The Great Police Work Thread

Iamtdg said:
Millions and millions and millions of people that abuse the welfare system is all I need to see. It's just too bad there is no way to quantify that.
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What the hell does that have to do with anything, even if that number was true.

Wow the slavery and welfare card in 2 days you are really on a roll.
 
Here's the thing that bugs me. The things we've seen out of Ferguson (and from cops in general) are just what has managed to slip through, or been miraculously recorded by someone putting their own well-being in danger by doing it.

How can anyone look at a dozen rats caught in the open, and not worry how many more are living in the walls? The fact that we've been able to find like dozens and dozens of incidents, means there are exponentially more that have gone unnoticed. That's terrifying, and infuriating.
 
townsend said:
This isn't about me. I grew up lower middle class, and white. So I've never ever had to deal with the kind of lifestyle that people in Ferguson have.

But if I grew up black and in Ferguson, I probably would have ended up uneducated, and in poverty, and you would have too. Using the understanding of that fact. I use this special tool called "empathy" to envision how miserable that life is.
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To be fair, if you grew up white and in Ferguson you would probably have been just as bad off as well.
 
Cowboysrock55 said:
To be fair, if you grew up white and in Ferguson you would probably have been just as bad off as well.
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Yeah pretty damn close. From all the statistics I've seen FPD specifically targeted black citizens more frequently, so I'd be less likely to end up in that fine, and jail time carousel.

That being said, at least on the macro scale, gender seems to play a much larger role in whether or not someone will end up in prison than skin color.
 
o-TYPHOON-HAIYAN-900.jpg

Just for the eff of it. Here's a chart for how welfare recipients spend all of that sweet sweet welfare cash. Blowing it on useless shit like housing, food, and transportation. If they weren't such victims they would have had more money to spend in the first place.
 
townsend said:
o-TYPHOON-HAIYAN-900.jpg

Just for the eff of it. Here's a chart for how welfare recipients spend all of that sweet sweet welfare cash. Blowing it on useless shit like housing, food, and transportation. If they weren't such victims they would have had more money to spend in the first place.
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It's prima facie that welfare recipients will have less money to spend on these items. That's why they are on welfare. I am failing to see what your point is with this statistical chart and how it equates to why there is crime involved as a result. Or maybe I am not understanding this part of the discussion at all.
 
L.T. Fan said:
It's prima facie that welfare recipients will have less money to spend on these items. That's why they are on welfare. I am failing to see what your point is with this statistical chart and how it equates to why there is crime involved as a result. Or maybe I am not understanding this part of the discussion at all.
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Honestly I'm not sure why welfare got brought up in the first place. Other than as a dismissal for a certain social class. The point of the chart is to fight, what I assume, is the stereotype of the welfare recipient who uses hard earned tax dollars on frivolity. That if these people didn't require the help, they wouldn't be spending the overwhelming majority of their money on basic essentials.
 
townsend said:
Honestly I'm not sure why welfare got brought up in the first place. Other than as a dismissal for a certain social class. The point of the chart is to fight, what I assume, is the stereotype of the welfare recipient who uses hard earned tax dollars on frivolity. That if these people didn't require the help, they wouldn't be spending the overwhelming majority of their money on basic essentials.
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Okay. Thank you. I initially thought you were correlating welfare recipients to crime neighborhoods and justifying it because they had less money to spend on the items listed.
 
townsend said:
I'm sure it's not fun to be the resident cop on any kind of board discussing police brutality. For what it's worth my experience with FWPD has been pretty positive so far.
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Thanks for that. IT does kinda suck. But I try to be informative. Sometimes I do get a bit defensive and I apologize. But honestly in all these circumstances I'm not trying to defend folk so much as offer an alternative outlook to the "he's so guilty" attitude of some here. I have always said when I post here, I don't know all the circumstances, but "this could be an alternative.

townsend said:
If cops are seriously afraid for their lives on a daily basis, there is a serious issue there. I've worked in relatively dangerous fields (the oil industry, and as an electrician) My current job accounts for about 160 annual deaths, that's just below annual Cop fatality rate (but there are quite a few less electricians than cops). If someone came to my job, afraid for his life every day. I'd tell him to quit.
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I know what he was trying to say and I appreciate that as well. Most police work is 90% routine stuff and nobody is in constant fear for their lives, but....You do have to be hyper vigilant all of the time because threats come from nowhere in no time at all. Remember the video of the officer talking to the kid on the porch? All seemed calm but the officer wasn't paying attention to what he kid was doing and the next thing you know he was shot dead. That is the reality of police work. It can go from no problem to shootout in no time.
 
townsend said:
I'm sure it's not fun to be the resident cop on any kind of board discussing police brutality. For what it's worth my experience with FWPD has been pretty positive so far.
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townsend said:
If cops are seriously afraid for their lives on a daily basis, there is a serious issue there. I've worked in relatively dangerous fields (the oil industry, and as an electrician) My current job accounts for about 160 annual deaths, that's just below annual Cop fatality rate (but there are quite a few less electricians than cops). If someone came to my job, afraid for his life every day. I'd tell him to quit.
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townsend said:
Here's the thing that bugs me. The things we've seen out of Ferguson (and from cops in general) are just what has managed to slip through, or been miraculously recorded by someone putting their own well-being in danger by doing it.

How can anyone look at a dozen rats caught in the open, and not worry how many more are living in the walls? The fact that we've been able to find like dozens and dozens of incidents, means there are exponentially more that have gone unnoticed. That's terrifying, and infuriating.
Click to expand...

This I take issue with Towns. It kinda goes back to what I said to Jiggs a few weeks back. There are over 700,000 cops in this country and you can find incidents all over of bad police work. But it is a tiny fraction of the dealings police have with folk but the media and others paint the entire profession with the overhanging color. You can do that with any profession, from janitor to president. But cops have been the hot topic since Obama came into office and his media started carrying water for him. Again, I'm not saying there aren't bad cops that need to be gotten rid of or jailed, but your last paragraph is a bit overstated I think.

In one of the posts you mentioned solutions and I agree with some of them. I think Clay and I touched on it briefly earlier as well.
1. Cops need more and better training. It should include more training on things liking dealing with mentally ill folk, "verbal judo", even more hand to hand physical force options would be great, but it wouldn't necessarily change how an officer reacts to a circumstance. Although I will say an officer that is more confident in any of his skills is more apt to use them before stepping up the force continuum.
Plus, that cop in that video about " you looked at me", that was stupid. He may have had a legit reason to stop him whether it was wormy or not, but he got nervous with the video camera and Mr. Felton talking noise got him to say something asinine. Had he relaxed and been trained to just do what he needed to do rather than engage with the mouthy black guy he would have been done and out of there in less than 5 minutes and not made a national spectacle of himself.
2. I am a firm believer in having more community involvement in policing. Things such as neighborhood watch groups that are interactive with the department not only boost police visibility in higher crime areas, but also help officers get to know their community they work in and visa-versa. It worked in Fort Worth like you wouldn't believe.
3. Departments have to be more open and communicative with their communities, all of them not just selectively. Like I said, it worked here and other places, departmental leadership just has to make it a priority.
4. I agree with the video camera thing. It is not yet mandatory with our department, but I believe we have one of if not the largest deployment of body cams in the country right now. I stress how beneficial it is to all my officers and constantly recommend they wear them.

These are a few of the suggestions I would make were I a new chief at department somewhere because I think they are important places to start to build faith in a department and for a department to better serve its communities.
 
All of those recommendations would help with police presence in poorer areas and I know this because I have seen it. Yes there are good people who live in bad circumstance because they have no choice. But I promise you there are people that live in that circumstance because they are perfectly content to do so as well. And that goes for both black and white. I can also tell you that I have dealt with folk of many colors that I would have confidently speculated that at some point in their lives they would wind up dead either by someone else's hand or by a cop's somewhere. They live on the ragged edge either high or committing crimes all the time and trust me, everyone on a department knows who they are.
 
I think the time is coming where cops having body cameras will be so normal only a tiny fraction of small town departments will not be equipped with them.
 
fortsbest said:
This I take issue with Towns. It kinda goes back to what I said to Jiggs a few weeks back. There are over 700,000 cops in this country and you can find incidents all over of bad police work. But it is a tiny fraction of the dealings police have with folk but the media and others paint the entire profession with the overhanging color. You can do that with any profession, from janitor to president. But cops have been the hot topic since Obama came into office and his media started carrying water for him. Again, I'm not saying there aren't bad cops that need to be gotten rid of or jailed, but your last paragraph is a bit overstated I think.

In one of the posts you mentioned solutions and I agree with some of them. I think Clay and I touched on it briefly earlier as well.
1. Cops need more and better training. It should include more training on things liking dealing with mentally ill folk, "verbal judo", even more hand to hand physical force options would be great, but it wouldn't necessarily change how an officer reacts to a circumstance. Although I will say an officer that is more confident in any of his skills is more apt to use them before stepping up the force continuum.
Plus, that cop in that video about " you looked at me", that was stupid. He may have had a legit reason to stop him whether it was wormy or not, but he got nervous with the video camera and Mr. Felton talking noise got him to say something asinine. Had he relaxed and been trained to just do what he needed to do rather than engage with the mouthy black guy he would have been done and out of there in less than 5 minutes and not made a national spectacle of himself.
2. I am a firm believer in having more community involvement in policing. Things such as neighborhood watch groups that are interactive with the department not only boost police visibility in higher crime areas, but also help officers get to know their community they work in and visa-versa. It worked in Fort Worth like you wouldn't believe.
3. Departments have to be more open and communicative with their communities, all of them not just selectively. Like I said, it worked here and other places, departmental leadership just has to make it a priority.
4. I agree with the video camera thing. It is not yet mandatory with our department, but I believe we have one of if not the largest deployment of body cams in the country right now. I stress how beneficial it is to all my officers and constantly recommend they wear them.

These are a few of the suggestions I would make were I a new chief at department somewhere because I think they are important places to start to build faith in a department and for a department to better serve its communities.
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Here's the thing. I don't want to disparage your profession. I'm very certain your job is hard, and I wouldn't want to do it. I think like most professions , a lot of fault lies in administration and training. But it's scary to have men out there, even a minority, armed without proper training and mindset to properly utilize lethal force.
A stones throw from where I lived at the time a member of Grapevine PD shot a guy on the highway because he moved closer to hear the officer's instruction over the road noise.

Up in McKinney a guy pulled his gun out on a teenager when she absolutely posed no threat.

In Arlington a rookie cop shot a guy who was a unarmed because of a bulge in his pocket.(Admittedly the kid was commuting a crime, but that doesn't warrant lethal force)

That's too hypervigilant. That's kids being given weapons they are clearly not qualified to use.

Like you said training is key. But this is the only job (other than doctors) where people have to die while the newbies learn the ropes.

Then there's also a second problem. Predators seek jobs of extreme trust. If you want to find easy access to the benefit of the doubt becoming a cop is a great way to do it.
How many of these blatant murders (and at this moment I'm just talking about the literal executions not the disputable uses of force) would have just been written up as "I thought I saw a gun." "He charged me." Etc if there hadn't been video tape to prove otherwise?

That's a serious problem. And it's not a criticism of the cops that go out and bust their ass to make their city a better place. It's a question of how much leeway we can give to any profession.

At this moment police officers are the only people who can shoot unarmed men and get the benefit of the doubt, and while only the smallest minority might abuse that privilege, it's a terrifying privilege for those guys to have.

In my rats in the wall analogy. The police force is the wall. Real no shit cops are only losing credibility and having their lives made harder due to backlash from a handful of criminals in their uniforms.
 
Just going to put this right here, do with it what you want.

In 2012, the average American taxpayer making $50,000 per year paid just $36 towards the food stamps program.

That's just ten cents a day!

The average American family pays a staggering $6,000 a year in subsidies to Republican-friendly big business.
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$90 billion spent on corporate welfare subsidies in 2007 compared to $59 billion spent on social welfare programs.
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Corporate-Welfare-to-Companies.jpg
 
fortsbest said:
This I take issue with Towns. It kinda goes back to what I said to Jiggs a few weeks back. There are over 700,000 cops in this country and you can find incidents all over of bad police work. But it is a tiny fraction of the dealings police have with folk but the media and others paint the entire profession with the overhanging color. You can do that with any profession, from janitor to president. But cops have been the hot topic since Obama came into office and his media started carrying water for him. Again, I'm not saying there aren't bad cops that need to be gotten rid of or jailed, but your last paragraph is a bit overstated I think.

In one of the posts you mentioned solutions and I agree with some of them. I think Clay and I touched on it briefly earlier as well.
1. Cops need more and better training. It should include more training on things liking dealing with mentally ill folk, "verbal judo", even more hand to hand physical force options would be great, but it wouldn't necessarily change how an officer reacts to a circumstance. Although I will say an officer that is more confident in any of his skills is more apt to use them before stepping up the force continuum.
Plus, that cop in that video about " you looked at me", that was stupid. He may have had a legit reason to stop him whether it was wormy or not, but he got nervous with the video camera and Mr. Felton talking noise got him to say something asinine. Had he relaxed and been trained to just do what he needed to do rather than engage with the mouthy black guy he would have been done and out of there in less than 5 minutes and not made a national spectacle of himself.
2. I am a firm believer in having more community involvement in policing. Things such as neighborhood watch groups that are interactive with the department not only boost police visibility in higher crime areas, but also help officers get to know their community they work in and visa-versa. It worked in Fort Worth like you wouldn't believe.
3. Departments have to be more open and communicative with their communities, all of them not just selectively. Like I said, it worked here and other places, departmental leadership just has to make it a priority.
4. I agree with the video camera thing. It is not yet mandatory with our department, but I believe we have one of if not the largest deployment of body cams in the country right now. I stress how beneficial it is to all my officers and constantly recommend they wear them.

These are a few of the suggestions I would make were I a new chief at department somewhere because I think they are important places to start to build faith in a department and for a department to better serve its communities.
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Very good suggestions and certainly a place to start.
 
Dekalb Officer, Homeowner Shot After Police Enter Wrong House

by NINA BOOKOUT on SEPTEMBER 1, 2015

Last night in the southeast Atlanta area, a DeKalb County Police Officer was shot while responding to a 911 call. In addition to the officer, who has not been identified, the homeowner was shot in the leg and his dog was killed. Unfortunately, this was a case of the wrong address.

Three officers were responding to a report of suspicious person, but instead went to the wrong home in the 1500 block of Boulderwoods Drive, near Bouldercrest Road, Cedric Alexander, director of public safety, said late Monday. Officers weren’t given a street address, but went to a home matching the description given by a 911 caller, Alexander said.

The officers went around to the backyard of the gray and brick home, and noticed the screen and back door were unlocked. Considering the time of night and the fact that the neighborhood has had a number of break-ins recently, the officers had every reason to believe that a burglary was in progress. The officers identified themselves when they entered the back of the house, and within minutes of entering the home, shots were fired.


The officer, shot in the thigh, was in critical condition and underwent emergency surgery at Grady Memorial Hospital. The homeowner was also being treated for injuries, but his condition was not known, Alexander said. At least one officer discharged his gun, but no information was released on whether the homeowner also had a gun.


Given the many unknowns with this incident, the DeKalb County Public Safety Director, Cedric Alexander, has turned the case over to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.



Unfortunately this shooting is just one of the many officer-involved shootings that have happened across this country in recent days and weeks. The most notable and tragic shooting is that of Harris County Deputy Darren Goforth who was gunned down in cold blood on August 28th.

As stated above, there are a great many unknowns in this case. Did the homeowner, identified as Chris McKinley, or his girlfriend fire on the officers? Was the home they entered truly the wrong residence? Was there another home broken into just down the street? And then there is this from the 911 caller:

Derek Perez told The Associated Press that he reported the suspicious person. He said he was walking his dog when he saw a man knock on a neighbor’s door and then just stand in the yard. He said he then heard a loud noise, a dog barking and didn’t see the man anymore. There had been break-ins in the neighborhood recently, so he called 911, he said.

Just as he was about to go into his house, he heard the gunshots, but they didn’t come from the house where he had reported the suspicious person.

If I were the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, I would be asking Mr. Perez a few questions. Such as, if he could clearly see someone knocking on the door, why didn’t he provide a house number to dispatch? He had time to see someone standing in the yard and then disappear, so again, why wasn’t Mr. Perez able to provide more information than a description of the color and style of the home? Valid questions given what happened after the officers responded to his call. Meanwhile, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation:

“Early investigation indicates that the injured officer was likely shot accidentally by one of the other officers on the scene,” said the GBI in a news release.

It could turn out that the officers and the homeowner were acting in good faith, the officers did follow procedure as much as they could, no charges are warranted other than disciplinary actions for the officers. We won’t know until the investigation is concluded. What we do know is that this is a horrible situation for all involved and we hope the homeowner and officer recover from their injuries.
 
I got no clue as to why that happened. Personally I can't see anything in that clip that justifies the shooting. Bad stuff.
 
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