Comments on: What A Bunch Of Whiners!

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 09 Dec 2014 21:28:38 +0000

If prosecutors won’t allow the cases to go to trial, the restrictions don’t come into play and the cops aren’t bound by them unless they are enforced.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Tue, 09 Dec 2014 19:36:29 +0000

Well, there *used* to be severe restrictions on the use of ‘deadly physical force’, but today? I’m not so sure, given how often cops are inflicting it with impunity.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 04:34:34 +0000

Kryten, when you make the cops look bad they will look for a way to retaliate.

Garner wasn’t threatening or fighting, he was just not doing what he was being told to do. The officer made the decision to struggle with Garner, which is not good technique or generally effective. The cop would have been in trouble if Garner collapsed backwards onto the fool.

Yes, even the Shrubbery can figure out that the cop screwed up, which makes the people who refuse to accept it dumber than mushrooms and other fungi.

Badtux, all the DA had to do was give the grand jury a copy of the law, the medical examiner’s report, a copy of the NYPD prohibition against choke holds, and screen the video. Instant indictment to follow. That’s how these cases are normally dealt with by prosecutors.

There is a defense under Article 35 of the Penal Law for law enforcement, but a competent DA can easily neutralize it with the NYPD memo, and the reality that Garner would only have been charged with a misdemeanor and didn’t offer any violence to the officers. Even for law enforcement, there are severe restrictions on the use of ‘deadly physical force’ and the Garner arrest didn’t qualify.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Sun, 07 Dec 2014 18:24:58 +0000

Thanks for the cite of the New York law, Bryan. Every state has a similar charge, but they all call it something different and I honestly wasn’t interested enough to look up what NY State called it. Clearly this cop was not guilty of murder, because there was no intent to kill. But his behavior was also clearly reckless given that he had been informed that department policy was not to use that hold because it was dangerous.

One thing I’ve noticed is that community groups really aren’t doing themselves a favor in these cases by pushing prosecutors to overcharge with murder charges where that’s not warranted by the evidence. The Zimmerman case was another case where prosecutors overcharged due to public pressure rather than going for the lesser charge that the evidence warranted.

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Sun, 07 Dec 2014 15:49:51 +0000

You know what i think. They did indict someone though. The guy who filmed Eric Garner's death/murder. Ramsey Orta, Man Who Filmed Eric Garner Death, Was Indicted By A Grand Jury, But Pantaleo Was Not And here's someone I never thought I'd agree with! George W. Bush: Garner decision 'hard to understand' So, let's see if all those white neocon bobble-head pundits and politicians call GW out for disagreeing! BTW, there were 5 pig's there. So I can't see that the murderer's excuse of "the guy was so big I was afraid he'd hurt me!" was in any way true.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sun, 07 Dec 2014 06:18:10 +0000

Steve, one of the guys in my class at my first language school was from Pensacola and was black. When we left school we came home on leave, he to Pensacola and I to Cinco Bayou, as my parents had moved back here while I was in school. As we were landing in Atlanta to catch the next flight he said we should act like we don’t know each other, and not to call him while we were on leave or “There could be trouble.” That was hard to hear, that nothing much had changed in the decade since I left Florida.

Oh, Badtux, the correct charge should have been:

New York Penal Law § 125.15 Manslaughter in the second degree.
A person is guilty of manslaughter in the second degree when:
1. He recklessly causes the death of another person.

It is a class C felony with a maximum term of imprisonment of 15 years.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sun, 07 Dec 2014 04:19:32 +0000

These whiners are not the cops I worked with. The police unions backed officers to the hilt, because that was their job, their raison d’être, but the individual cops didn’t want to work with people who caused trouble. The cops in Ferguson may have been supporting that cop publicly, but they had to know what a lightning rod he would be on the job. Based on his bogus testimony, I don’t see him as brave enough to want to work as a police officer in the atmosphere he created. We could have a summer of riots, like the 1960s, if the people with the power don’t stop this crap.

These police departments may find themselves under Federal court orders, as happened in the 1960s and 70s, and that was real hell for the departments hit.

I don’t trust the local cops in my jurisdiction to do anything correctly. They openly talk about abusing suspects at convenience stores to impress the locals, but there have been too many criminal indictments of the leadership in local law enforcement agencies, for regular people to feel secure. The badges in the US are tainted by misconduct, so cops are no longer safe on the streets and they are starting to feel the anger. Things are going to get really ugly before they are finally fixed.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Sun, 07 Dec 2014 03:34:32 +0000

FWIW, in W.W. II, my father, gunnery officer on a landing ship, told me when I was old enough to understand that he used occasionally to drink beer with the steward’s mate (inevitably a position filled by a black man in those days), but he confessed to me that they got together secretly, for fear of what some of their white comrades would do to the steward’s mate.

I’m relieved that my dad did not live to see the course of racism in America today…

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Sun, 07 Dec 2014 03:26:45 +0000

“There is one important difference today, though. Police now feel free to brutalize white people, too.” – BadTux

For many of us, the first inkling of that change was NYPD and LAPD cops beating bloody hell out of Occupy folk, who were quite possibly the most determinedly nonviolent protest group in American history. Of course, as I say that, I remember that the 1968 Democratic National Convention saw a fair amount of cop-on-white violence as well. The more things change…

You are probably right about how it could end up. The other possibility, though, is that the worst of policemen could join (have joined???) with the KKK in an active effort to eliminate all nonwhite people in America, and other Americans are either too scared or don’t care enough to stop them from finishing the job. Time will tell.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Sun, 07 Dec 2014 01:14:58 +0000

Steve, my dad’s shop was about five blocks from the main police station in the city where I grew up. A number of his customers were cops. By and large they were large boisterous Irishmen (sort of a stereotype, but there you go), and all were white. There were no black police officers in our city. Their interactions with white people were friendly, but their talking and joking around about what they did to black people when they went into “niggertown” and went “nigger-knocking” for fun, brutalizing any black person they came across “to teach the niggers their place”, was disturbing, to say the least.

In other words, I suspect that if your father had been black, the only interactions he would have had with police officers would have been at the end of a nightstick. And if you had been black, the only interactions you would have had with that police officer in ensemble would have been a cordial nod of the head as you passed in the hall, because he would not have given you the time of day. Things changed for a while because of lawsuits and civil rights laws and a general disquiet with blatant racist violence on the part of police officers, but they never really changed *that* much, and now they’re back to what they were for the previous 200 years of this nation’s existence. This nation has 300 years of history of police brutalizing people of color, and while the police culture may have changed somewhat for a while there, today it seems to have reverted back to form.

There is one important difference today, though. Police now feel free to brutalize white people, too. That is new. We will have to see where that ends up. I suspect that if there ends up being a backlash, it will be because the police beat up the wrong white person. We’ll see, I guess…