US police brutality item

[Rev. Rye]

There has to be something lacking in the way cops are educated and trained these days that they are unaware of the fact that their every action on the street is very likely to be recorded on one of the millions of cameras people carry with them.

They read too may Joseph Wambaugh novels. You can't get away with that shit anymore.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the issues involved in the epidemic of police brutality are too deep for the police academies to counteract in any meaningful way. Think about it; imagine you go around town every day meeting the worst representatives of the human race your town can muster. To keep yourself safe in the behavioral sink that is America, you go around armed and you've been trained to use your guns. Because of the depressingly intertwined natures of race and class, a disproportionately high proportion of these "worst representatives" will be nonwhite. And since these nonwhite people are more likely to be poor, and thus more likely to commit crime, it only makes sense that doing this reinforces racist ideas that society was already implicitly spreading. Sustain this for a long enough time, it's more a matter of when and not if shit like this happens. Frankly, even if they stop doing this in public, they can just drag people off the street and take them to a warehouse and do it there. I know this because I live in Chicago and our cops have, in fact, done this and probably still are.

And taking a clue from Joseph Wambaugh novels is a shitty idea, since those books are more descriptions of how the LAPD actually did things, and not meant to be exemplars. Seriously, one of the first things I learned about his oeuvre is that there was a cop character in one of his books who hated humanity so much that he wanted a word as strong as the N-word to apply to humanity as a whole (he settled with "Scrotes.")