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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsOh give me a fucking break !!
It was obvious very early from the beginning that right-wing groups and some police forces have developed a very nice relationship.... Unspoken of course...
Very frightening!!!
Karma13612
(4,552 posts)Specific.
Response to busterbrown (Original post)
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stopdiggin
(11,301 posts)that's an -- interesting -- perspective.
treestar
(82,383 posts)There are many black cops. And female cops.
Your statement is an extreme exaggeration. The number of deaths is not so high as to put it like that. It's still an unusual way to go.
Response to treestar (Reply #4)
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treestar
(82,383 posts)But it does not always end in death. Only rarely does. That poster described it as if it happens in every case of a stop and even called the cops the army of the racist right. That's absurd.
Boxerfan
(2,533 posts)We want to de-criminalize the police. Those who use excess force are criminals & should be prosecuted as such.
We can re-prioritize and train but de-funding will get you on Tuckers show.
better
(884 posts)Welcome to DU, by the way!
There are, however, a number of complexities that render defunding and starting over an inadequate (and likely actually counter-productive) solution.
Perhaps most significantly, because what police are depends GREATLY upon where you are.
This simple yet often overlooked fact is one of the most significant problems facing the BLM movement, in that where you happen to live can and does greatly influence the reality of dealing with police that you will get to experience. If I'd spent my entire life in the DC Metro area (and had been hiding under a rock and not seen the countless videos of egregious misconduct from many other places around the country), the grievances aired by BLM would likely strike me as largely unfounded, because they don't match that experience of it, where police culture actually is (at least in my experience) relatively well-rooted in actual public service.
But I've also lived in the deep south, and seen with my own two eyes that those grievances most emphatically ARE NOT unfounded. At least not everywhere, and as long as they're founded anywhere, we have important work to do.
I also take some issue with the notion that the race of the officers, or racial composition of the police force, is either the actual problem or the remedy. I've seen LEOs of color behave every bit as unacceptably as the overtly racist white asshole cops, within police forces that WERE overwhelmingly minority.
The actual problem, I think, lies in police culture, which spans race, but varies widely with geography.
Defunding the police sounds good on paper, but it's so dramatically oversimplified and under-explained that most don't even recognize what it actually suggests, which would be far more accurately and productively expressed as deburdening the police. The problem is not that police forces are over-funded, it's that they are dramatically overburdened, thanks in large part to the dismantling of our mental health treatment capacity over the last few decades.
We do need dramatic police reform, but we really must approach it more thoughtfully than looking primarily at such simplistic things as funding levels and racial force composition, because no combination of those two variables will solve the many serious problems that need to be solved.
We need to look much deeper, into things like what powers are afforded police, what responsibilities accompany those powers, what laws are being enforced against whom, how they're being enforced against whom, to what end and to whose benefit, on the basis of what deeper underpinnings, etc.
OneBlueSky
(18,536 posts)militant far-right group composed largely of cops and military . . . from Wikipedia:
Oath Keepers is an American far-right anti-government militia organization. The group describes itself as a non-partisan association of current and former military, police, and first responders, who pledge to fulfill the oath that all military and police take in order to "defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic". It encourages its members to not obey orders which they believe would violate the United States Constitution. The organization claims a membership of 35,000 as of 2016.
Several groups that monitor domestic terrorism and hate groups describe the Oath Keepers as extremist or radical. Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) describes the group as "heavily armed extremists with a conspiratorial and anti-government mindset looking for potential showdowns with the government." The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) lists the group's founder as a known extremist and describes his announced plans to create localized militia units as "frightening". According to the SPLC, the group espouses a number of conspiracy and legal theories associated with the sovereign citizen movement and the white supremacist posse comitatus movement.
Shermann
(7,413 posts)I've demonstrated that Trump is the Chief Oath Breaker:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100214557401
That should qualify him as Enemy Number One to the Oath Keepers.
And you know what they say about the enemy of your enemy.