If anyone wants a mostly neutral take what's going on in Baltimore right now

[blearyeyes]

Some background: A guy named Freddie Gray with a long rap sheet was arrested and died in the back of a police van. Although there has been no released report on how he died, there are rumors that he managed to break his own neck by banging his head against the side of the van, in which case he probably wasn't properly restrained. Anyway.

Some high schoolers in NW Baltimore staged a walk out today, with some people apparently itching for a fight; the police showed up in full riot gear with live bullets, tear gas (which is illegal to use in warfare, but not on your own civilians in the U.S.), and pepper spray.

They ordered the kids to disperse ... except that they had shut down public transportation in the area. For some context, all Baltimore high schools are magnet schools, which means most of the students don't live anywhere near their school but bus in; and there are no yellow school busses for high schoolers. So there was literally no way for most of them to get home.

Some rocks were thrown at police cars. The police gassed them and sprayed them with pepper spray. The exact timeline is unclear.

Then the situation continued to escalate. Guns were pointed at protestors. (Remember, they're high schoolers.) More rocks were thrown. A police officer was seriously injured. Twitter gets ugly and, as it is wont to do, incredibly, unbelievably racist. The Police twitter is characteristically tone deaf.

Some cop cars got burned. Then at least one cop van. So far as I can tell, a large part of the property damage is confined to police vehicles, at least for the pictures on my twitter, but I expect a lot of windows will get broken, certainly more than the comparatively minor damage done on Sunday.

Some neighborhood residents are turning out to form a human shield. Some part of the protest is a few blocks away from downtown.

All of this is very far away from where I live. My own little protest is to go downtown, play some music, and hang out with my racially and culturally diverse group of friends at the Teavolve open mic.

From my vantage point, the problems with the Fergusson riots were not learned by the Baltimore Police Department. The police were the ones accused by the public of wrong doing but are still the ones tasked with keeping the peace. It's the fox guarding the henhouse. I am hoping the National Guard gets called in soon so there can be a neutral party watching over the protests. Because right now, Deescalation doesn't seem to be on anyone's agenda.

I'm hoping that anyone who threw a rock feels ashamed tomorrow. But I also hope that whoever decided to gas and mace a bunch of high school students also wakes up ashamed of themselves. There's really nothing good to say about any of this today.

That's all.

That sounds about right.

Seems like nobody wins.

[Frag Magnet]

Some disjointed thoughts from my perspective:

Most of this is not so much about what's going on in Baltimore right now because I'm just not that up on it and (let's face it) the facts are far from in.

Coming from the military (I left active duty Army service in December 2012) I'm really starting to resent the term "police militarization."  The American military is highly trained, we have recruiting standards, retention standards, physical standards, and we have clear lines of accountability.  I also have three generations of cops in my family and due to my job (Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technician) frequently worked with local, county/parish, state, and federal law enforcement agencies and I can tell you that everything I just associated with "militarization" does not apply to many police departments.  It's downright insulting sometimes that the Barney Fife bullshit that's being called "police militarization" is being associated with what I did.  Also bear in mind that we're talking about a term that was invented back in the mid-90s by an academic that (as far as I know) has never spent a single day in uniform then got latched onto by the media in recent years... it's an artificial construct.  It's a thesis that some dude turned into a book deal.

I think there are some very severe shortfalls with the areas I mentioned with many departments (which are not all the fault of these departments by the way; for example it's difficult to attract qualified candidates (much less trim some dead weight) when you're paying crap wages for what's actually a very difficult, dangerous, and stressful job).  I've seen too many departments who are in the position of taking whoever they can get, are unable to give their recruits anything but the bare minimum amount of training, and then can't hold them to any kind of physical or performance standard once they're in uniform.  I'm not sure how responsible you can hold individual officers for doing the best that they can with the crap hand that they're frequently dealt.  I too saw how fucked up the Furguson PD's escalation of force (EoF) practices were but how much do you want to bet they were never properly trained on EoF?  It's not difficult to do.  It's sure as hell a lot easier than dealing with an even angrier mob.  In the military we had a system for deliberately reviewing incidents (especially where the was a loss of life), determining lessons learned, suggesting new strategies to counter the problems encountered, and then distribute everything across the entire force – as far as I know there is no such mechanism for civilian law enforcement and that's something else which needs to be addressed.

All that said, the majority of police officers I've met have been dedicated civil servants with an honest desire to help people who are doing the best they can with the tools that they are given.  I think there needs to be a push to give them better pay (where needed) and better training but also to hold them to higher standards that we all can be proud of.

Next up, I'd say that the performance of our press has been abominable.  They are effectively functioning as tabloid media at this point, latching onto sensational stories and reporting rumors and speculation as facts, whipping the public into a frenzy, and then hurriedly shuffling away when it turns out to be mostly bullshit with – at best – a shade of a retraction left in their wake.  The press is woefully inadequate at educating the public, especially on subjects as complicated as this one and I can easily tell by the way that people respond to these stories.  The press is also showing abject cowardice when it fails to confront the fact that there are some very serious social issues within the 'black community' (truthfully, I believe it's much more of an urban lower class issue than a race issue) which are feeding this cycle of violence.  The same can be said of "leaders" like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson on this point (although in the case of the media I'd say that the root cause is mostly a foolish adherence to political correctness while the latter examples are more concerned with job security).


Anyway, that's some of the junk rattling around in my brain.  I'll just conclude for now by saying that I've seen enough death.  People need to get right.

[playpunk]

I think that the term "Police Militarization" refers more to the oppositional attitude adopted by many police forces, than any specific protocol or set of equipment. Another problem many police forces run into is that the police force's racial and socio/economic demographic does not align with the community it is supposed to be serving, and underlying racial problems become a real problem. Both of these problems are more prevelent in urban areas than rural. The county in which I live, although mainly rural, has a couple of urbanish centers.

There are a slew of social problems that lead to more problems with the police, but that does not justify the actions of way too many police officers. I've had clients arrested for refusing to answer questions posed to them by police officers. That is just an abuse of power - no citizen has any obligation to aid law enforcement, and law enforcement officers would do well to remember that.

[alanp]

Well, now I know about the town for more than Jules Verne's Baltimore Gun Club.

More seriously, I can't help but think of all of Sam Vimes' internal philosophy pertaining to policing in the more recent Discworld books. How he approached the rioting in _Night Watch_ was pretty much opposite to this.

[Frag Magnet]

I think that the term "Police Militarization" refers more to the oppositional attitude adopted by many police forces, than any specific protocol or set of equipment.

Some define it that way, yes.  Others in terms of equipment.  Others in the increasing prevalence and use of SWAT teams.  Yet more people define the term in various combinations of all of these things.

This is what I mean by the term being an artificial construct.  It's a just-so story and not an especially helpful one at that.

Another problem many police forces run into is that the police force's racial and socio/economic demographic does not align with the community it is supposed to be serving, and underlying racial problems become a real problem. Both of these problems are more prevelent in urban areas than rural. The county in which I live, although mainly rural, has a couple of urbanish centers.

That's definitely a problem that I've noticed as well but I have trouble faulting the police for it when I've seen so many departments (even including Furguson, MO) who are actively trying to recruit minority officers yet almost nobody steps up.  People are treating this issue like it's a one-sided thing but the truth is that it's a lot more complicated than that.  I've spent a lot of time looking for work over the past couple of years and at every single job fair I've attended I've seen a booth for the Louisville Metro Police Department.  They're desperate to hire people (hell, I went to the grocery store late one night last week and an officer who spotted the EOD badge on my motorcycle vest tried to recruit me in the checkout line).

"It's not a sellout if nobody is buying."  Or something.

There are a slew of social problems that lead to more problems with the police, but that does not justify the actions of way too many police officers.

I think that depends.  Look at some of the cases where cops have shot mentally ill suspects; sure, the guy they've shot isn't responsible for his actions and if you know what to do there are often other ways they can be dealt with, but the fact remains that the vast majority of those officers aren't trained to deal with mentally ill people and if armed that person does pose a very credible risk to the officer's life it's unreasonable to fault an officer for using lethal force.  You can't expect someone to lay down their life over a non-compliant schizophrenic suspect with a knife or a screw driver when they aren't trained in how to handle that situation any other way.

Now in the shooting of Walter Scott, we have a case where the use of lethal force may have been justified at various points in the incident (there was a physical altercation and there's evidence that Scott got ahold of Slager's taser and tried to use it on him (and no, I'm not talking about when Slager moved the taser to Scott's body)) but at the time the shooting had taken place Scott did not pose a threat and had clearly broken contact.  I can understand Officer Slager's blood being up, I can understand the feeling of "oh, fuck this shit..." but a line was clearly crossed and Slager needs to be held accountable for it.

I've had clients arrested for refusing to answer questions posed to them by police officers.

Again... training, standards, and accountability.  I agree that this is wrong but it's unrealistic to expect the problem to get better if we don't address the root causes.

[HKimball]

So a quick addendum - I edited my original post to take out all the opinion stuff. I think we have a difficult situation and when I read my post I couldn't help but feel that it contained some not-so-thinly veiled racism... I can't just find and replace "race" with "culture" and expect people to pretend like there aren't any racial undertones.

I have difficulty expressing my opinion about the situation in a way that acknowledges these deep rifts between predominantly black segments of society and police, and at the same time prescribing a solution for it... I'm not part of the situation and pretending like I know the answer is disinguineous at best and pompous/condescending at worst.

I start many sentences with "I think" which is a problem. Its just impressions and half-baked idealist notions about society. I guarantee that if you put me in a classroom in Baltimore I wouldn't know how to reach the kids any better than the next guy.

At any rate, I still hope for a peaceful and speedy resolution to the situation. It would be great to see a meaningful dialogue come from this but I can't see the future... so, yeah.

[lincolnic]

So, the National Guard kidnapped Joseph Kent, a 21-year-old peaceful protest leader, on live TV.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/joseph-kent-baltimore-protesters-call-for-release-of-student-kidnapped-by-police-live-on-national-tv-10211500.html

http://www.salon.com/2015/04/29/where_is_joseph_kent_social_media_erupts_after_cameras_capture_activists_suspicious_looking_arrest/

You can't call this an arrest. When someone is arrested, they're told they're under arrest, put into a car, and taken to a station. When someone is kidnapped, they're hustled into a moving vehicle and disappeared in a matter of seconds.

A young man was vanished from the street on live television, and the anchors didn't even comment on it. Watch that video and try not to be horrified.

I have trouble faulting the police for it when I've seen so many departments (even including Furguson, MO) who are actively trying to recruit minority officers yet almost nobody steps up.  People are treating this issue like it's a one-sided thing but the truth is that it's a lot more complicated than that.  I've spent a lot of time looking for work over the past couple of years and at every single job fair I've attended I've seen a booth for the Louisville Metro Police Department.  They're desperate to hire people (hell, I went to the grocery store late one night last week and an officer who spotted the EOD badge on my motorcycle vest tried to recruit me in the checkout line).

If the police force (and the National Guard, which represents the United States) treats its minority citizens like this -- especially the Ferguson PD, which has a recorded history of discrimination and racism (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/05/us/us-details-a-persistent-pattern-of-police-discrimination-in-a-small-missouri-city.html) -- why would they be in any rush to join up?

[Frag Magnet]

So, the National Guard kidnapped Joseph Kent, a 21-year-old peaceful protest leader, on live TV.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/joseph-kent-baltimore-protesters-call-for-release-of-student-kidnapped-by-police-live-on-national-tv-10211500.html

http://www.salon.com/2015/04/29/where_is_joseph_kent_social_media_erupts_after_cameras_capture_activists_suspicious_looking_arrest/

You can't call this an arrest. When someone is arrested, they're told they're under arrest, put into a car, and taken to a station. When someone is kidnapped, they're hustled into a moving vehicle and disappeared in a matter of seconds.

Here's what one of the articles you just linked actually says:

Contrary to the name appended to videos of his being detained, however, Kent was not "kidnapped" — he was apparently arrested for having violated the city's 10 p.m. curfew. A Baltimore-based lawyer, Stephen Beatty, claimed to have located Kent last night:

1/2 Re: #JosephKent As a service to the community I can confirm that Mr. Kent is at CBIF awaiting processing. Report is he is ok and safe.

So, he is in fact under arrest.

Yet again we're putting media speculation and the word of protesters who have every reason to lie over hard, verifiable facts.

I have trouble faulting the police for it when I've seen so many departments (even including Furguson, MO) who are actively trying to recruit minority officers yet almost nobody steps up.  People are treating this issue like it's a one-sided thing but the truth is that it's a lot more complicated than that.  I've spent a lot of time looking for work over the past couple of years and at every single job fair I've attended I've seen a booth for the Louisville Metro Police Department.  They're desperate to hire people (hell, I went to the grocery store late one night last week and an officer who spotted the EOD badge on my motorcycle vest tried to recruit me in the checkout line).

If the police force (and the National Guard, which represents the United States) treats its minority citizens like this -- especially the Ferguson PD, which has a recorded history of discrimination and racism (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/05/us/us-details-a-persistent-pattern-of-police-discrimination-in-a-small-missouri-city.html) -- why would they be in any rush to join up?

First of all, the National Guard does not represent the United States (unless they're on Federal orders; in other words, "deployed overseas"), they represent their home state and they operate under the authority of that state's Governor.

Second, it's tough to find a more ethnically and culturally diverse organization than almost any American military outfit.  (Nothing brings people who would never associate with each other together like being ordered to.)

Third, you step up into a role like that of a minority police officer in a racially charged district in order to be the change you want to see.  Because (like most people who take those kinds of jobs) you want to help people and protect your community.  Unfortunately, the culture in many of those communities is one that shuns people who become police officers (you really can't say it's "black culture" because you see it in a lot of lower class communities regardless of race).  Frankly, I think that's more of a factor than anything else.

[midwayfair]

Very large protest at City Hall right now.* I have some friends who were in the march, so I got to watch it happen in real time through their phones. The crowd is much more diverse than previous days.

*EDIT: Apparently the police are trying to divert the protesters. I'm not sure why. Anyone driving downtown right now is probably lost, and there are enough people to completely fill the streets for a couple blocks based on pictures. EDIT again: actually it might be that there's a protest gathering at City Hall AND a march that they're diverting northbound. Okay, I'll stop updating this until it's more clear exactly what the heck is going on. There are a massive number of soldiers downtown right now. I think there are more NG than police in Baltimore at the moment.

Police twitter claims no arrests made since dawn related to the uprising.

The mayor is also considering lifting the curfew early. I expect it depends on the reaction to the curfew tonight.

There was a protest at the State's attorney's office whose purpose was also to draw attention to the dozen police accountability bills that were shot down in previous years. (See the Atlantic article linked in this thread for some more about those.)

[lincolnic]

Yes, obviously Joseph Kent was arrested by the National Guard for being out past curfew. I did, in fact, read the articles I linked to. But I'm asking you to look at the video footage of it happening. The message of my post was not "a man was literally kidnapped" but "something is wrong with these actions". Is that how arrests generally look? Is that how arrests usually proceed? No, it isn't. That was an unnecessary brute force display that doesn't serve to ease tensions at all.

If someone narrated the events to you, free of context -- "A man was standing in the street. As a car slowly rolled past him, four men rushed from behind with no warning and pushed him into it. Within seconds, all of them were gone." -- would you say that sounds like an arrest, or like a kidnapping?

First of all, the National Guard does not represent the United States (unless they're on Federal orders; in other words, "deployed overseas"), they represent their home state and they operate under the authority of that state's Governor.

I believe the National Guard actually is under the control of both the state and the federal government, isn't it? I defer to you on this, since you have actual service experience, but that was my understanding.

Unfortunately, the culture in many of those communities is one that shuns people who become police officers (you really can't say it's "black culture" because you see it in a lot of lower class communities regardless of race).  Frankly, I think that's more of a factor than anything else.

Yes, but why do they shun them? Because law enforcement has a history of systematically oppressing and discriminating against minorities, while those who do so often escape repercussions. It's no surprise that minorities don't want to join that kind of team; the team has been telling them for their entire lives that they're not worth anything. Daniel Pantaleo wasn't indicted for killing Eric Garner, even after it was ruled a homicide. Darren Wilson wasn't indicted for killing Michael Brown. George Zimmerman (though not a police officer) was acquitted of Trayvon Martin's murder. I'm not speaking of the events themselves, I'm talking specifically about the aftermath. Regardless of whether you or I personally agree with those decisions, I don't think it's a stretch of the imagination to understand how minority communities can look at these events and walk away with the lesson "they can do anything to you and get away with it".

The police in Ferguson violated the constitutional rights of their black citizens as a matter of course. (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/justice-department-finds-pattern-of-police-bias-and-excessive-force-in-ferguson.html?_r=0) The Baltimore police have a long history of brutality. (http://data.baltimoresun.com/news/police-settlements/) How can that not destroy the relationship between police and the communities they're supposed to serve? Why should you trust the people who regularly beat you? I don't see how you can have minority communities trusting the police without serious police reform happening first.

[Frag Magnet]

Yes, obviously Joseph Kent was arrested by the National Guard for being out past curfew. I did, in fact, read the articles I linked to. But I'm asking you to look at the video footage of it happening. The message of my post was not "a man was literally kidnapped" but "something is wrong with these actions". Is that how arrests generally look? Is that how arrests usually proceed? No, it isn't. That was an unnecessary brute force display that doesn't serve to ease tensions at all.

Or it was a smart decision based on the context of the situation.  Which do you think is more likely to illicit greater violence and more risk to all parties concerned; the police strolling up asking to speak to Joseph Kent, telling him he's under arrest, cuffing him, and reading him his rights as might be 'conventionally' done or snatching him before anybody has any idea what's happening?  Based on my experience and the likelihood that the police would have had to fight their way in and out of the former scenario, I'd say the latter is the better alternative even if it doesn't play well on CNN.  Lives come before feels and "optics."

At least in my world, anyway.

First of all, the National Guard does not represent the United States (unless they're on Federal orders; in other words, "deployed overseas"), they represent their home state and they operate under the authority of that state's Governor.

I believe the National Guard actually is under the control of both the state and the federal government, isn't it? I defer to you on this, since you have actual service experience, but that was my understanding

The National Guard belongs to the states.  NG units can be lent out to the federal government (which has become fairly common practice since 9/11) but under most circumstances they're strictly under the control of their home states.  It's a little more complicated than that; for instance a lot of DoD/Army/Air Force/etc regulations and policies (for instance, the regulations regarding the correct wear of uniforms) apply to NG and Reserve units but unless they're under federal orders, they're under the control of (and paid by) their home state.

Unfortunately, the culture in many of those communities is one that shuns people who become police officers (you really can't say it's "black culture" because you see it in a lot of lower class communities regardless of race).  Frankly, I think that's more of a factor than anything else.

Yes, but why do they shun them? Because law enforcement has a history of systematically oppressing and discriminating against minorities, while those who do so often escape repercussions. It's no surprise that minorities don't want to join that kind of team; the team has been telling them for their entire lives that they're not worth anything.

I've really got to take issue with this.  I currently live in an overwhelmingly black neighborhood and while the LMPD sometimes uses some heavy-handed tactics which I certainly find questionable, they're the same tactics used in roughly the same prevalence as the previous neighborhood I lived in which was mostly white.  What these two neighborhoods share is that they're mainly lower class and that there's a lot of crime in both neighborhoods.  I've also seen this general trend in other areas of the country in which I've lived.

Ever seen someone get pulled over for speeding and react with frothing anger and resentment at the officer for giving them a speeding ticket (even though they KNOW that they were speeding)?  I think that's the place that this attitude mainly comes from.  People don't like being told 'no' and when our government makes rules it's ultimately the police who end up as the one saying "no" in person; that automatically puts them at odds with the majority of the population.  Then when you start factoring in social factors within a community and police practices (ranging from those which are actually unfair to those which merely isolate police from the community they serve), there's a lot of wiggle room for that divide to get a lot wider.

That's not to say that police officers never do racist shit -- we all know better but an understaffed police department operating in an impoverished, crime-ridden community isn't going to be well-liked; even if everybody was part of the same ethnic group and 100% of its officers were total saints.  The problem is that in these situations the only time the police interact with people is when something bad is happening/has happened.  They're there to break up your fun.  They're there to arrest someone.  They're there to take someone you have social ties with away.

Daniel Pantaleo wasn't indicted for killing Eric Garner, even after it was ruled a homicide.

I'm not 100% up on this case nor the law in NY so I'm not going to comment on this one other than to say that a death being classified as a 'homicide' does not necessarily mean that a crime was committed.  For example, here in Kentucky, if someone were to break into my home and try to kill me -- all of it caught on camera because I was trying to make a crappy demo of one of my pedals -- and I killed them in self-defense it would still be ruled a homicide.  Even though I might have every right to defend my own life with lethal force in that scenario and even though there was conclusive proof of my justification.

Darren Wilson wasn't indicted for killing Michael Brown.

Nor should he have been.  Contrary to the narrative our media spewed for months on end, the "hands up, don't shoot" story was completely false and was proven so by the autopsy.  Michael Brown's finger prints and DNA were on Darren Wilson's gun and the wounds and GSR on his hands are only explained by his hand being on the gun at the time it was fired.  The "click, click, bang" part of his narrative that so many people found untrustworthy is in fact a technical issue with that weapon consistent with a struggle for the gun.  Michael Brown was fighting with Darren Wilson for his gun.  Darren Wilson had every reason to be in fear of his life.

Now, did Wilson make mistakes?  Sure.  I think not waiting for backup and trying to apprehend two suspects by himself in that situation was a huge blunder and one that responsible police departments will be reviewing for many, many years to come as part of their training program.  But being overeager to make an arrest does not rise to the level of a criminal act.

George Zimmerman (though not a police officer) was acquitted of Trayvon Martin's murder.

Which should have been a surprise to nobody.  There was never sufficient evidence for a murder conviction.

I'm not speaking of the events themselves, I'm talking specifically about the aftermath. Regardless of whether you or I personally agree with those decisions, I don't think it's a stretch of the imagination to understand how minority communities can look at these events and walk away with the lesson "they can do anything to you and get away with it".

You're right, it's not difficult to imagine at all but I also see this as signs of failure well outside of our police departments.  It's the failure of our educational system (did nobody else take a Civics class?).  It's the failure of parents to raise their children.  It's the failure of our press to act responsibly.  It's the failure of our politicians and community leaders to actually lead.

The very fact that in all of these cases you mentioned the officer/asshat-with-a-concealed-carry-license was tried and convicted in the court of public opinion before the crime scene was even processed should tell you that our perspective of this issue is extremely skewed.

The police in Ferguson violated the constitutional rights of their black citizens as a matter of course. (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/justice-department-finds-pattern-of-police-bias-and-excessive-force-in-ferguson.html?_r=0) The Baltimore police have a long history of brutality. (http://data.baltimoresun.com/news/police-settlements/) How can that not destroy the relationship between police and the communities they're supposed to serve? Why should you trust the people who regularly beat you? I don't see how you can have minority communities trusting the police without serious police reform happening first.

I very much agree that police reform is needed but my concerns are that police reform alone is not enough and that the average American is too uneducated on this topic to push for smart reforms.  Very, very few people (who I know at least) seem to understand that if a police officer is going to use lethal force, they have only a split second to make that decision.  I'm always hearing "he should have just used a taser" or "why not shoot to wound" or "the guy only had a knife" or a dozen other declarations of ignorance (if you've found yourself thinking any of those statements, I highly recommend reading this report on police officers killed in the line of duty; it will be very enlightening for you).  I fear that we will put our police officers into a position where they're no longer being asked to risk their lives, but institutionally obligated to throw them away.  And no good can possibly come of that.

[jkokura]

I don't know you Frag Magnet, but I do like your level headedness.

Canadians are really quiet when you ask them about the issues you Americans are facing. We don't have the same issues, we have different ones.

Jacob

[lincolnic]

Yes, obviously Joseph Kent was arrested by the National Guard for being out past curfew. I did, in fact, read the articles I linked to. But I'm asking you to look at the video footage of it happening. The message of my post was not "a man was literally kidnapped" but "something is wrong with these actions". Is that how arrests generally look? Is that how arrests usually proceed? No, it isn't. That was an unnecessary brute force display that doesn't serve to ease tensions at all.

Or it was a smart decision based on the context of the situation.  Which do you think is more likely to illicit greater violence and more risk to all parties concerned; the police strolling up asking to speak to Joseph Kent, telling him he's under arrest, cuffing him, and reading him his rights as might be 'conventionally' done or snatching him before anybody has any idea what's happening?  Based on my experience and the likelihood that the police would have had to fight their way in and out of the former scenario, I'd say the latter is the better alternative even if it doesn't play well on CNN.  Lives come before feels and "optics."

At least in my world, anyway.

Joseph Kent had his hands in the air the entire time, and was walking slowly. He wasn't acting aggressively, and according to his lawyer (quoted here: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/29/baltimore-protester-kidnapped-on-live-tv-joseph-kent?CMP=share_btn_fb) he was trying to disperse other protesters. Snatching him into a moving vehicle only makes the police look extremely suspicious in the public eye, and in the long term that's more likely to incite more violence. What countless people witnessed on CNN (and later via social media) reads as another reason for them not to trust the police: throwing a non-threatening, peaceful man into a car with an arrest that looks exactly like a kidnapping. If the arrest had been done by the book, of course they'd still be angry about it, but the manner in which it was performed wouldn't be adding any extra fuel to the fire.

I just noticed that the article I linked to doesn't actually mention Beatty had been retained as Kent's lawyer, but Beatty confirmed that on his Twitter earlier.

Unfortunately, the culture in many of those communities is one that shuns people who become police officers (you really can't say it's "black culture" because you see it in a lot of lower class communities regardless of race).  Frankly, I think that's more of a factor than anything else.

Yes, but why do they shun them? Because law enforcement has a history of systematically oppressing and discriminating against minorities, while those who do so often escape repercussions. It's no surprise that minorities don't want to join that kind of team; the team has been telling them for their entire lives that they're not worth anything.

I've really got to take issue with this.  I currently live in an overwhelmingly black neighborhood and while the LMPD sometimes uses some heavy-handed tactics which I certainly find questionable, they're the same tactics used in roughly the same prevalence as the previous neighborhood I lived in which was mostly white.  What these two neighborhoods share is that they're mainly lower class and that there's a lot of crime in both neighborhoods.  I've also seen this general trend in other areas of the country in which I've lived.

Ever seen someone get pulled over for speeding and react with frothing anger and resentment at the officer for giving them a speeding ticket (even though they KNOW that they were speeding)?  I think that's the place that this attitude mainly comes from.  People don't like being told 'no' and when our government makes rules it's ultimately the police who end up as the one saying "no" in person; that automatically puts them at odds with the majority of the population.  Then when you start factoring in social factors within a community and police practices (ranging from those which are actually unfair to those which merely isolate police from the community they serve), there's a lot of wiggle room for that divide to get a lot wider.

That's not to say that police officers never do racist shit -- we all know better but an understaffed police department operating in an impoverished, crime-ridden community isn't going to be well-liked; even if everybody was part of the same ethnic group and 100% of its officers were total saints.  The problem is that in these situations the only time the police interact with people is when something bad is happening/has happened.  They're there to break up your fun.  They're there to arrest someone.  They're there to take someone you have social ties with away.

It isn't just a matter of people not liking being told "no", or that they don't like being caught doing something wrong, though. In Ferguson, black people are arrested at a rate almost three times higher than white people. USA Today studied arrest records last year (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/18/ferguson-black-arrest-rates/19043207/) and found that in at least 1,581 police departments all across the country, black people are arrested at rates several times higher than that of Ferguson. We all know that correlation is not causation, and the article also states as much: "Those disparities are easier to measure than they are to explain. They could be a reflection of biased policing; they could just as easily be a byproduct of the vast economic and educational gaps that persist across much of the USA — factors closely tied to crime rates. In other words, experts said, the fact that such disparities exist does little to explain their causes." But, it goes on to say: "Whatever the reasons, the results are the same: Blacks are far more likely to be arrested than any other racial group in the USA. In some places, dramatically so."

That's just a plain fact. They found at least 70 departments across the country where the arrest rate for black people was ten times higher (or more) than people of any other race. And on the flip side, "Only 173 of the 3,538 police departments USA TODAY examined arrested black people at a rate equal to or lower than other racial groups." That's about one out of every twenty police departments -- slightly under 5%.

Regardless of the causes, the result of this is that people notice, and not just statisticians. This is where distrust of the police comes from. Not because they don't like being told what to do. Because if you're black, you have a significantly higher percentage of being arrested for any reason in 95% of America.

Even discounting arrests, while I have no numbers on a national level, I can tell you that at least locally to me (Brooklyn/NYC), minorities are harassed by police on a far more regular basis than white people. In the past few years there's been a lot of discussion about the NYPD's "stop-and-frisk" policy, in which they randomly stop and search people on the street. (This Wikipedia page is a very good overview on the subject if you're not familiar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_City) Between 2002 and 2014, the percentages of people who were stopped and innocent of any crime were generally in the high 80s -- usually between 86-89%. White people made up 9-12% of those stops. The other 88-91% of them were black or hispanic. (http://www.nyclu.org/content/stop-and-frisk-data)

Daniel Pantaleo wasn't indicted for killing Eric Garner, even after it was ruled a homicide.

I'm not 100% up on this case nor the law in NY so I'm not going to comment on this one other than to say that a death being classified as a 'homicide' does not necessarily mean that a crime was committed.  For example, here in Kentucky, if someone were to break into my home and try to kill me -- all of it caught on camera because I was trying to make a crappy demo of one of my pedals -- and I killed them in self-defense it would still be ruled a homicide.  Even though I might have every right to defend my own life with lethal force in that scenario and even though there was conclusive proof of my justification.

You're right that my mention of the homicide ruling is irrelevant, but it must be pointed out that Eric Garner wasn't killed in self-defense. He hadn't attacked anyone, and while he swatted Pantaleo's arms away when Pantaleo tried to handcuff him, as far as it's known that's the extent of his resistance. Pantaleo put him in a chokehold (which the NYPD prohibits) and pushed his face into the ground, while Garner repeatedly told him and the other officers "I can't breathe," before passing out. While Garner died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital, the medical examiner's report found his cause of death to be "compression of neck (chokehold), compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police."

I mentioned that case specifically because it was the most recent high profile instance that immediately came to mind that illustrate how hard it is to indict a police officer. I don't want to sound like I'm assigning homework, but this article does a much better job than I can of explaining why and how this happens: http://www.thenation.com/article/190937/why-its-impossible-indict-cop

The short version is that US case law gives a lot of weight to an officer's account of a situation, even if that account is proven wrong. Internal Affairs generally only give their police a slap on the wrist, and there's effectively no civilian oversight allowed. Civil suits also don't curb police misconduct, since the burden of paying damages falls to city governments and not the individual police officers or their departments in question. (The link I posted yesterday about the multi-million dollar cost of Baltimore's history of police brutality is a great example of this.)

The police in Ferguson violated the constitutional rights of their black citizens as a matter of course. (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/justice-department-finds-pattern-of-police-bias-and-excessive-force-in-ferguson.html?_r=0) The Baltimore police have a long history of brutality. (http://data.baltimoresun.com/news/police-settlements/) How can that not destroy the relationship between police and the communities they're supposed to serve? Why should you trust the people who regularly beat you? I don't see how you can have minority communities trusting the police without serious police reform happening first.

I very much agree that police reform is needed but my concerns are that police reform alone is not enough and that the average American is too uneducated on this topic to push for smart reforms.  Very, very few people (who I know at least) seem to understand that if a police officer is going to use lethal force, they have only a split second to make that decision.  I'm always hearing "he should have just used a taser" or "why not shoot to wound" or "the guy only had a knife" or a dozen other declarations of ignorance (if you've found yourself thinking any of those statements, I highly recommend reading this report on police officers killed in the line of duty; it will be very enlightening for you).  I fear that we will put our police officers into a position where they're no longer being asked to risk their lives, but institutionally obligated to throw them away.  And no good can possibly come of that.

"Police reform" isn't limited only to the use of force, though that is an inescapable part of it. It's really about accountability, much of which is related to what happens before and after force is used. As the article I linked above discusses, there's almost no meaningful self-regulation in America's police forces. When Internal Affairs bureaus and Patrolmen's Benevolent Associations exist mainly to shield their officers from the consequences of their actions after force is used, then self-regulation does not work. Independent civilian oversight would be one way to address the problem, but (at least in New York, where I live) this is constantly rejected.

If someone is more likely to be arrested for any reason just because they're black, that needs to be addressed as well. (This is the "before force is used" part.) The police need to prove to civilians that they're not specifically targeting black people, especially when hard data suggests otherwise. I don't claim to know what concrete steps need to be taken to accomplish this, but I do think that, again, more oversight and accountability are necessary to the process. Our police are supposed to serve and protect all of us, and they are failing at that task.

[midwayfair]

The police investigative report was turned over to the state early yesterday. Some details have leaked; a head wound matches a bolt inside the van in which he was being transported. I don't expect too much information to come out that isn't cleanup, analysis, and increasingly smaller protests until the state finishes.

[midwayfair]

The officers will be charged with a "depraved heart" homicide; the arrest was also ruled illegal as it turned out that the knife he was carrying wasn't even a switch blade -- which is a separate charge*. The report is described as "extremely thorough"; I'm hoping that the text will be released for public review.

Twitter has exploded.

What's a "depraved heart" homicide, you might be asking? Lexa dug up the definition:

"Depraved heart murder is the form of murder that establishes that the wilful doing of a dangerous and reckless act with wanton indifference to the consequences and perils involved, is just as blameworthy, and just as worthy of punishment, when the harmful result ensues, as is the express intent to kill itself. This highly blameworthy state of mind is not one of mere negligence. It is not merely one even of gross criminal negligence. It involves rather the deliberate perpetration of a knowingly dangerous act with reckless and wanton unconcern and indifference as to whether anyone is harmed or not. The common law treats such a state of mind as just as blameworthy, just as anti-social and, therefore, just as truly murderous as the specific intents to kill and to harm."

*I consider the wrongful arrest charge to be huge. Why? Because it challenges the 2000 Supreme Court decision where it was ruled that running from the police in a "high crime" area (plsdefinemmkay?) is grounds for arrest even absent evidence of a crime. That sort of decision should scare the tar out of anyone, regardless of their circumstances, due to its potential for abuse.