Defund the Police

Discussion in 'The Red Room' started by Steal Your Face, Jun 6, 2020.

  1. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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  2. Raoul the Red Shirt

    Raoul the Red Shirt Professional bullseye

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    If the beating is as brutal as those who have viewed it indicated, I'm fairly sure that any officers who committed such acts with such irrefutable evidence would be equally swiftly charged, regardless of their race. Rodney King was beaten for a little over a minute. From the reports, Nichols was beaten for about three minutes.
  3. matthunter

    matthunter Ice Bear

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    This implies there might be a line where only beating someone for 59 seconds would result in them getting away with it.

    I don't think we want to grant these fuckers that wiggle room.
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  4. Raoul the Red Shirt

    Raoul the Red Shirt Professional bullseye

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    I mean, the question of how/when it is reasonable to beat someone is often going to be fuzzy. The jury in the first Rodney King thought that the officers' actions were reasonable enough that the officers did not deserve to be convicted, whereas I think most people then and now would disagree.

    But I don't think anybody worth paying any attention to would say beating someone for three minutes who offers no resistance can be conceivably deemed as reasonable.
  5. tafkats

    tafkats scream not working because space make deaf Moderator

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  6. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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  7. Steal Your Face

    Steal Your Face Anti-Federalist

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    Isn't the police chief black?
  8. shootER

    shootER Insubordinate...and churlish Administrator

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    And a woman.

    interview-abc-ml-230127_1674824884543_hpEmbed_16x9_992.jpg
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  9. Ancalagon

    Ancalagon Scalawag Administrator Formerly Important

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    it’s quite a coincidence that, not long after the Civil Rights Movement made police brutality against Blacks unpopular, SCOTUS decided to create qualified immunity

    https://twitter.com/5thcircappeals/status/1619160238514667520

    Some interesting historical context on Qualified Immunity that I was unaware of.
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  10. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    And? Next you'll be saying that there's np racism in America because Obama was President for 8 years.
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  11. Steal Your Face

    Steal Your Face Anti-Federalist

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    No, but is @Ancalagon implying that the police chief who's black is racist towards other blacks? I know it's possible that she is, but it doesn't appear to be the case. Or maybe he's implying she's sexist? Again, maybe she is, but it doesn't appear to be the case. I figured it's because they want to show to the community that they are taking this case seriously. Maybe she wants to show whitey how to properly handle these type of situations.:shrug:
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  12. Steal Your Face

    Steal Your Face Anti-Federalist

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    @Ancalagon thinks this is the Memphis police chief.
  13. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    Or, perhaps the Police Chief felt that if they were white officers and she tried to fire them, she'd be out of a job.

    IAC, one example isn't going to be enough to prove that she's handling such situations appropriately, regardless of the races and genders of the people involved. A couple of years ago, I worked with a guy who was basically hiding from the Memphis PD. Not because he'd done anything wrong, but because he was suing them over what they did to him. One of them was driving their patrol car drunk, and hit dude with it, putting him in the hospital. The police were trying to cover it all up, and dude was afraid that if he got stopped for anything by the Memphis police, he wouldn't live long enough to see his court date. I don't know if he was telling the truth or not, but I've read enough news stories about problems with the Memphis police over the years to consider it plausible.

    Even if the police chief is a perfect crusader for justice, she won't have had time to make much impact on the corruption, etc., within the department.
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  14. shootER

    shootER Insubordinate...and churlish Administrator

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    The current chief created the unit that the indicted officers were in. :jayzus:


    The officers charged in Nichols’s death were all members of the SCORPION team, a unit that Davis formed shortly after taking over the department in 2021. (The name stands for Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods.) It’s a classic example of hot-spot policing, a tactic that aims to reduce crime by concentrating officers in locations with large numbers of crimes.
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  15. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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  16. Spaceturkey

    Spaceturkey i can see my house

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    I dunno... we've got a couple of local sketch bags that are in similar situations. They're effectively untouchable.
    he's almost gotten ANc's point that for once we're seeing a police dept with the integrity to put the public's safety from cops first. He just fucks it up by focusing on the irrelevant factor of the chief being a woman of colour.
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  17. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    Memphis has disbanded the unit. What will happen to the officers is another matter.

    https://twitter.com/mem_policedept/status/1619446919683796992?s=46&t=hEW7gYZPNjX3kEZwMTrWvQ
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  18. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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  19. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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  20. Ancalagon

    Ancalagon Scalawag Administrator Formerly Important

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  21. Raoul the Red Shirt

    Raoul the Red Shirt Professional bullseye

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    I think this is some revisionist history.

    A) I don't know that the Civil Rights Movement succeeded in making police brutality against Blacks "unpopular" in any meaningful way, broad way, sad to say.

    B) The concept of qualified immunity came about as I understand it in a 1982 case that had nothing to do with police conduct in the 1980s. So that doesn't constitute "not long after the Civil Rights Movement," and the concept of qualified immunity can't reasonably be said to have been crafted to get police out from under liability or as a reaction to the civil rights movement.

    https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/qualified_immunity

    https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/457/800/
  22. Raoul the Red Shirt

    Raoul the Red Shirt Professional bullseye

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    The thing is that you're saying based on the one example of the person you knew who suspected that Memphis PD would try to retaliate for him complaining about a drunk officer who got into an accident that the department is so corrupt that even a perfect crusader police chief hasn't had time to make much of an impact on the department. She's been in place for 20 months.

    The fact that the police chief is a black woman and that the officers she fired were also black could be completely irrelevant, could be partially relevant or could be central. There's no real way of knowing.

    For my money, there are probably few police officers who have conducted misconduct as obvious and well-documented as these five have who have not been fired in the post-George Floyd era, and probably the post-Rodney King era. At least, I cannot think of a situation that is on video in which there is not at least some plausible explanation for the wrongdoing. I find it hard to believe that a white police chief would not have soon fired white police officers (or any other permeutation of race), especially knowing/suspecting that criminal charges were coming and were likely to stick.

    When the Memphis Police Association can't even bring itself to offer a defense of the officers' actions, that speaks volumes.

    https://www.commercialappeal.com/st...-says-it-is-committed-to-justice/69850386007/
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  23. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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  24. Raoul the Red Shirt

    Raoul the Red Shirt Professional bullseye

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    I don't know if the accounts have fully spelled out the nature of the stop and the encounter. But from what I understand from this link, this white cop deployed a taser on Nichols at one point and said that he hoped the other officers stomped him. Using a taser on Nichols might have been justified at the point Hemphill did.

    It was the beating him for 3 minutes when he was offering no resistance that was completely unjustified, and presumably, Hemphill did not participate in that. Which does not mean that he is not subject to an investigation and ultimately being fired. It just means that the evidence on which one would justify firing him is not as clearcut as the actual people who beat Nichols to death.
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  25. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    You see the screen grabs from the bodycam videos? He was there while the beatings were going on and didn't stop them. You can clearly see it in the ones I've posted.

    Give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he's fully cooperating with the investigation and that he's the reason why we know this was murder. None of that absolves him for not trying to stop things while they were happening. None of that explains why he hasn't been fired or arrested. None of it. Seriously. This isn't an "Oops, I grabbed my gun instead of my TASER." this was cold-blooded murder, that took place over the course of several minutes (even longer when you add in the fact that the paramedics who arrived on the scene didn't immediately render aid to Tyre), and he was there for the worst of it, at the very least. Given that we're prosecuting fucking accountants who worked at the death camps in WWII, this dickhead should be fired.

    Okay, the police chief doesn't have enough power to do so. Maybe it's because she hasn't been on the job long enough, or the police "union" is too powerful for her to take them on. So what? If we don't do something about this, nothing will change. At the very least, dude needs to be fired. That hasn't happened, yet. Nor have we been told why it hasn't happened. This is something that should have been publicly discussed when the other officers were fired and arrested over the murder. It hasn't been. That should make you angry.
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  26. Demiurge

    Demiurge Goodbye and Hello, as always.

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    Qualified immunity as it stands now came to be after a series of cases in SCOTUS over 25 years. But the first introduction was Pierson v Ray in 1967, when police beat and arrested 12 Episcopol priests for disobeying an order to leave a bus stop cafe. Said priests were part of the Freedom Riders movement, and had been protesting for civil rights previously, but at that moment were simply trying to eat before they caught their bus. They were claimed to be in violation as a 'breach of the peace' simply by being there. While it was found that their rights were violated and they were imprisoned unjustly nothing was done against the police chief, Ray, and the police who reported it.

    Ray had been responsible for arresting over 300 of the Freedom Riders by that time.
  27. Raoul the Red Shirt

    Raoul the Red Shirt Professional bullseye

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    I looked at the article you linked without watching any of the video. I think I saw somewhere screengrabs showing that there was a white officer on-scene.

    Context matters, though. There is a difference between if Hemphill tased Nichols and remained behind as other officers pursued him and said the still despicable "stomp his ass comment" and if he was right in the immediate vicinity as the beating occurred and had the opportunity and obligation to step in and stop it. I don't think it is known how close he was during the actual beating, what he knew.

    I would say that even giving him the benefit of every doubt, Hemphill deserves to be fired. He is no longer capable of serving the public trust even based on the most beneficial version of what is known. But the Memphis PD might have a different take based on evidence that they have that might change that evaluation. The Memphis PD may have additional hoops to go through, given that he did not actually beat Nichols and his use of a Taser might have been justified under the circumstances of the stop. I haven't seen why a Taser was employed.

    It may have been easier to fire the five officers who actually participated in the beating because there is no question that their behavior was unjustified, especially against the backdrop of criminal charges.

    It may be harder to justify criminal charges against Hemphill because an ethical prosecutor would need to believe that they have a fair chance of convincing a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that Hemphill had committed a crime. I don't know if that would be a fair belief here, but then again, a lot of the facts are not known.
  28. Raoul the Red Shirt

    Raoul the Red Shirt Professional bullseye

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    As I read this summary, Pierson has to do with the demonstrators having been arrested under a statute later having been found unconstitutional.

    https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/386/547/#tab-opinion-1946562

    Anyway, you can criticize the Warren Court for many things, but being lapdogs of the police is not one of them.
  29. Steal Your Face

    Steal Your Face Anti-Federalist

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    Don’t you know that @Tuckerfan is the smartest man on earth and can’t possibly be wrong about anything?
  30. Diacanu

    Diacanu Comicmike. Writer

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    No, that's me. :diacanu: