Use of Force · 9:40pm Jun 7th, 2020
You know, I don't write a lot about myself. Mostly that's because I'm an incredibly shy person in real life, not because I want to be mysterious. To some extent I even feel like writing about myself is sort of the worst kind of vanity. That said, I want to just relate a short story about something that happened to me a few years ago, about the first time I saw a man get shot to death. It seems relevant in these times.
This was a few years back, around 2013-2014. I was sitting in my apartment and on my computer and I hear something strange outside. It sounded a heck of a lot like someone shouting 'put down the gun'. I took off my headphones and I got to watch a police standoff live from the comfort of my living room. Not the smartest thing, I admit. A stray bullet would have been pretty bad.
So let me set the scene - across the street is an apartment block, and there's a guy standing in front of the front door pacing back and forth with a pistol in his hands. By the time I really noticed what was going on, the cops had already arrived and had him surrounded. There were maybe six of them, most of them keeping a pretty fair distance. I remember the one closest to my window was actually sneaking around the side of the building, through the landscaping.
They tried to get him to put the gun down and talk for over an hour. At one point someone from inside the building started walking towards the glass doors and almost walked right into the standoff.
It ended how you might expect, given the way I prefaced this whole story with 'the first time I saw a man get shot to death'. He pointed the gun at the cops, they opened fire. He dropped. They moved in, then the paramedics, and that was more or less that. I found out later that the man was mentally ill, not just suicidal but paranoid schizophrenic. He was having some kind of breakdown.
The cops, in this case, did everything they could do keep this guy alive. They begged him to put the gun down. It could have been different. I saw good policing in action and a man still died.
So when I see cops shoving people to the ground, beating them with batons, killing people for no reason, and then they have the audacity to go out to the press and talk shit about people who were protesting them? That sickens me. I think a lot of people only see the good policing, because they're been lucky enough to live in towns or small cities where the cops are genuinely decent, and they think that's how all cops are. They're getting their first taste of what it's like for other people, the experiences of police brutality and uncaring force stomping on faces and kneeling on necks, and they're sickened too. They wanted to live in a world where those police shootings are justified, where the bad cops are a few bad apples, but that isn't the same world where people are gassed in the streets en masse.
I have seen this issue in my state. Of course, it's not as bad as it was when I lived on the east coast. In the state, I lived on the east coast. They closed the mental health hospital after that we had more of those issues there. But each time the cops tried very hard to not hurt them.
Wait, you've seen multiple people take bullets in person? Umm... you okay?
5280048
The second time was much less interesting. I was on a date, we were at her friend's house, and someone got gunned down in the street about two houses over. I didn't see the actual shooting, but I did see him die, so I'm counting it. I also got stuck there the whole night because my car ended up inside the crime zone.
5280052
Ah. Well, that's still more people than me, at any rate. Stay safe, my friend.
Neigh
The way you describe it, at least they tried to acted professionally, unlike this guys:
5280052
In the state, I am in now. I learned they have police force made just to handle mental issues. I learned they have a beer and other things to help. They even offer them a meal so they can sit and talk.
I almost got to bear witness to that late last year, waking up in the middle of the night to "Get on the ground and put your hands in the air!" echoing around from the front of my house to the back. >.> At least they didn't shoot the guy.
A friend of mine watched a gang shootout. One of the guys nearest where he could see was punching his fist as he shot his pistol, as though that would make the bullets go much faster, but instead ensuring that every bullet he shot went of in a different wild direction.
So, yeah, stray bullets are a thing.
Also, black lives matter, and the world is slowly, painfully getting better.
I lived in atlanta 1988-1993, before they demolished Techwood (for the olympics) a Crime and drug infested housing development/slum in Atlanta. There were shootings every night. There were police there, every night. It was like Beirut. Every single night for years. I cant imagine living in there. I was litterally two blocks north of there. The violence almost never spilled out because in effect it was a giant open air prison for the residents. They moved the people out spreading them throughout the city and miraculously the crime stopped and the drug activity went away or way down. You cannot imprison an entire people without horrible negative consequences. Blacks throughout america are living in Techwood Light.
Social media is simultaneously the best and worst technology invented in a long time, and I will continue to maintain it's a cancer that will slowly strangle and kill society.
But it did also lead to everyone having a video camera with them at nearly all times. It gave everyone the ability to become a journalist. Someone could have looked at the video of Eric Garner and reasonably concluded that what happened was an accident. Someone could have watched the video of Philando Castile and reasonably concluded that what happened was incompetence (either from the officer or the department that hired someone who was obviously too nervous and excitable to be a cop).
But there is no way to look at the video of George Floyd and reasonably conclude that it was anything other than malice.
5280151
Absolutely. And the problem is, I think a lot - if not almost all - of the people who claim there's no problem, or that it's just a few bad apples that can be weeded out are people who have genuinely never had a problem with their interactions with the police. They've never experienced that fear. All they've dealt with are polite people who are there to help, and they think that's how the police are to everyone everywhere. They can't understand that it's simply not how life is for many people.
5280156
The trick is, I think, to look at where those people actually live. In a lot (that is, basically all) cases where someone feels it's a few bad apples, they live in a small town, far away from a city. Of course they've never had a bad interaction with the police, despite interacting with them almost everyday: The cop lives next door. They went to school together. They're a friend of an uncle, and sometimes they have dinner together. They never have bad interactions with the police because, even if they don't know the officer personally, someone is that officer's immediate family is a friend of theirs, or they are otherwise not separated by more than one or two degrees. It's not a news headline when a cop misbehaves; it's a town-wide scandal. That kind of fear of what bad policing will do to their standing in the community, and the standing of their family, does a lot to prevent bad policing. In a town like that, it is just a few bad apples, and they get removed quickly.
That doesn't happen in a city: There are just too many people.
The problem is, those “good” cops protect the bad cops. The whole institution is rotten to the core and we need to entirely dismantle it. Unfortunately liberals get really jumpy when you drop the word “anarchy” into conversations, even though that’s a word with a ton of flavor and nuance behind it, they just automatically think of destructive violent chaos, because that’s what the authoritarian capitalist propaganda machine has taught them to think.
It's worth remembering the phrase "a few bad apples" concludes "spoil the batch." Not "a few bad apples, oh well."
5280359
You're absolutely right. In large parts of the country, calling the cops is the worst thing you can do in a crisis. People would be better off if there were no police at all. If nothing else, even if people still want to have police we need to pull all the current departments out by the roots and create something new and more effective for the community in their place.
5280368
Thanks for pointing that out! It drives me up the wall, just like the 'bootstraps' thing - how 'pulling yourself up by your bootstraps' has morphed into a thing about improving your circumstances on your own, when in fact it's originally a phrase about doing something that's physically impossible!
And thank you, Magnet, for throwing your hat into the ring.
Black lives matter, and fuck fascism.
So speaking from a position of research. Police are horribly under funded in urban areas. I'm not joking. The largest police force in the Country is New York City. 50,000 police officers to watch over 8,336,817 citizens. That's it. That's the thin blue line, and they're about to lose upwards of 600 officers because they're receiving lower pay for a city that literally dumps fecal matter on their heads just for existing. This means that those police departments can't be picky about who they hire. They don't have the funds to get the best officers in the nation on the ground because the city doesn't allocate to them the funds needed for better training or equipment. So that means those poorly trained officers are stuck patrolling in areas that need well trained police officers the most. For crap pay and a community that would prefer them hanging from street lamps. Each one of those officers is responsible for 167 people. When poorly trained and under constant assault, bad results happen.
In the entirety of our nation, there are 800,000 officers. In the entire nation. 50,000 are in New York. Somewhere around 800 work in Minneapolis. The epicenter of the current national spat. Those 800 officers have to watch over a city of over 400,000 people. That's 530 people to every one officer. On TOP of an already badly funded police department. Each officer is responsible for watching over 500 people. That means the bad eggs get stuck in and it's very unlikely they'll be let go because the department literally cannot afford to lose a body. That means you get bad officers like the shit who murdered a man he was familiar with and is now facing Murder 1 charges. Rightfully so. He should've been removed from the force years ago. But they couldn't lose that body and he had the Union on their back.
Sure, rural areas don't have that much crime, nor do they have the number of officers that urban areas see. I think my department has something around 50 or 60 officers on top of the Sheriff's Office. Bad officers here don't get to stick around long because we can afford to give them the boot.
Now, restructuring is something that should be done, but that's not going to fix the problem. The problem is in the communities where these things take place. They want the government to fix what they themselves refuse to fix. That's not the government's responsibility. It never has been. A community that can't police itself is a community doomed to violence.
I saw someone on here argue for Anarchy. Straight up, that is the single stupidest argument I've ever heard. Anarchy is the complete absence of law and order, the strictures of society. Without law and order you get Mob rule. You can put up all the lofty ideals that you feel Anarchy would bring, but at the end of the day it's going to be nothing more than whatever the mob says, and woe betide thee who speaketh out against that flood of madness.
If you, or anyone, wants to fix these problems. You have to take a hard glaring look at what the problem at the core is. If you follow the current narrative that police brutality is widespread, then you're not looking at the problem at all, you're looking at one of the many, MANY symptoms of the problem. I'm not going to get into the statistics on this however, as every time it's brought up lately, you're considered a racist, or some other such ist or ism for pointing out the truth and honestly? I am tired of having to deal with that level of ineptitude to where one wants to actively ignore the real problems for the virtue signalling that seems to give them a greater rush to the brain than actually getting out there and helping does.
5280523
Lol okay statist
5280567
My... How insightful. So brave, so stunning. 10/10.
5280412
"People would be better off if there were no police at all. "
Now I think you've gone too far the other direction. Remember those two that drove a jogger down and killed him with a shotgun because they claimed they thought he might have been responsible for thefts in the area despite literally no evidence of that and them not seeing him do anything suspicious?
That's the face of justice if you get rid of the police.
Not that the police haven't also killed innocent people, something which does need to be addressed and change needs to happen, but I don't know why you think getting rid of them would somehow lead to more accountability and less shootings of innocent people. Because then, instead of undertrained people dealing with crime, you'd just have completely untrained people doing it.
5280523
"In New York City, that share [of police spending] has hovered around 6 percent, a number in 2017 that amounted to $5.7 billion.", from a New York Times article, but I did see LAPD and NYPD's budget in the billions, so I'm curious what budget would not underfund them.
What the police are expected to deal with has increased throughout the years though the number of officers hasn't really, which perhaps can also be termed as 'more ways they can fail.'
So reallocating both funding and responsibilities to different services, perhaps housing and mental health care among others, is a venue people wish to pursue.
At any rate, thank you to MagnetBolt for sharing your story.