Jose Guerena

Well, no. No part of that was true, not even technically. Henry Louis Gates didn't do anything that "disturbed the peace"; to whatever extent the peace was disturbed it was disturbed by the actions of the police officer who unlawfully entered Gates' home, unlawfully refused to provide identification when asked, and unlawfully detained Gates who was not guilty of any crime. And the officer must have known all this because he's the one that did it. There was only one officer.Being "loud" around a police officer isn't a crime, but false arrest is. What happened in the Gates case was that an officer felt that he had to break the law in order to be in control of the situation, because police believe they have to be in control of all situations they're in. All situations, full control.We've created a police culture where the only lives police care about are their own. We've created a police culture where we've made police feel like civilians are expendable, because there are no civilians, only future criminals. We've made police feel like their lives are in danger every second they're on the job, even though being a police officer is safer than working at a gas station.That's why Jose Guerena had to die - so that SWAT could be "in control of the situation", which was only a "situation" because they'd created one. We've trained police to feel like they're at war with literally everyone who doesn't have a badge. Then he was lying. We know for a fact why Gates was arrested and it's not because the officer felt that Gates was a threat to his safety or a threat to the community, it was because Gates was a threat to his dignity.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Because criminalizing regular people is how police "maintain control" of the situations they're in. Sounds like a one in a million random crime. You know, the kind that regular people like us are subject to all the time. Sometimes from police.But it happened to a cop, so naturally it becomes a statewide bulletin that puts every cop on edge; the entire police apparatus is hypersensitive to any perceived violence against cops because of the mythology that there's nothing more dangerous than being a police officer, that every cop is a split-second away from violent death. Never mind that it's not even on the top twenty most dangerous jobs, or that the vast majority of cops won't be shot at even once in their lives. Cops want to think that they're on the edge, that they're the heroes standing between their families and chaos, so they're hypersensitive to events like your bulletin.And the thing is - it probably didn't even happen. But somebody hears a story about it, a statewide alert goes out, and now cops are on edge. The result? Half a dozen people shot dead by hair-trigger cops in incidents where all they were armed with were cigarette lighters.I know you think it's perfectly reasonable to suspect all civilians of being hardened criminals who could kill you at any moment. The problem is, you turn a blind eye to the criminals who look like cops. After all, the authority and training in violence afforded to police officers is pretty attractive to psychopaths. Sure - Dogmafood did not immediately and obsequiously defer to police authority. He made the mistake of thinking that he was talking to a workaday joe just like himself, not a sociopath with a government-issued monopoly on violence.

Well, no, Taz. The worst that could happen to a normal person is that he could be shot and killed by police.The problem, again, is that we've instituted this police culture that says that nobody's life is more important than a cop's, and that a cop has every right to do whatever he thinks he has to, to come home safe at the end of the day.If you want to be safe don't be a cop. (As I say, it's actually pretty safe to be a cop but still.) The job is where you're supposed to put your life on the line for us, not the reverse. But a lot of cops have become cowards with guns, scared of every shadow, worried that if they don't go in ready to blaze they may not make it out alive. And you still don't think that for most cops - for the ones we reward, anyway - it's about authoritarian control of every situation, not keeping the peace?Amazing.

You can always "blame the situation", but police who understood that their job was to put their own lives on the line for public safety wouldn't have fired until it was absolutely certain that they needed to - not to defend their own lives but to protect public safety. Coward cops who believed that they had the right to kill whoever they thought they needed to kill to "make it home at the end of the day", on the other hand, blew Amadou Diallo away.They did exactly what they were trained to do. It's the training that's the problem - somehow along the way we got to a point where we told cops that they had the most dangerous job in the world and that the only thing they were expected to do was survive:

quote:

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It started out as another routine day on patrol for Officer Steve Gallagher cruising the streets of Olympia, Wash. At an imposing 6’ 4 and 240 pounds, armed with a .45 caliber Heckler and Koch semiautomatic pistol, handcuffs and pepper spray, he was always ready to respond to the call. Like all cops, his goal at the end of his shift was to make it home safely, which for Gallagher meant to be with his teenage daughter, Molly. What would the call be on this particular day back in 2004? Shots fired? Burglary in progress? Domestic violence? Drug dealing?

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http://www.chnonline.org/...vest-for-priestly-vestments.htmlIf you want to "make it home safely" go work in an office. Society has no use for a coward cop.

Actually that's not even close to what I'm talking about.Don't you think there's a middle ground between a cop who won't fire his weapon no matter what - as this one clearly was - and police who execute civilians simply because they seem to be reaching for something? And what was the result of that suit? I suspect it ran afoul of the Supreme Court ruling in Castle Rock vs. Gonzales, where it was ruled that private citizens have no right to expect the police to protect them from crimes.Yes, that's right - according to the highest court in the land, we've given police a state-sponsored monopoly on the use of violence and we don't even get to expect them to protect us in return. They did what they were trained to do. I don't fault them - indeed I've defended these same cops in another thread. It's the training that's to blame - a police culture that turns cops into dangerous cowards. Then what the hell good are they?

Because it was bright fucking orange on the end and made of plastic? Yeah, no shit. Same as the rest of us.Do you think, maybe, that the cause of that has something to do with cops, not civilians?

Well, there was a shot - when the cop tripped, his gun went off.Keep in mind that, in a tense situation, people don't perceive events in the order that they happened.I don't fault the cops in the Amadou Diallo case - they were approaching a man who matched the description of the violent criminal they were chasing, he turned and grabbed something under his jacket, then a shot went off and one of the cops stumbled.Any human being is going to determine that they were under attack, especially if they already had an "attack mentality."

This is an example of what I'm talking about - cops obsessed with "controlling the situation" to the extent that they use deadly force when faced with anything but immediate obsequience.Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP0f00_JMak&feature=player...How come Jaderis can embed Youtubes but mine are just big blank spaces?Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

I used both forms of the embed code, and both gave me a completely blank post. When I copied and pasted Jaderis's code in and changed the SRC attribute, I got a blank post.

Oh, I wouldn't bet on it. Even without knowing any detail of your biography I can probably name half a dozen Federal laws you've violated without even knowing it, many of them tax or alcohol related. If I knew what states you've lived in I could find two dozen more. And none of that even gets into completely subjective "offenses" like "disturbing the peace" and so on.Some of it you've gotten away with because police don't even know about all of the laws, some of it because no one was around when you did it, and some of it because of the deference granted to even a former police officer. But it's impossible to say that you've never broken a Federal law because no one - not even the Federal government! - has a complete and accurate picture of what conduct is actually illegal!For instance, you've almost certainly violated the Federal Lacey Act (16 USC 3371) several times in your life, due to the broadness of the statute; it criminalizes essentially any activity related to fish, wildlife, or plants that is already illegal under the laws of any state, indian jurisdiction, or foreign power. That's right! The Lacey act makes it a violation of Federal law to do something with a fish, plant, or animal in the wild that is illegal in any other country, even if you're not in that country. In one case, four Americans were sentenced to 8 years each in Federal prison because they stored lobster tails in plastic bags instead of cardboard boxes, because that's outlawed by a Honduran regulation no longer enforced in Honduras. The infraction carried only a fine under Honduran law, but the Lacey act imports only foreign laws, not their associated punishments.If you've ever gone fishing, if you've ever picked a wild blueberry, if you've ever cut your grass you've technically violated the Lacey Act.So, no. You've broken probably hundreds of criminal laws without even knowing about it - the difference is, you just didn't get caught doing it. Almost all legitimate behavior has been rendered technically illegal, because it's in the interest of our police state to do so.

Oh, so you actually do break the law. All the time. You're just taking advantage of the loophole where police have informal enforcement discretion not to pay attention to people who don't speed more than 10 mph over. Yeah. You just have to be somebody who enjoys the privilege of having his lawbreaking ignored - like a cop. Particularly like a white middle-class cop. You mean like our laws about operating motor vehicles on public highways? Those laws? Murder has the lowest rate of recidivism of any crime. Sexual assault has the second lowest. The people you should be concerned about are thieves - property theft of all kinds has the highest recidivism rate of all crimes.

Oh, ok. You're just a criminal that nobody has ever caught, then. Really? You regularly violate state and federal laws governing the operation of motor vehicles on public highways, in the full knowledge that your specific violation is likely to go unpunished by your fellow officers.How the hell is that not a "loophole"?

Nobody's "nitpicking", Taz. I'm just trying to show you your blind spot - you know, where when someone else breaks the law, he's a criminal scum, but when you break the law, those are just the reasonable, accidental infractions that people are entitled to. Well, "people" meaning you and people like you.If you're entitled to the latitude to occasionally technically break the law and get away on a loophole, why isn't your DUI guy? He hadn't actually hurt anybody, had he? The law's the law, isn't it? Are you saying that traffic laws aren't there to protect people? To keep people safe? How about bad cops? What island do they go to?Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Or during, or before. My understanding is that his gun went off as a result of stumbling, and while you might counter that therefore the other policeman should have noticed that he saw his partner fall down and then heard the shot, it's a known feature of brains that they frequently don't perceive events in the order they happen, especially in tense situations.But, look. I don't think these cops were blameless; I think they erred in setting up a situation where they felt like they had to gun down an unarmed man in order to feel safe. And I blame the training that made them feel like they were in a warzone, behind enemy lines, a second away from death, and that therefore they had to blaze or be blazed.I just think they're not a tremendous example of police acting with impunity, because a reasonable person with the same stimulus - attempting to arrest a suspected violent criminal, subject reaching into a jacket to where a gun might be concealed, a shot fired, a partner suddenly down - also would likely have opened fire on Diallo. I have to honestly say that presented with all that evidence, I would have, too. Maybe I would have seen some other clues that Diallo was harmless, not a man firing on me from the dark with a concealed gun. But I haven't heard that any such evidence was available to those officers at that moment. Agreed. Absolutely we can, and should. Top to bottom these tactics and decisions should be subject to the utmost scrutiny even when they don't go wrong. I would read into evidence the cases of Oscar Grant and the recent acquittal of officers Mata and Moreno for the rape of a young lady, despite videotape evidence of them breaking into and entering her apartment and taped confessions to non-consensual sexual intercourse with the resident. http://www.nytimes.com/...ce-officers-acquitted-of-rape.html

The law's the law, isn't it?Put on your cop hat, for a second, and tell me what you think about the wisdom and feasibility of allowing private citizens to determine for themselves what laws count and what laws don't. And in your giant blue book of law, are traffic laws under the heading "doesn't count"? Does it say in your blue book "haha, just kidding, not really a law" when it comes to speeding? I'd love to see the court's reaction when you try to explain that your ticket doesn't really count because, hey, nobody's perfect and we all break the law.Oh, wait. You were there when that happened! As I recall you found that argument pretty risible. No, you're a criminal by definition. A law-breaker. Someone who exploits loopholes to get away with breaking the laws he thinks it's ok to break. The really hilarious part about all that is that you hate loopholes. Not enough to stop using them, though, I guess.