{"id":2875,"date":"2020-06-07T14:37:38","date_gmt":"2020-06-07T14:37:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=2875"},"modified":"2020-06-07T14:37:38","modified_gmt":"2020-06-07T14:37:38","slug":"why-the-policing-problem-isnt-about-a-few-bad-apples","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=2875","title":{"rendered":"Why the policing problem isn\u2019t about \u201ca few bad apples\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\n\n“No matter how you look at it, the American criminal justice system is riddled with biases. As the Washington Post\u2019s Radley Balko<\/a> cataloged, we know that black people are nearly twice as likely to be pulled over and more likely to be searched once they\u2019re stopped even though they\u2019re less likely to have contraband; and that unarmed black people are more than three times as likely to be shot by police as unarmed whites.” 
…
“Let\u2019s think about the Floyd case. Before we get to the killing, let\u2019s think about the arrest. The store owner called the police and said that someone had tried to pass a fake $20 bill. The police respond, and what they do is virtually impossible to imagine happening to a white person. What they do is to approach Mr. Floyd\u2019s car like he\u2019s a violent thug. They order Mr. Floyd and the passengers to exit the car. One officer has his hand on his gun. They put Mr. Floyd in handcuffs. When he falls to the ground, they leave him on the ground in handcuffs, and then, as the whole world knows, they hold him down by his back and knee and legs for 10 minutes until he dies. I just can\u2019t imagine that happening to a white person over a $20 bill.”
…
“Part of the evidence that the system was designed this way, and one of the reasons it recurs over and over again, is because a lot of the conduct that people of color complain about is totally legal. So I don\u2019t think the case against the officers in the Floyd case is a slam-dunk by any means. The defense will be that their use of force was reasonable. And they have a case to make. They don\u2019t have a great case, given that Mr. Floyd was handcuffed, but what they will say is that he was resisting arrest and they used reasonable force to subdue him. And obviously there comes a point where the reasonableness of that force is extinguished by the fact that his body is lying limp and motionless on the ground. But up until then, I think they have an argument that what they were doing was legal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outside of that case, in theory, the power that police have is unreal. I have a police officer buddy who comes and visits my criminal law class, and to demonstrate how much power he has, he invites my students to go on a ride-along in his car, to see what it\u2019s like to patrol the streets of DC. He plays a game with them called Pick That Car. He tells the student, \u201cPick any car that you want, and I\u2019ll stop it.\u201d So the student will say, \u201cHow about that white Camry over there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He\u2019s a good cop. He waits until he has a legal reason. But he says that he could follow any car, and after five minutes or three blocks, the driver will commit some traffic infraction, and then under the law he has the power to stop the car, to order the driver and the passengers to get out of the car. If he has reasonable suspicion that they might be armed or dangerous, he could touch their bodies, he can frisk them, he can ask to search their car. And it\u2019s totally legal. That\u2019s an example of the extraordinary power that police have.”…
“A hundred years from now, when people want to know what it was like to be alive in 2020, the Ferguson report is one of the things they\u2019ll look at. It\u2019s this amazing synthesis of data and stories. The data includes the fact that every single time the police used a dog in Ferguson, they used it against a black person.”
…
“So there\u2019s one story in there in which a woman calls the police because her boyfriend\u2019s beating her up. By the time the police get there, he\u2019s gone. The police look around the apartment and they say, \u201cDoes he live here?\u201d And she says, \u201cYes, he does.\u201d The police say, \u201cYou\u2019re under arrest for occupancy permit violation, because his name isn\u2019t on the lease.\u201d When that happened to another woman in Ferguson, she said she would never call the police again, she didn\u2019t care if she was being killed. Again, this is how the police do black people and brown people. They don\u2019t treat white people like this, certainly not as systematically as they do black and brown people.”
…
“I think a lot of people go into the work because they really want to help communities, and they really want to make a difference, and this belief is based on my experience as a prosecutor working with police officers of all backgrounds and of all races. So I don\u2019t think that police officers are especially racist. But I do think we give them tools and authority in a context that leads them to deploy it unjustly against people of color.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n


https:\/\/www.vox.com\/identities\/2020\/6\/2\/21276799\/george-floyd-protest-criminal-justice-paul-butler<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“No matter how you look at it, the American criminal justice system is riddled with biases. As the Washington Post\u2019s Radley Balko cataloged, we know that black people are nearly twice as likely to be pulled over and more likely to be searched once they\u2019re stopped even though they\u2019re less likely to have contraband; and that unarmed black people are more than three times as likely to be shot by police as unarmed whites.” <\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

“Let\u2019s think about the Floyd case. Before we get to the killing, let\u2019s think about the arrest. The store owner called the police and said that someone had tried to pass a fake $20 bill. The police respond, and what they do is virtually impossible to imagine happening to a white person. What they do is to approach Mr. Floyd\u2019s car like he\u2019s a violent thug. They order Mr. Floyd and the passengers to exit the car. One officer has his hand on his gun. They put Mr. Floyd in handcuffs. When he falls to the ground, they leave him on the ground in handcuffs, and then, as the whole world knows, they hold him down by his back and knee and legs for 10 minutes until he dies. I just can\u2019t imagine that happening to a white person over a $20 bill.”<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

“Part of the evidence that the system was designed this way, and one of the reasons it recurs over and over again, is because a lot of the conduct that people of color complain about is totally legal. So I don\u2019t think the case against the officers in the Floyd case is a slam-dunk by any means. The defense will be that their use of force was reasonable. And they have a case to make. They don\u2019t have a great case, given that Mr. Floyd was handcuffed, but what they will say is that he was resisting arrest and they used reasonable force to subdue him. And obviously there comes a point where the reasonableness of that force is extinguished by the fact that his body is lying limp and motionless on the ground. But up until then, I think they have an argument that what they were doing was legal.
\nOutside of that case, in theory, the power that police have is unreal. I have a police officer buddy who comes and visits my criminal law class, and to demonstrate how much power he has, he invites my students to go on a ride-along in his car, to see what it\u2019s like to patrol the streets of DC. He plays a game with them called Pick That Car. He tells the student, \u201cPick any car that you want, and I\u2019ll stop it.\u201d So the student will say, \u201cHow about that white Camry over there.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s a good cop. He waits until he has a legal reason. But he says that he could follow any car, and after five minutes or three blocks, the driver will commit some traffic infraction, and then under the law he has the power to stop the car, to order the driver and the passengers to get out of the car. If he has reasonable suspicion that they might be armed or dangerous, he could touch their bodies, he can frisk them, he can ask to search their car. And it\u2019s totally legal. That\u2019s an example of the extraordinary power that police have.”<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

“A hundred years from now, when people want to know what it was like to be alive in 2020, the Ferguson report is one of the things they\u2019ll look at. It\u2019s this amazing synthesis of data and stories. The data includes the fact that every single time the police used a dog in Ferguson, they used it against a black person.”<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

“So there\u2019s one story in there in which a woman calls the police because her boyfriend\u2019s beating her up. By the time the police get there, he\u2019s gone. The police look around the apartment and they say, \u201cDoes he live here?\u201d And she says, \u201cYes, he does.\u201d The police say, \u201cYou\u2019re under arrest for occupancy permit violation, because his name isn\u2019t on the lease.\u201d When that happened to another woman in Ferguson, she said she would never call the police again, she didn\u2019t care if she was being killed. Again, this is how the police do black people and brown people. They don\u2019t treat white people like this, certainly not as systematically as they do black and brown people.”<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

“I think a lot of people go into the work because they really want to help communities, and they really want to make a difference, and this belief is based on my experience as a prosecutor working with police officers of all backgrounds and of all races. So I don\u2019t think that police officers are especially racist. But I do think we give them tools and authority in a context that leads them to deploy it unjustly against people of color.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[305,56,280,348,854,285,49],"class_list":["post-2875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-bias","tag-black","tag-criminal-justice","tag-data","tag-floyd","tag-police","tag-racial-bias"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2875"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2875\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2876,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2875\/revisions\/2876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}