Police Arrest a Man to Death.

A guy with a bad ticker doing that for "hours on end"? Come on. I don't think so.

And at no time does the judge grant those rights. At no time has any legislator, ever, granted a right. They recognize rights. They protect rights from infringement. Never, anywhere, do they grant them.

Because we already have them, from birth.

Look to the original document of this country regarding rights. In each of the first ten amendments, the rights are spoken of in the context that they exist already, independent of the document. This is a basic, fundamental fact of nature. Rights exist by virtue of the existence of the individual human being.

Well? Whose fault is that?

Jesus fucking Christ!!

You've got a fucking computer. USE IT.

You've got natural rights and legal rights for starters.

Instead of railing against "the man" like a uneducated fool start reading.

"Before the formation of this Constitution, it had been affirmed as a self evident truth, in the declaration of Independence, very deliberately made by the Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled that, "all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." This declaration of Independence was received and ratified by all the States in the Union, and has never been disannulled. May we not from hence conclude, that the doctrine of Liberty and Equality is an article in the political creed of the United States."

Samuel Adams: Address to the Legislature of Massachusetts, January 17, 1794

The understanding of human rights as preexistent to and independent of government "generosity" is fundamental to modern law, and traces its descent from the Magna Carta. None of these fundamental legal documents posits the absurd and anti-human notion that government grants rights. Instead, they proscribe government actions which violate unalienable rights.

You do not have 'natural rights and legal rights.' You have natural rights and legal protections of those rights. The rights are inherent. Natural. They are birthrights. The protections of them are legal guarantees, but they are not dispensations.

This is why it's absurd on its face to claim that police have any legal "right" to initiate violence. No human being has a right to initiate violence against another human being. What police have may be legal permission to do it, but it is not a right.

Aggressive law enforcement tactics are about to become a big issue in this country, it will be interesting to see where the partisan dividing line falls.

Thanks for the clarification, Quest. Loosies are a bit of a different issue, but still not a victimless crime, because the package warnings are no longer there, meaning the buyer might be a victim of sorts, as he is denied consumer protections. Less of an issue, though, than black market sales to avoid taxes IMO.

It will not as long as the majority of the victims of it are minorities. If it was a string of pretty little white girls, it would be a different story.

And that's the everlasting shame of it. It's been tolerated as long as it has because of that, which is going to make the end of tolerance toward it look like a different kind of intolerance; not entirely without justification, either.

I think you're on shaky ground there. Anyone so desperate for a smoke that they'll buy loose cigarettes is already addicted to them. For folks in that state, the presence or absence of a warning label is a moot point.

Except it hasn't been universally tolerated. Let's use stop and frisk as an example. Democrats in NYC spoke out against it, and ultimately got it ended as a standard NYPD policy. I suppose I don't need to remind you who ridiculed the arguments against the policy, right?

I agree, it is a much lesser thing than tax evasion. I was only explaining how it is still not 100% victimless. The other element to consider is that the buyers are not so much addicts as teens. If it were only about keeping adults from hurting themselves, I'd agree that the law served no point whatsoever. But it is also about keeping kids from becoming addicts.

Who?

Speaking from experience, teenagers don't pay to get addicted to cigarettes. They only start paying after they've gotten addicted. And getting addicted to tobacco, for teenagers, turns out to be a lot easier than has long been believed, according to this piece in the New York Times.

According to the studies that are the subject of that article, the likelihood is extremely high that as soon as the first time a kid swipes a cigarette from mom or dad, or is handed one at a party or behind the school gym during lunch, that's it. Another addict is created. But -- and I'll admit, this is speculation -- the probability that a teenager will spend any amount of money to try it for the first time is exceedingly low -- particularly in the predominantly anti-smoking popular culture we have today.

My addition to this is that we often too easily consider any level of force police wish to use acceptable, or at least beyond our questioning. Police certainly don't appreciate having their actions questioned.

In this instance, we have someone committing what I would call a pretty minor crime, one not really worthy of arrest so much as a citation and a court appearance. An arrest can have many purposes but I think these are the most generally acceptable:

1. To remove a suspected perpetrator from a volatile situation when there is a crime in progress. Example: arresting someone for driving while intoxicated, because to not arrest them would permit them to remain an immediate menace to others on the road.
2. To properly process a suspected perpetrator after the fact of a crime, ensure they are arraigned, etc. Example: evidence points to a particular individual as a murder suspect; they should be arrested and charged.

I'm struggling to come up with a third general purpose here. If someone is selling untaxed cigarettes, they aren't endangering anyone (at least no more than people who are selling taxed cigarettes do), so scenario 1 is out. It's unclear whether the police had any cause to arrest him at that point for past crimes (which I assume had already been disposed in some way.) I guess there is speculation going around that he may have been selling cigarettes to minors that day, which I would consider serious enough for an arrest under scenario 1, but without further information I couldn't call it a good arrest on its face.

Police tend to think they can arrest anyone, anywhere, anytime, for any (or no) reason, and while they may be legally empowered to do so, I don't consider it ethical or just, and there absolutely should be pushback from the citizenry against police entitlement.

This is a tragic story and didn't have to happen. It takes two to escalate, and while the man who died didn't exactly help himself by getting so agitated, there should also be some expectation of cops to leave well enough alone instead of escalating a situation that didn't have to be dangerous into one that became deadly.

Conservatives like Hanity and other Fox commentators. I'm pretty sure we've had some Wordforge conservatives weigh in on it, too.

Okay, change what I wrote to be "feed their addiction." Point is that Loosies make it easy for kids to get smokes. And in Boston, teens were the main customers according to studies by the Health Commission done during the push to regulate sales.

@John Castle:

Here are some links regarding conservative Republican support for stop and frisk:

http://www.politicususa.com/2014/04...son-sean-hannitys-obsession-cliven-bundy.html

http://foxnewsinsider.com/2013/08/20/bill-oreilly-stop-and-frisk-intrusive-it-saves-hundreds-lives

You see 'Republicans' -- I see 'government.' One brand is as bad as the other.

Then you confirm that you're a fool, since the other major party stood in opposition to the policy. You claim there is no difference, I demonstrate that there is, and you repeat the claim. I don't care so much which one you pick, or whether you pick one at all. But don't pretend they are the same when the evidence clearly contradicts such a notion.

That's the case on every issue, gul. Problems created by Democrats, problems created by Republicans, the whole mess is a litany of problems created by Government. Each side resists the stupidity the other side tries to enact, while trying to enact stupidity of their own. Giving either side a pass on it by pretending some version or the other of shit don't stink depending on which ass it oozed out of is what makes someone a fool.

You keep changing the topic as soon as your position proves untenable. Knock it off.

How have I changed the topic? I'll admit that it's evolving, but I'm not throwing any non-sequitur monkey wrenches.

Oh? So when I demonstrate that the parties aren't identical, you move on to "well, so what, government bad!!!" I we don't call it changing the topic, should we instead opt for raving lunacy? Mental deficiency? Paranoid hysteria? Actually, I can see why you don't realize you've changed the topic.

You've certainly claimed that the parties aren't identical. You've come nowhere near demonstrating that either of them is not, in fact, a political party. (I don't expect you to attempt that, of course, that would be stupid.) Are they identical on the level of which idiotic policies they attempt to enact or succeed in enacting? No, of course not. Are they identical on the larger, more important level of attempting, and succeeding, in enacting idiotic policies? Absolutely, yes. And that's why your defense of either party fails; it's irrelevant hair-splitting.

Republicans defended "stop and frisk." Democrats defend "gun free zones."

Let me break that down for you:

Republicans defended some stupid shit that violates peoples' rights and has the potential to invite completely preventable violence. Democrats defended some stupid shit that violates peoples' rights and has the potential to invite completely preventable violence.

But saying it that way is redundant. So here is the ultimate truth:

Government has defended some stupid shit that violates peoples' rights and has the potential to invite completely preventable violence.

That's not a subject change. That is the subject, the thematic truth that stands as the genesis of this entire thread and dozens more like it here in the Red Room.

I'm not sure where one is meant to follow this logic. When government does bad things, the answer is hardly to eliminate/shrink down the government. As a counterpoint to "big government abuses people," these sorts of police abuses are far less common (in fact, virtually unheard of) in Western Europe, and by any measure you'd like to use their governments are bigger and more powerful. What should one take away from this? At a minimum, that the size/power of government is not directly correlated with how abusive it is, and in fact may be a completely orthogonal property.

Well, elimination is never going to happen. The most powerful gang is always going to write the rules, and after enough time passes, "gang" and "rules" are always going to end up as "government" and "laws." Shrinking in the sense of "indiscriminately" wouldn't be a good idea, either. If we were to employ one word answers, they would be "trimming" and "disciplining."

@tandelou:

I was heading in that direction by raising stop and frisk. The relevance is that it is possible to change police policies, and though New York might still have some work to do, it is nothing like what Oldfella describes in Georgia and Ancalagon confirmed is also the case in Alabama. So we have the elephant in the room that anti-government hystericals refuse to notice, that being that states with larger, more active governments, seem to have less abusive police procedures or are at least making strides in that direction.

That is, until we bring civil asset forfeiture into it.

Georgia does not however have the Mafia using actual policemen to carry out their hits, as has happened in NYC.
Georgia has something now called the "Super Speeder" ticket. If you are twenty (I think) miles over the speed limit you get the speeding fine from whatever town's cops pull you over, plus the state of Georgia puts another couple of hundred on top of it. Now if only they would crack down on people not using their turn signals, or camping out in the suicide lane.

Both of you are guilty of confirmation bias, I guess. It's all I can figure out based on the, I think, erroneous conclusions you've drawn from what little data we have.

It's raw numbers, but not the ones you're thinking about. It's easier to see statistical trends and incidents in an agency of 80,000 than it is an agency of 6. There's one agency near here that has six full-time certified officers. If one of them does something stupid, it may be viewed as a one-off incident. An anomaly. But, if 1/6th of the NYPD does something stupid, you're talking about nearly 14,000 incidents. If something happens once, we probably won't write a policy for it. If something happens 14,000 times, yeah, we probably need a policy.

If memory serves, 8 of the 10 largest County and Municipal Law Enforcement Agencies make up 33% of the total number of Law Enforcement Officers in the United States. These Agencies are mostly in "Blue" cities and states. But, the political makeup of the government has nothing, directly, to do with the size of the agency or its oversight. The Agency is big because it's jurisdiction and population are big. It has lots of oversight and citizen involvement because it is big. It's faults are glaring because of the raw number of people involved. It's trends and reporting are clear because of the amount of data involved.

I guess, in short, the NYPD (as an example) does not have less abusive procedures because they're in one of the bluest of blue states. They have these policies and procedures because they're the largest Law Enforcement Agency in the United States with approximately 80,000 personnel, almost 4.5 times bigger than the FBI. Trying to organize and maintain any kind of structure for any purpose, while also trying to insulate yourself from civil liability, would be impossible without them. But, things are different when you have 6 or 60 personnel. Things that may be printed in a manual for NYPD may be left to the discretion of the officer in a small agency.