The police-abuse-of-power thread

LeVeL

Forum Addict
Joined
Jun 16, 2007
Messages
13,246
I'm not sure if these stories simply get more coverage than they used to or if it's always been this widespread, but law enforcement has been in the spotlight quite a lot lately, it seems.

No-knock raids on wrong houses:
Salt Lake City Police say they raided the wrong house Wednesday while executing a no-knock search warrant.
Police Chief Chris Burbank held a news conference Friday to discuss the raid. He said officers made a mistake and had the wrong address while serving the warrant during a narcotics raid with Drug Enforcement Agency officers.
...
A 76-year-old woman was inside the home when police broke down her front door with guns drawn.

Some of which have resulted in fatalities:
A 61-year-old man was shot to death by police while his wife was handcuffed in another room during a drug raid on the wrong house.

Making up stories to get away with their own wrong-doings:

Beating people to death:
It was supposed to be a fun family outing to the movies, but then Nair Rodriguez' 19-year-old daughter got under her skin. They fought, she said, and she slapped her daughter.
Moments later, police arrived on a domestic dispute call at the Moore, Oklahoma, theater and confronted -- not Nair Rodriguez -- but her husband Luis. They took him down, and after the encounter on February 15, he was dead.

etc etc...

The worst part of all this is that in many cases the officers face no responsibility.

For example, the fatal beating of Kelly Thomas.
About 15 minutes into the video, Ramos puts on latex gloves and puts his fists in front of Thomas? face. ?Now you see my fists?... They?re getting ready to f? you up.?

Also, the Chris Dorner-related shooting of the wrong vehicle.
...the officers happened upon two women who were delivering newspapers in a blue Toyota Tacoma pickup truck. The officers apparently mistook the truck for Dorner?s, even though he drove a charcoal Nissan Titan pickup truck.
With no warning, the eight officers unleashed a hail of bullets, firing 103 times at the truck...


So, FG, what do you make of all this?





note: in making this thread, I am in no way joining the fuck-the-police brigade. I do believe that these officers are the rare exceptions, not the norm.
 
Part of me thinks the media sensationalises police brutality, because people eat it up. Unless you know both sides of the story, no logical conclusion can be made. With that being said, there are quite a few officers that suffer from "big swinging dick", they believe their authority to be absolute and everything they do is justified. I don't think that's the case for the majority of the force, though. Any bad seeds should be held accountable for their wrong doings. Not just some silly slap on the wrist, either.
 
I think the prevalence of cameras, both video and still, are a helpful tool that are catching police at their worst. But the No Knock Raids have been in the limelight for sometime. There is even a song about it.


The fact that the bad cops that are blatantly guilty get nothing more than a slap on the wrist is a sad part of the society we live in. The "extreme dangers" they face were used to sell protections for the police that have been extended to the absurd, and protecting the guilty. This means no lawsuit directly against an officer for their actions. If any other member of the general public did what they did, they would not only get sued into the stone age, but they would spend a long time in jail. I know there are more than a few former cops in jail for their actions, but they are the exception, and fairly rare in comparison to the complaints. I think reversing this single protection once an officer is convicted would change the way the vast majority of police would conduct themselves.
 
There are bad people everywhere in society. There are firefighters setting fire, priets absusing children and Police using their power for their own gain. I wish it wasn?t like that and that all bad people were criminals and bankers ;) so that they were easier to spot, but sadly that?s not the case. Human society is more complicated than that ...

The big problem with the Police (or rather, all members of the three branches of Goverment) is that Members of the Police, trust Members of the police and when it?s your word against that of a police officer, other police officers will not believe you. A Judge is not going to belive your word over that of a police officer too. So if there is the occasional bad apple within the police - you?re going to have one fucking hard time convincing someone about that. And that?s not right of course. There must be precautions that if there are accusations against members of police, those are checked extra thoroughly and indiepently.
A fair system of justice is at the base of every functioning society. The Police play a very improtant role in that. While they control "us" (as in the people), they need to be controlled and checked on even more. Because if the base of society is rotting with stuff like the obove, the whole thing is at risk.
 
Last edited:
Former officer salvatore leone of the baltimore pd, perfect real example. You guys can find it on youtube yourself. I personally film all encounters with police. If they ask why, I ask them if they are and they say yes. And I said well I'm keeping my own records.
 
For someone who is defying the police, he talks too much. It's none of their damn business what his patches mean, why he is in that area or where he is going, whether or not he does drugs, what club he belongs to, etc.

... at least in the US. Idk how it works in 'Straya mate!
 
I wonder if their is a correlation between the numbers of abusive or even criminal policemen and the general crime rate of a country...
 
I have always thought the more crime there is would require a progressively greater amount of bad/dirty cops. But I have nothing to back up my theory.
 
http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/22/5641266/nypd-twitter-photo-contest-backfires
NYPD's Twitter photo contest backfires with images of aggressive police force
The New York Police Department attempted to harness Twitter to drum up support today, but things haven't exactly gone as planned. Earlier today, the official NYPD Twitter account asked followers to tweet photos of themselves with NYC police officers under the hashtag #myNYPD ? but so far, many users have jumped on that hashtag to flood it with images of police aggressively apprehending apparent suspects. So far, these are hardly the friendly images the NYPD was hoping for.[...]

Well done Internet.
 
Top