- Moderator
- #541
I dunno. What is "the rights" responsibility for why "the left" is acting the fool these days?Then why did an officer commit suicide in Chicago today?The gangs are of all races westvall and Chicago doesn't rank in the top echelon of dangerous cities.Bullshit. You guys blame progressives for everything but when we look at the facts, republicans are the ones who support draconian policing policies.Wow. So I hear things like “police need better training” and reform not defund ... like no one ever thought of that. Until now.
Imagine that. We’ve been saying that for years!
Protests and riots don’t appear out of nowhere. Nor are they typically instigated, micromanaged, or controlled by shadowy conspiracies intent to on overturning the mythical American Way of Life. This one was brewing for a long time. Rodney King...Ferguson...now. So why is it that no one listens?
Oh wait. They did listen. After Ferguson. The DoJ implemented a series of reforms. But guess what? Rightists scrapped them. In their (by now) typical Rightist fashion, they purged the DoJ of all Obama era reforms.
Trump's scrapping of Obama-era reforms hinders police reform
Trump’s justice department has dropped the use of consent decrees to bring federal oversight of troubled police departmentswww.theguardian.com
The Trump administration has dismantled key federal tools for imposing accountability on police forces engaging in systemic racial discrimination, severely hampering efforts to heal the wounds of the police killing of George Floyd and the ongoing protests convulsing the country.
Under Donald Trump, the US justice department has allowed federal mechanisms designed to impose change on racist police agencies to wither on the vine. As a result, law enforcement agencies that practice racial profiling, use excessive force and other forms of unconstitutional policing are now free from federal oversight.
The most important of those tools, known as consent decrees, were deployed extensively by the Barack Obama administration in the wake of previous high-profile police killings of unarmed black men. They included the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014; 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio, that same year; and the 2015 death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland.
Under Obama, 14 consent decrees were enforced upon troubled and discriminatory police agencies. By contrast, none have been issued in the more than three years of the Trump administration.
By scrapping the use of consent decrees, Trump has effectively made it much harder for the US to recover from the turmoil roiling the nation. In the absence of federal pressure, any reform impetus will have to come from cities and states acting in isolation or from inside police agencies that are likely to be resistant to change.
This article was written June 7th. ... “The protests aren’t going to die down. We have a very long summer ahead of us,” he said.
Boy was he right.
I hate to break it to you Coyote, but it is progressive politicians who are to blame. They have consistently lowered the standards for police and have actively trained out the ability to think for themselves.
I am very pro good cop. But I am also very anti bad cop. It is a problem I have been writing about here, for years.
The left goes too far in terms of softening policing at times - case in point would be allowing "creative destruction" as some term it. Should probably have come down on it earlier. But, there can also be a reasonable rationale for some degree of that in that it provides a somewhat controlled safety valve for the anger by allowing it to dissipate rather than continue to build until it an reaches explosive point. Mob Management 101. Many otherwise repressive governments recognize this and allow limited protests and violence.
But we are clearly seeing the authoritarian impulses from the right in these discussions aren't we? Send in the Feds (which would otherwise have been damned, as in the Bundy takeover of federal property) without consulting or coordinating with local authorities (what happened to the principles of federalism...states rights). Make excuses for attacking the protestors who were not engaging in destructive behavior but exercising their rights to demonstrate.
And to top it off - send federal agents to big cities to "fight crime" despite the fact that a city like New York has not experienced a significant rise in violent crime since it was Republican controlled years ago. At least now they are backing down a little and working WITH the local authorities who welcome assistance in solving unsolved cases but don't want uncontrolled feds patrolling their streets and rounding up citizens.
It's pretty clear, when you look at - the ratcheting up of rhetoric regarding crime rates - that the right is intent on creating the fiction that Dem controlled cities are rampant with skyrocketing crime rates (they ONLY single out urban areas that vote Dem, no Republican cities or towns), so it's clearly an effort to politicize crime despite the fact that violent crime rates have fallen sharply over the past 25 years. So what does a president who wants to claim a "tough on crime" meme do? He has to invent soaring crime rates to justify federal take-overs of local law enforcement.
What does the data actually show us?
Crime rates in all categories have been falling.
What about some of the cities mentioned?
Chicago does have a rising homicide rate - almost entirely gun violence. If you subtracted that, according to this article, it would resemble that of other cities.
Yet New York - often targeted by Trump - is one of the safest large cities, with a low violent crime rate compared to other large metropolitan areas. But Trump wants to send feds to NY?
There are ways federal assistance can be valuable, and various mayors have spoken up about this. One example is in solving unsolved homicides. None of them wanted feds patrolling the streets.
Chicago has 150,000 KNOWN gangbangers. Guns don't magically kill people on their own.
Someone has to pull the trigger. You blame an inanimate tool, when you should be blaming the monster using it, and the fellow travelers in the DAs office who continue to let the monsters out.
Just stop, man.
What does an officer commiting suicide have to do with how dangerous a city is?
Chicago isn’t in the top tier of most dangerous cities. When you do a search, it isn’t in the ten and often not even the top 25.
Police have the highest suicide rate of any profession.
In the case of Portland, violence ratcheted way up after the feds became involved (and in mind, this was pretty much confined to a 2x4 block radius when they decided to intervene, and the mayor and governor begged them not to and said it be pouring gasoline on it. They were right weren’t they? I’d call that the right’s responsibility.
At a deeper level...these protests are (imo) driven by more than just Floyd’s death. The undercurrent is frustration, fear, and fallout. Frustration that nothing changed since Ferguson...except the attempted reforms (Congress refused to consider any legislation on this) coming out of the DoJ were promptly reversed by the new administration. Fear of economic uncertainty, huge unemployment hitting just after recover from the worst recession since The Depression, probably to be followed by home loss and evictions. Fear too, of this epidemic. Fallout - from all the restrictions of Covid and subsequent uncertainty.
The protests would have died down sooner, had the other factors not been in play and had the administration taken reform more seriously and listened to The People, a people historically marginalized. That is tbe RightIsts responsibility.