Enforcers category archive

Via Job’s Anger.

Recently, I heard a podcast in which an American ex-pat currently living in southeast Asia said, almost as an aside, for the podcast was decidedly apolitical, “America is a police state.”

His bland matter-of-fact tone was more chilling than would have been fervent emotion.

With that as an introduction, I commend Werner Herzog’s Bear to your attention.

Addendum:

Tony Norman has more.

A local police force has started sending its recruits to the Virginia Holocaust Museum as part of their training. The intent is “to show them what can happen when power is untethered from duty and decency.” Here’s a bit of the story; follow the link for more.

(Norfolk, Va., Police Chief–ed.) Goldsmith is following in the footsteps of Charles Ramsey, Philadelphia’s police commissioner who previously served as Washington’s police chief. While there in 1998, he accepted an invitation to come to the National Holocaust Museum and got a tour from a survivor.

He learned that, almost from the beginning of the Nazi Party’s rise to power, local police were intimately involved in helping them and were soon nearly indistinguishable from military groups like the SS.

Ramsey wrote a paper 16 years later about the tour and how it forced him to ask fundamental questions about the role police play in a democracy. Lest police and the public dismiss the lessons as something that happened long ago in a far away place, he draws connection between police in Nazi Germany and officers who helped enforce Jim Crow laws in the American South. Or more recently, when police watched while inner-city neighborhoods deteriorated into ghettos during the 1980s crack epidemic without trying to fix the underlying problems fueling it.

One can be skeptical of the extent to which a one-day tour may have a lasting effect, but one can only applaud the intent and effort, especially as one considers that many of our own police forces are already “nearly indistinguishable from military groups.”

Via Balloon Juice.

Even though CSI’s Gil Grissom kept saying, “Follow the science,” science has little or nothing to do with forensic evidence. Matthew T. Mangino reports:

Imagine visiting your doctor and she recommends a course of treatment but warns that the treatment has been applied with little or no scientific validation and with inadequate research, assessments or reliability.

Your doctor is telling you, let’s use this treatment, but “neither I — nor anyone else — knows if it works.” No way — the FDA, the Medical Society, even the National Academy of Sciences would never let that happen.

Unfortunately, no one is preventing it from happening on a regular basis in America’s courtrooms. The use of inadequately tested or assessed courtroom evidence results in offenders being locked away for years — in some cases for life.

Follow the link to follow the evidence.

The Grand Jury decision not to indict in the Tamir Rice case in Cleveland is, as best as I can tell, a perfect storm of excuses.

Via Delaware Liberal.

More news from the post-racial front.

At least a dozen guards in Santa Clara County’s troubled jails repeatedly exchanged racist text messages over the past year — mixing vile slurs with casual brutality, and even sharing images of a Nazi swastika and a lynching, this newspaper has learned.

The first group of messages, which surfaced in an ongoing investigation that began well before three guards were charged this fall with the beating death of an inmate, vilify blacks and, to a lesser degree, Latinos, Vietnamese and Jews. In one text, an officer wrote to his colleagues, “We could hang a n—-r in Haiti for about 75 bucks tops.”

Follow the link, but wait until you’ve digested your lunch.

Via Job’s Anger.

At Above the Law, Elie Mystal muses on why cops get away with killing black people for being. A snippet (emphasis added):

I don’t think most cops think their job is to shoot unarmed black people to death. But I do think most cops think their job is to protect other cops — including the ones who shoot unarmed black people to death. Black people die not just because there are a few racist cops, but because there are many, many more cops who refuse to do anything about the violent racists in their ranks.

(snip)

The best spin I can put on the pro-police faction in this country is that they kind of can’t BELIEVE that the cops are as racist and as violent as black people know they are.

Read it.

The Boston Review, blows the underpinnings from all the CSIs, Bones, and a number of other cop science(-fiction) shows by looking at what happens in real-life crime labs–failing to observe the chain of custody, falsifying results, and generally doing sloppy, if not downright incompetent, work.

Here’s a bit:

Some of the basic problems of forensic science are hinted at in the term itself. The word forensics refers to the Roman forum; forensics is the “science of the forum,” oriented toward gathering evidence for legal proceedings. This makes forensics unusual among the sciences, since it serves a particular institutional objective: the prosecution of criminals. Forensic science works when prosecutions are successful and fails when they are not.

(snip)

It shouldn’t be controversial to point out that forensic science is not really a science to begin with, not in the sense of disciplines such as biology and physics. Forensic science covers whatever techniques produce physical evidence for use in law.

\

Via Job’s Anger.

More here.