The police in the US have always been brown shirts for business interests, but it's gotten quite bad lately-- still not as bad as during the first Gilded Age, but it's getting there. Of course, the other real problem is that a hammer will find a nail, which is why we see people getting slaughtered during traffic stops etc.
Definitely agree about the pigs choosing the hard way-- it's all they know.
Their only strategy is escalate to force, whether in the micro situation of a traffic stop or the macro situation of rioting against police brutality. They just don't get it, and they don't want to get it, because they enjoy smashing heads and being unaccountable.
Voting aint gonna fix it, though-- most local candidates aren't about to make a problem with the cops that they rely on, and most national candidates aren't going to make it a problem because hey, all politics are local politics, so there's nothing to gain. Riots and peaceful protests are the way forward now, which is tough because neither are remotely legitimate or acceptable in the US. Predictably, the police will smash the peaceful protests, causing riots, which will ultimately end in disaster.
We saw a bit of walkback after the Ferguson / Baltimore burnings caught national attention, but there were no formal concessions and certainly no adjustment of police training. The de facto state of affairs is actually worse off than before the riots, since now the police have realized that the public has turned against them. Maybe a few more cities will be wrecked and then there will be some serious reparation. The shit factor here is race relations, which are already being played as hard as possible in order to keep the blacks and the whites separate from each other, leaving the blacks to carry most of the burden of police reform. Obviously, this doesn't work, because the blacks aren't considered to be legitimate political entities when it comes to police reform specifically because they've borne the brunt of the drug war's ravages.
In my pipe dream of police brutality being solved, we'd first need to get our national politicians to effect a formal surrender ending the drug war-- this probably won't happen, because "America never loses a war", but it's no secret that the drug war is lost. Ending the drug war formally would open the door for demilitarization/disarmament of the losers, along with closure of the legal loopholes and abuses that allowed police to raid houses and commit warrantless wiretaps nonstop etc. Once the weapons have been removed and the law patched to revoke the wartime leeway, I think we'd be in much better shape, and could focus on normalization of police-citizen relations via force drawdown, culling of the worst abusers, and retraining of the moderate abusers. We'd have a proper (European style) police force in the next generation or so.
Lawyers an bring law suits against the
police. My understanding is that there
are a lot of such suits and that they
cost taxpayers a bundle.
If the guy in the OP got a lawyer and won
a big judgment, say, $500,000, then
voters and, then, politicians would start
to take notice. If the SF police keep
attacking
old guys, then too soon one of them will
die, and the law suit could cost SF
millions. Then the politicians will
start to take positions and the voters
to vote.
Sure, one of the reasons the police get
away with stop and frisk, etc. is the
war on drugs. And if drugs are found
often enough, then that in effect justifies
the illegal stop and frisk.
But drugs do not have to have any direct
relevance: I doubt that the OP was really
about drugs. Instead, the cops just got
their jollies beating up on a poor, old,
handicapped, black guy on the sidewalk
in a high end business district -- jollies.
Definitely agree about the pigs choosing the hard way-- it's all they know.
Their only strategy is escalate to force, whether in the micro situation of a traffic stop or the macro situation of rioting against police brutality. They just don't get it, and they don't want to get it, because they enjoy smashing heads and being unaccountable.
Voting aint gonna fix it, though-- most local candidates aren't about to make a problem with the cops that they rely on, and most national candidates aren't going to make it a problem because hey, all politics are local politics, so there's nothing to gain. Riots and peaceful protests are the way forward now, which is tough because neither are remotely legitimate or acceptable in the US. Predictably, the police will smash the peaceful protests, causing riots, which will ultimately end in disaster.
We saw a bit of walkback after the Ferguson / Baltimore burnings caught national attention, but there were no formal concessions and certainly no adjustment of police training. The de facto state of affairs is actually worse off than before the riots, since now the police have realized that the public has turned against them. Maybe a few more cities will be wrecked and then there will be some serious reparation. The shit factor here is race relations, which are already being played as hard as possible in order to keep the blacks and the whites separate from each other, leaving the blacks to carry most of the burden of police reform. Obviously, this doesn't work, because the blacks aren't considered to be legitimate political entities when it comes to police reform specifically because they've borne the brunt of the drug war's ravages.
In my pipe dream of police brutality being solved, we'd first need to get our national politicians to effect a formal surrender ending the drug war-- this probably won't happen, because "America never loses a war", but it's no secret that the drug war is lost. Ending the drug war formally would open the door for demilitarization/disarmament of the losers, along with closure of the legal loopholes and abuses that allowed police to raid houses and commit warrantless wiretaps nonstop etc. Once the weapons have been removed and the law patched to revoke the wartime leeway, I think we'd be in much better shape, and could focus on normalization of police-citizen relations via force drawdown, culling of the worst abusers, and retraining of the moderate abusers. We'd have a proper (European style) police force in the next generation or so.