IGX

Blaidd Drwg wrote:and? I'm not sure what you think you have there. you strew your useless tripe in the wrong thread all the time.


This thread is full of over the top behavior that typifies modern law enforcement: mostly low level gubmnt employees power mugging citizens for consensual adult behavior.

So take this chap. Apply the reasonable man test to his behavior, regardless of the badge. No reasonable man believes preemptive dog shootings and no knock raids on the wrong house are reasonable. This fellow acts rationally, like any other decent grown man would in a very tough situation...Still wouldn't talk to the motherfucker or give him an inch of trust but as a man he did what was probably for the best.

baffled wrote:I'm not sure what Turd's point is exactly.

Turdacious wrote:

Blaidd Drwg wrote:and? I'm not sure what you think you have there. you strew your useless tripe in the wrong thread all the time.


This thread is full of over the top behavior that typifies modern law enforcement: mostly low level gubmnt employees power mugging citizens for consensual adult behavior.

So take this chap. Apply the reasonable man test to his behavior, regardless of the badge. No reasonable man believes preemptive dog shootings and no knock raids on the wrong house are reasonable. This fellow acts rationally, like any other decent grown man would in a very tough situation...Still wouldn't talk to the motherfucker or give him an inch of trust but as a man he did what was probably for the best.

I have to admit, I admire the consistency of your zealotry.

This thread highlights the many abuses and abusers and things going wrong with Law Enforcement but I don't think any of us hates all cops and we realise that if you made them all disappear tomorrow, you'd have to replace them with basically the same kind of service.

(This thread) serves a valuable purpose..The purpose is wake the fuck up, memorize the words not without a lawyer and NEVER EVER trust a cop. It's not required to hate the police but do not for one instant assume they have you interests in mind any more than does the IRS or TSA.

Turdacious wrote:Anyone who thinks American cops aren't held more responsible for abusive actions than they have in the past has studied too little history.

There are great people, shitbags, politicians, and lazy people in every profession. Anyone who thinks American cops are all shitbags who should never be trusted has spent their privileged life in the suburbs.

Turdacious wrote:Anyone who thinks American cops aren't held more responsible for abusive actions than they have in the past has studied too little history.

There are great people, shitbags, politicians, and lazy people in every profession. Anyone who thinks American cops are all shitbags who should never be trusted has spent their privileged life in the suburbs.

DrDonkeyLove wrote:

Turdacious wrote:Anyone who thinks American cops aren't held more responsible for abusive actions than they have in the past has studied too little history.

There are great people, shitbags, politicians, and lazy people in every profession. Anyone who thinks American cops are all shitbags who should never be trusted has spent their privileged life in the suburbs.

I live under the assumption that in any group 20% are awesome, 20% are awful, and 60% are somewhere in between. When it comes to cops, it's best to assume that you are dealing with the awful 20% unless you have good reason to believe otherwise simply because of their ability to ruin you if they choose to.

DrDonkeyLove wrote:They are part of a powerful bureaucracy, and like all bureaucracies, they should be monitored carefully because job #1 for a bureaucracy is to protect the hive. My personal opinion is that we're slipping and sliding in the wrong direction when it comes to the power relationship between the people and the enforcement arms of the state. As such, it's good to be alert to abuses....some of which are illustrated in this thread.

DrDonkeyLove wrote:I don't think it's an indictment of fine officers everywhere.

Terry B. wrote:

Turdacious wrote:Anyone who thinks American cops aren't held more responsible for abusive actions than they have in the past has studied too little history.

There are great people, shitbags, politicians, and lazy people in every profession. Anyone who thinks American cops are all shitbags who should never be trusted has spent their privileged life in the suburbs.

Not trusting and believing that all are shit bags aren't even close to the same thing.

Blaidd Drwg wrote:Turd's partially correct, but truly is not open to the complexity of the situation at all.

Blaidd Drwg wrote: However,the number of deadly police interactions,the militarization of the police and the capacity for abuse in the system is far greater than ever.

Turdacious wrote:

Blaidd Drwg wrote:Turd's partially correct, but truly is not open to the complexity of the situation at all.

LOL-- especially from someone who has presented a ridiculously simplistic argument that he's now backing away from.

Blaidd Drwg wrote: However,the number of deadly police interactions,the militarization of the police and the capacity for abuse in the system is far greater than ever.

Evidence? The only evidence I've seen is from 2003-present, and it's running at 5/1 (arrest related death/LOD death) ratio. Not convincing.

Blaidd Drwg wrote:Your statistic is a non-sequitur. You've never been convinced of anything that didn't already fit your political bent.

Blaidd Drwg wrote:I beleive we have one metric fuckton of evidence on this thread.

Turdacious wrote:

Blaidd Drwg wrote:I beleive we have one metric fuckton of evidence on this thread.

Let me correct myself-- stop your Wasserman Schultz.

Blaidd Drwg wrote:

Turdacious wrote:

Blaidd Drwg wrote:I beleive we have one metric fuckton of evidence on this thread.

Let me correct myself-- stop your Wasserman Schultz.

I went back and looked. I stand corrected. There is not sufficient data on officer involved shootings to definitively say they are increasing.

So, your point is...It could be worse? It has been worse at some point in the past and is now actually getting better?

That's a pretty slim spade your shoveling with.

Turdacious wrote:

Blaidd Drwg wrote:

Turdacious wrote:

Blaidd Drwg wrote:I beleive we have one metric fuckton of evidence on this thread.

Let me correct myself-- stop your Wasserman Schultz.

I went back and looked. I stand corrected. There is not sufficient data on officer involved shootings to definitively say they are increasing.

So, your point is...It could be worse? It has been worse at some point in the past and is now actually getting better?

That's a pretty slim spade your shoveling with.

Not really. Ask your granddad or one of his buddies if things got reported accurately back in the day. My guess is that they didn't. Hard to prove it isn't worse or better without decent data.

My guess is that things have gotten better since the crack wars wound down. I'm a big fan of data driven police work, as long as the right measures are used. It probably bothers us both that nobody cared to keep national stats until the W administration.

We have better tools now than the officer's word (cameras, DNA, etc...)-- it keeps police more honest and helps build better cases against accused criminals (as long as Mary Sue Terry isn't AG anyway). The Dialo and King cases gave some PDs very nasty publicity, PDs are now hiring more educated cops. I believe that these all cut down on police malfeasance and brutality problems.

Is it good enough? No, but the fact that a lot of the bad actors in this thread are no longer cops is progress.

Give some credit where credit is due.

Blaidd Drwg wrote:

Turdacious wrote:

Blaidd Drwg wrote:

Turdacious wrote:

Blaidd Drwg wrote:I beleive we have one metric fuckton of evidence on this thread.

Let me correct myself-- stop your Wasserman Schultz.

I went back and looked. I stand corrected. There is not sufficient data on officer involved shootings to definitively say they are increasing.

So, your point is...It could be worse? It has been worse at some point in the past and is now actually getting better?

That's a pretty slim spade your shoveling with.

Not really. Ask your granddad or one of his buddies if things got reported accurately back in the day. My guess is that they didn't. Hard to prove it isn't worse or better without decent data.

My guess is that things have gotten better since the crack wars wound down. I'm a big fan of data driven police work, as long as the right measures are used. It probably bothers us both that nobody cared to keep national stats until the W administration.

We have better tools now than the officer's word (cameras, DNA, etc...)-- it keeps police more honest and helps build better cases against accused criminals (as long as Mary Sue Terry isn't AG anyway). The Dialo and King cases gave some PDs very nasty publicity, PDs are now hiring more educated cops. I believe that these all cut down on police malfeasance and brutality problems.

Is it good enough? No, but the fact that a lot of the bad actors in this thread are no longer cops is progress.

Give some credit where credit is due.

I'll grant you that, yes. I'll have heard plenty of storied of the nasty shit went down in the past. Doesn't make it excusable anymore than the nasty shit I've seen in the last 20. But in the overall, I worry a lot less about those sorts of mundane bouts of power mugging than the breezy arrogance with which doors get kicked in because of a shitty drug war, teeth get kicked in becuase someone didn't want to be filmed, dogs get shot and grandma gets tazed becuase of some shitheel SWAT wannabe.

On April 19, 1989, a young woman was raped and beaten nearly to death while running in Central Park. The victim became world famous as the Central Park Jogger, as the brutality, randomness and site of the attack made it emblematic not only of a city spun out of control but of intractable racial polarization.

Six black or Hispanic teenagers were charged, and five eventually convicted in the attack. The five men, who were teenagers at the time, were held and interviewed by the police for more than 24 hours before they confessed. Their arrests led to headlines that included “wolf pack” and the coined term “wilding” that fueled racial divisions.

Years later, an imprisoned murderer and serial rapist, Matias Reyes, said that he alone had attacked the jogger. A DNA test confirmed that he had raped her, and a judge threw out the five men’s convictions.

The attack was yet another polarizing moment in a city that at the time seemed irretrievably divided by race. A then-familiar chorus of racial demagogues—led by the as-yet-unsanitized Al Sharpton—eagerly politicized the trial of the five teenagers accused of this atrocity. Worse, though, were the actions of the police, Linda Fairstein, head of the sex-crimes unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, and prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer, who wheedled false confessions out of the accused teens and put them away for lengthy prison sentences.

Why would the cops and the District Attorney’s Office railroad a bunch of young men for a crime they didn’t commit? The Central Park Five were part of a group of a group of 30 to 40 teens from the East Harlem housing projects who entered the park on the night in question—April 19, 1989—looking for a little blood-sport. They savagely attacked anyone they encountered, including a homeless man, a couple riding a tandem bike and several joggers running around the reservoir. It’s easy enough to see, when Ms. Meili was discovered not far away that same night, her skull smashed and most of her blood gone, how the cops and the prosecutors must have figured, So what if we don’t have the exact right subset of these sociopaths—what does it matter?

It mattered. An even scarier young man, one Matias Reyes, had been committing a series of assaults and rapes in the area. The police nearly apprehended him after a hospital reported a patient with suspicious wounds, but somehow a planned arrest never took place. Well, that sort of thing happens. On the night of the rape, Mr. Reyes was leaving the park when an officer delivering mail to the Central Park precinct stopped to ask him about reports of assaults coming in. Mr. Reyes told him he didn’t know anything about that, and the officer sent him on his way without even shining his flashlight on him.

If he had, he would have discovered that Mr. Reyes was covered in blood—Ms. Meili’s blood. A few months later, Mr. Reyes went on to rape and kill another young woman, Lourdes Gonzalez, in front of her three young children. A few months after that, he was caught while running out to try to get a pair of scissors with which to blind yet another rape victim.

In 2002, Mr. Reyes confessed to the jogger’s rape, and the evidence supported his admission. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau acknowledged his department’s mistakes, but by then, the five teens in question had done their time.

For this crime, at least, the innocence of the Central Park Five is no longer disputed.

Except by the NYPD, which soon after Mr. Reyes’s confession formed its own panel to quickly exonerate itself. The group—consisting of a former prosecutor, a former cop and an active deputy police commissioner—came up with a whole new theory of the case, conceding that Mr. Reyes did it, but insisting that the five teens must have helped him, and “subjected [the jogger] to some sort of attack.”

Everybody knew what was coming—a $250 million lawsuit by the Central Park Five, which the NYPD has now spent nine years fighting at untold public expense. The department has also spent years refusing to be interviewed for the Burns book and film. But now comes the subpoena, demanding the outtakes from the documentary, supposedly to help the city defend itself.

“We believe that, based on the information that the police and prosecutors had at the time, they had probable cause to proceed and the confessions were sound,” announced Celeste Koeleveld, the city’s executive assistant corporation counsel for public safety.

This is a baldfaced lie. DNA evidence was in its infancy in 1989—but none of the samples matched the defendants. Nor did any of the other forensics.

The petition against Ms. Lederer, in part, reduces her life in public service to a single moment, the jogger case. In fact, she has a lengthy résumé of unchallenged convictions in cold cases, having pursued investigations of forgotten crimes. No one lives without error. And designating a single villain completely misses the point and power of the documentary. The jogger case belongs to a historical moment, not any one prosecutor or detective; it grew in the soils of a rancid, angry, fearful time.

Politicians called for blood. Donald Trump campaigned for the return of the death penalty. Much of the news media failed to note the vast inconsistencies in the case. Among the skeptics, people like me had mumbled, rather than shouted, our doubts.

Advocates for the accused were undercut by demonstrators who marched outside the courthouse in 1990, and chanted that the attack had been a hoax or that the jogger’s boyfriend had done it. At least two defense lawyers dozed through parts of the trials. At parole hearings, the boys denied having any contact with the jogger, but acknowledged having been in the park that night with a mob that had hassled or hurt others.

Ms. Lederer wrongly told the jury that hair found in the clothing of one of the boys “matched” hair from the victim, a seeming corroboration of the confused, rambling confessions. Even at the time, that overstated the evidence. More than a decade later, DNA tests would show that the hair did not come from the jogger.

Mistakes were made.

Fairstein believed she had her perps and, says Salaam, was willing to do anything necessary to prove it. Fairstein gruffly dismissed Yusef Salaam's aunt and threatened his mentor, Brooklyn federal prosecutor David Nocenti, in refusing to let them see the teen while he was being interrogated. According to both Sharonne Salaam and Timothy Sullivan's book on the case, Unequal Verdicts, Fairstein then called her husband to demand the home number of Nocenti's then boss, Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Andrew Maloney, so she could get the young attorney fired. According to court records, Fairstein even tried to block Sharonne Salaam from interrupting the interrogation, despite Sharonne's claims that Yusef was 15 and too young to be questioned without an adult. "They really wanted us to leave so they could complete their process," says Salaam. "At one point, I was hyperventilating and I asked for water and Fairstein said there was just no water in the building. It was very strange."

Fairstein's behavior seemed so outrageous that in the 1993 appeals decision on Salaam's case then appellate court judge Vito Titone specifically named her in his dissenting opinion and blasted the entire interrogation process. He recently told Newsday, "I was concerned about a criminal justice system that would tolerate the conduct of the prosecutor, Linda Fairstein, who deliberately engineered the 15-year-old's confession. . . . Fairstein wanted to make a name. She didn't care. She wasn't a human."

Jovanovic had his own strange journey with Sex Crimes Unit prosecutors. He was kicked into a bizarre reality when Fairstein appeared at his arraignment, calling for bail to be set at $500,000, likening him to Ted Bundy and invoking images of serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, saying Jovanovic had material about the murderer in his home. That evidence was never produced. Even stranger, Fairstein allegedly threatened to arrest Jovanovic's mother if she appeared at the arraignment, accusing her of destroying evidence. "I was half in shock during all of this," says Jovanovic, who believes Fairstein threatened his mother so that it would seem Jovanovic had no supporters at his arraignment.