[presented without title]

beatyourselfup:

They Don’t Dial 911: Detroit Residents Privatize Law Enforcement

Since police officers have no legal or civil duty to aid an individual citizen, dialing 911 is a pointless exercise – a principle well-understood by Detroit residents, an increasing number of whom have privatized law enforcement amid plunging municipal budgets and rising violent crime.

In an interview with TheDaily.com, 73-year-old Julia Brown, who has called Detroit her home since the 1950s, recalls that the last time she bothered to call 911 to report a burglary, “they didn’t show up until the next day.” The following day she applied for a handgun permit.

“I don’t intend to be one of their victims,” said Brown, referring to the packs of armed thugs who are burglarizing her neighborhood. “I’m planning on taking one out.”

When a Detroit resident calls for police assistance, odds are they won’t bother to respond. However, things can go much worse when the police actually show up – as they did late in the evening of May 17, 2010, at the home of 7-year-old Aiyana Jones. The Detroit SWAT team – which starred in its own “reality TV” program, and was being featured on a cable program called “The First 48” – was seeking a homicide suspect.

Rather than surrounding the home and quietly waiting to arrest the suspect outside, the SWAT team — which had a cable TV crew embedded with it — chose to play to the cameras by staging a  “dynamic entry” that involved flinging a “flash-bang” grenade into the living room where Aiyana was sleeping, then charging in with fingers on the trigger of their assault rifles. Aiyana was severely burned and then shot to death.

None of the people responsible for that criminal homicide has ever been charged with a crime, owing to the fact that they have a government license to commit bloody mayhem. Private citizens who employ much less drastic means to deal with actual crime, on the other hand, can expect to be severely punished.

Roughly three years ago, Alvin Davis became enraged by the indifference displayed by the police to repeated break-ins at his mother’s home. Davis, at the time a 32-year-old agent of the Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, tracked down and detained the alleged assailants, at one point shoving the barrel of his handgun into their mouths. Davis was convicted of unlawful imprisonment and assault and sentenced to four years in prison.

That prosecution was probably meant to deter Detroit residents from “vigilantism”; if so, it had the opposite of the intended effect.

“Justifiable homicide in the city shot up 79 percent in 2011 from the previous year, as citizens in the long-suffering city armed themselves and took matters into their own hands,” reports TheDaily.com. “The local rate of self-defense killings now stands 2,200 percent above the national average. Residents, unable to rely on a dwindling police force to keep them safe, are fighting back against the criminal scourge on their own. And they’re offering no apologies.”

While the local police are carefully avoiding confrontations with actual criminals, they are diligently exploiting every opportunity to wring whatever revenues they can from the economically devastated Detroit region. This is why civil asset forfeiture – the confiscation of money and other property allegedly implicated in criminal activity – has become one of the highest priorities for municipal police departments in the greater Detroit area. Civil asset forfeiture can proceed even in the absence of a criminal conviction, and police departments are allowed to keep most of what they collect.

Between 2003 and 2007, Romulus, Michigan witnessed a 118 percent increase in forfeiture revenues. Rather than reducing street-level criminal activity, that forfeiture rampage facilitated an official crime wave.

beatyourselfup:

I know it’s long. But don’t be fucking lazy. How long could it possibly take you?

When we are dealing with the police as an institutional structure, we are not dealing with a group of individuals acting on their own personal feelings and judgements, but rather, with a group of functionaries who have, as part of the terms of their jobs, agreed to set their personal opinions and feelings aside and instead act as obedient agents of the state… Thus, if we are referring to “the police” as an institution, rather than the personal feelings of individual police, no, they are not “part of the 99%”, they are the enforcers of the 1%’s power. — David Graeber, PHD Professor of Anthropology


According to the 3rd Quarter Report of The National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project, police officers were accused of sexual assault at a rate of 79 per 100,000 law enforcement personal. The rate of accusations for the general public is 28.7 per 100,000 general public.  When corrected for gender these numbers tell us that there are 1.5 times more accusations of sexual assault among  male law enforcement officers than among the general male population.  The fact that rapists seem to be concentrated among a group of armed individuals who have the purported authority to detain and arrest other individuals should be more than a little alarming for even the most prolific police bootlicker.

    “As you can see, when we examine violent crime statistics, law enforcement officers appear to be involved in violent crime in a comparable rate with the general population. 432 officers out of every 100,000 compared to 454.5 people out of every 100,000. So, roughly 0.43% vs 0.45%.

    Both seem like small numbers, don’t they? Yet most people would probably tell you that they are worried about the rate of violent crimes… but not police misconduct even though both occur at similar rates statistically.

    If you’re wondering about the homicide rates, “Homicide Charged” compares the number of alleged homicides in general population with the number of police officers actually charged with homicide or murder. The “Homicide” number compares the same general population statistic with the number of officers involved in questionable non-vehicular homicide deaths including deaths in custody as a result of excessive force that were not charged as homicides.

    The statistic for sexual assaults is the stunner for us though. 29.3 per 100,000 in the general population vs 73.3 per 100,000 for law enforcement officers. That would seem to catch people’s attention as a problem, but apparently it doesn’t.

    So, you see, it’s all a matter of context. Sure, .073% is a small percentage of the population of police officers in the US, but that number represents 522 officers per year and is a larger, by over 2x, ratio of the population of police than are the number of alleged sexual assailants in the US general population at .029%.

    So, the next time you find yourself challenged by a law enforcement officer who says that police misconduct isn’t a problem because it only represents a small percentage of the number of police officers in the US. Remember that it really does represent a small percentage but so does crime in the general population but that doesn’t stop people from worrying so much about it that they’ll spend a majority of their tax dollars to fight it.”

When current data is filtered to examine only incidents that can be classified as violent crimes as specified per the US FBI/DOJ Uniform Crime Reporting standards and then compared with the 2009 FBI/DOJ UCR Crime in the United States report as a per capita general population and per capita law enforcement basis the results indicate that overall violent crime rates are not too divergent between the two population groups with a difference of only 20.1 per 100k point between the two. However, there appear to be some more significant differences at a more granular level with robbery rates for police far below those reported for the general population but sexual assault rates are significantly higher for police when compared to the general population.




While the rate of police officers officially charged with murder is only 1.06% higher than the current general population murder rate, if excessive force complaints involving fatalities were prosecuted as murder the murder rate for law enforcement officers would exceed the general population murder rate by 472%.

“But most cops are good right? It’s just a few that spoil the bunch.”

In today’s American society, if you don’t suggest this propaganda at the end of any comment regarding police brutality, you’re labeled as anti-police, or perhaps a conspiracy theorist.

I just want to set the record straight: I am not anti-police. I am anti to the current form of law enforcement we have today. For far too long I have believed that the police have the ability to “adjust” the law, to serve it in any form they see fit. And what bothers me most is the fact that when one police officer does wrong, there are VERY few officers who will stand up for what it is right and come forward about the abuses perpetrated by their fellow officers. A lot of officers would say they wouldn’t rat on their “brother”. But in my opinion, this makes those officers complicit and equally responsible under the law, as an accomplice.

So the next time you see a video of 12 cops, 5 of which are beating the shit out of a suspect, don’t just castrate the 5 cops who are clearly to blame. Ask yourself: What about the other 7? Why didn’t they come forward? Why weren’t those cops stopping the others? THEN… tell me it’s just a spoiled few in the bunch.

And just for good measure:

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