The Shooting Gallery: Police Violence MEGATHREAD

[Zoupa]

https://imgur.com/gallery/6pVrEV4

Another example of what I was saying earlier. The guy got arrested for looking at a cop wrong. 

I mean wtf America.

[DGuller]

I think there also has to be some acceptance that some of these things will trade lives for other goals.  I'm sure that if every cop drives around in full combat gear in armored vehicles, less of them will be killed in the line of duty than without those things, but cops coming home is not the one and only goal of policing.

Then you are ignorant of their/our general mindset. That is exactly what is in the forefront of their/our minds. It is drilled into their/our heads at the academies, training, even daily.

Not meaning to be snippy, just stating facts, however misguided or misinterpreted that mindset is.

No, I am exactly aware of that mindset, which is why I said what I said.  That mindset is wrong and should not exist.

[Eddie Teach]

https://imgur.com/gallery/6pVrEV4

Another example of what I was saying earlier. The guy got arrested for looking at a cop wrong. 

I mean wtf America.

Eh, he got arrested for calling the cop a retard. Not that that's ok, but it is more provocative than looking at him funny.

[jimmy olsen]

It isn't that you should kick cops and not get in trouble but the reaction here seems a bit disproportionate. Besides how is taking somebody's property not a violation of the 5th Amendment to the Constitution? Isn't there supposed to be a trial before penalties are applied?

Cops have been going crazy with confiscations for years. It's not news.

It's local jurisdictions and courts that were going crazy with confiscations for years, not the police (who lack that power). It's not news.

The USSC has also struck down almost all civil forfeiture.  That's not news.

Has there been another ruling since this one?
https://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police/supreme-court-didnt-put-nail-civil-asset-forfeitures

The Supreme Court Didn't Put the Nail in Civil Asset Forfeiture's Coffin

By Emma Andersson, Senior Staff Attorney, Criminal Law Reform Project
MARCH 15, 2019 | 4:45 PM

The 84 percent of Americans who oppose civil asset forfeiture can be forgiven for having the impression that the U.S. Supreme Court ended abusive use of this practice last month in Timbs v. Indiana when it ruled that the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment applies to the states. Some media hailed it as a huge victory.  But the celebration is premature.

So what really happened?

The Timbs opinion recognizes that the Constitution guarantees freedom from excessive monetary sanctions as a fundamental right. But crucial questions remain about what practical difference the Supreme Court's decision will make in ordinary people's lives, particularly in the context of civil asset forfeiture.

The question of whether the Excessive Fines Clause should apply to the states wasn't a difficult one to answer. Indeed, at the oral argument, Justice Gorsuch made fun of Indiana's Solicitor General, saying: "I mean, most ... of the incorporation cases took place in like the 1940s." Yet, he noted, that we're "still litigating incorporation of the Bill of Rights. Really?"

The oft-divided court was able to rule unanimously in favor of the plaintiff, Tyson Timbs, partly because the narrow issue of whether the clause is "incorporated" and therefore binding on the states was the only question before it. So while the court said that the Excessive Fines Clause applies to Timbs' civil asset forfeiture case, it didn't say that Timbs' forfeiture case violates the Excessive Fines Clause.

That means the case isn't over. Instead, it will return to the Indiana Supreme Court. That court will decide whether the forfeiture of Timbs' car violates the Eighth Amendment. And how will the Indiana court decide, and how will the rest of us know, if a forfeiture case violates the Eighth Amendment?

As we noted in our amicus brief, the historical roots of the Excessive Fines Clause indicate that courts need to consider an individual's financial circumstances in order to evaluate whether a fine or forfeiture is excessive. But the Supreme Court has never squarely answered this crucial question, and it didn't reach it in Timbs. So far, the court has only held that a criminal asset forfeiture violates the Excessive Fines Clause when it is "grossly disproportional to the gravity of the defendant's offense."

This "grossly disproportional" standard is a start. But, as the almost entirely unchecked growth of civil asset forfeiture has shown over the last 30 years, it is too vague, too general, and too varied in application to provide a meaningful limit on asset forfeitures. The court has similarly referenced a "grossly disproportionate" standard when evaluating whether a criminal sentence violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments.

Protections under the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause have been minimal in practice. Punishments struck down as grossly disproportionate are basically the equivalent of legal unicorns. Indeed, the Supreme Court has affirmed life sentences for shoplifting.

During the oral argument in Timbs, Justice Kagan addressed this concern directly, noting, "we've made it awfully, awfully hard to assert a disproportionality claim with respect even to imprisonment" and if the same standard applies under the Excessive Fines Clause, "we could incorporate this tomorrow and it would have no effect on anybody."

The Timbs opinion hints that its immediate, practical impact may be limited. The Supreme Court explains that, "all 50 States have a constitutional provision prohibiting the imposition of excessive fines either directly or by requiring proportionality." That means even before Timbs it was clear that property owners could argue that a civil forfeiture violated their state constitutional right against excessive fines.

But these state constitutional provisions have not historically served as a bulwark against the proliferation of civil asset forfeiture. One reason is that state supreme courts often follow the lead of the U.S. Supreme Court and interpret their state constitutions as providing the same level of protection that the U.S. Constitution provides. 

When it comes to current U.S. Supreme Court case law interpreting the Eighth Amendment, that protection isn't much.

Notwithstanding this cause for skepticism, Timbs is a 9-0 decision in favor of someone convicted of a drug crime and whose car was seized and forfeited as a result. Victories like this at the Supreme Court are rare and worthy of attention, even where their legal holding is relatively limited. Timbs can be a starting point for the work needed to establish a meaningful right to be free from excessive monetary penalties. We should treat the decision as an invitation to litigate these claims more often and push courts to make the Excessive Fines Clause a more robust protection against government overreach.

But even if we succeed at that, significant structural barriers would still stand in the way of a strong Eighth Amendment restraining civil asset forfeiture.

The biggest barrier to the Excessive Fines Clause restraining civil asset forfeiture is that owners who want their property back are not entitled to a court-appointed lawyer because the proceedings are deemed civil, not criminal. This means most people go unrepresented because it is economically irrational to hire a lawyer in cases when the value of the property taken is less than the cost of hiring a lawyer. And, as we showed in our complaint in Cox v. Voyles, when people try to represent themselves, they're fighting against government lawyers who are expert in these systems, expert in dirty tricks, and therefore expert in defeating even meritorious claims on procedural grounds.

More insidiously, as Cox also demonstrated, some people are justifiably afraid to fight their cases with or without a lawyer. For example, though the state law at issue in Cox has now changed as a result of our litigation, the law at the time allowed the government to recover its own attorneys' fees from people who fought to regain their seized property and lost. But if they won, the state didn't have to pay for the property owners' attorneys' fees. This meant that whatever the outcome of the case, many property owners would lose money if they dared to fight for their rights in court.

Or consider that police in Tenaha, Texas, spent years seizing property from Black and Latinx people traveling through town, threatening the travelers that if they did not turn over their cash and disclaim their rights to it, they would be arrested on money laundering charges and, in some instances, have their children taken by child protective services.

All of this means that Timbs — bolstered by a robust Excessive Fines Clause we have yet to establish — could only restrain civil asset forfeiture, case by case, if property owners fight back in court. So long as these barriers to fighting civil forfeiture cases exist, a back-end solution is simply not enough.

There is potential, though, for a solution before the asset seizure takes place.

One of the most pernicious parts of many civil asset forfeiture laws is the profit motive baked into them. In too many states, police and prosecutors get to keep a lot of the money that they bring in through forfeiture. This creates a perverse incentive for law enforcement to make decisions that maximize their profits instead of maximizing public safety. In other words, policing for profit. This self-interest, in our view, violates the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment and therefore renders such arrangements susceptible to wholesale invalidation.

Getting civil forfeiture laws struck down on this basis and preventing people from unjustly losing their property in the first place would be a major step towards eliminating or seriously curtailing the abusive use of civil asset forfeiture. In Marshall v. Jerrico, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that procedural due process imposes a limit on "scheme(s) injecting a personal interest, financial or otherwise, into the [law] enforcement process."

The court stated that such schemes in some contexts "raise serious constitutional questions." The court identified three factors to consider when someone alleges that a law enforcement official's financial interest in enforcement violates the Constitution. First, whether the official stands to profit economically from vigorous enforcement. Second, whether the enforcing agent is financially dependent on the maintenance of a high level of penalties. And third, whether the law enforcement agency's budget is so dependent upon this source of income that officials have a direct financial incentive to increase enforcement efforts. Many civil asset forfeiture laws suffer from all three defects and are therefore constitutionally suspect, as we successfully argued in Cox.

So, while Timbs is far from a fatal blow to this outrageous practice, it can serve as a jumping off point for our much broader efforts to eliminate civil asset forfeiture.

[Eddie Teach]

Is there a reason you crossed out the last couple paragraphs?

[garbon]

Why did 7 cars and 20 officers show up and why tow her car?

Either because they're fascist pigs compensating for their small dicks or because it was a volatile situation with tempers running high and friends and supporters gathering around.   Can't tell from the video.

I don't know why they towed her car.

Still don't see any force, disproportionate or otherwise, still think kicking a cop in the shin is wrong and illegal.

Let's get past the video and go towards the larger issue of policing in the US then.

I remember when I was dating this girl from California. I used to visit every few weeks. Got pulled over once by the cops and she could not believe how I was talking to them. I didn't understand what she meant but we talked for hours about it afterwards. Her main point was you do as they say and you don't talk back. She was also super nervous when I was arguing with the border patrol guys.

You guys seem to be fundamentally scared of your cops.

That reminds me of what used to happen on my yearly solo drives from NYC up to Quebec for a long weekend in Montreal.

How, I always set it up that when I left work, I'd drive only as far as about Plattsburgh. I'd spend a night in the hotel there so as to limit any concern the Canadian border agents might have if I was crossing at 1am.

And yet, inevitably, I always was asked to pull over for additional questioning. First time was the rockiest. Tthey went through every piece of paper, every object they could find in my car and even tried to puncture holes in what I'd told them about coming up for a weekend vacation from New York after they found printed directions to NJ from early in summer.

From then on, I made sure my car was spic and span when crossing the border but it still made little difference. Still had to go inside for questioning.

I was so used to that pullover process that the one time I took a female friend with me and they told us we were free to go (with no additional screening), I didn't even know where to go.

And uou can be damn sure that I was polite as fuck during all questioning.

[garbon]

Is there a reason you crossed out the last couple paragraphs?

That mention of 'scheme' had and an 's' in [] so then board picked that up as formatting.

[jimmy olsen]

Is there a reason you crossed out the last couple paragraphs?

That mention of 'scheme' had and an 's' in [] so then board picked that up as formatting.

Correct. Changed that to parentheses

[grumbler]

Eh, he got arrested for calling the cop a retard. Not that that's ok, but it is more provocative than looking at him funny.

You cannot know what he was arrested for.  All we can say for sure is that the cop committed assault, compared to which name-calling and funny-looking is trivial.  The cop should have been arrested.  Any civilian doing that to a cop would be murdered.

This cop is the poster child for the kind of cop that needs to be fired and banned from any position of authority.  He is a bully because his badge allows him to be.

[Sheilbh]

Statue of Edward Colston brought down in Bristol:
https://twitter.com/itvwestcountry/status/1269631972822921217?s=20

From a fairly local perspective this seems really good because Bristol is, in my experience, the least aware of its slaving past of the slave cities in the UK (Liverpool and Glasgow). And Colston is everywhere in Briston: two Colston schools, Colston Tower, Colston Avenue, the big music/cultural venue is Colston Hall, there's even a Colston bun. I think a couple of years ago there was a proposal to change the statue so the plaque actually mentioned that he was a slaver - but I don't think it got anywhere.

As I say I always feel like Bristol has least confronted its past compared to Liverpool and Glasgow, so good to see it happen.

Edit: And he's in the river:

[Tamas]

I see the police continues to solve the issue of dealing with a gathering larger than 6 people by not showing up.

[Tamas]

There's some altercation going on between protesters and police in Central London. 

[11B4V]

There's some altercation going on between protesters and police in Central London. 

No way....

[Tonitrus]

Eh, he got arrested for calling the cop a retard. Not that that's ok, but it is more provocative than looking at him funny.

You cannot know what he was arrested for.  All we can say for sure is that the cop committed assault, compared to which name-calling and funny-looking is trivial.  The cop should have been arrested.  Any civilian doing that to a cop would be murdered.

This cop is the poster child for the kind of cop that needs to be fired and banned from any position of authority.  He is a bully because his badge allows him to be.

The link had a link to a news piece with more deets:

https://nbcpalmsprings.com/2018/07/12/desert-hot-springs-officer-out-of-job-following-viral-confrontation/

A tidbit extracted from that article is the reference to something known as the "Peace Officer's Bill of Rights" or "Law Enforcement Officers BoR"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Enforcement_Officers%27_Bill_of_Rights
https://www.cato.org/blog/police-misconduct-law-enforcement-officers-bill-rights

I've still got some more reading to do on it...but the highlights sound like pretty bad practice.

Being as it was never stated that the aforementioned officer was fired, just "no longer employed", makes me suspect something I've seen before...

With the myriad of police agencies we have, it seems sometimes a "bad" officer will just quit their force before any discipline reaches an official/documented stage, and then go apply to work at another agency with their record still clean.  This is helped in that many local agencies love what are called "lateral" hires, that being the hiring of an already experienced officer from outside, as it makes for a great savings to them in training costs.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Statue of Edward Colston brought down in Bristol:

it's no better than the taleban shooting the Buddhas. As for that group those Buddhas represented something vile. Or early Christians chisseling away the faces of the old gods on Egyptian monuments.

Yes he was a slaver, but slavery was hardly exceptional.
Explain and clarify history, don't whitewash it.

and that's all I'm going to say on this.