Interestingly enough, this guy has been charged with obstruction of justice WITHOUT [use of] force. If he wasn't using force, why did the cops turn him into a bloody mess? Oh, I know, he actually deserved it. Because meting out extrajudicial punishment to people who have not been found guilty of anything is totally OK.
Apparently this same department was in trouble last year for arresting an underage woman at gunpoint when she came out of a store with what they took to be alcohol, but was in fact water.
http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/bo...9bb30f31a.html
Then there's the case of the heroic policeman in Ferguson who arrested a man at gunpoint who was sitting in his parked car after a basketball game. One of the charges was failure to wear a seatbelt.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/04/politi...port-shocking/
Then there are SWAT raids to serve warrants, enforce code violations, check the licenses of barbershops, etc.
Quote:
The raid on the Garden of Eden farm appears to be the latest example of police departments using SWAT teams and paramilitary tactics to enforce less serious crimes. A Fox television affiliate reported this week, for example, that police in St. Louis County, Mo., brought out the SWAT team to serve an administrative warrant. The report went on to explain that all felony warrants are served with a SWAT team, regardless whether the crime being alleged involves violence. In recent years, SWAT teams have been called out to perform regulatory alcohol inspections at a bar in Manassas Park, Va.; to raid bars for suspected underage drinking in New Haven, Conn.; to perform license inspections at barbershops in Orlando, Fla.; and to raid a gay bar in Atlanta where police suspected customers and employees were having public sex. A federal investigation later found that Atlanta police had made up the allegations of public sex.
Other raids have been conducted on food co-ops and Amish farms suspected of selling unpasteurized milk products. The federal government has for years been conducting raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in states that have legalized them, even though the businesses operate openly and are unlikely to pose any threat to the safety of federal enforcers
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3764951.html
Those people were lucky - at least the SWAT team got the right address. Oftentimes they either have the wrong address (because they rely on dodgy informants), or the person they're after no longer lives there.
And if you own a dog when they break your door down, be ready to say goodbye to Fido, because killing the dog is now pretty much SOP.
http://www.theagitator.com/?s=puppycide
It goes on and on and on. It's not a white or black issue. It's a cop issue. Just because as of late the well publicized victims of police have been black, that doesn't mean that only blacks care about it. Just read Radley Balko on Huffpost, or his old blog The Agitator.
The drug war has led to the militarization of the force. Cops have become so risk adverse that some overreact to situations. Other times they seem to needlessly escalate them so they can get a power trip.
You can say "oh, that's just a few bad apples." But what happens when good cops choose to stand behind the blue wall and do nothing to stop the bad ones?
Cops need to be better trained, they need to actually know the law they're enforcing (even though the Supreme Court ruled that they don't actually need to:
http://www.npr.org/2014/12/15/370995...tanding-of-law).
They need to wear video cameras, and have procedures in place to prevent that video from being "accidentally" deleted, as they have been known to do when obtaining a cell phone that has video of them that they'd rather not let people see.
https://news.vice.com/article/office...recording-them
http://www.click2houston.com/news/of...ation/30146490
They need to be held accountable for their actions. Outside prosecutors should be brought in to handle cases against police - local prosecutors have no incentive to hold police accountable, as they still have to work with the colleagues of the officer they're prosecuting.
And administrative leave with pay, i.e. getting a paid vacation when you screw up, needs to be abolished.