Originally Posted by
tn1911
Well sure, this whole catastrophe was initiated by 2 dangerous crooks. But what we've seen with our own eyes is, well shocking to say the least and at a minimum deserves some very critical eyes towards how it all ended.
But to respond to your anti-LE flames. I think I have an idea what's happening here so bear with me a bit.
First there is a level "trouble" in LE land today that might be just as much political as it is criminal, but I suspect it's more political. Recent high profile events such as the Houston drug raid, the Dallas cop who killed her neighbor and the Ft Worth cop who killed a home owner under very questionable circumstances, all the way to the Florida cop who was planting dope on well over 100 innocent travelers and the north Georgia cop who was arresting perfectly sober drivers for DUI... the list could go on and on.
The public sees all this and begins to form an aggressive opinion of LE as a whole because they do represent the enforcement arm of the .gov which most people already despise, just look at the approval ratings of various .gov bodies. So when something like this happens which looks very bad on the initial approach people immediately remember all the really bad stuff the cops have truly done in the past and that anger just spills over.......
Hopefully the police learn from this and change for the better. We all deserve a professional police force, what happened in Miramar was anything but.
You hit several things in your very thoughtful post.
I think the first thing we have to understand is that the relentless 24-hour news cycle makes incidents like this the topic of conversation much longer than it would have been 30 years ago. As an adjunct to that thought process, when you posted: I think had such an event occurred here and the only innocent lost was the UPS driver the conversation would be much different. It would be a huge tragedy still, but one normal everyday people like you and I could live with, my immediate thought was, no, not given the same media coverage. Mayhaps it wouldn't be so dramatic if there was no helicopter coverage. However, cellphones are endemic among the general population, so it stands to reason cellphone video would still be available to inflame the masses.
Now, who is to say if such widespread coverage of events is bad. I don't know. We used to say that police training manuals were written in the blood of officers who were killed in the line of duty, and widespread publicity can give rise to rapid changes in training and tactics that might otherwise take much longer to occur.
On the other hand, sometimes widespread coverage of events from throughout the United States gives folks the idea that such incidents are commonplace, when, in fact, just the opposite is true. Add to that the fact that the public is know faced with dueling expert witnesses, chosen for the slant in which they are willing to portray the event, and you have a large percentage of the public taking things completely out of context.
This is an example: after the Rodney King beating, the Los Angeles Police Department was in crisis. It was accused of racial insensitivity and ill discipline and violence, and the assumption was that those problems had spread broadly throughout the rank and file.
In the language of statisticians, it was thought that L.A.P.D.’s troubles had a “normal” distribution—that if you graphed them the result would look like a bell curve, with a small number of officers at one end of the curve, a small number at the other end, and the bulk of the problem situated in the middle. The bell-curve assumption has become so much a part of our mental architecture that we tend to use it to organize experience automatically.
But when the L.A.P.D. was investigated by a special commission headed by Warren Christopher, a very different picture emerged.
Between 1986 and 1990, allegations of excessive force or improper tactics were made against eighteen hundred of the eighty-five hundred officers in the L.A.P.D. The broad middle had scarcely been accused of anything.
Furthermore, more than fourteen hundred officers had only one or two allegations made against them—and bear in mind that these were not proven charges, that they happened in a four-year period, and that allegations of excessive force are an inevitable feature of urban police work. (The N.Y.P.D. receives about three thousand such complaints a year.)
A hundred and eighty-three officers, however, had four or more complaints against them, forty-four officers had six or more complaints, sixteen had eight or more, and one had sixteen complaints.
If you were to graph the troubles of the L.A.P.D., it wouldn’t look like a bell curve. It would look more like a hockey stick. It would follow what statisticians call a “power law” distribution—where all the activity is not in the middle but at one extreme.
The Christopher Commission’s report repeatedly comes back to what it describes as the extreme concentration of problematic officers. One officer had been the subject of thirteen allegations of
excessive use of force, five other complaints, twenty-eight “use of force reports” (that is, documented, internal accounts of inappropriate behavior), and one shooting.
Another had six excessive-force complaints, nineteen other complaints, ten use-of-force reports, and three shootings. A third had twenty-seven use-of-force reports, and a fourth had thirty-five.
Another had a file full of complaints for doing things like “striking an arrestee on the back of the neck with the butt of a shotgun for no apparent reason while the arrestee was kneeling and handcuffed,” beating up a thirteen-year-old juvenile, and throwing an arrestee from his chair and kicking him in the back and side of the head while he was handcuffed and lying on his stomach.
The report gives the strong impression that if you fired those forty-four cops the L.A.P.D. would suddenly become a pretty well-functioning police department.
from Million Dollar Murray, an essay by Malcolm Gladwell
The point being, that while there were problems, the public perception that LAPD was a force full of badge heavy racists intent on using excessive force, was wrong. In reality, it was a very small percentage of officers who were the problem. Obviously, this slant wasn't widely reported, as it didn't have a powerful visceral impact.
Last edited by 26 Inf; 12-08-19 at 22:15.
Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President... - Theodore Roosevelt, Lincoln and Free Speech, Metropolitan Magazine, Volume 47, Number 6, May 1918.
Every Communist must grasp the truth. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party Mao Zedong, 6 November, 1938 - speech to the Communist Patry of China's sixth Central Committee
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