Police: Between a Rock and a Hard Place"?

[bybee]

The death of an unarmed man by an illegal choke hold administered by a New York Police Officer along with several other officers is terrifying to me.

A petty crime gets this kind of time and attention?
Are the Police Officers directed by higher powers to get into this two bit stuff?
Police Officers are "Officers of the peace" in a community.
A good officer befriends the citizens he must guard. Often, some of those citizens are stepping to different drummers but not hurting anyone.
In our daily lives we must choose carefully to address those issues that might make a difference for the good.
Some things are best ignored and some things cannot be ignored.
I was raised to view the Policeman as our friend. The Cop on the beat spoke at our school and presented a protective presence in the neighborhood.
I have learned that is not always the case!
It is imperative that hostility be addressed by all sides involved in a dispute to work toward solutions.
God bless all of the hard working men and women in uniform who struggle to protect us and put their lives on the line every day.

 

[99lamb]

Do the police have a responsibility to ignore some laws and enforce others?


Here is an essential aspect of the police, the selection process, screening process.
If the quality of the police force is not up to a desired standard of conduct would people tolerate an exam process that turned away those deemed unfit, a minimum physical requirement 5'10' 180lbs, an intelligence level, psychological profile....
and what if this screening process excluded individuals, after all from what has been seen, the police do engage in life and death situations with only a spilt second to make that decision.
I would like to see the return of the two man teams, but maybe the camera vest will be a helpful tool.

Don't commit crimes and the police probably will not bother you.

 

[musterion]

Didn't The Police do 'Rock and a Hard Place' after 'Ghost In The Machine'?

 

[99lamb]

 

[bybee]

Didn't The Police do 'Rock and a Hard Place' after 'Ghost In The Machine'?

Could be? Who did "Deus Ex Machina"?

 

[bybee]

Do the police have a responsibility to ignore some laws and enforce others?


Here is an essential aspect of the police, the selection process, screening process.
If the quality of the police force is not up to a desired standard of conduct would people tolerate an exam process that turned away those deemed unfit, a minimum physical requirement 5'10' 180lbs, an intelligence level, psychological profile....
and what if this screening process excluded individuals, after all from what has been seen, the police do engage in life and death situations with only a spilt second to make that decision.
I would like to see the return of the two man teams, but maybe the camera vest will be a helpful tool.

Don't commit crimes and the police probably will not bother you.

With finite time, talent and money being deployed it seems logical to concentrate on the big stuff and give friendly warning whenever possible.
A guy selling cigarettes one at a time is only guilty of avoiding paying taxes. Gee whiz!!!
Al Sharpton owes the IRS millions of dollars and he is still alive and walking free and spilling swill....

 

[aCultureWarrior]

"Damned if you do, damned if you don't."

 

[TomO]

Could be? Who did "Deus Ex Machina"?

The ancient Greeks. lain:

 

[PureX]

A policeman is in many ways the face of our civic responsibility to each other. He or she is the person who comes and tells us when we have stepped over the line of our civil rights, and infringed on the civil rights of others. And of course, we don't like them for that. We don't want them coming around and telling us we can't do what we want to do.

Yet we also know, or we should know, that we need to be reigned in when we are infringing the rights of others, just as we need others to be reigned in when they infringe our rights. So that we do have a kind of love/hate relationship to the police. Just as we have a kind of love/hate relationship with the collective ideal of equal rights, equal justice, and equal opportunity for all.

And if that's not confusing enough, we have good cops, mediocre cops, and bad cops out there on the job. Which means the application of this ideal of freedom through equality can become very inconsistent. And it's not just the cops, it's civil authorities at every level.

It's a complex task with complicated solutions; this ideal of justice through equality. And there will always be mistakes and abuses. But it's still one of the greatest ideas of all human history, and it deserves our absolute best and most persistent attempts at implementation.

All the alternatives are far worse, and we have a long bloody history to prove it.

 

[99lamb]

With finite time, talent and money being deployed it seems logical to concentrate on the big stuff and give friendly warning whenever possible.
A guy selling cigarettes one at a time is only guilty of avoiding paying taxes. Gee whiz!!!
Al Sharpton owes the IRS millions of dollars and he is still alive and walking free and spilling swill....

Sure great points, but the store owner called the police, Garner had been arrested 9 times previously for selling cigarettes. The tax on cigs in N.Y. is very high, which is why the black market exists, but does that allow those doing the illegal transactions to tell the police what violations they are willing to comply with?

 

[musterion]

Al Sharpton owes the IRS millions of dollars and he is still alive and walking free and spilling swill....

True, but his judgment does not sleep.

 

[bybee]

Sure great points, but the store owner called the police, Garner had been arrested 9 times previously for selling cigarettes. The tax on cigs in N.Y. is very high, which is why the black market exists, but does that allow those doing the illegal transactions to tell the police what violations they are willing to comply with?

I am suggesting there is better use to which the Police Officer's time could be put.

 

[99lamb]

I am suggesting there is better use to which the Police Officer's time could be put.

Hey Bybee
what you have to understand is N.Y., is a bastion for the nanny state, because cigarettes are so harmful there are massive taxes imposed on a pack on a cartoon, so cigarettes are bought out of state for a cheaper price and then sold on the black market in N.Y.
What this does is bypass the taxes that N.Y. imposes on cigarettes, so what is the reaction of this activity? You have task forces sent out for the purpose of arresting those selling illegal 'loosies.'
Hence Eric Garner arrested 9 times for this activity.
The background is so very important to understand the event.

 

[PureX]

Hey Bybee
what you have to understand is N.Y., is a bastion for the nanny state, because cigarettes are so harmful there are massive taxes imposed on a pack on a cartoon, so cigarettes are bought out of state for a cheaper price and then sold on the black market in N.Y.
What this does is bypass the taxes that N.Y. imposes on cigarettes, so what is the reaction of this activity? You have task forces sent out for the purpose of arresting those selling illegal 'loosies.'
Hence Eric Garner arrested 9 times for this activity.
The background is so very important to understand the event.

See, it's all Obama's fault!

 

[bybee]

Hey Bybee
what you have to understand is N.Y., is a bastion for the nanny state, because cigarettes are so harmful there are massive taxes imposed on a pack on a cartoon, so cigarettes are bought out of state for a cheaper price and then sold on the black market in N.Y.
What this does is bypass the taxes that N.Y. imposes on cigarettes, so what is the reaction of this activity? You have task forces sent out for the purpose of arresting those selling illegal 'loosies.'
Hence Eric Garner arrested 9 times for this activity.
The background is so very important to understand the event.

Thank you. I understand the background Do not mess with the TAXMAN!

 

[PureX]

Thank you. I understand the background Do not mess with the TAXMAN!

Actually, that isn't the background at all. The background that explains this sad consequence is that the rulers of New York City decided about 20 years ago that the city was too dirty, crime-ridden, and chaotic to attract and hold the kind of wealthy white people who tend to vote for them, and pay for their re-election campaigns. So they set out to "clean up New York".

The responsibility and methodology of doing this big clean-up fell mostly to the police, and a relentless campaign against the homeless and petty crime began that is still going on, today. And it's a campaign that's worked as the city rulers intended, for the most part, in that it has cleaned up the streets and made them safe enough and pretty enough for the rich white folks to start moving back into the city.

The cops weren't hassling that guy because he wasn't paying taxes. They were hassling him because he was attracting and serving homeless bums. The tax thing was all they could think of in terms of a crime to justify harassing him. The beat-down was also part and parcel of a long running campaign by the NYPD to hassle and chase the homeless and petty criminals off the streets, and out of the city all together, if possible. The cops there have been beating people up for petty crimes, routinely, as a way of making the streets safer for the wealthy white voters and supporters that the city officials want and need to keep their positions of power.

I have friends living in New York, and this is all common knowledge, there. It's happened in other cities, too. (Florida keeps arresting a man for feeding the homeless in a public park.) As our economy becomes more and more ruthless in it's endless pursuit of greed, and as a result more people are falling into poverty and homelessness, our politicians are trying to sweep it all under the rug by chasing the human evidence of it all, away. And they are using the police to get that job done for them. It's why we are seeing these clashes between the police and the poor becoming more frequent, and it's why they have become so much more violent.