The Shooting Gallery: Police Violence MEGATHREAD

[The Larch]

Minneapolis City Council members consider disbanding the police

(...)
Now the council members are listening to a city that is wounded, angry, fed up with decades of violence disproportionately visited upon black and brown residents. Various private and public bodies – from First Avenue to Minneapolis Public Schools – have essentially cut ties with the police department. Council members are trying to figure out what their next move is.
(...)
On Tuesday, (Council Member) Steve Fletcher published a lengthy Twitter thread saying the police department was "irredeemably beyond reform," and a "protection racket" that slows down responses as political payback.

"Several of us on the council are working on finding out what it would take to disband the Minneapolis Police Department and start fresh with a community-oriented, nonviolent public safety and outreach capacity," he wrote.

Steve Fletcher - Minneapolis Ward 3
@MplsWard3
Bob Kroll's letter yesterday to the Minneapolis Police Federation membership showed us what rank-and-file officers voted for in their leadership, and it is yet another sign that the department is irredeemably beyond reform.

Fletcher says the entire council "to some degree" has been discussing disbanding the police department as an option. He doesn't yet know what that will look like. He suspects it's a transition that will take time, and the involvement – and possibly voting capacity – of residents.

But now more than ever, this feels within reach. Earlier this week, the council members unanimously signed on in support of the Minnesota Department of Human Rights' incoming investigation into the police department.

The power of state law, Fletcher says, might allow them to do things once thought "politically impossible" on the city level.

Even, say, recently. In 2018, the council voted to divert all of $1.1 million away from the police and toward "community-driven public safety programs." Last year, Mayor Jacob Frey's initial budget proposal called for hiring 14 additional police officers. After loud criticism from activists, Frey and the council compromised on a plan to hire 38 police cadets, with other funding going toward violence prevention.

Fletcher's looking forward to "conversations" with the community on how a new public safety approach would work – including some deeply uncomfortable conversations about use of force, and whether it still has a place in the city's approach to law enforcement. But what he's seen the community do already to take care of itself – forming fire watches, putting up unhoused folks in hotels, looking out for one another in a time of unrest – gives him hope for the future.

After all, this is an idea that came from residents – led by black and brown people – in the first place.

"This is our responsibility for not getting this done faster," he says.

What the councilman seems to be referring to in the quoted tweet of the article as proof of the unreformability of the city's police department is a letter by the President of the Minneapolis Police Union, who seems like an unmitigable piece of shit:

MINNEAPOLIS POLICE UNION PRESIDENT: "I'VE BEEN INVOLVED IN THREE SHOOTINGS MYSELF, AND NOT A ONE OF THEM HAS BOTHERED ME"

IN AN INTERVIEW in April, Lt. Bob Kroll, head of Minneapolis's police union, said that he and a majority of the Minneapolis Police Officers' Federation's board have been involved in police shootings. Kroll said that he and the officers on the union's board were not bothered by the shootings, comparing themselves favorably to other officers.

"There's been a big influx of PTSD," Kroll said. "But I've been involved in three shootings myself, and not one of them has bothered me. Maybe I'm different."

His comments underscore the rampant nature of police violence in the United States. The number of times police officers fire their weapons swamps the level of violence in most other countries, where authorities rely on nonlethal methods of coercion, persuasion, or control. Many police officers live with post-traumatic stress disorder induced by the violence associated with policing.

But not Kroll's crew, he said. "Out of the 10 board members, over half of them have been involved in armed encounters, and several of us multiple. We don't seem to have problems," he said. "Certainly getting shot at and shooting people takes a different toll, but if you're in this job and you've seen too much blood and gore and dead people then you've signed up for the wrong job."

Kroll has been a central figure in the unfolding protests and riots following the killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin. In a letter to union members on Monday, Kroll called Floyd a "violent criminal" and described the ongoing protests as a "terrorist movement" that was years in the making, starting with a minimized police force. He railed against the city's politicians, namely Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and state Gov. Tim Walz, for not authorizing greater force to stop the uprising. "The politicians are to blame and you are the scapegoats," he wrote.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Minnesota AFL-CIO called for Kroll's resignation, blaming him for his role in "[enabling] violence and brutality to grow within police ranks." Police forces across the country have been escalating violence against demonstrators; driving vehicles into crowds; firing rubber bullets, tear gas, and flash grenades at largely peaceful gatherings; and even killing a man in Louisville, Kentucky.(...)
Kroll's politics are not incidental to what is effectively a police riot underway in Minnesota and across the country. He's one of Minnesota's more outspoken supporters of President Donald Trump and took the stage with him at a 2019 campaign rally to praise the administration for "letting the cops do their jobs."

According to a 2015 Star Tribune report, Kroll clocked at least 20 internal affairs complaints during his three decades in the Minneapolis Police Department, "all but three of which were closed without discipline." There have also been several lawsuits against Kroll, detailing a long history of allegations of bigoted comments, including one that accused him of using excessive force against an elderly couple during a no-knock raid and another that accused him of "beating, choking, and kicking" a biracial 15-year-old boy while "spewing racial slurs."

"The big buzzword they had was deescalation," Kroll said of police reform efforts. "You're supposed to, you know, even if you're lawful in using force, it could look bad and give a bad public perception."

Being trained not to use force is what's causing officers stress, Kroll said. "Certainly cops, it's not in their nature. So you're training them to back away," he said. "And it's just not a natural — that's where a lot of the stress does come from with the cops is not [having] the ability to grab somebody and say, no, step back or you're going to jail and if need be, by force."

Kroll also mocked the concept of procedural justice, an institutional reform meant to reduce police use of force through diversity and anti-bias training, saying that it's an opportunity for people of color to get back at white men. He said that in his early days of training, the rule was to "ask them nicely to do something the first time," then give them a "direct, lawful order" to do so, and if they refuse — "you make them with force, that's how you get compliance."

"Those days are over," he said. "Now, it is ask them, love them, call, you know, give them their space and give them their voice. And this is what they're training new officers. ... Our cops went through that and they're going, 'Oh my God.' Yeah, procedural justice. And the theory behind it being that, you know, the white men have oppressed everyone else for 200 years. So it's their opportunity to get back."

[HisMajestyBOB]

The police unions in general appear to be even bigger pieces of shit than the police themselves.

[The Larch]

I knew I saw the guy earlier, and it turns out that the aforementioned Bob Kroll appears in the Hassan Minhaj show that I linked earlier (here's the link again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km4uCOAzrbM, it's around the 20 minute mark), he's the police union guy who talks to a reporter about the union covering agents' "Warrior Training" courses after the Minneapolis council banned them after the Philando Castille murder, boasting about how disciplinary action against him would never be upheld.

[Admiral Yi]

The police unions in general appear to be even bigger pieces of shit than the police themselves.

It makes sense.  One of their biggest jobs is fighting for rank and file in misconduct cases.

[Valmy]

"Certainly getting shot at and shooting people takes a different toll, but if you're in this job and you've seen too much blood and gore and dead people then you've signed up for the wrong job."

Damn,

[11B4V]

The police unions in general appear to be even bigger pieces of shit than the police themselves.

It makes sense.  One of their biggest jobs is fighting for rank and file in misconduct cases.

[grumbler]

The police unions in general appear to be even bigger pieces of shit than the police themselves.

It makes sense.  One of their biggest jobs is fighting for rank and file in misconduct cases.

Yeah, you want the loudest jerk you can working for your side in adversarial situations, but those same people make situations that shouldn't be adversarial into adversarial situations because, when the only tool you have is a hammer, all your problems look like nails.

I am not sure that much can be salvaged from the failed experiment in American policing, but the union system it uses is an element that certainly cannot.

[jimmy olsen]

Fucking scum. One of the worst things caught on tape yet

https://www.mediaite.com/news/watch-graphic-video-of-buffalo-cops-knocking-down-elderly-man-goes-viral-after-police-say-he-tripped-and-fell/


Also
https://twitter.com/aterkel/status/1268730108686319618

This was another appalling clip of Buffalo PD from earlier — a man is giving a TV interview with his hands up. Police just come up and tackle him

[DGuller]

The police unions in general appear to be even bigger pieces of shit than the police themselves.

They should be outlawed, and their function should be replaced with civil service laws.  They seem to be the nexus of police misconduct everywhere.

[jimmy olsen]

Police brutality map, each pin contains links to actual video of the brutality incident

https://twitter.com/KT_So_It_Goes/status/1268759620484464645

[jimmy olsen]

Fucking scum. One of the worst things caught on tape yet

https://www.mediaite.com/news/watch-graphic-video-of-buffalo-cops-knocking-down-elderly-man-goes-viral-after-police-say-he-tripped-and-fell/

Another angle of that incident https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1268759591573090304

[Syt]

Anti racism demo in Vienna yesterday. Over 50,000 in attendance which makes it one of the larger demos in recent years. I had originally planned to go, but then chickened out because of Covid. I did pass through some of the crowds near the subway, though, and there was basically no social distancing, and at least a third of the people didn't wear any masks.

[garbon]

NYT has apologized for running the Tom Cotton op-ed.

[Tamas]

The cultural influence of the USA is quite remarkable. People just HAVE to be doing the same shit they are doing, pandemic or not.

[Syt]

One Angry Gamer has released a "traitor list" of companies and people voicing support of BLM:

https://www.oneangrygamer.net/traitors-of-america/