black woman get killed in Police Custody
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I remember kind of challenging--not in a disrespectful way though--my first boxing coach about him not allowing me to spar some of the bigger guys. I don't know what some of your experience with certain personality types of excons are, but dude was not to patient even with my respectful questioning of "why not... won't it help me get better?"
He was a former pro boxer and an excon too. He was a bigger guy as well. He seemed to get quite irk with one not accepting their smaller size and wanting to be something more than what they are.
Different boxing coaches have different methodologies--and some different beliefs--as I've come to find out over time. But all of them seem to be unanimous that bigger guys (assuming they have enough experience) can really beat down smaller dudes.
I see MMA has weight classes too.
Yeah, I respect JKD but man! They jump from so many different things, different arts, that it will take you so many years to even be able to use a lot of that stuff with any success. Under the Insanto line we did a lot of FMA (Filipino Martial Arts), which has some cool stuff. But to be honest, some of their limb destruction techniques I kind of question, as the stuff is a bit more complicated than simpler moves in boxing like stepping to the forward side, outside of a persons jab, landing your straight left to the mid section, then turning to fire off a straight right to their head.
Even in boxing, some of the people good at doing fancy stuff while shadow boxing or working around a heavy bag, can loose all of that the first punch they get hit with. LOL. Then they're fighting just moving forward or running away from their opponent.
One of the things with boxing--like wrestling, BJJ, and Muay Thai--is that it becomes just as important to learn how to endure what your opponent is doing to you, and to control your own oxygen loss and fear, as it is to hit a person. Outside of BJJ during JKD I never got this in JKD practice. Not even with the Mauy Thai because we only ever hit the mitts or bag. I only sparred once with that and only by request. Drills on the mitts are awesome. But they can't teach you how to hit a moving opponent nor how to endure leg shots yourself. So, there was a deficit in my training with that.
I actually have a lot of respect for Karate. However, I really don't like the way they spar. In real fights you don't break once a person gets hit.
Karate was/is very practical for building up bare hand, bare knuckle conditioning. Some boxers and people in MMA--from what I've read briefly on online sites like Sherdog--are now using some of the old Karate conditioning exercises for wrists and knuckles.
And I think you are right about the old maxim of how you train will effect how you fight for real. One of the down falls of Karate and FMA. Well... empty hand FMA. With the sticks they actually spar one another with some frequency. I never got to that level though.
Back to Karate. I have an uncle that is a black belt in Karate. One of my father's brothers. Except he's been in and out of prison. He conditions his knuckles to be calloused. And whenever this dude gets out of prison he's always huge from pumping iron (later he shrinks smoking crack and not eating well enough). No exaggeration. And he's a violent man. Even in his what... 60's now? He's still street fighting like he's a 20 year-old kid.
He's jumped on me once. Post my arm injury from a bullet blowing the bone apart and causing nerve damage. I'll admit he beat me up. He's too big, too skilled from street and prison fights along with his Karate background. Even he'll admit size matters. As he likes to forewarn me... "There are bigger men in prison than me." He recounted one fight he had with a big white supremacist in prison. The guy was much taller and even bigger in muscle mass/weight than him. He was honest enough to say that had the guy caught him with one of his big punches he probably would have been knocked out. But he (my uncle) was too fast weaving out the way and landing fist and knee strikes to his abdomen.
Although, I was surprised as big as my uncle is (or was) his punches don't carry that same power, I've been harder on the jaw than hits he was landing to my jaw. Had my arm not been damaged (hits, pulls, presses can cause immense pain in it) I probably would have given him a run for his money.
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Eh...
it could help too that I have (by request on the drivers license form) the veteran stamp on my drivers license. I just got my REAL ID too. The one with the Federal star. You're aware everyone will eventually have to upgrade to the REAL ID to enter government buildings and enter airports? Well... I got the veteran stamp on that too.
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dgiharris
Old Crusty Vet
I do respect JKD, I respect all the martial arts. Anyone who has trained for YEARS in fighting is going to be formidable and someone really good in JKD and versed in fighting would be a nightmare to be up against. It's just that it takes a lot of time and study to get to that level whereas with the things I listed, you can be effective with just a couple of months training under your belt
I think this is where Boxing and Wrestling and BJJ are superior. They train from the get go in fluidity and continuous fighting and fighting through adversity whereas most martial arts don't and inadvertently teach "one strike" fighting.
To me, Karate is more than just building up your bare hands. The reason I feel Karate is "crucial" to building a good foundation for any martial artist is that Karate is one of the only arts that teaches you how to properly use your body to strike with it's full potential. If I were to draw an analogy, Karate is the "snap" of the whip. If a layman strikes someone with a whip, it will hurt and leave a mark. However, if an expert strikes someone with a whip, it will remove flesh. That is Karate. With Karate, you learn how to increase your striking power by about 50% with proper technique. Then there is the matter of expert strike placement. You also learn where to strike and human vulnerabilities. Of course other arts like Aikido also teaches this, but Karate teaches it with every strike, so you learn not only how to hit but where to hit and it is ingrained into you as a reflex.
Imo, if you want to become a great martial artist, you should "first" learn a traditional art like Karate, spend a solid year getting a good foundation, then move on to more fluid arts.
Size does matter, however quickness is just as important. If person A) is a 10 in strength/size but a 4 in quickness and he faces Person B) who is a 7 in strength/size but 8 in quickness, Person B) is going to win 3 out of 4 times.
I think with strength, you have to be "strong enough". Once you are "strong enough" then quickness becomes a HUGE factor. Mike Tyson would be the epitome of this. He was the smallest heavy weight to dominate the field as he did. He was 5'9" and 200 lbs which is pretty much the perfect strength to weight ratio for a human being and he destroyed bigger men that were 220lbs + and bigger simply because he was so much quicker than them. The fact is, the knockout power he had was equal to theirs, the main difference was his execution. He was "so quick" that he would land that first punch more often then they did, and as a result, he destroyed them.
However, if he had been 5'9" and 160 lbs, that would NOT have been the case, he wouldn't have been strong enough to inflict damage against them.
This has got to be one of the most interesting thread derailments i've ever participated in
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I do respect JKD, I respect all the martial arts. Anyone who has trained for YEARS in fighting is going to be formidable and someone really good in JKD and versed in fighting would be a nightmare to be up against. It's just that it takes a lot of time and study to get to that level whereas with the things I listed, you can be effective with just a couple of months training under your belt
I think this is where Boxing and Wrestling and BJJ are superior. They train from the get go in fluidity and continuous fighting and fighting through adversity whereas most martial arts don't and inadvertently teach "one strike" fighting.
To me, Karate is more than just building up your bare hands. The reason I feel Karate is "crucial" to building a good foundation for any martial artist is that Karate is one of the only arts that teaches you how to properly use your body to strike with it's full potential. If I were to draw an analogy, Karate is the "snap" of the whip. If a layman strikes someone with a whip, it will hurt and leave a mark. However, if an expert strikes someone with a whip, it will remove flesh. That is Karate. With Karate, you learn how to increase your striking power by about 50% with proper technique. Then there is the matter of expert strike placement. You also learn where to strike and human vulnerabilities. Of course other arts like Aikido also teaches this, but Karate teaches it with every strike, so you learn not only how to hit but where to hit and it is ingrained into you as a reflex.
Imo, if you want to become a great martial artist, you should "first" learn a traditional art like Karate, spend a solid year getting a good foundation, then move on to more fluid arts.
Size does matter, however quickness is just as important. If person A) is a 10 in strength/size but a 4 in quickness and he faces Person B) who is a 7 in strength/size but 8 in quickness, Person B) is going to win 3 out of 4 times.
I think with strength, you have to be "strong enough". Once you are "strong enough" then quickness becomes a HUGE factor. Mike Tyson would be the epitome of this. He was the smallest heavy weight to dominate the field as he did. He was 5'9" and 200 lbs which is pretty much the perfect strength to weight ratio for a human being and he destroyed bigger men that were 220lbs + and bigger simply because he was so much quicker than them. The fact is, the knockout power he had was equal to theirs, the main difference was his execution. He was "so quick" that he would land that first punch more often then they did, and as a result, he destroyed them.
However, if he had been 5'9" and 160 lbs, that would NOT have been the case, he wouldn't have been strong enough to inflict damage against them.
This has got to be one of the most interesting thread derailments i've ever participated in
LOL!
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I've read over the report and firstly, the lack of a trend in a direction wasn't the claim made by people criticizing police activity. As i had stated to Super Cloud, the big difference isn't the number of incidents that occur, but video technology which has shown that many times there is s substantial discrepancy between the police report and the actual occurrence as demonstrated by the videotape evidence.
The study itself was based off multiple surveys of people describing their interaction with police. The study was done off a sample of the population, and the results were extrapolated to estimate numbers on the entire population. What this means is that there is a substantial margin for error in a) the truthfulness or correct remembering of respondents and b) extrapolation (i only saw number of respondents for the 2008 study - there were surveys conducted in 1996, 1999, 2002, 2005, and 2008. Your article makes the claim: "two decades of data on police interactions" and it's 13 years of survey data extrapolated to the population size.
Regardless, i would expect even the worst cops to have positive/normal interactions with citizens. A police officer who is working traffic violations/speed traps most likely interacts with more than 20 citizens a day (low number, probably higher). 5 days a week would be 100 citizens, 4 weeks a month is 400 citizens. If this officer used unnecessary violence ONCE in a given month, it is only .25% of all his interactions with citizens, but i would hope that you would agree that if this officer unnecessarily roughed up one citizen each month that he was still a "bad" police officer. Would you?
This is why the statistics don't present any sort of real argument that there isn't an issue. A good officer isn't someone who only intentionally abuses his authority 1% of the time. A good officer is someone who doesn't abuse his authority.
I'm not talking about life-and-death situations where the officer needs to make a decisions, with that decision being the wrong one. I'm talking about, for example, the officer in this case, who arrested Sandra Bland because when she wouldn't put a cigarette out, he escalated the situation, used force on her, and threw her in jail. You realize that if that was all there was to this story, we would never have heard about it. Wrongful arrests on petty charges don't make the news. What brought this into the media spotlight was her death in custody, after only being arrested for a minor offence. Had the story been "Sandra Bland arrested for failing to signal lane change, released 3 days later on bail", there would have no media attention, and i question whether any attention would have been drawn at all on the improper procedure during the arrest, which was only reviewed after her death.
I'd love to hear why you think the police want cameras, yet still have a valid reason to not want their actions being recorded. I'd love to hear your justification of police pressing charges and arresting those who are legally recording police activity. I'd love to hear why if police want to be protected from false charges, officials are attempting to create laws to prevent police from being video taped.
http://www.ibtimes.com/illinois-passes-bill-makes-it-illegal-record-police-1744724
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/texas-representative-seeks-filming-police-illegal/
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No, I agree. If you're in Mau Thai, boxing, or Folk Style wrestling you're going over the same things over and over and over and over again. Sure... you'll learn new things over time but they usually tie into fundamentals you've already learn and every time you train (for some that is 5, 6, or 7 days a week) you're going back over those fundamentals.
It's easy to apply things you've learned in those arts after several months of training.
My experience in JKD--aside from the Muay Thai class--was that we'd jump from so many different arts and techniques that out of 3 months of so you only spent 30 minutes in 1 day on one technique (say... and FMA empty hand arm attack). How exactly are you supposed to get good at that technique? Muay Thai is less complex and is like boxing (emphasizing conditioning, cardio just as much) except it is more lethal with elbows, knees, shins, and the foot jab. And like boxing you drill over those same thing over and over and over and over again.
I actually used one of those downward elbow striking techniques in a street fight once. At night under low visibility engaged by two attackers (1 male, 1 female) from two different directions. I didn't use it on a person though but in an unorthodox way. I used it to block a brick thrown at me. The bone of my forearm made contact with the brick and knocked its trajectory downward and away from me. Hurt like hell. But I was still on my toes dodging both people. LOL.
That's the one way street fighting is worse than the controlled environment of a boxing ring or MMA mat. You can be on a street where lights are out. You may have multiple attackers and a chaos which includes flying objects. I actually tried throwing a Thai kick to the guy's thigh, but missed entirely. As I said... I'm not proficient in that. Let alone with timing, distance, and trying to execute it when I'm moving around and bouncing "up on my toes." Hitting a stationary object is one thing. Hitting a moving target with the intent of protecting itself is another thing.
Certainly. And why all three have been adopted and used so well in MMA.
I should probably point out my uncle is not much taller than I am. He is a little but not by so much it would bother me. No one in my family, aside from my young nephews, are towering figures. But my uncle gets swelled up, stocky, whenever he's doing some time in the joint. Immediately leaving afterwards he looks like a beast. At least relative to the typical man. He's not as huge as some of these pro bodybuilders. And of course, his shorter height means he can't get as massive as some of these very tall dudes pumping iron standing over 6 feet tall.
My uncle is a bully though, and always has been. He is tough. Not the toughest man (though I'm sure he likes to believe he is) but he is tough. And his fighting skills and hands are formidable, especially to the average man.
But that said he has some strengths and limitations like a lot of people. While his hands are very fast for his size, and he can "whip" as you say... his karate punches to a persons midsection with pronouncement, in terms of pure boxing he's pretty one dimensional though. But that's probably the case with most people in Karate outside of kickboxers.
Fortunately his years of Karate training has given him more things to work with than just his fists.
Speed and accuracy are very important. Yeah, I agree.
I got the impression that white supremacist dude he spoke of had no formal fighting training. He just pumped iron and became big dude. Apparently he was a very tall man.
When my uncle jumped on me we were in a duplex. In a room. Tables, chairs, different things around. Which made it's condition more applicable to a jail cell than an open street. This cut off my ability (at least at my own skill level and capabilities) to maneuver on my feet, on the balls of my feet. Essentially it trapped me with a bigger man in which everything would be straight forward, no "dancing" ability to move and dodge.
And though for his size he was not as powerful as what I expected, he was still stronger than me. He was helped by the fact I had--still do to some degree--developed a mental block about my arm. I now know what people in the boxing world mean when they speak of fighters developing mental blocks which become self limiting, reduces their courage.
I think with strength, you have to be "strong enough". Once you are "strong enough" then quickness becomes a HUGE factor. Mike Tyson would be the epitome of this. He was the smallest heavy weight to dominate the field as he did. He was 5'9" and 200 lbs which is pretty much the perfect strength to weight ratio for a human being and he destroyed bigger men that were 220lbs + and bigger simply because he was so much quicker than them. The fact is, the knockout power he had was equal to theirs, the main difference was his execution. He was "so quick" that he would land that first punch more often then they did, and as a result, he destroyed them.
However, if he had been 5'9" and 160 lbs, that would NOT have been the case, he wouldn't have been strong enough to inflict damage against them.
This has got to be one of the most interesting thread derailments i've ever participated in
Certainly. And a lot of people don't realize that. That Mike Tyson not only hit incredibly hard but his hand speed was incredibly fast too.
I totally agree about the 5'9" and 160 lbs thing. I once did a small experiment on my own to try and understand or glimpse body weight difference and its impact on punching power. I hit the heavy bag with my hand. Nothing in my hand. Then I picked up a 5 lbs dumbbell and hit the heavy bag with that in the same hand. The results--the differences--were dramatic. A 5 lbs difference in arm/hand weight was like the difference between a 4 year-old girl hitting a bag from that of a 18 year-old linebacker punching a bag. At least as I recall it all these years later.
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Ana the Ist
Aggressively serene!
And the goalposts move again...
So now we're talking about suppression hearings and officer-judge relationships? My relationships with judges isn't exactly buddy-buddy. I've been to the same judges' courts a few times...but I certainly wouldn't claim to have a "relationship" with a judge, nor do I see how you can expect me to speculate how well 500k cops get along with their judges. What's even more confusing is the article you quoted...what does it have to do with a cop-judge relationship? I'm assuming that's the reason why you posted it...but I don't see anything there that would indicate a "relationship". It seems just as likely to be the first time that cop has ever stood before that judge.
The first quote from Kramer that you posted was in regards to a DWI case. He's speaking about incidents where the driver was legally impaired and the cops are dead sober. Is it really that surprising that nearly every time in that situation the cop is more likely to be believed?
With regards to the camera question, yes...I'm absolutely sure that the overwhelming majority of cops would like to have them. For a lot of reasons why, but mainly to cover themselves against false allegations and to spend less time in court. False accusations happen against cops all the time. I've been a federal agent for 8+ years and over that time I've had 26 allegations leveled against me...and I can tell you with 100% certainty that none of them are true. Everything from sexual assault, theft, excessive force and probably any others you can think of. I don't wear a uniform...so cameras aren't even optional for me in most cases. Luckily for these guys, they did have cameras...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ur-times-that-video-evidence-exonerated-cops/
Those don't represent the majority of accusations that cameras disprove. Your typical accusation might simply be an claim of "racial profiling"...a black man who got pulled over and found with marijuana might claim he was profiled and he knows it because the cop called him the n-word repeatedly throughout the encounter. The police will record the accusation, check the camera on the cop in question, and make a copy of the stop in case the man decides to get a lawyer to pursue the charges. If he does, the lawyer gets a copy of the stop, tells the man he has no case...and the allegation gets dropped. Trust me when I say this happens all the time...
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I guess you'll have to define the parameters of the discussion, so that i don't discuss something not part of the set of allowable topics.
This opinion piece was written by a former police commissioner:
"Why do police, whom we trust as role models of legal conduct, show contempt for the law by systematically perjuring themselves?
The first reason is because they get away with it. They know that in a swearing match between a drug defendant and a police officer, the judge always rules in favor of the officer. Often in search hearings, it is embarrassingly clear to everyone - judge, prosecutor, defense attorney, even spectators - that the officer is lying under oath. Yet nothing is done about it. There are rare cases in which the nature of the testimony and the physical evidence make it absolutely impossible to credit an officer's version and the judge must rule the search illegal. When this happens, the judge rules hesitatingly and grudgingly for the defense. Indeed, judges sometimes apologize to the officer for tossing out illegally seized evidence where the cop has just committed felony perjury in the judge's presence."
http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/Why-cops-lie-2388737.php
"Remarkably, New York City officers have been found to engage in patterns of deceit in cases involving charges as minor as trespass. In September it was reported that the Bronx district attorney’s office was so alarmed by police lying that it decided to stop prosecuting people who were stopped and arrested for trespassing at public housing projects, unless prosecutors first interviewed the arresting officer to ensure the arrest was actually warranted. Jeannette Rucker, the chief of arraignments for the Bronx district attorney, explained in a letter that it had become apparent that the police were arresting people even when there was convincing evidence that they were innocent. To justify the arrests, Ms. Rucker claimed, police officers provided false written statements, and in depositions, the arresting officers gave false testimony."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/why-police-officers-lie-under-oath.html?_r=0
The Walter Scott case which made news earlier this year (as a result of civilian video recording) showed a clear case of the police lying about the incident until the video showed their narrative to be clearly false:
"The immediate response of the North Charleston police department to Scott's killing is a case in point. Without the knowledge that the killing had been videotaped, the department gave an account of the killing that wasbrazenly false. This tall tale was straightforwardly reported by local media, and probably would have set the narrative that led to Slager's exoneration had the videotape not surfaced."
http://theweek.com/articles/548688/...how-walter-scott-video-exposed-corrupt-system
"As Ohio State law professor Michelle Alexander noted in a 2013 article inThe New York Times, there is a powerful social presumption that we should put our faith in cops. “As a juror, whom are you likely to believe: the alleged criminal in an orange jumpsuit or two well-groomed police officers in uniforms who just swore to God they’re telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but?” Alexander said that this abiding faith in the police is misplaced: “In this era of mass incarceration, the police shouldn’t be trusted any more than any other witness, perhaps less so.”
Alexander’s contention rests on a strong scholarly literature about “testilying”—the practice of police officers committing perjury to secure a conviction, usually against someone they think is guilty. In a classic 1996 article for the Colorado Law Review, Vanderbilt Law professor Christopher Slobogin demonstrated that both “reportilying” (falsifying police reports) and “testilying” are pervasive in many American jurisdictions.
Police perjury, Slobogin argues, occurs because “police think they can get away with it. Police are seldom made to pay for their lying.” Not just prosecutors but even many judges see themselves as sharing a common set of goals with the police of making sure the guilty get punished. Working in a shared enterprise, they are loath to challenge police perjury. “Prosecutors put up with perjury because they need a good working relationship with the police to make their cases,” Slobogin notes.
Slobogin documented his case by citing a compelling 1992 study by Myron Orfield of the Chicago criminal justice system showing that a large percentage of judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys acknowledge the reality of police perjury: “In his survey of these three groups (which together comprised 27 to 41 individuals, depending on the question), 52 percent believed that at least ‘half of the time’ the prosecutor ‘knows or has reason to know’ that police fabricate evidence at suppression hearings, and 93 percent, including 89 percent of the prosecutors, stated that prosecutors had such knowledge of perjury ‘at least some of the time.’”"
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121486/walter-scott-killing-video-sheds-light-police-lying
You've shown me a document about how Connecticut jurors are supposed to treat police testimony. I've shown multiple studies and specfic cases which show police dishonesty to be prevalent with little repercussion.
Set your goalposts however you want. The bottom line is that officer testimony is treated with reverence in most courts.
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Ana the Ist
Aggressively serene!
Assuming it is indeed "most of the time"...that would be the fault of the individual, not the justice system.
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One wonders whether it's really reverence or the fact that police learn how to testify. They learn what to say and what not to say. Isn't that just part of doing their job effectively?
Bodycams and dashcams take much of the dependency on "officer" testimony alone out of the equation ... and hold both officers and those arrested to a very high standard of truth. It's all for the good.
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dgiharris
Old Crusty Vet
I've worked with federal agents, FBI, and FWIW, I feel that they are a cut above your local Joe Schmo cop. And I think you are inadvertently transferring your standards to them. There exist police departments out there that have impregnable blue lines and they protect their own no matter what...
Riddle me this then Batman, why is it that when something is happening and you break out a Camera cops try to block you or order you away? This happens time and time again to the point where they even threaten you with "Obstruction of Justice" charges. In fact, Federal Courts have ruled time and time again that it is "not" illegal to tape in public despite officers over and over again arresting and/or threatening citizens for taping.
What you say is just not logical. In the absence of video evidence, a cop's word is taken over a civilian's easily 90% of the time agreed? When it is he said she said, the cop will be believed 9 out of 10 times easy. So, if this is the case, what logical incentive would a police officer have in wanting a camera? Not only is a cop's word believed over a citizen's, but the ENTIRE system swings in to protect the cop. Police union, other cops, false reports, and DA's and supervisors who fail to bring charges.
Seriously, I can link you to dozens of cases where cops were clearly lying, yet they were 100% believed "until" video evidence surfaced. And then when the evidence surfaces, the cops are rarely fired. Maybe they get suspended with pay for a couple of weeks. The only time they are fired is when serious injury or harm was done to the citizen AND the media makes a big deal out of it. Otherwise, it gets swept under the rug.
Seriously, how is this even an argument. Everyone knows that if its your word vs the cop's you lose. Unless you got $20k to pay for a lawyer and fight it.
It's more than that, we are talking about how often they just flat out lie They lie all the time, small things, big things, threatening you, etc.
You can go to Youtube, and literally spend the next 10 hours watching police lie, threaten, beat up, and falsely arrest citizens. And then you can type of the policeman's name and read up on what happened to that police officer and 9 times out of 10, nothing. Nothing happened. The police department releases a statement and says, "We are looking into it" and then you fast forward a year and the cop is still there, still has his job... It is quite frankly disgusting.
And lets be clear, I'm not talking about some cop harassing some gang banger. No. I'm talking about a normal run-of-the-mill tax paying law abiding citizen running into some jerk cop and having his or her life ruined.
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Yep. It solves the problem of police bias, along with the issue of false allegations against the police.One wonders whether it's really reverence or the fact that police learn how to testify. They learn what to say and what not to say. Isn't that just part of doing their job effectively?
Bodycams and dashcams take much of the dependency on "officer" testimony alone out of the equation ... and hold both officers and those arrested to a very high standard of truth. It's all for the good.
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Just as the instant replay took officials' bias out of professional sports ... and eliminated all the post game criticisms.
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Ana the Ist
Aggressively serene!
Let's be clear...I'm not saying that police don't lie. I've worked with a lot of police, from several different departments, in several different states. As I stated before, I've never lied, been asked/told to lie, or witnessed a fellow agent or even a law enforcement officer from the state or local level lie. I'm not exaggerating...I'm not leaving out small lies which weren't of any legal consequences...I'm dead serious when I say that to my knowledge, it's never happened.
So with that in mind, maybe you can understand why it seems ridiculous to me when people claim that law enforcement does this all the time, it's systemic, or it's a part of the justice system. Allow me to explain something though...the biggest reason I don't lie is the consequences. At least for my agency, when an agent gets caught lying under oath...they're fired. It's not a slap on the wrist, it's not something minor, it's your entire career, health insurance, retirement, everything....gone. There's no criminal who's so bad or dangerous that I'm willing to risk all those things to put him in jail. There's no coworkers that I'd risk all those things for. I don't know how many police departments have the same policy...but I'm aware some do...so I'd really be surprised if the situation is any different for them.
As for the links...the started to reference each other so I didn't read every word of the last two. The first one is a joke. "Former police commissioner" is supposed to lend him credibility..."current lawyer" should remove that credibility. Seriously, he's commenting on the state of every police department in the U.S. based upon his experience with San Francisco. Maybe lying was prevalent in his department...I don't know. He certainly doesn't know how prevalent it is anywhere else....
In fact, none of your commentators do. The best evidence there was a survey of judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys asking for how often they thought the police lied. The problem with that is it's an opinion...they don't actually know. I can say that from my experience working in law enforcement...you get used to people lying to you. You expect it. My guess is that they experience something similar...so when it's a cop giving testimony, they probably have a tendency to view it the same way...as another person lying to them.
Also, this doesn't jibe too well with dgi's assertion that lawyers and judges always view police testimony as solid gold truth. It certainly looks like they don't, do they?
I found this, read the last question...and pay attention to who asks it
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Emphasis added.
And neither do you (in response to bolded statement). You try to make sweeping generalizations about the system based on your experiences, and ask us to trust you with what you "know" to be true, but you're entirely dismissive of others with experience in the system that have a completely different experience.
Why is the former police commissioner's experience with how the legal system treats police testimony "a joke", but your experience with how the legal system treats police testimony worth listening to?
What doesn't jibe with dgi's assertion that lawyers and judges view police testimony as solid gold truth? All the links i referenced indicated a strong propensity of judges and lawyers taking the police officer's word in court - even when they thought they were lying. If Joe Citizen is thought to be lying, they will get pushed on it, to expose the lie. The articles linked express that police testimony doesn't receive the same scrutiny. Believing that the police are lying, but still treating it as truth in the proceedings jibes perfectly well with what dgi was saying.
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Ana the Ist
Aggressively serene!
The reason I brought up the report...to you specifically...was because of your comments that described police misconduct as systemic, epidemic, etc. (I don't remember your exact words, so give me a little breathing room on that). The impression that I got was that you believed these weren't isolated incidents, or just the result of the inevitable "bad eggs" that you find in any group as large as U.S. law enforcement. The impression that I got was that you believed these were indicative of a trend, a pattern, or in some way widespread abuse of power by police in the U.S.. Was I wrong? Do you actually think that the occasional news story isn't really a reflection of the law enforcement community at large?
If I was right in my assessment of your statements...this research would seem to indicate that you're wrong. Overwhelmingly, cops handle their jobs and their interactions with civilians well and within the confines of the law. Not only that, but they seem to be getting better at it...and all this, as you put it, without the advantage of body cameras.
A lot of the "problem" you're witnessing is really IMO a result of two things. 1. Increased media focus on video footage of cops and their anti-cop bias. 2. General lack of knowledge about the law by the public. Ironically, my example would be the things that you've said here about the Bland case. Things like....
"...the officer who in this case arrested Sandra Bland because she wouldn't put a cigarette out....".
This didn't happen. She didn't get arrested for not putting out a cigarette. I haven't read the police report, but I have read the reason she was arrested was for disobeying a lawful command-getting out of her vehicle-which might even be a felony in Texas.
See how a lack of information can draw controversy where there is none? Would you have read an article titled "Woman commits felony, kills herself in jail."? Probably not.
There's several reasons why police may not want someone recording them while arresting someone that are going to be situational specific. I'll just give you three that I think are generally relevant in almost any situation.
1. The safety of the officer and public. There's plenty of times when police don't know who they're arresting at the time they slap the cuffs on. If the person is a member of a particularly violent gang...the arresting officer, and potential witnesses may become targets of violence by the subject's gang.
2. Privacy. Arrest for a rather small crime can still be potentially embarrassing professionally for the subject. If he/she loses money because the footage is made public, is the person recording liable? The police?
3. Deception. There are already multiple examples of people editing or manipulating footage to omit key evidence and paint the police in a bad light. If that incident leads to a trial, it could be very difficult to find a jury who hasn't seen the footage.
the officer in this case, who arrested Sandra Bland because when she wouldn't put a cigarette out
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Ana the Ist
Aggressively serene!
One wonders whether it's really reverence or the fact that police learn how to testify. They learn what to say and what not to say. Isn't that just part of doing their job effectively?
Bodycams and dashcams take much of the dependency on "officer" testimony alone out of the equation ... and hold both officers and those arrested to a very high standard of truth. It's all for the good.
This is a really good point.
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You haven't answered my questions in regarding my comments on the statistics. If an officer has 100 interactions with citizens per month, and abuses his authority once in those 100 times every month, is he a good officer. Is the fact that he only abuses his authority 1 in 100 interactions indication that "there is no problem".
You concede that these types of incidents, happen, yes? Assuming your answer to that question is yes (which, for all i know, you'll still insist that these officers acted properly or that justice would have been served even if there was no video evidence of the incident), then what is the threshold of these types of interactions before you'd be willing to say there is a problem. 5 in 100?
The research doesn't indicate i'm wrong. The summary of that research in the article you linked is trying to frame the data (which isn't even true data to begin with, rather estimates of data based on survey responses to a smaller sample size) to paint a certain picture.
"The occasional" news story is a) more than occasional, and b) not reflective of every encounter by police, but when you see 10-20-100 incidents in which not only did the officer abuse his authority, but there was a subsequent cover up until video evidence was presented by an independent party to contradict the police testimony, then yes, there is a "problem", and while you certainly may question the degree of the problem, asserting that "despite all of these incidents, there is no problem, because there are many, many more interactions of the police with citizens that are legitimate than there are incidents in which they abuse their authority.
No one is arguing that "the majority of police interactions with the public represent an abuse of authority". What we're saying is that there are enough incidents in which the police not only abuse their authority, but then are backed up by their departments/the justice system in that abuse that there is a problem.
I know that the official reason was because she wouldn't get out of the vehicle, even under threat ("i'll light you up!"), but his insistence of her leaving the vehicle was predicated upon her refusal to put out the cigarette. It was a display of authority by the officer, giving her a lawful (harshly worded, with no explanation) command as a response for her lack of respect in following his request to put out a cigarette.
I've commented on this several times previously in this thread. Did you watch the video?
There was no lack of information on my part, perhaps a distinction in articulation of the events that preceded her arrest. The request of her putting out the cigarette, and her subsequent refusal was the event which triggered the police officer's escalation of the situation.
The footage in this case was the footage of the dash cam. It wasn't edited "to make it look like she was arrested because she didn't put out the cigarette", it did, however, show clearly that when she refused his request to put out the cigarette, that the officer then escalated the situation. Conveniently, the officer then took her off camera when there was a full confrontation, her claims of using excessive force, and his claims of her attempting to resist.
We've discussed multiple cases in these forums incidents in which the police went after people who were videotaping, that clearly posed no threat (woman on her lawn in her pajamas?, brother of guy being arrested for a parking violation?). You can claim "safety", but the majority of the cases in which officers attempt to stop a video of them, the "safety" argument is a very hard sell.
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Ana the Ist
Aggressively serene!
I could be making the mistake of transferring my agency's standards to cops in general...but that's why I'm trying my best to avoid talking about specific incidents and speaking of generalities. When we keep the issues at that general level, much of the policy standards are the same. For example, I'd be extremely surprised to find out if the criteria for shooting someone in self defense is any different for the average cop than it is me.
What kind of work do you do?
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