Matt Taibbi For Rolling Stone: The Police in America Are Becoming Illegitimate

[kpete]

By Matt Taibbi | December 5, 2014
The Police in America Are Becoming Illegitimate

The crooked math that's going to crash American law enforcement if policies aren't changed



Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-police-in-america-are-becoming-illegitimate-20141205#ixzz3L7p0Y27t
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..........The Garner case was a perfect symbol of everything that's wrong with the proactive police tactics that are now baseline policy in most inner cities. .........

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Taking it one step further, if Eric Garner had been selling naked credit default swaps instead of cigarettes – if in other words he'd set up a bookmaking operation in which passersby could bet on whether people made their home mortgage payments or companies paid off their bonds – the police by virtue of a federal law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act would have been barred from even approaching him.

There were more cops surrounding Eric Garner on a Staten Island street this past July 17th then there were surrounding all of AIG during the period when the company was making the toxic bets that nearly destroyed the world economy years ago. Back then AIG's regulator, the OTS, had just one insurance expert on staff, policing a company with over 180,000 employees.


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......you can't send hundreds of thousands of people to court every year on broken-taillight-type misdemeanors and expect people to sit still while yet another coroner-declared homicide goes unindicted. It just won't hold. If the law isn't the same everywhere, it's not legitimate. And in these neighborhoods, what we have doesn't come close to looking like one single set of laws anymore.

When that perception sinks in, it's not just going to be one Eric Garner deciding that listening to police orders "ends today." It's going to be everyone. And man, what a mess that's going to be.





i wish i could post it ALL:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-police-in-america-are-becoming-illegitimate-20141205

[Kalidurga]

1. The police are not becoming illegitimate they are illegitimate...

some of us are already wise to the fact, some are just now catching on.

[smokey nj]

2. This section demonstrates that these issues are definitely about race:

I sat in that courtroom over and over again for weeks and listened to the stories. I met one guy, named Andre Finley, who kept showing up to court in an attempt to talk his way into jail as a way out of the $100 fine he'd got for riding a bike on a sidewalk in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He couldn't afford the hundred bucks. It took a year and multiple all-day court visits to clear up.

I met a woman who had to hire a sitter so she could spend all day in court waiting to be fined for drinking wine on her own front porch. And in the case of a Bed-Stuy bus driver named Andrew Brown, it was that old "obstructing traffic" saw: the same "offense" that first flagged Ferguson police to stop Michael Brown.

In Andrew's case, police thought the sight of two black men standing in front of a project tower at 1 a.m. was suspicious and stopped them. In reality, Andrew was listening to music on headphones with a friend on his way home after a long shift driving a casino shuttle. When he balked at being stopped, just like Garner balked, cops wrote him up for "obstructing" a street completely empty of pedestrians, and the court demanded 50 bucks for his crime.

This policy of constantly badgering people for trifles generates bloodcurdling anger in "hot spot" neighborhoods with industrial efficiency. And then something like the Garner case happens and it all comes into relief. Six armed police officers tackling and killing a man for selling a 75-cent cigarette.

White people, regardless of their economic status, do not face this kind of harassment day in and day out.

[woo me with science]

17. So what is the goal of these political protests?

I was pilloried by the Third Way on another thread for suggesting that we should demand demilitarization of our police forces or changes in corporate policies that keep minority communities impoverished. That, apparently, was too much to ask.

So what *is* the goal of these massive political protests? What are we asking
politicians to do?

[randome]

3. Good points but immersed in his usual hyperbole, too.

"...hundreds of thousands of people to court every year on broken-taillight-type misdemeanors..." Is he talking about Ferguson? The population is only 21,000.

It's true that the county -using police- is draining the citizens dry of money but hyperbole doesn't help. And if Taibi is talking about a nation-wide practice of this nature, it would be nice if he cited a source.

But he's correct on a lot of points.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Aspire to inspire.[/center][/font][hr]

[Kber]

6. I think he's talking about America.

[randome]

9. Sure, but some people actually deserve tickets for broken taillights.

How many of those are spurious tickets issued for the sole purpose of extracting more money from the population?

I can't argue with his main points, though.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Aspire to inspire.[/center][/font][hr]

[branford]

14. If you oppose tickets as a revenue source,

you issue is really with the elected politicians, many of whom are very liberal and Democratic, not with the police who are directed to enforce the law and policies of the authorities.

If you want fewer stupid arrests for insignificant and often victimless crimes that have the potential to terminally escalate, one great step, among many, would be to decriminalize a broad range of conduct, similar to what's happening with marijuana laws in many states.

I would note, however, that many of those tickets of which you complain generate a significant source of revenue for localities ranging from small towns to big cities like NYC, LA and Chicago. That revenue pays for a substantial amount of social services and infrastructure.

[PotatoChip]

4. I get this when I go to the link:

Sorry for the inconvenience,
this page is not found.

Anyone else, or is it just me? Others in this thread seem to be able to access it.

Great OP, though. K&R

[smokey nj]

5. That's what came up when I clicked on the bottom link, but I was able to read the article

when I clicked on the top one.

[PotatoChip]

7. Ah yes. This one works. Thanks! (nt)

[kpete]

8. thanks for having my back

arthritic fingers acting up this a.m.


peace to everyone,
kp

[PotatoChip]

10. I appreciate all that you do around here, kpete

You are a DU treasure.

Hope the aches go away soon.

[SamKnause]

11. That ship has sailed.

We have a corrupt government that panders to the whims of Wall Street instead of prosecuting them.

We have the Pentagon that feeds us propaganda and squanders TRILLIONS of dollars.

We have an ex president and ex vice president that admitted on television and in books, that the U.S. tortures and they would use torture again.

We have the current president telling us we need to look forward not backwards.

We have millionaires and billionaires buying our politicians.

We have voting machines that have been hacked.

We have ballots that come up missing.

We have monopolies that control our media, internet access, cell phones, etc.

Our natural resources do not benefit we the people they are sold to the highest bidders domestic or foreign.

Our health care system is a global disgrace.

Our educational system is a global disgrace.

Our penal system is draconian and cruel.

The United States is a cesspool of corruption and greed.

[KingCharlemagne]

12. Everyone should take the time to (re-)read the Preamble to the

"Declaration of Independence":

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
2.1 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
2.2 That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. (Emphasis added)

What's that you say? You thought those words, those self-evident truths, were dead letters, ancient fossilized relics of a by-gone era?

[KingCharlemagne]

13. Taibbi's final two paragraphs merit, imo, reading the piece in full:

Because you can't send hundreds of thousands of people to court every year on broken-taillight-type misdemeanors and expect people to sit still while yet another coroner-declared homicide goes unindicted. It just won't hold. If the law isn't the same everywhere, it's not legitimate. And in these neighborhoods, what we have doesn't come close to looking like one single set of laws anymore.

When that perception sinks in, it's not just going to be one Eric Garner deciding that listening to police orders "ends today." It's going to be everyone. And man, what a mess that's going to be.

[woo me with science]

15. IF POLICIES AREN'T CHANGED.

That is the key.

We need demilitarization of the police. We need an END to the programs that militarize them and a reversal of the weaponization.

We need a comprehensive database of police violence and murders.

We need relentless DOJ attention to police abuses until this garbage STOPS.

Note the relentless corporate attempt to avoid the purpose of political protest, which is political change. Nothing changes in Ferguson or towns like it until we take on corporate politicians to actually change our communities.