US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2327

On May 27 2020 06:02 Artisreal wrote:
you can add a couple of people burning to death in German prisons to that list as well.
Though I suppose it's still incomparable in scale to the US

On May 27 2020 06:02 Artisreal wrote:
you can add a couple of people burning to death in German prisons to that list as well.
Though I suppose it's still incomparable in scale to the US

On May 27 2020 02:54 Dan HH wrote:
I watched the video of the Minneapolis cop suffocating a handcuffed man to death for no reason other than to spite the bystanders and it fucked up my evening..

On May 27 2020 10:24 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:

Insanity... the officer killed the man in cold blood, rolled his corpse in an ambulance and walks off proud.

On May 27 2020 10:39 NewSunshine wrote:

Firing him and his enablers is only the first step. They used their badges as a shield to commit murder. It's a base perversion of law and order.

For example, businessmen in the late 19th century had both connections to politicians and an image of the kinds of people most likely to go on strike and disrupt their workforce. So it’s no coincidence that by the late 1880s, all major U.S. cities had police forces. Fears of labor-union organizers and of large waves of Catholic, Irish, Italian, German, and Eastern European immigrants, who looked and acted differently from the people who had dominated cities before, drove the call for the preservation of law and order, or at least the version of it promoted by dominant interests. For example, people who drank at taverns rather than at home were seen as “dangerous” people by others, but they might have pointed out other factors such as how living in a smaller home makes drinking in a tavern more appealing. (The irony of this logic, Potter points out, is that the businessmen who maintained this belief were often the ones who profited off of the commercial sale of alcohol in public places.)

At the same time, the late 19th century was the era of political machines, so police captains and sergeants for each precinct were often picked by the local political party ward leader, who often owned taverns or ran street gangs that intimidated voters. They then were able to use police to harass opponents of that particular political party, or provide payoffs for officers to turn a blind eye to allow illegal drinking, gambling and prostitution.

This situation was exacerbated during Prohibition, leading President Hoover to appoint the Wickersham Commission in 1929 to investigate the ineffectiveness of law enforcement nationwide. To make police independent from political party ward leaders, the map of police precincts was changed so that they would not correspond with political wards.

The drive to professionalize the police followed, which means that the concept of a career cop as we’d recognize it today is less than a century old.

In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system. Some of the primary policing institutions there were the slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts, Potter says; the first formal slave patrol had been created in the Carolina colonies in 1704. During the Civil War, the military became the primary form of law enforcement in the South, but during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed slaves.

On May 27 2020 11:21 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:

Hopefully there is enough outcry and demonstrations that they get civil charges, if not criminal, brought against them. But if we've learned anything from Eric Garner, it probably won't happen.

On May 27 2020 11:43 iamthedave wrote:


The American justice system is loath to ever punish cops. Protection from consequence always leads to corruption. Always.

On May 27 2020 09:48 iamthedave wrote:


What happened to the perpetrators?

Wikipedia says:
Oury Jalloh (born 1968 in Kabala, Sierra Leone;[1] died 7 January 2005 in Dessau, Germany) was an asylum seeker who died in a fire in a police cell in Dessau, Germany. The hands and feet of Jalloh, who was alone in the cell, were tied to a mattress. A fire alarm went off, but was initially turned off without further action by an officer. The case caused national and international outrage.

On May 27 2020 22:37 Vivax wrote:
Meanwhile Trump threatening to shut down twitter because free speech is threatening his election.
He wants you to get your news from his state-funded self-advertising shows. If that happens, you'll only see what you need to believe.