monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Let me quote one your posts.

Shot ONE HUNDRED THIRTY SEVEN TIMES. Not one cop went to jail.

Cleveland cops shot at 2 unarmed black people 137 times. Years later, 6 of them are fired.
By German [email protected]@vox.com Updated Jan 26, 2016, 3:45pm EST


Cleveland has fired six police officers involved in a 2012 shooting in which 13 cops fired nearly 140 bullets into a car occupied by two unarmed black people, BuzzFeed's Mike Hayes reported.



Among the fired cops is Michael Brelo, the only officer criminally charged for the shooting, who was acquitted by a court of two counts of voluntary manslaughter last year. Brelo came under particular criticism after the shooting for his brazen use of force: After his colleagues stopped firing, he allegedly stood on the hood of the car and fired the last shots downward into the windshield.

In total, Brelo fired 49 shots.

Investigators said the six police officers' firing was delayed to give time for Brelo's trial to finish.

The shooting occurred in a school parking lot after a high-speed chase, which began after cops mistook a car backfiring for a gunshot. Police killed both passengers in the car, Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, each of whom was hit by more than 20 bullets. Officers said they thought the couple was armed.

The shooting resulted in no criminal convictions — even though it led to a federal investigation into the Cleveland Police Department. But 63 Cleveland cops were temporarily suspended, and now six cops have been fired altogether.

After the shooting, the US Department of Justice conducted a sweeping investigation into the Cleveland police department.

The investigation found Cleveland police officers frequently used excessive force, including shootings and head strikes with impact weapons; unnecessary, excessive, and retaliatory force, including Tasers, chemical sprays, and their fists; and excessive force against people with mental illness or in crisis, including one situation in which officers were called exclusively to check up on someone's well-being.


Police officers also used "poor and dangerous tactics" that often put them "in situations where avoidable force becomes inevitable and places officers and civilians at unnecessary risk," according to the report.

The Justice Department attributed many of these problems to inadequate training and supervision. "Supervisors tolerate this behavior and, in some cases, endorse it," the report said. "Officers report that they receive little supervision, guidance, and support from the Division, essentially leaving them to determine for themselves how to perform their difficult and dangerous jobs."

Former US Attorney General Eric Holder, who headed the Justice Department at the time of the investigation, argued that fixing these issues is crucial for both the general public and police. "Accountability and legitimacy are essential for communities to trust their police departments, and for there to be genuine collaboration between police and the citizens they serve," he said.

Black people are much more likely to be killed by police than their white peers
police shooting by race
Joe Posner/Vox



An analysis of the available FBI data by Vox's Dara Lind shows that US police kill black people at disproportionate rates: Black people accounted for 31 percent of police-killing victims in 2012, even though they made up just 13 percent of the US population. Although the data is incomplete, since it's based on voluntary reports from police agencies around the country, it highlights the vast disparities in how police use force.

Black teens were 21 times as likely as white teens to be shot and killed by police between 2010 and 2012, according to a ProPublica analysis of the FBI data. ProPublica's Ryan Gabrielson, Ryann Grochowski Jones, and Eric Sagara reported: "One way of appreciating that stark disparity, ProPublica's analysis shows, is to calculate how many more whites over those three years would have had to have been killed for them to have been at equal risk. The number is jarring — 185, more than one per week."

The disparities appear to be even starker for unarmed suspects, according to an analysis of 2015 police killings by the Guardian. Racial minorities made up about 37.4 percent of the general population and 46.6 percent of armed and unarmed victims, but they made up 62.7 percent of unarmed people killed by police.

There have been several high-profile police killings since 2012 involving black suspects. In Baltimore, six police officers were indicted for the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody. In North Charleston, South Carolina, Michael Slager was charged with murder and fired from the police department after shooting Walter Scott, who was fleeing and unarmed at the time. In Ferguson, Darren Wilson killed unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown. In New York City, NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo killed Eric Garner by putting the unarmed 43-year-old black man in a chokehold.

One possible explanation for the racial disparities: subconscious biases. Studies show that officers are quicker to shoot black suspects in video game simulations. Josh Correll, a University of Colorado Boulder psychology professor who conducted the research, said it's possible the bias could lead to even more skewed outcomes in the field. "In the very situation in which [officers] most need their training," he said, "we have some reason to believe that their training will be most likely to fail them."

Part of the solution to this type of bias is better training that helps cops acknowledge and deal with their potential subconscious prejudices. But critics also argue that more accountability could help deter future brutality or excessive use of force, since it would make it clear that there are consequences to the misuse and abuse of police powers. Yet right now, lax legal standards make it difficult to legally punish individual police officers for use of force, even when it might be excessive.

Legally, what most matters in these shootings is whether police officers reasonably believed that their lives were in danger, not whether the shooting victim actually posed a threat.

In the 1980s, a pair of Supreme Court decisions — Tennessee v. Garner and Graham v. Connor — set up a framework for determining when deadly force by cops is reasonable.

Constitutionally, "police officers are allowed to shoot under two circumstances," David Klinger, a University of Missouri St. Louis professor who studies use of force, told Vox's Dara Lind. The first circumstance is "to protect their life or the life of another innocent party" — what departments call the "defense-of-life" standard. The second circumstance is to prevent a suspect from escaping, but only if the officer has probable cause to think the suspect poses a dangerous threat to others.

The logic behind the second circumstance, Klinger said, comes from a Supreme Court decision called Tennessee v. Garner. That case involved a pair of police officers who shot a 15-year-old boy as he fled from a burglary. (He'd stolen $10 and a purse from a house.) The court ruled that cops couldn't shoot every felon who tried to escape. But, as Klinger said, "they basically say that the job of a cop is to protect people from violence, and if you've got a violent person who's fleeing, you can shoot them to stop their flight."

The key to both of the legal standards — defense of life and fleeing a violent felony — is that it doesn't matter whether there is an actual threat when force is used. Instead, what matters is the officer's "objectively reasonable" belief that there is a threat.

That standard comes from the other Supreme Court case that guides use-of-force decisions: Graham v. Connor. This was a civil lawsuit brought by a man who'd survived his encounter with police officers, but who'd been treated roughly, had his face shoved into the hood of a car, and broken his foot — all while he was suffering a diabetic attack. The court didn't rule on whether the officers' treatment of him had been justified, but it did say that the officers couldn't justify their conduct just based on whether their intentions were good. They had to demonstrate that their actions were "objectively reasonable," given the circumstances and compared to what other police officers might do.

What's "objectively reasonable" changes as the circumstances change. "One can't just say, 'Because I could use deadly force 10 seconds ago, that means I can use deadly force again now,'" Walter Katz, a California attorney who specializes in oversight of law enforcement agencies, said.

In general, officers are given lot of legal latitude to use force without fear of punishment. The intention behind these legal standards is to give police officers leeway to make split-second decisions to protect themselves and bystanders. And although critics argue that these legal standards give law enforcement a license to kill innocent or unarmed people, police officers say they are essential to their safety.

For some critics, the question isn't what's legally justified but rather what's preventable. "We have to get beyond what is legal and start focusing on what is preventable. Most are preventable," Ronald Davis, a former police chief who heads the Justice Department's Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, told the Washington Post. Police "need to stop chasing down suspects, hopping fences, and landing on top of someone with a gun," he added. "When they do that, they have no choice but to shoot."

Police are very rarely prosecuted for shootings — and not just because the law allows them wide latitude to use force on the job. Sometimes the investigations fall onto the same police department the officer is from, which creates major conflicts of interest. Other times the only available evidence comes from eyewitnesses, who may not be as trustworthy in the public eye as a police officer.

"There is a tendency to believe an officer over a civilian, in terms of credibility," David Rudovsky, a civil rights lawyer who co-wrote Prosecuting Misconduct: Law and Litigation, told Vox's Amanda Taub. "And when an officer is on trial, reasonable doubt has a lot of bite. A prosecutor needs a very strong case before a jury will say that somebody who we generally trust to protect us has so seriously crossed the line as to be subject to a conviction."

If police are charged, they're very rarely convicted. The National Police Misconduct Reporting Project analyzed 3,238 criminal cases against police officers from April 2009 through December 2010. They found that only 33 percent were convicted, and only 36 percent of officers who were convicted ended up serving prison sentences. Both of those are about half the rate at which members of the public are convicted or incarcerated.

The numbers suggest that it would have been a truly rare situation if the officers who shot and killed Russell and Williams were charged and convicted of a crime. But without a conviction, the officers' firing may be the biggest form of discipline.

End note: Brelo was acquitted of all charges. Shot 49 bullets point blank while standing on top of the hood of the vehicle. And the cop walked away a free man.

If white women starting being used as pawns by organized crime to trigger police brutality and thus weed out uncooperative police, do you think they could achieve their goal with less human waste?

You just could have said this is a travesty of justice and Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams didn't deserve to die.

I could guess that, but I don't know it for a fact. What I pay attention to is the way the media assumes police brutality can only be due to racism among the police and never any consideration that organized crime is pulling strings in various ways for various reasons.

They always assume that victims of police are acting alone and never consider the possibility that they are being used as pawns by bad people and/or that they have been targeted by criminal cops or that organized crime is trying to get rid of cops who don't cooperate with their string-pulling.

All this violence bothers me a lot, and it makes it worse that the left is always making it into a battlecry against the police and Republicans instead of ever considering that there might be racism and exploitation going on among criminals and/or people who claim to be 'on their side,' and who might donate money to Democratic causes.

Although Cleveland did have it's own Mob back in the '3o's, rest assured Michael Brelo had no connections to it.

I am not all that surprised you keep dreaming up conspiracy stories such as this. It really shows how systemic racism is so embedded into our society, you don't even think twice about it.

Of course I do. That's why I think it's embedded in organized crime as well; and it bothers me the the left is biased toward assuming that there's systemic racism in all the legal governmental organizations, but they just ignore crime and criminal organizations and networks, transnational criminal supply-chains, etc.

Why don't you think system racism plays are role in criminal organizations and networks? Why do you say it's "embedded in our society" as if "our society" doesn't include organized crime, including transnational/global organized crime?

Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams were not on drugs, did not have drugs, weapons or any outstanding warrants.

Tell me why it's justified for a cop to stand on top of a hood of their vehicle, shoot 15 rounds through a windshield and be not convicted of anything?

You may as well quit asking. Some folks will ALWAYS give the benefit of doubt to the police, NO MATTER WHAT.

I don't know all the facts, but I do know that you are going to narrate only the facts you want to, and you're going to do it in a way that makes me the bad guy for not declaring a guilty verdict based on only what you have said.

What I really suspect happens is that criminal organizations try to make deals with police to make sure they are friendly and malleable, and when they come across officers who they see as potentially making things difficult for them, they target those officers to try to trigger them into reacting violently so that they can get them. I don't want to weigh in on these specific cases, because I don't know all the facts and I don't want to be involved in controversy, but in general I am concerned that crime takes advantage of young people in various ways, blackmailing them or because they need/want money, or whatever; and then they can use them as pawns to trigger the cops they want to manipulate to get them fired or whatever.

If you were a crime boss, don't you think you would pay attention to the police to see which officers were the biggest obstacles to your business plan and figure out ways to do something about them, such as baiting/triggering them into doing something that can be used against them, e.g. something that you can report to the media that will force their termination?

Lava, for the LAST time, there was NO organized crime in this case, whether concerning Micheal Brelo or Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams.

You putting a conspiracy theory where NONE is.

STOP.

1) People are presumed innocent until proven guilty
2) Police have to pass strenuous background checks and character tests, so of course a really good criminal is going to be able to work their way into the ranks, but it's not as easy as getting a job in fast food.
3) Police are supposed to be protecting and serving, so we should be recognizing them as the people whose presence can deter gangs and organized crime from recruiting and grooming those young people who are more vulnerable because they face more discrimination and economic struggle than other kids.

Remarkably fact=free. Merely evidence-less speculation/You sure it isn't alien shape shifters too?

You are playing a game instead of acknowledging that organized crime tactics are never even mentioned as a possible reason these atrocities happen.

This (below) is supposed to be a fact. I know progressives do not agree with that.

THIS:

Anti-racism activist Jane Elliott leaves white audience speechless
with a brilliant question about race:

https://twitter.com/Rebaone59275709/status/1266448205325238277



I want every white person in this room who would be happy to be treated as this society, in general, treats our black citizens -- if you, as a white person, would be happy to recieve the same treatment as our black citizens do in this society, please stand.

[auditorium is silent, stays seated]

You didn't understand the directions. If you white folks want to be treated the way blacks are in this society, stand.

Nobody's standing here. That says very plainly that you know what's happening, you know you don't want it for you. I want to know why you're so willing to accept it or to allow it to happen for others.


Jane Elliot is the school teacher who originated the Blue-Eyes-Brown-Eyes exercise in her classroom after the assassination of Martin Luther King.

https://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/jane-elliott-taught-kids-not-be-prejudiced-now-she-sees-racism-growing#stream/0

Edited to add youtube video link:

I think it's because the left has looked at all the institutions and history of the US as being that of an oppressive patriarchy, so when they see something like that the rights of the accused can be used to protect rapists and racists, etc. they think maybe those other forms of law that were rejected, such as presuming guilt until innocence is proven, are better for stopping oppression. They forget that the reason they were rejected was because they were tools of oppression and that colonists were oppressed by colonialism.

Now, honestly we make assumptions of guilt when we suspect people of wrongdoing, but of course we are supposed to then give the accused the chance to defend themselves and the burden of proof is supposed to be on us as accusers. That ends up working to the advantage of criminals and organized crime who seem to plot exactly how to escape justice by manipulating technicalities designed to protect the innocent.

It would just be nice if the social justice warriors could see that crime and organized crime are themselves forms of social injustice that discriminate against traditionally oppressed and thus vulnerable categories of people as much or more than any legal business or government. They learn about systemic racism in school and think they are big shots for seeing a big conspiracy to maintain white privilege, but then they don't think about crime bosses targeting certain people of color for the most dangerous jobs because they are more vulnerable and desperate due to discrimination and economic hardships.

Unless you're an unarmed, non criminal black couple in Cleveland, right???

What makes you assume you know all the facts? Were you there to witness what happened?

Actually, you could even witness it and not know all the context that might have led up to the situation. You would have to know all their business affairs, who might have had a motive to have them shot, or whatever went on. I just assume there are things that go on behind the scenes that remain below the radar. It may not be true, but I just keep it in mind as a possible explanation for what otherwise seems like total madness.

I watched the trial & verdict on tv. Brelo stipulated to everything. The Judge rendered a Not Guilty verdict because although Timothy Russell was shot 23 times and Malissa Williams shot 24 times and Brelo shot 15 times directly into the windshield, there was no conclusive evidence which gun shot was the actual fatal one that killed them.

So he walked.