Police Behaving Badly

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Originally Posted by PNWbrit

So...if the world is entirely as you describe it does the fact that a small percentage (and for the sake of discussion people in question - poor, inner city black) rise above their "birth station"...mean that everyone in that situation is so equipped, or able or should be

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Nope, everyone isn't equipped and never did I even come close to painting with that broad of a brush.

But if we are to believe in the goal of lifting every American up regardless of their circumstances or station, then you have to inherently believe that everyone possesses the ability inside them to do so, don't you agree?

Look not everyone from the ghetto is going to Harvard, nor should we expect them to, but why does that mean that the alternative is to be permanently stuck in that hellhole? That's where the help comes in.

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Originally Posted by BmillsSkier

not everyone from the ghetto.... why does that mean that the alternative is to be permanently stuck in that hellhole?

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If we are to believe in

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the goal of lifting every American up

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Hell holes and ghettos should be unacceptable. AS should the expectation that people should either pull themselves out of them or at least not protest too much or at all violently about having to be in one?

After all this is America. The only thing that you're supposed to get violent about is the government coming for your assault rifles. Isn't it?

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Originally Posted by BmillsSkier

...but why does that mean that the alternative is to be permanently stuck in that hellhole?

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Whoa, whoa, whoa Francis! We are talking about my hometown here!

Just fucking with you. Parts of Baltimore are certainly hellholes...but where the CVS burned was not necessarily so.

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Originally Posted by Grape_Ape

It's not 1967 anymore.

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In some regards it could be considered worse.

Consider demographics and scale of US prison population together with militarized police forces, wealth inequality, underemployment....

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Originally Posted by BmillsSkier

But if we are to believe in the goal of lifting every American up regardless of their circumstances or station, then you have to inherently believe that everyone possesses the ability inside them to do so, don't you agree?

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Just as you theoretically have the ability to understand the complexities, feedback cycles and dysfunction that define urban poverty in a police state.

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Originally Posted by Bromontana

Just as you theoretically have the ability to understand the complexities, feedback cycles and dysfunction that define urban poverty in a police state.

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The glass can be both half full and half empty.

Police state? Either I'm missing the intentional exaggeration for effect or you're not up to date on what a police state actually is. USSR, East Germany, North Korea...

Yes the ghetto is an unbelievably awful place to live that I am thankful I'll hopefully never a e to experience, but they aren't under the thumb of some secret police.


And Grape, I wasn't calling all of Baltimore a ghetto, just the hypothetical ones that the rioters may hail from. Glad you were just fucking around.

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Originally Posted by BmillsSkier

]they aren't under under the thumb of some secret police.

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That's ok then.

Sorry Bmills, you're right. It's effectively a police state for many, but not you. So it's not a universal problem, just in poor areas or areas where LE decides to go robocop like Albuquerque.

Now back to "up by the bootstraps" narrative......

Q: This isn't about cops (authority) unjustly using force and when they do, not being held accountable ? (I hope I used that question mark appropriately).

http://images.dailykos.com/images/14...jpg?1430258457

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Originally Posted by PNWbrit

That's ok then.

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Just because America isn't a police date doesn't mean that everything is hunky dory, but than again you really didn't mean that though, you were just being flip.

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Originally Posted by Bromontana

Sorry Bmills, you're right. It's effectively a police state for many, but not you. So it's not a universal problem, just in poor areas or areas where LE decides to go robocop like Albuquerque.

Now back to "up by the bootstraps" narrative......

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Easy Bro. No where in my post did I say it was universal or even a reality in the worst parts of America. I was just calling out your extreme example of the ghetto as a police state as a tad over the top. No clue what Albequerque means but I'm sure I'll find out shortly.

And if people didn't pull themselves out of the ghetto, then why do we have so many easily found examples of it happening? It's not impossible is all I'm saying. A fuck ton harder for sure and really shitty or dangerous, but not impossible and as I said above - that's where the help is needed.

the police state doesnt just involve cops, its all the backroom administrative and municipal fine generation and probation systems

once the county court gets their dirty claws on you they will make you bendover backwards for months or years while they fuck you up the ass

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Originally Posted by BmillsSkier

And if people didn't pull themselves out of the ghetto, then why do we have so many easily found examples of it happening? It's not impossible is all I'm saying. A fuck ton harder for sure and really shitty or dangerous, but not impossible and as I said above - that's where the help is needed.

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Why keep the ghetto in the first place?

I know we'd lose the whole hunger games aspect of college and major league sports, but....

The ghettos... they're the places where we should have the best funded and staffed schools and the best trained and least roid ragey & un-trigger happy police, well funded public defenders offices, tax breaks for businesses who hire there .... etc. Trickle up economics.

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Originally Posted by BmillsSkier

And if people didn't pull themselves out of the ghetto, then why do we have so many easily found examples of it happening? It's not impossible is all I'm saying. A fuck ton harder for sure and really shitty or dangerous, but not impossible and as I said above - that's where the help is needed.

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It's not impossible to move from the Middle class to become a Billionaire either (see Gates, Jobs, et al.) but it's still far from common. It's been rather proven by Sociologists and economists that whatever class you grew up in you'll end up in. Sure there are outliers but Poverty is about as close to a self-fulfilling prophecy as we have in this country. Sure there are avenues for those living in poverty to escape it, but that takes more than just hard work. The cuts in public education and the social safety net are not helping, would you agree?

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Originally Posted by ArmadaBC

hahahahah

That is an excellent movie.....could you imagine trying to get that made today....never going to happen

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Because Richard Pryor is dead.

http://www.bizpacreview.com/wp-conte...15/04/cops.jpg
Is this for real? This seems like one of those "Why Women Live Longer" pictures. Like this:
http://toco.distractify.com/postimag...866ce_650x.jpg

Glad you're ok, Grape. Don't do anything stupid like standing up for your abuser in front of an angry mob.

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Originally Posted by Benny Profane

Because Richard Pryor is dead.

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What does Richard Pryor have to do with Blazing Saddles?

As a child of the sixties from New Jersey, a cab driver who drove through burned out Bushwick after the 76 blackout, and a close witness to Crown Heights later (long story), I have to say, I'm pretty impressed how the leadership in Baltimore is handling this FUBAR.

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Originally Posted by Tippster

What does Richard Pryor have to do with Blazing Saddles?

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He was a writer, and was supposed to originally play the black guy.

Clearly season pass holders are very in tune with whats up in the prisons and shit holes ( insert at LEAST one area of every major city) as they are with the police and the fine upstanding citizens they try to control.

Admit it-were doomed as a society. It is ok to be a dead beat, drug dealing father in this country. It is also ok to pass those traits on to your children. Don't you think some of these cops are as fucked up as the losers they try to keep control of?

Admit it also you're not the one there with dead bodies from all sorts of ghastly events-shootings,over doses, rapes, beat to shit human beings. At the end of the day there sure is a bunch of integrity and giving a shit missing now days.

The best is when the dead beat loser dad cashes in on the death of a child ( and mother ) he clearly gave zero shits about right up until the same old blow hards ( Rev this, Rev that ) and the TV cameras show up.

It's laughable and tragic at the same time.

That one fat mom sure beat the fuck out of her kid though, all the while gripping her pink "smart phone" in her other hand. Like a movie playing out thats to stupid to believe!!! I beat you same shit stains who cursed AP are wet over her!!!

She wasn't fat. I could show you ghetto fat. That woman was far from fat.

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Originally Posted by Benny Profane

She wasn't fat. I could show you ghetto fat. That woman was far from fat.

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That's the funny part about poor people in America, they tend to be fatter than the average person. My guess is that 90% of the rest of the world would love to be poor in America.

Well, yeah, it's good to have a goal.

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Originally Posted by Tippster

It's not impossible to move from the Middle class to become a Billionaire either (see Gates, Jobs, et al.) but it's still far from common. It's been rather proven by Sociologists and economists that whatever class you grew up in you'll end up in. Sure there are outliers but Poverty is about as close to a self-fulfilling prophecy as we have in this country. Sure there are avenues for those living in poverty to escape it, but that takes more than just hard work. The cuts in public education and the social safety net are not helping, would you agree?

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No doubt, that's not helping at all.

The Dominant White Response to Baltimore Shows Why Black Residents are Justified in their Anger

by
Grizzard

http://images.dailykos.com/images/14...jpg?1430245609

Imagine for a moment that a man's neck was almost severed, nearly clean cut in the most painful way possible, while in the custody of the people charged with the duty of protecting and serving. Imagine that man died, alone, in a prison cell, while his cries for help were blatantly ignored. Now imagine that in the wake of that tragedy, a government had been infantile in its ability to explain even the basic details of what happened.

That's the revolting reality in Baltimore. And through it all, the dominant white response was muted. From different reaches of the Internet, prominent civil rights leaders weighed in on the travesty, offering perspectives on another data point in an ever-growing body of evidence that the police state is still being mobilized against black Americans. And sure, the death of Freddie Gray received some national media attention.

But it wasn't the concern of the average guy who looks like me. White Americans are immune to these problems, isolated from the realities of police brutality and oppression. Severed spines are a problem in the abstract, but certainly not something to get all bothered about. For some of us, the Freddie Gray travesty was another opportunity to reflect on the moral failings of the afflicted, noting that if Freddie had been a law-abiding choir boy, he wouldn't have found himself in the crunching grasp of Baltimore's police force. For others, it was an opportunity to remind the world that not all cops are bad, an impulse that's certainly correct, even if ill-timed.

But the brutal death of Freddie Gray, an example of police brutality that could have reminded us all of the dangers faced by inner-city black men on a daily basis? Well, that's just not occasion enough for us to offer an opinion.

Now imagine that in response to this one particular tragedy, the citizens of Baltimore - most of them black, but many white - rose up to question the culture of brutality that's produced more than 100 successful claims against police over the last few years. Imagine that in the midst of those protests, a debatable number of mostly young, mostly angry men smashed some windows, threw some rocks and bottles, and destroyed some property. A few of those men even got violent with those around them.

After sitting on the sidelines, silent at the lynching of Freddie Gray, you'd think that some property damage and non-lethal violence would fail to shake the conscience of the average white viewer. You'd be wrong.

It's in the defense of that property - those CVS stores owned by faceless individuals and those police cars being bashed in - that we've seen the strongest response from the dominant element of society. Social media is a good indication, but certainly not the only one. There, on sites like Facebook and Twitter, folks have spoken up about Freddie Gray for the first time. They've not come to the defense of the oppressed. Rather, they've spoken up in condemnation of those "animals," "thugs," and "criminals" who are "destroying their own city."

It's some combination of historical illiteracy and racial animus that drives the response. The prevailing white view has been tragically non-curious from an intellectual perspective. Rather than asking what might cause a people to risk life and limb in an effort to smash to bits their own neighborhoods, we've responded with a stupid, incredulous look on our faces. "Look at them," we've said. "Burning down their own city." We understand that we would never do something like that - not even when our favorite hockey team failed to win Lord Stanley's Cup. But we fail to ask that critical next question - if these people, who are in so many ways like us, would do something that we wouldn't think of doing, what must the conditions be like to drive that behavior?

To put all of the blame on the lack of historical literacy of white folks in America would be letting too many off the hook. Even if they don't know about the history of red-lining, the effects of the drug war, and how Jim Crow has shape-shifted into the modern criminal justice apparatus, many of these people would be unmoved if their eyes would open. Simply put, for them, it's racial animus that drives the boat.

But white Americans, many by their own choosing, are painfully unaware of the historical context in which a mostly-black protest in Baltimore might take place. What are these people so mad about? we ask, as if the answers are too complicated to be discerned from one extended reading of anything by Ta-Nehisi Coates or Greg Howard.

As a white man, I'm in little position to pass judgment on the behavior of people so beaten down that they have little hope. I'm certainly not in a position to offer the tired white liberal tripe, asking black folks in places like Baltimore to sit quietly and trust the system, waiting for me and those like me to rescue them through legitimate democratic means. While rioting, looting, and lighting stuff on fire is certainly not a productive way to achieve equality and real civil rights, I won't lie to these people and tell them that by doing so, they're undermining progress that might have been made through legitimate protesting.

That's because I understand the unfortunate reality that powers this kind of destructive protesting. That is - these people are aware in a way I can never be aware, that whether they choose to jump on cars, sing Civil Rights hymns, hold signs, or stage peaceful letter writing campaigns to their local congressperson, the situation is going to stay mostly the same.
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When we, as white folks, seem more eager to speak up in defense of property than we are to speak up in defense of another slain black man, we demonstrate that the righteous anger of those doing the rioting is justified. We show that our unwillingness to invest resources in their future is not a coincidence, but rather, the intentional workmanship of our decrepit value system, which tosses away young black men as readily today as it did 200 years ago.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/0...n-their-Anger#

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Originally Posted by BmillsSkier

No clue what Albequerque means but I'm sure I'll find out shortly.

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Here you go dumb fuck. It's the 3rd result after the government listings.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=albuquerque+cops

http://www.vice.com/read/david-simon...went-wrong-429

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Originally Posted by splat

The Dominant White Response to Baltimore Shows Why Black Residents are Justified in their Anger

by
Grizzard

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Spot fucking on.

Washington Post just released article which states Gray injured himself while in police custody.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...de?tid=HP_lede

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Originally Posted by ghettostyle

Washington Post just released article which states Gray injured himself while in police custody.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...de?tid=HP_lede

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Ummm... yeah.

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A prisoner sharing a police transport van with Freddie Gray told investigators that he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” of the vehicle and believed that he “was intentionally trying to injure himself,” according to a police document obtained by The Washington Post.

The prisoner, who is currently in jail, was separated from Gray by a metal partition and could not see him.

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Originally Posted by ghettostyle

Washington Post just released article which states Gray injured himself while in police custody.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...de?tid=HP_lede

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Originally Posted by skiballs

That's the funny part about poor people in America, they tend to be fatter than the average person. My guess is that 90% of the rest of the world would love to be poor in America.

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They're fat because, among other issues based on socio-economic factors, the only food many can afford is junk food, fast food, and processed foods high in fat, sodium, and preservatives and short on nutrition.

What's your mother's excuse?

^^^ "food deserts"

So much white guilt in here makes me nauseous. It's about Accountability. Do not care what "color" you are. Do not care what gender you are. Do not care if you are a republican, democrat, independent, etc. Fact of the matter is Accountability. People are at a breaking point, tired of "authority" getting a more than free pass on its behavior. We want Accountability!

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Originally Posted by concretejungle

Here you go dumb fuck. It's the 3rd result after the government listings.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=albuquerque+cops

http://www.vice.com/read/david-simon...went-wrong-429

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Sweet aggro response Hunter, I'm sorry if I'm not up to date on every instance of police brutality in a country of 300 million. Good to know your google works too though.

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Originally Posted by pisteoff

^^^ "food deserts"

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I was waiting to hear that term a year from now when all the grocers, bodegas, and CVS' refuse to rebuild after they determine it's not worth it. I guess your comment is a year early.

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Originally Posted by ghettostyle

Washington Post just released article which states Gray injured himself while in police custody.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...de?tid=HP_lede

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Originally Posted by Benny Profane

I just read that the "demonstration" was surprisingly peaceful on Saturday until it arrived around Camden Yards, then skirmishes ensued between the marchers and the patrons of outdoor bars by the stadium. Ahem, can you say asshole white people that drank too much? This also happened at St. Louis baseball games after Furgenson. Don't fuck with our prescious sports! But, on top of all that, let's not forget who Baltimore was hosting that night. Yuppa, the Red Sox! Been there a few times during Boston series. More Sox fans than Oriole fans. Rowdy bunch. And we all know how Boston residents have shown their love for black people before.......
Coincidence? I don't think so.

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"How drunk sports fans helped spark Saturday night's post-protest violence"


http://touch.citypaper.com/#section/.../p2p-83403290/

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Originally Posted by Grape_Ape

My older son said MLK was killed. I said yes, but his message is stronger than ever because he was martyred.

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I've lived with brothers who took martyrdom of MLK to the militant edge. Louis Farrakhan has way more dangerous ideas now than when his power was at it's zenith. Thank god he didn't get to pull off the stupidity he embodies now. Lest we forget the original PLO either (before sand nigga was a colloquialism) or what Malcom X brought to the table....

MLK's legacy will live because of his message and in spite of how he died. The knuckle heads above saw to that.

As to the inner city mentality and the police state. I was born in Newark - commuted to a charter HS in Newark; the riots went passed my side street because the tanks didn't fit. My father was a cop at the time. Later in life, living on the other side of the Hudson - use to cop in what is called alphabet city (the Stuyvesant Projects/now the depraved east side village) and play by night in what was stick built neighborhoods that shared the border of staye town. No amount of small caliber weapons and knives could make you feel safe. Bad like a back alley in the very worst of hong kong at night. Nothing a western yurp town or SA (maybe a rio favela) country could hold a candle to. Titled street gangs run the hood. The omnipresence of the law is palpable at all times on so many levels. From the enochous parking ticket to undercover everywhere. Everyone you don't know is a snitch or someone to steal from until proven otherwise. The acreage is shared, not sequestered. Worse than a none tactical combat patrol because there are no safety zones near or far. It is 24/7 - 365. Raised in this enviro and it's the epitome of a police state. Disregard your perception as it relates to a dictatorship or communism/socialism.

The police state is a real state, but it's harbored by the community, in spite of itself. The police-courts-gangs-stagnate family values-shit pub school-crap food-shit dwelling-etc. etc.. is just one viscous cycle that we only know how to contain. Militarization is only a containment method to be administered by the stupid obviously and is a line item in the annual budget under a dozen names.

We can alter them geographically and quarantine them, but we really haven't figured out how to fix them yet.

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Originally Posted by flowing alpy

Ghandi had a plan too, slow but effective.

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Ghandi had all the numbers in his favor. The total percentage of disenfranchised will have to grow substantially before the Ghandi effect can be tapped, but we finally have our foot firmly on the gas pedal to that end as the middle class shrinks at an ever increasing rate. Accelerate to the near future when the percentages of distributed wealth quintiles are more like [80/15/4/1]... this and then we need a new Jeebus to follow too.

I give it 50 to 80 years before the genie has to be put back in the bottle here on the home front. If not by then, it'll be mad max time across our nation just as it is in the second and third world nations on this planet right now.

There will be enclaves of civility instead of the other way around and you will need to afford to buy your way in or be a trustafarian.

Mad Max baby... skilled welders, vigilantes and mercenaries will rule!

Skiing will only be north or south of the 56th parallel of course.

Toymakers optional in this Mad Max world? Wooden puppets?

I'm super gripped for the collapse.

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Originally Posted by LightRanger

Toymakers optional in this Mad Max world? Wooden puppets?

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Currently 3D cnc with mostly synthetic substrates and some non-ferrous metals.

Could go the merc route... 2yrs in spec op after two years in a black op with four combat deployments. 3" shorter and 25lbs lighter now, but make up for it with finesse.

Probably good money protecting the civilized enclaves if my fabrication skills are of no use.