out and bellow and start writing a ticket, and if the person protests, the cop screams that they’re now getting an additional $200 fine for talking back. It’s appalling.
As for Ferguson, it seems that a lot of their behavior falls under the Hate Crime rubric, and should be prosecuted accordingly. And, yeah, as PZ says, fire every last one of them, top to bottom, and start with a new cadre of cadets and some leadership imported from civilization.
I agree. Police activities that violate the social contract are crimes and should be treated as such. Perhaps we should be able to perform citizens arrests on cops that are misbehaving.
That reasoning is EXACTLY why they are militarizing.
Police departments make sure to not hire anyone with a high IQ.
The courts have blessed this decision.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/too-smart-to-be-a-cop/
Our new Police State is the result.
The original incident was supposedly triggered by Michael Brown blocking traffic by walking in the middle of the street. The police blocked that street for five hours with his body in the middle of it, then blocked it later to prevent memorials, then went out in the main street and blocked that with their police riot for big parts of the next two weeks.
I say supposedly up there because black kids tend to walk in the street more, in my experience. Safely, and not blocking traffic, mind, but enough for the cop to be really hassling them for being black.
It is ever increasingly true that the worst criminals in the US by far are the ones wearing uniforms. The sheer level of contempt and hatred they show for the very people they swore and oath to protect is nothing short of terrifying.
I just cannot believe any human beings would be so callous, so hateful, so disregarding of the basics of civilized behavior. Much less how these people could possibly have been hired as peace officers. It is so far beyond the pale.
Gregory:
Yeah. I don’t think there’s a word for that depth of contempt.
One of those AHA moments, when the mason who has done a lot of good work on Casa la Pelirroja, and happens to be heavier on the melanin than me, complained about dogs. A lot of folks in town walk their dogs. On a leash, using the sidewalk as the center. And they do “sic” their dogs on those darker than themselves….
Callinectes #6:
I don’t disagree with you. But. We’re not talking about merely hitting a quota for frisks and arrests, or even having to produce more arrests than the next cop. (Which is already bad enough – see Comcast customer service – and suspiciously race-biased, let’s not forget.) We’re talking about active, blatant, public acts of disrespect towards the people these police have to deal with.
How many times do these decent cops have to help beat or taze an unresisting suspect to be safe from the retaliation of their peers? How much yelling of slurs must they do for their co-workers not to call them weak or untrustworthy? How much paperwork do they need to fudge, how many guns must they plant, how many cameras must they disable or conveniently evade, just to keep their jobs in a work culture this toxic? Keep in mind, Ferguson doesn’t have a huge impersonal police force. The Ferguson police department has 50 or 53 officers total, depending on how they’re counted. Everyone can know everyone else in a group that size. Where’s the quota for how much hate they have to go along with in order to keep their jobs?
I’m sure there are cops in St Louis who hate having to go along with this. Here’s one: (BBC link) But however much they hate it, unless they outright quit their jobs, they’re still there, swimming in the toxic culture. I’m not going to say none of them are decent people. Some of them would probably be great cops, in a department that encourages accountability and doesn’t tolerate bigoted BS (where would that department be, I wonder). But at this point, I think any former police officer from Ferguson would have to earn back the trust afforded to basically decent people. (Like Darren Wilson and his former colleagues probably should have.)
knowing as I do that most cops join up because they want to do good
[citation needed]
The location in my brain where “cops” resides is getting closer to the address for “bandits who repeatedly terrorize villagers.”
Nerd @ 17
It’s an aha moment for me, too. My mobility dog looks exactly like the dog in the picture. Folks with more melanin tend to go the other direction from him, even though he is the friendliest dog ever.
I’ve noticed that this happens much more often since we’ve moved back to Texas. When we lived near San Francisco, all sorts of people would walk up to us, ask to pet him and tell me stories about a German Shepherd in their lives.
Coastal California seems to be a dog-loving culture, and we were much more comfortable there.
Is it me or does that photo look an awful lot like the one of the guard terrorizing detainees down in gitmo?
That BBC link in 18 shows the least-scary picture from that particular incident. There were six guns pointing at that peaceful pedestrian, earlier. (American soldiers in war zones do NOT point their guns at civilians, even those of enemy nations. (They also have less armor and ammunition. ))
There is no civil oversight of police departments and their hiring practices, training, equipping and connection to reality. (I cannot think of a word to describe their overall attitude toward civilians, race, rules and honesty.) I do know that a lot of cops talk about joining to defend their communities, which implies that there are bad people out there to fight off — protip, cops: everybody out there is part of the community, and is an American with rights, and is a human being.
Darren Wilson seems to be from troubled homes and bad marriages, which would imply looking for a community of rules, and some resentment of blacks just because they are reputed to have troubled homes and bad marriages. I don’t say that with any surety, and certainly not to excuse anything he did — it looks to me like he was a cop for all the wrong reasons, in a bad department.
They’ve disbanded a police force in that area before, namely the police force that Darren Wilson was on before he ended up with Ferguson PD. There’s very good grounds now, including but not limited to this, for disbanding the Ferguson Police Department and rebuilding it from the ground up while under a federal consent decree limiting how and where they use force.
Thanks for the clarification, Callinectes. Whether people sign up to do good could be argued, but based in personal experience (n=2), I agree. Both are great guys – one quit, partially because of the crap, and the other retired with health problems.
Total agreement.
I know I shouldn’t be surprised any more. But it still amazes me that the police in Ferguson demonstrate such consistent failures of intelligence and integrity so as to do everything they can to make the situation even worse,
It amazes me even more that they haven’t been brought into line yet.
It’s like these police are fucking cartoon super villains. And yet there are too many authoritarians who will know all the shit they’ve done and STILL cheerlead for them. And there are way, way too many people who don’t know a quarter of the shit that this police department has been up to. They shouldn’t just be fired, a lot of them should facing jail time themselves. Fucking corrupt to say the fucking least.
@ 26
I too am amazed that this has been going on for this long.
words fail me!
uncle frogy
Of all the things that are happening there, in a way, this is the most insidious:
This seems to indicate that what’s actually happening there is a bunch of armed fuckheads are terrorizing and showing utter contempt for the local community, whilst wearing what look like police uniforms, using what looks like police equipment and weapons, and driving what look like police vehicles, but nobody, except themselves, can actually definitively say who they are, precisely, and they don’t seem to be telling.
What it’s like living in a police state: police are just another armed gang, only with government backing. They don’t give a fuck about the lives of anyone except other cops, and seem to expect everyone else to share their priorities.
For example:
That’s the only thing that matters to them.
Does it mean anything that the policeman is straddling the dog? It could be some sort of phallic symbolism, or standard dog-control technique, or both.
I was wondering if any fake cops got into the mix at Ferguson. There used to be wannabees who got all the gear and pretended to be policemen. These days they probably just go down to the station and get hired.
Hm. I was at a police canine demonstration, and they explained that on-duty police dogs only pee when they are instructed to do so. That’s their training. So, it’s not a matter of the officer “letting” the dog pee on the memorial — the dog must have been released to do so by the officer. On purpose. At least , if the dog and handler are properly trained, which is normally a condition of acquiring the dog. It’s highly regulated, because of animal welfare. Seriously.
Looks like he’s bracing to prevent the dog doing what it’s trained to do. And possibly instructed to, given how aggressive it is in that photo. Dog looks like a German Shepard – Ever tried to hold one of those back when it decides to chase*? Police dogs are well enough trained that it’d probably back off if instructed to, so I very much think it’s a deliberate attempt to terrorize the people nearby, but they are STRONG animals.
* Mother in law owns two badly-trained German Shepards, that I help walk on occasion.
—
How can a police officer who puts prevention of any injury to themself first do their job of “protect and serve” properly?
psanity #32 – some commenters on DailyKos agree with you.
somehow, I’m guessing it wasn’t this academy:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110857/
Not a U.S. resident, so I’m ignorant, but I read that a lot of the funds that support U.S. police departments come from fines for petty offences- car lights broken, small amounts of drugs, victimless crimes…. Can’t find the source, unfortunately, but could this explain the attitude of many policemen- they want people to give them a reason to arrest them and an aggravating circumstance which will increase the fine is even better?
That picture is bringing to mind those old photos of the cops siccing their dogs on Civil Rights protesters back in the day. Y’know, the same bunch of pictures that featured kids being hit by spray from fire hoses/water cannons? The more things change…
By the way, in civilized countries (like mine) it’s actually possible to fire half the police division.
11 Czech traffic police in 70K town found accepting bribes. They were all fired and got jail time or suspended sentences and the traffic police over here have been much more professional ever since.
Now we’ve still got lots of corruption and other problems over here, but it’s not as if firing criminal policemen and women is a *problem*. If there’s an entire police department involved, fire ’em all.
You are more correct than you even know – in Ferguson in particular, so many nuisance fines are handed out to poor (black) people who can’t afford them that there are now more active arrest warrants out for fine nonpayments than there are residents. Ferguson, with an average household income of less than 19k per year, collected more in fines last year than the neighboring town of Chesterfield, which has an average household income of over 60k.
one of the many stories about it
And from the same piece, there’s this stunning bit: (emphasis mine)
That was my surmise as well. I don’t know anything about police dogs, but I used to raise puppies for Guiding Eyes for the Blind. Training the dogs to eliminate on command is one of the main things puppy-raisers are responsible for. I would be shocked if police dogs don’t get similarly trained.
carlie, I cited your #39 and 40 over in the Good Morning America thread.
@6 “And I have to wonder now, knowing as I do that most cops join up because they want to do good, how many are genuine pricks and how many are being forced by the higher-ups to choose between basic decency and their career.”
Sorry, that escape hatch doesn’t work. A cop who deliberately abuses the citizenry in ways he KNOWS are wrong “to help his career” is arguably *worse*.
@43: And I’m going to add that it doesn’t matter how decent a cop thinks he is. In the case where a man was charged for destruction of property for bleeding on the uniforms of the four officers that beat him bloody, it doesn’t matter whether any one of those cops was decent now or in the past. They either participated in the beating or just stood by and watched it and did nothing.
Thsi is definitely an Edmund Burke situation, I think:http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/2298.html
What a clusterfuck. What an exponential clusterfuck.
O_O
Well, I now see another argument for increasing diversity such that police forces have more than just three or four black officers. (St Louis Post-Dispatch cover image)
If one of them wants or needs to turn whistleblower, the other officers won’t know which one to punish.
Here’s another data point: Florida cops kill bystander, but charge suspect they were trying to shoot with her murder. The person the cop was shooting at was armed with an empty gun, but this is still ridiculous.
Have you all seen this (via Mano’s blog)? Witness video of police shooting dead a mentally disturbed shoplifter. Un-fucking-believable.
Crossposting from the Good Morning America thread:
Cracked just posted an excellent Ferguson overview that referenced Frank Serpico, a whistleblower who exposed corruption in the NYPD in 1967-72.
From the Knapp Commission’s report, summarized by Wikipedia:
From a 2010 NY Times article on Serpico: (NY Times)
and from the wiki on Serpico himself: (Wikipedia)
Didn’t you Yanks once fight a war (of somesort) against us Brits to rid yourselves of this kind of tyranny ?
@pwuk:
That’s similar to my reaction. That racist, thug police force should fly the confederate flag. You know they want to, and the ‘good guys’ there should have quit in protest long ago.
And yes, that is a comment from privilege. But the ones still there should be made to feel like the nazi collaborators that they are.