What exactly is the purpose of the police?


companion piece about how many small towns use traffic stops as a main revenue source.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/us/police-ticket-quotas-money-funding.html?smid=tw-share

Vast majority in the South.


Last night the police had a few intersections blocked off in the neighborhood to keep the streets car-free for the trick or treaters. I think blocking off the streets like this is fantastic, and I'm grateful to my town for doing this. OTOH, why exactly did this require the presence of people carrying deadly weapons and authorized to use them? We use the cops for way too much. Or we need cops that don't have guns. Or something along these lines anyway.


It used to be that Australian police didn’t carry guns unless on special duty, but if you saw an officer just generally on duty in your neighbourhood or on traffic duty then no guns. I’m not sure now though, I think in the last decade it’s  changed (cf bikie laws etc).

Most of us still don’t expect police to routinely carry guns.


drummerboy said:

companion piece about how many small towns use traffic stops as a main revenue source.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/us/police-ticket-quotas-money-funding.html?smid=tw-share

Vast majority in the South.

Yeah, we got nabbed in NC a few months ago for going 57 in a 45, just shortly after the spend limit had changed from 55 to 45.

Court appearance required. Such a crock.


jimmurphy said:

drummerboy said:

companion piece about how many small towns use traffic stops as a main revenue source.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/us/police-ticket-quotas-money-funding.html?smid=tw-share

Vast majority in the South.

Yeah, we got nabbed in NC a few months ago for going 57 in a 45, just shortly after the spend limit had changed from 55 to 45.

Court appearance required. Such a crock.

 DC is brutal. They make the speed limit 25 MPH on four lane roads, and put up cameras to catch speeders.  Then they mail you a ticket for around $100 with a copy of the photo of your car and license plate as proof. We've learned our lesson, but it's crazy to be crawling along at 25 MPH on a four lane road with a double yellow center line.


The police role has for many years evolved with the culture of the United States from the time of the signing of the Constitution where wealthy white men were considered persons and slaves and women were considered property.

The police is not to blame for their adopted role.  They are only doing what they are tasked to do.  Their main purpose is to keep the wealthy white folks feeling safe in their homes and in and around their personal property.

After the signing of the Constitution came the use of police to attack slaves and blacks in the streets with dogs and batons, etc... Then more modernly in the 50s and 60s came the trouble with "white flight" also a lovely term.  People not wanting to live in neighborhoods with blacks and even sell homes to blacks.  Terrible.  The latest innovation is wealthy white folks electing wealthy white folks to raise property taxes so as to keep blacks from entering their towns and in paying these high taxes also paying for the high priced police forces in their suburban wealthy towns.  Source: Star Ledger Article 10 or more years ago pointing listing police officer salaries by county/town.  The more white, the more safe, the more suburban, the more gated, your town is the higher the salary of the police officer, which is quite counterintuitive, but really shows the insidious purpose behind all this.

Again, I reiterate, not the police's fault.  Just an evolution of police trained to do the bidding of the wealthy white man in a nutshell.  What does it say, that the more senior police officers are rewarded by working in towns with zero crime and get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for cruising in their cars while places like Camden, New Jersey have rookie police officers barely making more than an elementary school teacher?

Purpose?  Please.  Don't blame the police for doing exactly what every wealthy suburbanite wants them to do.  "To serve and protect" means to serve the wealthy white man and protect his property.
 


So the police are just following orders.

Hokay.


drummerboy said:

So the police are just following orders.

Hokay.

 Yes, that is what LaSalePute is saying - they are doing what the politically powerful want.  


La sale pute - nice translations are available


Thin Blue Line to the rescue!


more copaganda, this time from CBS


drummerboy said:

more copaganda, this time from CBS

And hopefully they solve the case, putting a murderer in jail, where he cannot kill again, at least in the public arena.


Here police rob a woman of $100,000 in broad daylight and the news just presents it as a good haul for a dog.

https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2021/12/07/100k-seized-k9-officer-dallas-love-field-airport-sniffs-bag/


Through an interpreter, Ballentine said: “Blankets! Blankets! What happened to the blankets?”


“In general, the public has this mistaken assumption that the police are there to serve and protect them. The police do what the politicians and other officials tell them to do or not to do.” - Maria Haberfeld, Police Science Professor, John Jay College.


It's worse than that. The police have no affirmative responsibility to even protect citizens.

https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-protect-you-federal-court-affirms-yet-again


ridski said:

Here police rob a woman of $100,000 in broad daylight and the news just presents it as a good haul for a dog.

https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2021/12/07/100k-seized-k9-officer-dallas-love-field-airport-sniffs-bag/

Oh yes, our wonderful civil asset forfeiture procedure. Where they grab your money firs and then you have to prove your innocence to get it back. And good luck getting it back even after proving your innocence.

So, so much for our wonderful constitution's 4th Amendment.

Makes me worry what our politicians will come up with next.


RTrent said:

ridski said:

Here police rob a woman of $100,000 in broad daylight and the news just presents it as a good haul for a dog.

https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2021/12/07/100k-seized-k9-officer-dallas-love-field-airport-sniffs-bag/

Oh yes, our wonderful civil asset forfeiture procedure. Where they grab your money firs and then you have to prove your innocence to get it back. And good luck getting it back even after proving your innocence.

So, so much for our wonderful constitution's 4th Amendment.

Makes me worry what our politicians will come up with next.

Can anybody explain why civil forfeiture laws are not just thrown out?  They seem to violate idea that a person cannot be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process (5th Amendment).  What are the arguments in defense of these laws?


tjohn said:

Can anybody explain why civil forfeiture laws are not just thrown out? They seem to violate idea that a person cannot be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process (5th Amendment). What are the arguments in defense of these laws?

I found this paper, excerpted below, to be informative. (Sorry, the quote function doesn’t work on the latest iOs update.)

One such constitutional challenge is the claim that forfeiture denies property owners procedural due process. To understand this argument, a distinction must be made between civil and criminal forfeiture. In criminal forfeiture proceedings, a person convicted of a crime may be compelled to forfeit property if it can be linked to the crime for which the property owner is convicted. Because it is a criminal proceeding, the individual is guaranteed procedural due process, meaning that he is guaranteed both notice and an opportunity to be heard. As with any criminal charge, proof beyond a reasonable doubt is required. By contrast, the government need only show probable cause in order to seize property as part of a civil forfeiture proceeding. Hearsay, circumstantial evidence, or facts obtained after the seizure may all be used to demonstrate probable cause; neither an arrest nor a conviction is required. Once property has been seized, the burden of proof shifts to the owner. In order to reclaim the property, the owner must prove by a preponderance of evidence that his seized property was not connected to the illegal activity. The constitutionality of the government's right to take property in civil forfeiture proceedings without the same procedural due process afforded in criminal proceedings was challenged before the Supreme Court of the United States in Van Oster v. Kansas (1926). Speaking for the Court, Justice Harlan F. Stone said that "[i]t has long been settled that statutory forfeitures of property intrusted by the innocent owner or lienor to another who uses it in violation of the revenue laws of the United States is not a violation of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment." The Rehnquist Court agreed in Bennis v. Michigan (1996), when it ruled that the forfeiture of a car which had been used in the com- mission of a crime did not violate the owner's right to procedural due process.

Opponents of civil forfeiture have fared somewhat better in Constitutional challenges based upon the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment. Identifying punishment as a determinant for when limits are constitutionally guaranteed by the Excessive Fines Clause, the Court found in Austin v. United States (1993) that forfeiture served both a remedial and a punitive function. Speaking for the Court, Justice Harry Blackmun said that since forfeiture represents payment to a sovereign as punishment, it is subject to the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment. The Court thus acknowledged that there is a limit to what may be seized from an individual in a civil forfeiture proceeding.

https://journals.wichita.edu/index.php/ff/article/download/36/43/49


Civil forfeiture is so open to abuse.  I suppose that is the problem.


DaveSchmidt said:

I found this paper, excerpted below, to be informative. (Sorry, the quote function doesn’t work on the latest iOs update.)

One such constitutional challenge is the claim that forfeiture denies property owners procedural due process. To understand this argument, a distinction must be made between civil and criminal forfeiture.

What pile of self serving bull our legal system has come up with. Its not surprising considering politicians drive that car.

The fact is forfeiture is done because its assumed that the person got the money illegally through a criminal act. So, if they catch you with a lot of money they often assume you did something like a drug deal.

But hey, lets call it civil forfeiture instead of criminal forfeiture, to more easily grab your money. And if someone complains they'll get on their high horses and say "oh no, its not criminal because you haven't been convicted of a crime." All legal. After all, we should know, we wrote the rules.


It seems as easy to discuss the Chauvin case here as in the various George Floyd threads…

I’ve read various articles in the past couple of hours on the new sentence, and I’m confused. Hoping someone can please help?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/15/derek-chauvin-pleads-guilty-civil-rights-charges-george-floyd-killing 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59671567
So there was a State case that prosecuted and finalised, and the man is convicted and in jail. I’m not sure why there’s a federal case as well? And shouldn’t such ‘deprivation of freedom’ (my paraphrase) also be routine in all such cases? - so, why don’t we hear about it happening more often?

All that aside, I’m surprised that Chauvin said he was Guilty this time around. I thought the whole point of police officers being so rough and ‘instinctive’ in their actions is that they believed they were acting within the law and their training. 
I wonder if this will help to initiate new training to prevent such excesses.

ETA: h’m  I’ve also just seen that New York is getting a female police chief. That is a hard job for anyone, let alone now. I don’t envy her one bit.


joanne said:

So there was a State case that prosecuted and finalised, and the man is convicted and in jail. I’m not sure why there’s a federal case as well? And shouldn’t such ‘deprivation of freedom’ (my paraphrase) also be routine in all such cases? - so, why don’t we hear about it happening more often?

All that aside, I’m surprised that Chauvin said he was Guilty this time around. I thought the whole point of police officers being so rough and ‘instinctive’ in their actions is that they believed they were acting within the law and their training.

I’m no expert — just reading up like you, thanks to your prompt — but this is my understanding: The federal civil rights case was set in motion long before Chauvin’s state trial, because such a case can be a Plan B if the state charges don’t stick. (A Minnesota paper reported that if Chauvin was acquitted, federal officers were prepared to arrest him outside the state courthouse.) I don’t think the Justice Department has stated why it followed through this time, even after the state conviction, but the assumption is that it wants to convey that it takes civil rights violations seriously; they’ve been a career focus of Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Al Sharpton said he and others had been pushing the department to file cases like this against the police for years.

One reason even the Plan B cases don’t happen more often is that the bar is high. The government has to prove that an officer “willfully” violated someone’s civil rights — knowing that the action was wrong but committing it anyway. And proving intent in court can be difficult.

Why did Chauvin change his plea? I haven’t seen any commentary about that, other than it spares him another public trial.


Thanks. I’d love to see more cases like this, where appropriate - obviously (as over in my country) everyone talks proudly about how far we’ve come and how inclusive and tolerant our societies are - except they’re really not. Too many exceptions to the theoretical rule. 
sigh. 


He likely took the deal because the accommodations at a federal penitentiary are undoubtedly nicer than those at the Minnesota State Prison.


Did you ever see a report and think "this is exactly what Drummerboy's talking about" because I did.


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