Police Reform (Please Don’t Call It Defund)

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  • Winnipeg Posts: 39,503
    nicknyr15 said:
    Yea I agree with that but he never fully came out and blasted police like some on the far left do
    he would have had it been politically expedient. 

    I see it like this: the left sees things as they are. the right sees things as they want them to be. massive generalization? OF COURSE. it wouldn't be AMT without it. 
    By The Time They Figure Out What Went Wrong, We'll Be Sitting On A Beach, Earning Twenty Percent.




  • Posts: 44,494
    mickeyrat said:

    gift article


    link within this article about the shifting story FROM L.E. , also a gift article



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  • Posts: 1,852
    Well... at least this guy can confirm what I said a few days ago.  A fumbling acceptance of responsibility ... but better than nothing. 

    Active shooter = go in.  No hesitation. 

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  • Posts: 2,034
    edited June 2022
    nicknyr15 said:
    No offense but I grew up in Brooklyn around all kinds of people. I’ve heard more privilege upper class white people say fuck the police than people of color. You can’t compare Winnipeg to NYC. Two completely different perspectives. 
    I can say it freely so you are right. They really can’t unless they want to get arrested for something else.

    I’ve never ever seen minorities being confrontational with police, I see white people doing it occasionally. I’m talking real life, not what I see on TV

    That speaks more to white privilege than the overriding sentiment of police among minority communities 
  • Posts: 9,245
    I can say it freely so you are right. They really can’t unless they want to get arrested for something else.

    I’ve never ever seen minorities being confrontational with police, I see white people doing it occasionally. I’m talking real life, not what I see on TV

    That speaks more to white privilege than the overriding sentiment of police among minority communities 
    Nothing more privileged than white people who live in gated communities telling minorities they need less police. 
  • Posts: 2,034
    edited June 2022
    nicknyr15 said:
    Nothing more privileged than white people who live in gated communities telling minorities they need less police. 
    I live in the middle of a major city. No gates here. 
    Policing in a lot of minority /and or low income areas operate under the assumption everyone is guilty far too often.  

    Police aren’t around quite as much in my neighbourhood as other areas though. Fact is there is a lot of “crime” here that isn’t policed at all. If the cops were as aggressive as they are in other areas they would find a lot of stuff… Ie pulling people over for taillights and executing searches based on really weak PC.    The more aggressively you police the more crime you find. So many things police find aren’t even from the actual crime that they are using for justification to begin with.  They stop you for x hoping to find y.  I’ve never heard of a police stop for jaywalking on my street and I do it every day. Other areas, it’s absolutely used to then look for drugs.  I’m committing the same crime as the other guy. Loitering is another one.  That’s the stuff extra policing goes after 

    Still remember driving from Houston to Corpus one night after work.  Got pulled over in a small town  in the middle of the night and the cop flat out said my “out of state plates” were the reason for the stop as I appeared to not be from around here. He probably assumed I wasn’t a white guy. Asked to search my vehicle anyway. I said sure, as soon as you wake up a judge and get a warrant.  Didn’t have anything to hide but I’m not about to cooperate with their fishing expeditions. Something tells me if I wasn’t white it wouldn’t have gone down that way. 


  • Posts: 12,805
    This is a pretty sobering read. 


    For the record, I’m not anti-cop. I recognize the need for effective policing in our country and make annual donations to local police charities…. With that being said, significant reform is needed. 
  • Posts: 44,494

     
    Kansas City struggles with Missouri over police funding
    By MARGARET STAFFORD and SUMMER BALLENTINE
    Today

    KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Leaders in largely Democratic Kansas City, Missouri, don’t control the city’s police department, hire the police chief or determine how the department spends its tax dollars. A 1930s-era law gives that power to a five-member board largely appointed by the Missouri governor, who since 2017 has been a Republican.

    A longstanding dispute over that arrangement is erupting this summer. The two sides are preparing for a statewide vote in November on a constitutional amendment that would give the Republican-majority Legislature even more authority to set police funding.

    A key legislative backer says Kansas City police need the support because some Democrats want to defund the force — a charge city leaders vehemently deny.

    A local civil rights leader sued on behalf of city taxpayers, arguing that allowing the state to control the city’s police force amounts to “taxation without representation” and discriminates against Kansas City's large Black population, which experiences much of its violent crime.

    Mayor Quinton Lucas, who is the only person on the Board of Police Commissioners not appointed by the governor, has indicated the proposal will be challenged in court.

    The debate echoes recent confrontations between Republican state officials and Democratic leaders of larger cities elsewhere over issues including voting rights, mask mandates and recognition of the Juneteenth holiday. And it comes as the nation continues to wrestle with racial injustice in policing.

    Last year, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia signed restrictive election laws that opponents claimed targeted Democratic strongholds. And school boards in largely Democratic areas defied governors in Florida, Texas and Arizona who sought to ban mask mandates during the height of the pandemic.

    Kansas City, with a population of about 508,000, about 28% Black, is the only Missouri city without local control of its police force. It’s believed to be the largest city in the U.S. in that situation, the mayor’s office said.

    After racial injustice protests in 2020 sparked calls for more police accountability, Lucas and some City Council members passed two ordinances that would have given city officials some control over how $42.5 million of the police department’s $239 million budget for 2021-2022 fiscal year would be spent. The money would have been used to emphasize social service and crime prevention programs.

    Critics, including the police union and former police chief, said the proposal was a roundabout way of defunding the department and would leave it with insufficient money to make it through the year.

    Shortly after the ordinances passed, the state-appointed police board sued the city to undo them and won. The judge said state law gives the board exclusive authority over the police budget.

    The fight prompted legislators to pass a bill requiring the city to increase police funding from 20% of its general revenue budget to 25%. Republican Gov. Mike Parson signed the bill June 27.

    But there was concern the move would run afoul of a state constitutional ban on unfunded state mandates for cities. So lawmakers put an amendment to address that on the November general election ballot.

    Lucas tweeted that “the bill represents the raw exercise of power by state lawmakers over the people of Kansas City,” and would be challenged in court. He and other officials have noted the city already routinely funds the police department above the 20% requirement.

    State Sen. Tony Luetkemeyer, a Republican who represents counties in suburban Kansas City, said he sponsored the legislation to stand with law enforcement during a time of “radical attempts across the country by city councils to defund the police.”

    Melissa Robinson, a Democratic Kansas City Council member, said the current arrangement disenfranchises Kansas City taxpayers by allowing outsiders to decide how their tax dollars are spent.

    She said supporters are strategizing how to persuade residents outside the city that the issue on the November ballot is centered on local control, a principle frequently lauded by Republicans.

    “This is not about divisive conversations about blue lives and Black lives,” she said. “It’s the basic question of how government should work ... We never said we wanted to decrease funding, we just wanted to separate out some money and ask questions about better ways to address crime.”

    Luetkemeyer said all Missourians should care about how the Kansas City police department operates because the city is one of the main economic drivers in the state.

    “If Kansas City sees a dramatic increase in crime because police are defunded, that’s going to have a ripple effect across the entire economy in the state of Missouri,” he said.

    According to police department crime statistics, reports of the most serious crimes, such as homicides, sex assaults, robbery, fraud and weapons violations decreased 6% from 2020 to 2021.

    Homicides in the city have fluctuated between 151 in 2017 to 157 in 2021, with a high of 179 in 2020. The statistics show 78% of homicide victims in the city in 2021 were Black men and women.

    Gwen Grant, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City and the civil rights leader who filed a lawsuit over the funding issue, said the current arrangement is steeped in racism.

    During the Civil War, Missouri was sharply divided between Union and Confederate supporters, with much of the Union support centered in St. Louis and Kansas City, which had larger Black populations than elsewhere in the state.

    In 1861, Missouri Gov. Claiborne Fox Jackson, who supported the Confederacy, persuaded the Legislature to pass a law giving the state control over the police department in St. Louis. Missouri voters in 2013 approved a constitutional amendment returning that department to local control.

    The state took over the new Kansas City Police Department in 1874. That changed in 1932, when the Missouri Supreme Court ruled the appointed board’s control of the agency was unconstitutional.

    But the state took back control in 1939 at the urging of another segregationist governor, Lloyd Crow Stark, in part because of corruption under highly influential political organizer Tom Pendergast. In 1943, a new law limited the amount a city could be required to appropriate to a police board to 20% of its general revenue in any fiscal year.

    continues....


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    Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
    you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
    memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
    another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
  • Posts: 44,494

     
    Lawsuit: Chicago police misused ShotSpotter in murder case
    by GARANCE BURKE AND MICHAEL TARM
    Yesterday

    CHICAGO (AP) — A federal lawsuit filed Thursday alleges Chicago police misused “unreliable” gunshot detection technology and failed to pursue other leads in investigating a grandfather from the city’s South Side who was charged with killing a neighbor.

    Chicago prosecutors used audio picked up by a network of sensors installed by the gunshot detection company ShotSpotter as critical evidence in charging Michael Williams with murder in 2020 for allegedly shooting the man inside his car. Williams spent nearly a year in jail, and The Associated Press reported last year that a judge dismissed his case at the request of prosecutors, who said they had insufficient evidence.

    The lawsuit filed by the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University’s law school seeks damages from the city for mental anguish, loss of income and legal bills for the 65-year-old Williams, who said he still suffers from a tremor in his hand that developed while he was locked up. It also details the case of a second plaintiff Daniel Ortiz, a 36-year-old father who the lawsuit alleges was arbitrarily arrested and jailed by police who were responding to a ShotSpotter alert.

    The suit seeks class-action status for any Chicago resident who was stopped on the basis of the alerts. It also seeks a court order barring the technology’s use in the nation’s third-largest city.

    “Even though now I’m so-called free, I don’t think I will ever be free of the thought of what they have done and the impact that has on me now, like the shaking with my hand,” Williams said. “I constantly go back to the thought of being in that place. ... I just can’t get my mind to settle down.”

    ShotSpotter isn’t named as a defendant in the 103-page filing though the lawsuit claims the company’s algorithm-powered technology is flawed. The suit also alleges the city’s decision to place most of its gunshot-detection sensors in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods is racially discriminatory.

    Asked for a comment, the city's law department, which represents police in such cases, said later Thursday that it had not yet been served with the complaint.

    Chicago police have previously praised the ShotSpotter system, saying it puts officers on the scene of shootings far faster than if they wait for someone to call 911. Police have also said crime rates — not residents’ race — determine where the technology is deployed.

    ShotSpotter said in a statement that the evidence it collects and its expert witnesses have been admitted in 200 court cases in 20 states, and have survived dozens of evidentiary challenges.

    It described its system as “highly accurate with a 97% aggregate accuracy rate for real-time detections across all customers” and that an analytics company had verified the effectiveness of the technology.

    ShotSpotter’s website says the company is “a leader in precision policing technology solutions” that help stop gun violence by using sensors, algorithms and artificial intelligence to classify 14 million sounds in its proprietary database as gunshots or something else.

    But the AP investigation identified a number of flaws in using ShotSpotter as evidentiary support for prosecutors, and found the system can miss live gunfire right under its microphones, or misclassify the sounds of fireworks or cars backfiring as gunshots. Last year, Chicago’s nonpartisan watchdog agency concluded that actual evidence of a gun-related crime was found in about 9% of ShotSpotter alerts that were confirmed as probable gunshots.

    The lawsuit says the investigating officers “put blind faith in ShotSpotter evidence they knew or should have known was unreliable” in order to charge Williams with killing 25-year-old Safarian Herring. The lawsuit alleges investigators used ShotSpotter material in a way that went beyond its intended use, quoting a disclaimer in one document related to Williams’ case that says the investigative lead summary “should only be used for initial investigative purposes.”

    The suit also accuses investigators of not pursuing other leads that could have produced credible suspects, including reports that someone previously shot at Herring at a bus stop.

    Police and prosecutors never established a motive for Williams to have shot Herring, never found witnesses to the shooting, and never recovered a weapon or physical evidence tying Williams to the killing, the suit alleges.

    “The Defendant Officers engaged in tunnel vision to target Mr. Williams, arresting him for First-Degree murder, without probable cause,” the lawsuit said.

    ___

    Burke reported from San Francisco.

    ___

    Follow Garance Burke and Michael Tarm on Twitter at @garanceburke and @mtarm. Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/


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    Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
    you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
    memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
    another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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    Scio me nihil scire

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  • Posts: 44,494
    could put this a couple different places, however I thik it fits best here.


     
    Breonna Taylor warrant details deepen mistrust in police
    By DYLAN LOVAN
    Today

    LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Recent revelations about the search warrant that led to Breonna Taylor’s death have reopened old wounds in Louisville’s Black community and disrupted the city’s efforts to restore trust in the police department.

    Former Louisville officer Kelly Goodlett admitted in federal court that she and another officer falsified information in the warrant. That confirmed to many, including U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, that Taylor never should have been visited by armed officers on March 13, 2020.

    Protest leaders who took to the streets of Kentucky's largest city after she was fatally shot by police say Goodlett's confession confirms their suspicions that Louisville police can't be trusted and that systemic issues run deep. They say officers abused demonstrators after the botched raid, and that her fatal shooting is just one of many reasons why the community remains wary.

    “What bothers me so incredibly, is that so many lives were lost because of this lie,” said Hannah Drake, a Louisville poet and leader in a push for justice after Taylor's death. “They don’t even understand the far-reaching tentacles of what they did.”

    More than once during that long, hot summer, individual officers escalated rather than calmed a situation. An officer who shot into the restaurant, injuring the dead man’s niece, was fired after taunting demonstrators on social media, daring them to challenge the police. Another Louisville officer faces a federal charge over hitting a kneeling protester in the back of the head with a baton.

    “We were right to protest,” Louisville Urban League President Sadiqa Reynolds tweeted shortly after Goodlett’s plea. “People are dead and lives upended because of a pile of lies.”

    Some Louisville officers have been disciplined, fired, and even charged with crimes for abusing protesters, in addition to the four officers now charged federally in relation to the botched raid. But the problems can’t be blamed on a few rogue officers, according to a lawsuit brought by Taylor’s white neighbors, who were nearly hit by gunfire during the raid.

    They accuse the department of having a “warrior culture” and cultivating an “us vs. them” mentality. And the family of a Black man shot dead in his restaurant's kitchen by law enforcement says in a lawsuit that police aggression during a curfew instigated his death.

    Louisville is working on numerous reforms, implementing a new 911 diversion program, increasing leadership reviews of search warrant requests and improving officer training. The city has outlawed “no knock” warrants, conducted an independent audit and paid Taylor’s mother $12 million in a civil settlement. A new police chief, Erika Shields, was hired in 2021.

    Such reforms have been implemented amid a continuing U.S. Department of Justice investigation of LMPD's policing practices, which could land at any moment.

    The chief called Taylor's death “horrific,” and said in an interview with The Associated Press that she welcomes the federal investigations, which led to charges against Goodlett and the other officers. “I think we’re in an important place that was necessary to get to, before we move on,” she said.

    Mayor Greg Fischer, whose 12-year run ends this year, said city officials turned the probes over to state and federal officials “because the community rightfully was saying LMPD should not be investigating LMPD, and I agree with that.”

    Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron's investigation then ended without any officers being charged directly in Taylor's death. It took federal prosecutors to convict Goodlett — she pleaded guilty to conspiracy and admitted to helping create a phony link between Taylor and a wanted drug dealer. Goodlett resigned the day before her charges were announced in August and awaits sentencing next month.

    In August court filings, federal prosecutors said another former officer, Joshua Jaynes, inserted the crucial information into the warrant request that drew Taylor into the narcotic squad's investigation — claiming that a postal inspector had verified that the drug dealer was receiving packages at Taylor's apartment.

    Goodlett and Jaynes knew that was false, as did their sergeant, Kyle Meany, when he signed off on the request, Garland said.

    “Breonna Taylor should be alive today," Garland said.

    Goodlett, Jaynes and Meany were all fired, as was a fourth officer, Brett Hankison, who faces federal charges for blindly firing into Taylor’s home through a side door and window. He was exonerated on similar state charges earlier this year. Jaynes and Meany are being tried together. That trial, along with Hankison's, is scheduled for next year. Goodlett is expected to testify against Jaynes.

    Metro Council President David James, a former police officer, said that to restore trust, Louisville’s Black community “just wants the police to treat them the same way they would treat people in another part of the city.”

    No incident highlighted the racial divide more than the fatal shooting of Black restaurant owner David McAtee as police sought to enforce the city’s curfew in a predominantly African American neighborhood far from the center of the Taylor protests.

    Just before midnight on May 31, 2020, Louisville officers and Kentucky National Guard members were sent to a gathering spot near McAtee's YaYa's BBQ “for a show of force (and) intimidation,” McAtee’s family alleges in a lawsuit.

    A few nights earlier, officer Katie Crews had been photographed in a line of police as a protester offered her a handful of flowers. Crews posted the image on social media, writing that she hoped the protester was hurting from the pepper balls she “got lit up with a little later on.”

    “Come back and get ya some more ole girl, I’ll be on the line again tonight,” Crews wrote.

    When officers marched toward McAtee's restaurant, Crews escalated the tension by firing non-lethal pepper balls at the crowd, an LMPD investigation found. Many people rushed into McAtee's kitchen, where his niece was shot in the neck by Crews with the non-lethal rounds.

    That prompted McAtee to pull a pistol from his hip and fire a shot. Seeing that, Crews and other officers switched to live rounds and McAtee, leaning out his kitchen door, was fatally shot in the chest by a National Guard member. The deadly force was found to be justified, but the police chief was fired by Fischer because the Louisville officers involved had failed to turn on their body cameras, just as they did during the Taylor raid.

    Crews later admitted that no one in the crowd had been disorderly. She was fired by Shields in February. Now she faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of a federal charge of using unreasonable force.

    James groaned while recalling McAtee’s death, saying he was saddened because he knew him and had eaten his food. The “extremely unfortunate and tragic” shooting has stuck with him as an example of bad policing, he said.

    Drake said more systemic changes are needed. In the meantime, she said authorities should apologize for their treatment of protesters, and drop any cases against people arrested for demonstrating that summer. Hundreds have been cleared, but some remain criminally charged. Knowing it was all so unnecessary only deepens the pain, she said.

    “We could have avoided all this,” Drake said. “And I think that’s where the pain comes from — we were right!”


    _____________________________________SIGNATURE________________________________________________

    Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
    you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
    memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
    another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
  • Pacific Northwest Posts: 6,438
    Police reform in action.

    Portland Street Response needs more staff, according to latest report - oregonlive.com

    These types of programs work. They need more funding. 

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